Introduction to Philosophy
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An-Introduction-to-Philosophy.pdf
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An Introduction to Philosophy
W. Russ Payne
Bellevue College
Copyright (cc by nc 4.0)
2015 W. Russ Payne
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document with attribution under the
terms of Creative Commons: Attribution Noncommercial 4.0 International or any later version of
this license. A copy of the license is found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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Contents
Introduction ………………………………………………. 3
Chapter 1: What Philosophy Is ………………………….. 5
Chapter 2: How to do Philosophy ………………….……. 11
Chapter 3: Ancient Philosophy ………………….………. 23
Chapter 4: Rationalism ………….………………….……. 38
Chapter 5: Empiricism …………………………………… 50
Chapter 6: Philosophy of Science ………………….…..… 58
Chapter 7: Philosophy of Mind …………………….……. 72
Chapter 8: Love and Happiness …………………….……. 79
Chapter 9: Meta Ethics …………………………………… 94
Chapter 10: Right Action ……………………...…………. 108
Chapter 11: Social Justice …………………………...…… 120
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Introduction
The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as a living discipline with historical
roots. While a few early chapters are historically organized, my goal in the historical chapters is
to trace a developmental progression of thought that introduces basic philosophical methods and
frames issues that remain relevant today. Later chapters are topically organized. These include
philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, areas where philosophy has shown dramatic
recent progress.
This text concludes with four chapters on ethics, broadly construed. I cover traditional theories of
right action in the third of these. Students are first invited first to think about what is good for
themselves and their relationships in a chapter of love and happiness. Next a few meta-ethical
issues are considered; namely, whether they are moral truths and if so what makes them so. The
end of the ethics sequence addresses social justice, what it is for one’s community to be good.
Our sphere of concern expands progressively through these chapters. Our inquiry recapitulates
the course of development into moral maturity.
Over the course of the text I’ve tried to outline the continuity of thought that leads from the
historical roots of philosophy to a few of the diverse areas of inquiry that continue to make
significant contributions to our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.
As an undergraduate philosophy major, one of my favorite professors once told me that
philosophers really do have an influence on how people think. I was pleased to hear that the kind
of inquiry I found interesting and rewarding might also be relevant to people’s lives and make a
difference in the world. Then he completed his thought, “it only takes about 300 years.” Over the
course of my teaching career, it has struck me that the opinions many of my students come to
class with have just about caught up with David Hume. So perhaps things are not quite as bad as
my professor suggested. While Hume did publish young, he was still an infant 300 years ago.
My mission as a philosophy teacher has been to remedy this situation to some small degree.
Most of the philosophy I read in graduate school was written by living philosophers, people I
could meet and converse with at conferences. Every time I’ve done so I’ve come back with a
new list of living philosophers I hoped to read. My experience with living philosophers has
convinced me that philosophy has progressed as dramatically as the sciences over the last
century or so. It is a great misfortune that the educated public by and large fails to recognize this.
Philosophers, no doubt, carry much of the blame for this. At the cutting edge of the profession
we have been better researchers that ambassadors. At no time in history have there been as many
bright people doing philosophy as there are today. Clearly articulated fresh perspectives on
important issues abound. But at the same time, philosophy’s “market share” in the university
curriculum has fallen to historic lows. If the flourishing of philosophy over the past century or so
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is to continue, philosophy as a living discipline will have to gain a broader following among the
general educated public. The front line for this campaign is the Philosophy 101 classroom.
This is an open source text. It is freely available in an editable, downloadable electronic format.
Anyone is free to obtain, distribute, edit, or revise this document in accordance with the open
source license. No one is free to claim proprietary rights to any part of this text. Sadly, one of the
main functions of academic publishing, both of research and textbooks, has become that of
restricting access to information. This is quite against the spirit of free and open discourse that is
the lifeblood of philosophy.
Introductory students should be exposed to as many philosophical voices as possible. To that
end, links to primary source readings and supplemental material are imbedded in the text. I’ve
restricted myself to primary source materials that are freely available on the Web. Students
should require nothing more than a reliable Internet connection to access all of the required and
recommended materials for this course. Limiting primary and supplemental sources in this way
has presented some challenges. Classic sources are readily available online, though not always in
the best translations. Many contemporary philosophers post papers online, but these are usually
not intended for undergraduate readers. Most good philosophical writing for undergraduates is,
unfortunately, proprietary, under copyright and hence unavailable for an open source course. The
strength of an open source text is that it is continually open to revision by anyone who’d care to
improve it. This is my humble attempt to remedy that situation. It can no doubt be improved
upon and so I invite more capable thinkers and writers to do so.
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1. What Philosophy Is
What is philosophy?
Many answers have been offered in reply to this question and most are angling at something
similar. My favorite answer is that philosophy is all of rational inquiry except for science.
Perhaps you think science is all of human inquiry. About a hundred years ago, many
philosophers, notably the Logical Positivists, thought there was nothing we could intelligibly
inquire into except for scientific matters. But this view is probably not right and here is a telling
question: what branch of science addresses the question of whether or not science covers all of
rational inquiry? If this question strikes you as puzzling, this might be because you already
recognize that whether or not science can answer every question is not itself a scientific issue.
Questions about the limits of human inquiry and knowledge are philosophical questions.
We can get a better understanding of philosophy by considering what sorts of things other than
scientific issues humans might inquire into. Philosophical issues are as diverse and far ranging as
those we find in the sciences, but a great many of them fall into (or across) one of three major
branches of philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is concerned with the nature of reality. Traditional metaphysical issues include the
existence of God and the nature of human free will (assuming we have any). Here are a few
metaphysical questions of interest to contemporary philosophers:
What is a thing?
How are space and time related?
Does the past exist? How about the future?
How many dimensions does the world have?
Are there any entities beyond physical objects (like numbers, properties, and relations)?
If so, how are they related to physical objects?
Historically, many philosophers have proposed and defended specific metaphysical positions,
often as part of systematic and comprehensive metaphysical views. But attempts to establish
systematic metaphysical world views have been notoriously inconclusive.
Since the 19th century many philosophers and scientists have been understandably suspicious of
metaphysics, and it has frequently been dismissed as a waste of time, or worse, as meaningless.
But in just the past few decades metaphysics has returned to vitality. As difficult as they are to
resolve, metaphysical issues are also difficult to ignore for long. Contemporary analytic
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metaphysics is typically taken to have more modest aims than definitively settling on the final
and complete truth about the underlying nature of reality. A better way to understand
metaphysics as it is currently practiced is as aiming at better understanding how various claims
about the reality logically hang together or conflict. Metaphysicians analyze metaphysical
puzzles and problems with the goal of better understanding how things could or could not be.
Metaphysicians are in the business of exploring the realm of possibility and necessity. They are
explorers of logical space.
Epistemology
Epistemology is concerned with the nature of knowledge and justified belief. Here are a few
noteworthy epistemological questions:
What is knowledge?
Can we have any knowledge at all?
Can we have knowledge about more specific matters, like the laws of nature,
fundamental moral principles, or the existence of other minds?
The view that we can’t have knowledge is called skepticism. An extreme form of skepticism
denies that we can have any knowledge whatsoever. But we might grant that we can have
knowledge about some things and remain skeptics concerning other issues. Many people, for
instance, are not skeptics about scientific knowledge, but are skeptics when it comes to
knowledge of morality. Later in this course we will entertain some skeptical worries about
science and we will consider whether ethics is really in a more precarious position. Some critical
attention reveals that scientific knowledge and moral knowledge face many of the same skeptical
challenges and share some similar resources in addressing those challenges. Many of the popular
reasons for being more skeptical about morality than science turn on philosophical confusions
we will address and attempt to clear up.
Even if we lack absolute and certain knowledge of many things, our beliefs about those things
might still be more or less reasonable or more or less likely to be true given the limited evidence
we have. Epistemology is also concerned with what it is for a belief to be rationally justified.
Even if we can’t have certain knowledge of anything (or much), questions about what we ought
to believe remain relevant.
Ethics
While epistemology is concerned with what we ought to believe and how we ought to reason,
Ethics is concerned with what we ought to do, how we ought to live, and how we ought to
organize our communities. It comes as a surprise to many new philosophy students that you can
reason about such things. Religiously inspired views about morality often take right and wrong
to be simply a matter of what is commanded by a divine being. Moral Relativism, perhaps the
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most popular outlook among people who have rejected faith, simply substitutes the commands of
society for the commands of God. Commands are simply to be obeyed, they are not to be
inquired into, assessed for reasonableness, or tested against the evidence. Thinking of morality as
so many commands based on the authority of God or society leaves no room for rational inquiry
into how we ought to live, how we ought to treat each other, or how we ought to structure our
communities. Philosophy, on the other hand, takes seriously the possibility of rational inquiry
into these matters. If philosophy has not succeeded in coming up with absolutely certain and
definitive answer in ethics, this is in part because philosophers take the answers to moral
questions to be things we need to discover, not simply matters of somebody’s say-so. The long
and unfinished history of science should give us some humble recognition of how difficult and
frustrating careful inquiry and investigation can be. So, we don’t know for certain what the laws
of morality are. We also don’t have a unified field theory in physics. We are far more
complicated than atoms, so why expect morality to be easier than physics?
So we might think of metaphysics as concerned with “What is it?” questions, epistemology as
concerned with “How do we know?” questions, and ethics as concerned with “What should we
do about it?” questions. Many interesting lines of inquiry cut across these three kinds of
questions. The philosophy of science, for instance, is concerned with metaphysical issues about
what science is, but also with epistemological questions about how we can know scientific truths.
The philosophy of love is similarly concerned with metaphysical questions about what love is.
But it also concerned with questions about the value of love that are more ethical in character.
Assorted tangled vines of inquiry branch off from the three major trunks of philosophy,
intermingle between them, and ultimately with scientific issues as well. The notion that some
branches of human inquiry can proceed entirely independent of others ultimately becomes
difficult to sustain. The scientist who neglects philosophy runs the same risk of ignorance as the
philosopher who neglects science.
What is the value of philosophy?
Philosophy is a branch of human inquiry and as such it aims at knowledge and understanding.
We might expect the value of philosophy to be found in its results, the value of the ends that it
seeks, the knowledge and understanding it reveals. But philosophy is rather notorious for failing
to establish definitive knowledge on the matters it investigates. I’m not so sure this reputation is
well deserved. We do learn much from doing philosophy. Philosophy often clearly reveals why
some initially attractive answers to big philosophical questions are deeply problematic, for
instance. But granted, philosophy often frustrates our craving for straightforward convictions. In
our first reading, Bertrand Russell argues that there is great value in doing philosophy precisely
because it frustrates our desire for quick easy answers. In denying us easy answers to big
questions and undermining complacent convictions, philosophy liberates us from narrow minded
conventional thinking and opens our minds to new possibilities. Philosophy often provides an
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antidote to prejudice not by settling big questions, but by revealing just how hard it is to settle
those questions. It can lead us to question our comfortably complacent conventional opinions.
Reading: The Value of Philosophy Our first Reading is Chapter 15 of Bertrand Russell’s Problems of Philosophy, “The Value of
Philosophy.” The whole book can be found here: http://www.ditext.com/russell/russell.html.
(Follow one of these links and do the reading before continuing with discussion of it below)
We humans are very prone to suffer from a psychological predicament we might call “the
security blanket paradox.” We know the world is full of hazards and like passengers after a
shipwreck we tend to latch on to something for a sense of safety. We might cling to a possession,
another person, our cherished beliefs, or any combination of these. The American pragmatist
philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce speaks of doubt and uncertainty as uncomfortable anxiety-
producing states. This would help explain why we tend to cling, even desperately, to beliefs we
find comforting. This clinging strategy, however, leads us into a predicament that becomes clear
once we notice that having a security blanket just gives us one more thing to worry about. In
addition to worrying about our own safety, we now also have to worry about our security blanket
getting lost or damaged. The asset becomes a liability. The clinging strategy for dealing with
uncertainty and fear becomes counterproductive.
While not calling it by this name, Russell describes the intellectual consequences of the security
blanket paradox vividly:
The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the
prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation,
and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or
consent of his deliberate reason. . . The life of the instinctive man is shut up within the
circle of his private interests. . . In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in
comparison with which the philosophic life is calm and free. The private world of
instinctive interests is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which
must, sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins.
The primary value of philosophy according to Russell is that it loosens the grip of uncritically
held opinion and opens the mind to a liberating range of new possibilities to explore.
The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. . .
Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts
which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free
them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to
what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the
somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of
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liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an
unfamiliar aspect.
Here we are faced with a stark choice between the feeling of safety we might derive from
clinging to opinions we are accustomed to and the liberation that comes with loosening our grip
on these in order to explore new ideas. The paradox of the security blanket should make it clear
what choice we should consider rational. Russell, of course, compellingly affirms choosing the
liberty of free and open inquiry.
Must we remain forever uncertain about philosophical matters? Russell does hold that some
philosophical questions appear to be unanswerable (at least by us). But he doesn’t say this about
every philosophical issue. In fact, he gives credit to philosophical successes for the birth of
various branches of the sciences. Many of the philosophical questions we care most deeply
about, however - like whether our lives are significant, whether there is objective value that
transcends our subjective interests - sometimes seem to be unsolvable and so remain perennial
philosophical concerns. But we shouldn’t be too certain about this either. Russell is hardly the
final authority on what in philosophy is or isn’t resolvable. Keep in mind that Russell was
writing 100 years ago and a lot has happened in philosophy in the mean time (not in small part
thanks to Russell’s own definitive contributions). Problems that looked unsolvable to the best
experts a hundred years ago often look quite solvable by current experts. The sciences are no
different in this regard. The structure of DNA would not have been considered knowable fairly
recently. That there was such a structure to discover could not even have been conceivable prior
to Mendel and Darwin (and here we are only talking 150 years ago).
Further, it is often possible to make real progress in understanding issues even when they can’t
be definitively settled. We can often rule out many potential answers to philosophical questions
even when we can’t narrow things down to a single correct answer. And we can learn a great
deal about the implications of and challenges for the possible answers that remain.
Suppose we can’t settle some philosophical issue. Does that tell us that there is not right answer?
No. That is not to say that every issue has a right answer. There is no answer to the issue of
whether chocolate is better than vanilla, for instance. But when we can’t settle an issue this often
just tells us something about our own limitations. There may still be a specific right answer; we
just can’t tell conclusively what it is. It’s easy to appreciate this point with a non-philosophical
issue. Perhaps we can’t know whether or not there is intelligent life on other planets. But surely
there is or there isn’t intelligent life on other planets. This question obviously has a right answer,
we just haven’t been able to figure out which it is. Similarly, we may never establish whether or
not humans have free will, but, at least once we are clear about what we mean by “free will”,
there must be some fact of the matter. It would be intellectually arrogant of us to think that a
question has no right answer just because we aren’t able to figure out what that answer is.
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Review and Discussion Questions
The first quiz covers this chapter and Bertrand Russell’s essay “The Value of Philosophy.” You
will find a link to the quiz in the course module for this chapter. Watch the course calendar for
when to take the quiz. The following questions will help you prepare. Feel free to take these
questions up on the discussion board.
On this Chapter:
Why should we doubt that science covers all of human inquiry?
What are some metaphysical issues? Some epistemological and ethical issues?
What problem does the view that morality is simply a matter of the say-so of some
authority lead to?
On Russell’s “The Value of Philosophy”:
What is the aim of philosophy according to Russell?
How is philosophy connected to the sciences?
What value is there in the uncertainty that philosophical inquiry often produces?
On the commentary on Russell:
Explain the “security blanket” paradox.
How can understanding of issues be advanced even when definitive knowledge can’t be
had?
What’s the difference between saying we can’t know the answer to some question and
saying that there is no truth of the matter?
Finally, consider some of the definitions of philosophy offered by philosophers on the page
linked at the opening of the lecture. A number of these would make for good discussion. Here’s
the link again: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/09/what-is-philosophy/
Some Vocabulary from this Chapter Metaphysics
Epistemology
Ethics
Skepticism
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2. How Philosophy is Done As a kind of inquiry, philosophy is aimed at establishing knowledge and understanding. Even
where certain knowledge about a particular issue can’t be had, there are often interesting things
to learn about why we can’t have certainty and what sorts of less-than-certain reasons there are
for or against holding a position on that issue. So, rational inquiry may be interesting and fruitful
even when we are denied straight-forward answers to our initial questions. Once we raise a
philosophical issue, whether about the nature of justice or about the nature of reality, we want to
ask what can be said for or against the various possible answers to our question. Here we are
engaged in formulating arguments. Some arguments give us better reasons or accepting their
conclusions than others. Once we have formulated an argument, we want to evaluate the
reasoning it offers. If you want to know what philosophers do, this is a pretty good answer:
philosophers formulate and evaluate arguments.
Your introduction to philosophy should be as much a training in how to do philosophy as it is a
chance to get to acquainted with the views of various philosophers. To that end, you should
carefully study the sections below on arguments.
Once a philosophical position is considered, we want to ask what arguments can be advanced in
support of or against that issue. We then want to examine the quality of the arguments.
Evaluating flawed arguments often points the way towards other arguments and the process of
formulating, clarifying, and evaluating arguments continues. This method of question and answer
in which we recursively formulate, clarify, and evaluate arguments is known as dialectic.
Dialectic looks a lot like debate, but a big difference lies in the respective goals of the two
activities. The goal of a debate is to win by persuading an audience that your position is right and
your opponent’s is wrong. Dialectic, on the other hand, is aimed at inquiry. The goal is to learn
something new about the issue under discussion. Unlike debate, in dialectic your sharpest critic
is your best friend. Critical evaluation of your argument brings new evidence and reasoning to
light. The person you disagree with on a philosophical issue is often the person you stand to learn
the most from (and this doesn’t necessarily depend on which of you is closer to the truth of the
matter).
Dialectic is sometimes referred to as the Socratic Method after the famous originator of this
systematic style of inquiry. We will get introduced to some of Plato’s dialogues chronicling the
exploits of Socrates in the next chapter on Ancient Greek Philosophy. This will give you a good
sense for how the Socratic Method works. Then watch for how the Socratic Method is deployed
throughout the rest of the course.
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Truth
As varieties of rational inquiry, it’s natural to think that science and philosophy are mainly
concerned with getting at the truth about things. There are some interesting and some confused
challenges to the idea that philosophy and science are truth oriented. But for now let’s assume
that rational inquiry is truth oriented and address a couple of questions about truth. Let’s focus
on just these two:
What is it for a claim to be true?
How do we determine that a claim is true?
It’s important to keep these two questions separate. Questions about how we know whether
something is true are epistemic questions. But the question of what it is for something to be true
is not an epistemic issue. The truth of a claim is quite independent of how or whether we know it
to be true. If you are not sure about this, consider the claim that there is intelligent life on other
planets and the claim that there is no intelligent life on other planets. I assume we don’t know
which of these two claims is true, but surely one of them is. Whichever of these claims is true, its
being true doesn’t depend in any way on whether or how we know it to be true. There are many
truths that will never be known or believed by anyone, and appreciating this is enough to see that
the truth of a claim is not relative to belief, knowledge, proof, or any other epistemic notion.
But then what is it for a claim to be true? The ordinary everyday notion of truth would have it
that a claim is true if the world is the way the claim says it is. And this is pretty much all we are
after. When we make a claim, we represent some part of the world as being a certain way. If how
my claim represents the world fits with the way the world is, then my claim is true. Truth, then,
is correspondence, or good fit, between what we assert and the way things are.
Is Truth Relative to Meaning?
There is a further potential source of confusion about truth that might be worth addressing at this
point. Words and sentences can be used in lots of different ways. Even if we are not being
inventive with language, there is lots of vagueness and ambiguity built into natural language. A
tempting pitfall in thinking about truth is to think that truth is somehow relative to meaning or
open to interpretation.
We’d all agree that it’s true that dogs are canines. But suppose we used the word “dog” to refer
to housecats instead. A word is just a sound or a string of letters. We can, in principle, attach any
meaning we like to the word “dog”. If we used the word “dog” to refer to housecats, then the
sentence “Dogs are canines” would be false. Doesn’t this make truth relative to meaning or
interpretation? Well, in a way yes, but not really.
The truth of sentences, bits of language, is relative to meaning. But the relativity at issue here is
entirely linguistic. It’s simply the result of the meaning of words and sentences being relative to
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linguistic convention. But our everyday notion of truth is not about linguistic convention any
more than it is about knowledge or belief. Our notion of truth is fundamentally about the
correspondence between what is meant by a sentence and the way the world is. Philosophers
often refer to what is meant or expressed by a sentence as a proposition. While a sentence is a
piece of language that has a meaning, the proposition it expresses is not itself a piece of
language. Consider “Schnei ist wies” and “Snow is white”. The first sentence is German for
snow is white. These are distinct sentences and this is clear because they belong to different
languages. But they say the same thing. They both express the proposition that snow is white (we
are stuck with using English to refer to the proposition. But that doesn’t mean the proposition is
linguistic. We use English to refer to lots of things that aren’t themselves part of language; dogs
and cats for instance).
So the proposition expressed by a sentence is not itself a linguistic thing. Being a non-linguistic
thing, the proposition does not have a meaning. Rather the proposition is what is meant. For a bit
of language to be open to interpretation is for us to be able to attach different meanings to it. But
the meanings themselves are not open to further interpretation. And it is the proposition, what is
meant by the sentence, that is the fundamental bearer of truth or falsity. A proposition is true
when it represents things the way they are. So when I speak of arguments consisting of claims
you might bear in mind that its propositions, not sentences I’m talking about. If we misinterpret
the sentence, then we haven’t yet gotten on to the claim being made and hence probably don’t
fully understand the argument. Getting clear on just what an argument says is critical to the
dialectical process.
Even if you are exceptionally bright, you probably found the last couple paragraphs rather
challenging. That’s OK. You might work through them again more carefully and come back to it
in a day or two if it’s still a struggle. The path to becoming a better critical thinker is more like
mountain climbing than a walk in the park, but with this crucial difference: no bones get broken
when you fall off an intellectual cliff. So you are always free to try to scale it again. We can sum
up the key points of the last few paragraphs as follows:
We use sentences, bits of language, to express propositions.
The proposition, what is meant by the sentence, represents the world as being some way.
The proposition is true when it represents the world in a way that corresponds to how the
world is.
Truth, understood as correspondence between a claim (a proposition) and the way the
world is, is not relative to meaning, knowledge, belief, or opinion.
Hopefully we now have a better grip on what it is for a claim to be true. A claim is true just when
it represents things as they are. As is frequently the case in philosophy, the real work here was
just getting clear on the issue. Once we clearly appreciate the question at hand, the answer seems
pretty obvious. So now we can set aside the issue of what truth is and turn to the rather different
issue of how to determine what’s true.
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Arguments
The common sense everyday way to assess a claim for truth or falsity is to consider the reasons
for holding it or rejecting it. Sometimes good reasons take the form of simple observations. I
have a good reason for thinking my bicycle has a flat tire when I see the tire sagging on the rim
or hear air hissing out of the tube. But often the business of identifying and evaluating reasons is
a bit more involved. Since philosophy proceeds by formulating and evaluating the reasons for
and against holding various positions, we will want to take a closer look at just how this goes.
We will do so in the remainder of this chapter with the informal introduction to logic and critical
thinking.
An argument is a reason for taking something to be true. Arguments consist of two or more
claims, one of which is a conclusion. The conclusion is the claim the argument purports to give a
reason for believing. The other claims are the premises. The premises of an argument taken
together are offered as a reason for believing its conclusion.
Some arguments provide better reasons for believing their conclusions than others. In case you
have any doubt about that, consider the following examples:
1. Sam is a line cook.
2. Line cooks generally have good of kitchen skills.
3. So, Sam can probably cook well.
1. Sam is a line cook.
2. Line cooks generally aren’t paid very well.
3. So, Sam is probably a millionaire.
The premises in the first argument provide pretty good support for thinking Sam can cook well.
That is, assuming the premises in the first argument are true, we have a good reason to think that
its conclusion is true. The premises in the second argument give us no reason to think Sam is a
millionaire. So whether or not the premises of an argument support its conclusion is a key issue.
Now consider these examples:
1. Boston is in Massachusetts.
2. Massachusetts is east of the Rockies.
3. So Boston is east of the Rockies.
1. Boston is in California.
2. California is west of the Rockies.
3. So Boston is west of the Rockies.
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Again, the first of these two arguments looks pretty good, the second not so much. But the
problem with the second argument here is different. If its premises were true, then we would
have a good reason to think the conclusion is true. That is, the premises do support the
conclusion. But the first premise of the second argument just isn’t true. Boston is not in
California. So the latter pair of arguments suggests another key issue for evaluating arguments.
Good arguments have true premises.
That is pretty much it. A good argument is an argument that has true premises that, when taken
together, support its conclusion. So, evaluating an argument involves just these two essential
steps:
Determine whether or not the premises are true.
Determine whether or not the premises support the conclusion (that is, whether we have
grounds to think the conclusion is true if all of the premises are true).
Determining whether an argument’s premises are true often involves evaluating further
arguments in support of those premises. An argument might be the last link in a long chain of
reasoning. In this case, the quality of the argument depends on the whole chain. And since
arguments can have multiple premises, each of which might be supported by further arguments,
evaluating one argument might be more involved yet, since its conclusion is really supported by
a rich network of reasoning, not just one link and then another. While the potential for
complication should be clear, the basic idea should be pretty familiar. Think of the regress of
“why” questions many of us tormented our parents with as children. Even at a young age we
understood that the reasons for believing one thing can depend on the reasons for believing a
great many other things.
However involved the network of reasons supporting a given conclusion might be, it seems that
there must be some starting points. That is, it seems there must be some reasons for believing
things that don’t themselves need to be justified in terms of further reasons. Otherwise the
network of supporting reasons would go on without end. The issue we are facing here is one of
identifying the ultimate foundations of knowledge and justified belief. This is a big
epistemological issue and we will return to it later in the course. For now, let’s consider one
potential answer we are already familiar with. In the sciences our complex chains of reasoning
seem to proceed from the evidence of the senses. We think that evidence provides the foundation
for our edifice of scientific knowledge. Sounds great for science, but where does this leave
philosophy? Does philosophy entirely lack evidence on which its reasoning can be based?
Philosophy does have a kind of evidence to work from and that evidence is provided by
philosophical problems. When we encounter a problem in philosophy this often tells us that the
principles and assumptions that generate that problem can’t all be correct. This might seem like
just a subtle clue that leaves us far from solving the big mysteries. But clues are evidence just the
same. As we will discuss in our chapter on the philosophy of science, science doesn’t really have
it much easier. Sensory evidence by itself doesn’t tell us as much about the nature of the world as
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we’d like to suppose. Scientific evidence provides clues, but there remains a good deal of
problem solving to do in science as well as in philosophy.
So we can assess the truth or falsity of the premises of an argument by examining evidence or by
evaluating further argument in support of the premises. Now we will turn to the other step in
evaluating arguments and consider the ways in which premises can support or fail to support
their conclusions. The question of support is distinct from the question of whether the premises
are true. When we ask whether the premises support the conclusions we are asking whether we’d
have grounds for accepting the conclusion assuming the premises are true. In answering this
question we will want to apply one of two standards of support: deductive validity or inductive
strength.
Deductive Validity
The deductive standard of support is validity. An argument counts as deductive whenever it is
aiming at this standard of support. Deductive validity is the strictest standard of support we can
uphold. In a deductively valid argument, the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the
conclusion. Here are two equivalent definitions of deductive validity:
(D) A valid argument is an argument where if its premises are true, then its conclusion
must be true.
(D’) A valid argument is an argument where it is not possible for all of its premises to
be true and its conclusion false.
Here are a few examples of deductively valid arguments
1. If Socrates is human, then Socrates is mortal
2. Socrates is a human.
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal
1. All monkeys are primates
2. All primates are mammals
3. So, all monkeys are mammals
If you think about these two examples for a moment, it should be clear that there is no possible
way for the premises to all be true and the conclusion false. The truth of the conclusion is
gauranteed by the truth of the premises. In contrast, the following argument is not valid:
1. If Sue misses her plane, she will be late for the conference.
2. Sue is late for the conference.
3. Therefore, she missed her plane.
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Again, to say that an argument is deductively valid is to say that it is impossible for all of its
premises to be true and its conclusion to be false. To see why the last argument is not valid, try to
think of a possible scenario that makes both of the premises true and the conclusion false. One
scenario is where Sue catches her plane, but her cab from the airport gets stuck in traffic. If we
can think of any possible way for the premises of an argument to be true and its conclusion false,
then we have show that the conclusion does not deductively follow from the premises. That is,
we’ve shown that the argument is not valid.
Our intuitive test for validity is to think about whether it is possible for the argument’s premises
to be true and its conclusion to be false. A key point to notice here is that validity is not directly
about the truth or falsity of the premises or the conclusion. The concept of validity is really a
concept about what is and isn’t logically possible. A deductively valid argument may or may not
have true premises. Consider this argument:
1. All stars are bodies that shine steadily.
2. All planets are stars.
3. All planets are bodies that shine steadily.
Both of the premises in this argument are false, but the argument is still valid. Suppose, contrary
to fact, that the premises were true. It should be easy to see that the conclusion would have to be
true if this were the case. Validity isn’t about whether the premises or the conclusion are in fact
true. It is only about whether the conclusion logically follows from the premises.
A deductively valid argument only provides one with a good reason for believing its conclusion
if its premises are true. If a deductively valid argument has all true premises, we say that it
is deductively sound. For an argument to be deductively sound is one way for it to pass both
steps (1) and (2) above for evaluating arguments.
The deductive arguments we’ve looked at here are pretty intuitive. We only need to think about
whether the conclusion could be false even if the premises were true. But most deductive
arguments are not so obvious. Logic is the science of deductive validity. Philosophy has made
some historic advances in logic over the past century. Bertrand Russell, who we got acquainted
with in the last chapter, was among the key contributors to early developments in logic over the
20th century. In the next chapter we will get acquainted with the first logician, Aristotle.
Inductive Strength
Consider this argument again:
1. Sam is a line cook.
2. Line cooks generally have good of kitchen skills.
3. So, Sam can probably cook well.
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This is a decent argument. The premises do support the conclusion. And yet it might be that both
premises are true and the conclusion is false. Sam could be a brand new cook hired because he’s
the manager’s son who has never cooked in his life. Many arguments give us good reasons for
accepting their conclusions even if their premises being true fails to completely guarantee the
truth of the conclusion. This suggests that we need another standard of support for arguments
that aim at giving us pretty good but not absolutely compelling grounds for accepting their
conclusions. And this standard of support is called inductive strength. Here are two equivalent
ways of defining inductive strength:
(I) An inductively strong argument is an argument in which if its premises are true, its
conclusion is probably to be true.
(I’) An inductively strong argument is an argument in which it is improbable that its
conclusion is false given that its premises are true.
If you look again at the earlier definitions for deductive validity you will find a good deal of
similarity. The only difference is in the use of the words "probably" rather than “must be” in the
first definition, and “improbable” rather than "impossible" in the second. This is a big difference.
As in the case of validity, when we say that an argument is strong, we are not assuming that it’s
premises are true. We are only claiming that if the premises are true then the conclusion is likely
to be true. Corresponding to the notion of deductive soundness, an inductive argument that is
both strong and has true premises is called a cogent inductive argument. Unlike the case if
deductively sound arguments, it is possible for an inductively cogent argument to have true
premises and a false conclusion.
Lots of good reasons for holding a belief fall short of the standard of deductive validity. The sort
of reasoning you were taught as “the scientific method” in secondary school is inductive
reasoning. As it is taught in high school, the scientific method consists of formulating a general
hypothesis and testing it against a large sampling of data. If the data is consistent with the
hypothesis, then the hypothesis is considered confirmed by the data. Here a limited amount of
evidence is taken to support a broader more general hypothesis. In the simplest case, inductive
reasoning involves inferring that something is generally the case from a pattern observed in a
limited number of cases. For instance, if we were to conduct a poll of 1000 Seattle voters and
600 of them claimed to be Democrats, then we could inductively infer that 60% of the voters in
Seattle are Democrats. The results of the poll give a pretty good reason to think that around 60%
of the voters in Seattle are Democrats. But the results of the poll don’t guarantee this conclusion.
It is possible that only 50% of the voters in Seattle are Democrats and Democrats were, just by
luck, over represented in the1000 cases we considered.
When evaluating deductive arguments for validity we ask if it is possible for the premises to be
true and the conclusion to be false. This is either possible or it isn’t. Possibility does not admit of
degrees. But probability does. The truth of the conclusion of an inductive argument can be
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probable to a greater or lesser degree. An argument either is or isn’t valid. But inductive
arguments can be more or less strong. We can identify a few factors that bear on the degree of
strength an inductive argument has. One is how much evidence we have looked at before
inductively generalizing. Our inductive argument above would be stronger is we drew our
conclusion from a poll of 100,000 Seattle voters, for instance. And it would be much weaker if
we had only polled 100. Also, the strength of an inductive argument depends on the degree to
which the observed cases represent the makeup of the broader class of cases. So our inductive
argument will be stronger if we randomly select our 1000 voters from the Seattle phone book
than if they are selected from the Ballard phone book (Ballard being a notably liberal
neighborhood within Seattle).
So far, we’ve only discussed inductive generalization, where we identify a pattern in a limited
number of cases and draw a more general conclusion about a broader class of cases. Inductive
argument comes in other varieties as well. In the example we started with about Sam the line
cook, we inductively inferred a prediction about Sam based on a known pattern in a broader class
of cases. Argument from analogy is another variety of inductive reasoning that can be quite
strong. For instance, I know that my housecat is very similar to cougars in the wild. Knowing
that my cat can jump great heights, it would be reasonable to expect that by analogy, or based on
this similarity, cougars can jump well too.
There are further varieties of argument that aim at the standard of inductive strength, but we will
discuss just one more in detail now. Abduction is inference to the best explanation. Detective
work provides a good example of abductive argument. When Holmes discovers Moriarty’s
favorite brand of cigar and a bullet of the sort fired by Moriarty’s gun at a murder scene,
inference to the best explanation suggests that Moriarty was the killer. That Moriarty committed
the murder provides the overall best explanation of the various facts of the case.
The 19th century American pragmatist and logician, Charles Sanders Peirce offers the Surprise
Principle as a method for evaluating abductive arguments. According to the surprise principle,
we should count one explanation as better than competing explanations if it would render the
facts we are trying to explain less surprising than competing explanations. The various clues in
the murder case are among the facts we want explained. The presence of the cigar and the bullet
casing at the murder scene is much less surprising if Moriarty committed the murder than if the
maid did it. Inference to the best explanation aims at strength. So a strong abductive argument in
this case needn’t rule out the possibility that the murder was committed by Moriarty’s evil twin
who convincingly frames his brother. There might an argument against the death penalty lurking
nearby. Inference to the best explanation is worth more attention than if often receives. This kind
of reasoning is pervasive in philosophy and science, but seldom gets much notice as an integral
part of the methods of rational inquiry.
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Fallacies
A fallacy is just a mistake in reasoning. Humans are not nearly as rational as we’d like to
suppose. In fact we are so prone to certain sorts of mistakes in reasoning that philosophers and
logicians refer those mistakes by name. For now I will discuss just one by name but in a little
detail. Watch for explanations of other fallacies over the course of the class. For pretty thorough
catalogue of logical fallacies, I’ll refer to you The Fallacy Files
(http://www.fallacyfiles.org/taxonomy.html).
“Ad hominem” is Latin for “against the man.” It is the name for the fallacy of attacking the
proponent of a position rather than critically evaluating the reasons offered for the proponent’s
position. The reason ad hominem is a fallacy is just that the attack on an individual is simply not
relevant to the quality of the reasoning offered by that person. Attacking the person who offers
an argument has nothing to do whether or not the premises of the argument are true or support
the conclusion. Ad hominem is a particularly rampant and destructive fallacy in our society. What
makes it so destructive is that it turns the cooperative social project of inquiry through
conversation into polarized verbal combat. This fallacy makes rational communication
impossible while it diverts attention from interesting issues that often could be fruitfully
investigated.
Here is a classic example of ad hominem: A car salesman argues for the quality of an automobile
and the potential buyer discounts the argument with the thought that the person is just trying to
earn a commission. There may be good reason to think the salesman is just trying to earn a
commission. But even if there is, this is irrelevant to the evaluation of the reasons the salesman is
offering. The reasons should be evaluated on their own merits. Notice, it is easy to describe a
situation where it is both true that the salesman is just trying to earn a commission and true that
he is making good arguments. Consider a salesman who is not too fond of people and cares little
for them except that they earn a commission for him. Otherwise he is scrupulously honest and a
person of moral integrity. In order to reconcile himself with the duties of a sales job, he carefully
researches his product and only accepts a sales position with the business that sells the very best.
He then sincerely delivers good arguments for the quality of his product, makes lots of money,
and dresses well. This salesman must have been a philosophy major. The customer who rejects
his argument on the ad hominim grounds that he is just trying to earn a commission misses an
opportunity to buy the best. The moral of the story is just that the salesperson’s motive is
logically independent of the quality of his argument.
Review and Discussion Questions
1. How does dialectic differ from debate?
2. What is it for a claim to be true? How does this issue differ from that of determining
whether a claim is true?
3. Explain our everyday concept of truth in terms of correspondence.
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4. What is an argument? How do we evaluate arguments?
5. What does it mean for the premises of an argument to support its conclusion, and what
are the two standards of support?
6. Explain the surprise principle and illustrate its use in evaluating an inference to the best
explanation.
7. What is a fallacy? Learn about a fallacy or two on The Fallacy Files and report back.
Exercises
Which of the following arguments are valid? Which are invalid?
A
1. Donna will get an A in philosophy if and only if she writes a good paper.
2. Donna got an A in philosophy
3. Therefore, she wrote a good paper.
B
1. If Donna writes a good paper, she will get an A in philosophy.
2. Donna got an A in philosophy
3. Therefore, she wrote a good paper.
C
1. If whales are mammals, then they are not fish.
2. Whales are fish
3. Whales are not mammals.
D
1. If the rapture has occurred, then either some of the cars on the highway will be
unoccupied or all drivers are damned.
2. Some drivers are not damned.
3. None of the cars on the highway are unoccupied.
4. Therefore, the rapture has not occurred.
E
1. Some snarks are bandersnatches.
2. All bandersnatches are igglypoofs.
3. So, some snarks are igglypoofs
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Answer the following questions. Give short explanations that reason from the definitions of the
relevant logical concepts.
1. Does an argument provide a good reason for believing its conclusion if it is valid?
Explain.
2. Can a valid argument have a false conclusion? Explain.
3. Can a sound argument have a false conclusion? Explain.
4. What is it for a statement to be valid? (trick question)
Which of the following arguments are inductively strong? Which are weak?
1. It has rained every day in the Darién Gap for the past 25 years. Thus, it will probably rain
in the Darién Gap tomorrow.
2. People try on shoes before buying them. People drive cars before signing up for a three-
year lease. People take a close look at travel information before committing to an
expensive vacation. So, people should have sex with each other before committing to
marriage.
3. Two teenagers were found writing graffiti on the school walls yesterday. Thus, all
teenagers are delinquents.
4. A reliable study showed that 90 percent of Bellevue College’s students want more
training in critical thinking. Maria is a student at Bellevue College. So, Maria probably
wants more training in critical thinking.
5. Upon landing at the SeaTac Airport, plane passengers saw broken buildings, large cracks
in the runway, fire engines running about, and paramedics assisting injured people. The
passengers concluded that an earthquake just occurred.
Answer the following questions. Give short explanations based on the definitions of the relevant
concepts.
1. Explain how deductive validity and inductive strength differ.
2. Can the conclusion of an inductively cogent argument be false? Explain.
3. Must an inductively strong argument have true premises? Explain.
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3. Ancient Philosophy Our main focus in this chapter will be with the three major ancient Greek philosophers, Socrates,
Plato and Aristotle. It is in these thinkers that science and philosophy get started. But even these
great minds were working in an intellectual tradition and it will be well worth a few minutes to
appreciate the historical context in which they worked and the foundation it provided. So we will
begin with a quick tour of Pre-Socratic thought.
The Presocratics
In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the early Ionian epic poet Homer offers a view of the world as
under the influence of the Olympian gods. The Olympian gods were much like humans,
capricious and willful. In the Homeric view of the world, human qualities are projected onto the
world via human-like gods. Here explanation of the natural world is modeled on explanation of
human behavior. This marks the world view of the epic poets as pre-philosophical and pre-
scientific. However, even in the early epic poems we find a moral outlook that is key to the
scientific and philosophical frame of mind. In Homer and in later Greek tragedy, we find stories
of the grief that human hubris brings upon us. The repeated warnings against human pride and
arrogance make a virtue out of humility. Intellectual humility involves recognizing the fallibility
of human thought, in particular one’s own. The willingness to submit one’s own opinions to
rational scrutiny is essential to moving beyond the realm of myth and into the realm of
philosophy and science. Intellectual humility makes it possible to see the world and one’s place
in it as a matter for discovery rather than a matter of self-assertion.
The Melisians
The beginning of philosophy in ancient Greece is often given as 585 B.C., the year that the
Milesian philosopher Thales predicted a solar eclipse. Thales brings a new naturalistic approach
to explaining the world. That is, his proposed explanations for natural phenomenon are given in
terms of more fundamental natural phenomenon, not in supernatural terms. The step away from
supernatural myth and towards understanding the natural world on its own terms is a major
development. Thales is interested in the fundamental nature of the world and arrives at the view
that the basic substance of the world is water. His reason for thinking that water is fundamental is
that of the four recognized elements - earth, air, fire and water - only water can take the form of a
solid, liquid, or a gas. According to Thales, earth is really water that is even more concentrated
than ice and fire is really water that is more rarified than steam. While his view sounds absurd to
us, the significance of his contribution is not the specific answer he gives to the question of the
ultimate nature of the world, but how he proposes to answer this question. Thales takes an
important step away from projecting ourselves onto the world through myth and superstition and
towards explanations that invite further investigation of the world as it is independent of human
will.
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Pythagoras (fl. 525-500 B.C.) traveled in Egypt where he learned astronomy and geometry. His
thought represents a peculiar amalgam of hardnosed mathematical thinking and creative but
rather kooky superstition. Pythagoras holds that all things consist of numbers. He saw
mathematics as a purifier of the soul. Thinking about numbers takes one’s attention off of
particular things and elevates the mind to the realm of the eternal. Scientific thinking, on this
view, is not so far from meditation. Pythagoras is responsible for the Pythagorean Theorem
which tells us that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the
squares of the remaining sides. He also discerned how points in space can define shapes,
magnitudes, and forms:
1 point defines location
2 points define a line
3 points define a plane
4 points define solid 3 dimensional objects
Pythagoras introduces the concept of form. The earlier Milesians only addressed the nature of
matter, the stuff of the universe. A full account of the nature of the world must also address the
various forms that underlying stuff takes. Form implies limits. For Pythagoras, this is
understandable in numerical terms. Number represents the application of limit (form) to the
unlimited (matter). The notion of form takes on greater sophistication and importance in the
thought of Plato and Aristotle.
Pythagoras led a cult that held some rather peculiar religious beliefs. The more popular beliefs in
the Homeric gods are not concerned with salvation or spiritual purification. There was the
Dionysian religion, which sought spiritual purification and immortality through drunken carnal
feasts and orgies. Pythagorean religious belief also aims at purification and immortality, but
without the intoxication and sex. Pythagoras founded a religious society based on the following
precepts:
that at its deepest level, reality is mathematical in nature
that philosophy can be used for spiritual purification
that the soul can rise to union with the divine
that certain symbols have a mystical significance
that all brothers of the order should observe strict loyalty and secrecy
Members of the inner circle were strict communist vegetarians. They were also not allowed to
eat beans. Pythagoras might have done well in Ballard.
The last of the Milesians we will discuss is Heraclitus. Heraclitus (544-484 B.C.) was born in
Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor. He is best known for his doctrine of eternal flux according
to which everything undergoes perpetual change. “One can never step in the same river twice.”
The underlying substance of the world is fire or heat according to Heraclitus. This is the least
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stable of the elements and explains the transitoriness of all things. Everything is a kindling or
extinguishing of fire. While everything is in a continual state of flux, this change is not without
order. Heraclitus saw Logos or rational order as essential to the world. Changes are injustices,
which by natural necessity are redressed in further changes. Heraclitus held ethical views worth
noting as well. The good life involves understanding and accepting the necessity of strife and
change.
The Sophists
Most of early Greek philosophy prior to the Sophists was concerned with the natural world. The
desire to explain an underlying reality required natural philosophers to speculate beyond what is
observable and they lacked any developed critical method for adjudicating between rival theories
of substance change or being. In this situation, it is easy to see how many might grow impatient
with natural philosophy and adopt the skeptical view that reason simply cannot reveal truths
beyond our immediate experience. But reason might still have practical value in that it allows the
skilled arguer to advance his interests. The Sophists were the first professional educators. For a
fee, they taught students how to argue for the practical purpose of persuading others and winning
their way. While they were well acquainted with and taught the theories of philosophers, they
were less concerned with inquiry and discovery than with persuasion.
Pythagoras and Heraclitus had offered some views on religion and the good life. Social and
moral issues come to occupy the center of attention for the Sophists. Their tendency towards
skepticism about the capacity of reason to reveal truth and their cosmopolitan circumstances,
which exposed them to a broad range of social customs and codes, lead the Sophists to take a
relativist stance on ethical matters. The Sophist’s lack of interest in knowing the truth for its own
sake and their entrepreneurial interest in teaching argument for the sake of best serving their
client’s interests leads Plato to derisively label the Sophists as “shopkeepers with spiritual
wares.”
One of the better known Sophists, Protagoras (481-411 B.C.), authored several books including,
Truth, or the Rejection (the rejection of science and philosophy), which begins with his best-
known quote, “man is the measure of all things, of those that are that they are, of those that are
not that they are not.” Knowledge, for Protagoras is reducible to perception. Since different
individuals perceive the same things in different ways, knowledge is relative to the knower. This
is a classic expression of epistemic relativism. Accordingly, Protagoras rejects any objectively
knowable morality and takes ethics and law to be conventional inventions of civilizations,
binding only within societies and holding only relative to societies.
Socrates
Socrates is widely regarded as the founder of philosophy and rational inquiry. He was born
around 470 B.C., and tried and executed in 399 B.C.. Socrates was the first of the three major
Greek philosophers; the others being Socrates’ student Plato and Plato’s student Aristotle.
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Socrates did not write anything himself. We know of his views primarily through Plato’s
dialogues where Socrates is the primary character. Socrates is also known through plays of
Aristophanes and the historical writings of Xenophon. In many of Plato’s dialogues it is difficult
to determine when Socrates’ views are being represented and when the character of Socrates is
used as a mouthpiece for Plato’s views.
Socrates was well known in Athens. He was eccentric, poor, ugly, brave, stoic, and temperate.
He was a distinguished veteran who fought bravely on Athens’ behalf and was apparently
indifferent to the discomforts of war. Socrates claimed to hear a divine inner voice he called
his daimon and he was prone to go into catatonic states of concentration.
The conflicting views of the Ionian and Eleatic philosophers of nature encouraged skepticism
about our ability to obtain knowledge through rational inquiry. Among the Sophists, this
skepticism is manifested in epistemic and Moral Relativism. Epistemic relativism is the view that
there is no objective standard for evaluating the truth or likely truth of our beliefs. Rather,
epistemic standards of reasoning are relative to one’s point of view and interests. Roughly, this is
the view that what is true for me might not be true for you (when we are not just talking about
ourselves). Epistemic relativism marks no distinction between knowledge, belief, or opinion on
the one hand, and truth and reality on the other. To take a rather silly example, if I think it’s
Tuesday, then that’s what’s true for me; and if you think it’s Thursday, then that’s what is true
for you. In cases like this, epistemic relativism seems quite absurd, yet many of us have grown
comfortable with the notion that, say, beliefs about the moral acceptability of capital punishment
might be true for some people and not for others.
Moral Relativism is the parallel doctrine about moral standards. The moral relativist takes there
to be no objective grounds for judging some ethical opinions to be correct and others not. Rather,
ethical judgments can only be made relative to one or another system of moral beliefs and no
system can be evaluated as objectively better than another. Since earlier attempts at rational
inquiry had produced conflicting results, the Sophists held that no opinion could be said to
constitute knowledge. According to the Sophists, rather than providing grounds for thinking
some beliefs are true and others false, rational argument can only be fruitfully employed as
rhetoric, the art of persuasion. For the epistemic relativist, the value of reason lies not in
revealing the truth, but in advancing one’s interests. The epistemic and Moral Relativism of the
Sophist has become popular again in recent years and has an academic following in much "post-
modern" writing.
Socrates was not an epistemic or moral relativist. He pursued rational inquiry as a means of
discovering the truth about ethical matters. But he did not advance any ethical doctrines or lay
claim to any knowledge about ethical matters. Instead, his criticism of the Sophists and his
contribution to philosophy and science came in the form of his method of inquiry.
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As the Socratic Method is portrayed in Plato’s Socratic dialogues, interlocutor proposes a
definition or analysis of some important concept, Socrates raises an objection or offers counter
examples, then the interlocutor reformulates his position to handle the objection. Socrates raises
a more refined objection. Further reformulations are offered, and so forth. Socrates uses the
dialectic to discredit others’ claims to knowledge. While revealing the ignorance of his
interlocutors, Socrates also shows how to make progress towards more adequate understanding.
A good example of the Socratic Method at work can be found in one of Plato’s early Socratic
dialogues, Euthyphro. Here is a link: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1642. Here is Euthyphro
as an audiobook: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19840.
In Plato’s dialogues we often find Socrates asking about the nature of something and then
critically examine proposed answers, finding assorted illuminating objections that often suggest
next steps. In this dialogue, Socrates and Euthyphro are discussing the nature of piety or
holiness. Socrates and Euthyphro never conclusively discover what piety is, but they learn much
about how various attempts to define piety fail. The dialogue works the same if we substitute
moral goodness for piety. Understood in this way, Euthyphro provides a classic argument against
Divine Command Theory, a view about the nature of morality that says that what is right is right
simply because it is commanded by God.
Socrates would not have us believe our questions have no correct answers. He is genuinely
seeking the truth of the matter. But he would impress on us that inquiry is hard and that untested
claims to knowledge amount to little more than vanity. Even though Euthyphro and Socrates
don’t achieve full knowledge of the nature of piety, their understanding is advanced through
testing the answers that Euthyphro suggests. We come to see why piety can’t be understood just
by identifying examples of it. While examples of pious acts fail to give us a general
understanding of piety, the fact that we can identify examples of what is pious suggests that we
have some grasp of the notion even in the absence of a clear understanding of it.
After a few failed attempts to define piety, Euthyphro suggests that what is pious is what is loved
by the gods (all of them, the Greeks recognized quite a few). Many religious believers continue
to hold some version of Divine Command Theory. In his response to Euthyphro, Socrates points
us towards a rather devastating critique of this view and any view that grounds morality in
authority. Socrates asks whether what is pious is pious because the gods love it or whether the
gods love what is pious because it is pious. Let’s suppose that the gods agree in loving just what
is pious. The question remains whether their loving the pious explains its piety or whether some
things being pious explains why the gods love them. Once this question of what is supposed to
explain what is made clear, Euthyphro agrees with Socrates that the gods love what is pious
because it is pious. The problem with the alternative view, that what is pious is pious because it
is loved by the gods, is that this view makes piety wholly arbitrary. Anything could be pious if
piety is just a matter of being loved by the gods. If the gods love puppy torture, then this would
be pious. Hopefully this seems absurd. Neither Socrates nor Euthyphro is willing to accept that
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what is pious is completely arbitrary. At this point, Socrates points out to Euthyphro that since an
act’s being pious is what explains why the gods love it, he has failed to give an account of what
piety is. The explanation can’t run in both directions. In taking piety to explain being loved by
the gods, we are left lacking an explanation of what piety itself is. Euthyphro gives up shortly
after this failed attempt and walks off in a huff.
If we substitute talk of God making things right or wrong by way of commanding them for talk
of the gods loving what is pious in this exchange of ideas, we can readily see that Divine
Command Theory has the rather unsavory result that torturing innocent puppies would be right if
God commanded it. We will return to this problem when we take up ethical theory later in the
course. While we don’t reach the end of inquiry into piety (or goodness) in Euthyphro, we do
make discernible progress in coming to see why a few faulty accounts must be set aside. Socrates
does not refute the skeptic or the relativist Sophist by claiming to discover the truth about
anything. What he does instead is show us how to engage in rational inquiry and show us how
we can make progress by taking the possibility of rational inquiry seriously.
Apology
This dialogue by Plato is a dramatization of Socrates’ defense at his trial for corrupting the youth
among other things. Socrates tells the story of his friend Chaerophon who visits the Oracle of
Delphi and asks if anyone in Athens is wiser than Socrates. The Oracle answered that no one is
wiser than Socrates. Socrates is astounded by this and makes it his mission in life to test and
understand the Oracle’s pronouncement. He seeks out people who have a reputation for wisdom
in various regards and tests their claims to knowledge through questioning. He discovers a good
deal of vain ignorance and false claims to knowledge, but no one with genuine wisdom.
Ultimately, Socrates concludes that he is wisest, but not because he possesses special knowledge
not had by others. Rather, he finds that he is wisest because he recognizes his own lack of
knowledge while others think they know, but do not.
Of course people generally, and alleged experts especially, are quite happy to think that what
they believe is right. We tend to be content with our opinions and we rather like it when others
affirm this contentment by agreeing with us, deferring to our claims to know or at least by
“respecting our opinion” (whatever that is supposed to mean). We are vain about our opinions
even to the point of self identifying with them (I’m the guy who is right about this or that). Not
claiming to know, Socrates demonstrates some intellectual humility in allowing that his opinions
might be wrong and being willing to subject them to examination. But in critically examining
various opinions, including those of the supposed experts, he pierces the vanity of many of
Athens’ prestigious citizens. Engaging in rational inquiry is dangerous business, and Socrates is
eventually brought up on charges of corrupting the youth who liked to follow him around and
listen to him reveal people’s claims to knowledge as false pride. The Apology documents
Socrates’ defense of his of behavior and the Athenian assembly’s decision to sentence him to
death anyway.
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You will find the Apology in several formats here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1656
Study questions for the Apology:
1. What are the ancient and the more recent charges brought against Socrates?
2. How does he answer the ancient charges?
3. According to Socrates, why would he not intentionally corrupt the youth?
4. Suppose Socrates unintentionally corrupted the youth. Should he be punished anyway
for the negative impact of his actions? Explain your answer.
5. Explain the mission Socrates sets himself on in response to the the pronouncement by
the Oracle at Delphi.
6. Socrates argues in a couple places that the worse man can not harm the better man.
How does that argument go?
7. What does Socrates’ defense reveal about the values he lives by? What matters most
to Socrates in life?
8. How does Socrates argue that the fear of death is irrational?
9. How could Socrates have avoided the death penalty?
10. Was his choice not to evade death an honorable one?
11. How did Socrates see his critical questioning of Athenians as beneficial to his city
and its citizens?
12. Do you think Socrates was too hard on his fellow Athenians before his accusers came
forward? Was he too hard on them during the trial and after the verdict?
Plato
Plato (429-347 B.C.) came from a family of high status in ancient Athens. He was a friend and
fan of Socrates and some of his early dialogues chronicle events in Socrates’ life. Socrates is a
character in all of Plato’s dialogues. But in many, the figure of Socrates is employed as a voice
for Plato’s own views. Unlike Socrates, Plato offers very developed and carefully reasoned
views about a great many things. Here we will briefly introduce his core metaphysical,
epistemological and ethical views.
Metaphysics and Epistemology
Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology are best summarized by his device of the divided line. The
vertical line between the columns below distinguishes reality and knowledge. It is divided into
levels that identify what in reality corresponds with specific modes of thought.
Objects Modes of Thought
The Forms Knowledge
Mathematical objects Thinking
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Particular things Belief /Opinion
Images Imaging
Here we have a hierarchy of Modes of Thought, or types of mental representational states, with
the highest being knowledge of the forms and the lowest being imaging (in the literal sense of
forming images in the mind). Corresponding to these degrees of knowledge we have degrees of
reality. The less real includes the physical world, and even less real, our representations of it in
art. The more real we encounter as we inquire into the universal natures of the various kinds of
things and processes we encounter. According to Plato, the only objects of knowledge are the
forms which are abstract entities.
In saying that the forms are abstract, we are saying that while they do exist, they do not exist in
space and time. They are ideals in the sense that a form, say the form of horse-ness, is the
template or paradigm of being a horse. All the physical horses partake of the form of horse-ness,
but exemplify it only to partial and varying degrees of perfection. No actual triangular object is
perfectly triangular, for instance. But all actual triangles have something in common,
triangularity. The form of triangularity is free from all of the imperfections of the various actual
instances of being triangular. We get the idea of something being more or less perfectly
triangular. For various triangles to come closer to perfection than others suggests that there is
some ideal standard of “perfectly triangularity.” This for Plato, is the form of triangularity. Plato
also takes moral standards like justice and aesthetic standards like beauty to admit of such
degrees of perfection. Beautiful physical things all partake of the form of beauty to some degree
or another. But all are imperfect in varying degrees and ways. The form of beauty, however,
lacks the imperfections of its space and time bound instances. Perfect beauty is not something we
can picture or imagine. But an ideal form of beauty is required to account for how beautiful
things are similar and to make sense of how things can be beautiful to some less than perfect
degree or another.
Only opinion can be had regarding the physical things, events, and states of affairs we are
acquainted with through our sensory experience. With physical things constantly changing, the
degree to which we can grasp how things are at any given place and time is of little consequent.
Knowledge of the nature of the forms is a grasp of the universal essential natures of things. It is
the intellectual perception of what various things, like horses or people, have in common that
makes them things of a kind. Plato accepts Socrates’ view that to know the good is to do the
good. So his notion of epistemic excellence in seeking knowledge of the forms will be a central
component of his conception of moral virtue.
Ethics
Plato offers us a tripartite account of the soul. The soul consists of a rational thinking element, a
motivating willful element, and a desire-generating appetitive element. Plato offers a story of the
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rational element of the soul falling from a state of grace (knowledge of the forms) and dragged
down into a human state by the unruly appetites. This story of the soul’s relation to the imperfect
body supports Plato’s view that the knowledge of the forms is a kind of remembrance. This
provides a convenient source of knowledge as an alternative to the merely empirical and
imperfect support of our sense experience. Plato draws an analogy between his conception of the
soul and a chariot drawn by two horses, one obedient, the other rebellious. The charioteer in this
picture represents the rational element of the soul, the good horse the obedient will, and the bad
horse, of course, represents those nasty earthly appetites. To each of the elements of the soul,
there corresponds a virtue; for the rational element there is wisdom, for the willing element of
the soul there is courage, and for the appetitive element there is temperance. Temperance is
matter of having your appetites under control. This might sound like chronic self-denial and
repression, but properly understood, it is not. Temperance and courage are cultivated through
habit. In guiding our appetites by cultivating good habits, Plato holds, we can come to desire
what is really good for us (you know, good diet, exercise, less cable TV, and lots more
philosophy - that kind of stuff).
Wisdom is acquired through teaching, via the dialectic, or through “remembrance.” Perhaps, to
make the epistemological point a little less metaphysically loaded, we can think of remembrance
as insight. A more general virtue of justice is conceived as each thing functioning as it should.
To get Plato’s concept of justice as it applies to a person, think of the charioteer managing and
controlling his team; keeping both horses running in the intended direction and at the intended
speed. Justice involves the rational element being wise and in charge. For a person to be just is
simply a matter of having the other virtues and having them functioning together harmoniously.
Given Plato’s ethical view of virtue as a matter of the three elements of the soul functioning
together as they should, Plato’s political philosophy is given in his view of the state as the human
“writ at large.” Project the standards Plato offers for virtue in an individual human onto the
aggregate of individuals in a society and you have Plato’s vision of the virtuous state. In the
virtuous state, the rational element (the philosophers) are in charge. The willing element (the
guardians or the military class) is obedient and courageous in carrying out the policies of the
rational leadership. And the appetitive element (the profit-driven business class) functions within
the rules and constraints devised by the rational element (for instance, by honestly adhering to
standards of accounting). A temperate business class has the profit motive guided by the interests
of the community via regulation devised by the most rational. The virtuous business class
refrains from making its comfort and indulgence the over-riding concern of the state. Plato, in
other words, would be no fan of totally free markets, but neither would he do away with the
market economy altogether.
Plato’s vision of social justice is non-egalitarian and anti-democratic. While his view would not
be popular today, it is still worthwhile to consider his criticism of democracy and rule by the
people. Plato has Socrates address this dialectically by asking a series of questions about who we
would want to take on various jobs. Suppose we had grain and wanted it processed into flour.
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We would not go to the cobbler or the horse trainer for this, we’d go to the miller. Suppose we
had a horse in need of training. We obviously would not go to the miller or the baker for this
important task, we’d go to the horse trainer. In general, we want important functions to be
carried out by the people with the expertise or wisdom to do them well. Now suppose we had a
state to run. Obviously we would not want to turn this important task over to the miller, the
cobbler, or the horse trainer. We’d want someone who knows what he or she is doing in charge.
Plato has a healthy regard for expertise. As Plato sees it, democracy amounts to turning over the
ethically most important jobs to the people who have the least expertise and wisdom in this area.
There is very little reason to expect that a state run by cobblers, millers, and horse trainers will be
a virtuous state.
Aristotle
Aristotle is a towering figure in the history of philosophy and science. Aristotle made substantive
contributions to just about every philosophical and scientific issue known in the ancient Greek
world. Aristotle was the first to develop a formal system of logic. As the son of a physician he
pursued a life-long interest in biology. His physics was the standard view through Europe’s
Middle Ages. He was a student of Plato, but he rejected Plato’s other-worldly theory of forms in
favor of the view that things are a composite of substance and form. Contemporary discussions
of the good life still routinely take Aristotle’s ethics as their starting point. Here I will offer the
briefest sketch of Aristotle’s logic and metaphysics. We will return to his ethics later in the
course.
Logic
Aristotle’s system of logic was not only the first developed in the West, it was considered
complete and authoritative for well over 2000 years. The core of Aristotle’s logic is the
systematic treatment of categorical syllogisms. You might recall this argument from Chapter 2:
1. All monkeys are primates.
2. All primates are mammals.
3. So, all monkeys are mammals.
This argument is a categorical syllogism. That’s a rather antiquated way of saying it’s a two
premise argument that uses simple categorical claims. Simple categorical claims come in one of
the following four forms:
All A are B
All A are not B
Some A are B
Some A are not B
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There are a limited number of two premise argument forms that can be generated from
combinations of claims having one of these four forms. Aristotle systematically identified all of
them, offered proofs of the valid one’s, and demonstrations of the invalidity of the others.
Beyond this, Aristotle proves a number of interesting things about his system of syllogistic logic
and he offers an analysis of syllogisms involving claims about what is necessarily the case as
well.
No less an authority than Immanuel Kant, one of the most brilliant philosophers of the 18th
century, pronounced Aristotle’s logic complete and final. It is only within the past century or so
that logic has developed substantially beyond Aristotle’s. While Aristotle’s achievement in logic
was genuinely remarkable, this only underscores the dramatic progress of the 20th century. The
system of symbolic logic we now teach in standard introductions to logic (PHIL 120 here at BC)
is vastly more powerful than Aristotle’s and while this system was brand new just a century ago,
it is now truly an introduction, a first step towards appreciating a great many further
developments in logic. Reasonably bright college students now have the opportunity to master
deductive reasoning at a level of sophistication unknown to the world a mere 150 years ago. The
methods and insights of modern symbolic logic are already so thoroughly integrated into
contemporary philosophy that much of contemporary philosophy would not be possible without
it.
Metaphysics
While Aristotle was a student of Plato’s, his metaphysics is decidedly anti-Platonist. The
material of the world takes various forms. Here it constitutes a tree and there a rock. The things
constituted of matter have various properties. The tree is a certain shape and height, the rock has
a certain mass. Plato accounts for the various forms matter takes and the ways things are in terms
of their participating in abstract and ideal forms to one degree or another. Plato’s metaphysics
centrally features an abstract realm of eternal unchanging and ideal forms. Plato’s forms are not
themselves part of the physical spatio-temporal world. Aristotle rejects the theory of abstract
forms and takes everything that exists to be part of the physical spatio-temporal world. It might
thus be tempting to think of Aristotle as a materialist, one who thinks all that exists is matter, just
atoms swirling in the void. Some pre-Socratic philosophers could accurately be described as
materialists. But this would miss key elements of Aristotle’s metaphysics. While Aristotle denies
the existence of an abstract realm of eternal and unchanging ideal entities, his account of the
nature of things includes more than just matter. Aristotle holds the view that form is an integral
part of things in the physical world. A thing like a rock or a tree is a composite of both matter
and form. In addition to matter, the way matter is gets included in Aristotle’s metaphysics.
Among the ways things are, some seem to be more central to their being what they are than
others. For instance, a tree can be pruned into a different shape without the tree being destroyed.
The tree can survive the loss of its shape. But if it ceased to be a plant, if it got chipped and
mulched, for instance, it would also cease to be a tree. That is to say, being a plant is essential to
the tree, but having a certain shape isn’t. An essential property is just a property a thing could not
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survive losing. By contrast, a property something could survive losing is had accidentally.
Aristotle introduces the distinction between essential and accidental characteristics of things.
This was an important innovation. When we set out to give an account of what a thing is, we are
after an account of its essence. To say what a thing is essentially is to list those ways of being it
could not survive the loss of. My hair length is not essential to me, and neither is my weight, my
having four limbs, or a given body/mass index. But my having a mind, perhaps, is essential to
being me.
How a thing functions is a critical aspect of its nature in Aristotle’s view. As an organism, I
metabolize. As an organism with a mind, I think. These are both ways of functioning. For
Aristotle, what makes something what it is, its essence, is generally to be understood in terms of
how it functions. Aristotle’s account of the essential nature of the human being, for instance, is
that humans are rational animals. That is, we are the animals that function in rational ways.
Functioning is, in a sense, purposeful. Aristotle would say that functioning is ends oriented. The
Greek term for an end or a goal is telos. So Aristotle has a teleological view of the world. That
is, he understands things as functioning towards ends or goals, and we can understand the
essence of things in terms of these goal-oriented ways of functioning. We still understand
people’s actions as teleological or goal oriented. We explain why people do things in terms of
their purposes and methods. Aristotle similarly understands natural processes generally as ends
oriented. Even Aristotle’s physics is fundamentally teleological. So water runs downhill because
it is part of its essential nature to seek out the lower place.
Explanation: The Four Causes
What does it mean to explain something? If we’d like to have some idea what we are up to when
we explain things, giving some account of explanation should seem like an important
methodological and epistemological issue. In fact, the nature of explanation continues to be a
central issue in the philosophy of science. Aristotle was the first to address explanation in a
systematic way and his treatment of explanation structures and guides his philosophical and
scientific inquiry generally. According to Aristotle, to explain something involves addressing
four causes. Here we need to think of “causes” as aspects of explanation or “things because of
which . . . .” Only one of Aristotle’s four causes resembles what we would now think of as the
cause of something. Three of the four causes, or explanatory principles, are reflected in
Aristotle’s metaphysics and will be familiar from the discussion above. Part of explaining
something involves identifying the material of which it is made. This is the material cause.
Thales account of the nature of the world addressed its material cause. A further part of
explaining something is to give an account of its form, its shape and structure. The chair I am
sitting on is not just something made of wood, it is something made of wood that has a certain
form. A complete explanation of what this chair is would include a description of its form. This
is the formal cause. Pythagoras and Plato introduce the explanation of formal causes. The idea of
a final cause refers to the function, end, or telos of a thing. What makes the chair I’m sitting on a
chair is that it performs a certain function that serves the end or telos of providing a comfortable
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place to sit. Again, Aristotle sees final causes as pervasive in the natural world. So part of
explaining what a tomato plant is, for instance, will involve giving an account of how it functions
and the goals towards which that functioning is aimed. Bear in mind Aristotle’s interest in
biology here. A complete biological account of an organism includes both its anatomy (its
material and formal causes) and physiology (which involves functioning and final causes). The
remaining cause (explanatory principle) is the one we can identify as a kind of cause in our
normal sense of the word. The efficient cause of a thing is that which brings it into existence or
gives form to its material. So, for instance, the activity of a carpenter is the efficient cause of my
chair.
From Ancient to Modern Philosophy
The following two chapters focus on what is known as the modern classical period which runs
roughly concurrent with the scientific revolution. About 2000 years elapse between the ancient
Greek philosophy and the modern classical period. This chapter will end with a very brief sketch
of some trends and developments over the course of those two millennium.
The rise and fall of Rome follows the golden age of ancient Greece. Greek philosophical
traditions undergo assorted transformations during this period, but Rome is not known for
making significant original contributions to either philosophy or science. Intellectual progress
requires a degree of liberty not so available in the Roman Empire. Additionally, the intellectual
talent and energy available in ancient Rome would have been pretty fully occupied with the
demands of expanding and sustaining political power and order. Rome had more use for
engineers than scientists, and more use for bureaucrats than philosophers. Christianity becomes
the dominate religion in Rome after emperor Constantine converts in the 4th century A.D., Also
in the 4th century, the great Christian philosopher Augustine, under the influence of
Plato, formulates much of what will become orthodox Catholic doctrine. After a rather dissolute
and free-wheeling youth, Augustine studies Plato and find’s much to make Christianity
reasonable in it. With the rise of the Catholic Church, learning and inquiry are pursued largely
exclusively in the service of religion for well over a millennium. Philosophy in this period is
often described as the handmaiden of theology. The relationship between philosophy and
theology is perhaps a bit more ambiguous, though. As we’ve just noted in the case of Augustine,
much ancient Greek philosophy gets infused into Catholic orthodoxy. But at the same time, the
new faith of Christianity spearheads an anti-intellectual movement in which libraries are
destroyed and most ancient Greek thought is lost to the world forever.
Through the West’s period of Catholic orthodoxy, most of what we know of Greek science and
philosophy, most notably Aristotle’s thought, survived in the Islamic world. What remains of
the complete works of Aristotle covers subjects as far ranging as metaphysics, ethics, politics,
rhetoric, physics, biology, and astronomy, and amounts to enough writing to fill 1500 pages in
the fine print translation on my bookshelf. But even this consists largely of lecture notes and
fragments. Most of his polished prose is lost forever.
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The crusade were a series of conflicts between the Christian and Islamic world towards the end
of the middle ages. This conflict between Christianity and Islam was also an occasion for cultural
exchange, and the Crusades led to the re-introduction of Aristotle and other ancient Greek
scholarship to the west. Aristotle’s philosophy and science was too carefully reasoned,
systematic, and subtle to be dismissed as pointless pagan speculation. Instead, Christian thinkers
in the west set out to understand Aristotle and interpret him a manner that would cohere with
Catholic doctrine. St. Thomas Aquinas is the most famous philosopher to engage in this work of
Christianizing Aristotle. He found ways to harness Aristotle’s metaphysical arguments in the
cause of advocating the existence of a Christian God.
Aristotle’s views about the natural world quickly come to be received as the established truth in
the Christian world. Aristotle’s physics, for instance becomes the standard scientific view about
the natural world in Europe. Aristotle also wrote about the methods of science, and he was much
more empirical than his teacher Plato. Aristotle thought the way to learn about the natural world
was to make careful observations and infer general principles from these. For instance, as an
early biologist, Aristotle dissected hundreds of species of animals to learn about anatomy and
physiology. The Scholastics who studied Aristotle obviously did not adopt the methods Aristotle
recommended. But some other people did. Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Copernicus were
among the few brave souls to turn a critical eye to the natural world itself and, employing
methods Aristotle would have approved of, began to challenge the views of Aristotle that the
Scholastics had made a matter of doctrine. Thus begins the Scientific Revolution.
Where the Renaissance is the reawakening of the West to its ancient cultural and intellectual
roots, the Scientific Revolution begins as a critical response to ancient thinking, and in large part
that of Aristotle. This critical response was no quick refutation. Aristotle’s physics might now
strike us as quite naïve and simplistic, but that is only because every contemporary middle school
student gets a thorough indoctrination in Newton’s relatively recent way understanding of the
physical world. The critical reaction to Aristotle that ignites the scientific revolution grew out of
tradition of painstakingly close study of Aristotle. The scholastic interpreters of Aristotle were
not just wrongheaded folks stuck on the ideas of the past. They were setting the stage for new
discoveries that could not have happened without their work. Again, our best critics are the ones
who understand us the best and the one’s from whom we stand to learn the most. In the Scientific
Revolution we see a beautiful example of Socratic dialectic operating at the level of traditions of
scholarship.
Europe also experiences significant internal changes in the 16th century that pave the way for its
intellectual reawakening. In response to assorted challenges to the authority of the Catholic
Church and the decadence of 16th century Catholic churchmen, Martin Luther launches the
Reformation. The primary tenet of the reformation was that faith concerns the individual’s
relation to God who is knowable directly through the Bible without the intermediary of the
Catholic Church. The Reformation and the many splintering branches of Protestant Christianity
that it spawns undermines the dogmatic adherence to a specific belief system and opens the way
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for more free and open inquiry. The undermining of Catholic orthodoxy brought on by the
reformation combined with the rediscovery of ancient culture in the Renaissance jointly give rise
to the Scientific Revolution and, what we often refer to as the Modern Classical period in
philosophy. The reawakening of science and philosophy are arguably one and the same
revolution. Developments in philosophy and science during this period are mutually informed,
mutually influencing, and intermingled. Individuals including Newton, Leibniz, and Descartes
are significant contributors to both science and philosophy.
Review and Discussion Questions:
1. Explain Protagoras’ epistemic relativism.
2. How does Socrates oppose epistemic relativism?
3. What is the Socratic Method?
4. How does Socrates respond to Euthyphro’s suggestion that the pious is what is loved by
all the gods? How does his response point us towards a critique of Divine Command
Theory? What is the problem with the view that what is pious is pious because it is loved
by the gods?
5. What are Plato’s forms? Why does Plato take the forms to be the most real sorts of
entities?
6. What is temperance and why is it a virtue in Plato’s view?
7. How is Plato’s vision of justice non-egalitarian and anti-democratic?
8. How do Plato and Aristotle’s views on form differ?
9. What is the difference between essence and accident?
10. What does it mean to say that Aristotle held a teleological view of the world?
11. Explain Aristotle’s four causes as principles of explanation.
12. What is the role of Aristotle’s philosophy and science in leading to the scientific
revolution?
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4. The Rationalists Is all of our knowledge based on the evidence of the senses, or is some of it justified by other
means? This epistemological question about the foundations of knowledge is what separates
Rationalism and Empiricism. According to Rationalism at least some knowledge can be had
through reason alone. For rationalists, the paradigm example of knowledge acquired independent
of sense experience is mathematics. Once we have the concepts required to understand
mathematical propositions (like 2+2=4), no experience is required to be justified in accepting
their truth. They seem to be adequately known “through the light of reason.” Empiricism, on the
other hand, takes all of our knowledge to be ultimately grounded in sense experience. Descartes
was the first significant rationalist philosopher of the modern classical period. He rejects sense
experience as a trustworthy source of knowledge early in his Meditations. Following Descartes, a
number of other European philosophers develop rationalist philosophical systems. Leibniz and
Spinoza are the most notable. Meanwhile, an empiricist tradition gets started in Great Britain.
The three major empiricist philosophers are John Locke, Berkeley and David Hume. In this
chapter we will focus on Descartes, Spinoza, and Liebniz, and we will take up the empiricists in
the next chapter.
Descartes
Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650) lived during an intellectually vibrant time. European scholars had
supplemented Catholic doctrine with a tradition of Aristotle scholarship, and early scientists like
Galileo and Copernicus had challenged the orthodox views of the Scholastics. Surrounded by
conflicting yet seemingly authoritative views on many issues, Descartes wants to find a firm
foundation on which certain knowledge can be built and doubts can be put to rest. So he
proposes to question any belief he has that could possibly turn out to be false and then to
methodically reason from the remaining certain foundation of beliefs with the hope of
reconstructing a secure structure of knowledge where the truth of each belief is ultimately
guaranteed by careful inferences from his foundation of certain beliefs.
When faith and dogma dominate the intellectual scene, “How do we know?” is something of a
forbidden question. Descartes dared to ask this question while the influence of Catholic faith was
still quite strong. He was apparently a sincere Catholic believer, and he thought his reason-based
philosophy supported the main tenants of Catholicism. Still he roused the suspicion of religious
leaders by granting reason authority in the justification of our beliefs.
Descartes is considered by many to be the founder of modern philosophy. He was also an
important mathematician and he made significant contributions to the science of optics. You
might have heard of Cartesian coordinates. Thank Descartes. Very few contemporary
philosophers hold the philosophical views Descartes held. His significance lays in the way he
broke with prior tradition and the questions he raised in doing so. Descartes frames some of the
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big issues philosophers continue to work on today. Notable among these are the foundations of
knowledge, the nature of mind, and the question of free will. We’ll look briefly at these three
areas of influence before taking up a closer examination of Descartes’ philosophy through his
Meditations of First Philosophy.
To ask “How do we know?” is to ask for reasons that justify our belief in the things we think we
know. Descartes’ Meditations provide a classic example of the epistemological project of
providing systematic justification for the things we take ourselves to know, and this remains a
central endeavor in epistemology. This project carries with it the significant risk of finding that
we lack justification for things we think we know. This is the problem of skepticism. Skepticism
is the view that we can’t know. Skepticism comes in many forms depending on just what we
doubt we can know. While Descartes hoped to provide solid justification for many of his beliefs,
his project of providing a rational reconstruction of knowledge fails at a key point early on. The
unintended result of his epistemological project is known as the problem of Cartesian skepticism.
We will explain this problem a bit later in this chapter.
Another area where Descartes has been influential is in the philosophy of mind. Descartes
defends a metaphysical view known as dualism that remains popular among many religious
believers. According to this view, the world is made up of two fundamentally different kinds of
substance, matter and spirit (or mind). Material stuff occupies space and time and is subject to
strictly deterministic laws of nature. But spiritual things, minds, are immaterial, exist eternally,
and have free will. If dualism reminds you of Plato’s theory of the Forms, this would not be
accidental. Descartes thinks his rationalist philosophy validates Catholic doctrine and this in turn
was highly influenced by Plato through St. Augustine.
The intractable problem for Descartes’ dualism is that if mind and matter are so different in
nature, then it is hard to see how they could interact at all. And yet when I look out the window,
an image of trees and sky affects my mind. When I will to go for a walk, my material body does
so under the influence of my mind. This problem of mind-body interaction was famously and
forcefully raised by one of the all too rare female philosophers of the time, princess Elisabeth of
Bohemia.
A whole branch of philosophy, the philosophy of mind, is launched in the wake of problems for
substance dualism. Today, the philosophy of mind is merging with neuroscience, cognitive
psychology, and information science to create a new science of mind. We are rapidly learning
how material brains realize the processes of thought. Once again, Descartes has failed in a most
fruitful way. We also see how undeserved philosophy’s reputation for failing to answer its
questions is. While many distinctively philosophical issues concerning the mind remain, the
credit for progress will go largely to the newly minted science of mind. The history of
philosophy nicely illustrates how parenthood can be such worthwhile but thankless work. As
soon as you produce something of real value, it takes credit for itself. Later in a chapter on the
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philosophy of mind we will examine some developments in this area since Descartes and get
acquainted with a few of its contemporary issues including the nature of consciousness.
The final big issue that Descartes brought enduring attention to is the problem of free will. We
all have the subjective sense that when we choose something we have acted freely or
autonomously. We think that we made a choice and we could have made a different choice. The
matter was entirely up to us and independent of outside considerations. Advertisers count on us
taking complete credit and responsibility for our choices even as they very effectively go about
influencing our choices. Is this freedom we have a subjective sense of genuine or illusory? How
could we live in a world of causes and effects and yet will and act independent of these? And
what are the ramifications for personal responsibility? This is difficult nest of problems that
continues to interest contemporary philosophers.
Descartes’ is also a scientific revolution figure. He flourished after Galileo and Copernicus and
just a generation before Newton. The idea of the physical world operating like a clockwork
mechanism according to strict physical laws is coming into vogue. Determinism is the view that
all physical events are fully determined by prior causal factors in accordance with strict
mechanistic natural laws. Part of Descartes’ motivation for taking mind and matter to be
fundamentally different substances is to grant the pervasive presence of causation in the material
realm while preserving a place for free will in the realm of mind or spirit. This compromise
ultimately doesn’t work out so well. If every event in the material realm is causally determined
by prior events and the laws of nature, this would include the motions of our physical bodies. But
if these are causally determined, then there doesn’t appear to be any entering wedge for our
mental free will to have any influence over out bodily movements.
Now we will turn to Descartes’ Meditations and examine how he comes to the positions just
outlined. Here is a link to several of Descartes’ writings including Meditations on First
Philosophy: http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/authors/descartes.html
The Meditations
Descartes project in his meditations is to carry out a rational reconstruction of knowledge.
Descartes is living during an intellectually vibrant time and he is troubled by the lack of
certainty. With the Protestant Reformation challenging the doctrines of the Catholic Church, and
scientific thinkers like Galileo and Copernicus applying the empirical methods Aristotle
recommends to the end of challenging the scientific views handed down from Aristotle, the
credibility of authority was challenged on multiple fronts. So Descartes sets out to determine
what can be known with certainty without relying on any authority, and then to see what
knowledge can be securely justified based on that foundation.
In the first meditation we are introduced to Descartes’ method of doubt. According to this
method, Descartes goes through all of his beliefs, not individually but by categories, and asks
whether there is any possible way that beliefs of this or that type can be mistaken. If so, they
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must be set aside as doubtable. Many of these beliefs may ultimately be redeemed as knowledge,
but they cannot serve as part of the secure foundation of indubitable beliefs from which his
rational reconstruction of knowledge proceeds. Empirical beliefs, things that we believe based on
the evidence of our senses, are set aside first. Our senses sometimes deceive us, as when an oar
appears bent in water or a stranger in a crowd appears to be a friend. It won’t do to say that we
can reliably diagnose these cases and correct for mistaken appearances though because we also
have experiences just like seemingly reliable sense experiences that are anything but in the case
of dreams. How can we be certain that any of our seeming sense experiences of the external
world aren’t in fact dreams? How can we be certain that our whole life isn’t a dream?
So sense experience is set to the side as uncertain and insufficient for justifying knowledge.
Descartes then considers things we might know for certain by the light of reason, like
mathematical claims. I seem to be about as certain in my belief that 2+2=4 as I can be about
anything. Is there any possible way I could be mistaken? Descartes here imagines a powerful
demon that could deceive me into always thinking that 2+2=4 when in fact this is not true. Is this
a genuine possibility? Descartes allows that it is and considers all such knowledge had through
reason doubtable as well.
Does anything remain? Are there any beliefs that can’t be doubted, even given the hypothesis of
a powerful evil deceiver? Descartes does find at least one. Even an evil deceiver could not
deceive Descartes about his belief that he thinks. At least this belief is completely immune from
doubt, because Descartes would have to be thinking in order for the evil deceiver to deceive him.
In fact there is a larger class of beliefs about the content of one’s own mind that can be defended
as indubitable even in the face of the evil deceiver hypothesis. When I look at the grey wall
behind my desk I form a belief about the external world; that I am facing a grey wall. I might be
wrong about this. I might be dreaming or deceived by an evil deceiver. But I also form another
belief about the content of my experience. I form the belief that I am having a visual experience
of greyness. This belief about the content of my sense experience may yet be indubitable. For
how could the evil deceiver trick me into thinking that I am having such an experience without in
fact giving me that experience? So perhaps we can identify a broader class of beliefs that are
genuinely indubitable. These are our beliefs about the contents of our own mind. We couldn’t be
wrong about these because we have immediate access to them and not even an evil deceiver
could misdirect us.
The problem Descartes faces at this point is how to justify his beliefs about the external world
based on the very narrow foundation of his indubitable beliefs about the contents of his own
mind. And this brings us to one of the more famous arguments in philosophy: Descartes’ “Cogito
Ergo Sum” or “I think, therefore I exist.” Descartes argues that if he knows with certainty that he
thinks, then he can know with certainty that he exists as a thinking being. Many philosophers
since then have worried about the validity of this inference. Perhaps all we are entitled to infer is
that there is thinking going on and we move beyond our indubitable foundation when we
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attribute that thinking to an existing subject (the “I” in “I exist”). There are issues to explore
here. But bigger problems await Descartes, so we will just note this one and let it pass.
So far Descartes has only adequately justified his beliefs about the contents of his own mind and
his own existence as a thinking being. Knowledge about any external reality or even truths of
reason like 2+2=4 remain in need of justification. To overcome skepticism about these matters,
Descartes sets out to prove that God exists and is not an evil deceiver. Once the evil deceiver
hypothesis is in check, Truths of reason and perhaps others may be yet be knowable. Not any
argument for God’s existence and good nature will do, though. The trick for Descartes’ project
of a rational reconstruction of knowledge is to prove the existence of a good God by reasoning
only from those beliefs that he has identified as indubitable and foundational.
Descartes argument for the existence of a good God goes roughly as follows:
1. I find in my mind the idea of a perfect being.
2. The cause of my idea of a perfect being must have at least as much perfection and reality
as I find in the idea.
3. I am not that perfect.
4. Nothing other than a good and perfect God could be the cause of my idea of a perfect
being.
5. So, a good and perfect God must exist.
This argument simplifies the rather involved reasoning Descartes goes through in the
Meditations. But it will do for diagnosing the fatal flaw in Descartes’ reasoning. Let us grant the
validity of the argument and consider the truth of its premises. Keep in mind that to accord with
the method Descartes has set for himself in carrying out a rational reconstruction of well
grounded certain knowledge, all of the premises of this argument must be indubitable and
foundational. Being a belief about the contents of his own mind, we can grant the certain truth of
premise one. Though it is not as clear, premise three might arguably count as a foundational
belief about the contents of Descartes’ own mind. An evil deceiver, being evil, would lack
perfection found in Descartes’ idea of a perfect being. So as powerful as such a being could be,
the cause of Descartes’ idea of a perfect being must be more perfect than any evil deceiver.
Perhaps any being so perfect would have to be a good God.
But the fatal flaw for Descartes’ rational reconstruction of knowledge is the second premise.
What are our grounds for thinking that the cause of something must have at least as much
perfection as its effect? The idea of degrees of perfection and the notion that the less perfect can
only be explained in terms of the more perfect is an idea that we find in Plato’s theory of forms.
It will strike many of us as implausible or even incomprehensible. Just what is perfection
supposed to mean here? And even once we’ve spelled this out, why think causes must be more
perfect? It seems not at all uncommon for less perfect things to give rise to more perfect things
(just consider my son, for instance). In any case, whether the second premise can be explained
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and defended at all, the fatal flaw for Descartes’ project is that it is not foundational. It is not an
indubitable belief about the contents of Descartes’ own mind, but rather a substantive belief
about how things are beyond the bounds of Descartes’ own mind. So Descartes’ attempt to
provide a rational justification for a substantive body of knowledge leaves us with an enduring
skeptical problem. All we have immediate intellectual access to is the contents of our own
minds. How can we ever have knowledge of anything beyond the contents of our own mind
based on this? This is the problem of Cartesian skepticism.
Having diagnosed the fatal flaw in Descartes’ project, we should briefly consider how his
rational reconstruction of knowledge was to go from there. Given knowledge of God’s existence
and good nature, we would appeal to this to assure the reliability of knowledge had through
reason and later also through the senses. God being the most perfect and good being would rule
out the possibility of interference by an evil deceiver. We might still make mistakes in reasoning
or be misinformed by the senses. But this would be due to our failure to use these faculties
correctly. A good God, however, would not equip us with faculties that could not be trusted to
justify our beliefs if used properly. This is a very cursory summary of the later stages of
Descartes’ attempted rational reconstruction of knowledge in his Meditations. But it will suffice
for our purposes.
The mind-body problem
Descartes is a substance dualist. This is the metaphysical view that the world is made up of two
fundamentally different kinds of substance: matter and spirit (or mind). In the Second Meditation
Descartes motivates this view by arguing that there are distinguishing differences between the
mind and the body. In particular, I can doubt the existence of my body but I can’t doubt the
existence of my mind. Is this a difference that justifies denying that the mind is in some sense
identifiable with the body? If something is true of one thing and not of another, then we have
conclusive grounds for thinking they are not one and the same thing. So if my favorite bike is red
but the bike in my office is yellow, then the bike in my office is not identical to my favorite bike.
Does this straightforward line of reasoning apply to the case of the mind and the body? The
existence of my body is dubitable, but the existence of my mind is indubitable. Descartes would
count this as a reason for denying that my mind is identical with my body. But consider this
analogous argument:
1. Mark Twain is such that Joe thinks he is the author of Huckleberry Finn.
2. Samuel Clemens is not such that Joe thinks he is the author of Huckleberry Finn.
3. So, Mark Twain is not identical to Samuel Clemens.
Clearly the conclusion that Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens are not one and the same person
does not follow in this case. As the Mark Twain argument looks like it is closely analogous to
Descartes’ argument for the non-identity of the mind and the body, it looks like Descartes’
argument is not valid. The problem here is that the premises of both arguments concern
someone’s mental states about something. In Descartes’ argument we have premises about what
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he can or can’t doubt. In the Mark Twain argument we have premises about what Joe does or
doesn’t believe. But people can fail to recognize true identity claims. Joe doesn’t know that Mark
Twain just is Samuel Clemens. Because of this, Joe can believe one thing about Mark Twain and
something different about Samuel Clemens. But this doesn’t show that Mark Twain and Samuel
Clemens aren’t identical. Likewise, it may be that the mind is identical with the body or some
part of it, but since Descartes doesn’t know this, he can believe one thing about the body (that its
existence is doubtable) and something else about the mind (that its existence is not doubtable).
So far we have just offered a critical evaluation of one of Descartes’ arguments for mind/body
dualism. Now we will consider a serious problem for the view. When Descartes’ considers how
the substance of mind and body differ, he offers a view that should sound familiar from popular
religious belief. On this view, the body is a physical object that exists in space and time and is
subject to the laws of nature. The mind, being spiritual in nature, exists eternally in an abstract
realm rather than existing in the physical realm of space and time. Further, the mind is not bound
by mechanistic laws of nature, but it has free will that allows it to will or not will to do one thing
or another. Descartes was both a believer in Catholicism and an active participant in the
scientific revolution. He was among those who were developing a view of the natural world in
which events occur in accordance with strict law-like regularities. A view of the natural world as
functioning like a predictable clockwork mechanism was on the rise. And yet Descartes’
Christian theology held that as a person created in the image of a divine being, he had free will
through which he might choose to do one thing or another, perhaps most notably, to choose to
accept the Catholic faith as true and be saved or not. His philosophical view is an attempt to
reconcile these conflicting scientific and theological perspectives.
An unfortunate fact of history is that women in Descartes’ time were rarely given a thorough
education or allowed to participate fully in intellectual life. A notable exception is the case of the
Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. And she was among the first to notice serious difficulties in the
substance dualism that Descartes advocated. The central problem has to do with mind-body
interaction. Clearly things going on in the physical realm have an influence on the mind. Light
reflecting off clouds and trees cause me to have the mental perception of a sunset. And likewise,
mental phenomenon cause things to happen in the physical world. When I mentally will to
preserve the image of the sunset in a picture, my body causes things to happen in the law
governed physical realm. I reach for my camera. But how can a non-physical soul be affected by
or effect events in the physical realm? If events in the physical realm are all transfers of physical
energy happening at specific places and times, how can it be that the non-physical mind has any
role to play in this? The problem gets all the more difficult when we take the physical world to
be deterministic, governed by laws where each event is determined to happen by prior events in
conjunction with mechanistic laws. Determinism in the physical realm would appear to leave no
room for the non-physical mind to influence events at all. Contemporary philosophers who study
the nature of the mind generally take these problems to be intractable and to constitute decisive
objections to Descartes’ substance dualism. More recent philosophy of mind has been mainly
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taken the mind to be physical. And philosophers, along with neuroscientists and cognitive
psychologists, are making tremendous progress in understanding how mental phenomenon can
be understood in biological, physical terms. When we take a closer look at more recent
developments in the philosophy of mind, however, we will find some arguments for denying that
some mental properties, consciousness in particular, can ever be identified with purely physical
properties or processes.
Study Questions for Meditations 1-3
1. Explain Descartes’ method of doubt. What is Descartes’ purpose in exercising this
method?
2. Why can’t Descartes be certain about beliefs he acquires through the evidence of the
senses?
3. Why can’t Descartes be certain about mathematical beliefs, like the belief that 2+2=4?
4. What belief(s) does Descartes ultimately identify as indubitable?
5. Why can’t an evil deceiver deceive Descartes about his belief that he thinks?
6. How does Descartes build up from the foundation of indubitable beliefs?
7. How does Descartes argue for the existence of God?
8. Given the existence of God, how does Descartes justify his beliefs based on reason and
on the senses?
Spinoza
Spinoza was the most rigorous and systematic of the major rationalist philosophers. Where
Descartes was confident that reason would vindicate the main tenets of his Catholic faith,
Spinoza dared to follow reason into religiously more treacherous territory. Spinoza is alternately
described as the “God intoxicated Jew” and as a heretical atheist. Spinoza’s family had fled the
Inquisition in Portugal for the relative religious tolerance of Amsterdam. At the age of 23,
however, Spinoza was excommunicated from his Jewish synagogue for holding heretical beliefs.
Spinoza knew religious persecution both as a member of a community of faith, and then as an
individual cast out of a community of faith. Perhaps not surprisingly then, he becomes an early
advocate for freedom of conscience and religious belief in his political writings.
Spinoza supported himself as a lens grinder until his early death at the age of 46. While he
demonstrated immense courage in the face of excommunication and in philosophically
challenging religious doctrines, he led a fairly quiet and reclusive life devoted to study and work
in a state of relative poverty. His views were widely considered so threatening to established
religion that his considerable influence went largely unacknowledged for a century or two after
his death. Still, the next most significant thinker of this period after Descartes, Liebniz, is now
seen by some as devising his philosophical system as an attempt to protect religious belief from
the intellectual threat of Spinozism.
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Descartes’ method of doubt sets him on the project of finding epistemological foundations for
knowledge. Descartes seeks to identify some knowledge as foundational in the sense of being
able to justify the rest of our knowledge. By contrast, we might best understand Spinoza as
seeking metaphysical foundations. Suppose the world is intelligible, that its nature can be
understood rationally. Assuming this, what must the world be like? We might worry that this
approach simply sidesteps epistemological worries about how we can know. But suppose that in
exploring the assumption that the world is intelligible we find that all but one view about the
nature of the world gets us mired in contradictions or intractable problems. We would then have
grounds to accept the one coherent metaphysical account of the nature of the world as an
instance of inference to the best (or perhaps, the only) explanation. Seeking coherent systematic
explanation can, ultimately, yield justifying reasons.
This is just a suggestion for how to understand what Spinoza is up to in his masterpiece The
Ethics. This strategy is not made explicit in the work itself. Rather, Spinoza’s Ethics is written in
a geometric style. He begins with a few definitions and axioms and the work proceeds by
deductively proving an impressive array of further propositions. The propositions derived from
his initial definitions give an account of God, the natural world (these turn out to be the same
thing), the self, the nature of human freedom, the nature of the emotions, and the nature of the
good life in-so-far as it is attainable for beings like ourselves. We might say of the entire system
that it is elegantly consistent. But why accept its starting points? His initial definitions and
axioms might strike us as arbitrary or even implausible (though his contemporaries would have
found them pretty reasonable). The case for the system as a whole is that it is elegant and
consistent while the alternatives are not. The axioms and definitions are not just arbitrarily
preferred starting places; they are the starting places that allow us to give a clear coherent picture
of God, the world, and the human condition.
It would help to see how Spinoza might make this case by understanding how his view of the
world is offered in response to an alternative, Descartes’, which did seem to lead to intractable
problems. Recall Descartes’ dualism, his view that the world contained two fundamentally
different kinds of substance: matter and mind. The difficult problem for this view was to give
some account of how mind and matter could interact in spite of being so different. But however
that problem is to be solved, there is something further to be noticed. Any kind of mind body
interaction will perforce involve mutual limitations on each. If through a mental act of will I
cause some change in the material realm, then the material realm is limited in that it can’t be
other than I have willed it. Likewise, if the material world has some effect on my mind, then my
mind is similarly limited.
Now consider the idea of God. Spinoza defines God as a being that is infinite, where being
infinite entails being unlimited. The only way that any substance could be absolutely unlimited is
for there to be no other substances that could possibly limit it. So, argues Spinoza, there is only
one substance and it is both God and nature. Every facet of the world is a mere part of this one
substance, God/nature. And everything we do and experience is a limited manifestation of the
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essence of God. Every aspect of our lives, everything we think and do, is an expression of
God/nature’s essence which is uncaused and necessary. For this reason, nothing we do or
experience could possibly be any different. This settles the matter of free will, though not quite it
the way Descartes would hope.
Our perception of the world as including many distinct things and minds other than our own is a
confusion of ours, or, as Spinoza would put it, an “inadequate idea.” The true nature of the world
is singular. There is only one thing in existence, and it is both God and all of nature. God/nature
being the one existing substance is self-sufficient. Since it depends on nothing and is affected by
nothing, everything about God/nature is necessary. God/nature, being infinite and perfect in all
respects, has an infinite number of aspects, or attributes. Our existence as human beings presents
us with only two of these, the attribute of thought and the attribution of extension (physical
spatio-temporal existence).
While thought and extension, which we experience as mind and body, are attributes of God, our
idea that there is some interaction between the two is a further confusion according to Spinoza.
The mind and the body are really one and the same. We are limited modification of God/nature.
One of the ways we are limited is in only being aware of two of the infinite attributes of God,
thought and extension. The idea that the mind and the body are different and interact is a
confusion of ours that we suffer due to thinking of ourselves sometimes under one attribute,
thought, and at other times under another, extension. In thinking about ourselves, we are in
position much like Joe who thought of a particular individual in one way, as Mark Twain, and
also in a different way, as Samuel Clemens. Spinoza’s view is that mind and body are one and
the same limited modification of God, understood on one hand through the attribute of thought
and on the other through the attribute of extension. A better way to put this might be to just say
that the mind is the idea of the body.
We are finite an imperfect “modes” of the attributes of thought and extension. As such limited
and imperfect beings, we see ourselves as separate from many other things. Being ignorant of the
causes of things, including the determination of our own wills, we imagine that things might
have been otherwise. But everything happens of necessity. So Spinoza’s answer to the problem
of free will and determinism is to deny that we have free will. This doesn’t mean, however, that
there is nothing to say about how to live well. Living well, according to Spinoza, involves
coming to terms with our limitations and the way things must be as a matter of necessity. And
the way to do this is through better understanding ourselves, the world (God/nature) and our
position in the world. The good life, for Spinoza, is one organized around the intellectual love of
God/nature.
There is one kind of freedom that we might aspire to in all of this, and it is the kind of freedom
that can be had through the intellectual love of God/nature. The freedom we can have is freedom
from the tyranny of our passions, our emotions. Our hopes and fears are passions that make us
anxious and insecure when we fail to understand their causes and our own place in nature. A
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better understanding of the necessity of all things, which for Spinoza is just the intellectual love
of God/nature, is the one therapy open to us in addressing the insecurity and anxiety that comes
with human vulnerability and mortality. Knowledge of how to live one’s life is established after
the manner of a proving a theorem of geometry in Spinoza’s Ethics. Coming to understand his
demonstration of how to live well will itself be an exercise in living well.
Leibniz
Among quite a few other things, Leibniz was an important mathematician. He and Newton vied
for credit for discovering the calculus of infinitesimals. He was also politically active as an
advisor to assorted rulers and aristocrats. Like Descartes, Leibniz was, at least publicly, religious.
His grandest political ambition was to see the Christian church re-unified (recall that Protestants
had broken off from Catholics over the prior few centuries). Leibniz was arguably the first to
have imagined anything like information technology. Among his grand ambitions was to
formulate a universal symbolic language for science and philosophy that would be rigorously
rule driven and free of all ambiguity. He even got as far as constructing a calculating machine,
though not a very reliable one.
Leibniz’ metaphysical views seem pretty exotic at first glance. Leibniz took the world to consist
of monads. Each monad is simple and indivisible. But monads are not merely physical, like
atoms. Each monad would include both a physical aspect and a mental aspect. Physical objects
are made up of monads that are also minds, just particularly dim-witted ones. Monads appear to
interact with each other. We seem to influence each other and make things happen in the
physical world. But according to Leibniz there is no actual interaction between monads. Instead,
monads exist in a harmony that is pre-established by God. As a result, like an element in a
spectral image or a droplet in a cloud, each monad carries in it a reflection all of creation.
If this seems to be a rather exotic picture of the world, let’s review the problems Leibniz is trying
to negotiate in the wake of Descartes and Spinoza. The problem of mind/body interaction looms
large after Descartes. If mind and body are distinct kinds of substances, then it is very hard to see
how either can have any influence on the other. Leibniz metaphysics handles this problem neatly
by making his substances, monads, have mind as an integral part. We needn’t worry about mind-
body interaction if mind and body are already unified. Next, bear in mind the theologically
challenging aspects of Spinoza’s monism. In taking there to be just one substance, Spinoza
identifies God with all of nature and denies that people have any existence distinct from
God/nature. God is not personal on this view. God/nature is really nothing like us at all.
Spinoza’s God is so unlike the traditional God of Christianity that Spinoza is widely deemed to
be an atheist. Worse, in taking humans to be mere parts of a self-caused and hence necessary
God, we lack free will entirely on Spinoza’s view. Leibniz is eager to provide a philosophical
route to avoiding Spinoza’s atheism and denial of free will. To avoid atheism, and in particular a
variety of atheism where people are mere parts of an impersonal God/nature, Liebniz needs to
posit a plurality of substances. Monads fit the bill. In order to preserve free will, which is also
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central to Christian theology, Leibniz needs for the substances that are mind not to be causally
determined by other substances. The pre-established harmony of monads is his means of
achieving this. But while Leibniz thereby avoids causal determinism, he seems to be saddled
with a kind of theological determinism instead. Everything that happens, including every choice
you make, will have been determined by God.
Leibniz was both intrigued and repelled by Spinoza’s thought. The two met for a few days while
Leibniz was ostensibly on a diplomatic mission in Amsterdam. As much as Leibniz abhorred
Spinoza’s views, he couldn’t dismiss Spinoza’s carefully reasoned and systematic response to
Descartes’ thought. As a result, Leibniz devotes a considerable amount of creative intellectual
energy to finding some way to avoid Spinoza’s heretical conclusions. Such was the influence of
the outcast Jew of Amsterdam.
Review and Discussion Questions
1. Explain Descartes’ method of doubt. What is Descartes’ purpose in exercising this method?
2. Why can’t Descartes be certain about beliefs he acquires through the evidence of the senses?
3. Why can’t Descartes be certain about mathematical beliefs like the belief that 2+2=4? 4. What belief(s) does Descartes ultimately identify as indubitable? 5. Why can’t an evil deceiver deceive Descartes about his belief that he thinks? 6. How does Descartes build up from the foundation of indubitable beliefs? 7. How does Descartes argue for the existence of a good God? 8. How does Descartes’ argument for God fail? 9. Given the existence of a good God, how does Descartes justify his beliefs based on
reason and on the senses?
10. How does Descartes argue for the distinction between mind and body? How does this argument fail?
11. Explain Spinoza’s Monism. 12. How does Spinoza’s view of God differ from more traditional theological perspectives? 13. How does Spinoza handle the mind/body problem? 14. How does Spinoza handle the matter of free will? 15. What sort of freedom can humans aspire to on Spinoza’s view? 16. What are monads and how does Leibniz hope monad will help him avoid Spinoza’s
theologically controversial views?
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5. The Empiricists Empiricism, you might recall, is the view that all of our knowledge is ultimately acquired
through by sense experience. The empiricist philosophical tradition comes to fruition in Great
Britain over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. We will discuss three major empiricist
thinkers: John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. We’ll consider the first two briefly
and focus more closely on Hume.
John Locke
John Locke (1632 –1704) is better known now for his political thought than his Empiricism.
Locke spent time in Holland as a young man and his political thought was probably influenced
significantly by Spinoza who had died only recently. Locke argued against the divine right of
kings to rule and instead defended a liberal egalitarian political philosophy on which people have
equal and natural rights to liberty. Liberty, in Locke’s thought, should be understood as being
free from domination by others. Liberty is not in Locke’s view being free to do whatever one
pleases. For starters, if everyone is to be free from domination, then it follows that nobody is free
to dominate. Locke also offers the classic justification for property rights as an extension of our
self-ownership. So property rights are seen as natural extensions of our human liberty. The point
of government is just to secure our natural liberties to the highest degree possible on Locke’s
view. So government is legitimate only when it is limited to this role. This view should sound
familiar. Locke’s political philosophy was influential with the founding fathers of the U.S.
Thomas Jefferson in particular was a close student of Locke’s political thought. We will return to
Locke at the end of the course when we take up political philosophy. But for now, we’ll say a
little about his epistemology.
Locke develops his empiricist epistemology in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Locke’s approach is to examine the origins of the contents of the mind. Early in this work he
argues against innate ideas. The mind starts off as a tablula rasa, a blank slate. All of our ideas
have their origin in experience. Simple ideas, say of solidity and figure, are acquired through the
senses, and from these we form complex ideas, say the idea of a dog, through the capacities of
the understanding. The details of this account raise a number of challenging questions. We might
think of Locke as launching a research program for developing an empiricist account of the mind
rather than spelling out a fully developed view.
Locke thinks that some of the impressions we get from sense experience are genuinely similar to
how things are objectively in the world. Our sense experience of the shape of things, for
instance, reflects the ways things really are according to Locke. Locke refers to the qualities
where there is a resemblance between our experience and the way things are as primary
qualities. Shape, motion or rest, and number are a few of the primary qualities. Other aspects of
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our sense experience don’t resemble the qualities in their objects. The taste of an apple, for
instance, is not really in the apple. What is in the apple is just a power to produce the experience
of a certain flavor. But we have no grounds for thinking that this power as it exists in the apple
resembles in any way the sense experience we have of its taste. Locke calls qualities where our
sense experience doesn’t resemble the qualities that give rise to our experience secondary
qualities. Our knowledge of the external world, then, is based entirely on our experience of the
primary qualities. Empiricism, as we will see in the case of later empiricists, especially Hume,
tends to place sharp limits on what is knowable.
While all experience depends on having simple ideas had through sense experience, Locke does
not take experience to be limited to these. We also have experience of the operations of the mind
in building up complex ideas out of simple ideas. Once you have some simple ideas through
sense experience, you also have an experience of yourself and of your mental operations on those
simple ideas. So given simple ideas through experience, the operations of the mind become a
source for further ideas. Locke thinks knowledge of the self, God, mathematics, and ethics can
be derived from this additional internal source of experience. Hume, as we shall see, is not so
optimistic.
George Berkeley
George Berkeley (1685-1753) is best known for arguing for Idealism on empiricist grounds. In
metaphysics, Idealism is the view that there is no physical substance underlying our sense
impressions of the world. Rather, the world consists entirely of ideas. Your mind is just a bundle
of impressions, and there is nothing in the world except for so many minds having their various
perceptions. Berkeley defends this as the view that best accords with common sense in Three
Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous.
Berkeley’s argument attacks Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities and
argues that all of our sense impressions are mere appearances and that we have no grounds for
thinking that any of them bear any resemblance to the way things are. Since we lack any
empirical experience of the underlying substances in which qualities inhere, we have no
empirical reason to suppose underlying substances even exist. All we have access to are our
sense impressions, and these are mental things, ideas. So all we can claim knowledge of are our
ideas beginning with our sense impressions, the most basic ideas.
Berkeley also argues that positing underlying substances do no significant explanatory work. So,
the common sense empiricist view ought to be that we live in a world of ideas that lacks any
underlying physical substance. This startling view might make us wonder what happens to my
desk when I leave the room and cease to perceive it. Does it pop out of existence when I leave
and then pop back into existence just as it was when I return to my work? This would be most
peculiar. Berkeley argues that the objects of our everyday life do have an enduring existence
when we are absent. They continue to exist as ideas in the mind of God. Given this appeal to the
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mind of God to explain the continued existence of things we aren’t actively observing, we might
argue that positing underlying substances does some explanatory work after all and charge that
Berkeley has only substituted one unobservable theoretical posit, God, for another, underlying
substances.
David Hume
Of the philosophers discussed here, David Hume (1711-1776) has probably had the greatest
influence on contemporary analytic philosophy. The twentieth century begins with a movement
known as Logical Positivism that tests the limits of Empiricism. The Empiricism of the Logical
Positivists is heavily indebted to Hume.
Hume’s empiricist epistemology is grounded in his philosophy of mind. Hume starts by asking
what we have in the mind and where these things come from. He divides our mental
representations into two categories, the relatively vivid impressions, these include sensations
and feelings, and the less vivid ideas which include memories and ideas produced by the
imagination.
What distinguishes impressions from ideas in our experience is just their vividness. The picture
of the mind Hume offers is one where all of our beliefs and representations are cooked up out of
basic ingredients provided by experience. Our experience gives us only impressions through
sense experience and internal impressions like feelings. From this we generate less vivid ideas.
Memories are merely faint copies of impressions. Through the imagination we can generate
further ideas by recombining elements of ideas we already have. So through impressions we get
the idea of a lizard and the idea of a bird. We can then generate the idea of a dragon by
imaginatively combining elements of each. In cooking up new ideas from old ideas, the
imagination is guided by associating relations like resemblance, contiguity (next-to-ness) and
cause and effect. So, for example, an impression of a grapefruit might lead me to think of an
orange due to their similarity. The thought of my bicycle might lead me to think of the table saw
it is parked next to in the basement. Through the association of cause and effect, my idea of a
struck match leads me to the idea of a flame. The last of these principles of association, cause
and effect, turns out to be faulty for reasons we will examine shortly.
The imagination is not merely a source of fancy and fiction. The imagination also includes our
ability to understand things when we reason well in formulating new ideas from old ones. A
priori reasoning, which is reasoning independent of experience, can produce understanding of
relations of ideas. Mathematical and logical reasoning is like this. When I recognize the validity
of an argument or the logic behind a mathematical proof, the understanding I attain is just a
matter of grasping relations between ideas. But a priori reasoning only reveals logical relations
between ideas. It tells us nothing about matters of fact. Our ability to understand matters of fact,
say truths about the external world, depends entirely on a posteriori reasoning, or reasoning
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based on experience. As we will see, our ability to reason about matters of fact doesn’t get us
very far.
Often our philosophical confusion is the result of having added more than we are entitled to add
to our experience when we are striving to understand it. Hume aims to correct many of these
errors and, in doing so, he aims to delineate the limits of human knowledge and understanding.
As it turns out, we don’t know as much as we commonly suppose, in Hume’s opinion. The result
of Hume’s rigorous Empiricism is skepticism about a great many things. Some of Hume’s
skeptical results are not so surprising given his Empiricism. Hume is skeptical about objective
moral truths, for instance. We don’t get to observe rightness and wrongness in the way we can
see colors and shapes, for instance. The idea that there are objective moral truths, according to
Hume, is a mistaken projection of our subjective moral sentiments.
Hume is not worried that his subjectivism about morality will lead to moral anarchy. Note that
the opinion that it’s OK to do whatever you want is itself a moral opinion. So, for the
subjectivist, “anything goes” is no more rationally justified than any other moral opinion. While
Hume does think that morality is concerned with subjective sentiments, not objective facts, the
lack of objective moral truths won’t corrupt us or undermine the social order because we all have
pretty much the same sorts of moral sentiments and we can base a sensible social order on these.
While we may feel differently about specific practices or principles, Hume thinks we have a
basis for negotiating our moral differences in our more general and more or less universally
shared moral sentiments of self-love, love for others, and concern for happiness.
Hume’s skepticism about objective moral truths now strikes many people as common sense. But
the empiricist epistemology that leads him to subjectivism about morality also leads him to
skepticism about causation, the external world, inductive reasoning, about God, and even about
the self. We’ll examine these further skeptical conclusions starting with causation.
Causation
When we examine our everyday idea of causation, Hume says we find four component ideas:
the idea of a constant conjunction of cause and effect (whenever the cause occurs, the
effect follows).
the idea of the temporal priority of the cause (the cause happens first, then the effect).
the idea of causes and effects being contiguous (next to each other) in space and time.
the idea of a necessary connection between the cause and the effect.
So, for instance, the idea that striking a match causes it to light is made up of the idea that
whenever similar matches are struck (under the right conditions), they light, plus the idea of
the striking happening first, and the idea of the striking and the lighting happen right next to
each other in time and space, and, finally, the idea that the striking somehow necessitates or
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makes the match light. Now let’s consider these component ideas and ask whether they all
have an empirical basis in corresponding sense impressions. We do have sense impressions
of the first three: the constant conjunction of cause and effect, the temporal priority of the
cause, and the contiguity of cause and effect. But Hume argues that we lack any
corresponding empirical impression of necessary connections between causes and effects.
We don’t observe anything like the cause making the effect occur. As Hume puts the point,
When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes,
we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connexion;
any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible
consequence of the other. We only find, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the
other. (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section VII)
The idea of causes necessitating their effects, according to Hume’s analysis, is a confused
projection of the imagination for which we find no basis in experience. For this reason, Hume
denies that we have rational grounds for thinking that causes do necessitate their effects.
The External World
All of our reasoning about the external world is based on the idea of causation. So the skepticism
that follows from Hume’s skepticism about causation is quite far reaching. Our beliefs about the
external world, for instance, are based on the idea that things going on in the external world
cause our sense impressions. We have no rational grounds for thinking so, says Hume.
More generally, our evidence for what we can know begins with our impressions, the mental
representations of sense experience. We assume that our impressions are a reliable guide to the
way things are, but this is an assumption we can’t rationally justify. We have no experience
beyond our impressions that could rationally certify that our impressions correspond in any way
to an external reality. Our assumption that our impressions do correspond to an external reality is
a rationally unsupportable product of our imagination.
Induction
Closely related to Hume’s skepticism about causation is Hume’s skepticism about inductive
reasoning. Inductive argument, in its standard form, draws a conclusion about what is generally
the case, or what will prove to be the case in some as yet unobserved instance, from some limited
number of specific observations. The following is an example of a typical inductive argument:
1. Every observed sample of water heated to well over 100 C has boiled.
2. Therefore, whenever water is heated to well over 100 C, it boils.
Unless every instance of water heated to over 100C in the history of the universe is among the
observed instances, we can’t be sure that the conclusion is true given the truth of the premises. It
follows that strong inductive arguments like the one above are not deductively valid. But then
what justifies the inference from the premise to the conclusion of an inductive argument?
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Hume considers the suggestion that every inductive argument has a principle of induction as a
suppressed premise, and it is this principle of induction that renders the inference from premises
to conclusion rational. This principle of induction tells us roughly that unobserved instances
follow the pattern of observed instances. So inductive arguments really go something like this:
1. Every observed sample of water heated to over 100 C has boiled.
2. (Unobserved cases tend to follow the pattern of observed cases)
3. So, whenever water is heated to over 100 C, it boils.
Of course the argument still isn’t valid, but that’s not what we are aiming for in induction. Given
the hidden second premise - our principle of induction - we can reasonably hold that the premises
taken together give us good grounds to accept that the conclusion is probably true. However, if
this principle of induction (2 above) is to render inductive inferences rational, then we need some
grounds for thinking that it is true. In considering how this principle of induction is to be
justified, Hume presents a dilemma. Since there is no contradiction in denying the principle of
induction, it cannot be justified a-priori (independent of our experience as can be done with
logical truths). And any empirical argument would be inductive and therefore beg the question
by appealing to the very principle of induction that requires support. So, Hume concludes, we
have no rational grounds for accepting inductive inferences.
Think about the ramifications of Hume’s skepticism about induction. If inductive argument is not
rational, then we have no reason at all to think the sun will rise tomorrow. Here we aren’t
worried about improbably possibilities like the sun getting blown to bits by aliens before
tomorrow morning. Hume’s argument against the rationality of inductive reasoning implies that
all of our experience of the sun regularly rising gives us no reason to think its rising tomorrow is
even likely to happen. If this sounds crazy, then we have a problem because it is not easy to find
a defect in Hume’s reasoning. This is why philosophers speak of this topic as the Problem of
Induction. Very few are prepared to accept Hume’s skepticism about induction. But in the two
and a half centuries that have passed since Hume died, we have yet to settle on a satisfactory
solution to the problem of induction. We’ll take a closer look at this problem when we take up
the Philosophy of Science in the next chapter.
God
Unlike Locke and Berkeley, Hume’s rigorous Empiricism leads him to skepticism about
religious matters. To avoid censorship or persecution, critics of religious belief in the 18th
century exercised caution in various ways. Hume’s earliest challenge to religious belief, an essay
on miracles, was removed from his early work, his Treatise of Human Nature, and published
only in his later Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding. In this essay, Hume argues that
the belief in miracles can never be rational. A miracle is understood to be a violation of the laws
of nature resulting from Divine will. But, argues Hume, the weight of the evidence of our
experience overall will always give us stronger reason to mistrust our senses in the case of a
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seemingly miraculous experience than to doubt the otherwise consistently regular course of
events in our experience. Testimony by others of miracles is on even shakier ground.
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind,
that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.
(Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, Section 10)
Among educated people in the 18th century, religious belief was thought to be supported not just
by Divine revelation, but by our experience of the natural world as well. When we look to the
natural world we find impressive harmony in the natural order of things. The various species all
seem well suited to their environments and ecological stability is maintained by the various roles
organism play in their environments. To the discerning mind in search of an explanation, the
order and harmony we find in the world looks very much like the deliberate work of a Divine
creator. This line of thought is known as the Argument from Design. Hume’s last work, his
posthumously published Dialogues of Natural Religion, aimed to undermine many arguments for
the existence of God, including the Design Argument.
According to Hume, the Design Argument is a weak argument by analogy. We have reason to
think that machines are the product of human design because we are familiar with their means of
production. But we have no analogue in the case of the universe. We have not observed its
creation. The alleged similarity of the universe to machines designed by humans is also suspect.
We do find regularities in nature, but only in the small corner of nature we are familiar with. The
regularity, order, and harmony we do find don’t provide enough of the appearance of design to
warrant positing an intelligent designer, according to Hume. But suppose we do think the natural
world bears the marks of a designer’s craftsmanship. The only sorts of designers we are familiar
with are people like us. But that doesn’t tell us much about what sorts of being could be
designers of complex harmonious systems. So even assuming we find the appearance of design
in nature, we have little grounds to think that it is the product of a personal god or any sort of
entity we can relate to.
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection provides a naturalistic account of the
appearance of design in life forms. Thanks to providing a developed naturalistic alternative to the
hypothesis of design by a Divine creator, Darwin probably had the greater impact in
undermining the design argument for the existence of God. Darwin cites Hume as among his
major influences, and there are a number of passages in Hume’s writing that foreshadow insights
that Darwin developed.
The Self
Descartes didn’t hesitate to infer the existence of himself from the certainty of his thinking. And
it seems obvious to most of us that having thoughts implies the existence of a subject that thinks.
Hume is more cautious on this point.
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For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on
some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or
pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can
observe anything but the perception.” (Treatise, 1.4.6.3)
The contents of our immediate experience are just particular impressions and ideas. But we have
no experience of any single unified self that is the subject of those experiences. The idea of a
self, including the idea of the self as a soul, is a fanciful projection from our experiences. All we
can say in an empirically grounded way of ourselves, according to Hume, is that we are just a
bundle of experiences.
We’ve given just given the briefest sketch of how Hume reaches his assorted skeptical
conclusions. There are many further arguments and objections to consider, but hopefully we’ve
covered enough to give you an appreciation for how carefully a strict and carefully reasoned
Empiricism leads to a variety of skeptical conclusions. Hume’s skepticism about causation and
induction may be the most surprising. We often hold up science as the paradigm of human
intellectual achievement, and we tend think of science as pretty empirical. Yet Hume’s strict
Empiricism seems to undercut science on the key notions of causation and induction. Perhaps
scientific inquiry is not as strictly empirical as Hume’s epistemology. Or perhaps, as some have
argued, science can get along fine without induction or causation. Still, if we are not comfortable
with Hume’s skepticism about causation and induction, this might be cause to reconsider his
Empiricism. And perhaps also the skepticism about morality it seems to invite.
Review and Discussion Questions
1. Explain Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities.
2. While Locke thinks that having any thoughts depends on sense experience, he doesn’t
think sense experience is the only source of our ideas. Explain.
3. Explain Berkeley’s Idealism.
4. How is Berkeley’s Idealism a response to Locke’s epistemology?
5. Explain Hume’s view of the contents of the mind.
6. What are ideas and impressions? How does Hume distinguish these?
7. How does the imagination form new ideas, according to Hume?
8. How is Hume’s Empiricism grounded in his philosophy of the mind?
9. Explain Hume’s skepticism about morality. How does he argue for this view?
10. How does Hume analyze our notion of the cause-effect relation? Explain Hume’s
skepticism about causation.
11. Why does Hume deny that we can have knowledge of an external world?
12. Why is Hume skeptical about the rationality of inductive argument?
13. Why does Hume doubt we could ever have reason to believe in miracles?
14. What is the Design Argument for the existence of God?
15. Explain Hume’s objections to the Design Argument.
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6. Philosophy of Science In high school you were probably introduced to something misleading called the scientific
method. According to this picture of science, science proceeds by asking a question, formulating
a hypothesis, designing an experiment to test the hypothesis, and analyzing the results to reach a
conclusion. The experiment should be repeatable and the hypothesis is only considered well
supported if our experimentation yields plenty of data in support of it. When we find plenty of
data supporting our hypotheses, the pattern of reasoning employed is basic induction by
enumeration where we generalize or predict based on observed patterns.
While this model does describe a frequently employed method in science, it’s misleading to
think of this as the scientific method. The disservice done to the actual practice of science by this
bit of high school curriculum is really quite egregious. It’s as if you were shown how to play a C
major scale on the piano and then told “there you go, that’s how to make music. That’s the
method.” In actual practice, scientists employ a variety of methods that involve a broad range of
patterns of reasoning, both inductive and deductive. Testing hypotheses often involves things
like hunting for clues, diagnosing the reasons of unexpected results, engineering new ways of
detecting evidence, and a great many things beyond designing experiments and generalizing
based on the results of these. The support for a hypothesis is often a matter of inference to the
best explanation rather than inductive generalization. Sometimes the best analysis of data seeks
alternative explanations for data anomalies that do not fit with predictions rather than
automatically counting such data as evidence against a hypothesis.
Investigating the messy, gritty details that drive actual scientific practice is where the real action
in the philosophy of science is today. Explaining how science advances human understanding of
the world often requires a close examination of what’s going on in actual scientific practice. It is
not uncommon for philosophers of science to describe their work as something like the science
of science. Methods are not to be prescribed up front by the philosophical lords of epistemology.
Rather, in contemporary philosophy of science we look to science to see what methods actually
work, and then try to better understand the significance of these.
Over the past few chapters we have covered a couple of classic skeptical problems. In the wake
of Descartes and Hume you might worry that we can’t know much at all. Out of intellectual
laziness, lots of people are willing to just let the matter rest there and think we can only have so
many subjective opinions, even about scientific matters (witness, for instance, the response of
many people to deniers of climate science). It’s hard, however, to take this uncritical skepticism
seriously in the face of the truly impressive achievements of science over the past few centuries.
Looking at these achievements, is seems we have pretty powerful evidence for our ability to
figure things out and attain knowledge and understanding. So, the suggestion I want to make at
the outset of this chapter is that the way to address the skeptical problems raised by Hume might
be to examine more closely the methods by which we seem to attain knowledge and begin to sort
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out how they work in practice. In this chapter we will trace a few developments over the course
of the 20th century with an eye to better understanding how the philosophy of science has
developed into what it is today. We will start with Logical Positivism, a broad empiricist
movement of the early 20th century.
Logical Positivism
Logical Positivism can be understood as Empiricism, heavily influenced by Hume, and
supercharged with powerful new developments in symbolic logic. The system of logic that we
now teach in college level symbolic logic courses (PHIL& 120 at BC) was developed just over a
century ago in the work of Gotlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Albert North Whitehead for the
purpose of better understanding the foundations of mathematics. In Principia Mathematica,
Russell and Whitehead made a strong case for analyzing all of mathematics in terms of logic
(together with set theory). According to the argument of Principia Mathematica, mathematical
truths are not truths justified independent of experience by the light of reason alone. Rather they
are derivable from logic and set theory alone. Merely logical truths are trivial in the sense that
they tell us nothing about the nature of the world. Any sentence of the form ‘Either P or not P’,
for instance, is a basic logical truth. But, like all merely logical truths, sentences having this form
assert nothing about how the world is. Logic doesn’t constitute knowledge of the world, it is
merely a tool for organizing knowledge and maintaining consistency.
Mathematics had long served as the rationalist’s paradigm case of knowledge justified through
reason alone. So we can make a powerful case for Empiricism by showing that math is really just
an extension of logic. It remains debatable whether Frege, Russell, and Whitehead succeeded in
showing this, but their attempt, and especially the powerful new system of logic they developed
in making this attempt, constituted a powerful blow against Rationalism and inspired a group of
empirically minded philosophers and scientists in Vienna to employ the same logical tools in
analyzing and clarifying philosophical issues in science. As we will see, their ambitions were
even grander since they also argued that much of what was going on in philosophy at the time
was literally meaningless.
We will consider three central projects taken on by the Positivists in developing their Empiricist
view of scientific knowledge. These are the demarcation problem, the problem of distinguishing
science from non-science, developing a view about what a scientific theory is, and giving an
account of scientific explanation. The Positivists utilize the resources of symbolic logic in each
of these projects.
The Demarcation Problem
Among the main tasks the Positivists set for themselves was that of distinguishing legitimate
science from other rather suspect fields and methods of human inquiry. Specifically, they wanted
to distinguish science from religion, metaphysics, and pseudo-science like astrology.
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19th century German metaphysics involved attempts to reason about such obscure notions as
“the absolute,” or the nature of “the nothing.” Such metaphysics needed to be distinguished from
genuine science. We had also seen appeal to obscure empirically suspicious entities and forces in
Aristotelian science such as the “vital force” to explain life, or the “dormative virtue” a
mysterious power of substances like opium to cause sleep. Such mysterious forces needed to be
eliminated from genuine scientific discourse.
While metaphysics and talk of obscure forces in science were to be distinguished from genuine
science, the Positivists needed to preserve a role for unobservable theoretical entities like atoms
and electrons. The rejection of metaphysics and obscure forces must not undermine the
legitimate role for theoretical entities.
The Positivists employed Empiricism in their proposed solution to the demarcation problem.
Empiricism, as we know, is just the view that our sense experience is the ultimate source of
justification for all of our factual knowledge of the world. The Positivists extend Empiricism to
cover not just the justification of knowledge, but the meaningfulness of language as well. That is,
they take the source of all meaning to ultimately be our sense experience. Only meaningful
statements can be true or false. So, only statements whose meaning can ultimately be given in
observational terms can be true or false. Theoretical terms like “atom” refer to things we can’t
directly observe. But talk about such theoretical entities could be made empirically respectable
by means of observational tests for when theoretical terms are being appropriately applied.
Electrical charge, for instance, is not itself observable. But we can define theoretical terms in
terms of observational tests for determining whether the term applies. So we might say that a
thing is in a state of electrical charge if it registers voltage when electrodes are attached and
hooked up to a voltage meter. Similarly, though you don’t directly observe the state of charge of
a battery, you can easily carry out a test in observational terms by putting the battery in a
flashlight and seeing if it lights up.
This doctrine about meaning was called the Verificationist Theory of Meaning (VTM). The
Verificationist Theory of Meaning has it that a sentence counts as meaningful only if we can
specify the observable conditions under which it would count as true or false. This view can then
be used to distinguish empirically respectable language from nonsense. Legitimate scientific
discourse must count as meaningful on the Verifiability Theory of Meaning. So we have a view
on which science is distinguished as meaningful while pseudo-science, religion, poetry etc. are,
strictly speaking, meaningless. Likewise, most of philosophy turns out to be meaningless as well.
Not only will obscure 19th century German metaphysics turn out to be meaningless, but talk of
free will, immaterial substances, and all of ethics will likewise turn out to be meaningless. The
only legitimate role left for philosophers, according to the Logical Postivitists, will be the logical
analysis of scientific discourse. Being meaningless, religion, pseudo science, most of philosophy,
literature etc. is neither true nor false. While these things cannot be true or false, according to
Positivists’ criteria for meaningfulness, they may provide helpful expressions of human
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emotions, attitudes towards life, etc. That is, poetry, literature, religion, and most philosophy will
be merely so much comforting or disturbing babble, mere coos, squeals, or screams.
Significant progress is made by paying close attention to the meaningfulness of scientific
discourse. But the Verificationist Theory of Meaning eventually falls apart for a number of
reasons including that it turns out not to be meaningful according to its own criteria. Amusingly,
we can’t provide an empirical test of truth or falsity for the claim that a claim is meaningful only
if we can provide an empirical test for its truth or falsity. That is, according to the Verificationist
Theory of Meaning, the term “meaning” turns out to be meaningless. Logical Positivism
remained a powerful influence in philosophy through much of the 20th century and it did serve to
weed out some pretty incomprehensible metaphysics. But I can now happily report that other
important areas of philosophy, notably ethics and metaphysics, have recovered from the
Positivists’ assault on philosophy from within.
Theories
Understanding the Logical Positivist view of theories requires that we say a few things about
formal languages. The symbolic logic developed in Russell and Whitehead’s Principia
Mathematica is a formal language. Computer languages are also formal languages. A formal
language is a precisely specified artificial language. A formal language is specified by doing
three things:
identify the languages vocabulary.
identify what counts as a well formed expression of that language.
give axioms or rules of inference that allow you to transforming certain kinds of well
formed expressions into other kinds of well formed expressions.
Scientific theories are formal languages according to the Positivists. We can understand what this
means be considering the component parts of a scientific theory and how these map on to the
elements of formal languages just given. A theory consists of the formal language of first order
predicate logic with quantifiers (the logic developed first by Frege and then in greater detail by
Russell and Whitehead) supplemented with observational vocabulary, correspondence rules that
define theoretical terms in terms of observational vocabulary, and statements of laws like
Galileo’s laws of motion, Newton’s law of universal gravitation etc. All of the non-logical
vocabulary of a scientific theory is definable in observational terms. Well formed expressions in
scientific discourse will be only those expressible in terms of formal logic plus the vocabulary of
science. The rules of inference in scientific discourse consist only of the rules of inference of
logic and math plus scientific laws.
The Logical Postivist’s view of what a theory is has since been deemed overly formalized. There
are numerous legitimate theories in science that can’t be rendered in a formal system. Consider
theories in anthropology or geology for instance. Nevertheless, the idea of a theory as a formal
system is a powerful one and it remains the gold standard in many sciences. Linguistics has
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“gone computational” in recent years, for instance. The most ambitious scientific undertaking in
all of human history, the science of climate change, also aims to render theory and explanation in
formal systems through massive and intricately detailed computer models of climate change. In
fact, roughly speaking, we can consider a theory formalizable when it can be comprehensively
modeled on a computer. Computer programs are paradigm examples of formal systems.
A further more general lesson we might take from the Positivist’s view of theories addresses a
very commonplace misunderstanding of what a theory is. People commonly think of theories as
just claims that lie on a scale of certainty being somewhat more certain than guesses or
hypotheses, but rather less certain than established matters of fact. This is really a terrible
misunderstanding of what a theory is. It is commonly invoked in fallacious attempts to discredit
science, as when people dismiss evolution or climate change science as “just a theory.” Such
comments reveal a basic misunderstanding of what theory is. For something to count as a theory
has nothing to do with our level of certainty in its truth. Many scientific theories are among the
best established scientific knowledge we have. A few years ago, for instance, some scientist
claimed to have observed a particle in a particle accelerator travelling faster than the speed of
light. It made the news and caused a bit of excitement. But those in the know, those who
understand Einstein’s special relativity and the full weight of the evidence in support of it
patiently waited for the inevitable revelation that some clocks had been mis-calibrated. Einstien’s
special relativity is right and we know this with about as much certainty as we can know
anything. In the other direction, there are lots of genuine theories that we know full well to be
false. Aristotle’s physics would be one example. Having very much or very little confidence in
something has nothing to do with whether it is properly called a theory.
So if it’s not about our degree of confidence, what does make something a theory? What makes
something a theory is that it provides a general framework for explaining things. The Positivists
didn’t discover this, but their idea of a theory as a formal system illustrates the idea nicely.
Theories generally consist of a number of logically interconnected principles that can be
mutually employed to explain and predict a range of observable phenomenon. Bear this in mind
as we consider the Positivist’s view of scientific explanation.
Explanation
According to the Deductive Nomological model of explanation developed by the Logical
Positivist, Carl Hempel, a scientific explanation has the form of a deductively valid argument.
The difference between an argument and an explanation is just their respective purposes.
Formally, arguments and explanations look alike. But the purpose of an explanation is to shed
light on something we accept as true, while the purpose of an argument is to give us a reason for
thinking something is true. Given this difference in purpose, we call the claim that occupies the
place of the conclusion the explanandum (it’s the fact to be explained), and the claims that
occupy the place of the premises the explanans (these are the claims that, taken together, provide
the explanation). In a scientific explanation, the explanans will consist of laws and factual
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claims. The factual claims in conjunction with the laws will deductively entail the explanandum.
For example, consider this explanation for why a rock falls to the earth:
1. F = GM1M2/r2, Newton’s law of universal gravitation which tells us that massive
bodies experience a force of mutual attraction that is proportionate to their mass
and inversely proportionate to the distance between them.
2. F=MA. This is the force law, which tells us that force equals mass times
acceleration.
3. The rock has mass of 1 Kg.
4. The earth has a mass of 5.97219 × 1024 kilograms.
5. The rock was released within the gravitational field of the earth.
6. No forces prevented the rock from falling to the earth.
7. The rock fell to the earth.
Recall that deductive logic is part of every theory, every explanatory framework. The first two
claims in this explanation are statements of law from Newtonian physics. The remaining four are
statements of fact. Taken together, these six claims deductively entail the explanadum, that the
rock fell to the earth. This should illustrate how theories function as explanatory frameworks.
One very useful thing Hempel’s account of explanation does is alert us to the argument-like
structure of developed explanations. The basic idea here is that a complete explanation should
include all of the facts involved in making the fact to be explained true. These will include both
particular facts relevant to the specific fact we want explained and general principles (scientific
laws in the case of scientific explanations) that belong to a broader framework for explanation. A
fully developed explanation reveals a logical relationship between the fact we want to explain,
other relevant facts and connecting principles like laws of nature.
Hempel’s account of explanation faced a number of problems that have helped to refine our
understanding of scientific explanation. We won’t address them here except to mention one
because it’s amusing. Consider this explanation:
1. Men who take birth control pills do not get pregnant.
2. Bruce is a man and he takes birth control pills.
3. Bruce is not pregnant.
This seems to meet all of the positivist’s criteria for being an explanation. But aside from being
silly, it’s at least not a very good explanation for why Bruce is not pregnant. Problem cases like
this suggest that purely formal accounts of explanation like Hempel’s will fall short in sorting
which facts are relevant in an explanation.
There is also a more general lesson I’d like you to take from the positivist’s account of
explanation. For your entire career as a student you’ve been asked to explain things, but odds are
nobody has ever really explained what it means to explain something. Personally, I don’t think I
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had ever given a thought to what an explanation was until I encountered the Deductive
Nomological account in a Philosophy of Science class. But now you’ve been introduced to a
model of explanation. You may not find it fully applicable to every academic situation you
encounter. But if you try to make use of it by thinking of explanations as having a developed
argument like structure, you might find grades in many of your classes improving significantly.
We mentioned at the outset that Logical Positivism was very much influenced by Hume’s
Empiricism. You will recall that Hume argued for some surprising skeptical results. The Logical
Positivists adopted one of two strategies for dealing with this. On some issues it was argued that
Hume’s skeptical conclusions were acceptable, while on others Hume’s skepticism was regarded
as a problem yet to be solved. As an example of the first strategy, Bertrand Russell, though not a
Logical Positivist himself, wrote an influential paper in which he argued that science can proceed
as usual without any reference to the notion of causation. Skepticism about necessary causal
connections was deemed not to be problematic. Skepticism about induction was more difficult to
accept. So the early 20th century saw a variety of sometimes colorful but generally unsuccessful
attempts to resolve the problem of induction. And this brings us to Karl Popper.
Karl Popper
Karl Popper was a philosopher in Vienna during the reign of Logical Positivism, but he was not
himself a Positivist. Popper is best known for his contributions to the problem of induction and
the demarcation problem. In both cases his views were critical of the Logical Positivists.
Conjecture and Refutation
As you will recall, Hume argues that inductive arguments fail to provide rational support for
their conclusions. His reason for taking induction to be irrational is that every inductive
argument assumes that unobserved events will follow the pattern of observed events and this
assumption cannot be supported either deductively or inductively. No purely deductive support
can be given for this principle of induction because it is not a mere truth of logic. And any
inductive argument offered in support of the inductive principle that unobserved cases will be
like observed cases will be circular because it will also employ the very principle of induction it
tries to support as a premise.
Popper accepted Hume’s conclusion that inductive inference is not rationally justifiable. He
takes the problem of induction to have no adequate solution. But he rejects the further conclusion
that science therefore yields no knowledge of the nature of the world. With Hume, Popper holds
that no number of cases offered as confirmation of a scientific hypothesis yields knowledge of
the truth of that hypothesis. But just one observation that disagrees with a hypothesis can refute
that hypothesis. So while empirical inquiry cannot provide knowledge of the truth of hypotheses
through induction, it can provide knowledge of the falsity of hypotheses through deduction.
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In place of induction, Popper offers the method of conjecture and refutation. Scientific
hypotheses are offered as bold conjectures (guesses) about the nature of the world. In testing
these conjectures through empirical experiment, we cannot give positive inductive reasons for
thinking that they are true. But we can give reasons for thinking they are false. To see how this
works, let’s look at the pattern of reasoning employed in testing a scientific hypothesis using
induction on the one hand, and Popper’s deductive method of conjecture and refutation on the
other. First, in designing an experiment, we determine what we should expect to observe if the
hypothesis is true. Using induction, if our observation agrees with our expectation, we take the
hypothesis to be inductively confirmed. The pattern of reasoning looks like this:
1. If H, then O
2. O
3. Therefore, H
This pattern of reasoning is not deductively valid (generate a counterexample to see for
yourself), and as an inductive argument it faces the problem of induction. So this pattern of
reasoning fails to provide us with rational grounds for accepting H as true. But suppose that
when we carry out our experiment, we observe “not O.” In this case our pattern of reasoning
looks like this:
1. If H, then O
2. not O
3. Therefore, not H
This pattern of reasoning is deductively valid. To see this try to suppose that the premises are
true and the conclusion is false. If the conclusion were false, then ‘H’ would be true. And, given
this and the truth of the first premise, ‘O’ would follow. But ‘O’ contradicts ‘not O” which is
asserted by the second premise. So it is not possible for the premises to be true and the
conclusion false. In other words, the pattern of reasoning here is deductively valid.
The latter is the pattern of reasoning used in the method of conjecture and refutation. It is a
deductively valid pattern that makes no use of inductive confirmation. It should now be clear
how Popper’s method of conjecture and refutation works and how empirical inquiry making use
of this method can provide us with knowledge of the world (or rather, how the world isn’t) while
avoiding the problem of induction.
According to Popper, there is no rational methodology or logic for evaluating how scientists
come up with hypotheses. They are just conjectures and no amount of evidence is capable of
inductively confirming hypotheses in the sense of giving us positive reason for thinking our
hypotheses are true. Evidence in agreement with a hypothesis never provides it with inductive
confirmation. If all the evidence is in agreement with a hypothesis, we can say that it is
“corroborated.” To say that a hypothesis is corroborated is just to say that it has survived our best
attempts at refutation. But contrary evidence can decisively refute hypotheses.
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Demarcation through Falsifiability
The demarcation problem is the problem of distinguishing science from other things, from poetry
to religion to obscure metaphysics. Popper offers an alternative to the Positivist’s verificationist
theory of meaning in addressing this problem. The Positivist’s solution to the demarcation
problem had the downside of denying that we can assert as true that it is wrong to torture
innocent babies just for fun. Popper’s view of the matter avoids this unsavory consequence.
Popper’s method of conjecture and refutation suggests his criterion for distinguishing science
from non-science. For it to be possible to refute a hypothesis requires that there be possible
observations that would give us grounds for rejecting the hypothesis. We can only scientifically
investigate hypotheses that take observational risks, those that are exposed to the possibility of
being shown false through observation. That is, we can take a hypothesis to be scientific if and
only if it is falsifiable. For a hypothesis to be falsifiable we must be able to specify possible
observational conditions that would be grounds for rejecting the hypothesis as false. But this
does not mean that that it will be proven false or that it can be shown to be false (either of these
confusions would lead to the absurd view that a claim is only scientific if it is false). Let’s look at
some examples to make this clear.
Consider the hypothesis that all crows are black. We can specify observable conditions under
which we would count this as false. Namely, seeing a white crow, or a green one. Being able to
specify the observational conditions under which we would reject this hypothesis doesn’t mean
that it false. Suppose the hypothesis is true. It is still a claim that takes risks in the face of
observation because we know that some possible observations would refute it. So the hypothesis
that all crows are black is falsifiable.
Now consider claims made by astrology. These are typically formulated in such a vague way that
any eventuality could be interpreted as affirming the astrologer’s predictions. If there are no
possible observations that could refute astrology, then it is not scientific. Some astrologers might
make specific and concrete predictions. These might get to claim that they are being scientific on
Popper’s view, but to the degree that astrologers do take risks of being refuted by observation,
they have been refuted too often.
Political ideologies often fail to pass the falsifiability test. Popper was especially critical of
Marxism which was very popular with the Viennese intellectuals he knew in his youth. Marxists
seemed to have an explanation for everything. The inevitability of Marxist revolution was
illustrated by its rising popularity in much of Europe. But if Americans, for instance, were not
rebelling against their capitalist oppressors it was only because they had yet to see how
alienating capitalism is. The conditions for revolution just weren’t yet ripe. But they will be, says
the confident Marxist. Popper’s key insight was that a theory that can explain everything that
might happen doesn’t really explain anything. It is empty.
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Today, Popper might make the same criticism of very different political ideologies. If free
markets don’t fix every problem, the libertarian can always complain that this is only because
they have not been allowed to function freely enough. If government doesn’t fix every problem,
the big government liberal can always complain that big government hasn’t been empowered
enough (when we get around to political philosophy we will find reason to doubt that there are
very many liberals that really fit this stereotype). Extreme views are only made plausible to their
fans by elaborate schemes of excuses for why they don’t work out as well as they should. Popper
would say that in politics as in science, we need to try things where we can honestly examine the
consequences and hold ourselves accountable when they don’t go well by trying something else.
Auxiliary Hypotheses
Here we will describe an objection to Popper’s method of conjecture and refutation that will set
the stage for introducing the views of Thomas Kuhn. According to Popper, we make progress in
science by refuting false conjectures. We never have inductive grounds for holding that proposed
scientific hypotheses and explanations are true, but we can narrow in on the truth by eliminating
the falsehoods. Our hypotheses lead us to expect certain observations. If we do not observe what
we expect to observe, then we have non-inductive grounds for rejecting our hypothesis. Again,
the pattern of reasoning followed in eliminating false hypotheses through scientific inquiry looks
like this:
1. If H, then O
2. Not O
3. Therefore, not H
This is the deductively valid pattern of reasoning known as modus tollens. However, we rarely
get to test hypotheses in isolation. Typically, our expectation of a given observation is based on
the hypothesis we are interested in testing in conjunction with any number of background
assumptions. These background assumptions are the auxiliary hypotheses. If we take into
account the auxiliary hypotheses, the pattern of reasoning used in Popper’s method of conjecture
and refutation looks like this:
1. If H and AH, then O
2. Not O
3. Therefore, not H
But this argument pattern is not valid. The observation (not O) might indicate the falsity of one
of the auxiliary hypotheses (AH) rather than the falsity of (H), the hypothesis we set out to test.
What this tells us is that the implications of other than expected observations are always
ambiguous. When our observations don’t accord with our expectations it tells us that at least one
of the assumptions or hypotheses that lead us to expect a given observation is false. It may be the
hypothesis we set out to test, or it may be one of our auxiliary hypotheses. But unexpected
observations don’t tell us which is false.
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Here’s a nice example of auxiliary hypotheses at work in everyday reasoning. Our hypothesis is
that Hare is faster than Tortoise. This hypothesis leads us to expect that Hare will win a race
against Tortoise. But suppose that, contrary to our expectation, we observe Tortoise winning the
race. The hypothesis that Hare is faster than Tortoise is not thereby falsified because of the
presence of a number of auxiliary hypotheses. Among these auxiliary hypotheses are the
following: (i) Hare did not stop in the middle of the race for a snack, (ii) Hare did not get run
over while crossing the road, (iii) Hare did not get eaten by Coyote during the race, (iv) Hare did
not get entangled in a philosophical discussion about the rationality of scientific methods with
his friend Gopher before crossing the finish line. When Tortoise crosses the finish line first, that
tells us that either Tortoise is faster than Hare or one of these or many other auxiliary hypotheses
is false. But Tortoise winning doesn’t tell us which. The unexpected observation thus fails to
cleanly refute our hypothesis.
Follow this link to a short article by Karl Popper on falsifiability as a criterion of science:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html
Thomas Kuhn
The Positivists and Karl Popper offer attempts to describe and develop rational methods for
scientific inquiry. In so doing, they offer normative theories of scientific practice. That is, they
offer views about how scientific inquiry should proceed and what counts as good scientific
practice. Kuhn’s philosophy of science is inspired by the history of science and seeks to describe
how science actually develops. Kuhn’s undertaking is not aimed at revealing universal norms of
rational scientific practice. But his views have been taken by some to imply that the development
of science is not guided by general norms of rationality, at least at crucial revolutionary periods
of theory change.
Kuhn describes three stages in the development of a science. The first stage is called “pre-
paradigm science.” In pre-paradigm science, people seeking to understand an observed
phenomenon share no common stock of background theory. Each inquirer essentially starts from
scratch. Under these circumstances, very little progress is made. We have nothing resembling a
tradition that can be passed from one person on to her students for further development and
investigation. The various theories of the nature of the world proposed by pre-Socratic
philosophers might be considered an example of pre-paradigm physics.
At some point, someone develops an account of the observed phenomenon that has enough
substance and explanatory power to attract the attention of a community of individuals who will
then carry on inquiry along the proposed lines. This marks the beginnings of normal science.
Kuhn calls the sort of account of the observed phenomenon that is required for this to happen a
paradigm.
A paradigm consists of the following four things:
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1. A body of theory including laws: For instance, the basic laws of motion.
2. Background metaphysical assumptions: For instance, that there is an external world and
that our senses provide a reasonably reliable guide to its nature, that we share common
objects of perception, etc.
3. Values: Here we have in mind primarily epistemological values including norms of
rationality. The idea here is that a paradigm tells you what counts as a phenomenon that
requires explanation and provides a standard for what counts as an adequate explanation
of that phenomenon.
4. Exemplars: These are textbook applications of the theory to the phenomenon it is
intended to explain. Classical physics is taught through exemplars that include applying
Newton’s laws to swinging pendulums and forces exerted on springs.
Normal science, the second of Kuhn’s three stages, is carried out within a paradigm. Working
within a paradigm, the scientist normally accepts the core elements of the paradigm as dogma.
The scientist’s job in the stage of normal science is to work out the details of the paradigm
without calling into question the central laws of the paradigm, or the epistemic standards it
presupposes. In the normal stage, we can think of science as puzzle solving. Investigators are not
advancing bold new theories, but applying the accepted theoretical framework in new and novel
sorts of cases. During normal science, a paradigm gets worked out in detail.
In the course of normal science, problems that resist resolution with the paradigm often arise. If
these “recalcitrant” problems remain long enough, they become what Kuhn calls anomalies. As
the details of a paradigm get worked out, the anomalies become harder and harder to ignore.
Researchers in need of projects may focus more and more scrutiny on the remaining anomalies.
Continued and intensified but unsuccessful attempts to resolve anomalies can give rise to a crisis
in normal science. Such a crisis makes it possible to call into question core elements of the
paradigm that had been previously held dogmatically.
Persistent anomalies in a science can provoke a crisis in which the paradigm itself is called into
question. In this atmosphere, it is possible for scientists to propose and win wide acceptance for
significant changes in the theoretical framework. Until persistent anomalies provide a crisis,
however, the social conditions aren’t ripe for revolution. Even if someone had great
revolutionary ideas, they simply won’t get a hearing with the community since it is committed to
working out the details of the standing paradigm. Revolutions in thinking can’t happen until the
community is convinced that the old paradigm is irrevocably broken. When this does happen and
an appropriate alternative to the old paradigm is developed and proposed, then and only then can
what Kuhn calls a scientific revolution happen. In a scientific revolution, the scientific
community abandons one paradigm in favor of another.
Once a new paradigm takes hold in the scientific community, normal science is resumed, the
details of the new paradigm begin to get worked out and normal science continues until a new
batch of anomalies emerges and provokes the next crisis.
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A key insight of Kuhn’s is that science is a community effort. We often hold a “great genius”
vision of the history of science where the fabulous insights of very special individuals are what
drive science forward. Kuhn would say this is a distorted picture. The great geniuses like Newton
or Einstein can only launch a revolution in scientific thinking when a broader community of
inquirers have prepared the field and created the conditions for the germination of the seeds of a
revolution in thinking. The history of science needs to be understood in terms how these broader
communities progress to the point where revolutionary thinking is called for and can be fruitful.
The great insights and discoveries never happen in a social vacuum.
Kuhn thinks that the paradigm shift that occurs in the course of a scientific revolution is
comparable to a gestalt switch as in the duck/rabbit image below.
Seeing this image as a duck blocks out seeing it as a rabbit. Something similar happens in the
case of a paradigm shift. In a paradigm shift one drops one conceptual framework in favor of
another. When we grasp and evaluate the claims made in normal science, we do so in the context
of acceptance of a paradigm. Kuhn suggests that the very meaning of the claims made in
paradigm-based normal science can only be comprehended relative to the conceptual framework
of that paradigm. A result of this is that from the perspective on one paradigm, we are never
really in a position to evaluate the claims of normal science under a different paradigm. In this
sense, paradigms are said to be incommensurable (lacking any common measure or independent
standard of comparison).
It is tempting to see the cycle of normal science and revolutionary science as a Popper style
process of conjecture and refutation at the level of paradigms. However, Kuhn maintains that
paradigms are never exactly refuted by intractable anomalies. Rather, when the scientific
community enters a period of crisis and an attractive alternative to the old paradigm emerges, the
community gives up on the old paradigm and adopts the new one. Paradigms are not so much
refuted as abandoned. This raises serious questions about whether paradigm shifts in scientific
revolutions can be understood as rational processes. They would seem not to be if we think of
human rational processes as in some way rule driven like logical rules of inference. But we
might instead take Kuhn be revealing a richer view of human rationality.
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On Kuhn’s view, the methods and standards of science get articulated and refined through
periods of normal science and are liable to undergo bigger shifts in periods of scientific
revolution. What counts as good scientific inquiry and investigation cannot be specified
independent of its history. We figure out what works as we encounter new challenges. The
history of science reveals the practice of science to be dynamic and adaptive. Creativity and
resourcefulness go into the hard-earned advances in our understanding of the world.
The broader moral of this story is that we should be highly suspicious of any attempt to boil the
methods of science down to any specific series of steps. Rather, a good understanding of the
many methods of science can only be had through a study of its history, its successes, and its
failures. And even at this, our appreciation of the methods of science must remain open ended.
The story of science is far from finished, and so our understanding of its methods is likewise
incomplete.
Review and Discussion Questions
1. How does the development of more powerful symbolic systems of logic boost
Empiricism at the beginning of the 20th century?
2. Explain how the Logical Positivists extend Empiricism to the theory of meaning.
3. How is the verificationist theory of meaning used to address the demarcation problem?
4. What is a theory according to the Positivists?
5. Explain what’s wrong with the view that theories are just very well supported hypotheses
that are still not so certain.
6. What does it mean to regard a theory as an explanatory framework?
7. How do the Logical Positivists understand explanation?
8. How would Popper resolve (not solve) the problem of induction?
9. How does Popper address the demarcation problem?
10. Explain how auxiliary hypotheses challenge Popper’s method of conjecture and
refutation.
11. Explain pre-paradigm science. Why is little lasting progress made at this stage of
science?
12. What is a paradigm?
13. How does normal science under a paradigm proceed?
14. What is an anomaly?
15. What conditions are necessary for a scientific revolution?
16. What does it mean to speak of competing paradigms as incommensurable?
17. How are the methods of science sensitive to its history?
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7. Philosophy of Mind Some of the main questions for the philosophy of mind are metaphysical questions about the
nature of minds and mental states. “What is the mind?” quickly proves to be too big a question.
We might say that for a being to have a mind is just for it to have mental states like beliefs,
desires, perceptions, memories, emotions, and so forth. And this leads us towards somewhat
more tractable questions like “What is a belief (desire, memory, perception. . .)?” The
philosophy of mind has seen tremendous progress since Descartes proposed his dualist view of
mind and body. Contemporary philosophical analyses of mental states and processes are among
the key components of a rapidly emerging new science of mind. Philosophers of mind, along
with cognitive psychologists, information scientists, and neuro-scientists have begun to work out
detailed explanations of how our physical brains realize and carry out the functions of many
mental states. In this chapter we will cover some of the progress philosophy of mind has
contributed over the past century. As we will see by the end, some hard philosophical questions
about the nature of mind persist.
Descartes’ Dualism
As with many topics, modern philosophy of mind begins with Descartes and soon moves on.
Descartes’ dualism holds that the mind is composed of a fundamentally different kind of
substance than the body. Bodies are composed of matter that exists in space and time, and
behaves in accordance with laws of nature. Minds, however, are spiritual in nature according to
Descartes. Their existence is not spatio-temporally bound, and unlike physical stuff, minds have
free will. The critical faults in Descartes’ view were quickly spotted by Princess Elisabeth of
Bohemia. The central problem lies in accounting for how the mind and the body can have any
influence on each other. Clearly the physical world has effects on the mind, as when I perceive
things. And it seems equally obvious that the mind has effects in the physical world, as when I
act on my will. But if mind and body are so completely different, it is hard to see how this can
happen at all. How does something that exists outside of space and time have any influence over
the body that exists in space and time? How can the behavior of my causally determined body be
influenced by a freely willing mind? The problem of mind/body interaction is a major stumbling
block for Cartesian dualism about the mind and the body.
Descartes’ correspondence with Princess Elisabeth can be found in a heavily edited form here:
http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/descelis.pdf. The full original text of Descartes’
correspondence with Elisabeth includes some ornate literary flirtation in the first couple letters.
By today’s standards, Descartes could be accused of sexual harassment for much of his flattery
of Elisabeth. But the patronizing flattery pretty much disappears in later letters as Descartes
comes to appreciate the seriousness of the Elisabeth’s incisively argued challenge. Elisabeth
provides a brilliant illustration of how to deal most effectively with patronizing behavior whether
it is of sexist variety or some other kind: just be competent and this will show that you deserve to
be taken seriously. Here is helpful summary of the debate between Descartes and Elisabeth:
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http://www2.fiu.edu/~hauptli/DescartesandPrincess
ElisabethCorrespondenceLectureSupplement.htm
Empiricism leads to Logical Behaviorism
Following Hume in the 18th century, the philosophy of science takes a sharp empirical turn in the
latter 19th and early 20th century. During this time, what is scientifically knowable is taken to be
limited to what can be defined in observable terms. This puts the mind and psychological
phenomena generally on epistemically shaky ground. Mental states like beliefs, desires,
perceptions, and anxieties are not the sorts of things we can examine under a microscope. If all
things knowable are supposed to be knowable through sense experience, then it begins to appear
that minds and mental states are not knowable.
The philosophical behaviorism of Gilbert Ryle is an attempt to salvage talk of minds and mental
states and make such talk empirically acceptable. Mental terms like belief or fear can often be
associated with observable behavior. Anger and fear, for instance, often seem to be observable.
Suppose we identified the mental state of being angry with displaying angry behavior. On this
proposal, anger just is stomping around, cursing a lot or generally throwing a fit. The obvious
problem here is that some people can be angry without displaying it and some people, good
actors for instance, can engage in convincingly angry behavior even though they aren’t really
angry. Or to take another example, my desire for chocolate ice cream might be observable in my
rummaging around in the freezer, or it might not be observable at all because the usual behaviors
are checked by my (also unobservable) desire to shed a few pounds. So mental states like anger
or many beliefs and desires sometimes show in terms of behaviors, but perhaps only under the
rights sorts of conditions. To make mental states empirically respectable and yet avoid the
obvious problems we’ve seen in identifying mental states with observable behaviors, Ryle
proposed to analyze mental states as dispositions to behave.
We are disposed in one way or another when we would behave a certain way given certain
conditions. The behavior is not the disposition itself, but a manifestation of the disposition. The
disposition can be identified in terms of a certain kind of “if. . .then. . .” statement. To help get
clear on the idea, consider simpler physical dispositions like solubility or flexibility. To say that
a spring is flexible is not to say that it is currently flexed. It is rather to say that if you were to
stress it in the right way, then it would absorb the force placed on it and bend. To say that sugar
is soluble is not to say that it is dissolved. But it is to say that if you were to submerge it in water
(under the right conditions), then it would go into solution. So dispositions are described in terms
of stimulating conditions and responses or manifestations. Ryle’s idea is that talk of mental
states, like beliefs, desires, perceptions, or emotions can be fully explained as talk of very
complex dispositions where the stimulating conditions and the manifestations are observable
conditions and behaviors. So, my desire for chocolate ice cream might be understood as a
complex disposition to exhibit behaviors like rummaging around in the freezer if I think I’ll find
chocolate ice cream there, and I’m not too worried about my weight, and . . . . If this project
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works out, then we can understand talk of mental states in terms of empirically respectable
stimulus-response dispositions.
The project of defining talk of mental states in terms of observable environmental stimuli and
behavioral responses faces a number of difficult challenges though. We normally understand
simple physical dispositions as being grounded in some further physical basis. Sugar is soluble in
water because of its molecular structure, for instance. So we associate the disposition of
solubility with a physical state of the sugar. In his eagerness to avoid positing unobservable
mental states, Ryle wanted us to understand talk of dispositions merely as defining mental terms
in terms of empirically respectable stimulus response “if. . then. . .” claims. He wanted to avoid
positing any unobservable states of the brain, for instance, as the basis of mental dispositions. So
Ryle’s talk of dispositions is limited to mere “if . . then . . .” without any appeal to underlying
states of minds.
A second problem is that while we might be able to formulate plausible stimulus response
conditionals for some mental state terms like fear or anger, in many cases the subtle links
between stimulus and response that we might associate with a belief or a desire are simply too
complex to allow for an analysis of the mental state talk in terms of observably defined
disposition talk. What “if . . then . . .” claim, for instance, analyzes talk of my belief that my
brother lives in Arizona?
A distinct problem, one that will continue to dog subsequent theories in the philosophy of mind,
is the problem of conscious experience. However Ryle’s project worked out, we could imagine
some kind of mindless robot that satisfies all of the relevant stimulus-response dispositions we
associate with beliefs, desires, and emotions. And yet, by hypothesis, the mindless robot lacks
any subjective conscious experience. When we think of our own case at least, our subjective
conscious experience seems to be quite central to having a mind. This is an issue we will return
to after a brief look at a few other 20th century approaches to understanding the mind.
Here is a link to the opening chapter of Gilbert Ryle’s classic The Concept of Mind. It features
a quite devastating critique of Cartesian Dualism that sets the stage for his own behaviorist
approach: http://thisdoesntmatterbecauseitisjustfiller.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/ryle-the-
concept-of-the-mind-chapter-1.pdf
Here is a link to the IEP entry on Behaviorism and some related movements in the Philosophy of
Mind including material eliminativism: http://www.iep.utm.edu/behavior/
The Brain State Identity Theory
Ryle’s behaviorism attempts to make talk of mental states empirically respectable by defining
mental terms in terms of observable conditions and behaviors. One concern raised about this
approach was that mental state terms are to be understood entirely in terms of observable things
going on outside the person. This seems to take the mind out of the person. There is no place in
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behaviorism for any account of our inner lives or even the notion that my beliefs and desires are
in some sense in me or part of me. The Brain State Identity Theory, most ably advanced by J. J.
C. Smart, goes some ways towards remedying this apparent defect (though Ryle would not have
counted it as a defect). The Brain State Identity Theory proposes that mental states are identical
with brain states. Contrary to Descartes’ dualism, the Identity Theory takes mind to be a physical
thing. Namely, it takes the mind to be identical with the brain. For this reason, we count the
Identity Theory as a physicalist view of the mind.
According to the Identity theory, the belief that Obama was president of the USA in 2002 just is
a certain neuro-chemical state of the brain. Note that a great many people share this belief. When
we speak of the belief as a view about what is true, one that might be shared by many people, we
are speaking of a belief type. My belief that Obama was the American president in 2002 is just
one token of that shared belief type. This distinction between types and tokens is important to
understanding what the identity theory says. The Identity Theory originally proposed that mental
state types are identical with brain state types. So for you to have the mental property of
believing that Obama was president of the USA in 2002 is just for your brain to have a certain
specific neuro-chemical property. The identity theory holds that for anyone to have the belief
that Obama was president in 2002 is just for them to have that same specific neuro-chemical
property. A popular and plausible example of such mental state/brain state type identity was that
pain just is C-fibers, a certain kind of neuron, firing.
We have scientific evidence that very roughly points in the direction for something like the
Identity Theory. Cases of localized brain injuries indicate that different parts of the brain carry
out different functions. People who suffer lesions in specific areas of the brain tend to find
specific mental functions impaired while other functions are left perfectly intact. It is through
analyzing such cases that we began to map areas of the brain according to the functions they
perform.
In the Identity Theory we witness a significant point of intersection between the philosophy of
mind and the science of mind. Philosophical speculation has given rise to a great many scientific
hypotheses. Here we have an example of how this can happen. We have a theory about the
metaphysical nature of mental states that turns out to be empirically testable. The Identity Theory
says that mental state types are identical with brain state types. Types are properties, so this view
tells us that all of your mental properties are physical properties of your brain. We have learned a
great deal about how brains store and process information since this hypothesis was popular. The
science of mind is not yet mature, but well past its infancy and the broad outlines of how brains
work are more or less in place. What the science tells us is that different brains store and process
the same information in very different ways. That is, the Identity Theory is wrong. My belief that
Obama was president in 2002 involves many properties of my brain. But your belief that Obama
was president in 2002 involves your brain having different properties.
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Functionalism
Belief is the spring of action. We explain people’s actions in terms of their mental states. People
do what they do because of what they believe, desire, fear, hope for, and so forth. The
behaviorists were on to something in thinking about mental states in terms of dispositions. But
recall that the behaviorists were looking for a way to analyze talk about mental states entirely in
terms of observable things like behavior. They wanted to avoid positing unobservable things
going on in the head. Talk of dispositions for the behaviorists was not talk of underlying and
possibly unobservable brain states that give rise to behavior. Rather it was merely talk of
tendencies that might allow us to understand mental state terms as synonymous with complex
“if. . . then. . .” conditional statements. The behaviorists sought a way to avoid understand mental
terms as referring to unobservable things going on in the head. To many, taking the mental out of
the head seemed a problematic feature of behaviorism. But this is just what behaviorists set out
to do, understand talk of the mental in public, observable terms.
The functionalists would understand talk of mental dispositions differently. To have a mental
disposition is not, by definition, just to satisfy a certain “if . . ., then. . .” claim. Rather, to be in a
mental state is to be in some underlying state, perhaps unobservable, that fulfills a certain
functional role. The molecular structure that makes the spring flexible might not be observable to
us. But for the spring to be flexible, for it to have this disposition, is for it to be in some
underlying state that makes the spring such that if we exert a force on it, it will bend and absorb
that energy. We can call that underlying state that accounts for something having a disposition
the causal basis of the disposition. With this idea in hand, we can mark a difference in how a
behaviorist and a functionalist would understand the idea of a disposition. For the behaviorist,
talking of mental states as dispositions does not involve the attribution of any causal basis, it
only gives us a way of translating talk of the mental into talk of observable behavior by means of
complicated “if . . ., then . . .” statements. For functionalism, on the other hand, talking of mental
states as dispositions does involve attributing underlying causal base properties. To be in a
mental state is to have some underlying causal basis for behaving in this way if these conditions
are met, or behaving in that way if those conditions are met, etc.
Given this differing treatment of talk of mental dispositions, the functionalist avoids a problem
we raised for behaviorism. We seem to understand what it means to believe that Obama was
president in 2002. But if this mental state attribution is really just a shorthand way of expressing
a complex behavioral disposition, then we ought to be able to fill in the associated “if . . then . .
.” claim. But we can’t. So talk of mental states can’t simply be regarded as synonymous with talk
of behavioral dispositions. Unlike the behaviorist, the functionalist is not trying to define away
talk of the mental in terms of talk of observable behavior. The functionalist is happy to leave the
mental in the head. Talk of behavioral dispositions don’t define mental terms for the
functionalist, they rather provide a means for specifying what it is for an underlying brain state to
realize, or be a causal basis for, a mental state type.
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We were lead to functionalism by the idea that a given mental state might be realized by various
different states in different brains. This suggests a physicalist interpretation of functionalism, a
view that insists that mental states are realized by physical states. But note that functionalism
needn’t be restricted in this way. Any state, physical or otherwise, can realize a mental state so
long as it fulfills the appropriate role. Being guided by spirits in the appropriate way might, in
principle, be the causal basis for having a certain mental disposition. So, strictly speaking, unlike
the brain state identity theory, functionalism is not committed to physicalism, the view that the
mental is ultimately physical. One could be a functionalist about mental states and a Cartesian
dualist.
Here is a link to further reading on functionalism: http://www.iep.utm.edu/functism/
Consciousness and Property Dualism
While one could, in principle, be a functionalist and a Cartesian dualist, the intractable problem
of mind/body interaction has lead scientists of the mind to reject Descartes’ substance dualism.
The difficulty of understanding consciousness, however, has led some leading contemporary
thinkers, notably David Chalmers, to another kind of dualism: property dualism. On this view,
though the world consists of just one kind of stuff, matter, that stuff has fundamentally different
kinds of properties including those we can regard as purely physical, like mass, charge and so
forth, and other kinds of properties, like consciousness, that are irreducibly mental. Let’s start by
thinking about how consciousness is special and especially difficult to analyze in terms of
physical properties.
Functionalism gives us a promising approach for understanding some kinds of mental states in
terms of physical states fulfilling functional roles describable in terms of complex dispositions.
According to functionalism, for me to believe that my cat is sleeping on the sofa only requires
that my brain be in some state that plays an appropriate function role. I can’t specify the
functional role completely, but it might include walking softly when I go to refill my tea, not
playing loud music on the stereo, saying “no” if my wife asks me if the cat is outside, etc. The
state of my brain that fulfills this mental functional role might be one that can be entirely
specified in physical terms. It is just the state of having certain connections between networks of
neurons activated in certain ways. With enough neurophysiology, we could completely describe
this brain state in terms of physical chemical and electrical properties. A great many kinds of
mental phenomena might yield completely to such functional explanation in purely physical
terms. Scientists of the mind have already made tremendous progress at understanding memory,
shape recognition, belief, and desire in terms of functional roles that could have purely physical
bases. But then there is our subjective conscious experience, what it is like for me to perceive
something, for instance, or how I experience desiring something, believing something,
remembering something.
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Consciousness does not yield to functional analysis in the same way. An interesting kind of
thought experiment suggests that consciousness can’t be understood in purely functional terms or
in terms of physical properties and processes at all. First we need to talk about zombies. The
zombies we are familiar with from horror stories are easily recognizable. They walk in menacing
dull witted ways in spite of broken legs and open wounds. They are the reanimated dead. This is
not at all like philosophical zombies, the beings that populate philosophical zombie thought
experiments in the philosophy of mind. The idea of a philosophical zombie is the idea of being
that functions exactly like a conscious person in every observable respect. The only difference
between a philosophical zombie and a normal person is that the philosophical zombie lacks
conscious experience. Imagine a physical duplicate of yourself, a doppelganger that is molecule
for molecule exactly like you and fully operational. It functions just like you, so it would give the
same replies you would give to questions and the same responses to stimuli. It is just as subtly
expressive as you in every conceivable way because it is functionally just like you. Your mother
or your lover could never tell the difference. The only difference there is, is that the zombie lacks
the conscious experiences that you have.
There is philosophical debate about whether such a being is metaphysically possible. There don’t
appear to be any logical contradictions involved, but that may not settle the issue. However, if
such a zombie is possible, this possibility would demonstrate something interesting. Since your
zombie doppleganger is exactly like your conscious self in every physical and functional respect
down to the atomic level, yet differs from you mentally because it lacks conscious experience,
the mere possibility of such a being would show that whatever consciousness is, it can’t be
understood in terms of functioning or the kinds of physical biochemical properties that ground
your functioning (provide the causal bases for you various dispositions to behave.
Chalmers thinks philosophical zombies are possible, so consciousness can’t be understood purely
in terms of physical properties or the functional processes they ground. He instead proposes that
we understand some properties of minds, like consciousness, as fundamentally mental properties
that are not reducible, even in principle, to physical properties. While no distinct kinds of non-
physical substance is proposed, Chalmers is offering a kind of dualism we now call property
dualism. Property dualism in the philosophy of mind is the view that among the primitive most
fundamental properties of our world, there are both basically physical properties and basically
mental properties.
Here is David Chalmers’ clear and accessible paper “Facing up to the Problem of
Consciousness”: http://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf
Here is the IEP reference article on consciousness: http://www.iep.utm.edu/consciou/
Here is a collection of SEP entries on Mind, largely edited by David Chalmers:
http://consc.net/guide.html
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8. Love and Happiness In this chapter we will begin to study things that matter, things that are important. We have had
brief passing encounters with ethical issues in prior chapters, but beginning with this chapter and
for the remainder of this text we will be concerned with issues that are, at least broadly speaking,
ethical. We will begin with the things that matter to us individually, the things we love. Of
course, different people love different things, people, and activities, so our starting point has to
do with things that are good in a highly subjective way. But after thinking some about the nature
of love, we will turn our attention to the good life later in this chapter. It’s tempting to think that
happiness and the good life are, like love, highly subjective. But notice that we can love, prefer,
and pursue things that are also quite self-destructive. Between love and happiness it is quite
possible for us to be at odds with ourselves. Indeed, this is the stuff of tragedy. So perhaps what
will make us happy and lead to a flourishing life isn’t so subjective after all.
In subsequent chapters we’ll examine the nature of morality generally, some theories of morally
good action, and finally social justice. It might be tempting to think we move from the more to
the less subjective in this sequence of topics. But subjectivity and objectivity are not the
organizing principle I have in mind in taking things in this order. Rather, our own sphere of
concern, what matters to us or what we love can be more narrowly focused on our subjective
desires or it can encompass a broader realms beginning with our own well being and proceeding
to concern for others, respect for persons generally, and ultimately concern for the various often
nested communities we are part of, all the way from the homeowners association up to the
biosphere. Maturing as a person likewise involves moving beyond the narcissistic self-centered
sphere of concern we have as infants and towards an appropriately broader sphere of concern.
Our introduction to ethics is organized around a view developing as a person towards moral
maturity to be largely a matter of successively expanding our sphere of personal concern. We
will take up topics in ethics roughly after the pattern of the developmental stages towards moral
maturity.
Love
Love comes in many varieties. A few varieties of love identified in ancient Greece continue to
provide useful points of orientation. The Greek terms for these are Philia, eros and agape. Philia
is friendship (this word is also the root of “philosophy” literally translated as the love of
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wisdom). Eros refers to erotic love, and agape we are most familiar with through the Christian
tradition as something like universal love for all people. Agape is the sort of love that God has
for all people and it also provides the foundation for Christian ethical precepts.
The classic account of Philia comes from Aristotle who takes friendship to be a concern for the
good of another for her sake. In friendship we adopt the good of another as a good of our own.
It’s important that we understand this as expanding our sphere of concern beyond ourselves.
Concern for another just because of some benefit she will bring to us is not genuine friendship.
Cultivating a relationship with someone because you think it will improve your social standing
or help you land a job is not really love in the sense of friendship. This is the significance of
having concern for another for his or her own sake. Given this view, we can see the cynical view
that everyone is ultimately motivated only by narrow self-centered self-interest as entailing the
non-existence of Philia or friendship. For this reason cynicism seems a rather sad and lonely
view.
Friendship is not, on Aristotle’s view, opposed to self-interest. It is common to think that when
we come to genuinely care for another we do so at the expense of self-interest. Love, on this
popular view often involves a measure of self-sacrifice for the sake of another. But this popular
view is at best a bad distortion of Aristotle’s view of friendship. This is because Aristotle takes
love in the sense of friendship to involve an expansion of our own sphere of concern to include
the good of another, not the refocusing of it away from ourselves. Of course there will be
conflicting desires among friends. But among friends these aren’t mere conflicts between their
individual wills. Rather, when I love my friend in the sense of Philia and I want one thing while
my friend has a competing desire, I experience this as an internal conflict of my own will, and
perhaps my friend does, too. It might not be obvious to either of us which movie we should see
on our night out together. But the question of my self-interest versus my friend’s dissolves in our
mutual concern for each other for his or her own sake. The salient issue becomes what movie we
should see together.
We often suppose that loving another means feeling good about that person. But love is
emotionally more complicated than that, and Aristotle’s account of Philia sheds some light on
this. A parent who loves his child will generally feel good about that child when things are going
well. But another emotional manifestation of whole hearted love for the child might include
disappointment when the child makes an irresponsible choice. This makes perfect sense on
Aristotle’s account since to love the child is to adopt the good for the child as the good for the
parent. When the child’s bad choice threatens what’s good for the child, being disappointed can
be seen as part of caring about what is best for the child. A corollary of this insight is that
coddling or spoiling a child is not the loving thing for a parent to do when this is liable to
undermine what is good for the child in the long run.
Loving things
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If philosophy is genuinely a case of Philia, then we should be able to make sense out of talk of
loving things other than persons. We do commonly talk of loving chocolate, loving this or that
band, or loving our house. In most cases this probably shouldn’t be taken literally. Love is not
mere appreciation, preferring, or desiring. So saying I love the new Spoon album isn’t saying
that I care for it for its own sake or that I have adopted its interests as my own. It doesn’t have
interests that I’m in any position to adopt as my own. So, talk of loving things other than persons
is often merely metaphorical. But is it always metaphorical?
Philia requires that a thing have a good of its own that we can adopt as part of the good for
ourselves. We don’t ordinarily regard things other than persons and relatively sophisticated
animals as having a good of their own. My computer has value only in that it is useful to me. We
refer to this kind of value as instrumental value. This is the sort of value a thing has because it is
instrumental to satisfying other ends that we have. Typically we deny that non-sentient things
have any value beyond their usefulness to us. In this frame of mind we are prone to think the
young hot-rodder who takes his vintage Mustang to have a good of its own, a value that is
intrinsic to it and not merely instrumental to him and its admirers, as suffering from a kind of
delusion. But perhaps this doesn’t tell us so much about whether non-sentient things can have the
kind of value that can make them appropriate objects of love as it does about the shortcomings of
our ordinary state of mind. It might be worth considering the matter from a more creative state of
mind and pondering the relationship between an artist and his or her art.
As a listener I can admire or enjoy a Spoon song or a Rachmaninov piano concerto, but I’m not
in much of a position to adopt the good of the work as a good of my own. However, Britt Daniel
and his colleagues are in a position to adopt the good of a Spoon song as a good of their own.
Rachmaninov could very well be concerned with the aesthetic quality of his piano concerto for
its own sake. The cynic will snidely remark that artists only aim to please their audience for the
sake of drawing praise and honor on themselves. But I think the cynic fails to understand the
artist and the experience of creating art. Practicing artists are typically not too concerned with
reviews and prizes while they are actively creating. The concert pianist invests most of her time
and concern in playing well. The adulation of an audience may be icing on the cake, but what
really matters to the serious artist is the art. The creative activity is not a mere means to some
further end, but it’s absorbing, even all consuming. The artist is concerned with playing well,
dancing well, making a beautiful and functional building, cooking well. We might worry that this
is all just so much self-indulgence. The cynic might claim that artists are just doing what they
want to, and if they are really lucky, others might like it too. But again, this doesn’t really do
justice to the nature of creative activity. When I bake an apple pie I might be inclined to do so
this way or that, and I might be perfectly happy with the results. But I don’t get to set the
standard of apple pie goodness. If I’m to be serious about my baking, I have to learn from people
who know. Then I have to practice a lot, recognize my mistakes, and learn from them. In this
process I have to sublimate my own inclinations and aspire to standards of excellence that lie
well beyond my self-interest narrowly conceived. Really baking well requires a kind of
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aspiration and devotion that goes beyond self-indulgence. In recognizing this we can see the
potential for love in creative activity. Creative activity can involve expanding one’s sphere of
concern to include the goodness of some activity or product for its own sake and this is the
essence of Philia. Art, I’d suggest, is distinguished in part by the loving devotion of the artist.
Now, depending on your inclination, listen to some Rachmaninov or some Spoon and see if you
get my point.
Self-Esteem
What if we apply Aristotle’s classic treatment of Philia to ourselves? The result is just that to
love ourselves is to adopt the good for ourselves as a good of our own. Broadly speaking, to love
yourself is just to care about what is best for you. We haven’t yet said much about what is best
for you. But let’s suppose for now that what is best for you is in some ways subjective and to be
understood in terms of what I love. If what’s best for me is just what’s good for the things I love,
then to love myself is just to love what I love. This is pretty much the view of self-love advanced
by Harry Frankfurt in his essay, “The Dear Self,” which is the last chapter of his book The
Reasons of Love.
The idea that to love yourself is just to love what you love sounds kind of poetically appealing,
but a significant worry about this application of Aristotle’s view of Philia to the self is that it is
also appears to be trivial. After all, how could you fail to love what you love? If loving what you
love is all there is to self-esteem this would seem to make poor self-esteem logically impossible.
Our account of self-esteem should not rob the idea of all content. Frankfurt appreciates this
problem and addresses it in an interesting way. He argues that we can fail to love what we love
by being half-hearted. Sometimes we are at odds with ourselves in ways that undermine our love
for the things we love. To take an all too common example, many of us both love our health and
at least like things like fatty foods that aren’t so good for our health. Our appetite for unhealthy
food frustrates and undermines our love of being healthy. So we are half-hearted and at odds
with ourselves about the prospect of going to the gym and having tofu for dinner. To have low
self-esteem on Frankfurt’s account just is to have a divided will that leaves us half-hearted about
the things we love. So we might love our bodies, but not whole-heartedly when we hold
ourselves to unrealistic standards of physical beauty. Too many of us love our lovers, but not
whole-heartedly because we still wish they were somehow more ideal. Or we might love our
work, but not whole-heartedly if we feel it is under-appreciated or if it has too much drudgery
attached to it. On Frankfurt’s account, these are all examples of ways in which we might suffer
from low self-esteem. To love yourself is nothing more than to love your friends and family,
your community, your activities, and projects whole-heartedly. To love yourself is to
wholeheartedly love what you love.
This might sound pretty good. Enough so that it can be easy to miss just how dramatic a
departure Frankfurt’s account of self love is from conventional popular wisdom. We are
frequently told that we have to love ourselves before we can love others. And in this
conventional wisdom, loving ourselves just means feeling good about ourselves or thinking we
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are perfectly fine the way we are. But this is the narcissistic approach to self-esteem, a self-
referential approach that is continually and simultaneously perpetuated and exploited in our
consumer culture. Pop psychology tells us that we can’t care for others until we care for
ourselves and consumerism makes sure that we are never quite done taking care of ourselves.
This view is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it can be hard to penetrate even with pretty
clear and compelling argument. What Frankfurt is recommending, perhaps without enough
fanfare, is that this popular cult of self-esteem gets things backwards. Leading a meaningful life
and loving yourself is a matter of whole-heartedly caring about other things. There is no
reference to feeling good about yourself in Frankfurt’s account of self-love. If things go well,
feeling good about yourself might be the result of whole-heartedly loving what you love. But
trying to feel good about yourself is exactly the wrong starting place.
Erotic Love
Even the most subtle minds are often overly tempted by the lure of simplification. So it is not too
surprising to hear smart people speaking of erotic love as nothing more than friendship plus sex.
This view has the attraction of reducing erotic love to just a special variety of Philia. But the
world has seen plenty of serious lovers that for one reason or another can’t or don’t have sex.
And we are familiar enough with the notion of “friends with benefits” that aren’t cases of erotic
love. We also struggle here with the unfortunate fact that the word “erotic” has acquired a seedy
connotation over the past century or two and now often serves as a code word for “X Rated.”
This is somewhat worse than a distortion of the word’s traditional meaning. Erotic love does
involve desire, attachment, and passion that is focused on a person, but this is not exhausted by
the desire for sex. It’s not even clear that this kind of love entails desire for sex. So it’s probably
best to try to examine erotic love on its own terms, first and then maybe somewhere down the
line think about how it relates to Philia or friendship.
The classic work on erotic love is Plato’s Symposium. This dialogue is a literary masterpiece as
well as an interesting philosophical discussion of enduring themes on love. Do we search for our
ideal other half in love? Do we love for reasons? And if so, what of the individuals we love? Do
they matter except for the qualities we find loveable in them? These issues remain relevant in the
very active contemporary literature on erotic love.
Erotic love is traditionally thought of as the kind of love that involves passionate longing or
desire. This would appear to make erotic love self-centered and this seems to be at odds with the
idea of Philia where another is valued for his or her own sake. A developed account of eros
might resolve this apparent tension. And some further reflection on passionate longing might
motivate this. If erotic love is hopelessly mired in selfish desire, then we might deem it a bad
thing, nothing more than a euphemism for lust. But this would entirely miss what many people
seek and sometimes find in erotic loving relationships.
When we desire something we generally have our reasons. There is something about it we
appreciate. When we are attracted to and desire some person, it may be because of this person’s
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wit, beauty or some other quality we find charming. Socrates makes this point in Plato’s
Symposium and it becomes the first step towards a highly impersonal view of eros. We might
love an individual for their beauty, but this is just a step towards loving beautiful people
generally and ultimately to loving beauty itself. As Socrates sees it, this is all for the good as our
attention and love is drawn ever closer to the most real and divine of things, the form of
goodness itself. Attachment to a particular individual is not the proper aim of erotic love and
may even be a hindrance. The view of erotic love voiced by Socrates in the Symposium becomes
refocused on God in the thought of Augustine with the result that in some veins of the Christian
tradition proper erotic love becomes passionate devotion to God. When focused on a person, it is
dismissed as mere sinful lust, a misguided eros focused on less than worthy objects.
Christianity aside, the Socratic conception of erotic love is much broader than personal love. Any
passionate aspiration can fall under the scope of the erotic on this broad view. An artist’s
passionate devotion to creative activity might count as erotic even when it has nothing to do with
sexuality per se. Frued offers a kind of inversion of this view. All creative aspiration is erotic, but
Frued sees erotic aspiration as essentially sexual. When our sexual longings get thwarted or
repressed, they surface in other kinds of creative activity. So Socrates would say that aspiration
generally is erotic and not necessarily sexual. Frued would also say all aspiration is erotic and
still indirectly sexual.
Socrates’ view of erotic love in the Symposium is a highly intellectualized view that most people
simply can’t relate to. The contemporary literature on the erotic love has framed the problem
with this impersonal view of erotic love in new ways. Robert Nozick, for instance, has pointed
out that if erotic love for another is focused on qualities we find charming or desirable, then it
should make sense for us to “trade up” whenever we find another individual who has those
qualities to a higher degree or those qualities plus others we find charming. Indeed, in the shuffle
of immature relationships we see this happen often enough. He dumps her for someone hotter, or
she dumps him for someone cooler. And granted some adults never quite outgrow this behavior.
But as erotic loving relationships go, we see something deficient in this “trading up” behavior.
We are inclined to say that these are rather sad cases where some of the people involved don’t
really know how to love. And we are inclined to say this precisely because there is something
superficial about loving the just the qualities we find attractive to the exclusion of the individual
person that might have some of those qualities. So, insofar as passionate longing or desire is
focused on qualities we find attractive or charming, we seem to be missing most of what we find
valuable in loving relationships. Perhaps what we do prize is a mix of Philia and eros. But just
saying this hardly solves the problems of erotic love, since it should be clear now how there is
liable to be some tension between the two.
The Ideal Union
Nozick proposes a model of love as a kind of union. In Nozick’s version of the union model
lovers form a “we” which is a new and different kind of entity, something more than just the sum
of two individuals. We might be on to Nozick’s idea of a “we” when we think of lovers as
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couples. Being part of a couple changes how we relate to the rest of the world. The IRS now
wants to hear from “us” every year. We now socialize with other couples as a couple. I might be
known as her husband to some and she will be known as my wife to others.
Nozick is hardly the first to think of erotic love as a kind of union. The first was probably, once
again, Plato, who has Aristophanes offer a colorful telling of the myth of the origins of love at
the outset of the Symposium. In this story people were once two-headed eight-limbed round
beings who upstaged the gods in their joyful vitality. To instill a bit of humility, the gods split
them in two, and since then erotic love has been the attempt by us incomplete halves to find our
other half and rejoin, if only temporarily. Less mythical versions of a union model of erotic love
have been articulated by several contemporary philosophers of love.
Critics of the union model often see a metaphor run amuck. To think of the couple as a new
entity distinct from the individuals that form it obscures the underlying reality. In fact, lovers are
autonomous individuals making their own decisions. My selfishness and my self-sacrifice remain
relevant in the relationship, but they are impossible to conceptualize on the union model. Our
individual tastes, desires, and transgressions get dissolved in a “we.” Love as a kind of union
sounds appealing as an ideal, but it may shed only limited light on the nature of our relationships
and attitudes, even when these are at their best.
However philosophical theories of love as a union work out, many of us seek partners we think
will be ideal complements to ourselves. The dream of a “soul mate” has powerful appeal. In the
grip of this vision we often find ourselves projecting what we want to see on to others who
probably don’t actually live up to our desires. This may be a pretty good description of
infatuation. A classic literary expression of “the birth of love” is given by the French writer
Stendhal (1822 On Love). Stendhal describes falling in love as a process of crystallization,
referring to how a twig left in a salt mine for a period of time will be retrieved covered in salt
crystals. Similarly, our perception of our beloved is laced with projections of our own
imaginative desire. In infatuation, our imagination gets the best of us and presents a distorted
picture of another. The prospects for disappointment are built into such high expectations. If you
haven’t personally fallen victim to the cycle of infatuation, disillusionment, and heartbreak
yourself, I’m sure you know others who have.
Perhaps the stumbling block of distorting imagination is just a practical problem and the quest
for one’s soul mate can be redeemed if only we can get a clear picture of who really is ideal for
us. But there are other stumbling blocks built into the quest for one’s soul mate. A problem
inherent to this quest is that, except for the searching, it puts one in a totally passive position,
expecting another to conform to one’s own needs and desires. There is a tendency towards
narcissism in this view when it encourages us to limit our sphere of concern to our own desires.
This passivity renders us vulnerable to dependency and disappointment.
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Another problem with the ideal union vision of love is that people are not just packages of
qualities and capacities. People are active, dynamic, malleable beings that have their own will,
grow in their own way, and have their own experience of the world. The person with the
qualities you like might not have them tomorrow. Or you might come to prefer different
qualities. The person you admire has his or her own desires and will, and fixating on what you
want in a partner will render you ill equipped to be responsive to the autonomy and agency of
another person.
Our challenge at this point is to find a way of understanding erotic love that is not both selfish
and self-defeating. As easy as it might be to fall victim to cynicism, we should find hope in the
many cases of people who do find mutually enriching loving relationships. It might help to turn
our attention away from what we want and towards trying to understand how erotic love enrichs
the lives of lovers when it does.
Bestowal
Notice how lovers affect each other. A kindness from a lover isn’t just pleasant, it can also
improve the beloved. A sincere complement isn’t just acknowledgement of something attractive
or admirable in us, it amplifies that attractive or admirable quality. When we value something or
someone we generally appraise that thing or person positively. Further, doing so can make that
thing or person more praiseworthy. Through valuing something we bestow value on it. The
marketplace provides a simple illustration of this in a very straightforward sense. If lots of people
value a house when it goes on the market, its value in a very objective sense increases. It will
fetch a higher price as a result. We bestow objective market value through subjectively
appraising things highly. Popularity and attraction works something like this in a superficial way.
A person’s popularity can be substantially boosted by a few people deeming him or her to be
likable. But this is not the kind of bestowal of value that makes loving relationships so enriching
to the lives of lovers.
The marketplace example is just supposed to illustrate how valuing something can make it more
valuable. Popularity and attractiveness are fleeting things that are as liable to mask vices and
insecurities as contribute to flourishing. Much more significant kinds of bestowal are at work in
loving relationships. When people care about each other they have much greater impact on each
other. And this is not just a matter of degree. We affect those we care about in very different
ways. Valuing an admirable quality in someone we love is a way of cultivating that quality. The
contemporary philosopher of love Irving Singer has made bestowal of value central to his
treatment of erotic love. Irving’s central idea is that through valuing another in a loving
relationship we create value and bestow it on our beloved. Loving another is not just a feeling on
this view, it’s a creative activity. Loving another and being loved brings out the best in us and
improves the quality of our lives. It might seem obvious enough when put this way. What Singer
would underscore is that through loving, we create and bestow value. Of course, as most of us
will recognize, the value we bestow on people we care about is not always positive. We can tear
down our lovers by being overly critical or unkind. So the first rule of being a good lover is to try
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to be charitable and kind. Love, when it goes well, is the cultivation of value and goodness in the
person we love.
Happiness
Let’s start with the idea of something mattering or being important. First notice the difference
between something mattering to us and something mattering for us. Almost anything could
matter to someone. All it takes for something to matter to someone is for that person to be
concerned with it. Mattering to or being important to someone is pretty subjective. Stamp
collecting might matter to one person but not another. Football matters to some people but not
others. The difference lies entirely in what the various parties are concerned with, prefer, or
value.
Mattering for is another matter. Eating well and getting exercise matter for your health whether
you prefer to do these things or not. Participating in caring relationships matters for your
psychological well being and this is arguably so even for relatively introverted people who enjoy
their solitude. The notion of mattering for is not entirely subjective. And what matters for you is
not relative to you in the way that what matters to you is. But mattering for is relational in a
different way. There is a sense in which the idea of something mattering for you is incomplete.
Things matter for your health, for your psychological well being, your happiness, your marriage,
your career, your projects, or for the quality of your life. You don’t get to just pick and choose
which things matter for your health or for your psychological well being. For these things at
least, what matters for you is largely settled by what and who you are. It remains an open
question whether what matters for our happiness is up to us or subjective in the way that what
matters to us is subjective.
Do I get to pick and choose what matters for my happiness? Is what matters for my happiness a
question of what matters to me? Assuming the good life is the happy life, the question we have
before us now is whether or not happiness and the good life are subjective and relative to our
values and preferences the way that what matters to us is. Popular opinion would seem to make
short work of these questions and straightaway affirm the subjectivity of happiness and the good
life. Surely different people enjoy different things depending on their preferences and values.
And nobody gets to decide what I enjoy or prefer but me. So, concludes this line of argument,
happiness for me and the good life for me are up to me.
Cultural norms of individualism and liberty probably feed a bias towards subjective ways of
thinking about happiness and the good life. The American way of life at the beginning of the 21st
century does seem to include an implicit view of the good life. We are indoctrinated into that
view of the good life by advertising and media from a very early age, and our peers, similarly
influenced, reinforce the programming. We are used to being referred to as consumers rather
than citizens, or simply people. And consumerism might be as good a name as any for the
philosophy of the good life that is standard issue in our culture. Consumerism as a philosophy of
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the good life tells us that what is good for us is just getting what we want. It’s a seductive view.
Who could possibly object? We all want what we want after all.
No matter how seductive the conventional wisdom is, if we want to address questions about
happiness and the good life philosophically we had better resist the urge to settle them by wishful
thinking. A bit of critical thinking should get us past our culturally ingrained bias and at least
suggest a more subtle and interesting appreciation of these issues. For starters, let’s look at cases
where people really do get everything they want and ask whether these make for plausible
examples of happiness and the good life. The spoiled child comes to mind. The spoiled child, by
definition, is the child that always gets what he or she wants. But spoiled children are typically
not very pleasant or happy. Closer to home, we are all familiar will instances where we get what
we wanted and then find that we aren’t as pleased as we’d hoped. Even when we are well
satisfied, we are generally not pleased for long. The next even more pressing want waits just
around the corner and we are dissatisfied again until we are briefly sated by its attainment.
Getting what he or she wants doesn’t seem to help the spoiled child either. Part of the problem
might be that having your every wish indulged provokes insecurity. The spoiled child becomes
completely and passively dependent on the parent who indulges, and the stakes are ever higher as
the desires become more pressing. Clearly we can get what we want and still not be happy. This
should be a pretty clear indicator that what we want is not a perfectly reliable guide to what will
make us happy.
Perhaps we have said enough to debunk consumerism as a plausible theory of the good life. But
in doing so we ran roughshod over an issue that might be worth exploring. We often suffer from
internal conflicts between two or more of the many things that matter to us. It might be that
losing a few pounds and being physically fit matter to me. And yet when the dessert cart comes
around I give in to the temptation for chocolate. What I want at the moment might diverge from
what really matters to me. Of course if I want the chocolate cake, then there is a sense in which it
matters to me as well. So we are conflicted. Our wants also change. We get drawn in and in our
craving we neglect other things that also matter to us. Our wants don’t just conflict, they seem to
jostle and vie for the privilege of commanding our will. So when we choose among the various
things we want, like losing some weight or enjoying a piece of cake, we might begin to wander
whether there is some wise rational executive function in our mind that can systematically bring
our competing desires into line with each other. Perhaps there is, but the effectiveness of this
rational deliberative function varies significantly from person to person, and from period to
period in the lives of the same person. It seems that among the people we know some do better
and some do worse at resisting the temptation of the moment and staying motivated by what
matters to them most. Even in our own lives, most of us can identify times when we exercised
self-control more effectively than others.
So here’s what we have so far: There can be conflicts among the things that matter to us and
some things matter to us more than others. We can do a better or worse job of resolving the
various conflicts in favor of the things that matter more to us. When we do well at this we have
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willed rationally and exercised self-control. When we fail we fall victim to weakness of will.
Based on this, it should be clear that self-control is a good thing. That is to say it’s a virtue. Self-
control empowers us to act most effectively on what matters most to us. We are now in position
to articulate another view of the good life, one that still doesn’t appeal to any external standards
and makes the good life a function of what matters to us, but doesn’t simply make the good life a
question of whatever I want or choose. The good life on this model is one where we reflectively
weigh the various things that matter to us in a way that makes it possible to resolve conflicts
among them in favor of the things that matter more to us and then exercise the virtue of self-
control in formulating the will to act in accordance with those things that matter to us most. On
this view, consumerism takes a step in the right direction by looking to what matters to us, but
then fails to articulate a model for resolving conflicting values and desires and misses the virtues
of rational deliberation and self-control in adjudicating these.
The next big question should be how do we determine what matters most to us? How do we
settle the conflicts among our competing desires? Is this simply a matter of our choice? If so,
then the whole structure we just articulated might be at risk of collapsing. If what matters to us
most can be read off of what we choose, then the distinction between exercising self-control and
being weak-willed simply collapses. Suppose we say that if I choose the chocolate cake, that can
only be because that’s what matters most to me. If what matters to us is simply a question of
what we choose, then there can be no such thing as weakness of will or self-control. So
formulating a plausible view of the good life seems to require that we somehow reach beyond
our subjective preferences, but it is not yet clear just how. Should some things matter more to us
than others? It begins to look like we need to recognize some substantive difference between
what matters to us and what matters for us. But it is not yet clear how to do so.
One thing does seem clear on the question, however: we don’t want to be told what is good for
us. Settling on what is good for us shouldn’t be a matter of acquiescence to some authority,
whether it is our parents, some tyrant, or the tyranny of popular opinion. If we don’t get to decide
what matters for us, then it won’t do to have anybody else deciding for us. The possibility that
remains open is that determining what matters for us is not a matter of anybody deciding, but
instead a matter of us figuring it out. If this suggestion is on the right track, then questions about
happiness and the good life are not subjective, that is, they aren’t matters for us or anybody else
to just decide. Rather, they are objective in the way that scientific truths are. We have to
investigate, discover, reason well, and figure out what is good for us. Enter Aristotle.
The Nichomacean Ethics
When we considered the consumerist conception of happiness and the good life we spoke of
identifying what would make us happy. Notice that this way of thinking about happiness puts us
in a passive position. Something outside of us does something to us, and it makes us happy. All
that is required of us is to be fortunate enough to be in a position to receive this wonderful
benefit. By contrast, for Aristotle, happiness is active. Things external to us might help or hinder,
but ultimately, for us to be happy just is for us to be active in the right sorts of ways.
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Aristotle identifies leading the good life with being happy. But happiness in the sense he has in
mind is not just feeling happy or being in a happy mood. Moods and feelings are things that
come and go in our lives. They are temporary states of mind. Aristotle is not interested in moods
so much as what it means to live well. So we are after the idea of an excellent life. The Greek
term Aristotle uses is eudaimonia and this might be best translated as living well and doing well.
So when Aristotle identifies the good life with happiness, he has something more enduring and
emblematic of a life in mind than just feeling good.
You might recall that Aristotle has a teleological view of the world. That is, everything has an
end or a goal towards which it strives. He is inclined to understand the nature of things in terms
of how they function in pursuing the ends towards which they are oriented. In this spirit,
Aristotle would take goodness to be something we naturally aim at, something we are oriented
towards by nature. So for Aristotle, the idea of the good life is understood in a naturalistic way.
Aristotle conceives of ethics in a way that blends seamlessly into his broader paradigm for
understanding the natural world. Goodness is an integral aspect of the natural world. What is
good for a thing can be understood in terms of that thing realizing its telos.
The good life, conceived of as happiness in the broader enduring sense, is a goal or an end for a
person’s life. But it’s an end of a particular kind in that it is sought for its own sake, not as a
means to some further end. Aristotle refers to ends like this as final ends. In more contemporary
language we might speak of things that are pursued for their intrinsic value, the value had “in
itself” as opposed to things that are pursued for their instrumental value, their value in the sense
of being useful as a means to other ends. Money, for instance, has instrumental value, but no
intrinsic value. It’s a useful instrument for attaining other things of value like clothes or food.
And these also may have only instrumental value toward yet further goals. The value of clothing
is to keep us comfortable and make us look good. But clothes don’t have a value of their own
independent of their usefulness towards these other ends.
The idea of things having instrumental value seems to presuppose that some things have value
just for their own sake. Otherwise we seem to have a regress of value where many things are
valuable as means to further and further ends, but at no point do any of these ends have any value
of their own. So to make sense out of anything having any sort of value, it seems there would
have to be some things that have intrinsic value or value in themselves. In the broadest sense,
goodness is an end that has “to be pursued” built into it. Thus goodness, for the ancient Greeks,
was a natural and obvious theoretical posit, needed to make sense out of any sort of talk of value.
For humans, the kind of goodness that matters is the good life. So ethics in general is concerned
with how to live well, how to lead an excellent life.
In the idea of flourishing, we have at least one familiar notion that should help us better
understand how Aristotle sees the good life. Think about what it is for the vegetable plants in the
garden to be flourishing. The flourishing tomato plant is one that grows vigorously without
disease and is well on its way to achieving its natural end, growing lots of sweet ripe tomatoes.
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In line with his teleological view of the natural world, Aristotle has it that the good for any sort
of thing can be understood in terms of fulfilling its natural function well and thereby realizing its
telos. So what then is the unique function of humans in terms of which our essence can be
understood?
It seemed we had a pretty good idea of what it means for a tomato plant to flourish. Roughly it is
for it to take in nourishment and grow. Biologically we might say its function is to
photosynthesize, converting nutrients and CO2 into lots of sugar and oxygen (and, ultimately,
tilthe). But we are essentially different from plants, so our function must be different as well.
Aristotle entertains the idea that our function might be to satisfy our appetites. This much seems
in line with the consumerist idea of the good life. But Aristotle rejects this too since it fails to
separate us from barnyard animals. Perhaps as infants we are similar to animals in functioning
only to satisfy our appetites, but then we outgrow this similarity. We might now see the
consumerist conception of the good life as infantilizing us since it appeals only to how we
function as infants, getting our appetites satisfied. But for Aristotle, how we function beyond the
developmental stage of small children is important to understanding our telos as human beings.
Ultimately Aristotle settles on our rational capacities. He takes the function of the human being
to lie in exercising our rational capacities because these are the ways of functioning that are
unique and special to humans. Humans are distinguished from others sorts of being by their
ability to function rationally. For Aristotle, the human being essentially is the rational animal.
The ability to reason is what sets us apart from other animals and this is what defines us.
Since for Aristotle, what’s good for us is not something we get to choose for ourselves, his idea
of the good life might seem much less flexible and personalizable than the consumerist
conception of the good life. But the apparent flexibility of the consumerist conception might be
just that, only apparent. On the consumerist conception of the good life, the preferences that fix
what is good for you are just given. What we want is taken as the starting point for thinking
about what is good for us. For this reason, the consumerist philosophy affords no means of
critically evaluating our wants. We just want what we want; that’s all there is to it. In our
contemporary consumerist culture, any challenge to the aptness of our wants is received as
grounds for offense, where our freedom to choose is compromised by someone else telling us
what we should want. However, our desires are quite malleable. Our tastes are typically acquired
and usually this happens without much critical reflection. Advertisers, and political pundits
among others know this well. The most powerful institutions in our culture put immense and
sophisticated effort into shaping and manipulating our desires. We are free to choose what we
want as consumers, but only after our wants have been engineered with care by others that aren’t
really concerned about what’s actually in our interest. In practice, the supposed freedom and
flexibility of the consumerist conception of the good life is more illusion than reality.
On the other hand, Aristotle’s view of the good life as the life of actively exercising one’s
rational capacities might be more flexible than it appears at first. Interpreted narrowly, Aristotle
offers a highly intellectualized view of the good life. The good life is the life of the
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philosopher/scientist. It would not be unreasonable to suspect a bit of professional bias in
Aristotle’s idea of what it is to live well. We might object that some people would rather work in
the garden, ride bicycles, or practice yoga than just do philosophy all the time, and that this is a
good way to live too. A reply that Aristotle can offer here (the reply I think he ought to offer) is
to say, “very well, and any of these activities will contribute to your flourishing only if you
engage your rational capacities and do them in thoughtful and inquisitive ways.” Many crafts,
arts, and skills can be cultivated in ways that exercise and develop our rational capacities. A life
spent working in the garden, riding bikes, doing yoga, or working as a plumber can be a
flourishing life on this more liberal interpretation of Aristotle’s account. There are details to
work out here concerning just what ways of life will exercise and cultivate our uniquely human
rational capacities. But more generally, perhaps I can understand the good life as the active life
of exercising and developing our uniquely human rational, capacities whatever specific
endeavors and activities I ultimately identify as serving that end.
Once we have a thought out idea of what the good life is, there remains the issue of how to go
about leading such a life. Through critical reflection on our nature and capacities we might
discover (as opposed decide or choose) where our genuine interests lie. But then how do we
bring ourselves to act in our best interest. What if it turns out that we don’t desire what is best for
us? Are we then just fated for misery? Aristotle doesn’t think so. There is a degree of flexibility
in our inclinations and preferences and we have some ability to shape these over time. On the
consumerist conception, what matters for us is set by our desires and the theory of the good life
is made to conform to them. On Aristotle’s view, the theory of the good life is developed
according to what matters for us and this is set by the sort of being we are. So living well is a
matter of bringing our desires into line with our interests. If Aristotle’s idea that we don’t get to
simply choose what is best for us still seems at all stifling, your sense of personal autonomy
might be replenished in appreciating how we are empowered to shape our tastes and preferences
and gradually bring them into line with what we can learn about our interests.
We are creatures of habit. While this often presents an obstacle to acting on our considered
interests, habit is also the means available to us for shaping our lives for the better. Recognizing
that making some a change would be good for us typically doesn’t result in our immediately
preferring it. Many of us, for instance, recognize that getting more exercise and eating better
would be good for us. But thinking that more exercise would improve our lives doesn’t
automatically result in feeling the urge to go for a run. Habituation, however, can bring our
preferences and urges into line. People that regularly go for runs do often have the otherwise
unusual urge to go for a run. Good habits are potentially as addictive as bad ones. And once we
establish a good habit, that becomes what we prefer and what we enjoy the most. For Aristotle,
the power you have to shape your life for the better lies in your ability to intentionally shape your
habits. Once we have figured out what really is in our best interest by examining who we are and
how we function, the key to being happy and living well is to mold our inclinations, preferences,
and pleasures through habituation. The good life, which is also the virtuous life, will be the most
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pleasant life because it is the life in which our pleasures cohere rather than clash with our
interests. The good life is one in which we have resolved the conflicts in our inclinations and
pleasures and we no longer have things that matter to us fighting against things that matter for us.
The truly virtuous person can wholeheartedly pursue what pleases her most because this will be
well aligned with what is best for her. The affinity between Aristotle’s advice on how to live well
and Frankfurt’s account of self-esteem should be easy to see here. Both would say living well is
largely a matter of getting your desires, inclinations, and motivations to hang together in a
unified coherent way. Where Frankfurt and Aristotle will differ is just in how that unified will
gets oriented. Frankfurt would have our considered best interest be determined by what we love.
Aristotle sees our considered best interest as settled by our nature as rational animals.
For Aristotle, to be virtuous is to have habitually established inclinations and preferences for
actively exercising our human rational capacities. Virtue aims at flourishing. Habit, on this view,
is quite literally character building. This way of thinking about virtue stands in sharp contrast to
more popular conceptions where to be virtuous involves lots of self-sacrifice. We suffer from a
Christianized notion of virtue that is more often than not associated with self-denial. To be
virtuous in the popular sense means something like not overindulging in cheesecake or sex. But
we are concerned with the idea of virtue as a kind of excellence. When Aristotle talks about
virtue, he is just talking about the excellent character traits a person might have. What makes a
character trait a good one is that on the whole, it contributes better to a flourishing life than
constrasting traits. So life in accordance with virtue promotes human flourishing, and for this
reason it is also likely to be the most pleasant.
Happiness, however, requires more than just virtue. It also requires some degree of good fortune.
A person with a virtuous character who is also in a coma is not really flourishing. Likewise, a
virtuous person who lives in a community of not so virtuous people faces a significant obstacle
to flourishing. Living in community of fools mght provide very limited opportunities for
exercising one’s rational capacities. There would be no one to talk philosophy with for starters.
More seriously, disputes could not be settled reasonably, but only through vicious maneuvering
for dominance. Extreme poverty can be an obstacle to flourishing. Being always anxious about
where your next meal is coming from could make leading the active life of the rational element a
difficult proposition. But extreme affluence and luxury could present its own obstacles since they
offers endless distractions, draw your attention to trifles, and ultimately render you passive and
weak. How much and what kind of good fortune does leading the good life require? Perhaps we
can’t give a very precise answer, but it might do to say that we require enough good fortune to
give us ample opportunity to exercise our rational faculties.
Here is an excellent translation of Book 1 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as a PDF:
http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam032/99036947.pdf
Here is the complete Nicomachean Ethics in a good, but older translation:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8438
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Review and Discussion Questions
1. Explain Aristotle’s view of Philia.
2. What is it to love one’s self on Frankfurt’s account?
3. How is love of the self the purest form of love? How doe Frankfurt handle the two
complications for his analysis of self love he raises at the end of section 9?
4. How is self love different from self indulgence? What does Frankfurt mean by
“wholeheartedness” and how does this bear on self love.
5. How does Frankfurt see self love as related to morality?
6. How does he see it as related to the meaningfulness of one’s life? Do think he is right on
these points?
7. How does Frankfurt’s analysis of love as wholeheartness square with Aristotle’s view of
virtue and happiness?
8. Explain the apparent tension between eros and Philia.
9. Explain the view of erotic love voiced by Socrates in the Symposium.
10. Explain Nozick’s union model of love. What problems does it raise?
11. What problems are inherent in the idea that the search for love is a quest for one’s ideal other
half or “soul mate”?
12. How does the cycle of infatuation, disillusionment, and heartbreak work? Explain the role of
the imagination in this.
13. What failings do the consumerist conception of the good life and the vision of love as a quest
for one’s “soul mate” share?
14. How do we bestow value in a loving relationship?
15. How do we understand what matters for us and what matters to us on the consumerist
conception of the good life?
16. What sort of evidence can be brought against the consumerist conception of the good life?
17. How can rational deliberation and self-control help the subjectivist view of the good life?
18. What is weakness of will, and what does the possibility of weakness of will tell us about how
we can determine what matter most to us?
19. What is the good life according to Aristotle?
20. Explain the ways in which the good life is passive on the consumerist conception and active
on Aristotle’s view.
21. Explain instrumental and intrinsic value.
22. On Aristotle’s view, once we know what the good life is, how do we lead it?
23. How does Aristotle understand virtue?
24. What sorts of things can be aids or obstacles to our flourishing?
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9. Meta-Ethics Ethics concerns what is good. Different things can be good in different ways. We just considered
the nature of the good life. The quality of one’s life is something that can be evaluated for
goodness. This makes it an ethical issue. Aristotle’s theory of virtue was part of our inquiry into
the good life and good character. More familiar will be ethical theories of good action. The ethics
of good action concerns what is morally permissible, obligatory, prohibited and superogatory
(good above and beyond what’s obligated). Beyond lives, character and actions, social groups
can be ethically good or bad. Social justice is the ethics of good society. So, ethics concerns the
goodness of assorted things. Ethical inquiry into what is good, right or best is normative. That is,
normative ethical inquiry is concerned with inquiry into how things ought to be. By contrast,
when anthropologists examine the moral traditions of various cultures, they are generally aiming
only to describe, explain and understand the ethical views of other cultures. They are not
engaged in the normative project of trying to understand what moral code is best. In other words,
they are out to understand what is regarded as good and bad by some culture or society. But they
are not thereby concerned with what is good and bad. Inquiry into what is good and bad is
normative inquiry and as soon as we engaging in this sort of inquiry, we are doing normative
ethics.
We started doing normative ethics in the last chapter in examining the nature of the good life. In
this chapter, we will not be doing normative ethics. Instead we will be asking more fundamental
questions about the status of our moral claims and attitudes. For starters, we will consider the
view that all our moral claims are false and all our attitudes about what is good or bad, right or
wrong are mere delusions. Perhaps there is no value in the world whatsoever. This view is
known as nihilism. Or, perhaps there is value in the world, but it is merely subjective. Moral
subjectivism is the view that there is only right and wrong relative to me, or you or some other
subject. This is a form of individualized moral relativism. A further possible mete-ethical
position is collectivized versions of moral relativism. It might be that good and bad are matters
of social convention, like laws or standards of etiquette. Perhaps the most popular view of this
sort is cultural moral relativism, the view that what is right is right only relative to cultural
groups and is determined by the values, standards and traditions of a culture. The assorted
varieties of moral relativism deny that there are any objective moral standards and make morality
a matter of the say-so or authority of people, either individually or in groups. A further view to
consider is that morality is objective, at least for humans, and determined by the authority or say-
so of God. This view is known as Devine command theory. And finally, we will consider the
view that there is real value in the world and objective moral truths are based on this. This view,
moral realism, is the one approach to ethics that takes there to be ethical truths but denies that
they are based on the authority or say-so of any person, even God, or any group of people. We
will take up each of these positions in turn in this chapter. In doing so, we are engaged in meta-
ethics, inquiring into the status of morality, whether it is subjective or objective and how so. Our
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meta-ethical inquiry will set the stage for our final two chapters on the normative ethics of
actions and social justice, the normative ethics of societies.
Nihilism
Nihilism is the view that there is no value in the world, nothing is good or bad, and we are just
deluding ourselves in thinking that anything matters at all. On this view all of our ethical
judgments are simply mistaken. Note that this is not the view that it’s morally fine to do as we
please. That too is an ethical judgment and is no more true or reasonable than any other value
judgment according to nihilism. We may not be able to decisively refute nihilism, but that would
be no argument in support of it. And building a case for nihilism presents some obstacles. In
particular, the nihilist owes us an error theory, an account of how our moral experience and
judgments so badly mislead us.
We are moral beings. Morality is a central part of our lived experience. This is not the case for
psychopaths and sociopaths, but this is just why these are pathologies. The psychopath and the
sociopath are lacking in a central area of human functioning. That these individuals lack moral
experience is no more reason to think the rest of us are deluded than to think that they are simply
blind to something real the rest of us appreciate. The rest of us do have moral emotions. When
we harm others, we are liable to feel guilty. And when we are harmed by others, we may feel
indignant. We also have moral motivations. We are generally motivated to treat others fairly
even when we can see some advantage in putting ourselves first. And we are motivated to
condemn cruelty and praise kindness. Most of us fall short in assorted ways now and then, and
we often recognize this ourselves whether someone else judges us or not.
In suggesting that our moral experience is just a delusion, the nihilist is offering a skeptical
hypothesis. This might remind you of the more general skeptical hypothesis of Descartes’ evil
deceiver. While we can’t rule out the more general skeptical hypothesis that all of our experience
is a deceptive illusion, we generally tag this as a philosophical curiosity and continue to
confidently believe that our senses provide us with fallible, but basically reliable evidence of an
external reality. Worries about Descartes’ evil deceiver present no obstacle to scientific inquiry
about the physical world and the benefits of this are pretty obvious even if it turns out that we are
living in a simulation of some sort. I’ll suggest we treat nihilism in the same vein. Perhaps we
can’t rule out the possibility that our experiences as moral beings are mere illusions. Yet, all the
same, we can better understand our ourselves and benefit in ways we care about by engaging in
systematic inquiry into our lived moral experiences. Our lived experience as moral beings
presents us with prima facie evidence for thinking that morality is real in some sense. The nihilist
owes us some compelling argument for doubting our lived moral experience before we should
grant is moral skepticism any more credence than Descartes’s evil demon.
Is Morality Subjective?
Setting aside nihilism, we now turn the idea that morality is subjective. We first need to ask just
what we mean by “subjective.” There is a broad sense in which your entire lived experience is
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subjective. It is, after all, your experience and you are a subject. But there are many aspects of
our subjective experience that usually confidently take to reflect an objective reality. My
subjective visual experience informs me that my bike has a flat tire and my subjective tactile
experience quickly confirms this. This subjective gives me a pretty good reason to confidently
believe that my bike tire is, as an objective matter of fact, flat. Setting aside skeptical curiosities
like Descartes’ evil deceiver, if we are observant and scientific about things, it seems that we can
learn quite a bit about what is objectively true on our subjective experience. But because this
broad sense of what is subjective includes experiences that track objective reality, it also doesn’t
get at what is supposed to be interesting about the notion that morality is subjective.
Rather, the idea of subjectivity that we want to capture in connection with moral subjectivism is
the idea something about you as a subject determines how things are for you or relative to you.
Things we care about and things we prefer seem to work this way. You determine what you
prefer or care about and no thing or person can do that for you. What’s best relative to your
preferences and concerns depends entirely on you and you may prefer things I don’t prefer. The
subjectivist takes morality to work like what we prefer or care about, but not like other aspects of
our subjective experience that track things that are objectively real or true. So, we’ll call moral
subjectivism the view that there is no objective goodness, but only what is subjectively good
relative to individual subject.
Moral subjectivism is no mere psychological thesis, but an ethical thesis. If I regard the death
penalty as morally justifiable in some cases and you don’t, that is just a psychological
observation about our differing beliefs and attitudes. The possibility that one of us gets this moral
issue wrong remains open. Moral subjectivism, as an ethical view, is the view that what is right
is right only relative to me or relative to another and what is right relative to me or another is
determined by our respective opinions and attitudes. It is not just individual moral beliefs and
attitudes that are relative to individuals according to the subjectivist, but morality itself that is
relative.
Moral subjectivism is a form of individualized moral relativism and it has some obvious appeal.
Everyone wants to think that they are good and subjectivism allows us all to set the standard of
goodness for ourselves. Subjectivism appears to be highly egalitarian since it entails that no
one’s moral opinion is better than anyone else’s. And it provides a usually convenient route to
avoiding unpleasant conflicts. The person who seeks to terminate an unpleasant conflict of
opinion on some moral matter by saying “what is right relative to you just isn’t what is right
relative to me” is appealing to something like moral subjectivism. Though adding that we should
just agree to disagree would be inconsistent with moral subjectivism. And we’ll take this point
up as the first of a series of objections to moral subjectivism. The key to appreciating each of
these objections is to see them as concerns about what is deductively entailed by moral
subjectivism.
1. No Conflicts over Moral Matters
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Moral subjectivism doesn’t resolve any conflicts of moral opinion, it rather dissolves the
appearance of conflict between moral opinions. People may have conflicts about what to do in
any case, but there are no conflicts about who is right on moral matters exactly because rightness
itself is relative to subjects on this view. For suppose I think the death penalty is just punishment
in some cases and you think the death penalty is unjust. The death penalty itself can’t be both
just and unjust, that would be a contradiction. But moral subjectivism doesn’t say that the death
penalty is both just and unjust. It says that the death penalty is just relative to me and unjust
relative to you. There is no contradiction or conflict in this. So, there is no disagreement between
us to resolve. According to moral subjectivism, there are no grounds for agreeing to disagree
because we never actually disagree about the same moral matters. My approval of the death
penalty is just about what is right relative to me and your disapproval is about something entirely
different, what is right relative to you. Conflicting opinions concerning moral matters can be
unpleasant (though they don’t have to be) and moral subjective provides a convenient escape
from conflict. We might be careful what we wish for, though. While moral subjectivism shields
us from conflict and criticism, it also rules out resolving conflicts reasonably, with brings us to
our next objection.
2. No Reasoning about Morality
Suppose you feel strongly about the injustice of the death penalty and you’ve thought a good
deal about why you think it is wrong. A disappointing corollary of the no conflicts objection is
that your issues with the death penalty are just about you. They can’t, in principle, provide any
reason for a supporter of the death penalty to change their mind. Reasoning with people
presupposes a shared reality we can reason about. But this is just what moral subjectivism denies
in the realm of morality. Suppose you attempted to argue that killing is always wrong and so the
death penalty is wrong. A supporter of the death penalty could happily grant that you have a
good argument, but since wrongness in this argument is only about what is wrong relative to you,
your argument presents no objection to the supporter’s argument that the death penalty is just
relative to the supporter. Since rightness and wrongness are relative to individuals according to
moral subjectivism, you and the supporter aren’t even offering arguments about the same thing.
According to moral subjectivism, no objective basis exists for reasoning about the moral status
of the death penalty.
3. Moral Infallibility
According to Moral Subjectivism, right and wrong relative to you is determined by your
opinions and attitudes. The makes each of us morally infallible. The only way a person could do
wrong, on this view is by failing to act according to their own opinions and attitudes. Now
consider the case of Dylann Roof, white supremacist and mass murderer, who killed nine African
Americans at a church meeting in 2015. Roof acted in accordance with his opinions and
attitudes. According to moral subjectivism, his actions were right relative to him. Of course, they
were wrong relative to just about everyone else, but subjectivism denies that there is any
objective moral standard according to which our moral opinions and attitudes are better than
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Roof’s. We humans often have self-righteous tendencies, but securing infallibility through moral
subjectivism comes at a high price.
4. Moral Growth Undermined
Thankfully, we are not always self-righteous. We do sometimes question our own moral
positions and occasionally change our view about the morality of some practice. A person might,
for instance, think that eating fast food hamburgers is morally unproblematic at one time and
then become convinced that animals deserve some kind of moral regard that speaks against
practices like factory farming. When moral views change in this fashion, people do not merely
drop one moral belief in favor of another. Typically, they also think that their prior moral opinion
was mistaken. They take themselves to have discovered something new about what is morally
right. Subjectivism has no problem with changes in moral standards. But subjectivism cannot
account for any changes in our moral beliefs as being changes for the better. This is because the
subjectivism recognizes no independent standard of goodness against which the new moral
opinions can be evaluated as better than the old moral opinions.
5. Anything Goes
A deep concern that underlies several of the foregoing problems is that moral subjectivism
renders morality arbitrary. Anything can be right relative of an individual on the subjectivist
view. If a person deems torturing innocent kittens just for fun right, then it is right relative to that
person and there is no higher moral standard from which kitten torture can be condemned. It is
hard to see how kitten torture could be made right relative to anyone just by that person deeming
it OK. This is the problem of arbitrariness. Our experiences as moral beings are not so arbitrary.
Our moral judgments and attitudes are usually somewhat more systematic and principled. Moral
subjectivism seems more appealing when we focus mainly on hot button moral issues where
people’s opinions conflict. But most moral issues aren’t like this. Almost everyone agrees,
perhaps with some special exceptions, that it is wrong to cheat, lie, steal and kill. We even tend
to agree of most of the cases where we’d make exceptions to these general moral rules. Moral
subjectivism has little to offer in the way of explaining our broad agreement on most moral
matters. And this suggests that morality is not so arbitrary.
Moral Relativism
Perhaps rather few people take moral subjectivism seriously. The idea that a person can make
something right, even just relative to themselves, merely by deeming it right may strike you as a
non-starter. But collectivized versions of moral relativism enjoy widespread popularity. The
most popular is Cultural Moral Relativism (which we’ll abbreviate as CMR). CMR is the idea
that what is right is right relative to a culture and determined by that culture’s values and
standards. Culture, along with religion, is often the means by which moral beliefs are
transmitted. We often accept things as right or wrong based on what is accepted in our culture or
religion. But is cultural tradition sufficient to make a moral attitude correct? CMR says yes. In
considering this collectivized version of moral relativism, we face collectivized versions of many
of the same objections raised against moral subjectivism.
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First let’s note that there are many possible varieties of moral relativism depending on who gets
to say what is right or wrong for whom. I don’t think anyone is a chess club moral relativist or a
garden society moral relativist. People are much more inclined to take culture to identify the
social groups relevant to morality. And this sounds appealing given that moral traditions are
often incorporated into cultural traditions. Keep in mind, though, that ethics is about what moral
opinions are best, not what moral opinions are regarded as best by people or how they come to
be held by people. While most of us are pretty likely to inherit our moral opinions from the
dominant traditions in our culture, being entrenched by culture might not be the best guide to
what is good. Given this, we might ask why it is culture that gets to decide right and wrong
rather than the chess club or the garden society. Moral Relativism seems to suffer a kind of
arbitrariness at the level of selecting the groups to which right and wrong are supposed to be
relative.
Next, what is it for a group to deem something right or wrong? As we are culturally engrained to
think egalitarianism is a good thing, most of us would probably say that a group deems
something right when a solid majority of its members deem it right. But why not take a group to
deem something to be right with the strongest and most aggressive members of the group deem it
right? This is how things work with gangs and outlaw militias. If right and wrong are merely
matters of convention, why should we favor egalitarian democratic say-so over gangland style
strongman say-so? Note that it won’t do to appeal to values independent of the say-so of groups
or their members here, since CMR denies the existence of any independent values.
Now let’s consider some problems for CMR. You will recognize several of these as collectivized
versions of the problems we encountered for moral subjectivism.
1. Anything Goes (again)
CMR has it that whatever is right according to values and traditions of a culture is right relative
to that culture. On this view, a culture’s moral code defines what is right relative to it (again,
what is right, not just what is considered right). In some cultures, it is considered right for fathers
and brothers to kill female family members who have been raped. Such “honor killings” strike us
as morally horrible, and indeed for this reason CMR will count honor killings as wrong relative
to our culture. But also, according to CMR, the mere fact that honor killings are in line with the
moral codes of other cultures makes these killing morally right relative to those cultures.
According to CMR, all it takes for something to be right relative to a culture is for that culture to
deem it right. So, if a culture deems racism, genocide, slavery or pointless sadistic torture right,
then it is right relative to that culture. And this strikes many as a reductio ad adsurdum of CMR,
a refutation of CMR on the grounds that it leads to absurd consequences. When a view
deductively entails an absurd consequence, that constitutes a powerful objection to it. So, we can
formulate this argument against CMR as follows.
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1. If CMR is correct, then honor killings are morally right relative to cultures that deem
them right.
2. Honor killings are not right (full stop)
3. So CMR is not correct.
This argument is valid. And the first premise correctly identifies a straightforward deductive
consequence of CMR. So, the only way to avoid the conclusion that CMR is a bad theory about
the nature of morality is by denying the second premise and maintaining that in fact honor
killings are right relative to certain cultures (again, are right, not merely are considered right). So
how might such a denial of the second premise go?
The relativist might start by asking, “Who are we to judge that honor killings are not right
(relative to cultures that deem them right)?” If the best answer we can supply in reply to this
question amounts to nothing more than a veiled appeal to the moral standards of our own culture,
then the relativist has a point. But why suppose the best we can do in replying to this question is
a mere appeal to the standards of our culture? Granted honor killings are wrong relative to the
standards of most cultures. But most cultures may adopt moral standards the oppose honor
killings for very good reasons. If members of cultures that accept honor killings fail to appreciate
those reasons, that might be due to a culturally induced moral blind spot rather than morality
itself depending on cultural attitudes. Having some sense of the moral worth of persons may be
all that is needed to see the injustice in honor killings and it is far from obvious that this
recognition depends in any way on cultural traditions or values. We recognize our own moral
worth regardless of cultural traditions and values. Basic human sympathy and compassion is all
that is required to recognize the same moral worth in other persons. For a culture to deem honor
killings morally just would then seem to require denying the full humanity of women. It seems at
least possible for a culture to get things wrong on this point. But . . .
2. CMR makes Culture Morally Infallible
According to CMR, what is right relative to a culture is whatever is deemed right relative to a
culture. Since the moral standards of a culture define right and wrong relative to a culture, the
standards of a culture can’t, by definition, get morality wrong. On the face of it, the case of honor
killings looks like a straightforward counterexample. Further evidence of cultural fallibility (the
possibility of a culture getting morality wrong) can be found in your choice of genocidal
episodes, culturally condoned practices of slavery, colonialism, caste systems, etc. We seem to
have an abundance of compelling evidence for the fallibility of culturally engrained moral
standards. This evidence for cultural fallibility is, like any sort of evidence, itself fallible. It could
be that what we regard as evidence of another culture’s fallibility only looks like evidence
through the distorted moral lens of our own culture. But this only suggests that our own culture
fallible in its moral judgments, which is not possible according to moral relativism. CMR
deductively entails that cultures are morally infallible, abundant historical and current evidence
not-with-standing.
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3. Reasoning about Morality is Undermined on CMR
A straightforward consequence of the moral infallibility of cultures on CMR is that it will be
conceptually impossible any reason or argument to be offered against the moral standards of a
culture. Since what is right relative to a culture is defined by that culture’s standards, no rational
argument to the contrary is possible. Those who disagree with a culture’s moral standards,
whether members of that culture or another, have no rational basis for doing so and will simply
be wrong by definition. CMR has it that moral standards are based on the authority of the
culture. The commands of an authority are merely to be followed, not rationally questioned.
There is no room for reasoned argument where things are made so by the say-so of authority. Yet
this stands in sharp contrast to the experience many of us have as moral beings. We do reason
about what is right. We sometimes critical question the moral dictates of authority figures,
cultural norms or even our own opinions. But where there is no truth of the matter independent
of cultural standards, there is no reasoning to do. We can only obey, or challenge cultural
authority with our own. But any challenge to cultural authority will be simply mistaken about the
nature of morality according to CMR.
4. The Moral Reformers Dilemma
The impossibility of moral growth entailed by CMR can be understood in terms of the moral
reformer’s dilemma. We recognize a few remarkable individuals as moral reformers, people
who, we think, improved the moral condition of their society in some way. Common examples
include the Buddha, Jesus, Ghandi, and Martin Luther King Jr. While the relativist can allow that
these individuals changed the moral views of their societies, none can be said to have changed
their societies for the better. This is because the the cultural moral relativist recognizes no
standard of moral goodness independent of what is accepted in a culture and identifying any
changes in a culture’s moral standards as changes for the better requires a standard of goodness
independent of those standards. The relativist is committed to taking the most overt and violent
forms of racism, for example, to be right relative to pre-civil rights American society and wrong
relative to post-civil rights American society. But since standards of goodness are determined by
the prevalent views in a society, there is no standard of goodness to appeal to in evaluating the
change our society underwent in the civil rights movement as a change for the better. According
to societal Moral Relativism, anyone who takes Martin Luther King to have improved American
society by leading it to reject many forms of racism is just mistaken about the nature of morality.
5. Tolerance Undermined
In each of the objections we have considered to moral subjectivism and CMR, we have reasoned
deductively from a clearly formulated relativistic view about the nature of morality to morally
problematic consequences. In each case we have appealed to evidence contrary to the
consequences of the respective forms of moral relativism. That is, we’ve first gotten clear about
the view we are considering, and then we have asked what would follow from that. In each case,
the consequences have been unsavory. We’ll conclude our critical evaluation of moral relativism
with one more such case, the case of tolerance. Here we encounter a sad irony. Fans of cultural
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relativism often endorse relativism in part because it seems to support tolerance and respect for
people of diverse cultures. CMR does take the differing moral standards of different cultures to
be right relative to their respective cultures. It rejects the notion that the moral standards of one
society could be objectively correct. This line of thought has led many who value cultural
diversity and tolerance to embrace Moral Relativism. But this is a mistake. Moral Relativism
does not entail that we should be tolerant of diversity. And this can be seen clearly by reasoning
deductively from what CMR says.
1. According to CMR, whatever a culture deems right is right relative to that culture.
2. Culture X deems intolerance of other cultures right.
3. Intolerance of other cultures is right relative to Culture X.
The argument here is straightforward and valid. CMR entails that we should be tolerant of
diversity if and only if our culture deems tolerance of diversity to be a good thing. If a culture
deems intolerance to be good, then, according to CMR, intolerance is good relative to that group.
Considering one of the other consequences of CMR, since goodness is relativized to cultures, our
culture’s view that tolerance and respect for diversity is good fails to provide the intolerant group
with any grounds for reconsidering its intolerance. CMR thus turns out to be a deeply
conservative view in the sense that it undermines all possible reasons for changing our moral
outlook. CMR is a view that gives a dominant racist culture moral standing and further denies us
any reasonable grounds for arguing against the intolerance of a dominant racist culture. People
who value tolerance and respect for diverse individuals or groups would do much better to
endorse tolerance and respect as objective real moral value. The widespread embrace of CMR
among multiculturalists is ultimately self-defeating.
[For yet another compelling line of argument against Moral Relativism, see Paul Boghossian’s
piece, “The Maze of Moral Relativism.” Boghossian argues that attempts to relativize morality
undermine the normativity of moral beliefs altogether and so ultimately collapse into nihilism,
the view that nothing matters, nothing is good. If you prefer to listen, here’s a Philosophy Bites
podcast in which Boghossian explains his line of argument.]
Relativism and the Social Sciences
Assorted branches of the social sciences are in the business of trying to better understand and
explain the diversity of cultural practices and world views. But in describing culturally based
beliefs about what is right or wrong, they are not defending ethical claims about what is right or
wrong. The social sciences are often concerned with what people in different cultures believe is
right or wrong. And social scientists will often discuss a kind of descriptive cultural relativism in
explaining how what is regarded as good or bad in various cultures is relative to the respective
values and traditions of those cultures. Here, what social scientists refer to as cultural relativism
is best understood as the view that what is regarded as good or bad is often relative to culture
and understanding cultures well requires suspending judgment about culturally relative standards
of good and bad. But the question of what is good or bad remains an open question for ethics.
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Suspending judgment is methodologically important for understanding. This is just as true in
philosophy as it is in sociology or anthropology. We suspend judgment at the stage of trying to
understand a new view. Only once we have a clear understanding can we then turn to critical
evaluation. Social sciences like anthropology and cultural and ethnic studies are out to
understand cultural practices and perspectives. Suspending judgment is essential to doing this
well. So, guarding against ethnocentrism is important when an anthropologist investigates
cultures that are different from her own. But the methodological importance of suspending
judgment for the sake of better understanding is not a permanent obstacle to critical evaluation of
the moral points of view transmitted through culture. Ethics, unlike sociology or anthropology, is
a fundamentally normative discipline. Its goal is to evaluate moral views and try to see which is
most reasonable in light of the kinds of ethical evidence and argument we can uncover. Here we
benefit from the social sciences and the understanding they produce of the moral perspectives of
different cultures.
Divine Command Theory
We have yet to consider the idea that morality is somehow grounded in religion. One popular
view that does so is known as Devine command theory (DCT), the view that morality is just a
matter of God’s commands. According to DCT, what is right is right simply because God
commands it. Note that like moral subjectivism and CMR, DCT takes morality to be based on
say-so of some authority. It’s just that the authority in the case of DCT is God rather than the
individual, culture or society. For this reason, even though DCT makes morality objective in a
sense, DCT is open to some of the same objections we have encountered for other authority-
based views of morality. DCT view makes ethics easy, so long as we can be sure we know what
God commands. If we can somehow be confident about that, ethics requires no critical thinking,
just total obedience. We had a much earlier encounter with DCT in our discussion of Plato’s
dialogue, Euthyphro. In that dialogue Socrates asks if the gods love what is good because it is
good or if what is good is good because the gods love it. DCT is the later option, that what is
good is good because God loves it. The central problem for DCT Plato points towards with the
question famously raised by Socrates is, again, that DCT makes ethics completely arbitrary. In
principle, God could command that anything be right. God could command that we torture
puppies, commit genocide, and treat children like livestock. According to DCT, if God does
command these things, then they are right, end of story. In fact, many people have sincerely
taken God to have commanded these things (perhaps except for the puppy torture). However,
hopefully, the idea that any of these things could be morally right strikes you as absurd. In spite
of our occasionally differing ethical opinions, ethics does seem to be systematic and coherent.
Right and wrong are not completely arbitrary. It seems at least that there is some reasoned
systematicity to our ethical opinions in spite of the differences we sometimes arrive at. If this is
right, then we should reject any meta-ethical view that makes ethics completely arbitrary. And
this means rejecting the view that right and wrong is simply a matter of God’s command.
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The religious believer has better meta-ethical options than DCT. When I share Plato’s
compelling objection to DCT, it’s not uncommon for someone to object that God would never
command us to torture innocent puppies because God is good. I think this is exactly the right
response for a believer to offer. But this response is not a defense of DCT. Any believer that
makes this move is joining Socrates in rejecting DCT and taking God to command what is good
because it is good. If God is essentially good, then what is right is not made right merely by his
command. Rather he commands what he commands because of his goodness. When the religious
believer takes God’s goodness to be what is ethically fundamental he abandons conventionalist
meta-ethics in favor of a kind of theological ethical realism. Of course, the challenge of
understanding God’s good nature remains.
If ethics is a matter of authority as both DCT and moral relativism would have it, then there is no
inquiry to engage in beyond figuring out what the relevant authority says. This would make
ethics a singularly boring topic to look into. But we will find quite a few interesting things to say
about plausible normative ethical theories. So, we might take our inquiry into normative ethics in
the next chapter to constitute one further argument against authority approaches to ethics like
DCT, moral relativism and moral subjectivism. Ethics just isn’t as dull as these views would
have it.
Objective Morality
We’ll now turn to the idea that morality is objective. In thinking of morality as objective, we just
mean that goodness and badness, right and wrong, aren’t determined by the say-so, will,
authority or preferences of any subjects, not even God. Nor do these things depend on our
collective say-so, will or preferences as in the case of moral relativism. Objective morality is
independent of the unique experiences of subjects/ Morality is also independent of the shared
experiences, values and traditions of social groups and cultures. What could it be for morality to
be objective in this sense? One possibility is that there is real value in the world. Perhaps
happiness is fundamentally good, quite aside from the fact that we generally prefer it. Perhaps
people matter objectively and have a kind of moral value that transcends their importance to
themselves or other subjects.
An immediate concern for the idea of real objectively existing value is that we can’t see or
otherwise empirically detect such value. We have no scientific instruments for registering and
measuring the fundamental objective value of happiness, or community, or persons. Of course,
we may subjectively value these things, but then we subjectively value assorted different things
and this seems to favor moral subjectivism or relativism. But bear in mind that my subjective
sense of the importance of people or happiness might just be subjective in the way that my visual
experience is. That is as a subjective indicator of independent objective facts.
So now let’s consider a range of fairly commonplace objections to the idea that morality is
objective. Here we will find that pretty good answers can be given, at least provisionally, to
many of the sources of doubt people often have about the idea of objective morality.
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1. But Morality isn’t like Science!
If objective moral value is real, shouldn’t we expect to find some scientific confirmation of this,
some proof or evidence of its existence? Perhaps, but what sort of proof or evidence we should
we expect to find remains an open question. It may be helpful to consider the sort of proof or
evidence science has been able to provide for the most fundamental features of physical reality.
Note first that we don’t have any direct observational evidence of the existence of fundamental
physical forces like gravity or electromagnetic charge. We know fundamental forces only
through their effects. You can observe the effects of gravitation when you fall off a bike, for
instance. Less hazardously, but also often more depressingly (if you haven’t been riding your
bike, for instance) you can measure, in excruciating detail, the effect of gravity when you step on
the bathroom scale. But nowhere here do you get to observe the force of gravity itself. You only
get to observe its manifestations, it effects. It is far from clear so far how real fundamental moral
value is any worse off. We can’t observe goodness or badness in the way we can a reading on a
bathroom scale or a voltmeter, but perhaps we do have similarly indirect experience of it. We
frequently have very powerful and vivid experiences of indignation when we are wronged. And
we may have experiences of satisfaction when justice is served, or experiences of joy or gratitude
at the realization that something is good. These are aspects of our experience. They are not just
widespread, pervasive parts of our experience of the world. It would not be unreasonable to seek
some account of our moral experience. The too common suggestion that these things are “merely
subjective” doesn’t explain much. Perhaps one thing the subjectivist can explain are the
occasional points of difference in moral approval or disapproval between different individuals.
But we may be far too impressed with the difference among our moral attitudes. Note for
instance, that our moral sense is well enough aligned from one person to the next that we can all
appreciate the often subtle moral dynamics of stories. No one has any trouble recognizing for
instance, the various virtues and vices in the characters in a novel or a play, for instance. We are
all similarly largely on the same page when it comes to identifying fortuitous events and
tragedies.
Even in the case of hot button moral issues, thoughtful people can often appreciate the conflict in
terms of understandable moral values. To take one such current issue, the moral value of having
our government protect us from dangerous criminals crossing our southern border is obvious to
all. Often less easy to appreciate, but also powerfully compelling, is a sympathetic understanding
of the plight of people who seek asylum in our country. There may be a number of narratives and
perspectives to consider in approaching complex issues like immigration. Assorted values may
be at issue in different ways in these diverse perspectives, but even here, the situation doesn’t
present obvious difficulties for the idea of objective morality. On the face of it, security for
citizens matters. And so, does concern for the basic human rights of others. Why not take these
both to be plain truths, not unlike how its plainly true that it hurts to fall off a bicycle (which
itself is rather obviously a bad thing).
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The idea of real objective moral value appears to be on par that of real objective fundamental
physical forces in science so far. We have not found any deep difference between ethical inquiry
into objective moral value and scientific inquiry into the nature of the physical world yet. There
may be important dis-analogies between ethics and science to uncover and explore and we may
get to some of them ahead. But so far so good for the idea of objective moral value.
2. Dogmatism and Intolerance
If there were objective moral truths, wouldn’t this lead to people who have this truth, or at least
think they do, to be dogmatically confident in their correctness? People who are dogmatic in
their moral views do tend to think their views are objectively correct. So perhaps we should be
concerned about this correlation. But is it objectivism that leads to dogmatism, or rather
dogmatism that leads to misguided objectivism? For a person who is dogmatically sure of their
view, asserting their view as objectively correct is sometimes convenient way of rationalizing
their intolerance of other views. But too often, when we do encounter characters of this sort, the
intolerant bigot or religious fanatic for instance, we also find pretty good reasons to think their
views are objectively false. Dogmatism is much more highly correlated with being objectively
wrong than with thinking there is an objective truth of a matter when there isn’t one.
Here we find further useful analogy with science. Science is concerned with discovering
objective matters of fact. But this is not achieved through dogmatic certainty. Progress is science
is more often a matter of overcoming dogmatism through open-minded evidence-based inquiry.
Our reasons for thinking scientific results reveal objective truths is generally strengthened by
testing these views against alternative hypotheses and critical challenges. Dogmatism is an
obstacle to getting at the truth in science simply because it suppresses potentially revealing
evidence. Open minded evidence-based inquiry is our best means of learning what is objectively
true because it aims to consider all possible explanations and evaluating each in light of
conflicting views.
For there to be objective morality is for there to be truths about what is good that don’t depend
on our beliefs, attitudes or wills. A proper appreciation of this should be humbling since it alerts
us to the possibility of getting things wrong. Our confidence in our moral opinions should not be
absolutely certain if morality is objective. Dogmatism only serves to shut us off from potentially
important evidence and argument. This doesn’t mean we should never be confident, it just means
that our degree of confidence should be based on how thoroughly we have considered the
evidence, reasons and objections. Even where this justifies high levels of confidence in our moral
views, we should never be too confident to consider further evidence and insight from other
perspectives. Confidence based on thorough consideration of evidence and reasons is not the
same thing as absolute dogmatism. Well-reasoned confidence is rationally incompatible blinding
certainty.
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3. Won’t Objective Morality lead to Intolerance?
This concern may be based on confusing the existence of objective truths with dogmatic
certainty as we’ve just discussed. And as that discussion suggests, acknowledging our fallibility
in ascertaining objective truths should lead us towards tolerance of competing views, not away
from it. The best way we have of getting at objective truth, in ethics as in science, is to consider
the full range of possible views and critically evaluate each in light of the others and the
evidence. So getting at true moral beliefs suggest that we should be tolerant of diverse moral
beliefs, even given that many of them will get morality wrong.
But then, false moral beliefs are liable to be the springs of bad actions. Must we also tolerate
these? That is a separate and more difficult question. Note that there doesn’t seem to be anything
morally problematic about intolerance of some bad actions. To the contrary, we may have a
moral duty to not tolerant murder, fraud and other bad things. But objective morality may also
require us to respect human autonomy in ways that leave us vulnerable to actions motivated by
false moral beliefs.
4. What about Cultural Diversity
Just as human beings are fallible as individuals, we should acknowledge that human beings are
fallible in groups. Culture’s can get morality wrong. To take a couple of pretty clear examples,
American culture got it wrong in practicing slavery until about a century and a half ago. More
recently, German culture got morality wrong in the holocaust. We’ve already suggested that
cultures that condone honor killings are getting morality wrong. But acknowledging the moral
fallibility of cultural traditions doesn’t by itself suggest we should be intolerant of other cultures.
For starters, where we find a morally significant difference in the practices accepted by two or
more cultures, acknowledging fallibility should alert us to the possibility that it is our own
culture that has things wrong.
Many of the things billed as moral matters in cultural or religious traditions are not really moral
issues at all. There may be objective moral truths, and yet none that speak to how animals should
be butchered, whether women should wear veils, how many spouses a person can have, whether
sins need to be confessed in a particular manner and so forth. Many of the things deemed morally
obligatory or forbidden in many cultural or religious traditions might turn out to be morally
optional according to what is objectively morally correct. Cultural variation along these lines
may be benign. Though we might worry further about how transgressors of otherwise morally
benign cultural standards are treated.
Next, many variations among cultures may amount to different ways of expressing the same
underlying objectively good things. For instance, it may be morally good to express appreciation
for hospitality. Slurping one’s noodles is a way of expressing this in Japan, but not so much in
most other places.
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Finally, cultural identities and the traditions through which these are expressed might in various
ways have positive objective moral value in their own right. Cultural traditions and values bind
communities of people together and to a common shared past. Most of us find positive value in
our varying cultural backgrounds and identities. Objective morality might require tolerance and
respect for these, at least when nothing of greater moral importance is at stake. Morality
probably doesn’t require tolerance and respect of cultural traditions of marauding and pillaging.
5. Objective Moral Truths would be Absolute
We may be concerned that if there are objective moral truths, these would be absolute in the
sense of not allowing for exceptions. Perhaps objective moral truths would be like universal laws
of nature in that they hold in all places and at all times. So, if “thou shalt not kill” is an objective
moral truth, we might worry that this would rule out killing self-defense.
This concern is hasty in linking the idea objective truth to truth that is absolutely universal and
exceptionless. For moral truth to be objective is just for it to hold independent of certain feature
about us like our wills, attitudes and beliefs. So here is a logically coherent, if silly view: there is
just one objective moral truth and it holds that that Jimmy shall not flush his dead goldfish down
the toilet. This view is silly because it fails to explain any of our moral intuitions or evidence.
But it does provide a clear example of how there could be moral truths that don’t involve
exceptionless general rules.
Next, note that many general rules still allow for exceptions. US Tax laws are general rules that
apply to all income earners in the US and they allow deductions for IRA contributions, except if
you have earned more than a certain amount. In this case the exception is explicit and written
into the rules. But this needn’t be the case. In fact, the most fundamental laws of science are
ceteris paribus laws, laws that hold “all things being equal.” So, for instance, Newton’s law of
universal gravitation does not accurately describe the falling of a well-made paper airplane.
Paper airplanes don’t violate the laws of physics. When we try to understand the objective truths
of physics, we do so with the understanding that the forces our fundamental laws describe often
operate in interaction with other forces and the results will not always align neatly with the
generalizations suggested by individual laws. Similarly, when we identify an exception to a
general moral rule like “don’t kill” we expect an explanation of this exception in terms of some
factor that is itself morally compelling. Our moral rules typically hold generally, but ceteris
paribus. It is a mistake to infer absoluteness from objectivity in ethics, just as it is in science and
other realms.
Conclusion
Unless you have had some prior philosophical education, you have probably assumed that
morality is either subjective, a matter of society’s say-so, or a matter of God’s say-so. People of
religious faith tend to go for Divine command theory and non-believers tend to merely substitute
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society’s say-so for Gods. The idea that morality is independent of these things and so can be the
subject of critical inquiry is rather unfashionable outside of philosophical circles. At least that
seems to be the bias in contemporary American culture. This chapter has followed fairly standard
practice in introductory ethics texts in alerting readers to the hazards of popular opinions about
the nature of morality as grounded in authority or say-so, and in defending the notion that
morality is objective against some common misconceptions. This is hardly the end of the meta-
ethical story. There remain several views about the specific nature of morality to explore. But the
popular favorites, Devine command theory and moral relativism, have been nearly universally
rejected by philosophers since Plato for the sorts of reasons we have covered in this chapter.
Hopefully you find these reasons compelling. Morality grounded in authority or say-so doesn’t
afford much opportunity for critical inquiry. The work of this chapter has been to clear away
such intellectual dead ends and prepare the way for inquiry into normative ethics. Critical inquiry
into substantive theories of what is right and wrong, good or bad, presupposes and object of
inquiry that is independent of God’s say so or our subjective say-so, either individually or
collectively. Seeing how such inquiry can proceed may give you further cause for taking the idea
of objective morality seriously. The evidence we have to work with starts with our experience as
moral beings. While this experience is ours, that doesn’t imply that it is subjective in the sense of
simply being up to us to decide. Our moral sense makes more sense, and provides the
opportunity for further inquiry, when our moral experience is understood as a guide to things
larger than ourselves.
Review Questions
1. What is the aim of normative ethical inquiry?
2. What is nihilism?
3. What is moral relativism?
4. Explain moral subjectivism as an individualized form of moral relativism.
5. What is Devine command theory?
6. What is moral realism?
7. How does metaethics differ from normative ethics?
8. Explain the challenge nihilism faces as a skeptical hypothesis.
9. How doe moral subjectivism and other varieties of moral relativism undermine reasoning
about morality?
10. Moral subjectivism makes each person infallible judges of morality relative to
themselves. Why might we regard this as a problem?
11. How does moral subjectivism along with other varieties of moral relativism undermine
the idea of moral growth?
12. Explain the concern about arbitrariness for moral subjectivism and other varieties of
moral relativism.
13. What is attractive about cultural moral relativism (CMR)?
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14. Why should we worry about how what is right relative to a culture gets determined on
CMR?
15. Give some examples that raise concerns about arbitrariness for CMR?
16. Explain the Moral Reformers Dilemma.
17. Why does CMR fail to support tolerance?
18. How does talk of cultural relativism in the social sciences differ from CMR as an ethical
thesis?
19. What is the problem with Devine command theory and what better alternative is open to
religious believers?
20. In what ways is experience based inquiry into morality similar to scientific inquiry?
21. How does experience based inquiry into morality differ from scientific inquiry?
22. How can objective morality accommodate cultural diversity? When should it not?
23. How does objective morality support tolerance?
24. How is dogmatism and intolerance problematic if morality is objective?
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10. Right Action Our focus in this chapter will be normative ethics. Normative ethical principles aren’t intended to
describe how things are, how people think or how they behave. Normative ethics is concerned
how we should be motivated and how we should act. Our project here is to think critically about
which normative ethical principles do the best job of explaining our assorted moral intuitions
about the broadest range of possible cases. We will start with Utilitarianism, a view of right
action based on the idea that happiness has fundamental value. We’ll then examine Kant’s ethics
of respect for persons. On this view persons have intrinsic moral worth, and ethics is concerned
with what respecting the value of persons requires of us.
Both Utilitarianism and Kant’s ethics of respect for persons can be understood as aiming to
formulate action-guiding normative ethical principles. Later in the chapter we will consider
approaches to normative ethics that are not so concerned with identifying exceptionless “laws”
of right action. Our understanding of right action doesn’t have to be expressible in terms of strict
rules. Feminist ethics finds value in caring relationships. But taking relationships to be good
doesn’t directly lead to specific rules for action as Utilitarianism might. Environmental ethicists
have advanced various proposals for expanding the realm of moral relevance to include other
species or systems of life as a whole. This is not to deny that people matter morally, but many
environmental ethicists deny that people are all that matter. Accounting for the value of non-
persons in addition to persons is likely to frustrate attempts to characterize right action in terms
of simple formulas or “moral laws.”
At the end of this chapter we will consider a pluralistic approach to understanding ethical
motivation and action. The suggestion here will be that a substantive realist approach to
normative ethics doesn’t require reducing all ethical value to one fundamental kind. Such a
pluralistic account of ethical value undermines the quest for simple exceptionless or absolute
moral principles. But it also suggests that substantive realist normative ethics doesn’t require
these either.
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is based on the idea that happiness is good. Utilitarian thinkers have traditionally
understood happiness in terms of pleasure and the absence of pain. Utilitarianism’s best known
advocate, John Stuart Mill, characterizes Utilitarianism as the view that “an action is right insofar
as it tends to produce pleasure and the absence of pain.” If happiness, conceived of as pleasure
and the absence of pain, is the one thing that has value, then this criterion of right action should
seem to follow straightforwardly.
In any given scenario, every possible course of action will have a utility. The utility of an action
is the net total of pleasure caused by the action minus any pain caused by that action. In
calculating the utility of an action we are to consider all of the effects of the action, both long run
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and short run. Given the utilities of all available courses of action, Utilitarianism says that the
correct course of action is the one that has the greatest utility. So an action is right if it produces
the greatest net total of pleasure over pain of any available alternative action. Note that
sometimes no possible course of action will produce more pleasure than pain. This is not a
problem for Utilitarianism as we’ve formulated it. Utilitarianism will simply require us to pursue
the lesser evil. The action with the highest utility can still have negative utility.
Utilitarianism places no privileged status on the happiness of the actor. It’s happiness that
matters, not just your happiness. So Utilitarianism can call for great personal sacrifice. The
happiness of my child over the course of his lifetime might require great personal sacrifice on my
part over the course of his first few decades. Utilitarianism says the sacrifice should be made
given that the utility at stake for my child is greater than the utility at stake in my child-rearing
sacrifices.
Likewise, Utilitarianism places no privileged status on the immediate, as opposed to the long
term, effects of the action. An action’s utility is the net amount of pleasure or pain that is
experienced as a result of the action over the long run. So, while it might maximize a small
child’s pleasure in the short run to be given ice cream whenever he wants it, the long run utility
of this might not be so good given the habits formed and the health consequences of an over-
indulged sweet tooth.
There is an obvious concern to address at this point. We often don’t know what the long-run
consequences of our actions will be, and even in the short run we are often uncertain about just
how much pleasure and pain will be caused for the various parties affected. So we might not be
able to calculate the utilities of alternative actions to figure out which action will have the highest
utility. These are practical problems for applying utilitarian theory. But while it might be difficult
to tell on a case by case basis just which course of action will maximize utility, this is not a
problem for Utilitarianism as a normative ethical theory. As a normative ethical theory,
Utilitarianism is aimed at identifying the standard for right action, not telling when a particular
action meets that standard. Setting the standard for right action and figuring out how to meet that
standard are two different projects.
When we speak of utility as pleasure and the absence of pain, we need to take “pleasure” and
“pain” in the broadest sense possible. There are social, intellectual, and aesthetic pleasures to
consider, as well as sensual pleasures. Recognizing this is important to answering what Mill calls
the “doctrine of swine” objection to Utilitarianism. This objection takes Utilitarianism to be unfit
for humans because it recognizes no higher purpose to life than the mere pursuit of pleasure. The
objector takes people to have more noble ends to pursue than mere pleasure. According to this
objection, Utilitarianism is a view of the good that is fit only for swine. Mill responds that it is
the person who raises this objection who portrays human nature in a degrading light, not the
utilitarian theory of right action. People are capable of pleasures beyond mere sensual
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indulgences and the utilitarian theory concerns these as well. Mill then argues that social and
intellectual pleasures are of an intrinsically higher quality than sensual pleasure.
We find a more significant objection to Utilitarian moral theory in the following sort of case:
Consider Bob, who goes to the doctor for a checkup. His doctor finds that Bob is in perfect
health. And his doctor also finds that Bob is biologically compatible with six other patients she
has who are all dying of various sorts of organ failure. Let’s assume that if Bob lives out his days
he will live a typically good life, one that is pleasant to Bob and also brings happiness to his
friends and family. But we will assume that Bob will not discover a cure for AIDS or bring about
world peace. And let us make similar assumptions about the six people suffering from organ
failure. According to simple Act Utilitarianism, it looks like the right thing for Bob’s doctor to
do is to kill Bob and harvest his organs for the benefit of the six patients who will otherwise die.
But intuitively, this would be quite wrong. Act Utilitarianism gets the wrong result in this sort of
case. This case seems to provide a clear counterexample to simple Act Utilitarianism. This looks
like a bit of evidence that calls for a change in theory. But perhaps that change can be a
modification of utilitarian thinking rather than a complete rejection of it.
One move open to the utilitarian is to evaluate rules for acting rather than individual actions. A
version of Rule Utilitarianism might say that the right action is the action that follows the rule
which, in general, will produce the highest utility. A rule that tells doctors to kill their patients
when others require their organs would not have very high utility in general. People would avoid
their doctors and illness would go untreated were such a rule in effect. Rather, the rule that
doctors should do no harm to their patients would have much higher utility in general. So the
move to Rule Utilitarianism seems to avoid the difficulty we found with Act Utilitarianism. Or at
least it seems to when we consider just these two rules.
But here is a rule that would have even higher utility than the rule that doctors should never harm
their patients: doctors should never harm their patients except when doing so would maximize
utility. Now suppose that doctors ordinarily refrain from harming their patients and as a result
people trust their doctors. But in Bob’s case, his doctor realizes that she can maximize utility by
killing Bob and distributing his organs. She can do this in a way that no one will ever discover,
so her harming Bob in this special case will not undermine people’s faith in the medical system.
The possibility of rules with “except when utility is maximized” clauses renders Rule
Utilitarianism vulnerable to the same kinds of counterexamples we found for Act Utilitarianism.
In effect, Rule Utilitarianism collapses back into Act Utilitarianism.
In order to deal with the original problem of Bob and his vital organs, the advocate of Rule
Utilitarianism must find a principled way to exclude certain sorts of utility maximizing rules. I
won’t pursue this matter on behalf of the utilitarian. Rather, I want to consider further just how
simple Act Utilitarianism goes wrong in Bob’s case. Utilitarianism evaluates the goodness of
actions in terms of their consequences. For this reason, Utilitarianism is often referred to as a
consequentialist theory. Utilitarian considerations of good consequences seem to leave out
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something that is ethically important. Specifically, in this case, it leaves out a proper regard for
Bob as person with a will of his own. What makes Bob’s case a problem case is something other
than consequences, namely, his status as a person and the sort of regard this merits. This problem
case for utilitarian moral theory seems to point towards the need for a theory based on the value
of things other than an action’s consequences. Such non-consequentialist ethical theory is called
deontological ethical theory. The best known deontological theory is the ethics of respect for
persons. And this will be our next topic.
Here is a link to John Stuart Mill’s essay Utilitarianism:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11224/11224-h/11224-h.htm
Respect for Persons: Kant’s Moral Theory
Like Utilitarianism, Imannual Kant’s moral theory is grounded in a theory of intrinsic value. But
where the utilitarian takes happiness, conceived of as pleasure and the absence of pain to be what
has intrinsic value, Kant takes the only thing to have moral worth for its own sake to be the
capacity for good will we find in persons. Persons, conceived of as autonomous rational moral
agents, are beings that have intrinsic moral worth and hence beings that deserve moral respect.
The opening passage of Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork for a Metaphysic of Morals proclaims
that “it is impossible to conceive of anything in the world, or indeed beyond it, that can be
understood as good without qualification except for a good will.” This is a clear and elegant
statement of the theory of value that serves as the basis for Kant’s ethical theory of respect for
persons. The one thing that has intrinsic value, for Kant, is the autonomous good will of a
person. That said, Kant does not understand the expression “good will” in the everyday sense. In
everyday discourse we might speak of someone being a person of good will if they want to do
good things. We take the philanthropist’s desire to give to the less fortunate to be an example of
good will in this everyday sense. On Kant’s view, the person of good will wills good things, but
out of a sense of moral duty, not just inclination. Naturally generous philanthropists do not
demonstrate their good will through their giving according to Kant, but selfish greedy persons do
show their good will when they give to the poor out of a recognition of their moral duty to do so
even though they’d really rather not. So it is our ability to recognize a moral duty and will to act
in accordance with it that makes persons beings that have dignity and are therefore worthy of
moral regard. On Kant’s view, our free will, our moral autonomy, is our capacity to act
according to duty as opposed to being a slave to our desires or inclinations. So free will, in the
sense that is associated with moral responsibility, doesn’t mean being free to do as you please
without consequence. Rather, freedom comes with moral responsibility for the intentions we act
on.
So, understanding the good will as the capacity to will and act out of duty or respect for moral
law, we can see having this capacity as part of having a rational, autonomous will. As persons,
we have a free or autonomous will in our capacity to weigh our desires against each other and
against the rational constraints of morality and reach our own determination of the will. We are
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the originators and authors of the principles we act on. On Kant’s view, our free will, our moral
autonomy, is our capacity to act according to duty as opposed to being a slave to our desires or
inclinations. So free will, in the sense that is associated with moral responsibility, doesn’t mean
being free to do as you please without consequence. Rather, freedom comes with moral
responsibility for the intentions we act on. Having an autonomous good will with the capacity to
act from moral duty is central to being a person in the moral sense and it is the basis, the
metaphysical grounding, for an ethics of respect for persons. Now what it is to respect a person
merits some further analysis.
Kant calls his fundamental moral principle the Categorical Imperative. An imperative is a
command. The notion of a Categorical Imperative can be understood in contrast to that of a
hypothetical imperative. A hypothetical imperative tells you what to do in order to achieve some
goal. For instance, “if you want to get a good grade in calculus, work the assignments regularly.”
This claim tells you what to do in order to get a good grade in calculus. But it doesn’t tell you
what to do if you don’t care about getting a good grade. What is distinctive about a Categorical
Imperative is that it tells you how to act regardless of what end or goal you might desire. Kant
holds that if there is a fundamental law of morality, it is a Categorical Imperative. Taking the
fundamental principle of morality to be a Categorical Imperative implies that moral reasons
override other sorts of reasons. You might, for instance, think you have a self-interested reason
to cheat on exam. But if morality is grounded in a Categorical Imperative, then your moral
reason against cheating overrides your self-interested reason for cheating. If we think
considerations of moral obligation trump self-interested considerations, Kant’s idea that the
fundamental law of morality is a Categorical Imperative accounts for this nicely.
Here are two formulations of Kant’s Categorical Imperative:
CIa: Always treat persons (including yourself) as ends in themselves, never merely as a means to
an end.
CIb: Act only on that maxim that you can consistently will to be a universal law.
Kant takes these formulations to be different ways of expressing the same underlying principle of
respect for persons. They certainly don’t appear to be synonymous. But we might take them to
express the same thing in that each formulation would guide one to act in the same way.
The formulation (CIa), tells us to treat individuals as ends in themselves. That is just to say that
persons should be treated as beings that have intrinsic value. To say that persons have intrinsic
value is to say that they have value independent of their usefulness for this or that purpose. (CIa)
does not say that you can never use a person for your own purposes. But it tells us we should
never use a person merely as a means to your own ends. What is the difference? We treat people
as a means to our own ends in ways that are not morally problematic quite often. When I go to
the post office, I treat the clerk as a means to my end of sending a letter. But I do not treat that
person merely as a means to an end. I pursue my end of sending a letter through my interaction
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with the clerk only with the understanding that the clerk is acting autonomously in serving me.
My interaction with the clerk is morally acceptable so long as the clerk is serving me voluntarily,
or acting autonomously for his own reasons. By contrast, we use people merely as a means to an
end if we force them to do our will, or if we deceive them into doing our will. Coercion and
deception are paradigm violations of the Categorical Imperative. In coercing or deceiving
another person, we disrupt his or her autonomy and his or her will. This is what the Categorical
Imperative forbids. Respecting persons requires refraining from violating their autonomy.
Now let’s consider the second formulation CIb. This version, known as the formula of the
universal law, tells us to “act only on that maxim that you could consistently will to be a
universal law.” The maxim of our action is the subjective principle that determines our will. We
act for our own reasons. Different intentions might lead to similar actions. When I want to make
myself a bit more presentable, I shave and shower. My son might perform the same action for a
different reason (to get his mom off his back, for instance). We can identify different maxims in
terms of these different reasons or intentions. For Kant, intentions matter. He evaluates the moral
status of actions not according to the action itself or according to its consequences, but according
to the maxim of the action. The moral status of an action is determined by the actor’s intentions
or reasons for acting.
According to the formula of the universal law, what makes an action morally acceptable is that
its maxim is universalizable. That is, morally permissible action is action that is motivated by an
intention that we can rationally will that others act on similarly. A morally prohibited action is
just one where we can’t rationally will that our maxim is universally followed. Deception and
coercion are both paradigm cases of acting wrongly according to Kant. In both cases, our maxim
involves violating the autonomy of another rational being and this is something that we, as
rationally autonomous beings ourselves, could not consistently will to be a universal law.
According to Kant, there is a contradiction involved in a rational autonomous being willing that
autonomy be universally coercively or deceptively violated. This would involve a rational
autonomous being willing the violation of its own rational autonomy. Acting out of moral duty is
a matter of acting only on maxims that we can rationally will others act on as well. The person of
good will recognizes the humanity of others by not making any special exception for herself
even when her interests or inclination would be served by doing so.
There is no higher moral authority than the rational autonomous person, according to Kant.
Morality is not a matter of following rules laid down by some higher authority. It is rather a
matter of writing rules for ourselves that are compatible with the rational autonomous nature we
share with other persons. We show respect for others through restraining our own will in ways
that demonstrate our recognition of them as moral equals.
Primary Source Reading:
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Kant’s Groundwork for a Metaphysic of Morals can be found here:
http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/kgw.html
Ethical Pluralism
In ethical theory, we can understand pluralism as the view that there is a plurality of
fundamentally good things. Traditionally, ethicists have tried to analyze right and wrong action
in terms of a single fundamental underlying kind of value. We can call this kind of approach
ethical monism. For utilitarians that single value is happiness, for Kantian respect for persons
theorists, it is the value of the person. Ethical Pluralism allows that there may be multiple kinds
of fundamental and irreducible value in the world. Happiness and respect for persons might be
among these, but there may be others yet. Here I’ll explain how pluralism so understood differs
from Moral Relativism and how it is better suited than relativism and monist ethical theories to
the goals of social justice sought by pluralism in a broader sense of valuing diversity.
Recall that according to Moral Relativism, what makes something right relative to a group is just
that it is deemed to be right by that group. This is a pretty loose characterization of the view. We
could get a bit more specific by asking just what the relevant groups are. We would also want to
ask who gets to decide for that group, because according to Moral Relativism and other
conventionalist views of morality (like Divine Command Theory) right and wrong, good and
bad, are ultimately questions of authority.
Views that take morality to be matter of authority, whether it’s God’s, the culture’s collectively,
the king’s or the chess club’s authority, all suffer the same basic defect. They render right and
wrong entirely arbitrary. If someone or some group gets to decide what’s right and wrong, then
anything can be right or wrong. According to CMR, whatever a culture deems to be morally right
is right relative to it. So, if our culture says that homophobia, sexism, and racism are fine, then
they are what is right relative to our culture and that’s the end of it. If some people don’t like it,
that’s just too bad. Moral Relativism denies them any objective standpoint from which to
complain or any possibility of providing reasons for changing things. Complaints about the
oppressiveness of the dominant group amount to nothing more than the whininess of losers. The
group that dominates is perfectly well within its rights to do so. This hardly sounds like a
plausible account of social justice. But it is straightforwardly entailed by Moral Relativism and
that’s exactly why Moral Relativism is an awful ethical theory. This much is just a bit of review
from the last chapter. But bear this in mind for the purpose of recognizing how Ethical Pluralism
avoids this defect. For according to Ethical Pluralism the fundamental ethical values are real. The
importance of happiness comes with the existence of pleasure. The value of respect for persons
comes with the existence of persons. This doesn’t depend on the whim or say-so of any
authority.
Suppose morality doesn’t depend on the say-so of cultures, God, or any other individual or
group. On this view goodness is “out there” in the realm of things to be discovered. It needn’t be
“way out there,” like goodness in some cosmic sense or goodness for the universe at large. We’re
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just interested in goodness for human beings and this might have lots to do with our nature as
persons. So let us set aside the relativist’s claim that goodness is decided by us and ask what else
goodness for humans might be. In doing so, we take goodness to be an appropriate object for
inquiry, not merely a matter of custom, something somebody gets to decide, or a tool for tyranny.
We have some evidence to guide us in this inquiry and it includes all of our varying perspectives
on what is good (the more the better). But just as in the sciences, our evidence is fallible and
needs to be tested, both against other evidence and the explanatory power of theory.
From the 17th through the 19th centuries, the Holy Grail in ethical theorizing was to find a single,
rationally defensible criterion of right action. This quest was dominated by utilitarians like
Bentham and Mill, and respect for persons theorists like Kant. Both theoretical approaches are
value monist, that is, they take there to be just one thing that has value fundamentally. For the
utilitarian it is happiness that matters and the goal is to formulate a single law of morally right
action that aims at maximizing happiness. For Kant it is the good will, or the dignity of the
person that matters, and the goal is to establish a single moral law that properly captures what it
means to respect the value of the person.
The utilitarian might start with the idea that an action is right if it produces the greatest amount
of happiness of any available action. But this clearly conflicts with respect for persons as we saw
above in the case of Bob and his vital organs. There are various moves a utilitarian might make
to try to address this case, but there are more subtle cases yet where Utilitarianism seems to
conflict with respect for persons. So, it looks like we can’t coherently sign on to both a utilitarian
and a Kantian criterion of right action since they will conflict in interesting ways. Utilitarian
standards of right action tend to be logically incompatible with standards like Kant’s Categorical
Imperative. If what we are looking for is a single criterion of right action that is based on a single
kind of ultimate ethical value, it looks like we have to pick a single winner among competing
monist ethical theories. But perhaps this sets the wrong kind of goal for ethical theory.
The idea that there might be a single universal and absolute criterion of morally right action
strikes many who value cultural diversity as highly problematic. But lest we abandon monist
approaches to ethical theory too quickly, we should note that the standards of right action offered
by both the utilitarian and the Kantian are highly abstract and for this reason they are quite
compatible with a rich range of diversity in more specific derivative guidelines for action. In
fact, lots of cultural diversity can be explained in terms of more broadly shared underlying moral
values. Eating the dead may be seen as a way of honoring them in one culture, but be considered
a sacrilege in another culture. Both of these diverse practices can be seen as diverse ways of
expressing respect for persons. The difference between cultures in this case is not really a
difference of fundamental moral values, but a difference in how these are to be expressed.
Similarly we consider infanticide morally wrong while other cultures facing more difficult
environmental pressures may practice it routinely. What may seem like conflicting moral
standards at this more specific derivative level might instead be understood as differing ways of
maximizing happiness that are appropriate for the starkly different circumstances that the
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respective cultures must deal with. So absolutist, universalizing, monist ethical theories turn out
to be considerably more accommodating of cultural diversity than we might have thought at first.
Still, they may not be flexible enough.
It might be that some cultures value respect for persons over happiness while others value
happiness at the expense of respect for persons and others yet value community or kinship
relations more than happiness or respect for individual persons. That is, we might find conflicts
in the most basic or fundamental moral values upheld by diverse cultures. How can ethical
theory account for this without begging questions against one set of cultural values or another?
Recall that the ethical monist is out to discover a single rationally defensible moral truth that is
grounded in a single kind of moral value. In discussing monist ethical theories I insisted that you
can’t be both a utilitarian and a Kantian respect-for-persons theorist. This is because these
theories offer logically incompatible principles of morally right action. There will be actions
(like harvesting the healthy patient’s organs in the simple versions) that one theory will deem to
be right and the other will deem to be wrong. So, you can’t coherently hold both a utilitarian
principle of right action and a Kantain principle of right action to be true. If the principles
disagree on even a few cases, they can’t both be true. But let’s set principles aside for a moment.
I’m not suggesting we be unprincipled, I just want us to focus on the underlying moral values
without worrying about truths that might be based on them. There is nothing logically incoherent
about taking happiness and respect for persons to both be good in fundamental ways. And there
may be other plausible candidates for fundamental goodness. Happiness and respect were just the
ones that got most of the attention in the 18th and 19th century. Since then, feminist philosophers
have argued that we should recognize a fundamental kind of value in caring relationships.
Environmental ethicists have argued that we should recognize a fundamental kind of value in the
natural world. Hindus and Buddhists have long suggested that there is a kind of fundamental
value in consciousness.
Perhaps this short list is long enough. Or perhaps it is already too long. A moral value is only
fundamental if it can’t be explained and supported in terms of some other fundamental value. So
if caring relationships matter just because they bring happiness to human lives, then we already
have this kind of value covered when we recognize happiness as a kind of fundamental value.
But it is not at all clear that happiness fully explains the value of caring relationships. There are
issues to explore here and feminist philosophers are just starting to map out this terrain. In any
case, kinds of fundamental value might be rare, but still plural.
So what should ethical theory say about cultures that differ in the fundamental values that shape
their customs and codes? Monist approaches to ethical theory would insist that we pick winners
in this kind of situation. But should we? Certainly, in some cases we should. The fundamental
values of Nazi culture were racist through and through. Good ethical theory should not be
accommodating this kind of cultural diversity at all. Recall that our most compelling argument
against Moral Relativism was that it is committed to accepting that racism is right relative to
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racist societies and our condemnation of racism has no more moral force than their endorsement
of it.
But what about cases like Confucian cultures that give kinship relationships a higher priority
than respect for persons? The more individualistic cultures of the West would favor respect for
persons. Must we pick a winner here? Monist ethical theories would insist. But pluralism about
ethical value offers us a few other options. The ethical pluralist can say that both cultures are
structured around worthy fundamental values and neither unjustly favors one kind of
fundamental value at the expense of another. Or a pluralist might allow that some ways of
prioritizing worthy fundamental ethical values really are better than others, but that there is no
strict rational formula for working out which is best. Because we have a plurality of worthy
fundamental ethical values and these are not reducible to each other or anything more basic,
rigorous rational methods might not be up to settling the matter and the best we can hope for is
good judgment. But however we settle these issues, pluralism about fundamental ethical value
opens some new avenues for counting a broader range of cultural diversity as ethically sound.
There are many issues to address yet in exploring Ethical Pluralism and I won’t get to them all
here. But a few loom too large to ignore. In particular, you might be worried that over the past
few paragraphs I merely assumed that the fundamental values of Confucian cultures are worthy
ethical values but the fundamental values of Nazi culture aren’t. How do we figure out which
fundamental values are worthy and merit a place in our ethical theorizing and which don’t?
Monist ethical thinkers like Kant and Mill faced the same issue, they were just limiting
themselves to identifying one kind of value. If I’m given a fundamental value, say respect for
persons, then I can argue for more derivative values, being honest for instance, on the grounds
that these are required for respecting persons. But when it comes to fundamental values, this
strategy for justifying value is no longer open. I’ve come to the end of the explanatory and
justificatory line. So what now? What’s my evidence for taking some fundamental values to be
worthy ethical values but not others? The evidence in ethics is not like the evidence in physics.
But then the evidence in physics is not really like the evidence in anthropology. Still, I think we
do have evidence in ethics. The evidence in ethics consists of our ethical intuitions. We do have
a moral sense about things.
Our ethical intuitions do differ around lots of issues, but that’s not an argument for skepticism or
relativism. People disagree about how to understand scientific evidence, too. The evidence of our
senses can be misleading and even systematically distorted. We certainly don’t just sense that the
earth spins and travels around the sun. What we sense seems quite contrary to the truth of this
matter. So the evidence provided by our ethical intuitions is fallible and even has the potential
for misleading us systematically. Things are no different here than they are in any branch of
inquiry. Our job as inquirers in ethics is to account for the evidence of our various ethical
intuitions as best we can by formulating theories that help make sense out of them. As we try to
systematize our ethical intuitions we will encounter problem areas where some intuitions conflict
with our best theories and explanations. Since our intuitions are fallible, such conflicts don’t
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automatically mean our theories are just wrong. There might be creative ways to reconcile such
evidence with our best theories, or we might find that the evidence is defective or distorted in
some way, or we might find grounds to alter or refine our theories in light of the evidence. There
are at least these different paths our inquiry might take. Likewise, each of these paths is open
when the evidence of the senses seems to conflict with our scientific theories. Inquiry in ethics is
pretty much like other kinds of inquiry. Our reasoning engages us in a continual negotiation
between our experience and how to best understand it. Our experience shapes our theoretical
understanding and our theoretical understanding shapes our experience in turn in a more or less
organic process of intellectual growth. Reason doesn’t dictate any outcomes, it merely provides
the system of currency in which this negotiation towards deeper understanding takes place.
So let’s illustrate how this negotiation works with the case of the Nazis. Why reject their
fundamentally racist values? There are probably lots of good reasons, but here’s one: The value
of respect for persons accounts for a very broad range of ethical intuitions about how we should
treat people and there is no way to reconcile general respect for persons with Nazi racism. So
much the worse for Nazi racist values, they don’t merit any place in our ethical theory. The
ethical intuitions of Nazis should be rejected as systematically distorted.
The last issue I’ll take up here has to do with oneness. Just why is oneness so special? Why
would philosophers like Kant and Mill think it so important to have just one kind of fundamental
ethical value? One powerful appeal of oneness is that is allows for a high degree of precision and
rigor. Bentham even hoped that we would one day have a calculus of utility that would allow us
to rigorously prove which actions will maximize utility and therefore be right. The powerful
appeal of oneness here is that it allows us to completely replace human judgment with rational
calculation. We have yet to outgrow this intellectual lust for reduction. Many of us still want to
see the sciences as in some way reducible to just one, physics. But philosophers of science have
been raising a steady stream of questions about our reductionistic inclinations over the past few
decades. And even physics itself appears to be stuck with a kind of force pluralism. The
fundamental forces, according to our best theory, include nuclear, gravitational, and electrical
forces. We have specific theories that explain the behavior of things if we abstract away from
other forces and focus only on gravity. And we have specific theories that explain the electrical
behavior of things, but only when we ignore other forces that might be at play. Similarly, some
version of Utilitarianism might give us the ethical truth about the value of happiness at least
when no other important ethical values are relevant. And some interpretation of Kant might give
us ethical principles that get at the truth so long as we abstract away from ethical values other
than the moral dignity of persons. Plurality in both ethics and physics denies us the satisfaction
of a single specific formula that accounts for absolutely everything. But that shouldn’t bother us
too much. I rather doubt that this kind of intellectual satisfaction is really worthy of human
beings.
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Review and Discussion Questions
1. What, according to Utilitarianism, has fundamental value?
2. What is the utility of an action?
3. How does Mill’s Utilitarianism understand happiness?
4. What is it for an action to be right according to Act Utilitarianism?
5. Describe a problem case for Utilitarianism.
6. Explain Rule Utilitarianism and the risk it faces of collapsing back in to act Utilitarianism
7. What has fundamental value according to Kant?
8. What is the difference between a hypothetical imperative and a Categorical Imperative?
9. Explain a version of Kant’s Categorical Imperative.
10. What does it mean to refer to Utilitarianism and Kant’s respect-for-persons theory as
monist theories?
11. Explain Ethical Pluralism.
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11. Social Justice Social justice is just the idea of goodness as applied to social groups. When asked what it means
for a society to be just, most of us will think of things like freedom and equality. But things
haven’t always been thus. Valuing liberty and freedom is a pretty recent innovation. We have
already noted John Locke as an early advocate of liberal political thinking in the 17th century.
Older conceptions of justice were neither egalitarian nor freedom loving. Here we’ll consider
Plato’s.
Plato develops his conception of justice in the Republic. Here Plato develops a view of the ideal
state as modeled on that of the ideal person. The state is understood as the person writ large. The
idea of justice, for Plato, was as much a virtue of the individual person as of the state. Justice was
seen as a kind of meta-virtue. The just person is the person who has all the other virtues and has
them in the appropriate integrated balance. People have various capacities and abilities and we
have various virtues that correspond to those abilities. We can be courageous in facing threats,
temperate in managing our appetites, diligent in carrying out our projects, and wise in
deliberating about what to do and how. To be a just person is for the various abilities relevant to
the various virtues to be playing their proper role. When we turn to the justice of communities,
we find different individuals playing the various roles. We want the virtue of wisdom in the
ruling class, the virtue of courage in the military class, and the virtues of temperance and
diligence in the business class. The just community, in Plato’s view, is the community where the
various elements stick to their proper roles and cultivate the virtues appropriate to those roles.
Though Athens was a democracy, Plato was no fan of democracy. In his dialogues he has
Socrates repeatedly lampooning democracy as rule by the least qualified. This is because the
leaders in a democracy are not chosen by the wise, but by the majority, and the majority is often
easily manipulated by bad actors. As a result, Plato endorsed a kind of elitism, the rule by experts
or “philosopher kings.” His idea of justice is one where the various functions of society are
carried out by those who have the wisdom, expertise and excellence appropriate to the specific
role. While Plato places no particular value on equality or freedom for individuals, his ideal state
is a meritocracy where everyone has equal opportunity to find his or her appropriate place
through a vigorous system of public education. The point of equal opportunity in this
meritocratic system was not to be fair to individuals, though. The goal was to identify and
cultivate talent wherever it is to be found.
However we might feel about the inegalitarian view of justice Plato develops in the Republic, he
raises an important problem that every political system faces. Specifically, how do we reliably
fill positions of power with people who are competent and will conduct themselves in the interest
of the public. Plato’s answer to the competence issue was to select leaders through a rigorous
meritocratic education system. To discourage leaders from abusing their power to serve personal
ends rather than the good of the state, Plato also would have his philosopher kings be wards of
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the state for life, owning no personal property and even severing all family ties to avoid the
corrupting tendencies of self-interest. We should not here that the inegalitarian aspects of Plato’s
system don’t address the problems of incompetence and corruption, though. The inegalitarian
aspects of Plato’s political thought helped to legitimize a long tradition of top-down governance
by kings, religious authority, and military might in the Europe and this history includes ample
and often colorful stories of incompetence and corruption. It’s only in the last few centuries that
ideals of equal individual rights and freedoms begin to gain traction. We’ll turn to these now.
Freedom and Equality We should note at the outset that freedom and equality are both highly ambiguous notions. We
can be equal or unequal in a wide variety of different ways. Socialism, traditionally understood
as public ownership of the means of production, emphasizes equality of wealth and resources in
ways that are liable to frustrate some kinds of freedom. In more liberal traditions, those that
emphasize liberty, equality is incorporated in terms of equal liberties, equal treatment before the
law, equal opportunity, equal access to public goods, and so forth. Talk of freedom can also refer
to assorted different things. Freedom can be thought of in negative terms as in being free from
the dominance of others or in positive terms as in being free to do what we like with things that
are ours. And there are many kinds of freedom. Economic freedom is one thing, freedom of
conscience is another. Then there is freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of
movement, and so forth. So clarifying our political philosophy in liberal traditions requires being
fairly specific about what we mean by talk of freedom and equality. Not everyone who claims to
love freedom and equality loves the same thing.
Here we will focus on two giants of liberal political philosophy, John Locke and John Rawls.
What makes a political philosophy a liberal political philosophy is just that it takes individual
liberty, in one form or another, to be a fundamental virtue of the just state or society. So liberal
political thought stands in contrast to both communism on the left and fascism or nationalism on
the right. Liberalism rejects aristocracy, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, oligarchy, and
plutocracy (I’ll leave those fancy words for you to look up). Liberal political philosophy,
understood literally as political philosophy that places a high priority on liberty, is a broad
tradition that includes both mainstream “liberal” and “conservative” political thinking according
to more familiar labels in American politics. You will find John Locke’s thinking to be more in
line with contemporary conservativism and John Rawls thought to be more reflective of
contemporary political liberals. We’ll begin with John Locke
John Locke
John Locke’s First Treatise on Government was an extended argument against the European
system of aristocracy and the alleged divine birth right of rulers. Of course, in a society that had
only known government by the rule of kings, this raises an obvious question. If human society is
not legitimately organized by the authority of a ruling class, then how is it to be organized?
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Locke addresses this issue in his Second Treatise on Government which can be found
here: http://jim.com/2ndtreat.htm
Locke’s positive political theory starts with thinking about what morality demands in the absence
of government. According to Locke, in the state of nature (or in the absence of government)
people exist in a state of perfect freedom. This partly means that people are free to pursue their
own happiness and well being. But this perfect freedom is not a license to do whatever one likes
or to treat others as one likes. Rather, Locke would understand the liberty we have a natural right
to as freedom from domination and coercion.
The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason,
which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and
independent, no one ought to harm another in his life (The Second Treatise of
Government, Chpt. 2 Sect. 6)
By the moral law of nature, one is not justified in assaulting others except as retribution for an
injustice. Likewise, one is not justified in taking another’s property except as redress for that
person taking or destroying one’s own property. But this state of nature inevitably leads to a state
of chaos because people are not very good arbiters of justice in their own case. They are prone to
inflate the wrongs committed against themselves and seek too much in the way of redress or
retribution.
Government is justified as the most effective way of securing the natural rights of individuals. In
joining civil society, we voluntarily turn our right to protect and enforce our individual rights
over to the state. The legitimate function of the state is to secure the equality liberty that people
have a natural right to. This view places rather strict limits on the legitimate functions of
government. The point of government is just to secure our liberty and its function should
therefore be limited to that. Where a government goes beyond this liberty securing role, Locke
says people are justified in rebelling against the government.
Just what are the rights and liberties government serves to protect? Self ownership is central to
the natural rights equally enjoyed by all. In fact, the idea of self-ownership captures much of how
Locke understand individual liberty. This clearly speaks against slavery and other forms of
domination or oppression. If a person own’s herself by natural law, then clearly she can’t also be
owned by another. Property rights are then justified as an extension of self ownership. Locke
sees all of nature as initially held in common. When a person “mixes her labor with the stuff of
the earth,” say, by planting a tree or fashioning a tool from a branch, she acquires a right to the
fruits of her labor as an extension of her right of self ownership. Here Locke offers a compelling
philosophical justification for property rights.
Locke also recognizes limits to the extent of property rights. Specifically, A person does not
have a right to more property than they can make use of. So, if the apple trees I plant produce
more apples than I can harvest and preserve, I have no grounds for complaint when a passerby
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picks a few for himself. Above and beyond what one can make use of, the fruits of one’s labor
return to the commons and are to be freely available to others. This limitation on property rights
is harder to understand once we introduce a money economy where there are no limits to how
much wealth I can set aside for future use and many more ways in which I might put that wealth
to use. All the same, it would be hard to argue that anyone can make practical use of say, more
than 50 million dollars.
The notion that there is an injustice in funding a social safety net for the less well off with taxes
on the more affluent has its roots in a Lockean conception of property rights as natural rights that
are closely tied to human liberty. On Locke’s view, when we mix our labor with the stuff of the
earth, the fruit of our labor is ours by natural right. It is an extension of our natural right to our
own selves. Thus, property rights, on Locke’s view, are closely tied to human liberty. The
contemporary philosopher Robert Nozick extends Locke’s line of thought concerning property
rights in his entitlement conception of social justice. On Nozick’s view, any distribution of
property and wealth, no matter how unequal, is socially just so long as it was arrived at by just
means. Acquiring wealth by one’s labor and then building on that through fair trades (those not
involving coercion or deception) will be fair. Taxation beyond what is necessary to keep
property rights (and hence human liberty) secure will be an injustice. In fact, it will be a variety
of theft. Something along the lines of the views of Locke and Nozick has inspired a good deal of
the anti-tax, small government sentiment that has been so influential in U.S. politics for the past
30 years or so. Liberty is seen as closely tied to property rights. To the degree that the
government taxes citizens, it takes their property and thereby limits their freedom. It is worth
noting that Nozick’s view goes well beyond Locke in stripping limits from property rights.
Nozick is most closely associated with libertarian political thought. While libertarian thought
offers principled grounds for accepting extreme inequality, it offers very little in the way of
addressing the social instability that can result from this.
A further limitation on property rights according to Locke holds that the accumulation of private
property constitutes no injustice to others “at least where there is enough and as good, left in the
commons for others.” Locke takes the natural world and all the resources in it to be a
commonwealth. That is, the earth, the waters, skies, and the various systems they contain are
taken to be commonly owned by all. I draw from the resources of nature for raw materials when
I create something I can then claim as property. As long as there is “as enough and as good” left
for others, my accumulation of private property doesn’t limit the liberty of anyone else.
Locke lived in a time when natural resources appeared to be endlessly bountiful and any
motivated person who wasn’t happy with the available distribution of property could hop a ship
to the new world and homestead a piece of land (albeit one that was likely formerly occupied by
Native Americans). Where natural resources can be regarded as practically unlimited, my
neighbor’s great wealth doesn’t place any restriction on me investing my energy in creating
wealth of my own. But if natural resources are limited and my neighbor has claimed much of
what is available in the creation of his private property, then my opportunities are limited to that
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degree. We can no longer sustain the illusion that natural resources are unlimited. And as we
bump up against those limits, Locke’s “enough and as good” proviso becomes much more
significant and a problem known as the tragedy of the commons deserves some careful attention.
The Tragedy of the Commons
Garritt Hardin is well known for his clear articulation of the Tragedy of the Commons in the late
sixties. Hardin was mainly concerned about human population, but this is just one instance of a
much broader kind of problem. A tragedy of the commons is any case where some commonly
held resource gets exhausted to the point where it has little value left to offer. Such a tragedy is
bound to occur eventually whenever a commonly held resource is finite and freely utilized by
self-interested agents.
Hardin introduces the notion of the tragedy of the commons with a tale about the fate of
shepherd who share a pasture in common. Each shepherd notes that if he runs one more animal
on the commonly held pasture, he will get the full benefit of that animal’s value when he takes it
to market, but since the pasture is held in common, he will bear only a fraction of the cost of
raising the animal. As a result, each shepherd finds it in his or her self-interest to run an
additional animal on the pasture, and then another and another until the commonly held pasture
is depleted to the point where it of no use to anyone. This dynamic is at work in a broad range of
issues including fisheries, fresh water supplies, air pollution, and climate change.
Once we have a clear understanding of the logic of the commons, it is equally clear that there are
only a limited number of ways to avoid a tragedy of the commons. Again, a tragedy of the
commons is the inevitable result whenever we have a finite commons that is freely utilized by
self-interested agents. The only way to avoid a tragedy of the commons is to prevent one or
another of the three conditions that give rise to one. Perhaps we cannot expect individuals to
consistently refrain from acting on their own interests. But there remain the possibilities of
regulating access to the commons or expanding the commons in some way. In the case of climate
change, some mitigation strategies like carbon sequestration can be seen as ways of expanding
the commons. The commons in this case is the atmosphere which we use as a sink for carbon
when we burn fossil fuels. The CO2 released by even quite a few cars and furnaces poses no
serious problem. But beyond a certain point, carbon emissions become a serious problem. The
atmosphere can’t soak up more without disrupting systems we all rely on in many ways.
Attempts to capture carbon and sequester it reduce the load on the atmosphere as a carbon sink.
One way to think of this is as a strategy for expanding our overall carbon sink by supplementing
the atmosphere with underground carbon storage facilities (or, perhaps more realistically, trees
and soil that sequester carbon, too). Another example of expanding the commons would be state-
run fish hatcheries to rebuild fish populations depleted through fishing.
But in many cases, notably including climate change, strategies for expanding the commons
aren’t sufficient for avoiding a tragedy of the commons. Given this, only one possible means of
avoiding a tragedy of the commons remains, and that is regulating the use of the commons. We
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routinely accept of restrictions on our liberty as a means of avoiding a tragedy of the commons.
In the early 70s the air in Southern California was barely breathable do the pollution from cars.
So, California imposed stiff regulations on vehicle emissions. Southern California is still often
smoggy, generally not as bad as it once was. Since it did not significantly impact people’s
freedom to drive, requiring pollution controls on cars was a pretty unobtrusive kind of regulation.
Sometimes we regulate the use of a commonly held resource by charging people to use it and
this can take many forms from campground fees to special taxes based on use like car tabs that
fund public transportation (the roadways are a commons that become much less valuable when
too many people drive and too few use transit). Sometimes we do this with added limits on the
use of a commonly held resource as in the case of fishing licenses with catch limits. Proposals to
put a price on carbon in the form of energy taxes or cap and trade systems for carbon emissions
are relatively unobtrusive attempts to regulate the use of the atmosphere as a carbon sink. Energy
taxes would regulate use of the atmosphere by charging a fee. Cap and trade systems are a bit
more complex and involve limits on emissions together with a market mechanism for rewarding
innovative ways of cutting emissions. It’s worth noting that climate change is a much more
difficult problem than your typical tragedy of the commons due to some challenging
asymmetries. For instance, since climate change is a global and international problem, those who
must regulate their use of the atmosphere to avoid a tragedy of the commons are a different
group of people from those who will suffer the consequences. We might hope that the current
generation will care enough about its descendants to take action. But after failing to act for a
couple of decades, we are already entering the stage of lasting consequences and so far, a
generation (mine) has passed the mounting problem on to the next generation (likely yours).
Once we have a clear understanding of the logic of the commons, it seems pretty obvious that
regulating the use of commonly held resources is often called for. We are very prone to think of
government regulation as an imposition on our liberty. But the destruction of commonly held
resources poses a much greater imposition on our liberty. So, regulation to avoid a tragedy of the
commons is quite in line with Locke’s view that the legitimate role of government is to secure
out liberty. This should help us understand why conservatives as well as liberals were proponents
of environmental regulation through the 60s and the 70s.
Here is a link to Garritt Hardin’s article, “The Tragedy of the Commons”
http://dieoff.org/page95.htm
The System
Now we will consider an objection to Locke’s political philosophy, one that will set the stage for
our discussion of John Rawls. The political thought of Locke is highly individualist. One aspect
of this is that Locke takes the rights and liberties of individuals to be the only thing that matters
in political philosophy. Beyond this, Locke would limit the legitimate role of government to
securing those individual rights and liberties. Is this enough to secure justice?
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Even when our rights and liberties are secured, our lives are significantly affected for better or
worse by what I’ll refer as “the system.” So, what is this system? The system we have in a
society is constituted by various subsystems like the market economy, our tax system, our
education, health care and environmental management systems. As Rawls sees it, government
has important work to do in establishing and upholding systems that are fair. Here Rawls goes
beyond Locke. Rawls political philosophy still prioritizes individual rights and liberties. But
Rawls sees something more at play. Justice in a society also depends on having a fair system.
Now what is it for a system to be fair? This is the question Rawls sets out to answer. But before
we get to that, let’s explore the system some and consider a few of the ways we rely on
government to sustain the system.
We don’t create wealth from our own labor and ingenuity in a social vacuum. With the possible
exception of the vegetables I grow in my garden, none of my wealth is entirely the product of
mixing my labor with the stuff of the earth. Rather, nearly all of our productive activity is carried
out in the context of a complex fabric of social structures and interrelations buoyed by a
substantial technological infrastructure. Enjoying the fruits of my labor nearly always requires
doing business with someone else and what I get out of this depends as much on the favorable
social environment and technological infrastructure that makes doing business possible as it does
on the efforts I bring to the deal. In light of this, the view of property rights offered by Locke is
unrealistically individualistic in that falsely assumes property and wealth is the product of
individual effort alone.
Having a functioning well-ordered community is a necessary condition for succeeding in every
line of business (even gangsters depend on the system they exploit). The businessman who has
profited from a fair exchange with his customers depends on the underlying system that makes it
possible for him to do his business in the first place. His success may require a healthy and well-
educated workforce, stability in the economic system, a citizenry that is well informed enough to
politically sustain just social institutions, a citizenry that respects the law, a customer base that is
doing well enough themselves to afford his product and so forth. It will also depend on physical
infrastructure we rely on the government to provide or at least regulate. Roads and bridges to
sewer systems are a few examples. Utility companies are often private businesses, but these
require government oversight and regulation since they constitute natural monopolies. All of
these things and others are hidden ingredients in the wealth created through the businessman’s
activities. Given this insight into the kind of sophisticated market economy we have, taxation for
the maintenance and upkeep of our various social and infrastructure systems is not theft, but fair
compensation for the benefits we derive from participating in the system we are productive
members of. Limiting the role of government to the protection of rights and liberties turns a blind
eye to need for government involvement in the upkeep of the various systems we all depend on.
The Locke/Nozick approach to social justice where the legitimate activity of government is
limited to securing our natural rights and liberties is roughly analogous to field biologists aiming
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to secure the well-being of squirrels without giving any regard to the health of the ecosystem that
sustains them.
Given some sense of the importance of the various systems we rely on government to uphold and
maintain we can turn our attention to Rawls and the concept of fairness.
Justice as Fairness Where all other things are equal, we are liable to think of fairness in terms of equal treatment.
The fair way to divide a cookie between three equally hungry boys is into three equal sized parts.
Now what if one of the boys had a piece of chocolate cake an hour ago. What is fair isn’t
completely obvious in this case. And in the real world, things are seldom equal.
Now consider the case of Jones and his three sons. Jone’s has done well in life and build up a
modest fortune of 1.5 million dollars. But now his life is coming to and end as he enters the late
stages of terminal cancer. So, he now faces with the question of how to divide his modest fortune
among his three sons. Again, all other things being equal, the fair thing to do would be to give
each a half million. But things aren’t equal. Jones’ eldest son, John, is a brilliant young man. He
is near the end of a PhD. In computer science at Stanford and he is being aggressively recruited
for a high paying Silicon Valley job with Google. Jones second son, James, is a star athlete on a
full scholarship at UCLA where he is majoring in business. In addition to being talented on the
basketball court, James is highly popular, well regarded for his forthright and easygoing manner,
trusted and liked by peers and superiors alike. The third son, Joe, well, he’s a nice guy. He has no
particular talents. He has tried hard in school, but hasn’t done especially well. He’s a bit
awkward socially, the sort of guy that just isn’t going to find a date for the prom. In addition, he
has a fairly expensive lifetime medical condition, he’s type 1 diabetic. What would be the fair
way to divvy up his modest fortune among his three sons?
Jones can’t just pull a clear answer out of thin air, but he is clever and has a friend who does
research in neuroscience that can help. His friend has developed a drug for highly selective
memory loss that temporarily mutes a person’s sense of personal identity. Jones administers the
drug to one of his sons (it doesn’t really matter which one) and instructs that son to decide how
his fortune is to be divided among the three. He offers the following instructions: “you are one of
my three sons and you are fully informed about the life circumstances of all three. Now, with just
your own self interest in mind, you are to decide how my estate is to be divided between you and
your brothers.” The son who decides how the fortune is divided must do so without knowing
which of the brothers he is. The effects of the drug render the son who decide incapable of
favoring the interests of one son over another, and this gives us some grounds for thinking his
decision will be reasonably fair. Let me know how you think the drugged son will decide.
What we’ve described here is similar to the method Rawls recommends for selecting fair
principles of social justice. Rawls is aiming at a conception of justice as fairness in the sense that
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social systems won’t advantage any particular kind of person at the expense of others. Rawls’
proposes that we can get onto the ideal of justice as fairness in this sense by means of a thought
experiment that involves reasoning from what he calls "the original position." In the original
position, we imagine that we are perfectly rational agents with full information about the
consequences of the various possible social arrangements. We are then given the task of
designing the principles of justice that will structure our society and we are expected to do so
with an eye to what will be in our own best interest. But then there’s a catch. In reasoning from
the original, we operate behind a veil of ignorance about our own personal circumstances and
characteristics. So in the original position, behind the veil of ignorance, I must think about what
set of social institutions will work out best for me without knowing whether I will be weak or
strong, healthy or diseased, clever or dull, beautiful or ugly, black or white, born to a wealthy
family or a poor one and so forth. If I am rational and self interested, I will want to set things up
so that I can substantially enjoy the benefits if I have characteristics that are highly valued in my
society and I put them to good use. But at the same time, I will want to hedge my bets to assure
that I still have a decent life in case I am not so lucky or my best efforts fail.
Of course, the original position thought experiment is just that, a thought experiment. No one
could actually place themselves behind the veil of ignorance, nor reason perfectly rationally
about all the possible social arrangements that might result from her choice of principles. Still
Rawls has devised a way to think about what is fair when things all other things aren’t equal, and
we can apply this to approximate relatively impartial judgments about what a fair society would
look like.
On the basis of the original position thought experiment, Rawls argues for two principles of
justice as fairness:
The Equal Liberty Principle: Each person is to be granted the greatest degree of liberty
consistent with similar liberty for everyone.
The Difference Principle: Social practices that produce inequalities among individuals
are just only if they work out to everyone’s advantage and the positions that come with
greater reward are open to all.
The Equal Liberty Principle has a longer history. The idea that everyone should be granted the
greatest degree of liberty consistent with similar liberty for others is defended at length in John
Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty. In fact we could take some variation on this principle as the core
tenet of Liberalism as a political theory. This principle doesn’t tell us that people should be free
to do as they please no matter what. At some points, my being free to do something is liable to
interfere with your being free to do something. For instance, my being free to host parties with
live bands into the early hours of the morning might interfere with my neighbor’s being free to
get a decent night’s sleep. In the interest of maximizing equal liberty for all, we would be
justified in restricting people from activities that would interfere with the liberty of others. This
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has many familiar applications. Neighborhood zoning regulations are one example. A good deal
environmental regulation illustrates this idea. Maximizing liberty for all equally requires that we
restrict businesses from being free to pollute where doing so would adversely affect the health of
others.
Rawls thinks the equal liberty principle will be selected by rational agents reasoning from the
original position because no rational agent in this position would choose to be less free than
necessary nor grant some (possibly someone else) greater liberty than others (possibly herself).
The Equal Liberty Principle is only concerned with equality of liberty. But we can be equal or
unequal in many other ways. In fact, being equally free is liable to lead to other sorts of
inequalities. If we are all free to plant apple trees as we see fit, we will probably wind up with an
unequal distribution of apples simply because some of us will plant more trees and do a better
job of tending them. So long as this is merely the result of people exercising their equal liberties,
there is nothing unfair about this. If I’d wanted more apples, I could have spent more time
growing apple trees and less time playing chess.
Given equality of opportunity, the Difference Principle holds that a system that produce
inequalities is fair so long as it works out to the benefit of all. This will strike some as puzzling.
How could we have inequalities that benefit all? It might seem that liberty and the fact that we
want different things can account for some of this. I can’t claim unfairness when my neighbor
has more apples because I’d rather play chess than harvest apples. The inequality here is one that
serves the interests of both of us, my neighbor’s interest in having lots of apples and mine in
playing chess. But the difference here isn’t the result of any system, fair or unfair. It’s just the
result of our individual choices. What we are concerned with in connection with the difference
principle are inequalities that result from the system, not just the free choices of individuals.
So, we want some clarity on how there could be inequalities resulting from a system that work
out to the benefit of all. Here it will help to get familiar with the idea of a zero-sum game. A
zero-sum game, as the term suggest, is a game where the sum of the winnings of the winners and
the losses of the losers add up to zero. So, a friendly neighborhood poker game is a zero-sum
game. The combined winnings of the winners will be exactly equal to the combined losses of the
losers. Likewise, slicing a pie is a zero-sum game. Ordinarily, the only way I get a bigger piece is
if other get smaller pieces where the difference between how much bigger my piece is and how
much smaller other pieces are is zero. But not every game is a zero-sum game. To take a fanciful
example, suppose the pies I bake are magic pies that are favorable to me in a specific way. When
I cut myself a bigger piece, the size of the whole pie doubles. Now, when I cut myself a bigger
piece, I get more than other people who want some pie, and the others get more than they would
have if I’d taken a smaller slice. So, this is a positive non-zero sum game, but we can easily
describe a negative non-zero sum game. Suppose my method for dividing a cookie between three
hungry boys is to just toss it on the table and have them grab at it. They will probably wind up
with unequal size chunks of cookie, but the sum of the winnings of the winners and the losses of
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the losers will add up to less than zero because a good part of the cookie will wind up as crumbs
on the floor. So, a social system that operates as a positive non-zero sum game can, under the
right circumstances, both systematically produce inequalities and yet leave the less advantaged
better off than the less advantaged would be under a different system. Such a system will satisfy
the difference principle.
A market economy can provide a good example of a positive zero-sum game that would satisfy
Rawls difference principle. This will depend on how the market economy functions in the
context of the broader system of social policies and institutions. But let’s first consider Adam
Smith’s notion of the invisible hand. Adam Smith is well known as the founder of economics,
but he was also a notable moral philosopher who did important work on the emotions. We’ll be
concerned, though, with one of his key economic insights, one that is often touted as making the
case for free markets. First, we need to describe a scenario. Let’s imagine that we are all part of a
small low-tech economy where one of our technologies is making matches. The standard method
for making matches to light fires is to sliver off individual sticks with a knife and dip them one
by one in the solutions that make them ignite easily when struck. In this economy we have a free
market, meaning that we have property rights and the freedom to set out own prices and
negotiate our own deals with customers. I, being clever and self-interested, devise a way to
dramatically reduce the amount of labor I have to invest in each match by building a small jig
that allows me to split a small log into a hundred little sticks at once and then hold all hundred as
I dip them together in the various solutions. Because I have dramatically lowered my labor cost, I
can take my matches to market, charge less for them than my competitors and dramatically
increase my market share while still making a tidy profit. I get rich as a result, probably driving
several of my competitors out of the match making business. But my competitors, also being
clever and self-interested, will find other ways to contribute to the village economy. Perhaps one
starts growing flowers and becomes the first florist and another discovers yeast and invents
bread. And folks in the village can afford to pay for flowers and bread now that they are paying
so much less for matches. In this happy little story, competition in a market system generated an
inequality when I got rich thanks to my clever innovation in match making. And the community
as a whole benefits because now we are investing much less of our collective energy into making
matches. Instead, we have cheaper matches plus bread and flowers. We are all better off as a
result. In this story, the private vice of greed leads me, as if by an invisible hand, act in a way
that benefits the community.
We should note that contrary to myth, Adam Smith notion of the invisible hand was not intended
as an endorsement of greed or laissez faire capitalism. In a poorly regulated market economy,
greed is just as liable to lead to predatory behavior as productivity boosting innovations. But all
the same, under the right conditions, the profit motive can bring out the best in people and result
in wealth creation that benefits all. We can look to the historical example of East and West
Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Communist East Germany had a Soviet style
command economy that dictated a high degree of equality and sharply restricted property rights.
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West Germany had a mixed economy with a healthy market based private sector. The result was
less equality in West Germany. But still, the least well off were substantially better off than the
least well off (pretty much everybody) in East Germany. What this indicates is that while, on the
one hand, the market economy with its institutions of private property inevitably generates
inequalities, it is so much more effective at generating wealth that the least well off can be better
off in spite of the inequalities. But this is likely to happen only under the right conditions. West
Germany had then, as Germany has now, a mixed economy where a vibrant private sector
market economy is supplemented with a substantial system of social benefits. The profit motive
is harnessed and the well to do are quite well off, but taxes are higher and those who don’t fair
well in the market economy still get decent health care, modest but safe and comfortable places
to live, access to education etc. Compare this America where the private sector market economy
dominates and the least well off are much worse off than the least well off in communist East
Germany. Again, it is ultimately the system as a whole that gets evaluated according to the
difference principle.
Hopefully it is clear now how Rawls’ view of justice as fairness would endorse taxing the well
off in order to provide for things like education, health care and a social safety net. His is a more
expansive view of the role of government than Locke or Nozick would support. But to what
degree will taxing the rich be justified on Rawls’ view? Clearly taxing the successful members of
society to the point where they are no better off than those who are largely unproductive will not
meet the Rawlsian ideal under the difference principle. If people are not rewarded for hard work
and innovation, then it’s liable not to happen and everyone suffers as a result. Too much taxation
of the well off will be unjust on Rawl’s view precisely because it doesn’t work out to benefit of
least well off (or anyone else). Rawls would deem communism and socialism as unjust under the
difference principle for just this reason (not to mention the ways these systems undermine equal
liberty) Rather, Rawls would aim for that sweet spot where the hard work and innovative are
well rewarded, so everyone has a reason to do their best, and yet those who fail for whatever
reason are not left by the wayside, but still have opportunity and enjoy some modest quality of
life.
Rawls represents the “liberal” side of liberal political philosophy. In some corners of popular
political discourse, the term “liberal” has been reduced to a term of derision and its meaning has
been so badly distorted as to make it unrecognizable. Liberals are routinely described as
socialists or communists by a fair number of political pundits. Hopefully some acquaintance with
Rawls will help you can recognize the lie in this rhetoric. Liberals, as the name should suggest,
support liberty. Communists do not. Socialism traditionally refers to public ownership of the
means of production, as opposed to having a market economy with property rights. Mainstream
liberalism as represented by Rawls political philosophy, endorses a market economy, just one
with guard rails and safety nets to correct for some of the excesses of laissez faire capitalism.
An excerpt from John Rawls, Justice as Fairness, can be found here:
http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ362/hallam/readings/rawl_justice.pdf
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Illiberal Political Philosophy When I initially wrote this text just a few years ago, my aim in this chapter was to explain the
philosophical underpinnings of the two dominant mainstream traditions in American politics. As
we’ve discussed, both what we popularly know as liberalism and conservativism are positions
within a broader tradition of liberal political thought. We can understand a political philosophy
as laying within that broader liberal tradition when it gives priority to the liberty of individuals as
a political value. Illiberal political philosophies will just be those that reject the rights and
liberties of individuals as being of paramount importance. I originally prefaced this chapter with
a discussion of Plato to provide some historical perspective, some appreciation for how recent an
ethical innovation it is to treat individual rights and liberties as important in political thought.
Over the past few years, though, the broad tradition of liberal political thought that has guided
this country since its inception, in both its “liberal” and “conservative” variants, has come under
threat. So, a few cautionary words about illiberal ways of thought are in order.
Political observers have recently heard lots of talk about authoritarianism, populism, nationalism
and other assorted “isms.” I’m not going to take up a detailed analysis of these here, but I do
want to address an underlying current common among them. Authoritarianism, as the term
suggests, prioritizes the will of an authority figure. But for an authority figure to gain and sustain
power, he must have the support of a sizable chunk of the population. So, would-be
authoritarians will need to appeal to the concerns of ordinary people and make themselves
popular and this is what populism is. So, populism can lead to authoritarianism, though that
depends on the concerns of the people appealed to. If ordinary people to care most about
individual rights and liberties and have some ability to defend themselves against the rhetorical
trickery of a demagogue (a leader who appeals to people through emotion and prejudice rather
than rational argument), then populism won’t provoke a turn away from individual rights and
liberties. But people have concerns beyond individual rights and liberties and these can eclipse
the tenets of liberalism.
We’d be hard pressed to explain how popular opinion could turn against the broad tradition of
liberalism if varieties of illiberalism had nothing to offer people. Mass movements in support of
nationalism (which prioritizes national interest over individual rights and liberties), offer the
powerful appeal of a shared identity and the social cohesion of a common cause. Indeed, one of
the classic criticisms of liberal political thought is that it fails to provide shared ideals that can be
the basis of a sense of shared identity, purpose and community. Liberty alone is thin gruel for
those seeking a sense of meaning and purpose in life. And prioritizing liberty as a political value
requires taking a fairly neutral political stand on a broad range of other values and conceptions of
the good life. Pushing a specific further set of values in the realm of politics as the basis of
community and shared identity is bound to marginalize and threaten adherents of other value
systems, But the whole point of liberal values like freedom of conscience is to avoid this.
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Conservative political thinkers like Edmund Burke and the contemporary writer David Brooks
have sought some middle ground, like upholding liberty as a primary political value while
supporting the development of community built around shared values beyond the realm of
politics.
Communism also held the appeal of a shared identity based on commonly held values to its
adherents in its heyday. In direct opposition to liberal traditions, both communism and
nationalism prioritize the good of a collective over concern for citizens as individuals. Fairly
recent history is rife with examples of how collectivist thinking, both on the left in the form of
communism and on the right in the form of nationalism, have licensed extreme brutality. I won’t
pursue historical examples or details here. But it should come as no surprise that prioritizing
collectives over individuals is liable to be pretty hard on individuals.
What I do want to say in the way of caution concerning collectivist ideologies of all stripes is
mainly that collectives don’t suffer. The very idea of a collective is an abstraction. Collectives
have no existence beyond the individual members that make it up. And so, it is hard to see how a
collective can have any value of its own. My intuition is roughly Kantian here. People have
intrinsic moral worth. Not nations. Advancing the interests of people has nothing to do with
pitting the interests of one nation against those of other nations. America is not a human being.
But we might consider making America humane again.
Review and Discussion Questions
1. Explain Plato’s conception of justice. How does it differ from contemporary liberal views of justice?
2. Why is Plato no fan of democracy? 3. In what way does Locke see us as having a natural right to liberty? 4. What is the function of government according to Locke and how is it justified? 5. How does Locke justify property rights? 6. Explain the tragedy of the commons and how it provides a rationale for regulating use of commonly held resources.
7. How does the creation of wealth and property in our society differ from the idealized individualistic conception Locke offers?
8. Explain Rawls’ two principles of social justice as fairness. 9. Explain Rawls original position thought experiment and how it gives us a way of thinking about fairness?
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