Part of my issue with the deontological approach to ethics is that by putting rules first (above both intentions and consequences), it seems to suggest that an action has the normative status it does intrinsically — that is to say, independent of intentions and consequences. I don’t think the notion of value is even intelligible apart from some context of evaluation. It seems to me that intentions and consequences together form the relevant context in which actions occur and should be evaluated.

I believe any putatively intrinsic value of an action is just a reification. We might be inclined to say, e.g., that killing is intrinsically bad, but I would say instead that it is bad because by definition it has a bad consequence. The difference is that consequences can be weighed against other consequences, so we can say killing is bad but might nonetheless be justified in some particular case, if that bad thing would prevent what would truly be a worse evil.

We should put interpretive charity first. No one should be blamed or penalized for an action that was sincerely and responsibly well-intentioned, or the consequences of which were in balance good.

I agree with Aristotle that ethics cannot be an exact science. I also hold with Leibniz that all necessity whatsoever is conditional.

Practical judgment or phronesis discerns differences and gradients, not “things as they are”. Questions of the form “What is to be done in circumstance c” do not in general have a single, necessary answer.

Ground-level ethical rules, I want to say, have no value apart from such always somewhat open judgment of situations. If all I were doing were conforming to a rule, I would be showing no sign of reason or intelligence. (Kant at least partially makes a similar point by distinguishing between rules and concepts of rules, though it it is a bit unclear what this means.) Only if I can be said to have reasonably judged that following rule r in circumstance c was situationally appropriate, was my rule-following rational. Judgment could not be reducible to simply applying a pre-existing formula.

Needless to say, I don’t really like deontology. Necessity in first-order ethics smells to me of subrational compulsion.

On the other hand, it would be absurd to say that because there is no hard necessity in first-order ethics, anything goes. An ought that we positively assert about anything in particular is based on differences and gradients, not binary necessity. Binary necessity could at best apply only to prohibitions, not to any positive injunction to do x. I don’t even believe it applies in the negative case. But in any event, what we ought positively to do is the real concern of ethics, and that is a weaker sort of ought.

Still, we “ought” (in some different, stronger sense that applies only to meta-level generalities like the categorical imperative) to be faithful to our best judgment of those differences and gradients. I would also agree that we “ought” in this stronger sense to practice mutual recognition as described by Hegel, and we “ought” to practice wise charity as described by Leibniz. Brandom points out two more things that I agree “ought” in this stronger sense not to be done: affirming contradictory things, and affirming something while denying a consequence of it. I have no issue with speaking of necessity in these meta-level cases.

In line with a practice of interpretive charity, I want to resolve the ambiguity in Kant’s (and Hegel’s) talk about moral “necessity” by saying that any true necessity must refer to meta-level principles in themselves, not their application.

In chapter 1 of Making It Explicit, Brandom talks about the desirability avoiding “regulism”, or the attempt to rely on explicit rules all the way down. Wittgenstein’s infinite regress of rules-to-interpret-rules is said to show that the conception of norms as rules “is not an autonomous one, and so does not describe the fundamental form of norm”. This seems promising. He both invokes Kant’s distinction between rules and concepts of rules, and suggests a move from rules to practices, attitudes, and construals. Mere conformity to a norm is not even a candidate for a construal in accordance with a normative attitude.

I also want to say, as Aristotle would, that the correctness of such construals, though emergently relatively objective in terms of something like multidimensional gradients of “should”, is not in general decidable in Boolean yes/no terms. Brandom seems more worried about avoiding collapse of moral necessity into causal necessity or mere factual regularity. While I thoroughly agree that normative conclusions cannot be derived from non-normative premises, I take overly rigid prescription to be still the more practically important concern. Pufendorf’s doctrine of imposition of norms by a sovereign will is huge step backward from Aristotle.

What is needed is ground-level, broadly rational interpretation of real-world situational particulars, complexities, and ambiguities that is not strict rule application; i.,e., phronesis.

The objectivity of ethics does not consist in strictly univocal determinations, but in shareable reasonableness. The interesting cases are not like “It’s raining and I don’t want to be wet, so I should open my umbrella.” There could be no precise formula for how to balance independent concerns when they are in partial conflict. (See also Kantian Maxims; Categorical Imperative; Kantian Obligation; Binding; Varieties of Ethics.)

How reasonable we are in acting in our lives is largely a matter of our emotional constitution. Our character is the result of many choices we have made, and many things that have happened to us. Character is not something we are born with; it is acquired, by living a life.

A life of reason as a moral goal has little to do with applying logic to situations in a calculating way. Reasonableness has to do with not being unreasonable — i.e., not behaving in ways that are unreasonable from the point of view of others. This is largely a matter of what might be called emotional intelligence.

A cornerstone of this is recognition of other people as independent from us and our wishes. Aristotle pointed out that mutual recognition of this sort is one of the defining marks of true friendship or love. Hegel made mutual recognition a general goal.

However, our ability to participate in mutual recognition here and now comes back again to our emotional state and our acquired emotional constitution. (See also Interpretive Charity; Practical Judgment; More Difference, Less Conflict.)

For a long time, I mostly reduced ethics to empathy and an endlessly open Socratic quest for truth. The way to be ethical was just to seek the fullest possible understanding, in things small as well as large. Truth about how things really are seemed to me to be the decisive factor. Thinking about politics and history in terms of abstractly considered, putatively free choices by individuals seemed like a massive source of confusion, failing to take real-world contexts and constraints into account.

Under the influences of recent discourse about normativity, I now consider a sort of meta-ethics to be a good candidate for first philosophy. Logic, epistemology, and ontology can all be seen as depending on normative considerations.

It took some time for me to become comfortable with normativity talk. I was suspicious that in the background there must inevitably be some sleight-of-hand grant of deontological status to empirical “norms”, which would give the whole thing an inherently conservative slant. But this need not be the case. Normativity is just a fancy word recent philosophers use for value.

I still prefer to translate deontological vocabulary to something more hermeneutic. The only unconditionally binding imperatives are purely formal, and thus cannot provide unconditional guidance for action. This does not mean anything goes. There are meaningful differences and gradients everywhere. All differences are relative by definition, yet they are still differences.

The Platonic dialogues posit the Good as the first principle of all, prior to any matters of fact, beyond being and beyond knowledge. Aristotle developed a rich account of normativity internal to nature. Each thing has its own internal good, which for an animal for instance is a way of life. Modern mathematical natural science explains many new facts without reference to normativity, but nothing about this invalidates normative discourse. Kant and Hegel argue in effect that normative, “practical” reason about what to do is superior to (and actually informs) theoretical reason about what is.