Does Morality Have a Point?

Abstract

Proceeding from the assumption that moral discourse is best conceived of as a practice in the technical sense specified by John Rawls, this paper discusses whether it is possible, adequate or even necessary to take up a legislative perspective on the constitutive rules of the practice. There seem to exist two principal legislative manoeuvres with respect to practices, namely (a) rendering the practice under consideration compatible with a practice that is more important and (b) evaluating the constitutive rules of the practice with respect to its point, purpose or telos. I put under scrutiny two projects in normative ethics which offer an affirmative answer regarding the possibility of moral legislation and which make use of the respective manoeuvres, namely neo-Hobbesian contractarianism and ruleconsequentialism. I thereupon inquire into the merits of a position that draws upon broadly Wittgensteinian considerations and that denies the existence of such a thing as a legislative perspective on morality.