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, etc.) to one's nation or even one’s species (which can, in some human belief systems, extend beyond even that to encompass concern for 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 might have approached the demands on each of us created by the pandemic we're all living through in the first half of 2020. Goldstein examines John Stuart Mill's "rule utilitarianism" account (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 rather than for their consequences which may turn out either good or bad and which cannot be predicted with any certainty (contra Mill's test for morally right behavior, i.e., that it maximizes goodness by increasing the sum of happiness of people in the world).

As Goldstein points out, Kant's argument for good acts is that they can only be deemed morally good to the extent that performing them expresses a good will, which is to say acting from the desire to do the right thing, regardless of the outcome(s). Such a desire must involve acting for only one of two possible reasons (two related principles or maxims): 1) that the act must be one which is universalizable (something that is which, if done by the actor, can be understood by him or her as being consistent with his or her belief that, if everyone did the same, he or she would count that as a good thing; or 2) that the action in question reflect a respect for the personhood (that is to say the rationality, which implies the free will) of the other because it recognizes the other’s interests as being as valuable to them as ours are to ourselves.

This last also follows from the universalizable principle, by the way, since Kant argues that it is essential to being rational in the first place, i.e., if we are rational we must act in accord with rational dictates by recognizing and so acknowledging the rationality of others who exhibit the same capacities we have. That means the rational person defers to universalizability in order to preserve rationality. Being rational implies recognizing rationality and its hold on those others who share that same capacity.

In her brief article, Goldstein also briefly covers Aristotle's approach, so-called virtue ethics (which premises the moral good on developing one's character by cultivating core human virtues in ourselves). Developing one’s person or character enables us to make the right choices because having such a character entails choosing rightly for the given circumstances. For Aristotle, we get here by recognizing, emulating and so developing the various virtues which are found in human beings and which must be cultivated effectively for humans to reach their fullest potential which is to say to live the most rewarding sort of life available to members of their species. The best humans are the ones that “flourish” and flourishing is achieved by most fully realizing the capacities that, together, represent the natural strengths of the human creature. Its best qualities as a part of nature's world.

The virtues involved are a heterogeneous lot but, in achieving them, we bring ourselves closer to the ideal condition of human beings. Included among these are traits like magnaminity, compassion, nobility, courage, generosity, etc. They are, essentially, social traits because, as human beings, we are social creatures. More we instinctively recognize them as the best way to be, the actions they engender in the agent as the best actions to take when circumstances call them forth in us. We recognize them to the extent our minds are sufficiently clear of the sometimes self-aggrandizing detritus that may clutter and confuse our understanding of what makes us the best we can be. Thus, the ethical philosopher’s job, on this view, would seem to be a matter of laying it all out for the rest of us, enabling the honest person to see what’s at stake and so to choose to improve him or herself in order to “flourish” as a human being.

As to the specific virtues, it remains possible that different cultures and different people, in different eras, will value some traits more than others. Which traits best serve the human animal may vary with circumstance and period in human history. But the point of the Aristotelian moral account is to explain our moral decision-making as a function of the natural desire of the human animal to be the best kind of animal he or she can be. There is a certain circularity here and the absence of a clear and definitive standard seems to suggest room for lots of moral fudging. Why shouldn’t a Nazi conceive of the traits that make for the best Nazi (most loyal to the state, to the ideals promulgated by the state, to the race he is a member of, etc.) as the optimal traits a truly developed (flourishing) human being could have? That these don’t accord with the traits favored by Aristotle or his contemporaries, or the Nazis’ contemporaries for that matter, seems beside the point.

Of course, one might argue that there are certain timeless traits all humans can have and should aspire to, but on what grounds can this be claimed other than subjective ones (that I feel one way about what’s best for humans and the Nazi another)? A certain timelessness seems to be required in moral standards though or we cannot differentiate between then and now, or between different standards in different cultures. Yet on the Aristotelian viewpoint it seems that is all but impossible even if some thinkers (like Philippa Foot, Alistair Macintyre, etc.) seek to argue that there is a standard common to human beings as such, just to the extent that they are human beings.

But naturalistic thinking, in the sense of making the account accord with the science of what we know about ourselves is not limited to Aristotelians. Sentimentalist advocates like Churchland and Jesse Prinz argue for a Humean account of moral goodness based on our feelings and their cultivation by suggesting that these are inherent in human beings, reflecting how we have evolved. On this view our moral beliefs are expressions of this evolution. Here an argument can be fielded that asserts that we are simply constituted to care about others, that such concern just is a kind of trait intrinsic to human beings because of their evolutionary development or, if we take this from a religious perspective, as Macintyre and some others would, because God (or whatever “entity” answers to that name) has built that tendency into us.

Certainly, Aristotle aspired to give such a general account, albeit based on his own experiences of humans and the cultures in which he saw them rather than in religious or evolutionary terms. If we cannot come up with something along these lines, however, that is a standard that transcends individual cultural choices and practices, how can moral assessment ever be anything other than relative to its time and place? And that way lies moral nihilism. If we accept such a limited view of morality we can neither hold others, whose world view is different from ours, to account for their actions nor can we suppose that there is any such thing as moral progress in the world, i.e., that the things we hold to be morally unacceptable today have always been so and will always be even if our predecessors missed the moral boat.

One question that we can ask here is whether, when we make choices in the moral domain, any of us ever actually does wonder about the justifications of our choices at this level. If asked why we do something by others, why we think some action is morally good or bad, as often as not we will just assert our belief about what is or is not the right thing to do or invoke some religious doctrine as support for our choice. Or perhaps we content ourselves with the question “But isn't it obvious, how can you not see it?”

Sometimes, in more thoughtful moments, we may offer some semi-developed explanation as our reason. "It helps everyone," we might say, or, as in the current pandemic, "if we don’t do X people may die." But we don't worry overmuch about follow-up questions that may follow, demanding our justification, like why is helping "everyone" a good thing itself or why limiting the number of deaths from a contagion is good, especially if we and ours are spared in the end without taking action to help others? In fact, why does it even matter if we're spared? Why should we think we and ours deserve to be spared? But these questions do not typically find their way into our moral discourse. We take the answers for granted, that it is just good or right to do some things, wrong or bad to do others.

When we engage in moral valuing, such questions, the kind philosophers, especially moral philosophers, bother with, just don't seem to matter much. We don't ask these questions or feel a need to answer them before acting. We just respond to the moment. Sometimes we do so from the heart, because we feel compassion, and sometimes act by rote, i.e., according to how we've been trained to respond. But it's the rare moral agent who bothers to consider whether a Millian utilitarianism, a Kantian deontological account (that is following moral rules) or a Humean sentimentalism (such as Churchland espouses, with evolutionary overtones) best explains our motivations or offer better guides for action than the ones we've implicitly relied on . Nor do we look to talk about flourishing a la Aristotle and his interpreters.

Indeed, what counts as flourishing for me may not count for the Nazi or the terrorist. We don't consider what counts as the best way to achieve a life of human flourishing a la Aristotle when considering our moral choices. We just do what we do and explain it afterwards if we feel called upon to so though we often don’t feel that need. We teach our kids to do as we do, to see the world as we see it, just as others taught us. And think well, isn’t that enough? We don't need heavy theories to operate in a moral domain, the arena in which human actions are chosen or rejected, lauded or condemned. We just act. So much for philosophy!

Over the centuries, philosophers, moralists and others have offered a number of possible solutions along the lines explored by Churchland and Goldstein. These can all be boiled down to finding an account which enables us to equate so-called moral goodness with something that seems more comprehensible because more obvious or easier to explain. We may suppose that:

1) Claims of moral goodness amount to having certain kinds of sentiments about some things (,ost famously expressed by David Hume as moral judgment as a form of sentiment and picked up by later thinkers, e.g., the expressivism of the logical postivists and ethical emotivsts along with so-called moral subjectivism); or there is

2) The idea that doing whatever produces the most good for the most people in the world proposed by utilitarians of various stripes (from naturalistic thinkers like John Stuart Mill to moral intuitionists including G. E. Moore and certain modern advocates of the idea like Michael Huemer); or

3) The idea that acting in a morally right way depends on acting for the right reasons without regard to outcomes (such as the notion that moral acts are those which reflect the demands of reason itself and so support reason as a necessary human trait), e.g., a reason-based Kantian deontology; or

4) The belief that to act morally is to act in accordance with the will of the Divine as represented in western religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam (or in accord with the will of Heaven, as in Confucianism, or with the universe itself, as in Taoism where the “divine” is impersonalized); or

5) The notion that acting in a way that denies attachment to things as such (as in the denial of the will which endlessly seeks attachment, a la Schopenhauer; or by realigning one's psychological self with a transcendental self, posited to underlie all subjective selfhood, a la the early Wittgenstein; or by identification with some notion of a larger, non-personal self such as the "All" or spirit, a la Bradleyan Idealism; or through rejection of the illusory nature of reality itself, e.g., Buddhism, which seeks freedom from attachments to the illusion that which what we assume to be the real world is taken to actually be or to re-identify oneself with the core of all being a la Hinduism [and some forms of Buddhism as well]; also Stoicism which denies the demands of the personal self in order to learn to accept what cannot be avoided);

6) Then there are notions reflecting Aristotle’s insights, suggesting that to be moral is to act in ways that optimize the best aspects of human life in order to flourish (live in a way thought best for a human being);

7) Of course, this doesn’t exhaust all the options for there is still another possibility: to do whatever one's particular society treats as morally valuable (this is to take a position of moral or ethical relativism, itself a moral valuation of sorts, for it involves assigning a value to the actions we take no less than the others, only it justifies it by saying that such value is obtained not by recourse to an individual assessment of one’s reasons but by acceptance of others’ reasons (although here, too, in making this choice we are embracing a reason to do so just as with the other reasons presented above -- so even in rejecting reasons as such we still have reasons).

Philosophy, when it turns to ethics, examines these various ways of explaining what we count as the ethical or moral good, i.e., those actions human beings tend to select in various social conditions and towards which it is thought they should strive. Ethical philosophy examines the reasons and the justifications we think we have for taking up one sort of justfication for our behavioral choices instead of another. But in doing this, has philosophy ever offered answers that satisfy in a way that can claim broad acceptance by those who take philosophical assertions as valuable for making the choices they make?

It depends on each of us, of course, on what we find satisfying. But if that’s so then the answer would seem to lie not in any single solution but in developing a story that happens to appeal to each of us. What we take to be justifying for adopting a moral perspective in making the choices we may be called upon to make can be highly individual. Does that mean there cannot be some single standard by which we can assure ourselves of an ability to reject moral nihilism or what we take to be morally disreputable behavior or, even more, to support claims of moral improvement which we take our present beliefs to represent over those of past humans in societies we would, today, reject?

It is simply undeniable that moral questions are an inevitable part of human discourse and activity, that all cultures and all human language have both a concept of goodness as such (i.e., what we take to have value) and of what constitutes goodness in human behavior. No one ever acts because he or she thinks they are doing a bad or wrong thing. They always act to achieve what they take to be good (something they are take themselves to be justified in seeking to attain). But how does the moral fit into this? It’s clear enough that sometimes we act for self-interest and that sometimes we should. Most of us do not deny self-interest as a legitimate reason to act in some cases in theory — and none of us can deny it entirely in practice. But what then enables us to move from merely acting on our own self-interest to something else, to thinking about and acting to favor the interests of another?

The answers listed above represent a range of ways humans have sought, through philosophy and religious practice, to answer this question. To ask what is morally good is to ask not what is good in general, what role assertions of goodness play generally in human activity, but, rather, to ask about a very particular sort of goodness, i.e., what it actually is. Of course, even without answering that question, we cannot avoid acting in ways that imply we have, or accept, some answers, even if we cannot explain why we accept them as answers.

Questions of moral right and wrong, moral valuation, will always be with us it seems, even if no one has yet come up with a universally satisfying answer to explain what makes the morally good good. But then, perhaps there is no single answer. Or, if there is, perhaps it does not lie in philosophy for it cannot be up to philosophers or anyone else, for that matter, to tell us what is right or wrong to do, what is good or bad. We come to such views ourselves, within the context or framework of the society in which we have been raised and/or are embedded. Even when having fully enrolled in our society’s moral point of view, its system of valuing human acts, it is still, at least in theory, always open to us to reject or alter the standards generally adhered to by others in that society. After all, if we could not do that we would not have the possibility of moral improvement either.

In a society without moral questioning and shifting valuation, there would never be change at all and without the possibility of change there would also be no possibility of moral improvement. If slavery was favored as an institution in the past, it would be so still, today. If infanticide was considered acceptable then, why not now? Social change implies moral change as well and if moral change is to be significant it must imply the possibility of moral improvement. Even if we are born into a society and fully inculcated in its practices and beliefs, we always have open to us the possibility of saying no, of thinking about and deciding to do or not do what that society rejects or favors.

Sometimes the answer we give others or ourselves is simple. We do what we do to get what we want or what we think we need and if that means conforming we conform. But we always have the possibility of doing otherwise. But when it comes to moral assessment, conforming is not generally enough of a reason to act. Moral judgment implies rejecting as well as embracing a particular moral practice or standard. Here the idea of mores and customs shades into the idea of moral assessment and when it comes to that, we find ourselves asking a different question than questions like what’s in it for me, i.e., we want to know what's right to do regardless of the benefit to ourselves.

While not all moral questions fit this particular bill (some are genuinely about conformity to support one's group, or at least not to disrupt it, and some do involve an assessment from the perspective of personal gain, as in winning the plaudits of our fellows), the questions before us that tend to trouble us most in the moral sphere are those in which our interests seem to run counter to the interests of others. And then we want to find a reason to act in ways that may subvert or be antithetical towards ourselves. We want to know, that is, when and why it is appropriate to care about others rather than ourselves — the kind of judgments addressed by Patricia Churchland (and other sentimentalist partisans like Jesse Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals) by resort to assertions about our naturally occurring sentiments.

But can moral sentimentalism and its kindred explanations, i.e., approaches like Churchland’s, which seem most fully in accord with our modern scientific understanding of human beings as a particular mammalian species within an evolutionary context, ever provide a fully satisfactory answer? If humans always have a degree of choice, as Sartre maintained, and this is implied by our apparent ability to always say yes or no in the face of different options, then what do we fall back on in justifying our choices? It cannot be something that lacks a rational basis for then, as Kant reminded us, there is no real choice at all. To choose is to be free but that just means to be free (that is able) to choose the correct course of action. To be free in this sense is to be constrained by what is justified by reasons.

Moral valuation is ultimately not about instinctive species responses but about bringing our thinking to bear on the question of what to do next when that is before us. That is, it’s about looking for and deciding on reasons to do some things and not others. The unthinking beast can make choices in the sense of responding to the factors that affect it and it does so by operating via instinct, by what nature has programmed it to do (however complex its behavior may be). But the animal that thinks in the sense we do, having more than awareness alone but also a capacity to think about and make comparisons and not just to be aware of something in our sensory range, brings something else to bear in its activities. A thinking animal (of which we, at least so far, seem to be the only example on the planet) not only reacts but judges. And valuing, including moral valuing falls within the rubric of judging.

What other answer is possible then, to explain our moral judgments, once we eliminate instinctive responses or other rote performances from consideration, than to talk about reasons? And that means we must go back to Kant's notion that free actions imply having reasons to choose what we choose. But Kant's approach doesn’t fully satisfy our experience of making moral judgments. So something else is required and that will be something which somehow blends the other various alternatives offered by different thinkers into this mix. After all, they all seem to have got hold of one aspect of the valuing enterprise.

Like the blind man and the elephant, we must feel our way along the tail and across the flesh of the entire beast if we are to give a full account of it. And that means, in the case of the moral enterprise, we must explore and find a way to mix together all the insights offered by sentimentalists and intuitionists, naturalists and expressivists and rationalists, if we're to see this particular elephant in its fullest rendering.

We cannot adequately account for moral judgment as a function of our evolutionary biology nor can we lose sight of the role of reasoning in the process, nor that of insight, if we are to explain the nature of the beast itself. There is a reason moral valuation has been so intricately tied up with religious insight in so much of human history as well and this cannot be dismissed either. Such continuities don’t simply happen by accident. And so we must add this to the mix as well along with our recognition of the natural capacity of humans as a species without rejecting our peculiar capacity to think at a level that enables judgment, i.e., our ability to compare and contrast and so to assign weights of significance to things that are possible objects of choice for us.

How can we put it all together and make a full bodied stew of these various strains in our lives, that is our moral lives? Without denying the role of sentiment, we must still make room for our capacity for making judgments, for reasoning that is, and so put the whole thing back together in a way that occasions greater understanding of what we do when making moral claims. We must, that is, blend sentiment with reasons and spiritual insight and the evolution of our species with all its natural propensities in a way that accommodates them all.