Hugo Adam Bedau

by Hugo Adam Bedau Department of Philosophy Tufts University Medford, Massachusetts Publication and Copyright Information Prepared for the lecture series, "Ideas Matter," at the Department of Philosophy, Oregon State University, and presented on 10 March 1994. Copyright @1998 Hugo Adam Bedau. Used by permission of the author. A quarter century is a good fraction of your life and mine, but it is not a long time in the life of most nations or universities, or even of most academic departments in a university. Nevertheless, it does measure the life of the d epartment of philosophy at this university It is also a convenient unit of time around which to organize some retrospective thoughts, long enough for various changes and developments to have taken place yet short enough to fix most of them in mind. Twenty-five years ago, in the spring of 1969, Richard Nixon was our President, having been elected a few months earlier in the first of the nation's "law and order" national political campaigns. A year earlier, Reverend Martin Luthe r King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. The Civil Rights movement had come to an end amidst President Lyndon Johnson's frustrated efforts to create what he called The Great Society. Above all, the war in Southeast Asia dominated the nation's attention and by now had thoroughly divided the American people, threatening to tear the country apart. Nowhere was this tension more evident than on our college campuses. Across the Pacific, technology from Japan--especially in automobiles and e lectronic equipment--had systematically invaded the American marketplace. Accross the Atlantic, in Europe, the Iron curtain firmly divided nations in the west from what later would be called the Evil Empire to the east. The whole world was firmly in the frigid grip of the Cold War.between the Soviet Union and the United States. For those who reached maturity before or during this period, the mere mention of these few salient events and circumstances should suffice to bring to mind the general tenor of the times. However, let us shift our attention away from these topics of newspaper headlines and the evening television news, and focus instead on the condition in that era of moral, political, and legal philosophy--social philosophy, as I sha ll often refer to them collectively, for the sake of brevity. What issues in these fields interested America's social philosophers in those days? What did they have to say about other matters of public policy and institutional practice? What thinkers and theories then loomed on the horizon, to come into full light only in the subsequent years? What projects and accomplishments, all the rage then, have in the intervening years passed quietly from notice? What were the hot-button issues in ethical, politica l, and legal philosophy then, the issues on which fourth-year graduate students were writing their Ph.D. theses, the issues that vexed the deep thinkers of the day, in contrast-or perhaps in continuity--with those that perplex today? What roads did we tra vel then to get to where we are now? I In 1969, the philosophical movement variously called "analytic" or "linguistic" or "ordinary language" philosophy had by no means spent its force, as it clearly has today. But its days were numbered even though the prevailing tone in moral and political philosophy was still largely what I will call micro-co nceptually analytic in style. The dominant analytic style of the 1950s in the field of political theory, as found in T. D. Weldon's tendentiously linguistic book, The Vocabulary of Politics (1954) had passed; likewise with Patrick Nowell-Smith's hy perlinguistic (and I think much underrated) little book, Ethics (1954). (As an aside: Why did no one ever write a book comparable to these two in the field of jurisprudence or legal philosophy? Perhaps only the late A. J. Ayer knows, because it was in the series he edited for Penguin Books, in which the Weldon and Nowell-Smith volumes appeared, that such a book in legal philosophy would then have been published.) Nothing very definite was on the horizon to succeed them. Thanks to the influence of O xford philosophers, notably Isaiah Berlin, H.L.A. Hart, and Stuart Hampshire, and the absence of any countervailing voices, ethical and political theory were openly and unapologetically pluralistic in their norms. A lingering dislike for normative argumen t remained, however; narrowly meta-ethical and meta-political preoccupations prevailed. The preferred format for a philosophical discussion in these fields was still the professional article published in Mind or Analysis. If I had to single out for special notice one book that marks the end of the micro- conceptual analytic era in metaethics, it would be the volume by Roger Wertheimer, The Significance of Sense, published by Cornell University Press in 1972. Wertheimer's book had the misfortune to be published just a decade too late and at a time when a new agenda was being set. His preoccupations were, in their way, akin to Paul Ziff's in his earlier book, Semantic Analysis (1960). Ziff endeavored to teach his readers how to do semantic analysis using the test-case of the meaning of the word, "good." Wertheimer worked over the whole central range of ethical and evaluative concepts and the relevant deontic modalities as well. As events t urned out I expect that he may well have thought, ruefully, of his book what David Hume said of his great Treatise, that it fell stillborn from the press. Part of the problem, as we can see more clearly today, was that analytic or linguistic philosophy was linked however informally with a lingering endorsement of the Emotive Theory of ethical and evaluative language. That theory, even in attenuated forms, yoked to the linguistic orientation across the whole range of philosophy, resulted in a self-denying parochialism that kept philosophers from discussing in a serious way any political, social, or ethical aspects of policy issues, pub lic institutions, and personal choice. As a result, analytic linguistic philosophy always trembled on the edge of irrelevance; I turned out not to be alone in having been nourished by that tradition yet wanting to bite its hand out of increasing disconten t and frustration over the meagre philosophical agenda of that day. It is difficult for those too young to remember the utter paucity of books in social philosophy available to us a quarter century ago. One might even go so far as to say there were no philosophical treatises of any importance whatev er on any of the subjects that interest ethical or political philosophers today. Who among us now assigns to our students, or even to our graduate students, books from the early 1960s on, say, justice, or rights, or equality, on political obligation, priv acy, autonomy, property, desert, punishment, coercion, moral agency, or moral psychology? There were no books from that era on any of these subjects-whereas now, as I write these words, I can glance over at my shelf nearby and see a dozen major books on t he topic of justice alone. To be sure, essays scattered here and there on all these topics, as well as a few stray volumes now best forgotten, and occasionally a book of essays collected for teaching purposes, there were, indeed. But that is all. One poss ible exception comes to mind, Felix Oppenheim's Dimensions of Freedom (1961), an exercise in conceptual analysis that, despite its manifest emotivism and positivism, is still worth reading. There is, however, one major book of that era to be saved from the flames, an important exception to the generally unsatisfactory character of the few books published in those years of possible interest to philosopher today. I refer , of course, to H.L.A. Hart's marvelous book, The Concept of Law (1961), that rara avis of ethical, political, and legal philosophy: A genuine book, and moreover (as Hart not immodestly noted in his preface) a book that did not just rehash "what ot her books contain" (p. viii). I shall have more to say about Hart and this book shortly. In ethics, undoubtedly the most widely discussed book at the beginning of the period under our scrutiny was Freedom and Reason, a modest volume of some two hundred small pages published in 1963 by Richard Hare, then a Fellow of Balliol College and soon to be elected White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. The main features of Hare's position in ethics and meta-ethics had been laid out in his earlier little book, The Language of Morals (1952), a book suitably e ntitled given the dominant linguistic analytic style of the Oxford of that day. The most memorable feature of that book was its attempt to combine kantian rationalistic universalist with aggregative utilitarian considerations into a coherent normative fra mework. Hare's Freedom and Reason dominated discussions in ethical theory in the 1960s much as his Language of Morals had done in the 1950s. But the future path in moral theory had already been forecast by the work of Hare's Oxford colleague, Herbert Hart. Forty years ago, Hart was a Fellow of New College and had just been elected Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford. A reader of his widely praised inaugural lecture, "Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence," with its linguistic and conceptual preoccupations, would never have been able to forecast the apparent shift over the next eight years in Hart's philosophical outloo k as evidenced in his book, an outlook in which the normative concerns proved to be as important as the conceptual.

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