Philosophy 361		Ethics		Darwall		Fall 1997

	METAETHICS III:  IDEAL JUDGMENT THEORIES

TAP Assignment for 10/6:  Ayer, pp. 78-79 (esp. para. 6) 

I	According to the ideal judge theory, what it is for something to be good or 
bad, or for an act to be right or wrong, is for it to be the case that an ideal judge 
would regard the thing or act in a certain way.  The underlying idea is that we can 
identify qualities of good judgment independently of normative views about what 
sorts of things are good or right. Think of people whose ethical judgment you trust.  
Aren't they:
	(i) well-informed about the issues in question;
	(ii)  experienced, sensitive, and able to imagine vividly what it is like "from 
the inside" for persons and creatures who are likely to be affected in the issue in 
question;
	(iii)  dispassionate and judicious, and form their attitudes by trying to temper 
momentary emotions like anger, envy, and so on.
	(iv)  impartial, likely to view the issues, not from their own personal 
standpoint.
	These are general epistemological virtues.  But a more radical possibility has 
had substantial philosophical appeal in ethics, viz., there is no truth, independent of 
what would issue from good judgment, that the ideal judge is better able to track.  
Rather, ethical beliefs are true if, and only if, they would be held by an ideal 
observer.  This is what ethical truth consists in.  Call this idea the ideal observer, 
or ideal judge, theory. 

II So far we only have a sketch of a theory.  
	(i) What is the full specification of the features characterizing the ideal 
judge?
	(ii) What is the way (or ways) of regarding things, such that when held by 
the ideal judge, they determine value and obligation?
	A.  Take (ii) first.  What if we say that something's being intrinsically good 
is the same thing as its being thought to be intrinsically good by an ideal judge. Is 
this circularity a problem?  What is the content of the ideal judge's thought?   Do we 
face an infinite regress?  There may not be a problem if we are not attempting a 
conceptual reduction.  Maybe we can understand what it is to regard something as 
intrinsically good, and the question is the metaphysical one of what it is to be 
intrinsically good.
B.  Another reductionist possibility:  something is intrinsically good if, and 
only if, an ideal judge would prefer (desire) it (i.e. its existence to its nonexistence).  
Does this theory remind you of Mill?

	This may work fairly well for intrinsic goodness, but what about moral 
rightness?  What sort of way of regarding things, held by the ideal judge, can 
determine that?  We might say that an act is wrong if it would be disapproved of by 
an ideal judge.  But is their a way of understanding what disapproval is without 
understanding what wrong is? Thus, compare disapproval of an act of betrayal with 
the sort of dislike one might have for a joke that was really corny.  Is there any way 
of capturing the difference in response, except to say that in the case of disapproval, 
one thinks that a wrong has been done.  If there is not, then we seem to be back 
faced with the problem mentioned in II.A. above.

	C.  The other set of problems with the view concern giving a fuller 
specification of the ideal judge.  Take the features (i)-(iv).  The problem is that they 
do not seem to determine a unique set of judgments.  Thus, compare two different 
judges who come from two quite different societies--one comes from a society that 
has a culture of machismo and masculine codes of honor, the other comes from a 
society that stresses maintaining harmonious relationships and turning the other 
cheek.  Is it not true that if we were to endow both with complete knowledge, 
impartiality, experience, and dispassionateness we might still get different 
judgments, for example, with respect to how it is appropriate to respond to an 
insult?  The ideal judge from the first society might disapprove of failing to 
challenge the offender, whereas the ideal judge from the latter might disapprove of 
such a challenge, approving, rather, of attempts to conciliate.
		(i) One response to this problem would be to be a sort of relativism. 
		(ii)  Another response would be to try to specify the characteristics of 
the ideal judge further. Adam Smith and David Hume argued that an ideal judge 
would be equally sympathetic with the interests of all individuals.  It is not 
coincidental that these writers had broadly utilitarian sensibilities.  Critics of 
utilitarianism will object that this theory already begs the question in the direction of 
utilitarianism.  

III	The ideal judge theory might have substantial appeal if it can overcome these 
problems.  It seems to be a kind of naturalistic theory, but one that might be able to 
escape some of the problems that afflict other naturalistic theories.
		(i) the features that realize the ideal, are natural features:  being 
informed, being dispassionate, being experienced, and being impartial, even if they 
are not realizable in the limit, or ideally, in nature.  In this way they are like an 
ideal gas in chemistry, a frictionless surface in physics, or a perfect market in 
economics.  We may still regard our theory about what an ideal judge would think 
as a theory about nature, in some suitably broad sense.
		(ii) on the other hand, unlike other naturalistic theories, it may be 
able to respond to some of the criticisms of ethical naturalism.  Consider, for 
example, the objection that naturalism cannot capture the normative or 
recommending force of ethical judgments, since they simply describe reality, 
whereas ethical judgments seem to endorse or condemn it in some respect or other.  
According to the ideal judge theory, there is a truth about, say, something's intrinsic 
goodness, just in case an ideal judge, or, to put more generously, oneself were one 
judging ideally, would endorse or prefer the existence of that thing.