Morality and Objectivity (Routledge Revivals)

A Tribute to J. L. Mackie

Ted Honderich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136668142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The late J. L. Mackie and his work were a focus for much of the best philosophical thinking in the Oxford tradition. His moral thought centres on that most fundamental issue in moral philosophy – the issue of whether our moral judgements are in some way objective. The contributors to this volume, first published in 1985, are among the most distinguished figures in moral philosophy, and their essays in tribute to John Mackie present views at the forefront of the subject.

Five of the essays give a new understanding of the objectivity of moral judgements. These are by Simon Blackburn, R.M. Hare, John McDowell, Susan Hurley and Bernard Williams. The remaining contributors – Philippa Foot, Steven Lukes, Amartya Sen, David Wiggins – give their attention to problems which are equally compelling, such as the defence of a moral outlook based on a conception of a need and of what follows from it. The volume also includes the addresses given by Simon Blackburn and George Cawkwell at the memorial service for John Mackie, and a list of his publications, compiled by Joan Mackie.

VIII

CLAIMS OF NEED

David Wiggins

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It has been felt for a long time that there must be some intimate connection between people's needs and the abstract rights they have. H. L. A. Hart was giving voice to a strong and widespread intuition when he wrote:

A concept of legal rights limited to those cases where the law … respects the choice of individuals would be too narrow. For there is a form of the moral criticism of law which … is inspired by regard for the needs of individuals for certain fundamental freedoms and protections or benefits. Criticism of the law for its failure to provide for such individual needs is distinct from, and sometimes at war with, the criticism with which Bentham was perhaps too exclusively concerned, that the law often fails to maximize aggregate utility.¹

In practice however the connection between needs and rights has proved elusive. It ought not of course to have been expected that a linkage of this kind would be simple or hard and fast, or provide the single most important clue to everything that still puzzles us in the idea of justice. But if the connection is not only complicated but also important, and if some connection is there to be discovered among the sentiments that actually sustain our various ideas about justice, it will be a great shame if its failure to be simple or hard and fast continues to stand in the way of the attempt to understand the special force and political impact of a claim of serious need.

J. L. Mackie never, so far as I know, made any special study of the idea of a need. But I think that, towards the end of his life, in the succession of papers that began with ‘Can there be a rights-based moral theory?’, was continued in ‘Rights, utility and universalization’,² and was then so abruptly cut short by his sudden death, he suggested a framework in which, without presupposing the welfare state, one can try to reason positively about the kind of entitlement that needing creates. I hope that Mackie would not have disapproved of what is attempted in § 13 following, and that he would have found a discussion of the main contentions advanced there an enjoyable change from the meta-ethical disputations on which we carelessly expended so many of the (it proved) not numerous opportunities we had after I became his colleague to talk together about philosophy.

In advance, however, of any questions of justice and entitlement, where I have been happy to adopt something rather similar to Mackie's approach, it will be necessary to attend for its own sake and at some length to the question of what needing is – a precaution disregarded almost equally by champions and critics of the idea that there is something serious to be made of this notion in political philosophy. One can hardly explain the special force of a claim when one will not first determine what exactly one who makes it says, or in what context it seems particularly natural to make it, or what conceptions and misconceptions these contexts especially lend themselves to.

1. Those who complain that the question what it is to need some-thing is relatively neglected in our tradition are sometimes directed to the writings of Hegel and Marx. But there one is likely to be dis-appointed. It is true that each of these writers makes heartening acknowledgment of the familiarity and importance of the concept of need, and true again that in Marx one will encounter the famous or infamous formula ‘From each according to his ability; to each according to his need’.³ (Although Marx did not in fact invent this principle.⁴) But neither Marx nor Hegel says what a need is, or indicates what it really turns on whether in a given case this or that is needed by someone. In Hegel, there is a strong tendency for needs to be simply run together with desires: needs are first placed with desires on the side of subjectivity, in opposition to the objects of needs and desires and the reality that resists them (as in the description of the evolution of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit), and then they are put with desires again, on the social level, in the totality comprehending all interests and motivations that constitutes civil society as a ‘system of needs’ (as in the Philosophy of Right). Marx can be read as innocent of this conflation: but what we encounter in his case is the philosophically debilitating refusal to say anything that will substantially forejudge the public criterion of need that it is supposed history will supply or to anticipate in any other way the needs that some future ‘consciousness exceeding its bounds’ will acknowledge as properly expressive of ‘human essence’.

Analytical philosophers are not as constrained here as it seems Marx was. But in our kind of philosophy, sensitive though it always is to questions of the form what is it to ϕ?, the idea of needing something suffers from guilt by association. Either the idea smells of dirigisme, state interference in the processes of production, and distaste for ‘consumer preference’;⁵ or else it revives bad memories of the ‘means test’ and numerous earlier attempts to restrict the number of indigent persons entitled to the outdoor relief provided by the Poor Law of 1601 and its more recent counterparts (social security etc.); or else the idea somehow contrives to arouse both sorts of association. What is more, those who have wanted to give the idea an extended trial have been dismayed to find, seeing the question of social justice in the way they were apt to see it, that, if anything, need aggravated instead of simplifying the problem.

2. However inhibiting these doubts and suspicions have been in phil-osophy itself, it is a surprising and most important fact that they operate only at the level of theory. In practice – and to an extent that could not be predicted or even suspected on the basis of an examination of present-day political theory –, the political cum administrative process as we know it in Europe and North America could scarcely continue (could scarcely even conclude an argument) without constant recourse to the idea:⁶

‘The outstanding object of the Beveridge Plan is to provide as far as possible a unified system of income maintenance to cover needs arising from a variety of causes.’ (G. D. H. Cole, pamphlet explaining the Beveridge Plan)

‘Scientists are almost unanimous that in spite of the development of in vitro methods of testing and experiment, and in spite of advances in tissue culture techniques, we still need to perform experiments on live animals.’

‘The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority … has told the Government that it thinks that a fast reactor needs to be built and it is naturally keen to move on from the experience gained on the two small-scale plants it has operated at Dounreay in Scotland and to the logical next stage of development.’ (The Times, 18 March 1981)

‘The minister decided not to reopen the inquiry, and in his decision he said that he had taken into account the general changes relating to design flow standards and traffic forecasts since the inquiry, and he was satisfied that they did not affect the evidence on which the inspector made his recommendation. He was convinced the schemes were needed and the road should be constructed.’ (The Times, Law Report, 10 December 1977)

An economist once said to me ‘What do you mean by a need? Is a need just something you want, but aren't prepared to pay for?’. This was in a certain way insightful (cp. §24 foll.), as well as witty. But the literal inaccuracy of the suggestion will appear plainly to anyone who makes the experiment of reformulating ‘needs’ claims like those cited above by replacing ‘need’ by ‘want’, ‘desire’, ‘prefer’, or their nominal derivatives. No matter how one does this, the result lacks not simply the rhetorical force of the original, but all its meaning, coherence and argumentative point. And this is something that we have to explain, rather than rail against the idea of need and accuse it of trying to force our hand or of aiding and abetting some illicit transition from a state-ment of what is to a statement of what must be.⁷ Indeed I should say that, given the special force carried by ‘need’, we ought to try to grasp some special content that the word possesses in virtue of which that force accrues to it. It would be a sort of word magic if so striking a difference as that between ‘want’ and ‘need’ could arise except from a difference of substance.

3. The last contention might be defended on general grounds relating to meaning and force. But where someone is seriously tempted by the idea that needs are a certain class of strong desires or preferences, or strong unconscious desires or preferences,⁸ more particular considerations can be adduced. If I want to have x and x = y, then I do not necessarily want to have y.If I want to eat that oyster and that oyster is the oyster that will consign me to oblivion, it doesn't follow that I want to eat the oyster that will consign me to oblivion. But with needs it is different. I can only need to have x if anything identical with x is something that I need. Unlike ‘desire’ or ‘want’ then, ‘need’ is not apparently an intentional verb. What I need depends not on thought or the workings of my mind (or not only on these) but on the way the world is. Again, if one wants something because it is F, one believes or suspects that it is F. But if one needs something because it is F, it must really be F, whether or not one believes that it is.⁹

4. The apparent distinctiveness of needing being registered in this way, we may now move one step closer to a positive elucidation. Something that has been insisted upon in most analytical accounts of needing¹⁰ is that needing is by its nature needing for a purpose, and that statements of need which do not mention relevant purposes are elliptical – some will say dishonestly elliptical – for sentences that do mention them.¹¹

One thing seems right with this claim, and another seems wrong.

The thing that seems right concerns what may be called purely instrumental needing. Someone may say ‘I now need to have £200 to buy a suit’, or, speaking elliptically, ‘I need £200’. If he can't get the suit he has in mind for less than £200, then it is true, on an instrumental reading of his claim, that he needs £200. What has to hold for this to be the case is something of the form:

It is necessary (relative to time t and relative to the t circumstances c) that if (….at t″) then (– at t′).

In the present case, the antecedent of the conditional relates to the man's having the suit and the consequent to his having £200.¹²

So far so good. If something like this is right, then it makes excellent sense of the claim that certain uses of ‘I need to have x’ are elliptical (e.g. the claim ‘I need £200’ as made by this man): and one whole class of non-elliptical need sentences receives a plausible treatment. But there is something else the elucidation fails to make sense of. This is the fact that, if we have already been through everything this man can say about his need, then we can properly and pointedly respond to his claim with: ‘You need £200 to buy that suit, but you don't need £200 – because you don't need to buy that suit’. The ellipse theory suggests that he ought then to insist that there is an end of his for which the suit is necessary. But it is plain that without deliberate misunderstanding of what we are now saying, he cannot make this retort. If he did respond in this way, then it would be open to us, meaning our remark to him in the only way we could mean it, to say that he was simply missing the point. What he has to show, if he wants to make more than the instrumental claim, is that he cannot get on without that suit, that his life will be blighted without it, or some such thing.

What is suggested by the existence of this extra, however problem-atical requirement? It suggests that, although there is an instrumental sense of ‘need’ where we can ask for some purpose to be specified in a non-elliptical version of the ‘needs’ claim and there are no limits on what purpose this is, there is another sense of ‘need’ by which the purpose is already fixed, and fixed in virtue of the meaning of the word. What is more, this must be the sense of the word employed by the majority of scientists, the UKAEA, the Minister, and the other makers of needs claims quoted in §2 above.¹³ These men are representing, and the meanings of their words commit them to representing, that we simply can't get on without more roads, more reactors, or more animal experiments or whatever. (‘We have no real alternative.’) They might be wrong. There might be minor obscurity in what exactly is intended by this. But what is controversial in what is said is not the necessity for the avoidance of harm to human beings – it is precisely the fact that such avoidance is not as such a controversial purpose that lends needs claims their prima facie special practical and argumentative force – , but the claim that our prior adherence to this end commits us (leaves us with no alternative but) to have more roads, more fast reactors, more animal experiments or whatever.

5. We have then to assign at least two senses to ‘need’ if we are to assign the right significance to the sorts of thing people use the word to say and to understand the special argumentative force of needs claims. But of course there is a connection between the purely instrumental and the not purely instrumental sense, or what we may call (simply for the sake of a name, not to exclude the relativities to be set out in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Introduction
• Errors and the Phenomenology of Value
• Morality, Action and Outcome
• Ontology in Ethics
• Objectivity and Disagreement
• Taking Morality Seriously
• Values and Secondary Qualities
• Rights and Capabilities
• Claims of Need
• Ethics and the Fabric of the World
• A Memorial Address by Simon Blackburn
• A Memorial Address by G. L. Cawkwell
• The Publications of J. L. Mackie