Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (review)

Wiggins’s treatise offers a course on the whole of morality in twelve lectures and in just under four hundred pages. The style is simple, clear, and elegant, and peripheral issues are relegated to footnotes so that the reader can stay on track with the main argument. Wiggins calls this book an “introductory work,” but he qualifies this claim somewhat: “The book will serve best and most usefully perhaps as a second introduction to this subject, a reintroduction, so to say, designed for those who want to start again without presupposing anything from their previous acquaintance with philosophy” (vii).

He tells us that the book comprises a set of materials prepared for part-time students at the night school, Birkbeck College. The lectures are, however, quite demanding, and it is hard to imagine undergraduates making their way through these densely argued chapters without substantial help. Wiggins is perhaps too modest about the ambitions of the work; it constitutes an original contribution to the field of moral philosophy.

Part 1 consists of seven lectures on the most important moral theories, beginning with a discussion of the challenge of Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Republic, and then proceeding to a discussion of the big three moral theories: Humean subjectivism, Kantian deontology, and consequentialism. Part 2 consists of a single lecture on the topic of justice, contrasting the Aristotelian approach with contemporary liberalism. Part 3 delves into meta-ethical issues, chiefly the question of whether morality can claim objectivity.

Wiggins’s general philosophical outlook is pluralist and non-reductionist. He convincingly warns against the temptation to reduce ethics to one single goal or value: “What a fully grown-up moral philosophy might attempt is an account of morality that embraces the full gamut of moral predications, seeing them as mutually irreducible and mutually indispensable, allowing no primacy to character traits or virtues or practices or acts or states of affairs—or allowing primacy to all at once” (82). He uses this pluralism to criticize virtue ethics for trying to see ethics entirely in terms of character, but even more to criticize utilitarianism for trying to reduce ethics to a single, external goal (be it happiness or utility). Wiggins devotes a full three lectures—more than on any other topic—to refuting consequentialism, presumably because of what he sees as its pernicious influence on public policy. The chapter on Hare’s “linguistic” defense of utilitarianism is probably unnecessary, as Hare’s influence has dropped off rather dramatically. Wiggins’s arguments against consequentialism will not likely change the mind of any confirmed consequentialists. Nonetheless, they provide a useful summary of the major objections to the theory.

Wiggins also provides a strong critique of the rationalist tendency in ethics, that is, the desire to construe moral theory in terms of a small number of explicit propositions. Morality, he declares, “does not consist of a set of moral propositions, even a very large one” (350). For Wiggins, morality is inseparable from ordinary life and the implicit principles grounded in everyday behavior. Moral judgments “cannot even be understood as they are intended except against the background of a lived understanding that will never be fully articulated” (350). And this implies that “it would be wrong for us to expect that we could arrive at an assessment of the success of a first-order ethic of a given place and time by measuring its success in implementing some independently determinable ‘aim’ or ‘object’” (265). Morality must be grounded in the human: “The first-order ethic we are concerned with incorporates a human scale of values and a human deontology” (242).

These epistemological limitations do not, however, lead Wiggins to give up on the project of moral theory. Indeed, the most interesting and valuable part of his book is his comparison of a Humean versus a Kantian approach in terms of which better accounts for ordinary moral beliefs and practices. On this question, Wiggins comes down (though with substantial qualifications) on the side of Humean benevolence as against Kantian reason: “Insofar...