What is Ethics? by James P. Sterba

Author:James P. Sterba
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509531042
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

Universalizability is not enough

However, there is a moral problem with such maxims. They go too far in allowing just anyone to break a promise provided a sufficient number of other people are not doing the same. While exceptions to promisekeeping surely cannot be so numerous that they would have a negative impact on the practice, not having such an impact, as required by Kant’s Categorical Imperative test, is not sufficient to justify making an exception of oneself. Morality requires more; it requires that promise-breaking not impose unreasonable burdens on others and so it must be further limited to just those cases where people have the best reasons for breaking their promises. Simply claiming that my breaking my promises in a limited way, and others doing the same, would not have a negative impact on the practice of promisemaking does not provide a sufficient justification for my promise-breaking. There must be some additional reason that justifies my promise-breaking, but not the promise-breaking of others who are similarly situated. Morality requires that the universalizability of maxims be combined with adequate moral grounds for determining when exceptions are to be explicitly or implicitly included in those maxims.

Furthermore, the maxims that people employ in such cases could never be fully specified. Obviously, the laws of a nation can never be fully specified to indicate all the present and future exceptions its members should make to them. That is why we need courts to interpret such laws. But the same holds for the promises and other agreements we make. They, too, can never be fully specified to indicate all the present and future exceptions we should be making to them. In general, it is universalizability together with appropriate grounds for making exceptions that determines the morality that binds us in this regard.

Yet, just as Kant’s Categorical Imperative universalizability test needs to be supplemented with adequate moral grounds for exceptions in order to properly capture what we are morally required to do, something similar holds of the “What if everyone did that?” argument. It is not, all by itself, a sufficient moral test. The argument rightly indicates that moral requirements must be universalizable, and it further suggests that your act would not be justified when everyone’s acting as you are acting would lead to very bad consequences. The reason for this is not that these bad consequences would actually happen. Rather, it is that in acting in this way, you would be able to reap the benefits of your promise-breaking only because a sufficient number of other people, similarly situated, did not act as you did. What this shows is that without some reason justifying your promise-breaking, but not theirs, your act of promise-breaking would not be morally justified because it would impose an unreasonable burden on others and thereby give you an unfair advantage.

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