MORAL JUSTIFICATION

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:

“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.