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“Not judge in one’s own cause” and the Nature of Ethics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
The principle “You can’t be judge in your own cause” is both selfevident and powerful. It is the principle that compels us to recognize that the ethical enterprise entails submitting to a higher judgment than our own first judgment. Moreover, it is the principle that commits us to conceding that ethical judgments are objective. Those two conclusions are accepted by many moralists. There is a third conclusion that, unless I am mistaken, follows just as inexorably as these two, but is rarely, if ever, accepted in modem discussions. If you can’t be judge in your own cause you commit yourself to depend on the praise and blame of a judge who is competent to judge your cause. The principle “Not judge in one’s own cause” entails an ethics of reward and punishment, because praise is a reward and blame a punishment.
“Notjudge in one’s own cause”
The principle “You cannot be judge in your own cause” is self-evident. It ordinarily applies in cases where I am in dispute with someone else over property: perhaps over ownership of land or fishing rights or the proceeds of a will. The principle is extended to cover issues such as the ban on an examiner from examining a relative, or a magistrate from presiding at the trial of a business associate.
No one doubts the applicability of the rule in these relatively unproblematic cases. What could be easier, it might be argued (but never is) than discounting one’s tendency to severity or to leniency when examining one’s own child? Yet most moral dilemmas are far more difficult than property disputes and arguments over examination grades. Every dispute inevitably involves the “cause” of every disputant.
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- Copyright © 1995 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
Footnotes
*
A paper read at the Staff/Graduate Seminar of the Department of Philosophy, The University of Edinburgh on 9 December 1994.
References
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