Morality as Collective Rationality

Ralph Wedgwood (University of Southern California)

This talk gives a programmatic sketch of a new approach to moral theory – in particular, to the distinction between moral and non-moral reasons. The central idea is that the moral reasons that an individual has all arise from the reasons of the various groups to which the individual belongs. The theory comes in four stages. First, there are the pre-moral reasons of individuals – reasons to pursue one’s own well-being or self-improvement or worthwhile personal projects or the like. Second, there are the reasons of groups, which depend on the pre-moral reasons of the individual members of those groups; these group reasons are in a sense political or at least “proto-political” in character. Third, there are the individual's moral reasons, each of which arises from the reasons of some group to which the individual belongs. Finally, there are principles about how these reasons are to be weighed against each other, to determine what the individual should do all things considered; intuition suggests that sometimes the moral reasons that arise from smaller groups may be weightier than the moral reasons than arise from larger groups.