388 Victor Reppert
Creationist “explanations” do not explain. When we appeal to the inscrutable acts and incomprehensible powers of an occult being to account for mysterious phenomena, we only deepen the mystery. Like Nagel . . . I regard such “explanations” as mere markers for our ignorance, placeholders for expalantion we hope someday to get. (Parsons 1999, p. 84)
However, what we are calling “supernatural” explanations are primarily intentional, teleological, or person explanations that cannot in principle be reduced to impersonal mechanistic explanations. And it is just false to say that in the absence of a further mechanistic explanation, all we have is a “placeholder.” Consider my cheering and pumping my fi st when Steve Nash hits Amare Stoudemire with a alley-oop pass that results in a slam dunk for Amare against the San Antonio Spurs. The explanation that makes sense of that action on my part is that I am a fan of the Phoenix Suns who especially likes to see them beat the San Antonio Spurs. Having given that explanation, which is intentional in nature, I have not indicated whether or not there is some further explanation available in terms of neurophysiology. No doubt neurophysiology is part of the account (no dualist wants to deny that), but whatever may be involved in that further account, or even if there is no further account and the intentional explanation is all we are ever going to have, nevertheless
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we do have an explanation and not just a placeholder. Indeed, a detailed analysis of my brain states would be far less explanatory in terms of what anyone wants to know about my state of mind after seeing that slam dunk than the simple intentional explanation that I gave earlier.
If, as I believe, God is a rational, personal being, surely that makes it more likely that rational creatures shold arise in a world God creates because persons by nature are interested in communicating with other persons. So the probability that rational beings should emerge looks to me pretty good; the emergence of rational beings in a naturalistic universe seems very unlikely if not impossible.
While we do not know any strict laws concerning God’s conduct, we certainly think we know various things regarded God’s character which make some divine acts more likely than others. If God were to resurrect someone from the dead who lived in the twenty-fi rst century, it would more likely be Mother Teresa than Adolf Hitler.
The inadequacy objection gratuitously assumes that matter is what is clearly understandable, and that “mind” is something mysterious, the very existence of which has to be explained in terms of unmysterious matter. This seems just false. According to Galen Strawson:
This is the assumption that we have a pretty good understanding of the nature of matter—of matter and space—of the phsyical in general. It is only relative to this assumption that the existence of consciousness in the material world seems mystifying. For what exactly is puzzling about consciousness, once we put the assumption aside? Suppose you have an experience of redness, or pain, and consider it to be just as such. There doesn’t seem to be any room for amything that could be called a failure to understand what it is. (Strawson 1999, p. 13) On the other hand, matter is described by modern physics in the most mystifying terms imaginable. The philosopher of science Bas van Fraassen writes: “Do concepts of the soul . . . baffl e you? They pale beside the unimaginable otherniess of closed space-times, event horizons, EPR correlations, and bootstrap models” (Churchland & Hooker 1985, p. 285).
Parsons says, “When I am told that consciosuenss and reasoning are due to the inscrutable and miraculous operations of occult powers wielded by an undetectable entity that exists nowhere in the physical universe, I am not enlightened.” I will not comment on whether or not this description of mind/body dualism backed up by theism is an apt one, although I consider it to be actually misleading. Nonetheless, I would simply point out that to be enlightened is to discover the truth, and if this is the truth, then it is enlightening, even though it may be epistemically frustrating to someone like Parsons. Second, the
“obscurantism” I am advocating may be necessary to preserve science itself, while (if I am right) a mechanistic account of mind undermines the scientifi c enterprise. Parsons’s own theory makes Einstein’s theory of relativity and Darwin’s theory of evolution the result of blind physical causes. In the last analysis, whose theory is more obscurantist?
Therefore, I maintain that the inadequacy objection gratuitously assumes that the only real explanations are mechanistic explanations, and that this is evidently false. It is supposed to be part of God’s nature to be rational. If we explain one thing in terms of something else, and that something else in terms of something else again, the chain of explanation will have to terminate somewhere. The theist explains the existence of rationality in the universe by appealing to the inherent rationality of God. It cannot be the case that the
materialist can actually argue that one ought never to explain anything in terms of something having such and such a nature. One cannot go on giving reductive explanations forever. If, as I have argued, we have good reason to suppose that reason cannot be built up out of nonintentional and nonteleological building blocks, then in order to preserve reason and the logical foundations of science, we have good reason to accept a nonmaterialist understanding of the universe. If my argument in this chapter is correct, then explaining reason in terms of unreason explains reason away, and undercuts the very reason on which the explanation is supposed to be based.
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The Moral Argument
MARK D. LINVILLE
G. K. Chesterton once remarked that Nietzsche was unable to laugh but could only sneer.
I believe his point was that all good satire is animated by moral vision or conviction.
Attempts at satire without such conviction never rise above mere sarcasm – sneering.
Whether all of this is so is beyond the purpose of this chapter. But we certainly do fi nd Nietzsche sneering in places, and in some of those places, that sneering is directed at moral conviction itself. When in the midst of a tirade against nearly anyone and everyone ever to put pen to paper, Nietzsche heaped scorn upon “G. Eliot” and her fellow “English fl at-heads.” Eliot – whose actual name was Mary Anne Evans – had long since rejected theistic belief, but she held fast to a sense of moral duty that she regarded as “peremptory and absolute” (Myers 1881, p. 62). Morality, she thought, simply did not require a religious foundation. Indeed, the religious impulse dilutes the moral, as thoughts of another world distract from the duties of the present, and hope of an eternal reward reduces moral motivation to a form of egoism. Instead, hers was a “Religion of Humanity,” involving “the expansion of the sense of human fellowship into an impulse strong enough to compel us to live for others, even though it be beneath the on-coming shadow of an endless night”
(Myers 1881, p. 61). At this, Nietzsche complained, “They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more fi rmly that they must cling to Christian morality” (1968, p. 69).
But this “English consistency,” he argued, is altogether inconsistent. He urged that, in giving up the Christian faith, “one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.”
The “duty” to which Eliot and her freethinking friends appealed, was actually part and parcel of the system that is Christianity. “By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands” (Nietzsche 1968, pp. 69–70). Indeed, the moral “intuitions” to which Eliot and others appealed were nothing more than the lingering effects of Christianity upon that society – fading echoes of the late deity’s voice, whose churches remained as his “tombs and sepulchers” (Nietzsche 1982, pp. 181–2).
If Eliot held out for the reality of a moral law over against the illusion of religion, Nietzsche countered with the exclamation, “Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no realities” (1968, p. 55). Nietzsche’s moral nihilism is handily summarized with his assertion, “There are altogether no moral facts” (1968, p. 55).
And there are no such facts precisely because neither are there any theological ones.
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Nietzsche observed that few of his contemporaries seemed to comprehend the full implications of the death of God – the fact that “belief in the Christian God has ceased to be believable.” But once that belief was undermined, all that was built upon it would inevitably collapse, notably “our whole European morality” (1982, p. 447). Morality “has truth only if God is the truth—it stands or falls with faith in God” (Nietzsche 1968, p. 70). For Eliot and the English, “morality is not yet a problem” only for want of discernment.
The moral argument for the existence of God essentially takes Nietzsche’s assertion as one of its premises: if there is no God, then “there are altogether no moral facts.” But it urges with Evans and against Nietzsche that we have, in our moral experience, good reason to suppose that there are indeed moral facts. And so our moral experience provides some reason for belief in God. The argument may take a variety of forms, some more plausible than others. Popular versions of the argument abound. Some have argued, for instance, that wherever there are laws there is a Lawgiver, so that the existence of moral laws calls for someone who bears a strong resemblance to Moses’s Host atop Sinai. Others have argued that without a carrot and a stick – heaven and hell – there is no suffi cient incentive for behaving morally. Some might even be heard to argue either that belief in God is required in order to have a knowledge of right and wrong, perhaps through some sort of special revelation, or that such explicit belief is required in order to become virtuous
– there can be no virtuous atheists, it might be said. Similarly, it is sometimes urged that a society that abandons faith in God is doomed to destruction from within due to moral decay.
More sophisticated, perhaps, is the sort of argument for which Immanuel Kant is famous. If there is no God, then the moral law makes objective demands that are not possibly met, namely, that the moral good of virtue and the natural good of happiness embrace and become perfect in a “highest good” (Kant 1956). But then those demands appear to be empty and, in the face of such an “antinomy,” we might come to think of moral requirement as null and void.
For Kant, although God is not the Author of the moral law, he is required as a sort of Director of the screenplay. Kant also argued, promisingly, I think, that if “one vast tomb”
fi nally engulfs both the righteous and the wicked, then it is hard to see why moral behavior ultimately matters (Kant 1987, p. 342). But if moral requirements are genuine, it seems that they ought to matter in some ultimate sense.1
Whatever merits such arguments may or may not have (and some, I think, have no merit at all), none is on offer in the essay that follows. Actually, there are two essays, each a relatively independent version of the moral argument. The fi rst, “An Argument from Evolutionary Naturalism (AEN),” argues that theists can, where naturalists cannot, offer a framework on which our moral beliefs may be presumed to be warranted. In particular, the naturalist’s commitment to a Darwinian explanation of certain salient features of human psychology presents an undercutting defeater for our moral beliefs taken as a whole.
The argument is thus chiefl y epistemological in nature, and seldom strays from the discipline of metaethics. The second essay, “An Argument from Personal Dignity,” argues, fi rst, that something like the Kantian notion of human or personal dignity is implicated by the sorts of moral beliefs with which we begin moral refl ection. Here, it weighs various competing theories in normative ethics and fi nds them wanting. Second, theists can, where naturalists cannot, offer a worldview that accommodates the notion of personal dignity.
1. George Mavrodes develops an argument along similar lines in Audi and Wainwright (1986).
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An Argument From Evolutionary Naturalism
Edward O. Wilson and Michael Ruse have agreed together that “ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes in order to get us to cooperate” (Ruse & Wilson 1989, p. 51). The sociobiologists tell a familiar evolutionary story to justify this striking assertion. The pressures of natural selection have had an enormous infl uence on human psychology, including the hardwiring of epigenetic rules. According to Wilson and Ruse, these are widely distributed propensities to believe and behave in certain ways, and such rules have developed through the interaction of human genetics and human culture. “Epigenetic rules giving us a sense of obligation have been put in place by selection, because of their adaptive value” (Ruse 1998, p. 223). Such rules have adaptive value because they incline us toward adaptive behaviors, and a behavior is adaptive insofar as it tends toward reproductive success. The resulting “sense of obligation” is thus in place, not because it detects any actual moral obligations but because the perceived obligatory behavior is adaptive. Strictly speaking, experiences of, say, moral obligation or guilt are nonveridical: their seeming objects are illusory. Ruse explains:
The Darwinian argues that morality simply does not work (from a biological perspective), unless we believe that it is objective. Darwinian theory shows that, in fact, morality is a function of (subjective) feelings; but it shows also that we have (and must have) the illusion of objectivity. (Ruse 1998, p. 253)
The belief in moral objectivity is a useful fi ction, and its utility is in the name of reproductive fi tness. Evolutionary theory is thus wed to some variety of moral antirealism. Ruse thinks Darwin’s theory complements Hume’s subjectivism.
Hume, of course, maintained that belief in objective moral properties is, at best, unwarranted, and talk of them is, in fact, meaningless. In a pivotal passage, Hume challenges his reader to produce the moral property of some putatively immoral action, such as willful murder, over and above the natural properties that we perceive. “The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object” (Hume 1978, p. 468). But a closer look does reveal a matter of fact that is the object of experience: one’s own sentiment that is excited by the deed.
Here is a matter of fact; but ‘tis the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it. Vice and virtue, therefore, may be compar’d to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which, according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind. (Hume 1978, p. 469)
The mind has a “great propensity to spread itself on external objects” (Hume 1978, p.
167), so that the subjective feelings which, given our constitution, result from the contemplation of some act, are mistaken for perceptions of objective properties of the act itself.
As Michael Ruse (1998) sees it, Darwin explained the origins of that constitution.
Some have seized upon these apparent implications of Darwin’s theory in order to argue that naturalism – the view that reality is pretty much exhausted by the stuff of the empirical sciences – implies an unpalatable moral skepticism. To take a noteworthy example, C. S.
Lewis argued that if naturalism is true, and human moral beliefs are ultimately the product of our evolution, then the “transcendental pretensions” of morality are “exposed for a sham” (Lewis 2001b, p. 59). Let’s call the combination of naturalism and an overall Darwinian account of the origin of species evolutionary naturalism (EN). According to Lewis, on EN, the dictates of conscience are little more than an aggregate of subjective impulses, which, although distributed widely throughout our species, are no more capable of being true or false “than a vomit or a yawn” (2001b, p. 58). “If the naturalist really remembered his philosophy out of school,” then he would realize that his saying “I ought” is on a par with “I itch,” and “my impulse to serve posterity is just the same sort of thing as my fond-ness for cheese” (Lewis 2001b, p. 59). Morality is thus an “illusion” (Lewis 2001b, p. 56), little more than a “twist of the mind” (Lewis 1996b, p. 18).
Lewis scores an apologetic point when he observes that the very people who defend such a variety of subjectivism are often later found promoting some moral cause. “A moment after they have admitted that good and evil are illusions, you will fi nd them exhorting us to work for posterity, to educate, revolutionise, liquidate, live and die for the good of the human race” (Lewis 2001b, p. 58). Elsewhere, writing with these same thinkers in mind, he quips, “We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful” (Lewis 1996a, p. 37). Lewis believes that he has identifi ed a practical inconsistency in such persons: their considered theories entail that morality is an illusion, but they nevertheless live as though there are objective moral facts that are the appropriate objects of our serious concern. Moral skepticism is impracticable, but it appears to be implied by a naturalistic worldview. If this is so, then, all other things being equal, we have some reason to reject naturalism.
An argument – call it the argument from evolutionary naturalism (AEN) – thus emerges from such considerations. Perhaps the following is in the spirit of what Lewis has in mind: (1) If EN is true, then human morality is a by-product of natural selection.
(2) If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, then there are no objective moral facts.
(3) There are objective moral facts.
(4) Therefore, EN is false.
Of course, AEN, even if successful, is not an argument for the existence of God, but only for the falseness of EN. But it might be employed as an important component of such an argument were one to go on and argue that theism accommodates moral facts in a way that naturalism does not, that, all other things being equal, a worldview that makes sense of moral facts is preferable to one that does not, and so, all other things being equal, theism is preferable to naturalism.
Does AEN succeed? Off the bat, one might note that the falseness of EN is not thereby an argument for the falseness of naturalism, and the latter is the real target of such arguments. Might one be a naturalist without being an evolutionary naturalist? Does naturalism entail Darwinism? Strictly speaking, it seems possible to affi rm the worldview of naturalism without also endorsing the scientifi c theory of evolution, and so there is no strict entailment. But as Alvin Plantinga, a theist, and Alex Rosenberg, a naturalist, agree, for the naturalist, “Darwinism is the only game in town.” Indeed, Richard Dawkins was recently seen sporting a T-shirt that read, “Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth, The Only Game in Town. ” Perhaps Dawkins’s shirt refl ects his more careful comment elsewhere that, “Although
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atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfi lled atheist” (Dawkins 1986, p. 6). Before Darwin, the inference to Paley’s Watchmaker seemed natural, if not inevitable, given a world fi lled with things “that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose” (Dawkins 1986, p. 1). Naturalism sans Darwinism – like Tarzan sans loincloth – is lacking in essentials. It is a worldview at a loss for explanation. While it is conceivable that a critic of AEN might object by driving a wedge between the worldview and the theory, we will retain the focus on the evolutionary version of naturalism.
As we shall see, there are substantial objections to each of the three premises. Premise (3) is an assertion of the truth of moral realism, and, of course, there are a variety of extant antirealist traditions. Antirealists will tell us either that there are no moral facts whatever, or that the moral facts that obtain are not objective – that is, they are not mind-independent or stance-independent. When C. S. Lewis originally advanced his argument, perhaps the majority of his philosophical detractors would have embraced noncognitivism, thus denying that there are moral facts. But, at least for the present, I am more interested in those philosophers (of increasing number) who embrace (3), and thus some form of moral realism, but aim to conjoin that commitment to moral realism with EN.
I am primarily interested, then, in objections to (1) and (2). One might object to (1) by denying that natural selection is solely (or even partly) responsible for the emergence of
“human morality.” Theists are permitted nonsupernatural explanations of some things.
Might not the Darwinian be permitted nonevolutionary explanations here and there? And (2) moves rather quickly from an account of the origins of human morality to the assertion that its claims to objectivity are false. But why think this? First, such a move might be thought guilty of a well-known fallacy. And should we not at least give an ear to what the evolutionary naturalist may have to say about the possible connections between the workings of natural selection and the truth of our moral beliefs?
AEN and the genetic fallacy
Let us begin with an objection to (2). At fi rst blush, at least, the move there appears guilty of the genetic fallacy. At least in standard cases, the fact that a given belief B is the product of some cause C, entails nothing whatsoever regarding its truth or falsity. And (2) concludes that widespread beliefs in moral facts are false if such beliefs have an evolutionary explanation. But some forms of genetic argument may be correct. Suppose we can show that the explanation of someone’s belief is epistemically independent of whatever would make the belief true. In a discussion that has direct bearing upon the assessment of AEN, Elliot Sober offers an example of such an ill-formed belief (Sober 1994, pp. 93–113). Consider Sober’s eccentric colleague, Ben, who believes that he has 73 students in his class because he drew the number 73 from an urn fi lled with slips of paper numbered from 1 to 100. Presumably, there are no esoteric connections between class attendance and such random drawings.
Ben’s resulting belief is thus epistemically independent of its would-be truth-maker in that Ben would believe that this was his enrollment regardless of the actual number of students in the class. According to Sober, Ben’s belief is “probably false.”
Might we offer a similar evolutionary argument for moral skepticism? Sober suggests that such an argument is a tall order because one would fi rst have to identify (a) the processes of moral belief formation and (b) the would-be truth-makers for moral beliefs, and then show that (a) and (b) are independent. Call this the Independence Thesis. A defense
of the Independence Thesis would call for a considerable project in metaethics for which the simple observation that our moral beliefs have evolutionary origins is no substitute.
As Sober sees things, such an evolutionary argument aims to show that “subjectivism”
is true. (He identifi es subjectivism as the view that “no normative ethical statement is true,”
and thus seems to have in mind something more akin to noncognitivism or error theory.) That is, such an argument would attempt to establish the Wilson–Ruse assertion that ethics is an illusion. But to say that ethics is an illusion is to advance a positive thesis regarding the ontological status of putative moral facts or properties. Presumably, such an argument would call for some positive reason for thinking that the Independence Thesis is true.
Of course, even the truth of the Independence Thesis does not entail that morality is an illusion. At best, we might conclude that it is safe to treat moral beliefs as though they are false on the grounds that it is unlikely that beliefs formed independently of their truth conditions will be true. After all, and all other things equal, we should grant the possibility that Ben’s enrollment is precisely 73, and the possibility should be conceded even where we have a compelling argument for thinking that urns and numbered slips of paper have absolutely nothing to do with student enrollment decisions. Ben’s belief about the number of students in his class is “probably false” only because we suppose that he has about a 1
in 100 chance of drawing a number that corresponds to his enrollment. And, assuming the truth of the Independence Thesis, our moral beliefs are “probably false” in that the odds that truth and adaptiveness would happen to embrace are slim. Sharon Street compares such odds to “setting out for Bermuda and letting the course of your boat be determined by the wind and tides” (Street 2006, p. 13). Well, bon voyage!
But we need not argue for the falseness or probable falseness of our moral beliefs. Nor is it necessary to argue for the truth of the Independence Thesis. It is one thing to suggest that there are positive reasons for asserting epistemic independence; it is quite another to say that we lack any reason for thinking that a relevant dependence relation obtains. We would have a reason for thinking there is such a relation just in case the best explanation for a person’s having a given belief essentially involves the truth of that belief. One might thus argue that belief in objective moral facts is warranted only if there is reason for thinking that a relation of epistemic dependence obtains between our beliefs and their truth-makers.
It seems that a plausible Darwinian yarn may be spun in such a way as to offer a complete and exhaustive explanation of our various moral beliefs without ever supposing that any of them are true. According to this story, some behaviors (feeding one’s babies, fl eeing from large predators) are adaptive, and others (feeding one’s babies to large predators) are not. Any predisposition or prompting that increases the probability of the adaptive behavior will thus also be adaptive. A predisposition to make moral judgments or form moral beliefs enforced corresponding behaviors, and so was adaptive for such reasons. Richard Joyce asks, “Can we make sense of its having been useful for our ancestors to form beliefs concerning rightness and wrongness independently of the existence of rightness and wrongness?” The answer, he thinks, is “a resounding ‘Quite possibly’ ” (Joyce 2006, p. 183).
In review of the “whole complex story” of the evolution of altruism and “helping behavior” as well as the predisposition to form moral beliefs, Joyce notes, “It was no background assumption of that explanation that any actual moral rightness or wrongness existed in the ancestral environment” (Joyce 2006, p. 183). The observation fi nds support, I think, when we look around at the behaviors of many nonhuman social animals. Individual animals display the predisposition for social behavior – what Darwin called social instincts
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– but, presumably, without judgment s of any sort regarding the appropriateness of the behavior. We explain their behavior – and the impulse toward the behavior – by appeal to adaptiveness. Moral properties are not included in the cast of characters. Rightness and wrongness do not even come up. On this Darwinian story, conscience is what arises in a social creature once the social instincts are overlain with a suffi cient degree of rationality.
As Darwin asserted:
The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and fi lial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. (Darwin 1882, p. 98) Wolves in a pack know their place in the social hierarchy. A lower-ranked wolf feels compelled to give way to the alpha male. Were he endowed with the intellectual powers that Darwin had in mind, then, presumably, his “moral sense” would tell him that obeisance is his moral duty. He would regard it as a moral fact that alpha interests trump beta or omega interests. Lupine moral philosophers might even wrangle over the question of whether there are such moral facts, and, if so, whether the legitimacy of the ancient hierarchical social system is one of them. But we need not suppose that the moral realists among them have it right in order to understand the genealogy of lupine morals.
Arguably, given an evolutionary account of human moral beliefs, there is no reason for thinking that a relation of epistemic dependence obtains, and so, given an evolutionary account, belief in moral facts is unwarranted (Joyce 2006, p. 183). If our moral beliefs are without warrant, then they do not amount to moral knowledge. We might thus modify AEN so that (2) gives way to
(2*) If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, then there is no moral knowledge.
There is moral knowledge only if there are warranted moral beliefs, and the suggestion under consideration is that an evolutionary account serves to undercut whatever warrant we might have had for those beliefs.
Bertrand Russell allegedly once observed, “Everything looks yellow to a person suffering from jaundice.” Actually, I believe the truth of the matter is that people suffering from jaundice look yellow. But suppose that both are right: jaundiced people both appear and are appeared to yellowly. Jones enters Dr. Smith’s offi ce, complaining of various and vague discomforts. Smith takes one look at Jones and exclaims, “Your skin has a very tawny appearance!” He diagnoses Jones with jaundice and prescribes accordingly. Later, it occurs to Smith that all of his patients have a yellowish tint, as do his charts, the fl oor tiles, once-white pills, and the nurses’ uniforms. A simple blood test determines that he is suffering from jaundice. It dawns on the doctor that Jones would have appeared yellow to him regardless of Jones’ actual condition. Has Smith now a reason for supposing Jones is jaundiced is false in the way that, say, a negative blood test would provide such a reason? It seems not. Perhaps Jones is jaundiced. Smith simply lacks any reason for thinking that Jones’ appearance was caused by Jones’ condition, or that the belief that Jones was jaundiced is epistemically dependent upon any medical facts about Jones. And this is to suggest that facts about Dr. Smith’s own condition have now supplied him with an undercutting defeater for his belief regarding Jones’ condition.
As we have seen, Wilson and Ruse (and Lewis, hypothetically) draw the inference that ethics is an illusion – there are no objective moral facts. And they draw this conclusion from a consideration of the evolutionary function of our moral beliefs. We have the beliefs that we do, they suppose, because of their reproductive advantage, and not because of their truth. Thus, they think, Darwinism poses a rebutting defeater for our moral beliefs, as well as for moral realism itself. But it seems to me that the proponent of AEN might back off from the stronger claim that Darwinism entails that there are no moral facts, speaking instead of whether we are warranted in our ordinary moral beliefs. In this way, AEN
becomes an epistemological argument for moral skepticism.
Judith Thomson (Harman & Thomson 1996) suggests that any red-blooded moral
realist should seek to defend the Thesis of Moral Objectivity (TMO):
(TMO) It is possible to fi nd out about some moral sentences that they are true.
Of course, one may challenge TMO either by arguing that moral sentences never express true propositions or that it is not possible to fi nd out. The former route involves advancing a positive metaethical theory that either denies that “moral sentences” ever express moral propositions at all (because there just are no moral propositions), or denies that moral propositions are ever true, or else denies that their truth is mind-independent. The latter route simply involves advancing an epistemological argument to the effect that no one is in a position to know whether any moral proposition is ever true. In challenging the warrant of our moral beliefs, AEN takes this route. As Richard Joyce observes, the conclusion that our moral beliefs are “unjustifi ed” is “almost as disturbing a result” as an argument for the actual falseness of those beliefs (Joyce 2006, p. 180).
The suggestion, then, is that Darwinism presents us with an undercutting defeater for such beliefs. And so, instead of (3), perhaps we want:
(3*) There is moral knowledge.
And this takes us to our conclusion.
(4) EN is false.
What we lack is some reason for thinking that the adaptiveness of a moral belief depends in any way upon its being true. Perhaps, then, the tables may be turned. Instead of Sober’s suggestion that the AEN defender must show that moral beliefs are independent of any truth-makers, perhaps the onus is on those who assert dependence. Why, given EN, should we suppose the world to include anything more than natural facts and properties and our subjective reactions to those properties? We will return to this question momentarily, and consider some possible replies. But fi rst, let us consider a challenge to our Premise (1).
AEN and “greedy reductionism”
The evolutionary naturalist is saddled with the task of explaining the connection between adaptiveness and truth only if they accept our fi rst premise.
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(1) If EN is true, then human morality is a by-product of natural selection.
In fact, (1) is widely rejected. Consider fi rst a homely example illustrating the reason for this rejection.
I once attended a university lecture given by a noted animal ethologist who was convinced that evolutionary psychology applies to human behavior just as surely as it applies to the canines with which she specialized. She had a good stock of examples of how widespread human behaviors betray their evolutionary and genetic roots. Suppose, she said, you are sitting on your sofa in your living room. The front door opens, and in walks a stranger, uninvited. You bristle with fear, anger, and resentment, and experience a rush of adrenalin. On the other hand, suppose that, as you are sitting there, a bird fl ies in through an open window and lights on a curtain rod. While, out of a concern for your new uphol-stery, you might take measures to shoo the bird outside, you experience none of the emotions triggered by the human intruder. Why the difference? She answered: because of our evolutionary heritage, we have been hardwired to be territorial toward conspecifi cs –
members of our own species – and more tolerant of the company of other species. The difference in the two reactions is thus predicted on a sociobiological reckoning of human psychology.
But is there not a simpler, more straightforward and “cognitive” explanation? In the case of the human intruder, it is reasonable to think that harm is intended. As a moral agent, he is presumably capable of understanding and acting upon societal laws as well as the rules of morality and etiquette, and his intrusion likely signals a willful breach of all of these in order to have gained entry. And then there is that ski mask.
Arguably, resentment is properly directed only at persons in the event that they cause or intend some harm. I may be unhappy that the wind has toppled a tree, causing property damage. I may lament the fact that termites have made a meal of my guitar collection. But resentment would be misplaced and would perhaps indicate misunderstanding or emotional immaturity on my part. Lacking such moral agency, the invading bird is incapable of intending harm, and he is likely already showing signs of regret for what seemed at fi rst a good idea. And, in any case, it is easy to imagine that fear, resentment, anger, and adrenalin would present themselves in the event that my door is darkened not by an intruding human but by an Alpha Centaurian who, although a person, shares no Linnaean rank whatsoever with me.
I have been instructed more than once that the sociobiological assumptions of an argument such as AEN have been “widely discredited.” Sociobiologists are often accused of forcing genetic and evolutionary explanations for widespread human behaviors and thereby supplanting more plausible cultural or “cognitive” or otherwise nonevolutionary explanations. Daniel Dennett charges Wilson and others with a biological form of “greedy reductionism,” for their apparent assumption that the genes have human behavior and culture reined-in on a sort of leash. As Dennett (1995) wryly puts it, the fact that tribesmen have everywhere and always thrown their spears pointy-end fi rst does not suggest a “pointy-end-fi rst gene.” Many such traits are instead to be attributed to “the general nonstupidity of the species.” C.S. Lewis’s character, Ransom, in Out of the Silent Planet, was surprised to discover that a boat constructed on Malacandra (Mars) was very much like a human-built boat. “Only later did he set himself the question, ‘What else could a boat be like?’ ”
(The astute Lewis reader might also have noticed that Malacandran hunters throw their spears pointy-end fi rst, as Dennett would have predicted.) Some ideas are just better
than others and, assuming a minimal degree of rationality, perhaps we have been equipped to discover and implement them.
The point applies forcefully in our assessment of AEN. The argument, as stated, seems to assume that our “moral beliefs” have an evolutionary explanation. We generally view deception, theft, and violence as wrong. We believe that good parents care for the welfare of their children and that kindness calls for reciprocation. We have an urge to help those who need help that we are capable of rendering. We tend to share the belief that basically equitable arrangements are just or manifest the moral property of justness. But, for one thing, it is just implausible to think that any fairly determinate belief has somehow been fashioned at the genetic level and then lodged, intact, within the human brain. Of his belief,
“I ought to reciprocate to Mary for picking me up at the airport,” Richard Joyce asks, “What does natural selection know of Mary or airports?” (Joyce 2006, p. 180). It would be like asserting that an unfortunate Tourette’s-like disease resulted cross-culturally and throughout history in some determinate and meaningful combination of ejaculated words: “Peter Piper picked a peck!”
Further, do all of these traits fi nd their explanation in the selection pressures that were at work when we came down from the trees? Is this not akin to the suggestion that all human problems stem from the trauma of early potty training? Is it not possible that certain moral beliefs are widespread because, like the hunting techniques of Dennett’s tribesmen, they simply make sense? Philip Kitcher writes:
All that selection may have done for us is to equip us with the capacity for various social arrangements and the capacity to formulate ethical rules. Recognizing that not every trait we care to focus on need have been the target of natural selection, we shall no longer be tempted to argue that any respectable history of our ethical behavior must identify some selective advantage for those beings who fi rst adopted a system of ethical precepts. It is entirely possible that evolution fashioned the basic cognitive capacities— alles übriges ist Menschenwerk. (Kitcher 1985, p. 418) Thus, our evolution may have provided us with the intellectual tools required for building cathedrals, playing chess, and drawing up social contracts. But might not these activities be more or less autonomous as far as the genes are concerned?
Let us agree, at least provisionally, that there are extremes to be avoided when seeking evolutionary explanations for human behavior. Thus, “It’s all about the genes, stupid”
expresses a form of greedy reductionism. Mary Midgley’s own term for such reductionistic explanations is the “hydraulic approach,” after the simpleminded person who, in seeking an explanation for rising damp, seeks a single place where the water is coming in (Midgley 1979, p. 57).
But extremes tend to come in pairs. Is it reasonable, given a background acceptance of evolutionary theory, to suppose that our evolution has had nothing to do with the distribution of widespread moral beliefs?
For one thing, one might have thought that to appeal to natural selection to explain incisors and libidos but to exclude the deepest springs of human behavior from such an account would seem rather a tenuous position to hold. Moral behavior is not the sort of thing likely to be overlooked by natural selection because of the important role that it plays in survival and reproductive success (Sommers & Rosenberg 2003, p. 659). Early ancestors who lacked the impulse to care for their offspring or to cooperate with their fellows would, like the celibate Shakers, have left few to claim them as ancestors.
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Midgley refers to the wholesale rejection of evolutionary psychology as the “blank paper view” – a notion of humans as “totally plastic” and “structureless.” Stephen Gould, she thinks, assumes a view implying that “newborn babies [are] what bear cubs were once supposed to be—indeterminate lumps of animal protoplasm, needing to be licked into shape by their elders” (Midgley 1979, p. 66). To B. F. Skinner’s claim that the capability for abstract thought arises not from some “cognitive faculty” but from “a particular kind of environment,” she quips, “So why can’t a psychologist’s parrot talk psychology?” (Midgley 1979, p. 20). To the blank paper view in general, which would deny that we humans come equipped with any innate tendencies whatsoever, she asks, “How do all the children of eighteen months pass the news along the grapevine that now is the time to join the sub-culture, to start climbing furniture, toddling out of the house, playing with fi re, breaking windows, taking things to pieces, messing with mud, and chasing the ducks?” (Midgley 1979, p. 56). More recently, Richard Joyce has argued forcefully that this tabula rasa view
“is obviously wrong.” Indeed, “broadly speaking, no sensible person can object to evolutionary psychology.” (He also observes that many of the objections are politically motivated and may even evince an unfortunate willingness to treat science as a wax nose, shaped to suit particular political agendas.)
Midgley maintains that the standard “nature versus nurture” debate presents a false dichotomy between two implausible extremes, and Joyce adds to this that the dichotomy
“is so dead and buried that it is wearisome even to mention that it is dead and buried.” If the extreme version of the blank paper view says, paraphrasing Locke, that there is nothing in human nature that is not put there by experience, Midgley, in effect replies after Leibniz,
“except for human nature itself.”
If “instincts” refers to basic predispositions, drives, or “programs,” then humans have instincts, but the more interesting of these are, by and large, “open instincts” or “programs with a gap.” She suggests that the more complex an animal, the greater the “gap” in the program. The gap, where it exists, leaves it to the intelligence – rational refl ection and culture in general in the case of humans – of the individual or the species to fi ll in the details. Migratory waterfowl come equipped with a basic drive to follow the sun south in the winter, but the programming itself need not specify the details of the itinerary. While the dances of bees or the songs of some birds may be due almost exclusively to their programming, so that the precise patterns are genetically choreographed, the dancers and singers displayed on, say, American Bandstand, might be supposed to have a bit more latitude. And this remains true even if there proves to be an evolutionary answer to the question, “Why are people fond of such things as singing and dancing?” (My minister in childhood insisted that dancing is “foreplay set to music.” In this he may have found one point of agreement with the evolutionary psychologists.)
That latitude – the gap in Midgley’s open instincts – would seem to leave ample room for Kitcher’s Menschenwerk, whether it involves composing a piece of 12-bar blues or forging a social contract. Joyce notes that, “By claiming that human morality is genetically
‘programmed,’ one doesn’t deny the centrality of cultural infl uence, or even imply that any manifestation of morality is inevitable” (Joyce 2006, p. 8). The “development of ethical precepts” of which Kitcher speaks, thus may well be the result of careful deliberation and rational refl ection, but perhaps these are in response to proclivities that come with our programming. Such programming may be rather more determinate than a mere capacity for programming. Mammalian mothers are provided with both the capacity for motherhood and a nearly irresistible impulse to nurture offspring.
Along these lines, Sharon Street (2006) distinguishes between basic evaluative tendencies and full-fl edged evaluative judgments. The latter include our specifi c moral beliefs that might be formulated as moral principles or rules, and they may be explained by appeal to a variety of infl uences, cultural and otherwise. The former are “proto” forms of evaluative judgment that are unrefl ective and nonlinguistic impulses towards certain behaviors that seem “called for.” She argues that “relentless selection pressure” has had a direct and “tremendous” infl uence on our basic evaluative tendencies and these, in turn, have had a major
– but not necessarily overriding – indirect effect on our actual moral beliefs or full-fl edged evaluative judgments.
If such programming and predispositions provide our basic moral orientation, then it is within their scaffolds that all moral refl ection takes place. Our refl ective beliefs about the duties of parenthood or of friendship, for instance, arise from more basic parental and altruistic drives that predate and are presupposed by all such refl ection. While this evolutionary account provides a role for reason, that reason is in effect, to borrow from Hume, the slave of the passions. Those “passions” – Street’s basic evaluative tendencies – are almost certainly not cultural artifacts. Evolutionary theory requires, and the experiences of common life suggest, that they are not. Human mothers sometimes require instruction on how to care for their newborns. But this typically presupposes that they care, and that such caring comes as a part of the mother’s standard equipment.
Bottlenose dolphins off Australia have been spotted wearing sea sponges on their snouts.
Hardly a fashion statement, the sponges presumably protect them from sharp objects and stinging marine animals while foraging on the bottom. Further, the behavior appears to be passed on exclusively from mothers to daughters. Biologists see here clear evidence of cultural transmission among the dolphins. It is highly unlikely that this behavior is the product of a “sponge-on-the-snout gene.” It is, with apologies to Kitcher, Delfi nwerk. But it is equally unlikely, I think, that the mammalian drive to nurture offspring, seen in these mother–
daughter sessions among dolphins, is also a feature of dolphin culture. Here, it is exceedingly reasonable to suppose that they are “compelled by their genes.”
The sponge trick and the task of mother–daughter instruction are the result of
intelligence set to work at solving problems posed, respectively, by the instincts of self-preservation and motherhood. Were the local conditions of survival different, the “idea”
might never have occurred. And, presumably, were the circumstances of dolphin evolution relevantly different, mother-daughter sessions of any kind might have been unnecessary, and delphine maternal instincts might have been nonexistent. “Teach your children well,”
after all, is a precept happily ignored by the female sea turtle, whose maternal “duties” are discharged along with her eggs.
Similarly, human culture is responsible for great accomplishments that assuredly are not the direct product of our evolution. And these may well include complex systems of moral precepts. Perhaps human social contracts – like sponges on the snout – are Good Tricks in that they solve problems posed by some combination of genetics plus environment plus intelligence. Rationality – Menschenwerk – is certainly employed. But it is an instrumental rationality.
We are now in a position to refi ne our claim at (1). “Human morality” is a by-product of natural selection in that a fundamental moral orientation – Street’s “basic evaluative tendencies” and Midgley’s “programming” – is in place because it was adaptive for our ancestors given the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape. Thus, the “program”
provides general directives or tendencies. The “gap” allows room for rational refl ection
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regarding our moral beliefs, but their very rationality is conditional or hypothetical: given the program that has been bequeathed to us by our genes, some policies are better than others. The program itself – with the general “moral” orientation that it determines – is precisely as it is due to its adaptive value given the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape. Even if the gap is positively cavernous for humans, allowing for rational and moral deliberation, it is nevertheless found within the scope of our programming that is directly explained by appeal to natural selection. Moral reasoning would then appear to be means-end reasoning, where the ends have been laid down for us by natural selection.
Counterfactually, had the programming been relevantly different, so would the range of intelligent choices. As we saw, Darwin was of the opinion that the moral sense is the result of a sort of recipe – what you get when you begin with a set of social instincts and throw in a suffi cient degree of intelligence. There may be “forced moves” through evolutionary design space, as Daniel Dennett (1995) has observed. For instance, given locomo-tion, stereoscopic vision is highly predictable. But Darwin did not think that any determinate set of moral precepts or dictates of conscience was among them. Consider what he described as an “extreme example” and what I will call a Darwinian counterfactual.
If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering. (Darwin 1882, p. 99)
Given the actual conditions of our “rearing,” we have come to believe that our children and siblings are deserving of our care and respect, and that equitable bargaining outcomes are just. But here we are asked to imagine a world in which the resulting fundamental moral orientation – Midgley’s open instincts – is different. Darwin appears to countenance the possibility of a species that is prompted, even upon refl ection, to behave in ways that are inequitable and, from our standpoint, unjust. If rational and moral refl ection takes its cue from a more primitive predisposition, then have we any reason for supposing that such refl ection – the product of culture – would inevitably settle upon equitable treatment?
Recall our lupine philosophers who fi nd themselves strongly inclined to think in terms of a social hierarchy and to regard anything like Bentham’s dictum – “Each to count for one, none to count for more than one” – an absolute howler. Lacking opposable thumbs and all, they do not write books. But if they did, one learned treatise might be titled, Our Caste System of Justice, with chapters on “Duties of Obeisance” and “Beta Encounters Alpha: Rules of Engagement.” If humans as a species have come to regard equitable arrangements as fair or just (have they?), then perhaps this is only because their initial programming was wired as it was given the circumstances of human evolution. We have the actual moral orientation that we do because it was adaptive. Had the circumstances been different, some other set would have conferred fi tness. Is there any plausible reason to suppose that such a moral orientation is adaptive because its resultant moral beliefs are true? Does this not return us to Joyce’s observation, “It was no background assumption of that explanation that any actual moral rightness or wrongness existed in the ancestral environment” (2006, p. 183)?
Of course, one might reply to this line of argument by insisting that a wedge be driven between Street’s “basic evaluative tendencies” and her “full-fl edged moral judgments.”
Have we not just acknowledged that the results of such programming are not inevitable?
Following Dennett and others, might we not suggest that, with the advent of culture it became possible for us to “snap” Wilson’s “genetic leash” and strike out on our own?
Perhaps, then, morality is autonomous, engaging in refl ection that is independent of the drives of human nature. Such a reply, however, is just implausible. Our considered judgments regarding duties of parenthood or kinship or friendship clearly fi nd their wellspring in our psychology, just as beliefs about the sacred duties of Darwin’s hive bees or our wolves would fi nd their respective sources in apiarian or lupine psychologies. And these respective psychologies appear to be what they are because of the circumstances of evolution in each case.
There is reason, then, to accept AEN Premise (1).
(1) If EN is true, then human morality is a by-product of natural selection.
It is time to return to the question that we raised just before our assessment of (1). If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, is there any reason to suppose that there is a relevant dependence relation between (a) the processes of belief formation and (b) the would-be truth-makers for such beliefs? We can sharpen the question by simply asking whether there is a reason to suppose that the belief-producing mechanisms of our moral beliefs are truth-aimed? Is there a plausible defense of the Dependence Thesis available to the naturalist?
Epistemological arguments and the Dependence Thesis
I have characterized AEN as an epistemological argument for moral skepticism. The aim is to show that, on EN, our moral beliefs are without warrant. This is because the mechanisms responsible for our moral beliefs appear to be fi tness-aimed, and such an account of those mechanisms seems not to require our thinking that they are also truth-aimed. As Tamler Sommers and Alex Rosenberg (2003) have put it, “if our best theory of why people believe P does not require that P is true, then there are no grounds to believe P is true” (p. 667).
In this, AEN resembles a much-discussed argument urged by Gilbert Harman (1977).
Harman’s so-called “problem with ethics” is that moral facts, if such there are, appear to be explanatorily irrelevant in a way that natural facts are not. Hitler’s behavior, for example, may be fully explained by appealing only to certain natural facts about him, such as his anti-Semitism, monomania, and will to power. According to Harman, we need not suppose that, over and above such natural facts, there is a moral fact of Hitler’s depravity. Nor must we appeal to his actual depravity in order to explain our belief that he was depraved. “You need only make assumptions about the psychology or moral
sensibility of the person making the moral observation” (Harman 1977, p. 6). Harman may thus be viewed as arguing in his own manner that we “have no reason to believe that the best explanation for our moral beliefs involves their truth.” We have no good reason to suppose that the causes of those beliefs are dependent upon whatever would make them true.
Nicholas Sturgeon has replied fi rst by noting that moral facts are commonly and plausibly thought to have explanatory relevance. Both Hitler’s behavior and our belief that he was depraved are handily explained by his actual depravity, and this is, in fact, the default explanation. He observes, “Many moral explanations appear to be good explanations . . .
that are not obviously undermined by anything else we know.” “Sober people frequently
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offer such explanations of moral observations and beliefs,” and “many of these explanations look plausible enough on the surface to be worth taking seriously” (Sturgeon 1988, p. 239).
Citing Quine’s naturalized epistemology – what Sturgeon elsewhere (1992, p. 101) refers to as the method of refl ective equilibrium – he notes, “We cannot decide whether one explanation is better than another without relying on beliefs we already have about the world” (Sturgeon 1988, p. 249). Refl ective equilibrium, a method employed in both science and ethics, begins with certain considered judgments, and with the assumption that our theories, scientifi c and otherwise, are roughly correct, then moves “dialectically in this way between plausible general theses and plausible views about cases, thus seeking a refl ective equilibrium” (Sturgeon 1992, p. 101). Sturgeon notes that, whereas he allows for the inclusion of moral beliefs among the initial set, Harman does not. But, he argues, there is no non-question-begging justifi cation for singling out moral beliefs as unwelcome in the initial set while allowing those of a scientifi c or commonsense nature.
In particular, Harman’s argument requires us to consider the conditional, If Hitler had done just what he did but was not morally depraved, we would, nevertheless, have believed that he was depraved. But this calls for our entertaining the possibility that (H) Hitler would have done just what he did even had he not been morally depraved.
(H), in turn, presupposes that there is a possible world in which Hitler does what he did but is not morally depraved. One will seriously entertain such a counterfactual only in the event that one accepts that
(H*) There is a possible world W in which Hitler’s natural properties are identical to those that he possesses in the actual world but in which Hitler is not depraved.
But Sturgeon’s own moral theory invokes the supervenience of moral properties upon natural properties. On standard accounts, if some moral property M supervenes upon some natural property (or, more likely, some set of natural properties) N, then it is impossible for N to be instantiated unless M is also instantiated. Thus, we appear to have the following implication:
(S) For every world W, every natural property N and every moral property M, if M
supervenes upon N in W, then for all worlds W*, if N obtains in W*, then M is
exemplifi ed and supervenes upon N in W*.
Allowing that there is a world that includes N but not M requires either denying that M
actually supervenes upon N or holding that (S) is false. And so (H*) and (S) together entail that there is no possible world in which Hitler’s having the personality and displaying the behavior that he did constitutes depravity. To get off the ground, Harman’s argument tacitly assumes that there are no moral facts or properties, which, of course, is the very point at issue.
Further, Harman must be understood to suppose that we would have believed that Hitler was depraved even if, despite having done all of the things that we know him to have done, he was not, in fact, depraved. One should be prepared to grant this point only if one has already granted that our whole moral theory is “hopelessly mistaken” (Sturgeon 1988,
p. 251). But the fact that our theory would be wrong were this possible is no reason for either abandoning the theory or embracing the possibility. Thinking otherwise provides a recipe for skepticism of a more global variety. Thus, “We should deny that any skeptical conclusion follows from this. In particular, we should deny that it follows that moral facts play no role in explaining our moral judgments” (Sturgeon 1988, p. 251).
Sturgeon’s appeal to refl ective equilibrium thus plays a crucial role in his reply to Harman. We begin moral refl ection with a fund of considered judgments that may serve as the initial data for the construction of ethical theories. And, Sturgeon suggests, these beliefs are “not obviously undermined by anything else we know.” Since all theorizing has these same humble origins, how can one nonarbitrarily single out a particular domain of beliefs for suspicion? Indeed, David Brink goes to some length in arguing that “Harman fails to demonstrate any explanatory disanalogy between the scientifi c and moral cases” (Brink 1989, p. 185). A scientist’s belief that a proton has just passed through a cloud chamber might be explained merely by appeal to his background beliefs and theoretical commitments. For example, his theory has it that the appearance of a vapor trail is evidence of proton activity, and so, of course, when he sees, or believes that he sees, a vapor trail, he forms the belief in the proton. But here, we are required to be realists about protons only if we have assumed that the scientist’s theory is “roughly correct.”
Indeed, my conviction that I have a head, and my belief that other heads involve other minds are best explained by the actual existence of such heads and minds only on the assumption that a common theory of life is generally on the right track. But, again, why extend this courtesy in these cases while being decidedly discourteous in the case of morality?
To my mind, Sturgeon’s reply to Harman succeeds. Why, indeed, should our considered moral beliefs be excluded at the outset? Nearly a century ago, in his Gifford Lectures, W.
R. Sorley cited “Lotze’s Dictum,” after the nineteenth-century German philosopher Rudolph Hermann Lotze: “The true beginning of metaphysics lies in ethics” (Sorley 1935, p. 3).
Sorley observed that “the traditional order of procedure” – business as usual in metaphysics
– was to construct an interpretation of reality – a worldview – that drew exclusively upon nonmoral considerations, such as the deliverances of the sciences. Not until the task of worldview construction was complete did one “go on to draw out the ethical consequences of the view that had been reached” (Sorley 1935, p. 1). Sorley thought it likely that such a method would result in an artifi cially truncated worldview, and that moral ideas would be given short shrift. And the exclusion of our moral experience was simply arbitrary. “If we take experience as a whole, and do not arbitrarily restrict ourselves to that portion of it with which the physical and natural sciences have to do, then our interpretation of it must have ethical data at its basis and ethical laws in its structure” (Sorley 1935, p. 7). Harman seems to be following that traditional procedure that Sorley criticized, and he thus manifests that same arbitrariness. His results are achieved only by begging the question against the moral realist.
But even Sorley would, in principle, admit that the initial “ethical data” must prove to be compatible with everything else that is included in our fi nal interpretation of reality. In fact, in the same year that Sorley delivered his Gifford Lectures, George Santayana published Winds of Doctrine. There, he complained that Bertrand Russell’s then-held moral realism was the result of Russell’s “monocular” vision. “We need binocular vision to quicken the whole mind and yield a full image of reality. Ethics should be controlled by a physics that perceives the material ground and the relative status of whatever is moral” (Santayana
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1957, p. 115). Russell took notice of Sorley’s “ethical data” – “the ideas of good and evil as they appear in man’s consciousness” (Sorley 1935, p. 1), but, according to Santayana, he simply refused to “glance back over the shoulder” to see that “our moral bias is conditioned”
and has its basis “in the physical order of things” (Santayana 1957, p. 115). Indeed, Russell had made frequent appeals to common moral sense – not at all unlike the contemporary appeal to refl ective equilibrium – in the course of his arguments. But Santayana would have none of this.
Mr. Russell . . . thinks he triumphs when he feels that the prejudices of his readers will agree with his own; as if the constitutional unanimity of all human animals, supposing it existed, could tend to show that the good they agreed to recognize was independent of their constitution. (1957, p. 166)
Clearly, Santayana thought that human moral beliefs are a function of the human constitution, and the latter had taken its shape as the result of processes with no concern for the truth. An appeal to those very constitutional beliefs hardly offsets this skeptical conclusion.
Interestingly, Santayana’s arrows found their mark. Russell eventually abandoned his moral realism, crediting these very arguments.
The lesson carries over to our current discussion. While Harman seems not to have provided any good reason for challenging those initial ethical data – the initial moral beliefs with which we are equipped – our vision has been “monocular.” AEN calls for a glance over the shoulder, and what we see poses a challenge to Sturgeon’s refl ective equilibrium despite his assertion that widely held judgments are “not obviously undermined by anything else we know.” An appeal to those considered judgments that tip off the process of refl ective equilibrium would hardly assuage Sharon Street’s worry:
If the fund of evaluative judgments with which human refl ection began was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate infl uence . . . then the tools of rational refl ection were equally contaminated, for the latter are always just a subset of the former. (2006, p. 125) What we require, then, is some assurance that our original fund is not contaminated. And so, we return to our question, what reason have we for supposing that the mechanisms responsible for those judgments are truth-aimed? What reason have we for supposing that the Dependence Thesis is true?
Santayana suggested an answer to this question that he knew was unavailable to the atheist Russell: if God exists and has fashioned the human constitution with the purpose of discerning moral truth, then we have reason to embrace the Dependence Thesis. “If the good were independent of nature, it might still be conceived as relevant to nature, by being its creator or mover; but Mr. Russell is not a theist after the manner of Socrates; his good is not a power” (Santayana 1957, p. 136). Alas, neither is Sturgeon a theist. And so he and other metaphysical naturalists shall have to seek assurance of the Dependence Thesis in nature itself.
In order to inspire confi dence in those initial evaluative judgments of which Street speaks, the moral realist owes us some account of their origin that would lead us to suppose that they are reliable indicators of truth. On some externalist theory of justifi cation, such as a causal theory, one might have, as Norman Daniels puts it, a “little story that gets told about why we should pay homage ultimately to those [considered] judgments and
indirectly to the principles that systematize them” (Daniels 1979, p. 265). For the evolutionary naturalist, the account might follow that which is offered on behalf of ordinary perceptual or memory beliefs, or the everyday conclusions that we reach by induction. Quine offers such a story with a Darwinian spin to inspire confi dence in our ability to acquire knowledge of the world around us. “Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind,” he suggests (Quine 1969, p. 126). Natural selection is unkind to those exhibiting particular behaviors that plausibly stem from either false beliefs or profound stupidity. Witness the so-called
“Darwin Awards,” given posthumously to people who met their fate as a result of bolting jet engines to automobiles or climbing – naked and inebriated – into bear cages. The suggestion, then, is that we should expect our cognitive faculties to be truth-aimed and generally reliable given such selection pressures.
Alvin Plantinga, of course, has challenged such stories with what he calls “Darwin’s Doubt.” The connection between fi tness-conferring behavior and true belief might not be so certain as Quine suggests (Plantinga 2000, pp. 218–40; Beilby 2002, pp. 1–14, 204–276).
If he is correct, then evolutionary naturalism is saddled with a far-ranging skepticism that takes in much more than our moral beliefs. And AEN would merely amount to a particular application of Plantinga’s evolutionary argument. In that case, one might note, after the manner of Brink’s comment on Harman, that there is no signifi cant “explanatory disanalogy between the scientifi c and moral cases.” But this would cut against the naturalist; not the proponent of AEN who rejects the evolutionary naturalism that apparently yields such untoward results.2 However, Plantinga’s argument has met with stiff resistance (Beilby 2002). Despite his many ingenious examples in which adaptive behavior results from false beliefs (e.g. Paul’s belief that tigers are cuddly and the best way to get to know them is to run away), many people just fi nd the link between true belief and adaptive behavior plausible. And, in any event, the two cases, moral and nonmoral, appear to be signifi cantly different, as Street, Joyce, and others have argued.
The core of Sharon Street’s paper is her “Darwinian Dilemma” that she poses to “value realists” such as Sturgeon. Our moral beliefs are fi tness-aimed. Are they also truth-aimed?
Either there is a fi tness–truth relation or there is not. If there is not, and if we suppose that evolution has shaped our basic evaluative attitudes, then moral skepticism is in order. If there is a relation, then it is either that moral beliefs have reproductive fi tness because they are true (the “tracking” relation), or we have the moral beliefs that we have simply because of the fi tness that they conferred (the “adaptive link” account). But the adaptive link account suggests some variety of non-realism, such as the constructivism that Street endorses. The realist requires the tracking account in order to provide an account of warranted moral belief. Here, fi tness follows mind-independent moral truths. But the tracking account, which, Street observes, is put forth as a scientifi c hypothesis, is just implausible from a scientifi c standpoint. While there is a clear and parsimonious adaptive link explanation of why humans have come to care for their offspring – namely, that the 2. As Joyce (2006, p. 183) observes, Peter Railton has argued that any argument taking the form of AEN “hammers itself into the same ground into which it had previously pounded morality.” His reason for saying this is that the very faculties employed in constructing such an argument are just as much a product of natural selection as are the moral faculties being pounded. Because Joyce embraces EN, his strategy is to drive a wedge between the cases of moral and nonmoral belief. Those of us who reject EN need not bother with the wedge, being content to allow the evolutionary naturalist to wield Railton’s hammer.
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resulting behavior tends toward DNA preservation – the tracking account must add that basic paternal instincts were favored because it is independently true that parents ought to care for their offspring.
Ethical nonnaturalists, who hold that moral properties are sui generis and thus distinct from any natural properties, might be thought to have the worst time of it. Unlike the environmental hazards that Quine had in mind – predators, fi res, precipices, and the like – “a creature cannot run into them or fall over them or be eaten by” nonnatural properties (Street 2006). Ethical naturalists, on the other hand, view moral properties as being constituted by natural properties with causal powers, so that it may be more plausible to suggest that creatures could interact with them profi tably or unprofi tably. But even here, insofar as the naturalist affi rms a bona fi de version of moral realism, the answers are far less plausible than is had in a straightforward adaptive link account. Why not just say that our ancestors who had a propensity to care for their offspring tended to act on that propensity and thus left more offspring – particularly when, as we noted earlier, we witness such propensities among nonhuman animals? Do dolphin mothers care for their daughters because they ought to do so? But, of course, Street’s adaptive link account fails to provide what we have sought in this discussion: some defense of the Dependence Thesis.
Darwinian counterfactuals and ethical naturalism
A dilemma similar to that urged by Street arises if we return to consider the Darwinian counterfactuals. Consider the sorts of worlds that Darwin envisioned. Had the circumstances of human evolution been more like those of hive bees or Galapagos boobies or wolves, then the directives of conscience may have led us to judge and behave in ways that are quite foreign to our actual moral sense. Our wolfi sh philosophers defend justice as inequality, and their erudite reasonings take their cue from the fund of judgments bequeathed to them by their genes. Bees and boobies graced with intellect would judge that siblicide and infanticide are morally required under certain conditions. Presumably, those beliefs are fi tness-aimed in those worlds. Are the beliefs also true there?
Consider Sturgeon’s version of ethical naturalism, discussed earlier. One might expect that a straightforward implication of Sturgeon’s Supervenience Thesis would be that such beliefs are false. We learned earlier that there is no possible world in which Hitler (or anyone) has just those natural properties that Hitler actually displays but is not depraved. Indeed, Sturgeon is of the Kripkean conviction that moral terms rigidly designate natural properties. Thus, moral terms function in much the same way as natural kind terms in that they pick out natural properties and track those same properties across worlds. “Gold” rigidly designates that metal with an atomic number of 79 and thus necessarily refers to all and only substances with that atomic number. We can readily imagine a Twin Earth scenario in which some other metal – of a different atomic number – with all of the phenomenal qualities of gold is scarce and valued, plundered by pirates and prospected by dreamers, and is even referred to as “gold.” But for all of that, Twin Earth “gold” is not gold.
If “justice” picks out some natural property or properties, such as the equity displayed in the distribution of societal goods, then we might expect an ethical naturalist such as Sturgeon to conclude that inequitable arrangements are unjust. And this will be true even, say, in those lupine worlds in which such inequities are thought to be just, as surely as “all is not golde that glistereth” on Twin Earth.
But to insist that our moral terms rigidly designate specifi c earthly natural properties to which human sentiments have come to be attached appears to be an instance of what Judith Thomson has called metaphysical imperialism. In seeking the reference of “good” as used in “this is a good hammer,” Thomson suggests that the natural property that best serves here is “being such as to facilitate hammering nails in in manners that conduce to satisfying the wants people typically hammer nails in to satisfy.” She opts for this property as opposed to the more determinate properties of “being well-balanced, strong, with an easily graspable handle, and so on” (Thomson in Harman & Thomson 1996, p. 135). Even though we may fi nd that the latter set of properties coextends with those that “conduce to satisfying the wants that people typically hammer nails in to satisfy,” there are all sorts of
“odd possible worlds” in which people typically have quite different wants for which deviant hammers come in handy. There are worlds in which “large slabs of granite” do the best job in this regard. And so we are being metaphysical imperialists if we presume to impose our nail hammering wants upon denizens of those worlds. She thus fi xes upon a property that is less determinate than those that characterize hammers of earthly goodness: it is good insofar as it answers to wants, and chunks of granite serve well in this respect in some possible worlds.
The ethical non naturalist might very well maintain that the “justice” in such worlds is ill conceived and that natural selection has had an unfortunate and distorting infl uence there, alleging that some transcendent principle of justice as equality is among the verities.
Perhaps entire species can get their moral facts wrong, as might entire societies. Russ Shafer-Landau, for instance, compares moral laws to mathematical or logical laws, and asks why the former should be any more problematic than the latter (2004, p. 77). If Twin Earth logicians have a penchant for affi rming the consequent, then Earthly logicians might regard Twin Earth as a veritable mission fi eld. There is certainly nothing “imperialistic” about that.
But our ethical naturalist has identifi ed justice as a particular set of natural properties upon which human evolution has, in fact, converged. Whatever circumstances of justice have obtained on Earth are contingent and fail to obtain in those Darwinian worlds. It seems that we have no more reason to think that Earthly justice is normative there than we have for denying that those denizens, who lack C-fi bers, ever experience pain.
Should the ethical naturalist allow that such beliefs are true, as well as fi tness-conferring, in such worlds? Suppose so. Then it would seem that either the Supervenience Thesis is false, since the world in question is one in which justice fails to supervene upon the relevant natural properties,3 or the actual supervenience base is something different from what we might have imagined. Perhaps, for instance, the sacredness of infanticide is in virtue of the fact that it is conducive to fi tness, so that truth follows fi tness, so to speak. Or infanticide may be fi tness-conferring because it is indeed a “sacred duty” in such worlds.
Either way, Sturgeon’s own ethical theory will be in for some readjustment along unexpected and, I think, implausible, lines. Whatever we say of the truth conditions of infanticide is a sacred duty in that Darwinian world will function as a universal acid, bearing implications for the shared moral beliefs of the actual world – if the actual world is similarly Darwinian.
If the truth-maker there is the belief ’s conduciveness to reproductive fi tness, then, presumably, our own moral beliefs, opposed as they are to those in that Darwinian world, will 3. Is there, after all, a world in which someone behaviorally indiscernible from our Hitler – Schitler, perhaps – is a moral saint?
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be true in virtue of their conduciveness to fi tness here. This is a Dependence Thesis of sorts that may guarantee that truth and fi tness may be found together. But it is hardly what we were seeking.4 Did Sturgeon wish to say, implausibly, that the moral properties of an action supervene upon the overall reproductive advantage that it confers?
If, on the other hand, the counterfactual beliefs in those Darwinian worlds are fi tness-conferring because they are true, then, given the Supervenience Thesis, it would seem that the moral properties that obtain in that world supervene upon natural properties found in common with the actual world. Presumably, this would be some natural property that is common to both equitable and inequitable social arrangements and to both the nurtur-ing and the strangling of babies.5 In that case, the natural properties upon which justice and injustice or depravity and saintliness supervene, are neither equity nor inequity, cruelty or kindness but something that is less determinate and serves as the genus for these seemingly opposed species of moral properties. One unhappy result here is that those more determinate natural properties that are favored by refl ective equilibrium would prove to be merely accidental and coextensive features of morality. If there is some natural property N that is common to both equitable and inequitable bargaining outcomes, and upon which justice supervenes, then N, and not equity, defi nes the essence of justice. This would appear to be the metaethical equivalent of the suggestion that water is whatever fi lls a world’s oceans, so that Earthly H2O and Twin-Earthly XYZ both qualify as water. But then being H2O is not the essence of the stuff that we call “water.” (Note that N could be conduciveness to reproductive fi tness, so that our two earlier suggestions would seem to converge.) One might thus offer a functionalist account of moral properties. Perhaps, for instance, “justice”
picks out whatever natural properties tend toward societal stability. We happen to live in a world in which, given, as Kant put it, “the nature of man and the circumstances of the world in which he is placed,” equity has this effect. But there are worlds in which inequity does the trick. In addition to signaling a signifi cant departure from the sort of account that naturalists such as Sturgeon wish to offer, such a move would seem to offer a precarious footing for any robust account of moral realism.
Taking a line from the imperishable Jeremy Bentham, Daniel Dennett has suggested that, from a Darwinian perspective, the notion of rights is “nonsense on stilts.” But, unlike Bentham, he thinks it is “good nonsense,” and it is good precisely because it is on stilts (Dennett 1995, p. 507). “Rights” language is instrumentally good in that it functions as a
“conversation stopper,” thus putting an end to otherwise paralyzing deliberation. It is a variety of “rule worship,” and obeisance to such rules is conducive to societal stability. But from this perspective, the content of the rules is of no more inherent importance than the contents of varying traffi c laws. Things will go smoothly in Cambridge, UK, so long as everyone keeps to the left, but they are just as smooth in the New England namesake so long as everyone does the opposite. A realism indifferent to such content is a realism in name only.
We might pursue, if only briefl y, one possible route suggested by something Sturgeon says in his exchange with Alan Gibbard. Gibbard (1990) offers a possible evolutionary 4. It is akin to saying that God is “necessarily good” in the sense that, necessarily, whatever God does is “good”
for the simple reason that it is God who is doing it.
5. The set of natural properties that form the supervenience base might, after all, be rather complex, taking into account more than a bare description of an action, but the action performed under varying sets of circumstances.
account of human morality that he thinks is suggestive of expressivism. Perhaps our notion of justice, for instance, emerged from early “bargaining situations” in which some form of cooperation between self-interested individuals proves benefi cial for all involved. Here,
“benefi cial” means, roughly, getting what one wants out of a bargain, and the assumption is that getting what one wants has some reproductive advantage. The problem is that, unless self-interest is checked in some way, the bargaining – and thus, the benefi cial cooperation
– breaks down. There is a stable outcome in which each is satisfi ed with getting his share, that is, an outcome that is least likely to prompt retaliation on the part of any members leading to a breakdown in the bargaining. There would thus be selection pressure in favor of a certain disposition to be satisfi ed with that outcome. With the advent of language, humans came to use words that were functionally equivalent to our words “just” or “fair”
to express the positive sentiment attached to an outcome in which goods are distributed in some roughly equal manner. Thus, there is fi tness in a particular sentiment that would likely be distributed widely. Moral language describes or expresses this sentiment. The result is a form of noncognitivism, or, at least, a variety of antirealism with regard to moral properties.
Sturgeon replies that there is nothing in Gibbard’s admittedly speculative account that requires us to see morality as having been undercut. “Perhaps,” Sturgeon suggests, “our ancestors sometimes called bargaining outcomes just because they really were” (1992, p. 105). In this case, people have come to “care about justice” and “are also able to resolve disputes about it.” And perhaps “achieving consensus in debate might be a way . . . of detecting a property” (Sturgeon 1992, p. 105). Why, then, should we not think that Gibbard’s bargainers are “referring to a real property that they care about, and about which their views are often correct?” (Sturgeon 1992, p. 105).
Further, moral explanations that appeal to justice enjoy the same plausibility as do appeals to, say, Hitler’s depravity.
The justice of a society . . . is supposed to stabilize it; and people are alleged to prosper precisely because of their justice. Of course, there is also a tradition that attacks this latter claim as a pious fi ction. But the most prominent opposing view also treats justice as explanatory. That justice always pays, and that justice sometimes costs, are both views that cast justice as a property with causal effi cacy. (Sturgeon 1992, p. 105)
We may discern here echoes of Sturgeon’s exchange with Harman. We are entitled to regard moral properties as real in the event that they play an explanatory role. If an equitable distribution of goods tends toward societal stability, and people have come to believe that such equity is just, then why not conclude that the fact that the bargaining outcome is, in fact, just, explains both the belief and the stability? Why not suppose that the nonmoral evolutionary explanation amplifi es rather than undermines the moral explanation? Sturgeon claims that Gibbard’s account “does nothing whatever” to favor the “irrealist” account over the realist one. His general conclusion is that “nothing we know of our evolutionary history” supplies us with an undermining nonmoral explanation “or makes irrealism any more plausible than the moral realism that I am prepared to defend” (Sturgeon 1992, p. 112).
But is this so? Justice as equality has a stabilizing effect upon Gibbard’s group of bargainers because of what the parties to the bargain are and are not prepared to accept. That
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is, stability is achieved because each bargainer leaves the table with the belief, “I got what I deserved.” Gibbard’s story includes a cast of characters who are self-interested individualists, each of whom imports assumptions about his relative worth within the community. Given these conditions, there is pressure in the direction of equitable arrangements. But might we imagine a different set of initial conditions? Would lupine “bargainers”
instead come to “detect” the natural property of inequity? Might some come away with a disproportionately smaller share plus the belief, “I got what I deserved”? That “justice”
would then be causally effi cacious. Would it then be real?6 Not if a property’s being real requires its being mind-independent. For in each of these worlds, actual and lupine, if justice supervenes upon certain natural facts, these will essentially include facts about the psychological constitution of the respective bargainers.
Perhaps Sturgeon or some other ethical naturalist can offer some account that sits comfortably with the implications of Darwinian counterfactuals. My present argument is not that there is no possibly true story that can be told. However, in considering the sorts of circumstances that Darwin describes, it seems that the most plausible explanation is that such counterfactual moral beliefs are formed as the result of selection pressures that are themselves in place due to the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape – contingencies that are morally indifferent. Such beliefs are evolutionary means to nonmoral reproductive ends. While ethical naturalists in those worlds no doubt argue for the supervenience of the moral upon the natural, the effi cacy of moral explanations, and the existence of corresponding moral facts, we should, I think, regard them as mistaken. But if the moral beliefs of the actual world have also taken their cue from predispositions that were fi tness-conferring, then it is hard to see why our own ethical naturalists are in any better position so to argue.
Darwinian counterfactuals, ethical nonnaturalism, and theism
I suggested earlier that the ethical nonnaturalist might have a ready reply to the argument from Darwinian counterfactuals. For the nonnaturalist may be in a position to maintain that certain natural properties bear a necessary relation to the moral properties that they exemplify, regardless of any evolutionary possibilities.
But nonnaturalists who are also metaphysical naturalists seem to have problems of their own in the face of such Darwinian counterfactuals. Here, Santayana’s criticism of Russell resurfaces. If “man is a product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving” and moral beliefs are ultimately the product of whatever selection pressures were in place given the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape; if there is a vast range of possible outcomes, how is it that unguided human evolution on earth has resulted in just those moral beliefs that accord with the verities? The circumstances of evolution have likely 6. David Copp (1990) has argued that the sort of explanatory role to which Sturgeon and other “confi rmation theorists” appeal falls short of the sort of justifi cation that the moral skeptic demands. One might explain Stalin’s behavior by observing that he is an Ubermensch. Indeed, the notion may come to be useful in identifying a particular personality type. But such explanations hardly take us in the direction of providing a standard of behavior.
Similar things may be said of the “justice” that prevails in the Darwinian world under consideration. But, then, why suppose that things are different in the actual world?
been shaped by everything from plate tectonics to meteorological fl uctuations to terrestrial collisions with asteroids. As Stephen Gould (1989) argued, everything about us, including our very existence, is radically contingent so that, were we to imagine “rewinding the reel,”
so to speak, and allowing it to play again, it is highly unlikely that evolution would again attempt the experiment called Homo sapiens. What a fortuitous chain of events that resulted in the actual existence of the kinds of creatures to whom eternally and necessarily true, but causally impotent, principles apply!7 The Dependence Thesis in the hands of the nonnaturalist seems highly improbable. A sort of “moral fi ne-tuning argument” is suggested. The theist may have an advantage just here. For, on theism, as Santayana put it, the Good is also nature’s Creator.8
The theist, like the nonnaturalist, is in a position to say why there is a necessary connection between certain natural properties and their supervenient moral properties. Robert Adams, for example, has recently suggested that things bear the moral properties that they do – good or bad – insofar as they resemble or fail to resemble God. As he notes, “Natural things that resemble God do so, in general, by virtue of their natural properties” (Adams 1999, p. 61). A theist who accepts such a view can thus agree with Sturgeon that there is no possible world in which anyone does just what Hitler did but is not depraved. And this is precisely because there is no possible world in which such actions fail to be an affront to the divine nature.
But the theist also has an account of the development of human moral faculties –
a theistic genealogy of morals – that allows for something akin to Street’s “tracking relation”: we have the basic moral beliefs we do because they are true, and this is because the mechanisms responsible for those moral beliefs are truth-aimed. Adams again says:
If we suppose that God directly or indirectly causes human beings to regard as excellent approximately those things that are Godlike in the relevant way, it follows that there is a causal and explanatory connection between facts of excellence and beliefs that we may regard as justifi ed about excellence, and hence it is in general no accident that such beliefs are correct when they are. (1999, p. 70)
The theist is thus in a position to offer Daniels’ “little story” that would explain the general reliability of those considered judgments from which refl ective equilibrium takes its cue.
Certain of our moral beliefs – in particular, those that are presupposed in all moral refl ection – are truth-aimed because human moral faculties are designed to guide human conduct in light of moral truth.
7. Apparently, Kant’s Principle of Humanity, as it appeared in the empyrean and before the foundation of the world, read, “Should, against all probability, there be stars, and should, also improbably, those stars align in such a way as to permit the emergence of life, and should, against overwhelming odds, some of those living things turn out to be ‘human,’ then they are to be treated as ends-in-themselves and never as means to ends, and this even in the event that the contingencies of evolution direct them to think otherwise. Disregard this directive in those universes in which these conditions fail to obtain.”
8. Of course, another option – one that earns “raised eyebrows, incredulous stares, or worse” – is John Leslie’s recent suggestion that the best explanation for the existence of the world as it is, is simply that it is good for there to exist such a world. Leslie thus rousts Plato’s Forms from their impotent repose and puts them directly to work in matching is for ought (Leslie 2001).
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Humean skepticism or Reidean externalism?
Both the evolutionary naturalist and the theist may be found saying that certain of our moral beliefs are by-products of the human constitution: we think as we do largely as a result of our programming. Whether such beliefs are warranted would seem to depend upon who or what is responsible for the program. And this calls for some account of the metaphysical underpinnings of those beliefs and the mechanisms responsible for them.9
With this point in mind, perhaps we may tidily summarize our discussion by comparing the perspectives of David Hume and his critic, Thomas Reid.
We saw that Michael Ruse claims Hume as one of his own in that Hume seems to have defended a variety of moral subjectivism – and a Humean one at that! But I am not convinced that this is right. I see Hume’s discussion of moral beliefs as a part of a seamless whole that includes his discussion of the beliefs of common life. And there, I do not think that Hume should be read as advancing the positive metaphysical theses that causal connections fail to obtain or that the world is devoid of both material substances and substantial selves. Rather, his is a skeptical epistemological argument to the effect that we lack any warrant whatsoever for thinking that there are such connections. To be sure, in the fi nal analysis, all that we are warranted in accepting are perceptions and the various ways in which we fi nd them conjoined or otherwise related. But determining whether there is or is not anything more calls for speculation that exceeds the limits of Hume’s skepticism. In each discussion – causality, substance, personal identity – he aims to show both that the belief in question is without any epistemic credentials and that relevant human propensities explain the belief without making any assumptions about the truth of the belief.
Things are no different when Hume turns to the question of morality. We are no more warranted in believing in objective moral properties than we are in thinking that there is any necessary connection among events. And a propensity account waits in the offi ng to explain the persistence of moral beliefs despite their lack of warrant. Moral beliefs are the by-products of human psychology. “Morality is more properly felt than jug’d of ” (Hume 1978, p. 470). But then, so is just about everything else. “All probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation. ‘Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy” (Hume 1978, p. 103). As I read him, Hume was no more a subjectivist than he was a bundle theorist regarding persons. He offered positive theories in neither metaethics nor metaphysics.10 From a Humean perspective, we lack positive reasons for accepting either the dependence or independence theses. Thus, his is a variety of epistemological moral skepticism and, in this, resembles the version of AEN
defended earlier.
9. Here, the advice of Hastings Rashdall is apt: “So long as he is content to assume the reality and authority of the moral consciousness, the Moral Philosopher can ignore Metaphysic; but if the reality of Morals or the validity of ethical truth be once brought into question, the attack can only be met by a thorough-going enquiry into the nature of Knowledge and of Reality” (Rashdall 1907, p. 192).
10. This assertion is, of course, complicated by Hume’s unfortunate assertion that we do not even have the idea of objective moral properties, and talk of them is meaningless – which seems to place him in the noncognitivist camp. But neither do we have the ideas of necessary connection, material substance, or substantial selves, according to Hume, and for precisely the same reasons. If he is, say, an “expressivist” in the one area, then he is equally so in the other.
Thomas Reid countered the conclusions of Hume’s Treatise by appeal to “common sense.” Reid compares the course of modern philosophy, which began with Descartes and ended with Hume, to a traveler who, upon fi nding himself “in a coal-pit,” realizes that he has taken a wrong turn. Upon hearing the skeptical musings of some of the modern philosophers, the average person, confi dent in the deliverances of common sense, takes them to be “either merry or mad.” Indeed, Reid suggests that anyone who is a true friend of the man who seriously entertains doubts regarding, say, his own mind or of a world of things that endure over time, will “hope for his cure from physic and regimen, rather than metaphysic and logic” (Reid 1983, pp. 4–5). He places his hope in the doctor of medicine rather than the doctor of philosophy precisely because the beliefs in question do not admit of the sort of proof that the philosopher would vainly offer. As G. K.
Chesterton (1986) put it, curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher but casting out a devil. There is no set of premises more certainly known from which such beliefs follow. Hume is right: the beliefs of common life are not endorsed by reason, but, instead, are the inevitable by-products of our constitution. But Hume is mistaken in inferring from this that such beliefs are, therefore, without warrant. Why, after all, trust the rational faculties to which Hume appeals, but not trust the faculties responsible for our commonsense beliefs? After all, both “came from the same shop” (Reid 1983, p. 85). As Nicholas Wolterstorff notes, according to Reid, that “shop” was “divine creation by fi at”
(Wolterstorff 2001, p. 199).
As Reid had it, the commonsense beliefs that arise spontaneously and noninferentially given our constitution are warranted even though they fail to measure up to the exacting standards of epistemic justifi cation assumed by foundationalists after the Cartesian fashion.
My belief, I have a head, is not logically self-evident: I am free to deny it without pain of contradiction (although perhaps not without pain of running it into a post). There are logically possible scenarios that would explain my having the belief even if it were false, though, of course, none of these is commended to me. Further, I have a head is not incorrigible in the way that I am being appeared-to headly is. Nor have I inferred the former from the latter or from any other belief. Nevertheless, I am warranted in believing it, and, what is more, I know that I have a head just in case I have one.
These days we might say that such beliefs are properly basic. My belief in my head is basic in that it is noninferential. And my accepting this belief in this basic way constitutes no epistemic impropriety on my part. The belief is properly basic just in case the faculty through which it is acquired (which, presumably, involves my head) is functioning as it ought. More specifi cally, as Alvin Plantinga (1993) has refi ned Reid’s original view, a belief is warranted just in case it is the product of a belief-producing mechanism that is truth-aimed and functioning properly in the environment for which it was designed.
This account accommodates those perceptual, memorial, testimonial, and even metaphysical beliefs that are the guides of common life and, closer to our purposes, are among the fund of native beliefs with which we begin in theory assessment. Even closer to our purposes, such an account accommodates those moral beliefs employed in refl ective equilibrium.
Reid appealed to a set of “fi rst, or ‘self-evident’ principles” of morality discerned through faculties that he thought were wrought in the same shop as reason and perception. Just as there is no reasoning with the man who, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, is convinced that his head is a gourd, neither is there advantage in engaging in moral argument with a man who fails to recognize self-evident principles of morality.
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If a man does not perceive that he ought to regard the good of society, and the good of his wife and children, the reasoning can have no effect upon him, because he denies the fi rst principle upon which it is grounded. (Reid 1983, p. 322)
The details of Reid’s own candidates for such fi rst principles need not concern us in the present context. What is of signifi cance is the suggestion that there are moral beliefs to which “we should pay homage,” as Norman Daniels has put it. We pay such homage when we utilize them as data for the construction of moral theories or as a kind of court of appeal in assessing them. This is business as usual in moral philosophy. We may suppose, with Nicholas Sturgeon, that Adolf Hitler was depraved, or with Kai Nielsen (1990, p. 10) that wife beating or child molesting is vile, and go on to agree with the latter that such beliefs are “bedrock.”
But our confi dence in these constitutional beliefs is wisely invested only in the event that we have reason to believe the faculties responsible for them to be truth-aimed. Reid’s theism provided him with such a reason: the moral faculties were forged in the same shop as our other cognitive faculties. They are designed by God for the purpose of discerning moral truth. “That conscience which is in every man’s breast, is the law of God written in his heart, which he cannot disobey without acting unnaturally, and being self-condemned”
(Reid 1983, p. 355). Hume, on the other hand, fi nding only the faculties but pretending to no knowledge of their origin, placed no such confi dence in their reliability. The evolutionary naturalist may have added an account of origins, but it is one that inspires no more confi dence than that displayed by Hume.
An Argument from Personal Dignity
In The Brothers Karamazov, one of Dostoevsky’s characters relates a chilling tale of unspeak-able acts of cruelty committed by soldiers at war. Among other things, he describes soldiers snatching babies from the arms of their mothers and tossing them into the air to catch them on the points of their bayonets. Presumably, bayoneting babies for fun (and for any other reason) is wrong. Indeed, we might suppose the belief that it is wrong to be included in that fund of moral beliefs with which we begin moral refl ection. Employing the method of refl ective equilibrium, we might appeal to such a belief as we seek to construct or assess theories of morality. We may well suppose that any ethical theory that implies the permissibility of recreational baby-bayoneting is worthy of the dustbin.
But competing ethical theories may be found to have signifi cant overlap regarding which classes of actions are deemed right or wrong. One might imagine a group of three attempting to save a beached whale. Subsequent interviews reveal that one is a Deep Ecologist whose primary concern is the preservation of biological diversity, and this whale is a specimen of an endangered species. His collaborators include an animal rights activist who is acting from a direct concern for the welfare of the animal itself, and a theist who views the rescue as a duty of stewardship. Almost certainly, we could fi nd other issues where the entailments of these respective views clash, but here they are in agreement. As they say, philosophy makes for strange bedfellows.
Similarly, competing grounds may be offered for the wrongness of baby-bayoneting.
Consider, for example, the probable assessment of philosopher Mary Anne Warren. In a widely anthologized essay, Warren argues that all and only persons have rights, fetuses are
not persons, and so fetuses do not have rights (Warren 2005). Her reason for thinking that fetuses are disqualifi ed is that there is a set of faculties or capacities, X, Y, and Z, some subset of which all persons possess, fetuses display none of X, Y, or Z, and so fetuses are not persons. The upshot, of course, is that abortion does not involve a violation of any fetal right to life, and so the only rights at stake in the abortion issue are those of the woman.
In a postscript to the essay, Warren anticipates an objection. Infants fail to display the requisite faculties and so Warren’s argument has perhaps proved more than she intended: we now have before us an argument for the moral permissibility of infanticide. Have we not the makings of an ad absurdum for her original argument?
Her reply is to acknowledge that her argument does indeed imply that infants do not have a right to life, and so the killing of an infant can never amount to murder, since murder essentially involves the violation of such a right. But she maintains that it does not follow that infanticide is permissible. The moral wrongness of killing a baby may be made out without invoking rights – at least not those of the baby.
The needless destruction of a viable infant inevitably deprives some person or persons of a source of great pleasure and satisfaction, perhaps severely impoverishing their lives. (Warren 2005, p. 124)
On Warren’s view, infanticide is wrong not because it violates any direct duties owed the infant. Rather, we have direct duties to other persons – individuals with traits X, Y, and Z –
and these direct duties imply indirect duties regarding infants. Even if you do not care for babies, there are other people who do, and the wanton destruction of infants deprives those other people of the pleasure and satisfaction of having a child. In this respect, Warren’s view of the wrongness of infanticide displays the same structure as Kant’s account of the wrongness of animal cruelty. Kant (1981) maintained that we have direct duties to all and only persons. But it does not follow that we may deal with animals as we please. Animal cruelty works as a corrosive on one’s character, resulting in callousness or even cruelty to our fellow humans. Because we have direct duties of kindness to people, we should cultivate those character traits that give us a propensity for such kindness. Animal cruelty is simply counterproductive in this regard.
I suspect that most people fi nd both Warren’s and Kant’s views to be inadequate. In fact, Warren acknowledges that many will regard her conclusion on infanticide as “morally monstrous.” Indeed, if infants do not have rights at all, then not only do they not have a right not to be killed, but neither do they have a right not to be tortured. And so, were we to imagine Dostoevsky’s scenario or (assuming there can be such a thing) worse, Warren’s position entails that the wrongness of the torture of infants is contingent upon the effect that it has upon actual persons. If infants, as nonpersons, have no rights whatsoever, then even such horrifi c instances of cruelty cannot be understood as violating any direct duty owed the infant. They are afforded no moral standing, and any moral concern regarding their treatment must look to other grounds. Perhaps it is wrong because of the suffering that it causes the mothers or other people. Perhaps it is wrong because of some other bad societal consequence, proximate or remote. If Kant is correct in thinking that animal abuse spawns cruelty to other humans, how much easier might be the move from infant torture to the torture of “actual” persons? Or we might suppose that it is wrong in that it manifests wickedness or vice in the extreme. Thomas E. Hill (1991) offers a potentially usable model
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here. He asks, if we do not think that, say, natural environments or works of art enjoy moral standing in their own right, might we explain our “moral unease” on contemplating their destruction by asking the question, “What sort of person would do a thing like that?” Our attention is thus shifted from a question of rights or direct duties owed anyone or anything, to an assessment of character. Surely, an even harsher judgment is appropriate regarding Dostoevsky’s soldiers. Perhaps some combination of those mentioned can work together to arrive at the conclusion that infanticide is impermissible.
But such answers, even taken together, seem altogether unsatisfactory. Surely, if bayoneting babies for fun is morally wrong, the wrongness must be explained chiefl y in terms of what is done to the baby. Consider Mary Midgley’s objection to G. R. Grice’s contract theory. Grice’s theory implied that animals, young children, and the mentally impaired have no natural rights due to their nonparticipation in the contract out of which rights arise. He anticipated that some readers would chafe at such implications and urged that, for the sake of consistency with the theory, we “should be willing to accept” them even if they seem “harsh.” Presumably, Grice, no more than Warren, was advocating a slaughter of the innocents. Nevertheless, Midgley will have none of this. She observes that, here, “harsh” just means “unjust.” She insists, “An ethical theory which, when consistently followed through, has iniquitous consequences is a bad theory and must be changed” (Midgley 1986, p. 157). The so-called “iniquitous consequences” of the theory are seen not only in what actions would be permitted if the principle were accepted but also in the grounds for saying that a given action is required, permitted, or prohibited.
It is along similar lines that Richard Joyce, in contemplating an example of “Jack,” who treats those around him with brutality, remarks, “It is surely grotesque to think that what is wrong with Jack’s actions is the self-harm being generated. The wrongness of torture, for example, surely derives chiefl y from the harm being infl icted on others! (Joyce 2006, p. 60).
One lesson to be gleaned from the discussion thus far is that, for any proposed theory of morality to be plausible, it must not only carry implications that do justice to certain of our deep-seated moral convictions, but it must also offer a satisfactory account of those implications. After all, when told that his proposed theory implies the moral permissibility of baby-bayoneting, it is always open to the theorist to reply, “If my theory implies the permissibility of baby-bayoneting, well, then, baby-bayoneting is permissible! Let your
‘intuitions’ be hanged!” The fact that this is rarely done demonstrates the force of those
“intuitions.” In the face of such objections, most theorists will argue that, properly understood, their theories do not entail the permissibility of rape, genocide, or slavery. But if, as Norman Daniels (1979) has it, we are to “pay homage” to certain considered judgments about which acts are permissible or impermissible, and to the principles that would system-ize those judgments, the honor should be extended to take in judgments about what qualifi es as an acceptable explanation.
Another lesson to be gathered is that the considered judgments in question appear to call for our according moral standing to individuals – in the case of our considered example, human infants. I understand S has moral standing to mean S is the appropriate object of direct moral duties. And to say that S is the object of a direct moral duty is to imply that a violation of that duty would entail wronging, or doing an injustice to S.
Suppose that you carelessly park your car in the lot adjacent to the mathematics department at your university. When you return to your vehicle, you fi nd that delinquent mathematicians have left the car on blocks and spray painted mathematical graffi ti from bumper
to bumper: the Pythagorean Theorem, the Triangular Inequality, Cantor’s Theorem – it is all there. Have they done something wrong? Presumably. But, this side of the Bay area, we are not likely to fi nd people suggesting that they have wronged the car, done it an injustice or violated its rights. Cars are not plausibly thought to have moral standing – not even Bentleys. Rather, we might suppose that the wrongness of such vandalism stems from the violation of a direct duty to you to respect your property rights or the like. And that direct duty carries with it an indirect duty regarding the car.
Consider the wrongness of rape as a test case. Any theory worthy of consideration even as a contender will imply the wrongness of rape. But any theory that essentially and wholly explains the wrongness of that act by regarding the rape victim in the way that we regard the car in the vandalism case, where our direct concern is for someone or something other than the victim, is, I think, equally implausible. Generally, in the case of harms brought to persons, we have, I think, an implausible explanation if it is reducible to the form: (ID) A’s harming B is wrong solely because A’s harming B affects C.
Here, I will understand C to be anyone not identical to B – including A.
Moral standing and egoism
There is some reason to doubt whether philosophical egoism is to be regarded as an ethical theory.11 But let us regard it as such, at least provisionally, in order to put the present point into sharp relief. Using our distinction between direct and indirect duties, we may classify egoism as any theory holding that agents have direct duties only to themselves and indirect duties, if there are any duties at all, regarding anyone else. An initial reaction to the egoist’s proposal is to think that the principle involved entails the precept, Do whatever you can happily get away with. An egoist might pillage and plunder and rifl e and loot like a pirate, and, so long as it serves his interests and he is able to sleep nights (and why would he not, since he is acting in accord with the only moral principle he takes to be true?) then he may well be on his way to canonization.
Of course, one might distinguish between “nasty” and “nice” egoism. The former
was just described. Proponents of the latter might fold in claims about the interdependence of individuals and the societies in which they are found. Perhaps, as Jerome K. Jerome suggested, “We are so bound together that no man can labor for himself alone. Each blow he strikes in his own behalf helps to mold the universe” (Jerome 2005, p. 47). Bishop Butler maintained in earnest that “self-love” and “benevolence” (by which he meant a concern for others and the public good in general) are so intricately related that, “we can scarcely promote the one without the other” (Butler 1983, p. 27). Were this true (is it?), one might have the resources for arguing that a world full of calculating but truly circumspect egoists would be like one big Hallmark greeting card commercial, featuring smiling people exchanging kindnesses. And, of course, rape is never depicted on greeting cards.
But even “nice” egoism is not nice enough. If the egoist concludes, happily, that rape is wrong, then he can only conclude this because he has determined that it wrongs the rapist. Such a verdict is, as Joyce (2006) says, “grotesque.” While it is no doubt true that 11. See Kurt Baier’s discussion of egoism in Singer (1991).
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agents who engage in horrifi c acts of violence do damage to themselves in the process, this concern is, or ought to be, peripheral to the direct concern that one has for the victim. Rape is wrong, if wrong at all, because it violates a direct duty owed the victim. The victim is wronged by the act and done an injustice. Egoism cannot accommodate this insight. Any attempt to do so signals the abandonment of egoism for some other, perhaps more plausible, theory of morality. Egoism satisfi es the criterion that a theory must countenance the moral standing of individuals. The trouble is that the only individual who enjoys such standing is the agent. And so we have but to add the clause, in addition to the agent.
Moral standing and utilitarianism
Are there more plausible theories? Consider utilitarianism, which is a theory that most certainly looks beyond a concern for the good of the agent. Generically stated, the principle of utility tells us that right actions are those that have good consequences for the community. This is “generic” because a great deal of variation is possible in defi ning what “good”
and “community” mean here. Classical utilitarians in the tradition of Jeremy Bentham and J. S. Mill have held to a hedonist theory of value, so that pleasure is viewed as of intrinsic value. As Mill put it, “Pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and . . . all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain” (Mill 2001, p. 7). But there are other, nonhedonistic theories of value that could be plugged in here, from the plausible (e.g.
human fl ourishing or the meeting of interests) to the bizarre (e.g. the maximization of back hair or of plastic Elvis fi gurines). As for the question of what is meant by the “community,” classical utilitarians have taken an anthropocentric approach, equating the community with “humanity.” But, following a clue from Bentham, Peter Singer has urged that the moral community should consist of all and only sentient creatures. His resulting utilitarianism would thus have it that our aim should be to maximize utility for the set of all sentient animals, including, of course, sentient humans. On this latter point, we might say, then, that utilitarians may differ with regard to the scope of the moral community. This issue, as with the theory of value, admits of much variety, including both the plausible (e.g.
humanity, sentient creatures) and the implausible or bizarre (e.g. all and only those people who are Neil Young, all and only fl atworms).
We might suppose that the utilitarian’s question concerning the scope of the moral community is identical to the question of who or what has moral standing. However, I believe this is a mistake. The utilitarian’s “moral community” is not identical to the set of individuals who enjoy moral standing. Utilitarianism does not accord moral standing to individual members of the moral community.
Jeremy Bentham, that imperishable proponent of utilitarianism, famously said that the notion of natural rights is “nonsense on stilts.” In fact, the broader context of that quote is useful for our present purpose. Bentham’s subject was the Declaration of Rights published by the French National Assembly in 1791. That declaration included a number of articles that Bentham thought demonstrably false. Article II, in particular, asserted, “The end in view of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.” On analysis, Bentham suggests that the article manifests confusion and that what it asserts is
not only nonsense but also “dangerous nonsense” (2001, p. 500). In particular, Bentham challenges the notion of natural and imprescriptible rights, thought to exist, “anterior to the establishment of government.” The notion is as fantastic as it is mischievous.
How stands the truth of things? That there are no such things as natural rights – no such things as rights anterior to the establishment of government – no such things as natural rights opposed to, in contradistinction to, legal: that the expression is merely fi gurative; that when used, in the moment you attempt to give it a literal meaning it leads to error, and to that sort of error that leads to mischief – to the extremity of mischief. (Bentham 2001, p. 500) Where that French document maintains that “the ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments,”
Bentham notes that this is little more than wishful thinking. “Reasons for wishing there were such things as rights, are not rights; – a reason for wishing that a certain right were established, is not that right – want is not supply – hunger is not bread” (Bentham 2001, p. 501). And whereas the document is motivated by a concern to preserve the natural rights of people, Bentham reasons that things that do not exist are in no danger of being destroyed and, therefore, cannot call for preservation. One might as well add unicorns and griffi ns to the list of endangered species. This sets the context for Bentham’s well-known “nonsense” quip: “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, – nonsense upon stilts” (Bentham 2001, p. 501).
Bentham’s argument, then, is with the notion of rights that are inherent and imprescriptible (i.e. “inalienable”). Both features of such rights are rejected by means of one parsimonious explanation: whatever rights exist are contingent upon the circumstances of society. And those “circumstances” are determined by the question of what is “advantageous to society,” that is to say, the notion of utility.
In proportion as it is right or proper, i.e., advantageous to the society in question, that this or that right – a right to this or that effect – should be established and maintained, in that same proportion it is wrong that it should be abrogated: but that as there is no right, which ought not to be maintained so long as it is upon the whole advantageous to the society that it should be maintained, so there is no right which, when the abolition of it is advantageous to society, should not be abolished. (Bentham 2001, p. 501)
Bentham’s view does clearly entail that there are no natural or moral rights that are anterior to and independent of the civil rights that are accorded by society, and so the former are unavailable as the grounds for the latter. But it is worth highlighting here what may be obvious: this does not leave him in a position of saying that there are no anterior moral grounds for the granting of civil rights. Although there are no anterior and inherent rights, it may still be the case that individuals within a society ought to be accorded certain rights – perhaps even that list of rights delineated in the Declaration. And, of course, the court of appeal will be found in the Principle of Utility. But whether rights are extended or abrogated will be determined by the circumstances of utility, and this is always with a view to the advantage of society. There cannot be “imprescriptible” rights precisely because a concern for social utility may call for their abrogation. If there were such rights, then there would be occasions on which it is morally inappropriate to calculate consequences.
But if the Principle of Utility is true, then it is always appropriate so to calculate. Whether you eat or drink, or whatsoever you do, do all to the benefi t of society.
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With this bit of exegesis behind us, we may see that John Stuart Mill did not veer sharply from the course already plotted by Bentham once Mill got around to discussing the notion of rights. Chapter fi ve of Utilitarianism is Mill’s attempt to show that utility and justice embrace, despite the criticisms of the theory’s detractors. Mill identifi es duties of justice with those “perfect duties”12 discussed by philosophers. Unlike so-called “imperfect duties,”
these involve the rights of individuals, so that the violation of such a duty involves the wronging of the individual whose rights are involved. Thus, the notions of justice and individual rights are inextricably bound. “Justice implies something which it is not only right to do, and wrong not to do, but which some individual person can claim from us as his moral right” (Mill 2001, p. 50).
The ascription of any individual right, in turn, implies a claim that society ought to defend in the individual. To say, for instance, that I have a right to property is to imply that, through either legislation or education or both, society ought to defend me in my possession of that property. And it is here where Mill makes the connection between justice and utility clear:
To have a right, then, is, I conceive, to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask, why it ought? I can give him no other reason than general utility. (Mill 2001, p. 54)
Nothing here would be likely to cause Mill’s forbear, Bentham, to turn over in his booth.
Mill, like Bentham, maintains that the sole basis for according rights to individuals is the effect that doing so has upon the advantage to society. He, no more than Bentham, has
“anterior” or “inherent” rights in mind. But are Mill’s rights “imprescriptible”?
Where Mill may offer some advance beyond Bentham is in his account of the seeming inviolability of such rights. As we have seen, Daniel Dennett (1995) suggests that “rights language” tends to serve as a “conversation stopper.” The rights card is thought to trump any and all other considerations. Reading Bentham, one may come away with the impression that whatever “rights” we enjoy are tenuous at best, contingent as they are upon the fortuitous circumstances of social utility. We are prepared for Mill’s argument in chapter fi ve by some of the elements of his theory that are presented in earlier chapters. By the end of chapter two, it is clear that Mill is advancing a variety of rule utilitarianism. For example, he suggests at one place that there are occasions on which one must abstain from an action, even though “the consequences in the particular case might be benefi cial” because “the action is of a class which, if practised generally, would be generally injurious” (Mill 2001, p. 19). And in what, at 178 words, is surely a contender for the longest sentence in the history of the English language, Mill argues for the wrongness of lying even when the lie is immediately expedient because lying undermines the trustworthiness of human assertion, “. . . which does more than any one thing that can be named to keep back civilisation, virtue, everything on which human happiness on the largest scale depends” (Mill 2001, p. 23). Lying thus falls under a rule of “transcendent expediency.” He speaks of “corollaries 12. “Imperfect” duties are typically thought to correspond to “duties of benevolence,” and these leave it to the discretion of the agent just when, under what circumstances, for which benefi ciaries and to what degree the duties will be carried out. “Perfect” duties leave no such latitude. My duty to refrain from lying to you is not open to my own discretion to determine when to lie or be truthful, and so on.
from the Principle of Utility,” “intermediate generalizations,” “subordinate principles,” and
“secondary principles,” which, clearly, are moral rules derived from the “fi rst principle” –
utility. And he closes the chapter with a discussion of moral quandaries in which two or more “secondary principles” are brought into confl ict. “We must remember that only in these cases of confl ict between secondary principles is it requisite that fi rst principles should be appealed to” (Mill 2001, p. 26).
Each moral rule has its place in this scheme because of the utility derived from abstain-ing from tokens of the act type (in the case of wrong actions) or performing such act tokens (in the case of permissible or obligatory actions). But, as with any plausible theory of morality, Mill’s rule utilitarianism treats such derivative rules as posing presumptive, rather than absolute, obligations, which may be overturned by rules weightier than themselves.
Relative weight is determined by direct appeal to the principle of utility. We might thus speak of a weightier rule trumping its less substantial competitor. Mill’s account of justice focuses on a set of moral rules which, because of the supreme importance of the human goods or interests that they are designed to protect, tend to trump any rules with which they may be found to compete. Thus, “Justice is a name for certain classes of moral rules, which concern the essentials of human well-being more nearly, and are therefore of more absolute obligation, than any other rules for the guidance of life” (Mill 2001, p. 59). And again:
Justice is a name for certain moral requirements, which, regarded collectively, stand higher in the scale of social utility, and are therefore of more paramount obligation, than any others; though particular cases may occur in which some other social duty is so important, as to overrule any one of the general maxims of justice. (Mill 2001, p. 63)
Thus, those moral rules which are designed to safeguard our fundamental security or well-being derive their supreme importance and impose paramount obligations due to the weight of the goods that they protect as weighed on the scale of social utility. Individual
“rights” are thus claims that people have to those goods, and, as we have seen, the claims themselves are sustained by that same concern for utility.
Mill takes nothing away from Bentham. The notion of inherent or natural rights is just as fantastic by Mill’s reckoning as by Bentham’s. He, like Bentham, “dispute(s) the pretensions of any theory which sets up an imaginary standard of justice not grounded on utility”
(Mill 2001, p. 59). A concern for individual rights or for justice is at once a concern for social utility. This is no more to say that utilitarians must act from a conscious concern for general utility, overlooking the individual concerned, than that advocates of the “selfi sh gene” theory are committed to denying consciously altruistic motives. Perhaps the utilitarian has the resources for arguing that there is greater social utility to be had in a society of individuals who consciously and mutually value the other intrinsically. A Kantian respect-for-persons ethic could prove to be a useful fi ction on a utilitarian reckoning. But, if Mill is to be believed, it is a fi ction, useful or not, and it must be so precisely because of that utilitarian reckoning.
Mill’s chapter is motivated from a concern to answer a familiar objection to utilitarian theory. We might call that objection the problem of justice. The worry is that there appears to be no necessary connection between an action’s maximizing utility and its being fair or just. It is sometimes urged that the consistent utilitarian would be in a position of justifying, say, slavery, the torture of innocent persons, or even rape should the circumstances of
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utility call for it. I am supposing for the sake of argument that Mill’s development of rule utilitarianism and account of utility-based justice offers a satisfactory solution to the problem of justice.13 Let us assume with Mill, then, that even where it is determined that slavery or rape would produce benefi cial consequences in a particular case, “it would be unworthy of an intelligent agent not to be consciously aware that the action is of a class which, if practised generally, would be generally injurious, and that this is the ground of the obligation to abstain.” Indeed, let us leave the door open to Mill and to later utilitarians to demonstrate that the Principle of Utility, rightly understood, has none of these “iniquitous consequences.” Nevertheless, I maintain that any and all versions of utilitarianism worthy of the name must fail to account for that portion of commonsense morality that we are holding up as a criterion: that individuals have moral standing.
Consider our test case of rape. Surely, rape is immoral if any act is immoral. And we may suppose that Mill has offered us grounds for saying why. Rape violates a moral rule that concerns “the essentials of human well-being more nearly” than other rules to such a degree that we fi nd it diffi cult to imagine any competing rule trumping the rule against rape. And because justice is a name for rules in this class, and, further, justice always involves individual rights, we may say that, on Mill’s view, rape involves the violation of the victim’s rights. And, as we have seen, Mill suggests that, in such cases, the individual is wronged or done an injustice. Why, then, is this not suffi cient for allowing that his view accords moral standing to individuals within the moral community?
The answer is that, upon analysis, the explanation for the wrongness of rape appeals to the “generally injurious” consequences for the community rather than the simple fact that the person who is the victim simply ought not to be treated in that manner. Again, Mill, no more than Bentham, offers us an account that permits the existence of inherent rights. If there is a right not to be raped, it is, therefore, derivative and contingent upon the circumstances of social utility. The structure of the utilitarian explanation of the wrongness of rape is reducible to that of (ID) mentioned earlier, and bears a strong resemblance to the explanation required of the egoist, not to mention our account of the wrongness of vandalism. And, while Mill employs language suggestive of direct duties to the holders of rights, we must not lose sight of the logic of the utilitarian analysis. William Paley, a divine command moralist who moonlighted as a utilitarian, seemed not particularly troubled over the prospect of convicting innocent persons, suggesting that “he who falls by a mistaken sentence may be considered as falling for his country” (Paley 1785, p. 369). Mill’s “rights utilitarian” might endorse Blackstone’s Formulation: “Better that ten guilty persons go free than that one innocent suffer.”14 This may call for extending certain civil rights to the obviously guilty and perhaps even acquitting in the event that those rights are deemed to have been violated in the process. Indeed, the resulting view has been aptly put by one economist: “The disutility of convicting an innocent person far exceeds the disutility of fi nding a guilty person to be not guilty” (Volokh 1997). But where this occurs, it is not out of a direct concern for the guilty person but for the preservation of an institution essential to social utility, and this is so despite a language of civil rights 13. I am, in fact, persuaded by the argument that rule utilitarianism is reducible to act utilitarianism – act utilitarianism in a rented tux, so to speak.
14. Bentham, of course, referred to Blackstone’s work – or perhaps the man himself – as “ignorance on stilts.”
Were Blackstone to join company with the French delegates – whose views were, in Bentham’s estimation, of similar artifi cial stature – we would have the beginnings of a small circus.
that may seem to suggest otherwise. And should the utilitarian insist otherwise, a dilemma awaits.
To the question of why society ought to defend the rights of individuals, Mill’s answer was “social utility.” But this invites a further question. Why should we concern ourselves over social utility? Is it for the sake of anything beyond itself – in particular, for the sake of the individuals who make up the community – or is it not? If not, then the argument of the present chapter succeeds: the utilitarian does not act ultimately out of a regard for the moral standing of individuals. But if so, then it would appear that our utilitarian has something beyond utility in mind – perhaps something more laudable. After all, the believer in natural rights might well evince a concern for social utility in that the fl ourishing of the community is conducive to the fl ourishing of people.
When a British captain and eight soldiers were to be tried, each for his role in the Boston Massacre, John Adams hazarded “a popularity hardly earned” and incurred “a clamour and popular suspicions and prejudices” by accepting an invitation to mount their defense.
Reading accounts of the defense itself, as well as Adams’ own memoirs concerning the trial, it is evident that he believed his clients were innocent. “Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the Verdict of the Jury was exactly right,” he said (Adams & Adams 2007, p. 317). The John Adams whose name is affi xed to a document asserting inalienable human rights might well be thought to have been motivated by a direct concern for innocent soldiers, Quakers, and witches, as their natural and imprescriptible rights were at stake. But had he later read and been convinced by Bentham’s critique, his interest may have been diverted to the importance of avoiding the “foul Stain”
for its own sake rather than for the sake of those who would endure it. As Bernard Williams notes, “consequentialism attaches value ultimately to states of affairs” (Smart & Williams 1973, p. 95). This “ultimacy” calls for those states of affairs being pursued for their own sake rather than for the sake of anyone who appreciates them.15 Perhaps man was made for the Sabbath after all.
The point coincides with the so-called “receptacle problem” that Tom Regan has urged against utilitarianism. According to Regan, it is not individuals that are valued by the utilitarian, but their mental states. Mill, for instance, made it clear that pleasure is the only thing desirable as an end, and the desirableness of anything else is contingent upon the pleasure that it produces. Other utilitarians might substitute satisfaction of the interests of individuals as the one thing of intrinsic value. Either way, this invites the question of where persons fi t into such a scheme. According to Regan, persons are important because they are the vessels that are laden with this treasure. Consider his following example:
Here is an analogy to help make the philosophical point clearer: a cup contains different liquids
– sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, sometimes a mix of the two. What has value are the liquids: the sweeter the better; the bitterer the worse. The cup – the container – has no value.
It’s what goes into it, not what they go into, that has value. For the utilitarian, you and I are like the cup; we have no value as individuals and thus no equal value. What has value is what goes into us, what we serve as receptacles for; our feelings of satisfaction have positive value; our feelings of frustration have negative value. (Regan in Pierce & VanDeVeer 1995, p. 75) 15. Marcus Singer has pointed out in his lectures that the utilitarian’s direct duty proves to be an odd abstraction: it is to maintain a number in the universe – something like a GNP on a cosmic scale – representing net utility, and this not for the sake of anyone’s enjoyment.
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There is no direct concern to see to it that individuals are satisfi ed rather than frustrated, pleased rather than pained – at least, not for the individual’s own sake. The principal concern is to maintain the greatest possible net pleasure or satisfaction. And this net pleasure is not for the sake of any individual persons. Rather, the reverse is true: any regard for the individual is ultimately out of a concern for increasing net utility. Utilitarianism fails to accord moral standing to individuals.
Moral standing and virtue ethics
Virtue Ethics (VE) is often distinguished from both consequentialist and deontological theories of morality on the grounds that, whereas those theories emphasize the rightness of acts, VE places a premium upon the goodness of agents. Thus, Roger Crisp and Michael Slote write, “Certainly it is characteristic of modern VE that it puts primary emphasis on aretaic or virtue centered concepts rather than deontic or obligation-centered concepts”
(Crisp & Slote 1997, p. 3). And Rosalind Hursthouse (2007) helpfully observes: Suppose it is obvious that someone in need should be helped. A utilitarian will point to the fact that the consequences of doing so will maximise well-being, a deontologist to the fact that, in doing so the agent will be acting in accordance with a moral rule such as “Do unto others as you would be done by” and a virtue ethicist to the fact that helping the person would be charitable or benevolent.
Aristotle maintained that excellence or right action should be understood in terms of how a good person, one of practical wisdom, would choose to act. As Monika Betzler has it,
“The standard of right action is to do whatever an entirely virtuous person would do”
(Betzler 2008, p. 2) and, as Robert N. Johnson suggests, such theories make “an ideal of the person, rather than duty or value” the “foundation of ethics” so that “what makes an action a moral duty and what makes something of value is its relationship to some ideal of the person” (Johnson 2008, p. 58).
It is sometimes suggested that Aristotle faces a circularity problem here. Rightness is whatever a good person would do. But what makes a good person good? One cannot say, in turn, that good people are those who perform right actions. Consider, for example, a point made by Vasilis Politis in a review of Theodore Scaltsas’s The Golden Age of Virtue: Aristotle’s Ethics. Politis observes that Scaltsas attempts to break the circle by suggesting that good people are to be understood as those who choose things that are “good by nature”
( phusei), and that these are good by nature insofar as they contribute to a “harmonic whole.” But, Politis thinks, this signals an abandonment of Aristotle’s position: I am not sure how the proposed solution is really a solution to the problem. Aristotle thinks that right action must be determined in terms of how the good person would choose. But Scaltsas’ proposal, if I am not mistaken, means that right action is determined without appeal to how the good person would choose: right action is right by virtue of contributing to the
‘harmony among a variety of elements in the character of the person. (Politis 1995, p. 259) I do not wish to spend any time in worry over this problem. Instead, I will assume that the Aristotelian is able to answer the question, “What makes good people good?” without being drawn into this vortex. Perhaps an account of human fl ourishing may be offered so that
the virtues amount to character traits that either conduce to or are manifestations of such fl ourishing – they are among the good-making traits for the kind. There is much that the virtue ethicist may plausibly say along these lines. Robert Johnson offers a formal account of VE that takes such a notion of fl ourishing into direct consideration.
(VE) For all actions ϕ and all persons S, it is right (to be done, ethical, correct, etc.) for S to ϕ in C at t if and only if ϕ-ing in C at t is or would be characteristic of a fl ourishing human life (Johnson 2008, p. 60).
But Politis’ criticism raises an important point for our purposes. He is, after all, analyzing the structure of moral explanation regarding the moral properties of rightness and goodness – what Johnson calls the “form” of the theory (Johnson in Betzler 2007, p. 58) –
and this is our task. Does the moral standing of persons factor in to the virtue ethicist’s account?
Consider how a VE account might look in explaining the wrongness of an action in a context where we do not suppose that any direct duties are being violated.16 Richard Routley (1973) has offered a counterexample – his “Last Man” example – to the anthropocentric view that our environmental duties are indirect, derivative of direct duties owed other humans. You are literally the last person on earth and, for whatever reason – perhaps just for the hell of it – you are considering some action that will have disastrous environmental effects,17 say, setting multiple and massive wildfi res in the Redwoods. In this scenario, there are no other human persons whose well-being could be either harmed or helped by anything that you do, and so an anthropocentric theory cannot account for the apparent wrongness of the act. But it does seem to most of us (does it not?) that it would, nevertheless, be wrong. Does this not implicate an ethic of direct environmental duties –
the according of moral standing to nature itself?
I agree that Routley’s Last Man behaves badly. But I am equally willing to censure him in other contexts. Suppose the Last Man were to set off on a kind of iconoclastic rampage.
We fi nd him in Paris defacing Mona Lisa, then on to Florence to have a go at Michelangelo’s David. I squirm at such thoughts just as I do when he is targeting trees. But I do not think it is at all plausible to extend moral standing to paintings or statues.
Thomas Hill has suggested that there is a perfectly sensible way in which we may account for environmental wrongs independently of our positing direct duties to the environment itself. In the sorts of cases considered earlier, Hill would have us ask, “What kind of person would do a thing like that?” His is an application of a virtue ethic to the question of environmental responsibility. With this emphasis, there is a shift – characteristic of VE – away from the question of the rightness or wrongness of the actions in question and to the issue 16. Much of what I say here follows my discussion in Linville (1998).