Morals and Metaphysics

It took me much longer than I'd expected but I just finished The Phenomenon of Life by Hans Jonas this weekend. Jonas was a student of Heidegger who broke with his teacher over Heidegger's embrace of Nazism though the biographical material in the book suggests he later forgave the older man and did continue to take Heidegger seriously as a thinker. Jonas was Jewish so it's not entirely surprising that he would have had some issues here. He apparently left Germany some time after the rise of Hitler and fought with the Jewish Brigade under British leadership out of Palestine during World War II. He later fought for Israeli independence in 1947-48 and then, in the fifties, emigrated to the United States where he settled in to teach and do philosophy, most prominently at the New School for Social Research. As his educational background suggests, he was drawn to phenomenology and existentialism and this book reflects that.

I picked it up some years ago out of an interest both in existentialism and moral philosophy since the blurb on the book's back cover suggests it's an ethical inquiry of a sort. However, I never got into it until quite recently when I picked it up again in order to learn about and consider another philosophical tradition's approach to Ethics. But I fear the book was a little disappointing. It consists of a series of essays Jonas wrote in the 1950s and early sixties and the first half of the volume is actually quite good. The problem is that the second part fails to sustain the quality of insight and reasoning of the first.

In the first part, Jonas offers insightful analyses of the nature of life and its relation to non-life in the universe, some of his ideas, such as the notion that life is not merely a serendipitous occurrence in a non-living universe but a natural occurrence, being particularly suggestive. While life did not have to arise, Jonas points out, under certain conditions it is the natural next step in the process that is matter he argues. And as life goes so goes mind, for mind -- or consciousness, sentience, awareness -- he seats firmly in the continuum of life. Given this, he proposes that the level of sentience we attain, i.e., the condition of cognitive functioning, of intelligence, must be seen to naturally arise from the sentient itself. None of this is entirely new but Jonas offers some interesting ways of understanding this phenomenon of life in a universe of non-life. Where is the ethical in all this though, for sentient beings which also have sapience* may be quite inured to ethical concerns?

This brings us to the essays in the second half of the book which are somewhat less satisfying. After a series of essays addressing the role of life within non-life and the levels of life itself and man's special capacities as grounded in the living modality in which he stands, Jonas ends the first section with a transitional essay he entitles "From Philosophy of the Organism to the Philosophy of Man." That piece ends with a refocusing on the thought systems of human beings as part of human history. . .

Click to read more ...

Why Moral Judgments Aren't True or False and Why They Don't Have to Be

One big debate in metaethics today is whether or not we can argue for the truth or falsity of value claims. Is it true that kicking babies is bad? Or eradicating ethnic groups (genocide)? Is it true that keeping promises is good? That being kind to animals is? That being one's brother's keeper is? That we should treat others as we would wish to be treated? So-called moral realists argue for the necessity of being able to claim that such statements, and a great many others, are either true or false for, if it turns out we can't, then it looks as if we have lost the possibility of believing in the rightness or wrongness of these and similar behaviors. And this seems to undermine the moral project (the possibility of selectively differentiating between a certain class of actions). Without the ability to grant validity to our moral claims, we seem to be at a loss to tell others to do or not do a whole class of actions which seem to demand just such differentiating capability from us if we are to get on, in a satisfying way, with our lives. Societies and communities stand on the capacity to make such differentiations and to defend them when we do so, i.e., to believe in the truth of our differentiations.

No one doubts that one can judge the prudential value or its lack in certain behaviors, of course. We can know if it's true that we should keep our promise to another if we come to believe that doing so will prompt some good result for ourselves, e.g., that they will keep promises in turn to us (something we wish or need them to do) or if keeping promises will yield other rewards for us. But if personal rewards are the name of the game, then it's not keeping promises that's good (the right thing to do) per se, but getting the reward. And doing something to get a reward for doing it seems to vitiate the claim of moral goodness because it allows us, when the desired reward may not be available, to disregard practices like promise keeping, indeed to pursue a policy of deliberately performing their opposites.

Moral realists want to say that moral value claims carry their own criteria for being true or false, criteria which are not the same as the benefits an agent may gain, or hope to gain, by acting in a prudentially good way. Prudential benefits are external to the presumed morally good trait or action while what makes them morally good (or not) must be intrinsic to them, part of their very nature. Making and acting on moral claims must be independent of personal benefit, the value-granting feature (the presumed property of moral goodness the action is thought to possess) existing somewhere and somehow within the act itself -- or in our description of it. It's the presence or absence of such an extra feature, a feature we discern by observation and inquiry and which we assert to be there in statements which are subject to true or false judgments, that makes any claim of moral goodness reliable (or not) and so fit to be acted on (or rejected).

Intuitionists suppose such extra features are recognized by us because we have a kind of sense of them when they are there, picking up whatever the goodness feature is in a fundamentally unanalyzable way. Just as we see colors and hear sounds and taste flavors, so, for intuitionists, we have a kind of parallel capacity to apprehend moral goodness. That was G. E. Moore's notion and the notion of others, like Henry Sidgwick, who followed him down the intuitionist path. But intuitionism lacks a certain respectability in the modern intellectual world. If we can't explain the intuitive mechanism, as we can explain how and why we see colors, etc., in some physically demonstrable way (as a function of our sensing faculties and as phenomena sensed and thus relayed to the brain), then the idea of intuitions of goodness just looks spurious . . .

Click to read more ...

The Mechanism of Moral Belief - Part I (Valuing)

IF VALUING is just the activity we must be capable of in order to reason about, and so interact with, things in the world (i.e., the capacity to arrange our options in some preferential order by sorting them in ways that allow for selectional differentiation), then moral valuing will involve applying this kind of activity to phenomena of the type we count as morally relevant, namely, to actions. To the extent moral judgments are about actions then (i.e., about distinguishing them along some preferential grid – just as we distinguish other referents in other valuing cases), what will be needed, in moral terms, is a way of determining the relevant markers that constitute a sorting standard suitable for actions.

Of course, not all evaluations of actions are about moral claims since every action we take in the course of deliberation expresses some underlying valuation and actions may be valued and evaluated in terms of those, too. That is, we often value actions for their role in these other types of valuation by considering them in terms of how, and to what extent, they serve as a means for securing other valued ends. Actions may thus be viewed either from a non-moral or a moral perspective.

Valuing as Giving Reasons

When we concern ourselves with the value of things which are objects of our behavior, our behavior expresses that value and is itself valued to the degree its performance is likely to realize the objective(s) in question. But what’s meant by valuing things in this sense?

I may call a scoop of ice cream, or a book, “good” and by this only mean that the ice cream is suitable for eating because it has a taste I consider desirable (and think you will, too), or that the book is one you should have on your shelf, read on your summer vacation or just shell out some cash for at your local book store. If pressed, I may offer still other reasons to back up these. The ice cream is good for you or will introduce you to a new flavor or the book is well written, will give you pleasure, you have something to learn from it, etc. If, when pressed, I can’t say why I think the ice cream is worth eating or the book worth reading my judgment of goodness in such cases must be suspect, for my use of “good” serves in such cases as a proxy for these other, more detailed statements I can make . . .

Click to read more ...