ZYGOZygon®0591-23851467-974410.1111/j.1467-9744.1983.tb00506.xTHE VALIDITY OF MORAL THEORIESHeldVirginia0206198318210.1111/zygo.1983.18.issue-2167181
Abstract. We can usefully draw an analogy between ethics and science, despite the significant differences between them. We can then see the ways in which moral theories can indeed be “tested,” not by empirical experience but by moral experience. This can be expected to lead to rival moral theories, but in science also we have rival theories. I argue that we should demand more than coherence of our moral theories, as we do of our scientific theories. I try to show how the “testing” of moral theories can be carried out and how this can allow us to accept some moral theories as valid.
. See, e.g., Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), esp. pp. 6–7.
. Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Science Editions, 1961), pp. 60–103.
. See Mary Hesse, The Structure of Scientific Inference (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
. For a discussion of this analogy, see, e.g., Peter Caws, Science and the Theory of Value (New York: Random House, 1967).
. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs‐Merrill, Liberal Arts, 1956).
. Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 49.
. Ibid.
. Deontological moral arguments judge actions to be intrinsically right or wrong apart from their consequences. For instance, a lie may be judged to be wrong even if it causes no one pain or unhappiness.
. Teleological moral arguments judge actions on the basis of consequences alone, denying that actions have any intrinsic nature. An act whose consequences are on balance good is considered right, one whose consequences are on balance bad is considered wrong.
. W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), p. 31.
. See Virginia Held, “Justification: Legal and Political,” Ethics 86 (October 1975): 1–16; “Property Rights and Interests,” Social Research 46 (Fall 1979): 550–79: and “The Accountability of the Legislator” (unpublished).
. Since writing this paper, I have benefitted from considering the somewhat different view of the analogy between ethics and science offered by Morton White in What Is and What Ought To Be Done (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
. Robert Ackerman, “Inductive Simplicity,” in The Philosophy of Science, ed. P. H. Nidditch (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 125.
. Carl Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice‐Hall, 1966), p. 32.
. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).