Robert Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations by Robert Pippin, Review by: Reviewed

by RichardRorty Ethics, Vol. 111, No. 2 (January 2001), pp. 438-441 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/233494 . Accessed: 30/09/2012 01:37
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BOOK REVIEWS
Applbaum, Arthur Isak. Ethics for Adversaries: The Morality of Roles in Public and Professional Life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. 273. $23.95 (paper). Ethics for Adversaries is a sustained but reasoned attack on harmful adversarial tactics common in professions, business, and politics. Other philosophers have launched such attacks before, but Applbaums is systematic and deep. It is systematic because he concentrates on possible justications for adversariness across the board, instead of considering the professions separately (he does use several different ones as examples). This approach has both virtues and drawbacks, as I shall argue below. It is deep because it develops its arguments from a wellarticulated contractual moral framework. According to this framework, it is wrong to violate persons by failing to respect their moral agency; if rights of persons are to be justiably violated, they must be given reasons that they could reasonably accept. Applbaums central thesis is that professional roles cannot justify doing what is otherwise morally prohibited. To defend it he considers in detail each of the most plausible arguments to the contrary. The book begins, however, on a more literary and satirical note. The rst chapter rehearses possible justications for a now thankfully defunct professional role, that of Paris executioner during the French revolution. Applbaum has the executioner argue that he is simply carrying out legitimate legal decisions that express the will of the people. He claims that such obedience is necessary for social order; it cannot be replaced by his personal judgment as to who shall live and die. This satirical reductio might not convince those who take seriously professional roles that are seen to be socially necessary. For them it might remain an open question whether the role of executioner is blameworthy. But as an introduction intended to unsettle, this one adds a nice literary touch. In the central part of the book Applbaum rejects arguments that justify adversarial tactics by claiming that professional roles change the proper descriptions of the actions that they require; that institutional rules, like rules of games, can render otherwise objectionable acts morally permissible; and that offsetting actions of adversaries under a moral division of labor result in equilibria with socially benecial results. The rst argument holds that just as surgeons do not stab and police do not kidnap, so business managers who bluff and lawyers who convince jurors of what the lawyers know to be false do not lie. Applbaum counters that one cannot change the moral character of an action simply by redescribing it. Preprofessional or natural descriptions persist, and the actions in question must be evaluated under those descriptions as well. This refutes the argument that actions properly described in terms dened by the rules of a practice can be evaluated only by standards internal to that practice. I agree that all morally neutral descriptions continue to apply. Whether morally loaded terms apply, even when they would apply absent the professional roles, is the matter that may be in dispute. Surgeons do not stab their patients, although they do cut them; police do not kidnap suspects, although they do detain them involuntarily. In the face of challenge or controversy, we should therePermission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.

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fore retreat from descriptions such as stabbing or operating to descriptions such as cutting, from kidnapping or arresting to detaining against a persons will, from murdering or executing to killing, and from lying or legally advocating or advertising to intentionally uttering falsehoods. The latter neutral descriptions allow us to focus on the contexts and consequences of the actions and to evaluate them without begging the moral questions. If lying has a morally negative connotation, then lawyers may or may not do it, but they do intentionally utter falsehoods, an action that is justied in many contexts and not justied in many others, leaving it initially open whether it is justied in the various contexts of legal practice. Applbaums counterargument might have been clearer here if he had appealed to this distinction between thick moral or institutional terms or concepts and their morally neutral counterparts. The second argument he considers assimilates rules of professional practice to rules of games. The latter can render otherwise objectionable acts morally permissible: deception is permitted in poker and violence in boxing and hockey. But such permissions rest ultimately on consent to play the games. Adversarial professional practices may harm those who do not consent to play. Even when they do play, they may have no reasonable alternative, and so the consent is not genuine. Applbaum also considers easing the requirement of consent into an argument from fair play, in which seeking the benets of a practice that justly distributes those benets sufces for moral permission to be a victim of its rules. He notes once more that these conditions are rarely satised in contexts of professional practice. Reasonable ex ante consent is also Applbaums general criterion of when rights may be justiably violated. Although he is not a consequentialist, he does not claim that all rights are inviolable, which would make his argument against adversarial tactics easier. Instead there is a long theoretical discussion in which he dismisses the idea of rights as absolute side constraints. While violating the rights of some in order to minimize violations of others is indeed to use the former as means, which is prohibited on contractualist grounds, we can violate a right of a person if that same person will otherwise be more seriously violated, or if not violating is Pareto inferior (that person along with others will otherwise be violated). In such circumstances it would be reasonable for the person to agree ex ante that a policy allowing such violation is permissible. Person violation, the denial of moral agency, is more fundamental than right violation, and protection against the former allows the latter in the narrow circumstances specied. A sensible conclusion. Applbaum again points out, however, that contexts of professional practice rarely satisfy the criterion of reasonable ex ante consent to harm. People have little choice but to participate in legal, medical, and political institutions that have not been shown to be reasonable. Perhaps the most common purported justication of adversarial tactics appeals to the benecial equilibrium that results from their use in well-designed social contexts. Such practices are to oppose one another so as to counteract potential harm in ways necessary for social benets. The legal profession, the business market, and the arena of political campaigning are all supposed by defenders to instantiate this model of benign equilibrium. But if not all harm is prevented by these intended oppositions, then appeal to overall good consequences is insufcient as justication within a contractualist framework. Furthermore, the overall good of actual practices as opposed to alternatives is rarely

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demonstrated. Adversarial tactics intended to create market imperfections in comparison to ideal models (e.g., monopoly power or imperfect information created by concealment and deception) cannot be justied by appeal to those idealized models. Applbaum sees a sharp difference here between the viewpoints of rule makers and actors under the rules. While the former can be justied in making rules that they know will allow wrongs in particular cases, actors under those rules may not be justied in perpetrating those wrongs. Even if zealous advocacy is generally the best means to discover truth in legal cases, this does not imply that lawyers ought to use its tactics to thwart the discovery of truth in particular cases. This point is correct and familiar from discussions of freedom to utter offensive speech, but the difference in viewpoints is not quite as sharp as Applbaum seems to think. While institutions can justiably allow what actors within them ought not to do, rulemakers should not require what is otherwise generally wrong to do. They cannot justify a set of rules that ought systematically to be disobeyed. And rules that require zealous advocacy in various elds may be of that sort. Applbaums emphasis on individual responsibility needs to be balanced by an equal focus on institutional design and collective responsibility. By contrast, his abstract and general approach to the arguments may sometimes be too general. The thesis that professional roles and institutions cannot justify doing what is otherwise morally prohibited may be too strong in admitting of exceptions which require separate and careful scrutiny. Consider the case of a judge who issues an eviction order, making a blameless victim of poverty homeless. This act of forcible eviction would certainly be wrong for a private person to perform; arguably, however, the judge ought to follow the legal rule and enforce the law in such cases. Applbaum argues that person as well as act descriptions persist. The judge who puts this person on the street is certainly also a person, but a person who is not a judge could not be justied in doing so, as a judge can. Here a rule enforcing evictions is required to maintain the stability of the nancial institution, and an ofcial of the legal system alone is justied in enforcing the rule. More piecemeal examination of such cases is needed. Applbaum does end the book with an extended example that poses the question of when government ofcials should exercise discretion to pursue policies against the judgments of their superiors or of majority mandates. He argues that an ofcial in disagreement must judge not simply the rightness or wrongness of the policy, and not simply the legitimacy of the opposing authority, but also whether it is an issue of justice or the common good, and whether the oppositions reasons and processes of deliberation are of the right sort. The ofcial must then match the form of her dissent, for example, open and persuasive or strategic, with the type of wrongness or illegitimacy she perceives. She must also weigh the effects of the type of response she contemplates on democratic institutions in the context in question. Applbaums criteria are properly complex here. He avoids the extreme positions: that ofcials always have the moral authority to pursue their own conceptions of the right and the good, or that they must always obey formally valid external authority. (There is a tension here, I believe, with the general claim, criticized above, that professional roles cannot justify doing what is otherwise morally prohibited.) For some, the complexity would seem to call for simplifying rules, but I agree with Applbaum that the presumption is always in favor of full moral judgment.

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My criticisms of this book have been relatively minor. It is very knowledgeable and well written and argued. The only remaining skepticism I harbor is in regard to its probable effect. Other attacks on the professions by philosophers in recent years have gone mostly unnoticed, except for a few responses from more academically minded lawyers. Certainly practice in the legal profession, business, and politics has not improved appreciably as a result of these writings. Nor does Applbaum go out of his way to be accessible to nonphilosophical audiences. The probability of positive practical effect on the professions of this book is therefore next to nil. It is small consolation that such books will consequently continue to be written and enjoyed by philosophers. Alan H. Goldman University of Miami

Berkowitz, Peter. Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. 235. $27.95 (cloth). Peter Berkowitz has written an eye-opening book that presents a clear and compelling argument for two important and largely unappreciated theses. First, that Thomas Hobbes, rather than Locke or Rousseau, is the progenitor of modern liberalism. Second, that virtue is and has been an important feature of liberal theory. To prove his case, Berkowitz demonstrates his mastery of the primary and secondary literature as he traces the concept of virtue in political philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through the work of Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Mill, moral and political theorists who have been taken to ignore or repudiate virtue. The inherent tension between liberalisms dening commitments to selfdetermination and equality and its need to mold character to form the virtues required to maintain a liberal regime provides the drama to sustain a readers interest from cover to cover. To gloss the question in terms that Berkowitz never uses, how can the champions of autonomy accommodate paternalistic manipulation of desires and behavior? If the paternalism issue was challenging in Harry Frankfurts and Gerald Dworkins discussions about the moral acceptability of requiring people to use motorcycle helmets, the suggestion of aggressive social policy to form desired character traits drastically ratchets up the stakes. Berkowitz demonstrates how each of the exponents of liberalism whom he discusses sees the need for virtue, and he shows how each justies intervention and proposes to address the need. The claim that Hobbes is the founder of liberalism has been noted by others, most fully by Frank M. Coleman (Hobbes and America: Exploring the Constitutional Foundations [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977]). Yet, because Locke and Rousseau are hailed as the founders of the tradition, and because Hobbes has been and continues to be routinely disowned or disparaged by liberals (p. 74), now including John Rawls and T. M. Scanlon, Berkowitz does a great service by according Hobbes his due. He dubs Hobbes the protoliberal (p. 112) and points out the signicant agreement between Hobbess positions and stands taken by Locke. He carefully demonstrates how Hobbess liberal ideas play an important role in the works of Kant and Mill. And he shows how Hobbess iden-

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tication of the place of virtue in maintaining political stability is similar to Rawlss view in neglected part 3 of A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971) and in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). To explain the place of virtue in liberal political philosophy, Berkowitz provides an explication of the accounts of virtue that Aristotle offers in the Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics (pp. 7 14). By blending both accounts into one view, Berkowitz arrives at the position that a virtue is one of a somewhat contingent catalogue of human functional excellences, some having to do with human perfection, others (the lesser virtues) with political needs and goals relative to particular regimes. In general, moral virtue, which governs feelings and actions, is a xed disposition or character trait acquired through habituation, involving choice, and performed in accordance with right reason (p. 9). It consists in doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, toward the right people, for the right reason (p. 10). Using this description as his standard for separately examining the political theories of Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Mill, Berkowitz provides textual evidence to demonstrate the place of virtue in their accounts and to distinguish each theorists views from the others. Accordingly, Berkowitz identies a list of common liberal virtues for both sovereigns and citizens, all concerning self-discipline and the exercise of judgment. Other virtues, such as courage, appear on some lists but not on others. According to Berkowitz, some regarded virtue as a rare occurrence, others saw virtue in some degree as commonplace; some described virtue in terms of passions, others offered accounts in terms of habitual action and reason; some focused their attention on human or societal perfection, others on political stability. Nevertheless, Berkowitz nds that even Kant was in agreement with Hobbes, that virtues are crucial as correctives of the natural passions of competition, difdence, and glory (p. 129) and that, therefore, tendencies to cooperation, trust, and respect had to be deliberately cultivated in order to maintain functional government. In all of his exposition, Berkowitz shows the importance of reading an authors corpus rather than the selected fragments that have made their way into the cannon of important philosophical texts, and he shows great sensitivity to discerning the authors intentions. While his treatment of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant are all instructive and thought provoking, Berkowitz is clearly most enlightening in his discussion of Mill. In this section, Berkowitzs discussion of secondary sources is entirely conned to endnotes. He weaves his own reading of Mill by bringing together insights from Mills Autobiography with his philosophical works. Berkowitz creates an insightful account of Mill that reveals him as a far more complex, subtle, and perspicacious liberal theorist than is commonly appreciated. Although I nd the main theses of Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism convincing and a number of the particular arguments persuasive, the undeveloped points and the points of disagreement it provokes provide an additional value to Berkowitzs rich essay because they raise new and interesting questions about virtue in the liberal tradition. For instance, how does Kant justify the paternalistic inculcation of virtue? And, is Berkowitzs view of contingent Aristotelian virtues correct? Is he right about Hobbesian virtues all being related to fear? Do his distinctions between higher and lesser virtues and perfectionist and merce-

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nary accounts of virtue distort the positions? Could the authors different agendas account for the differences that Berkowitz identies? And while Berkowitz points to the old dogs of education, family, religion, and governments as means for inculcating the virtues that liberal societies must foster, he does not seem to notice the remarkable changes in the world that are likely to have a huge impact on character formation and modication. What is and should be the role of news media, entertainment, the internet, global marketing, and public relations? Will Disney, Spielberg, Sesame Street, Hallmark, and CNN replace the old forces? And should government intervene? Are the organization of marathon races and millennium celebrations important virtue-fostering tools for teach[ing] habits of cooperation and instill[ing] an enlightened concern with the public good (p.157)? These tantalizing questions open new doors for careful textual analysis, for probing political evaluation, and for enriching our understanding of virtue in liberalism. Rosamond Rhodes Mount Sinai School of Medicine and The Graduate School, CUNY

Bratman, Michael E. Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. 288. $59.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). Often, when human beings act, they execute plans that stretch well into the future. Human beings are, as Bratman puts it, planning agents (p. 1). In a previous book, Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), Bratman fruitfully explored this fact in an effort to understand what intentions are and the basic roles they play in our lives. That effort resulted in a sophisticated, groundbreaking, and enormously inuential planning theory of intention (p. 2), including a valuable account of the rationality of agents for their intentions. In some subsequent articles, Bratman applied this theory, or an enriched version thereof, to shared agency, responsible agency, and problems about intention posed by such issues as temptation and the toxin puzzle. Nine of those articles (essays 2 10) and four careful, insightful critical studiesDavidsons Theory of Intention (1985), Castan edas Theory of Thought and Action (1983), Cognitivism about Practical Reason (1991; a review of J. David Vellemans Practical Reection [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989]), and Review of Korsgaards The Sources of Normativity (1998) are reprinted in Faces of Intention. The remaining essay (essay 1) is a lucid, instructive introduction. Over the years, I have learned a great deal from Bratmans work and have been persuaded by most of what he has written about intention and related matters. Here I will briey describe the reprinted articles and then focus on one of them in the space that remains. Part 1 of the book, Acceptance and Stability, is a trio of essays. Practical Reasoning and Acceptance in a Context (1992, essay 2) defends the view that there is an important kind of acceptance that falls short of belief and explores the place of such acceptance in practical reasoning. For example, for the pur-

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poses of deciding how to schedule and pay for various parts of a home remodeling project, one may accept that the total costs will be at the high end of the estimates one received even though one lacks the belief that the total cost will be that high (pp. 22 23). Accepting this for the purposes of deliberation can play an important role in explaining what one decides to do. Planning and Temptation (1995, essay 3) and Toxin, Temptation, and the Stability of Intention (1998, essay 4) address interesting issues about intention raised by some scenarios in which circumstances at a later time are what agents expected them to be when they formed or acquired an intention about what to do at that time. Sometimes, we form intentions now to A later while expecting to be seriously tempted later not to A and even to prefer (or judge it better) not to A. For example, A1 might decide now to refrain from smoking tomorrow but expect now that, tomorrow, he occasionally will be seriously tempted to smoke and will prefer smoking then to not smoking then. Suppose that such an anticipated preference reversal arises tomorrow. Might it be rational of A1 to retain and act on his earlier intention, and if so why? In essay 4, Bratman addresses this question in a rich theoretical context that includes detailed attention both to Gregory Kavkas toxin puzzle and to Warren Quinns puzzle about a self-torturer (puzzles that I lack the space to describe here). He argues, plausibly, that the anticipation of future regret or nonregret, in some cases of the kind at issue, is important in determining whether it is rational to retain or abandon an intention. If A1 is condent that he would regret smoking (if he were to smoke) and would be glad that he did not smoke (if he were not to smoke), then, other things being equal, it would be rational of him to retain and act on his prior intention. Part 2, Shared Agency, is a quartet of essays: Shared Cooperative Activity (1992, essay 5); Shared Intention (1993, essay 6); Shared Intention and Mutual Obligation (1997, essay 7; originally published in French); and I Intend That We J (1997, essay 8). Essay 5 defends an account of shared cooperative activity, essay 6 offers an analysis of shared intention, essay 7 examines the connection between shared intentions and related obligations, and essay 8 defends an analysis of an agents intending that he and someone else do something, A, jointly. In this part of the collection, Bratman amply displays the utility of a theory of individual agency in understanding group agency. Part 3, Responsibility and Identication, is a pair of essays: Responsibility and Planning (1997, essay 9) and Identication, Decision, and Treating as a Reason (1996, essay 10). In the former, Bratman shows that his planning theory of intention can illuminate a sort of agency that is important to Strawsonian compatibilism. On the assumption that we ordinary adult human agents in a broadly modern social world . . . are responsible agents, we are so partly in virtue of our planning agency (p. 184). Essay 10 is the primary topic of the remainder of this review. As Bratman points out in his introduction, his theory of planning agency is meant to be neutral regarding competing substantive conceptions of the good, and he does not take a stand on the basic issue of whether practical reason, by itself, mandates specic ends or moral constraints (p. 6). This helps to account for the remarkable breadth of his audience. Some moral theorists may regard Bratman as an opponent, insofar as his treatment of practical reason is conducted independently of an interest in deriving particular ends or moral con-

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straints, but even such theorists can learn much from him. Moral theorists who do not base their substantive conceptions of the good on considerations of practical reason have no ax to grind in this connection. And the great majority of philosophers of mind and action are accustomed to thinking about practical reasoning quite independently of moral considerations. In any case, Bratman rightly sees Harry Frankfurt as a kindred spirit in the present connection, and he believes that his theory of planning agency can provide Frankfurt with something important for which the latter has been searching in his own inuential project on human agency. This takes us to essay 10. According to Frankfurt, people regard some attitudes of theirs as somehow external to themselves and identify with other attitudes of theirs. If Bob regards his desire to strike Carl as external to himself, if he feels that the desire is alien to him, then, if he acts on that desire, his action seems to be in some way defective, perhaps sufciently defective that he is not morally responsible for it. If, alternatively, Bob identies with this desire and acts on it, his action is not defective in the way at which I just gestured. Bratmans aim in essay 10 is to describe without independent appeal to judgments of responsibility a fairly unied phenomenon that [is] the target of Frankfurts discussions of identication (p. 187). Bratman defends the following analysis: To identify with ones desire is (a ) to reach a decision to treat that desire as reason-giving and to be satised with that decision, and (b 1) to treat that desire as reason-giving or, at least, (b 2 ) to be fully prepared to treat it as reason-giving were a relevant occasion to arise (p. 202). According to Bratman, I treat my desire as reason-giving in the relevant sense when I treat it as end-setting where to treat it as end-setting is, in part, to treat it as potentially justifying, at least to some extent, my performance of relevant means and/or relevant preliminary steps (p. 198). One worry about the analysis is that we can identify with desires that we are in no position to decide to treat as reason-giving in the sense just mentioned. Donna fully identies with her desire to go to heaven. However, she is absolutely convinced that the doctrine of predestination is true and that there are no means or preliminary steps that she can take to get into heaven. Consequently, she is in no position to decide to treat her desire to go to heaven as end-setting, in Bratmans sense. Now, Bratman generally writes in terms of identifying with a desire to act in a certain way. He can say, rightly, that going to heaven, as Donna conceives of it, is not a potential action of hers and that the case therefore is irrelevant to what he intended to be analyzing. However, this does not get him off the hook. Donna certainly can identify with her desire to go to heaven, in Frankfurts sense (whatever, exactly, that sense is), and, arguably, what one who wants to understand identication in this sense needs is an analysis that applies in the same way both to action-desires and to desires like Donnas. Bratman mentions that the sense of treating a desire as reason-giving that I reported is not the only relevant sense (p. 198), and he can argue that Donnas identifying with her desire is conceptually dependent on her treating it as reason-giving in some way. The present worry at least shoulders Bratman with the burden of producing that argument. Another problem is that one seemingly can fail to identify with an actiondesire that satises Bratmans conditions. Ed insulted Frank yesterday. Today, Frank has a strong desire to retaliate. Owing partly to a decision he made some

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time ago to try to get himself to be less vindictive, Frank does not decide to treat his desire to retaliate as reason-giving and, in fact, decides not to treat it in this way. Moreover, he decides to treat his desire to do the right thing and refrain from retaliating as reason-giving, he is satised with that decision, and he actually treats the desire as reason-giving. (Bratman indicates that it is sufcient for being satised with a decision of this kind that the decision does not conict with other standing decisions and policies about which desires to treat as reasongiving [p. 200].) But Frank sees himself as a vindictive person, he views his desire to retaliate as reective of who he truly is, and he regards his desire to refrain from retaliating as, at most, indicative of what kind of person he would like to be. When the matter comes up in a therapy session, Frank sincerely says, Im a vindictive person. My vindictive desires are in no way alien to who I am; they are expressions of the real me. And my desire to refrain from retaliating against Ed does not speak for my own true self. As the notion of identication tends to be used in the literature, Frank would not count as identifying with his desire to do the right thing and refrain from retaliating. How one analyzes identication will depend in part on the theoretical work one wants identication to do. David Velleman suggests that one intended role for the notion of identication is to assist in advancing a reductionist account of agent causation that places it in the natural order, where causes are events and states (What Happens When Someone Acts, Mind 101 [1992]: 474 75). On the face of it, Bratmans analysis of identication does not help with this project. If, as I believe, deciding to do something is a mental action (Mele, Deciding to Act, Philosophical Studies 100 [2000]: 81 108), Bratman has analyzed identication partly in terms of something that a typical agent-causationist would insist is irreducibly agent caused. One who rejects Bratmans analysis of identication may nevertheless believe that he has offered an acceptable analysis of an important phenomenon. If, like me, one regards self simply as an afx, one will not try to articulate the signicance of the phenomenon in terms of the light it sheds on the boundaries of the self, or of real selves. But there are other potential applications of a theory of the phenomenon that is the target of Bratmans analysis. For example, that phenomenon or something similar that does not encompass cases like vindictive Franks may be an important aspect of what Velleman (1992) calls human agency par excellence. This is a superb collection of essays. Bratman has a gift for constructing complex, original theories and arguments with remarkable clarity. The book will be widely and protably read. Alfred R. Mele Florida State University

Carter, Alan. A Radical Green Political Theory. London: Routledge, 1999. Pp. 409. $65.00 (cloth). Were historical materialism an artifact not of nineteenth-century capitalism but rather of fourteenth-century feudalism (granted, an impossibility by many of its

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interpretations), it might have drawn very different conclusions about the way society works. It no doubt might have posited its familiar relationship between the forces and relations of production, class divisions within society, and the revolutionary potential of each. It might also have concluded from these tendencies, however, that the driving force of the whole ensemble was not the economic base but rather the political state the highly visible institution whose agents exacted a surplus product from landed peasants by transparent and often brutal force. Alan Carter advances just such a thesis in A Radical Green Political Theory, in an era when workers cheerfully surrender their product for a wage and when other political theorists have pronounced the state all but dead at the feet of an increasingly globalized economy. One might assume that such an account would be less tenable in 1999, with the long evolution of capitalism in hindsight, than it would have been in 1399. Carter, however, gives liberals, marxists, and statist authoritarians each quite a bit to think about. Carter sets himself the task of outlining an analytical anarchism that is, of doing for anarchism what G. A. Cohen has done for marxism (not an uncontroversial goal, given that a number of marxists and nonmarxists alike are not particularly enamored of what is now described as analytical marxism). To this end, Carter applies the methods of analytical philosophy to an area where rigor has heretofore been seen as irrelevant or simply another form of oppression, and he lays out a functionalist account of economic history on the scale of Cohens reworking of marxism. The arguments at the core of Carters State-Primacy theory are laid out in the fourth chapter, and the departure point from Cohens Techno-Primacy interpretation of historical materialism is never far from sight. For Cohen, the forces of production (machinery, labor power, etc.) select relations of production (lord and serf, capitalist and worker, etc.) which allow the economic forces to further develop, which, in turn, select the political relations which best accommodate these economic arrangements. Carter takes the same elements, adds the coercive political forces of the military and police for symmetry, and reverses the causal direction. State agents, for Carter, select the economic relations which best enable the development of the productive forces, which, in turn, are best able to generate the surplus wealth which ultimately can arm and fortify the political forces of the state. It would be only a slight oversimplication to suggest that Carters sweeping historical account, if accurate, would effectively vindicate the belief of antiwar and nuclear disarmament activists among the New Left in recent decades that militarism seeds our various social ills economic and political no less than military. We endure the economic conditions we have only insofar and for as long as they produce the wealth necessary to fund powerful states and their military arms. Just what makes this a radical green political theory? Programmatically, it is the fact that the rst chapter calls for one, and the remaining chapters should at least purport to deliver. Substantively, Carter devotes much of the sixth and seventh chapters to laying out just how his anarchistic State-Primacy theory can inform radical environmental thought. Chapter 6, on The State and Nature, argues that the environmentally hazardous dynamic between the state, the economic base, and the natural world that obtains under present conditions can be converted to an environmentally benign interrelationship, via the institution of a stateless, decentralized, participatory democracy and cooperative autonomy among citizens. Self-governing instruments of this sort, however, Carter

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maintains, require egalitarian economic relations, which themselves only work in the context of appropriate convivial technologies that tread more lightly on the planet. This was standard fare among pacists and alternative-technology advocates in the 1970s and 1980s, and Carters account does, at times, dissolve into the familiar counterfactual environmentalism from this period, wherein a number of conditions virtually unattainable under present circumstances are demonstrated to t together under very different circumstances. Carters unique claim here, however, is that this literature, much of which has been understood (perhaps justiably) as fast-food, cafeteria political ideology, grabbing from here and there without any rhyme or reason (p. 253), now has a rigorous, philosophically robust theory of the state on its side. Reasonable and informed readers may disagree as to whether it is sufciently robust, but Carters careful and readable prose ensures that they will be clear on where the disagreements lie. State-Primacy theory, however, seems to work better as an explanatory account of history and the evolution of the modern state than it does as a normative account of green or anarchist political action (a charge often leveled, in a somewhat modied form, against the marxism that Carter is most explicitly trying to supplant). His fth chapter, for example, defends State-Primacy theory in the face of globalization, offering an explanation for third world underdevelopment that rivals orthodox theories from both marxist and mainstream political scientists a cogent case in itself, but one that does little to advance the prescriptive ends at which Carter is presumably aiming. The moral imperative eventually outlined in the nal chapter, on the other hand radical disobedience aimed at undermining the state, economic relations, and oppressive technologies on behalf of future generations is much less carefully argued and ultimately rests on the belief that only State-Primacy theory would have us contest each of these institutions. Carter attempts to revive at this point the concept of interrelationism that he had defended at length against individualism and collectivism in chapter 3, but the relevance of the earlier discussion is never fully realized. The absence of a rm normative vision notwithstanding, it is refreshing, at a time when anarchism is little more than a fashionable identication for the multiply pierced and politically disaffected, to nd an ambitious and engaging volume that struggles with anarchisms complexity in a way that is worthy of serious discussion. Carter clearly achieves this. Edward Tverdek Chicago, Illinois

Eisenach, Eldon J., ed. Mill and the Moral Character of Liberalism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Pp. vi336. $48.50 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). This volume consists of twelve essays, with an introduction and bibliography, all dealing with various aspects of John Stuart Mills liberal political philosophy. The distinguishing characteristic is that all authors go beyond the essays Utilitarianism and On Liberty, seeking to interpret Mills liberalism in the light of his other works his Logic; his Principles of Political Economy; his Auguste Comte and Positivism; his essays, especially the early essays on The Spirit of the Age, Bentham, and

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Coleridge; his letters; and his speeches and in the context of his time. Seven of the essays and parts of an eighth have appeared in print elsewhere. Four and parts of a fth are published here for the rst time. Among the new publications are the following. Peter Berkowitz, in Mill: Liberty, Virtue, and the Discipline of Individuality, examines the connections between Mills espousal of liberty and individuality, and the virtues necessary for their contribution to human good. Janice Carlisle, in Mr. J. Stuart Mill, M.P., and the Character of the Working Classes, examines Mills speeches in Parliament to document Mills support for the extension of the franchise to the working classes, while showing that he was critical of working class character and conduct. Richard Ashcrafts contribution, John Stuart Mill and the Theoretical Foundations of Democratic Socialism, examines Mills Logic and other writings to put Mills discussion of democracy into the context of his social theory and to show that Mill saw linkages between democracy and socialism representing the progressive advancement of mankind. Eldon J. Eisenach, in Mill and Liberal Christianity, documents how seven Oxford churchmen appropriated major features of Mills moral philosophy and theory of liberty in their defense of Christianity. Robert Devigne, in Mill on Liberty and Religion: An Unnished Dialectic, cites both Mills reading of ancient Greek history and philosophy and Mills discussion of a Religion of Humanity to show that the individualism which he advocated was to be developed in an overarching moral framework. The essays reprinted here are four that appeared in 1993 96. These include Bernard Semmel, John Stuart Mills Coleridgean Neoradicalism; Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mills Defense of Liberal Culture; Richard Vernon, Beyond the Harm Principle: Mill and Censorship; and Wendy Donner, John Stuart Mills Liberal Feminism. The volume also has three earlier studies that appeared in 1965 72: Clark W. Bouton, John Stuart Mill: On Liberty and History; Richard B. Friedman, A New Exploration of Mills Essay On Liberty ; and Allan D. Megill, J. S. Mills Religion of Humanity and the Second Justication for the Writing of On Liberty. A theme running through most of the essays, in addition to the effort to interpret Mills On Liberty in light of his other writings, is an effort to show that Mill sought to introduce historical consciousness and social responsibility into his liberalism. The editor says that Mill could be said to have consciously situated himself right at the boundaries of what is today the liberal-communitarian divide at the crossroads where abstract rights claims meet shared identities and common experiences (p. 5). The editors selection is evidently aimed to underline the importance Mill placed on liberal culture and tradition and on the centrality of character as a moral and political virtue. Some of these selections, such as the editors own Mill and Liberal Christianity, are mainly of historical interest. Carlisles essay is of historical interest but also tells us signicantly about Mills analysis of society in terms of class struggle and the need for class representation, not just individual citizenship. Capaldis highly controversial essay distinguishes liberal social philosophy from liberal culture, arguing that Mill does not t the tradition of liberal social philosophy that can be traced to Hobbes and is found currently in Rawls and Dworkin, although Mill was advocating liberal culture, grounded on moral foundations, in On Liberty. This, and to a lesser extent the other articles, contain not

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only interpretations of Mill but also signicant analyses of contrasting kinds of liberalism. Henry R. West Macalester College

Farber, Daniel A. Eco-Pragmatism: Making Sensible Environmental Decisions in an Uncertain World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. 210. $23.00 (cloth). Much of the debate over environmental protection has been presented as a choice between conicting alternatives: a choice, for example, between environmental quality and economic efciency, between command and control regulation and private market approaches, and between endangered species and jobs. What often is missing from this theoretical and normative debate is a middle ground. University of Minnesota professor Daniel Farber brings the middle ground into the debate in his book Eco-Pragmatism: Making Sensible Environmental Decisions in an Uncertain World. As the title suggests, Farbers Eco-Pragmatism takes a moderate approach to resolving the core issues involved in making hard environmental decisions. Instead of joining the battle between competing holistic theories being fought in the environmental arena, Farber advocates the adoption of a pragmatic approach to environmental problem solving. Basing his approach on legal pragmatism, Farber explains that a pragmatic approach draws on the coherence of many sources, rather than . . . on a single unied foundation and uses theories as tools, not ends in themselves (p. 10). Much of the book is devoted to making the case for Farbers moderate, pragmatic approach. Farber uses key problems involved in making hard environmental decisions as his organizational tools. Those problems include deciding how to make trade-offs between conicting values, deciding how to deal with the time dimension of environmental problems, and deciding how to respond to uncertainty about risk. Farber examines the problem of making trade-offs by comparing the two principal methods for making social decisions: politics and the market. According to Farber, the current debate over these two methods has become bogged down in some very deep philosophical waters (p. 40). A more helpful approach, in Farbers view, would be to think of economic concepts as tools for resolving disputes over resource allocation. As Farber explains, both individual preferences and political choices should be important to environmental decision making. Because of the strong commitment to environmental protection already expressed through the political process, decision makers should begin with an environmental baseline, allowing environmental harm only when avoiding it is infeasible or grossly disproportionate in cost (p. 68). Farber proposes limiting the role of economic methods like cost-benet analysis to assisting rather than controlling the decision-making process, in hopes that economic tools will act as a check on unreasonable regulation without overtaking the decision-making process.

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Farber examines the time-dimension problem of environmental decisions by beginning with a simple question: should we spend $10 million to save one life one hundred years from now? After discussing how cost-benet analysis deals with the problem of time lags through discounting, Farber recognizes some of the problems of discounting. In his discussion of the fable of the future-oriented grasshopper and the present-oriented ant, Farber effectively shows how discounting can make real costs disappear and how the effect of discounting varies according to the time span. In his discussion of nuclear waste disposal, Farber powerfully demonstrates how discounting can discriminate against future generations. To deal with these problems, Farber suggests the use of low discount rates and proposes that the current generations feelings toward its own descendants be used as a baseline for dening intergenerational equity. Finally, Farber deals with the problem of uncertainty about risk by advocating a dynamic, as opposed to static, approach to decision making that fosters the ability of the regulatory system to engage in learning over time (p. 165). Under this dynamic approach, certain coping strategies would be adopted to deal with the uncertainty about the scope and degree of environmental risks and to allow the system to adapt to new information. Those strategies include burden-shifting rules that require the polluter to show that its activities are harmless, adoption of a precautionary approach when irreversible consequences would result from a decision, and decentralization of environmental decision making to encourage quicker responses to new information. Farber powerfully and systematically makes the case for his moderate approach. Some might nd it easy to dismiss Farbers book precisely because his position is not revolutionary or pure. Those who do will be ignoring some important points made by Farber. First and foremost, he develops an approach to environmental protection that is grounded in the real world. Second, instead of just dening the problem of change and making the case for a exible approach, Farber actually offers some suggestions for dealing with change. Third, at all times he recognizes the value of both economic decision making and the political process. Neither is exclusively in charge under Farbers approach. Fourth, Farber recognizes the need for politically acceptable approaches to environmental problems, offering a number of suggestions for tempering purist impulses under the environmental baseline. Finally, he compellingly ties the time dimension of environmental problems to the ethical question of intergenerational equity in a way that effectively makes the case for eco-pragmatism. Eco-Pragmatism admittedly may trouble economists and environmentalists alike by making some key assumptions and purposefully ignoring some fundamental questions. Those who do not trust the Environmental Protection Agency will have difculty with Farbers argument for greater reliance on agency expertise. Those who want to discuss fundamental moral questions raised by environmental problems will not be satised by Farbers dismissal of the philosophical debate. Those who understand ecological principles may question Farbers treatment of the problem of change as primarily an information problem and may wonder why Farber ignored problems of temporal and spatial scales, resilience, and ecological integrity. Those who recognize the importance of different legal contexts may question how Farber could treat regulatory and judicial actions together in talking about coping strategies for dealing with uncertainty. Perhaps Farber anticipated these difculties when he admonished the reader not to ex-

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pect perfection in such a complicated area as environmental protection. In any event, though Farbers book does not make any profound revelations, it can have a profound impact on the world of environmental decision making if readers recognize the masterful job Farber does of integrating theory and practice. Lynda L. Butler College of William and Mary

Finnis, John. Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xxi 385. $52.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). In some ways this study complements Finniss Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980) and other writings on ethics and philosophy of law. Those are theoretical works which draw amply on Aquinas. Formally this one is history, but the dominant concerns remain theoretical. This is not to say that we are given only reports or reformulations of Aquinass thought. Indeed, the documentation is massive, almost overwhelming. But throughout, interpretation is intertwined with, and subordinated to, engagement over issues. I know of no other such full-scale rethinking of Thomass political philosophy in the recent literature, and we should be grateful to Finnis for the hard work. Politics in Aquinas is inseparable from ethics, and after a nice biographical sketch, Finnis dwells long on what he considers the salient general features of Thomass moral philosophy. The rst, which becomes a kind of refrain in the sequel, is that the subject of moral science is a genus of its own, with its own mode of intelligibility. The key text is the beginning of the commentary on Aristotles Ethics. There Aquinas divides science into four types, according to four orders, which Finnis calls irreducibly distinct (p. 21): the natural (the objects of the speculative sciences), the logical, the moral, and the technical. The moral order is the order of things formed by deliberate choice. Its rst principles are the ends, or reasons for choice, naturally ordained by practical reason in the primary precepts of natural law. These ends are the basic human goods. This notion, like several of the more prominent ones in the book, will be quite familiar to readers of Finnis and Germain Grisez. Finnis tells us in the preface that writing this book has conrmed his understanding both of the foundational principles of their ethical theory and of Aquinas subscription to them (p. ix). Not surprisingly then, as he lays out the Thomistic moral landscape, Finnis is emphatic and constant in making practical reason the primary reference point. Even his scheme reects this approach. Thus, chapter 4 brings together the themes of happiness, the common good, and morality. The link is evidently the constitutive role played in each by practical reason. Regarding happiness, the point is that practical reason directs not only to each of the basic goods but also to their coordination and integration. So it is as a sort of synthesis (p. 85) projected by practical reason that the one last end enters the human scene, at least as viewed by moral philosophy. (Metaphysics and theology get a brief say in the

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nal chapter. Why, though, are we never told that for Thomas, the question of the last end is the very rst one, in any moral inquiry?) Similarly, it is from reason ordering the integral (and common) pursuit of the goods that properly moral principles emerge. These regulate the moral virtues, chief among which are those pertaining to social life, the parts of justice. The specic norms of justice must be articulated. This is done in terms of its objects, the iura. Finnis renders this as rights. Aware that some eyebrows are rising, he pushes further and argues that for Thomas, natural rights enjoy a certain priority over the very norms of natural law. They are prior in their ontological, rst order basis: the natural equality and dignity of human persons. Does this claim encroach upon the primacy of practical reason? In the context of the whole account, not much. Practical reason too has a rst order side, as part of human nature, and the clear drift of Finniss treatment is toward making it the core of our dignity. For he presents our ultimate perfection at least our earthly one, proportionate to our nature as the full working of practical reason in action (pp. 104 10). He also considers it quite in the spirit of Aquinas, if not the letter, to see practical activity as that whereby our nature and its dignity are manifested to us most satisfactorily (pp. 90 94, 176 80). Eventually we reach more strictly political and legal matters: Distribution, Exchange, and Recompense (chap. 6); The State: Its Elements and Purposes (7); The State: Its Government and Law (8); The Power of the Sword (9). These pages, I would say, are where we nd Finnis at his best, exploiting his great erudition in legal history and theory. At the same time, the chapters on the state defend two interpretations which, I expect, students of Thomas will want to dispute. These are that Thomas treats specically political community as a merely instrumental good (with a slight qualication as regards restorative justice), and that the promotion of virtue is only a remote end of good legislation, more a private than a public matter. But I would raise another issue. It has to do with the kind of primacy that Finnis assigns to practical reason and the kind of autonomy he ascribes to the moral order. Put loosely, my worry is the extent to which he depicts the practical or human good as a sort of closed arena. In more concrete terms, I fear he simply has not come to grips with the dominant role, in the life of reason and in human life as a whole, that Aquinas attributes to speculative intellect. This is intellect as knowing universal being and as enabling us to be, in a way, all things. Only grudgingly does Finnis acknowledge that intellectual speculation or contemplation is the primary element in Thomass conception of earthly happiness (pp. 109 10). Finniss own candidate is the life of practical reasonableness (prudentia ) and moral virtue. He reminds us that Thomas never treats this life solely as a means to contemplation, but as a kind of happiness in itself. He questions how secondary it really is for Thomas, and also how distinctive is the life of contemplation. In the last analysis, contemplation is a form of action and had best issue in (further) action, indeed public action. Part of my concern is related to this public action issuing from contemplation. Finniss examples of it are preaching and teaching by bishops and friars. But what is its status in the secular order? Here we miss a discussion of education. Still, the general answer seems clear: the status is minor. Aquinas never treated contemplation as an organizing or integrating principle of social and political

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theory. Seemingly, the only intellectual activity so treated is that of practical reasonableness. Yet in Summa theologiae I II, q. 66, a. 5, Aquinas argues that the supreme intellectual virtue is sapientia, speculative wisdom. (Among the profane sciences, this is metaphysics.) Wisdom is architectonic, judging and ordering all the other intellectual virtues. Against this position, the articles rst objection invokes an assertion by Aristotle, which Thomas endorses: regulating education in civil society belongs to a part of prudence, namely, statecraft (politica !). The reply, also invoking Aristotle, is that nevertheless prudence does not command wisdom itself; rather the reverse. Prudence commands only about things ordered to wisdom, that is, how men ought to come to wisdom. Hence in this matter prudence, or rather statecraft, is minister to wisdom; for it leads into it, preparing the way to it, as the doorkeeper to the king. But symptomatic of what concerns me most is the thesis that in the last analysis contemplation itself is a form of action. The prevailing view that we get from Finnis can be summed up in his own words: nothing can be . . . an object of or reason for human action, save what can be realized by human action (p. 92). Does he not see the implication that only what can be realized by human action can be judged good? To be sure, good is a practical notion, because it means desirable or willable. But not everything that it is said of is something realized by the will! Thomas holds that it is said of all being. Finnis favors approaching contemplation from the side of the subject, as one good human activity among many. But what secures its preeminence for Thomas is above all the goodness, the loveliness, of its chief objects: the natural kinds (including human kind), and what lies beyond nature. The human mind does not form the best things. They inform it. Still, do speculative objects have any directive function, any formative inuence on practical thought? The beginning of Thomass commentary on the Ethics ought to be read alongside the prologue to his commentary on the Politics. Here too he keeps the moral order distinct from the natural. But he also says that practical reason works in imitation of nature, and necessarily so. This and companion doctrines gure repeatedly in the moral part of the Summa theologiae. I would submit that in Aquinas, the good of all being is in a way the very rst reason for action. In another way, it is the object of our ultimate perfection and maximum satisfaction. Of the many things that he has to say to us about conducting human life, might these not be among the very most important? Stephen L. Brock Pontical University of the Holy Cross, Rome

Kekes, John. A Case for Conservatism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. Pp. 239. $28.50 (cloth). Perhaps the most interesting thing about John Kekess newest book, A Case for Conservatism, is that it simultaneously makes readers think that they too are conservative and that conservatism is obviously false. Kekes accomplishes this by os-

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tensibly taking a middle road approach on key theoretical issues. In this brief commentary, I explain his approach and indicate some shortcomings from a liberal perspective. As will be obvious, Kekess view is distinctly his own, though aspects of it appear in the historical literature. Kekes believes that there are four fundamental beliefs at the core of conservatism: skepticism, pluralism, traditionalism, and pessimism. Each of these provides a middle ground between two extremes. To understand them, one must understand Kekess distinction between primary and secondary values and his three-level conception of political morality (p. 92). Primary values are based on benets and harms that must count as such in all good lives, . . . secondary values derive from benets and harms that vary with social and individual forms of good lives (p. 50). Primary values are those goods and evils that derive directly from human nature, be they physiological, psychological, or social. Although there is room for debate about some of the values Kekes includes, at least some are beyond debate: oxygen, nutrition, and rest are goods for any human (p. 51). While some secondary values are the particular traditional forms in which primary values are interpreted, others enrich life by representing possibilities beyond the requirements set by primary values (p. 58; regarding the rst sort, one thinks of the thick /thin distinction). Primary and secondary values play different roles at each of the three levels of Kekess political morality. At the universal level are conventions required for the protection of primary values; at the social level are variable conventions that protect culturally relative secondary values; nally, at the individual level are the limits and possibilities allowed for by various combinations of available secondary values (p. 93). Skepticism is a via media between rationalism, dened as a belief that there are universally objective reasons, generally rooted in a metaphysics (pp. 28 29), and deism, dened as a belief that all forms of reasoning are ultimately based on assumptions that must be accepted on faith (p. 30; some might call this subjectivism). Skepticism offers middle ground by insisting on rationalism only on the universal level (with claims about human nature), so that what objective reasons there are on the social and individual levels are not universal (p. 200). Pluralism is the via media between absolutism and relativism. Absolutism has a rationalistic basis and is the view that any diversity of values is apparent, not real (p. 32; some would call this monism). Relativists claim that the diversity is real and that What counts as a value . . . depends . . . on the consensus of a society (p. 33; one thinks of Richard Rortys pragmatism). In contrast, Kekesian pluralists believe there is a universal and objective standard, but [that] it is applicable only to some values (p. 34). There are objective facts about primary values and so conventions required to protect them. On the social and individual levels, though, there is a genuine though limited plurality of values and so only contingent conventions (p. 192). Given this, Kekes does not foolishly insist that there be only one convention guiding an individual; he recognizes that there may be several possible conventions [that] ought to guide agents in a particular situation and so insists that we not blindly accept traditions but creatively participate in them (p. 113). This direct recognition that there are likely to be competing values and conventions guiding citizens goes some distance toward rapprochement with contemporary cosmopolitan-minded liberals. Kekess pluralism seems laudable as it insists on basic universally necessary

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values and leaves secondary values to the choice of society and individuals. One wonders, though, how seriously to take Kekes on this score when he refuses to grant respect to such absurdities as . . . martial artists in strip malls . . . and yogis in gyms (p. 134). This is only worsened when Kekes defends his refusal by asking if we should respect racists, anti-Semites, . . . paedophiles, . . . and so forth (p. 135). Comparing those on the rst list to those on the second is insulting. Of course, Kekes thinks we have to tolerate those on the rst list; he simply thinks they are alien to our culture and not due our respect. On his view, conceptions of the good life are due both toleration and respect in a society only if they conform both to the required and variable conventions of that society; if they violate required conventions they do not deserve even toleration; if they conform to required conventions, but violate the system of variable conventions, they are due toleration but not respect indeed, people should be discouraged . . . from adopting them (pp. 131 32). Kekes justies withholding respect from conceptions of the good life that violate only variable conventions by insisting that any society must limit what is accepted on the social level in order to provide a distinct moral identity of its own people (p. 134). In this way, Kekess conservatism ends up as a provincialism insisting that individuals could not lead good lives as cosmopolitans. But Kekes is wrong that traditions are to human lives what countries are to the Earth. . . . [as if] If you leave one, you enter another (p. 209). I need not leave one tradition to enter another and I need not be in only one at a time (as Kekes insists on p. 39). Moreover, many have argued convincingly that good lives require only cultural contexts and not particular cultures with particular identities. Maintaining a distinct moral identity does not justify failing to respect secondary values. Kekes argues that the third core conservative belief, traditionalism, operates as an appropriate via media between individual autonomy and social authority. Autonomy is a constituent of many good lives, but Kekes rightly denies that a life cannot be good unless it is autonomous (p. 37). Many individuals lead good lives by accepting the authority of others. Moreover, since autonomous individuals can engage in evil, autonomy will need to be limited. Given the above, though, we might wonder if Kekes would endorse too many limits. Pessimism, the nal basic conservative belief, is the via media between an Enlightenment optimism regarding human perfectibility and the fatalism, despair, or cynicism that rests on the belief in irredeemable human corruption (p. 213). Kekess commonsense approach is to insist that human beings are neither basically good nor basically evil they are basically ambivalent (p. 213) and at the same time to recognize the limited control a society has over its future (p. 42). As such, Kekes wants to emphasize the need to hinder evil as much as the need to foster good but also insists that we recognize that the prevalence of evil . . . is a permanent condition (p. 42). How much evil exists is largely an empirical question, but Kekes is surely wrong to talk as if none of us Faithful to Enlightenment ideals recognize its natural occurrence. Surely, we think that much evil results from bad political arrangements; just as surely, we recognize that some evil is due directly to individuals. Kekess conservatism is dened as adherence to skepticism, pluralism, traditionalism, and pessimism. Skepticism and pluralism will be appealing to liberals, but liberals are unlikely to think Kekes treats the latter seriously enough. Traditionalism seems to offer no problems for any political theorist (it does not deny

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the value of autonomy). Finally, Kekes is likely right that liberals have been too optimistic regarding human nature and his pessimism is a welcome corrective. A major difference between Kekes and his putative opponents is his reliance on historical analysis. Whereas liberals use some ideal (say, an original position) to judge society, Kekes start[s] with a presumption in favor of the existing political arrangements because he takes the endurance of the traditional arrangements of quite good and not-so-bad societies to be a strong initial reason for supporting them . . . [as] the arrangements are unlikely to have endured unless they helped those subject to them to live good lives (p. 15). Surely, no one will deny that it matters whether a society successfully provides its citizens good lives and that doing so is strong prima facie reason to defend it. Just as surely, most political philosophers will be less sanguine about recent history (e.g., post World War II America; p. 6). At the end of the day, Kekes offers a challenge to political philosophers: show why change should be permitted at the cost of damage to a social system (pp. 6 8). However, that challenge can frequently be met; the presumption in favor of existing arrangements is easily defeasible. What is needed is an account of the good life. Without that, the claim that conservatism is not a mindless defense of . . . prevailing political arrangements . . . [because these] must be good to merit conservation, and what makes them good is that they enable the people of a society to make good lives for themselves (p. 46) is empty. We need to know which secondary goods are acceptable and which are not. Because he obfuscates that distinction, much of what Kekes says sounds right, but obviously right. Still, he does, in various ways, tighten our focus on the debates between those who advocate for traditions and those who do not. Anyone interested in those debates or in conservatism should read this book. Andrew Jason Cohen James Madison University

Kernohan, Andrew. Liberalism, Equality, and Cultural Oppression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. 130 xiv. $54. 95 (cloth). In this book, Andrew Kernohan argues that the egalitarian liberal state (that is, a liberal state based on principles of the kind John Rawls or Ronald Dworkin would support) should adopt an advocacy strategy toward reform where there is cultural oppression. The central argument is this (pp. 24 25): (P1) Liberalism must regard beliefs in the unequal moral worth of persons as false. (P2) If the transmission of false beliefs in moral inequality by individuals causes harm to signicant interests, then the liberal state must abandon universal tolerance and combat this individual harm. (P3) The transmission of false beliefs in moral inequality does cause signicant harm.

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(C1) Therefore the state must combat the transmission of false beliefs by individuals. (P4) If the social transmission of false beliefs in inequality (i.e., the cultural oppression of groups) is a harm, then it is an accumulative harm. (P5) It is just as important for the state to combat accumulative harms as it is for the state to combat individual harms. (C2) Therefore the liberal state must take an active role in reforming culture and combatting the cultural oppression of groups. Much of the book concentrates on establishing P3, the harmfulness of false ethical beliefs about moral equality, and P5, the importance of combatting accumulative harms. I sketch the main lines of support he offers for each of the premises below. In support of P1, he shows how belief in the equality of persons enjoys a privileged status in liberal theory. There are, of course, several varieties of liberalism, though they share two central ingredients: rst, a commitment to the equal moral worth of persons, and second, a certain tolerance for diverse points of view. The commitment to the equal moral worth of persons is more fundamental: equality is an underlying presupposition. Kernohan appeals to Rawls when he says political liberalism aims to specify the fair terms of social cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal. The equal moral worth of persons is not a postulate with which reasonable people in a democratic society are asked to agree or disagree; agreement to this principle is a precondition of being a reasonable person in a democratic society (p. 3). Tolerance, by contrast, emerges as the conclusion of an argument about epistemic uncertainty concerning the value of pursuing different ways of life. The liberal state should be agnostic about the value of being a hermit, but it should not be agnostic about the equal value of people (p. 4). For Kernohan, cultural oppression is the social transmission of false beliefs, values, and ideals about how to live, and the attitudes, motivations, behaviour patterns, and institutions that depend on them (p. 13). Reasonable people may well disagree about which enculturated beliefs are false. However, Kernohan is concerned only with a subset of these: those they must see as false, namely, beliefs in the unequal moral worth of persons. Cultural oppression is an accumulative harm on a par with the kind of harm that can be caused by environmental pollution. A serious condition of harm can arise because of the small polluting acts of individuals. Cultural pollution is the same, according to Kernohan. There may be no particular individual who is necessarily at fault for creating the cultural oppression: the harm is perpetrated by the practices of a group of people who, for the most part, have no particular intentions toward the particular victim. Liberals are already aware that the cultural environment can damage selfrespect. This is one important harm that can be inicted, but Kernohan wants to focus on another, more pervasive kind of harm: The harm of interfering with one of an individuals most important interests: her interest in forming a concep-

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tion of what is meaningful and valuable in her life (p. viii). It is the protection of this signicant interest for which Kernohan argues in P2 and P3. A lack of self-respect can certainly impede ones ability to implement ones conception of the good, but it can also impede ones ability to formulate conceptions of the good: Our knowledge of the good comes from our social and cultural context. As individuals, we do not acquire all our beliefs by the application of scientic method. Our background beliefs are simply accepted from (or thrust upon us by) our surrounding culture. We have neither the time nor the intellectual capacity nor the resources to critically evaluate each and every one of them. Our justications for our ends often depend on these enculturated beliefs. If the enculturated beliefs upon which our justications depend are false, our knowledge of our ends will be undermined . . . . An inegalitarian culture pollutes the cultural environment with behaviours, representations, and speech acts that lead to false beliefs about the worth of persons. This kind of cultural oppression will be a harm to a persons interest in knowing her good, for if a person forms a conception of the good that depends on a false assessment of her own worth, or of the worth of other people, she will fail to know her good. (P. 37) Direct harm can be caused to people because of an inegalitarian culture. It harms people directly by harming their highest-order interest in forming and implementing their conception of the good (p. 37) by undermining their selfrespect and by harming their interest in coming to know what their good is. (These are the main threads to the defence of P3.) Kernohans account of the kind of harm at issue presupposes cognitivism in ethics by assuming that it is possible for someone to know her good, that the good is something knowable. He defends cognitivism in ethics (the view that we could, or do, have ethical knowledge, or that at least some of our ethical judgments can be justied) by arguing that egalitarian liberals, such as Dworkin and Rawls, have implicitly become cognitivists about much of what is valuable in a persons life (p. 37). In his analysis of accumulative harm, Kernohan emphasizes that an accumulative harm is a harm done by a group not to a group. It is a harm to another person brought about by the actions of a group of people where the action of no single member of that group can be seen, by itself, to cause the harm (p. 72). In support of P4, he argues that a single act cannot really be oppressive it is a series of acts that create the kind of harm at issue. Just as with second-hand smoke, a single exposure does no harm, but continually exposure may; similarly, the behavior of a solitary racist is likely to be no more than offensive. But the cumulative effect of the behavior of many racists will create an oppressive culture which crosses a threshold into being harmful (p. 73). The revised harm principle he argues for is this: The state may adopt policies that otherwise would violate neutrality only if individual activity either is, by itself, causing harm to others or is part of an accumulative activity which brings about harm to others (p. 76). He observes that whether an activity is harmful depends not only on the kind of activity it is but also the circumstances in which it is done. As circumstances change, we must examine the social context in which an activity takes place, at the point in history when we are considering regulating liberty to prevent harm . . . . We have to gather as much empirical

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information as we can about the workings of our social circumstances before we can decide on the limitations to our liberties that the accumulative-harm principle justies. And we have to recognize that our circumstances, and therefore the extent of our liberty, will change (p. 81). Even when the revised harm principle justies interventions, it justies only maximally equitable and minimally onerous ones (p. 86). In particular, Kernohan notes that we will aim to interfere with free expression as little as possible. To this end, he outlines three strategies an egalitarian liberal state could use to try to change an oppressive culture. His preferred option is the advocacy strategy, according to which the state should not interfere coercively with expression, but should employ non-coercive means, its economic and ideological power, to challenge false beliefs about moral equality (p. 91). He contrasts this strategy with the laissez-faire strategy advocated by, for instance, Rawls and Dworkin, and the censorship strategy, which would involve the state in more coercive regulation of the harmful expressive activities. Kernohan argues for the advocacy strategy on a number of grounds. An important argument he makes is that censorship does little to change the attitudes behind the activity and little to challenge the false beliefs already formed by the audience (p. 97). It is only if the advocacy strategy fails that a censorship strategy should be considered. It is often believed that the laissez-faire strategy is required by the neutral state, and on this view the state should neither censor mistaken expression nor engage in education campaigns against false beliefs. The neutral state allows the development of what its defenders often call a cultural marketplace, or a free market of ideas. Defenders have also claimed that in the free market of ideas, false conceptions of the good will be driven out (p. 91). Kernohan notes the laissez-faire strategys ineffectiveness in guaranteeing the elimination of cultural oppression. He recommends that the state should participate actively in public forums on behalf of equality; the state should try to prevent inegalitarian beliefs by challenging them actively and publicly (pp. 96 97). The state should use the economic and educational state apparatuses to oppose inegalitarian cultural oppression (p. 100) by, for instance, subsidizing moral education and organizations or private associations that oppose inequality. A specic example of what would be required by the advocacy state is that it should oppose commercial advertising that represents women in positions subordinate to men. It should do so because the representation of inequality is both false and part of a diffuse cultural sexism that leads women to false and undermining beliefs about themselves and their entitlements (p. 101). The advocacy state can, and must, take a stand in such cases. This book is an important work which issues a signicant challenge to those who want to retain state neutrality in the face of certain kinds of cultural oppression. Of course, some of the most powerful institutions in peoples lives that convey inegalitarian messages (e.g., religious institutions) often maintain and disseminate more complex stories than that not all persons are morally equal. The beliefs about treating people differently which have oppressive consequences are not always based on beliefs all liberals must view as false but rather are sometimes based on beliefs reasonable people may well disagree about. Consider the case

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of a particular church not wanting to appoint women as priests, based on their beliefs that God wants priests in that church to be male, or the institutional traditions prohibit female priests, or on beliefs about the status of certain respected institutional procedures and the decisions reached by them. Some beliefs about unequal treatment may well be traced to controversial supporting beliefs. Whether or not being female is a sufciently good reason to treat someone differently may depend on a set of background beliefs about which liberals may sometimes have to concede that people may reasonably disagree, such as beliefs about what God may want people to do or beliefs about the status of decisions handed down through respected institutions. Would Kernohan recommend that the advocacy strategy be abandoned in such cases? It would seem not (e.g., pp. 114 15). Would government support for religious groups more committed to equality, or advertising campaigns (and so on) be a good idea in such cases? I believe so, but I can see how reasonable people might differ with me on this because some of the supporting premises are ones about which liberal states are supposed to be agnostic. Where beliefs about inequality rely on controversial supporting beliefs about which liberals may reasonably disagree, it would seem that vigorously pursuing the advocacy strategy may not always be appropriate. Yet, if this is the case, too many people might be let off the moral hook too easily. Furthermore, these powerful institutions are primary sources of false beliefs about moral equality, and, for many people, the primary impediment to their interests in knowing their own good, so it seems not inappropriate to be concerned about them. I think there are some genuine tensions within liberalism (even egalitarian liberalism) that pull in different directions here. Kernohan realizes that people may hold more complex stories about their inegalitarian beliefs, but he seems to think that in such cases they are simply operating with the wrong interpretation of what equality means (e.g., p. 48). While that may be true in some cases, he does not acknowledge what I think of as the more typical and worrisome cases: those in which reasonable people could disagree about some of the supporting beliefs for treating people differently and, so, could also disagree about how this consideration weighs in favor of the liberal state not intervening in citizens affairs in such cases. I look forward to Kernohans further thoughts on these more difcult cases. Kernohan challenges liberals on a number of issues worthy of further attention. For instance, he criticizes liberal views about how we choose our beliefs about value from the range of options presented by our cultural context as if we were choosing an ice-cream avor from the range of choices at an ice-cream parlor. He argues that such a model of culture contrasts sharply with others dominant in cultural anthropology, such as Clifford Geertzs model in which culture is a set of control mechanisms plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call programs) for the governing of behavior (p. 23). Kernohan draws attention to the way we take up many of our background beliefs and attitudes by processes more akin to perception than choice, and how this gives rise to some of the most powerful and insidious aspects of culture. Certain beliefs can form a relentless backdrop to peoples ethical deliberation (p. 90), and it is inegalitarian beliefs of this kind that must concern the liberal state. Kernohan draws attention to some of the more harmful aspects of cultural

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membership and argues for useful policies on how we can make cultural frameworks liberating rather than oppressive. The arguments presented in this book deserve careful consideration. Gillian Brock University of Auckland

King, Michael, ed. Moral Agendas for Childrens Welfare. London: Routledge, 1999. Pp. 257. $90.00 (cloth); $29.99 (paper). This provocative collection on children focuses on moral issues in child welfare. While most of the cases, laws, and policies referred to are British, the controversies they illustrate are universal. Most of the contributors are from disciplines in psychology and law David Archard, a moral philosopher, is a notable exception and each is strongly grounded in child welfare research and study. In extremely hard-hitting style, Michael King, the editor and author of the introduction and chapter 1, describes the landscape which the collection looks out on. In an attempt to undermine any cozy assumptions about what is coming, he rips into the surfeit of palliative moral information the sea of values discourse in which he argues the postmodern citizen is awash. Referring to this information as moralizing, he concludes it has no practical effect on social problems. Instead, through the raising of moral high ground against individual representatives, moralizing triggers defense mechanisms which keep the systems under attack safe from damage. If this amorality is the price we must pay for the survival of public order, then moralists may simply have to satisfy themselves with private moral action. Bringing the compass round to childrens welfare, King tells us that attempts at public morality seem to draw attention to fears and anxieties (p. 7) which the moralizers themselves have helped to construct (p. 7). Removing certain individuals (the hockey coach, the parish priest, the day care worker) from their posts or ddling with regulations simply initiates the systems latent defense protocols. We feel safe but only until, inevitably, the next bad person is decloaked. In effect, King argues that moral discourse today is impotent to really change the basic institutional structures which the morality of yesterday played such a key role in establishing. Further, the stamina of these institutions depends in part on the moral energy expended every time their public facades are stormed by the righteous. King supports the distinction between morality and public order implied by his argument. But he does raise questions about whether or not private moral discourse about children can nevertheless be seen as connected to the ways in which the public order deals with them. The essays in the volume present answers to these questions both in general terms and ones specic to particular problems in the area of child welfare. Morality, in the sense deployed by King, is primarily concerned with the welfare of the individual understood as a feeling subject embedded within a nest of relationships with other feeling subjects. The most dominant theme throughout the collection responds to Kings challenge by suggesting that the traditional

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private (where intimate relations are the norm) and public (where impersonal relations are the norm) models of social organization can and ought to be replaced. In Liberalism and Distributional Justice, for example, Terry Carney argues that more attention needs to be paid to nding ways of further dissolving the dichotomy between public and private spheres of action, such as seeking creative ways of adapting the existing role and function of public agencies and services (p. 64). This theme is also explored in Allison Diducks Justice and Children. Diduck rejects denitions of autonomy which exclude reciprocity or dependence as well as those of dependence which exclude individual agency (p. 132). While not every instance of this general response is identical in its foundations or practical implications, the overall idea among contributors seems to be that because young human beings are usually dependent, the traditional public order is ill equipped to treat them judiciously. Yet, because children are not essentially dependent, their entitlement to justice is not necessarily dispatched within the private sphere. The fact of children forces us to rethink our existing social categories and thereby open up the possibility of moral action beyond the private and public. In his essay, Andrew Cooper defends models of child welfare found in both France and Belgium. (Based on this decades revelations of child pornography rings operating throughout Belgiums child protection services, it seemed an odd choice, however.) In these countries, either a special judge or small committee is devoted to hearing, investigating, resolving, and following up each child welfare complaint involving the child, suspected abuser, and state in informal discussion on a regular basis. While the law is kept at a distance, it is available if no progress is made. Daniel Monk argues that the distinction between the excluded or suspended pupil (legal discourse) and special education needs pupil (welfare discourse) exacerbates rather than ameliorates the tragedy of the lost child by imposing an unrealistic choice on schools and parents when it comes to responding to behavior difculties. In order to more effectively deal with the challenges of teaching children who come from a wide variety of backgrounds and with a variety of behavioral dispositions, Monk urges the development of reexive structures that preclude an over-simplication and systematic colonization of the issues and include a genuine form of child responsiveness (p. 228). Rounding out the volume are several essays on a variety of related topics. Comments on some but not all of these follow. Christine Piper, a historian, presents a fascinating study of nineteenth-century child protection legislation in an effort to show how slowly the erosion of the traditional priority of familial sanctity in the face of serious child abuse proceeded. She argues that this was largely due to the lingering justication of state interference in such cases on grounds that the offending families were not properly families at all. Stephen Frosh offers a highly lucid critique of religious fundamentalism and its version of the best interests of the child launched from the ground of liberal humanism. Yet he rightly cautions that the liberal humanist version unlimited by the recognition of community identity often provided by commitment to religious practice merits criticism as well. David Archard argues compellingly for the abandonment of the term child abuse on the grounds that it has ceased to satisfy the philosophical criteria for a good denition. Instead, Archard suggests we ought to talk about

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a range of harms that may befall children through the action or inaction of human agency (p. 87). Special mention must be made of the contribution by Wendy and Rex Stainton Rogers titled What Is Good and Bad Sex for Children? In his comment on the piece, editor King notes that the authors draw on Michel Foucaults analysis of sexuality (p. 28) and invoke a higher morality than that of the moralizers, a moral agenda which recognizes child sexuality and allows the possibility that it might be expressed in ways which are not always harmful to children (p. 29). While the broad concern their essay explores is certainly germane to child welfare issues particularly in the law what counts as good sex as implied by their view cannot rule out sexual relations between children under 12 and adults. The authors elide distinctions between young and older children throughout the piece and have arguably confused the desire of young children to be educated about sex with a desire to be instructed in sex. The ethics of children and sex have been treated with greater care and insight elsewhere (David Archard, Children: Rights and Childhood [New York: Routledge, 1989]) and so the inclusion of this poorly argued piece in an otherwise excellent collection is disappointing. Susan M. Turner University of Victoria

Kramer, Matthew H. In the Realm of Legal and Moral Philosophy. New York: St. Martins Press, 1999. Pp. x 202. $59.95 (cloth). Kramers announced goal is to investigate the realm of legal and moral philosophy (p. 1) by critical encounters (p. 9) with a number of prominent recent theories and central controversies (p. 1). This volume, however, consists principally of republished versions of Kramers recently published articles. These include encounters with Finnis, Lyons, Dworkin, Posner, Coase, Coleman, Kronman, and Gewirth. Although the essays are advertised as having undergone numerous and sweeping revisions (p. ix), in the essay on Lyons which I checked, the revision consists in the addition of a footnote arguing that the uniform failure to enforce a statute is a procedural injustice in every case (because in each case, considered individually, the individual against whom the statute otherwise would have been enforced is privileged vis-a ` -vis all others). Nonetheless, several themes emerge in the essays. Overall concerns are the rejection of grand theory, the embrace of indeterminacy, and the fascination with paradox. Kramer offers partial defenses of legal positivism in arguing against Finniss support for natural law theory and in working to develop a plausible positivist account of procedural justice. He offers related support for utilitarianism, criticizing the antiutilitarian views of Finnis, Dworkin, and Gewirth, and defending the utilitarianism of Posner and Coase. The essays are thought provoking, albeit sometimes puzzling and not entirely convincing. This brief review takes up two of them, one with a positivist and the other with a utilitarian theme. In On Formal Justice, an article rst published by now over twenty-ve years ago (and more recently reprinted), David Lyons argued that formal justice

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in the sense of ofcial action in conformity to law is not really a species of justice at all. The article was part of Lyonss then-effort to purge legal positivism, as a pure theory of law, of any moral commitments. (Lyons has since come to the view that we do think of law as having pretensions to justice; positivist efforts to argue that formal justice is a species of justice might be regarded as a manifestation of this connection.) Lyons argued that the connection between following the law and doing any kind of justice at all is contingent, depending on the substantive content of the law. Efforts to ground the justice of ofcial compliance in the maxim treat like cases alike, the injunction to follow rules, or the stricture that ofcials should behave impartially and without bias, are likewise contingent, Lyons contended. As a counterexample to formal justice, Lyons offered a law that prescribes extermination of members of a hated group, and a judge who stays on the bench in order to try to avoid strict enforcement of the law (knowing that were she or he to resign, the replacement would strictly enforce the law). Would the judges success in preventing a single extermination be unjust? To whom? Lyons contends that it would not be unjust to the person saved or to others who have been or will be exterminated. To be sure, all those who are exterminated are wronged, but that is a matter of the horror of the law, not of the violation of formal justice. Kramer disagrees. His view is that formal justice, in the sense of the strict application of legal norms, is a species of justice. It does not, however, carry any moral weight, even prima facie weight. Lyonss basic mistake, according to Kramer, lies in thinking that the requirements of formal justice are moral requirements of any sort; in this, Lyons blurs the distinction between formal and substance justice. (A reply here might be that it is hard to see the point of defending formal justice as Kramer understands it, or indeed of terming it formal justice at all; the defense of formalism may have been part of the legal positivists effort to have his cake in the sense of separating law and morality and eating it too in the sense of insisting that law as a normative system commands obligation.) Kramers view is that an applicable legal norm creates a procedural warrant that it be followed, although it does not create even a prima facie moral justication for such compliance; in this respect, Kramer thinks, recognition of procedural justice as a species of justice furthers the positivist project of separating law and morality. Kramer concedes Lyonss claim that we cannot know whether the strict application of law is prima facie morally legitimate unless we know the moral legitimacy of the underlying law itself, but he distinguishes his view from Lyonss in two respects. First, he maintains that even though procedural justice carries no moral weight on its own, it does partake of a certain moral import (p. 41): by virtue of requiring strict compliance to law, it insures that the administration of laws is no better or worse than the laws themselves. Second, procedural justice, by guaranteeing that no one will be treated better or worse than applicable law, can generate decisions without any moral weight whatsoever, such as in the example of the law requiring extermination. Yet Kramer does nd something of moral signicance here: the ofcial in applying the law has a moral obligation not to go below the minimum of decency secured by procedural justice, but he also has a moral obligation not to treat that minimum as a maximum (p. 42). Procedural justice tells us that unrestrained evil is worse than legalistic evil, but that legalistic evil has no moral claim on us at all. But why should this be so? And if unrestrained evil is indeed worse, why is

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that a matter of procedural injustice, of nonconformity to law, rather than a matter of the underlying pattern of evil that results? Isnt Kramer also seeking to have his moral cake (procedural justice is a species of justice) and to eat it too (procedural justice carries no moral weight)? His answer is given in his discussion of Lyonss supposed counterexample to procedural justice, the judge who in a single instance fails to follow a law requiring extermination of all members of a hated group. Kramer contends that we can judge the judge as having acted unjustly to those who have been exterminated, although not as having acted in a manner that was even prima facie morally wrong. The victims of extermination were wronged by the extermination, and by the fact that the judge acted wrongly in not following the policy consistently. When we judge the judge in this case, we should note that although the judge did the morally right thing, and that what she or he did was not in any sense prima facie morally wrong, the judge nonetheless committed a procedural injustice. Kramer fails to make the case, however, that this judgment is anything other than the observation that the judge failed to follow the law. Yet he clearly wants it to be more: he regards it as a procedural injustice, a minimum of moral decency, albeit one with no moral weight at all. Another essay in the volume is devoted to Anthony Kronmans criticism of both libertarian and liberal opposition to redistributive uses of contract law (such as the refusal to enforce contracts that are substantively unconscionable). Kramer uses this essay as an occasion to criticize Rawlsian theory and thereby to suggest indirect support for utilitarianism. Kronmans strategy is to argue that both libertarians and Rawlsian liberals are committed to at least some redistributivism in the law of contracts. Libertarians would refuse to enforce contracts that are arrived at by force or fraud or that violate the rights of third parties. But when, Kronman asks, are contracts involuntary? To ask this question is, in Kronmans view, to inquire which forms of advantage taking in exchange relationships are compatible with libertarian freedom. In answering this question, it will not do for the libertarian simply to say contracts that violate rights, or contracts that involve force or fraud; the libertarian needs to provide a principled explanation of when, for example, a failure to supply information amounts to fraud. As a means for drawing such lines, Kronman suggestions the Paretian principle: advantage taking should be permitted in just those types of cases in which it works to the long-run advantage of the promisee. On this view, advantage taking that consists of fraudulent concealment would not be enforced, but advantage taking that encourages generally benecial information gathering would be. Kronman also argues that taxation is not a preferred substitute for redistributive contractual regulation in achieving liberal social justice. Kramers criticism, quite fairly, begins with Kronmans efforts to commit the libertarian to the form of Paretianism he suggests. Kramer argues convincingly that Kronman begs the question against the libertarian. Why should the libertarian concede that not making promisees worse off is the touchstone of libertarian freedom? And, why should libertarians accept the baseline Kronman proposes, that advantage taking is presumptively illegitimate, rather than the reverse, that it is presumptively legitimate? Where Kramer fails is in his further argument that adopting Paretianism opens Kronman up to the charge of indeterminacy. Kramers point is that because there are many possible Paretian improvements from a baseline in which a particular contractual process is forbidden, Kronman cannot provide us with a

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theory about which contracts should be enforced and which should not be. But this misunderstands Kronmans view. Kronman is contending only that when enforcing a particular class of contracts would make promisees worse off than a baseline of refusing to enforce them, those contracts should not be enforced. He is not arguing for a theory of optimization, although Kramer as a utilitarian might prefer such a view. A nal note. Kramer potentially brings a professional ethics problem to light in the preface. Two of the essays (including the one on Kronman) were originally published as coauthored and are presented here as single authored (whether with the permission of the coauthor is not stated). The justication is that most of the ideas and all of the prose (p. x) in the two are Kramers, but the coauthor contributed a key idea (p. x) and carefully perused the typescript of the rst (p. x), and engaged in some long conversations that helped rene [the] argument (p. x) in the second. This justication would appear to open Kramer up to questioning about whether the essays were properly published as coauthored in the rst place. Leslie Pickering Francis University of Utah

Kupperman, Joel J. Value . . . and What Follows. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. vi 168. $35.00 (cloth). Joel Kupperman has written a very lucid book on the nature of value and how we understand it. This book ts into a fairly recent trend in the literature of trying to understand value through our emotional responses. Kupperman will argue for an account of value that is realistic though he will also argue that there are real limits to what we will be able to know or discover about value. The scope of the book is ambitious, since he attempts to tie his claims about value to a rather controversial claim regarding public policy that a form of perfectionism ought to be supported by social policy, in contrast to the traditional liberal conception of state neutrality which holds that the state ought not support one conception of the good over others. The positive thesis, a gentle form of perfectionism, is a contribution to the debate over value and how (or whether) political systems should support particular views of value. Since the value system Kupperman considers the most plausible is pluralistic, the despotic potential is limited. Still, problems having to do with deciding priorities abound. Indeed, it is unclear how his account differs from a form of liberalism which simply constrains legitimate value by what is reasonable. An early claim in the book is that emotional states can function as senses of value. For something (and the only relevant things here are emotional states) to be an awareness of a sense of value it must (1) put someone in a better position to make judgments of value, (2) deliver up awareness of value, and (3) yield rsthand judgments of value. Further, (4) to accept senses of value is to accept realism about value (pp. 33 34). Kupperman isnt claiming that all emotional states are senses of value, just that senses of value will be emotional states. Candidates are emotional states such as admiration and contempt. The idea is that to admire x I must really be committed to the view that x is something valuable. To

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have contempt for x is to be committed to its disvalue or badness. Kuppermans claim is that these emotional states lead to an awareness of value, not that they incorporate value. This awareness of value, ultimately, gives us the material that we need to make discriminations in value judgments about a variety of things, particularly, for Kuppermans purposes, about the sort of society one should prefer to live in and the sort of social policies one ought to support. The value sense will be used to show that a limited form of perfectionism is a viable option, and not really incompatible with liberalism. The middle portion of the book is taken up with a discussion of normative ethical theory. In particular, Kupperman argues for a consequentialist view committed to the following claims: 1. The structure of morality is justied in terms of consequences. 2. The content of any acceptable morality is justied in terms of consequences. 3. Catastrophic consequences may provide exceptions to generally valid moral rules. 4. There are occasions on which what one should do is what is likely to have the best consequences (p. 112). Kupperman is not an act consequentialist because he believes that one should not, on every occasion, perform that act with the best (or likely best) consequences. Thus, the commitment to claim (4), rather than the stronger claim. He notes that some anticonsequentialists might accept (3) and (4). This is certainly the case indeed, I cant think of many theories at all that would reject (4) the way it is stated. Even if one believed that consideration of consequences should have no place in practical deliberation whatsoever (a highly implausible form of anticonsequentialism), one could still hold that sometimes what one ought to do (for other reasons) will end up producing the best consequences. Claim (3) also seems fairly uncontroversial, though some may interpret Kant as disagreeing. Kupperman writes that the structure of morality . . . includes both the way in which claims are shaped and justied (i.e., the preference for broad general rules) and the typical connections of moral judgment with motivation and community pressures (pp. 113 14). This structure is justied in terms of consequences in that it is consequentialist considerations that speak in favor of using broad general rules to justify ones actions and policies. Furthermore, it is important that we have certain motivations and inhibitions of a certain sort. Thus, we will have difculty violating norms in some situations that may, strictly speaking, call for violations given consequentialist considerations. What Kupperman is describing is a form of sophisticated consequentialism. However, he does not discuss his account in relation to other sophisticated consequentialists. For example, Peter Railton is generally recognized as the philosopher who has best developed such a view, yet his groundbreaking essay Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality gets no discussion. It is not even mentioned in the bibliography. Nor does Kupperman engage in a defense of the view against some of its more vexing problems. For example, some have pointed out that this type of theory will have problems accounting for the value we place on friendship (see, e.g., Neera Badhwars Why It Is Wrong to Be Always Guided by the Best: Consequentialism and Friendship, Ethics 101 [1991], 483 504). While his view would be able to accommodate friendship (I believe most indirect forms of consequen-

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tialism can do so), a discussion of his work in relation to the literature would have been helpful in highlighting ways in which his approach differs from others. So, claims (1) and (2) seem to boil down to the view that we are committed to broad general rules and the recognition that, given facts of human psychology, we cant always eliminate useful inhibitions and motives even when it looks best to do so on occasion. Further, the content of the rules will be determined by a consideration of consequences, as will determinations of good motives and inhibitions. This is not to commit Kupperman to an absolute form of rule consequentialism. Rules, like useful habits of the mind, help guide action, but are simply one way in which this is accomplished. In the nal portion of the book he seeks to show that liberalism and perfectionism do not in fact conict. His general strategy is to point out that liberalism need not be neutral with respect to value at all, and, indeed, the noninterference advocated by Mill is not committed to it. Rather, there can be competing values all important to human ourishing which need to be balanced in a system that does not set lexical priorities. Similarly, he argues, perfectionism need not set lexical priorities among those things which are valued. Of course, he argues, a Nietzschean perfectionism will conict with a Rawlsian liberal, but there are more limited forms of perfectionism which will not conict with most liberalisms. The limited perfectionism he argues for is very imprecise (which Kupperman admits, but argues that this is necessary because there will be no plausible way to sharply characterize a system which considers disparate values). Kupperman believes that we are in a good position to make comparative judgments regarding which societies are better: We can say that the overall value within a society that is not culturally and intellectually alive seems likely to be less than that within one that is, and that some individual lives (especially those of intelligent people) seem likely also to be somewhat impoverished (p. 155). Further, the perfectionist thesis is that there is, generally speaking, more value in societies in which there is strong awareness of cultural traditions, and also vital new work in the arts and sciences, than in societies that lack these features (pp. 155 56). He doesnt claim to be able to demonstrate this with certainty, though he thinks the claim is strongly supported by evidence. He believes that the state ought to provide funding to support cultural institutions that educate people about the past and about cultural traditions as well as to support the arts and sciences. The claim is that this sort of society is a better one to live in. I dont see that it follows, however, that the society which supports the arts and sciences is the better one to live in. This is because of a kind of international free-rider problem. Persons living in Canada, for example, benet from the fact that the United States government supports medical research. The taxes of U.S. citizens go to pay for basic research, and the large potential market provides incentives for companies to develop new drugs. For persons living in other countries there is a tremendous benet. They gain the benet of the newly developed knowledge and medical resources, without having to fund the development process. Arguably, it may be better to live in the country or society that free rides than in the country that expends the resources of its citizens to support medical and scientic progress. Julia Driver Dartmouth College

Book Reviews
Lehrer, Keith. Self-Trust: A Study of Reason, Knowledge, and Autonomy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. 204. $36.00 (cloth); $17.60(paper).

427

Curiously, Lehrer says that this book claims to be about many things but is really only about me. My apologies. You have been warned (p. vii). Perhaps Lehrer later explains, saying I encourage all who read this book to ennoble themselves by the search for truth rather than by citation of references, even if, in so doing, they cite me not (p. vii). The book attempts to sum up views developed over the whole of his philosophical career, thereby making it less self-contained. It may be hard for someone unfamiliar with Lehrers other works to fully appreciate or completely understand the power or subtlety of many of his views on reasoned acceptance and preference, wisdom, conict resolution, consensus, theories of preference, autonomous love, nonsupervenience of self-trust, and consciousness. Still, one would learn a lot from reading this as ones introduction to Lehrers philosophical views. Reviews of this book typically will begin at the front and work to the back, but I shall reverse the order. Perhaps Lehrers entire philosophical view revolves around a central image: the mathematical loop of Estavayer (p. 184), a keystone loop in the ceiling of the chapel at Estavayer, Switzerland. With an air of mystery, Lehrer tells us that such a loop is an actualized mathematical structure that realizes quantity and quality, individual and society, mind and body. Reality is mathematical as the Pythagoreans afrmed and many a physicist will insist when asked whether reality is made of waves or corpuscles. You can only understand this answer from within the loop. If you do not understand, return to the beginning, read, evaluate, and aggregate. You will nd the answer within the loop (p. 185). Lehrer seems to take the Pythagorean reference seriously. Reminiscent of Descartess question What am I? Lehrers answer is that he is a mentalized body and materialized mind. Lehrer continues: There is a mathematical loop from the mentality of the body to the materiality of the mind, and the unity of the autonomous self is enclosed in the mathematical loop. . . . I am the mathematical loop of trust and trust-worthiness in the metamental ascent and descent of the mind and body in time and space. I may be more than that, but of that I am ignorant (p. 182). Does Lehrer really believe that he is a mathematical structure? How important is this to the overall package of Lehrers views? It is the common thread to the several topics of the book. It is by reference to it that he defends his view of autonomy of self, love, and reason. If one is a mathematical structure (or the instantiation of one), Lehrer seems to think ones acceptances and preferences are cut free of determinism. Mathematical systems validate a type of circular reasoning and justication that may be suspect if it supervened on purely natural properties as opposed to, say, mathematical ones. Accordingly, Lehrer denies that ones epistemic properties (of reasonableness, preference, and self-trust) supervene on naturalistic (as opposed to mathematical) properties (pp. 61 76). Where Descartes placed the mind in a nonphysical realm to free it from bondage, Lehrer places the mind in a mathematical realm, with the same end in view. Lets consider consciousness. Consciousness gives us knowledge of beliefs and desires in virtue of which we form reasoned acceptances and preferences. Here Lehrer employs a series of mathematical formulae for aggregating prefer-

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ences. One formula in particular loops around to itself as a value in computing itself, namely, w j w l w lj w 2 w 2j w j w j j w nw nJ . This is a source of Lehrers homage to the mathematical loop. He employs it on the topics of consensus, autonomous reason (and love), and consciousness. Access to mental states involves their becoming the lucid content of conscious states. Lucid contents are epistemically transparent and involve exemplarization where an instance of a type of thought or sensation becomes representative of a class. For thoughts, he employs quotation to designate the exemplifying state. Lehrers example is seeing a monitor. The example goes from the mental state M (M ) I see a monitor to consciousness of its content (LC) I see a monitor has the content that I see a monitor. Although Lehrers mathematical formula does not employ the device of quotation, it is clear that he sees this as consistent with the mathematical loop in the formula above. One can employ an instance of a thought to exemplify its very content. Thus, we can understand the content of the thought if we can think the thought and ascend to its representation (and exemplication). A similar technique, but without the device of quotation, is employed for conscious knowledge of sensations. A sensation of a phenomenal quality, say red, can stand as an exemplar of its type. Without quotation, Lehrer needs a device to designate the exemplary state. He offers none, but it is clear that an instance of the sensory state is to serve as a symbol. This visual sensation, referring to the visual sensation one is having looking at a re engine in good, white, light, might identify the exemplar of a sensation of red. One may then use that sensation token to stand as an exemplar in conscious thought for that qualitative, sensation state type (of red). The self-referential feature of the exemplar is compared to the mathematical loop in the above formula. (Lehrer closes his discussion of consciousness by claiming that his formula can be instantiated in a neural net perhaps to appease connectionists and that it can rebut the nonmaterialists conclusions based upon qualia by Nagel and Jackson.) Of course, it is far from clear that this all works or even what Lehrer thinks about the metaphysics of consciousness, beyond its faint resemblance to the mathematical loop in the equation above. He rejects any attempt to naturalize the self, consciousness, or reason, on one hand, while taking steps to assure the reader that an activation loop is a possible neural realization (p. 179), on the other hand. This tension is unresolved in the book. Middle sections of the book give accounts of how to resolve conicts and achieve autonomous social consensus and how to achieve autonomous loving relationships with others. Both of these solutions rely on Lehrers notion of metamental ascent to the level of free preferences and acceptances. To achieve autonomy, Lehrer shuns causal explanations of preferences or acceptances. Autonomy requires that we prefer to have the preferences we do. Reasons can be given to justify our highest power preferences (p. 100). But reasons do not cause or necessitate those preferences. If one hankers for an account of the meta-

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physics of preferences or a cognitive explanation of how they are shaped, one will be disappointed. Lehrer eschews any such attempt. The title of the book is taken from Lehrers account of reasonable acceptance. (A structurally parallel argument is given for reasonable preference.) To accept a belief is to positively evaluate it. An acceptance is reasonable when it conforms to the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. I accept that p. I am worthy of my trust concerning what I accept. I am worthy of my trust concerning my acceptance of p. I am reasonable to trust my acceptance of p. I am reasonable to accept that p.

Premise 2 is essential. How is it justied? Using the mathematical formula above as our guide, we may recursively plug the premise into p and iterate, 1A. I accept that I am worthy of my trust concerning what I accept. 2A. I am worthy of my trust concerning what I accept. 3A. I am worthy of my trust concerning my acceptance of the premise that I am worthy of my trust concerning what I accept. 4A. I am reasonable to trust my acceptance of the thesis that Im worthy of my trust concerning what I accept. 5A. I am reasonable to accept that I am worthy of my trust concerning what I accept. This explains how one can be reasonable in accepting p (and in accepting ones self-trust). One is not home free, of course, unless ones acceptances are also true. (Lehrer gives no argument that his acceptances are true. Thats not his goal.) Reasonable acceptances are parts of an overall background system that, as a result of coherence, and undefeated justication, yield knowledge. Being trustworthy in what one accepts loops back upon itself to support acceptance that one is trustworthy. This acceptance inductively coheres with ones other acceptances for mutual support. More important, if Lehrer is right, ones very trustworthiness explains ones trustworthiness in accepting that one is worthy of ones self-trust. The explanation is not causal, however, but justicatory. Lehrer invites the reader to choose between the surd and the loop. The choice of the surd leaves unexplained explainers (foundationalism). The choice of the loop yields the above explanation of reasonable acceptance that is modeled by the mathematical loop of self-trust. Fred Adams University of Delaware

Levine, Andrew. Rethinking Liberal Equality from a Utopian Point of View. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. Pp. x 140. $32.50 (cloth). This is a refreshing and interesting book that attempts to reinvigorate a utopian tradition of egalitarian political philosophy historically associated with Marx and Rousseau. Neo-Hobbesians who view justice merely as an articial device for the realization of mutual advantage will no doubt view Levines work as among the

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more fancy ights of recent egalitarian theorizing. But theorists more sympathetic to Rawlsian-inspired theories of justice have reason to consider Levines arguments carefully. Levine seeks both to reveal limitations of contemporary egalitarian liberalism and to sketch a supraliberal conception of democratic equality that can ultimately supercede justice as the rst virtue of an egalitarian political community. Despite his invocation of political themes drawn from nonliberal sources, Levines most fundamental commitment is to the Kantian ideal of equal respect for autonomous persons that animates contemporary liberalism. Levine believes Rawlsian liberals adopt an unduly limited and in some respects defective interpretation of this basic ideal. Whereas liberals believe that the ideal of Kantian equality leads to an afrmation of the primacy of justice with special emphasis on distributive fairness, Levine attempts to sever, or at least render contingent, the tie between equality and justice. In his attempt to break this link, Levine relies heavily on traditional marxist forecasts concerning the inevitable emergence of a kind of material superabundance. Under such favorable conditions, Levine contends the normative importance of fairness in the distribution of resources is signicantly diminished. Instead, the Kantian ideal is best achieved through a form of democratic polity in which individuals exercise democratic control over productive assets and in which democratic rule by the people is not constrained by liberal constitutional mechanisms. Drawing on Rousseau, Levine envisions a harmonious egalitarian polity in which self-realization and individual autonomy ourish through the equal participation of individuals in the democratic community. Levines articulation of a utopian alternative to liberal equality comes with a frustrating proviso. Under current historical conditions (i.e., prior to the elimination of the circumstances of justice and the attendant transformation of human nature), the conception of democratic equality can only be barely elaborated (p. 129). But Levine does not intend his book to serve as the blueprint Marx never supplied for a communist society. Rather, he primarily aims his argument against what he sees as liberal egalitarian complacency about the transcendent importance of justice as a political ideal. Though Levine seeks to lay the groundwork for a form of egalitarianism that ultimately surpasses liberal equality, he begins the book by challenging the internal coherency of some standard liberal commitments. Liberals believe that individuals must assume responsibility for the ends they freely choose. In matters of distributive justice, this kind of choice sensitivity means that the subsidization of voluntary idleness is unjust. Against this, Levine argues that liberal egalitarians should, on their own terms, embrace a right not to work because failure to do so is incompatible with the conception of fairness embedded in the ideal of liberal neutrality. In short, treating different conceptions of the good fairly requires support for idlers for whom leisure (involving a complete absence from work) denes their life plan. Levines argument reveals a tension between a certain construal of neutrality and a choice-sensitive theory of distributive equality. However, the signicance of this result is diminished by the fact that Levine can reach it only by insisting that a preference for idleness should not be considered an expensive taste. Leisure is a special good merely because it is, in fact, a key constitutive element of some persons conception of the good. But even if leisure is prized in a special way by some people this is, on its own, an insufcient reason

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for supposing that it should not be considered an expensive taste for which no subsidization is required. Levines chief complaint about current theories of liberal equality concerns the requirement that individuals be held responsible for the distributional consequences of what they freely choose to do (p. 32). Levine concedes that where relative scarcity obtains this requirement is, for the most part, appropriate. But he thinks liberals mistakenly represent this demand of justice as an inviolable and timeless principle of political morality. There are two general difculties with conferring this kind of normative primacy on justice. First, it is a normative mistake to suppose that a Kantian view of individual responsibility always implies a concern for choice-sensitive distributive fairness. In conditions of afuence the importance of securing distributive fairness recedes to the point of vanishing. Second, the focus on individual ownership that accompanies emphasis on distributive fairness presents an obstacle to progressive political change by encouraging acquiescence in an inegalitarian political status quo. The recognition of an attractive egalitarian vision in which private ownership gives way to a system of socialized ownership is obscured by the view that equality concerns justice in the distribution of private property. In developing these themes, Levine criticizes the approach to political legitimacy embraced by political liberals who attempt to divorce political justication from broader moral justication. He claims that political liberalism has a stultifying effect on political imagination by treating certain contentious liberal doctrines such as neutrality as constitutive of political legitimacy. Levine prefers an instrumental liberalism in which political institutions are assessed in terms of the contribution they make to the realization of deeper moral objectives such as full self-realization by all. On this approach, the possibility of surpassing liberal institutions is not precluded by a criterion of legitimacy that inherently privileges liberal institutions. Levine also claims to detect a problematic tension between liberal constitutionalism and egalitarian democratic objectives. Liberal constitutional arrangements place constraints on the expression of full democratic rule by the people. Levine optimistically suggests that the need for such constraints will be diminished in a regime of democratic equality partly because the sort of extension of full democratic control over productive assets that he envisions would have a transformative effect on individuals. They would internalize liberal constraints such that democratic deliberations by the people would never place members of the community in jeopardy. Levine packs a lot of interesting arguments into a short book. His presentation of ideas is admirably clear and analytically rigorous. Moreover, his approach to the assessment of liberal equality is novel and provocative. I think Levine is right to warn liberals against theoretical complacency and acquiescence in a manifestly inegalitarian status quo. In the nal analysis, however, the overall damage to liberal egalitarianism wrought by his critique is slight. Levines most effective arguments are those directed against political liberalism. The attempt to ground liberal equality in an overlapping consensus is fraught with difculties. But the debate between political liberals and those who favor a comprehensive form of liberalism is one that occurs within the space occupied by liberal equality. Indeed, Levines comprehensive doctrine of legitimacy is similar to the justicatory strategy favored by some advocates of liberal equality. As for the future of

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egalitarian thought, it is possible that egalitarianism should have a different face in a community in which the circumstances of justice no longer obtain. But Levine supplies no compelling evidence that relative scarcity is on the verge of elimination. Similarly, even in the most afuent political communities, there is little evidence to suggest that citizens are close to achieving a form of internalized liberal conscience that would render superuous constitutional constraints on democratic majorities. Ironically, Levines acceptance of the Kantian ideal and his acknowledgement of the plausibility of liberal equality as a response to the circumstances of justice actually seem to vindicate the current importance of liberal egalitarian theory. After all, we live in a world characterized by relative scarcity and injustice. So despite Levines thoughtful critique, its difcult to conclude that liberal theorys focus on the nature of justice and the possibilities of its realization are currently anachronistic or an impediment to progressive political change. Colin M. Macleod University of Victoria

May, Larry. The Socially Responsive Self: Social Theory and Professional Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. 222. $35.00 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). Many of the positions in professional ethics for which May argues in this book a softening of legal advocacy and medical paternalism, and protection for whistleblowers are very familiar from a philosophical literature in this country that now stretches back at least twenty years. But his way of arguing for these positions will probably not be familiar to most readers of that literature. He does not cite many of its sources, but instead argues from a communitarian and collectivist perspective developed largely in relation to Continental philosophers such as Durkheim, Arendt, Habermas, and Lyotard. This gives the book a very different avor from the usual ones in the eld and makes it more interesting reading. But, at least from the point of view of a liberal individualist, it also suffers to some degree from the usual weaknesses (or excesses) of the communitarian perspective. The general focus of the book is also quite different from the usual work in professional ethics, deriving from Mays earlier work on shared responsibility. He focuses here on what is necessary for individual professionals to live up to their moral commitments, to stand up to objectionable pressures and respond to others in need or to potential victims of harm. Problems result largely from the fact that professionals are members of different groups and organizations seeking to impose different values and loyalties. Their solution requires from the individuals side personal integrity and a sense of shared responsibility for the actions of those groups with which one identies. But, equally important and largely neglected in the previous literature, it requires from the side of professional groups and organizations solidarity and support for individuals doing what these groups demand of their members. Individuals must extend their sense of shared

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responsibility, and groups must offer support for individuals seeking to obey their moral demands, if these demands are to be reasonable. The focus here is on the social origins of the self and of personal integrity, on collective and shared responsibility, and on solidarity within professional groups. The rst part of the book addresses these general issues; the second, specic issues in the professions. In the chapter on personal integrity, May argues that the self develops in relation to those groups with which it identies. These groups are sources of values to which the individual becomes committed. A diversity of sources is needed for an integrated rather than one-dimensional self. Integrity requires a coherence of values, a critical ability, and principled action, but the latter does not require unconditional commitment to any principles, only reective change and the ability ultimately to control what are initially external social inuences. May next analyzes the notion of solidarity within groups, which he takes to be necessary to their moral authority. His emphasis is on bonds of sentiment and the immediate willingness to morally support other members. Solidarity develops from individuals identifying with a group in full understanding of how others in society identify them. It can counteract the self-interested motive to violate moral principles or act against the common good, but it can also be morally dangerous if it results in a loss of individual autonomy. Whether the inuence is morally positive or negative depends on the way solidarity develops from the socialization of individuals into the group. Socialization within bureaucratic institutions can exploit vulnerability to create blind loyalty, anonymity, and diffused responsibility. Or, if personal values are enhanced in the process of socialization, it can enhance the sense of responsibility as well. May seems to think that the full analysis of solidarity requires some concept of collective consciousness. He therefore examines several concepts: ways of perceiving unique to members of certain groups, inherited forms of reasoning and perhaps contents, and shared cognitive and emotive content embodied in institutions and rituals. Such consciousness is not reducible to beliefs, even shared beliefs, of individuals according to May. By contrast, his ethic of responsibility stresses responsiveness to the concrete and specic needs of those who rely on or stand in special relationships to an individual. Such responsiveness is to replace obedience to abstract rules: May criticizes professional codes for seeking to impose absolute rules that are insensitive to the conditions of particular conicts. His emphasis here seems to be on unique individual relationships and not on groups and their common characteristics. I see a tension between this particularist ethic and the previous appeal to collective consciousness. Even if we can make sense of the latter notion as irreducible (and May does not succeed in my view in making sense of it), it seems inimical to the enhancement of personal responsibility that he urges. It seems plausible that individuals will sooner feel responsible for actions of groups when they view these groups as collections of individuals instead of entities that exist above and beyond all the individuals who seem to compose them. When he turns to concrete issues in the professions, May argues rst that conicts of interest among personal and professional roles cannot be completely eliminated and that compromises between competing values will be necessary. Since most professionals work for organizations whose collective interests may

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oppose professional values, and since the latter may conict with personal interests as well, conicts are to be expected. Once more, professional codes are unrealistic in prohibiting them absolutely. It is most important to reveal such conicts to clients so that they are not disadvantaged or deceived, instead of deceptively denying that they exist. The next two chapters concern lawyers and doctors. In his chapter on lawyers, May advocates a cooperative and conciliatory approach in many areas in which lawyers are presently adversarial. He maintains that lawyers need to be socialized differently, so that they do not see every dispute as a clash of private interests. They need to foster and appeal more to shared values as the basis of cooperative solutions. At the same time, he recognizes some of the dangers of the cooperative model, insisting that procedural safeguards be kept in place. The chapter on medicine focuses on Christian Science refusal of care cases. These are seen as conicts between two communities or groups, and compromises are suggested. Just as I have some reservations about Mays general communitarian framework, so these carry over into his more specic discussions of the professions. Although I too have opposed the model of fully zealous advocacy, I would still maintain that a model of constrained advocacy is generally more applicable to the legal profession than a cooperative model, however attractive the latter may sound in the abstract. One reason is that appeal to the legal system is best seen as a last resort when disputes cannot be settled cooperatively. It should continue to be so regarded if it is not to exceed its presently overextended boundaries. In areas of law involving mainly negotiation and legal document drafting, a cooperative model may be more tting, but it is arguably already in place. Viewing the medical cases in question exclusively in terms of conicting group interests among which compromises must be struck fails to take as central the rights of individual children against harm or neglect. May might condemn the fact that the appeal to rights rarely allows compromise, but that may be the virtue of rights here. May actually wafes on this point, saying in one place that fundamental rights are not at stake in these cases, and in another place that they may well be. The individualist will want to draw the line at respecting group interests precisely at the point where they begin to violate important individual rights. Despite these reservations arising from a generally different orientation, I recommend this book highly as a welcome addition to the literature. Fresh viewpoints are always to be welcomed when they are well articulated, and May is a worthy representative of this different tradition. He brings difcult (if not obscure) authors to bear on issues of professional ethics with admirable clarity. And much of his criticism of the professions, especially their reliance on rigid, absolutist codes as the main form of ethical guidance, is very well taken. Alan H. Goldman University of Miami

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Paul, Ellen Frankel; Miller, Fred D., Jr.; and Paul, Jeffrey; eds. Problems of Market Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv448. $24.95 (paper). Librarians beware! Like other volumes edited by Paul, Miller, and Paul since Cambridge University Press took over publication of Social Philosophy and Policy, this collection reprints an issue of that journal (in this case, vol. 15, no. 2). Only a brief introduction and an index are new. In the main, Social Philosophy and Policy articles are, in turn, redacted versions of talks given at Bowling Green conferences. Over the years, these conferences have brought together established libertarian theorists, edgling libertarians promoted by the Bowling Green group, and well-known mainstream social and political philosophers of a variety of political and philosophical orientations, including some on the left. It would be cynical, though not entirely wrong, to say that the presence of nonlibertarians at the Bowling Green conferences has helped to legitimate the libertarians the Bowling Green philosophers favored. But however this may be, these conferences have been occasions for thoughtful dialogue. More than a few admirable philosophical essays owe their origin to this source. (In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that I once attended a Bowling Green conference in Florida from which an article in Social Philosophy and Policy followed.) This volume, however, stands out because an overtly nonlibertarian representation is missing from it perhaps because, in political philosophys n de sie ` cle condition, libertarianism has become sufciently mainstream not to need legitimation; perhaps because the editors believe, with some justication, that nowadays only actual or quasi libertarians have anything interesting to say about market liberalism and its problems. This state of affairs is, to say the least, depressing for those of us who consider libertarianism philosophically awed, ahistorical, and, ultimately (though not unambiguously), supportive of social and political arrangements desperately in need of change. It is also, in this case, more than a little overwhelming at least for anyone who is not a true believer. To read this very uneven collection through to the bitter end is to encounter enough libertarianism to last a lifetime or until the pendulum swings back and libertarian political philosophy is marginalized again whichever comes last! Still, there is some good philosophy here and some interesting writing. Approached selectively, therefore, this volume or the Social Philosophy and Policy issue it repackages is worth perusing. What follows is a brief and I hope not too idiosyncratic guide for readers inclined to do so. There are, rst of all, a few essays in this collection that engage opposing positions with care; compensating, as it were, for the absence of a dialogue. Of particular interest is James Childs historical survey cum conceptual analysis of views about the normative status of prots and prot making. Child argues that the zero-sum view of prot making that Western thinkers from Aristotle through Marx developed is mistaken and that prot making can be an activity that benets all parties to economic interactions, leaving others unaffected. His argument is more subtle than this bald statement of his conclusion suggests and, in pressing his case, he produces a brief and commendable intellectual history of prot making that is perhaps the most useful item in this volume. Also noteworthy for its treatment of views hostile to libertarianism is Richard Epsteins essay Imitations of Libertarian Thought. Epstein argues that versions of liberalism that support more afrmative uses of state power than those libertarians

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favor New Deal liberalism, for example depend on misguided extensions of defensible liberal understandings of security and coercion and of the rightful role of the state in maintaining the former and protecting against the latter. Epstein, a mainstay of the Bowling Green conferences, is a heavyweight among libertarians. Not surprisingly, there is much in his essay that calls for a sustained response on the part of those who think differently. There is not space here even to begin a rebuttal. I would only observe that, in arguing for the kind of liberalism he and other Chicago school law and economics legal theorists favor, Epstein reconstructs opposing positions in original and insightful ways. Of at least equal interest is the economist Robert Sugdens Measuring Opportunity, the one piece in this collection that has little, if anything, directly to do with libertarianism. In fact, Sugdens contribution bears a strong afnity to the work of Amartya Sen and others who, following Sens lead, have sought to measure standards of living and, in so doing, to advance egalitarian concerns and contribute to egalitarian theory. But if there is a whiff of non- or antilibertarian politics implicit in this piece, it lies well beneath the surface. Sugdens aim is strictly theoretical; it is to reect on the prospects for a suitable metric for measuring how much opportunity individuals have under different institutional arrangements. In executing this task, Sugden adds his voice to the chorus of economists, philosophers, and political scientists who, following Sens lead, have become increasingly critical of welfarism. Thus, implicitly, Sugden stands opposed to libertarians like Epstein who defend largely unregulated capitalist market relations on generally utilitarian and therefore welfarist grounds. But Sugdens is a strictly theoretical intervention. It should be noted, too, that, as is often the case with mainstream contributions to the Bowling Green conferences, this paper largely recapitulates positions the author has advanced elsewhere more extensively. A number of the policy-oriented papers included in this volume assume positions that are as much welfarist as Epsteins. Of these, by far the most successful is Thomas Hazletts brief in favor of establishing and protecting full market property rights on the airwaves, in contrast to public interest regulation of the kind that nowadays governs broadcast speech in the United States and other countries. If only for its thoughtful and balanced account of the way public debate has fared under the regime now in place, this article is worth reading. Stalinists are said to have regarded fellow-traveling intellectuals as useful fools. Those of us who are inclined to apply this epithet mutatis mutandis to libertarians who, like Hazlitt and other contributors to this volume, defend capitalism but not capitalists, and who therefore want to ingest their libertarianism in small doses only and only if it is of high quality would be well advised to stop at this point after reading Child, Epstein, Sugden, and Hazlett. I suspect that even dedicated libertarians will detect a falloff in the level of the remaining pieces. They are all, in varying degrees, wanting in cogency or in philosophical substance or both. Some, however, make interesting reads, if one is in the right mood, and others could make good foils for teachers of applied ethics. I will therefore plod on to make this guide complete. Still in the vein of arguing for libertarian measures on consequentialist grounds are Daniel Shapiros brief in favor of market health insurance over stateorganized systems and Daniel Polsbys case for relaxing state regulations on food and drugs. Each piece depends on dubious empirical speculations and on a

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rather blissful disregard of pertinent historical and comparative sociological data. In contrast, Gerald Gauss essay, Why All Welfare States (Including Laissez-Faire Ones) Are Unreasonable, is critical of the consequentialist strain of libertarian theory. Like Sugden, Gaus questions current understandings of welfare and welfarism. But unlike Sugden, his objections have little to do with specically philosophical challenges to welfarism. Gauss is the voice of Hayek weighing in against Epstein and his fellow Coaseans. Gaus doubts that states actually can advance individuals welfare because governments are generally incapable of knowing how to advance individuals well-being, inasmuch as the information required for doing so is, as Hayek insisted, irreducibly local and therefore inaccessible. Better, therefore, for states to remain faithful to classical liberal (libertarian) principles and let individuals pursue happiness according to their own lights. Gaus makes it plain that this consideration cuts as much against welfarist justications for laissez-faire regimes as it does against welfarist arguments for welfare states. He insists that what justies libertarianism is not the often-alleged claim that libertarian institutional arrangements make people better-off. Institutional arrangements of any kind cannot be defended on these grounds. The reason to be a libertarian, for Gaus, is just that libertarianism occupies the default position after more ambitious uses of state power are justiably abandoned. This position is at odds with the neo-Lockean or Nozickean view advanced by Eric Mack in his contribution to this volume, Deontic Restrictions Are Not Agent-Relative Restrictions. In what is perhaps the most obscure and also the most abstract essay in this collection, Mack defends what he takes to be deontic restrictions on what individuals and states may rightfully do. He argues, however, that these restrictions are ultimately incompatible with agent-relative conceptions of the good. Where this leaves Hayekians like Gaus or Coaseans like Epstein is left unclear. Mack is another Bowling Green mainstay. Perhaps the group does not want to air its internal differences in public; more likely, these differences have been aired so many times among themselves in the past that no one is interested in saying more about them. N. Scott Arnolds underlying philosophical commitments are less clear. But his brief against afrmative action is plainly nonwelfarist and therefore at least consistent with the views of both Hayekians and Coaseans. Arnold argues that preferential treatment in hiring, college admissions, and the awarding of contracts violates a number of stipulated principles that he thinks justice requires. His case would be strengthened if those principles were more self-evidently defensible or if he were more persuasive in their defense. Neo-Lockean views that depend on one or another notion of natural property rights are implicitly, but only half-heartedly, challenged by Robert Ehman in Natural Property Rights: Where They Fail. For reasons that remain unclear, Ehman is not opposed to the idea of property rights that go, as Nozick claimed, all the way back. However, he does question whether they can serve as infrangible constraints on admissible institutional arrangements, as Nozick thought they could. The problem, for Ehman, is that the legitimate exercise of these rights can infringe the legitimate exercise of other persons property rights in ways that only legitimate public institutions can properly adjudicate. It remains unclear, however, just how far-reaching the implications of this concession to non-Lockean ways of thinking about political arrangements are for the kind of libertarian theory Ehman apparently continues to endorse.

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The most readable essays in this collection are those that assume libertarianism without trying to argue for it. Jonathan Macey speculates on why libertarianism has failed to capture the popular imagination. He thinks that the reason is that people are generally risk averse and therefore desirous of social insurance of various kinds. If only libertarians did a better job of showing their fellow citizens how much better markets do than states in supplying the kinds of insurance people want, then libertarianism would become more popular, or so he claims. Roderick Long thinks that libertarianism is in need of what he calls a theory of class. In pressing his case, Long provides a number of unlikely but intriguing typologies of libertarian and authoritarian political movements, and of their intersecting allegiances with capitalism, socialism, and what he calls populism. Finally, and best of all, Loren Lomasky, the author of what is still the most reasonable and sustained defense of libertarian political principles, Persons, Rights and the Moral Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), laments the plight of those who, like himself, believe libertarianism correct but nd themselves in a world where almost everyone else disagrees. One must wonder at Lomaskys assessment of the political and philosophical isolation of contemporary libertarianism. Still, his account of the plight of a (nearly) lone voice crying in the wilderness and forced to live among the heathen cannot fail to resonate with anyone whose views fall outside the ever narrowing philosophical and political consensus. Paradoxically, of all the essays included in this volume, this is the one from which socialists and other outliers have the most to learn. On the whole, this is not the most high-powered collection of essays to emerge from a Bowling Green conference. But it does contain some creditable and interesting work. Like other issues of Social Philosophy and Policy, repackaged or not, it is worth a good look in the library and perhaps, too, a little time spent at the photocopy machine. Andrew Levine University of Wisconsin Madison

Pippin, Robert. Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv466. $69.95 (cloth). Robert Pippin has done more than any other contemporary anglophone philosopher to persuade us to take seriously the hard parts of Hegel: the System of Logic and the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, as opposed to the relatively easy lectures on history, morality, and politics. In his earlier commentaries on Kant and Hegel, Pippin gradually put together an original and detailed account of the role of autonomy in both philosophers thought, of the connection of this concept with the conditions of modern social existence, and of the need for a transcendental justication of this concept. In this collection of papers he includes additional essays on both of these philosophers, but also imaginative and highly suggestive treatments of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Among the most intriguing and enlightening of the seventeen essays in this volume are Pippins criticisms of discussions of the nature of modernity which he thinks misguided: those of Leo Strauss, Hans Blumenberg, and

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Ju rgen Habermas. He treats these three magisterial gures with appropriate respect but gives plausible reasons for doubt about the adequacy of the historical narratives they have sketched. Pippin, unlike many American philosophers whose interests are centered in German thought, has rm views about the relation between the work of all these gures and current discussions within analytic philosophy. He suggests, for example, that we view functionalist accounts of the autonomy of the psychological, anomalous monism, the unique status of the subjective point of view, and so on, all as recent successors of the basic problem rst addressed in the post-Kantian German accounts of the status of human freedom, and as inadequate solutions to that basic problem (p. 12). Pippin is no mere exegete. He is an original philosopher one who is equally dubious about postmodernism and about the naturalism which dominates the anglophone philosophical world. In his difcult, dense, and provocative book, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), Pippin tried to persuade us that Hegels idealism is not only the solution to this problem but that appreciating this fact will help us do what Hegel called grasping our time in thought: a proper appreciation of Hegel will help make out the general claim for the universal normative superiority of distinctly modern institutions and practices (p. 3). The discussions of post-Hegelian philosophers in this new volume show us how these men look to a philosopher who thinks that Hegel has not yet been aufgehoben that he already said pretty much all that needed to be said about modernity. Neither the earlier book, nor this collection, will still the doubts of those of us who think that, as Pippin puts it, liberal or modernist aspirations are better understood against the concrete historical alternatives out of which they developed, and not as grounded on any world view or philosophical program (p. 3 n. 3). Pippin thinks that Mill, Dewey, and some of their modern admirers (such as Berlin and Rawls) simply have not asked the most basic and hardest philosophical questions, and that the German idealist tradition is the only one to have thought these questions through. For only that tradition has seen the need for a wholly critical, radically self-reexive or rationally self-authorizing philosophy (p. 6). To believe that we need that sort of philosophy, rather than just the sort that, because it aims only to show how things hang together, declines to offer bootstrapping legitimations, one has to believe that naturalism inevitably denies normativity (p. 10). To see anything like Hegelian idealism as required to make proper sense of normativity, one must have become dissatised with the Wittgenstein-inspired idea that what we call rationality is just our communitys way of getting on (p. 18). Pippin thinks that idea indefensibly smug, yet it is hard to nd in his books a direct argument against it. It is not clear whether Pippin thinks that the unsatisfactoriness of naturalism can be shown by argument or, rather, that a preargumentative sense of its deciencies is required before one can advance beyond it. Pippin seems to agree with Hegel and Heidegger that the problems of linguistic meaning, understanding a speaker, assigning intentional content, and so forth, are all derivative, neither the primary phenomena nor fruitfully discussed in isolation from a theory of Sein or Geist (p. 376 n. 3). But those who nd such isolated discussion (in the work of, e.g., Davidson or Brandom) very fruitful in-

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deed will search this volume in vain for a detailed defense of this view. The claim about the derivative status of linguistic meaning (and, more generally, of any social practice which is maintained by people praising and blaming one another) seems to be, for Pippin, an unargued rst principle. Yet it is hardly obvious what invoking either Sein or Geist will tell us that we might not learn equally well from Wittgenstein. Pippin says that Heidegger and Hegel want to advance an anti-individualist and anti-mentalist account of the general possibility of any sort of meaning, of anything being intelligible at all (p. 376). So they do, but so, as Pippin recognizes, do a lot of naturalists. Pippin leaves it unclear what exactly he thinks is wrong with recent attempts to be naturalistic without being reductionist, dualist, or individualist. Consider a naturalism which holds merely that there are no spooks that there must be an adequate causal explanation of any event (even of an event like the Renaissance) in terms of the behavior of entities made out of physical particles. One would think that Pippins resolutely anti-Cartesian Hegel would nd this minimal sort of naturalism unobjectionable. Pippin addresses the question of what Hegel can give us that Wittgenstein cannot directly and in detail in the essay called On Being Anti-Cartesian: Hegel, Heidegger, Subjectivity and Sociality. But his answer seems to beg a lot of questions. Discussing the attempt, running through the Enlightenment and romanticism, to achieve a properly modern form of collectively sanctioned likemindedness, he says that we badly confuse the nature of this shape of Spirit if we regard it simply as network of tasks, how we go on, or who we happen to be . . . For the possibility of such like-mindedness is very much a question for Hegel (p. 391). If it were clear how to make the possibility of going on as we do an intelligible question, then maybe it would become clear what Hegel adds to Wittgenstein. But what do transcendental questions about the possibility of this and that add to causal questions about the actuality of this and that? Many of us naturalists cannot see the point of answering such questions with seemingly ad hoc explanations of how the trick is done by referring us, for example, to the transcendental unity of apperception, or Sein, or Geist, or the Will to Power. Will not the next transcendental philosopher to come down the pike ask questions about the conditions of possibility of whatever her immediate predecessor has offered as the ultimate explicans? What, after all, is to stop her? What are the rules of the transcendental philosophy game? Presumably one rule is that you have found the one true ultimate explicans only when you have discovered something that doubles back on itself, authorizes itself, pats itself on the back, and proceeds to swallow up everything else, including its own tail. But by now there are quite a few competitors for this stellar role. How can you tell which of these doubling-back and tail-swallowing performances is a sham and which actually comes off ? These rhetorical questions express my mixed feelings about Pippins enterprise. On the one hand, I have the nervous and guilty feeling that Pippin sees something important that smug Wittgensteinian naturalists like myself do not. On the other hand, I feel a certain amount of impatience with his inability to make it clearer to me just what I am missing. I began reading this collection with the hope that I would nd the case against naturalism more convincing than in

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Pippins previous books. But getting to the end of the book was a bit of a letdown. I never got lifted over the hump. By concentrating, in this review, on the issue of naturalistic versus transcendental philosophy, I have failed to do justice to the rich variety of Pippins collection. There is much more in his book than I have had space even to mention. Each essay is carefully crafted, and each takes an unforeseen approach to material about which one might easily have thought that there was nothing new to say. Even those who share my doubts about transcendental philosophy, and about modernitys need for legitimation, will understand the authors Pippin discusses much better after reading his book. Richard Rorty Stanford University

Sumner, L. W. Welfare, Happiness and Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 239. $24.95 (paper). L. W. Sumner presents us with a theory of personal welfare or well-being. To Sumner, a theory of welfare tells us both what welfare is and how much it matters for ethics. All but the nal chapter deals with the question of the constitution of welfare. To know the welfare of an individual is to know what it is for something to benet or harm it or, equivalently, to know what it is for its life (career) to go well or poorly. If this is not to be an exercise in stipulation, welfare and its explications need to be understood as terms in ordinary language and not part of a technical vocabulary. Sumner is admirably aware of this point and as a result adopts two criteria of adequacy of any proffered theory. The theory must pass the tests of descriptive and normative adequacy. A theory is descriptively adequate to the extent that it conforms to our pretheoretical intuitions; it is normatively adequate to the extent that it harmonizes with our ethical theory. Although something like Sumners methodology is, in the end, probably one we must adopt, it does point to how difcult his project is. None of us are likely to be enticed by a theory of welfare that claims that doing well is a function of how many mirrors you gaze into. But when we are given more plausible alternatives, people can reasonably differ. That is, intelligent people have varied intuitions about serious candidates because intelligent people will have distinct intuitions about whether, in a particular circumstance, an individual is being beneted (harmed) or not. The adversarial situation becomes rhetorical: But on your theory, S is being harmed and that is absurd (ridiculous, uncommonsensical, silly) is answered by, It is not only not absurd, it is obviously true to anyone with the least bit intelligence. None of this, of course, is intended to denigrate Sumners project (indeed, I take on a similar one in On Moral Considerability [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998]), but it is a caveat that those who maintain an opposing viewpoint after reading Sumners book, be it for dogmatic or enlightened reasons, are not liable to the charge of irrationality. Sumner interprets a commonly used distinction to sort out competing theories of welfare. To Sumner, a subjective theory of welfare claims that an item can

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make an individual better-off (or worse-off ) only if the individual has (or would have under the appropriate conditions) a positive (negative) attitude toward that item. To have an attitude toward an item is for that item to matter to the individual or for the individual to care or mind whether that item exists. Objective theories of welfare deny the necessity of attitudes toward items for inuencing the welfare of an individual. Subjective theories, unlike objective ones, make welfare essentially mind dependent. Sumner extensively argues for a certain type of subjective theory. Welfare is relative to its possessor, and this subject-relativity is (nontrivially) explained by the subjectivity of welfare. Objective theories fail because they cannot either explain or explain away this subjectival, perspectival point of view. G. E. Moores private ownership theory, which regarded prudential value as ethical, fails in virtue of reversing the explanatory order. Unlike Moore, who believed that certain conditions make our lives better because we have a moral reason to bring them about, Sumner thinks that we have a moral reason to bring them about because they make our lives go better. Personal relationships make the world a better place by enriching our lives and do not, as Moore would have it, enrich our lives by making the world a better place. Need theories fail for various reasons, not the least of which is that many turn out to be ultimately subjective. Perfectionist theories fail because they fail to notice that the relationship between possessing a particular excellence and making the individual better-off is contingent. Evaluating Sumners success here will, unsurprisingly, rely on the readers pretheoretical intuitions. Toward his positive theory of welfare, Sumner rst dismisses two popular subjective theories. Hedonism, understood as a theory of welfare, characterizes positive and negative attitudes toward an item in terms of the pleasure and pain that a subject experiences toward that item. Classical hedonism additionally holds that pleasures and pains form a class of introspectively discriminable experiences. Sumner shows that this addendum is highly implausible, and with it goes the viability of classical hedonism as an account of welfare. More generally, the gure of Robert Nozicks experience machine submerges all purely mental state theories in doubt. Here, we are asked to consider whether we would believe our welfares enhanced if the pleasures and pains we felt were a product of illusory experiences. We concede that our lives would be improved by enjoying the pleasures of a ne vegetarian dinner. However, if the experience of the dinner were the unknown product of some (malevolent?) scientists machine, it is suggested that we would no longer think of our lives as enhanced. The moral, and one that will play a large role in Sumners own account, is that the authenticity of the subjective experience and not just its quality must play a role in evaluating its contribution to an individuals welfare. The second subjective theory, probably the one with most currency, is the desire theory. Here, ones welfare is improved to the extent that the individuals desires are fullled and diminished to the extent that the individuals desires are frustrated. Here, as in the case of hedonism, Sumners discussion is careful and nuanced. One major focus throughout this discussion is the essential prospectivity of desires. Because of the future-orientation of desires, we always face the possibility of nding a desires fulllment being followed by lack of enjoyment. It also seems clear that our lives can go better in a host of ways that we never envisioned, and so we have no desires at all concerning these future states of affairs.

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While Sumner does not deny the truism that desire satisfaction is a standard source of improving personal well-being, he does reject the idea, common to desire theorists of all stripes, that that the satisfaction or frustration of desires can be used to provide a formal account of the nature of welfare. The two dismissed subjective theories have mirror-image problems. Hedonism lacks reference to the world external to the subjects mind, while the desire theory loses connection with the subjects experience of the conditions of his life. Attempting to capture the insights of both without maintaining any of the deciencies, Sumner suggests that ones welfare be thought of as authentic happiness. Happiness is identied with life satisfaction that has an affective and cognitive component. The former is the experiencing of ones life as fullling or rewarding, while the latter is judging that your life is going well by your own standards. The authenticity requirement mandates that the individuals selfevaluation really reect the agents own point of view by being informed and autonomous. It is understandable why Sumner would want to add an authenticity requirement. Ephemeral moods and undue inuences may color ones self-perceptions. Still, a worry may be whether any cognitive component is necessary at all. Many animals and some humans are incapable of self-judgments, and yet it appears evident that their lives can continue in better and worse ways. At least on my pretheoretical intuitions, then, the requirement for informed and autonomous self-evaluations is too demanding. Finally, Sumner argues for welfarism, the view that ultimately, nothing but welfare ethically matters. Welfarists claim that welfare is the only foundational value, that ethics, at bottom, deals with ensuring that lives go well, or at least, not so badly. If we are told that we have a moral reason to act in a certain way, it is always legitimate to question whose life or lives will be beneted if I so acted and that the answer to this question should inuence what I do. Sumner admits that not a great deal can be positively used to support such a foundational claim, and so his argument for welfarism reduces to an attack on other alternatives. He attacks perfectionism, the other prime monistic opponent, and then spends extensive time objecting to various pluralisms. Sumner has written a very ne book. Clear and cogent, fair to adversarial positions, Sumners work would be a welcome addition to an advanced undergraduate or graduate course in ethics. Professional philosophers, too, are likely to have their welfares enhanced by reading this book. Mark Bernstein University of Texas at San Antonio

Thompson, Paul. The Spirit of the Soil: Agriculture and Environmental Ethics. New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. 196. $52.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Modern agriculture has proceeded under a policy of increasing productivity of food and ber for human consumption. Late modern and poststructural concerns for the environment have favored the end of preserving the natural world and, at times, have even seemed ready to exclude humans. Both perspectives

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have something to teach us, both are awed. Environmental ethics needs to put its feet on the ground in the context of global development serving at least basic needs. Agriculture is damaging the resource base in a way that is out of character for a practice which has been dened largely by producers interested in permanence and sustainability. Thompson urges the pursuit of an ethic based on that practice, an ethic which shows the possibility of producing food and ber with a care and concern that reveres the resource base. It would be an ethic guiding producers within the spirit of the soil. Thompson takes the reader through several leading criticisms of the current practice of farming. These he treats as only quibbles about the present state of some of its methods. To nd deeper criticism he turns to the work of Aldo Leopold and E. F. Schumacher. Leopold urges that we must see ourselves as a member of the biotically and ethically seamless community of natural beings and systems. Schumacher urges that we have misunderstood economics appropriate to the soil since that resource is the basis of life for all, not a source of prot for the few. Thompson notes that in both Leopold and Schumacher there is a way of looking at agriculture which includes an environmental ethic drawn from the very practices of farming itself (p. 46). The search for such an ethic comprises the remainder of the book, with attention given to the aim of productivity, the constraints of stewardship, the inherent costs of production, the possibilities of holistic thinking, and the goal of sustainability. None serves. Productionism has been associated with a rapacious consumption of resources. This has no place in an ethic of care and preservation. Still the dimension of productivity which calls for careful immersion in our work could be part of an environmental ethic for agriculture. But this is not to replace the consequentialist ethic which serves to guide productionism. Thompson then looks to Wendell Berrys work in the hopes of nding a notion of stewardship values which might take productivity closer to the care of the environment. What he nds instead is a concern for production which is appropriate to living in and through agriculture. Stewardship then is not separated from but aligned with productive activity which is part of living with a respect for the earth as the source of our well-being. Hence the appeal to stewardship comes to be seen as an appeal to the economics of living well. Economics and its utilitarian ethic can help us with policy in our transition to such a life, if that is what we value. It can help dene a system of incentives to move us toward counting the true costs of agricultural practices and goals. But it will not tell us which features of agricultural practice have salience, let alone which are true costs, and which are benets. Economics does not clarify the values at the base of an environmental ethic for agriculture. Holism offers two further possibilities Thompson considers closely: (1) the (correct) view that farmers need the traditional scientic understanding of agricultural practice as productivity-oriented intervention into ecological systems, and (2) the view that science and values themselves are the outcomes of uid and changing constructions so that the role of the holist expert is to help those involved arrive at a set of valued goals and a construction of practices with which to achieve these. Thompson writes off the second of these options as having no credibility in current research and policy circles. Further, he urges against the public promotion of the idea that mass moral conversion is a viable solution to environmental crisis (p. 145).

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Finally, Thompson suggests that sustainability of production systems is an appropriate goal given general ethical concerns for justice, rights, or productive efciencies. In itself the idea of sustainability offers no way to bridge the gap between productionism and preservationism. And, in any form calling for perpetuation of resource or practice viability into an unlimited future, the idea is incoherent. Instead, sustainability should be a derivative desideratum of food production systems which will eventually fail and have to be replaced. Thompson ends with the claim that each of the various ethical foci considered has provided a way of taking the ethics of food and ber production closer to an ethic of preservation apparently latent within the spirit of the soil. And, given the revisions the future will force on us, that seems the best we can do. But the reader must wonder. The book is valuable for its many historical contributions and for its attempt to relate thematically a number of gures from a varied eld. Thompsons conclusion is neither surprising nor convincing, however. It is never clear that an environmental ethic for agriculture will be allowed a framework different from that of a somewhat traditional pluralist consequentialism. The early tone-setting argument, according to which complaints with current agriculture are no more than indications that agricultural techniques need modication, seems tendentious. If someone complains of torture for the harm it brings to humans, this is not a complaint against technique so much as a call for abolition. Maybe complaints such as those against topsoil loss, habitat destruction, groundwater depletion, the chemical poisoning of soil microorganisms, and reductionistic research and development (oblivious to the ourishing of self-organizing systems) are not complaints about specic techniques so much as a call for a reconception of these activities. Further, perhaps it is the case that moral education and redevelopment are what would be needed to bring agricultural practice and environmental concern closer together. To be sure, we cannot sit on our hands while we wait for that education and reform to take hold. But just as surely there are philosophers, educators, farmers, agricultural activists, sociologists, political scientists, and numerous others who seem to grasp various versions of a morally reformed vision of agriculture that is more friendly to the environment, and they are doing something about it. The book lacks systematic discussion of some of these works. Charles V. Blatz University of Toledo