METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 11, No. 1, January 1980

COMMENTS ON BOND’S ARTICLE ALAN GEWIRTH

In his foregoing remarks E. J. Bond presents many pertinent criticisms of my book. They are marred, however, by the fact that he repeatedly commits the error which I shall call ignoratio scripti: ignoring what has been written in the book he is pur- portedly reviewing. On point after point where he raises objec- tions he evinces no recognition, and hence does not tell the reader, that in my book I have already raised these very objec- tions against myself and have given answers to them. My answers may, of course, be subject to further criticism; in any case I should have welcomed explicit consideration of them. But by reiterating the objections while ignoring both my own anticipations of them and my replies, Bond misleads the reader on relevant contents of my book. I am hence left with no alter- native but to repeat the elucidations I have already given on these matters in Reason and Morality.

A prime example of Bond’s ignoratio occurs in his first foot- note where, referring to my formulation of the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGCF‘Every agent ought to act in accord with the generic rights of his recipients as well as of himself”-he objects : “but that statement’s analyticity lies plainly visibly on its surface. That rights are to be respected is definitionally true. . . . But this is empty analyticity, quite lack- ing in content. . . . It is surprising that Cewirth failed to notice this inadequacy in his first formulation.” (emphasis added)

On pages 151-152, however, I raised this very objection against myself, so that I did “notice this inadequacy”. I there gave as the criterion of a statement’s being “necessarily true directly” that “its denial can be shown to be self-contradictory through a consideration only of the definitions or meanings of its directly constituent terms together with the logical principle of identity”. This is, of course, an explication of at least part of what it means for a statement to be analytic or definitionally true. I then wrote the following: “Now it might be thought that the PGC is in this way necessarily true directly. For when the PGC tells the agent that he ought to act in accord with his recipient’s rights, it tells him nothing he didn’t already know simply from the meaning of ‘rights’. For the term ‘rights’ means, at least in part, that in accord with which one ought to act”

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SYMPOSIUM ON REASON AND MORALITY 55 (emphasis added). Thus I here raised against myself the very objection about the “empty analyticity” of the PGC that Bond has raised against me. He has, at a minimum, shown careless reading of my book and has misled the reader when he asserts that I have “failed to notice” this point.

The reply I gave in my book is that the PGC is not necessarily true directly, or analytic by virtue of the meanings of its directly constituent terms (and hence a fortiori is not a case of “empty analyticity, quite lacking in content”), because it “says not only that one ought at least not to interfere with that to which one’s recipients have rights; it also says that both the agent and his recipients have the generic rights, and it goes on to make explicit what is the agent’s duty in light of this fact. Thus the PGC, unlike purely formal principles of justice, provides a substantial criterion for distinguishing morally right from morally wrong actions. That the agent and his recipients have the generic rights is a substantial proposition whose denial cannot be shown to be self-contradictory simply by a consideration of the meanings of its directly constituent terms together with the principle of iden- tity.” (p. 152)

What I have pointed out, then, is that it is one thing, and definitionally true, to say that rights ought to be respected; but i t is quite another and further thing, and one not derivable from the mere concept of a right, to say who are the holders and the respondents of the rights and what are the objects or contents of the rights. I t is the latter thing and not only the former that is said by the PGC by virtue of its derivation from the generic features of action. Bond completely ignores this reply which I give to the charge of the PGC’s “empty analyticity”, just as he has ignored that I have raised the issue myself.

A second example of Bond’s ignoratio is found in his exten- sive comments on my thesis that the PGC is logically necessary (although as a theorem, not as an axiom), so that to deny or violate it is to contradict oneself. To this Bond presents the following objection :

The [moral] reason why I must not do some things is that, if I do, I will cause other persons hurt or harm. . . . Gewirth invites us to suppose that beyond this lies the real reason why these things are wrong, viz. that to suppose that hurting others is permissible is to ‘incur an inconsistency’. Thus moral evil is reduced to logical error. . . . But it is no answer to these questions [of moral philosophy] to say that logic

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requires me to act for the sake of certain of the interests of all others. . . . Gewirth and others would turn wickedness into a kind of intellectual incompetence. But if wickedness is irrational, i.e. contrary to reason, it is so in neither of these senses. From reading Bond’s prolonged reiteration of this point, one

would not suspect that I have raised this very objection against myself. Compare the above quotation with the following from page 183 of Reason and Morality:

Still another objection to the analyticity of the PGC is that even if the freedom from self-contradiction that analyticity assures is the necessary and most basic condition of rational justification, this has no specific bearing on moral justification or rightness. To contradict oneself is to make an intellectual mistake, but this is different from making a moral mistake in the sense of doing what is morally wrong. The immoral person is not necessarily poor at logic or at figuring out how to avoid inconsistency; he is, rather, villainous and lacking in sympathy for others. Even if it could be shown that the range of actions that commit an agent to generic consistency and inconsistency coincides extensionally with the range of actions that are, respectively, morally right and wrong, this would not remove the fact that there is a significant inten- sional difference between these characterizations and criteria of action. (emphasis added)

In this passage I have raised against myself exactly the same objection as Bond has raised against me. At a minimum, in presenting the objection without indicating at all that I have myself made it previously, he has misled the reader.

I devoted four pages (184-187) to my direct reply to this objection; in addition, I dealt with many other ramifications of the issue in other sections of Chapter 3. Of none of this does Bond take any notice in his review despite its obvious and cen- tral bearing on the objection he has pressed.

I must here content myself with noting two main points of my reply. First, it is false that I present logical inconsistency as the sole or exclusively “real” reason or ground of moral wrongness. On the contrary, I emphasize in many passages of Chapter 3 and elsewhere that “the PGC has a necessary content as well as a necessary form” (p. 164; see pp. 24-25, 78, 135, 145, 166-168). “The PGC, however, is not presented as self- evident, nor is it justified as a moral principle solely through

SYMPOSIUM ON REASON AND MORALITY 57 its denial‘s being self-contradictory. Rather, an intrinsic part of the principle’s justification rests on its having a necessary content referring to the freedom and well-being that every agent must regard as his rights.” (p. 196; emphasis added.) The point is that the PGC is justified as a moral principle not only because violation of it incurs inconsistency but also because this incon- sistency bears on, has as its content, the necessary conditions or goods of human action and how these goods are to be distributed.

Generic consistency in its very concept is a moral as well as a logical requirement, so that the extensional equivalence of the two requirements in the PGC is not merely coinciden- tal. For the PGC bears not on consistency of beliefs or actions on the part of one person in isolation, but rather on con- sistency that is transactional and hence interpersonal in connection with the distribution of rights and goods. To be generically inconsistent is to uphold a disparity between the essential conditions of action that one necessarily claims for oneself and what one is willing to concede to others. It is to maintain for oneself the most general rights of action in a transaction with other persons, while denying these rights to the persons who are affected by one’s action and who are relevantly similar to oneself. It is hence to make exceptions in one’s own favor with regard to the necessary conditions of purpose-fulfillment, and hence to be unfair to others. To violate the PGC is thus to do what is morally as well as logi- cally wrong. (p. 187; emphasis added)

The central idea, then, is that in being generically inconsistent, where the content of this inconsistency concerns the necessary goods of action of other persons as well as of oneself, one is violating the rights of these other persons to these necessary goods. This point is obviously a moral as well as a logical one.

A second main point of my reply to the objection is that while the logical consideration of consistency is not a sufficient con- dition of the establishment of moral rightness, it is a necessary condition for at least two reasons. First, without this consider- ation, the categorical obligatoriness of performing or refraining from certain kinds of actions cannot be established, because this requires showing that certain deontic judgments are neces- sarily true, and this can be shown only by establishing that the denials of the judgments are self-contradictory. Second, as the last passage quoted above indicates, the consideration of logical

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consistency is indispensable for establishing what is the right distribution of goods as between agents and their recipients (pp. 184-185). In leaving my discussion of these points entirely unmentioned in his review, Bond fails to take account of argu- ments that bear crucially on the objection about the moral irrelevance of logical consistency that he presses against me, and he thereby gives the reader a misleading impression of my book.

To clarify further the relation between moral wrongness and logical inconsistency as I deal with it in my book, certain back- ground considerations presented there must be indicated. The general concept of a morality is that it is “a set of categorically obligatory requirements for action that are addressed at least in part to every actual or prospective agent, and that are concerned with furthering the interests, especially the most important interests, of persons or recipients other than or in addition to the agent or the speaker.” (p. 1) The general area of moral wrongness, then, consists in violating some interests of persons or recipients. But there remain central questions about what interests of which persons are to be respected, and why any agent should be concerned with respecting other per- sons’ interests. Any answers one might give to these questions can always be countered by alternative and opposed answers, unless the answers are so conclusive that logical inconsistency results from rejecting them. This, then, is the point of emphasiz- ing the criterion of logical consistency: not that of superseding moral criteria that use specifically moral concepts of persons and their interests, but rather that of providing a culminating structural argument where other arguments fail of conclusive- ness. When Bond says that by such an argument “moral evil is reduced to logical error”, he fails to see the difference between a substantive proposition and a logical proposition about that proposition, so that he confuses first-order and second-order levels of argument.

When I reply in this way to the objection I raised against myself that a “moral mistake” is here confused with or reduced to an “intellectual mistake”, the reply bears directly on the structural aspects of the actions whose moral wrongness is in question. But a parallel point applies to the question of what constitutes the moral wrongness or evil of persons or agents. Here, however, three rather than two levels must be dis- tinguished. First, there is the level of action-contents themselves with their morally relevant descriptions referring to the actions’

SYMPOSIUM ON REASON AND MORALITY 59 impacts on recipients and their interests. Second, there is the level of the agents’ performances of those action-contents; here, the concepts of voluntariness and purposiveness, which I have called the generic features of action, are relevant. Now the directly moral reasons why agents are blameable for certain of their actions, or why the agents are morally bad or evil, involve reference not only to the contents of the actions they perform but also to the mental conditions of voluntariness and pur- posiveness with which they perform them. The morally bad person not only does what is morally wrong but does it knowing that it is wrong and intending nonetheless to do it.

Here again, however, alternative and opposed answers are possible as to which persons are morally bad becmse of dis- agreements over what actions are morally wrong. For this reason, similarly, a further, third level must be brought into consideration : that of the logical inconsistency that is incurred if the answers epitomized in the PGC are rejected. To recur to this third level is by no means to s ly or imply that morally evil agents are so only by virtue of committing logical or intellectual errors. I t is rather to specify first, in directly moral terms of persons, their interests, and their voluntary and purposive behaviors, what their moral evil consists in, and then to prove that any rejection or denial of those specifications cannot be rationally justified because it embodies a contradiction. Thus once more the logical consideration of consistency is presented neither as being identical with nor as superseding specifically moral considerations of moral evil, but rather as providing a culminating structural argument.

This aspect of logical consistency is also pertinent to morality because of its interpersonal structure. The immoral person is in the position of claiming for himself rights that he refuses to grant to other persons, and in this way of making exceptions in his own favor. The immorality is found directly in this refusal and exception-making. But the logical consideration of inconsist- ency brings out the formal structure of this refusal and this pro- vides a conclusive culminating argument against any attempts to reject or deny its moral wrongness.

The following challenge may be addressed to Bond and any- one else who may want to uphold any moral rule or principle without appealing to the consideration of consistency. Does he have any way of showing conclusively that his principle is right and ought to be accepted? Take Bond’s own statement: “The [moral] reason why I must not do some things is that. if I do,

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I will cause other persons hurt or harm.” Entirely apart from the vagueness of “hurt or harm”, there still remains the ques- tion: ‘Why should I accept this ‘moral reason’?’ Is the obliga- toriness of not hurting or harming other persons self-evident? Does its obligatoriness rest on its consequences for myself or others? It is because of the inconclusiveness of these and other suggested answers to this and other central questions of moral philosophy that a conclusive answer in terms of logical con- sistency provides an indispensable, culminating reason. And, as I indicated in my book, such conclusiveness is part of the very concept of the moral “ought” with its implication of what categorically must be done or not done (pp. 23-24, 184-185).

Let us now consider a third objection, or rather set of objec- tions, where Bond also commits various ignorationes. The objec- tions are found in his prolonged insistence of the following three theses: (a) “In doing most things I am not affirming anything a t all” and hence not making any judgments, (b) “Only judg- ments, not actions, can be consistent or self-contradictory.” (c) “Avoiding inconsistency can only be a reason for not holding certain things to be true together. It cannot, per se, be a reason for doing anything, and hence it cannot be the source of moral requirement or necessity.” These three theses bear directly, of course, on the objection I have just discussed that my argument reduces moral evil to logical error, but they also require separ- ate attention. The main thing to be noted here is that all these theses concern my use of the dialectically necessary method. Although at the end of his review Bond offers a lengthy argu- ment to show that my use of this method is “redundant”, he does not at all consider how the method is directly relevant to the points listed above.

Consider the first thesis: “In doing most things I am not affirming anything a t all.” Bond elaborates on this when he says that “the immoral agent . . . does not judge that he ought to do what he does, or even that it is permissible for him to do it; he just goes ahead and does it and judgment be damned”. This raises the question: what is an action? Is it simply the emitting of certain movements? Such an answer would ignore the men- tal elements involved in action; it would fail to differentiate behaviors like thrashing about during a nightmare or slipping on a banana peel from behaviors where the person controls his movements by his unforced choice for purposes he wants to attain. Thus mental factors like choosing, wanting, caring, decid- ing, and so forth are at least p r t l y constitutive of actions, and

SYMPOSIUM ON REASON AND MORALITY 61 these are modes of practical thinking. But such thinking, in turn, has linguistic counterparts.

Now it has long been recognized that language is connected with thought, as expressing and communicating it. This is as true of practiml as of theoretical thinking. Hence, to the extent to which such practical thinking is attributable, and to some extent necessarily attributable, to the agent who performs actions as analyzed above, to the same extent linguistic expressions or judgments are also attributable to him. This does not mean that he necessarily speaks aloud or mutters to himself vocally, but rather that in acting and think- ing as he does the agent uses or makes judgments that can be expressed in words. To say that they are so expressible is not, of course, to say that they are actually expressed. (p. 42; emphasis added)

Bond completely ignores this and other elucidations I have provided about the connection between action, practical think- ing, and judgment. But what they show is that his first thesis, that “in doing most things I am not affirming anything at all”, is mistaken because in its unqualified form it overlooks the facts that in doing what he does the agent engages in various forms of thinking and that this thinking is expressible in affirmations or other judgments. I have also gone on to show that the logical implications of these judgments include certain evaluative and deontic elements.

Bond also ignores the related considerations I have given bear- ing on his thesis (b), that “only judgments, not actions, can be consistent or self-contradictory”. I believe, indeed, that actions can be consistent in further ways; but the way that is directly relevant here is that, since judgments can be logically attributed to the agent by virtue of his practical thinking, consistency and inconsistency can also be attributed to him as an agent. If, moreover, certain judgments are necessarily attributable to him because of the necessary structure of action as involving pur- posiveness and apparent goods, as I have argued in my book, then consistency or inconsistency is necessarily attributable to the agent insofar as he accepts or rejects the logical implications of these judgments. Such rejection is attributable to him not only in the infrequent cases where he explicitly makes the rele- vant judgments but also where he evinces the rejection by his actions which violate the requirements presented in the judg- ments (see p. 139). Thus even if it is true that only judgments,

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not actions, are logically consistent or inconsistent, it is also true that agents incur logical consistency or inconsistency by virtue of the judgments that are attributable to them because of their actions.

There still remains the thesis represented by Bond’s statement (c), “Avoiding inconsistency . . . cannot, per se, be a reason for doing anything, and hence it cannot be the source of moral requirement or necessity.” This statement is a non sequitur. It may well be the case that avoiding inconsistency is not a reason in the sense of a motive for doing anything. But from this it does not follow that inconsistency may not be a conclusive culminating reason for holding that certain moral judgments are right or wrong and thus for doing or not doing the actions they prescribe. Hence, avoiding inconsistency can be the source of moral requirement or necessity not as directly providing a moti- vating factor but as showing what is justified or unjustified in the sphere of actions affecting the interests of persons other than the agent or the speaker. As I indicated previously, such a justificatory argument is in this way a second-order reason for affirming or denying the first-order rightness of judgments about actions and hence also of the actions themselves.

I turn now to consider Bond’s comments on the four stages into which he divides my argument leading to the PGC. On the first stage, where I say that every agent must regard the pur- poses for which he acts as good, Bond objects: “There is no reason at all why I cannot be in the grip of a powerful appetite (say a perverted sexual desire), yet regard its end as wholly base, ignoble, and unworthy.” He here ignores two points which I have emphasized. First, to qualify as an action, a behavior must be voluntary in that the person controls his behavior by his unforced choice and with knowledge of relevant circumstances. Hence, various kinds of external and internal causes, including reflexes and “obsessive submission to some dominating passion” (pp. 31, 253), debar behaviors from being actions. But it is just such uncontrolled causal factors that Bond adduces in his examples of non-valued purposes or goals of actions; thus he talks of being “in the grip of a powerful appetite” and says, “The appetite is simply upon one.” Hence, his counter-examples do not tell at all against the first stage of my argument, because the kinds of involuntary, compulsive behaviors he adduces are not cases of action. At the same time, my account of action as voluntary accommodates the behaviors of which most adult humans are normally capable. It is because they engage in such

SYMPOSIUM ON REASON AND MORALITY 63 behaviors by their unforced choice with a view to purposes they want to achieve that they regard these purposes as good. Thus, even if obsessive or compulsive behaviors over which a person has no control may be such that he does not regard their ends or purposes as good, this does not refute my thesis about the way agents regard the purposes of their actions. This feature of voluntariness also undercuts Bond’s attempt to depict wanting as non-judgmental and to separate it from valuing.

A second point of my argument that Bond ignores here is my repeated emphasis that the criteria of value whereby an agent ascribes goodness to his purposes “need not be moral or even hedonic; they run the full range of the purposes for which the agent acts, from the momentarily gratifying and the nar- rowly prudential to more extensive and long-range social goals” (p. 49). Bond, on the other hand, seems to restrict the relevant criterion of value to the moral; thus when he talks of being “in the grip of a powerful appetite”, he says he may “regard its end as wholly base, ignoble, and unworthy”. But there still remains the question: if the appetite is one that he undertakes to gratify through behavior in which he engages by his unforced and informed choice, so that his behavior is voluntary, then doesn’t he to that extent regard his purposes as worth pursuing and hence as good according to whatever criterion is directly in- volved in his purpose (whether its criterion be sensual, hedonic, or other), even if he regards i t as bad on other criteria? Other- wise, why would he unforcedly choose to pursue that particular goal as against others which he might pursue instead?

I pointed out, indeed (and Bond ignores this also), that “the agent may act for a purpose that seems to him to be bad on various criteria. He may regard it as morally bad in that he thinks it wrongly frustrates the interests of other persons; and he may also regard it as bad on legal and even prudential grounds.” (p. 50) These example are similar to, but more exten- sive than, the one Bond adduces against me. But in addition to ignoring them, he also ignores the reply I gave, that “in all such cases [the agent] still controls his present, ongoing actions for the sake of something he wants. . . . So long as this wanting is not a case of forced choice in the sense discussed above, it constitutes a valuing on the part of the agent so that, to this extent, he regards the purpose or object of his action as good, whatever his further beliefs about the conformity of his action to moral, legal, or even prudential criteria.” (p. 51) Thus in connection with the first stage of my argument it is important

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not to overlook, as Bond does, the conditions of control and knowledge embodied in voluntariness, the multiplicity of criteria on the basis of which an agent may pursue and value his various purposes, and the relativity of his valuing to the particular pur- pose and criterion on which he acts.

Bond’s criticism of the second stage of my argument also overlooks salient considerations. In this stage I pointed out that since the agent values the purposes for which he acts, he must also, so far as he is rational, value the generic features of his action, voluntariness or freedom and purposiveness or intention- ality, because these are the proximate necessary conditions of his acting to attain anything else he may regard as good. Bond objects first that the agent may not value his freedom because “he might prefer to have his desires catered to by others with no need for any effort on his own part”. Here again he ignores the fact that I have raised this very objection against myself (p. 53). I answered it by saying that such cases of surrender- ing one’s freedom “may correctly be regarded as pathological, because, so far as the historical record indicates, they mainly occur when basic well-being-persons’ ability to obtain the mini- mal necessities required for agency-is so severely threatened that only surrender of their freedom seems to offer any relief. . . . Thus it still remains true that agents value their freedom or voluntariness as a necessary good so long as the possibility remains of successful purposive action-that is, of action that is able to fulfill and maintain at least those purposes required for the continuation of agency.” (p. 53; see also pp. 263-267) This answer also applies to Bond’s invocation of a “desireless nirvana”; in addition, to maintain such a condition would require the practical use or availability of certain resources, and hence, potentially at least, certain actions. Moreover, the rational agent would not completely surrender his freedom to other persons because he would be aware that there is no assur- ance that these others would continue to “cater” to his desires (see p. 125).

Against my thesis that the agent also values as a necessary good the generic purposiveness of his action, Bond objects that the three general kinds of goods which every agent values- basic, nonsubtractive, and additive-are not “aspects of pur- posiveness itself”. He here ignores my distinction between the procedural and the substantive aspects of purposiveness, between “purposing” and the objects aimed at, and my emphasis that in each. aspect purposiveness “involves intrinsic reference to

SYMPOSIUM ON REASON AND MORALITY 65 the end or goal the agent envisages for his action” (p. 39). Since purposiveness includes both these aspects, in valuing the pur- posiveness of his action the agent values not only the general kind of goals or objects for which he acts but also the general abilities or conditions which enable him to engage in such cona- tive pursuits, and which I refer to collectively as “well-being”.

Bond, despite some cavilling, seems in the end to grant this. He still objects, however, against my derivation of the nature of well-being from the generic features of action, arguing instead that is is sufficient to refer to “the necessary conditions for successful action in general”. In his third footnote he extends this objection to charge that I have confused two different senses of “generic” as meaning, first, essential or defining fea- tures, and second, universal or invariant features of action. It must be noted, however, that whatever is generic in the first sense must also be generic in the second. Moreover, Bond over- looks the way in which I relate what he rightly calls “the enabling conditions of successful agency” to the defining charac- teristics of action. He also ignores my distinction between the generic features “that are found in every action, whether or not it achieves its purpose” and “the generic features of successful action” (pp. 61-62). In all these uses of “generic”, the word signifies either the defining characteristics of action or what- ever is directly derivative from or explicable by reference to those characteristics, so that there is no confusion of meanings.

Coming to the third stage of my argument, where I show that every agent must hold or at least accept that he has rights to freedom and well-being because they are necessary goods for him, Bond says that I here give “more rhetoric than argument”. Considering that I devote a total of forty pages to detailed analyses and argument on this matter (pp. 63-103), I strongly object to this remark as rank misrepresentation.

Bond’s specific criticism of this stage of my argument is that, since rights entail correlative duties, to say that the agent has rights to freedom and well-being against other persons “is to claim that there is for them an (over-riding or commanding) reason for respecting my freedom and well-being, and that does not follow at all”. Bond here overlooks my repeated and explicit insistence that the agent’s “ought”-judgment “is made from within the agent’s own standpoint in purposive action : what grounds his judgment is his own agency-needs, not those of the persons about whom he makes the judgment” (p. 71; emphasis added. See also pp. 79, 83, 94, 146). In making his rights-claim,

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the agent is thus not claiming that other persons have their own prudential or other reasons for according him the rights in ques- tion; he is saying or implying only that he has his own pruden- tial reasons for holding that he has these rights against other persons. This is why the agent’s rights-claim is prudential rather than moral. Incidentally, I never use the phrase “prudential obligation” that Bond here attributes to me.

On the fourth stage of my argument Bond ignores, first, all the extensive arguments I give to show that the sufficient reason on which the agent must ground his rightsclaim is that he is a prospective agent who has purposes he wants to fulfill (pp. 104-128). He ignores, second, the precise way in which I derive a generalization from the rights-claim together with its sufficient reason. He ignores, third, that I raise against this derivation the same objection he raises against me, and, because of his mis- taken interpretation of what I say, he also fails to understand my reply.

Bond is mistaken when he asserts that the agent’s singular rights-judgment “is true only because it is an instantiation of the universal principle” which says that all prospective agents have rights to freedom and well-being. Rather, the singular judgment is initially upheld by the agent independently of its relation to the generalization that follows from it when the sufficient reason is added to it. The singular judgment is upheld because it expresses the agent’s recognition that, from the stand- point of his own agency-needs, other persons ought at least to refrain from interfering with his freedom and well-being.

Bond then raises this objection: “But if the initial statement is true only because it is an instantiation of the universal prin- ciple, how can the former be prudential while the latter is moral, i.e. how can a prudential statement be an instantiation of a moral principle?” Once again he does not tell the reader that I have raised this very objection against myself:

A question may be raised about the correctness of calling the PGC a moral principle. For the PGC is logically derived from the agent’s claiming the generic rights for himself. The criterion of this right-claim, however, is prudential, not moral, since the agent claims these rights for his pursuits of his own purposes. How, then can the PGC as a moral principle be derived from claims or judgments that are themselves not moral? (p. 145; emphasis added) The answer I give to this question (pp. 145-147) is based on the

criterion of the “moral” as requiring favourable consideration

SYMPOSIUM ON REASON AND MORALITY 67 of the interests of at least some persons other than the agent or the speaker. We begin from the agent’s singular prudential judgment that he has rights to freedom and well-being because he is a prospective purposive agent. By virtue of the sufficient reason embodied in this “because”, the agent must accept the generalization that all prospective purposive agents have rights to freedom and well-being. And since these rights entail correla- tive duties on the agent’s part, he must accept that he ought to respect the freedom and well-being of all other purposive agents, so that this is for him a moral judgment. Bond’s diffi- culty with this (“If we generalize a prudential statement, the result must be a prudential principle”) stems from his failure to see that the logical result of the generalization is that the agent must now give favorable consideration to the interests, especially the most important (because action-related) interests, of all other prospective purposive agents. No repeated invo- cation of the words “moral” and “prudential” can remove this result, especially when, as in Bond’s case, it is accompanied by a persistent failure to advert to the indicated criterion of the moral.

I come finally to Bond’s comments on my use of the dialec- tically necessary method. By this method the argument I present for the PGC is given not in assertoric statements made by myself but rather in statements that every agent logically must make or accept from within his own conative standpoint of purposive action. Thus the dialectically necessary method confines the argument leading to the supreme principle of morality to what is necessarily involved in action as viewed by the agent.

Bond objects: “If the agent’s reasoning is in order, we might well ask, where is the need for the dialectically necessary method?” But by this very way of putting the question he shows that he accepts at least part of the very method whose needfulness he is disputing. For it is “the agent’s reasoning” that is and must be used here. To give the argument not as made directly by myself but rather as made by the agent is central to the argument’s being dialectical rather than asser- toric. Bond should look again a t my definition of “dialectical”: “a method of argument that begins from assumptions, opinions, statements, or claims made by protagonists or interlocutors and then proceeds to examine what these logically imply” (p. 43; emphasis added). “As dialectical, the method proceeds from within the standpoint of the agent, since it begins from state- ments or assumptions he makes. The dialectical method must

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thus be distinguished from an assertoric method that is not limited to such a purview.” (p. 44; emphasis added)

Bond also shows his unwitting acceptance of the dialectically necessary method when he writes: “What is important is that the agent must recognize as goods his own freedom and well- being.” (emphasis added) Exactly. I t is what the agent must recognize from within his own standpoint as an agent that is crucial to my use of the dialectical method.

Other remarks made by Bond, however, show that he is not aware of the bearings of his own acceptance of the dialectically necessary method, and hence of the reasons I give for my use of this method. Thus, asking “Why all the fuss about the ‘dialectically necessary method’?”, he presents what he calls “the genuine substance of the argument” as follows : “Freedom and well-being, as the necessary conditions of successful pur- posive action, are necessary goods for all prospective purposive agents. This being so, all agents have rights to them.” Note that the first sentence could be construed as dialectical, for it says that freedom and well-being “are necessary goods for all . . . agents”. The words “goods for”, however, are here ambigu- ous as between meaning simply “beneficial to” and as meaning “regarded as beneficial by”. The former meaning is assertoric, the latter dialectical. But if we interpret “goods for” as asser- toric, as Bond seems to intend, then the next sentence as he here presents it does not follow: “This being so, all agents have rights to them.” Why, from the fact that certain conditions are beneficial (“goods for”) certain persons or even necessary goods for them, does it follow that those persons have rights to these conditions? Is this part of the definition of “rights” or of “neces- sary goods”? In particular, why should any one agent grant or accept that all other prospective agents have rights to freedom and well-being just because they are necessary conditions of these other persons’ actions? Bond simply ignores the difficulty here, to which I called attention in my book: “From ‘A needs freedom and well-being in order to act’ (or ‘Freedom and well- being are necessary conditions of A’s acting’), it does not follow that ‘A has rights to freedom and Well-being.’ A person who accepts the former statement may without contradicting himself reject the latter.” (pp. 160-161) For it still needs to be shown why any persons other than A should (let alone must) hold that A has rights simply because he has certain interests that are important or even necessary to him.

The case is otherwise, however, when the dialectically neces-

SYMPOSIUM ON REASON AND MORALITY 69 sary method is used. For then each agent, thinking or speaking in propria persona, and as concerned with his own purposive pursuits as an agent, must hold that he has rights to freedom and well-being because, if he denies this, then he accepts that it is permissible for other persons to remove 3r interfere with his freedom and well-being. But if he accepts this, then he must contradict what it has been previously established that he must accept, namely, that freedom and well-being are necessary goods for him, so that he must hold that it is impermissible for him to be deprived of them.

The difference made by the dialectically necessary method, then, is that it proceeds in terms of what the agent must claim or accept from within his own conative practical standpoint, as concerned with his own pursuits of his purposes. This is in contrast to the assertoric method which proceeds “objectively” without being focussed in the agent’s own pursuit of his pur- poses. Thus, inferences that are illicit when presented asser- torically (such as “A does X for purpose E; therefore E is good.”) are valid when presented dialectically (such as “A does X for purpose E; therefore A thinks or believes, ‘E is good’.”). The latter inference tells us what the agent must think because of his conative relation to his own purposes; the former infer- ence tells us what the speaker or writer asserts, not as an agent, but as purported objective describer of the agent’s purpose.

In the end, Bond seems to grant much of this when he writes: “But there really is something very special about comtiveness, for i t is the agent’s necessarily willing the necessary conditions of his successful agency in general that is really doing the work.” But he blurs this insight when he goes on to say: “But we cannot move deductively from what an agent necessarily wills to any statement about what rights he has or even about what rights he thinks he has, since that not only implies that a will- ing, which is not a proposition, has entailments, but it also presupposes a deontic moral background or context.” On these points I have already given my replies above. A “willing” is not indeed a proposition, but its thought-content can be expressed as a judgment, and this does have entailments. These entail- ments, moreover, include right-claims which agents must make or accept for their own prudential purposes, so that the claims, while deontic, are not moral. On these as on other matters Bond shows a lack of understanding of the analyses and arguments I have given in Reason and Morality. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO