Real World Moral Progress
I think we can make progress morally. I think we’ve made an incredible amount of progress already in both moral thought and practice, though I don’t propose we’re in much danger of exhausting room for improvement. In another sense I deny the attainability of perfect moral theory and practice for finite beings with robust forms of personal utility. This should not be interpreted as a denial of a fully determined ‘best’ morality - an objective “absolute morality.” The denial instead grows from the belief that advance can proceed only asymptotically, and not perfectly so. Better approximations enable still better and so on, in an indefinite loop lasting the span of human history without ever achieving perfection.
Part of the difficulty with morality, however, is its “special” status amongst academic pursuits. Few philosophers of morality and ethics seem willing to take seriously the relevance of rich real-world subjects like game theory, economics, cognitive neuroscience, and information theory on their age-old deliberations. I suppose it is at least somewhat plausible that those theological moral systems founded on the will of a logically neat infinite being need accede no recourse to such untidy studies of dynamic systems. So far as I can tell, however, that set’s avoidance of the usual difficulties predicates on their constitutional incoherence. This by no means disqualifies all theistic moral systems; that broad criticism only applies to morality defined and exhausted by the will of an infinite anthropomorphic entity. I don’t know if the tradition of such hopeful-but-confused attempts to distill all moral considerations remains the proximate cause of philosophers’ distracting quest for a computationally tractable final answer, but I do think it creates frequently disastrous social expectations of parsimonious advice.
Despite our experience with the horrible religious insanities that have occasionally seized control of human history, the repeated rise and fall of fashionable isms, the easy answers the ambitious have offered the masses, we have not yet lost our taste for moral guidance in 25 words or less. The ratio remains large of those aligning themselves with bold new ideas to those who invest substantial personal effort in evaluation of the idea’s justifications and those of its best critics. This gives demagogues and opportunists inordinate leverage and thereby our control of our spiritual destiny, singly and collectively, is attenuated.
Daniel Dennett tells the story of a man who walked a thousand miles barefoot and climbed a tall mountain to seek the guru’s wisdom.
“Oh guru,” he asked, “Will you tell me the meaning of life?”
“Certainly,” the guru replied kindly, “but to understand the answer you must first master mathematical logic and recursive function theory.”
This took the man aback after his arduous journey. “Really?” he asked in dismay.
“Oh yes,” the guru replied.
The man looked downcast. “Never mind, then.”
“Suit yourself.”
This little fable evokes humanity’s tendency to be willing to embark on only that sort of personal journey and exert only that sort of personal effort to which we have already committed ourselves. I think our history has prepared us to participate in sit-ins and protests standing up for our convictions far more than it has taught us that legitimate moral certitude carries a price other than an obligation to act in accordance therewith. The September 11th terrorists were so confident of their morality and so righteously motivated that they were willing to devote years of work and their very lives to the cause. Some might wish to object to this example on the grounds that the terrorists’ belief in the quid-pro-quo of divine reward annuls the selflessness of their sacrifice, but this is irrelevant - surely they thought the reward due because of the goodness of the action, not vice-versa. Furthermore, plenty of examples exist of people sacrificing their lives to godless communism. Surely atheists can’t be easily accused of anticipating material advantage in oblivion. Not even the most copious dousing by willingly-shed blood of its faithful proves any creed or guarantees its salubrious effect on humanity.
The foregoing thesis has the single-sided insight of an aphorism; ‘Think before you act,’ I could summarize, and so appear to preserve the gist of the conclusion while demolishing whatever analytical value it may have offered a reader. Almost certainly some better essayist could render the same analysis more concisely without loss of fidelity, but I very much doubt the ability of the best writer to communicate the substantial logic in a moderately-long chapter heading, much less a headline. We pointy-headed intellectuals have been decrying the layperson’s unwillingness to engage the no-doubt sublime truths of our elegantly-argued positions since the invention of writing and before, I’m sure. It’s not that most people have lost the taste for discursive rigor - they’ve never had it in the first place. Otherwise, how is there an “us-them” dichotomy in the first place?
Ask any person how informed they are regarding subjects highly relevant to their lives and how well-reasoned are their beliefs about them, and they’re likely to score themselves above-average. Further, most will assert that they know ‘enough’ to be sure of themselves. Whether implicitly or explicitly, people make judgements regarding the marginal value of further intellectual work. The costs/benefit equation for those of us who enjoy debate and rigor enough to spend our free time on them diverges wildly from those who’d like to get on with the many other genuinely pressing practical problems they face on a daily basis. It would seem more than a little unfair to expect the single mother of three holding down two jobs to keep up with the ongoing quibbling in the uncounted fields of human mental endeavor. Does it really matter to her life whether Nietzsche was misunderstood, sloppy, or just hopelessly confused? Can she expect a raise for being able to explain Pinker’s critique of the Standard Social Science Model? Even more plausibly relevant analysis of the long-term incentive effects of state-funded health care seems a poor candidate distract her from her worries about little Timmy’s undiagnosed thyroid condition.
Is this apology for public disinterest condescension? I suppose it could be if one accepts the ambient perception of intellectual inquiry as high-minded and inaccessible to lesser beings. The truth is rather than people’s decision to leave the issues to others of appropriate inclination and ability is fully rational, if not necessarily fully-considered. The breadth of science long ago exceeded the ability of any human to grasp the whole of it in any great detail even if they spent every waking moment reading peer-reviewed journals. It that realm at least we’ve all had to become more or less comfortable with allowing specialists to do our thinking for us. I haven’t suffered noticeably from my lack of knowledge of how exactly my old VCR worked. I’ve even learned to live with the idea that I will probably never become much more familiar with Nietzsche than I am now, contingently trusting to my current impressions of the worth of his ideas.
But a problem remains: people widely value scientific analysis performed in their stead by others - they do like to have VCRs (or DVD players, these days) to use, after all - but they see less utility in the erudite squabbling of moral philosophers. There’s justice in this, of course. Those who chose to purchase a DVD player get the functionality they want without having to know almost anything about the machine’s articulation. Not so for moral philosophy. Even Christ’s words seem to need exegesis, judging by the number of clergies devoted to that pursuit, and Bentham’s hope that the masses could use his limericks as a tool to craft an expedient first-order approximation of moral rectitude in any situation was simply fantasy.
Another point of difference is the relative amounts of consensus. Scientists sweat details all the time and entire theoretical paradigms every now and again, but generally one can enough agreement on the big issues to satisfy moderate curiosity. Not so moral philosophy. It’s been said that while bad science advances the field less than good science, poor philosophy doesn’t yield any progress at all. Perhaps that explains why millennia and seemingly inexhaustible verbiage has not built many theoretical houses in which most philosophers are willing to live.
I am a little more optimistic, personally. Some areas of inquiry are just not very accessible without supporting understandings that may take a great deal of time coming. Before the identification of deoxyribonucleic acid, all attempts at a comprehensive account of heredity were hopelessly hamstrung. Not to say breeders and the like hadn’t achieved a level of true knowledge, but all explanatory depth was confined to the shallows. The subjects I mention above as examples of fields of which philosophers often fail to take account have all come of age only recently and I look forward to ethical philosophers expanding their intellectual toolkit so that they can make real headway into the deep issues.
At the same time, even if we do take leaps forward in moral theory, I doubt it will translate into a pushbutton moral certitude machine. I expect moral decision making will always be hard, uncertain work - not an answer people like to hear - but I do hope for a time when people can count on substantial and comprehensible help from philosophy in their quest to improve themselves and do the right thing.
Part of the difficulty with morality, however, is its “special” status amongst academic pursuits. Few philosophers of morality and ethics seem willing to take seriously the relevance of rich real-world subjects like game theory, economics, cognitive neuroscience, and information theory on their age-old deliberations. I suppose it is at least somewhat plausible that those theological moral systems founded on the will of a logically neat infinite being need accede no recourse to such untidy studies of dynamic systems. So far as I can tell, however, that set’s avoidance of the usual difficulties predicates on their constitutional incoherence. This by no means disqualifies all theistic moral systems; that broad criticism only applies to morality defined and exhausted by the will of an infinite anthropomorphic entity. I don’t know if the tradition of such hopeful-but-confused attempts to distill all moral considerations remains the proximate cause of philosophers’ distracting quest for a computationally tractable final answer, but I do think it creates frequently disastrous social expectations of parsimonious advice.
Despite our experience with the horrible religious insanities that have occasionally seized control of human history, the repeated rise and fall of fashionable isms, the easy answers the ambitious have offered the masses, we have not yet lost our taste for moral guidance in 25 words or less. The ratio remains large of those aligning themselves with bold new ideas to those who invest substantial personal effort in evaluation of the idea’s justifications and those of its best critics. This gives demagogues and opportunists inordinate leverage and thereby our control of our spiritual destiny, singly and collectively, is attenuated.
Daniel Dennett tells the story of a man who walked a thousand miles barefoot and climbed a tall mountain to seek the guru’s wisdom.
“Oh guru,” he asked, “Will you tell me the meaning of life?”
“Certainly,” the guru replied kindly, “but to understand the answer you must first master mathematical logic and recursive function theory.”
This took the man aback after his arduous journey. “Really?” he asked in dismay.
“Oh yes,” the guru replied.
The man looked downcast. “Never mind, then.”
“Suit yourself.”
This little fable evokes humanity’s tendency to be willing to embark on only that sort of personal journey and exert only that sort of personal effort to which we have already committed ourselves. I think our history has prepared us to participate in sit-ins and protests standing up for our convictions far more than it has taught us that legitimate moral certitude carries a price other than an obligation to act in accordance therewith. The September 11th terrorists were so confident of their morality and so righteously motivated that they were willing to devote years of work and their very lives to the cause. Some might wish to object to this example on the grounds that the terrorists’ belief in the quid-pro-quo of divine reward annuls the selflessness of their sacrifice, but this is irrelevant - surely they thought the reward due because of the goodness of the action, not vice-versa. Furthermore, plenty of examples exist of people sacrificing their lives to godless communism. Surely atheists can’t be easily accused of anticipating material advantage in oblivion. Not even the most copious dousing by willingly-shed blood of its faithful proves any creed or guarantees its salubrious effect on humanity.
The foregoing thesis has the single-sided insight of an aphorism; ‘Think before you act,’ I could summarize, and so appear to preserve the gist of the conclusion while demolishing whatever analytical value it may have offered a reader. Almost certainly some better essayist could render the same analysis more concisely without loss of fidelity, but I very much doubt the ability of the best writer to communicate the substantial logic in a moderately-long chapter heading, much less a headline. We pointy-headed intellectuals have been decrying the layperson’s unwillingness to engage the no-doubt sublime truths of our elegantly-argued positions since the invention of writing and before, I’m sure. It’s not that most people have lost the taste for discursive rigor - they’ve never had it in the first place. Otherwise, how is there an “us-them” dichotomy in the first place?
Ask any person how informed they are regarding subjects highly relevant to their lives and how well-reasoned are their beliefs about them, and they’re likely to score themselves above-average. Further, most will assert that they know ‘enough’ to be sure of themselves. Whether implicitly or explicitly, people make judgements regarding the marginal value of further intellectual work. The costs/benefit equation for those of us who enjoy debate and rigor enough to spend our free time on them diverges wildly from those who’d like to get on with the many other genuinely pressing practical problems they face on a daily basis. It would seem more than a little unfair to expect the single mother of three holding down two jobs to keep up with the ongoing quibbling in the uncounted fields of human mental endeavor. Does it really matter to her life whether Nietzsche was misunderstood, sloppy, or just hopelessly confused? Can she expect a raise for being able to explain Pinker’s critique of the Standard Social Science Model? Even more plausibly relevant analysis of the long-term incentive effects of state-funded health care seems a poor candidate distract her from her worries about little Timmy’s undiagnosed thyroid condition.
Is this apology for public disinterest condescension? I suppose it could be if one accepts the ambient perception of intellectual inquiry as high-minded and inaccessible to lesser beings. The truth is rather than people’s decision to leave the issues to others of appropriate inclination and ability is fully rational, if not necessarily fully-considered. The breadth of science long ago exceeded the ability of any human to grasp the whole of it in any great detail even if they spent every waking moment reading peer-reviewed journals. It that realm at least we’ve all had to become more or less comfortable with allowing specialists to do our thinking for us. I haven’t suffered noticeably from my lack of knowledge of how exactly my old VCR worked. I’ve even learned to live with the idea that I will probably never become much more familiar with Nietzsche than I am now, contingently trusting to my current impressions of the worth of his ideas.
But a problem remains: people widely value scientific analysis performed in their stead by others - they do like to have VCRs (or DVD players, these days) to use, after all - but they see less utility in the erudite squabbling of moral philosophers. There’s justice in this, of course. Those who chose to purchase a DVD player get the functionality they want without having to know almost anything about the machine’s articulation. Not so for moral philosophy. Even Christ’s words seem to need exegesis, judging by the number of clergies devoted to that pursuit, and Bentham’s hope that the masses could use his limericks as a tool to craft an expedient first-order approximation of moral rectitude in any situation was simply fantasy.
Another point of difference is the relative amounts of consensus. Scientists sweat details all the time and entire theoretical paradigms every now and again, but generally one can enough agreement on the big issues to satisfy moderate curiosity. Not so moral philosophy. It’s been said that while bad science advances the field less than good science, poor philosophy doesn’t yield any progress at all. Perhaps that explains why millennia and seemingly inexhaustible verbiage has not built many theoretical houses in which most philosophers are willing to live.
I am a little more optimistic, personally. Some areas of inquiry are just not very accessible without supporting understandings that may take a great deal of time coming. Before the identification of deoxyribonucleic acid, all attempts at a comprehensive account of heredity were hopelessly hamstrung. Not to say breeders and the like hadn’t achieved a level of true knowledge, but all explanatory depth was confined to the shallows. The subjects I mention above as examples of fields of which philosophers often fail to take account have all come of age only recently and I look forward to ethical philosophers expanding their intellectual toolkit so that they can make real headway into the deep issues.
At the same time, even if we do take leaps forward in moral theory, I doubt it will translate into a pushbutton moral certitude machine. I expect moral decision making will always be hard, uncertain work - not an answer people like to hear - but I do hope for a time when people can count on substantial and comprehensible help from philosophy in their quest to improve themselves and do the right thing.
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