Grounding Obligations

Grice has been an unjustly neglected thinker. His version of contract theory offers a distinctive approach combining deliberative rationality with a non-moralized conception of motivation. He is particularly noteworthy for his early attempt to distinguish motive and reason. His attempt to ground moral reasoning is presented as part of a general scheme of reasoning in which there are different forms of reasons: prudential; obligatory; and super-obligatory. Each depends on how human interests and goals are understood. There are some particular difficulties with his theory. However, the principal difficulty is that, in order to derive a general ground of obligation, he has to assume that reasons are intrinsically agent-neutral, having universal scope, and there is no reason to think this thesis true. There can be agent-relative reasons, and Grice does not provide us with an argument to move beyond those.