BookReview 
INFORMAL LOGlC 
XVI.3, Fall 1994 

Can't We Make Moral Judgements? 
by Mary Midgley 

JEFFREY BLUSTEIN Albert Einstein College oj Medicine 

Midgley, Mary. (1991). Can't We Make Moral 
Judgements? New York: St. Martin's Press. Pp. 
viii, 1-167. ISBN 0-312-06129-3. Cloth. 
U.S.$24.95. 

Mary Midgley's short and somewhat 
convoluted book is a critical examination 
of the problem of scepticism as it relates to 
moral judgment. This is a problem that aca-
demic moral philosophers have long been 
interested in, but the current climate in ad-
vanced Western societies has given this in-
vestigation a new urgency. The breakdown 
of traditional sources of moral guidance 
and the experience of moral conflict and 
diversity have left many in contemporary 
society confused and uncertain about the 
validity of passing moral judgment on the 
acts and characters of others. Social critics 
across a broad spectrum perceive a loss of 
interest in, or of seriousness about, moral 
issues, and they trace this to a fashionable 
relativism and subjectivism about moral 
values. Against this background, a book 
like Midgley's is a welcome reminder that 
serious argument about moral topics is both 
possible and necessary. 

Midgley clarifies her concern early on 
by distinguishing between two kinds of 
scepticism, the "enquiring" and the "dog-
matic" (p. 3). The former refers to the salu-
tary habit of asking questions about popu-
larly held beliefs and withholding agree-
ment with particular moral positions until 
some rational grounding has been provided 
for them. The second is more far-reaching 
and destructive of our moral practices, and 
this is the type of scepticism that engages 

Midgley's attention throughout the book. 
For what the dogmatic sceptic claims is that 
there is "no rational way to answer" (p. 3) 
moral questions, no way to argue sensibly 
and systematically for or against any moral 
judgments whatsoever. (It should be noted 
that there are philosophers - e.g., Harman 
and Mackie who profess forms of moral 
scepticism that go beyond the "enquiring," 
but that do not deny a role for reason and 
argument in ethics.) Elsewhere, Midgley 
characterizes this extreme scepticism as a 
denial of the possibility of moral knowl-
edge. 

Midgley explores the roots of the scep-
tical challenge in some detail. She traces 
the development of the Western ideal of 
freedom of the individual, and shows how, 
in its modern incarnation, it has come to 
exalt the solitary, self-reliant individual and 
to disparage dependency on and responsi-
bility for others. Protecting the individual 
in his solitude is a zone of privacy, and in-
dividuals are commonly thought to be im-
mune from moral criticism for whatever is 
done within the protected sphere. Actions 
in the public sphere, by contrast, are gen-
erally agreed to be appropriate candidates 
for censure, but it is the censure of law or 
custom, not morality. Against this. Midgley 
responds that the idea of a private sphere 
itself presupposes widely shared moral 
judgments. That is, the statement that some 
conduct falls within the private sphere reflects 
the prior judgment that it is either not wrong, 
or not wrong in such a way as to warrant in-
terference by others. There is thus no ante-



230 Jeffrey Blustein 

cedently fixed notion of "the private" that 
blocks moral judgment of individual conduct. 

Midgley also examines the pronounce-
ments of those she labels subjectivists, phi-
losophers like Nietzsche, Sartre, and Ayn 
Rand, who urge their readers to eschew 
external sources of moral guidance and cre-
ate their own moral values. In fact, she ar-
gues, these philosophers tum out not to be 
the radical sceptics that a cursory reading 
of their work would suggest. Theirs is ac-
tuaIly a "moralistic kind of subjectivism" 
(p. 96), not a sweeping critique of moral 
judgment as such, but a more limited repu-
diation of what they regard as particular 
false values and self-deceptive habits of 
mind. 

Sometimes, Midgley observes, the ex-
pression of a general scepticism about 
moral judgment is only an exaggerated way 
of warning us about the dangers of being 
judgmental and self-righteous. Thus, a cer-
tain hesitation before judging the practices 
of cultures that are remote from or alien to 
our own is well-advised, since there may 
be real obstacles standing in the way of our 
understanding the meaning those practices 
have within those cultures. But this sound 
advice, Midgley tells us, is very different 
from the thesis of relativism, either in its 
simple form, which asserts that "the exist-
ing principles of other cultures are valid in 
those cultures" (p. 76), or in its apparently 
more plausible sceptical form, which holds 
that "nobody can say anything valid about 
moral questions in cultures other than their 
own" (p. 77). Indeed, relativism should be 
rejected because people tend to assume that 
"at a profound level the human race is in 
some way one" (p. 85). How, or whether, a 
universal morality can be grounded in what 
people suppose to be a common human 
nature is a question that Midgley does not 
pause to examine. 

Untenable though relativism might be, 
Midgley believes that it serves a useful 
purpose in underscoring the essentially 
public or communal aspect of morality. The 
notion of an entirely private morality is 

senseless, she argues at several places in 
the book, because moral judgment utilizes 
linguistic and conceptual categories sup-
plied by the larger society. Society provides 
the background that invests our moraljudg-
ments with meaning, and "without this 
background, we could not speak or think 
coherently on such subjects at all" (p. 42). 
But this conceptual argument, it should be 
noted. would not provide a basis for moral 
criticism of social practices. For example, 
it would not support the claim that a soci-
ety which fails to promote acts of positive 
assistance for persons in need is morally 
deficient. 

Midgley appears to understand this in 
her chapters on "individualism, solitude 
and privacy" and "morality and harm," but 
her discussion is confusing. She continues 
to refer to the communal nature of morals, 
but she fails to alert the reader to the fact 
that her criticism of extreme individualism 
is actually based on a different construal 
of the relationship between individual and 
society. The criticism proceeds not from a 
general point about meaning, but rather 
from a view about "the mutual dependence 
in which we all quite rightly live with those 
around us" (p. 59). 

On the issue of moral knowledge, Midgley 
does not hold that moral judgments are fac-
tual in the paradigm sense afforded by natu-
ral science, but she attempts to elaborate and 
defend an account of moral knowledge that 
is broadly of a piece with her account of sci-
entific knowledge. She rejects the classical 
foundationalist view of Descartes, according 
to which belief is justified when it is self-evi-
dently true or derived from self-evident truths, 
as "an over-ambitious search for perfectly 
secure knowledge" that ends" in a paralys-
ing disillusion" (p. 130). Understanding this, 
she claims, should make us more receptive 
to the possibility of genuine moral knowl-
edge, for while the quest for absolutely cer-
tain foundations is obviously futile in moral-
ity, it is no less futile in science as well. The 
correct account of knowledge in both areas 
is a coherentist one. 



Midgley's brief discussion of a 
coherentist approach to moral justification 
is one of the more interesting parts of her 
book. "What supports value-judgements," 
she argues, "is their relation to the whole 
of life" (p. 138). Some moral beliefs de-
rive their clout from the relatively central 
position they occupy in the fabric of our 
moral experience: "they are woven into 
everything we do, and cannot be changed 
without bringing society itself to a stand-
still" (p. 139). Others are more peripheral 
in the sense that they are alterable without 
calling into question the bulk of our moral 
attitudes and principles. In any case, 
Midgley observes, no moral belief, how-
ever deeply implicated in our moral lives, 
is immune to revision, and a radical shift 
away from our initial convictions is possi-
ble, at least over an extended period of time. 
Readers familiar with Rawls's use of the 
notion of "reflective equilibrium" may find 
it a way fruitfully to develop Midgley's 
suggestive remarks. 

In the penultimate chapter of her book, 
Midgley offers a different sort of response 
to the moral sceptic. "It is of special inter-
est to notice," she says, "how unavoidable 
it is that we should pass judgements on 
ourselves" (p. 150). The argument here is 
a complex one that links the making of such 
judgments to the possession of a sense of 
one's own identity through time. The au-
thority of morality, according to Midgley, 
is rooted in a psychological fact about us, 
in the fact that it is "deeply distressing to 
us to live shapelessly, incoherently, discon-
tinuously, meaninglessly - to live without 
standards" (p. 153). Whatever the merits 
of moral scepticism as an abstract philo-
sophical position, then, it fails to take into 
account certain fundamental facts about 
human psychological makeup. But it is not 
clear whether this argument succeeds. The 
moral sceptic, as Midgley describes him, 
believes that it is not possible to justify on 
rational grounds the conviction that any 
particular form of conduct is really any 
better than any other. It does not seem to 

Review of Mary Midgley 231 

follow from this, however, that the sceptic 
cannot have deeply felt and abiding moral 
convictions about various matters. What 
Midgley needs to show is why belief in the 
rational defensibility of one's moral con-
victions is necessary for the possession of 
a sense of one's continuity through time. 

If features of human psychology are 
taken as basic and the adequacy of the 
moral sceptic's position is to be assessed 
in terms of its compatibility with them, then 
this would seem to have important impli-
cations for Midgley's coherentist account 
of moral justification. The suggestion, in 
other words, is that the possibilities of re-
vision of our moral beliefs are likewise 
constrained by our possession of certain 
psychological characteristics. Some revi-
sions, while possible in an abstract sense, 
might not fall within the range of the natu-
ralistic possibilities, and so be unavailable 
to us. Midgley does not explicitly connect 
up her coherentist account with her anti-
sceptical naturalistic argument in this way, 
but she might very well agree with the 
point. 

Midgley's book ranges over a wide ar-
ray of topics in an engaging manner that is 
refreshingly free of technical philosophi-
cal jargon. If the test of a good introduc-
tion to philosophy is whether it excites in-
terest in the subject and stimulates further 
reading, then her book should get high 
marks. But readers with a background in 
philosophy will likely be disappointed with 
the brevity and occasional abstruseness of 
her treatment of difficult issues, and they 
may be put off by the book's freewheeling 
and unsystematic style. 

JEFFREY BLUSTEIN 
DEPARTMENT OF EPIDEMIOLOGY & 

SOCIAL MEDICINE 
DIVISION OF BIOETHlCS 
MONTEFIORE MEDICAL CENTER 
1825 EASTCHESTER ROAD 
BRONX. NY 10461-2373