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CHAPTER TITLE: “The Making of a Moral Self”

BOOK AUTHOR: Johnson, Mark

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Jb?S

Morality for Humans

Ethical Understanding from the

Perspective of Cognitive Science

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

lllllll 11111111111111111111 111111111111111111 *2066127*

MARK JOHNSON is the Philip H. Knight Professor of Liberal Arts

and Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at the University of

Oregon. He is the author of several books, including The Meaning of the

Body; The Body in the Mind; and Moral Imagination; and coauthor, with

George Lakoff, of Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-11340-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-11354-8 (e-book)

1 2 3 4 5

DOI: 10. 7208/chicago/9780226113548.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnson, Mark, 1949- author.

Morality for humans: ethical understanding from the perspective of

cognitive science/ Mark Johnson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-11340-1 (cloth: alk. paper)-

ISBN 978-0-226-11354-8 (e-book) 1. Ethics. 2. Cognitive science-­

Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title.

B}45.5.J64 2014

171'.7-dc23 2013025456

§ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO 239.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper).

EIGHT

The Making of a Moral Self

What Should a Moral Theory Do?

Here, in outline, is my summary of the argument I have

been developing so far for an empirically responsible ac­

count of a morality that is fit for humans as we currently

know them.

1. Human moral agents are highly complex animals whose values

emerge in ongoing interactions with their physical, interpersonal,

and cultural environments. Those values arise naturally and are not

handed down from some transcendent source.

2. Our values relating to human well-being come from many sources:

the biological necessities for life maintenance, aspects of our inter­

personal relations, requirements for group cooperation, and consid­

erations of individual and group flourishing.

3. Experience does not come pre-classified into distinct types, so there

is no such thing as an exclusively moral experience. Therefore, there

is no need to posit any scientifically suspect moral instinct, moral

organ, or discredited faculty psychology to account for any alleg­

edly distinctive moral judgments.

4. Instead of thinking of moral reasoning as the application of uniquely

moral rules to concrete situations, we should see ethical thinking as

nothing but a type of problem-solving activity. All forms of knowl­

edge, including the results of scientific research, can contribute to

the intelligence, quality, and effectiveness of our moral problem­

solving by informing us about who we are, how we evolved to

our present condition, how we think and feel, where our values

come from, and what kinds of institutions and practices have ex­

isted throughout our history. Consequently, every type of empirical

192

THE MAKING OF A MORAL SELF

knowledge and every exercise in human meaning is pertinent to deciding how

we ought to live. This ranges over history, biology, neuroscience, anthropology,

psychology, sociology, religion, the arts, and the humanities.

5. The idea of moral absolutes, whether in the form of universal moral laws or foun­

dational moral facts, is challenged by cognitive science research into the nature

of human conceptualization, understanding, appraisal, and reasoning. Moral fun­

damentalism, besides being scientifically suspect, is also morally suspect, insofar as

it silences the ongoing moral inquiry we need most if we are to have any hope

of dealing intelligently with our problems. There can be a role for moral ideals or

principles, since they are summaries of values, considerations, and strategies that

past experience has shown to be useful in resolving certain types of moral problems.

However, given that the conditions of human existence are both complex and fre­

quently changing, we cannot always rely on existing standards that may have arisen

in situations substantially different from those we currently face.

6. The sciences of mind have recently investigated two fundamental processes of

moral cognition: (a) a mostly nonconscious, non-reflective, fast, and affect-based

intuitive process of appraisal, and (b) a conscious, reflective, slow, after-the-fact

justificatory form of reasoning that tends to be principle-based.

7. In addition to these two processes, I have argued that there is a third process­

imaginative moral deliberation-in which we imaginatively simulate (i.e., rehearse)

possible courses of action, in order to determine which course best resolves at least

some of the tensions among competing values, interests, and ends that we are

currently encountering.

8. This third form of appraisal involves feelings and emotions (of the sort operative in

the intuitive track), but it also has a more reflective, critical, and exploratory process

that can properly be called a form of imaginative reasoning.

9. Consequently, moral deliberation is principally a process of assessment of the ad­

equacy of various imagined courses of action for reconstructing our problematic

situation into a more fluid, harmonious, and fulfilled reality. A deliberative process

is reasonable when it actually gives us a sense of resolution of conflicting ends and

values. Reasonableness is thus an outcome of imaginative deliberation, not the

aligning of our deliberation with some allegedly pre-given standards of rationality.

The Metaphysics of Moral Experience: Three Metaphorical

Conceptions of the Nature of Moral Thinking

The account I have just summarized requires a view of the nature and

purpose of a moral theory that is substantially different from the domi­

nant conception in most Western philosophical traditions. The change

of view that is necessary cannot be achieved by minor tin}sering with

193

CHAPTER EIGHT

received moral theories; instead, it demands a basic overhaul of some of

the foundations of those theories. In particular, it requires us to abandon

the mistaken idea that moral philosophy ought to provide absolute stan­

dards of governance for human behavior.

What is at stake here is not just our conception of moral theory, but

our entire metaphysics-our ontological picture of the world. The chief

question amounts to this: Is reality a closed system of preestablished es­

sences of things, persons, and events manifesting their intrinsic natures

in the world? Or, as I have argued, is experience a process of ongoing

interactions of organisms with their environments, marked by change

and the emergence of new conditions? The former is an objectivist meta­

physics, and the latter is a pragmatist process metaphysics.

The underlying objectivist metaphor sees moral reasoning as an act of

discovery of something (viz., the moral standards) that exist outside and

independent of the situations to which they are to be applied. Within

this metaphorical framework, experience supposedly comes fixed and

pre-categorized into action types, the moral rules or standards are es­

sentially fixed, and the only form of reasoning is recognizing individual

cases as fitting pre-given moral types or categories that are then sub­

sumable under highly determinate moral rules. There can be no serious

addressing of the newly emerging conditions of a situation that might

require solutions hitherto unappreciated and untried.

The idea that there are such foundational moral truths discoverable

by revelation, by reason, or by feeling is not, I have argued, supportable

by research on how humans conceptualize, value, and reason. Rejection

of the discovery metaphor has, unfortunately, often pushed us toward

the opposite extreme of adopting a metaphor of arbitrarily making or con­

structing moral values and laws, rather than finding them. 1 From the per­

spective of the cognitive sciences, this is an overly simplistic and quite

unsatisfactory either/or logic that offers us only two radically opposed

and equally mistaken descriptions of the process of moral judgment;

namely, either (1) as the discovery of external or transcendent constraints

on morality, or else (2) as the arbitrary creation of values ex nihilo. In other

words, either we find those moral values objectively existing in the world,

or else we just make them up!

In sharp contrast, the pragmatist view adopts a process- and event­

oriented metaphysics of experience that recognizes both change and rela­

tive stability in our lives. A world with this sort of character requires a

different metaphor, one of creative transformation of our experience-a

form of artistic remaking of experience. It is a metaphor that stresses

the art of living rightly and well, via a form of constrained yet creative

194

THE MAKING OF A MORAL SELF

problem-solving activity more akin to the making and judging of art­

works than to the discovery of preexistent truths. In avoiding the di­

chotomy between values as discovered and values as made, we must not

slip into the relativism of denying that there are any constraints on, or

grounds for, our values. I hope it is clear from chapter 2 that we do not

merely "make up" our values, just as it is clear from chapters 3-5 that our

imaginative deliberation operates under constraints, and therefore not

arbitrarily. The notion that the absence of moral absolutes catapults us

into a barren moral wasteland, where anything and everything is permit­

ted, is simplistic nonsense.

According to the pragmatist view I am articulating, when we en­

counter a morally problematic situation, the initial processes by which

we evaluate our situation are mostly nonconscious, operating at the

intuitive-track level where our emotional assessment and responses have

already begun to selectively narrow the range of options we will con­

sciously consider. On the basis of that earlier affective directing and se­

lecting, we then imaginatively explore the meaning and implications of

the range of possible courses of actions that appear to us. To the degree

that our moral reflection rises to the level of conscious inquiry, our best

strategy is typically to make use of all of the relevant knowledge we can

muster from every conceivable discipline, in order to determine where

different imagined paths of experience might lead us, and what their

broader effects might be.

This appeal to broad and deep knowledge of human affairs and the

world is no more than a common desideratum for any sort of good

problem-solving, of which so-called "moral" problem-solving is but one

instance. To ensure that you actually make the situation better through

your inquiry, you need to know about how things work in the natural

and cultural worlds you inhabit. Relevant knowledge can come from any

of a number of modes of inquiry, such as biology, neuroscience, anthro­

pology, psychology, sociology, political science, economics, history, the

arts, literature, philosophy, and any other discipline that gives us insight

into our world, human nature, psychosocial developmental, and culture.

Ongoing scientific research can thus contribute to our moral understand­

ing in at least the following ways:

• It can show us where our values come from and why creatures like us have the kinds

of values we do.

• Cross-cultural and historical studies can help us understand how our moral views

and theories have emerged within culturally specific, historically contingent situa­

tions, in response to particular scientific, political, religious, philosophical, economic,

195

CHAPTER EIGHT

social, and other conditions and developments. Our values are not, therefore, ab­

solute or history transcending in any radical sense.

• The cognitive sciences can help us understand the working of human conceptual

systems, such as how concepts are structured, how abstract thinking traffics mostly

in conceptual metaphor, and how our reasoning is grounded in our bodily (sensory­

motor) experience and is bound up with our emotional responses and feelings.

• Empirical research can give us insight into the processes of human appraisal, delib­

eration, and judgment. This can help us avoid cognitively inadequate assumptions

about mind, thought, and values that often creep into both common moral under­

standing and sophisticated moral philosophies alike. The cognitive sciences, in dia­

logue with philosophy, are our principal source of reliable knowledge about human

conceptualization, reasoning, emotional appraisal, and reflective judgment.

• Psychology, anthropology, and sociology can reveal which notions of well-being

and flourishing arise in which cultures, and they can explore how these various con­

ceptions are either challenged or supported by our current scientific understand­

ings of bodily functioning, human development, and social cooperation.

• The social sciences can give us insight into which practices, social arrange­

ments, and modes of living contribute to different conceptions of happiness or

flourishing.

Ethical naturalism, so conceived, can provide us a sound basis for in­

telligent moral inquiry. As I have argued, ethical naturalism of this sort is

non-absolutist, non-relativist, non-reductive, and ameliorative. It is non­

absolutistbecause it understands that there are no non-perspectival, ahis­

torical, or epistemically pure ( or a priori) transcendent sources of moral

values or principles. It is non-relativist insofar as it believes that we can

provide evidence and general reasons for thinking that certain possible

courses of action are better, and others worse, when it comes to our moral

problem-solving within a particular situation. It is non-reductive because

it realizes that no one method, or no single type of explanatory frame­

work, is by itself adequate to the complexity of experienced situations. It

is ameliorative insofar as it is predicated on the psychologically realistic

hope that collective human reflection and agency can make things bet­

ter through intelligent problem-solving, just as it can make things worse

when it fails to adhere to the highest standards of moral inquiry.2

What Kind of Self Ought We to Cultivate?

Insofar as it issues from our habits of appraising, thinking, and acting,

our moral inquiry is a manifestation of our character and personality,

196

THE MAKING OF A MORAL SELF

expressing who we are as presently developed. When we act in routine,

habitually engrained ways, there is little or no actual deliberation or

reflection involved. As we have seen, this is what Dewey called "intui­

tive valuing" (Dewey and Tufts 1932/1989, 266; Dewey 1939/1991)-we

just value what we have come to value, either as a result of our biologi­

cal makeup, our acquired personal habits of thought and action, or our

learned cultural values and practices, and then we act accordingly.

Genuine moral deliberation, in sharp contrast, arises only when we

stop doing what we were mindlessly doing and begin to inquire into

our situation that has in some way become conflicted or disharmonious.

Only when we reflectively engage a problematic situation, do we have an

opportunity to remake ourselves (and our world) by changing our inter­

actions with our environment. On those occasions when we are able to

be more reflective about what we ought to do in a given situation (i.e.,

cases in which we are engaged in Deweyan valuation), we have the oppor­

tunity to reconfigure our habitual selves in a way that transforms who we

are. As Dewey explains, when we recognize that we are confronted with

a tension among competing claims, values, ends-in-view, and possible

courses of action, we have to go beyond the habits of experience and

thought that brought us into the conflicted situation in the first place,

and this deliberative going beyond is a reformation of self:

We have to make up our minds, when we want two conflicting things, which of them

we really want. That is a choice. We prefer spontaneously, we choose deliberately,

knowingly.

Now every such choice sustains a double relation to the self. It reveals the exist­

ing self and it forms the future self .... Deliberation has an important function in this

process, because each different possibility as it is presented to the imagination appeals

to a different element in the constitution of the self, thus giving all sides of character a

chance to play their part in the final choice. The resulting choice also shapes the self,

making it, in some degree, a new self. (Dewey and Tufts 1932/1989, 286-87)

The "new" self that arises from our moral problem-solving is, obvi­

ously, not an entirely new self fabricated from whole cloth. It is an emerg­

ing self-in-process that retains a large measure of continuity with our

self as previously constituted, and this includes our prior habits of feel­

ing, imagining, and thinking. Ideally, it is a self that grows and expands,

through its appreciation of the new complexities encountered in its cur­

rent situation, instead of stagnating and atrophying, on the one hand,

or fragmenting and disintegrating, on the other. Dewey nicely sums up

this self-in-process:

197

CHAPTER EIGHT

Except as the outcome of arrested development, there is no such thing as a fixed,

ready-made, finished self. Every living self causes acts and is itself caused in return by

what it does. All voluntary action is a remaking of self, since it creates new desires, in­

stigates to new modes of endeavor, brings to light new conditions which institute new

ends. Our personal identity is found in the thread of continuous development which

binds together these changes. In the strictest sense, it is impossible for the self to stand

still; it is becoming, and becoming for the better or the worse. It is in the quality of

becoming that virtue resides. We set up this and that end to be reached, but the end is

growth itself. (Dewey and Tufts 1932/1989, 306)

The truly radical idea here is not just that the self is a self-in-process,

but rather the idea that the end of our reflective transformation of expe­

rience should be "growth itself." The moral fundamentalist will object

that "growth" alone cannot be the end, because we can always ask, "Why

growth? What is growth good for?" And that question, they will insist,

requires some other additional value that growth would need to be mea­

sured by.

By now, it should be clear that the question "What ultimate purpose

does growth serve?" is both question-begging and seriously misleading,

insofar as it presupposes the very objectivist metaphysics (in the form

of moral absolutism) that we have rejected. It erroneously assumes that

growth itself cannot be a sufficient value and could only be validated by

some other value or purpose that it serves.

Dewey's alternative view is that growth is the end-in-view of good

moral inquiry. Because there are no final causes (as overarching human

ends), absolute values, or supreme moral laws, what we should strive for

is growth of meaning. In other words, once we abandon the objectiv­

ist metaphysics of moral fundamentalism-according to which growth

would be justified as a value only if it served some other (absolute) fixed

and final purpose or value-we would come to recognize growth itself

as integral to moral well-being and as the condition for the only kind of

moral living that we have any measure of control over as reflective beings.

The only way to keep moral fundamentalism from creeping back in is to

realize that growth itself is the goal of moral deliberation and the sole test

of any process of imaginative reasoning about better and worse.

What Does Growth Consist in, as a Basis for Morality?

The big question, then, is the following: What does growth mean, from

the perspective of ourselves as moral-agents-in-process? In order to get

198

THE MAKING OF A MORAL SELF

an adequate definition of moral growth, we have to remember our prior

account of what it is in a given situation that first gives rise to the need

for moral reflection. Recall, one last time, that the need for moral de­

liberation arises only when our established habits of thought, feeling,

and action (which were sedimented in response to some prior history)

run up against new conditions that they are not fitted for and cannot

adequately resolve. Habits and feelings conditioned by earlier situations

have become inadequate for dealing with new, changed conditions, and

that is why we are experiencing frustration, conflict, indeterminacy, and

disharmony. Typically, the situation proves to be more complex than we

were prepared for, and the result is that we are unsure what the better

course of action might be, because our prior habits (our established ways

of feeling and responding) leave us without sufficient resources for ad­

dressing the problem(s) we are facing.

What we need is a deeper and broader comprehension of the complex­

ity of the situation in which we find ourselves-a depth of understanding

that is adequate to all of the impulses, emotions, ends-in-view, and inter­

ests active within our current situation. At least some of these aspects of

our situation are in conflict or tension, and so our prior habits of feeling,

thinking, and behaving are in conflict. If we are to move forward, we

need an enriched understanding of all of the factors operating within

our situation and all of the possibilities open to us for harmonizing our

competing ends, principles, and values. In a very real sense we need to go

beyond our present self-identity:

The growing, enlarging, liberated self ... goes forth to meet new demands and occa­

sions, and readapts and remakes itself in the process. It welcomes untried situations.

The necessity for choice between the interests of the old and of the forming, moving,

self is recurrent .... For everywhere there is an opportunity and a need to go beyond

what one has been, beyond "himself," if the self is identified with the body of desires,

affections, and habits which has been potent in the past. Indeed, we may say that the

good person is precisely the one who is most conscious of the alternative, and is the

most concerned to find openings for the newly forming or growing self; since no mat­

ter how "good" he has been, he becomes "bad" (even though acting upon a relatively

high plane of attainment) as soon as he fails to respond to the demand for growth. Any

other basis for judging the moral status of the self is conventional. In reality, direction

of movement, not the plane of attainment and rest, determines moral quality. (Dewey

and Tufts 1932/1989, 307)

The crucial importance of the idea of direction of movement as the

key determinant of moral quality has not been fully appreciated in moral

199

CHAPTER EIGHT

philosophy. 3 To repeat the argument: If there is no source of value resid­

ing outside experience (and then brought to bear upon it), you are left

not with arbitrary creation of values, but rather with growth in depth,

richness, and scope of meaning as your only guide. The last thing you

would want in such a situation is a rigid, unreflective reaffirmation that

your moral problem could be solved simply by getting clear which pre­

existing determinate standard or principle applies to the case at hand.

The last thing you need is an unthinking insistence that the right rule of

behavior is waiting there to be found, if only we were insightful enough

to discover it. The last thing you need, in short, is moral fundamen­

talism. That would be a recipe for continued moral obtuseness, close­

mindedness, and refusal to engage in moral inquiry. To the extent that

experience is actually changing (which is precisely the reason you are

faced with a moral problem in the first place), what you need is a process

of moral inquiry that allows you to explore all of the relevant dimensions

of your situation. In other words, you need growth of meaning.

The proper "direction" of this process of inquiry is thus increase in the

depth, breadth, and complexity of meaning of the situation. The mean­

ing of any object or event is the experiences it evokes.4 Those experiences

can be past (consisting of relations to prior events), present (referring to

experiences currently had), or future (involving possible experiences that

might follow). If the reason you are encountering a moral problem in the

first place is that there are more conflicting components of your current

situation than you have heretofore appreciated, then the crux of moral

inquiry must be, ideally, to understand all of the relevant dimensions

that constitute your present conflicted experience. This is your best hope

for intelligent resolution of moral problems. Dewey describes the type of

progress involved in such a movement of thought:

The present is complex, containing within itself a multitude of habits and impulses. It is

enduring, a course of action, a process including memory, observation and foresight,

a pressure forward, a glance backward and a look outward. It is of moral moment

because it marks a transition in the direction of breadth and clarity of action or in

that of triviality and confusion. Progress is present reconstruction adding fullness and

distinctness of meaning, and retrogression is a present slipping away of significance,

determinations, grasp. (1922, 195)

Growth means the liberation of experience and thought by means

of recognizing the complexity of relations within a given situation and

imaginatively following out such possible relations in projected courses

200

THE MAKING OF A MORAL SELF

of action, in order to see if we can harmonize competing impulses, values,

and ends, and thereby resolve some of the tension within our conflicted

situation.

Why might so many people find this conception of moral growth so

objectionable, or at least uninspiring? The answer, I have been suggest­

ing, is that they are laboring under the illusory expectation that moral

reasoning could and ought to discover the one correct principle ( or set of

principles) that is properly applicable to our present state of affairs, once

we have correctly categorized or described it. The appropriate alterna­

tive to a pre-given standard or outcome of reasoning is attention to the

character of the process of reasoning itself. The more you understand the

various meanings, values, emotions, and purposes that make up your

present situation, the better you are able to choose an appropriate course

of action from among all those available to you from your deliberations.

The sin of moral obtuseness (or failed perceptiveness) is the inability to

appreciate all, or at least most, of what is going on in the situation you are

facing. It is a failure to recognize a plurality of competing values, conflict­

ing habits, incompatible desires, emotional responses, and motivational

dispositions. It is also a failure of vision regarding the possibilities for

reconstructive improvement of the present situation. The result of such

a failure is dogmatic adherence to prior habits of feeling, thinking, and

response that only reinforce what is problematic about the situation in

the first place.

There can be no other adequate standard, then, than progress in the

growth of the self and meaning. Dewey's classic statement of this concep­

tion of growth is the following:

Morals means growth of conduct in meaning: at least it means that kind of expansion

in meaning which is consequent upon observations of the conditions and outcome

of conduct .... In the largest sense of the word, morals is education. It is learning the

meaning of what we are about and employing that meaning in action. The good,

satisfaction, "end," or growth of present action in shades and scope of meaning is the

only good within our control, and the only one, accordingly, for which responsibility

exists. (1922, 194)

We are better off, Dewey is saying, the more perceptively, sensitively,

and comprehensively we are aware of the distinctions, relations, emo­

tions, and values operating within our present situation. The key to what­

ever freedom we are capable of is knowing the meaning of our situation

so that we can effect change for the better where, when, and to what

201

CHAPTER EIGHT

extent that is possible. The better we grasp the principal relevant factors

operating in our present situation, the more intelligently and wisely we

have the opportunity to address any problems that arise. We want to har­

monize competing values and ends; otherwise, our actions are disjointed,

at odds with themselves and the ends of other people, and therefore li­

able to engender even more difficulties. We want to unify our situation,

which means resolving, as far as is humanly possible right now, whatever

is at odds within and without us. Unification of experience is an ongo­

ing dynamic ordering (i.e., allostasis) of our situation, rather than being

merely some fixed and completed structural unity among parts.

We want to develop and expand our capacities for thinking and acting,

because that is what makes intelligent inquiry and experiential transfor­

mation possible. Given his rejection of absolute rules, Dewey guardedly

suggests that we replace Kant's categorical imperative with the pragma­

tist categorical imperative: "So act as to increase the meaning of present

experience" (196). The new imperative is appropriate only insofar as we

never forget that it is not an absolute moral law, but rather a useful prin­

ciple of intelligent moral inquiry.

The human condition is such that no "solution" of a problem can ever

be final in any absolute sense. We take a course of action, and perhaps

thereby realize a certain good, but in realizing that good, there are other

alternative goods we do not, and cannot, then realize. Moreover, since we

can never be completely sure of the outcome of actions we undertake, nor

the situational changes we either intentionally or unwittingly initiate,

every chosen good brings with it potentially problematic unanticipated

future consequences. For example, the Industrial Revolution brought us

many technologies and goods that have enhanced the quality of human

life (e.g., improved food production, shelter, safety devices, and medical

technologies); however, along with these goods have come unforeseen

consequences that have proved to introduce profound new problems

(e.g., resource depletion, pollution, tools of modern warfare, alteration

of genetic makeup of crops, etc.). Life thus continually presents us with

new conditions, new difficulties, new problems:

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient it is to stimulate us to remedial

action, to endeavor in order to convert strife into harmony, monotony into variegated

scene, and limitation into expansion. The converting is progress, the only progress

conceivable or attainable by man. Hence every situation has its own measure and qual­

ity of progress, and the need for progress is recurrent, constant. ... Progress means

increase of present meaning, which involves multiplication of sensed distinctions as

well as harmony, unification. (Dewey 1922, 195-96)

202

THE MAKING OF A MORAL SELF

An Example of Deweyan Moral Deliberation

Since we do not have values and standards as traditionally construed

from an absolutist perspective, we are left with moral problem-solving

as embodied, situated growth of meaning. From a Deweyan naturalistic

perspective, we are engaged in an empirical moral inquiry that draws

on all the sources of knowledge of our world and ourselves that we can

muster. I want to illustrate this naturalistic, empirically grounded no­

tion of moral inquiry by putting it to work on the issue of gay marriage

that has recently become a topic of vehement disagreement in many

societies and cultures around the world. This example shows (1) how

our understanding of key concepts (here, marriage) can change, as the

result of changed empirical circumstances, thereby giving rise to novel

moral considerations, and (2) how scientific knowledge can be relevant,

and even essential, to the investigation of a moral problem. Science is

certainly not the whole story, but it is important to realize how much it

can contribute to moral deliberation.

In American society and elsewhere, it is only within the past two or

three decades that the issue of gay marriage has been thrust into the lime­

light. Prior to that, it was mostly taken for granted that marriage ought

to be a lifelong bond exclusively between a man and a woman. In many

Western societies this conception of marriage has been regarded as an in­

disputable moral fact-a virtually self-evident moral truth either divinely

commanded or else somehow inscribed in the "natural order."

How could the morality of gay marriage possibly depend in any way

on empirical knowledge of the sort generated by scientific research? Isn't

it just a matter of analyzing what the concept marriage means, and then

immediately recognizing that it does not "contain" or "include" same­

sex partners? Isn't it merely a matter of incisive conceptual analysis of the

sort that moral theorists are supposed to be masters of? Well, the answer

is no-or, at least, that cannot be the whole story.

In order to see this crucial point, we need to stand back and take a

broader historical look at what marriage has meant. We begin with the

obvious but important point that the need for moral deliberation about

gay marriage arises only because some person or group has challenged

the received mainstream view. In other words, somebody must have rec­

ognized the problematic character of our current situation surrounding

this issue. Otherwise, there is no "problem of gay marriage." Some per­

son or group must make a claim that our current arrangements lead to

unfairness and injustice for gays and lesbians. It is only this tension of

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competing claims, values, and interests that gives rise to a moral problem

requiring inquiry and justification.

What we need to do, then, is to inquire into the origin of the alleged problem at hand, in order to determine how and why somebody came see

any problem at all. We need to figure out why there has arisen a conflict

of views, values, principles, ends. Notice that this is already a question

susceptible of empirical study, namely, "What is our received conception

of marriage and how (under what conditions) did it emerge historically?"

Historical study reveals that many cultures have assumed that hetero­

sexual marriage was either God-ordained, or else that it constitutes the

"natural" condition for procreation and the raising of a family. Any other

arrangement (e.g., pregnancy out of wedlock, gay marriage, polygyny,

polyandry) was taken to be either "contrary to the will of God" or else

"contrary to nature."

However, from the very start, historical investigation also teaches

us that there is nothing universal about this particular conception of

marriage! There have been in times past, and are today, cultures that

have not shared this notion of monogamous, heterosexual marriage. A

history of marriage practices would reveal multiple types of sanctioned

relations-polygyny (one husband, several wives), polyandry (one wife,

several husbands), and even extremely rare cases of group marriage (mul­

tiple females married to multiple males).

The situation becomes even more complicated when we realize that

even within a particular conception of marriage (such as heterosexual

monogamy), there can be different requirements about what the husband

owes his wife, how she ought to be treated, what she may expect regard­

ing material goods and personal freedoms, what the range of permissible

living arrangements is, and on and on. The combinations and permuta­

tions reveal anything but unanimous agreement about the nature of the

marriage relation, even within heterosexual monogamy.

The first empirical result, then, is that there is no transhistorical, uni­

versal conception of marriage that applies to all times and all cultures, from

which it follows that our mainstream American conception of marriage

is most certainly not a self-evident fact or truth. Instead, it arose under

historically contingent circumstances in response to social, cultural, eco­

nomic, political, and often religious considerations.

It gets worse. The variability of the concept of marriage shows up even

within specific moral traditions, such as Hebrew and Christian religious

traditions. In the Hebrew scriptures, polygyny is reported as a common

occurrence, and wives were regarded as the property of their husbands. 5

However, even within the narrower confines of Christianity, we find no

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unanimity of thought on the nature of marriage. For instance, marriage

is today regarded as a sacrament in Catholicism, but this was not always

the case. It was not until the Council of Trent (in several sessions between

1545 and 1563) that marriage was officially identified in canon law as a

sacrament, although it had been regarded as a minor sacrament for cen­

turies prior to that time. In contrast, certain Protestant denominations

did not, and still do not, recognize it as such. 6

If we continue to narrow our focus even more, by looking only at

Protestant Christianity, where heterosexual marriage is a moral absolute,

there have been and remain serious differences of opinion about the pre­

cise form that marriage should take. There are religious sects that support

polygyny as an acceptable (or even desirable) marital arrangement. But

even if we set those "marginal" sects aside, we still find fundamental dis­

agreement among Christians about the rights and duties of husbands and

wives. Many conservative Christians today accept St. Paul's controversial

twist that husbands are commanded to love their wives, and "wives, sub­

mit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord" (Ephesians

5:22). That this is but one historically contingent requirement must seem

obvious to anyone who is not a Christian, but some Christians neverthe­

less claim that it is an absolute moral and spiritual requirement of a true

marriage, as sanctioned by God.

In short, what the most cursory survey of the history of marriage re­

veals, even when we confine ourselves only to Judea-Christian traditions,

is a broad array of quite different conceptions of marriage. Our currently

preferred conception of monogamous heterosexual unity "until death us

do part," arose in response to quite particular historical conditions, and

then only relatively recently over the past few hundred years. If, as many

claim, the precise nature of marriage is God-ordained, then it is a curious

fact that so many Christians can disagree about what, precisely, it was

that God ordained.

In short, the "essential" nature of marriage appears to vary across sects

and subcultures, and throughout the course of history, and we should

not delude ourselves into believing that all sane, moral persons would

be forced to acknowledge this allegedly "one true meaning" of marriage

as heterosexual monogamy. I am claiming that (1) asserting that some

principle is absolute does not make it so, and (2) if the basis for the alleged

absolute character of some conception of marriage is supposed to be that

it issues as a commandment from God, then the scripturally revealed

will of God should not involve inconsistent and incompatible assertions,

which it most assuredly does within the Hebrew and Christian traditions

of interpretation of the holy scriptures.

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One can easily anticipate the following response by the person of faith:

"So what if there are multiple incompatible views of marriage across, and even within, religious and moral traditions. The fact is that all but

one of these must simply be mistaken. God, or my implanted human

reason, tells me that marriage means life-long heterosexual monogamy,

and that's all we need to know." I would simply respond that, while one

can certainly hold to such a view, that view cannot be made consistent

with many cases in the Old and New Testaments, where it is clear that

important figures took multiple wives and concubines.

Let us then ask what purpose marriage is thought to serve, under this

heterosexual monogamy conception. This received traditional concep­

tion of marriage is based on the ideas that (1) monogamous, heterosexual

marriage is the moral (and perhaps spiritual) context for sexual union

leading to procreation, and (2) marriage is the natural, and moral, context

for the raising of a family. Many have simply elevated this historically

evolving view of marriage into what they regard as an unconditionally

binding, absolute, and unambiguous moral principle. Taken as an abso­

lute standard, it is supposed to follow that men cannot marry men, nor

women, women. Furthermore, if marriage is the proper moral and spiri­

tual framework for the conceiving of children, then gays and lesbians are

not fit for parenthood with a member of their gender, since they cannot,

by themselves, procreate.

Focusing now on the purpose of marriage, the next stage of an empiri­

cal inquiry into the morality of marriage would involve an examination

of whether any of the original conditions that generated the received

conception might no longer hold. Perhaps new conditions have arisen

that might have a significant bearing on how we should view the na­

ture of marriage. This is an empirical question. Even the briefest inquiry

reveals that some of the conditions and assumptions upon which the

received view rests no longer hold and have given way to new conditions

and constraints. Consider, for example, how certain biblical conceptions

of marriage appear to have often gone hand in hand with the absolute

prohibition of homosexuality, regarded as an abomination in the sight

of God. It was considered "unnatural" (and against God's laws) that a

man should lie with a man (Leviticus 18:22) or, by extension, a woman

with a woman. Consequently, the idea of a homosexual couple nurturing

and raising a family is a non-starter within a cultural understanding that

regards homosexuality as immoral.

I also suspect that the belief that a baby could only be conceived

through sexual intercourse between a man and a woman (which has ac­

tually been the case for most of human pre-history and history) strongly

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reinforced the belief that the natural (and moral) framework for the rais­

ing of a family was within a heterosexual marriage. However, we now

know that this is not the case, as we have developed new reproductive

technologies, such as in vitro fertilization and surrogacy that allow for

the creation of a baby without intercourse. As recently as forty years ago,

a woman had to carry her own baby to term ( or nearly so) for it to be born

and to survive. It took a man, a woman, sexual intercourse, and consider­

able good luck (or, sometimes, an unfortunate one-night stand) to have

a human baby. 7 It was within this very limited knowledge framework

that marriage fit our need for procreation and the nurturing of children.

Coupled with prohibitions against homosexuality, it was easy to consider

gay marriage morally objectionable.

Today conditions have changed quite dramatically, with modern sci­

ence and new medical technologies altering the range of possibilities for

conception, gestation, and birth. We now have available, for a price, in

vitro fertilization. We have the possibility of the sperm and egg coming

from donors other than the "parents." We have surrogacy, in which an­

other "mother" can carry an implanted fertilized egg to term. We now

have newly emerging technologies of genetic manipulation. In other

words, the range of conditions for bringing children into the world has

changed markedly since the early days of Hebrew and Christian religion,

and we have every reason to believe that they will continue to change

in the future as technology develops. Sexual intercourse between a man

and a woman is no longer a necessity for procreation. This fact alone is

enough to call into question that connection of marriage with hetero­

sexuality.

The other dimension of this justification of marriage, namely, the

prohibition of homosexuality on the grounds that it is "unnatural" or

"against the natural order" has also been subjected to withering attack

over the past several years. In addition to changes in medical technol­

ogy surrounding fertilization and gestation, there have been substantial

changes in our scientific understanding of nature and "the natural," es­

pecially as this pertains to the question of the alleged "unnaturalness" of

homosexuality. The scientifically discredited notion of natural purposive­

ness (which posited final causes inscribed in the ontological structure of

being) can no longer support any of the earlier absolutist claims about the

purposes (as Aristotelian final causes) of organisms. It is not that organ­

isms lack purposiveness (of course, they are purposive); but rather, nature

has no final causes-no ultimate natural ends toward which individual

things or organisms develop. The doctrine of final causes is a holdover

originally from Greek immanent teleology and then later from medieval

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theological frameworks in which every existing thing is the handiwork

of a God who designs each entity to manifest or realize some essence and

to serve some purpose in the divine plan. Non-theological versions of

final causality, such as Aristotle's, regarded natural processes as directed

toward fulfilling some purpose or realizing some eternal form.

In radical contrast to this essentialist teleology, explanations in con­

temporary science no longer sanction reference to final causes as tradi­

tionally conceived. Living things do not exist as an expression of some

ultimate end or purpose they were created to pursue and to realize. Organ­

isms are purposive, in the sense that they have evolved to preferentially

seek certain states, such as satisfaction of nutritional needs, maintenance

of homeostasis within their internal milieu, and avoidance of harm. But

they are not aspiring, as agents, to realize some ultimate end they were

designed for.

The point is not that absent final causes, everything comes to exist

randomly, but rather that such purposiveness as we find it is the prod­

uct of evolutionary processes that have no preestablished, overarching

goal or design. What we call "purposes" arise naturally and immanently

within the evolutionary development of living organisms. Consequently,

if there are no "final causes" in nature, then homosexuality cannot be

against nature's purposes, precisely because there are no final natural pur­

poses to be gone against. Moreover, if you find homosexuality arising in

nature (both in so-called human nature and also among other animals),

then it is as natural as anything could be. Add to this the wariness within

contemporary natural and social sciences against the outdated distinc­

tion between "the natural" and "the cultural," and then arguments about

what is "natural" lose their force as a basis for moral evaluation. Humans

are naturally cultural beings. Because it is "natural" for human beings to

grow and develop within cultural systems, we cannot, therefore, cleanly

and unconditionally separate out what is natural to a thing, as opposed

to what is a product of culture-at least not in any strong sense that

would be required to rule out certain sexual practices as "unnatural."8

The point I am emphasizing here is that empirical scientific research

has undermined any form of strong metaphysical teleology. The argu­

ment that homosexuality is unnatural cannot stand. The claim that some

practice is "against nature" is merely a way of smuggling in a moral pref­

erence where there is no argument or any scientific basis for the claim.

Therefore, the idea that one reason we cannot have homosexual marriage

is that homosexuality is unnatural (and, supposedly immoral) will not

hold up under scrutiny.

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In short, today we have a much deeper understanding of the contin­

gent circumstances under which our traditional monogamous, hetero­

sexual model of marriage took shape. We are in a brave and somewhat

scary new world that could not have been imagined in the early centuries of

Judaism and Christianity when our traditional conceptions of marriage were

being developed. Some of the beliefs and conditions under which earlier

moral conceptions were constructed have changed, and so must our con­

ception of marriage.

Finally, other important empirical findings, such as the constantly

growing research on human sexuality and family life, ought also to prove

relevant to our moral inquiry into the institution of marriage. To cite just

one example, there is now social science research concluding that there

appears to be no reason to think that gay couples are any less fit to be lov­

ing, kind, and nurturing parents than heterosexual couples are.9 One re­

cent survey of research on this subject concludes: "The research indicates

that parenting practices and children's outcomes in families parented

by lesbian and gay parents are likely to be at least as favourable as those

in families of heterosexual parents, despite the reality that considerable

legal discrimination and inequity remain significant challenges for these

families" (Short et al. 2007, 4). Gay and lesbian couples can be bad par­

ents, just like heterosexual couples can, but there is nothing inherently

inferior about gay- and lesbian-parented families.

What I am suggesting is that empirical (psychological, neuroscience,

sociological, anthropological, and historical) inquiry is crucially relevant

to our consideration of the nature of marriage. We saw that even the

most superficial historical investigation reveals the absence of any uni­

versal conception of marriage, and this holds true even within particular

religious traditions. We then saw that empirical evidence from various

disciplines undermines the traditional claims that (1) only sexual inter­

course between a male and female can produce a human baby, (2) that

homosexuality is unnatural, and (3) that gays and lesbians cannot be just

as good (or just as bad) parents as heterosexual couples. Those who ignore

empirical research of this sort about sexuality, gender, child rearing, and

human relationships are left with little more than unsubstantiated (and

scientifically unsupportable) assertions about the nature of marriage. The

preferred alternative to serious scientific inquiry appears to be theologi­

cal assertion drawing mostly on citation of biblical passages taken to be

the literal word of an omniscient, omnipotent, moral God. Those who

choose that path will most certainly find no place for empirical inves­

tigation or marshaling of relevant scientific evidence. The only type of

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disputation that remains is reliance on the authority of biblical texts

whose interpretation has to be regarded as self-evident, literal, and not

subject to disputed interpretation.

Biblical literalism, however, is highly problematic from a cognitive

perspective. As we have seen earlier (chapter 7), it assumes a seriously

inadequate and mistaken view of human understanding, conceptualiza­

tion, and reasoning. Furthermore, it is morally suspect insofar as it ends

up requiring the faithful to commit to practices that are completely at

odds with our contemporary sensibilities about respect for humans. For

instance, consider the biblical literalist who cites Genesis 2:21-24 as a

biblical justification of heterosexual marriage: "Therefore shall a man

leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall

be one flesh" (KJV). Unfortunately, the defense of moral views by refer­

ence to biblical scripture is a notoriously problematic practice, especially

when one presumes to take all biblical passages (from the historically

canonized books determined by certain ecclesiastical bodies to constitute

holy scripture) as the literal and absolute word of God. Once you go down

that road, you must accept a host of biblical passages condemning certain

practices and commanding certain others that even the most devout Jews

and Christians could not, in good conscience, accept as moral absolutes.

For, if we were to take biblical narratives and commandments as ahistori­

cal, absolute, God-given, literal stories and imperatives, then we would

be subject, by requirements of consistency, to adhere to wildly objection­

able moral imperatives of the sort that can be easily culled from the pages

of books such as Leviticus or Deuteronomy. To cite just four examples

(out of scores that can be gleaned from various books of the Bible): (1) "If

a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death; and ye shall slay the

beast" (Leviticus 20:15, RSV); (2) "If a man shall lie with a woman having

her sickness, and shall uncover her nakedness; he hath discovered her

fountain, and she hath uncovered the fountain of her blood: and both of

them shall be cut off from among their people" (Leviticus 20:18); (3) "He

that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death,

and all the congregation shall certainly stone him11 (Leviticus 24:16); and

( 4) "If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the

voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have

chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his

mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city,

and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his

city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice;

he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone

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him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you;

and all Israel shall hear, and fear" (Deuteronomy 21:18-21).

It is highly instructive to study the pages of requirements set forth in

Leviticus for the intricate preparation of burnt offerings as a cleansing

ritual for moral misdeeds and for acts that make one unclean (" acts"

such as menstruating and giving birth). Cases such as these, and there

are scores of them in Leviticus alone, surely reveal the historical, cultural

situatedness and contingency of many biblical commandments that any

moderately reflective person would recognize as wholly inappropriate

for our present age. These are good examples of what most Westerners

would today regard as excesses of purity rituals in early religion, based

on an erroneous understanding of the nature of menstruation and birth.

Prescriptions for the cloistering of a woman having her period, or for the

cleansing of her following childbirth, can be no more than historical

artifacts of a culture uninformed about the nature of biological processes

and obsessed with purification rituals of the sort found in all religions

that stress culturally defined notions of spiritual purity. 10

The point of citing cases like these is to indicate the perils of any

kind of literalism and fundamentalism, either biblical or otherwise. No

doubt, some people do attempt to pursue a strategy of strict biblical lit­

eralism, but the moral costs are extremely high, requiring adherence to

beliefs that are demonstrably false, such as the belief that menstruation

and childbirth render a woman morally unclean. Another disastrous cost

would be the violation of one moral stricture (such as the requirement

to love and nurture one's children, or the requirement not to murder) in

order to adhere to some other stricture (such as the requirement to deliver

up one's rebellious son to the elders so that he can be stoned to death).

And while I can imagine that there might be a few fanatics who want to

kill a person guilty of bestiality, would they also think they had to visit

the same fate on the poor beast that had the misfortune to be chosen by

the sinner?11

Moral fundamentalism of this sort is designed to end moral debate,

not to encourage and enrich it. At the very least, such a posture expresses

one's refusal to engage in reflective moral inquiry. At the worst, it denies

the fact that our interpretation of any principle, command, or scripture is

constrained by hermeneutical practices deemed appropriate within par­

ticular communities and subcultures. It denies the historically contingent

circumstances in which certain views, values, practices, and institutions

arose, and it fails to recognize that changed conditions can, from time to

time, require us to rethink our received views.

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To summarize: I have been characterizing "growth" in moral delibera­ tion as the bringing into play of deeper, richer, and ever more compre­ hensive understandings of the situation we find ourselves in. At the heart of this process is, first, an examination of the historical contingencies un­ der which certain values were articulated, certain principles formulated certain habits developed, and certain interpretive practices taken to b� authoritative. We then have to ask whether our current situation is dif­ ferent-and in what ways-from those earlier conditions. In our present case, the "problem of gay marriage" has arisen today under very different conditions than those obtaining during the early Hebrew and Christian eras. The traditional prohibition of gay marriage historically went hand in hand with the prohibition against homosexuality. It also went hand in hand with certain assumptions about marriage being established for the procreation and rearing of children. I am claiming that it took a bet­ ter scientific understanding of biology and psychosexual development in order to realize that homosexuality is a "natural" condition of certain humans, and not a grotesque deviation from "proper" human nature. Once this is recognized, we are well advised to reevaluate our conception of marriage, as follows.

First, if homosexuality is not unnatural, then perhaps matrimony between two persons of the same sex or gender might be perfectly reasonable.

Second, we needed to realize that procreation does not necessarily require male-female sexual intercourse, so that the having and rearing of children does not necessarily require a heterosexual married couple.

Third, we had to see that parenting is not intrinsically an exclusively heterosexual capacity, since loving nurturance, support, care, and respon­ sibility are capacities of all suitably developed, non-sociopathic human beings.

Fourth, we had to appreciate that it is morally irresponsible to over­ simplify by ignoring the complexity of the situations that called us to engage in our moral deliberation in the first place.

Only under something like these conditions can we realize that our received moral principles about marriage might need to be reconsidered in light of newly emerging conditions that did not exist in earlier times. Refusal to examine our changing situation is a form of self-inflicted moral blindness. Moreover, once the need for reconsideration (Dewey's valua­ tion) is recognized, there is no good reason to deny the relevance of em­ pirical considerations arising from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In sum, there is nothing unusual or inappropriate about the claim that moral deliberation of this sort is an eminently empirical

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affair that can draw on our best scientific understanding of every aspect of existence, without limiting the sources of insight to science alone. In addition to scientific research, literature and the arts are obviously extremely important sources of moral insight. Short stories, novels, and poems can capture the narrative structure of our lives and our self­ identity, in a way that carries us beyond the methodological limitations of the natural and social sciences. 12

I end this exploration of the role of empirical inquiry in moral delib­ eration with the suggestion that what we have just seen about the nature of the concept of marriage holds equally for all or most of our moral concepts, however we circumscribe the domain of the moral. Marriage is a garden-variety moral notion, representative of the way our moral con­ ceptions operate generally. Like all concepts, it developed within some historical context, relative to the practices, values, and prior conceptual systems of a society. It has a radial category structure (Lakoff 1987), char­ acterized by central (prototypical) cases that shade off into less central members of the category that share some, but not all, of the principal fea­ tures of the prototype. Therefore, it is not definable by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for its application. Furthermore, as historical conditions continue to change, so also do some of our concepts change and grow. Our concepts are not known "in themselves," via allegedly fixed structures that persist for all time. They are historically evolving functional notions that can, and ought to be, interrogated and reworked as experience requires.

Developing Conscientiousness

I have argued that the answers, such as they are, to our moral problems are not eternal verities given for all time in advance of our moral delib­ erations. Moral insight is the result of moral inquiry, not a precondition of it. We have to give up the metaphor of moral truths inscribed on metaphysical, noumenal, or transcendental stone, waiting eternally to be discovered or grasped by us. Moral deliberation is a process of inquiry and not a means to some independently existing truth, value, or state of affairs. We can describe how we ought to deliberate, but we cannot say, in advance, what the outcome of any such deliberation ought to be. That, I submit, is the limit of our moral understanding.

Life is not a game to be played in accordance with rules supplied in a cosmic rule book given to us from beyond our experience. Rather, as Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) has argued, such rules as there are emerge only

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within the practices themselves, subject to the historically changing con­

ditions of those evolving practices. Translated into human life and moral

traditions, this means that the constraints and guidance we finite, fallible

creatures have are those that emerged from the contingent characteris­

tics of ourselves as presently formed and the changing structures of our

physical, interpersonal, and cultural environments.

We are thus brought, at last, to the key question of what kind of

person-as-moral-inquirer we ought to cultivate. Moral valuation is a

boots-on-the-ground operation, to be assessed relative to how well it re­

solves our problematic situation within our present circumstances in the

world. In Theory of Valuation (1939), Dewey described the appropriate

reflective process of problem-solving as follows:

There is no a priori standard for determining the value of a proposed solution in con­

crete cases. A hypothetical possible solution, as an end-in-view, is used as a method­

ological means to direct further observations and experiments. Either it performs the

function of resolution of a problem for the sake of which it is adopted and tried or it

does not. (232)

Dewey then proceeds to illustrate this process by analogizing it to best

practices with respect to maintaining or restoring health:

While there is no a priori standard of health with which the actual state of human be­

ings can be compared so as to determine whether they are well or ill, or in what respect

they are ill, there have developed, out of past experience, certain criteria which are

operatively applicable in new cases as they arise. Ends-in-view are appraised or valued

as good or bad on the ground of their serviceability in the direction of behavior dealing

with states of affairs found to be objectionable because of some lack or conflict in them.

They are appraised as fit or unfit, proper or improper, right or wrong, on the ground of

the requiredness in accomplishing this end. (233)

Moral deliberation is thus goal-directed but not directed to some goal

standing outside our present situation, as if it were an ultimate value. The

"goal," instead, is problem-solving, or the resolution of an indeterminate

situation. The only indication we can ever have that we are perhaps on a

good track is that our deliberations issue in reworkings of ourselves and,

correlatively, our world, in a way that resolves tensions, conflicts, dishar­

monies, rigid stasis, and uncontrolled randomness. Our only indication

of resolution is our present sense of release from the oppression of our

prior situation-right here and now, rather than in some non-existent

ideal, future world.

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If I have accurately characterized the situations that give rise to moral

inquiry, then the kind of moral personhood we should nurture in an­

ticipation of such situations is the opposite of the kind of self that is

envisioned in traditional Western moral theories that claim to discover

objective, preestablished moral standards! In those traditional theories,

the self has an essence that exists prior to, and independent of, the acts

it chooses. Such a self is allegedly a knower of moral truths (i.e., truths

about values, ends, or principles) that it supposedly brings to bear to

clarify what ought to be done in a particular case. According to the Moral

Law folk theory that I have been criticizing, the locus of the self is a ra­

tional agency that stands under governing principles stemming from the

essence of human rationality (or, alternatively, from divine reason and

thus discernible by reason). The basic relation between the self and ra­

tional principles is constraint. In Kant's words, 11 All imperatives are ex­

pressed by an ought and thereby indicate the relation of an objective law

of reason to a will that is not necessarily determined by this law because

of its subjective constitution," and "consequently, imperatives are only

formulas for expressing the relation of objective laws of willing in general

to the subjective imperfection of the will of this or that rational being,

e.g., the human will" (1785/1983, 413, 414).

According to this objectivist view, the will is given, as a free power to

act, prior to its encounter with any morally binding principles of action.

Such a self chooses the ends it will pursue but is not essentially determined

by those ends. There is no new self in the making; rather, there is only

an essential self attempting to bring the world into conformity with the

preexisting governing values or principles it allegedly has discerned, ei­

ther through divine revelation, reason, sentiment, or social inculcation.

On this static objectivist view, the self is not really solving a problem

through action in the world. Instead, it only clears up what was suppos­

edly required from a correct understanding of whichever value, end, or

principle it properly recognizes as applying to the case at hand. This is

the logic of judgment that, as we saw earlier, Donagan (1977) described

as discerning what a given moral concept (e.g., the concept of respect for

a person) means "in itself."

In radical contrast with this traditional picture of the self, Dewey pro­

posed that the self does not exist independent of its actions but is mani­

fested in and through them, so that ongoing activities are processes of

self-reformation. Dewey concludes that "it is not too much to say that the

key to a correct theory of morality is recognition of the essential unity of

the self and its acts, if the latter have any moral significance; while errors

in theory arise as soon as the self and acts (and their consequences) are

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separated from each other, and moral worth is attributed to one more

than to the other11 (Dewey and Tufts 1932/1989, 288). Dewey's moral

agent is a doer and re-former of experience, and not just a knower seek­

ing conformity with guiding principles. An agent of this sort constantly

remakes its world, and in the process remakes itself, its character, and its identity.

We need to give up the idea of a preestablished self that seeks to con­

form its choice to pre-given standards allegedly determined by God, rea­

son, society, or the world. Such a self is precisely what we do not want when we encounter genuine moral problems, for those problems arise

only when our prior habits of thought, feeling, valuing, and action are in­

adequate to the complexity of our new situation. In other words, we have

those problems in the first place precisely because our self as presently

formed is out of balance with its environment. In such situations, our

very self-identity is at stake, because it is a question of what kind of per­

son we are becoming. We cannot simply rest with the preestablished-ei­

ther in the form of a preset essential self or in the form of pre-given moral

rules. To cite a crucial passage once more, what we need, instead, is to

transform our problematic situation through reflective inquiry:

Perhaps the most striking difference between immediate sensitiveness, or "intuition,"

and "conscientiousness" as reflective interest, is that the former tends to rest upon

the plane of achieved goods, while the latter is on the outlook for something better.

The truly conscientious person not only uses a standard in judging, but is concerned

to revise and improve this standard. He realizes that the value resident in acts goes

beyond anything which he has already apprehended, and that therefore there must be

something inadequate in any standard which has been definitely formulated. He is on

the lookout for good not already achieved. Only by thoughtfulness does one become

sensitive to the far-reaching implications of an act; apart from continual reflection we

are at best sensitive only to the value of special and limited ends. (Dewey and Tufts

1932/1989, 273)

The kind of person we should aspire to become is a conscientious per­

son. This is the opposite of the dogmatic mind that, convinced of its hold

on absolute truth, and suffering under the illusion of a fixed metaphysics

of the self and the world, treats moral thinking as rule mongering-the

bringing of concrete cases under definite moral principles. Conscien­

tiousness, by contrast, requires the mental and emotional flexibility to

imagine new solutions and new ways of going forward that resolve press­

ing moral problems.

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We Are Not Little Gods: Morality for Humans

The central theme of this book is that we need a morality fit for actual hu­

man beings, and an important part of that story will come from cognitive

science research to help us develop a realistic account of where our moral

values come from and how we can address our concrete moral problems

through an imaginative process of moral deliberation. At the very end

of Experience and Nature (1925), Dewey summarizes his key claims by

reminding us that we are not "little gods" but rather natural human crea­

tures for whom all experiences, identity, values, judgments, and ideas

emerge from our ongoing natural engagement with our world:

Yet if man is within nature, not a little god outside, and is within as a mode of energy

inseparably connected with other modes, interaction is the one unescapable trait of

every human concern; thinking, even philosophic thinking, is not exempt. This interac­

tion is subject to partiality because the human factor has bent and bias. But partiality

is not obnoxious just because it is partial. ... What is obnoxious in partiality is due to

the illusion that there are states and acts which are not also interactions. Immature and

undisciplined mind believes in actions which have their seat and source in a particular

and separate being, from which they issue. (1925/1981, 324)

Virtually all of my critical arguments-against moral fundamentalism,

the Moral Law folk theory, pure practical reason, and other foundational­

ist and transcendent perspectives-are based on the inescapable primacy

of organism-environment interactions as the basis for our values, mean­

ings, thoughts, and actions. The Moral Law folk theory, of which I have

been so critical, starts with a supernatural God as the absolute transcen­

dent source of moral principles and laws, and then, when that is called

into question, puts God inside us (in the guise of universal moral reason

and conscience), attempting to tum us into "little gods11 who are self­

legislating absolute sources of moral law.

We are not little gods-we are human animals. Once we get over the il­

lusion that each of us has the divine spark within, we will recognize that

we face life with only our animal cunning, our human intelligence, our

imagination, and our cultural resources. Once we recognize ourselves

as dynamic stabilities realized in processes of making and remaking

meaning, self, and world-only then can we begin to develop a self­

understanding that is adequate to our embeddedness in intertwined bio­

logical and cultural matrices that constitute nature as an ongoing process,

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or what Dewey calls an "affair of affairs." Any realistic moral understand­

ing has to grow out of our bodily and mental situatedness:

When a man finds he is not a little god in his active powers and accomplishments, ...

[w]hen he perceives clearly and adequately that he is within nature, a part of its interac­

tions, he sees that the line to be drawn is not between action and thought, or action

and appreciation, but between blind, slavish, meaningless action and action that is

free, significant, directed and responsible. (Dewey 1925/1981, 324)

Knowing what kinds of creatures we are, how our minds work, where

our values come from, and how we appraise, evaluate, and remake expe­

rience are the keys to freeing up thought and making it intelligent. Our

human animal minds are inextricably embodied and therefore tied to

our visceral connection to the world. Whatever else your personal iden­

tity consists in, it cannot be separated from your brain, operating within

your active, living body, as that body engages your material, interper­

sonal, cultural world. What and who we are has emerged in the ongoing

evolutionary process (on the large scale), across centuries of historical

cultural change (on the medium scale), and in our individual develop­

mental processes (on the small scale) in which organisms engage their

complex, changing environments and form themselves up in response to

the contours, values, and possibilities for engagement afforded by those

environments. That self is thus a self-in-process, until the moment you

die. There is typically a good measure of stability in our identity over

time, but it is only a pattern persisting through dynamic processes of

change as we encounter our environment. Your moral selfhood resides

not in your brain, not in your body, not in the world beyond your fleshy

corpus, and not in your sociocultural reality, but rather in the ongoing

interactions of all four of these dimensions of experience.

One important consequence of our embodied selfhood is that our hu­

man condition is finite, frail, fallible, and fearful, but it can also some­

times be exuberant, confident, joyful, celebratory, meaningful, and

expansive. As we have noted repeatedly, we are creatures that need cer­

tain conditions to sustain our biological life, our interpersonal relations,

our cultural institutions, and our sense of meaning and well-being. These

conditions are indicative of the values we have. These values are natu­

ral (given that culture is a natural process), not supernatural or issuing

from some alleged transcendent source. They emerge from our bodily,

interpersonal, cultural engagement at multiple levels of organizational

complexity.

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Perhaps the single greatest obstacle to the acceptance of the view I am

proposing is the necessity of abandoning the idea that "the right thing

to do" exists antecedently in some Platonic moral space ready to be dis­

covered through moral reasoning. There is no such preexistent moral

essence, rule, or ideal to which we are supposed to match our concrete

actions. When I concluded that moral fundamentalism is immoral, what

I meant was that fundamentalism closes us off from the very forms of

moral inquiry that are our only psychologically realistic hope for a better

world. If you think you have the Absolute, One-and-Only Moral Truth,

then why would you ever bother to seek an enriched understanding or

to engage in problem-solving? Moral fundamentalism is a desperate and

misguided attempt to overcome our human finitude and fallibility. It

represents a quest to find an eternal, unchanging, unshakable foundation

for living rightly and well. It is an attempt to escape from our human

condition.

The alternative position that I have been developing is that morality is

really a matter of moral inquiry, which is a form of problem-solving. Yes,

there are intuitive, mostly nonconscious appraisals (Dewey's valuings)

doing a great deal of the work of our moral assessment. There are also

after-the-fact acts of reflective justification of our valuings, by which we

shore up our intuitive judgments and try to defend our actions to ourself

and others. To these two processes I have added moral deliberation as

an ongoing activity of problem-solving that attempts to harmonize and

enhance values from multiple domains of experience and multiple per­

spectives. This process of reflective valuation incorporates our intuitive

processes of evaluation and assessment of situations, but those are pri­

marily starting points for a process of imaginative dramatic rehearsal of

possible courses of action open to us. The outcomes of such deliberative

inquiries can be more and less reasonable, depending on how well they

resolve the blockages and tensions that gave rise to our sense of moral

conflict in the first place.

Conscientiousness is a primary virtue of moral inquiry, because it

seeks the most comprehensive survey of conflicting ends, values, and

principles, and it then strives for the most comprehensive resolution

available within the situation as we currently understand it. It follows

from this that we should appropriate all the relevant knowledge and un­

derstanding we are able to bring to bear to make sense of our problematic

situation. It is here that we have to get beyond what we traditionally

regard as "moral" knowledge and instead use every method of gaining

understanding that is available to us. This will include all of the sciences,

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both 11 natural11 (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience) and 11 so­

cial11 (psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, history), as well

as various philosophical perspectives (phenomenology, existentialism,

hermeneutics, pragmatism), and embracing also all of the arts and hu­

manities as providing insight into the non-human and human worlds. It

is in this sense, then, that morals ought to be seen as empirical, experi­

mental, and experiential.

Success at moral problem-solving is a humbling activity that requires

sensitivity, perceptiveness, comprehensiveness of thought, empathy,

goodwill, a cooperative spirit, imagination, and sometimes a good mea­

sure of dumb luck. A sense of humor helps, too. Moral problem-solving

is a transformation of the world, because it remakes experience. It is, at

the same time, a self-transformation-a reconstitution of our identity,

insofar as it reconfigures our habits and our relation to our surroundings,

both physical and social. For each of us, it is never done until we die,

simply because change is intrinsic to experience. So long as we live, life

will present us with new challenges that cannot be adequately met with

our currently sedimented habits, dispositions, values, and practices. So

we need to cultivate the virtues of moral inquiry, develop flexibility of

thought, and exercise our moral imagination.

This portrait of ongoing imaginative exploration and reconstruction

need not induce in us a sense of failure or gloom stemming from an ac­

knowledgment that we can never live up to what God, practical reason,

society, or moral law demands of us. Morality is not about living up to

such transcendent ideals. Rather, it is about humanly realistic ideals that

grow out of our communal experience. Dewey captures the essence of

this hope:

Because intelligence is critical method applied to goods of belief, appreciation and con­

duct, so as to construct freer and more secure goods, turning assent and assertion into

free communication of shareable meanings, turning feeling into ordered and liberal

sense, turning reaction into response, it is the reasonable object of our deepest faith

and loyalty, the stay and support of all reasonable hopes. (1925/1981, 325)

An important part of moral growth is corning to see that morality is

about better and worse-not about the Right or the Good-and cultivat­

ing our dispositions and skills for determining better and worse in actual

human situations. For the fact is that sometimes things do actually de­

velop for the better. Sometimes we manage to be perceptive and sensi­

tive enough to achieve a breadth of perspective that encompasses much

of what matters in a particular situation, and to see a way to harmonize

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competing interests and perspectives so that people feel more free, more

connected, more respected, more fulfilled, more cared for, better under­

stood, and more able to act constructively than before. And when that

happens as a result of our moral deliberation, it is a consummation much

to be desired, and it is often accompanied with a sense that grace was

somehow at work-not the grace of an Almighty Father, but the harmo­

nious convergence of various constituents of a world-in-process.

221