Abstract

In the dispute as to whether the ultimate foundation of the ethical is principles or persons, this study vigorously advances the latter position. The author develops the thesis that morality is fundamentally a matter of caring about others. He derives this claim from the premise that engaging in the proscription of certain harmful acts "will depend ultimately upon your relation to the person against whom these acts are directed". The author contends that if one were utterly indifferent to the well-being of the person affected by the acts in question, one would not condemn them morally. He goes on to claim that this caring qualifies as moral only if it is an unselfish concern for what happens to the person in question. He does not so much argue as illustrate this view by adducing from literature examples of human desperation and suffering to which compassion is the only natural response. Our condemnation of, e.g., a brutal assault shows, he says, that we care disinterestedly about the well-being of others. This immediate concern for the other is contrasted with attention to the inherent rightness or wrongness of actions--something the author characterizes as pharisaical. He attacks not only any theory which would reduce morality to a refinement of self-interest but likewise any which would preposit to this personal concern any alternative frame of reference--the rules of moral language, norms backed by social pressure, or the objectives of social harmony. Morality, he argues, is not a system of social control --it is not properly controlling nor systematic.