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. Traces of his earlier linguistic style were of course in evidence; one recalls the way he distinguished between being obliged to act in a certain way and being obligated to act in that way. But such maneuvers were rare and ancillary to the main business, which was nothing less that providing (in the prophetic words he borrowed from John Austin a century earlier) "the key to the science of jurisprudence." For the first time in a generation or more, a philosopher presented an elegant, comprehensive, and highly original treatise on a central conceptual problem- the nature of law. And he did so without turning his project into just another conceptual exercise in analytic philosophy. As he himself stated in that book, much of what he had to say could be readily viewed as a contribution to the "descriptive sociology" of law, and thus to empirical science generally. But it could also b e viewed-though he did not say so--as a contribution to normative science (if that is not an oxymoron) because of the emphasis he placed on what he called the "internal point of view" toward the law. As Hart showed, failing to recognize the centrality of this point of view guaranteed that no intelligible account of our obligation to obey the law could be provided. One could not understand compliance with the law or the institutional practices of those charged with the dayto-day administration of the law u nless the internal point of view to the law was fully taken into account. In both respects Hart departed radically both from the legal positivism he himself acknowledged to be the tradition out of which he wrote, and from the purely conceptual analytic ph ilosophy of the 1950's.

Thus, the demise of purely linguistic philosophy, together with Hart's model of a comprehensive, balanced, normative, descriptive, conceptual treatise on the law, set the stage for the era about to unfold. II.

The great event more or less at the threshold of the period under review here was, of course, the publication late in 1971 by John Rawls of his block-buster treatise, A Theory of Justice--six hundred pages of dense text that set the upper bound of- permissible bulk. The book was immediately greeted with an unprecedented chorus of praise, and not only in the philosophical journals. In my review of Rawls's book in The Nation, I dared to say: "As a work of close and origi nal scholarship in the service of the dominant moral and political ideology of our civilization, Rawls's treatise is simply without a rival." Stuart Hampshire, writing in The New York Review of Books, opened his review by saying: "this book is the most substantial and interesting contribution to moral philosophy since the [second world] war...." Marshall Cohen ended his remarks in the New York Times Book Review with these words: "Whatever else may be true it is surely true that we must devel op a sterner and more fastidious sense of justice. In making his peerless contribution to political theory, John Rawls has made a unique contribution to this urgent task. No higher achievement is open to the scholar." In England, the Times Literary Sup plement was not to be outdone: "[Rawls's book] is a convincing refutation, if indeed one is needed, of any lingering suspicions that the tradition of English-speaking political philosophy might be dead. Indeed [t]his book might plausibly be claimed to be the most notable contribution to that tradition to have been published since Sidgwick and Mill."

Throughout the early 1970s, critical discussion of Rawls's treatise quickly appeared in law reviews, quarterlies for economists, and journals of political theory, as well asin a wide variety of specialized publications in the social sciences and humanities. The era of philosophers talking only to other philosophers--and then, all too often, talking right past each other--had been brought abruptly to an end. Direct concern for the ethical basis of political norms, one of the central tasks of A Theory of Justice, once again became a permissible concern among philosophers interested in social philosophy. Many then and today would say of A Theory of Justice that it is "A brilliant and important book, bound to contribute no tably both to theory and, in time, to the good of society"--and if they were to say this, they would be using the words that Quine used in 1974 to praise another book, Anarchy. State, and Utopia, written by Rawls's powerful and imaginative critic a nd Harvard colleague, Robert Nozick. ----:A quarter century ago, in 1969, Rawls's book was still two years away from publication, but its essential features had been broadcast already in a few much- discussed articles. Chief among these was his essay, "Justice as Fairness," published first in 195 7 and then republished in a fuller version the next year. In the years following it was much reprinted, among other places in a little volume titled Justice and Equality, a collection of classic and recent essays I edited and published in 1971. To judge from that book's sales, perhaps 50,000 college students read Rawls's "Justice as Fairness" from this source alone. I like to think of that anthology as a useful stepping-stone to support students as they moved into the deeper waters of Rawls's treat ise itself.

In the twenty-odd years from then to now, Rawlsstudien has become a major scholarly industry. But Rawls himself has contributed to it only in modest amounts. We know from the record that Descartes, for example, undertook to reply and publish his r eplies to several critics--a manageable task, it would appear, judging from what we can read of those exhanges today. But in the more than two decades since A Theory of Justice appeared, Rawls has replied to barely a dozen or so of the hundreds of articles and books criticizing his views. Indeed, neither he nor anyone could possibly undertake to reply to the wealth of discussion his views have enjoyed. Even such extensive and radical critics as Brian Barry and Robert Paul Wolff--two among the many who have declared that Rawls's entire project is a demonstrable failure-- have been ignored by Rawls in his published discussions to date. Few other American philosophers of note in this century have received so much attention in print and responded so inf requently and selectively to their critics.

Political philosophy since Rawls's book of 1971 has been largely philosophy in response to Rawls. His main critics, like Caesar's Gaul, divide into three. First, there are those, such as Richard Brandt in his Theory of the Riqht and the Good (1979 ) and Richard Hare in his Moral Thinking (1981), who defend the utilitarianism Rawls chiefly criticized. Second, there are those, such as Robert Nozick, in his Anarchy State and Utopia (1974) and more recently Jan Narveson in The Libertar ian Idea (1988), who develop the libertarianism Rawls largely ignored. Third, there are those, such as Michael J. Sandel in Liberalism and Justice (1982), Michael Walzer in his Spheres of Justice (1983), and Alasdair MacIntyre in his Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), who advance against Rawls's views a virtue-oriented, communitarian ethics he seems not to have anticipated. In contrast to these three sets of relatively hostile critics one might add a fourth group of more sy mpathetic critics, who share a commitment to more or less the same political liberalism that inspires Rawls, although they offer different versions of it. I have in mind--to mention but three of many-Bruce A. Ackerman in his Social Justice in the Liber al State (1980), Amy Gutmann in her Liberal Equality (1980), and Thomas Nagel in his Equality and Impartiality ( 1991) .

One might well ask for a score card, evaluating the extent to which these criticisms of and alternatives to Rawls have prevailed over his views. But that is enormously too large a topic to do more than mention here. One can say, how ever, that Rawls's new book, Political Liberalism (1993) will not go far toward placating these critics, friendly and hostile, despite what appear to be various concessions at many points, modifying the theory of A Theory of Justice in sever al respects. And the new book will certainly disappoint (though probably not surprise) the many critics over the years who have hoped--in vain, it now appears--for some sort of reply to their many objections.

Of the several criticisms and alternatives confronting Rawls's liberalism I find the most troubling to be Alastair MacIntyre's conservative tradition-bound relativism. According to MacIntyre, reason and experience jointly are insuff icient to dictate any interesting norms of conduct, political institutions, or social practices that cut across ethnic, religious, and ideological communities. The chief reason there are no such intercommunal norms is that ideas and ideals of justice and of reason are essentially tied to "traditions," of which there is a disconcerting plurality even today. The view he opposes he expresses this way: "[T]here are standards of rationality, adequate for the evaluation of rival answers to such questions, equal ly available, at least in principle, to all persons, whatever tradition they may happen to find themselves in and whether or not they inhabit any tradition" (p.393).

I for one refuse to believe that each of us is at the mercy of this or that "tradition," avowed or not, and that the reasoning serving us so well in mathematics, logic, and empirical science abruptly fails when we attempt to reason about individual and collective conduct. Here, of course, I cannot attempt to carry out a critique of MacIntyre's position; but I am happy to ally myself with Bernard Williams when he writes: "Even if the liberal were as incurably selfdeceived as MacIntyr e believes, liberal fantasies of impartiality and neutrality would perhaps serve the discourse between traditions better than the manifest and equally fantastic partiality to be found in other places" (LRB, 1/5/ 89, p. 6) Not a very powerful argument for political and ethical liberalism, perhaps, but an argument that no other tradition, sacred or secular, can match. III

Rawls's Theory of Justice has also been influential in bringing into social philosophy generally a method of argument and justification to be found in general philosophy owing to the work and influence of, among others, Quine and Ne lson Goodman. I refer to what Rawls has dubbed the method of "reflective equilibrium," his elegant name for jockeying back and forth to obtain the best possible fit between our intuitions about clear cases of right and wrong, our avowed governing moral pr inciples, and the relevant background empirical beliefs, with such revisions in any or all as the requirements of coherence and reexamination dictate, culminating in reaching "considered judgments". It is, Rawls said, "an equilibrium because at last our p rinciples and judgments coincide; and it is reflective since we know to what principles our judgments conform and the premises of their derivation" (TJ, p. 20). This method, or variations on it, has been widely adopted and is currently probably the most p opular strategy of argument in social philosophy.

One of the distinctive features of the method of reflective equilibrium is the role it assigns to intuitions -intuitive judgments, convictions, and beliefs. Already in 1972, in his long critical review of Rawls's Theory of Justice, Richard Hare ar gued that the method of reflective equilibrium was really an ill-disguised and inadequately acknowledged form of intuitionism--not as Rawls used that term (it meant for him irreconcilable pluralism in moral principles) but as intuitionism had always hithe rto been understood, viz., as an empistemology of basic moral judgments giving rise to more general principles and so trivially deducible from them. Hare's criticism here paved the way for any number of later critics who made the same objection. However, as my colleague Norman Daniels pointed out some years ago, Rawls's method of reflective equilibrium, while it gives an indispensable role to intuition, clearly denies any finality in moral theory to unadulterated intuitions. And one might add that it is n ot easy to see why Hare thought or thinks that the role he himself assigns to intuitions in his post-Rawlsian volume, Moral Thinkinq (1981), is such an improvement on the role alloted to intuitions by the method of reflective equilibrium.

Some other recent writers, however, come rather closer than Rawls does to reviving forms of methodological intuitionism. Judith Jarvis Thomson, in her brilliantly argued book of 1990, The Realm of Rights, manifestly relies on moral intuitions that she believes we (or most of us) share with her. This was already evident in her famous violinist example twenty years ago. Her intuition, and she believed ours as well, was that it was within your rights to unplug the helpless violinist ev en though that would result in his certain death--because, after all, he had no permission and so had no right to get himself plugged into you in the first place. In her recent book, Thomson now tells us in no uncertain terms that "[o]ther things being eq ual, one ought not to cause others pain"--and that this is nothing less than "a necessary truth" tp. 15). Of course, caeteris paribus one ought not to cause others pain. But is this "a necessary truth"? That is not a pronouncement, so far as I can see, th at one could sustain on the strength of the method of reflective equilibrium, any more than Quine could defend the law of excluded middle as "a necessary truth."

We find much the same methodology at work in the first of what promises to be several volumes titled Morality/ Mortality, by Frances Kamm. She declares that the method "used or presupposed" in her book is one of presenting "h ypothetical cases for consideration" and then seeking "judgments about what may and may not be done in them" (p. 7). As she explains, these judgments are in some sense intuitive, and there is no reason to apologize for that; "[i]ntuitions are appropriate to ethics because ours is an a priori, not an empirical, investigation." (p. 8). Although the language is somewhat different, the result is much the same in Eric Rakowski's recent book, Equal Justice (l990). After mentioning reflective equilibrium somewhat sympathetically, Rakowski abruptly declares: "There is no way to bore below the everyday appeals to principles and consequences we make routinely when engaging in moral argument" (p. 10). But such appeals amount to reliance on norms that intuition, acquired and tutored by social practice, serves up to us . And to be told that we cannot "bore below" them risks foundering the whole enterprise of normative ethics and politics because of the foreseeable clash of irreconcilable intuitions.

I have, perhaps, in the above remarks sounded too hostile to intuitionism and too sympathetic to reflective equilibrium, as well as too confident of their sharp separation. Be all that as it may, I would not want my main point to be blurred, viz., that contemporary social philosophy has Rawls to thank not only for reviving and sustaining interest in substantive normative principles but also in the philosophical methodology by which such principles can be identified and employed--and that his method of reflective equilibrium recognizes a role for intuitive moral judgments, thereby effectively encouraging others less interested than he in grand theory to cultivate those intuitions for all they are worth. IV

Whereas political philosophy and to a lesser extent, moral philosophy, has over the past generation been oriented around Rawls's work, legal philosophy has fairly substantially been refocused during the same period by Ronald Dworkin . Marshall Cohen has rightly remarked that "the jurisprudential writings of Ronald Dworkin constitute the finest contribution yet made by an American writer to the philosophy of law" (RDCJ, p. ix). To which I would add that Dworkin today must be re garded as the premier public philosopher in the English-speaking world. For one thing, he has chosen as a regular forum for his views not any of the usual scholarly journals or law reviews (though of course he has published in these, too), but instead the nation's most widely read journal of general intellectual interest, The New York Review of Books. For another, he has chosen to confront public issues of considerable variety and timeliness. With the possible exception of John Dewey sixty or seven ty years ago, one would be hard pressed to name any philosopher in this century who has so deliberately and successfully cultivated the general audience of intellectuals rather than either the mythical "general reader" or the narrowly academic audience of his own profession.

Dworkin's distinctive voice first reached the scholarly public in 1967 with his law review essay, "The Model of Rules," in which he paid the most earnest tribute to his mentor, H.L.A. Hart, that one could: After a concise restatemen t of central features of Hart's theory of law, Dworkin subjected its central tenets to an extensive, trenchant, and novel set of criticisms. That 1967 essay can still be read with profit today. A year later, in 1968 Dworkin published an essay, "On Not Pro secuting Civil Disobedience," in the New York Review. Here he argued that the constitutionality of laws governing the selective service system was sufficiently untested and uncertain that prosecutors inclined to rigorous enforcement of the law aga inst draft resisters ought to think twice--indeed, they ought to hesitate altogether--before pressing forward with their indictments. (The much broader and even more widely discussed essay on civil disobedience by Rawls, although originally presented in 1 966 as a public lecture, was not published until the same year as Dworkin's essay.)

H.L.A. Hart is now dead, and Dworkin has clearly inherited his mantle as the leading philosopher of law in the English-speaking world. Not only that, he now plays a role in public discourse unlike any Hart ever tried to carve out fo r himself. On a few rare occasions Hart did write for the general public; his reputation, of course, has brought (and one hopes will continue to bring) his views to the attention of many outside law and philosophy. Still, during his academic career of nea rly four decades Hart addressed no more than a small number of the controversia issues of law, public policy, and political practice of his day. By contrast, Dworkin has elevated almost single-handedly the level of critical discourse in this country on a wide variety of public issues-affirmative action, judicial appointments human rights violations, Reagan-era law enforcement, civil disobediences free speech senile dementia, pornography, and--most recently in his book, Life's Dominion (1993)--abortion and euthanasia. On each of these substantive issues, around which widespread debate and controversy has swirled, D workin has attempted to recast the issues and bring to the surface the underlying norms relevant to their resolution. He has endeavored to show that the sharp and perennial positivist distinction between Law as It Is and Law as It Ought to be, of law vers us morals, is a massive distortion of legal reality, especially in the constitutional system under which we live. Dworkin has endeavored to show how his own brand of liberalism, in which principles of equal respect and equal rights are paramount, can be s een to undergird and guide constitutional interpretation and appellate judicial decisions in even the hardest of "hard cases" where it might otherwise seem that the law has run out and only their subjective moral convictions remain to guide judges.

His work has of course provoked criticism, a fair sampling of which can be found in the book, Ronald Dworkin and Contemporary Jurisprudence, edited in 1983 by Marshall Cohen. At the risk of over-generalization, I am tempted t o say that for all the criticism his views receive in this volume (and have received elsewhere), little or none of it it derives from the resources of a new, rival theory of law. Instead, the critics--I am thinking especially of Joseph Raz and the late J. L. Mackie--seem largely content to refurbish as deemed needed the rather attenuated legal positivism that Hart originally developed in the 1960s. Thus it would be fair to say, I think, that we have yet to see a comprehensive theory of law--of judicial de cision making, the obligation to obey the law, and their place in a liberal society--that threatens to replace Dworkin's theory. That time will no doubt come, but it has not come yet.

I hazard the guess, however, that Dworkin's major treatise so far, Law's Empire (1990), has not and probably will not transform the field of legal philosophy to anything like the extent to which Rawls's Theory of Justice has transfo rmed political and ethical philosophy. Why this is not certain. Surely it is not that the distinctive features of Dworkin's philosophy of law are 'n themselves more controversial, or obscure and counter-intuitive, or illphrased or ill-argued in their pres entation than is Rawls's philosophy of political institutions. I must leave it for others to speculate on the explanation for the differential impact of these two major figures on their respective portions of the large field of social philosophy. V

If we leave behind any further review of political and legal philosophy, and turn to ethics, we will find that we cannot mark out the development and current activity in this field by reference to some one salient book or figure. D iscussion in ethics today does not focus conveniently on any one theory, book, figure, or doctrine, nor can a retrospective survey such as this attempt to do so without grave distortion. Indeed, the important development over this period--apart from Rawls 's work, perhaps--is not in ethical theory per se. Rather, it is in the cultivation of "practical" or "applied" ethics, and to this story I now turn.

Philosophy as it is daily practiced by its academic professionals is not entirely immune from the intellectual, political, and cultural environment in which its practitioners act. As an example, I think it is highly unlikely that Ra wls would have chosen civil disobedience for thorough discussion as his one example of non-ideal theory, that is, of partial compliance in a well-ordered society, had he and we not lived through the practice and preaching of civil disobedience and related activities (conscientious objection, constitutional testing, violent illegal protest) first in the Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s and then in the antiwar movement of the later 1960s. Indeed, we have in these sections of Rawls' s Theory of Justice one of the first major instances of applied ethics in the period under discussion.

One of the first, that is, by an American philosopher. Elsewhere in the world, philosophers had given notice of their refusal to sit passive avnd silent in the face of catastrophe. In 1965, shortly after our government had ordered r egular bombing raids over North Vietnam and had landed thousands of troops in South Vietnam, Bertrand Russell and his Peace Foundation organized a nongovernmental "International War Crimes Tribunal." A year later, after vigorous argument from the world's best known public philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, the Tribunal voted unanimously that the United States Government was "guilty of genocide against the people of Vietnam." This verdict (and the whole Tribunal of which it was a part) was an ambiguous affair at best, and elsewhere I have criticized in some detail Sartre's argument about genocide in Vietnam. I remind us of this event because the engagement of Russell and Sartre in world affairs prefaced, even if it did not otherwise significantly influence, th e rebirth of interest among American philosophers in the world around them.

On these shores, the critical moment was a weekend in May in the watershed year of 1969, in New York City, during the height of campus and national unrest over the continuing war in Southeast Asia. Gathered at Rockefeller University under the auspices of its then graduate department of philosophy was an unusual--indeed, unprecedented--conference of philosophers from across the nation. Present were many of the best-known philosophers in America, such as Donald Davidson and Saul Kripk e, whose careers to date had given no evidence of any professional interest in social philosophy or any desire to see philosophy go public. It is not an exaggeration to say, I think, that those of us present at that conference were bound together by only one concern: To bring the benefits of philosophical analysis into the public arena by subjecting practices and policies concepts and controversies of public interest to critical scrutiny. Thus was founded the Society for Philosophy and Public Affairs, bri nging to a semi-official end the neglect by philosophers of any professional interest in public life. Had John Dewey been an observer of that New York conference, he no doubt would have heaved a sigh of relief at the end of an era in which American philos ophers, proud of their analytic skills and jealous of their territorial rights, refused to attend to any but the most abstract conceptual issues in a manner that William James would have called with a suitable sneer "scholastic."

Not only did the Society immediately schedule regular meetings with the American Philosophical Association (as it continues to do today), but--thanks to the initiative of several of its leading members--Oxford University Press in Ne w York published two books of essays built around papers presented by members of the Society at meetings of the American Philosophical Association. The first volume, Philosophy and Political Action, edited by Virginia Held, Kai Nielsen, and Charles Parsons, appeared in 1972; the second, Philosophy. Morality. and International Affairs, edited by Held, Sidney Morganbesser, and Thomas Nagel, appeared in 1974.

No doubt the premier signal, as well a principal vehicle, of change, at least in this country, was the founding at the same New York conference of the journal, Philosophy and Public Affairs. Its inaugural issue appeared two y ears later in the autumn of 1971. From its inception it was edited by a distinguished group of philosophers, led by Marshall Cohen. In short order this journal clearly established itself as the leading serial publication in the field (or fields) designate d by its title. In its very first issue it published what has become the most widely discussed essay on abortion any philosopher has written, "A Defense of Abortion," by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Whether the journal shaped or influenced the development of th e field by way of cultivating any theme or topic or trend is harder to say; I rather doubt it but I cannot speak for the board of editors. The journal had and has no discernible ideology or hidden agenda, so far as I can tell, apart from being interested in publishing only articles that treat their topics in a manner roughly continuous with the great western tradition of analytic, critical, argumentative philosophy. The founding of this journal helped breathe new life into legal philosophy, political theo ry, applied ethics, an related subjects. In no time at all other journals with overlapping jurisdiction--Law and Philosophy, Social Theory and Practice, Social Philosophy, Journal of Applied Ethics, Public Affairs Ouarterly, to name but five--were also founded to soak up the increasing wealth of material available for and worthy of publication.

The creation of the Society for Philosophy and Public Affairs and the founding of several journals in applied ethics and related fields more or less coincided with the creation of various research centers and teaching institutes in the field. First and foremost was the founding, again in the year 1969, of the Institute of Society, Ethicst and the Life Sciences--known far and wide as The Hastings Center-whose headquarters are just north of New York City. Cofounded and co-directed sti ll by the psychiatrist Willard Gaylin and the philosopher Daniel Callahan, the Hastings Center put philosophy and philosophers to work in a multidisciplinary setting alongside other humanists, social scientists, doctors, and the whole range of medical and health care professionals. The Hastings Center's pioneering contribution of a quarter century ago must rate very high in any survey of social philosophy in this period.

Unlike The Hastings Center, however, which has (andhas had) no university affiliation, its rivals and imitators have typically been centers or institutes on a university campus some of whose members have regular faculty status in t he local philosophy department. Typical of these is the Center for Philosophy and Public Policy, created at the University of Maryland in 1976 by Peter Brown and well known for its many conferences and publications in which philosophers, jurists, social s cientists and other professionals have worked on projects as diverse as foreign policy, food supply, human rights, and military service.

The founding of the Society for Philosophy and Public Affairs and the eponymous journal also ushered in--or coincided with--an era of unprecedented growth of interest in applied or (as it is also called) practical ethics. Thirty yea rs ago, I published the first edition of The Death Penalty in America, an anthology of writings by sociologists, lawyers, penologists, criminologists, journalists, theologians, and a philosopher or two, addressing the various aspects of this moral, constitutional, and political problem. At the time, so far as I can recall, there was no other book like it on any subject. A truly multi-disciplinary approach to an issue of public policy was not only uncommon, it was unknown, whether masterminded by a humanist, social scientist, or other professional. Philosophers in particular never took the initiative to conceive and carry out projects of this sort.

All that has changed. For some years now, it has been possible to find philosophers working side by side with law professors, economists, other social scientists and even an occasional humanist on a wide variety of topics. A good an d pioneering example is the book, Doing Justice: The Choice of Punishments, published in 1976 and written by Andrew von Hirsch (a philosophically-trained lawyer) on behalf of the Committee for the Study of Incarceration, situated in New York. The C ommittee was created by the Field Foundation and the philosopher Marshall Cohen was one of its fifteen members. Von Hirsch's book is one of only two or three in the field of penology that has had major impact on the actual development of the law of crimin al sentencing over the past twenty years.

An even better example, though less well known in this country, is the so-called Williams Report, named after its chairman, the philosopher Bernard Williams, and published in 1979. This British government document, properly titled < U>Report of the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, is a model of careful draughtsmanship and judicious evaluation of the relative benefits and harms that a policy of film censorship of obscenity might be expected to yield. Virtually all reade rs of the report have come away dazzled by Williams's virtuoso performance in this document. Today, one can point to dozens of comparable ventures (if not always so distinguished), mostly to be sure in the field of bioethics, in which philosophers have pl ayed a prominent role in evaluating current policy and recommending change. VI I have called the theme of my remarks "the recovery of normativity" because I want to stress how prominent and striking is the role of normative thinking and normative projects in current and very recent ethical, political, and lega l philosophy, in sharp contrast to the prevailing tone of a quarter century ago. By normative thinking I do not mean hortatory preachments or other first-order acts of remonstrance, admonition, denunciation, exhortation, and the like. I mean rather both s econd-order reflections on the role and nature of norms relevant to governing this or that practice or institution, and first order reflection in which particular norms are identified, justified and employed.

The picture I have tried to paint omits much. Postmodernism, feminism, Reconstruction, and other trends, fashions, and influences that now flutter the dovecotes are conspicuous by their absence from my remarks. Like royalty, I will neither apologize nor explain; but I will comment. I agree that philosophers have given up most of their pretentions to grandeur and ought to give up whatever remains from earlier days, the salad days of analytic philosophy, logical positivism, and whatev er other entrenched -isms still survive. Few of us today are foundationalists in ethics and related fields. Fewer still lay claim to the knowledge of any interesting a priori truths, our methodological intuitionists to the contrary. All agree with Quine t hat virtually everything in our conceptual schemes is up for grabs even if not all at once. We are all passengers or crew in Otto Neurath's boat, and no safe harbor is in sight or even marked on our charts.

Yet I hesitate to describe our moral, political, and legal environment in language suggesting that contingency and instability rule. True, our reflective account of how best to understand the norms of liberal society may indeed shar e all the uncertainty and controversiality typical of philosophical reflection in other fields. But those norms themselves we must live by, until we identify better ones; meanwhile, they must be practiced, taught, and enforced, lest civilized life itself no longer be possible and we revert to the poor, nasty, and brutish world that awaits those who forget this.

As for some suggestions about the future conditions of social philosophy, I will hazard here nothing--but I will confidently make one observation. If philosophy has a future in forms that would be recognizable to us were we so fortu nate as to witness them, it will be because our critical faculties still have fields in which to graze and browse, and that our private and public lives are nourished then as now by our faith in reason and experience. * * * * * * *