I have just finished reading, for the first time (and without taking any notes), Philip Kitcher’s new book The Ethical Project. Kitcher’s take on ethics is practical and naturalistic. He calls his kind of ethics pragmatic naturalism, and links it closely to the pragmatism of Dewey and James. He assumes that ethics started out in tribal conditions where altruism failures were a problem. According to Kitcher, the ethical project got its start by establishing roles and rules designed to correct altruism failures. Furthermore, he suggests, with considerable reason, it seems to me, that contemporary ethics is a developmental extension of those first rough attempts to produce, first, a form of behavioural altruism, which was then, by necessity, extended to a truly psychological altruism. (Careful definitions of behavioural and psychological altruism are provided.) When I have reread the book more closely I will get back to what he is proposing in more detail, for what he does propose, it seems to me, might help to break the logjam caused by the many metaethical proposals that are still in play, from the intuitionism of Moore to the emotivism of the logical positivists.
Alongside Kitcher I am also rereading (after many years) Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which starts from the very odd premise that modernity was a mistake, and that to reestablish ethics on sound foundations we have to return to Aristotle and Aquinas. An interesting sidelight on the publication of After Virtue is that the first edition of the book was published shortly after MacIntyre’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. And an interesting comment on that is that the woman who was his wife at the time of his conversion was his third! Since the Roman Catholic Church holds that divorce is impossible, and that the marriage bond is essentially indissoluble by anything but death, it was an odd choice of religious allegiance, except that, in After Virtue, he more or less takes the position of Pope Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti (otherwise known as Pius IX) with respect to modernity, and assumes that it is largely a logical and cultural mistake. (At least that’s the way MacIntyre’s argument seems to me. If only we had retained the virtue ethics of Aristotle as perfected by Aquinas, transitions to the scientific world view would have moved more smoothly, as well as being more intellectually respectable.)
In the first chapter of After Virtue, “A Disquieting Suggestion,” MacIntyre suggests a thought experiment. It is not clear to me that the thought experiment is even entertainable, since it does not explain clearly enough on what basis governance is to be continued in the conditions supposed. He asks us to imagine a time in the future when people have got fed up with science, have removed science from the curricula of schools and universities, killed or imprisoned all the scientists, and then government is carried out — well, how, exactly? Since science is not only physics and math and chemistry and biology, but a fairly strict methodological approach to information, how would a government function where fact checking was ruled out, and decisions were based on pure whim? MacIntyre seems to forget that science is not only composed of lists of facts, but is tied together by theory and based on experience, and that that process can scarcely simply disappear when we stop teaching the sciences. However, imagine it done for the purposes of argument. Now, says MacIntyre, we are to suppose that a generation comes along which is opposed to this science-destructive world outlook. However, during the anti-science period the scientific tradition had been virtually destroyed. There are fragments left, a book here or a page there, and a few memories of phrases and scientific terms, like the periodic table without any sense of what it was once about. But now we are to imagine people trying to reconstruct science in the absence of any understanding of what science was once really about, so they begin using scientific language without really understanding what the language was for, or what it really signified. Science, for this new generation, is a bunch of disjointed technical terms thrown out more or less at random, and repeated pointlessly in a form much like some postmodernist free association.
In this situation, MacIntyre supposes, people would still have theories about how science functioned. As MacIntyre puts it:
Subjectivist theories of science would appear and would be criticized by those who held that the notion of truth embodied in what they took to be science was incompatible with subjectivism. [2]
And he imagines that, in this context, we could still have the kind of philosophy which was done in the mid-twentieth century, where philosophers considered it their task, not to add anything to the sum of knowledge, but in Wittgensteinian (or even Lockean) mode, to be clearers of the conceptual ground upon which others were working the seams of knowledge. Philosophy would proceed undisturbed, and a “Husserl or a Merleau-Ponty would be as deceived as a Strawson or a Quine.” [loc. cit.]
MacIntyre uses this imaginary account to throw some light, as he supposes, on the plight of ethics in the context of modernity. He really does think that ethics was abolished during the Enlightenment, and that subsequent attempts to understand morality is limited by the fragmentary nature of the remains of the great destruction that took place during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The tradition that entered the Enlightenment in the late seventeenth, early eighteenth century, as a complete functioning ethics, was carelessly flung away, and all we have left are bits and pieces of it, fragments of a once true morality which had its own completely comprehensive functional procedure for distinguishing true from false ethical principles and norms. Instead, what we are left with is very much like those (in the thought experiment) who are trying to reconstruct science from bits and pieces of the scientific tradition, fragments from here and there without any underlying or intelligible rationale. Modern morality, which seems to have lost touch with the old objectivity suggested by Aristotle and Aquinas, is composed of disjointed fragments of a now forgotten objective morality. The result is, consequently, not a morality at all, but a metaethical attempt to rediscover a sound basis for morality, and finding, instead, only fragments, and no way to keep moral judgement from floating free of the situations to which it belongs.
There is, after all, some evidence that this is the situation that we are faced with. There is no agreed way of establishing our moral judgements, and fixing them in something objective in the situations in which moral judgement is called for. Some people have suggested that moral judgements are only subjective affirmations of our preferences, simply emotional grunts of approval or disapproval. Others imagine wholly imaginative situations in which we are thought to have agreed with certain outcomes in communal situations, so that we are, in some sense, bound contractually to the acceptance of those outcomes. Others, like Bentham, suppose that what we are really saying when we speak of right and wrong, or duty, obligation, and guilt, has to do with the effects of our actions in increasing or diminishing happiness or well-being. Others suppose, with Kant, that our duty follows directly from our rationality, and that the rational person must acknowledge that reason itself determines what we ought or ought not to do, with a kind of absoluteness which brooks no argument, and permits no escape. So what we seem to have is a bunch of loosely connected fragments of moral understanding, but no overall structure in terms of which we can confidently express our moral convictions, and expect them to be affirmed by others with equal confidence.
Thus far, then, MacIntyre seems to be justified. European society did make a transit from a situation in which moral language seemed to have decisive and general purchase, to a situation in which moral justification of our actions seemed to be called into question, and moral discourse became hopelessly fragmented amidst a jumble of contending factions. Finding some coherence in this jumble may take a while — I am speaking personally — but I think there are a few things that can be said at this point. The first thing to say is to raise a question about MacIntyre’s confidence that the old Aristotelian-Thomistic synthesis could really have provided a way forward from the position it had reached during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To a large degree, this synthesis was maintained by the unique position and power of the Roman Catholic Church, and the church’s use of that synthesis during the unsettled and unsettling events of the time, does not really lend confidence to the claim that it provided an adequate moral basis for the development of modernity. However, rejecting the modern experiment as he does, it made sense that MacIntyre should covert to Roman Catholicism, for it was the church’s power, and the loss of that power, that both kept alive the dream of moral consensus, but also showed how impossible it was to continue to support that consensus in greatly changed circumstances.
MacIntyre seems to me to be willfully blind to the failures of the Aristotelian-Thomistic synthesis. He should have looked more closely at the history of those times, and asked not only whether the consensus could have been maintained, but whether it should have been. Could the exercise of papal power — in the way that it was actually exercised – during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation really justify the maintenance of the old moral consensus? And could such a moral consensus be maintained without the exercise of that kind of power? To my knowledge — and it’s a long time since I read After Virtue and Whose Justice, Which Rationality? – these are questions that MacIntyre never asks or answers. Instead, he confines himself to what he thinks are the philosophical reasons why this particular ethical and moral system is to be preferred to the evident confusion of ethical discourse within what has come to be called modernity, a cultural transformation of Europe which was condemned outright by Pope Mastai-Ferretti in his Syllabus of Errors.
But there is another angle from which to approach MacIntyre’s disquieting suggestion. MacIntyre seems to forget, when he is imagining the destruction of science, that science is not science at all without a fairly clear method of theory construction and empirical confirmation and disconfirmation, and that science does differ from ethics in this respect. What he seems to neglect is that, were science entirely to disappear, except for a few catch phrases here and there, as he is supposing in the thought experiment, more than just the disappearance of science would occur. People would no longer have any sense of learning from experience, for that is what science does, even though it does so by showing that what we think we know by experience often deceives us to the real nature of reality, since the truth about reality is often only accessible to those who are prepared to question what it is that they think they see. But still, even within this greatly diminished science, if MacIntyre’s thought experiment permits the normal processes of learning from experience to continue – and it is difficult to see how he could, even in imagination, disallow that — there would be a basis for piecing together the fragments of science, after the destructive period is over, because there wouldn’t even be fragments of science left if the empirical methodology was completely missing, and the fragments of science were just arcane catch phrases without any empirical context.
However, morality is different in this respect. Even though MacIntyre thinks he can find, within a Thomist framework, some kind of objective ground for ethics, there is still nothing like the theory construction and empirical confirmation or falsification of science. Ethics is still something that is exercised in an entirely different context, and is still more closely related to the humanities than to science. Questions of sensitivity, compassion, empathy, desire, preference and so on abound in ethical contexts, and are ineliminable from it, whereas science does not deal in this kind of subjective, emotional, appetitive content. Emotions, feelings of approval and disapproval, desires, hopes and fears all enter into ethical thought, but these are not integral to the scientific enterprise — although of course scientists are human and experience hopes and fears, desires and repugnances, just like other human beings, as some of the unfettered competition amongst scientists testifies. My initial response to MacIntyre is that he has awakened in the wrong century, and is imagining the logic of ethics as much more science-like than he has a right to. It makes more sense to trace the ethical project to its remote beginnings, as Kitcher does, than to start, in medias res, as MacIntyre thinks appropriate, for MacIntyre begins with a moral system fully developed, without noticing that that system, whatever else we may say about it, seemed to a large number of people during the Enlightenment, not only inadequate to account for their experience of morality, but also came to conclusions they thought were definitely immoral, as many of the thundering denunciations and affirmations from the Vatican today continue to confirm. Not only were Aristotle and Aquinas not sufficient to ground morality, whatever their strengths; they brought people to conclusions which they came to regard as contrary to reason and moral decency. The need for a revision of the morality that MacIntyre takes as foundational is no less needed now. It may be a difficult and sometimes confusing project, but, given the moral disasters continually exemplified by the Roman Catholic Church in action, a very necessary one. So it seemed to our predecessors during the Enlightenment; so it still seems to many of us today. Whether it can be done remains to be seen, since religion’s footprint in morality and ethical discourse is still extremely large, even today, but that it must be done, the great immorality of religious moral systems reinforces daily.
And I repeat: If I had a time machine, I’d go back and strangle Aristotle in his crib. Save the world a lot of trouble.
Though if Aristotle never existed, we’d probably have to invent him.
This appearance may be deceptive. What if there were truly no overall structure to moral convictions, just the miscellaneous bunch of stuff we observe? Looking for an absolute foundation could be like looking for the end of a rainbow – it can’t be found because the image of the rainbow is relative to each viewer.
If you tackle moral behaviours (note: not beliefs) from a naturalistic point of view, various species show behaviours that we consider to be altruistic, sensitive to fairness, sensitive to status, selfishness, sharing, hunger, etc. These behaviours need not be learned or dependent on intelligence, only that they arise in the correct context. The process of evolution sieves the result of actions, not intent, so the behaviours may be the result of very low level bodily and neurological motivations.
Now in humans our motivations are built up of many ‘layers’. Some are genetically originated, but development, imitation, learning, and culture all modify and elaborate basic motivations – but there is no ‘absolute moral machine’, only what works well enough each generation.
I find the concept of relative morals to have potentially greater explanatory value for what is rather than what ought to be. And by extension what ought to be merely a cultural artefact.
Some people find this uncertainty disquieting. Personally I think it gives us freedom to modify our ‘brute morals’ with rational thought.
It should not be surprising to me that theologians often show such gross misconceptions of what science is. For this “thought experiment” to even be possible, science needs to be exactly as dogmatic and tradition based as religion is. Perhaps this kind of misconception is why so many theists consider scientific opposition to be merely an authority contest where the loudest voice should win. It would also explain why such theists do not understand why actual scientists are never swayed by their tactics.
This is as perfect a deconstruction as I can imagine. Well done Eric.
McIntyre’s approach of immanent criticism is an interesting one, but surely immanent criticism (of the Frankfurt school variety) lies outside the Thomistic-Aristotleanism tradition? Even so, I’m prepared to follow McIntyre’s critique of liberalism, although I suspect, at base, his criticism is motivated as an apology for Catholicism. (I’ve only read the first Chapter so far).
Another contradictory part in the first chapter, is that he complains that the collapse of moral understanding preceded academic tradition, but is he not part of the academic tradition?
So while his approach is interesting, it isn’t very convincing so far. I still don’t believe there is any objective basis for morality, rather only a subjective basis in sentiment or personality. I would like to be convinced by Kitcher, but so far not.
It has been quite some time since I dove into Macintyre, but, if I remember correctly, in After Virtue he thinks that the analogy to “fragments” of science is apt because he thinks that Aristotelean/Thomist ethics can be shown to be “correct”, at least in some intersubjective (if not objective) manner. Unfortunately, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is the documentation of the failure of his attempt to do so.
There’s a simple explanation for Macintyre’s claims. He isn’t and wasn’t a very good philosopher, and proving ill-equipped to undertake modern meta-ethics, he’d rather attack the discipline. I’m sure a lot of Catholic philosophers and anti-analytic “Humanities” types think he’s the bees-knees, but he’s really just a sloppy, lazy thinker.
If science had been completely demolished apart from a few phrases and labels which no one understood – on what basis would the new generation oppose the anti-science position? If the new generation had no understanding of what science had been about, why would they want to revive it?
That thought experiment seems to fall apart before it gets started.
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It could possibly be similar to how modern worshipers of the “old” Norse religion have attempted to recreate it after it was demolished by Catholicism.
MacIntyre’s absolutist view of morals is alive and well — if you can call it that — in all too many marriages, military units, schools and other institutions — including religions — in which one person ‘makes the rules’ which others are obliged to follow without questioning.
When questioning the basis of an imposed morality is itself defined as immoral, then you have tyranny, not freedom.
Oh what a horribly confused mess. I wonder whether I should one day read MacIntyre for the giggles or whether I would just throw the book against the wall. Maybe I should just say that you bravely read him so that I do not have to…
See, this is actually the trick about natural history, science, math, and maybe a few other areas depending on how widely you want to circumscribe science: If we bomb us all back to the stone age, and humanity has to start from scratch, it will, given enough time, again discover that fertilization works well in agriculture. It will again discover that the earth moves around the sun, that antibiotics kill bacteria, what the approximate value of pi is (although it will of course likely not be called that), that water consists of two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms, and that extant organisms evolved out of simpler ones. Because that is simply the reality out there, and it does not change depending on the observer, regardless of what postmodernists hallucinate, it just sits there waiting to be discovered and described.
I am not a philosopher, so I will not pretend to be able to know whether the same is or is not true for ethics. But it may well not be true, and it may well be a hard fact of life that science could be reconstructed if it was destroyed but that morals cannot be justified objectively and universally, and that is that. And patching it up by fiat of the church is really not the same as patching science up with continual reference to empirical evidence.
That being said, my personal, uninformed, non-philospherish opinion is a pragmatic one. It is nice to do meta-ethics, it is nice to try to do philosophy and ponder whether you can derive the prohibition of murder from first principles or not – nice job if you can get it. But ultimately these concerns are not what motivates the vast majority of people. They don’t do bad things because they fear reprisals ranging from jail time to retaliation by the victims, reproach by their parents or shunning by their peers, and because we are born with a rudimentary sense of fairness.
And ultimately that sense of fairness and what is considered virtue or vice were not decided by an armchair philosopher but, yes, by what allowed groups of humans to flourish. Murder is not considered a vice because a god said so but because no society can tolerate the random killing of its members if it wants to function, and people prefer to be save from being murdered themselves. Bravery is not considered a virtue because a philosopher was able to prove to our cave-people ancestors that it logically is but because a tribe that promotes cowardice does not exactly flourish in competition with neighboring tribes that promote bravery. The same for theft, lying, cheating, assault, being lazy, etc.
The second chapter is a bit more difficult to follow, but basically builds on from the previous chapter, the moral world has been thrown into disorder but we never knew, apparently. McIntyre describes that we’re all living in an age of emotivism, which is disordered because there’s no objective justification for all our moral opinions.
I actually think that is more or less true, that in our current age, our moral judgments spring from emotional responses and attitudes. We then seek to justify those responses and attitudes with reason, only to find that there are pluralistic justifications for various responses, that can all conflict.
But I don’t necessarily think that being emotive is a bad thing, it’s just not rational.
I’d suggest that such is not limited to “our current age”, but has always been so. In the past, under one dominating social system, it was possible to maintain the illusion that moral judgments were based on reason, just at it was possible to maintain the illusion that Catholic theology was rationally justified.
Eric, you say:
This makes me wonder what you think emotions, desires, hopes, fears, etc are on a physiological level. Aren’t these within the purview of neuoscientific understanding? Doesn’t positive psychology address itself to hopes, desires, empathy, and the like? Doesn’t affective neuroscience address itself to the explanation of emotion in physiological terms? Doesn’t nociception encompass how pain is transmitted through the nervous system?
That we have identified neural correlates for aesthetic experiences, for desire, for pain, and in some places, outlined mechanisms, is itself enough to carry on with our empirical presumption, just as we do elsewhere in the study of biology.
And it certainly seems that people employ moral language to talk about these things. To argue that sleep deprivation constitutes torture, it is necessary to know something about how sleep deprivation affects a person physiologically. In fact, it seems like an understanding in physiological terms that sleep deprivation causes severe suffering would by itself be enough to settle the issue.
I can already see at least one reply: these studies may “contribute to” our moral understanding but not swallow up the whole of morality. To this I ask what extra thing is it that these studies are different from, yet can contribute to, while being different? What is the pivot point? What is the means of interaction? Spiritual dualism fails for its inability to answer these questions. I don’t see that a form moral dualism would fare any better.
Josef. That is not the reason for saying that they are not integral to the scientific enterprise. Nothing at all about neurology or neurobiology, but simply not part of the methodology of science. Of course, from the sociobiological perspective of value, the fact that these experiences are measurable and identifiable, may have something to contribute to ethics, but that is not the context in which I was denying that they are part of the substance of science, of the methodology of the sciences, even though our desires, preferences, etc. may have something to do with the kinds of things we will investigate scientifically.
Of course, the social sciences can (and I think do) deal with ethics, or at least are able to study human and social behavour, but not necessarily in a positivist sense. Even the arts are able to explain morality through literature. Atheists may be ‘fixated’ on the natural sciences, because they’re a useful weapon against religion.
Egbert,
In what sense are the arts able to “explain” morality through literature? Explain as in provide twenty possible interpretations, or explain as in arrive at a universally valid, testable and reproducible truth?
And I think you are wrong about “the atheists”. The academic profession with the highest percentage of atheists appears to be philosophy, unless I remember that incorrectly.
Fiction is able to explore moral dilemmas. Thought experiments are ‘fiction’ for example, a perfectly valid form of explanation. And I think it is fair to say that atheists align themselves with the natural sciences.
And I think it is fair to say that atheists align themselves with the natural sciences.
I have no idea how a sentence like that can even make sense.
I am an atheist, and I cycle to work every day. Do I therefore align myself with cycling? What would that mean? Am I therefore arrogantly dismissive of car driving?
Science is a (broadly circumscribed: the) way to find out facts about the world. Soft atheism is just a conclusion derived from the facts we have established so far, but you can just as well base atheism on philosophy, and many do. Massimo Pigliucci, anyone?
Alex,
I’m not sure exactly what problem you have with what I’m saying. I think it’s fairly acceptable to state that atheists have traditionally used the natural science or naturalism (and natural philosophy) to make their case.
I too found the sentence perfectly understandable. Atheists in philosophy tend to be on the side of natural sciences and reference them in the course of exploring various philosophical issues.
Okay, “used the natural science to make their case” is a point that I can understand, but I completely fail to see the problem with it. As I wrote, science is the method to figure out what the world is like; gods and/or their acts would be part of the world; so logically, the existence of gods is discussed with reference to stuff that science found out. That is about as spectacular as observing that round earth advocates use scientific evidence in their discussions with flat earthers.
But then: “Atheists in philosophy tend to be on the side of natural sciences”. What side? Is there a Natural Science Party competing for election against a Anti-Natural Science Party and each philosopher has to say which candidate they endorse? Science is a method or a profession, not an ideology or movement.
Alex, your sarcasm is misplaced, and I really don’t understand why you’re taking such a hostile stance to what I’m saying. If I was being controversial, or making the case for creationism, then perhaps your sarcasm would make sense. And there really is no need to explain to me that science is a method to find out what the world is like, I’m not that stupid.
The problem with aligning so much with natural science, as some of us (and Eric perhaps) have pointed out here many times, is that natural science studies the natural world, whereas its methodologies just do not transfer to the human subjective world. For that, we have the social sciences and humanities. But atheists tend to ignore these fields, and then apply the natural sciences to the social or human realm, leading to a rather naive social or human perspective.
There is nothing wrong with natural science when used in the right context of its own category, it’s the best methodology so far discovered to explain nature. I have tried my best to explain myself, and if I’m still misunderstood, then I apologize that I could not be more clear.
I am sorry, if I came across as hostile that is not what I intended.
But you still harp on the same thing. Atheists do not “tend to ignore” those fields; atheists are as diverse as any group holding one randomly chosen opinion can be. Conversely, there are many people who are dismissive of the humanities who are agnostic, have some undefined spirituality, or even are religious. And in fact you will find many of the usual suspects I can only imagine you are thinking of (Coyne, Myers, Moran) singing the humanities’ praise, with the obvious qualification that they mean the humanities done well, but that should go without saying. If you expound on the value the natural sciences have for us, you will hopefully not include homeopathy or similar quackery either. Finally, I have already pointed to one prominent atheist who is very much on board with your view that the natural sciences are oh so limited.
I think if you accept that the natural world is all there is then this ‘world view’ aligns with many scientists and atheists ‘world views’. It is not a 100% match though. Many would go on to say that the human subjective experiences are a subordinate part of the natural world (and morality a subordinate part of human subjective experiences).
This doesn’t mean to say that the human subjective experiences have no value. It is quite common to value human subjective experiences (love, beauty, friendship, hate, selfishness, morals) above, say, finding confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson.
The tricky bit is the interface between human subjective experiences and the rest of the natural world. Without love, hate, desire etc. there would be no motivation to get out of bed in the morning, but does this privilege human subjective experiences? I don’t think so. They are worthy but without humans the natural world would continue.
I don’t find Great Works of Art ‘explain’ anything… they do ‘example’ or ‘illuminate’ or ‘elevate’. For me – they modulate the human subjective experience, but they don’t add knowledge. I think that people who privilege particular human subjective experiences have a much tougher philosophical burden.
Egbert, the social sciences fall under naturalism as they rely on rational methods; some call them scientific ones but still don’t mean scientistic! So do the humanities,etc. Haughty John Haught excoriates us naturalists for not accepting other venues of knowledge but he begs the question thereof. Revelations, unconfirmed intuitons and such reflect the argument from ignorance, not knowledge. Fellow skeptic John L.Schellenberg thinks that we naturalists rely too much on science due to its changes, but that’s its glory!
Alvin Plantinga’s argument from reason self-refutes as reason shows that Carneades’ atelic argument shows that it begs the question of directed outcomes as do all teleological arguments,besides each having other problems. We learn by trial and error to trust- or mistrust our faculties, requiring inter-subjectivity and instruments at times to verify their conclusions. Adaptation cannot make perfection, and Plantinga cannot use God as verification of the quality of our faculties! Does he then propose with natural evils that perhaps demons cause our errors? Theologians depend on such ad hocness! Why, God Himself reflects convoluted, ad hoc assumptions that He violates the Ockham; Richard Swinburne mistakingly thinks that parsimony requires a simple being whilst no,it requires no unnecessary ad hoc assumptions.
“Logic is the bane of theists.” Fr.Griggs
Yea, Alex!
http:fathergriggs.wordpress.com
Social sciences and humanities fall under naturalism? That’s new to me.