http://ideasofimperfection.blogspot.com/2006/04/utter-rubbish.html
Other People's Mothers
The utilitarian
horrors of Peter Singer
by Peter Berkowitz
The New Republic
JANUARY 10, 2000, pp.
27-37
A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation
by Peter Singer
(Yale University Press, 64 pp., $9.95)
Practical Ethics, Second
Edition
by Peter Singer
(Cambridge University Press, 395 pp., $18.95)
I.
In early September, The New
York Times Sunday Magazine featured
a brief article on the solution to world poverty, which in a few short,
snappy steps argued to the astonishing conclusion that middle-class American
households have a moral obligation to contribute more than one-third of
their income (and all households every cent earned above $30,000) to the
hungry and disadvantaged around the globe. The editors at the paper seemed
to see no irony in the appearance of such an argument in the same magazine
whose style and fashion pages regularly promote some of the most conspicuous
consumption of the day.
Introducing the author of the article, the Times proclaimed
the Australian- born and Oxford-trained philosophy professor Peter Singer to
be "perhaps the world's most controversial ethicist." And a week before,
Singer, who had been recently appointed amid much (and continuing) furor to
a new chair in bioethics at Princeton's University Center for Human Values,
was the subject of a long and largely flattering profile in The New Yorker,
whose front flap declared him "the most influential living philosopher."
Since celebrity is anything but the ordinary reward for a life devoted to
teaching and philosophical reflection on ethics, the case of Peter Singer
endows the obvious questions--why the controversy? whence the
influence?--with special interest.
To the obvious questions, there are obvious answers. Singer is controversial
for certain remarkable views that he holds: that infanticide and euthanasia
(and of course abortion) are not only permissible in certain circumstances,
they are sometimes also morally obligatory. And the major part of his
influence stems from certain other views, in particular his argument that
many non-human animals are, in truth, persons, possessing the same "
special claim to be
protected" usually thought to be the peculiar privilege of human beings. But
controversy and influence
do not a philosopher make.
Singer's acclaim as well his notoriety are owed to the intellectual
respectability he gives to his views in his accessible, engaging, and
voluminous writings. His opinions have a reputation for being rigorous. He
seems to be a genuinely rational man, a true creature of logic.
Given his reputation as a crafter of arguments, Singer's recent debut in the
Times magazine was a puzzling performance. One would think that to reach his
dramatic conclusion--to live a "morally decent life," households must eschew
all luxuries and donate that part of their income in excess of what is
necessary for their bare necessities to the world's poor--Singer would need
to summon heavy logical and moral artillery. After all, he does not merely
suggest that households ought to contribute more money than is customary to
charitable causes, or that they should sacrifice some luxuries on behalf of
perfect strangers. No, he equates moral decency with an almost monkish
renunciation of material goods, popular entertainment, cultivated pleasures,
and devotion to the special care of one's friends and family. "The formula,"
Singer declares, "is simple: whatever money you're spending on luxuries, not
necessities, should be given away." A
total mortification of the consumerist soul.
To be sure, Singer acknowledges that weakness and selfishness will prevent
most of us from coming close to complying with his--excuse me, with morality's--minimum
imperatives. Yet to justify the moral life as the abstemious life, he makes
no appeal to theological categories, to God or sin or redemption. Nor do
natural rights, or natural law, or any notion of universal principles of
justice, enter into the argument for his simple formula. Instead Singer
hangs his radical revision of our common conception of moral decency on a
single, surreal, hypothetical dilemma.
Singer's "imaginary example," whose purported purpose is to "probe our
intuitions," is in its way strong and ingenious:
Bob is close to retirement. He has invested most of his savings in a very
rare and valuable old car, a Bugatti,
which he has not been able to insure. The Bugatti is
his pride and joy. In addition to the pleasure he gets from driving and
caring for his car, Bob knows that its rising market value means that he
will always be able to sell it and live comfortably after retirement. One
day when Bob is out for a drive, he parks the Bugatti near
the end of a railway siding and goes for a walk up the track. As he does so,
he sees that a runaway train, with no one aboard, is running down the
railway track. Looking farther down the track, he sees the small figure of a
child very likely to be killed by the runaway train. He can't stop the train
and the child is too far away to warn of the danger, but he can throw a
switch that will divert the train down the siding where his Bugatti is
parked. Then nobody will be killed--but the train will destroy his Bugatti.
Thinking of
his joy in owning the car and the financial security it represents, Bob
decides not to throw the switch. The child is killed. For many years to
come, Bob enjoys owning his Bugatti and
the financial security it represents.
Most people will immediately respond, Singer contends, that Bob's conduct is
"gravely wrong." Suppose that Singer is correct about his readers' typical
response. It is worth noting that, though he regularly scolds others for
failing to address empirical questions empirically, Singer provides no
evidence to support this empirical claim. More importantly, what follows
from the moral intuition that Bob ought to sacrifice his pride and joy and
the source of his financial security to save the innocent child's life? What
follows, Singer asserts, is the inflexible and unqualified duty, regardless
of variations in personal circumstances, to give to the poor, beyond a
certain austere minimum, all one's income and wealth.
Bob's dilemma may at first glance seem contrived and outlandish, and wildly
remote from ordinary experience; but in the morally relevant respects it is,
Singer argues, no different from the challenge we all confront every day: "
When Bob first grasped the dilemma that faced him as he stood by that
railway switch, he must have thought how extraordinarily unlucky he was to
be placed in a situation in which he must choose between the life of an
innocent child and the sacrifice of most of his savings. But he was not
unlucky at all. We are all in that situation." Are we? One reason to doubt
that any moral formula--much less a simple universal formula that mandates a
major transformation in how we live our lives--can be derived from Bob's
dilemma is the powerful lack of similarity between Bob's situation and our
own.
Singer's imaginary example radically simplifies matters. Bob appears to be
wifeless, childless, parentless, and friendless. And Bob appears to have
only two choices: he can save his prized possession and personal fortune,
which will allow the child to die, or, saving the child, Bob can allow his
financial security to be wiped out. In deciding how much of our income we
ought to give away, however, surely we face a smooth spectrum of
possibilities. We can give a few dollars, or a few hundred dollars, or a few
thousand dollars. We can give to the poor ten percent of our income, as do
many pious Christians and observant Jews (who, on Singer's account, fall
considerably short of their obligations and therefore live morally indecent
lives). We can give away one fifth of our income, as does Singer (and very
admirably, though he stands condemned as morally indecent by his own simple
formula). To replicate the situation in which we actually find ourselves,
Singer's example would not only have to allow degrees of generosity or
selfless giving, it would also have to incorporate a variety of factors and
recognize a range of tradeoffs. For in our lives we must balance sacrifices
in personal wealth against, among other things, the kind of injuries that we
can practicably prevent, the number of innocent sufferers involved, the
proximity of those in need to us, and the cost of our benevolence to those
whom we love and with whom we share our lives.
Reflection on the many textures and myriad colors of the moral life suggests
that Singer's use of the imaginary example also distorts our situation as
citizens and human beings by focusing on a single moral intuition to the
exclusion of all others. In fact, a good part of the drama of the moral life
arises from the clash between competing moral intuitions. While it may be
true that many have an intuition that we should sacrifice considerable
personal wealth to save innocent human lives, some of these same are likely
also to possess the intuition that we have stronger obligations to care for
the personal happiness of our family and friends than to tend to the basic
needs of passing acquaintances and perfect strangers. And no doubt
individuals could be found who, while appreciating the distinctive duties
owed strangers and intimates, also intuit that the perfection of their
talents, which requires wealth and leisure, stands as an obligation that
they owe to both themselves and others.
Having casually invested intuition with moral authority, Singer overlooks
that in living the moral life we find ourselves subject to the authority of
multiple and competing intuitions. And even if we had but a single relevant
intuition concerning our duty to give, or if all our relevant intuitions
sang in harmonious unison, what is the philosophical basis for investing
intuitions with moral authority? Singer himself observes that "most people
could be wrong; we can't decide moral issues by taking opinion polls." But
the argument he offers for viewing massive worldwide redistribution of
wealth as a moral imperative rests on an even flimsier basis than opinion
polls, and that is his own armchair speculation about people's moral
intuitions as inferred from their imagined response to a single
philosophical thought experiment.
Singer argues that if you think person X should do act Y in situation Z,
then, in order to be consistent, you should do act A in
situation B. But he has nothing to say about the goodness or rightness of Y,
other than the (falsifiable) contingency that many people believe person X
should do it in situation Z. No doubt it belongs among the tasks of
philosophy to identify our basic intuitions and to clarify their
implications. But another of philosophy's task is to assess the soundness of
our intuitions, to sift out what is owed to ignorance, bias, sentimentality,
and confusion, and to refine what remains into principles that are sturdy,
flexible, and just.
On examination, it appears that Singer's imaginary example is designed less
to "probe our intuitions" than it is carefully constructed to serve a single
solitary intuition, and to vindicate a peculiarly extreme and one-sided
interpretation of the moral life. It also appears that Singer's "penchant
for provocation," as the Times breathlessly put it, can be nourished by a
rather energetic inclination to obfuscation. Of course, one can only demand
so much, even from an eminent philosophy professor, when he writes in the
pages of a daily newspaper. And Singer performs a valuable service by
impelling readers to confront, and make moral sense of, the great gap
between our prosperity and the desperate poverty in which large portions of
the world's population live. Yet the careful consideration of his most
controversial views and his most influential arguments reveals that the
obfuscation evident in the Times article is not a mere lapse from customary
rigor for the sake of reaching a popular audience. It is, rather, part and
parcel of Singer's characteristic approach to the problems of ethics.
II.
Singer has developed his ideas in numerous articles and books, some of which
are scholarly, some of which are popular, and some of which blur the genres.
He dealt with political themes at the beginning of his career in Democracy
and Disobedience, has published short synoptic volumes on Hegel and Marx,
and recently completed a biography of the American animal rights activist
Henry Spira;
but the preponderance of his writings concentrate on sensitive and
high-profile moral issues involving decisions about life and death: animal
rights, reproduction, abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, famine relief, and
refugees. His best known book is Animal Liberation. Since its appearance in
1975, it has sold more than 500,000 copies, and cannot but provoke
fair-minded readers to examine their views about the myriad uses-- some
clearly brutal--to which we put animals for our convenience, health, and
pleasure.
Singer's tiny new book is another story. A Darwinian Left is not devoid of
useful admonitions about the dangers of utopian visions, and the aspirations
to remake human nature, and the dreams of the perfectibility of humankind;
but it features a central line of argument that manages to be both
unexceptionable and incoherent. Singer does not argue, as his title might
seem to imply, that what follows from
Singer casually assumes that a politics of the left is synonymous with
justice. And he writes as if the theory of evolution, unsupplemented by
the study of history, literature, religion, and philosophy, provides the
left with more or less all that it needs to know concerning human nature.
His book also glosses over contemporary disputes that rage in and outside of
biology about the scope of sociobiological theory,
which Singer treats as the authoritative interpretation of
According to Singer, the longstanding aversion to
On the basis of this currently popular interpretation of
In dividing human nature between narrow selfishness and impartial concern
for others, Singer wishes to acknowledge a certain complexity. In reality,
he not only uncritically reduces the panoply of human passions and interests
to two basic propensities, but actually also obscures sociobiology's own
central insight about altruism and the challenge that it poses to the
universal benevolence that underlies many leftist hopes. For the altruism
that sociobiology teaches is built into our nature is not primarily the
"genuine altruism" that inspires Singer's cross-species egalitarianism. It
is, rather, "kin altruism," which is directed toward those who possess a
portion of our genetic make-up. In practice, this means that the drive to
ensure the survival of our genes will lead us to act selflessly on behalf of
children, siblings, and other close relatives, but it will move us only very
weakly if at all on behalf of perfect strangers. Indeed, "kin altruism"
powerfully discourages sacrifice on behalf of total strangers, because such
sacrifice reduces the time, energy, and wealth we can devote to family and
kin group, who alone share some of our genes. Thus it is not only our
natural selfishness but also our natural altruism--which makes us partial to
our near and dear, at least according to the form of Darwinian thinking
Singer embraces--that undercuts the politics of universal benevolence. So
much for a Darwinian left.
III.
It is not this recent ill-conceived foray into politics, but Practical
Ethics, which was first published in 1979, and then revised and reissued in
1993, and which by now has sold more than 120,000 copies, that is most
representative of Singer's thought. The book gathers together in one place
and restates the arguments that have earned him fame and influence. It has
been assigned as a textbook for ethics courses across the
Singer begins his book by stating what he believes ethics is not. It is not,
as Singer says "traditional moralists" believe, "a set of prohibitions
particularly concerned with sex" (a charge, it must immediately be noted,
that is patently false, at least if one numbers Aristotle, Augustine, Maimonides,
and Aquinas among traditional moralists), since "sex raises no unique moral
issues at all." Nor is ethics, as Singer suggests that realists and cynics
think, "an ideal
system that is noble in theory but no good in practice," since "the whole
point of ethical judgments is to guide practice." Nor is ethics, as Singer
maintains that rights theorists hold, "a system of short and simple rules,"
since simple rules often conflict and sometimes an apparently sound rule,
when scrupulously followed, can lead to disaster. Nor is ethics, as many
religious believers and some free-thinking nonbelievers contend, "something intelligible
only in the context of religion," because we properly define the good
independently of God's judgment and "our everyday observation of our fellow
human beings clearly shows that ethical behaviour does
not require belief in heaven and hell." Nor is ethics "relative or
subjective" in the sense that it reflects our culture's point of view or our
own personal judgments, because then we could have no rational basis for
moral praise or blame, thereby "making nonsense of the valiant efforts of
would-be moral reformers."
Many objections could be raised to Singer's catalogue of misconceptions
about ethics. Proponents of the conceptions he rejects are likely to protest
the crudity with which their views are introduced and then summarily
dispatched. Those who have studied Mill's account, in On Liberty, of the
many- sidedness of morals and politics, or have learned (as Mill did) from
Plato's dialogues to appreciate the partiality and the vulnerability of our
opinions about justice, or who have simply taken the time to listen closely
to the give and take of ordinary people arguing about the issues of the day,
will be taken aback by Singer's categorical and complete rejection of ideas
with which he disagrees, and by his inability to find in other perspectives
and approaches any power or plausibility or part of the truth.
Since his intention in beginning his book with an examination of the nature
and the scope of ethics is to provide a preliminary overview of his subject
matter, perhaps the most serious objection to Singer's bundle of errors
concerns what he leaves out. Among the opinions that he apparently deems
unworthy of even criticism and refutation is the oldest understanding of
ethics, the one developed by Aristotle (the founder of ethics as an
independent philosophical subject) and since elaborated in countless works
of literature and history, namely,
that ethics in essence is
about character. Aristotle taught that ethics--which derives from ethos, the
ancient Greek word for character--is the branch of philosophy that studies
the virtues, the exercise of which enable human beings to act well and
flourish, to live the kind of life that makes a human being truly happy,
just, and good.
Though he recognizes no intellectual need or philosophical obligation to
consider on the merits the view that ethics is essentially about character,
Singer in practice rejects it in favor of the opinion, quite common in
universities today, that the essence of ethics is reason. "The notion of
living according to ethical standards," he innocuously observes, "is tied up
with the notion of defending the way one is living, of giving a reason for
it, of justifying it." But in practice, for Singer, the giving of reasons is
not merely tied up with ethics, it
is the very heart and soul of ethics.
And the right kind of reason-giving occurs from the perspective of "a
universal point of view." On this, Singer implies, the Western philosophical
tradition is in all but complete and unbroken agreement. "From ancient
times," he asserts, "philosophers and moralists have expressed the idea that
ethical conduct is acceptable from a point of view that is somehow
universal." Singer's "somehow" might indicate a certain tentativeness, a
recognition that his thesis is in fact somehow open to question; but he
immediately proceeds to suggest that it is not really debatable at all.
Gesturing on its behalf to an overwhelming array of teachers and
teachings--Moses and Jesus, Stoic natural law, Kant's categorical
imperative, Adam Smith's impartial spectator, Bentham's utilitarianism,
Rawls's procedural liberalism, Sartre's existentialism, and Habermas's discourse
ethics--Singer implies that in philosophy and religion support for the
identity of the universal point of view with the ethical point of view is,
well, universal. And this universal point of view, Singer suggests, goes
beyond the merely formal: it not only takes into account all people, it also
has built into it the substantive idea that all persons must be taken
account of equally.
As in the case of his effort to say what ethics is not, however, Singer's
preliminary attempt to say what ethics is quickly falters before certain
immediate and imposing difficulties. In equating the ethical point of view
with the universal point of view and the universal point of view with the
idea of equality, Singer does not note that from ancient times many
distinguished philosophers have also rejected the notion that a single rule
or standard governs all individuals and applies to all conduct. In his long
list of eminent thinkers he somehow does not manage to mention among classic
thinkers the names of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Machiavelli, or Burke, and
among contemporary thinkers Hannah Arendtand
Alasdair MacIntyre,
who all reject the equation of ethics with an abstract principle of human
equality. Nor does Singer distinguish the variety of ways in which a rule or
a standard might apply universally.
What Singer means by universality is a substantive claim about equal worth
regardless of excellence or merit. But it is obvious, or it should be
obvious, that universality by no means implies equality. Nietzsche may be
wrong on the merits, but there is no internal contradiction in his claim,
fervently argued in Beyond Good and Evil, that free spirits and the
philosophers of the future possess special rights and privileges. It is a
claim that is at once resolutely aristocratic and resolutely universal:
wherever and whenever they arise, declares Nietzsche, rare human types are
entitled to liberties that ought to be absolutely off-limits to the ordinary
run of men and women.
Unfazed by these and related difficulties, Singer proceeds to suggest that
not only is there a natural affinity between the ethical point of view and
the school of ethics known as utilitarianism, but that utilitarianism and
practical ethics are for all intents and purposes one and the same. In 1789,
in Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, the English
rationalist and progressive reformer Jeremy Bentham provided
a classic statement of utilitarianism's core idea: "By the principle of
utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every
action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to
augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in
question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose
that happiness." A form of what moral philosophers call consequentialism,
utilitarianism does seem to give expression to the common sense idea (it is
to common sense that Singer is explicitly appealing) that in determining the
morality of an action, we must look to its results, whether and to what
extent the action in question brings benefit or harm.
But this common sense idea does not exhaust what common sense has to say
about ethics. For
there is also a natural affinity between the common sense view of ethics and
the great rival to consequentialism in
modern philosophy.That school, whose towering figure is Kant, and
which sometimes goes by the daunting name of deontology, argues that the
relevant factor in determining the morality of an action is not its foreseen
consequences but the rational intentions that motivate and guide it. If it
is a staple of common sense that consequences matter in morals, it is no
less a staple of common sense that in morality intentions matter, that
sometimes we must seek to do the right thing come what may, that evil must
not be done even for the sake of good consequences.
Common sense would have us tend to both consequences and intentions. Just as
it is a mistake to suppose that consequences are irrelevant to moral
conduct, so, too, it is a mistake to imagine that right and wrong can be
determined by a utilitarian calculation of consequences alone. Some things--
the framing of innocents, rape, slavery, murder--are wrong in themselves,
and cannot be justified on the grounds that, in this circumstance or that
circumstance, the overall social good will be served. This is the great idea
captured in Kant's third formulation of the Categorical Imperative: "Act in
such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in
the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same
time as an end."
It is the appeal to common sense that suggests that it is a mistake to
identify the ethical point of view either with the calculation of
consequences, in the manner of the utilitarians,
or with purity of intentions, in the manner the Kantians think correct.
Surely the moral life is best and most responsibly construed as consisting
in the effort to heed and to harmonize the competing claims of both these
ideals. But Singer, under the guise of elaborating the allegedly irreducible
features of the ethical point of view, reads this fundamental tension in the
moral life right out of existence.
IV.
Singer wishes to read into utilitarianism a substantive and universal
doctrine concerning human equality: that the happiness with which one ought
to be concerned is everybody's happiness, rather than some people's
happiness- -one's nation's, or community's, or family's happiness--or one's
own happiness. Among the more disconcerting implications of this doctrine is
that the happiness of your spouse, or child, or mother is to you, morally
speaking, of no greater significance than the happiness of a distant
stranger.
Although they are compatible with it, Singer's interpretations of
universality and equality are certainly not entailed by, and they are
certainly very far from the only orientations consistent with, the principle
of utility. In its classical formulation, it is worth noting, the principle
of utility refers to "the happiness of the party whose interest is in
question." It does not, by itself, specify the parties or the range of
parties whose interests are relevant to the calculation of consequences. To
be sure, most utilitarians follow
Mill in supposing that in calculating "the greatest good for the greatest
number" it is only reasonable and fair for "
everybody to count for
one, nobody for more than one." But this is an entirely separate matter
which requires an independent argument. That neither Bentham nor
any of his successors have supplied the argument lends force to the claim
advanced by Charles Taylor, Hilary Putnam, and others that the principle
that the happiness of each should be given equal weight is a secularized
version of the Christian doctrine of the sanctity of human life. Ironically,
to the extent that utilitarians such
as Singer, under the guise of the logic of utility, succeed in smuggling in
their preferences for universal equality, it is because their readers
continue to presuppose at a deep and inarticulate level the very doctrine of
the dignity of man that Singer's utilitarianism aims to overthrow.
As Henry Sidgwick concluded
in his great work The Methods of Ethics, which appeared in 1874, one cannot
on utilitarian grounds demonstrate that equal concern for all is superior to
rational egoism. Why, then, shouldn't looking out for Number One be seen as
a rival teaching about ethics rather than, as Singer attempts to argue, a
rival to ethics? After all, putting oneself first- -whether understood from
a mundane perspective as the business of self- preservation, or in more
exalted terms as the pursuit of self-perfection--can be formulated as a
principle and understood either in terms of maximizing happiness or
protecting individual rights; and it can can govern
universally; and it requires the cultivation and exercise of specific
virtues.
What accounts for the long trail of objections, difficulties, and doubts
created by Singer's preliminary efforts to dissolve difficulties and silence
doubts is his determination to present one particular opinion about the
nature of ethics as if it were necessitated by or identical to the ethical
point of view. What accounts for the failure of so many of his colleagues to
be disturbed by this act of intellectual imperialism is perhaps the extent
to which they share his prejudice that the principal task of ethics is to
derive from fixed and unquestionable principles the implications of human
equality for moral and political life.
Singer contends that the equation of ethics with equality is not willful or
partisan but a necessary inference from the ethical point of view.
"Equality," he declares, "is a basic ethical principle, not an assertion of
fact," which is his way of saying that equality inheres in the very logical
structure of the idea of ethics. All arguments that instead attempt to find
the basis for human equality in some empirical quality of human
nature--intelligence, rationality, moral personality--are doomed, according
to Singer, because these qualities can always be seen to be unequally
distributed. Never mind that thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Kant argued
that equality can be derived from human nature or our nature as rational
beings on the grounds that it is the capacities, which are essential, that
are morally relevant, while the differences in capacity among members of the
species are too slight to be of moral significance.
In any case, Singer is certainly correct to argue that differences in
talents and abilities do not in themselves justify an inegalitarian political
order, because "there is no logically compelling reason for assuming that a
difference in ability between two people justifies any difference in the
amount of consideration we give to their interests." Yet Singer is quite
wrong to proceed as if this observation provided an argument in favor of
egalitarian political arrangements. For what Singer fails to point out is
that there is also no logically compelling reason for assuming that a
difference in ability between two people can under no circumstances justify
differences in the amount of consideration we give to their interests. On
the question of human equality, logic is strictly neutral.
Nevertheless, a partisan interpretation of equality lies at the core of
Singer's understanding of ethics:
The essence of the principle of equal consideration of interests is that we
give equal weight in our moral deliberations to the like interests of all
those affected by our actions. This means that if only X and Y would be
affected by a possible act, and
if X stands to lose more than Y stands to gain, it is better not to do the
act. We cannot, if we accept the principle of equal consideration of
interests, say that doing the act is better, despite the facts described,
because we are more concerned about Y than we are about X. What the
principle really amounts to is this: an interest is an interest, whoever's
interest it may be.
It is of course difficult to quarrel with the proposition "an interest is an
interest." But
this having been established, Singer leaves open and scarcely addressed
several sizeable questions.
Call the first question the Aristotelian question. What are the relevant
respects in which interests ought to be judged like, and what are the
relevant respects in which they should be judged unlike? If X is my child
and Y is a perfect stranger, and if my child and the stranger are similarly
hungry, poorly clothed, and in need of a roof over their heads, then X and Y
may have a like interest in obtaining food, clothes, and shelter. But can
they be said to have a like interest in having me provide for them food,
clothes, and shelter? Can I be said to have a like interest in caring for my
child and for a perfect stranger? It depends in large measure on the answers
we give to substantive questions about the nature of interests and the
texture of relations, questions which the laws of logic cannot answer, the
principle of utility cannot resolve, and the principle of equal
consideration of interests cannot adjudicate.
Call the second question the Millian question.
At what point, if any, does the influence of an action on someone else's
interest become so indirect, so remote, and so slight as to cease to affect
that interest in a morally relevant sense? We ordinarily tell others to mind
their own business when we feel them to be meddling in our affairs, and when
we receive unwanted advice we reproach our wouldbe benefactors
by reminding them that our actions do not concern them. But like the
teaspoon of water which, when dropped into the ocean eventually spreads
through all parts of the ocean equally, every individual action can be said
eventually, if only indirectly, remotely, and slightly, to affect every last
person's interests. Hence it is not sufficient, in determining the morality
of an action, to consider only whether an action affects an interest; one
must consider also the directness, the quality, and the extent of the
action's impact on the other's interest.
Call the third question the Kantian question. Why should interests be
accorded any moral worth at all? Inasmuch as many (if not all) interests are
not under our control, but are formed by forces external to our will,
perhaps interests are only equal in the trivial sense that they equally lack
moral worth. If my interests are not the expression of deliberation and
choice, but rather reflect the cold promptings of biological impulse, or the
mechanical operations of the physical laws of cause and effect, or the
indoctrination by the established authorities into the values shared by my
community, perhaps they are morally worthless. Without a plausible account
of human freedom, all of our interests might reasonably be seen to be
morally irrelevant, equally so.
Singer should not be faulted for failing to provide definitive answers to
these enduring questions. No one else has answered them adequately either.
They are essentially controversial questions; and the controversy over them
was set in motion whenever human beings first began wondering what we owe
each other and ourselves, and worrying about how we can be sure that our
considered judgments really are correct. Precious knowledge has been gained
and brilliant light has been shed, but in these matters no definitive
conclusions are in sight; and this intellectual inconclusiveness is itself a
measure of our moral vitality.
If you allowed Singer's preliminaries to guide your understanding of ethics,
however, you would never guess that any serious issues about human nature,
the status of justice, or the claims of divine authority remain unresolved.
Singer's grave fault is to proceed as if the fundamental controversies about
the nature of ethics have not only been solved, but solved to the advantage
of his theory; as if the basic philosophical questions concerning the roots
and reach of the moral life not only have all been answered, but answered in
his favor.
V.
Perhaps the most egregious example of Singer's bad habit of treating as a
settled matter issues over which reasonable people disagree--and certainly
the most significant such misrepresentation for his own theory--is his
grandiose repudiation of the doctrine of "the sanctity of human life."
Singer argues that the doctrine of the sanctity of human life is a form of " speciesism,"
an irrational prejudice rooted in discredited medieval religious ideas that
gives priority to human beings while sanctioning discrimination against and
oppression of non-human animals.
We know, Singer explains, as if he were reciting the obvious for the
umpteenth time, that men and women are not created in God's image, because .
. . well, as a matter of fact Singer never does say how it is we do know for
sure, how rationally and in good faith we can conclude once and for all that
the truths of faith are altogether empty and untrue. Proceeding as if
atheism- -which may be true, but certainly requires argument--were a selfevident truth,
anunrebuttable presumption,
Singer contends that in the absence of divine sanction there is no reason to
regard human life, just because it is human, as worth more than animal life.
On the basis of his atheistic premise, coupled with Singer's contention that
"the claim to equality does not rest on the possession of intelligence,
moral personality, rationality, or similar matters of fact," one might
wonder what obstacle remains to the conclusion that might makes right, or
what resources could be called upon to justify treating any form of animal
life, human or non-human, as deserving of respect. Singer has an answer,
naturally; but the answer hurls his theory into incoherence.
What counts in determining whether respect is owed, says Singer, is whether
the being in question is a person. Astonishingly, though they are the
fathers of the rights-based moral philosophy that Bentham derided
as "nonsense on stilts," Singer follows Locke and Kant in defining a person
as "a rational and self-conscious being." But he goes beyond them in two
distinctive ways. First, he contends that a considerable variety of
non-human animals are capable of reasoning, remembering, and recognizing
others, and so they are persons in the relevant sense of the term. Second,
he maintains that insofar as particular human beings are incapable of
reasoning, remembering, and recognizing others, they cannot be considered
persons. Some of the extraordinary implications of Singer's scheme are
immediately obvious: dogs and dolphins are persons, while fetuses, newborns,
and victims of Alzheimer's disease are not.
Singer wishes to have the reader believe that his moral theory is of a
piece, the essential elements elicited from common sense, self-evident
truths, and the rationally irresistible judgments of history, and then
seamlessly bound together by the unerring and uncompromising laws of logic.
Yet the principle of utility, the principle of equal consideration of
interests, and the definition of a person, are not obvious, or necessary, or
conceptually connected. And considered apart from the causes for which
Singer enlists them, moreover, Singer's leading principles produce some
rather startling conclusions, though not always the startling conclusions in
behalf of which Singer enlists them.
Singer consistently reaches egalitarian and liberationist conclusions, but
his basic ideas lay the groundwork for a regime of savage inequality. For
Singer himself maintains that equality cannot be grounded in human
intelligence, moral personality, or rationality, because such qualities or
capacities are unequally distributed among human beings. If rationality and
self-consciousness nevertheless define the morally significant person--as
Singer insists that they do, in his case for animal rights, euthanasia,
infanticide, and abortion--then why shouldn't greater rationality make you
more of a person, or a more valuable person, an individual entitled to a
greater proportion of society's scarce resources?
Since it only tells you to treat like interests equally, and it does not
tell you which interests are in the relevant respects alike, no violation of
the principle of equal consideration of interests would appear to be
involved in determining that the interests of the artistically and
intellectually gifted differ qualitatively from, and are superior to, the
interests of the ordinary and below-ordinary person, and therefore should
count for more. And since it only tells you to approve or to disapprove of
an act according to its tendency to augment or to diminish the happiness of
the party whose interest is in question, but it does not identify the nature
of happiness or specify the parties whose interests are appropriately taken
into account, the principle of utility would seem to leave the artistically
and the intellectually gifted free to give binding reasons for the
maximization of their own happiness, and, insofar as they attain positions
of power, to govern so as to advance their own superior interests. Singer
thinks himself a great egalitarian, and he wishes to lead a philosophically
reconstituted left; but his confused thinking leads in the opposite
direction. Radically aristocratic arrangements appear to be not only
consistent with his principles, they
seem to be even encouraged by his principles.
VI.
Singer's practical conclusions, when they are understood to be animated by
the irredentist impulse to push forward the boundaries of equality and
individual autonomy into new realms, relations, and species, are rather
predictable. They can be neatly summarized, as follows.
Since all animals are sentient beings, their pleasure and pain should be
incorporated into our calculations about which actions to perform and which
to avoid. Since many non-human animals are persons in the technical sense of
the term, they should enjoy protections and privileges normally reserved for
human beings alone. We should probably not eat any animals, and we certainly
should cease to breed them in cramped, squalid conditions in which their
lives are nothing but misery and wretchedness; and owing to the suffering
that they must endure, we should also re-think the use of animals in medical
and psychological research. Since the fetus or the unborn child is not a
person in the technical sense of the term, abortion is morally permissible;
indeed, it poses no unique moral issues at all, and if killing the fetus is
likely to increase the overall happiness in the world, then abortion is an
unambiguous moral good. In consultation with their physician, parents
rightly choose infanticide when their newborn is "severely disabled"--a
class of unfortunates that Singer understands expansively to include those
afflicted with Down's syndrome and hemophilia--and killing their child will
permit the parents to try again to bring a healthy baby into the world.
Adults suffering from diseases that cause severe and unending pain should be
allowed to choose euthanasia. There is a universal moral obligation to
relieve poverty and to aid refugees, certainly to an extent substantially
greater than now recognized by any country and by all but the most
extraordinary individuals. And we have a moral obligation to protect the
environment to advance the interests of all the persons in the world, human
and non-human alike.
Those are Singer's teachings. It must be acknowledged, notwithstanding the
flawed and incomplete arguments by which he arrives at many or even all of
these conclusions, that he often impels one to think where thought had
seemed no longer necessary. It is useful to be reminded that important
principles are at stake in apparently unimportant occasions. The fact is
that the new cashmere sweater for your sweetheart that you have been saving
up for all summer, or the night on the town at the end of the long week that
you tell yourself makes the idiocies at the office seem endurable, to say
nothing of the splurge on the Caribbean vacation that promises to restore
both your humanity and your tan, all involve outlays of money that could
easily have been used to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and educate
the ignorant.
So where does one draw a principled line? How does one respond to one's
conscience conscientiously? The attempt to answer Singer often leaves one
uneasy, in part because there are no easy answers to the hard questions that
he poses. And his
own easy answers leave one uneasier still.
One of the reasons for the unease is that in far too many cases the
reasoning by which Singer moves from his premises to his conclusions turns
out to be as badly flawed as the reasoning that he uses to establish his
premises' validity. He consistently employs several rather disreputable
rhetorical maneuvers, all of which come down to the self-congratulatory
imposition of extremely stringent demands on arguments of others accompanied
by the quiet relaxation of the demands for evidence and precision on
arguments of his own.
Thus Singer insists on the moral irrelevance of the fact that a view is "
widely accepted" when the
view is opposed to his own; but when they support his position, Singer shows
little compunction about appealing to "widely accepted views." Similarly,
Singer frequently attempts to discredit the views of his opponents by taking
their arguments to a logical extreme, while ignoring the extreme
implications that inhere in the logic of his own doctrine. And while Singer
takes his opponents to task for failing to supply relevant empirical
evidence, he glosses over the empirically questionable claims on which his
own arguments rely.
These obfuscatory maneuvers
perform heavy labor in Singer's notorious defense of infanticide. First,
there is Singer's flip-flop on the moral relevance of "widely accepted
views." According to Singer, since there is no morally relevant difference
between a fetus and a newborn infant--like a three-month old fetus, a
newborn is sentient, but like a three-month old fetus, the newborn is
neither rational nor selfconscious--infanticide,
like abortion, is not morally wrong. To support this, Singer adduces widely
accepted views from other times and places. He notes approvingly that
infanticide was once common, and he suggests that its demise, in which he
finds nothing to be thankful for, should be understood as a result of a
certain lamentable Christian idiosyncracy.
(This is somewhat unfair to Christianity, which must proudly share the blame
with Judaism, which took an earlier stand in the ancient world against child
sacrifice and infanticide). In this connection, Singer notes that Plato and
Aristotle endorsed infanticide, though he neglects to explore the
significance of the fact that the assumptions underlying their endorsement
of infanticide were at work in their calm and considered justification of
slavery. But the plain fact that many adults in modern western liberal
democracies are horrified by the thought of infanticide, on the grounds of
"the widely accepted obligation to protect the sanctity of human life,"
counts for little in Singer's analysis.
Then there is Singer's consistently inconsistent concern with pursuing the
logic of an idea all the way to the end. To show how silly the opposition to
abortion is, Singer suggests that if pro-lifers took their views seriously
they would find that they have a moral obligation to protect calves, pigs,
and chickens, "for on any fair comparison of morally relevant
characteristics, like rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, autonomy,
pleasure and pain, and so on, the calf, the pig and the much derided chicken
come out well ahead of the fetus at any stage of pregnancy--while if we make
the comparison with a fetus of less than three months, a fish would show
more signs of consciousness."
In the process of inviting a fair comparison, Singer has unfairly omitted a
crucial and morally relevant characteristic: the capacity to develop. Unlike
a fish, which is incapable of ever becoming different from what it already
is- -there is only one way to be a fish, and all members of the species
exemplify it--there is no telling the unique person into which the unborn
child might develop. But put aside Singer's defective effort to reduce the
pro-life position to absurdity. Of greater interest is the full range of
intriguing implications of Singer's pro-infanticide position.
Consider his restriction of infanticide to newborns who are "severely
disabled." This restriction, already expansive enough to include
hemophiliacs, derives no support from the logic of his position. Singer is
right that on the basis of his premises there is no relevant difference
between abortion and the killing of "severely disabled infants." But why
does he confine the comparison to newborn infants who are severely disabled?
He certainly does not confine abortion to severely disabled fetuses. If
newborns, like unborn children, are not persons, and it is permissible to
abort unborn children regardless of whether they are afflicted or healthy,
then newborns, afflicted or healthy, should be subject to killing too,
provided of course that "on balance, and taking account the interests of
everyone affected," their killing will increase the total amount of
happiness or satisfied preferences in the world. Singer certainly offers no
good utilitarian reason to confine the killing to severely disabled
newborns.
And yet it is tolerably clear why Singer blinks. Call it an old fashioned
sense of the dignity of human life. Nagged by such a scruple, he dodges the
logical implications of his newfangled utilitarian calculus, and seeks to
build a fence around the sweeping license to take newborn human life so
obviously authorized by his ethical outlook. Yet Singer cannot articulate
the actual justifications for the restrictions that he would impose, for to
do so would make manifest a certain philosophical faintness of heart. He
would be forced to acknowledge the dependence of his own ethical conclusions
on the doctrine of the dignity of man that his ethical theory is designed
rigorously to replace.
Singer, it should also be said, does wrestle with the question of killing
for the sake of promoting a greater good: a classic stumbling block for
utilitarian ethics. One solution that he suggests is that whatever benefits
could be expected to flow from permitting human beings to be killed on the
basis of calculations about the greatest good would be offset by the general
anxiety in the population that would be produced by making, in the interest
of the good of the whole, each individual subject to having his or her life
cut short at any moment--a sort of utilitarian terror. Of course, this
argument cannot apply to newborns, since newborns do not feel anxiety about
the laws under which they live, nor are any who do feel such anxiety in
danger of becoming newborns for a second time.
According to singer's utilitarian reasoning, severely disabled infants often
face a life of low quality and unending suffering that will also only bring
misery to their parents and those around them. Perhaps. But
surely the same argument could be made, in some cases at least, about only
somewhat disabled infants and their parents, especially if the parents are
short- tempered and self-centered. And the day may not be far off when
science enables us to make immediate predictions about our children's life
prospects. What, then, of the especially ambitious parents of newborns of
merely ordinary physical abilities and average intelligence who have their
hearts set on their son becoming a dashing quarterback or their daughter
becoming a high-powered Fortune Five Hundred CEO? Such parents (surely no
less imaginable than Bob and his Bugatti)
may suffer terribly from raising a son whose averageness will
likely prevent him from starring on the football field or a daughter whose
intellect is probably not up to competing at the highest levels of commerce.
Indeed, the experience of raising merely ordinary children may disappoint
and distress especially ambitious parents to such an extent that "on
balance, and taking account the interests of everyone affected," their
suffering will outweigh whatever happiness their newborn can reasonably be
expected to find in life and add to the world. For such parents, from
Singer's perspective at least, infanticide would seem to be a moral
alternative.
Finally, Singer tacks between the scholar's insistence on reliable empirical
evidence and his own unscholarly indifference to empirical evidence. He
complains, on the one hand, that opponents of infanticide and euthanasia
ignore the harsh facts about the lives of the severely disabled; but he
casually posits, on the other hand, that on balance an ordinary human life
contains more happiness than sadness. "The infant exists: His life can be
expected to contain a positive balance of happiness over misery." Really? Plausible
or implausible, this is an empirical claim for which Singer offers no
evidence. It is certainly far from a self-evident truth or unrebuttable presumption.
Many are the thoughtful men and women who have come to a pessimistic
conclusion about life, or whose bitter experience has persuaded them that
the Greek god Silenus was
right and the best for man is to have never been born, and the next best to
die quickly. And if one reduces the moral life to the summing of pains and pleasures, how
can one rule out that all is not "vanity of vanities," because "all things
are full of weariness: man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with
seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing"?
Perhaps, on balance, many or most or all human lives contain more suffering
than happiness. This is an empirical question, and within a utilitarian
framework how it is answered is of considerable significance. Given his
repudiation of natural rights and the doctrine of the sanctity of human
life, for example, Singer's practical ethics would seem to open the door to
calculations concerning the status of the sensitive and the
thoughtful--those peculiarly alive to, and prone to suffer from, the
absurdities, tragedies, and horrors in which our existence abounds.
Here, as elsewhere, though he places the giving of reasons at the center of
ethics, Singer fails to notice many dramatic consequences that flow from the
potent and peculiar combination of the principle of utility, the principle
of equal consideration of interests, and the repudiation of the doctrine of
the sanctity of human life. The list of oversights is lengthened by the long
appendix to Practical Ethics, called "On Being Silenced in
Those Germans who organized against him no doubt went too far in likening
his views to those of the Nazis; but their exaggeration, especially given
the nightmare that had unfolded in their country, is slight compared to the
grotesque exaggeration that Singer commits in reporting their conduct. For
in the quiet of his scholar's study, Singer, in an act of obscene
indulgence, reverses the charge, and likens those who sought to silence him
to the Nazis, and by extension himself to the Nazis' Jewish victims, as if
the essence of Nazism were restrictions on freedom of speech. One would have
thought that, from Singer's point of view, the salient issue raised by his
adamant insistence on his right to express his views in
In the end, Singer cannot even say whether it is reasonable to be moral. Or
rather, he concludes that it is not reasonable. In the final pages of his
final chapter, he casually confesses that it is not given to us to be able
to assert rationally that a moral life is better or worse than (these are
his incredible examples) a life of crime or a life of stamp collecting.
Morality, in Singer's view, makes maximal demands, but it is not even
minimally obliging. While the moral life requires a radical revision in how
we think and act, living morally is no more reasonable than living immorally
or amorally. The least one might observe is that this muddle of moralism and
laxity, extreme rigor and casual permissiveness, arduous altruism and
nonchalant selfishness, has consequences. For one thing, it could scarcely
be better calculated to ensure the unprincipled application of moral
principles and their hectoring, high-handed, and ham-fisted dissemination.
At the leading universities, the teaching of ethics and the research in
ethics has become a booming business. The university ethics programs are
supported by hefty gifts from alumni and corporate donors (who seek the
services of "ethicists"); they sponsor numerous undergraduate classes; they
offer substantial fellowships to graduate students and faculty; and they
provide generous honoraria to bring to campuses a steady stream of eminent
scholars to deliver open lectures and participate in public symposia. The
ethics programs also share a view about the essence of ethics. What links,
say, Princeton's University Center for Human Values, Harvard's Program on
Ethics and the Professions and the Moral Reasoning division of its Core
Curriculum, Yale's Program for Ethics, Politics, and Economics, and Brown
University's new Stephen Robert Initiative for the Study of Values is the
underlying conviction that the major part of morality consists in reasoning
rigorously about moral dilemmas.
But does it? Perhaps it is not surprising that professors, whose job it is
to draw fine distinctions, and construct intricate arguments, and infer
general laws from particular instances and subsume concrete cases under
general rules, should come to the conclusion that what especially makes men
and women moral is the refinement of their rational capacities. Yet it
remains an inconvenient fact, too little examined by courses in and
conferences on ethics,
thatrefined rational capacities can be used for ill as well as for
good. As Socrates points out in Book I of the Republic, the outstanding
doctor, by virtue of his technical knowledge of medicine and the human body,
also makes the bestpoisoner. Knowing all the
arguments may help you discern the right and persuade others to do justice.
But ratiocinative cleverness or technical proficiency in reasoning about
morals may assist you in dazzling and disarming the defenders of common
sense and ordinary decency, and in justifying in the name of lofty
principles gross violations of personal trust and the public interest. In
ethics, as in most walks of life, character makes the difference.
It is not only on the theoretical level that Singer provides a cautionary
example about the professional expertise in practical ethics. The concluding
paragraphs of the genial profile of Singer in The New Yorker revealed that
he has hired, at considerable expense, health care workers to tend to his
mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He is a good son, and his
ideas about morality have made him also a prosperous son; but what makes
this otherwise common act of filial piety noteworthy is that it flagrantly
violates the son's own moral theory.
After all, Singer's mother has lost her ability to reason, and to remember,
and to recognize others. She has ceased to be a person in her son's
technical sense of the term. In these circumstances, Singer's principles
surely require him to take the substantial sums of money that he uses to
maintain her in comfort and in dignity and spend them instead to feed the
poor and save the lives of innocent children. And early in Practical Ethics,
Singer declares that the true test of an ethics is its ability to guide
life: "Ethics is not an ideal system that is noble in theory but no good in
practice. The reverse of this is closer to the truth: an ethical judgment
that is no good in practice must suffer from a theoretical defect as well,
for the whole point of ethical judgment is to guide practice." Although he
strenuously denies that from the ethical point of view we ought to treat
friends and family differently, Singer's actions seems to proclaim that what
is right and what is rigorous applies only to other people's mothers.
Is this a failure of logic or a failure of nerve? Has love conquered
utility? "I think this has made me see how the issues of someone with these
kinds of problems are really very difficult," he remarked to The New Yorker
about the trials of his mother's illness. "Perhaps it is more difficult than
I thought before, because it is different when it's your mother." The son's
love for his mother is affecting. And the professor's acknowledgment, in the
light of the glaring contradiction between his principles and his practice,
of the need to rethink views to the development and promulgation of which he
has devoted his professional life displays a certain intellectual integrity.
But the ethicist's innocence, at this late date in his career, of the most
elemental features of his subject matter boggles the mind.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more stunning rebuke to the well-heeled and
well-ensconced academic discipline of practical ethics than that its most
controversial and influential star, at the peak of his discipline, after an
Oxford education, after twenty five years as a university professor, and
after the publication of thousands of pages laying down clear cut rules on
life-and-death issues, should reveal, only as the result of a reporter's
prodding, and only in the battle with his own elderly mother's suffering,
that he has just begun to appreciate that the moral life is complex.
Peter Berkowitz teaches
at
(Copyright 1999, The New Republic)
George Scialabba
http://www.georgescialabba.net
The argument over modernity is as old as modernity. Pascal could not forgive Descartes and Montaigne for begetting irony, self-consciousness, radical doubt. Kant labored to overcome Hume’s skepticism. Kierkegaard railed at Hegel’s cosmopolitan historicism. Dostoevsky stated the conservatives’ ultimate misgiving: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”
On the left, too, there is a tradition of ambivalence about the results of certain modern liberations. Mill fretted that virtue might not survive the decline of Christian superstition. Morris was sure that Beauty and mass production could not coexist. Lawrence called industrialism “a black mistake.” By now the modernist turn seems irreversible, yet thoughtful radicals like Christopher Lasch and Michael Walzer are still troubled by a sense of something lost as everything solid melts into air.
What has worried opponents of modernism is its primarily critical,
destructive character. Its chief strategies have been negative: dissolution
(of supposedly fundamental distinctions), unmasking (of unconscious motives,
class interests), debunking (of myths), stripping away (of gratuitous
assumptions, superfluous first principles). In one perspective, modern
intellectual history seems a kind of ascetic frenzy, a continual
renunciation of consoling, structure-providing, community- creating
illusions. And what, ask the anti-modernists, is left? Babel, chaos, anomie,
nihilism: unreal cities, a handful of dust.
Something like this bleak picture de scribes contemporary religious and
moral philosophy, according to Leszek Kolakowski and Alasdair MacIntyre. By
and large in both fields, the center does not hold: there is little final or
even preliminary agreement, and no agreement on how agreement might
eventually be reached. Once arbiter scientiarium, philosophy has become an
administrative convenience. What’s more, this fragmentation of theoretical
discourse mirrors the anarchy of our moral and political practice and the
spiritual disunity of our culture.
All this profoundly disturbs Kolakowski and MacIntyre, who from strikingly similar backgrounds have written, perhaps not so strikingly, similar or at least congruent diagnoses of the modern condition. Both men are former Marxists, transplanted Europeans, and distinguished academic philosophers. In their voices, a similar crepuscular note sounds: beleaguered and disillusioned, but determined to outface the end, if this be the end, with a valiant, quixotic faithfulness to professorial norms of civility and rationality. Let us go reasoning into that good night.
Kolakowski quotes Ivan Karamazov’s remark about everything being permitted if God does not exist and proposes that it is “valid not only as moral rule but as an epistemological principle.” Reason and religion have fought each other to a stand still; and while there are no rational, universally accepted grounds for admitting any religious truth, we are not bound to accept any definition of rationality that, like scientific positivism, excludes religious possibilities altogether. Positivism’s main line of attack has been to demonstrate that religious language doesn’t do what plain, honest, everyday usage is expected to do: produce predictions, consensus, and other useful results. Normative statements, ultimate choices, and cosmic conjectures about how everything hangs together cannot be justified in empirical terms. But, Kolakowski argues, such norms, choices, and cosmic prejudices are exactly what is presupposed by the positivists’ assumption that all genuine knowledge is publicly verifiable and that nothing else counts. In reality, he claims, what counts only counts within some epistemological/moral/cosmological framework, and such a framework cannot be justified, only chosen. Belief is choice, and secular rationalists are believers, too. Not to choose is to drift, to define truth as whatever solves whatever problems are at hand. Hence our dilemma: “either an infinite regress or a discretionary decision… either God or a cognitive nihilism.”
Of course, even discretionary decisions are not made in a void, so Kolakowski offers an account of how religious commitments come about. Certainly not by sheer force of argument: “Probably nobody has ever been converted to faith by philosophical discussion.” Instead “people are initiated into the understanding of religious language and into worship through participation in the life of a religious community,” in which knowledge, the feeling of participation in the ultimate reality, and moral commitment appear as a single act.” This faith-act is strictly ineffable: the inner life of the faith-community can not be explained or communicated, but those inside understand each other as reliably as the most austere positivists. One is, it seems, chosen by faith almost as much as one chooses it. Nonbelievers call this a mystification; believers call it a mystery.
Kolakowaki’s defense of religion is peculiarly modern: all the standard objections are cheerfully admitted, even embellished, then declared not to matter. Belief is a “logically arbitrary” option, but then so is unbelief. Believers and nonbelievers should not expect to convert each other, indeed should not even expect t understand each other. We shouldn’t talk of “an ‘escape into irrationality,’ but rather of the irreductibly different ways in which religious beliefs are validated in contrast to scientific propositions, of the incommensurable meanings of ‘validity’ in those respective areas.” The Sacred and the Profane are equally coherent and equally compelling, each on its own terms, and may as well quit feuding and just nod stiffly at each other from opposite sides of the room.
It is a little too pat. What is really on Kolakowski’s mind? One hint is that, despite his professed agnosticism, his references to skeptics are almost uniformly negative. Rationalists have “travestied” Christian notions like original sin. Free thinking, once an instrument of tolerance, has degenerated into “fanatical rationalism.” Science has “monopolistically” arrogated to itself the very definition of Reason. And so on. This may be the author’s idea of sportsmanship, since religion is definitely the underdog in this matchup and needs rhetorical support. But these jibes sound too genuinely enthusiastic; more likely they are the product of Kolakowski’s long-standing ambivalence. He once declared himself an “inconsistent atheist,” and went on to observe wistfully that nevertheless “men have no fuller means of self-identification than through religious symbolism” and that “religious consciousness ... is an irreplaceable part of human culture, man’s only attempt to see himself as a whole.” In “Religion” he concludes forlornly that “human dignity is not to be validated within a naturalistic concept of man. The absence of God spells the ruin of man in the sense that it demolishes or robs of meaning everything we think of as the essence of being human: the quest for truth, the distinction of good and evil, the claim to dignity, the claim to creating something that withstands the indifferent destructiveness of time.” After a life extraordinarily full of both action (dissent and expulsion from Communist Poland) and thought (the massive and renowned “Main Currents of Marxism”), here stands Kolakowski, head bloodied and only just unbowed, unable to take comfort but unwilling to renounce it altogether, at least for others. Perhaps—at least for others— there is some escape from modernity.
Alasdair MacIntyre is much less ambivalent: he is determined to deliver us from modernity. Though somewhat more practical than Kolakowski’s, his concerns are no less sweeping, and “After Virtue” is a far more rigorous, ambitious, and original book than “Religion”. It is a reinterpretation of the entire history of Western moral philosophy, as decline, fall, and—possibly—rebirth.
To motivate this vast undertaking, MacIntyre begins by canvassing contemporary moral philosophy. What he finds is an explicit and widespread disavowal of its perennial ideals: objectivity, impersonality, universality, proof. Emotivism, the view that moral utterances are at bottom functional (i.e., persuasive statements of one’s own attitudes or preferences) has swept the field. Moral discourse is now framed almost exclusively in terms of interests. In the society at large, moral argument consists of asserting interests—often, to be sure, disguised in terms of “rights” or “justice,” but less and less convincingly to the other protagonists. Philosophers now mostly try to devise procedures for arbitrating among the claims of individuals whose interests and values, it is taken for granted, will be wholly disparate. For Aristotle and other premoderns, “justice” meant fidelity to a shared conception of cosmic or social order; now it means fair treatment of competing equals, who share no such conception. Since even this degree of procedural egalitarianism involves some prior consensus about values—how to weigh them, which to designate as within the political arena—public moral discussion verges on cacophony.
As a result, modern culture has produced a distinctive character-type, our equivalent of the Homeric warrior-hero, the Athenian gentleman-citizen, the Christian saint, the 18th-century honnete homme. The defining activity of this character-type is manipulation; its most common embodiments are the aesthete, the therapist and, above all, the manager. All three express their culture’s understanding of social relations as primarily instrumental: by the consumption of other people as interesting sensations, or by the deployment of morally neutral expertise to achieve organizational goals. In a developed society that has renounced the ideal of virtue, of universal, rationally justifiable norms, this is the form taken by the war of all against all, and these characters are its warrior-heroes.
Having sketched this chilling and plausible portrait, MacIntyre asks: how has it come to this? His answer is that we took a wrong turn, roughly at the Enlightenment. Classical and Christian morality was based on the concept of telos, which means variously “goal,” “purpose,” “perfection,” or “essential nature.” Homer, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Calvin all believed that virtues were qualities that enabled men and women to fulfill their essential nature and so achieve the goal of their existence. Of course, these writers described the goal of human existence differently, and so gave differing accounts of the virtues. But the form of moral reasoning was the same: from the telos.
Then it was discovered (perhaps the founding discovery of the modern era) that science could only be done by dispensing with the idea of essential natures. In the riot of liberation, teleological reasoning was banished from the—as yet only putative—human sciences. And that, according to MacIntyre, was our cardinal mistake. Physical science may be incompatible with telos, but there never has and never will be a human or social science. MacInytre devotes a scathing chapter to demonstrating the utter nullity and bogusness of contemporary social science and to arguing that the spurious fact- value distinction invoked to support its pseudoscientific pretensions is merely ideological camouflage. The modern rejection of normative rationality, the cliché that no “ought” may be deduced from an “is,” is based on a mechanistic misunderstanding of human subjectivity and, consequently, of moral reasoning. So much for Weberian bureaucratic rationality. And so much for Marxism and all other theories which agree with Weber that values are created by human decisions and that conflicts between rival values cannot be rationally settled.
At this point one may begin to suspect MacIntyre of reactionary intentions. That would be a mistake. His few specific comments on politics are acute and even handed. In one deft, lethal paragraph, Burkean traditionalism is exposed as a fraud, an opportunistic yoking of market and hierarchy. In another, right-wing libertarianism, exemplified by Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy”, “State and Utopia”, is shown to rest on an absurdly unhistorical fiction: “justified original acquisition.” Marxism is judged a failure, but not for the usual reasons: “the barbarous despot ism of the collective Tsardom which reigns in Moscow is as irrelevant to the question of Marxism’s moral substance as the life of a Borgia pope was to that of Christianity’s moral substance.” MacIntyre is a neo-Aristotelian; he urges a thorough repudiation of modern ideologies, left or right, in favor of a commitment to…virtue.
A hundred years ago, “virtue” meant “chastity.” Today it hardly means anything. To reinstate this admittedly archaic concept, MacIntyre embarks on a dense and suggestive though finally unsatisfying attempt to prove that human life does indeed have a purpose, a telos. His argument weaves together notions of community, tradition, practices (skills, crafts, arts, intellectual disciplines), and narrative considered as the form of unity of a life. Virtues (e.g., honesty, prudence, diligence) make possible our participation in practices (e.g., physics, pottery, public service), each of which rests on a tradition (a history of development whose past merits allegiance and whose future is the responsibility of its virtuous practitioners). Practices are communal and narrative: they are the embodied history of a community of practitioners. Practices are teleological: they have intrinsic, characteristic goals, distinctive lines of development. And practices presuppose a larger community, or polis, which prizes and makes possible the common pursuit of those perfections aimed at by the practices (which is to say—MacIntyre says so almost inaudibly—a society not based on competition and commodity production).
All this sounds vaguely promising. But what’s the cash value of this elaborate philosophical construction? What might the virtuous community actually look like? And isn’t that species extinct any way, beyond reviving, after centuries of modern barbarism? Addressing these questions, MacIntyre falters. “The good life for man,” he concludes lamely, “is the life spent in seeking the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to under stand what more and what else the good life for man is.” This is not much help. The final gloomy pages of “After Virtue” compare the present to the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome. The partisans of virtue can do little but huddle together in unspecified sanctuaries, guarding the tradition. “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.” Modernity cannot be repealed, but perhaps it can be survived.
Richard Rorty has, if possible, even less hope than MacIntyre, but doesn’t seem to mind. His exquisitely witty, humane book is a dernier cri of modernist disillusionment. “Consequences of Pragmatism”, a collection of essays, announces that the history of philosophy is over, and a good thing, too. Rorty presents that history as a series of enchantments or incantations which, as is now obvious to everyone, simply haven’t worked. Our culture’s trek to the present has been a Long March through one province after another of philosophical folly: Plato’s Ideas, Aristotle’s essences, Descartes’ mind-body distinction, Kant’s Ding-an-sich, Husserl’s phenomenological method, the logical positivists’ scientific method—all in quest of absolute, suprahistorical Certainty. At last we have learned from the great antiphilosophers—James and Dewey, Nietzsche and Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Foucault—that this Certainty is not to be had, and that wanting it was all along a lack of maturity, a failure of nerve, a yearning for what Nietzsche called “comfort.”
There is no God, in other words, and no telos. “Is everything permitted, then?” ask Kolakowski and MacIntyre, anxiously. “Yes indeed,” replies Rorty. “We must grow up or go under. Our culture’s childhood is at an end.” Nietzsche and Foucault suppose that this recognition must lead to lonely self-creation for the few and ubiquitous bureaucratic control for the many. But James and Dewey— Rorty’s heroes—hope that a sense of our common predicament might lead to some thing else: “To accept the contingency of starting-points is to accept our in heritance from, and our conversation with, our fellow-humans as our only source of guidance In the end, the pragmatists tell us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of (Certainty).”
A fragile ideal, this community of despair, and Rorty knows it. His remarks about morality and politics are oblique, almost resigned. In the end, he endorses an ecumenical liberalism and recommends Dewey as the model contemporary moralist “simply because his vocabulary allows room for unjustifiable hope, and an ungroundable but vital sense of human solidarity.” That’s something, surely. But is that all?
“Art and nothing but art,” wrote Nietzsche. “We have art in order not to die of the truth.” How not to die of the truth is what both Kolakowski and MacIntyre are asking: the truth that everything is contingent, that no religious or moral system can compel assent, that purposes are not given in the nature of things. Kolakowski asks how belief is possible and MacIntyre asks how virtue is possible; both answer, “through community.” But neither can explain how community is possible without a willful suspension of the critical spirit. Rorty is more helpful, but finally can offer only the hope that rigorous intellectual honesty will keep the delicate flowers of human decency and autonomy from being smothered by metaphysical weeds. About how we might nourish the life that this strenuous hygiene is supposed to protect, he has nothing to say. Does modernity hold out no more robust hope than this?
Perhaps it does. Tracing the decline of teleological reasoning and normative rationality, MacIntyre identifies Hume as the most powerful and destructive antagonist of the premodern tradition. After finishing off the Aristotelian philosophical fictions, Hume had somehow to account for altruism, to show how reason might be enslaved to benign passions. In a famous footnote to the “Enquiry Concerning Morals”, he fudged the issue: “It is needless to push our researches so far as to ask why we have humanity or a fellow-feeling with others: it is sufficient that this is experienced to be a principle in human nature. We must stop some where in our examination of causes; and there are, in every science, some general principles beyond which we cannot hope to find any principle more general.” The irony of history’s most consistent skeptic suggesting sheepishly that we take for granted the conceptual cornerstone of his positive moral theory does not escape MacIntyre, who exultantly declares Hume’s whole project a failure.
But Hume’s project was completed, or at least continued, by some very unlikely collaborators. Godwin enthusiastically accepted Hume’s critique of traditional superstition and tried, crudely and uncertainly, to imagine an emancipated world. In Shelley, Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic imagination were harmoniously combined. “A Defense of Poetry” locates the cultivation of altruism (Hume’s “fellow-feeling”) among the effects of Art: “The great instrument of good is the imagination …a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person not our own.”
Later, construction began on the ground Hume had cleared and on the foundations the Romantics had laid. The supposedly prosaic British political imagination produced an unrivaled burst of utopian art and theory, including Morris’s “News from Nowhere” and “How We Live and How We Might Live”; Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”; Russell’s “The World As It Could Be Made” and “Principles of Social Reconstruction”; Shaw’s “The Revolutionist’s Handbook” and “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism”; Wells’s “Men Like Gods” and “The Discovery of the Future”; and Lawrence’s “Democracy,” “The Education of the People,” and “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine”. Despite many extravagances, inconsistencies, and plain mistakes, these and other works in the utopian mode achieve some thing for human solidarity: not the metaphysical grounding that Rorty rightly mocks, but imaginative embodiment. They further our collective education in desire.
Modernity may be considered the joint accomplishment of skeptics and visionaries. The skeptics can be seen as clearing a space for the utopian imagination, for prophecies of a demystified community, of a solidarity without illusions. The skeptics weed, the visionaries water. Where the seed of generous, humane sympathy comes from is as obscure as where genius comes from. “We can’t make life,” wrote Lawrence. “We can but fight for the life that grows in us.”
With at least these two weapons: criticism and vision. In our culture, the great skeptical liberators of the Enlightenment and after have long been honored as (even christened) the party of humanity. If their project—the modern project—succeeds, it will be because we have also assimilated and surpassed the dreams of, among others, God Win and Shelley, Morris and Wilde, Shaw and Wells, Russell and Lawrence: the visionary party, the party of hope.