Why Philosophy ain't Psychology . . . and Vice Versa

Updated on June 27, 2021 by Stuart W. Mirsky

Some years back I was having drinks with an elderly neighbor, a retired accountant with a broad range of interests. He had played the violin in his youth and was an avid collector of art which he picked up in his travels. I happened to mention that I'd recently completed a book of philosophy and his ears perked up. He called to his wife and had her bring us a book he had received as a gift and handed it to me. I looked at the title, Brainstorms, and noticed the author was an M.D. Thumbing through it I quickly realized it was a popularized narrative about the maturing brain in adolescents. "This is about the brain," I said "neurological development and the psychology of young adults." He nodded and told me to keep it, saying that, since I was interested in philosophy I might find it interesting, too. He said he hadn't read it himself.

I accepted the gift and later gave him a copy of my then latest book and kept the one he gave me, though to this day I still haven't read it. Why not? . . .

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Separating the Rational from the Rationalized

A friend of mine argued the other day (and for many days prior) that reasoning plays a miniscule role in our actions. We don't really act on judgments we come to by reasoning he claims but rather make up reasons to explain what we do. Reasoning, he suggests, is a function of after the fact stories we tell ourselves and others, the excuses, that is, which we offer for what we have done or intend to do. What really motivates us is more basic, he claims. It's how we feel about things which is, itself, a function he insists of our upbringing and genetic inheritance. We develop a point of view characterized by our learned and inherited inclinations and when it comes to deciding, we fall back on created narratives of explanation to justify what we have done or mean to do.

On this view, of course, there are no genuinely rational considerations or conclusions and rationality, the reliance on reasons and reasoning, is reduced to a facade we present to the world. . . .

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Valuing and the World

As a latecomer to philosophy (I waited until retirement, after 30 odd years of working, before re-engaging actively with philosophy, both contemporary and historical) I have had to play catch-up. It meant reading a lot of stuff I'd missed after graduating college (and moving out into the world), and learning (and re-learning) things I had otherwise forgotten -- or missed entirely. It meant wrestling with philosophers at a depth I hadn't engaged in for decades despite having kept up a passing interest in the field, reading sporadically when I had the time. But at a certain point we start to feel caught up and, while I am certainly no expert in all fields, I have been pretty well steeped in one, Ethics, a philosophical concern that's interested me since my late undergraduate days and I now hold some well-formed views on the subject. . . .

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The Phenomenology of Morals

With a hat tip to Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, I decided to name this The Phenomenology of Morals although it would be better named The Phenomenology of Moral Thought (or of the Moral). It is not concerned with morals, as in any particular code of righteous behavior, but with the moral project itself, the thing we do which may rightly be called moral valuing.

The ideas presented here are a tighter recap of the ideas I worked out in my book Value and Representation: Three Essays Exploring the Implications of a Pragmatic Epistemology for Moral Thought. There my main thrust was to apply an analysis based on an account of knowledge grounded in American Pragmatism to the moral sphere by exploring the nature of valuation as a pragmatic activity which makes both knowledge and judgement, including moral judgment, possible. This somewhat truncated account, which I decided to share here, offers a briefer but also less detailed version of the thesis I laid out in that book . . . .

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Moral Ideas and Religious Belief

Especially in parts of the world that draw their cultural inspiration from the European Enlightenment (and other developments within that civilization), we tend to associate moral behavior with religious belief. Even among those in the west who have shucked off the religious dimension of life, there is still a tendency to look to the religious teachings of the Western World (which, in fact, arose in what we call the Middle East and subsequently spread to Europe) when discussing the idea of moral valuation and to see this as an outgrowth of Western religious beliefs.

Indeed, those who reject religion and its traditions for a more secular sense of moral rightness, an increasingly common phenomenon in what may still be called the "Western" world, tend to associate the idea of moral goodness as such with the teachings of spiritual growth which are often taken to be the better elements of religion per se. Dispensing with such outmoded ideas as “faith” and various doctrinal narratives about the nature and origin of the world itself, many still cling to the idea of an intrinsic link between religion and moral value. An examination of religious traditions from other parts of the world shows that even in these non-Western ways of thinking about the world, the idea of what’s right or wrong, that is, of what we take to be moral, connects with the religious enterprise. This connection between religious belief systems and moral valuation is not something solely limited to the "West." . . .

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The Problem of Moral Explanation: Do Philosophers Have Anything to Add?

A recent edition in a major paper ran two pieces on what philosophers have to say or might say in light of the Coronavirus pandemic currently afflicting the world. One piece looked at philosopher and cognitive scientist Patricia Churchland's account of altruism (the self-suppressing concern some of us show whenever we exhibit concern for others) as an evolutionary development in about 5% of mammals (including human beings) as the writer puts it, a capacity which, in humans reaches what may, perhaps, be its apogee (at least thus far) in extending that concern beyond the parent-offspring caring relation of animal mothers sometimes animal fathers to one's wider family and one's group (seen in primates and certain other social mammals like dogs and wolves, elephants and dolphins) to one's nation or even one’s species (which can, in some human belief systems, extend beyond to include all living things, e.g., Buddhism).

Alongside this article about Churchland’s effort to explain morality qua altruism was a second by the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein (Plato at the Googleplex) discussing and exploring how three great moral philosophers in the western tradition would might have approached the demands on each of us created by the current pandemic. Goldstein examines John Stuart Mill's "rule utilitarianism" (which grounds moral judgments, i.e., choosing the right actions, in our ability to follow rules likely to produce the greatest good for the greatest number) as well as Kant's argument that actions must be chosen based on whether or not they are good in themselves and not for their consequences such as maximizing goodness in the world (Mill's test of morally right behavior).

As Goldstein points out, Kant's argument for good acts is that they can only be deemed morally good to the extent performing them expresses a good will, which is to say acting from the desire to do the right thing, regardless of their outcomes. Such a desire must involve acting for only one of two possible reasons (one of two related principles(or maxims). . .

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Representation, Presentation and Just Making Stuff Up

Immanuel Kant, who revolutionized the philosophy of his time, famously wrote that his was a Copernican Revolution. Just as Copernicus had radically revised the then existent picture of our universe, pointing out that the sun, not the earth, was the center of things, that we revolved around it rather than vice versa, so Kant believed his approach to philosophy radically refashioned how it would be done henceforth. And on the evidence, he was right. Kant moved philosophy from the metaphysical project of trying to describe the world comprehensively, in all its aspects—by applying our epistemic capacities to things beyond our empirical reach—to describing what we can think and know about what is the case and limning the rest indirectly, by sketching out what must also be the case if we are to know anything at all.

This is no less metaphysical than our efforts to talk about what lies beyond our intellectual reach, of course, but it isn’t subject to the inherent error of attempting to describe what is, in its nature, necessarily indescribable. Hence Kant concluded his efforts were of a "transcendental" nature, his metaphysics understandable as a transcendental sort albeit without assuring us of the same level of epistemic result we expect from knowledge obtained through the senses, from information garnered about things that can be seen or felt, etc. After Kant philosophy turned much of its attention to the parameters of knowledge itself. Kant, himself, sought to explain the seeming reality of things, and our capacity to know that reality, by explaining how this world is ultimately just a product of our human minds. We are, he reasoned, in possession of certain mental equipment which gives form to the bombardment of information we receive on an ongoing basis, shaping it through a kind of built-in lens into a world of things we see and feel, hear, smell and taste, the sensory data impinging on us being shaped, as it were, into knowable phenomena, things we can identify as such and so speak about. Our sensory organs, he reasoned, in tandem with the shaping capacities inherent in our minds, make of the raw data something shaped and structured, yielding objects for our attention where, before, all was disparate and unconnected, unformed, amorphous.

But we cannot, he thought, know the structures within which knowledge as such takes shape in the same way we know the things shaped. . . . .

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