Volume 32, Number 16 · October 24, 1985
The High Cost of Virtue
By Ronald Dworkin
Morality and Conflict
by Stuart Hampshire
Harvard University Press, 175 pp., $17.50
Stuart Hampshire's main target, in the subtle and beautifully written essays collected here, is the ancient but still current idea that moral conflict is an illusion, that we can always find, in every situation, one choice or decision that leaves us nothing to regret. Aristotle held one version of that idea: he thought that philosophical reasoning could reveal the place of each virtue and experience in the ideally best life, which would have the right degree of each and the right balance among them. Utilitarians have another version: they argue that all questions about how people ought to behave, from the most intimate personal decisions to political decisions affecting many millions, must be made on one standard alone. People ought always to do what will produce the greatest overall happiness, or the greatest 'utility,' according to some other conception of what that means. A certain form of conventionalism offers a third version: it insists that morality is nothing more than falling in with the traditions, practices, and codes that define each moral community; since morality has no purchase outside conventions of that sort, someone who behaves as his community requires, on this view, can have no grounds for moral regret.
Review, 3106 words
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