Moral Conflict and Prudential Agreement: Michael Moehler’sMinimal Morality

Abstract

Michael Moehler’s Minimal Morality is a wonderful and important book, from which I have learned a great deal. It reinvigorates rational choice moral theory in the process of confronting what I see as the most important issue in social and moral philosophy today: can those in a deeply morally divided society endorse a common moral framework to structure social cooperation? Is a rational moral order possible under conditions of deep and wide moral diversity? Minimal Morality’s answers are thoughtful and innovative. I am not, however, entirely persuaded that Minimal Morality can fulfil its promise of grounding a cooperative order when ‘traditional’ modes moral justification cannot. Minimal Morality is offered as a framework for cooperation when social conflicts are so deep that public reason approaches to moral justification fail. Consider two reasonably well-known public reason approaches. As we know, Rawlsian public reason is offered as a response to the fact that under free institutions the exercise of human reason leads to ‘intractable struggles’ and ‘irreconcilable’ conflicts of ‘absolute depth’ about the nature of the universe, the world, value and justice (Rawls 2005: xxvi, 4). To cope with such diversity, Rawls and his followers seek to identify some basic, shared, moral commitments – some minimal level of agreement – that will secure a shared moral framework for cooperation. Let us call this the Shared Moral Basis Approach. On this approach the search for a public morality in a deeply divided world cannot be based, as it were, on moral diversity all the way down: diversity must bottom out in basic agreement on some shared values on which a shared moral framework can rest.

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