Can Moral Goodness Be Based on Naturalism?

ONE OF THE moves in the field of modern moral or ethical philosophy has been to claim that moral judgments of goodness, of what's right for people to do, can be determined by considering the best way for a person to live, i.e., what's good for humans as humans. Among such "goods" are, of course, survival and a full belly and shelter in a storm. But these are taken to be mere animal goods, what any living organism will want for itself in general, i.e., whatever is necessary to survive well, and will include the absence of pain and debilitating conditions. Alone these do not offer a basis for making moral claims, a distinctively human activity. For this we have to go further and look to what's good for humans as humans. And here we come up against the usual problem of determining which things qualify in this respect.

Aristotle supposed the goodness that suited human kind lay in the achievement of a certain balance in one’s life and that this represented the best state a person could be in, i.e., the state in which a human being might be said to do best, to flourish in much the same way as a well watered plant, placed in nutrient rich soil and provided with plenty of sunlight or an adequately fed beast, given the opportunity to exercise sufficient for its health and mental condition might do well. For Aristotle developing various human traits in the best way represented that same sort of phenomenon for humans. He posited that humans do best when they find and adhere to a middle path between extremes of behavior.

Thus, Aristotle famously defined things like courage as a human virtue to the extent it represented a midpoint between the alternatives of timidity or cowardice, on the one hand, and rashness or foolhardiness on the other, courage thus being seen as the condition of knowing when to step up and risk oneself, rather than always fearing to do so, or doing so without regard to any and all consequences. Aristotle proposed that other human qualities, like wisdom, could be seen similarly in this way, as the midpoint between stupidity or dullness, on the one hand, and over attachment to thinking everything through so that one never reached the point of choosing one’s actions and acting, on the other. Charity, on this view, similarly represents the state in which we balance our own needs with those of people we should care about, etc., neither refusing to help those in need when we can nor helping others to such an extent as to impoverish ourselves or those dependent on us.

For Aristotle, to be in the best, or happiest, human state was just to be balanced in this way because it led to the best sort of life a person could live, one that both most satisfactorily served the person himself or herself and also those around him or her (from one's own family to one's community). It generated, Aristotle believed, the best results overall. A happy man in this Aristotelian sense was then a virtuous one where virtue represented such moderation between behavioral extremes.

Other philosophers of the ancient world thought the idea of living rightly, choosing the right sorts of things to do similarly depended on having some form of human happiness as one’s objective. This was often and variously defined in a variety of ways by thinkers of the ancient world, from Aristotle’s concept of virtue to the notion of living in a state which exercised a human being’s unique cognitive faculties to the fullest or achieving a life of moderation which offered a person just enough to keep him or her satisfied but not so much as to bring on undue cares (through excessive pursuit of wealth and the worry and strife that accompanies such concerns) or which might lead to slothfulness or dissipation. Still other ancient thinkers counted human happiness as the state of having sufficient pleasure in one’s life, through the temperate enjoyment of the finer things, and others thought it was to simply achieve a state in which one stood in equilibrium with the world’s vicissitudes, to be unbroken by the trials and tribulations of a lifetime.

The happiest state for persons, of course, may be defined in any number of ways and each definition will find its adherents . . . .

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Are There Intrinsic Goods?

ONE WAY OF dividing up the different principles by which we acknowledge or ascribe goodness or badness to things (whether objects, actions, goals, states of affairs, etc.) is to suppose that there are some things that are good because they help us achieve other things, some of which must be just good in themselves. The first sort of goodness, the one dependent on the effectiveness of the object of reference (whether physical objects or other type) to perform some function for us or bring something about, is often classified as "extrinsic," as in being outside the object itself. That is, we would not care to obtain or achieve or use such objects if they did not serve our purpose in achieving something else. Some of those things which fit into the class of "something else" are then taken to have so-called "intrinsic" goodness, i.e., to be good no matter what purpose we mean to put them to because we desire their possession just for what they are.

Thus, philosophers have often divided the world of possible goods between the extrinsic and the intrinsic. The notion of extrinsic, or instrumental, goodness is easy enough to understand and largely uncontroversial. We have no reason to doubt the goodness of a thing which serves to get us whatever it is we want, that is to say, we have no reason to doubt its goodness for that purpose. And no one seems disposed to claim that there is no such thing as this kind of goodness (to the extent they are prepared to acknowledge that there is goodness at all). The problem arises when we turn to the moral case, however, for here what we want to call "morally good" produces a special class of things (actions, generally) which, if they are called good just because they are thought to be instrumentally so, do not seem to fit that case.

That is, while there are any number of moral claims we can make, far and away the most important are those which are motivated by concern for another's interest and not strictly for our own. Giving charity, avoidance of doing harm to another, reaching out to support others in moments of pain, respecting their persons, avoiding lying to, stealing from or otherwise injuring them, etc., all typically fall under the moral case. And yet, if we do any of these sorts of things because we wish to obtain some benefit for ourselves, we would not grant that they were motivated in a moral way.

To the extent that we undertake a so-called moral act only to bring about some other good that we want or need for ourselves, that act appears self-interested – and self-interest abrogates the moral basis since, in any case in which self-interest is the predominant basis for acting, a different action, which lacks moral standing according to ordinary moral usage, may be justified or more justified. And so the fact that a presumptively morally good act may be justified by self-interest undermines that very justification for, if some things were different, the same justification would support our acting in what we take to be an immoral way . . . .

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A Moral Conversation

Over the summer my wife and I tend to get to spend more time together and today we took a long drive which is often the place where I get to apply some of my thoughts on how things are to real life. On the drive home we passed a building in a serious state of disrepair. It used to be a "gentleman's club" which prominently displayed its wares on it's billboard like front, until some of the more morally minded in the local community took up arms over the somewhat audacious displays. Personally I had no objection to the long limbed figures depicted in spike heels (the place called itself "High Heels" as I recall) or the other sometimes quite frank images of the "hostesses" within. But a colleague of my wife's had objected. A single mother, she is raising her boys alone and she felt it was inappropriate for them to be exposed to such images when, driving by with her, they couldn't help but notice. So she joined a petition drive to shut High Heels down and, in time, they succeeded. The result, now, is a derelict building without occupant or purpose. But no more scantily clad gals displayed to the driving public either.

I made this point to my wife and noted that I kind of missed the images. After all, at least from my perspective they were not entirely unpleasant to look at. More importantly, they were nicer to look at than the now decrepit structure that met our eyes as we drove past this afternoon. My wife snarled at me that it was inappropriate and that I shouldn't have been looking at those images either. After all, would I want my daughters or granddaughters to parade about like that? If I wouldn't, she declared, then why would I want other men's daughters to be doing that?

I said, hold on a minute. Everyone is somebody's son or daughter, aren't they and some people do things like that. Why should their being someone's daughter matter if they wanted to do it? It's a free country, after all, I added, and no one was forcing these young ladies to engage in such activities. That didn't assuage my wife's annoyance though. So I tried another tack. . . .

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Recapitulating the Moral Account

One of the criteria of a good argument or account of something, I have generally believed, is that we should be able to briefly and cogently state the case for it. If it's a good account it shouldn't get bound up in complexity, ambiguities and unclarity. We shouldn't need reams and reams of paper to say what we are talking about. Still, if the subject being accounted for were easily explained, there wouldn't be a need to say more, would there? So I'm torn between preferring simplicity and brevity, on the one hand, and acknowledging the need for complexity, occasioned by the difficulty of a longstanding issue, on the other. The possibility of giving a moral account strikes me as raising just this sort of problem.

The other day, following a link on Duncan Richter's blog, I ended up on a site discussing a moral issue. I weighed in with comments reflecting my own ongoing effort to say what moral valuing is and what reasons underlie it. One of the posters suggested I spell out my own view, since I was challenging his, and I decided to give it a go, even knowing how difficult it would be to say succinctly what I have come to think about the issue of how moral valuing works. (The full exchange can be found here: http://kazez.blogspot.com/2014/08/ethics-in-gaza.html)

In the meantime, here is a composite version of what I wrote there, representing still another iteration of the view I have been developing on this site concerning moral questions:

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Philosophy and Practicality

Updated on July 29, 2014 by Stuart W. Mirsky

Not being a member of the academic community of philosophers, and yet having an abiding interest in that community's subject matter (some elements of it, at any rate), I have often wondered about the meaningfulness of the field. This is partly a reflection of my own decision more than 40 years ago not to pursue a a graduate philosophy degree (I doubted my ability to make a mark in that particular arena and also the value of doing so). I was drawn to Wittgenstein back then, perhaps partly because he seemed to be the epitome of the anti-philosopher but, I think, even more because his strategy and approach to the business philosophers did seemed to clarify so many of my own concerns. I was caught in the web of idealism at the time, after a flirtation with logical positivism and, briefly, American pragmatism. But I was always and primarily drawn to the analytic approach of which Wittgenstein was a part even after leaving that reservation in his later years. The fact that there seemed to be no solutions to the pressing philosophical questions both kept my head spinning and suggested, to me at least, the virtual pointlessness of bothering with such questions. Yet I could not simply divest myself of them, not even after exposure to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.

I spent a number of years, after graduating, still troubling the same philosophical bones but finally gave it all up entirely and moved on. Yet, in my later years I've found myself drawn back to these kinds of concerns. Although I have improved my understanding of many of the issues and, I think, of Wittgenstein himself, it has seemed to me that there are still areas worth chewing over for those who are philosophically inclined. Of course, if Wittgenstein was right in his later years, we're all better off moving on to more practical endeavors but perhaps, when one has finished the practical part of one's life, a return to philosophy is just what's called for. And so I've engaged on and off over the years in philosophical discussions on Internet sites like this one. They have not always been satisfying but have often been edifying. . . .

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Logic and Moral Discourse (revised)

A while back I put up on this site what my take on resolving the moral question is. After examining a number of different solutions, from intuitionism to ethical naturalism (Foot, Anscombe, and Brandom -- the last of whom presents a proposal which seems to be a hybrid of Aristotelian naturalistic "virtue ethics" and Kantian rationalism) and then on to Searle's speech-act based answer to the emotivist denial and the prescriptivist solution, as well as a Kantian style argument for the power of rational thinking to drive moral judgment, I tried to cover all the bases by looking at some additional approaches. These also included considering a Wittgensteinian solution (based on Wittgenstein's later work) which finds moral standards in our "forms of life" (Beardsmore) as well as the "sentimentalism" argument of Jesse Prinz (which elaborates a logic of sentiment in terms of the logic of description) and the evolutionary-biological thesis of James Q. Wilson (which seats moral judgments in certain species-specific capacities identifiable as human). Considering all the options, I concluded that none are quite right though all seem to have something to commend them. I offered my own tentative explanation here under the post entitled Realizational Ethics in which I tried to lay out a step by step account (not quite an argument!) that would lay bare the moral valuing mechanism and show why it works.

In a nutshell, I proposed that moral valuing involves looking at actions in the most complete way, i.e., a way that considers them in light of the quality of the intentions that underlie them and which they express and not just instrumentally (in terms of the outcomes they bring about). Unlike Searle, I argued that intentions aren't entities (a strange choice of words for such phenomena, to say the least) but that they are just a way we have of talking about some things (and therefore distinguishing them from other kinds of things, picking this up from Dennett's notion of the "intentional stance"). Nevertheless, there is a reality to them if we recognize that what we mean when we consider intentions per se is the state of the mental life of the agent, what he or she is emotionally inclined to do. And this can be looked at referentially, no less than we do with the phenomena of the observable physical world, because it makes sense to speak of intentions and selves, and about the manifold mental features of our lives.

From there I suggested that judging actions in the most complete way is to look at them as expressing intentions which is to say expressing the mental state of the acting self as opposed to considering their worth instrumentally or in terms of whether or not they satisfy some need, desire, requirement, etc. That is, we may consider actions in any of these other ways and put a value on them based on their role in addressing these elements in our psychological lives because valuing just is an adjunct of rationality per se. You can't be rational in making choices unless you can prioritize and, to do that, you need a basis for sorting, you need a scale of significance. But actions, per se, cannot be fully and adequately evaluated unless and until we also take into account the underlying motivations, the intentions they express, and these can be understood as aspects of an agential self, the state of the agent's mental life at the moment he or she is acting . . . .

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Searle's "Solution" to the Ethics Quandary

Updated on June 8, 2014 by Stuart W. Mirsky

Updated on June 16, 2014 by Stuart W. Mirsky

Updated on June 23, 2014 by Stuart W. Mirsky

As noted previously, I've begun reading Searle's Rationalism in Action, the last of Searle's books that I have after the flood in 2012. As it happens this is also the one book of his in my possession that I hadn't yet read so its survival was fortuitous. However, the book, itself, has proved a disappointment. I know that I've gone on record in the past as thinking highly of Searle's work despite my strong disagreement with his Chinese Room Argument (which I initially found quite compelling but gradually came to see as deeply flawed). In the case of the present book and its extended argument, however, I am surprised at what I take to be some serious errors and an overall failure of the book's thesis. I want to qualify this, though, since I'm only about two thirds through it and it could, conceivably, get much better from here.

In this book Searle undertakes to explain how rationality as reasoning is thoroughly embedded in human life and how it underwrites our obligation claims as well as talk about rights and duties and, of course, moral judgments. In this he seems to be worrying the same bone that Brandom was on in his book Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas, which I just finished last weekend. But, despite the complexity and abstruseness of Brandom's exposition, I think it's fair to say that Brandom did it better. Searle mostly involves himself with elaborating a complex vocabulary for how we think and speak about things and what that entails. Unfortunately, his effort seems to largely consist of elaborating a complex jargon to rename features about language and human relations to the world we already know under other, more familiar terms. He seems to think one can improve on ordinary language by invoking an extraordinary vocabulary. . . .

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