Naturalism and morality JOHN E. HARE
Thus, S only intends the action of her getting the glasses for a reason because she first chooses to perform that action for that reason. Intention provides no explanatory link between reasons and the choices made for those reasons.
At this point, Ginet might argue that it is false to maintain that free agents only intend to perform those actions which they first choose to do. Free agents also intend their choices to act. They must intend those choices because their choices are teleologically explained by reasons and an intention is required to forge a link between those choices and their reasons, if the libertarian is to present an adequate account of the distinction between acting with a reason and acting because of it.
In response, one needs to ask ‘How do free agents intend their choices?’ What explains such intentions? The reasons R for which the choices are made? But if R can explain these intentions directly without the need for something to forge an explanatory link between the two of them, why cannot R explain the choices directly without the need for intermediate intentions to link the choices with their reasons?
Do further reasons R′ explain the intentions? But if free agents intend their choices
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for R′, will they not need second-order intentions to link the first-order intentions with their reasons R? Here, a vicious regress seems unavoidable. The only way to avoid it is to say that free agents intend their choices for reasons R′, and that is the end of the matter. But if there is nothing problematic with saying this, there is no problem with saying that a free agent such as S chooses for reasons R, and that is the end of the matter. Thus, by maintaining that agents intend their choices, Ginet has not really explained the distinction between acting with a reason and acting because of it.
Rather, he has merely relocated the place where the distinction needs to be accounted for.
Ginet might respond to this criticism of his view by maintaining that it is preferable to talk in terms of the act of adopting the intention to perform act A, instead of the act of choosing to A,45 where the act of adopting the intention to A forges an explanatory link between A and the reason R for which A is done. Even if we concede to Ginet this preference, it can still be shown that intention cannot plausibly be used to account for the distinction between acting with a reason and acting because of it. This is because adopting an intention is itself an act and, as such, is explained by a reason. What forges an explanatory link between the adopting of an intention and the reason for which it is adopted? Is there some further intention which is adopted? If there is, then it will have to be adopted for a reason and an explanatory link will have to be forged between it and that reason. A vicious regress like that described in the previous paragraph is avoidable only by saying that an intention can be adopted for a reason, without any explanatory relation between it and that reason being forged by a further intention.
But if this is the case, then the explanatory connection between a reason and the act of adopting an intention is ultimately primitive, and intention cannot be used in the way Ginet suggests to distinguish between having a reason and acting with it and having a reason and acting because of it.46
III
Classically, libertarianism was held to be incompatible with naturalism because the former was indeterministic in nature while the latter was deterministic. The determinism espoused by those who can be called ‘classical naturalists’ was causal in nature and was often expressed by saying that the causal laws of nature and the past together entail the occurrence of one course of events. Thus, causal determinism was, one might say, past-to-present in form. There is, however, a different kind of determinism which is currently popular among naturalists. According to contemporary, non-classical naturalists, even if classical past-to-present causal determinism is false and what is physical is ultimately indeterministic (as some understandings of quantum physics maintain) in nature, it is still possible and plausible to believe that determinism is true because it is reasonable to believe in the
general ontological thesis that reality is a multilayered hierarchy which consists of levels of entities with their characteristic properties.47 It is assumed by present-day naturalists that there is a lowest, fundamental, or bottom level of reality which consists of what micro-physics considers to be the most basic particles out of which everything is composed. On ‘top’ of the lowest level are higher, intermediate-level entities (e.g.
chemical, biological) with their distinctive properties. Mental properties are properties of human beings (brains or central nervous systems) which are higher (highest?)-level, macro-entities.48 There is a dependency relation between the lower-level, physical properties of micro-objects and the higher-level mental properties of human beings such that no human being can have its mental properties unless it has physical properties, and the lower-level physical properties determine the higher-level mental properties in the sense that nothing can be just like a given human being in all of its physical properties without its also being just like it as regards its mental properties. That is, physical indiscernibility entails psychological indiscernibility.49
Contemporary bottom-to-top determinism is typically characterized by its naturalist proponents as the supervenience of the mental on the subvenient physical, and, thus, might be termed ‘supervenience determinism’. In supervenience determinism, the supervenience of the mental on the physical is held to be asymmetric in character in the sense that the higher-level mental properties are dependent upon and determined by the lower-level physical properties, but the bottom-level physical properties are not dependent upon and determined by the higher-level mental properties.50 In summary,
[a]ccording to some philosophers, mind–body supervenience gives us the right kind of physicalism: It respects the primacy of the physical by giving a clear sense to the idea that the physical determines the mental. Without the instantiations of appropriate physical properties, no mental property can be instantiated, and what particular mental properties are instantiated depends wholly on what physical properties happen to be instantiated.51
Thus, on what I will call the contemporary ‘supervenience naturalist’s’ view of the world (supervenience naturalists endorse supervenience determinism), mental properties and events cannot ‘float free’ of physical properties and events. Because one’s physical life superveniently determines one’s mental life, one’s mental life is not autonomous from one’s physical life.
The implications of the bottom-to-top determinism of the mental by the physical in the supervenience naturalist’s view of the world for free will has not been widely discussed.52 Searle is one supervenience naturalist who has raised and addressed the relevant implications, and in what immediately follows I will summarize his discussion of them. His comments are especially helpful because they help to tease out the logical
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relationships between free will, dualism, and naturalism. What I ultimately hope to show in this section is that there is good reason to think that libertarianism implies the falsity of naturalism for a more basic reason than its incompatibility with determinism.
This reason is that libertarianism implies dualism, and dualism implies the falsity of naturalism.
According to Searle, the libertarian is right about this much: belief in libertarian freedom is not the invention of philosophers.53 On the contrary, it is something which all of us believe as ordinary people in everyday life:
[I]f there is any fact of experience that we are all familiar with, it’s the simple fact that our own choices . . . seem to make a difference to our actual behaviour. . . .
We know we could have done something else, because we chose one thing for certain reasons. But we were aware that there were also reasons for choosing something else, and indeed, we might have . . . chosen that something else. . . .
Human freedom is just a fact of experience.54
Though it is obvious to us from our experience that we seem to have free will, Searle claims that modern science poses problems for its existence. It does so because of its bottom-up view of the world in which nature consists of particles and their relations with each other, and everything about the world can be accounted for in terms of these particles and their relations.
Why exactly is there no room for the freedom of the will on the contemporary scientific view? Our basic explanatory mechanisms in physics work from the bottom up. That is to say, we explain the behaviour of surface features of a phenomenon such as the transparency of glass or the liquidity of water, in terms of the behaviour of microparticles such as molecules. And the relation of the mind to the brain is an example of such a relation. Mental features are caused by, and realised in neurophysiological phenomena . . . .55
Searle maintains that his account of the mind–brain relationship is a form of supervenience naturalism.
On the account that I have been proposing, mental states are supervenient on neurophysiological
states
in
the
following
respect:
Type-identical
neurophysiological causes would have type-identical mentalistic effects. . . . On this characterization of the supervenience relation, the supervenience of the mental on the physical is marked by the fact that physical states are causally sufficient . . . for the corresponding mental states. . . . [S]ameness of
neurophysiology guarantees sameness of mentality . . . .56
Given the supervenience naturalist’s layered picture of the world and the place of the mental in it as a higher-level macro-feature which is supervenient upon the lower-level micro-features, Searle claims the following would have to be the case if we were to have free will:
In order for us to have radical [libertarian] freedom, it looks as if we would have to postulate that inside each of us [our physical bodies] was a self that was capable of interfering with the causal order of nature. That is, it looks as if we would have to contain some entity that was capable of making molecules swerve from their paths. I don’t know if such a view is even intelligible, but it’s certainly not consistent with what we know about how the world works from physics.57
As Searle describes matters, the problem for free will is that it requires that a dualist self or mind be able to causally affect the micro-physical world and such causal interaction is problematic, if not unintelligible. It is relevant to note at this juncture, however, that if such causal interaction is a problem for free will, it is not one which is distinctively generated by the thesis that the mental is superveniently determined by the physical. It is just an application of the classic objection to dualism in the context of supervenience naturalism. Therefore, before addressing the alleged problem of mental-to-physical causation for dualism, it is important to understand why it is that supervenience naturalists believe that libertarianism implies the truth of dualism. In order to acquire this understanding, it will be helpful to focus on the explanatory nature of the determinism in the supervenience relation itself.
As I indicated at the outset of this section, classically, the explanatory character of naturalism consisted of causal determinism. Supervenience naturalists, however, say little, if anything positive, about the explanatory nature of the determinism in the supervenience relation, except that it is deterministic. Indeed, they seem to know more about what the explanatory nature of the determinism is not than about what it is. To see that this is the case, consider Searle’s view. In a spirit of continuity with the classical naturalist view, he maintains (see the penultimate quote) that physical states causally determine their supervening mental states. According to Searle, supervenience determinism is a form of causal determinism. He is careful to point out, however, that the causation in the supervenience relation is not event-event in kind.58
This will strike many, if not most, as very puzzling or even incoherent, because causation seems to be essentially a relation involving events of objects or substances.
For example, in terms of the ontology which I set forth in Section I, causation essentially involves the eventful exercising of a causal power by an agent which
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produces the eventful actualization of a liability in a patient.
Kim is another supervenience naturalist, and though he denies that determinism in the supervenience relation is a form of causal determinism of any kind (whether event or not-event),59 he has little, if anything, to say in a positive vein about it. Heil summarizes the inabilility of supervenience naturalists such as Kim to say anything positive about the explanatory nature of the determinism in the supervenience relation in the following way:
Although modal notions constitute an important ingredient of the concept of supervenience, they do not exhaust that concept. . . . [W]e might inquire as to the remaining aspects. These include, first, a notion of dependence, according to which a property or characteristic in the supervenient family requires for its instantiation the instantiation of a property or characteristic in the subvenient family; and second, a notion of determination, according to which supervenient properties or characteristics are instantiated in virtue of or because of the instantiation of some subvenient property or characteristic. . . . Offered as an analysis of supervenience, these remarks would be excessively thin. We should want to know what dependence and determination amounted to, and how they bear on explanation. . . . This difficulty is . . . one about which I have nothing exciting or original to suggest.60
How about what the explanatory nature of determinism in the supervenience relation is not? For present purposes, it is crucial to note one thing which supervenience naturalists (in virtue of their naturalism) maintain it is not, and that is that it is not teleological in nature. Whatever the explanatory nature of the determinism in the supervenience relation is, supervenience naturalists are united in affirming that what explains a choice (provided a supervenience naturalist acknowledges the reality of a choice as a genuine mental event) is not a purpose or goal of an agent (a teleological explanation). The bottom-to-top layered picture of the world where the mental is a higher-level feature excludes future-to-present explanation of a choice in terms of a goal or purpose. Thus, while supervenience naturalism is incompatible with libertarianism because of the determinism present in the supervenience relation, at a more basic level it is incompatible with libertarianism because like all forms of naturalism61 it denies any explanatory role for teleology.
Supervenience naturalists are committed to the thesis that there are no undetermined choices which are made by their agents for purposes. To clarify why they exclude teleological explanation, it is helpful to return to one of Searle’s comments quoted earlier. As he analyses the issue of human freedom, if we were to concede the reality of libertarian choices made for purposes, then we would be committed to the view that mental events, rather than being dependent surface
features of the world which are determined to occur by deep subvenient microphysical characteristics, would themselves be independent deep features of the world.
Searle believes (as do most, if not all, supervenience naturalists) that in order for a mental event such as a choice to occur and be explained teleologically, it would have to be an independent deep occurrence of the world, and this would imply that a self exists which is an independent deep entity that makes the choice for a purpose. And if this self exists and is able to choose for a purpose, then if it is to realize or accomplish its purpose for choosing, it will have to be able to causally affect what goes on at the micro-physical level of the world. In short, in order for libertarian freedom to be real, a teleological explanation must be the ultimate explanation of a choice. And in order for a teleological explanation to be the ultimate explanation of a choice, a substantial self (mind or soul) which makes a choice for a purpose must exist at the deepest level of reality and be able to causally interact with the ultimate or deep entities of the physical world. Stated in slightly different terms, if libertarianism is true, there is a form of explanation, namely, teleological, which is equally fundamental as the causal explanation operative at the micro-physical level of reality, and on those occasions when an agent chooses for a reason, events at the micro-physical level of the world occur only because a soul causes them to occur in accomplishing its goals. Because goals or purposes must be grounded in the representational character of propositional attitudes (mental contents) of minds, if there is teleological explanation at the most basic level of reality, then it follows that minds with their representational contents exist at the most basic level of reality. Therefore, if choices are ultimately explained teleologically, the dependency of the mental on the physical is undermined. In order for us to have free will, dualism must be true. From the perspective of a supervenience naturalist such as Searle, if we accept the reality of free will, we fall into the “absurdity of supposing that there are two kinds of substances . . .
in the world,” and “[w]e are reluctant to concede any of the commonsense facts that sound ‘Cartesian,’ because it seems that if we accept the facts, we will have to accept the whole of Cartesian metaphysics.”62 Kim echoes Searle on this issue:
[T]o abandon the physical causal closure is to retrogress to the Cartesian picture that does not allow, even in principle, a complete and comprehensive physical theory of the physical world. On the Cartesian dualist model, any theory that gives full coverage of the physical would have to invoke nonphysical causal agents. This is something that no serious physicalist will find palatable.63
The thinking of the supervenience naturalist to this point can be summarized as follows: free will is just a fact of experience, but free will requires the truth of dualism.
There is, however, the problem of causal interaction between an immaterial soul and a micro-physical entity which implies the falisty of dualism. Given the falsity of dualism,
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libertarianism is false. Thus, contrary to the way things seem, there is no free will.
It is now time to examine the alleged problem of causal interaction. To begin, it is appropriate to spend a few moments on the issue of the intuitive or initial plausibility of dualism. Is the soul, like the free will which implies its existence, just a fact of experience? It has seemed so to many, if not most, people. Among philosophers, Descartes noted in the Sixth Meditation that “as a matter of fact, when I consider the mind, that is to say, myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire . . . .”64 In other words, on the basis of self-awareness, it seemed to Descartes that he was a substantial mind which lacked proper parts (a simple entity). That this ‘simple view’ of the self is not an aberration is recognized by several contemporary non-dualist philosophers of mind. For example, Nagel states that the self exhibits an “apparent unique simplicity and indivisibility,”65 while David Braine captures the seeming simplicity of the self in the following words:
[T]here is no question of dividing an ‘I’ . . . into parts. The ‘I’ . . . presents itself as undivided and indivisible. . . . [W]hen we think of the ‘I’ . . . as undivided and indivisible, we are somehow denying that, as such, it has parts at all rather than thinking of some special kind of integratedness of its parts.66
It is important to stress that these philosophers are noting the features of first-person self-awareness which explain why it is that the ordinary person is a dualist. They are not foisting a philosophical invention on the ordinary mind. Thus, Searle notes that
“when I lectured on the mind-body problem in India”, [I] “was assured by several members of my audience that my views must be mistaken, because they personally had existed in their earlier lives as frogs or elephants, etc. . . .”67 Searle goes on to add that
“given what I know about how the world works, I could not regard their views as serious candidates for truth.”68
As we have already seen, what Searle thinks he knows about how the world works is that it is a multi-layered hierarchy in which mental features are dependent upon and determined by micro-physical properties. In explicating the implications of his supervenience naturalism for free will, Searle claims that dualism is implausible because of the problem of mind– body causal interaction. In his estimation, mind-to-body causation is deeply mysterious, if not incoherent. Kim concurs with this point.
According to him, there is “the sheer impossibility of coherently imagining the details of what might have to be the case if some nonphysical agency is going to affect the course of purely physical events.”69 Acknowledging some non-physical agency would force us to accept a conception of the physical in which to give a causal
account of, say, the motion of a physical particle, it is sometimes necessary to go outside the physical system and appeal to some non-physical agency and invoke some irreducible psychophysical law. Many will find this just not credible.70
For, as many thinkers have pointed out, it simply does not seem credible that an immaterial substance, with no material characteristics and totally outside physical space, could causally influence, and be influenced by, the motions of material bodies that are strictly governed by physical law. Just try to imagine how something that isn’t anywhere in physical space could alter in the slightest degree the trajectory of even a single material particle in motion. Its inability to explain the possibility of “mental causation,” how mentality can make a causal difference to the world, doomed Cartesian dualism. . . .
There has been a near consenus among philosophers that the concept of mind as a mental substance gives rise to too many difficulties and puzzles without compensating explanatory gains.71
The heart of Kim’s argument is that dualism cannot be believed because it cannot explain how mental causation involving an immaterial substance which is not located in space is possible. One way for a dualist to respond to challenge would be to bring the soul into the same spatial system as its physical body. For example, a dualist might assert that the soul occupies a spatial point, presumably somewhere within the space occupied by its physical body,72 and because it does it is able to causally interact with that body. It is doubtful, however, that this response by the dualist will satisfy the supervenience naturalist. Thus, Kim approvingly quotes Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia’s response to Descartes that locating the soul at a spatial point will not make any clearer how an immaterial, thinking substance can causally interact with its physical body.73 The problem for the dualist postion according to the supervenience naturalist is that no matter ‘where’ the soul is located, whether in space or not in space, the dualist can only say that causal interaction between it and the physical world just happens. And this inability to say anything explanatorily informative about how causal interaction occurs is enough to undermine any initial plausibility the dualist view has (and, therefore, any initial plausibility libertarianism has).
As I have argued elsewhere,74 the supervenience naturalist, in spite of all of his bluster about the problem of causal interaction for dualism, is no better off than the dualist when it comes to explaining how it is that the mental relates to the physical.
Thus, Kim himself has stated, “the problem of mental causation [doesn’t] go away when Cartesian mental substance [goes] away.”75 To make it evident that this is the case, it is helpful to recall the supervenience naturalist’s inability to say anything positive about the explanatory nature of the determinism in the supervenience relation. What this inability consists of is an inability of the supervenience naturalist to explain how subvenient physical properties determine supervenient mental
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properties. Thus, Searle, after affirming his non-event causal interpretation of the determination in the supervenience relation, concedes that “[w]e do not know the detail of how brains cause consciousness. . . . [W]e do not know how the system of neuro-physiology/consciousness works . . . .”76 Though there is no knowledge of how brains non-event causally determine consciousness, Searle has no hesitation to affirm that they just do. Supervenience naturalists who reject any causal interpretation of the determinism in the supervenience relation are no more helpful in elucidating the explanatory character. As noted in the quotation earlier in this section, Heil admits that such supervenience naturalists do not provide an explanation of the deterministic connection between subvenient physical properties and supervenient mental properties. Chalmers, who is himself a supervenience naturalist, concurs: “It might be objected that [the supervenience framework] does not tell us what the connection is, or how a physical configuration gives rise to experience. But the search for such a connection is misguided. . . . [B]eyond a certain point, there is no asking
‘how.’”77 Given the supervenience naturalist’s own inability to explain the nature of the determination in the supervenience relation, it is at least initially puzzling why he maintains that the dualist’s inability to say anything informative about how a mind and a body causally determine events to occur in each other is a decisive reason for rejecting dualism. It would initally seem that if this inability cuts against one view, it cuts equally against the other.
In an effort to be charitable to the supervenience naturalist, one might think that his inability to elucidate the explanatory character of the determinism in the supervenience relation does not cut as strongly against his view because it is reasonable to believe that it is merely a temporary state of affairs, and that with the advance of science the supervenience determinist will come to have the requisite information to provide the desired elucidation. For example, Searle states that the mystery of how consciousness is related to neurophysiology is merely a function of our present “ignorance of how the brain works.”78 This claim, however, expresses a radically mistaken belief. Some comments from Searle himself will help clarify why this is the case.
As was pointed out earlier in this section, Searle argues for supervenience naturalism by claiming that the model for understanding the relationship between the mind and the brain is found in the distinction in physics between micro- and macro-properties of systems. In physics, the global or surface features of objects are explained by the behavior of elements at the micro level. Searle’s examples are solidity and liquidity. The solidity of the table on which I am writing is explained by the lattice structure of the molecules of which the table is composed. Similarly, the liquidity of water in the glass in front of me is explained by the nature of the interactions between H2O molecules. Indeed, in the case of solidity and liquidity, it is appropriate to say that solidity and liquidity are identical with the relevant micro-structures.
Thus, to take the example of solidity, the table in front of me is solid in the ordinary sense that it is rigid, it resists pressure, it supports books, it is not easily penetrable by most other objects such as other tables, and so on. Such is the commonsense notion of solidity. And in a scientific vein one can define solidity as whatever micro-structure causes these gross observable features. So one can then say either that solidity just is the lattice structure of the system of molecules and that solidity so defined causes, for example, resistance to touch and pressure.
Or one can say that solidity consists of such high level features as rigidity and resistance to touch and pressure and that it is caused by the behaviour of elements at the micro-level.79
When we say that solidity just is the lattice structure of the system of molecules, we are claiming that causal reductionism leads to property ontological reductionism wherein one property can be shown to consist of nothing but another property.80 Such a reduction is possible because we are able to picture the relation between solidity and the lattice structure of molecules.81 Thus, one object’s solidity vis-à-vis another can be pictured as the inability of the latter to break apart the proper parts of the former which are held together by causal forces. What is important about this model of reductionism for our present purposes is that solidity and liquidity are features of whole objects which are composed of spatially related proper parts. One would expect, then, that if the mental–physical supervenience relation is a form of causal reductionism which is elucidated by the solidity–liquidity model, the mental could be ontologically reduced to the physical because it could be pictured in terms of the spatial extension of an object and the relations of its proper parts. Searle himself, however, recognizes that the mind does not seem to be a spatial object with extension: We are not aware in conscious experience of . . . the dimensions of our conscious experience . . . . Although we experience objects and events as both spatially extended and of temporal duration, our consciousness itself is not experienced as spatial, though it is experienced as temporally extended.82
In light of the fact that the mind does not seem to be spatially extended, we are unable to picture the mind–brain relation in terms of the part–whole relation. Therefore, in the case of the mind–brain supervenience relation, causal reductionism does not lead to ontological reduction. It is important to stress, however, that the inability to picture the mind–brain relation in part–whole spatial terms is not simply a temporary difficulty which we may someday overcome. We cannot overcome it because of the logical impossibility of explaining what does not seem to be made up of spatial parts in terms of such parts. Colin McGinn summarizes this impossibility in the following
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way:
It is precisely [spatially defined properties] that seem inherently incapable of resolving the mind–brain problem: we cannot link consciousness to the brain in virtue of spatial properties of the brain. . . . [C]onsciousness defies explanation in such terms. Consciousness does not seem made up out of smaller spatial processes . . . . Our faculties bias us towards understanding matter in motion, but it is precisely this kind of understanding that is inapplicable to the mind–body problem.83
In light of the conceptual barriers which prevent getting a property ontological reduction of the mental in terms of the physical, we are left in Searle’s terms with a causal reduction of the mental to the physical, which is really no more than saying that the explanatory nature of the determinism in the supervenience relation will forever remain an inexplicable, brute fact. As Chalmer’s states, “there is an explanatory gap between the physical level and conscious experience. If this is right, the fact that consciousness accompanies a given physical process is a further fact, not explainable simply by telling the story about the physical facts. In a sense, the accompaniment must be taken as brute.”84
In spite of acknowledging that the nature of the determinative relationship between the physical and the mental is in principle explicable on their own view, supervenience naturalists continue to maintain that dualism is not a viable philosophical position. The following are representative comments from Kim: You want to raise your arm, and your arm goes up. Presumably, nerve impulses reaching appropriate muscles in your arm made those muscles contract, and that’s how the arm went up. And these nerve signals presumably originated in the activation of certain neurons in your brain. What caused those neurons to fire?
We now have a quite detailed understanding of the process that leads to the firing of a neuron, in terms of complex electrochemical processes involving ions in the fluid inside and outside a neuron, differences in voltage across cell membranes, and so forth. All in all we seem to have a pretty good picture of the processes at this microlevel on the basis of the known laws of physics, chemistry, and biology.
If the immaterial mind is going to cause a neuron to emit a signal (or prevent it from doing so), it must somehow intervene in these electrochemical processes.
But how could that happen? At the very interface between the mental and the physical where direct and unmediated mind–body interaction takes place, the nonphysical mind must somehow influence the state of some molecules, perhaps by electrically charging them or nudging them this way or that way. Is this really
conceivable? Surely the working neuroscientist does not believe that to have a complete understanding of these complex processes she needs to include in her account the workings of immaterial souls and how they influence the molecular processes involved. . . . Even if the idea of a soul’s influencing the motion of a molecule . . . were coherent, the postulation of such a causal agent would seem neither necessary nor helpful in understanding why and how our limbs move.85
In this passage, Kim once again questions the possibility that an immaterial mind might causally influence the physical world. For the sake of discussion only, he concedes that this is possible, but then adds that the inclusion of such a causal agent is neither necessary nor helpful to a neuroscientist who is trying to understand why, for example, your limb moves. According to Kim, the neuroscientist does not need to include reference to an immaterial soul to have a complete understanding of the molecular processes (their movements) involved in raising your arm.
Contrary to what Kim’s comments suggest, it is intuitively plausible to think that the neuroscientist, like anyone else (i.e. qua ordinary human being), does need to include reference to your reason (purpose) for raising your arm and the fact that you, a soul, caused it to move (rise) in order to have a complete explanation of why it moved as it did. Knowing only the neural (physical) story is not enough for such an explanation.86 Kim is also mistaken in suggesting that the neuroscientist, qua scientist, is seeking a complete understanding of your arm’s movement. What the neuroscientist seeks, qua scientist, is a knowledge of how micro- physical entities of various kinds relate causally to each other in virtue of their causal powers and liabilities.
Thus, as Chalmers points out:
Basic particles . . . are largely characterized in terms of their propensity to interact with other particles. Their mass and charge is specified, to be sure, but all that a specification of mass ultimately comes to is a propensity to be accelerated in certain ways by forces, and so on. . . . Reference to the proton is fixed as the thing that causes interactions of a certain kind, that combines in certain ways with other entities, and so on . . . .87
The limitation of the neuroscientist’s investigation to causal relations among microphysical entities has two important implications for dualism and free will. First, from the fact that the the neuorscientist seeks to acquire knowledge about various microphysical entities and their forces (exercised powers) to move other micro-physical entities in various ways, it does not follow that he is required to presuppose the non-existence of souls which also have the power to move those other micro-physical entities in those ways. If a scientist makes such an assumption, he is not making it qua
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scientist but qua naturalist.
Second, the propensities (liabilities) of micro-physical entities to be moved in certain ways about which the neuroscientist seeks to learn are inherently conditional in nature. What Chalmer’s describes as a propensity of a particle to be moved is a liability of it to be moved which is such that if it is actualized by an exercised power of another entity (whether physical or non-physical), it will be necessitated to move in a certain way. There is nothing, however, in the nature of that liability of that particle which requires that it be actualized in accordance with physical deterministic laws such that the physical world is closed to causal influence by non-physical entities. Hence, the actualization of that liability by a soul on an occasion when it makes an undetermined choice for a reason is not excluded by a scientific study of that liability. And it is precisely on those occasions when arm movements occur for purposes that a neuroscientist will reasonably believe that the originative micro-physical movements are traceable to the causal activity of a soul.
IV
Naturalists such as Searle and Kim believe that libertarian freedom implies the truth of dualism. Are they correct? Like them, I am inclined to think that it does, though it has been argued that it does not. In an effort to avoid dualism and yet not be a naturalist, some have tried to develop a via media in the form of property emergentism.
On such a view, when appropriate basal conditions obtain, higher-level, irreducible mental properties of an agent emerge which take on lives of their own. Thus, an emergentist who is also a libertarian might maintain that the power to choose is an emergent property which emerges along with the emergent causal power to produce movements in basal objects such that when an agent exercises his emergent power to choose for a purpose, he also exercises his emergent causal power to produce events in or involving the relevant basal objects. O’Connor has described such an emergentist view in terms of supervenience. On his account, an emergent property P
is an emergent causal property (power) of a mereologically complex object O iff: (1) P supervenes on properties of the parts of O; (2) P is not had by any of the object’s parts; (3) P is distinct from any structural property of O (A property, Q, is structural iff proper parts of particulars having Q have some property or properties not identical with Q, and this state of affairs is, in part at least, constitutive of the state of affairs of the particular’s having Q. In terms of Searle’s ontological reducibility, solidity and liquidity are structural properties.); and (4) P has direct (‘downward’) determinative influence on the pattern of behavior
involving O’s parts.88
As O’Connor notes, there are ways to avoid acknowledging the existence of emergent properties. For example, one might posit the presence of additional and hitherto undetected micro-properties which manifest themselves in highly complex systems of certain kinds by giving rise to P in such a way that P is constituted by them (thus, P is a structural and not an emergent property). O’Connor responds to this proposal by saying that “the only motivation one could have for postulating a (rather elusive) micro-property is a very strong methodological principle to the effect that one is to avoid emergentist hypotheses at all costs, which by my lights is not a reasonable one.”89
Four points are relevant to keep in mind when evaluating the emergentist position. First, the emergentist view does not make any clearer than dualism how the mental and physical are related. For example, according to the emergentist, how a psychological property such as P emerges from the physical “will forever remain a mystery; we have no choice but to accept it as an unexplainable brute fact.”90
Moreover, once it has emerged, the direct downward determinative influence of P
(see condition (4)) will be no more intelligible than the causal activity of a soul on a physical particle.
Second, in the spirit of O’Connor’s emergentist response to the position that one can avoid emergentism by positing the existence of hitherto undetected micro-properties which are the structural components of the emergent property, it is plausible for the dualist to respond to the emergentist that the only motivation for postulating emergent properties is the very strong methodological principle that one is to avoid dualism at all costs.
Third, emergentism is incompatible with the conviction that teleological explanation is a deep form of explanation. That is, in so far as emergentism retains the dependency element of the supervenience thesis (see condition (1)), it is incompatible with the idea that purposes of agents are grounded in bedrock properties of bedrock entities of the world.
Finally, the emergentist view conflicts with, while the dualist position is supported by, the point made in Section III that the self seems to be simple in nature (i.e. the self seems to be an indivisible entity which is not comprised of proper parts). Our consciousness of ourselves is of entities which do not seem to be spatially extended in the sense of our having proper parts which occupy distinct regions of space. According to the emergentist, however, an object which exhibits an emergent property P is constituted by proper parts (see condition (2)) which, presumably, occupy distinct spatial regions . Hence, an emergentist account of free will cannot be easily reconciled with the experience of ourselves as simple entities.
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V
As soft naturalists, supervenience naturalists often point out that their form of naturalism is preferable to hard naturalist views because it preserves the reality of consciousness. For example, Chalmers describes eliminativist views about consciousness “as being in conflict with the manifest facts.”91 Searle claims that hard naturalist views are false by reductio ad absurdum because they entail that our ordinary conscious mental life does not exist.92 He adds that proponents of one such view, namely, functionalism, do not need refutation but help,93 and asks “[H]ow did we get into this mess?”94 According to his own diagnosis, the reason why hard naturalists put forth such absurd views is that they “have a terror of falling into Cartesian dualism.”95
Nevertheless, Searle and other supervenience naturalists are like hard naturalists to the extent that they are willing to deny the reality of a central element of our conscious life: choice or free will. Of them, it is appropriate to ask, ‘How did they get into this mess?’ As was seen in Section III, they get into this mess because they believe that free will implies dualism. Thus, someone like Searle endorses his supervenience naturalism because he, like the hard naturalists he chides, has a terror of falling into Cartesian dualism. I conclude, therefore, that in light of what naturalists themselves say it is plausible to believe that libertarian freedom is incompatible with the truth of naturalism because it implies the truth of dualism. Thus, if one is a libertarian, one cannot consistently be a naturalist.96
Notes
1 David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 1.
2 Ibid., 30f.
3 Ibid., 31, footnote 26. The emphasis is Papineau’s.
4 D. M. Armstrong, “Naturalism, Materialism and First Philosophy,” Philosophia 8 (1978): 261–
76.
5 Ibid., 261.
6 Ibid., 262.
7 Eliminativists in the philosophy of mind are hard naturalists.
8 David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 158–9.
9 Ibid., 124–9.
10 John Heil, The Nature of True Minds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 4–5. The emphasis is Heil’s.
11 “Naturalism is suspicious of C artesian dualism: The mind’s place is in, not adjunct to, nature.” Ibid., 11. Cf. Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism, 1, 27; and Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 124–5.
12 John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), Chapter Six.
13 If we let ‘N’ symbolize ‘Naturalism’, ‘Psy’ symbolize ‘Psychological’, ‘Spsy’ symbolize
‘Supervenience of Psychological’, ‘D’ symbolize ‘Dualism’, and ‘C’ symbolize ‘Choice’, the argument of Section III is as follows: (1) N→ (~Psy v Spsy) (i.e., naturalism implies either hard naturalism or soft naturalism), (2) (~Psy v Spsy)→ ~D, (3) ~D→ ~C. The libertarian asserts C and, therefore, ~N.
14 Carl Ginet, On Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 13f.
15 It is appropriate to point out that libertarians are not the only ones who discuss the issue of choice in terms of feeling. Non-libertarians do also. For example, Richard Double ( Metaphilosophy and Free Will [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], p. 42) asks about the reality of libertarian choice in the following terms: “How much evidential weight should we accord to our ‘feelings’ that we can choose otherwise than we do . . . ? . . . And how certain is it that we actually feel the way we say we do when we claim that our introspective awareness shows that we feel that we are able to choose otherwise . . . ?” The emphasis is Double’s.
16 Wilfrid Sellars (“Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in Metaphysics, ed. by Ronald C. Hoy and L. Nathan Oaklander [Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1991], 509) has pointed out “the mistake of supposing that in self-awareness conceptual thinking presents itself to us in a qualitative guise.” Jaegwon Kim ( Philosophy of Mind [Boulder, Colo.:Westview Press, 1996, 14]) says the following about intentional or ‘contentful’ states of mind: “Do these mental states have a phenomenal, qualitative aspect? We do not normally associate a specific feel with beliefs, another specific feel with desires, and so on.” See also 158f. Finally, Zeno Vendler ( Res Cogitans [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972], 156) comments as follows: “For an asthmatic patient the feeling of his breathing is likely to be unpleasant or even painful; his opinion, on the other hand, if it is an opinion, that he is breathing, or that he is breathing painfully, is neither unpleasant nor painful. Moreover, whereas those feelings are felt in the chest and the throat of the patient, his thought that he is breathing, or that he is in pain, is not felt in any part of the body. Thoughts, in fact, are not
‘felt’ or ‘experienced’ at all.”
17 Harry Frankfurt, “The Problem of Action,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978): 157.
Frankfurt makes this epistemological point with respect to bodily actions but it is equally, if not more, relevant for mental actions.
18 Myles Brand ( Intending and Acting [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984], 17–23) and Irving Thalberg (“Do Our Intentions Cause Our Intentional Actions?,” American Philosophical Quarterly 21 [1984]: 249–60) are examples of causal theorists who do this.
19 Double, Metaphilosophy and Free Will, 58.
20 Ibid.
21 “It is the contents of beliefs and desires (and not that she has the beliefs and desires) which serve as an agent’s reasons for acting, while it is by being the content of beliefs and desires that these contents manage to serve as an agent’s reasons.” Geoffrey Sayre-McC ord,
“Explanations and Reasons,” Philosophical Perspectives 3 (1989): 140. The emphases are Sayre-McCord’s. He does not, however, endorse an indeterministic, non-causal account of choice.
22 Thomas Nagel, a non-libertarian, says the following about a free action: “A free action should not be determined by antecedent conditions, and should be fully explained only intentionally, in terms of justifying reasons and purposes” ( The View from Nowhere [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], 115). Robert Kane, who is a libertarian, goes further and maintains that “many libertarians (and their critics) have [actually] held that incompatibilist free choices or actions cannot be given causal explanations of any kinds. . . .” ( The Significance of Free Will [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 174). Neither Nagel nor Kane gives the names of any such libertarians, and I think for good reason: most libertarians have not defended a non-causal understanding of free will. Instead, they have believed that it is necessary to include causation in an adequate account of free will because (I think) they have
Naturalism and libertarian agency 183
wrongly been persuaded that a non-causal account is flawed. Kane, himself, is such a causal libertarian.
23 Richard Taylor, Metaphysics, third edition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983), 45.
24 Ibid., 45.
25 Ibid., 48. Taylor defends the reality of teleological explanation and its irreducibility to causal explanation in his Action and Purpose (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1980), especially Chapter 10.
26 Ibid., 116.
27 Ibid., 107–11.
28 Ibid., 174.
29 Ibid., 136, 139, 194.
30 Ibid., 140, 146.
31 Ibid., 136, 139, 194.
32 I have doubts about the reality of probabilistic causation (see the third of the following responses to Kane), but for the purpose of this objection I will concede its reality.
33 Ibid., 141. The emphasis is Kane’s. I say Kane’s view on this issue “seems” to be what I have stated because nowhere, as best as I can ascertain, does he explicitly explain, as opposed to merely claim, why a non-causal view of choice is inadequate.
34 Ibid., 176–7.
35 Ibid., 136. “There is . . . a teleological element involved in choosing for reasons.”
36 Randolph Clarke, “On the Possibility of Rational Free Action,” Philosophical Studies 88 (1997): 45.
37 Ibid., 55, endnote 16.
38 Randolph Clarke, “Agent Causation and Event Causation in the Production of Free Action,”
Philosophical Topics 24 (1996): 36.
39 Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 9, 11, 32, and 87.
40 For a further discusson of this issue, see my “Libertarian Choice,” Faith and Philosophy 14
(1997): 199ff.
41 Timothy O’Connor, “Agent Causation,” in Agents, Causes, & Events, ed. by Timothy O’Connor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 173–200.
42 Ibid., 191.
43 Ginet, On Action, Chapter 6.
44 Ibid., 145–6.
45 In written correspondence, Ginet has expressed his preference to talk in terms of the act of adopting an intention.
46 In further written correspondence, Ginet has conceded that the description ‘We have an intention formed for a reason, period’ is perhaps correct.
47 Cf. Kim, Philosophy of Mind, 9–13, 221ff.
48 “First of all, the phenomenon of consciousness arises on the macroscopic level. That is, it is only highly organized physical systems which exhibit mentality.” Joseph Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (1983): 358.
49 Ibid., 10.
50 Strictly speaking, it should be noted that supervenience itself is not an asymmetrical relation, but a non-symmetrical, covariance relation which must be supplemented by a naturalistic affirmation of or commitment to the ontological priority of the physical in order to achieve the desired asymmetry. See Kim, Ibid., 10–11; Stewart Goetz, “Dualism, C ausation, and Supervenience,” Faith and Philosophy 11 (1994): 92–108; and Heil, The Nature of True Minds, 98–102. For the sake of discussion, however, I treat supervenience as if it were itself an
asymmetrical relation.
51 Kim, Philosophy of Mind, 149.
52 “There is a different sort of determinism associated with naturalism that, while very much alive today, has not found its way into discussions of human freedom. It is a sort of determinism according to which the microphysical world determines the distribution of the higher level properties of material beings, adumbrated in various popular supervenience theses,” J. A. Cover and John O’Leary-Hawthorne, “Free Agency and Materialism,” in Faith, Freedom, and Rationality, ed. by Jeff Jordan and Daniel Howard-Snyder (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 47.
53 A hard naturalist who claims that libertarianism is an invention of philosophers is Daniel Dennett. See his Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1984). His approach to dealing with difficult metaphysical issues in the philosophy of mind is just to deny that any reasonable person believes what creates the problem, which in this case is libertarian free will.
54 Searle, Minds, Brains and Science, 87–8.
55 Ibid., 93.
56 John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 124–5.
57 Searle, Minds, Brains and Science, 92. The emphases are mine. Searle recognizes the implications of supervenience naturalism for free will while others do not notice it or ignore it. For example, Kim ( Philosophy of Mind, p. 12.) states that “very few of us would think that there can be mental events . . . that float free . . . of physical processes.” Yet, he is aware that supervenience naturalism seems to imply that the mental is epiphenomenal and that “Few philosophers have been self-professed epiphenomenalists” (ibid., 129). But why are so many philosophers reluctant to endorse epiphenomenalism? The most plausible answer is precisely that at least on some occasions (i.e., when we choose) the mental does seem to float free from the physical and determines what happens in it.
58 John Searle, “The Mystery of Consciousness,” The New York Review of Books, November 2, 1995, 60: “Look around you at the objects in your vicinity and think of the causal explanation of the fact that the table exerts pressure on the rug. This is explained by the force of gravity, but gravity is not an event. Or think of the solidity of the table. It is explained causally by the behavior of the molecules of which the table is composed. But the solidity of the table is not an extra event, it is just a feature of the table. Such examples of non-event causation give us appropriate models for understanding the relation between my present state of consciousness and the underlying neurobiological processes that cause it.” Contrary to what Searle asserts, (the force of) gravity is a continuous event (or a continuous series of events).
Moreover, as I will have need to point out again in a moment, not only is the solidity of the table not an extra event, but also it is not an extra feature of the table. It is identical with the structure of the molecules which comprise the table.
59 Kim, Philosophy of Mind, 149–50. See also his “Mental Causation in Searle’s Biological Naturalism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (1995): 194.
60 Cf. Heil, The Nature of True Mind, 102. The emphases are Heil’s.
61 Thus, while classical naturalism was incompatible with libertarianism because of its deterministic nature, it was more fundamentally incompatible with libertarianism because of its exclusion of teleological explanation. J. P. Moreland recognizes naturalism’s exclusion of teleology in his forthcoming “Naturalism and Libertarian Agency,” Philosophy and Theology 10 (1997): 351–81.
62 Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 13.
63 Kim, Philosophy of Mind, 232–3. See also “The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 63 (1989):47: “Is the abandonment of the
Naturalism and libertarian agency 185
causal closure of the physical domain an option for the materialist? I think not: to reject the closure principle is to embrace irreducible nonphysical causes of physical phenomena. It would be a retrogression to Cartesian interactionist dualism, something that is definitive of the denial of materialism.” The emphasis is Kim’s.
64 The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. I, trans. and ed. by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T.
Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 196.
65 Nagel, The View from Nowhere, 43. Cf. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), Part Three.
66 David Braine, The Human Person (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 315.
67 Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 91.
68 Ibid.
69 Jaegwon Kim, “Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, volume IX, edited by Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr. and Howard Wettstein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 266.
70 Ibid.
71 Kim, Philosophy of Mind, 4.
72 For a discussion of this alternative, see Philip L. Quinn’s, “Tiny Selves: Chisholm on the Simplicity of the Soul,” in The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (La Salle, Il: Opern Court, 1997), 55–71.
73 Kim, Philosophy of Mind, 131.
74 Goetz, “Dualism, Causation, and Supervenience,” 99–105.
75 Kim, Philosophy of Mind, 4.
76 Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 89–102.
77 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 170.
78 Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 102.
79 Searle, Minds, Brains and Science, 21–2.
80 Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 113, 115.
81 Ibid., 102.
82 Ibid., 105, 127. Levine (“Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap”) argues that the mind/body problem is resistant to explanation in terms of magnitudes and mechanisms.
While ‘Heat is molecular motion’ is intelligible because heat can be explained as motions of molecular extended parts of an object which can causally produce motions in parts of other objects, ‘Pain is the firing of C-fibers’ is unintelligible because pain is a simple quale which cannot be explained in terms of an organized system of parts.
83 Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 11–12, and 18, footnote 21. Chalmer’s points out the irrelevance of Searle’s solidity–liquidity model for understanding how consciousness is related to the physical: “It seems clear that this is a false analogy, however. Given all the microphysical facts about a particular batch of H2O, it is logically impossible that those facts could hold without liquidity being instantiated. . . . The mircrophysical features do not cause liquidity; they constitute it. This is entirely different from what is going on in the case of consciousness, so the analogy fails. Consciousness is ontologically novel in a much more significant way than liquidity” ( The Conscious Mind, 130).
The emphases are Chalmer’s.
Galen Strawson ( Mental Reality [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994]) recognizes the bruteness or “That’s just how things are” (pp. 83–4) nature of the mind–brain or experience–
non-experience relation, and says that he would “ban the word ‘supervenience.’ It has seemed to promise much, . . . but it has been of no real use at all,” “Replies to Noam Chomsky, Pierre Jacob, Michael Smith, and Paul Snowdon,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58
(1998): 481, footnote 49. He espouses, however, a materialist’s faith that some future physics
about which we are presently ignorant will provide an account or theoretical understanding of how experience (what-it’s-likeness) is realized in the brain ( Mental Reality, 81 ; 84–93).
Given the simplicity (lack of part–whole structure) of experience, it is impossible to understand how any future physics will be able to do what Strawson hopes it will do. Why not accept dualism? Because it “faces well-known problems” (ibid., 43). Not surprisingly, Strawson denies the reality of libertarian free will. See his Freedom and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
84 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 107. The emphases are Chalmer’s.
85 Kim, Philosophy of Mind, 131–2.
86 One is reminded, here, of the famous passage from Plato’s Phaedo 98c-99a, where Socrates criticizes Anaxagoras for claiming that mind causes all things and then adducing only physical causes: “It seemed to me that he was just about as inconsistent as if someone were to say, The cause of everything that Socrates does is mind – and then, in trying to account for my several actions, said first that the reason why I am lying here now is that my body is composed of bones and sinews, and that the bones are rigid and separated at the joints, but the sinews are capable of contraction and relaxation, and form an envelope for the bones with the help of the flesh and skin, the latter holding all together, and since the bones move freely in their joints the sinews by relaxing and contracting enable me somehow to bend my limbs, and that is the cause of my sitting here in a bent position. Or again, if he tried to account in the same way for my conversing with you, adducing causes such as sound and air and hearing and a thousand others, and never troubled to mention the real reasons, which are that since Athens has thought it better to condemn me, therefore I for my part have thought it better to sit here, and more right to stay and submit to whatever penalty she orders.
Because, by dog, I fancy that these sinews and bones would have been in the neighborhood of Megara or Boeotia long ago – impelled by a conviction of what is best! – if I did not think that it was more right and honorable to submit to whatever penalty my country orders rather than take to my heels and run away.”
87 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 153.
88 Timothy O’Connor, “Emergent Properties,” American Philosophical Quarterly 31 (1994): 93–6.
89 Ibid., 99.
90 Kim, Philosophy of Mind, 229.
91 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 164.
92 Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 8.
93 Ibid., 9.
94 John Searle, “Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion, and Cognitive Science,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (1990): 585.
95 Ibid., 13.
96 I want to thank J.P. Moreland for reading an earlier draft of this paper and making helpful comments.
Value theory
John E. Hare
The moral gap
The project of this essay is to point to a certain kind of incoherence in the attempt to reconcile morality with naturalism, and then to discuss what we need if we are going to avoid this incoherence.1 I will argue that morality, as it has been conceived in modern Western philosophy, has a three-part structure, which I will call the structure of the moral gap.2 I will focus on Kant, because I think he is the greatest and most influential moral philosopher of the modern period. I will not be talking about his work outside moral philosophy. In the Kantian structure, there is, first, the moral demand. I will stress the demand for impartiality, which is the demand to give oneself the same weight in moral thinking that one gives to any other human being. There are, second, our natural capacities which are unequal to the moral demand. They are unequal because they give us the tendency to partiality, the tendency to give ourselves more weight than morality allows. For example, they give us the tendency to desire power and prestige, both of which require (if we are to have them) that others do not have them or have them less than we do. The third part of this structure is a possible holy being, whose functioning is not limited in the way ours is, and who is seen as the source of the moral demand. Thus Kant says we should recognize our duties as God’s commands.3
This structure of the moral gap presents a certain problem, one which Kant saw in terms of “ought” and “can.” If it is the case that we ought to do something, it must be the case that we can do it. If, therefore, morality is too hard for us, it is not something we ought to be practicing. But Kant is quite certain that we are under the moral demand. He therefore makes use of the Western theological tradition, which relates the three parts of the moral gap structure this way: it says that the third part of the structure (the possible holy being) intervenes to change the second part of the structure (our natural capacities) so that they become adequate to the first part of the structure (the moral demand).
The incoherence in the attempt to reconcile morality with naturalism is the following. If contemporary moral philosophers who have embraced naturalism want
John E. Hare
to keep the structure of the moral gap, they will have to find a substitute for Kant’s (and the tradition’s) appeal to divine assistance in dealing with the problem about “ought”
and “can.” I shall argue that they have not found a substitute, and therefore that they are left with the incoherence of saying that we are under a demand which we are unable to meet. The essay will have three sections. In the first, I describe in more detail what the moral gap picture is like, taking it one part at a time. In the second, I discuss three strategies to be found in contemporary moral philosophy for dealing with the moral gap without God. Finally, in the third section, I return to the tradition’s solution to the problem, and discuss what resources it has for making possible what Kant calls
“moral faith.”
The moral demand
What I want to do first is to go back to the structure of the moral gap, and describe its three parts more slowly. The first part is the moral demand, in particular the demand of impartiality. Suppose we label as the ‘maxim’ of an action the agent’s prescription of that action together with her actual reason for the action (as opposed to the reason she gives for it). Then we can express the moral demand in two ways. First, the maxim of an action, if it is to be morally permissible, must be able to be willed by the agent as a universal law.4 The connection with impartiality is as follows. The agent must be willing to eliminate from the maxim of her action any singular term (most importantly, any reference to herself). She has to be willing to prescribe that the same thing should be done by any agent to any recipient in any situation like the present one in the morally relevant respects. For example, she has to be willing that the same thing should be done to her if the present roles in the situation were reversed. The moral demand is, in this form, a version of the golden rule; but it has the additional feature of connecting with the nature of reason (which always looks for universal law, whether in science or in morality). The second way of expressing the demand requires that the agent must treat humanity, whether in her own person or the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means.5 This means that the agent has to share as far as possible the purposes of all those affected by her action, and the extent of the possibility here is the extent of the moral law. That is, she has to share all the morally permissible purposes of those affected by her action, and this means she has to make them her purposes. She may not treat a waiter, for example, merely as a means to get her food from the kitchen to her table. Again, the connection with impartiality is that she has to be impartial between all the parties involved including herself. She must not ignore her own desires, but by the same token she must give equal consideration to the morally permissible desires of all those affected (and those purposes will then become her own). If she does this, she will be treating those people as having the same moral dignity as she has herself.
There is a possibility here that I am only going to mention and not discuss. This is
the possibility that the two expressions of the moral demand which I have described might diverge, under one very natural interpretation of the second. This divergence does not occur in Kant himself, since on his view it is other people only as universal-law-givers who deserve treatment with equal dignity. But if we relax this requirement, we might suppose that we could treat another person as an end in herself, even if the relation between us was grounded not in our common rationality but in, for example, blood. A mother could make her son’s morally permissible purposes her own, without extending this generosity to anyone else. Would she then be treating her son as an end in himself, in line with the second formula? Not in Kant’s view, and not if we want to require the eliminability of singular reference.6 But this is a large question, which I will not need to go into further. I think a large part of morality does require this eliminability; and if there is some part of morality that does not require it, then there will be a tension within morality which morality itself may not be able to resolve.
The reading of the moral demand I have given is not peculiar to Kant. It lies at the foundation of the moral systems of his successors, though these systems differ in various ways. Impartiality is expressed by the utilitarians as the requirement that each person count as one, and no person as more than one. Utilitarianism is often seen as a competitor to Kant, but Mill himself is clear that the formula of universal law is unexceptionable, indeed admirable, from a utilitarian point of view. It is only when Kant goes on to deduce actual duties of morality that Mill finds himself in disagreement.7 This feature of the moral demand can be found in R. M. Hare’s account of universalizability, in Rawls’s account of the veil of ignorance, and in Habermas’s account of the autonomous will.8 These various systems differ from each other in manifold ways. But in this way they agree.
Our natural capacities
The second part of the structure of the moral gap is our natural capacities, which are not adequate to the moral demand. Kant puts this point in terms of our original predisposition to good, which is overlaid by a propensity to evil.9 Here he recapitulates the traditional structure of Christian doctrine, which teaches an original creation of good, succeeded by a fall into evil. The propensity to evil, Kant says, is both innate and imputable to us, just as original sin is both of these in Christian doctrine. It is not the desire for our own happiness that Kant is condemning here. He thinks that creatures of need, like ourselves, are supposed to want to be happy. What is wrong is the ordering of happiness above duty. This is what he calls “the evil maxim,” which he contrasts with “the good maxim,” which reverses this priority, and tells the agent only to do what is conducive to his happiness if this is consistent with his duty. Sometimes Kant is made to sound unduly rigorous on this point, as though he thought there was something wrong with wanting to be happy. But it is the elevation of the “dear self” and its happiness above duty that he finally condemns, although his treatment of this in
John E. Hare
the Groundwork is not completely clear. We are born, Kant thinks, under the evil maxim, and this radical evil is both innate and imputable to us.
On this matter, Kant’s successors have not always followed him. The nineteenth-century utilitarians, in particular, shared the general belief of their contemporaries in humanity’s ability to improve itself.10 To give one example, a historian in 1908 says,
“Indeed I think the most remarkable thing about our civilization and the thought of the world to-day, is the increase in the spirit of brotherliness and of unity.”11 John Stuart Mill puts his faith in education and what he calls “opinion.” He says that the principle of utility prescribes
that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole; .
. . So that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being’s sentient existence.12
This optimism did not survive the carnage of the twentieth century. It is hard to see that education and opinion have had the effect Mill was hoping for.
Some of the more recent utilitarians have been less sanguine, and I will take R. M.
Hare again as an example. The highest level of moral thinking, in his system, is what he calls “critical thinking,” and it involves knowing the preferences of all the parties affected by a decision and being completely impartial between them. He ascribes this kind of thinking to an imagined archangel, and distinguishes it from “intuitive thinking” which he ascribes to an imagined prole. He then says: The critical thinking of a perfect moral thinker manifests this full representation and identification. Archangels can do it, and of course God. We human beings are not gifted with so much sensitivity or sympathy, and for that reason have to do for the most part with intuitive thinking; but we have to try, if we are to do the critical thinking which would validate our intuitions.13
This means that critical thinking is both something we ought to do, in order to validate our intuitions, and something which we do not have the sensitivity and sympathy to do as we should. This is the structure of the moral gap.
I will return shortly to the suggestions that we can deal with the moral gap by exaggerating our capacities to meet the moral demand, or by relaxing the demand to
fit our capacities. At the moment my point is just that the picture of the moral gap fits the experience of the moral life. Neither of these two suggestions will satisfy us in the end.
The possible holy being
The third part of the moral gap structure is the possible holy being. In Kant, as I have said, this being is God. It is striking, however, that even moral philosophers who have not retained belief in a supernatural God, have retained the formal place of this possible holy being in their moral theories. This can be done either by addition to our human capacities, as in R. M. Hare’s archangel, or by subtraction, as in Rawls’s veil of ignorance. These two theories differ in many ways, but they are alike in this: the authoritative moral prescription is given by someone who is not in the usual human situation. This is something that requires explanation. Why should not morality be seen as a paradigmaticaly human institution? Nietzsche already had this thought, and made the prediction that guilt (which arises from the recognition of the gap) would decline along with the Christian God. He said, “there is no small probability that with the irresistible decline of faith in the Christian God there is now also a considerable decline in mankind’s feeling of guilt.”14 It is true that some contemporary moral philosophers have conceded Nietzsche’s connection between the gap picture and traditional religion, and have accordingly urged us to reject the gap picture.15 But if this is the price for rejecting traditional religion, I think the price is too high. If the moral gap picture is right, we have to make the following choice: either we must accept the traditional religious picture of divine assistance or we must find a successful substitute for it.16
I do not mean to imply by anything I have said that the picture of the moral gap is unique to Christianity. It can be found in the other great monotheistic religions. It can also be found in Aristotle. He tells us that the best life would be superior to the human level, but that we ought not to follow the proverb-writers, and “think human, since you are human,” or “think mortal, since you are mortal”; rather, as far as we can, we ought to be immortal.17 I believe it can also be found outside Western thought. I am not an expert in Chinese philosophy, but there seems to be a similar picture to be found there. When I was recently teaching in China, I was referred to the thought of Chu Hsi.
He uses the picture of a pearl (our natural goodness) in muddy water, and seems to have held that this nature “as it is found actually inherent in the physical endowment of an individual, . . . always strives for the ideal, but always falls short of it and cannot attain it.”18 Kant might ask the question, “If our predisposition to goodness (the pearl) is obscured by distortive desires and thoughts (the muddy water), how can we see and will clearly enough to correct them?” If this is not a picture of the moral gap, it certainly suggests this picture at first reading.
Why should we accept the principle that “ought” implies “can”? It would be one
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way to disarm the problem of the moral gap to deny this principle. But the principle seems to be embedded in much of our moral practice. In the education of children, we recognize that we should not hold them accountable to standards which they are unable to meet. A child should not be blamed for knocking over her milk, if she has not yet developed the motor skills for the fine control of her limbs. It is one of the hardest tasks for teachers to make what they demand of their students fit their students’ capacities. But though this is hard, we think the teachers have failed seriously if they do not do this.
It might be objected that Christian doctrine is guilty of just such a failure.
Augustine says,”God bids us do what we cannot, that we may know what we ought to seek from him.”19 Luther uses the analogy of a parent teaching his child to walk. The parent tells the child to walk to him, and the child tries and falls over. Why does the parent ask? Because he wants the child to reach out for the parent’s hands which are held out to help him.20 In the same way, Luther says, God gives us his law in order that we might know that we are unable to live in a way that pleases God unless we call on God for assistance. The point is that the doctrine here does not contradict the principle that “ought” implies “can.” This is because the principle does not state that
“ought” implies “can by our own devices.” What we are capable of (our capacities) depends on what assistance is available.21
Three secular strategies
The next section of this essay is a brief description of three ways that can be found in contemporary moral philosophy for dealing with the moral gap without invoking divine assistance. I do not think that these strategies work.22 My purpose here is merely to give an indication in outline of what the alternatives are to the view I am presenting.
Puffing up the capacity
The first strategy is to deny the gap by pretending that our natural capacities are after all equal to the moral demand. I call this strategy “puffing up the capacity.” I have already mentioned one variant of this strategy, which can be found in nineteenth-century utilitarianism. For Mill, there is a defect in our education and in “opinion”
that prevents us living up to the utilitarian principle, and these defects can be remedied. I want now to describe some contemporary utilitarians who make much the same point. Shelly Kagan, in The Limits of Morality, argues that if all our beliefs were fully vivid, including especially our beliefs about the interests of others, we would tend to conform to the impartial standard that utilitarian morality requires.23 Suppose, for example, that I am purchasing a ticket for a movie which I know in advance will not be of high aesthetic or moral character. It may occur to me that the money I am about to
spend could keep someone currently starving alive for about a week. In utilitarian (and also in Kantian terms), I have to ask whether I could continue to will the spending of this money this way if I did not know whether I was going to be the movie-consumer, or the man dying of starvation. There are many complications in considering this sort of case, and I have written about them elsewhere.24 Utilitarianism can justify some non-essential spending on myself even in the face of this thought experiment. But most people in the affluent parts of the world in fact habitually make expenditures which are unjustified according to the utilitarian principle. Kagan’s claim, then, is that if our beliefs about those who are starving were fully vivid, we would tend not to make those expenditures. I want to claim that he is wrong about this, and that his mistake arises from failing to take seriously what Kant calls “radical evil.”
Kagan’s argument is that we can draw on the analogy of prudence, or enlightened self-interest. Suppose I hate going to the dentist. The thought of the drill in my mouth this afternoon may weigh more with me than the thought of the long-term future health of my teeth, and I may decide to cancel the appointment. But I can be won over by the thought that if I were being prudent I would prefer the long-term health of my teeth. Abscesses are a lot worse than the drill. I can, by attending to this thought, increase my tendency to go to the dentist, and thus do what prudence dictates. So we can both concede that we are by nature biased in favor of the present and say that prudence is authoritative for us. For despite the bias, we can be motivated by the thought of what we would be motivated towards if we were prudent. We can make the counterfactual claim that if all our beliefs were vivid, including especially our beliefs about our long-term future interests, we would tend to do what prudence requires.
Kagan then draws the analogy. It is true, we can concede, that we are biased towards our own interests over those of others. But we can be motivated by the thought of what we would be motivated by if our beliefs about the interests of others were as vivid as our beliefs about our own interests. And he makes the corresponding counterfactual claim (as he needs to do). If all our beliefs were vivid, including especially our beliefs about the interests of others, we would tend to conform to the impartial standpoint (to what the utilitarian principle requires). Evidence for this counterfactual claim is that when we do succeed in making the interests of others vivid, it does increase our tendency to give weight to them. Some relief organizations capitalize on this fact by linking donors with particular children in recipient countries, and send photographs and periodic reports on their progress. It is easier to give sacrificially when we are linked in this way.
Unfortunately the analogy between morality and prudence breaks down at the key point. Suppose, to modify one of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s examples, there are two brothers who both love chocolate, and one of them receives a chocolate bar as a gift.25
This example has the advantage that the chocolate-owner knows his brother well, and represents to himself quite vividly his brother’s interest in the chocolate. Suppose morality requires that he share it (but we leave open, because it is not relevant for
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present purposes, the question of whether justice in some strict sense requires it).
Suppose that the chocolate-owner knows that if he were committed to doing what is morally right, he would share it. Now we have to ask whether this knowledge gives him the tendency to share. This is not merely the question whether his tendency to share is increased, but whether that tendency becomes greater than half. I think the answer is that it all depends on whether or not he is already committed to morality. Some people are and some people are not, and some people are committed in some arenas and not in others. There are again many complexities here which I will not go into. My point is just that we can know perfectly well the harm we are doing to other people, and know that if we were committed to morality we would not do it, and then go ahead and do it anyway. Consider the bullying on the school playground at recess. Perhaps, the optimist may argue, it is only children who behave this way. But then we need to consider the refined torture which married couples can put each other through.
Knowing how much they are hurting each other can increase the tendency to do it. To return to the case of famine relief, I think that people can know that if they were to represent to themselves vividly the suffering of those who are starving, their tendency to give would be increased, and so they turn off the television when the pictures of starving children come on. This is because the claims of morality have, so to speak, already lost the battle.
Other recent utilitarians have adopted the approach of what is sometimes called the “objective list.” Thus James Griffin, in Well-Being, produces a list of the things that together make human life good.26 He aims here at what he calls a “common profile,”
and he calls the desire for these things “the natural structure of desire.” ‘Virtually all persons, when informed,” he says, “want to live autonomously, to have deep personal relations, to accomplish something with their lives, to enjoy themselves.” His list is completed by a fifth item, understanding, or knowing about oneself and one’s world.
He allows that individual differences between people can affect the degree to which and the manner in which a particular person can realize one of other of these values, but he claims that any normal person will conform to the common profile in spite of such differences. On Griffin’s moral theory, we can therefore decide what to do on the basis of maximizing the satisfaction of peoples’ informed desires (where “informed”
desires are those that conform to the natural structure of desire).
The first thing I want to note about this theory is that there are similar lists given by non-utilitarian theorists, for example by contemporary Thomists such as Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle and John Finnis.27 Grisez, for example, lists the various kinds of human good as self-evident objects of pursuit: self-integration, authenticity, justice and friendship, holiness, life, knowledge, and exercises of skill. These Thomist lists differ in various ways from Griffin’s, but I want to point to two. They include the relation to God as a basic human good, and they include communal goods and not merely deep personal relations. In both these ways, they reflect the Aristotelian and the Christian tradition. Griffin’s list is that of a secular individualist Westerner, and this
casts doubt on the claim that he has really captured the common human profile.
More important for present purposes, however, is that Griffin and the contemporary Thomists both miss out from their lists items such as power and prestige, which ought to belong there if the claim is to capture what ordinary people in fact aim at.28 These lists are too benign. The moral gap picture I have been presenting is one in which after the Fall we naturally aim at competitive goods, which are goods that we can only have if others do not have them or have less of them than we do. Kant says that human beings, as soon as they enter into each other’s company, are besieged by envy, the lust for power, greed, and the malignant inclinations bound up with these.29 The desire to control and dominate others may be at least as strong as the desire to understand oneself and one’s world. In fact the first desire often lies behind the motive power of the second. We want the knowledge in order to produce the means of control. Even the good we aim at is distorted by the evil.
Reducing the demand
The second main secular strategy for dealing with the moral gap without invoking divine assistance is the opposite of the first. I will deal with it more briefly. The first strategy aimed to bridge the gap by exaggerating our capacities so that they fit the moral demand. The second strategy is to diminish the demand so that it fits our natural capacities. The main example I shall give of such a strategy is from the feminist ethical theory which takes its origins from Carol Gilligan’s work on the ethic of care.
Gilligan herself does not so much reduce the demand as add to it. But Nel Noddings, in Caring, writes as follows, “I am not obliged to care for starving children in Africa, because there is no way for this caring to be completed in the other unless I abandon the caring to which I am obligated.”30 Caring is, for her, a rich relation, calling for “a displacement of interest from my own reality to the reality of the other,” and this is only possible for a moral agent within a comparatively small group of other people. I will call this view “extreme particularism,” because it holds that our obligations are confined within the special relations to those we can care for, in her sense. There are other versions of particularism, one of which I argue for myself, which hold that our obligations include, but are not confined to, those with whom we have special relations.31
If extreme particularism were right, this would indeed reduce the moral demand.
This is not because caring is easy. On Noddings’s account, the demand to care is a very high demand. But at least we are relieved of the obligation to those starving children in Africa (though she does say that we should maintain an internal state of readiness to try to care for whoever crosses our path). The special relations are more natural sources of self-sacrifice. I do not think, however, that extreme particularism can be right, and this for three reasons. First, it does not fit our ordinary usage of the moral terms or our ordinary moral practice. When famine or floods hit, there are many
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thousands of people in the richer nations who hear about it or see it on television, and give generously to people with whom they have no antecedent relations at all, and without even knowing who the recipients of their gifts are going to be.32 Second (though this in a way begs the question), if we were to adopt the extreme particularist view, the suffering in the world would increase. Unfortunately the truly desperate in the world cannot depend for their survival or nurture on those who have special relations to them. I say this begs the question because it assumes that it is a morally bad thing that the suffering of the world increases. It would be possible for an extreme particularist to deny this, on the grounds that what is morally bad is confined to what we have an obligation to do something about, and we have obligations only to those for whom we can care. Third, even the special relations like friendship and family need an impartial sense of justice if they are to function well. The people within these relations need to look at each other not merely as objects of special favor, but also as human beings deserving no more and no less than any other human beings. There is, so to speak, a base line of respect (the recognition of what Kant calls “dignity”) which special relations are often tempted to erase.33 Though it is a rich subject, I am not going to say anything more here about the relation between universal morality, which conforms to the first expression of the moral demand I started with, and the morality internal to special relations.
Finding a secular substitute
The third main strategy for dealing with the moral gap without invoking divine assistance is to leave the moral demand and our natural capacities where the moral gap picture says they are, and then find a substitute for divine assistance to bridge the gap. There are various proposals in contemporary moral philosophy which can be understood in terms of this strategy. I will discuss one, the appeal to evolution. But there are at least two others which a fuller discussion would cover. There is the appeal to rational choice theory (where this is seen as a kind of machinery operating on our choices, like an invisible hand) and the appeal to the forces of history (as in Marxist versions of Hegel).
It may seem strange to describe evolutionary ethics as looking for a substitute for divine assistance, since the workings of genetic mutation and natural selection would seem to belong to the category of our natural capacities. This would make evolutionary ethics a proposal that our capacities are in fact equal to the moral demand. But it is helpful to see evolution as a substitute for divine assistance, because it is proposed as operating beyond our conscious control. This gives us not a deus ex machina, but just a machina. Nevertheless, it is proposed as something external to the conscious life of practical agency, and as something which saves us from the otherwise tragic and irresoluble tension between duty and inclination. In fact some proponents of evolutionary ethics have been quite explicit about the idea that evolution functions
as a replacement for God in solving the problem of the moral gap. Thus Donald Campbell proposes an account of social evolution that gives us a solution to what he sees as a biological bias that humans have towards egoism. Social evolution, he says, counteracts this bias at the level of social system preaching, which produces the demand for altruism. Campbell’s idea is that this demand produces just enough countervailing pull to bring us to what he calls “the bio-social optimum,” roughly half-way between the biological optimum (which is egoistic) and absolute altruism.34 Here we have the recognition of the moral gap. Campbell himself is a naturalist, in the sense that he wants to do away with “a supernatural transcendent authority,” but he also recognizes the traditional function of the third part of the moral gap picture, the holy being who assists us. He therefore proposes that those who cannot any longer believe that there is such a being do a translation exercise; they should translate talk about a supernatural God into talk about something else that can function this way, such as our ecological niche.35 Those who can go on believing in the traditional picture should do so, he thinks, for this is socially beneficial. But this is not because, on Campbell’s view, this picture is true. It is a picture produced by processes mysterious to us, but analogous to biological evolution. He urges that the fact that we do not understand the process should not prevent our using its results, just as it is rational on evolutionary grounds to continue breathing air before one understands the role of oxygen in bodily metabolism.
There are some difficulties with this view. The first is with the analogy embodied in the notion of social evolution itself. For the analogy to work for explanation there would have to be something at the social level like heterogeneous variation, systematic selection, and retention and replication of the variation. I am a mere philosopher, and do not want to claim to know that there is no such thing. (I suspect that a burden of proof point is appropriate, however. In the absence of the kind of study that shows that this kind of explanation works, we should remain skeptical about its chances.) A second difficulty is that there is a curious kind of dishonesty in the account. Campbell’s kind of naturalist knows that giving the translation of theistic language in terms of a naturalistic scientific analysis will tend to diminish the effectiveness of the preachments in their original form. He can give it to carefully screened groups of his peers, but he cannot let it get out into the general public. The third difficulty is that the translation seems quite inadequate to do the job the original beliefs were supposed to do. The ecological niche is not a very plausible object for our worship, and there is a principled reason for this. In Campbell’s view the niche is not merely biological. It is something altered by our actions; it is what we have as a species done with what we have been given. Our niche now includes, for example, nuclear weapons.
But the object of worship, if it is to have the kind of countervailing effectiveness which Campbell wants it to have, must transcend our actions if it is to have authority over them.
One way for an evolutionary ethicist to respond to these criticisms is to drop the
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notion of social evolution. I will take one example of a contemporary philosopher who does this, namely Allan Gibbard in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. 36 Gibbard says that to think an act morally reprehensible is to accept norms that prescribe, for such a situation, guilt on the part of the agent and resentment (or anger) on the part of others. A moral judgment that an act is wrong is then the expression of the acceptance of such norms. We can use evolution, he suggests, but now straightforward biological evolution, to explain how it may be natural to accept the norms. We are probably biologically conditioned to anger (since it seems to be pervasive across cultures). But anger makes coordination, and hence the goods attainable only through coordination, more difficult. Since guilt leads to actions that mollify anger, such as apology and reparation, evolution gives us guilt in order to make those goods accessible.
There is a problem, however, which Gibbard recognizes, with saying simply that evolution gives us guilt. The problem is that guilt seems to be culturally specific. If an emotion is genetically determined, we can suppose that it is a physical state of the organism which Darwinian forces have selected because it stands behind a pattern of overt kinds of behavior. Perhaps anger is like this; but guilt is not. Gibbard says: Shame or something like it appears everywhere, and so does anger, but guilt seems culturally special. Many languages have no word for guilt, and so if the people who speak these languages do feel guilt they cannot say so. Yet if guilt and shame are distinct biological adaptations to the human condition, then they were widely present as human nature evolved, and they should appear distinctly in a wide range of present cultures.37
Since he is talking about the evolutionary time-scale, it is especially in the surviving hunter-gatherer societies that he would need to find guilt, and he does not. What is the difference between guilt and shame? Roughly, guilt is a response to the voluntary doing of wrong, and the consciousness of lack of proper motivation, whereas shame is a response to inadequacy or blemish in what one is, and the consciousness of lack of proper resources. Gibbard therefore has to say that guilt is a different kind of emotion from anger, one that is significantly a matter of peoples’ own conceptions, which will vary sharply from one culture to another.
What are the cultures which produce the sense of guilt? The moral gap picture suggests that we will find guilt in those cultures which also believe in a holy being who is without human moral limitations and is seen as the source of the moral demand.
This is just what we do find. This is also why Nietzsche could express the hope (in the passage already quoted) that the death of God in our culture would free us from the sense of guilt. But this connection makes a difficulty for those who want to use evolution as the ground explanation for the moral-gap kind of morality. We would
need an evolutionary account of why some cultures specialize in religious views of this kind. If we had such an account, we could add that there is a genetic programming “for broad abilities to pick up the emotional script one’s culture provides.” But without such an account, it does not seem that evolution can provide the required explanation.
Moral faith
In the third and final section of this essay, I want to return to the solution which Kant and the tradition offer to the problem of the moral gap. Invoking divine assistance avoids the incoherent position of putting ourselves under a demand we are unable to reach. This is the negative way to put the point. We can also say, positively, that we need to have moral faith of two kinds. We need to have the faith that we can be morally good, and we need to have the faith that being morally good is consistent with being happy.
I will link the discussion of the first of these to some general remarks about Kant’s relation to the traditional religion in which he was reared, and his relation to the Christian Bible.
Pure rationalism
Some interpreters have urged that Kant is a deist, in the sense that he does not accept special revelation, especially the authoritative revelation by God through the Christian Bible.38 I think it is better to take him, in his own term, as a “pure rationalist,”
which is to say that he accepts special revelation but does not think that this acceptance is necessary to rational religion.39 It is helpful to look at the prologue to the second edition of Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, where he suggests that we construe revelation in terms of two concentric circles. The historical revelation (to particular people at particular times, for example through the Bible) lies in the outer circle; the revelation to reason (which Kant takes not to be historical in this sense, but to be the same in all people at all times) lies in the inner circle. People in China, for example, who have never heard of Christianity, will still receive from God, on Kant’s view, this revelation to reason. Kant then has two projects. The first is to see if the contents of the outer circle are consistent with the contents of the inner. The second is to take the central items of the historical revelation, and see if they can be translated into the language of the inner circle when looked at in the light of the moral concepts. If I am right that he is a pure rationalist, we can expect him to say that the historical faith is consistent with the religion of pure reason, and we can expect him to demonstrate this by means of the translation project. But we can also expect him to deny that the historical faith is the only possible way to reach a saving faith. He thinks it is possible for God to decree salvation even though a person has lived outside the contingent
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geographical and historical reach of the Christian scriptures. He thinks that he himself, however, and his contemporaries in Christian Europe, are amongst those for whom the Christian scriptures have been the “vehicle” of a saving faith.
Despite being a pure rationalist, however, Kant also concedes that we may have to believe some item in the outer circle, even though we cannot make use of it with our reason in either its theoretical or its practical employment. This is most importantly the case when we are dealing with what he calls “Spener’s problem,” referring to the great Lutheran pietist, Philipp Jakob Spener. The problem is “how we can become other men and not merely better men (as if we were already good but only negligent about the degree of our goodness).”40 Kant agrees with Spener (and Luther) that human beings start out in bondage to radical evil. In Kant’s terms, as I said in the first section of this paper, humans are born with an innate and imputable tendency to prefer their own happiness to their duty. Since we live, he is certain, under the moral law which makes duty prior to happiness, it must be possible for a revolution of the will to take place in us, by which the immoral preference is reversed. Otherwise we would not be able to follow the moral law. But how can such a revolution take place? If the propensity to evil is radical, it is inextirpable by human powers, “since extirpation could occur only through good maxims, and cannot take place when the ultimate subjective ground of all maxims is postulated as corrupt.”41 This is Spener’s problem.
And Kant’s solution is also Spener’s; he appeals to divine assistance. It must be God who works in us to bring about the revolution of the will. This doctrine of divine grace is something Kant thinks we have to accept if we are to sustain the moral life, but he does not think he can translate the whole of what we need into the language of the inner circle. This makes Kant’s position unstable, and I will pursue the question of this tension one further step.
We see in Kant’s view about the revolution of the will one kind of moral faith, the faith that “Heaven will find the means to make up our deficiency.”42 Kant is here using the Christian doctrine of justification. God sees us as just, or righteous, or well-pleasing to him, “through a purely intellectual intuition.”43 In Kant’s doctrine, intellectual intuition is productive. God does not passively receive what he sees; he makes it. In Lutheran terms, justification is constitutive. As the Formula of Concord puts it, “God bestows and imputes to us the righteousness of the obedience of Christ; for the sake of that righteousness we are received by God into favour and accounted righteous.”
When God looks at us, he sees his Son, because he is imputing to us his Son’s righteousness. Kant has a partial translation for this doctrine, by reading God the Son in this context as humanity in its moral perfection.44 But he does not have a way to translate the claim that something which is not already human has to intervene in order to change the moral propensities with which we are born. If this is right, then either we need to supply the translation which Kant fails to give us, or we have to acknowledge that we have to go outside the inner circle in order to find the beliefs
which can sustain the moral life.
Providence
The moral agent has to believe that her capacities have been transformed inside, so to speak. That is the first kind of moral faith she has to have. The second is that she has to believe that the world outside is the kind of place in which happiness is consistent with a morally good life. There is a natural objection here, that moral duty is supposed to be a sufficient end all by itself, a “pure” end, whether it leads to happiness or not. To put this more strongly, is not there something disreputable about keeping hold of the desire to be happy in the face of the majesty and dignity of the moral demand? The second kind of moral faith seems to require the moral agent both to be committed to morality as a pure end, excluding self-interest as a motivation, and to care that morality is consistent with her own happiness. Kant’s view, however, is not that there is anything disreputable about the desire to be happy as such. He thinks this is our fixed nature.45
What is disreputable is subordinating our duty to our happiness. We can say that the moral agent who has moral faith foresees her happiness as consistent with living a life of duty. So far there is nothing wrong. It would only be wrong if she did her duty in order to be happy, or if she viewed her duty as a means to her happiness.
I am going to proceed by identifying within this second kind of moral faith two component beliefs, which I will call the less ambitious belief in providence and the more ambitious belief in providence. First, there is the less ambitious belief that the world could be such that every person is morally good and every person is happy. This would be the best kind of world, and faith in providence contains the belief that our world could become such a world. Second, there is the more ambitious belief that the actual world is so ordered that a person’s own virtue is consistent with her own happiness, whether other people are virtuous or not. I will proceed by showing, first, that the less ambitious belief can be derived from other more familiar beliefs required by the practice of morality. Then I will try to show that the less ambitious belief is not enough, and the more ambitious belief is needed as well.
The less ambitious belief may seem odd, not the kind of belief that most people have or have even considered. What is the importance of the belief that the world could be such that every person is both morally good and happy? I think this possible state of the world functions for us as an ideal, which inspires us towards engagement with the world as it actually is. But for it to function in this way as an ideal, this state of the world does have to be possible. There is an expression of this ideal in Psalm 85:10, in the vision that righteousness and peace (in Hebrew shalom) will kiss each other. This idea of peace is a world in which we are all happy; but “happy” is too flimsy a word. It is not merely that in such a world we have what we want, but that what we want is what it is morally good to want. That is why it is righteousness and peace that kiss each other.
This is a vision by the psalmist of the full kingdom of God, and it has the power to
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sustain us as we try to bring the actual world closer to the vision than it now is. When we do see glimpses of the kingdom, the vision allows us to hold them together into a pattern, and to recognize them as significant.
We can derive the less ambitious belief in providence from two other beliefs that a moral agent has to have about her own life and the lives of other people. She has to believe, first, that she can, over the course of her life as a whole, will the good.46 This is made problematic by the gap between the moral demand and our initial capacities, and I have discussed various secular solutions to this problem which I claim do not succeed. The second thing she has to believe, I think, is that she can achieve, a significant proportion of the time, the good things she aims at. She has to believe this, because otherwise there would be no point in aiming at them. To make this vivid, consider what would happen in our moral life if there were the moral equivalent of Descartes’s evil genius or demon. In Descartes, the point is about the state of our knowledge. The evil genius is imagined to exercise his fiendish distortion so that all our attempts at true belief about the world end up with falsity. But suppose the evil genius concerned himself directly with our moral lives, and brought it about that whenever we tried to do good we ended up doing harm. I think we would stop trying to do good.47 This second belief is required by the first. I do not think it would be possible, over the course of an agent’s life as a whole, to will the good, if she did not believe that she could achieve that good a significant proportion of the time. The manipulations of the evil genius, if she knew about them, would stop her trying to do good. And if she could not try to do good, she could not will the good, though she could still wish that the good would occur independently of her will. An agent’s will is formed in deliberation about what to do, and she could not will the good if she thought her moral deliberation would constantly be frustrated in this way.
These two beliefs about her own life apply also to the lives of other people. The moral agent has to believe that they are capable of willing the good, and that they would then be capable of achieving, a significant proportion of the time, the good things they would be aiming at. Why does a moral agent have to believe these things about other people? One answer to this is that morality requires us to think of each other as people who could be good people. The moral agent has, we might say, to respect other people.
This does not mean she has to regard them as virtuous. But she cannot respect them if she does not regard them as capable of virtue. This does not mean, either, that she has to believe them capable of virtue by their own resources. To respect another person requires believing that he has enough good in him so that given the assistance that is in fact available, he could be a good person. It is Kant’s argument that this requirement means that we have to think God’s assistance is available.
I said that the moral agent has to believe that if everyone were virtuous, they would be able to accomplish, a significant proportion of the time, the good things they try to accomplish. Another reason for this is that we have to think, if we are to be able to deliberate successfully, that other people can, much of the time, carry out what they
decide to do in their deliberations. This is because our intentions are massively interconnected with other peoples’ intentions. It is hard to think of intentions we might have that do not require the trust that others have the ability to carry out most of what they choose to do. Consider, for example, the intention which I formed when I started writing this essay, to have it published in this book. The publication of such a book requires deliberation and action by all the people who produce, market, distribute and sell books. For all the people involved in this way, consider then a second larger group, all the people relied on by the first group in their daily lives. Then consider a third larger group relied on by the second, and so on. In the end we will get to almost everybody.48
Now if we add together these two beliefs as they apply to herself and to others, we get the less ambitious belief in providence which I started with. The best way to see this is to suppose that these various possibilities are actualized. Suppose everyone is in fact virtuous, and everyone in fact achieves much of the time the good things aimed at.
Then roughly everyone will be happy. In such a world the happiness of others is what everyone will be aiming at; and if they are achieving what they are aiming at, they will be achieving each other’s happiness. Kant calls this “the idea of self-rewarding morality.”49 It is because we are collectively virtuous, on this vision of the good, that we collectively secure each other’s happiness. If everyone is virtuous, there can still be tidal waves and arthritis, which happen independently of our deliberation. But such natural evil will not be, for most people, sufficient to destroy their happiness. This is because they will be embedded in loving relationships with other people, and surrounded with compassionate and competent care-givers. What we have here is an idea of self-rewarding morality, because the idea is that it is everyone’s virtue which results in (roughly) everyone’s happiness.
But the less ambitious belief in providence is not enough. Here is the conclusion of the argument. We have to be able to persevere in morality even if we do not believe that most people are in fact morally virtuous. We need what I called the more ambitious belief in providence, the belief that the actual world is so ordered that a person’s own virtue is consistent with her own happiness, whether other people are virtuous or not. I have noticed a very widespread gloom about the decline of virtue, and decreasing trust (at least in the countries I know well) in the general goodwill of other people. What is important for my present purposes, however, is not how virtuous other people actually are, or even what the general belief is about the general virtue. The important thing is that the moral agent’s commitment to morality does not depend upon her belief in the virtue of others.
Consider the fact that morally good agents try to teach their children to be moral, and also want their children to be happy. If they thought that being virtuous would make their children miserable, they would be more ambivalent about teaching virtue than they actually are. But they persevere in the attempt to bring up their children to be morally good people even though some of them do not think their children will be
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living in a society in which most of their fellows are morally good people. What happens to moral education in periods of great social turbulence and upheaval, when other people’s behavior becomes quite unpredictable? Do morally good parents go on trying to teach their children to be good people? My point is not that they do, or that they do not, but that morality requires that they do. Since good parenting also requires caring for their children’s happiness, it requires something like the more ambitious belief in providence I have been talking about. If the idea of self-rewarding morality were the only kind of providence we could believe in, this requirement of perseverance would be quite mysterious. What lies behind such a requirement is surely a belief that the world is so ordered that when their children grow up, they can be both morally good and happy, and that this is secured not by general human virtue but by something else. The nature of this ‘something else’ is often, I think, left indeterminate. Eventually we need a more complete account of what this kind of trust in the moral order of the world requires.
The experience of evil
This is especially true because the more ambitious belief in providence is not clearly supported by experience. That is why moral faith is the right term here. Experience gives us all sorts of cases of morally bad people who are to all appearances happy, and morally good people who are to all appearances unhappy. Our experience is thus consistent with a much bleaker picture of how the world is. This is the kind of picture which Bernard Williams locates in the world-view of the ancient Greeks. He says, of Sophocles and Thucydides, that they represent “human beings as dealing sensibly, foolishly, sometimes catastrophically, sometimes nobly, with a world that is only partially intelligible to human agency and in itself is not necessarily well adjusted to ethical aspirations.”50 He identifies this as the ancient sense of tragedy and the vulnerability of human life to the caprice of fortune. There is here a competitor to moral faith and a much darker picture of our destiny. Actually I think Williams has got Sophocles and Thucydides wrong. In Sophocles’s tragedies, Oedipus and Ajax are made to suffer by an agency which they do not understand. But it is anachronistic to think of this in Nietzschean terms. Our failures to understand what is happening to us do not license the conclusion that there is no moral order. They require a humility about our own understanding of the object of our faith, which Kant also urges upon us. Thucydides, though he is often presented as cynical, in fact had a deep belief that certain kinds of moral decay would lead to certain kinds of catastrophe. He wanted to lay out the symptoms he had observed in order to give his successors advanced warning. But these exegetical questions about the ancient Greeks are not the main point. Williams does present us with an alternative to moral faith, and that is what is important for now, rather than the question whether he is reading Nietzsche back into the ancient world, because he himself finds the Nietzschean picture congenial.
What Williams does is to tie the rejection of moral faith to the rejection of the traditional picture of the moral demand I started with, especially the demand for impartiality. My argument has been that moral faith is morally necessary; necessary, that is, if the commitment to morality is to be sustained. But someone who rejects the picture of the moral demand I have been giving can use my argument to his advantage by reversing it, or turning it on its head. Williams, following Nietzsche again, wants to discard the Kantian picture of the moral demand. He belongs, therefore, under the second strategy I discussed in the second section of this essay, the strategy of reducing the demand. He also thinks that the evidence of the lack of fit between virtue and happiness in this life is overwhelming. It is so strong that only a fool or a bigot would go on believing that the world is so ordered that we can both meet the moral demand in its traditional form and be happy. Moral faith is not possible in the kind of life that Williams finds admirable. Rather, it is the product of weakness or self-deception. But if the traditional picture of morality requires moral faith, and if moral faith is not possible in an admirable life, then he has an argument that the traditional picture of the moral demand needs to be rejected. Only fools and bigots will be able to stay committed to morality in its traditional form.
Here I think it is relevant to look at the lives of those who have experienced great evil, and have yet persevered in their faith. What do these lives show us? That the experts in the experience of evil have not always found that this evidence forces them to reject their faith. I talked with a woman named Eva while I was writing The Moral Gap.
She was a survivor of the German concentration camps of World War II. She said that her experience was that those who went into the camps with a strong faith in God came out, if they came out at all, with their faith stronger. It is not that they understood why God permitted the suffering, but that their faith in him is what held them and kept them through it. Eva was Jewish, and I do not know whether she believed in an afterlife or not. My sense is that she did not. But she did have a basic attitude of trust that God was somehow in charge, and that the good was more fundamental in the world than the evil in it, and would in the end win. There is a large biographical and autobiographical literature here, and I am not claiming that it speaks with a single voice. But Elie Wiesel, to take one other example, says that he has been angry with God, and has not answered the question of why God allowed the Holocaust. But he did not lose his faith, and in fact claims to have become closer to God through his protest.51 I am not discussing here the argument from evil against the existence of God. Rather, I am looking at the character of lives which contain moral faith even in the presence of overwhelming evil. It is important that the lives of people like Eva are admirable. Their lives carry conviction. They have a reading of the enormous evil which they experience. This is not merely logically consistent with their faith (though that is important to argue as well). My point is, rather, that this reading lies behind lives which are obviously praiseworthy, whose goodness it would be perverse to deny.
I will end with one instructive case, that of Ivan and Alyosha in Dostoyevsky’s
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Brothers Karamazov. Ivan tells the story of the Grand Inquisitor, which is often used in Western philosophy textbooks as the paradigm case of the argument against faith in providence. Ivan ends up, after telling a number of horrifying stories of evil, saying to God that he cannot believe in a providential order, that he returns the ticket. But we have to ask what Dostoyevsky is doing in putting this powerful section in the mouth of Ivan, with Alyosha as its audience. The philosophy textbooks take the passage out of its context in the whole novel, and they miss its point. What happens to these two brothers? Ivan, who does not disguise either the moral demand or his own radical incapacity, ends the book by going crazy and holding conversations with the devil.
Alyosha ends the book declaring his faith to a circle of adoring children. Dostoyevsky is trying to show us something. The story of the Grand Inquisitor is powerful, but it is not decisive. The life of Ivan, who is a man in the moral gap but without moral faith, is doomed; but Alyosha, who retains his faith without pretending that evil does not exist, is bound for glory. We can see in his life the character of the full kingdom of God towards which he is headed.
What is the implication of all this for the relation between naturalism and morality? We can put this both negatively and positively. Negatively, the point is that there is an incoherence involved in accepting both naturalism and the moral-gap picture of morality. Positively, the point is that we need moral faith if we are to sustain moral lives through the experience of evil. If naturalists have a way to give us such moral faith, they need to present it to us.
Notes
1 I am using the term “naturalism” here as equivalent to the denial of the supernatural. The editors of this volume use the term “philosophical naturalism” for this purpose. A naturalist in this sense is someone who denies there is anything outside or beyond (anything which transcends) this universe. Unfortunately, the term “naturalism” also has a particular use within moral philosophy which is not relevant here, but which needs to be explicitly set aside.
One place to find a reasonably precise definition for this use is in R. M. Hare’s Sorting Out Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 63–81. This definition is embedded in his own theory, and is thus somewhat technical. Readers who do not know his vocabulary can ignore the present footnote, since it will not affect the rest of the paper. R. M. Hare divides up ethical theories first into descriptivist and non-descriptivist theories, where the difference between these is that descriptivist theories affirm, but non-descriptivist theories deny, that apart from syntactical features, the meanings of moral statements are determined entirely by their truth conditions. He then divides descriptivist theories by the kind of truth conditions that they say determine the meanings of moral statements. Naturalist theories hold that the truth conditions are the possession (by the actions, people, etc. about which the moral statements are made) of what he calls, following tradition, “natural properties.” Intuitionist theories hold that the properties in question are “non-natural” or “sui generis. ” The difference here is that a naturalist is someone who thinks that the truth conditions of moral statements require the possession by their subjects of properties which can be defined, or have their meaning
explained, without using any specifically moral terms. An intuitionist is someone who thinks that in order to give the truth conditions of these statements we have to use specifically moral terms. In this sense of “naturalist” it is possible to avoid naturalism by being an intuitionist, and also by avoiding descriptivism of both these kinds (as R. M. Hare himself does). I mention this sense of the term, however, only in order to set it aside. In the sense of
“naturalism” I am using in this paper, R. M. Hare is a naturalist, as are most intuitionists. See, for example, R. M. Hare, “The Simple Believer,” in Essays on Religion and Education (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 24–5.
2 The argument I am giving in this paper has been given more fully in my book, The Moral Gap (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). The reader will find many of the points I make in the present paper more adequately covered in this book, where I also engage more explicitly with the work of other philosophers. I have had to omit in the present essay all sorts of refinements and qualifications, and the result is that the thesis appears in a stark form. This is in some ways an improvement. I have been able in some places to put the argument more clearly just because of the constraints of the project.
3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 130, and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 6: 154. I will refer to Kant by the volume and page numbers of the Prussian Academy Edition, except for his Lectures on Ethics, where I will refer to the English translation. I have tried to explain what Kant means by saying we should see our duties as God’s command, in “Kant’s divine command theory,” forthcoming in Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion, ed. D. Z. Phillips (New York: Westview, 2000).
4 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4: 421.
5 Ibid., 4: 429.
6 I discuss this question in The Moral Gap, chapter 6.
7 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979), 4.
8 See, R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, 1987).
9 Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 6:26 and 6:29.
10 Kant also believed in moral progress through education. See Education, 9: 446. But he believed (though this is not fully worked out until Religion within the limits of Reason Alone, see 6: 98) that this change over the history of humankind, like the change within an individual, required divine assistance.
11 Henry Bedinger Mitchell, Talks on Religion (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 47.
12 Mill, Utilitarianism, 17.
13 R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 99. See also p. 34.
14 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 90–1.
15 For example, Samuel Scheffler, Human Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
16 Nietzsche is illuminating for another reason. He has his own three-part structure. His positive doctrine is hard to discern, but it seems to contain a demand which can be met by the overman, but not by the rest of us. But to what extent, then, can we be held accountable to this demand?
17 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 10. 7, 1177b 26–34.
18 Fung Yu-Lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (New York: The Free Press, 1966; reprinted
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in 1977), 302. Chu Hsi adds that Heaven is the source of principle, or Li.
19 Augustine, On Grace and Free Will, 16. 32.
20 Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. J. J. Packer and O. R. Johnston (Fleming H. Revell Co.
1957), 152.
21 This is why Kierkegaard’s pastor at the end of Either/Or introduces the thought, “you might actually have done what you could but no one came to your assistance.” Kierkegaard, Either/
Or, volume 2, ed. and trans. Howard H. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 345. It is this kind of thought about our capacities, indexed to the available assistance, that leads in Kierkegaard’s system out of the ethical life and into the religious.
22 The Moral Gap deals with both the description and the evaluation of these strategies at greater length in chapters 4–7.
23 Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
24 John E. Hare and Carey B. Joynt, Ethics and International Affairs (London: Macmillan, 1982), 163–83.
25 Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 1, 47–
66, and then endlessly reprinted in anthologies.
26 James Griffin, Well-Being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 114.
27 Germain C. Grisez, “The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on Summa Theologiae,” 1–2, Question 94, Article 2, in Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Anthony Kenny (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame Press, 1969), 340–82. Joseph M. Boyle, “Aquinas and Prescriptive Ethics,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 49 (1975): 82–
95. John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), chapter 4.
But these authors do not try to deduce how we ought to act from what we in fact aim at.
28 It is interesting to observe that Aristotle does include power and prestige as requirements of the human good. See Nicomachean Ethics I, 2, 1094b8–10; IX, 7, 1168a5–10; VI, 5, 1140b8–11; VI, 8, 1141b24; Politics III, 4, 1277a13–b29. This is one main reason why contemporary theorists have felt nervous about embracing an Aristotelian view too closely.
29 Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 6: 93.
30 Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 86.
31 In The Moral Gap, chapter 6, I argue that there is a part of morality that does not conform to Kant’s formula of universal law.
32 If Noddings wants to include this under “crossing our path,” then her account is not different any longer from the universal caring she wants to deny.