Moral Philosophy and Political Problems

Moral Philosophy and Political ProblemsAuthor(s): Amy GutmannSource: Political Theory, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Feb., 1982), pp. 33-47Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/190854 .

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MORAL PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL PROBLEMS

AMY GUTMANN Princeton University

LAR WORSE THAN CALLING a political philosopher's conclu- sions wrong is accusing his method of being misconceived. Since this accusation is intended to undercut the very enterprise in which a philosopher is engaged, it precludes consideration of the substance of his particular arguments. In this brief article, I want to pursue several such undercutting criticisms directed against the method of contemporary Anglo-American political and moral philosophy. I shall begin by considering those made by Philip Abbott in "Philosophers and the Abortion Question."' I shall then turn to a series of criticisms that suggest that acontextualist accounts of our moral principles given by analytic philosophy provide no support for further moral or political argument.

Abbott identified philosophic method too narrowly by its reliance upon hypothetical microexamples employed to test the moral validity of our intuitions or to aid us in justifying our moral preferences and principles. A broader and more accurate characterization of analytic moral philosophy would focus not on the use of microexamples, but rather, on the attempt to resolve by moral reasoning particular contemporary political and moral controversies. The attempt to bring moral reasons to bear upon political problems separates moral philosophy from philosophical analysis that stops at the clarification of concepts and from analyses of the political reasons for preferring one resolution to a moral conflict over another. Clarification of concepts is often a necessary prelude to the task of resolving a moral argument, and finding a politically prudential solution need not be unprincipled. But the emphasis of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy is upon the resolution of contemporary moral problems by applying, refining, and rendering consistent our moral intuitions.

A UTHOR'S NOTE: I am grateful to Stephen Holmes and Dennis Thompson for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 10 No. 1, February 1982 33-47 33 0 1982 Sage Publications, Inc.



34 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1982

I

Although Abbott makes "no attempt to evaluate the general philosophical effort to clarifying public policy in general," he does intend his criticism of the way philosophers have handled the abortion issue to raise "serious doubts concerning the viability of philosophy's recent excursion into public policy."2 I want to consider and finally reject both Abbott's doubts in the specific case of abortion and his more general and interesting criticisms that aim at undermining analytic philosophy.

Abbott repeatedly attacks philosophers' use of extreme situations.3 I assume he means situations that are beyond the range of human experience and (to the best of our knowledge) are extremely unlikely ever to occur, or situations that are within the range of human experience but constitute very hard cases to apply otherwise acceptable and firmly grounded moral rules to. An example of the first sort is Judith Thom- son's hypothetical case of "people seeds" drifting about in the air like pollen.4 An example of the second is that of several people stranded on a lifeboat, where one can survive only if he or she consumes the other two. Both situations do indeed throw "our moral habits into chaos,"5 or at least temporarily into uncertainty. Moral principles must be justified within a social context, in which human relationships follow some patterns. But this need to ground moral principles in a context does not imply, as Abbott would have us believe, (1) that our moral habits are always grounded upon correct moral principles, (2) that we can know whether they are correct without resorting to moral reasoning, or (3) that we always have moral habits to guide our actions in situations that demand a moral decision.

Which moral habit is thrown into chaos by a philosophical treatment of abortion? The habit of not aborting a fetus? That habit ceased to prevail in our society long before Philosophy and Public Affairs came upon the scene. Abortion can itself be characterized as an "extreme" moral situation because it is not clear how our firmly grounded moral principles concerning murder and self-defense apply to abortion cases, in part because we are not sure what status the fetus has as a living being, and in part because we are not sure what it would mean morally to kill a fetus even if it is a human being. Let us grant to Abbott that our emotional reaction to seeing an aborted fetus is morally relevant.6 That reaction still ought not to determine our answer to the abortion question any more than a soldier's agony upon seeing the mutilated body of a



Gutmann / MORAL PHILOSOPHY 35

combatant whom he killed should settle his or our judgment of the rightness of his action.

The germ of truth in Abbott's attack is the moral relevancy of our "6normal" or "natural" reactions to a fully formed fetus. Our identification with developed fetuses (like the soldier's identification with enemy combatants) may create a primafacie case for allowing them to live. But the question still remains whether, when all other relevant things in our social situation are considered, a fetus has a right to life, or (if Abbott is disturbed by this language of rights) whether a mother has a duty to bring the fetus to term. If either a right or duty exists, at what point in the development of the fetus does it obtain? Abbott's invocation of our moral habits and emotional reactions toward a fetus does not answer this question.

Abbott concedes that the emotional reactions and habits that we now have towards fetuses may not be a firm basis for moral judgments: "Grief is in some ways socially structured and induced in some ways independent of the actual life of human beings."7 Thus, he leaves us without an alternative basis for making a moral decision concerning abortion. Instead we are given another indirect indictment of philosophical method derived from the fact that philosophers of abortion "have conjured individuals that are able to reject the emotion of communal solidarity in a way that makes them'greedy individuals."'8 This assumption that individuals are greedy flows from philosophers' refusal to support the traditional family and from their corresponding use of a rights model to explain the morality of personal relationships. Indeed, questions concerning women's rights were not paramount within societies firmly grounded upon traditional family structures. But the implication that traditional family structures lacked greedy individuals and that theories justifying traditional family structures foster communally minded individuals blinds us to the dominant, if not greedy, position of men, and to the extreme dependency imposed upon women within those families. In addition, parents within the modern family, for all their individualistic faults, may demonstrate more loving and less instrumental attitudes toward their children than did parents within traditional "noncontractual" families.9

"Rights models" are individualistic in that they ascribe rights to individuals rather than to families or to groups considered assuigeneris entities, but they do not necessarily assume that individuals are or should be egoistic, let alone greedy. Whether a rights model is individualistic in this latter sense depends entirely upon the content of




the rights ascribed to individuals. A society based upon Nozickean rights would encourage people to look out for "Number 1," but the social welfare rights for which Bernard Williams and other analytic philosophers have argued presupposes a society in which individuals accept obligations to ensure the basic welfare of their fellow citizens. '0 Philosophical analyses in favor of welfare rights or communal rights of ownership establish mutual obligations among citizens that go far beyond libertarian claims of obligations of noninterference. Some even argue for our natural duty to further such just communal institutions. " I

The implications of my argument for abortion should now be clear. First, rights models of abortion need not have the pernicious consequences that Abbott attributes to them. Everything depends upon the nature of the rights and correlative obligations ascribed to parents and fetuses. Second, Abbott's discussion misleadingly implies that all moral dangers stem from the attribution of rights to women.'2 One could just as easily (and misleadingly) turn the table on Abbott and consider a philosophical world of "greedy fetuses" in which women had an absolute duty to bring fetuses to term regardless of the conditions under which those fetuses were conceived and of the consequences (short of death) for the future life of the pregnant women. Neither scenario of near-absolute duty or of near-absolute freedom is morally acceptable. Yet Abbott's arguments point solely toward the natural duty model, whereas Thomson's analysis at least leaves room for recognizing maternal obligations toward those fetuses which were intentionally conceived.

II

Let us now return to Abbott's charge against the use of fantastic hypotheticals by philosophers. He would surely be correct if he were suggesting that our moral principles cannot always be tested by using extreme examples. We may, for example, have good reason to support the principle that enemy noncombatants not be killed during war. We can still consistently concede that this principle may be violated under the unusual conditions that the enemy threatens to obliterate our entire civilization (assuming that it is worth preserving) and we have no effective defense other than bombing their civilian cities. Yet there are other situations in which extreme examples undermine our moral intuitions. Why would extreme examples not call our intuitions into




question in cases in which we cannot find any morally relevant differences between the "normal" conditions under which we apply our intuitions and the hypothetical conditions that are suggested to us by philosophers?

A blanket condemnation of the use of hypothetical examples makes as little sense as an uncritical reliance upon them. Their value simply cannot be established on the level of methodological principle. There are good and bad uses of hypotheticals just as there are appropriate and inappropriate invocations of our emotional reactions to moral dilemmas. Our judgment must depend upon the intended use of hypotheticals, not (as Abbott's indictment implies) upon the unusualness of the example. Take Thomson's example of a women trapped in a tiny house with a rapidly growing child who will crush her if nothing is done to stop his growth. 13 Abbott treats this example as if it were misleading because of its bizarreness, one more instance of an example that forces us "to contract whatever morality we have left."'4 But Thomson uses this example to criticize the extreme antiabortionist view that if a third party has no right to choose between the life of a mother and the life of her child, then the mother has no right to save her own life, if she has the means to do so. Thomson does not claim that this hypothetical es- tablishes more than a mother's right to self-defense in situations in which her life is threatened by the life of a fetus. '5 Whatever its limits, surely this argument is an important response to a position found within Papal encyclicals and the writings of antiabortionists who rhetorically ask: "What cause can ever avail to excuse in any way the direct killing of the innocent?"'6 Most of Thomson's extraordinary examples are similarly used to undercut extreme antiabortion positions.

This observation suggests a significant limitation of philosophers' excursions into the abortion problem: None of their hypothetical examples go so far as justifying or condemning abortion under the more common conditions (such as pregnancy caused by carelessness) in which many women believe that they have a right to an abortion. In these cases, we are left with our "raw" moral intuitions concerning abortion, which conflict because of our different upbringings and remain largely untouched by philosophical argument. I shall later consider some criticisms of this ultimate reliance of philosophers upon our moral intuitions.

In addition, many criticisms intended to undermine philosophical method on more careful examination turn out to be instances of bad philosophy. To step beyond the abortion issue, we might consider




Robert Nozick's use of a woman's right to marry whomever she wishes in order to cast doubt upon a principle of democratic socialism that people ought to have a say in matters affecting their lives.'7 Surely Nozick's defense of woman's integrity does not undermine the case for democ- racy. Social democrats do not deny that individuals have such significant rights of noninterference (as the right to marry whomever one chooses) that are immune to democratic determination.

To answer Nozick's argument, we must clarify why people within a democratic society retain certain rights to determine what they will do with their own lives and private property. Such individual rights of action do not derive from a single liberty to do what one pleases with ones property or life within the limits of a few Nozickean provisos. Nozick's examples could serve as analogies only if our moral world allowed us to support all acquisition and transfer of possessions by a simple principle of individual choice. Only then would my right to decide whom I shall marry imply a right to decide how "my" oil wells are used. Bad analogies do not indicate profound flaws within philosophical method, but only that any method can be abused. The wild and crazy analogy is a peculiar occupational hazard of the moral philosopher, but even valuable occupations have their dangers.

Since all analogies break down, even good arguments using hypothetical examples at best provide steps toward resolving moral dilemmas; they can rarely clinch the case for a particular position. In Thomson's famous analogy, for example, we are asked to apply our intuitive judgment that an ailing violinist would not have a right to use our body for nine years or even for nine months in order to formulate a principle favoring abortion under certain narrowly defined circumstances.'8 Before we claim that this example decides the case for abortion under those circumstances, we must ask whether the personal sacrifice during pregnancy is analogous to the personal sacrifice demanded of us in Thomson's example. After all, many antiabortionists agree that some sacrifice (for example, the mother's life) justifies aborting the fetus, but few pregnancies demand sacrifices similar to those that the ailing violinist demands.

Further, clear intuitions concerning hypothetical cases often cannot be easily translated into resolutions of hard moral cases. Problems like abortion, free speech, and affirmative action cannot be resolved without considering the context in which individual rights and obligations will (or will not) be enforced. Moral philosophers usually bracket some difficult and crucial empirical factors that must be considered in order to




resolve political issues. While the use of hypothetical or actual microexamples can help us clarify our moral principles, it is not always conflict over such principles that blocks our agreement, but failure to concur upon the facts of the case.

This criticism of the neglect by some moral philosophers of contextual factors is distinct from the criticism that our intuitions only yield correct answers when applied to actual or plausible examples. My argument is that even if moral principles may be properly derived from hypothetical examples coupled with our intuitions, the moral principles upon which we ought to decide an issue do not suffice to determine what position we should take on that issue. The latter step almost always necessitates an examination of the actual operation of society: What are the sacrifices of pregnancy, the burdens of being black, or the consequences of free speech? Thus, even if we agree upon the moral principle that a mother who is not responsible for becoming pregnant has a right to abort a pregnancy that demands a great deal of personal sacrifice, we are still left with the important and difficult step of determining how such sacrifice varies among individual women and along class lines. If it is true that the application of a single moral principle may yield distinct moral results for different classes of people, then only a contextualist examination of moral issues can yield knowledge of what ought to be done. But can an acontextualist account at least provide moral principles to guide this further investigation?

III

Abbott's critique of analytic philosophy fails because he either takes our current moral habits and intuitions for granted, or when he does not, he provides no method or reasons for calling particular intuitions or habits into question. Yet my defense of moral philosophy against Abbott also relies ultimately upon moral intuitions, suitably tested by the careful use of analogies, relevant arguments, and examples. Therefore, it still might be said that analytic philosophers, like Abbott, are guilty of the methodological mistake of relying upon moral intuitions that are socially dependent. I shall not turn to "racial" criticisms of analytic philosophy that call into question the very moral intuitions upon which philosophers build their cases. These criticisms suggest that our common intuitions do not provide a firm foundation for moral




argument because they may be supported by unjustifiable, perhaps even unacceptable, forms of social life.

Moral philosophers who tackle particular political issues such as abortion begin by supposing that at least some of us share their intuitions concerning plausible or implausible examples. They then proceed to apply these intuitions to an actual moral dilemma. A critic might simply ask the moral philosopher: Is it not possible that your intuitions are wrong? Since the ultimate support for your moral intuitions is not rational argument but the social life into which you have been educated and socialized, and since you do not have sure standards by which to choose among forms of social life, how can particular intuitions or your entire system of beliefs be correct standards for moral argument? This skeptical position limits the justificatory claims that philosophers can make for their arguments since we cannot know that our intuitions are correct. But if those intuitions are widely shared among us and the critic is right that there is no way to choose among radically conflicting systems of beliefs and intuitions, then using our intuitions as moral standards may be the best we can do within our received form of social life. Of course, those with whom we share similar intuitions may only be a subset of all people within our society. In his criticism of A Theory of Justice, Milton Fisk suggests that moral intuitions are relative to and irreconcilable among classes within a society.19 If Fisk is correct, then philosophers can claim no more than that their moral reasoning follows from the presuppositions of a particular class position. Moral reconciliation of class positions is beyond philosophic grasp; only political struggle remains as an ultimate means of "reconciliation."

William Connolly has suggested that there is an even deeper level at which philosophers cannot reconcile conflicting intuitions. People who disagree fundamentally about the resolution of a political dilemma are also likely to disagree on the definition of the significant terms used to characterize that dilemma. Thus, essentially contested moral and political concepts overlap with essentially contested moral and political intuitions.20 The abortion controversy abounds in essentially contested concepts, the most obvious being the definition of a human being. Despite Thomson's demonstration that we can defend a limited right to abortion even if we concede the antiabortionist view that a fetus is a full- fledged human being, we cannot defend a more liberal position so long as we accept such a definition of human life.2' As Roger Wertheimer points out, the dispute between the liberal and the firmly committed




antiabortionist rests upon a fundamental disagreement concerning the status of the fetus and the meaning of humanness: "Without agreement in judgments, without a common response to the pertinent data, the assertion that the fetus is a human being cannot be assigned a genuine truth-value."22

Connolly tentatively suggests that in recognizing that certain controversies are irreconcilable by further rational argument, people may be led toward "a measure of tolerance and a receptivity to reconsidera- tion of [their] received views."23 In the case of abortion, however, a policy of toleration itself is more acceptable to a liberal than to an antiabortionist for the obvious reason that it is morally easier to tolerate self-imposed restrictions than the murder of innocent beings. Nonethe- less, Connolly's suggestion may have some plausibility: An awareness that neither side can prove its case to the other may push both toward accepting a compromise, especially if each side recognizes that intran- sigence will create continued political turmoil and that the only alternative would be division into two separate political communities.

Our critic's argument has assumed so far that moral philosophy reaches its limits when no further reasons can be offered to deliberate between two or more conflicting moral judgments. But suppose that there are criteria by which a theorist can evaluate the distinct forms of social life that have shaped the basic moral intuitions of different groups of individuals. For example, suppose that some forms of social life are freer or more humane than others, and that some people have been socialized into a distinctly less liberating form of social life than others. Given the additional premise that some intuitions are systematically shaped by inferior socioeconomic circumstances, moral philosophers could be accused of basing their arguments upon moral intuitions that are inferior to those that people would have in a better society or to those shared by members of a more progressive social group.

A specific criticism along these lines of Thomson's argument concerning abortion might run as follows. In our society, most of us believe that people have a right to life, but not a right to whatever is necessary to sustain life regardless of cost to others. However, were we raised in another, radically different society, we might grant that the right to life ought to entail the right to impose significant sacrifices upon other people. One might respond to this challenge by saying that we can always imagine better societies than our own, structured so that people's moral intuitions have been significantly altered, but in resolving the moral problems of our society, we must depend upon our intuitions.




This quick reply will not do because the critic's point is meant to be more than hypothetical. After all, many people in our society probably intuit that the right to life does not include the right to deprive others of their accustomed standard of living. Yet those of us who want to argue for welfare rights do not take those intuitions for granted. So which intuitions we do take for granted seems to depend upon some prior assessment or assumption of which intuitions are valuable.

This critique need not be open to the challenge of infinite regress. The critic's point is not that one can rightly demand justification for any place philosophers choose to begin their moral explanations. Rather, it is that the foundation of philosophers' arguments may be peculiarly problematic because they are chosen on an ad hoc basis to support the theorists' favored positions. As a partial consequence of this ad hoc selection, whole systems of beliefs and attendant intuitions remain unexamined. Critics must therefore offer reasons to examine these intuitions further. Were there no reason to suspect the legitimacy of our total system of beliefs, we might not worry about the ad hoc nature of the particular intuitions moral philosophers employ or the unexamined whole into which these intuitions fit. We might rightly be content with simply "muddling through." But if the conditions of life within a better society can be described in some detail, or if the superiority of a particular class morality can be demonstrated, then the project of moral philosophy is at best limited in its aspirations. At worst, philosophers might be reconciling us to moral resolutions that take for granted the inferior social life or class morality into which we have been socialized.

I have intentionally left the forgoing criticism of moral philosophy in the conditional. This criticism may apply to all, none, or only some of the specific issues that philosophers have tackled. Indeed, it is quite difficult to formulate this challenge to moral philosophy convincingly with respect to the abortion question. What are the good social conditions under which the abortion question would disappear or be easily solved? Surely the critic does not have technical advances in birth control methods in mind. Even if these would solve the birth control problem, such advances are not directly related to structural changes that are likely to alter our moral intuitions. One might argue that in a socialist society, there would be no plausible Catholic position on abortion. Yet, Catholics do not stand alone in strenuously denying a woman's right to abortion and the view that fetuses are persons is not "spooky" or peculiarly metaphysical. We might instead hypothesize the




triumph in a socialist society of an antiabortion position, arguing that the reasons for supporting abortion within our society will no longer be relevant in a socialist society. Abortion laws will not discriminate against any oppressed class. People will have taken responsibility for their lives and the democratic community for all unwanted children. Not an unreasonable position, although I wonder whether the moral dilemma of abortion can be intellectually diffused quite so simply. In this case, our political predictions seem no more solidly based than our present moral intuitions.

Abortion is a hard case for both analytical philosophers and for their critics. On the one hand, analytic philosophers cannot find a purely rational moral resolution to the abortion question since people's intuitions diverge radically. On the other hand, critics are hard pressed to explain why this intuitional divergence would disappear under better-even radically better-social conditions. Abortion does not support the challenge that contemporary moral problems are epiphenomenal. However, the literature on abortion does not show that moral philosophers can resolve hard moral dilemmas. So long as some moral problems must be resolved politically with people who do not share some of our firmest moral intuitions, the most that we can reasonably expect from philosophy is guidance concerning the moral implications of our firmest intuitions.

IV

Since the theorist's attention to a moral problem implies its importance, one need not claim that a particular predicament is epiphenomenal in order to criticize the philosophers choice of subject matter. One can argue instead that theorists ought to worry about more significant problems than those on the political agenda of contemporary liberal democracies. This attack is analogous to one prominent criticism of the methodology of community power studies of the 1950s: A systematic political bais existed in the method of political scientists who studied only actual decision-making events in order to discover who wielded power, since the political agenda of liberal democracies already reflected the institutionalized power of certain groups. Similarly, a critic of analytic philosophy might contend that by choosing to treat issues already on the political agenda of our society, philosophers ignore those




problems that are reflected in the very choice of issues made public. This criticism is true in one sense: Analytic philosophy is a method of inquiry, not a substantive theory that distinguishes significant from insignificant issues.

A variant of this criticism is the contention that the intellectual task of the theorist-as distinct from the lawyer or politician-is to interpret the significance of political aganda, and to explain why some problems and not others are debated publicly. Now criticism has shifted from a substantive claim that problems such as abortion are epiphenomenal to a metatheoretical claim concerning the proper task of political philosophy. When divorced from the substantive claim that our political agenda reflects some contemporary social malaise, this argument can be interpreted as a call for political theorists to become historians of contemporary politics. But more often, this call is tied to a belief that our contemporary political agenda is made inadequate for our problems by excluding those changes that would cure the most serious of our present social ills. The political theorist's interpretation of the meaning of our present political preoccupations aims therefore at uncoverinlg why these more basic challenges are avoided.

Yet the method of moral philosophy does not preclude a more thorough criticism of contemporary politics than is offered by philosophers who try to resolve specific problems arising within our nonideal social context. Within this context, there may be reasons why political actors and specific socioeconomic groups neglect the radical (i.e., structural) changes that would be necessary to realize a thoroughly just society. But the task of a complete and ideal moral philosophy is to challenge this neglect by offering principles by which the basic institutions of our society can be rationally criticized. Indeed, one wonders how any social critic can claim that our present institutions are inadequate without applying a set of consistent moral principles. The task of explaining why the most basic challenges to our social institutions have not been placed upon our political agenda is in part parasitic upon the attempt of an ideal moral philosophy to discover principles that might support such basic challenges. Furthermore, both are essential political enterprises so long as politics is understood as more than a mere means to arbitrarily chosen human ends.

Yet moral philosophy has been charged with being apolitical in the sense that philosophers ignore the political consequences of enforcing certain moral positions. In political debates over abortion, one often hears the argument that regardless of law, women will continue to seek




abortions, and that therefore we ought to oppose antiabortion legislation since it will only make abortions more expensive and discriminate against poor women who are most likely to get butchered by incompe- tent quacks. At the very least, philosophers can reply that whatever we claim to be the best political solution (in this narrow sense), we still ought to worry about our moral rights and obligations toward fetuses. I suspect that even this reply concedes too much since the same sort of argument can be made against gun control legislation (that people will continue to buy guns), yet in assessing the political case for and against gun control we care whether people have a right to possess firearms. If one really believes that abortion is unjustified killing, the argument that restrictive legislation would discriminate against the poor does not necessarily undermine the case for this particular legislation, however much it may say about the inadequacy of enforcement mechanisms or about economic injustices within our society.

V

I began this essay by assuming that Philip Abbott's purpose in "Philosophers and the Abortion Question" was to demonstrate that the method of recent analytical philosophy is seriously improverished. I have attempted to demonstrate that Abbott's own arguments are impoverished by his failure to discriminate between basic methodological problems of moral philosophy and the inappropriate use of hypothetical examples within that method.

I have also suggested that the method of analytic moral philosophy does not dictate moral principles or political perspectives. If deter- mined, such choices are prompted by the moral intuitions that a philosopher brings to bear upon political problems and that may necessarily limit the critical scope of philosophizing. However, even these intuitions can often be undermined by further moral analysis of the social conditions that have engendered them.

Perhaps the most significant implication of my defense of moral philosophy is that several other forms of political theorizing do not conflict logically or politically with that of moral philosophy: The tasks of interpreting political agenda and of explaining the failure of rational moral argument to resolve political disputes supplement rather than supplant the moral philosopher's enterprise. In addition, these forms of




theorizing often rely upon moral philosophy to establish the injustice of contemporary institutions.

Political theorists as individuals must choose to engage in one form of theorizing at any given moment. But too often these personal choices determine our intellectual attitude toward alternative forms of theorizing. While some critics dismiss the abortion problem as epiphenomenal, one can believe that the principles and resolution of the abortion debate merit sutstantial concern and consistently accept the argument from an ideal moral theory that none of the proposed resolutions will eliminate certain basic structural problems within our society.

In our recent past, radical critics have claimed rightly that we cannot remain neutral on political questions without implicitly taking a stand in favor of the political status quo. But to apply this nonneutrality position to the choice between analytic moral philosophy and all other forms of political criticism would be to fall under the influence of a misanalogy. When the political establishment is perpetuating evils and we insist on noninvolvement, our inaction can be rightly understood as a sign that we are content with both the evils and the political establishment. My argument is not that individual theorists can avoid the choice of whether to do analytic philosophy, but rather, that their own choices ought not to dictate their criticisms of alternative modes of theorizing.

This plea for a limited intellectual pluralism cannot be rightly analogized to some weak arguments for political pluralism. The intellectual pluralism for which I am arguing is neither unbounded nor standardless. It advises respect only for those theoretical enterprises that are methodologically and substantively compatible with a search for better polities.

NOTES

1. Political Theory 6, 3 (1978), pp. 313-335. 2. Ibid., p. 313. 3. Ibid., pp. 314-322, 324. 4. Judith Jarvis Thomson, "A Defense of Abortion." Philosophy and Public Affairs

1, 1 (1971), p. 59. 5. Abbott, "Philosophers and the Abortion Question," p. 319. 6. Ibid., pp. 320-321. 7. Ibid., p. 322. 8. Ibid., p. 323.




9. See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 4-9, 104-114, 161-174, 195-202, 390-395, and 405-415.

10. See T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977); B.A.O. Williams, "The Idea of Equality," in Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford: Basil Blackell, 1962), 2d series, pp. 110-131; and Michael Walzer, "In Defense of Equality." Dissent (Fal 1973), pp. 399-408. See also Richard Flathman's discussion of rights and community in The Practice of Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 194-197 and 204- 219.

11. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 333-338. It should be noted that neither Rawls's nor any of the theories cited above go so far as would a thoroughly communitarian or collectivist theory in which the general will totally encompasses particular wills and the assertion of individual rights is therefore considered unjustifiable or perhaps even unthinkable.

12. In conclusion, Abbott implies that the "right to life" model has a corresponding fault of including every present or future person "having a claim" within the moral community. But Abbott never develops this criticism, and it is by no means clear that "right to life" advocates need to be committed to what Abbott calls the generality dimen- sion of the rights model. Here again, his discussion misleadingly implies that the nature of rights remains constant across all rights models. Only the body of legitimate right claim- ants vary. See Ibid., pp. 330-331.

13. Thomson, "A Defense of Abortion," p. 52. 14. Abbott, "Philosophers and the Abortion Question," p. 319. 15. See Thomson, "A Defense of Abortion," pp. 52-53. 16. John T. Noonan, Jr., "An Almost Absolute Value in History," in John T. Noonan,

Jr., ed., The Morality of Abortion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), p. 43. 17. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974),

pp. 268-271. Even with bad analogies, one might argue that Nozick and other analytic philosophers at least show us what moral distinctions have to be established in order to support particular political principles.

18. See "A Defense of Abortion," pp. 48ff. 19. See Fisk, "History and Reason in Rawls' Moral Theory," in Reading Rawls:

Critical Studies of "A Theory of Justice," ed. Norman Daniels (New York: Basic Books, 1975), esp. pp. 73-80.

20. See William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1974), esp. pp. 35-41.

21. See Roger Wertheimer, "Understanding the Abortion Argument." Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, 1 (1971), pp. 76-77.

22. Ibid., p. 86. 23. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, p. 41.

Amy Gutmann is Associate Professor of Politics, Princeton University. She is author of Liberal Equality (Cambridge University Press, 1980), and is presently working on a political theory of education.



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Moral Philosophy and Political Problems