Decisions, Judgments, Universalizability

Mary Warnock makes the remark, for instance, that “it is far from clear that the process of deciding what to do is [as the emotivists, and others, seem to assume] exactly like the process of judging somebody else’s actions” (130).

the “logic” or analysis of difficult moral decisions is quite unlike that of moral judgments, whether about one’s own actions or about somebody else’s (130).

“Sidgwick’s universalizability principle (hereafter UP) applies to all moral judgments including those about one’s own actions but that it does not apply to all moral decisions, especially not to one’s own difficult moral decisions” (130).

“a morally serious agent who decides to do X will usually also judge that X is the right thing for him to do, but the deciding is one thing and the judging another—and when the decision is a difficult one, he may do the former and not the latter” (130).

“Faced with two conflicting moral obligations, not merely a moral obligation as opposed to a “military duty,” Vere asks himself, in effect, “What ought I really to do?”” (131).

“not “What ought I really to do?” as if what I ought to do might be different from what you or anyone else ought to do, but “What ought to be done by anyone in my position?”” (132).

“First, I may decide that I ought to acquit (or convict) Budd-which does not matter-but this is to decide that anyone ought to make the same decision” (132).

“The second possibility is this. I may not be able to decide what ought to be done, that is, what anyone ought to do, thus I will not have been successful in deciding what I ought to do. Nothing remains but for me to act; owing to the pressure of circumstancesor, as Melville puts it, “when it is imperativepromptlyto act,”I simply must act.”” (132).

“to act is not necessarily to decide what I ought to do, and it is not, therefore,to make a moral judgment that what I in fact do is “right for me” (to use a phrase from Winch)” (132).

So: two decisions. 1) That I ought to make one, and 2) between conviction and acquittal

“it is false in this particular case to say that I have made a decision about what I ought to do. I have decided what to do but not what I ought to do” (132).

in really difficult moral dilemmas an agent cannot decide what he really ought to do because he cannot decide what anyone ought to do, and yet he must act; this is the tragedy (133)

“One moral demand, he holds, deserves precedence; one overrides the other for anyone like himself, for anyone “who proceeds under the imperial code”” (133).

“To sum up: I have claimed that there are occasions of serious moral dilemma in which an agent, wholly intent upon doing what is right [morally serious], may decide to do X and yet refuse to judge that X is right. Since he has not made a moral judgment, he is not committed to anything stated in UP, for UP pertains only to moral judgments” (133).