Morality and Contingency

A sound-bite. If I am not a racist it is not because I have reasoned my way to this from neutral premises. It is because I have been raised to be a certain kind of person, with a certain kind of character, and all that is endangered – indeed it is already beginning to be undermined – if I start taking the racist seriously. Reason will not make me immune from the racist’s influence: once the racist is granted a seat at the table we have already conceded the premises he needs to make his position seem reasonable. Some philosophers fear the contingency of this, but that is the way it is.

Going Slow

Hello Blog-Readers,

You may have noticed a bit of time has passed since my last post. Unfortunately the pressure of trying to post once a wek has caught up with me. I won’t be sable to do that any more. But I am not giving up the blog entirely. From now on I shall blog as and when the spirit moves me. That might mean some longish silences. I hope it will also means an improvement in quality. My thanks to those who have been following posts and even commenting from time to time. I hope you will still look in now and again. Best, Andrew.

God and Conscience

God and conscience. There is a certain sort of religious devotion in which these two are very hard to separate. Our souls are transparent to God. Nothing can be hidden from him. But in what sense. It is tempting to think (as we also do with his power) that God’s knowledge of our souls is a special case of the knowledge human beings sometimes have of our souls. Our parents, my friends may see this or that about us: that we are selfish or lazy or whatever. They may know specific things too: that I told this lie, or did this cruel act, and so on. Such human knowledge is only ever partial though. But, the thought would go, we can imagine it being total. We can imagine a being who knows all about us, from whom no stain of guilt can be concealed. That is God, we might think. But is that right? Is God’s knowledge just a hugely magnified version of ours? There is a problem with this. It makes sense to try and hide my sins from other human beings, but there is something problematic about trying to hide them from God. The point is not just that God’s knowledge is perfect so I have no hope of successful concealment. If a mad scientist knew all my thoughts by scanning my brain I could acknowledge this but quite scorn him nonetheless. (I don’t think this is even logically possible, but it might still serve to make the point.) What do I care what he knows or thinks? The point is that there seems a deep tension in saying, parallel to the scientist case, that ‘God knows all my inner most thoughts, but I couldn’t care less’. I don’t claim that it makes no sense at all to say this. But it does seem to be a deracinated use of the word ‘God’. Perhaps what brings this out best is the fact that the best explanation for why such an utterance is so rare, is that people who don’t care what God thinks are nearly always people who don’t believe he exists. And that is most odd. If I don’t care what Kevin Rudd thinks of me I’m not in the least inclined to think he doesn’t exist. But with God, taking him seriously and taking him to exist, to be real, are intimately, I’m inclined to say conceptually, connected. This strongly suggests that the reality of God, the logic of reality in God’s case, is different from the reality of physical objects (including Kevin Rudd) or theoretical posits (like a new sort of particle). Affirming that God exists and confessing a faith in him are not fully separable things the way they are in the other cases (the cases I would say are the physical object paradigm of reality). Against this it might be urged that this is just a matter of (perhaps confused) psychology. It is logically possible to believe in God without caring the least about him: look at the Deists. But this really confirms my point. The deistic God is deracinated, i.e. well removed from actual religious practice and devotion. He has been torn from that context and placed in a different one: the context of evidence, probability, hypotheses, causality, science etc. Then he can be treated with indifference to our moral lives. If he knew our inner thoughts, we might not know how, we might not know the details, but the context configures him as a knower of the same stripe as the mad scientist. Indeed we might just as well call him a mad scientist as call him God, for our only interest in his knowing about us is theoretical and abstract. If it became practical it would only be for the reasons an invasion from Mars would have practical import. The more God is pictured as a giant version of us, the more removed he becomes from actual religious attitudes of devotion. The usual objection to the Deistic God is that he sets the world going then ignores it. But the problem with him goes deeper than that. Indeed in one sense it is nearly the opposite of that. The problem is not that he is too distant from us, but that he is too like us, just a bigger version of us, and thus quite as irrelevant in religiously important ways as Kevin Rudd.

More on Applied Ethics in Schools

Joe’s comment on my last post about applied ethics in schools has stirred some more thoughts. I shall avoid getting into The Unthinkable yet again. As I have tried to explain before I don’t think my position rests on assuming a linear, foundationalist epistemology – but hey, I said I wouldn’t go there. And I don’t think I have to for present purposes. Here are some thoughts.

1. While I certainly mentioned unthinkability (though not under that name: I wrote of fixed moral points) my worries about applied ethics, and much philosophical ethics in general, do not rest just on that, important as it is. All I need is something else I in effect claimed viz. that morality is sui generis so that the attempt to find extra-moral grounds for it (in utility, rationality, cooperation, self-interest, flourishing, the will of God, etc) is liable to alienate us from it: at worst undermining morality, at best leaving us with a tension between our ethical understanding and our moral understanding. I am happy to concede that this risk may be minimised, and the relation of things like utility and rationality to ethics discussed, if students are presented with the sui generis view as well as the others, but my experience of applied ethics does not encourage a realistic expectation that this will happen. Too often there is a de facto assumption that unless we can provide grounds, morality is simply irrational. Joe rightly points out that to question something is not necessarily to reject it, but the pressure to reject it is on in practice if the assumption is present that an answer (and of course a non-question begging, a justificatory answer) must be given on pain of the belief being unreasonable: the question why? comes loaded with that assumption, and slides into why not? Moreover, the sui generis view is not an easy one to get across to students, partly because – superficially – it seems like relativism. If I can’t get it across to university students, then I doubt 10 year olds are going to grasp it, despite some of the hyperbolic claims made on their behalf. Even among philosophers the sui generis view is widely misunderstood, rendered as a metaphysical thesis, one of the unhappy legacies of G E Moore.

2. It is worth emphasising that the sui generis view of morality is compatible with discussion of basic moral values, it is just that the discussion will not take the form of trying to account for morality in extra-moral terms. But there is such a thing as the exploration of morality, even of the most basic and uncontroversial sort. In one way – once the project of vindicating morality in extra-moral terms is abandoned – it looks like there is not much to understand or discuss re basic norms ‘don’t lie, steal etc’ other than perhaps the casuistry of hard cases. But this is not so. There is a universe here to explore which sadly philosophy has too often left to literature and art. These simple norms conceal a wealth of meaning – about, e.g., the significance of concepts like human being, parent, child, friend, enemy, God, animal, life, death, and many others like truth, courage, honesty, humility, grief, sorrow, joy, forgiveness, grace and on and on. There is a complex tapestry of interconnections here, but what is crucially distinguishes them from the foundationalist project is that, the tapestry does not support or justify these basic norms, it assumes them. Indeed morality is this tapestry and the norms just convenient abridgments from it. Primary school students should indeed be studying these things, but it is better done, I suspect, through literature rather than philosophy. Should they discuss hard cases? Maybe. But my view is that such discussion is liable to be impoverished when the tapestry is ignored or poorly understood. Perhaps that is what is most troubling about applied ethics, at least as it currently exists. It rushes into the hard cases, impatiently seeking definitive answers, simply assuming one or other of the justificatory theories of ethics I have mentioned, so that the sui generis view (and the tapestry) never gets the opportunity to so much as come into view.

3. The point about tension between our moral and intellectual lives is not that you can’t live with it and remain morally decent. Clearly people do. Most just probably leave university and stop thinking about it. (Having said that, it is also important to say that it is not alarmist or obscurantist, or a form of moral panic, but only consonant with our responsibilities as teachers, to realise that corruption – the word is unavoidable – is a real possibility.) My point is that the tension is unnecessary because it arises from a mistaken conception of morality and what is needed for morality to be intellectually respectable. (Alright, perhaps that should have been my point. I admit to shifting emphasis here.) Still, I acknowledge a need to be careful. The groundlessness of ethics can indeed give rise to a certain sort of existential anxiety. This is something deep in us, and since the foundational theories of ethics are in part a response to this, for that reason alone (there are others) the theories are not to be scorned, though they are in my view to be treated with caution.

4. Of course open discussion can lead to moral advance. But only where targeted, by questioning some specific attitude or practice, not by saying everything is in principle questionable. That is moral anarchy, not moral reform. It is likely to block reform, since moral progress is rarely if ever a matter of complete novelty. The advance of women or animals etc proceeds in good measure (not necessarily entirely) by appeal to quite intelligible moral ideas that it could not proceed without.

5. Can we get it wrong when we say some things are not up for grabs? Of course. There is a real risk of being dogmatic about something we should not be. But as Joe says the dangers do not run one way, a point I have made many times. There is also the risk of being permissive about things we should not be. I’m not talking about sex. The Nazis are often cited as an example of where my kind of view might lead. They refused to countenance the possibility of being wrong, and look at the consequences. But the Nazis can with equal plausibility be described as too permissive: of cruelty, racism, imperialism and so on. Their failure – and that of many round them – was in not being dogmatic enough about the virtues of kindness, humility, charity, toleration and so on. The irony is that it is undermining morality by searching for foundations to something that is sui generis we may create the vacuum into which a truly pernicious authoritarianism will rush. Complete dogmatism about everything is a mistake. But so too is complete permissiveness, opening everything to question.

Applied Ethics in Schools

Last week the SBS program Insight discussed the topic of ethics in schools, including (unless I badly misunderstood) primary schools. As some of you know I have deep reservations about this, especially if the ethics is likely to be of the ‘applied’ type, and again, unless I misunderstood (I didn’t see all the program) this seemed to be the case too. At one point, a Church representative, opposed to the courses, suggested they aspired to be ‘value free’. Simon Longstaff from the St James Ethics Centre, denied this, pointing out they were based on the values of free inquiry, open discussion and rationality. (I’m summarising from memory. If I have Simon wrong, I apologise.) Now my own view – which invariably draws the accusation that I am some sort of fascist – is that free inquiry etc is indeed an important value, but that it can only be realised where it operates within limits, within boundaries that are not open to question. This is not a matter of morality. It is a matter of logic. If there are no limits – if everything can be questioned – then no argument ever counts as a reductio, and nothing can ever be proven or refuted, and the open discussion becomes profitless (and ironically leads to the relativism – or dogmatism – of which I am often accused). So what are the limits? I’m afraid logic is not enough of a limit. It can tell us that a set of propositions (premises and the negation of the conclusion they entail) is inconsistent, but it cannot tell us which proposition to reject to remove the inconsistency: one philosopher’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens and all that. Sense perception and science – empirical fact in general? But it’s an optimistic philosopher who thinks that ethics will come out of that hat, let alone that primary school students will follow the arguments, or discover them. So that leaves us with the conclusion that if open ethical discussion is to be profitable there need to be moral limits. (I am of course asserting all this in desperate brevity here. I have argued the claims elsewhere, including in this blog.)

Now maybe the proponents of applied ethics in primary schools will accept some restrictions of this sort, at least for primary school children. Children will not be invited to speculate whether or not it is alright to cheat in exams, steal from the tuck shop or torture the dog. But – and I think there was some suggestion of this in the program, but again my memory is very fallible here – a natural thought is that what they will do, while holding these fixed moral points, is inquire into why these things are wrong, into the ground of morality. Now the problem with this, in a nutshell, is that it assumes morality has a ground. If it doesn’t – if it is basic in the way trusting our senses and trusting logic are basic (if they have no non-circular justification) – then searching for grounds has the potential to undermine our understanding of morality, since there is a perpetual gap between our sense that certain things are wrong and the reasons we are able to provide in justification of that sense. For example, we feel strongly that gossiping nastily about our friends behind their back is a shabby thing to do, even if they never find out and no one is hurt. Attempts to find a justification for this – usually in terms of long and short term consequences, or in terms of disrespecting people’s rational nature – try to make this moral sense more palpable and intelligible, less mysterious seeming, than it is apt to be. The justifications may or may not succeed in providing good reasons to refrain from these behaviours, but even if they do they inevitably leave us with a sense of disappointment, a sense they have not captured the depth of what is amiss here, that they are the wrong reasons (not least because they reverse the felt order of justification: we do not think it wrong of our friends to betray us because it hurts our feelings, it hurts our feelings because we think it is wrong). We either live uncomfortably with this feeling, or else try to snuff it out with a hard-headed attitude. My point is less that we may be tempted in practice to start misbehaving (though that is possible) as that something in our intellectual lives has been disturbingly put in tension with our moral lives, so that we end up alienated from our own deepest moral responses and liable to condescend to them. This is not promoting moral understanding.

Now the supporters of applied ethics in schools may again say that this will not be their practice, that there is something else they have in mind. But as far as I know, applied ethics has made it way into schools from the universities, where most of its teachers will have been trained, and where most of its ideas come from. I have been teaching the subject in universities (in a subversive way) for nearly ten years and know it is, with honourable exceptions, dominated by the sort of thing I have been talking about. In light of these facts I find it hard to believe that the subject at school level will not, in simplified form, replicate the basic pattern of its university parent.

Finally, I am not saying any of this because I believe there should be religious instruction in public schools. In fact I am inclined to the opposite view. Since in Australia we have a separation of church and state, it is logical there should be no religious instruction in our public schools.

Theodicy and Compensation

Theodicists often recognise that the goods of virtue and character and so on supposedly created by evil in this life are not adequate to justify God’s creation of the world. In particular, they recognise the inadequacy of this for the innocent victims of this world, especially children. The natural suggestion, in line with Christian theology, is that these victims be specially compensated for their suffering, perhaps with the largesse of an infinite post-mortem beatitude. But it is a logical truism about compensation that it is not a moral justification of the evils it is for. If I break your arm (or let it be broken when I could have easily prevented it) I am obligated to pay compensation, but it doesn’t follow that the original act (or omission) is thereby justified. Perhaps intending the evils to have a long-term outweighing benefit for their victims (one not achievable without the evils) is not the same thing as compensation. But it is still intended to justify God creating a world in which such evils are visited: that is its whole purpose. It is hard to see how it can do that if compensation cannot, for at least compensation retains the idea of justice to a victim in addition to providing a future (‘greater’) good. Non-compensatory theodicy dispenses with the justice, so is in a weaker position even if one thinks the future good has some justificatory force in its own right.

But that is doubtful too. For a start, a purely quantitative superiority of good over evil, one in which compensatory ideas of justice and what is owed play no role, means the superiority can be achieved by giving extra post-mortem good to people who have suffered little and none at all to those who have suffered terribly. (One could apply the consequentialism to each individual life, requiring that each life be in the black (overall), but the motive for doing this is the thought that this is owed to people who would otherwise be victims of injustice. One might also object that the maximal superiority of good over evil is one giving every victim infinite beatitude, so there is no injustice. But this is possible only for God. The point is that the moral assumptions would sanction unjust distributions for a less powerful being and that is fault in those assumptions.) Further, unlike compensation a purely quantitative theodicy (at least in a maximising form) sets no limits on the severity and number of evils that may be visited if they are necessary for greater goods. More deeply, it wrongly assumes that the significance of good and evil can be adequately understood in quantitative terms. There is something profoundly disturbing in the idea horrendous evils may be visited on people if they receive an overwhelming good later on, even if (as cannot happen in this case) they consent to the deal in advance: it seems to me we entertain this because we do not face properly the nature of those evils. The root I think is that seeking greater goods for their own sake – that is, absent the idea that they are owed to victims of evil as compensation, which as I say implies the act compensated was wrong, so is no value to the theodicist – despite appearances treats the people who have suffered as means to an end, rather than as beings to be respected as important in their own right. Indeed I would confront theodicists who press the importance of a post-mortem greater good for victims of evil with a dilemma. If they allow any element of compensatory thoughts of justice owed into their rationale for the greater goods policy, then it follows that the original action was wrong. But if they do not, then they face the charge that there is nothing about that policy which is rooted in concern for the victims, in which case it is not clear why it is needed: why provide the greater goods if they are not owed to those who have innocently suffered?

A likely reply is that it is only rational for God to maximise good and rational for everyone else, including the victims, to agree. But apart from whether rationality is really a concept that can bear this sort of weight, whether its use here genuinely respects the people it is being applied to, is it really irrational for someone to say they can’t endure the evil to get the subsequent good, however quantitatively larger? If not, then the appeal to rationality collapses. One might add that it is all very well for God, who may feel the good and evil simultaneously, or empathise with the joy and the terror simultaneously, and ‘weigh’ them, but we have to go through them one at a time and we have to do the evil first and some evils are intolerable. What is ‘rational’ for God may not be for us!

One More Post on Universalizability

It might help to think of the ideal of being true to one self as something fundamental to morality. The claim is that there are cases where the only thing left to say to someone who disputes my view – the only thing left to say after all the conditions of ideal judgment have been explored and acquitted – is that in acting otherwise I would be, as we put it, unable to live with myself. It would be misleading to say that this fact about myself was something that (together with everything else) made it true that I was required as I am. What makes it true are the same facts that make it true that you are otherwise required: in this context the right thing for Ivan Karamazov to say (when asked why he cannot accept the world God has made) is that he must be true to the suffering children, not himself. Consequently it is not right to think of ‘true to myself’ as a consideration that I appeal to (as a tie-breaker) to establish – to myself or to others – that I am required as I take myself to be. When I offer it as ‘the only thing left to say’ to those who judge otherwise, I am not doing the sort of thing I am doing when I try to convince others that ф-ing is a requirement simpliciter, i.e. a requirement upon anyone in the relevant situation. It is less an argument or reason than a confession, an owning of responsibility, in which I invite others to acknowledge the reality of my being bound as I am, as I am willing to acknowledge that they are bound as they are. It is, if you like, partly an acknowledgement of a shared human limitation, definitive of our condition (or predicament) viz. that we are, in certain circumstances, unable to distinguish even to ourselves the propriety of one course of action over another in terms that we judge entail that someone who judges otherwise must be wrong. In such cases it behoves us to acknowledge that others may be legitimately claimed in different and conflicting ways. The denial of universalism thus opposes an intrusive moralism which refuses to recognise an important limitation upon us. There is a great importance in some situations – like dilemmas – in being willing to see things from another’s point of view if one is to make a judgment about what requirements they are under. As Craig Taylor has put it, we not only need to take their situations seriously, but to take them seriously. But if this is true then universalism is false, since universalism just is the doctrine that from the fact alone that I am required to ф it follows that anyone else in the same circumstances is also required to ф regardless of who they are. This entailment is guaranteed by the formal properties of normative judgment, not by any substantive judgment about others’ requirements distinct from the judgment about one’s own. Indeed, it renders any such judgment unnecessary and irrelevant. So according to universalism there cannot be any situations in which we are under a requirement – call it a meta-requirement – to see things from another’s point of view if we are to determine their (first-order) requirements. Such a situation is not even possible. Is universalism so obvious we should accept this? Is there not a risk we will impose a philosophical dictum on the diversity, richness and difficulty of actual human life?

More Universalizability

I’ve been discussing universalizability with some friends. One correctly identified the nub of the problem as this. Suppose I and someone else, call him Jones, in the same very difficult moral situation. Suppose that both of us satisfy the conditions of ideal judgment that I listed last week: (i) being free of relevant factual or logical error, (ii) being free of any mistakes in instrumental rationality, (iii) not endorsing clear immorality, (iv) not suffering from any wider human failings in the way of such things as wanting courage, integrity, seriousness, honest self-examination and so on. Suppose we both make a compelling case from the same facts, but mine is for the judgment that I am required to Φ and Jones is for the judgment that he is required not to. Suppose I feel the force of Jones’ case and he mine, and we both understand how it is that the other can see things so differently, yet neither of us feels able to move. We just give different weight to the same factors and each must say like Luther ‘Here I stand’. Now the issue is: assuming it is true that I am required to Φ, does it follow from that fact alone that Jones is required to Φ, and consequently that his judgment is mistaken? Universalists say yes, and anti-universalists (like me) say no. The no answer does not mean that it may not be true that Jones is required to Φ, just that this does not follow from the fact that I am required to Φ. According to we anti-universalists, if I do judge that Jones is required to Φ then this is not merely drawing a logical consequence of the judgment that I am required to Φ. It is a new moral judgment, distinct from the one about myself. If we have to make it the ‘have’ is a substantive moral ‘have’, not one arising from the formal features of moral judgment per se. Now some people feel powerfully that this cannot be so, that there is an unavoidable entailment from my duty to his that requires no further moral judgment. But why? What is inconsistent in allowing that our duties differ? I might have to judge Jones is mistaken. But equally, I might not. Why can’t I say: he is entitled to see it his way? Because truth is different from entitlement, and we can sometimes be entitled to believe falsehoods? But my reason for saying he is entitled is (or at least includes) because he has satisfied all the conditions of ideal judgment in a certain sort of case, perhaps a dilemma. So if we say truth and entitlement come apart then we are saying truth and ideal judgment come apart. And as I contended in last week’s post, that makes moral truth pretty strange. When I allow that Jones may be obligated differently from the way I am, despite being in the same relevant circumstances, I am basically not including the acceptance of my position as itself a condition of ideal judgment (in the way that rejecting the flagrantly immoral – category three of the conditions of ideal judgment above – is included). I am not saying I can’t include it, but whether I do or not seems to me to be a substantial moral decision, a decision that the case is important enough, or of such a nature, as to bind everyone this way. What feature of ‘the logic of moral discourse’ requires I include it?

Universalizability

Nearly all philosophers accept the thesis that morality is ‘universalizable’ – or, as I shall say, universal – in the sense that if two agents are in the same ‘morally relevant’ circumstances, then their obligations and permissions are the same. They also believe that this is a necessary feature of morality, part of the ‘logic of moral discourse’. So a single counter-example would refute it. Like Peter Winch I doubt the truth of universalism. Winch uses the well-known case of Melville’s Billy Budd. In my book on the problem of evil (nearing completion) I use, inter alia, whether humans can believe in the goodness of God given the evil in the world. Here I just want to give public exposure to a small section of my argument dealing with a strategy which admits the assumption Winch and I make about our examples that agents in the same relevant situation can be obligated in different and conflicting ways despite satisfying all the conditions of what I call ‘ideal judgment’. Those conditions are (i) being free of relevant factual or logical error, (ii) being free of any mistakes in instrumental rationality, (iii) not endorsing clear immorality, (iv) not suffering from any wider human failings in the way of such things as wanting courage, integrity, seriousness, honest self-examination and so on. The strategy tries to show that this can be accepted of the examples, but universality preserved.

The strategy is to try including an agent’s ideal judgments inside the class of ‘morally relevant circumstances’ – call it C – that defines the moral decision which confronts them. Then, the hope goes, it will turn out, in the sort of cases I envisage, that agents in the same situation have the same obligations and permissions, despite those obligations and permissions arose from ideal judgments. On this account, in introducing what the agent would take themselves to be required to do, I am merely precisifying one of the conditions of C, so that while different agents may be under different requirements, this is only because their circumstances are different, since what they would ideally judge themselves to be required to do is part of the circumstances and they would ideally judge themselves to be required to do different and conflicting things. Thus my story is not a violation of universalism, but merely a special, perhaps limiting, case of it. But if we do this then, as Winch remarks, it is hard to see what interest remains in the universalism thesis. In certain cases (those we enemies of universalism have in mind) all universalism will entail is that if I am required to ф in circumstances C which include that I would ideally judge that I am required to ф, then anyone is required to ф in circumstances C which include that they would ideally judge that they are required to ф. Or in short: an agent (any agent) is required to do whatever they would ideally judge they are required to do. This concedes the necessary extensional convergence (across all cases in which C includes what we would ideally judge we are required to do) of what we are required to do with what we would ideally judge we are required to do. (Footnote: necessary because it is being proposed as a moral truth that Cs which include that I would ideally judge I should ф entail that I should ф, and moral truths are necessary truths.) But since the ‘same circumstances’ now include what we would ideally judge we are required to do – which (it is being conceded on this universalist strategy) can vary – this convergence means the ‘same circumstances’ effectively include what we are required to do. So there is a real danger than in the relevant cases universalism entails: if I am required to ф in circumstances C which include that I am required to ф, then anyone is required to ф in circumstances C which include that they are required to ф. Or in short: an agent (any agent) is required to do in C whatever they are required to do in C. I can’t argue with that. It might be objected that though truth value is preserved in every possible case under this substitution, the meaning of what we are required to do and what we would ideally judge we are required to do is not thereby the same, and so it has not been shown that the strategy reduces to sheer triviality. But what, actually, is added by talking about our ideal judgment of our requirements as opposed to our actual requirements? (Remember that ideal judgment includes possessing all relevant knowledge, logic etc, so there is no relativising it to epistemic circumstances of cognitive or even moral capacities.) It was only universalism which ever made the distinction seem necessary. But it yields only mystery as far as I can see. Arguably, truth may outstrip even our ideal epistemic powers in matters of fact, mathematics and so on, but the practical nature of morality makes it mysterious what a moral truth which we cannot even in principle know of – yet which we are, somewhat unjustly, required to comply with (that is, after all, the whole point of a moral truth) – could be. It is universalism which is buying into enigmas here, not its denial. Indeed we might put the case against it as a dilemma: either mystery (when the importance of the distinction is insisted on) or a trivial claim (when it is not).

Reason

A bit oracular this week. Something of a philosophical credo I suppose.

We aspire to a ‘reason’ which transcends, and thus can act as arbiter upon, all the actual (empirically conditioned) reasons that arise in actual human experience. We turn our attention away from those, towards a God’s eye view (and thus change the subject). We call this appealing to reason, but really it is the abandonment of reason, i.e. of studying good and bad reasons in this or that context. (‘In this or that context’ = ‘about this or that topic’. Why wouldn’t the force of reasons vary with topic? The strangeness of the contrary assumption.) We turn our vision from the richness, depth and complexity of actual reasons – and thus lose our grasp on them, at least when we are philosophising (let us hope it is only then) – towards an ideal to thin, too emaciated, to do anything for us. Because Reason aspires to be a reason for anyone at all – for a merely rational being – it ends up being a reason for no one. Kant thought this was necessary because he saw all the impulses of our ‘empirically conditioned’, animal nature as blind, mechanical forces. There was nothing between their blindness and the sublime freedom of unconditioned Reason. Many share the same assumption (they do not have to be Kantians): Reason vs. emotion, stimulus and response vs. belief-desire cognition, determinism vs. randomness. One expression of it is the thought (usually covert) that any legitimate comparison between two items must be conducted (not necessarily consciously of course) by comparing both against an ideal of the type. But this is a fallacy, another form of the idea that reasons must transcend everything ‘empirically conditioned’ and merely contingent, must be reasons that would be reasons for anyone regardless of their conditioning, reasons that must be universally neutral and non-question-begging. Comparison may imply an ideal, but that ideal is surely constructed from the comparisons. In that sense it may be implied by our comparisons, but that does not mean we have a prior access to it in performing them. The implication, perhaps the intimation of the ideal is, I suspect, in all but simple cases, very partial and remains inadequate even after extensive experience. As Plato tried to teach us, thought necessarily aspires to completeness and unity as a goal, yet it is a goal that necessarily can never be realised in topics of any importance. It is a perpetually elusive necessity. Iris Murdoch is very good on this. (But compare Wittgenstein on philosophy leaving ragged what is ragged in life. The unity is not necessarily the sort of unity you see in a scientific theory.) The ideal of Reason underestimates the diversity, richness and penetration of responses which are still responses of a contingent and conditioned sort. We feel dissatisfied with them because we insist on looking at things from a perspective that is not our own (the God’s eye perspective, the Archemedean point). Or better – to stress the essentially personal nature of this – I insist on looking at things from a perspective that is not mine, you from a perspective that is not yours, Harry from one that is not his. We think this abdication will give us a common perspective, the perspective of Reason, but it really deprives us of any. Hence the strange feel of dissociation, of speculations and conclusions that no one really believes or takes seriously, that pervades philosophy. (Scepticism of many types is not the least of these. So long as philosophy is mesmerised by this ideal of Reason it will remain haunted by a genie of radical scepticism it cannot dispel.) The only perspective we have, the only one we can have, is each our own. From inside our own perspectives there is nothing radically inadequate about all the reasons human beings actually commerce in (have, agree and disagree over, argue about, etc). Notice this does not mean that ‘anything goes’: the assumption that it does is just another attempt to abdicate to the God’s eye view, another attempt to be accountable to something beyond my own best judgment, beyond what I (AG, this particular, empirically conditioned, animal being) can take seriously: as opposed to what I can put into a theory, publish in an article or book, and so on. This last contrast – so vital in Plato, and then again in a philosopher as superficially different as Wittgenstein – is vital to everything I have said here. It is when we learn to live inside our own skins that we will give (a certain sort of?) philosophy peace.