ABSTRACT
Obligation has suffered the fate of narrow foci in its modern and contemporary philosophical treatments. The tropes are familiar to the point of cliché: duty versus consequence versus virtue. These categories have become ontological tropes in the philosophical study of ethics. Those in doubt should consult the many anthologies on ethics in the Western academy. A particularly influential recent example is A Companion to Ethics (Singer 1993). It’s as if the moral philosophical universe, save Friedrich Nietzsche’s metaethical reflections and critique, were an ontological tripartite pretty much as the age of Christianity signaled the primacy of thinking in threes. Primacy of duty subordinated consequence, which meant that rightful action was the order of the day. Should one aim for the good, the result was a subordination of rightful action. In a liberal age, however, agreement on the good is difficult to substantiate; hence, as John Rawls has shown in his introduction to A Theory of Justice (1971), agreement on reasonably reflected ways of organizing the social and political world is such that the differing conceptions of the good could be tolerated. In defense of a virtue approach, however, objection could be made to a world of horrible human beings who aim at no good beyond making sure that their actions were fair or just, even though their own characters may be quite vicious. What’s more, in narrow approaches that simply look at rightful noncontextualized actions, there is a loss of the common good beyond the concession that justice is a good thing for all. 1 Aiming for the good of all raises the familiar objections as well of possible sacrificed innocence. And so these debates go on, fine-tuned, with the familiar “illusions of technique.” 2
