Editor's Note:
The following information on moral justification is lifted from Contemporary Issues In Bioethics, pp. 10-13, authored by Tom L. Beauchamp and LeRoy Walters. The italics and bold terms are mine; I intend to highlight some very important words for students to remember and examine. This book provides excellent information, knowledge, and moral (medical) cases and questions that can be explored and studied with rigor and interest. I highly recommend this book especially for college students.
MORAL JUSTIFICATION
Excerpts:
The following information on moral justification is lifted from Contemporary Issues In Bioethics, pp. 10-13, authored by Tom L. Beauchamp and LeRoy Walters. The italics and bold terms are mine; I intend to highlight some very important words for students to remember and examine. This book provides excellent information, knowledge, and moral (medical) cases and questions that can be explored and studied with rigor and interest. I highly recommend this book especially for college students.
MORAL JUSTIFICATION
Excerpts:
“Can answer about what
is morally good and right be justified?” This question arises repeatedly even
in popular discussions of morality. Questions of justification are matters of
immediate practical significance, and at the same time they are related to the
most theoretical dimensions of
philosophy. A good case can be made that philosophy in general, in all its
fields, is primarily concerned with the criticism and justification of
positions or points of view – whether the subject matter under discussion is
religion, science, law, education, mathematics, or some other field. Similarly
a good case can be made that the central questions in ethics are those of
justification. But what is required in order to justify some moral point of
view?
Moral judgments are
justified by giving reasons for them. Not all reasons, however, are good
reasons, and not all good reasons are sufficient for justification. For
example, a good reason for involuntarily committing certain mentally ill
persons to institutions is that they present a clear and present danger to
other persons. Many believe that this reason is also sufficient to justify various
practices of involuntary commitment. By contrast, a reason for commitment that
is sometimes offered as a good reason, but which many people consider a bad
reason (because it involves a deprivation of liberty), is that some mentally
ill persons are dangerous to themselves.
If someone holds that commitment on grounds of danger to self is a good reason
and is solely sufficient to justify commitment, that person should be able to
give some further account of why this reason is good and
sufficient. That is, the person should be able to give further justifying
reasons for the belief that the reason offered is good sufficient. The person
might refer, for example, to the dire consequences for the mentally ill that
will occur if someone fails to intervene. The person might also invoke certain
principles about the importance of caring for the needs of the mentally ill,
etc. In short, the person is expected to give a set of reasons that
amount to an argued defense of his or her perspective on the issues.
Moral arguments. Every belief we hold is subject to challenge
and therefore to justification by reasoned argument. No matter what we believe
about the justifiability of intervening to protect the mentally ill, our views
are subject to criticism and require defense. However, because not all reasons
that are offered in support of a belief are sufficient reasons, many reasons
that are advanced in an argument fail to support the conclusion reached. Logic
is that branch of philosophy concerned with the relationship between reasons and conclusions drawn from the
reasons. More precisely, logic describes the relationship between premises and
conclusions that are correctly drawn from the premises. Logic is thus concerned
to explain why arguments succeed and fail. But what is an argument – in particular
a moral argument – and what role do arguments play in the attempt of
justification?
An argument is a group of
related statements where one statement in the group, the conclusion, is claimed to
be either the consequence of the others or to be justified by the others, which
are called variously evidence, reasons, grounds, and premises.
In general, every argument can be put into the following form: X is correct;
therefore, Y is correct. Arguments are rarely presented in this simplified
form, however. More often they are submerged in complex patterns of discourse;
they are disguised by rhetoric, irrelevancies, redundancies, and subtle
connections with other arguments.
Moreover, an argument
in which conclusions correctly follow from premises does not necessarily
constitute a proof. The term “proof” refers to a sound argument, that is,
one that establishes the correctness of its conclusion. Just as there are good
and bad reasons, so there are good and bad arguments, and a person may argue
adeptly for some conclusion and still not prove anything. In general, logic is
not concerned with soundness or proofs because (with one minor exception) logic
alone cannot determine whether the premises in an argument are correct or
incorrect. Thus, in ethics some form of evidence or reflection must determine
whether the premises used are acceptable in order to know whether an argument
proves anything. It is the business of logic to tell us whether conclusions
follow
from premises; it is the business of some substantive inquiry such as ethics to
tell us whether the premises should be accepted in the first place. Only
ethics, not logic, can tell us if it is ever morally permissible to deceive
those who are sick or dying. But only logic can tell us whether we have
made a mistake in the way we formally argue about this topic. For
example, it can tell us if we have made mistaken inferences, are guilty of inconsistencies, have a sufficient
number of premises, etc.
Levels of Justification in Moral Argument. Different
kinds of discourse are involved in moral reasoning and argument. A moral judgment, for example, expresses a
decision, verdict, or conclusion about a particular action or character trait. Moral rules are general guides governing
actions of a certain kind; they assert what ought (or ought not) to be done in
a range of particular cases. Moral
principles are more general and more fundamental than such rules, and serve
(at least in some systems of ethics) as the justifying reasons for accepting
rules. A simple example of a moral rule is, “It is wrong to deceive patients,”
but the principle of autonomy may be the basis of several moral rules of the
deception-is-wrong variety. Finally, ethical theories are bodies of principles
and rules that are more or less systematically related.
The different kinds of moral disclosure can also be
developed as a theory of levels of justification. Judgments about what ought to
be done can be viewed as justified (i.e., good and sufficient independent
reasons for the judgments given) by rules, which in turn are justified by
principles, which then are justified by ethical theories. This thought can be
diagrammed as follows (where the arrow indicates the direction of justification,
the particular or less general moral assertion being justified by appeal to the
more general):
Theory
Principle
Rule
Moral Judgment
+++
Consequentialist theory (e.g., utilitarianism)
Principle of autonomy
Rule of confidentiality of a physician's information
Judgment that the psychiatrist's confidential information
should remain confidential (undisclosed to others)
+++
The particular judgment
made by the psychiatrist (and one judge) that confidential information should
remain undisclosed in this case is shown in this diagram to be justified in
terms of a rule of confidentiality, which in turn is justified in terms of a
more general principle of autonomy, which is then justified by a more general
theory that recognizes the importance of consequential appeals. (Of course, more
than one rule or principle may be involved at these levels in the attempt to
justify a judgment.)
This discussion of
justification and argument implicitly raises the question of the best
justifying reasons and theories – and thus of the best premises to use in moral
arguments.
