Philosophy assignment 6

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CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

Descartes: Doubt and Certainty

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CHAPTER 9

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9.1 THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE

In René Descartes’ time, the world must have seemed to many to be turning upside down. Time-honored ideas, established religious doctrines, and traditional attitudes were being called into question both by new discoveries in science and by radically di!erent religious outlooks on the Continent. "is was the era of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, and Martin Luther—thinkers who were dismantling the old ideological structures piece by piece. "ese were unsettling signs that the modern world—the world we inherited—was being born. Into this crucible of upheaval and change came the brilliant Des- cartes (1596–1650)—the inventor of analytic geometry and founder of modern philosophy. He was determined to see if there could be any epistemological certainties in an age of doubt. He hoped that knowledge could be given a foundation as sturdy as that which buttressed mathemat- ics. If only knowledge of the world could be as certain as knowledge of geometry! "us Descartes chose bravely to wrestle with a very old and di#cult issue: whether it was possible for anyone to possess knowledge.

But isn’t it obvious that we do in fact know things? Many philosophers who have looked deeply into the question have thought the answer is not obvious at all. "ey ask—quite seriously—this question and several others: If you have knowledge, how did you attain it? And if you possess it, how much do you possess— that is, what is the extent of your knowledge? Do you know only the contents of your own mind or only mathematical or logical truths? Do you know that there is a God, that ordinary physical objects exist, that there is an external world (one existing inde- pendently of your mind), that unobservable entities such as electrons are real, that other minds besides your own exist, that events have occurred before the present moment?

Do these questions seem odd, even absurd, to you? Among serious think- ers, they are neither. Trying to find good answers to these is the main business of epistemology, the philosophical study of knowledge (see Chapter 1). It is the branch of philosophy that systematically investigates whether, how, and to what extent we know things. For well over two thousand years, philosophers have been searching for answers because both the asking and the answering have theoretical and practical value. We value knowledge for its own sake, regardless of what we can do with it. When we are at our best, we crave the light simply because it is the light. But we also value knowledge because it can guide us to our goals, steer us away from error, and help us succeed in life, however we define success. Knowledge is power. Whatever our reply to the epistemological questions, if we take them seriously, they surely will a!ect how we see the world and what we do in it.

Knowledge comes in di!erent forms, and philosophy is usually concerned with only one of them. Knowing what something feels like (for example, what influenza

“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”

—Descartes

epistemology "e philosophical study of knowledge.

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feels like) constitutes one form of knowledge. Knowing how to do something (for ex- ample, how to throw a ball) constitutes another. Knowing that something is the case (such as knowing that an elm tree grows in the quad) is propositional knowledge— knowledge of a proposition. A proposition is a statement that is either true or false, an assertion that something is or is not a fact. "is kind of knowledge has been the main focus of philosophers.

As we saw in Chapter 4, thinkers going back as far as Plato have said that propo- sitional knowledge has three necessary and su#cient conditions: to know a proposi- tion, (1) you must believe it, (2) it must be true, and (3) you must have good reasons for—be justified in—believing it true. On this traditional account, merely believing something is not enough; what you believe must be true. But a mere true belief is not knowledge either, because you can have a true belief and yet not genuinely know. To have knowledge, your belief must be true, and you must have good reasons to believe it true. Knowledge, then, is true belief that is justified.

Most philosophers believe we have some knowledge but di!er on its extent. "ey may insist that we possess knowledge of the existence of an external world, other

propositional knowledge Knowledge of a proposition.

THEN AND NOW

The Scientific (and Philosophical) Revolution At the center of the universe, the stationary Earth— the focus of all God’s attention—reigns as a per- fect sphere, nested in the exact center of a series of other perfect hollow spheres, like an onion. On each sphere rests one of the planets, the sun, the moon, or stars, every sphere turn- ing around the Earth producing the familiar movements of these heav- enly bodies. "e spheres are not only perfect but change- less and eternal. Beyond the sphere of the stars is heaven, the realm of light where God abides and human souls go to their reward.

"is view of cosmic re- ality is roughly what

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minds, physical objects, the past and future, or self-evident truths. But some philoso- phers embrace skepticism, the view that we lack knowledge in some fundamental way. "ey hold that many or all of our beliefs are false or unfounded.

Some skeptics argue that we lack knowledge because we have no way of distin- guishing between beliefs that we think constitute knowledge from beliefs that clearly do not constitute knowledge. For all we know, we could be hallucinating, dreaming, in the grips of an illusion, or mistaken for some other reason. How do we know that we are not hallucinating or dreaming right now? Hallucinations and dreams can seem as real as our “normal” experience. If we cannot distinguish these two, the skeptic says, then we cannot have knowledge.

Other skeptics raise doubts about the reliability of what we take to be our normal sources of knowledge—perception, memory, introspection, and reasoning. We real- ize that all these sources are fallible, that they sometimes lead us into error. But skep- tics ask how we know that these sources are not always in error. If all these sources are suspect, we cannot use one to check another. We cannot, for example, use our sense of sight to check the reliability of our sense of touch. And if we think one mode

skepticism "e view that we lack knowledge in some fundamental way.

millions of people believed and never questioned in ancient and medieval times. It was said to be derived from unimpeachable authorities—from Aristotle and Christian scripture or dogma. But the scientific revolution (dating roughly from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries) upended the medieval worldview and ushered in a host of new ideas both in society and philosophy. "e combined work of Copernicus (1473–1543), Kepler (1571–1630), Galileo (1564–1642), and others showed that the Earth rotated around the sun, not the other way around; that the movements of the heavens could be precisely described through mathematics; that the old notion of spheres was unfounded; that (thanks to Galileo’s telescope) the heavenly bodies are not perfect but have obvious imperfections; and that teleo- logical explanations (those assuming that everything is guided to an end or goal) are inac- curate and uninformative.

Descartes was influenced by, and influenced, the scientific revolution, which in turn a!ected his contributions to philosophy. He was the genius who founded analytic geometry (remember Cartesian coordinates?), advanced the science of optics, wrote treatises on meteo- rology, and discovered how rainbows work. In philosophy he insisted that a radically di!er- ent perspective was required. In light of the methods and findings of the “new sciences,” he saw that the old ideas had to go and that a new mechanistic and mathematical view of the world had to take its place. In fact, he deemed mathematics a model for human understand- ing. He declared that the simple mathematical steps used to derive very complicated proofs “gave me occasion to suppose that all things which fall within the scope of human under- standing are interconnected in the same way” (Discourse on Method, Part II).

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“"e first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.”

—Descartes

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of perception is more trustworthy than the others, how do we know that? We seem forced once again into skepticism.

Philosophers distinguish two ways to acquire knowledge: through reason and through sense experience. "e former is called a priori; it yields knowledge gained independently of or prior to sense experience. "e latter is known as a posteriori; it gives us knowledge that depends entirely on sense experience. We can come to know many propositions a priori—for example, that all bachelors are unmarried, that all triangles have three sides, that 2 ! 3 " 5, and that something is either a cat or not a cat. We need not do a survey of bachelors to see if they really are all unmarried; we can know this just by thinking about it. And we know that the statement “some- thing is either a cat or not a cat” is true; it is a simple logical truth—and we know it without having to observe any cats. It seems that we can also come to know many propositions a posteriori—for instance, John the bachelor has red hair, that he just drew a triangle on paper, that he is holding five pencils, and that Tabby the cat is on the mat. To know these things, we must rely on our senses.

"rough the centuries, philosophers have debated whether our knowledge of the world is fundamentally a priori or a posteriori (if indeed we have knowledge), and these arguments continue today in many forms in both philosophy and science. On one side of this divide are the rationalists, who believe that some or all of our knowledge about the world is gained independently of sense experience. "at is, they maintain that some or all of our knowledge is a priori. On the other side are the empiricists, who contend that our knowledge of the world comes solely from

a priori knowledge Knowledge gained inde- pendently of or prior to sense experience.

a posteriori knowledge Knowledge that de- pends entirely on sense experience.

rationalists "ose who believe that some or all of our knowledge about the world is gained indepen- dently of sense experience.

empiricists "ose who believe that our knowledge of the world comes solely from sense experience.

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“I think, therefore I am.” —Descartes

“I feel, therefore I exist.” —"omas Je!erson

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sense experience. We acquire knowledge entirely a posteriori. We may come to know logical and mathematical truths through reason, but we can know nothing about the world unless we use our senses.

At this point, you may find yourself being more sympathetic to the empiricists than to the rationalists. After all, you seem to acquire an enormous amount of infor- mation via your five senses. "rough them, you grasp that the grass is green, the stove is hot, the music is loud, the lime is tart, and the sugar is sweet. But what can you know through reason alone? Rationalists like Descartes would say that you can know a great deal. Without making any empirical observations, mathematicians can not only discover new mathematical truths but also develop mathematical models that can accurately describe the empirical world. "ey can, for example, accurately pre- dict the existence of astronomical objects and their movements without once look- ing through a telescope. Likewise we know the fundamental truths of logic, without which reasoning itself would be impossible. We know, for example, that nothing can both have a property and lack it at the same time, and that for any particular property, everything either has it or lacks it. "us we know without looking that nothing can both be a dog and not be a dog at the same time, there are no square circles, and mar- ried bachelors don’t exist. Some rationalists have gone further and asserted that reason alone can reveal the most important, basic truths about the world—such as “every event has a cause” and “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.”

Many of the greatest thinkers in history have taken the rationalist approach to knowledge, most notably Plato and Descartes. Descartes, espousing the most influen- tial rationalist theory, thinks sense experience is an unreliable source of knowledge, so he looks to reason to give all our knowledge a foundation as firm as that which sup- ports unshakeable mathematical truths. "rough reason he hopes to defeat skepticism. His method is first to doubt everything that he cannot be certain of, a process that leaves him knowing hardly anything. But through reason alone he soon uncovers what he considers to be self-evident; certain truths from which he derives other indubitable propositions. In this way he tries to build an edifice of knowledge that, like an inverted pyramid, rests on one or two rock-solid foundation stones that support all the others.

"e empiricist view of knowledge has been advanced most famously by the Brit- ish empiricists John Locke (1632–1704), George Berkeley (1685–1753), and David Hume (1711–1776) (see Chapter 10). "ey want to turn Descartes’ pyramid right side up, resting all knowledge on a vast foundation of sense data (the content of our experience) that supports the upper stones. Among these thinkers, Hume probably has been most influential, arguing for an uncompromising empiricism that leads to a far-reaching skepticism that not all empiricists have shared. He holds that all our knowledge (aside from purely logical truths) is derived from sense perceptions or ideas about those perceptions. Like other empiricists, he believes that the mind is empty—a blank slate—until experience gives it content. We can have knowledge of something only if it can be sensed, and any proposition that does not refer to what can be sensed is meaningless. Guided by this latter empiricist principle, Hume is driven to skepticism about many things that others have taken for granted, including the existence of the external world, causation, a continuing self, religious doctrines, and inductive reasoning. His skepticism arises because he thinks that even though

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

—Edgar Allan Poe

empiricism "e view that our knowledge of the world comes solely from sense experience.

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all our knowledge is based on sense experience, we cannot know how the objects of our sense experience are related. We cannot know, for example, that there is a cause- and-e!ect relationship between associated objects. To infer such a connection is to go beyond what our senses tell us. Our notions of causal connections are merely matters of custom and habit.

9.2 PLATO’S RATIONALISM

"e great-grandfather of modern rationalism is Plato. As noted in Chapter 4, Plato maintained that sense experience alone could not be the source of knowledge, al- though many of his contemporaries claimed otherwise. Some of them assumed that since knowledge must be based on sense experience, and since sense experience can vary from person to person or culture to culture, relativism must be true. If one person says a grape is sour, and another says it’s sweet, there must be no objective fact of the matter, just truth relative to di!erent persons. Other thinkers thought that since our perceptions are often illusory, distorted, or otherwise mistaken, sense experience is not a reliable source of knowledge. And since our perceptions are the only possible route to knowledge, we must not know anything. "us skepticism, they said, is the proper epistemological attitude. Plato thought that our perceptions were just as unreliable a guide to genuine knowledge as the relativists and skeptics assumed. But he argued that since we clearly do have knowledge, we must derive it from a reliable source—and that source has to be reason.

Plato deduced that we must be able to acquire knowledge because we can iden- tify false beliefs, and we obviously possess knowledge because we can grasp, through reason, mathematical, conceptual, and logical truths. We know that 2 ! 5 " 7; that a triangle has three sides; and that if A is larger than B, and B is larger than C, then A is larger than C. Plato pointed out that these truths are objective: they are true regardless of what we think. We do not invent them out of our imaginations; we discover them. No matter how hard we try we cannot make 2 ! 5 " 9. Plato reasoned that if such truths are objective, they must also be about real things. "ey must refer to an independently existing, immaterial reality that is beyond sense ex- perience. In addition, he insisted, these truths must also be immutable and eternal, existing in the immaterial realm unchanged for all time. Only through our powers of reason can we reach beyond the physical world to take hold of real knowledge of fundamental truths. Sense experience, in contrast, can yield only transitory, ever- changing information—mere opinion that is vastly inferior to everlasting truths.

So for Plato, reality comprises two worlds: the fleeting world of the physical ac- cessed through sense experience; and the eternal, nonphysical, changeless world of genuine knowledge accessed only through reason. In spelling out the contents of the latter, Plato articulates his notion of the Forms. As discussed earlier, the Forms (also called Ideas) are perfect conceptual models for every existing thing, residing only in the eternal world penetrated by reason alone. "ey are the ideals, or standards, that we can first come to know and then use to assess the notions and objects we encoun- ter in our lives. "rough reason, we can access the Form of “table” and thus know

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rationalism "e view that some or all of our knowledge about the world is gained indepen- dently of sense experience.

“"ere is thus, in all philosophy derived from Descartes, a tendency to subjectivism, and to regarding matter as something only knowable, if at all, by inference from what is known of mind.”

—Bertrand Russell

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the ideal template of “table.” With this knowledge we can understand the essence of a table and use this understanding to make judgments about all physical tables. Likewise when we access the Form “courage,” we know what the ideal of courage

DETAILS

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Innate Ideas Rationalists like Plato and Des- cartes typically accept the doc- trine of innate ideas—the notion that we are born with some gen- eral ideas already in our minds. Ideas such as God, freedom, the laws of logic, the truths of math- ematics, moral principles, and causality (specifically, that every event has cause) are supposed to be hidden in our minds until we are cognitively mature enough to see that they are self-evident. Rationalists believe that the theory of innate ideas is the best explanation of why we can know some concepts a priori— that is, without ever experienc- ing them. We understand the idea of perfection, for example, even though we have never en- countered a perfect object.

Most philosophers reject the doctrine, but in contemporary life, advocates of the view are not hard to find. "e linguist Noam Chomsky, for instance, argues that children come into the world possessing a universal grammar that enables them to learn a first language—an achieve- ment that Chomsky thinks would not be possible without some innate grammatical ideas.

Critics of innate ideas ask how we can possess knowledge that we are not aware of. Innate ideas are not learned; the mind is supposed to somehow always have them. But if we are unaware of them, how can they be or become knowledge?

Empiricists admit that our minds do possess innate cognitive capacities to learn certain concepts, but they maintain that having these capacities is a long way from having innate knowledge.

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is and can use this knowledge to appraise a particular instance of courage. As Plato sees it, the truly real world is the world of the Forms—the domain of the perfect and everlasting. With knowledge of the really real, we can understand the “less real” realm of the imperfect and transitory.

How is it, Plato asks, that we seem to have knowledge of the Forms, however dimly, even though our senses can tell us nothing about them? Our sense experience can acquaint us only with material objects, but the Forms are not material. It’s as if these universals were already in our minds waiting to be uncovered. Plato’s answer— and the answer of most other rationalists—is the doctrine of innate knowledge: at birth our minds come equipped with conceptual content, ideas about the world that we can know a priori. In Plato’s version of this view, knowledge of the Forms is pres- ent at the very beginning of our lives, inscribed in our minds (our immortal souls) in a previous existence. We are born with this knowledge. Accessing this knowledge then is a matter of using reason to recall what we previously knew in another life.

Many thinkers reject Plato’s notion of a preexisting state in which we acquire knowledge, and they are skeptical of the claim that we are born with knowledge. But the idea of innate knowledge in some form is still attractive to rationalist philoso- phers, for it would explain how we could possess knowledge without relying on sense experience. In any case, both rationalists and empiricists must provide an explana- tion of how we seem to know logical and mathematical truths (and perhaps scientific truths) that we do not arrive at through our senses.

9.3 DESCARTES’ DOUBT

Oddly enough, Descartes begins his quest for knowledge by first plunging into skep- ticism. He sees that a great many things he thought he knew appear now to be false. So he decides to “raze everything to the ground and begin again” from a firm foun- dation, doubting all beliefs except those that are “certain and indubitable,” beliefs that cannot possibly be false. Only beliefs that are certain can count as knowledge, he says. If he has reason to doubt any of them, they are not knowledge. Here he is at the start of his quest:

“[T]o have recourse to the veracity of the su- preme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit.”

—David Hume

“Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hard- est to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.”

—Descartes

“Hamlet did think a great many things; does it follow that he existed?”

—Jaako Hintikka

3FO�%FTDBSUFT��Meditations on First Philosophy

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Descartes soon finds reason to doubt all beliefs based on sense experience, arriv- ing at this conclusion via his famous dream argument. He notes that “there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from asleep.”2 Our dreams can seem like reality, and in dreams we often don’t know we are dream- ing. So it is possible that we are dreaming now, he says, and that what we take to be the real world is in fact not real at all. More to the point, it is possible that our sense experience—by which we presume to know material reality—is just a dream. If so, we can’t be certain about anything we think we know through our senses. "erefore, sense experience can yield no knowledge.

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“All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.”

—Leonardo da Vinci

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After this insight, Descartes discovers that his skepticism goes even deeper. Sup- pose, he says, that an evil genius or god has set out to systematically deceive me. "is being could delude me about every kind of thought I could possibly have. I can’t be sure that this is not the case. I can’t be certain that all my thoughts are not the work of an evil entity that infuses my mind with false sensations and ideas, making an

Living in the Matrix Descartes’ evil-genius scenario is the forerun- ner of some similar what-if tales told by phi- losophers and others in our own times. In one of them, you are not at the mercy of a malicious demon; you are instead a brain in a vat of chem- icals in a laboratory. Your brain is hardwired to a computer, which a brilliant (but prob- ably crazy) scientist is using to give you experi- ences that are indistinguishable from those you might have if you were not a wired-up marinat- ing brain. "e question is, How could you ever be certain that you are not such a brain in a vat?

"e same sort of question arises about the predicament of humans in the movie !e Matrix. Intelligent computers have enslaved the human race, encasing everyone in pods and electronically feeding simulations of the real world into their brains. As Christopher Grau says:

"ese creatures have fed Neo [the mov- ie’s protagonist] a simulation that he couldn’t possibly help but take as the real thing. What’s worse, it isn’t clear how any of us can know with certainty that we are not in a position similar to Neo before his “rebirth.” . . . A viewer of !e Matrix is naturally led to wonder: how do I know I am not in the Matrix?

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Christopher Grau, “Bad Dreams, Evil Demons, and the Experience Machine: Philosophy and !e Matrix,” in Philosophers Explore the Matrix (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 10–23.

DETAILS

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external reality appear to exist. And if I am not certain of this, I can’t know anything that I previously thought I knew, including such seemingly obvious things as the truths of mathematics.

As we have seen, Descartes’ assumption is that knowledge requires certainty. He holds that for beliefs to count as knowledge, we must be certain of them—they must be so well supported as to be beyond all possible doubt. But some philosophers claim that this requirement for knowledge sets the bar too high. "ey reject Des- cartes’ skeptical arguments because they are convinced that knowledge demands not beyond-all-doubt certainty but only reasonable grounds for believing. After all, they say, we often claim to know many propositions that are not certain. We insist that we know that grass grows, that some dogs have fleas, that Africa exists, and that Abraham Lincoln lived and died in America—yet none of these statements are beyond all possible doubt.

9.4 DESCARTES’ CERTAINTY

Adrift in doubt, Descartes wonders whether there is anything at all he can know. But just when it seems that he can know nothing, he comes upon a truth that he cannot possibly doubt: he exists.

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts. But if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”

—Francis Bacon

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Descartes concludes that if he can persuade himself of something, if he can have thoughts, he must exist. Even an evil genius cannot rob him of this knowledge. In the very act of doubting, or of experiencing something contrived by the evil genius, Descartes finds unshakeable proof that he himself exists: “I think, therefore I am.”

But can he know any more than this? He holds that he can indeed. He believes that he has discovered a first principle by which he can acquire knowledge despite his obvious fallibility:

“I am indeed amazed when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error.”

—Descartes

He declares that if he perceives something clearly and distinctly, he must know it with certainty. Armed with this principle of knowledge acquisition, he thinks he can know a great many things about the world. If he seems to perceive a flower, and his perception is clear and distinct, then the flower must exist and be very much as it appears to be.

But why does Descartes think this principle is sound? He argues that in his mind he has a clear and distinct notion of perfection, which must have a cause. "e cause

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of the idea of perfection, he says, must also be perfect, and this perfect cause can only be a perfect God. A perfect God is no deceiver; such a God would not allow him to be deceived when he correctly applies his God-given ability to achieve knowledge— that is, when he follows the principle of clarity and distinctness. "erefore, when he perceives something clearly and distinctly, he knows it beyond all doubt. He has knowledge, and skepticism is defeated.

Being a thoroughgoing rationalist, Descartes believes that he apprehends sub- stantial truths about the world through reason. He would admit that through per- ception he learns simple facts such as the color of a flower and the position of the sun in the sky. But in many other cases, he says, knowledge of the external world is obtained through an “intuition of the mind,” not sense data. Here is Descartes explaining this point:

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3FO�%FTDBSUFT�� Meditations on First Philosophy

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PORTR AIT

René Descartes Descartes (1596–1650) did his philosophical work in a time of intellectual, scientific, and religious change; an era of revo- lutionary new thinking that would eventually transform the Western world. He was a contemporary of Galileo and Kepler, coming along after Copernicus did his work and before Newton did his. While trying to reconcile the old ideas with the new, he sparked a quiet revolution of his own and became the “father of modern philosophy.”

He was born in La Haye, France, educated in philosophy and mathematics at the Jesuit College of La Fleche in Anjou, and trained in the law at Pontiers. He served for a while in the Dutch army, where he did much of his early philosophical thinking, supposedly inspired by dreams he had while sleeping in a “stove-heated room.”

He was such a bright student that he easily advanced beyond his teachers, and he quickly realized that their arguments and reasoning were defective. Knowledge in general, he thought, is on very shaky ground, and that state of a!airs is intolerable. So he set out on his long quest for knowledge that was as logical and certain as a mathematical proof. Along the way, he reshaped mathematics by inventing coordinate geometry.

He developed a rationalistic theory of knowledge whose starting point was a recognition of personal existence (“I think, therefore I am”). Reason is the source of substantial knowl- edge, and sense experience has only a subordinate role. His epistemology would be influen- tial and controversial for centuries to come. His metaphysics has also a!ected succeeding generations. He posited a stark division between mind and matter, with the two somehow interacting (an interaction that he could not adequately explain). His Discourse on Method was published in 1637, Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641, Principles of Philosophy in 1644, and !e Passions of the Soul in 1649.

In 1649 he agreed to tutor the philosophically minded Queen Kristina of Sweden. But the work demanded an unpleasant departure from his usual routine of sleeping in: he was asked to begin lessons at 5:00 a.m.! "e change allegedly caused his demise; he con- tracted pneumonia and died. Another notable philosopher, Grotius, had visited Kristina in 1644 and su!ered an identical fate. Kristina seems to have been very tough on famous philosophers.

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3FO�%FTDBSUFT� Meditations on First Philosophy

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Descartes points out that although our senses tell us that the wax has changed through melting—that it has become a completely di!erent object than it was before—our minds know better. "rough a rational intuition, our minds under- stand that the wax, though radically altered, remains a piece of wax. If we relied only on sense experience to inform us about the wax, we would have to conclude that the original object no longer exists.

For three and a half centuries, Descartes’ case for knowledge has been both com- mended and criticized. Many reject a key part of his argument, the premise asserting the existence of God. "ey doubt that Descartes—or anyone else—can infer the existence of God merely from the concept of God. Some also charge Descartes with begging the question, the fallacy of trying to establish the conclusion of an argument by using that conclusion as a premise (also known as arguing in a circle). "rough his principle of clarity and distinctness, he tries to demonstrate that God exists. But then he attempts to establish the legitimacy of the principle by citing the existence of God. (Descartes’ pattern of argument here has become known as the Cartesian circle.) Not everyone agrees that Descartes falls into this fallacy, but few doubt the ingenuity of his e!ort to rout the skeptic.

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3FO�%FTDBSUFT�� Meditations on First Philosophy

“So, my soul, it is time to part.”

—Descartes, his last words

WRITING AND REASONING CHAPTER 9

1. Do you agree with Descartes (and skeptics) that only propositions that are beyond all doubt can be knowledge? How would you argue against this view?

2. "e skeptic argues that if we are sometimes mistaken about our beliefs, then it is logically possible that we are always mistaken and that we therefore do not have knowledge. Evaluate this argument.

3. Are you living in the Matrix right now? What argument can you o!er to show that you are not in the Matrix? What kind of argument would Descartes o!er?

4. Consider this statement: All triangles have three sides. Explain how you know it is true even though you haven’t examined all triangles in existence.

5. Consider the skeptic’s charge that we can never be confident about the reliability of our normal sources of knowledge (perception, memory, introspection, and reasoning). Does it follow from the fact that we are sometimes mistaken when we rely on these sources that we are always mistaken? How would you respond to the skeptic?

226 CHAPTER 9 %FTDBSUFT��%PVCU�BOE�$FSUBJOUZ

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REVIEW NOTES

9.1 THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE t� ɨF�NBJO�RVFTUJPO�JO�FQJTUFNPMPHZ�JT�XIFUIFS�XF�IBWF�QSPQPTJUJPOBM�LOPXMFEHF�

and if we do, how much we have. t� 1SPQPTJUJPOBM�LOPXMFEHF�IBT�UISFF�OFDFTTBSZ�BOE�TVċDJFOU�DPOEJUJPOT��UP�LOPX�B�

proposition, (1) you must believe it, (2) it must be true, and (3) you must have good reasons for—be justified in—believing it true.

t� 4PNF�QIJMPTPQIFST�FNCSBDF�TLFQUJDJTN �UIF�WJFX�UIBU�XF�MBDL�LOPXMFEHF�JO�TPNF� fundamental way. Skeptics may deny that we have knowledge in all areas of in- quiry or maintain that we lack knowledge in only some of them. In any case, they hold that many or all our beliefs are false or unfounded.

t� 1IJMPTPQIFST� EJTUJOHVJTI� UXP� XBZT� UP� BDRVJSF� LOPXMFEHF�� UISPVHI� SFBTPO� BOE� through sense experience. "e former is called a priori; it yields knowledge gained independently of or prior to sense experience. "e latter is known as a posteriori; it gives us knowledge that depends entirely on sense experience.

t� 3BUJPOBMJTUT�CFMJFWF�UIBU�TPNF�PS�BMM�PG�PVS�LOPXMFEHF�BCPVU�UIF�XPSME�JT�HBJOFE� independently of sense experience. Empiricists contend that our knowledge of the empirical world comes solely from sense experience.

9.2 PLATO’S RATIONALISM t� 1MBUP�CFMJFWFT�UIBU�UIF�TPVSDF�PG�PVS�LOPXMFEHF�JT�SFBTPO��)F�TBZT�UIBU�XF�NVTU�CF�

able to acquire knowledge because we can identify false beliefs, and we obviously possess knowledge because we can grasp, through reason, mathematical, concep- tual, and logical truths.

t� 'PS�1MBUP �SFBMJUZ�DPNQSJTFT�UXP�XPSMET��UIF�nFFUJOH�XPSME�PG�UIF�QIZTJDBM�BDDFTTFE� through sense experience; and the eternal, nonphysical, changeless world of genu- ine knowledge accessed only through reason. "is nonphysical world contains the Forms, which are perfect conceptual models for every existing thing, residing only in the eternal world penetrated by reason alone.

t� 1MBUP�CFMJFWFT�JO�JOOBUF�LOPXMFEHF�UIF�JEFB�UIBU�LOPXMFEHF�PG�UIF�'PSNT�JT�BM- ready present at birth, inscribed in our minds in a previous existence.

9.3 DESCARTES’ DOUBT t� %FTDBSUFT�JOJUJBMMZ�mOET�SFBTPO�UP�EPVCU�BMM�CFMJFGT�CBTFE�PO�TFOTF�FYQFSJFODF �BS-

riving at this conclusion via his dream and evil-genius arguments. t� %FTDBSUFT� QVMMT� IJNTFMG� PVU� PG� TLFQUJDJTN� CZ� SFBMJ[JOH� UIBU� IF� DBOOPU� QPTTJCMZ�

doubt that he exists—for if he can have thoughts, he must exist (“I think, there- fore I am”).

9.4 DESCARTES’ CERTAINTY t� 'SPN�i*�UIJOL �UIFSFGPSF�*�BN w�%FTDBSUFT�HPFT�PO�UP�EJTDPWFS�BOPUIFS�QSJODJQMF�PG�

knowledge acquisition: If he perceives something clearly and distinctly, he must

'PS�'VSUIFS�3FBEJOH� 227

vau28703_ch09_210-227.indd 227 05/09/17 06:02 PM

know it with certainty. He must know it with certainty because a perfect God would not allow him to be deceived.

t� 8JUI�IJT�XBY�UIPVHIU�FYQFSJNFOU �%FTDBSUFT�BSHVFT�GPS�IJT�SBUJPOBMJTN��)F�TBZT�UIBU� although our senses tell us that the wax has changed through melting—that it has become a completely di!erent object than it was before—our minds know better. "rough a rational intuition, our minds understand that the wax, though radically altered, remains a piece of wax. If we relied only on sense experience to inform us about the wax, we would have to conclude that the original object no longer exists.

KEY TERMS a posteriori a priori empiricism

empiricists epistemology

propositional knowledge rationalism

rationalists skepticism

/PUFT 1. René Descartes, “Meditation One,” in Meditations on First Philosophy, vol. 1, !e

Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 144–145.

2. René Descartes, “Meditation One,” Meditations on First Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Dover, 1931), 146.

3. Descartes, “Meditation One,” trans. Haldane and Ross, 1931, 145–146. 4. Descartes, “Meditation One,” trans. Haldane and Ross, 1931, 147. 5. Descartes, “Meditation Two,” trans. Haldane and Ross, 1931, 149–150. 6. Descartes, “Meditation One,” trans. Haldane and Ross, 1931, 158. 7. Descartes, “Meditation Five,” trans. Haldane and Ross, 1931, 184–185. 8. Descartes, “Meditation Two,” trans. Haldane and Ross, 1931, 154–155.

'PS�'VSUIFS�3FBEJOH Robert Audi, Belief, Justification, and Knowledge (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1988).

Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

Eve Browning Cole, Philosophy and Feminist Criticism: An Introduction (New York: Paragon House, 1993). A readable introduction to feminist criticism of traditional philosophy.

René Descartes, “Meditation One,” Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Dover, 1931).

Christopher Grau, ed., Philosophers Explore the Matrix (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Paul K. Moser, Dwayne H. Mulder, and J. D. Trout, !e !eory of Knowledge: A !ematic Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Bertrand Russell, !e Problems of Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1912, 1959).

vau28703_ch10_228-262.indd 228 05/09/17 06:03 PM

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

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����� )6.& t�%FöOF�principle of induction. t�&YQMBJO�)VNF�T�EJTUJODUJPO�CFUXFFO�SFMBUJPOT�PG�JEFBT�BOE�NBUUFST�PG�GBDU�

From Hobbes to Hume

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Remember: the luminous career of René Descartes (1596–1650) marks the beginning of the modern world with its new ideas, new science, new philosophy, and new ques- tioning of religious values. In the seventeenth century, not only did Descartes start his epistemological revolution, but an impressive array of brilliant minds launched philosophical rebellions of their own. In the space of a hundred years, four British empiricists and two rationalists from the Continent veered from the path laid down by Aristotle, Descartes, the Church, and the reigning powers of the day. What they found along the way helped shape the intellectual and scientific future of the West.

10.1 HOBBES

!omas Hobbes (1588–1679) was an eminent English philosopher whose ideas influ- enced all the English moral and political thinkers who came after him. He was also a linguist, poet, classical scholar, translator, logician, critic, and mathematical tutor to Charles II.

He was born into a poor religious family and liked to say that when his mother was pregnant with him, she went into labor on hearing that the Spanish Armada was threatening England. He joked that “fear and I were born twins together.” He was educated at Oxford and spent most of his years as secretary and tutor to the family

“!e source of every crime, is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions. Defect in the understanding is ignorance; in reasoning, erroneous opinion.”

—!omas Hobbes

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10.5 SPINOZA t�%FöOF�pantheism. t�6OEFSTUBOE�XIBU�4QJOP[B�BUUFNQUT�UP�EP�CZ�MBZJOH�PVU�IJT�BSHVNFOUT�JO� �iHFPNFUSJDBM�PSEFS�w

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230 CHAPTER 10 'SPN�)PCCFT�UP�)VNF

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of the third earl of Devonshire. During this employment, he met the foremost European thinkers (Galileo and Francis Bacon among them) and wrote on a wide range of issues, both scientific and philosophical. Many of these works were extremely controversial. His political philosophy was o"ensive to both sides in the English Civil War; the Roman Catholic Church and Oxford University forbade the reading of his books; and he went against the grain of his era by advancing materialism, egoism, and (what some considered) heresy.

His best-known and most influential creation is Leviathan (1651), a sweeping treatise on political theory. His other writ- ings include Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (1651), On the Body (1655), and On Man (1658).

In Leviathan, Hobbes sets forth a new theory of distributive justice, or social justice. In its broadest sense, justice refers to people getting what is fair or what is their due, and the core principle that defines a person’s due is equals should be treated equally. Distributive justice is about the fair distribution of society’s benefits and burdens (its material and nonmaterial goods)—such things as jobs, income, prop- erty, liberties, rights, welfare aid, taxes, and public service. How these goods are distributed among the citizens of a state

is a function of how the state is structured, how its social and political institutions are arranged. It’s this kind of justice that is the focus of political philosophers and their theories of justice.

Hobbes’s understanding of distributive justice is a social contract theory, which says that justice is secured, and the state is made legitimate, through an agree- ment among citizens of the state. !e people consent explicitly or implicitly to be governed—to be subject to the dictates and the power of the state—in exchange for the state’s providing security, rights, and liberties. !e state’s existence is justified by the binding contract that all parties accept. !is idea about the role and justification of the state was incorporated into the Constitution of the United States, and in the twenty-first century, the wisdom of social contracts is taken for granted by much of the world.

!eories of justice embody principles that define fair distributions, that explain what people are due and why. A utilitarian theory of justice, for example, says that the distribution of goods should be based on the principle of utility. Society’s institutions must be arranged so that its benefits and burdens are allocated to maximize some measure of society’s welfare (total happiness, for example). !is is a popular scheme of distribution, although some think it is inconsistent with our commonsense notions of justice and equality. As you might guess, the utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill favors the view.

Some theories of justice insist on distributions according to merit, or desert (what people deserve). Plato took this tack, arguing that because people di"er in their talents and achievements, they should be given a station in life that reflects

Figure 10.1 5IPNBT�)PCCFT� ����o���� �

distributive justice (or social justice) !e fair distribution of society’s benefits and burdens— such things as jobs, income, property, liber- ties, rights, welfare aid, taxes, and public service.

justice !e idea that people should get what is fair or what is their due.

social contract theory !e view that justice is secured, and the state is made legitimate, through an agreement among citizens of the state or between the citizens and the rulers of the state.

“Hell is truth seen too late.”

—!omas Hobbes

)PCCFT� 231

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this di"erence. Some people have superior capacities and therefore should receive a superior share of society’s goods; some possess few capacities and should get a smaller share. As you can see, Plato’s view is strongly antidemocratic.

Hobbes was the first philosopher in modern times to systematically articulate a social contract theory. It was a major departure from received views about society, and that fact alone was enough to infuriate many. It also contained a rejection of both the divine right of kings and the notion of a divinely established moral law— points that gave his critics even more reasons to attack him.

Hobbes contends that a social contract is necessary in human a"airs because living without one would be a horrific nightmare of existence. He begins by assuming a pessimistic view of human beings: at their core, he says, they are selfish, treacherous, dishonest, and violent. He argues that when these tendencies are left unchecked by enforced laws or agreements, humans sink into a “state of nature”—a “war of every man against every man.” In the state of nature, there is no code, culture, or comfort. !ere is no justice. !ere is only “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”1

But, Hobbes says, humankind also has a strong instinct for self-interest and self-preservation, and fortunately this impulse is coupled with the power of reason. !rough reason, he says, people see that the only way to escape this “war of all against all” is to enter into a social contract with one another. In the name of self-interest, they agree to turn over much of their autonomy, freedom, and power to an absolute sovereign that will forcibly keep the peace, restrain antisocial actions, and compel people to keep their agreements. Hobbes calls this sovereign the Leviathan (the name of a sea monster mentioned in the Bible), which symbolizes great power and evil. Its authority over those bound by the social contract is absolute, and its power is fearsome (enough to deter any tendency to disorder). Once power is given up to this despot, there is no going back, and there is always the chance that the sovereign will create an environment worse than the state of nature. But that is the chance people must take.

So the state’s authority is justified by a social contract, and justice comes into being as the Leviathan assumes power. For Hobbes, justice is a matter of keeping covenants (contracts), and the only way to ensure that covenants are kept is to let the Leviathan reign. Without the Leviathan to enforce covenants, there is no justice. As Hobbes says, “Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law no injustice.”2

Here is Hobbes arguing for his theory:

1.�)PCCFT�JT�B�QFTTJNJTU� BCPVU�IVNBO�OBUVSF�� IF̓UIJOLT�QFPQMF�BSF� CBTJDBMMZ�HSFFEZ�BOE� USFBDIFSPVT��%P�ZPV�UIJOL� IF�T�SJHIU�BCPVU�UIJT �0S� BSF�QFPQMF�GVOEBNFOUBMMZ� TPDJBCMF �DPPQFSBUJWF � BOE̓HPPE �&YQMBJO�ZPVS� SFBTPOJOH��

“It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.”

—!omas Hobbes

5IPNBT�)PCCFT��Leviathan

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232 CHAPTER 10 'SPN�)PCCFT�UP�)VNF

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CHAPTER 15.�0'�05)&3�-"84�0'�/"563&

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“!e condition of man . . . is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.”

—!omas Hobbes

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5IPNBT�)PCCFT�� Leviathan

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!e philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), a contemporary of Hobbes, devised a di"erent kind of social contract theory. It has some points in common with Hobbes’s— but also much that Hobbes would have rejected outright. Both Hobbes and Locke assert that (1) reason enables people to see the wisdom of forming a state through a social contract, (2) people must freely consent to be bound by the contract (not be coerced into accepting it), and (3) the state’s authority is justified by this consent of the governed. Beyond these matters, Hobbes and Locke part company.

For one thing, they have very di"erent ideas about the “state of nature,” the world in which no civil society exists. For Hobbes, to be in the state of nature is to be in a “war of all against all,” where morality is nonexistent, and the only laws are commonsense rules for survival and self-interest. For Locke, on the other hand, the state of nature is considerably less nasty and brutish, for even there, natural moral laws apply and help regulate people’s behavior. !ose living in the state of nature are free, sociable, equal, and (mostly) at peace.

Hobbes contends that, generally, justice and rights do not come into being until the state is established. People surrender their lives and liberties to the Leviathan in exchange for security and peace, and he can do what he wants with his subjects. But Locke argues that humans have inherent, God-given rights whether or not a govern- ment is around to guarantee them. Chief among these is the right to property—not just land but your own body and any object that you change through work (with which you “mix your labor”). !ese rights are inalienable: they cannot be transferred

“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”

—John Locke

236 CHAPTER 10 'SPN�)PCCFT�UP�)VNF

vau28703_ch10_228-262.indd 236 05/09/17 06:03 PM

to the government or any other entity. Humans create the government and cede some power to it; in return it protects their rights and liberties. !e state serves the people (not the other way round), directing all its power “to no other end but the peace, safety, and public good of the people.”

But what exactly does the state do to preserve liberties and promote the common good? Locke identifies three functions that people need the state to perform. First, citizens need the natural moral law to be set out in clearly expressed laws of the land. Unwritten natural laws are clear to humans, but people are apt to misconstrue them in line with their biases. Second, there needs to be impartial judges who can settle dis- putes concerning the application of the laws. !ird, there needs to be power in the state to enforce the laws. Otherwise people will be able to take justice into their own hands.

Suppose, however, that the state abuses its power by repeatedly and arbitrarily trampling on the people’s rights and liberties. Hobbes says once you cede power to the Leviathan, he is free to treat you as he will. But Locke says if the government violates the rights of citizens, it is no longer legitimate, obligations to it are voided, and the people have a right to dissolve it—to initiate rebellion. Locke’s insistence on the right to rebel against a government that misuses its power is echoed clearly in the Declaration of Independence:

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10.2 LOCKE

In addition to his political writing, John Locke also advanced a theory of knowledge, taking an empiricist approach, as do two other British empiricists—George Berkeley and David Hume. Like most empiricists, Locke and Berkeley reject skep- ticism while denying rationalist claims (such as the doctrine of innate ideas), building their theories of knowledge on the supposed firmer ground of sense experience. (See Descartes’ rationalist view in Chapter 9.) But the di"erences among these seminal thinkers are stark. Locke argues that we can know much about things external to our minds; Berkeley agrees that we can have knowledge but denies the reality of material objects; and Hume insists that the scope of our knowledge is much narrower than most people realize, raising skeptical doubts about the existence of the external world and the inductive methodology of science.Figure 10.4 +PIO�-PDLF� ����o���� �

-PDLF� 237

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In Locke’s philosophical masterwork, An Essay Concerning Human Understand- ing (1689), he builds a case against rationalism and for a thoroughgoing empiri- cism. First he contends that the rationalist notion that we are born with knowledge (“innate principles,” as he says) already imprinted on our minds is unfounded. !e rationalist argues, says Locke, that since all people seem to possess knowledge of certain universal principles (such as truths of logic), this knowledge must be inborn. How else could everyone have come by this knowledge? Locke replies that there are no such universal principles, and even if there were, they could have easily arisen through sense experience. !ey need not be present at birth. Here is Locke’s critique of innate ideas:

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is think- ing that makes what we read ours.”

—John Locke

+PIO�-PDLF��An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

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+PIO�-PDLF��An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

For Locke, the mind does not come into the world already inscribed with ideas or knowledge. On the contrary, he says, the mind is unmarked “white paper” void

of any ideas until sense experience gives it content. From where does the mind obtain “all the materials of reason and knowledge”? he asks. “To this I answer, in one word, from experience. In that all our knowledge is founded.”6

Rationalists like Descartes would say that our most important items of knowledge must be innate because they could not possibly have come from sense experience. !ey would maintain, for example, that our knowledge of the concept “infinity” and of the proposition “every event has a cause” must be prenatally imprinted on our minds because we can never observe instances of these in reality. !rough sense experience we can become acquainted only with finite things, not an infinity of things; and we can observe only a limited number of events, not all events. Locke, however, holds that we can grasp such ideas by first having sense experience related to them and then extrapolating the ideas from the sense data. We can, for example, have the concept of infinity by experiencing finite things and multiplying and extending them in our imagination until we approach the idea of the infinite.

Locke tries to defeat the skeptic by showing how our sense experience can reveal the existence of an external world. He says we must distinguish between the objects of our experience (external objects) and the experience of those objects (sensations, or sense data). Physical objects cause sensa- tions in us, and we are directly aware only of those sensations (or ideas, as Locke calls them). So we have direct knowledge not of external objects,

Figure 10.5 5JUMF�QBHF�PG�-PDLF�T�Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

-PDLF� 239

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but of the sense data that seem to be external objects. But if all we ever really know are sense data, how can we be sure they give us an accurate picture of the external world?

Locke’s answer is that sensations caused by external objects somehow represent those objects and thereby give us knowledge of them. Sensations are, Locke says, “resemblances” of external things. But he points out that not all of our sensations faithfully reflect reality. He distinguishes between two kinds of properties that external objects can have. Primary qualities are objective properties such as size, solid- ity, and mobility. !ey are in material objects, independent of our senses, and would be possessed by the objects even if no one was around to sense anything. Secondary qualities are subjective properties such as the color red or the smell of roses. !ey are in the mind in that they depend on the operation of the senses. !ey exist only when someone experiences them. For Locke, we can have objective knowledge of material objects because some of our sense data represent the objects’ primary qualities, which are objective characteristics of them.

“To prejudge other men’s notions before we have looked into them is not to show their darkness but to put out our own eyes.”

—John Locke

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THEN AND NOW

The Defeat of Relativism Like Plato and many other philosophers, Locke rejected the doctrine of relativism. Recall that relativism is a view about knowledge that has been controversial since Socrates’ time. (It’s surprisingly common today, especially among college students.) It’s the doctrine that the truth about something depends on what persons or cultures believe. !e notion that truth depends on what a person believes is known as subjective relativism, and the idea that truth depends on what a culture believes is called cultural relativism.

As we’ve seen, we normally assume that truth is objective—that it depends on the way the world is. When we assert a proposition, we generally believe that the proposition is true if and only if it says the way things are in reality. But the relativist rejects this view, believing instead that truth is relative to what a person or culture accepts as true. Truth is a matter of what a person or culture believes—not a matter of how the world is. Most philosophers have rejected relativism because the doctrine implies several absurdities that render it implausible. !ey point out, for example, that if we could make a statement true just by believing it to be true, we could never be in error; we would be infallible.

But relativism in all its forms has a bigger problem: it is self-defeating. It defeats itself because its truth implies its falsity. !e relativist says, “All truth is relative.” If this statement is objectively true, then it refutes itself because if it is objectively true that “all truth is rela- tive,” then the statement itself is an example of an objective truth. So if “all truth is relative” is objectively true, it is objectively false.

"SF�ZPV�B�SFMBUJWJTU �8IZ�PS�XIZ�OPU

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Locke’s theory of knowledge, however, has been sharply criticized by both ratio- nalists and empiricists. !e main criticism is that Locke has not given us any good reason to think that our sense data are proof of the existence of an external reality. After all, according to Locke, we directly experience only our sensations, or ideas; we do not directly perceive external objects. We have no way of jumping out of our subjective point of view to compare our sense experience with the objective world. For all we know, our sense data present a radically distorted or thoroughly false picture of reality.

Here is Locke’s answer to this charge:

“One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposi- tion with greater assur- ance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.”

—John Locke

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+PIO�-PDLF��An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

-PDLF� 241

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6. Pleasure and Pain, which accompanies actual sensation, accompanies not the returning of those ideas, without the external objects.�5IJSEMZ �BEE�UP�UIJT �UIBU�NBOZ�PG� UIPTF�JEFBT�BSF�QSPEVDFE�JO�VT�XJUI�QBJO �XIJDI�BGUFSXBSET�XF�SFNFNCFS�XJUIPVU�UIF�MFBTU� PòFODF��5IVT�UIF�QBJO�PG�IFBU�PS�DPME �XIFO�UIF�JEFB�PG�JU�JT�SFWJWFE�JO�PVS�NJOET �HJWFT� VT̓OP�EJTUVSCBODF��XIJDI �XIFO�GFMU �XBT�WFSZ�USPVCMFTPNF �BOE�JT�BHBJO �XIFO�BDUVBMMZ� �SFQFBUFE��XIJDI�JT�PDDBTJPOFE�CZ�UIF�EJTPSEFS�UIF�FYUFSOBM�PCKFDU�DBVTFT�JO�PVS�CPEJFT� XIFO�BQQMJFE�UP�JU��"OE�XF�SFNFNCFS�UIF�QBJOT�PG�IVOHFS �UIJSTU �PS�UIF�IFBE�BDIF �XJUIPVU� BOZ�QBJO�BU�BMM��XIJDI�XPVME�FJUIFS�OFWFS�EJTUVSC�VT �PS�FMTF�DPOTUBOUMZ�EP�JU �BT�PGUFO�BT�XF� UIPVHIU�PG�JU �XFSF�UIFSF�OPUIJOH�NPSF�CVU�JEFBT�øPBUJOH�JO�PVS�NJOET �BOE�BQQFBSBODFT� FOUFSUBJOJOH�PVS�GBODJFT �XJUIPVU�UIF�SFBM�FYJTUFODF�PG�UIJOHT�BòFDUJOH�VT�GSPN�BCSPBE��5IF� TBNF�NBZ�CF�TBJE�PG�QMFBTVSF �BDDPNQBOZJOH�TFWFSBM�BDUVBM�TFOTBUJPOT��"OE�UIPVHI�NBUI- FNBUJDBM�EFNPOTUSBUJPO�EFQFOET�OPU�VQPO�TFOTF �ZFU�UIF�FYBNJOJOH�UIFN�CZ�EJBHSBNT� HJWFT�HSFBU�DSFEJU�UP�UIF�FWJEFODF�PG�PVS�TJHIU �BOE�TFFNT�UP�HJWF�JU�B�DFSUBJOUZ�BQQSPBDIJOH� UP�UIBU�PG�EFNPOTUSBUJPO�JUTFMG��'PS�JU�XPVME�CF�WFSZ�TUSBOHF �UIBU�B�NBO�TIPVME�BMMPX�JU�GPS�

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+PIO�-PDLF��An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Locke asks, in e"ect: What could possibly cause our sense experience if not external objects? His answer is that we know that external objects are real (and not a dream or delusion) because the theory that they exist is the best explanation for the sensations we have. External objects cause our sensations, and this is a much better explanation for our experience than that an evil genius or our own minds create a fantasy world that we take to be real.

10.3 BERKELEY

Like Locke, George Berkeley (1685–1753) is an empiricist who rejects skepticism. He believes that we can indeed acquire knowledge and that the only path to it is through sense experience. But beyond these points of agreement, Berkeley veers sharply from Locke’s view and from the theories of most other empiricists. (Caution: At first glance, you may think Berkeley’s theory of knowledge is both bizarre and

“Hunting after arguments to make good one side of a question, and wholly to refuse those which favour the other, is so far from giving truth its due value, that it wholly debases it.”

—John Locke

#FSLFMFZ� 243

vau28703_ch10_228-262.indd 243 05/09/17 06:03 PM

wrong. But he provides plausible, and unsettling, arguments for his view, and generations of philosophers—whether they agreed with Berkeley or not—have been forced to take his theory seriously.)

For Berkeley, there are no material objects, no things that exist in the external world. !ere are objects to be sure, but they exist only as sensations (what Berkeley calls ideas) in some mind. !ey are real only because they are perceived by someone. !us he declares in his famous phrase, esse est per- cipi, “to be is to be perceived.” What we usually call physical objects, then, are simply compilations of sense data, and real- ity consists only of ideas and the minds that perceive them. Our sense experience does not represent an external reality as Locke thought; our sense experience is reality. Locke’s view is vulnerable to skeptical criticism because he admits that there is a gap between our sensations and reality. Berkeley, how- ever, tries to defeat skepticism by doing away with the gap entirely. He contends that there is no gap, because material objects do not exist; only ideas exist along with the minds that perceive them.

Let’s allow Berkeley to make his case: Figure 10.6 (FPSHF�#FSLFMFZ� ����o���� �

(FPSHF�#FSLFMFZ��Of the Principles of Human Knowledge

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244 CHAPTER 10 'SPN�)PCCFT�UP�)VNF

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“All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth— in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world—have not any subsistence without a mind.”

—George Berkeley

(FPSHF�#FSLFMFZ��Of the Principles of Human Knowledge

To provide further support for his theory, Berkeley takes aim at Locke’s distinc- tion between primary and secondary qualities. He claims that primary qualities are just as mind dependent as secondary qualities are, for primary qualities can also vary according to the state of our senses, and primary qualities are inseparable from secondary qualities.

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(FPSHF�#FSLFMFZ��Of the Principles of Human Knowledge

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Berkeley’s most interesting argument against the existence of material objects is a purely logical one: he contends that they cannot exist because their existence would be logically absurd. !e commonsense view is that material objects continue to be even when no one has them in mind. But, says Berkeley, this would mean that they can be conceived of as existing unconceived, that we can think about things that no one is thinking about—a logical contradiction. !erefore, Berkeley concludes, the claim that material objects exist is false.

Critics have taken issue with this argument. !ey agree that in one sense it is impossible to conceive of something unconceived: it is impossible to contemplate a thing that is at the same time not being contemplated. But they maintain that there

“!e possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. !ere is always more mystery.”

—Anaïs Nin

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is no incoherence in believing the assertion that an entity exists unconceived. No contradiction lurks here. If so, the concept of a material object is not, as Berkeley charges, “a manifest repugnancy.”

Some have faulted Berkeley’s theory in another way. !ey ask, Why do pat- terns of sensations present themselves to us as if they were entirely independent of our minds? !at is, why do the configurations of sense data behave like material objects, seemingly existing unperceived and beyond our control? Berkeley’s answer is that things are never unperceived, for God continually perceives them and thus causes them to be as they are. God inserts a grand, intricate panoply of ideas into our minds—sensations that constitute for us a real world of God’s making. What we think of as material objects are instead repeating patterns of sense experience caused by God.

Like the rationalist Descartes, Berkeley the empiricist ultimately brings in God to explain how knowledge is possible. But to many, his explanation of the peculiar nature of our sense experience is not as good by far as the commonsense explanation: material objects exist independently of us and cause the patterns of our sensations. !ey think the God theory leaves too much unexplained; to them the material- object theory seems simpler and more consistent with scientific understanding of perception. As Bertrand Russell says:

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10.4 HUME

So, in their own ways, Locke and Berkeley wrestled with the great epistemological questions: Do we have knowledge? And if so, what exactly do we know? In the end they all concluded that we do indeed have knowledge, but they di"ered on its extent. In contrast, David Hume—the renowned Enlightenment thinker and preeminent British philosopher—argued for a thoroughly consistent empiricism that led him to a skepticism so extensive that few others dared follow his lead.

Hume insists that whatever knowledge we have is of two kinds: “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact.” !e former includes truths of mathematics and truths of logic (such as “either it’s raining or it’s not raining” and “no bachelors are married”); they are derived from reason. !e latter consists of information about the world and is based entirely on sense experience. We can come to know relations of ideas with certainty, but they are not informative about reality. We know that “either it’s rain- ing or it’s not raining” is true, but the proposition tells us nothing about whether it is actually raining. It simply states an obvious logical truth. Matters of fact, on the other hand, are informative about the world, but they cannot be known with cer- tainty. So contrary to the rationalists, Hume maintains that reason is not a source of knowledge about the world. In line with the empiricists, he holds that knowledge about the world can be acquired only through experience.

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other o#ce than to serve and obey them.”

—David Hume

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But how much can we really know through experience alone? !at is, what can we know about matters of fact? Hume’s answer: very little. He says that the infor- mation derived from experience—what he calls perceptions—consists of sense data (such as sights, odors, and sounds) and inner psychological states (such as hate, fear, love, and desire). Perceptions are of two types: impressions and ideas. Impressions are what we directly and vividly experience, the raw sense data and psychological states. Ideas are our less vivid thoughts and reflections about impressions. !e experience of a bright red color when you look at a rose is an impression. Your thoughts or imaginings about the original rose experience is an idea. Hume uses this terminol- ogy to make his central point: For something to count as knowledge, it must be based on impressions or on ideas derived from impressions. And for a statement to be meaningful, it must ultimately refer to impressions. Here is Hume outlining these distinctions:

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David Hume During his lifetime, David Hume (1711–1776) earned a reputa- tion as one of Britain’s premier men of letters and garnered fame as the author of the six-volume History of England. In our time, he is regarded as a key figure in the Enlightenment, the most influential of the British empiricists, and possibly Britain’s great- est philosopher.

He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, educated at its university, and spent most of his literary career in the city of his birth. By age sixteen he was already well versed in classical literature, logic, meta- physics, philosophy, and ethics. Later, in a three-year period, he read, in his words, “most of the celebrated Books in Latin, French & English.”

He wrote essays on politics, ethics, and economics as well as major philosophical trea- tises. !e first (and some say the greatest) of the latter was A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), followed by An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, his masterpiece in epistemology, he argued for a stronger and more encompassing skepticism than any other major philosopher dared embrace. His skepticism extended to induction, causation, the external world, the self, miracles, and the existence of God. (His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion was such a scorching attack on religious belief that he delayed its publication until after his death.) His doubts about all these ideas sprang naturally from his consistent and thoroughgoing empiricism in which assertions can count as knowledge only if they can be traced back to experience. He boldly declared, “When we run over librar- ies, persuaded of these [empiricist] principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

Despite his tough-minded philosophy, Hume was blessed with a cheerful disposition, which probably helped him cope with the gloomy skepticism of his studies. He said that reason could not cure his melancholy but distraction and recreation could. As he put it, “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.” But he did enter into them again many times—and so laid down a challenge to future thinkers to try to answer his philosophical doubts.

By all accounts, Hume was a decent, generous, and honorable person, admired and liked by everyone who knew him. A contemporary of Hume’s, Adam Smith, the renowned phi- losopher and economist, said of Hume that “upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his life-time and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit.”

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Hume not only argues that whatever we know about the world must be grounded in our perceptions but also that we can be sure only of those perceptions. We know just our experience and can only guess what lies beyond it. It’s as if we are locked in a windowless room and must speculate about what it’s like outside based on a video we can watch indoors. !e video may or may not resemble the outside world, but it’s the only information we have.

Hume’s strict empiricism leads naturally to skepticism about a notion that we usually assume without question: causality. We believe the world is filled with causes and e"ects; we think one thing causes another, and the two are somehow physically linked. Every day of our lives we draw countless conclusions based on our assump- tions about cause-and-e"ect relationships. But Hume argues that we have no good grounds for believing that causes and e"ects are related the way we think they are.

“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in phi- losophy only ridiculous.”

—David Hume

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Hume asserts that neither reason nor experience can provide us with evidence that causal relationships exist. We can observe no power or force that enables causes to produce events. Our perceptions do not give us any reason to believe that one thing makes another thing happen. All we observe, says Hume, is one event as- sociated with another, and when we repeatedly see such a pairing, we jump to the conclusion that the events are causally connected. We make these inferences out of habit, not logic or empirical evidence.

In making judgments about causes and e"ects, we reason inductively. !at is, we assume that events that followed one another in the past will do the same in the future, that the future will be like the past. We presuppose, in other words, the principle of induction. Because of previous experience, we expect night to follow day, fire to burn, bread to nourish, and dogs to bark. Likewise the whole scientific enterprise runs on this principle, with scientists making inferences from empirical regularities to predictions about events to come. At first glance, it might seem that no one would seriously question the legitimacy of inductive reasoning. But Hume does:

“We have limited knowl- edge, or else science and philosophy would not be necessary.”

—Ivan Urlaub

principle of induction !e presumption that events that followed one another in the past will do the same in the future, that the future will be like the past.

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Hume asks, Do we have any grounds whatsoever for believing the principle of induction? What justifies our assumption that the future will be like the past? He argues that the principle cannot be an a priori truth, and it cannot be an a posteriori fact. It cannot be the former because the denial of an a priori truth (such as “all bachelors are unmarried”) is self-contradictory, and the denial of the principle of induction is not like that. It cannot be the latter because no amount of empirical evidence can show it to be true. Why? As Hume observes, to maintain that the principle of in- duction is an a posteriori fact is to say that it can be established by experience (that is, inductively). !at is equivalent to saying that the principle of induction can be proved by the principle of induction—which is to beg the question. Arguing in a circle like this o"ers no support to the principle at all.

!is di#culty of justifying the assumption that the future will be like the past is known as the problem of induction, and it has incited generations of thinkers to try to solve it. !ey have explored whether there are grounds for believ- ing that the inductive principle—so indispensible in science and daily life—is true. All the while we use the principle to make all kinds of inferences and predictions, which usually serve us well.

Hume, for his part, holds that we rely on the principle of induction not because it is an established truth but because it is a habit of mind. Because of our long experience of seeing one event repeatedly follow another, we develop a feeling of expectation that they will always follow one another.

By now you probably know that Hume’s skepticism extends beyond causality and induction to the existence of the external world. He reasons that because all we can directly know is our experience, we can never be sure that an external world exists beyond our internal perceptions:

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“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”

—David Hume

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Provoked by Hume’s radical skepticism, philosophers have expended a great deal of energy trying to show that his views on causality, induction, and the external world are partly or wholly unfounded. But the brilliant Hume has put forward some compelling arguments, and they have proven hard to counter.

10.5 SPINOZA

Baruch (Benedictus) Spinoza (1632–1677) was one of the three greatest rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century (the others were Descartes and Leibniz), ul- timately constructing an imposing metaphysical and epistemological system that has been studied and debated for three centuries. In his lifetime he earned the devotion of friends and followers and the disdain of enemies and critics. In the latter camp, he was both reviled as an atheist and characterized as “a god-intoxicated” man. Among those who were a"ected by him we can count Nietzsche, Freud, Russell, and Einstein, and among the most influential books of Western philosophy we can include his masterpiece the Ethics.

Spinoza was born into a well-to-do Jewish family living in Amsterdam, Hol- land, where they had fled to escape religious persecution in Portugal. He received a Jewish education in Hebrew and studied the works of Jewish and Arabic theolo- gians and philosophers (including Maimonides). But as he became familiar with secular and Christian thought and with Descartes’ philosophical and scientific thinking, he turned away from his orthodox upbringing and adopted heretical views. !us in 1656, at age twenty-four, he was excommunicated from the Jewish community, whose members were enjoined to cease all contact with him. To earn an income, he ground lenses for spectacles and telescopes, and this money (plus modest financial support from friends) allowed him to pursue a life of philosoph- ical reflection and writing without formal attachments to the academic world. He did, however, engage in frequent correspondence with several eminent thinkers of the day.

In 1663 Spinoza published his first book, Principles of Descartes’s Philosophy, a rendering of Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy in strict “geometrical order”—that is, in the form of a deductive geometry proof consisting of definitions, axioms, and derived propositions. In 1670 Spinoza published—anonymously—his !eological- Political Treatise, an argument for free inquiry, tolerance, religious liberty, and open-minded biblical criticism. !e work was first condemned, then banned, by the Reformed Church. His greatest work, the Ethics, was published posthumously. It too is set out in geometrical fashion, comprising five parts: “Concerning God,” “On the Nature and Origin of the Mind,” “Concerning the Origin and Nature of the Emo- tions,” “Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions,” and “Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom.”

!e heart of Spinoza’s metaphysics is his concept of substance. To ask what is substance in the philosophical sense is to ask, What is being? or What fundamen- tal realities exist? (Such questions, of course, are central concerns in any mature

“Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.”

—Baruch Spinoza

4QJOP[B� 253

vau28703_ch10_228-262.indd 253 05/09/17 06:03 PM

metaphysics, from Aristotle to the present.) Descartes de- clares that there are two kinds of substances—matter and mind (the material and mental)—and this dichotomy is what constitutes his dualism. But for Spinoza, there is only one substance, and this substance is God (or Nature), and all material and mental things are attributes of God (who also has an infinite number of other attributes). So entities in the world are features of the one eternal, divine substance. A human being is a finite feature of the infinite God, a feature that can be conceived as either material or mental. Spinoza’s view then is a form of pantheism, the notion that God is identical with everything. !us his God is infinite, eternal, and immanent but is not a person, not a being that interacts with the world as the West’s traditional God is supposed to.

Spinoza uses the notion of substance to try to prove the existence of his God through an ontological argument. An- thony Kenny summarizes it like this:

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Spinoza argues that God not only exists, but exists necessarily: God could not have failed to exist, nor could he have existed with any other attributes than what he has. And if God exists necessarily, then everything that arises from his nature arises necessarily.

If everything behaves by necessity, it would seem that neither God nor humans can act freely. But Spinoza maintains God is nevertheless free because his actions are determined by his own nature. God cannot act in any way other than how he must act, but how he must act is determined by him. Humans too can have a kind of freedom. As aspects of a determined God, they are ultimately determined, but they can still act freely if they themselves are in control of their choices, if they can do what they choose to do, rather than have their choices dictated to them by forces beyond their control. !ey lack freedom when their choices are ruled by, for example, unconstrained emotions, hidden motivations, and irrational thinking. !ey can act freely when they are fully aware of these factors and choose in the light of reason.

Figure 10.9 #BSVDI�4QJOP[B� ����o���� �

“Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.”

—Baruch Spinoza

pantheism !e view that God is identical with everything.

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DETAILS

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Russell on Spinoza !e English philosopher Bertrand Russell was one of the twentieth century’s greatest minds and a world-famous symbol of philosophy itself. He wrote about every area of philosophy and penned several histories of philosophy in the West. He also wrote about other philoso- phers and had biting criticisms of many of them. Here’s Russell’s assessment of Spinoza and Leibniz:

Spinoza . . . is the noblest and most lov- able of the great philosophers. Intellec- tually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme. As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness. He was born a Jew, but the Jews excom- municated him. Christians abhorred him equally; although his whole philos- ophy is dominated by the idea of God, the orthodox accused him of atheism. Leibniz, who owed much to him, con- cealed his debt, and carefully abstained from saying a word in his praise; he even went so far as to lie about the extent of his personal acquaintance with the heretic Jew.

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Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), 569.

-FJCOJ[� 255

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10.6 LEIBNIZ

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was not only one of the great rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth cen- tury but also the most impressive polymath of all the phi- losophers in the modern era. He was an innovator and leader in mathematics, jurisprudence, history, politics, theology, science, and technology. He independently discovered the infinitesimal calculus (he didn’t know that earlier Newton had also discovered it). He invented a calculating machine that could handle many of the functions that electronic cal- culators do now. He founded learned societies (the Society of the Sciences in Berlin, for example), undertook diplo- matic missions, tried to reconcile Christian denominations, devised a plan to unite the Christian states of Europe, and corresponded with most of the great thinkers of his day, in- cluding Spinoza. In philosophy he made his mark in logic, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophies of mind, religion, and science.

Leibniz was born in Leipzig, Germany, where his father taught philosophy at the university. By the time he entered that school at age fifteen, he had already fully imbibed meta- physics and the Greek and medieval classics. During his college years, he studied mathematics, law, and the works of Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Galileo, and others. In 1667, at age twenty-one, he took his doctorate in law at the University of Altdorf and was o"ered a professorship there, which he declined.

In the same year, he began working for the archbishop-elector of Mainz, sys- tematizing German law and later leading a diplomatic mission to Paris. Over the following decade, he was tutored in mathematics by the physicist and astronomer Christian Huygens, studied Descartes and Spinoza, met scientific and philosophical luminaries in Paris and England, and invented his infinitesimal calculus, a feat that engendered a long-running controversy over whether he or Newton was first to make the discovery. He spent the last two decades of his life in Hanover.

Like Spinoza, Leibniz developed a metaphysical system built largely on the fun- damental notion of substance. As with Spinoza, Leibniz’s urgent question is, What is being? Any stable metaphysics, thinks Leibniz, must begin there. He believes that for lack of a plausible understanding of substance, the philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke ran into trouble.

While Descartes maintains that there are two kinds of substances, and Spinoza insists that there is only one, Leibniz argues that there are many. !e reasoning goes like this: A substance must be simple (having no parts). Material (extended) objects cannot be substances because they are not simple: they can always be divided into many separate pieces. Simple substances make up compound material objects. As Leibniz says, “!ere must be simple substances, since there are compound sub- stances, for the compound is only a collection or aggregatum of simple substances.”16

“I hold that the mark of a genuine idea is that its possibility can be proved, either a priori by conceiv- ing its cause or reason, or a posteriori when experience teaches us that it is in fact in nature.”

—G. W. Leibniz

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But simple substances cannot be extended. !ey must instead be immaterial, mind- like existents. Leibniz calls these existents monads. !ey are, he says, “the true atoms of nature and, in a word, the elements of things.”17 !ey are, however, more like souls than tiny bits of matter.

Monads are strange, to say the least, but for Leibniz, they are the only things that make sense as substances. Frederick Copleston explains some other implications that Leibniz draws from his odd concept:

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Monads are not full-blown minds but are centers of rudimentary mental processes— specifically, perceptions and their changes. !rough its perceptions, each monad mirrors the entire cosmos in its own distinctive fashion and from its own perspec- tive. Each is “windowless,” meaning that nothing can enter or leave it, nothing from outside can causally a"ect it. Its perceptions—its mirror images of the world—are supplied and coordinated by God. It is God who manages the monads and arranges them into a harmonious, intelligible reality. In fact, monads behave according to a pre-established harmony laid down by God from eternity. !us monads are like cells of the body—each one independent of, and distinct from, the others yet behaving in perfect accord with them, each one containing a representation of the whole (a per- ceptual representation in monads; a genetic representation in cells).

In the Leibnizian universe, everything seems to follow its natural course by ne- cessity. But if necessity reigns, humans would have no free will, for everything would happen according to a pre-established harmony that no one except God has any control over. Leibniz says that even in God’s well-ordered world, humans are free to act as they see fit:

“!is is the best of all possible worlds.”

—G. W. Leibniz

monads Leibniz’s term for the only true substances—immaterial, mental entities that constitute reality.

(PUUGSJFE�8JMIFMN�-FJCOJ[��Discourse on Metaphysics

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-FJCOJ[� 257

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XBZ�UIBU�PVS�UIPVHIUT�PDDVS�TQPOUBOFPVTMZ�BOE�GSFFMZ�JO�UIF�PSEFS�MBJE�EPXO�CZ�UIF�OPUJPO� PG�PVS�JOEJWJEVBM�TVCTUBODF �JO�XIJDI�UIFZ�DPVME�CF�GPSFTFFO�GSPN�BMM�FUFSOJUZ��'VSUIFSNPSF � IF�EFUFSNJOFT�PVS�XJMM�UP�DIPPTF�XIBU�BQQFBST�CFTU �ZFU�XJUIPVU�OFDFTTJUBUJOH�JU��5IJT�JT� JO̓ WJSUVF� PG� IJT� EFDJTJPO� UIBU� PVS� XJMM� TIPVME� BMXBZT� UFOE� UP� UIF� BQQBSFOU� HPPE � UIVT� �FYQSFTTJOH�PS�JNJUBUJOH�UIF�XJMM�PG�(PE�JO�DFSUBJO�QBSUJDVMBS�BSFBT �XJUI�SFTQFDU�UP�XIJDI�UIJT� BQQBSFOU�HPPE�BMXBZT�IBT�TPNF�USVUI�JO�JU��'PS�TQFBLJOH�BCTPMVUFMZ �PVS�XJMM�JT�JO�B�TUBUF�PG� JOEJòFSFODF �JO�TP�GBS�BT�JOEJòFSFODF�JT�PQQPTFE�UP�OFDFTTJUZ �BOE�JU�IBT�UIF�QPXFS�UP�EP� PUIFSXJTF � PS� UP� TVTQFOE� JUT� BDUJPO� BMUPHFUIFS � CPUI� BMUFSOBUJWFT� CFJOH� BOE� SFNBJOJOH� QPTTJCMF���

Leibniz’s view is that God may incline our wills one way or another but does not necessitate them. Our thoughts are our own, occurring “spontaneously and freely.” In this way, Leibniz says, determinism and free will coexist in human actions and choices.

According to Leibniz, God also has free will. He had the freedom to select among many possible worlds this one world we now inhabit and to make that world actual. In fact, Leibniz says, God—acting in the light of reason and through his own goodness—chose this world because it is the best of all possible worlds.

From this view, the question naturally arises: Is this “best of all possible worlds” really the best that God could do? How can the best possible world contain so much evil and imperfection? Leibniz’s answer is that for God, the best possible world is one in which humans have freedom to choose good or evil. A universe full of obedient, sinless automatons is not God’s idea of perfection. And if humans have such free- dom, they will inevitably err, engendering evil. As Leibniz says:

19.�8IBU�JT�-FJCOJ[�T� TPMVUJPO�UP�UIF�QSPCMFN� PG̓FWJM �

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!e idea that we now live in the best possible world, however, has struck some critics as preposterous. Voltaire, for example, satirized Leibniz’s notion in his novella Candide. In the book, the character Dr. Pangloss reacts to woes and misfortunes with an optimistic, “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

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WRITING AND REASONING $)"15&3���

1. Hobbes believes that there is no such thing as justice until the Levia- than is established. !is means that justice does not exist independently of an authority to define and enforce it. Explain why you agree or dis- agree with this view.

2. Assess Locke’s argument that we can have knowledge of an external world despite our being directly aware only of sense data. Do you agree with him, or do you side with his critics who say that we can know only the contents of our minds?

3. Suppose someone claims that he can easily refute Berkeley’s idealism by simply kicking a rock or eating an apple. Does this demonstration show that Berkeley’s view is false? Explain.

4. Do you agree with Hume that any belief not based on perceptions (which includes all theological and metaphysical beliefs) cannot be knowledge and is completely meaningless? Give reasons for your view.

5. What is Leibniz’s argument that there are an infinite number of sub- stances? Do you think the argument sound? Why or why not? Are any premises questionable?

R&7*&8 N05&4

10.1 HOBBES t� 4PDJBM� DPOUSBDU� UIFPSZ� JT� UIF� WJFX� UIBU� KVTUJDF� JT� TFDVSFE � BOE� UIF� TUBUF� JT� NBEF�

legitimate, through an agreement among citizens of the state or between the citi- zens and the rulers of the state. !e people consent explicitly or implicitly to be governed—to be subject to the dictates and the power of the state—in exchange for the state’s providing security, rights, and liberties. !e state’s existence is justi- fied by the binding contract that all parties accept.

t� )PCCFT�TBZT�UIBU�QFPQMF�BSF�CBTJDBMMZ�TFMmTI �EJTIPOFTU �BOE�WJPMFOU �CVU�UIFZ�BMTP� have a strong instinct for self-interest and self-preservation. Without a social con- tract, they would devolve into a state of nature—a “war of every man against every man.”

t� )PCCFT�BSHVFT�UIBU�UISPVHI�SFBTPO �QFPQMF�DBO�TFF�UIBU�UIF�POMZ�XBZ�UP�FTDBQF�UIF� “war of all against all” is to enter into a social contract with one another. In the name of self-interest, they agree to turn over much of their autonomy, freedom, and power to an absolute sovereign—a Leviathan—that will forcibly keep the peace, restrain antisocial actions, and compel people to keep their agreements. Its authority over those bound by the social contract is absolute. For Hobbes, justice is a matter of the keeping of covenants (contracts), and the only way to ensure that

3FWJFX�/PUFT� 259

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covenants are kept is to let the Leviathan reign. Without the Leviathan to enforce covenants, there is no justice.

t� )PCCFT�BOE�-PDLF�EJĊFS�BCPVU�TPDJBM�DPOUSBDU�UIFPSZ�PO�NBOZ�QPJOUT��'PS�POF� thing, Hobbes contends that justice and rights do not come into being until the state is established. People surrender their lives and liberties to the Leviathan in exchange for security and peace, and he can do what he wants with his subjects. But Locke argues that humans have inherent, God-given rights whether or not a government is around to guarantee them.

10.2 LOCKE t� -PDLF�BSHVFT�BHBJOTU�SBUJPOBMJTN �NBJOUBJOJOH �BNPOH�PUIFS�UIJOHT �UIBU�UIFSF�BSF�

no innate ideas. He says that the mind does not come into the world already in- scribed with ideas or knowledge. On the contrary, the mind is unmarked “white paper” void of any ideas until sense experience gives it content.

t� -PDLF� UIJOLT� UIBU� PVS� TFOTF� FYQFSJFODF� DBO� SFWFBM� UIF� FYJTUFODF� PG� BO� FYUFSOBM� world. We must distinguish between the objects of our experience (external objects) and the experience of those objects (sensations, or sense data). Physical objects cause sensations in us, and we are directly aware only of those sensations (or ideas, as Locke calls them). So we have direct knowledge not of external ob- jects, but of the sense data related to those objects.

t� $SJUJDT�IBWF�MBNCBTUFE�UIJT�WJFX �CVU�-PDLF�BTLT �XIBU�DPVME�QPTTJCMZ�DBVTF�PVS� sense experience if not external objects? His answer is that we know that external objects are real (and not a dream or delusion) because the theory that they exist is the best explanation for the sensations we have.

10.3 BERKELEY t� 'PS� #FSLFMFZ � UIFSF� BSF� OP� NBUFSJBM� PCKFDUT � OP� UIJOHT� UIBU� FYJTU� JO� UIF� FYUFSOBM�

world. !ere are objects to be sure, but they exist only as sensations (what Berkeley calls ideas) in some mind. !ey are real only because they are perceived by some- one: “to be is to be perceived.”

t� #FSLFMFZ�BSHVFT�UIBU�-PDLF�T�EJTUJODUJPO�CFUXFFO�QSJNBSZ�BOE�TFDPOEBSZ�RVBMJUJFT� is bogus, for primary qualities are just as mind dependent as secondary qualities are.

t� #FSLFMFZ�DPOUFOET�UIBU�NBUFSJBM�PCKFDUT�DBOOPU�FYJTU�CFDBVTF�UIFJS�FYJTUFODF�XPVME� be logically absurd. !e commonsense view is that material objects continue to be even when no one has them in mind. But, says Berkeley, this would mean that they can be conceived of as existing unconceived, that we can think about things that no one is thinking about—a logical contradiction. Critics of this argument insist that it’s based on logical confusion.

10.4 HUME t� )VNF�TBZT�UIBU�XIBUFWFS�LOPXMFEHF�XF�IBWF�JT�PG�UXP�LJOET��iSFMBUJPOT�PG�JEFBTw�

and “matters of fact.” !e former includes truths of mathematics and truths of logic; they are derived from reason. !e latter consists of information about the

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world and is based entirely on sense experience. We can come to know relations of ideas with certainty, but they are not informative about reality. Matters of fact, on the other hand, are informative about the world, but they cannot be known with certainty. So, contrary to the rationalists, Hume maintains that reason is not a source of knowledge about the world.

t� )VNF�UIJOLT�UIBU�BMM�LOPXMFEHF�NVTU�CF�USBDFE�CBDL�UP�QFSDFQUJPOT��PUIFSXJTF� assertions of knowledge are meaningless. From this he concludes that all theologi- cal and metaphysical speculations are worthless.

t� )VNF�BTTFSUT�UIBU�OFJUIFS�SFBTPO�OPS�FYQFSJFODF�DBO�QSPWJEF�VT�XJUI�FWJEFODF�UIBU� causal relationships exist. Our perceptions do not give us any reason to believe that one thing makes another thing happen. All we observe, says Hume, is one event associated with another, and when we repeatedly see such a pairing, we jump to the conclusion that the events are causally connected. We make these inferences out of habit, not logic or empirical evidence. For Hume, the principle of induction is unfounded.

10.5 SPINOZA t� ɨF�IFBSU�PG�4QJOP[B�T�NFUBQIZTJDT�JT�IJT�DPODFQU�PG�substance. Descartes declares

that there are two kinds of substances—matter and mind (the material and mental). But for Spinoza, there is only one substance, and this substance is God (or Nature), and all material and mental things are attributes of God (who also has an infinite number of other attributes). So entities in the world are features of the one eternal, divine substance. A human being is a finite feature of the infinite God, a feature that can be conceived as either material or mental. Spinoza’s view then is a form of pantheism, the notion that God is identical with everything.

t� 4QJOP[B�BSHVFT�UIBU�(PE�OPU�POMZ�FYJTUT�CVU�FYJTUT�OFDFTTBSJMZ��(PE�DPVME�OPU�IBWF� failed to exist, nor could he have existed with any other attributes than what he has. And if God exists necessarily, then everything that arises from his nature arises necessarily.

t� 'PS�4QJOP[B �(PE�JT�GSFF�CFDBVTF�IJT�BDUJPOT�BSF�EFUFSNJOFE�CZ�IJT�PXO�OBUVSF�� Humans too can have a kind of freedom. As aspects of a determined God, they are ultimately determined, but they can still act freely if they themselves are in control of their choices, if they can do what they choose to do, rather than have their choices dictated to them by forces beyond their control.

10.6 LEIBNIZ t� 8IJMF�%FTDBSUFT�NBJOUBJOT�UIBU�UIFSF�BSF�UXP�LJOET�PG�TVCTUBODFT �BOE�4QJOP[B�

insists that there is only one, Leibniz argues that there are an infinite number. Simple substances must exist and make up compound material objects. !ey must be immaterial, mind-like existents—monads.

t� .POBET�BSF�OPU�GVMM�CMPXO�NJOET�CVU�BSF�DFOUFST�PG�SVEJNFOUBSZ�NFOUBM�QSPDFTTFT� perceptions and their changes. !rough its perceptions, each monad mirrors the

/PUFT� 261

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entire cosmos in its own distinctive fashion. Each is “windowless,” meaning that nothing can enter or leave it, nothing from outside can causally a"ect it. Its perceptions—its mirror images of the world—are supplied and coordinated by God. It is God who manages the monads and arranges them into a harmonious, intelli- gible reality. Monads behave according to a pre-established harmony laid down by God from eternity.

t� -FJCOJ[�T�WJFX�JT�UIBU�(PE�NBZ�JODMJOF�PVS�XJMMT�POF�XBZ�PS�BOPUIFS�CVU�EPFT�OPU� necessitate them. God also has free will. He had the freedom to select, among many possible worlds, this one world we now inhabit and to make that world actual. In fact, Leibniz says, God—acting in the light of reason and through his own goodness—chose this world because it is the best of all possible worlds.

,&:�5&3.4 distributive justice justice

monads pantheism

principle of induction

social contract theory

/PUFT 1. !omas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651. 2. Hobbes, Leviathan. 3. Hobbes, Leviathan. 4. Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. 5. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book I, ch. 2 (1689). 6. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book II, ch. 1, part 2. 7. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book IV, ch. 11, parts 1–9. 8. George Berkeley, Of the Principles of Human Knowledge, in Principles of Human

Knowledge and !ree Dialogues, part I, sec. 1–4, 6, 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

9. Berkeley, Of the Principles of Human Knowledge, part I, sec. 9–10, 14–15. 10. Bertrand Russell, !e Problems of Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press,

1912, 1959), 24. 11. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 2 and 4, ed.

Peter Millican (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 12. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 7, parts I and II. 13. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 4, part II. 14. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 12, part I. 15. Anthony Kenny, !e Oxford Illustrated History of Western Philosophy (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1994), 149. 16. G. W. Leibniz, Monadology, 2; G., 6, 607; D., p. 218. 17. Leibniz, Monadology, 3; G., 6, 607; D., p. 218. 18. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Volume IV: Modern Philosophy from

Descartes to Leibniz (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 1994. 19. G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, trans. and ed. R. S. Woolhouse and

Richard Francks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 81. 20. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, Woolhouse and Francks, 81–82.

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'PS�'VSUIFS�3FBEJOH Robert Audi, Belief, Justification, and Knowledge (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1988).

A. J. Ayer, Hume: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Steven M. Cahn, ed., Political Philosophy: !e Essentials (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Volume IV: Modern Philosophy from Descartes to Leibniz (New York: Doubleday, 1994).

Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Volume V: Modern Philosophy—the British Philosophers from Hobbes to Hume (New York: Doubleday, 1994).

Anthony Kenny, !e Rise of Modern Philosophy, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Texts, trans. and ed. R. S. Woolhouse and Richard Francks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

David Miller, Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2003).

Paul K. Moser, Knowledge and Evidence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

John Rawls, A !eory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Bertrand Russell, !e Problems of Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1912, 1959).

Roger Scruton, Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

John Simmons, Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Benedict de Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader, trans. and ed. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

Roger Trigg, Reason and Commitment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

Jonathan Wol", An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

vau28703_ch11_263-285.indd 263 05/09/17 06:03 PM

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

11.1 THE SMALL!TOWN GENIUS t�6OEFSTUBOE�XIZ�,BOU�JT�DPOTJEFSFE�B�QIJMPTPQIJDBM�SFWPMVUJPOBSZ� t�"QQSFDJBUF�UIF�DPOUSBTU�CFUXFFO�,BOU�T�QMBJO�BOE�SFHJNFOUFE�MJGF�BOE�IJT� BDIJFWFNFOUT�JO�TDJFODF �FQJTUFNPMPHZ �BOE�FUIJDT�

����� 5)&�,/08-&%(&�3&70-65*0/ t�%FöOF�analytic statement�BOE�synthetic statement. t�&YQMBJO�UIF�EJTBHSFFNFOU�CFUXFFO�,BOU�BOE�)VNF�BOE�IPX�UIFJS�UIFPSJFT� PG̓LOPXMFEHF�DPOøJDU�

t�&YQMBJO�IPX�,BOU�T�UIFPSZ�PG�LOPXMFEHF�IBT�CPUI�FNQJSJDJTU�BOE�SBUJPOBMJTU� FMFNFOUT�

t�4VNNBSJ[F�,BOU�T�FYQMBOBUJPO�PG�IPX�TZOUIFUJD�B�QSJPSJ�LOPXMFEHF�JT�QPTTJCMF� t�6OEFSTUBOE�,BOU�T�JOTJHIU�BCPVU�DPODFQUVBMJ[FE�FYQFSJFODF�BOE�IPX�JU�JT� SFøFDUFE�JO�NPEFSO�QTZDIPMPHZ�

����� 5)&�.03"-�-"8 t�%FöOF�ethics, morality, moral theory, consequentialist theory, deontological

theory, utilitarianism,�BOE�categorical imperative. t�6OEFSTUBOE�UIF�EJTUJODUJPO�CFUXFFO�FUIJDT�BOE�NPSBMJUZ �BOE�LOPX�UIF�CBTJD� FMFNFOUT�UIBU�NBLF�NPSBMJUZ�B�VOJRVF�OPSNBUJWF�FOUFSQSJTF�

t�%JTUJOHVJTI�CFUXFFO�NPSBM�PCKFDUJWJTN �NPSBM�BCTPMVUJTN �NPSBM�SFMBUJWJTN � TVCKFDUJWF�SFMBUJWJTN �BOE�DVMUVSBM�SFMBUJWJTN�

t�4VNNBSJ[F�TPNF�PG�UIF�NBJO�PCKFDUJPOT�UP�DVMUVSBM�SFMBUJWJTN� t�,OPX�UIF�FTTFOUJBM�EJòFSFODFT�CFUXFFO�VUJMJUBSJBOJTN�BOE�,BOU�T�UIFPSZ� t�"SUJDVMBUF�UIF�NBJO�GFBUVSFT�PG�,BOU�T�NPSBM�UIFPSZ�BOE�PG�IJT�UXP�WFSTJPOT� PG̓UIF�DBUFHPSJDBM�JNQFSBUJWF�

Kant’s Revolution

CHAPTER 11

264 CHAPTER 11 ,BOU�T�3FWPMVUJPO

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11.1 THE SMALL!TOWN GENIUS

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), a small-town man of con- ventional living, launched a revolution in epistemology and charted a major new route in ethics. For these feats, he earned the title of the greatest philosopher of the last three hundred years.

A superficial look at his life would lead many to think he was about as dull and as unimaginative as one could get. He was born, lived all his life, and died in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad). His habits were so regimented that the good folk of his town could set their watches to his punctual, daily stroll.

But appearances can be deceiving. Kant had many friends, was charming and interesting in conversation, par- ticipated in many of the scholarly debates of his time, and made exciting discoveries in both science and philosophy. Early in his career, he wrote about physics and astronomy and predicted the existence of the planet Uranus, which was discovered three-quarters of a century after his death.

Kant studied at the University of Königsberg for six years; later served as a pri- vate tutor; and then in 1755 began lecturing at the university, an appointment that lasted over forty years. He taught physics, mathematics, geography, philosophy (all the main areas of study), and more. Most of his writings reflected his relentless search for the proper philosophical foundations or methods in science, metaphysics, and ethics.

In epistemology, he e!ected an intellectual revolution as dramatic and as in- fluential as any advance in science up to that time. To the astonishment of many thinkers of the day, he turned the conventional assumptions about knowledge upside down. To acquire knowledge, he said, the mind does not conform to reality—rather, reality conforms to the mind. "us he found what he thought was a third path to knowledge between empiricism and rationalism, extracting from each their grains of truth and changing epistemology forever.

In ethics, he fashioned a powerful answer to consequentialist moral theories (utilitarianism and ethical egoism, for example) and to anyone who thinks morality must be based on desires, feelings, and other contingencies instead of solid, unvary- ing reason.

He published his greatest work, !e Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781. After that came an extraordinary procession of other influential writings, including Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793).

Since Kant, anyone who seeks a full understanding of theories of knowledge and moral philosophy must submit to lessons taught by this modest, small-town genius.

“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”

—Immanuel Kant

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11.2 THE KNOWLEDGE REVOLUTION

Kant began his forays into epistemology after being scandalized by David Hume’s radical skepticism (Chapter 10). Kant was sure that knowledge was possible and that we can know many things about the world, most notably countless propositions in mathematics and science. But Hume had raised serious doubts about the possibil- ity of scientific knowledge, and his extreme skepticism shocked Kant into trying to show that Hume was wrong. Kant declares:

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Recall that Hume had maintained that knowledge of the world comes entirely from experience; we know nothing unless our knowledge can be traced back to perceptions (sense data and internal states). Moreover, he had insisted that we have access only to these inner experiences. We have direct awareness of our own percep- tions but not of the world beyond them. "is means that the empirical laws and principles of science, which scientists regard as universal and changeless, cannot be known. "ey cannot be known because they assert more than experience is capable of establishing. "is skeptical conclusion, Hume had argued, applies even to the principle at the heart of the scientific enterprise—the law of cause and e!ect. He had maintained that our experience cannot reveal to us any causal connections, for all we can actually perceive is some events following other events. And even if we could repeatedly observe a particular sequence of cause and e!ect, we still could not conclude that the sequence will happen the same way in the future. We may drop a baseball from the roof of a house and watch it fall downward, and we may repeat this little experiment a hundred times with the same result. But according to Hume, we have no basis for inferring—and therefore do not know—that exactly the same thing will happen on the hundred-and-first try. So Hume’s view meant that scien- tists could never legitimately conclude that they had discovered a universal, change- less law of nature. "ey could not know what they thought they knew. "is was the conclusion that so exasperated Kant—and that set him on his quest to disprove it.

To map out the epistemological di!erences between Hume and Kant, we can apply some terms that Kant himself used. Two of these terms we have already met: a priori statements (statements known independently of or prior to experience) and a posteriori statements (statements that depend entirely on sense experience). Two new terms are analytic and synthetic. An analytic statement is a logical truth whose denial results in a contradiction. For example, “All brothers are male” is analytic. To

analytic statement A logical truth whose denial results in a contradiction.

“Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.”

—Immanuel Kant

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deny it—to say that “it is not the case that all brothers are male”— is to say that some males are not males, which is a contradiction. Or consider, “All bodies are extended [occupying space].” To deny this is to say that something extended is not extended—another contradiction. Analytic statements are necessarily true (cannot be false) but trivially so. "ey are true but tell us nothing about the world. "e statement about brothers is obviously true but does not tell us whether any brothers exist. A synthetic statement is one that is not analytic. It does tell us something about the world, and denying it does not yield a contradiction. Science specializes in synthetic statements, and so do we in our everyday lives. Examples include: every event has a cause, the planets orbit around the sun, from nothing comes nothing, water boils at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level, and Abraham Lincoln was born in the United States.

Both Hume and Kant agree that we can know analytic state- ments without appealing to experience (that is, a priori). (Re- member, Hume refers to such statements as “relations of ideas.”) "rough reason alone we can come to know such analytic a priori propositions as “all brothers are male” and “all bodies are ex- tended.” But Hume also holds that we can know synthetic propo- sitions (those that are informative about the world) only a posteriori (only through experience). And this synthetic a posteriori knowl- edge (“matters of fact”) is limited: we cannot know what our per- ceptions cannot detect. According to Hume, we are not able to

directly observe causality at work, and we cannot infer universal propositions or laws based on limited, local observations. "e empiricist path to knowledge, then, is detoured by skepticism. Kant, on the other hand, insists that synthetic a priori knowledge is possible. We can indeed know things about the world, and we can know them independently or prior to experience. Because this knowledge is a priori, it is both necessarily true and universally applicable, a far cry from Hume’s extensive skepticism. Kant says we can know that every event has a cause (a synthetic truth), and we can acquire this knowledge a priori, through our powers of reason:

synthetic statement A statement that is not analytic.

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“"e Copernican revolu- tion brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the his- tory of philosophy.”

—Bryan Magee

informative

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So Kant’s epistemology is neither entirely empiricist nor fully rationalist. He departs radically from tradition by finding a third way—one that sees merit and error in both theories of knowledge. In line with the empiricists, he holds that all knowledge has its origins in experience, but that doesn’t mean experience alone is the source of all our knowledge. With a nod to the rationalists, he maintains that experi- ence by itself is blind, but that doesn’t mean we can acquire knowledge of the world through reason alone. Kant says that Plato took this latter route and, like a dove trying to fly in empty space with no air resistance, found himself trying to reason about reality with no raw material (experience) to reason about:

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But Kant cannot simply assert that synthetic a priori knowledge is possible and leave it at that. He must show how it’s possible. His starting point is the premise (which he thought obvious) that science and mathematics do give us necessary, universal knowledge about the world. From there he argues that some- thing must therefore be fundamentally wrong with both empiricism and rational- ism because these theories fail to explain how this kind of knowledge is possible. In Hume’s empiricism, he says, sense experience can shine no light on the outer

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“"e wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend—and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in him.”

—Immanuel Kant

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world, leaving in profound doubt the existence of external objects, causality, and scientific laws. And rationalism promises access to synthetic knowledge while ignoring sense experience, where such knowledge begins. To Kant, only a dras- tically di!erent approach could demonstrate how synthetic a priori knowledge could be justified.

Actually, to call Kant’s approach drastically di!erent is an understatement, for what he proposed was a far-reaching transformation in epistemology that he thought was comparable to the Copernican revolution in science. At a time when the prevail- ing (and Church-sanctioned) belief was that the sun orbited the earth, Nicolaus Co- pernicus (1473–1543) thought the better theory was that the earth orbited the sun. Copernicus turned out to be right, and he arrived at his answer through a stunning reversal of the received view. In similar fashion, Kant thought he had instigated his own revolution by turning the traditional perspective on knowledge upside down. For centuries the conventional view was that knowledge is acquired when the mind conforms to objects—that is, when the mind tracks the external world. But Kant pro- posed the opposite: objects conform to the mind. He argued that sense experience can match reality because the mind stamps a structure and organization on sense experi- ence. Synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, he said, because the mind’s concepts force an (a priori) order onto (synthetic) experience. "e idea is not that our minds literally create the world, but that our minds organize our experience so we perceive it as recognizable objects. "e empiricists see the mind as a passive absorber of sense information, but Kant says the mind is an active shaper of experience into objects that we can know a priori. As he says:

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According to Kant, the mind shapes raw experience by organizing it in accor- dance with certain fundamental concepts, such as time, space, and causality. All our experience is sifted and sorted through the mind’s “conceptual processor,” without which we could make no sense of the bewildering flow of sights, sounds, smells, and other perceptions. Our raw sense data may consist of a blur of red, for example, but by interpreting this information in light of basic concepts (roundness, space, time, past experience, etc.), our minds perceive a red rose. We therefore know the world only as conceptualized sense data, a world that Kant calls phenomena. What the world is in itself outside our experience Kant calls noumena, a reality forever beyond our ken.

“And seeing ignorance is the curse of God, knowl- edge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.”

—William Shakespeare

“Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.”

—Immanuel Kant

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Copernicus Until the scientific work of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Coper- nicus in the sixteenth century, most of the Western world believed in the geocentric (Earth-centered) theory of the universe. After all, the doctrine had come down from Aristotle and had been refined by the great astronomer and mathematician Ptolemy, who flourished in Alexandria between 146 and 170 CE. But Copernicus thought the Ptolemaic system was a monstrosity, a complex patchwork of components propped up by numerous assumptions for the purpose of making the theory fit the data. He proposed a heliocentric theory in which Earth and the other planets orbit the sun, the true center of the universe. In doing so, he greatly simplified both the picture of the heavens and the cal- culations required to predict the positions of planets—and thus launched what came to be known as the Copernican revolution.

Copernicus’s theory was simpler than Ptolemy’s on many counts, but one of the most impressive was retrograde motion, a phenomenon that had stumped astronomers for centuries. From time to time, certain planets seem to reverse their customary direction of travel across the skies—to move backward! Ptol- emy explained this retrograde motion by positing yet more epicycles, asserting that planets orbiting Earth will often orbit around a point on the larger orbital path. Seeing these orbits within orbits from Earth, an observer would naturally see the planets sometimes backing up.

But the Copernican theory could easily explain retrograde motion without all those compli- cated epicycles. As the outer planets (Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) orbit the sun, so does Earth, one of the inner planets. "e outer planets, though, move much slower than Earth does. On its own orbital track, Earth sometimes passes the outer planets as they lumber along on their orbital track, just as a train passes a slower train on a parallel track. When this happens, the planets appear to move backward, just as the slower train seems to reverse course when the faster train overtakes it.

One test implication of the Copernican theory is the phenomenon known as parallax. Critics of the heliocentric view claimed that if the theory were true, then as Earth moved through its orbit, stars closest to it should seem to shift their position relative to stars farther away. "ere should, in other words, be parallax. But no one had observed parallax. Coper- nicus and his followers responded to this criticism by saying that stars were too far away for parallax to occur. As it turned out, they were right about this, but confirmation didn’t come until 1832 when parallax was observed with more powerful telescopes.

Another test implication seemed to conflict with the heliocentric model. Copernicus reasoned that if the planets rotate around the sun, then they should show phases just as the moon shows phases due to the light of the sun falling on it at di!erent times. But in Coper- nicus’s day, no one could see any such planetary phases. Fifty years later, though, Galileo used his new telescope to confirm that Venus had phases.

Ultimately, scientists accepted the Copernican model over Ptolemy’s because of its simplicity—despite what seemed at the time like evidence against the theory.

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Kant’s insight about conceptualized experience might sound odd, but he was on the right track, anticipating find- ings in modern science by two centuries. Research in develop- mental and cognitive psychology shows that our perceptions are not the result of the mind’s passive recording of sensations. Our perceptions are, to a large degree, constructed; they origi- nate with our unfiltered sense experience and then are inter- preted by the mind according to our preexisting ideas. For example, our experience may consist only of red sensations in dim light, but because we have reason to believe we are look- ing at a red rose and already have in mind the relevant con- cepts, we perceive a red rose. We hear only a mu#ed sound in the next room, but because of our expectations, we perceive the sound as a telephone ring. When we look at a car in the far distance, the image we see is tiny. But because of previous experience and our understanding of how the size of objects stays constant, we perceive the car as having normal dimen- sions and is actually much larger than we are.

"is is how Kant explains the role of sense experience and concepts in our perception of reality:

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Kant thought his theory of knowledge corrected the errors of rationalism and empiricism and expelled the skepticism that these views engendered. In their theo- ries the rationalists had bet heavily on reason as the key to knowledge; the empiri- cists had bet everything on experience. Kant tried to show that genuine knowledge

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THEN AND NOW

Conceptualizing the World

Kant’s view of the mind as an actively constructive faculty is echoed in contemporary psychological research, which shows that our minds constantly construct and interpret our perceptions. "at is, our senses are not mere recorders of perceptual in- formation; instead our minds take the raw data of experience and rework them in light of the concepts and beliefs already in our heads. Our minds must “conceptualize” the raw sensory input so we can un- derstand it. We do this so often and so extensively that we are hardly aware of the process. Consider these three examples of “ambiguous figures.” In each case, it’s possible to see the figure in two ways—even though the visual input is the same in both.

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is a synthesis of both reason and experience. He argued that we can know many things about the world—cause-and-e!ect relationships, the truths of mathematics, the laws of science—and we can know they are necessarily, universally, and a priori true. We can, in other words, take hold of synthetic a priori knowledge. We can obtain it because our thinking is framed by fundamental concepts that guarantee our experience will take a predetermined form. And we can be sure the truths we discover are universal because all our minds possess the same cognitive structure determined by the same set of innate concepts. In short, Kant’s answer to the ra- tionalists, empiricists, and skeptics is that we know the world because we, in e!ect, constitute it.

After Kant, epistemology was never the same. Anyone who has seriously tried to fathom the nature and extent of our knowledge has had to contend with his insights and arguments. "at is not to say that everyone who has delved deeply into Kant has agreed with him. Some philosophers doubt that everyone uses the same set of basic concepts to make sense of the empirical world. "ey point to anthropological and psychological research showing that not every culture uses the same set of concepts (the same conceptual scheme) to interpret and organize their experience. Other crit- ics have argued that Kant’s theory does not adequately explain our certainty that facts about the world must be consistent with logic and mathematics. We think that truths of logic and mathematics are true necessarily and universally regardless of the structure of our minds. But Kant wants us to believe that logical and mathematical concepts do depend on the innate structure of our minds. "is implies that the structure of our minds could possibly change to make 5 ! 12 " 13, or make the statement “all brothers are male” false.

"ese and many other criticisms of Kant’s work will be debated for generations to come—which is proof of his lasting influence.

11.3 THE MORAL LAW

To understand Kant’s achievement in ethics, we need to step back and take a broad view of the field. Ethics is part of philosophy; it is also part of life—a very large, vital, inevitable part of life. You cannot avoid thinking about right and wrong, judging people as good or bad, wondering what kind of life is worthwhile, debating others about moral issues, accepting or rejecting the moral beliefs of your family or culture, or coming to some general understanding (a moral theory) about the nature of morality itself. When you do these things, you are in the realm of ethics.

Ethics and Morality Ethics, or moral philosophy, is the study of morality using the methods of philoso- phy, and morality consists of our beliefs about right and wrong actions and good and bad persons or character. Morality has to do with our moral judgments, prin- ciples, values, and theories; ethics is the careful, philosophical examination of these.

ethics (moral philosophy) "e study of morality using the methods of philosophy.

morality Beliefs about right and wrong actions and good and bad persons or character.

“"e learning and knowl- edge that we have, is, at the most, but little com- pared with that of which we are ignorant.”

—Plato

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Ethics applies critical reasoning to questions about what we should do and what is of value, questions that pervade our lives and demand reasonable answers.

Morality is a normative enterprise, which means that it provides us with norms, or standards, for judging actions and persons—standards usually in the form of moral principles or theories. With moral standards in hand, we decide whether an action is morally right or wrong, whether a person is morally good or bad, and whether we are living a good or bad life. "e main business of moral- ity is therefore not to describe how things are but to prescribe how things should be. "ere are of course other normative spheres (art and law, for example), but these are interested in applying nonmoral norms (aesthetic and legal norms, for instance) to judge the worth or correctness of things. When we participate in ethics, we are typically either applying or evaluating moral norms and using the tools of philosophy to do it.

Morality stands out among other normative spheres because of its distinctive set of properties. One of these is that moral norms have a much stronger hold on us than nonmoral ones do. "e former are thought to dominate the latter, possessing a property that philosophers call overridingness. For example, we would think that a moral norm mandating that everyone be treated fairly should override a legal norm (a law) that enjoined one group to discriminate against another. If a law commanded us to commit a seriously immoral act, we would probably think the law illegitimate and might even flout it in an act of civil disobedience. Moral norms are generally stronger and more important than nonmoral norms.

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“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

—Immanuel Kant

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In addition, moral norms have impartiality: they apply to everyone equally. Mo- rality demands that everyone be considered of equal moral worth and that each person’s interests be given equal weight. Morality, in other words, says that equals should be treated equally unless there is a morally relevant reason to treat them dif- ferently. We would consider it unjust to apply a moral norm to some people but not to others when there is no morally relevant di!erence between them.

Moral norms, like nonmoral ones, also possess the property of universality: they apply not just in a single case, but in all cases that are relevantly similar. Logic tells us that we cannot reasonably regard an action performed by one person as mor- ally wrong while believing that the same action performed in an almost identical situation by another person is morally right. Morality demands consistency among similar cases.

Finally, morality is reason based. To be fully involved in the moral life and to make informed moral judgments is to engage in moral reasoning. To do moral rea- soning is to try to ensure that our moral judgments are not wrought out of thin air or concocted from prejudice or blind emotion—but are supported by good reasons. We would think it preposterous for someone to assert that killing innocent children is morally permissible (or impermissible)—and that he has no reasons whatsoever for believing this. In science, medicine, law, business, and every other area of intel- lectual life, we want and expect claims to be backed by good reasons. Morality is no di!erent. And ethics—the systematic search for moral understanding—can be suc- cessful only through careful reflection and the sifting of reasons for belief. Critical reasoning is the main engine that drives ethical inquiry.

But what about emotions—what role do they play in ethics? Feelings are an essen- tial and inevitable part of the moral life. "ey can help us empathize with others and enlarge our understanding of the stakes involved in moral decisions. But they can also blind us. Our feelings are too often the product of our psychological needs, cultural conditioning, and selfish motivations. Critical reasoning is the corrective, giving us the power to examine and guide our feelings to achieve a more balanced view.

Some people believe that conscience, not ethics, is the best guide to plausible moral judgments. At times, it seems to speak to us in an imaginary though authori- tative voice, telling us to do or not to do something. But conscience is no infallible indicator of moral truth. It is conditioned by our upbringing, cultural background, and other factors, and, like our feelings, it may be the result of irrelevant influences. Nevertheless the voice of conscience should not be ignored; it can often alert us to something of moral importance. But we must submit its promptings to critical ex- amination before we can have any confidence in them.

"e moral life, then, is about grappling with a distinctive class of norms, which can include moral principles, rules, theories, and judgments. We apply these norms to two distinct spheres of our moral experience—to both moral obligations and to moral values. Moral obligations concern our duty, what we are obligated to do. "at is, obligations are about conduct, how we ought or ought not behave. In this sphere, we talk primarily about actions. We may look to moral principles or rules to guide our actions, or study a moral theory that purports to explain right actions, or make judgments about right or wrong actions. Moral values, on the other hand, generally

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“Morality is not the doc- trine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”

—Immanuel Kant

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“All that any of us has to do in this world is his simple duty.”

—H. C. Trumbull

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concern those things that we judge to be morally good, bad, praiseworthy, or blame- worthy. Normally we use such words to describe persons (as in “he is a good person” or “she is to blame for hurting them”), their character (“he is virtuous” or “she is honest”), or their motives (“she did wrong but did not mean to”). Note that we also attribute nonmoral value to things. If we say that a book or bicycle or vacation is good, we mean good in a nonmoral sense. Such things in themselves cannot have moral value.

Strictly speaking, only actions are morally right or wrong, but persons are morally good or bad (or some degree of goodness or badness). With this distinction we can acknowledge a simple fact of the moral life: A good person can do something wrong, and a bad person can do something right.

A large part of ethics and the moral life consists of devising and evaluating moral theories. "at is, we do moral theorizing. In science, theories help us under- stand the empirical world by explaining the causes of events, why things are the way they are. "e germ theory of disease explains how particular diseases arise and spread in a human population. "e heliocentric (sun-centered) theory of planetary motion explains why the planets in our solar system behave the way they do. In ethics, moral theories have a similar explanatory role. A moral theory explains not why one event causes another but why an action is right or wrong or why a person or a person’s character is good or bad. A moral theory tells us what it is about an action that makes it right or what it is about a person that makes him or her good. "e divine command theory of morality, for example, says that right actions are those commanded or willed by God. Traditional utilitarianism says that right ac- tions are those that produce the best balance of happiness over unhappiness for all concerned. "ese and other moral theories are attempts to define rightness or good- ness. In this way, they are both more general and more basic than moral principles or other general norms.

Two types of theories have been of the greatest interest to philosophers. Consequentialist theories insist that the rightness of actions depends solely on their consequences or results. "e key question is what or how much good the actions pro- duce, however good is defined. Deontological (or nonconsequentialist) theories say that the rightness of actions is determined not solely by their consequences but partly or entirely by their intrinsic nature. For some or all actions, rightness depends on the kind of actions they are, not on how much good they produce. A consequentialist theory, then, may say that stealing is wrong because it causes more harm than good. But a deontological theory may contend that stealing is inherently wrong regardless of its consequences, good or bad.

"e most influential consequentialist theory is utilitarianism (discussed in Chapter 13), the view that right actions are those that maximize the overall well-being of everyone involved. Or to put it another way, we should do what re- sults in the greatest balance of good over bad, everyone considered. Various forms of utilitarianism di!er in how they define the good, with some equating it with happiness or pleasure (the hedonistic view), others with satisfaction of preferences or desires or some other intrinsically valuable things or states such as knowledge or perfection.

“Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. "eir tastes may not be the same.”

—George Bernard Shaw

moral theory A theory that explains why an action is right or wrong or why a person or a person’s character is good or bad.

consequentialist theory A moral theory in which the rightness of actions depends solely on their consequences or results.

deontological (or nonconsequentialist) theory A moral theory in which the rightness of actions is determined not solely by their consequences but partly or entirely by their intrinsic nature.

utilitarianism "e view that right actions are those that result in the most beneficial bal- ance of good over bad consequences for everyone involved.

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Moral Relativism Recall that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are opposed to relativism, including the form known as moral relativism— and so is Kant. (See Chapter 2.) As we’ve seen, moral relativ- ism is the view that moral standards are not objective but are relative to what individu- als or cultures believe. But moral relativism seems to have as many unpalatable implica- tions as generic relativism.

Without thinking much about it, most people accept a view of morality known as moral objectivism, the idea that at least some moral norms or principles are ob- jectively valid or true for ev- eryone. (Moral objectivism, however, is distinct from moral absolutism, the belief that objective moral principles allow no exceptions or must be applied the same way in all cases and cultures.) But some reject moral objectivism in favor of moral relativism. To them, morality is not an objective fact; it’s a human invention, dependent entirely on what people believe.

Critics point out that subjective moral relativism (moral relativism that applies to indi- viduals) implies that each person is morally infallible. An action is morally right for someone if he approves of it—if he sincerely believes it to be right. His approval makes the action right, and—if his approval is genuine—he cannot be mistaken. His believing it to be right makes it right, and that’s the end of it. But our commonsense moral experience suggests that this relativist account must be mistaken. Our judgments about moral matters—actions, principles, and people—are often wide of the mark. We are morally fallible, and we are rightly suspicious of anyone who claims to be otherwise. "e same criticism can be launched

DETAILS

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Kant’s Theory "e most sophisticated and influential deontological theory comes from Kant. His theory is profoundly opposed to consequentialism on numerous counts. Utilitar- ians insist that the morality of an action depends entirely on its e!ects—whether it maximizes human well-being. No action whatsoever is inherently right or wrong;

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against cultural moral relativism. If a culture genuinely approves of an action, then there can be no question about the action’s moral rightness: it is right, and that’s that. But is it at all plausible that cultures cannot be wrong about morality? "roughout history, cultures have approved of ethnic cleansing, slavery, racism, holocausts, massacres, mass rape, torture of innocents, burning of heretics, and much more. Is it reasonable to conclude that the cultures that approved of such deeds could not have been mistaken?

Related to the infallibility problem is this di$culty: moral relativism implies that we cannot legitimately criticize others for immorality. "ey are all beyond criticism. Cultural relativism, for example, says if a culture approves of its actions, then those actions are morally right—and it does not matter one bit whether another culture disapproves of them. Remember, there is no objective moral code to appeal to. Each society is its own maker of the moral law. What this would mean is that if the people of Germany approved of the extermination of millions of Jews, Gypsies, and others during World War II, then the extermination was morally right.

Moral relativism also seems to rule out the possibility of moral progress. As a society we sometimes compare our past moral beliefs with those of the present and judge our views to be morally better than they used to be. We no longer countenance such horrors as massacres of native peoples, slavery, lynching, and racial discrimination, and we think these changes are signs of moral progress. But cultural relativism implies that there can be no such thing. To legitimately claim that there has been moral progress, there must be an objective, transcultural standard for comparing cultures of the past and present. But according to moral relativism, there are no objective moral standards, just norms relative to each culture. If over time a culture goes from condoning racial discrimination to condemning it, that does not represent moral progress. "at is just a change from one set of moral attitudes to another; each one just as plausible as the other. "e two are di!erent, but one is not superior to the other. On the other hand, if there is such a thing as moral progress, then there must be objective moral standards.

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only its costs and benefits make it so. Kant will have none of this. He maintains that right actions do not depend on their consequences, the production of happiness, people’s motives, or their desires and feelings. Right actions are those that are right in themselves because they are consistent with universal moral rules derived from reason, and the actions have moral worth only if we do them out of a sense of duty,

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simply because they are our duty. Our motives are irrelevant. For Kant, the moral law cannot be something contingent, changeable, or relative. "e moral law is absolute, unchangeable, and universal; a rock-solid structure built on eternal reason.

Here is Kant on the subject:

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“History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.”

—James A. Froude

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In Kant’s system, all our moral duties are expressed in the form of categorical im- peratives. An imperative is a command to do something; it is categorical if it applies without exception and without regard for particular needs or purposes. A categori- cal imperative says, “Do this—regardless.” In contrast, a hypothetical imperative is a command to do something if we want to achieve particular aims, as in “if you want good pay, work hard.” "e moral law, then, rests on absolute directives that do not depend on the contingencies of desire or utility.

Kant says that through reason and reflection we can derive our duties from a single moral principle, what he calls the categorical imperative. He formulates it in di!erent ways, the first one being: “I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.”7 For Kant, our actions have

categorical imperative Kant’s fundamental moral principle, which he for- mulates as (1) “I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law,” and (2) “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only.”

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logical implications—they imply general rules, or maxims, of conduct. If you tell a lie for financial gain, you are in e!ect acting according to a maxim like “it’s okay to lie to someone when doing so benefits you financially.” "e question is whether the maxim corresponding to an action is a legitimate moral law. To find out, we must ask if we could consistently will that the maxim become a universal law applicable to everyone—that is, if everyone could consistently act on the maxim and we would be willing to have them do so. If we could do this, then the action described by the maxim is morally permissible; if not, it is prohibited. "us moral laws embody two characteristics thought to be essential to morality itself: universality and impartiality.

To show us how to apply this formulation of the categorical imperative to a specific situation, Kant uses the example of a lying promise. Suppose you need to borrow money from a friend, but you know you could never pay her back. So to get the loan, you decide to lie, falsely promising to repay the money. To find out if such a lying promise is morally permissible, Kant would have you ask if you could con- sistently will the maxim of your action to become a universal law, to ask, in e!ect, “What would happen if everyone did this?” "e maxim is “whenever you need to borrow money you cannot pay back, make a lying promise to repay.” So what would happen if everyone in need of a loan acted in accordance with this maxim? People would make lying promises to obtain loans, but everyone would also know that such promises were worthless, and the custom of loaning money on promises would disappear. So willing the maxim to be a universal law involves a contradiction: If everyone made lying promises, promise making would be no more; you cannot con- sistently will the maxim to become a universal law. "erefore, your duty is clear: making a lying promise to borrow money is morally wrong.

Kant’s first formulation of the categorical imperative yields several other impor- tant duties. He argues that there is an absolute moral prohibition against killing the innocent, lying, committing suicide, and failing to help others when feasible.

Perhaps the most renowned formulation of the categorical imperative is the prin- ciple of respect for persons (a formulation distinct from the first one, though Kant thought them equivalent). As he expresses it, “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only.”8 People must never be treated as if they were mere instruments for achieving some further end, for people are ends in themselves, possessors of ultimate inherent worth. People have ultimate value because they are the ultimate source of value for other things. "ey bestow value; they do not have it bestowed upon them. So we should treat both ourselves and other persons with the respect that all inher- ently valuable beings deserve.

/PX�*�TBZ��NBO�BOE�HFOFSBMMZ�BOZ�SBUJPOBM�CFJOH�exists�BT�BO�FOE�JO�IJNTFMG �not merely as a means�UP�CF�BSCJUSBSJMZ�VTFE�CZ�UIJT�PS�UIBU�XJMM �CVU�JO�BMM�IJT�BDUJPOT �XIFUIFS�UIFZ�DPODFSO� IJNTFMG�PS�PUIFS�SBUJPOBM�CFJOHT �NVTU�CF�BMXBZT�SFHBSEFE�BU�UIF�TBNF�UJNF�BT�BO�FOE��"MM� PCKFDUT�PG�UIF�JODMJOBUJPOT�IBWF�POMZ�B�DPOEJUJPOBM�XPSUI��GPS�JG�UIF�JODMJOBUJPOT�BOE�UIF�XBOUT� GPVOEFE�PO�UIFN�EJE�OPU�FYJTU �UIFO�UIFJS�PCKFDU�XPVME�CF�XJUIPVU�WBMVF��#VU�UIF�JODMJOB- UJPOT�UIFNTFMWFT�CFJOH�TPVSDFT�PG�XBOU�BSF�TP�GBS�GSPN�IBWJOH�BO�BCTPMVUF�XPSUI�GPS�XIJDI� UIFZ�TIPVME�CF�EFTJSFE �UIBU �PO�UIF�DPOUSBSZ �JU�NVTU�CF�UIF�VOJWFSTBM�XJTI�PG�FWFSZ�SBUJPOBM� CFJOH�UP�CF�XIPMMZ�GSFF�GSPN�UIFN��5IVT�UIF�XPSUI�PG�BOZ�PCKFDU�XIJDI�JT�to be acquired�CZ�

“It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.”

—Immanuel Kant

“Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will.”

—Immanuel Kant

*NNBOVFM�,BOU�� Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals

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PVS�BDUJPO�JT�BMXBZT�DPOEJUJPOBM��#FJOHT�XIPTF�FYJTUFODF�EFQFOET�OPU�PO�PVS�XJMM�CVU�PO�OB- UVSF�T �IBWF�OFWFSUIFMFTT �JG�UIFZ�BSF�OPOSBUJPOBM�CFJOHT �POMZ�B�SFMBUJWF�WBMVF�BT�NFBOT �BOE� BSF�UIFSFGPSF�DBMMFE�things;�SBUJPOBM�CFJOHT �PO�UIF�DPOUSBSZ �BSF�DBMMFE�persons,�CFDBVTF�UIFJS� WFSZ�OBUVSF�QPJOUT�UIFN�PVU�BT�FOET�JO�UIFNTFMWFT �UIBU�JT�BT�TPNFUIJOH�XIJDI�NVTU�OPU�CF� VTFE�NFSFMZ�BT�NFBOT �BOE�TP�GBS�UIFSFGPSF�SFTUSJDUT�GSFFEPN�PG�BDUJPO� BOE�JT�BO�PCKFDU�PG� SFTQFDU ��5IFTF �UIFSFGPSF �BSF�OPU�NFSFMZ�TVCKFDUJWF�FOET�XIPTF�FYJTUFODF�IBT�B�XPSUI�for us�BT�BO�FòFDU�PG�PVS�BDUJPO �CVU�objective ends,�UIBU�JT�UIJOHT�XIPTF�FYJTUFODF�JT�BO�FOE�JO� JUTFMG��BO�FOE�NPSFPWFS�GPS�XIJDI�OP�PUIFS�DBO�CF�TVCTUJUVUFE �XIJDI�UIFZ�TIPVME�TVCTFSWF� merely�BT�NFBOT �GPS�PUIFSXJTF�OPUIJOH�XIBUFWFS�XPVME�QPTTFTT�absolute worth;�CVU�JG�BMM� XPSUI�XFSF�DPOEJUJPOFE�BOE�UIFSFGPSF�DPOUJOHFOU �UIFO�UIFSF�XPVME�CF�OP�TVQSFNF�QSBDUJ- DBM�QSJODJQMF�PG�SFBTPO�XIBUFWFS�

*G�UIFO�UIFSF�JT�B�TVQSFNF�QSBDUJDBM�QSJODJQMF�PS �JO�SFTQFDU�PG�UIF�IVNBO�XJMM �B�DBUFHPSJ- DBM�JNQFSBUJWF �JU�NVTU�CF�POF�XIJDI �CFJOH�ESBXO�GSPN�UIF�DPODFQUJPO�PG�UIBU�XIJDI�JT�OFD- FTTBSJMZ�BO�FOE�GPS�FWFSZPOF�CFDBVTF�JU�JT�an end in itself,�DPOTUJUVUFT�BO�objective�QSJODJQMF�PG� XJMM �BOE�DBO�UIFSFGPSF�TFSWF�BT�B�VOJWFSTBM�QSBDUJDBM�MBX��5IF�GPVOEBUJPO�PG�UIJT�QSJODJQMF�JT�� rational nature exists as an end in itself.�.BO�OFDFTTBSJMZ�DPODFJWFT�IJT�PXO�FYJTUFODF�BT�CFJOH� TP��TP�GBS�UIFO�UIJT�JT�B�subjective�QSJODJQMF�PG�IVNBO�BDUJPOT��#VU�FWFSZ�PUIFS�SBUJPOBM�CFJOH� SFHBSET�JUT�FYJTUFODF�TJNJMBSMZ �KVTU�PO�UIF�TBNF�SBUJPOBM�QSJODJQMF�UIBU�IPMET�GPS�NF��TP�UIBU�JU� JT�BU�UIF�TBNF�UJNF�BO�PCKFDUJWF�QSJODJQMF �GSPN�XIJDI�BT�B�TVQSFNF�QSBDUJDBM�MBX�BMM�MBXT�PG� UIF�XJMM�NVTU�CF�DBQBCMF�PG�CFJOH�EFEVDFE��"DDPSEJOHMZ�UIF�QSBDUJDBM�JNQFSBUJWF�XJMM�CF�BT� GPMMPXT��So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only.9

According to Kant, the inherent worth of persons derives from their nature as autonomous, rational beings capable of directing their own lives, determining their own ends, and decreeing their own rules by which to live. "us, the inherent value of persons does not depend in any way on their social status, wealth, talent, race, or culture. Moreover, inherent value is something that all persons possess equally. Each person deserves the same measure of respect as any other.

Kant explains that we treat people merely as a means instead of an end-in- themselves if we disregard these characteristics of personhood—if we thwart people’s freely chosen actions by coercing them, undermine their rational decision-making by lying to them, or discount their equality by discriminating against them.

Notice that this formulation of the categorical imperative does not actually pro- hibit treating a person as a means but forbids treating a person simply, or merely, as a means—as nothing but a means. Kant recognizes that in daily life we often must use people to achieve our various ends. To buy milk we use the cashier; to find books we use the librarian; to get well we use the doctor. But because their actions are freely chosen and we do not undermine their status as persons, we do not use them solely as instruments of our will.

Kant’s principle of respect for persons captures what seems to most people an essential part of morality itself—the notion that some things must not be done to a person even if they increase the well-being of others. People have certain rights, and these rights cannot be violated merely for the sake of an overall increase in utility. We tend to think that there is something terribly wrong with jailing an innocent person just because her imprisonment would make a lot of other people very happy or with

11.�*O�UIFTF�QBTTBHFT �EPFT� ,BOU�NBLF�DMFBS�IPX�XF�BSF� TVQQPTFE�UP�BQQMZ�IJT�QSJO- DJQMF�PG�SFTQFDU�GPS�QFSTPOT � 'PS�FYBNQMF �IPX�FYBDUMZ� EP�ZPV�TIPX�SFTQFDU�GPS�B� QFSTPO�XIP�JT�UFSNJOBMMZ�JMM� BOE�JO�HSFBU�QBJO�XIP�CFHT� ZPV�UP�IFMQ�IJN�FOE�IJT�MJGF

“"e death of dogma is the birth of morality.”

—Immanuel Kant

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seizing a person’s possessions and giving them to the poor to maximize overall hap- piness or with enslaving a race of people so the rest of the world can have a higher standard of living. Over the principle of respect for persons, Kantians and utilitar- ians part company. Utilitarians reject the concept of rights, or they define rights in terms of utility. Kantians take respecting rights to be central to the moral life.

Kant’s theory, however, does have its detractors. Many philosophers argue that it is not consistent with our considered moral judgments. A major cause of the problem, they say, is Kant’s insistence that we have absolute (or “perfect”) duties—obligations that must be honored without exception. "us in Kantian ethics, we have an absolute duty not to lie or to break a promise or to kill the innocent, come what may. Imagine that a band of killers wants to murder an innocent man who has taken refuge in your house, and the killers come to your door and ask you point blank if he is in your house. To say no is to lie; to answer truthfully is to guarantee the man’s death. What should you do? In a case like this, says Kant, you must do your duty—you must tell the truth though murder is the result and a lie would save a life. But in this case such devotion to moral absolutes seems completely askew, for saving an innocent life seems far more important morally than blindly obeying a rule. Moral common sense suggests that sometimes the consequences of our actions do matter more than adherence to the letter of the law, even if the law is generally worthy of our respect and obedience.

Some have thought that Kant’s theory can yield implausible results for another reason. Recall that the first formulation of the categorical imperative says that an

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action is permissible if persons could consistently act on the relevant maxim, and we would be willing to have them do so. "is requirement seems to make sense if the maxim in question is something like “do not kill the innocent” or “treat equals equally.” But what if the maxim is “enslave all Christians” or “kill all Ethiopians”? We could—without contradiction—will either one of these precepts to become a univer- sal law. And if we were so inclined, we could be willing for everyone to act accord- ingly, even if we ourselves were Christians or Ethiopians. So by Kantian lights, these actions could very well be morally permissible, and their permissibility would depend on whether someone was willing to have them apply universally. Critics conclude that because the first formulation of the categorical imperative seems to sanction such obviously immoral acts, the theory is deeply flawed. Defenders of Kant’s theory, on the other hand, view the problems as repairable and have proposed revisions.

"is apparent arbitrariness in the first formulation can significantly lessen the theory’s usefulness. "e categorical imperative is supposed to help us discern moral directives that are rational, universal, and objective. But if it is subjective in the way just described, its helpfulness as a guide for living morally is dubious. "ere may be remedies for this di$culty, but Kant’s theory in its original form seems problematic.

“Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.”

—Immanuel Kant

13.�*O�,BOU�T�WJFX �JT� MZJOH�UP�TPNFPOF�UP� TQBSF�IFS�GFFMJOHT�NPSBMMZ� QFSNJTTJCMF �%P�ZPV�UIJOL� JU�JT�QFSNJTTJCMF �

WRITING AND REASONING $)"15&3���

1. How does Kant’s moral theory di!er from consequentialism? Are the two theories in conflict in particular cases? Explain.

2. What is Kant’s revolution in epistemology? According to his theory of knowledge, how is it that sense experience can match reality?

3. Is Kant a moral objectivist or a moral relativist? According to him, can the moral law be contingent or changeable? Explain.

4. For Kant, what does it mean to treat someone as an end and never as a means only? Provide a scenario in which a person is treated merely as a means, and give an example of a person being treated as an end.

5. What is the categorical imperative? Explain how Kant applies the cat- egorical imperative to the example of the lying promise. Does he think that a lying promise is ever morally permissible? Explain.

3&7*&8�/05&4

11.1 THE SMALL!TOWN GENIUS t� *NNBOVFM�,BOU �B�NPEFTU�NBO�PG�DPOWFOUJPOBM�MJWJOH �MBVODIFE�B�SFWPMVUJPO�JO�

epistemology and charted a major new route in ethics. He is regarded as the great- est philosopher of the last three hundred years.

t� *O�FQJTUFNPMPHZ �IF�FĊFDUFE�BO�JOUFMMFDUVBM�SFWPMVUJPO�BT�ESBNBUJD�BOE�BT�JOnVFO- tial as any advance in science up to that time. He turned the conventional assump- tions about knowledge upside down.

284 CHAPTER 11 ,BOU�T�3FWPMVUJPO

vau28703_ch11_263-285.indd 284 05/09/17 06:03 PM

t� *O�FUIJDT �IF�GBTIJPOFE�B�QPXFSGVM�BOTXFS�UP�DPOTFRVFOUJBMJTU�NPSBM�UIFPSJFT�BOE� to anyone who thinks morality must be based on desires, feelings, and other con- tingencies instead of solid, unvarying reason.

11.2 THE KNOWLEDGE REVOLUTION t� "O�analytic statement is a logical truth whose denial results in a contradiction. A

synthetic statement is one that is not analytic. It does tell us something about the world, and denying it does not yield a contradiction.

t� ,BOU� CSPVHIU� BCPVU� B� $PQFSOJDBO� SFWPMVUJPO� JO� FQJTUFNPMPHZ�� +VTU� BT� $PQFSOJ- cus revolutionized astronomy by reversing the traditional theory, so Kant brought forth a radically di!erent theory of knowledge by arguing for an analogous rever- sal. Instead of accepting the conventional view that knowledge is acquired when the mind conforms to objects, he argued that objects conform to the mind.

t� ,BOU� BSHVFE� UIBU� TFOTF� FYQFSJFODF� DBO� NBUDI� SFBMJUZ� CFDBVTF� UIF� NJOE� TUBNQT� B� structure and organization on sense experience. Synthetic a priori knowledge is pos- sible because the mind’s concepts force an (a priori) order onto (synthetic) experience.

11.3 THE MORAL LAW t� Ethics, or moral philosophy, is the study of morality using the methods of philoso-

phy, and morality consists of our beliefs about right and wrong actions and good and bad persons or character. Morality has to do with our moral judgments, princi- ples, values, and theories; ethics is the careful, philosophical examination of these. A consequentialist theory is a moral theory in which the rightness of actions depends solely on their consequences or results. A deontological theory is a moral theory in which the rightness of actions is determined not solely by their consequences but partly or entirely by their intrinsic nature. Utilitarianism is the view that right ac- tions are those that maximize the overall well-being of everyone involved.

t� Moral objectivism is the view that at least some moral norms or principles are objec- tively valid or true for everyone. Moral relativism says that moral standards are not objective but are relative to what individuals or cultures believe. Moral relativism pertaining to individuals is known as subjective relativism, more precisely stated as the view that right actions are those sanctioned by a person. Moral relativism regarding cultures is called cultural relativism, the view that right actions are those sanctioned by one’s culture. Both forms of relativism face serious di$culties.

t� ɨF�categorical imperative is Kant’s fundamental moral principle, formulated in two ways: (1) “I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law,” and (2) “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only.”

t� ,BOU�T�UIFPSZ�TBZT�UIBU�SJHIU�BDUJPOT�BSF�UIPTF�UIBU�BSF�SJHIU�JO�UIFNTFMWFT�CFDBVTF� they are consistent with universal moral rules derived from reason, and the actions have moral worth only if we do them out of a sense of duty. Kant’s central moral tenet is the categorical imperative. For Kant, the moral law cannot be something contingent, changeable, or relative. "e moral law is absolute, unchangeable, and universal; a rock-solid structure built on eternal reason.

'PS�'VSUIFS�3FBEJOH� 285

vau28703_ch11_263-285.indd 285 05/09/17 06:03 PM

,&:�5&3.4

/PUFT 1. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Paul Carus

(New York: Open Court, 1912). 2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York:

Humanities Press, 1929), 44. 3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, 41–42, 46–47. 4. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, 22. 5. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, 92–93. 6. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. T. K. Abbott

(London: Longmans, Green, 1909, 1873), 3–4, 9–10. 7. Kant, Groundwork, trans. Abbott, 18. 8. Kant, Groundwork, trans. Abbott, 311. 9. Kant, Groundwork, trans. Abbott, 46–47.

'PS�'VSUIFS�3FBEJOH Robert Audi, Belief, Justification, and Knowledge (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1988).

Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Con- cise and powerful critique of relativism and constructionism.

Steven M. Cahn and Joram G. Haber, Twentieth Century Ethical !eory (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995).

Eve Browning Cole, Philosophy and Feminist Criticism: An Introduction (New York: Paragon House, 1993).

C. E. Harris, Applying Moral !eories (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1997).

Paul K. Moser, Knowledge and Evidence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Kai Nielsen, Ethics without God (Bu!alo, NY: Prometheus, 1973).

Onora O’Neill, “Kantian Ethics,” in A Companion to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer (Cam- bridge: Blackwell, 1993), 175–185.

James Rachels, !e Elements of Moral Philosophy, 4th edition (New York: McGraw- Hill, 2003).

Russ Shafer-Landau, Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2004).

Roger Trigg, Reason and Commitment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

Lewis Vaughn, Contemporary Moral Arguments: Readings in Ethical Issues, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

analytic statement categorical imperative

consequentialist theory deontological theory

ethics morality moral theory

synthetic statement utilitarianism