The Phenomenology of Morals

The biggest problem we face in coming to grips with the question of cognitive content in moral judgments is the issue of “is” vs. “ought.” As Hume noticed a couple of centuries ago and others have realized (both before and since), moral claims are valuational not factual in form. They express our orientation (in terms of the feelings and attitudes we possess or adopt) towards something, in this case instances of human behavior, both our own and that of others. We evaluate, and so pass judgment on, the rightness or wrongness of the behavioral choices we and others make or think about making by asserting claims of justifiability about them.

What we do, we deem right or wrong because we have the ability to choose our paths or at least we seem to. Actions caused by events are neutral except to the extent they impact creatures like us and so serve our purposes or fail to. Similarly, when an action we take is not of our own free will (a function of our capacity to choose), we exclude it from the moral domain although we may assess it for rightness or wrongness from other perspectives, e.g., is it likely to get us what we want or think we need? An act may also be deemed right if it conforms with the law and we want to do that (or accept the fact that we should act in conformity with the law). Thus, it may be thought right if it enables us to secure the necessities of life, enabling us to stay alive, or remain in good health or ensure the same for others whose well-being we similarly seek to ensure. In cases like this, an act is right or wrong to the extent it conforms with our interests, with what we desire to make happen.

But moral claims pose a special problem in this regard since they generally tend to involve acts which affect others when our interests are not determinant at all. The morally relevant concern is one in which how what we do affects others matters to us, whether to advance and impede their interests, regardless of how it affects ours. And here it is often the case that our interests conflict with those of others.

To the extent our interests are only those which pertain to ourselves, even if they are presented as moral judgments, the choices we make, however morally cloaked in our explanations of what we do, can be reduced to forms of valuational claims which do not give a predominant role to the interests of the other. If I act to help another for some reward for myself, or because our interests just happen to coincide at the moment, then moral valuation seems to evaporate in a cloud of convenience. Self-interest rules.

But, if it does, moral claims as such, i.e., acting out of concern for the other, seem to have lost its hold on us as moral claims. And then we might as well be entirely pragmatic in the non-philosophical sense of that term. Pragmatism, in this sense, undermines the moral. So how do we square this particular circle? How can we save the moral (and its implications for us as social creatures) in the face of the pressure of self-interest?

One answer, of course, has been to argue that the idea of concern for others is merely an illusion, that all moral claims rest on a set of regulatory principles we adopt within a particular societal context, promulgated by and among the members of that particular society and enforced by our self-interested choice to affiliate with them, or remain so affiliated. Moral claims on this view, are just a cloak over the raw self-interest that really motivates and justifies our actions.

Here, moral valuation has a law-like quality, being the set of unwritten (sometimes written) norms developed, preserved and enforced within particular societies and voluntarily subscribed to by members of that society, a choice that can be disavowed under the right circumstances. The moral, that is, is whatever this or that society proclaims it to be and we enroll ourselves in those practices to the extent we, as individuals, choose to enroll ourselves in that society. We can, after all, always walk away, at least in theory. On such a view, moral valuation becomes a matter of buying into this or that society’s mores, those practices which members of that society count as the right thing to do. But this doesn’t seem right because we can all readily see how some societies may sanction behaviors that members of our society would find repugnant. If moral values amount to nothing more than implicit social rules of behavior, then anything goes, depending on where and in whose company we find ourselves. Here there is only moral relativism left because nothing is any more firmly rooted in the foundations of our judgment than anything else. And moral relativism is fatal to moral claims.

At any moment we can abandon one set of moral precepts for another if we hold such a view. Nor can we have any ground for disapproving those moral choices made by a society’s members if these conform with the mores of that society. And if we cannot do so between societies, then we cannot do so even within our own, for there is nothing fixed to oblige us to hold fast to those moral beliefs we start out with in our own cultures. Having been taught or inculcated with certain moral precepts is no ground for demanding we continue our allegiance to those precepts, neither that others do so or that we expect it of ourselves. We might as well become racists, then, or fascists or serial killers, misogynists or rapists. If nothing binds us in a morally evaluative sense but our own willingness to pledge ourselves to some norms rather than others, then why should we bother with the norms in question at all? Why not just pick and choose or, better, make up our own?

It seems to some that this is the answer, of course, but even when it does, those who argue for such relativism cannot divest themselves of the notion that there are standards on a moral level which bind them. Human beings, whatever societal culture they attach themselves to, always think that the norms they follow are right and, being right, must be followed if they are to be able to consider themselves justified in what they do. Being right, whether in a moral or any other sense, is to consider that one is justified in the choices one makes. But even the most morally relativistic of claimants, those who want to say that no society’s moral claims are any more sound than any other’s, will balk at the notion that certain claims, of which they tend to disapprove, are therefore okay because some society approves them. People on the conservative side of contemporary politics in Western countries (however “conservatism” is defined) tend to view those on the self-styled progressive side as being wrong in some deep and absolute sense. And the same goes for those on the left who consider the attitudes and choices of those on the right similarly wrongheaded, to be disparaged or condemned.

Those who believe in complete human equality will not say things like, “well I just mean this should apply in societies like mine.” They will not agree that other societies have the right to enslave or relegate some humans in their midst to subordinate status. If one believes in human freedom one holds that it is appropriate for all and this must include those humans outside our own societies. There is a difference between uncomfortable tolerance of behavior one cannot force others to alter and agreement to the claim that whatever the society in which the disapproved behavior is approved is right.

Moral judgment is necessarily non-relative, even while the basis for this non-relativity seems to elude us, and even when some of us come to think that its basis must, itself, be relative, a function of mere social practice and that there can be no firm foundation to which the moral evaluator can appeal. This way, of course, lies nihilism and the collapse of moral judgment entirely. If anything goes from society to society, then anything goes within each society, too, and there is no basis for urging others to act differently than they do, whether within our society or in another’s. If the ancient Aztec nation believed in, and practiced, human sacrifice, if some cultures sanction cannibalism as routine practice, if exposing newborns to die is alright in some cultures, if women are denied the same human rights as men in some cultures, and the rightness of all these practices depend on the societal sanction they receive in their places of occurrence, then moral claims against these and other practices we would reject can be no more than illusions we conjure up for ourselves, easily abandoned by those who break the spell or think they have. Nothing can compel those who employ such practices to do otherwise if they conclude they have been hornswoggled by those around them. A Nietzschean picture of ethics arises and we are forced to drop our belief in ethical certainty in favor of a freewheeling nihilism which hands us the opportunity to call our own moral shots, to decide for ourselves what is and is not allowable in behavior. The nihilism of a Nietzsche becomes the ethics of the strong, the morality of might makes right. But in this case the core moral idea of concerning ourselves with the interests of the other is lost.

This, then, is the moral quandary for, if moral claims are merely evaluative and evaluative claims are mere expressions of our particular feelings and attitudes towards certain ways of behaving, then there can be no moral valuing in the sense discussed at all. But then those who claim moral authority to condemn or advance this or that viewpoint, cannot have that authority either. And neither can any of us. Moral valuation collapses in the face of an analysis that relegates it to the status of social practices, devoid of any real cognitive content. A morality explained in genealogical terms is no morality at all. It is just an excuse for doing what we like and an argument for claiming a moral mantle in doing so.

Is there a way around this conundrum, a way out of this self-defeating box into which we have locked ourselves by the acceptance of the is/ought dichotomy (the idea that, as Hume put it, no ought statement can ever be taken to imply a statement about what is)? If this analysis is correct then there can be no moral facts and, without these, no compelling moral judgments. This challenge leads to an examination of Hume’s distinction to better understand why this doctrine feels right at first blush but fails if we are to save the idea of moral judgment. It is certainly true, after all, that the world is known through the factual statements we make about it. And that such factual statements find their basis, indeed their truth, in the degree to which the statements correctly characterize the reality they are statements about. The sky is blue because it looks blue to the observer and it is gray when there are clouds that obscure the sunlight that illumines the atmosphere which appears, on clear days, to be blue. On Mars, perhaps, it is brownish or reddish on such days. These things are ascertainable by using our eyes and so the truth of the statements we make about the sky in these various circumstances is secured by observation, by the readiness of speakers observing the same phenomena to agree on how these are to be characterized. But moral claims have no basis in shared observations of phenomena and thus no facts to back them up, nothing readily visible to the observer other than his or her embrace of an attitude which as observers we can often recognize but sometimes fail to. Attitudes, of course, are personal, even if shared and conveyable through words, behavior and cultural interaction.

We can observe how others feel by how they act and determine what they value based on what they say and do. But we cannot see their values. We only see them in the process of valuing. There are no colors, as with skies, to look to, nothing determinable by two or more of us getting together and looking and coming to an agreement about what we see and what we mean by the words we use to express our beliefs about what’s seen. Skies and colors are in the observable world. Values are not.

We observe actions, of course, but not values which remain for us to “see” in a different sense, namely through our interpretive powers in relation to others. Observing actions does not count towards asserting value claims though which is why no “is” statement can imply an “ought.” To see that so-and-so values X is no reason for you or me, or anyone else for that matter, to do so—even if we may be psychologically moved to do so by the example set. Such an example may constitute some shared facts about what is observed but those facts about the world are not, themselves, the valuations. Valuing is activity not facts in the world.

But isn’t activity also a fact in the world? Yes, but as activity alone and not as the value which requires a valuer to assign value to it. So, does this mean valuation, itself, is a mere chimera? Just something we tell ourselves is real but actually isn’t?

We know the reality of valuation because we do it, of course, but if we have no basis for it beyond our particular preferences, then doesn’t that mean valuing is kind of a joke we play on ourselves? What is valuing then, and how does moral valuation fit into this concept? We cannot deny the reality of valuation as those activities, those practices, we engage in when making choices between competing options; nor can we deny the role of facts observed or reported which we rely on in making those choices. We choose what we do in order to secure certain ends which we consider desirable or necessary for ourselves; and their existence and potential to satisfy our wants and needs rests on the facts we discern about them.

Valuing is certainly a real element in human activity, factually established by observation, too, but it involves something about us, i.e., how we relate to the world around us. It relies on the value we place on those things so we, as valuers, have a critical role in valuing’s existence as a reportable phenomenon. But moral valuing is a special subcategory of valuing which looks not at things around us, whether objects or situations (so-called states of affairs) but at our actions themselves. And human action is more than just the physical events that get us from here to there.

Moral valuing looks at our relation to others and expresses itself in terms of how we regard the interests of the other. Moral valuing happens when we are prepared to set aside or diminish the idea of meeting our own needs in recognition of another’s. But if all other forms of valuing involve attention to satisfying our own needs and wants, where does the moral form of this activity fit in? Is it really the illusion Nietzsche and those who think as he did claim? How does valuing, which involves our choice-making capacity as applied to advancing the cause of our interests as living organisms, sometimes and somehow morph into the moral version of itself?

In a harsh environment, humans must work together for common ends and in less harsh environments, we frequently choose to work together because we are genetically predisposed to doing so. In this, we establish practices and set objectives that have value for each participant, providing participating agents a reason to choose to cooperate with others or to trim his or her behavior to accord with others needs as well as his own. The idea of moral valuing runs into a problem, however, when it clashes with individual needs and so we cannot reconcile the moral with the merely social. We choose to work together and follow rules and practices that make that possible, even efficient. But if we can choose otherwise, as we often can and do, then moral valuation must either exist as a separate form of valuing, with its own basis for assigning value to our actions (giving an agent reason to choose a moral course) or not. If not, if it is, instead, entirely dependent on other non-moral forms of valuing, then it loses its status and its claim on us.

In this case, we may drop the moral pretense at any moment and follow other standards of valuation which have no part in the concept of the moral. Here moral valuation becomes a mere charade, a game we play to convince others we’re on their side—or that we care. In this case the idea that moral judgment is a grounded form of valuation, grounded in reasons that uniquely determine the moral choices we may make, is false.

The concept of valuation concerns the human capacity for choice, for deliberation in one’s thinking in order to arrive at a conclusion that motivates action. But valuation is more than just wanting or feeling needs for this or that because it involves a rational dimension. Valuing is about recognizing our wants and needs as ours and as warranting action to satisfy them. It entails our realization that we are creatures with wants and needs and so it’s about our placing these within a framework of possibilities, that is, of other wants and needs—and the potential outcomes of different actions to satisfy them, determining what is achievable and what isn’t.

Yet moral valuing must be about something else as well or it cannot be what it appears to us to be, a separately grounded form of valuing in which we humans engage. Unlike other forms of valuing which address things and situations in the world, moral valuing addresses the choices we make concerning those things and situations themselves. In a sense, it’s about valuing our other valuing activities—for every deliberative choice we make expresses some valuation.

Valuing, then, is something we, as thinking, deliberating creatures, do in the course of finding our way about in the world and moral valuing is that level of valuing that kicks in when we move from evaluating our options to evaluating the choice making elements in the process of deliberation itself. Valuing turns its attention to the deliberations we engage in, to the reasons we think we have for choosing one thing instead of another, and, in doing so, it turns to the question of the deciding agent him or herself. Valuing an agent’s choice, his or her action, is also to value the agent, the one who acts.

By looking at the valuation we place on our reasons, we look at our motivations, i.e., at what matters to us as deliberating agents. In this sense, moral valuation is thus about evaluating the agent, not just those things the agent would secure, or what he or she would do to secure them. What then is there about an agent to value or disvalue?

He or she is a thinker first and foremost, aware of his or her world and, as such, is capable of thinking about things. Moral valuation kicks in when valuing, as an activity of human life, begins to be about more than those things, or activities, that are discernible by us in the world. Then valuing, in its moral dimension, reflects the redirection the valuing agent’s attention to itself, to the quality of the actions the agent would undertake, and thus to what the agent itself is—and why it is that. Moral valuing puts the agent, not the thing sought, in its sights. The valuer’s concern becomes the action or actions the agent would take, i.e., those events of which the agent is a part which define the agent and thus determine his or her status in the world.

A deliberative capacity is needed to convert the wants and needs of any creature into values; and valuing, because such a capacity can only occur in creatures with the capacity to see themselves as both separate from but also part of their world, moves from the valuation of things in the world to the valuation of the agents who may apply valuing to the world. Valuing, that is, hangs for its existence entirely on the capacity of an entity to engage in it; and that capacity implies an ability to see, through an environment, a world as such, a world that extends beyond the moment and place of immediate existence, that has temporal and spatial dimension. Such a world demands thinkers capable of organizing their sensory impingements into the complex picture we call a “world.” But, having that capacity, depends on and implies the capacity to referentialize, to turn phenomena into things that can be recognized and considered, thought about and described.

Such a capacity implies conceptualization. Valuing is thus an activity of thinking creatures capable of conceptualizing their environments. A dog does not value even while it wants and needs things and acts to secure or achieve them. It does so, however, without the capacity to envision a world in which it stands. Indeed, envisioning has no place in the dog’s life while it is precisely what defines us as human creatures. And when conceptualizing creatures like ourselves achieve a certain level of conceptualizing capacity, when they can begin to recognize themselves as inhabitants of their world, and not just a solipsistic presence in it, then they can also begin to come to grips with what it means to be a subject in a world. Moral valuation goes to this question of subjectness, to being a self that knows a world in which it exists.

Creatures capable of valuing, who begin to see themselves as fellow objects in their world, along with all the other things there are, begin to wrestle with what it is to be such an entity, a creature that sees and has needs, that reports and sorts, that is, a subjective presence in the world. When we begin to achieve this level of awareness, when we become selves to ourselves, when we begin to have self-awareness, so, too, do we begin to consider what it means to be selves. And what that means is the beginning of moral concern.

If we are selves, so are others around us who are like us, and then we want to know just what it is that makes us selves and not just things. And here we begin to make selfhood, that is, subjectness, an object of our concern, too. Whatever we can objectify in this way, whatever can become an object of our concern, that is, can also become something else: an object of valuation, something to be considered and sorted in the same way we consider and sort (for our action) those things in the world that have the potential to satisfy our needs.

The idea of moral valuation, then, is about valuing selves as such, i.e., what it is to be a subject in a world, both what distinguishes selves from other entities that have no selfhood and what this distinction entails. Thus, at a certain stage in human development, we become aware of our own selfhood; we give it a name, we reference it, we turn the intrinsic subjectness, that distinguishes entities with awareness from entities without it, into objects of consideration, too—and here we begin to consider what makes one sort of self (one state of being a subject in the world) better or worse than another. Here the moral dimension of valuation comes to the fore because now our object of concern is not just what we want but who we are and what we want to be. That is, we begin to wrestle with ideas about the best way of being in the world. We tilt here into religious and spiritual domains, of course, but the concern for selfhood and what it is goes deeper than the outward manifestations characterized by religious and mystical practices. A self that becomes self-aware must also begin to come to grips with selfhood itself. Religion and mysticism are only expressions of this deeper need that defines us.

In finding selfhood, we develop ideas about what we ought to do, ideas that go beyond the merely practical (i.e., what gets what result for ourselves in terms of satisfying our wants and needs). Here we begin to think about others who are selves as we are—and about selves grouped together for the purpose of achieving shared ends. We begin to recognize the roles of obligation and commitment, of loyalty and courage, of protecting others as well as ourselves. Here the human world opens up new horizons as relations between creatures like ourselves don new garments unavailable and unknown to our animal cousins. We develop institutions, traditions, practices and, of course, mores.

All animals of a certain brain capacity can act, instinctively, to save themselves and others related to them, as the mother bear protects her cubs, the mother bird her hatchlings. And higher level social creatures can act for the group as well as for themselves or their offspring alone. Doing so advances the evolutionary ends of their kind and so finds its way into their genetically ingrained dispositions to behave. Greater mental capacity makes joint action with others increasingly feasible and more sophisticated and we are, in this sense, no different from other primates or mammals capable of living and acting together in groups. But our greater capacity for thought, for seeing and understanding our world, opens a new vista for us, thus enabling us to think about things like advancing the evolutionary goals inherent in our group-oriented behaviors in novel ways. Here evolution moves us toward a moral domain where concern with behaviors towards our kind (or those enough like us to qualify) matter. But if the moral were only about that, we would have to dismiss it as no more than an evolutionary outcome for certain species whose form of life requires group activity. This tendency to group commitment may or may not obtain in any individual, however, because evolution is non-thinking, not planned, and so those without the social instinct will have no reason to act as if they had it. A purely evolutionary account has no power to compel us to behave in a socially conducive way if the instinct happens to be absent in any particular member of our group. We would have no reason, that is, to choose to act in any way we are not already motivated to act. And all valuation is about having reasons, whether we are concerned here with moral valuation or the prudential.

Valuation is not just about being motivated but about choosing not only which actions we will perform but choosing the motivations we acknowledge and nurture in ourselves which prompt our actions. Because we live in a world and not just an environment, as other creatures do, and because we can see that world in terms of ourselves and other things in it and ourselves as beings like others who share what we possess, we can value the state of being a subject, too. But what is there about being a subject in a world that is better or worse for that subject? We can objectify and therefore value selves as such, as referents like everything else we are able to think about, by looking at their type. Being a self is to be a subject in one’s world and what is there that can make being one type of self better than another? Why should we, as such subjects, care to be different from what we are at any given moment? Why should we tailor our acts to achieve some better state of selfhood at all? And if we have a reason to do it, what is better than who we are now and how can we know it?

To recognize ourselves as selves is to recognize our own status as subjects in a world and this leads us to consider that status and what it means to have it. When we reach a level where selfhood becomes self-awareness, we begin to think about what makes for better selves and here we find ourselves thinking about more than the actions we or others take as mere phenomena in the world, targets of our own valuation for the purpose of satisfying our own wants and needs. In seeing the actions of others who are selves as we are we see thoughts and beliefs, intentions and motivations. We see a domain of selfhood not otherwise visible to an observer lacking in awareness of what it is. We recognize ourselves in others then and others in ourselves, creatures sharing in these same capacities, i.e., possessed of a mental life consisting of thoughts and feelings, of awareness of things. We recognize subjectness in others as in ourselves and, in doing so, we come to think about its nature, about how being a subject must involve having what we have: awareness, feelings, needs.

We react not to the body of the other but to the self the other presents through its actions. We see the other but, in doing so, we do not merely see an outer casing, as it were. We see the other self. And seeing a self requires something more than just certain words of acknowledgement, of recognition. It requires actions from us, as well. It requires acting towards others who are like us as something more than rocks or automatons. It involves relating to the other as an aware entity, too. To relate thus is to acknowledge, through our behavior, the existence of the other self as a self. But how do we relate thus? We must not only say the right words but do the right things. And this means acknowledging the other as like ourselves through what we do in reaction to and in tandem with them. Such acknowledgement leads to, and can only be constituted by, the acceptance of the other as like us. We cannot deny their subjectness while affirming our own.

Or, rather, we can, of course, because that is what rational choice means; the ability to embrace or deny, endorse or reject. But denying the other’s subjectness, its selfhood, is denial of ourselves as well. Seeing the other in its fullest manifestation requires recognition of what that entails and this means allowing the other’s concerns to enter into our own calculations in ways that grant them significance. The demands of the moral are voluntary. Recognition is a choice. But it is a choice we make because we come to see we are as they are. We come to embrace the natural empathy of our species by choice as well as by instinct. This is the basis of moral valuation.

The moral level of valuation is about finding and choosing those behaviors which establish the relationship of recognition with the other when it is a self as we are. Religious and other mystical practices can offer an avenue for achieving this end but they do not exhaust the possibilities for the moral question is deeper than any religious or mystical doctrine. It is, in fact, the source of those doctrines since they are about reconciling ourselves in our world. Moral valuation arises when the valuing entity (one, that is, with sufficient cognitive capacity to engage in the activity of valuing) reaches a stage of awareness that also includes awareness of selfhood as referenceable object; and then the question that must be faced is what are the right things to do, the right ways to be, in a world in which selfhood defines its world?

Here those acts which affirm the other, as a fellow self, become the ones to perform. But it remains for each of us, at every moment of our lives, to wrestle with the choices that valuation lays before us, whether to affirm or reject this or that course of action, whether such actions affirm or dismiss the existence of other selves along with us in a common world. When faced with conflicts between others’ interests and our own, each of us must choose and chart our way. We do that by acting in ways that affirm the other.

This secures us, as subjects, in our world because it affords us the means to most fully realize what it means to be us. Choosing otherwise denies the other and, in so doing, leaves the one who makes that choice without a full and complete understanding of itself. Nothing external to us requires that we find and achieve such an understanding, of course. There are no independent moral facts—nor are there logical rules that enjoin us to choose concern for others over ourselves in relevant cases. Not even the Kantian categorical imperative can do that, for we can always say, when confronted with the Kantian argument for universalizing our behavior, ‘so what, I just don’t care.’ The point of moral valuation is that it enjoins us, in its fashion, to care.

The very nature of being a self, possessed of sufficient cognitive capacity to see selfhood for what it is (although it must be acknowledged that not all have this capacity), gives us a reason to act in ways that show that we do care. That’s why, in the end, the moral level of valuation is best described as spiritual not factual in its nature, even if facts are and remain relevant to such judgments. Moral thought involves achieving a certain level of awareness, the achievement of which alone obliges us to choose certain kinds of actions instead of others. Moral valuing is about becoming most fully what we are, about finding ways to more fully realize what it means to be a self in its world—and, in doing so, affirming our own selfhood.