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    Experiments in Ethics PDF

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    Experiments in Ethics KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH Hanvann Universiry Press Cambridge, Massachusetts + London, England Copyright © 2008 bythe President nd Fells of Haid College ‘Allright eserved Print nthe United States of Ameren “i hor ri ein ais bo Dr “Toying 0 Les fet appeared i Cori 2 (Fl 939-360, 2 sex mbshed inthe clon in Ne ea Sri (New Yo: Fra, Sr td ie 97 Pleo, 30), conga © a9 by La Dai “Tape Moment” speed in Se omen Int (New Yok MeSreeney aks 200 Prades 208 sopght © aoe by ya Dv Botha wre ped by ein of la sd of ur Srna Ginn LC. ‘Apith, Anon Experiments in ties /Kuame Antony Appi, peem—(The Mary Fleer eres) Trlr nde, ISBN: 570-60 harder atk ges) ISBN: 0-4-3609 hardcore) 1 Ethics. 1 Tie ‘arty 2007 evdas—see7or7ay ‘Tue Many Furxwen Lecruresiip was established at Bryn ‘Mawr College on February 22,1938, by Bernard Flexner, in honor of his sister, Mary Flexner, graduate of the College.'The income from the endowment is tobe used annually or at longer interval, athe discretion of the Directors ofthe Callege, as an honorasiumn fora distinguished American or foreign scholar in the field of the ‘humanities. The abject ofthe letureship isto bring to the College scholacs of distinction who will be & stimulus to the faculty and students and who will help to maintain the highest ideals and stan~ dards of learning. CONTENTS Prologue 1 Introduction: The Waterless Moat ‘The Case against Character ‘The Case against Intuition ‘The Varieties of Moral Experience ‘The Ends of Ethics ones 207 AcknowunDentENTs 259 snes 26 164 Prologue ‘This tite book is an attempt to relate the business of philoe sophical ethics, which is my professional bailiwik, to the work of scholars in a number of other fields and to the coneeras of the ordinary, thoughtful person, tying to live a decent life. ‘There are philosophers aplenty in these pages; but there ae, as ‘well, many other practitioners of what used to be called the ‘moral seiences—psychologists, economists, anthropologists, and. sociologists. The relevance ofthe socialsciences to our ordinary lives is ficty straightforward, Since what we should do depends on hhow the world is, our everyday decisions ean draw on knowl edge fom any sphere. eis less abvious that empirical research could have any bearing on our specifically moral judgments Yet ‘in making our choices we must sometimes start with a visio, however inchoate, of what it is fora human life to go well. That was one of Aristotle's central insights, It is my argument that ‘we should be free to avail ourselves of the resources of many disciplines to define that vision; and that in bringing them to- gether we are being fichful to along tradition, In the humani- ties think, we are always engaged in illuminating the present by drawing on the past; it is the only way to make « future worth hoping for. ‘The burden ofthe disciplinary genealogy with which I will begin is that “experimental philosophy” rather than being something new, is as old as the term “philosophy The com= rmonplace I want to challenge is that philosophy, in having re= linguished those inquiries that now belong to the physical and socialsciences, has somehow become more purely itself. The second chapter pursues a ease study in empirical moral psy chology—focusing, in particulae, on the challenge that so- called situationist research has posed to the revival of virtue ethics. The patative confrontation should I think help to shove what sand isn of value in “virtue.” Inthe thed chapter, Icon= sider more broadly the vexed status of intuition in moral phi losophy, focusing on the distinction berween explanations and reasons. The fourth chapter takes seriously the proposal that a certain aay of distinct “moral emotions” may bea deep fearore of human nature, and explores the concordances between our traditions of explicit moral reflection and these posted pritmi= tives In the last chapter, Pl be relating these inquiries tothe classical sense. (In the no project of ethics in its capaci youll find, in addition to source citations, some suggestions for ‘additional reading and the occasional ancillary argument or ob- servation. You may treat this endmater lke the “extras” on a DVD: please be assured, in other words, that you needs ever fip there if youre nots inclined) ‘The experiments of my ttle are in one sense, not mine. ‘Throughout the chapters that follow I touch upon a range of experimental work that seems to bear on our moral makeup. I o 80 asa philosopher, convinced that our discipline has a role to play in these discussions, and interested, 1 admit, in the philosopher's angle more than the psychologist’s or the econo- ‘mist’. Though T want the insights and the discoveries of other disciplines to be taken up in mine, I don't tink that, in taking them up, we philosophers are losing a distinctive voice. Philos- phy should be open to what it can learn from experiments it doesnt need to set up its own laboratories. ‘But I want to ask you to think of the whole book as exper- Jmental, in another sense, The stimulus for this book was the invitation to give the 2005 Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr, which allowed me to explore—in the tentative way that the ‘word “experimental” connotes—the significance of work that is very much ongoing for my own developing views about the values thet guide us. The result isin the nature ofa preliminary report from that laboratory of reflection; a report that is ad- dressed, asthe Flexner committee asks, to a nonspecialistaudi- ence ... to anyone, in fact, who is engaged in—or by—the “moral science.” Introduction: The Waterless Moat ‘The sry of history confirms the reasonings of trae philosophy. Davin Howe, A Tati of Homan Nate ‘The Partition At least since Homes, in the European tradition —but surely everywhere and everywhen in societies both oral and literate— ‘communities have fashioned themselves around stories of the past, chronicles that constitute “us” as Hellenes or Yorubas or Americans. Ths is, by now, a familiar ide, famously expressed sore than a century ago by Emest Renan in his essay "Quest ce qu'une nation?" (What Is a Nation?) It is not as often re marked thet the communities that engage in this practice are not just ethnic and national: one of my communities, the league ‘of Western philosophers, has constructed histories that reach bback two and a half millennia, assigning to the ancients the very problems we now claim to be working through ourselves THE WATERLESS MOAT “Forgetting, and I would even say historical error, is an es- sential element in the creation of a nation,” Renan noticed, rather more provocatively, and that i why the progress of his~ ‘orca studies soften a danger forthe nation itself His ob servation could just as easily have been made about disciplines: there isthe same likelihood of forgetting and historial error hee, too, Offering an account of the pas, in disciplinary histo ries a in ethnic and national ones is in part away of justifjing a contemporary practice. And once we have a stake in a prac tice, we sal be tempted to invent past that support it. Dis- ciplines ae shaped by what Kant once called the confit ofthe faculties—the struggle among the different traditions assoc ated with differene departments. And, in those confit, in~ ‘compatible stories re often told about how we got tobe where ‘we are If they are incompatible, one of them must be wrong. So ‘we can agree with Renan both that such confts are consitu- tive essential," as he says) and that the truth (the ‘progress of| bistocical studies") may be threatening ‘Wes often said that peychology has a short history and a long past. Might the opposite be tre of philosophy? In what follows J want to invert some common assumptions about the continu ity of my discipline. Philosophy is now typically defined by what it is not (psychology, physics, anthropology, et.), and if you want philosophers to engage more eagerly with practition- ers of other disciplines, t's helpful to see how newfangled that disciplinary self-conception rally i. What’ novel isnt the ex- perimental turn; what's novel was the turn away from it. Looking back at our putative ancestors with an attempt at historical objetvity, one is struck by how much of what Renan THE WATERLESS MOAT called “forgetting” the construction of a philoso has required. We have had to ignore so much of what they wrote, Plato and Aristotle had almost physiological theories about the nature of the soul and the nature of life, which jnvoked reason and various kinds of passions to explain the way people behave and more general ficulties shared between hhumans and other animals, to explain, say, the workings of the senses Is Descartes, whose “mechanical philosophy” aimed to ‘overturn Aristotelianism, our true forebear? Then you should wonder at how selectively most of us read him. Much of his at- tention, after ll, was devoted to geometry and optics, and for period, he was revered among scholar as, principally a sort of| sathernatical physicist. (The only reference to him you wil al most certainly know of if you dont do philosophy, i in talk of ‘the “Cartesian coordinates he pioneered.) He alzo spent time and energy dissecting cows and other animals. Only later was he cepositioned as, centrally a theorist of mind and knowledge, ‘whose primary concern had to do with the justification of be- lief. In his The Passions ofthe Soul (649), he discusses the way the “movements of the muscles, and likewise al sensations, de~ pend on the nerves, which are lke litle threads or tubes eom= ing from the brain and containing, ike the brain itself, certain very fine air or wind which is called the ‘animal spirits"? Descartes aimed to solve what we think of asthe canonically philosophical puzale about the relation between the sou! and the body by appeal to an empirical hypothesis about the brain: “On carefully examining the mater, think I have clearly es- tablished that the part ofthe body in which the soul directly ex- ————_—__—. THE WATERLESS MOAT excises its fnetions is... the innermost part of the brain, which isa certain very smal gland situated in the middle of the brain's substance and suspended above the passage through Which the spirits inthe brains anterior cavities communicate with those in its posterior cavities”? That “very small” gland (the pineal, which sits near the hypothalamus) is not an inci= dent of the theory. Without it, Descartes has no story of how mind and body are functionally integrated. “The true philosophy” Robert Hooke weote in his Micro= _srapbia (0665), is*to begin withthe Hands and Eyes, and to pro- ceed on through the Memory, to be continucd by the Reason; nor is it to stop there, but to cme abou to the Hands and Eyes again, and so, by a continual passage round from one Faculty to another, itis to be maintained in life and strength as much as the body of man is by the cirularon ofthe blood through the several parts of the body, the Arms, the Feet, the Lungs, the ‘Heart, and the Head." Ie’ a lovely image—but he was simply describing what he took to be the bass of any sound learning ‘The term “philosophy” hewed to the cuticular contours of the ‘medieval university, in which it was » general designation for systematic knowledge, typically subdivided into the natural, ‘moral, and metaphysical (the last—in the scholastic mode— being largely confined to typologies of substance and accidents, form and matter) 1 dontt want to overstate the case: before the dscpls rise of modem philosophy, one can readily trace distinetions— between, say, reason and experience, speculation and experi- _ment—that seem cognate to our way of organizing knowledge ‘When Thomas Hobbes denied that Robert Boyle's air-pump THE WATERLESS MOAT research deserved the name "philosophy," one element of his brief was the intrinsic superiority of demonstrative findings (a 4a Euclid) to experimental findings. But another was simply that the pump was leaky’ Descartes gives us hope when he refers to “frst philosophy,” and he famously maintained that “all philosophy slike a tree, of which the roots are metaphysics, the trunkis physics, and the branches, which grow from this trunk, are all of the other sciences, which is to say medicine, mechan- ics, and morals." Yet even here, we ean see that his taxonomy isnt quite ours: morals, tous a division of philosophy, is to him & practical endeavor on a par with medicine, Margaret Caven- dish, early in her Observations upon Experimental Philosphy (2668), urged that “the experimental part of philosophy” was not to be “prefered before the speculative,” for “most experi- ments have their rise from the speculative, so the artist or me- chanic is but a servant to the student.” Still, i's significant that, at che time, there were virally no thinkers who confined themselves tothe realm of unsulied abstraction; Cavendish, in Inter chapters of her Observations, went on to offer opinions about how wood got petrfed and whether snails have blood, John Locke's inquiries into the origins of ideas involved con- sideration of facts about savages and children, By the eighteenth century, the growing prestige of experi mentation was apparent everywhere, The encyclopedist Jean DiAlembert praised Locke fr reducing metaphysics to what it should be: “la physique expérimentale de l'ime"—the experi- rental science of the spirit And Hume subtitled his great ‘Treative of Human Nature as we do not sufficiently often recall Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Rea- THE WATERLESS MOAT soning into Moral Subjects. The point isnot just tha the canon ical philosophers belong as much tothe history of what we now call psychology as to the genealogy of philosophy. I is that their “metaphysical” and their psychological claims are, insofar 425 we insist on distinguishing them, profoundly interdepen- dent. Their proper place as ancestors of both modern disci- plines is reflected inthe fact that many ofthe claims they make about the mind—inchuding those claims that are thought to be ‘of current philosophical relevance—are founded in empitical observation, even if they are not often founded in experiment. ‘They depend on stories about the actual doings of actual people, on claims about how humanity atuallyis. Hume's Hi tory of England—fve volumes of empirical information, ele~ ‘gantly organized—has rightly been seen as expressing ideas about morality and politics and psychology. For him, it was an extension of the project of a work like the Enguiry concerning Human Undetanding, where, in a farnous footnote, Hume identified and rebutted an emerging tendency: NOTHING is more usual than for writers, even, on moral, political, ox physical subjects, to distinguish between reaen and experience, and to suppose, that these species of ar~ gumentation are entirely differen from each other. The former ate taken for the mere result of our intellectual faculties, which, by considering a priori the nature of ‘things... establish particular principles of science and phi- losophy. The later ae supposed robe derived entirely from sense and observation, by which we lean what has actually resulted from the operation of particular objects. 10 THE WATERLESS MOAT But norwithstanding that this distinction be thus uni- versally received, bth inthe active and speculative scenes ‘of life I shall not scruple to pronounce, that tis, at bot~ tom, erroncous, at least, superficial... It is experience which is ultimately the foundation of our inference and conclusion’ ‘A case has been made that the modern conception of the discipline is presaged in the epistemological preoccupations of ‘Thomas Reid and Immanuel Kant. But Reid himself was em- phatic in his suspicion of mere conjecture. Every eal discovery, he say, is arsived at by “patient observation, by accurate exper- iments, or by conclusions drawn by strict reasoning fiom obser- vation and experiments, and such discoveries have always tended to refute, but not to confirm, the theories and hypothe ses which ingenious men had invented." Ie is anything but historically anomalous that Kant, to whom we owe the analytic-syntherc distinction, worked avidly ‘on both sides of the putative divide. The founder of “ritical Philosophy” elaborated theories ofthe winds and ofthe earths rotation, and dispensed advice about the taining ofthe young (games with balls are among the best for children’); the author OFA Critigue of Pare Reason was also the author of Concerning the Voleanoes on the Moon Kant possessed the resources fora ‘conceptual partition between what we think of as philosophy and psychology, but not those for a vocational partition One artifact of philosophy’ striking modemity—it is ‘most too obvious to remark—is that twentith-century ref= ference books almost invariably give pre-twentieth-century THe WATERLESS MOAT philosophers compound designations: this person is a philoso~ pher and mathematician, chat a philosopher and Titérateur, the other a philosopher and political economist, The tail 1g con junction signals the shrunken disciplinary rump state to which wwe have retreated. To retrace the old boundaries, we might give particular attention to books that call themselves histories of philosophy, because, as Renan would have expected, the con tours of the discipline are shaped by such narratives. In this sens, the history of philosophy isthe history of its histories. ‘Thomas Stanley's Hitory of Pilsopy (is four volumes, pub= lished in the 16308 and 1660s, “containing those on whom the autribute of Wise was conferred”) focused entire baric" and classical figures; Jacob Brucker's Hisriea Critica Philosophiae, from the 7408, included, in its survey of modern philosophers, the natural philosophy of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and so on. Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy (published in 132, a year after his death) contained the now-commonplace distinction berween rationalism and empiricism, but placed Locke together with Descartes in the firstcamp. And though Hegel chastisee| Newron for his dictum “Physics, beware of metaphysics.” it was in part because he thought that this led to bad science: did, Newton derived his conclusions from his experiences; and fon “bar= garding matters as he in physics and the theory of color-vision, he made bad observa tions and drew worse conclusions... . A miserable kind of ex- perience like this itself contradicts itself through nature, for nature is more excellent than it appears in this wretched expe rience: both nature itself and experience, when carried a litte farthes, contradict it, Hence, ofall the splendid discoveries of THE WATERLESS MOAT Neuron in optic, none now remain excepting one—the dlvi- sion of light into seven colours." (The point is not that Hege! is ight, here: itis that these remarks reveal his sense of disc plinary geography.) Even through much ofthe nineteenth cen- tury, by which time physics was a well-defined separate profession, you could routinely replace the term “philosophy” with ‘philosophy and psychology” without lots of precision, About a decade after Hegel’ Lectures appeared, and about the same time that George Henry Lewes was publishing his immensely popular Bizgrapbical History of Pilsophy, Charles Dickens was publishing his novel Martin Czzewit and tak- ing gleeful notice of the ways of sel improving Americans: “What course of lecrares are you attending now, malar?" said Martin’ friend, taing again to Mrs. Brick, “The Philosophy ofthe Soul, on Wednesdays." "On Mondays?” "The Philosophy of Crime,” ‘On Fridays?" “The Philosophy of Vegetables.” ‘The novelist knew that the term ‘philosophy” breathed up- lift, whatever its purview (which he only slightly exaggerated). ‘The historical ambit of the noun, plainly, is no more a guide to its current disciplinary contours than the Macedonian empire is to the present-day republic of Macedonia. You would have had a dificult time explaining to most of the canonical philoso- pphers that ris part of their work was ely philosophy and shat part of ther work was not. Trying to separate out the *meta- 3 physical” from the ‘psychologiea!” elements in this corpus is like tying to peel a raspberry Psychologism and Anti-Psychologism Did psychology calve off from philosophy? You ean make & strong case that it was the other way around. Hobbes, Locke, and Hume spent a great del of energy elaborating an account of associationist psychology, in order to explain how faculties of the human mind processed sensations and ideas for John Stu art Mill logic was “not a Science distnet from, and co-ordinate with, Psychology. So far as it isa sconce at all itis a part, or ‘branch, of Psychology. Ie was a a professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig that Wilhelm Wundt established the first institute for experimental psychology, in 879. (He aimed in pac to prove Kantian ideas, and disprove Kantian skepticism bout the methods by which he did so.) And the psychology labs at Harvard are in William James Hall because its inhabi- tants rightly think of James (who migrated from Harvard's Physiology Department to its Philosophy Department in 1881) «as one oftheir ancestors, just as we contemporary philosophers claim him for ourselves. Hs colleague Josiah Royce was elected president of the American Paychological Association in 1902, and president of the American Philosophical Association in 1903. The common lineage is visible inthe history of our pro= fessional journals too. The quarterly Mind has long been considered a premier journal of philosophy, and is one of the oldest; but when it was founded, in 1878, and for a couple of decades afterward, it just as often published articles we would “4 THe WATERLESS MOAT ‘now consider to be psychology. Even in the years following the rise of experimental psychology, a habit of intimacy was pre- sumed. The Journal of Philseply was founded, in 1904, a the Journal of Piles, Pycbology, and Scientific Methods. This was, it might be worth underlining, litle mote than a century ago. {es signiican, then, thatthe two great founding figures of twentieth-century philosophy, Edmund Husset| and Gottiob Frege, were marked by their vehement anti-psychologism. (If you want to adjust the story for modem Continental philosophy, demote Frege and promote Heidegger) In an often-repeated formula, a pupil of Wundt’, Theodor Lippe, had proposed that Joie was “nothing if not the physics of thought"—and that was the grievous error that subsequent generations of theorists sought to stamp out. For Frege, even “the thought,” der Gedanke, ‘wasalt a mental event, but an abstract object. To have thoughts without thinkers it hard to get more anti-psychological than that! Philosophy was struggling to define itself, crucially, by contrast with psychology" That took time. Experimentalists and pure speculators coexisted in Harvard's Philosophy De- ‘partment until the mid-r930s, and, give or take a few years, you find a similar pattern at other universities. I was educated at (Cambridge University, where the degree in philosophy had not long before been called the Moral Sciences Tripos, and experi- mental psychology was still one ofthe fields in which you could choose to be examined for that degree. To see when entities that weld recognize as philosophy departments came into exis tence, look to see when psychology departments came into existence. Mach the same point could be made, of course about the 6 THE WATERLESS MOAT distinction between economies and moral philosophy. Adam Smith, whom many economists regard as among the founding fathers oftheir discipline, is also one ofthe major moral theo~ rists ofthe Scottish Enlightenment. Everybody knows this. But John Stuart Mill, who was the greatest of the British moral philosophers of the nineteenth century (with the possible ex- ception of Henry Sidgwick) was also the author of a founda~ tional work in classical economics, he Principle of Political Economy. Indeed, it can be argued that Mill was the fist per= son to use the idea of “economic man,” the rational wealth- rmaximizer—a central explanatory ideal type in almost all of ‘what we now call economic theory John Maynard Keynes, who revolutionized economies in the first half ofthe twentieth cen= tury, wrote 4 Treativeon Probability, which is one of the leading philosophical treatments of the concept. And his friend and contemporary Frank Ramsey one of the most influential (if not ‘one of the best known) philosophers ofthat century, invented ‘the modern foundations of formal decision theory, which un- derlies almost all ewentith-century attempts atx unified and general mathematical account of human economic behavior. Ramsey, we philosophers say, was a philosopher: but the Ram= sey Chair at Cambridge is quite plausibly ocupied by the dis tinguished economist Sie Parcha Dasgupta. Economists have developed increasingly sophisticated methods of taming the massive torrents of statistics generated in the modern world and discovering orderly pattems within then; and, more re= cently they too have turned away from the a priori psychologi~ cal theories of rational behavior in the marker toward a more realistic understanding of the mind that draws on the work of THE WATERLESS Moar modern experimental psychology. The dismal science has ‘turned its attention to behavioral economics, even to neuzoeco- nomics, sit continues to try to understand the patterns of hu rman social life, In bringing the empirical entanglements of canonical philosophers back into view, Iam only doing what I said we al ways do, Iam crafting a genealogy that supports a conception of the subject to which I am sympathetic. In deciding what story to tell of philosophy’s pas, those who were convinced of ‘the importance ofthe distance between philosophy and the hu- ‘man sciences picked their way through the past accordingly: as Jay, they have tended to skirt things lke Aristotle's careful re- port of the dissection of an octopus, oF Descartes interest in ‘optics and meteorology, or Hume's account of history as “so ‘many collections of experiments,” or Mills vast accumulation of data in the development of his arguments about economic theory.” Experimental facts may illustrate philosophical truths, inthis view, but they arent usually evidence for them. When ‘modern philosophers, whether analytic or Continental, need a ‘tory, what usually matters isnt whether it is true but whether it «ould be true. And the “could here is a logical o metaphysical “coule,” not a peychological o historical one. So what was this philosophy, disembarrasted ofthe experi smentalists? Qu/estce quun philesophe? In the high heyday of an~ alytic philosophy—the decades before and afier the Second ‘World War—the answer went lke this. Philosophy is now what the best philosophy has always been: eonceptual analysis. Ths i 4 matter of elucidating concepts or exploring meanings, But meanings are what speakers know in understanding a language, ” 0 any speaker ofa language knows alread, withovt looking be- yond hee own linguist competence, what she needs to know to do the analysis. Philosophical claims—that knowledge is justi~ fied true belief, say—are true (jftrue) in virtue of the meanings of the words they contain. They are what Kant had dubbed “an- lytic” sruths, where, as he put it, the predicate is “contained, (chough covertly" within the concept ofthe subject. This way of doing philosophy presupposed «certain theory of meaning. “Conceptual analysis” was the examination of important concepts, most of them familiar from the earlier history of phi- Josophy, among them: knowledge, existence, truth, time, mean= ing, mind, and body, and, with pechaps slightly less urgency, such normative concepts as good, right, beauty, freedom, and justice. These concepts were explored in an essentially a priori ‘way. You didn’t do experiments or even usually attend very uch to the details of the actual world. And if you did think about experiments, you thought not about how they turned out but about what you should sayif they turned out one way or a= other. You considered, then, not how things are but how we think about them, more or less however they are; and the only access you really had to how we ¢bink was to notice some of the patterns in what we say (or dont say). "Though the “we” here was meant robe all those who had a native-speaker’s grasp of the language, the actual conversations ‘were naturally discussions among philosophers. W. H. Auden once wrote: ‘Oxbridge philosophers, to be cursory, ‘Are products ofa middle-class nursery: 18 THE WATERLESS MOAT ‘Their arguments are anent ‘What Nanny really meant. Now, Auden, like most poets, had « wonderful ear for other people’ language; so what he had in mind, no doubt, was the seund of philosophers at Oxford, when he was Professor of Po- ety therefrom 1956 to 1961. And, though comic verse does not ‘spire tobe either accurate oF fir, he had a point. “Suppose I dd say ‘the cat is on the mat” when its not the case that I be~ liewe thatthe cat ison the mat, what should we say?” asked J. L. Austin, one of Aude leading philosophical contemporaries in the Oxford of those years, in his William James Lectures, given at Harvard in 1935. “What is to be said of the statement that ‘Jobnis children are all bald if made when John has no chi dren?” For Austin, "What i to be said?” was not an invitation to collet ethnographic data about how a given population of Persons might make sense ofthese statements. It would have been a diversion because the answer was supposed to be obvi- fous. What a person knows in knowing her language, in know- ing English, say, is what everyone competent should say in a certain situation; and so, being competent myself, know what everyone else tould say if they were competent. That is why it ‘wouldnt matter if we found individuals who didn’ say i: it ‘would just show that they werent competent. In section a: of the Philsepbical Investigation—not in Oxford but over in Cam- bridge, the other branch of Auden’s Oxbridge—Wittgenstein “We do in fact call ‘Isnt the weather glorious to-day? a question, although itis used as a statement.” Until recently, philosophers in my tradition would have thought it imperti- 9 We WATERLESS MOAT nent toaskowho the" we"ishere,and pointes ogo out and in ‘gie of people in the acct whether someone whe said these words was rally asking a question Philosophy, in the modem sense of the term, had finaly ined an institutional erie all wo tse Unfoceaately for this happy eonsensus, however, by the early 1960s the theory of meaning on which twas based had been subjected to sustained assault by leading exponents of the analytic tradition itself ost influential inthe work of W. V. O. Quine, who per~ suaded many people thatthe dea ofan analytic trth, che idea that sentence could be tre in viene solely ofthe meanings of the words it contained, was mistaken. Belen analyticty was, {Quine argued, one of the “dogeas of empiricism’ episteral- cogysin his view, simply flint place as chapter of psychol- ogy and hence of natural science ‘Antipsychologism, which enabled philosophers to hive themselves off fiom other disciplines, i now just one position in philosophy among others. The Great Partition succeeded as an institutional project, but faltered as an intellectual one, The (Oxford philosopher Michae! Dummett has written that certain cetors of Frege and Huser “have left philosophy open toa re- newed incursion ftom psychology, under the banner of cog tive science’ The strategies of defense employed by Husser] and Frege willno longer serve: the invaders canbe repelled only by correcting the flings ofthe positive theories of those two pioneers" Lower the porteuiis! The belicosethetori, albeit tongue-in-cheek, suggests a genuine measure of unease, but no such strategy for repelling the marauders has gained wide- pychologiam is new perfectly spread acceptance, Anti-anti- 20 mainstream, Indeed, philosophers of mind have, for decades, ‘been working closely with their peers in psychology and pey- cholinguisties; there has been an effor to ground the philoso phy of language, too, in naturalistic theories of the mind (an effort ta which my frst ewo books belong); and evolutionary models have become commonplace in areas of philosophical inquiry ranging from political theory to the theory of knowl ‘edge. Philosophy, after Quine, remains in the peculir situation ‘of having surrounded itself with a moat—only to have drained it of water ‘Moral and Nonmoral ‘One might suppose that atleast when it comes to moral inquiry, philosophy shouldbe impervious tothe Cavalry of the Contin~ sent. One reason for philosophical skepticism about the rele= vance of empirical moral psychology is a conviction, which is usualy raced to Westem intellectual traditions flowing from the Enlightenment, of the deep metaphysical and epistemological significance of a distinction between fats and norms. We re- member Hume remark that the step fom “sr "ought" is “of the lst consequence meaning “ofthe utmost importance.” YYet Hume himself never supposed that a disjunction be- tweens" and “ought” wasa reason to recoil from evidence and operiment. “Tis 90 astonishing reflection to consider, that the application of experimental philosophy to moral subjects should come after that ro nat Hume wrote in his Treatise of Human Nature "ort ve it seems evident, that the essence of the mind being equally unknown to us with that of external 2 {THE WATERLESS MOAT bodies it must be equally impossible to form any notion ofits powers and qualities otherwise than ftom carefil and exact ex- periments, and the observation of those particular effects, ‘which result from is different circumstances and situations."= 'Now, many philosophers these days ae inclined to think that moral judgments have the same objectivity and “truth= aptness” as nonmoral ones to them, an “ought” isan “is,” and the fallacy was to have supposed otherwise. For our purposes in this book, it wont mach matter what postion you take on this issus; so lt me simply sidestep it for the moment, Even if you couldnt derive an “ought” from an “is” fats would sil be rel= evant to moral life. Morality is practical. In the end itis about ‘What todo and what to fel; how to respond to our own and the ‘world’s demands. And to apply norms, we must understand the empirical contexts in which we are applying them. No one de- nies that, in applying norms, you wil need to know what, 26 empirical mater, the effects of what you do will be on others. ‘An opponent who denied that would bea straw man. Bur there are real opponents who deny that psychology can be relevant to the question of what values we ought to be guided by and what sorts of people we should aim to be. To such opponents, one can reasonably put such questions as these What would be the point of norms that human beings were psychologically incapable of obeying? Afterall, normative re- fection suggests, in a philosopher's form, that “ought” im- plies ‘can.” (Which means: if you say somebody ough? t0 do something, you must be supposing that itis something they can do.) And even ifimpossible norms had some sot of idea Force, how should we actual humans respond tothern? If moral phi= n IE SISESSSIZ THe WATERLESS MOAT Josophy is to connect with moral life—if it i not tobe, in the pejorative sense, “merely theoretical it must attend, in artic~ ating and defending norms, to how they can come to bear in actual lives. When Hume set out, in his Enquiry, to make the ideas of his Treatise more widely available, he began by distin- gushing two sorts of moral philosopher. One sort, he ssid, sakes “us eel the difference between vice and virtue, they ex- cite and regulate our sentiments’ and, he goes on, so long as “they can but bend our hearts to the love of probity and true hhonous, they think that they have filly attained the end ofall ‘heir bouts." The others “egard human nature asa subject of speculation; and with «narrow scrutiny examine in order to find those principles, which regulate our understanding, excite four sentiments, and make us approve of blame any particular objec, action, or behaviour Bur iis hard to see how we ean pursue the first project (of moral exhortation and reform) if ‘what we learn in the second (speculative) projec suggests that our recommendations are hopelessly unealistc. At the very least, then, we would owe the psychologists « hearing in our moral lives, even ifthere were a kind of speculative philosophy that could ignore them. As Hume once wrote in a leter: “I found thatthe moral philosophy transmitted tous by Antiq- uty, laboured under the same inconvenience that has been found in their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypotheti- cal, and depending upon more invention than experience, Every one consulted his fancy in erecting schemes of virtue and ‘of happiness, without regarding human nature, upon which every moral eonelusion must depend." This complaint is more fairly made against the moral phi- 2 Josophy ofthe late twentieth century than it was against Aris totle. (Aristotle afterall, had read his Herodotus, and knew, like Dionysius, alter son of Haticarnassus that history is phi- losophy taken from examples.) Ifwe ae in Aristotle's founding formula, to consider “what the good life is and how to get it,” ‘what we are cannot be irelevant to what we should be. In the past half-century, moreover, we have been treated to no shortage of arguments for how factual-sounding propositions might yield normative- or evauative-souneding propositions (as wel as arguinents against those arguments) Alasdair Machntyre, ina paper from the late r9sos argued that Hume himself in his account of justice, derives an “ought” from an “is.” Hume's posi MacIntyre’ rendering, is:"We ought to obey the rules [of justice], because there is no one who doeset gain more than he loses by such obedience.” And the claim that we ought to do ‘what’ in everyone's long-term interest sit an evaluation, but a definition, « necessary truth that underlies morality In this ac= count, the reason Hume wanted us to be alert when moving from “iso "ought" was that we should be on guard against the insin= uations of religious morality a foundation he sought to replace with one based on human flourishing. ** ‘Other arguments draw on the ways in which our langage ‘works—the rules and institutions that undergird the terms we use, Philippa Foot, also in th late fifties, noted that “ruce"—an evaluative term, expressive of disapproval—was correctly used of behavior that “causes offense by indicating luck of respect.” Assuming that you're willing to discuss the issue of rudeness, ‘then, accepting the (nonevaluative) proposition that those con= ditions were met requires that you accept the (evaluative) 24 THE WATERLESS MOAT Proposition that the behavior was rude. “Anyone who uses ‘moral terms a all, whether to assert or deny a moral proposi- tion, must abide by the rules for their use, including the rules about what shall count as evidence for or against the moral judgment concerned,” she concluded” A few years later, John Searle offered another argument enlisting the ways that norms and institutions were built into our language. If Jones tells Smith, “I promise to pay you five dollars,” he has (ceteris paribus) taken on the obligation to do so, and the conclusion follows, furly swiftly, that Jones ought to do so: In a later chapter ll retun to the significance ofthe fact that moral lan- sage, indeed, language—something public, social, and open for inspection. Bur now let me toss up another argument—one whose form I have an idea I learned in college long ago. Tts conclusion is that you must be able to derive a mora claim from a non- ‘moral one at least if you grant two plausible assumptions. This argument has the rhetorical virtue of being cast in exactly the abstract style of those defenders of a pure conceptual analysis whom it aims to convert ‘Here are those two modest-looking assumptions. Assump- tion 1 is that every claim is eitber moral or nonmoral. Assurnp~ tion 2 is that jf claim is nommorl, then its denial is nonmoral, ton. Once you grant these two assumptions and some very clementary logic, you can show that it must be possible to derive a moral claim from nonmoral ones. Here's how. ‘Take a moral claim, ‘John is a good man’; and a nonmoral claim, “Mary hates John.” Imagine that Mary has announced that she hates people who aren't good and knows a great deal 25 about Joha. In those circumstances you might find yourselé saying A: Either Jobn is a good man or Mary bates Joba ‘From Assumption 1, it follows that A most make either a ‘moral or 2 nonmoral claim. Since this way of parceling things ‘out isnt one that I have much sympathy with, I don’t have an inkling which it wil be. But fortunately, in philosophy, you can sometimes get the conclusion you want without setling a dis- puted question. Because sometimes you can show thatthe con= clusion follows whichever way you settle the question. So let's explore the two options. (This is called “arguing by dilemma.”) Suppose, fis, that A is nonmoral. Notice that by Assump- tion 2, if “Mary hates John’ is nonmoral, so is “Mary doesnit hate John." That's plausible enough anyway. Now consider the following argoment: A: Either Job ia good manor Mary bates ebm Mary doen bate Job. Ser Jobn isa god man ‘This form of argument is valid by a very, very elementary prin= ciple of sentential deductive logic (namely, dgunctive yl _gimm), Since we're exploring the situation on the assumption that Ais nonmora, and “John is a good man” was stipulated, by contest, to be moral, we have just deduced a moral claim from ‘wo nonmoral ones. ‘You might suspect this problem isthe result of our having suppoted that A is nonmoral. So, suppose, instead, that A is 26 EERE Eee eee eee eee ee Eee eee eee eee eee eee eee aaa THE WATERLESS MOAT ‘moral. Then we can derive a moral truth ffom a nonmoral one as well, and this is much quicker. Because this time relying on an equally elementary logical principle (namely, addition), Mary bates Job So: Bither Job isa good man or Mary hates Jobn isa valid argument; and “Mary hates Joh was, by siplation, not moral dont expect you to take this argument all that seriously. Tt has more than a whif of sophistry about it. Notice just to sug- est one way to begin undermining its appeal, that isnot clear you could actualy ger to that moral conclusion by the fist route, because to have reason to believe one premise, A, you'd probably have to have either good evidence that Mary hated John or good evidence that John was a good man, Now we can ange, as befor, by dilemma, Suppose you believed A because you had good evidence ‘hat Mary hates John; then, ifyou came to believe that she did ‘not hate him, youd lose your reason to believe A, and so you ‘would no longer have the frst premise to rely on, Now suppose you believed it because you had good evidence that John was 2 ‘good man. Then, in some obvious sene, your belie in the truth ‘of A would be (let's say) “grounded” in a moral claim. And this suggests that you cant tell whether a sentence makes a moral claim simply by looking at the sentence itself. Whether we want to say that it makes a moral chim or not may depend on your grounds fr believing it So, I sy, 1 dont urge you to take this argument very se- Fiously—though, as with many apparent sophisms, we may 2” THE WATERLESS MOAT learn a fair amount by disentangling it. What it does suggest, at the very least, is that itis entirely clear what we mean when ‘we say that you cant derive a moral claim from nonmoral ones, ‘And until we understand the claim, 1 think we are justified in not allowing anyone to rely on it too heavily The Psychology of Virtwe ‘Weiting in 196, when the Great Partition was tle more than 8 couple of decades old, Richard Wollheim ventured, “It is very marked feature ofthe moral philosophy’ of the recent past that it has sedulously separated questions of philosophy from «questions of psychology. This has been a very important thing to do, and has resulted in the careful distinction of differences traditionally obscured, But now thatthe differences have been firmly noted, it may well be the task of the moral philosophy of the immediate farure no longer to hold apart the two aspects of hurnan nature so distinguished. Moral philosophy, in other words, may revert fom the tradition of Kant to that of Aristotle and Hume.” ‘The tradition Woltheim was invoking has come to be vived under the rubric*virtue ethics” and his call echoed one of the most influential papers in postwar Anglophone ethics, Bizabeth Anscombe's “Modern Moral Philosophy,” which some have suggested was largely responsible for the resurgence ofthis approach. Anscombe argued that “itis not profitable for us at present”—the date was 1958—"to do moral philosophy: that should be lid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology; in which we are conspicuously lack= 8 ing: She went on to make a series of apparently devastating at- tacks on moral philosophers “from Butler to Mill.” OF Joseph Butler (1692-1752), the English divine who taught that con- science was the leading faculty ofthe human mindy, she wrote: he “appears ignorant that a mans conscience may tell him to do the vilest things.” About Kant (1724-1804), she complained that he “introduces the idea of legislating for oneself which is as b- sur as iin these days, when majority votes command great re~ spect, one were to call each reflective decision 2 man made a wore resulting in a majority, which asa matter of proportion is over- whelming, because it is always 1-0.” The rule utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was “stupid, because it is nota all clear how an action can fll under just one principle of utility.” Henry Sidgwick (2838-1900), that great Vietorian sage, was “rather dull” and even “vulgar” And, in general, Anscombe's ‘own contemporaries were lost in the shadows east by what she called a *lawo conception of ethics," which explains what it is right to do by appeal toa divine law. (You should not think that this diagnosis reflected any hostility to theism on Anscombe’s part: she was an active and devout Roman Catholic.) Modern ‘moral philosophers spoke of a special moral sense of the word “ought,” but they had forgotten that the identification of this spocial sense presupposed the law conception, Anscombe eis as if the notion “riminal” were to remain when crim- inal law and criminal courts had been abolished and for= gotten. A Hume discovering this situation might conclude that there was a special sentiment, expressed by “rimina,” 29 THE WATERLESS MOAT which alone gave the word sense. So Hume discovered the situation in which the notion “obligation” survived, and che word “ought” was invested with that peculiar force having which itis said to be used ina “moral” sense, bu in which the belief in divine law had long since been abandoned.” In the course ofthis slashing indictment, Anscombe threw. ‘out the suggestion tha, rather than pursuing ethics in the way. that had led to these various intellectual dsssters, we should in- stead get back to basics, investigating, frst, such notions as “action, “intention, ‘pleasure, wanting.” Anscombe was here preaching what she had already practice: the previous yea she hhad published her own book Jnfemion, which Donald David= son described (on the cover) as “the most important treatment” its subject had received since Aristotle. (A plausible commen dation, if you set aside Saint Thomas Aquinas.) “Eventually.” Anscombe wrote in er sketch ofa possible future, *t might be possible to advance to considering the concept of a virtue; with ‘which, I suppose, we should be beginning some sort of study of thins Tn the course of the essay, Anscombe made various approving noises about Aristotle—though even he did not escape tongue-lahing: she observed, early on, that the concept of pleasure was a “dffcul” concept that had “reduced. Asistotle to sheer babble about ‘the bloom on the check of youth."®2Tn the years that followed, both Anscombe’ enthusi- asm for Aristotle and her recommendation that we could return to moral philosophy by way of a psychology of virtue were taken up by a new generation of philosophers. (We can be 30 satel, perhaps, that they did not all share her caustic turn of phrase.) The enthusiasm ofthe new moral philosophy was for a psychology conceived, as Anscombe had suggested, in terms of an exploration of the concep of virtue; virtue, in the spirit of those times, was to be scrutinized by conceptual analysis. Nearly half a century later, there are now many explorations of such virtues as honesty, courage, and compassion. These are thought of as psychological dispositions. And, in recent years, such char- acter-based theories have invited empirical scrutiny. They seem. to incorporate—or at least to presuppose—psychological claims. ‘Are those claims true? In Chapter 2, Tl take the new virtue ethics as an opening case study in our post-post-psychologial philosophy. Having abandoned the dogmas of empiricism, Quine had said, we would see ‘a blurring of the supposed boundary between specu lative metaphysics and natural science.” Ina later papes,“Epis- temology Naturalized,” Quine went on to propose that the theory of knowledge abandon its normative aspirations and be- come “contained in natural science,” even as he acknowledged that there would bea “reciprocal containment, chough contain- ‘ment in different senses: epistemology in natural science and natural science in epistemology” The prospects—indeed, the meaning—of what Quine had in mind continue to be debated, but it has become abundantly clear that moral philosophy, in which normativty is « central concer, hes not been exempt from such reciprocal containments. The Great Partition granted the pure analyst «reprieve—but only a temporary one. ‘And so my project in these pages isin part, to engage those who are working today to bring economics, psychology and phi- aes 31 The wateatess Moar Josophy back together—who sek, in a sense, to reconstitute the “moral sciences.” Over the past couple of decades, growing ‘number of philosophers have not confined themselves to“what Nanny really meant.” Many seckto learn what Nanny. ora given population of nannies, would actualy ay, under specified con- ns, Others, as we'll sce, are busy stuffing nannies into MRU. machines in order to study pattems of neural activation while the nannies contemplate various moral conundrums. These re= search methods—for which the centuries-old designation "ex- perimental philosophy" has boon revived-—can sometimes seem, rather remote from our accustomed habits, as if they're an at- ‘tempt to return the philosopher’ stone to philosophy. ‘The “new philosophy callsall in doubr,"John Donne wrote of the post-Galilean era; and the newer philosophy, too, gener ates questions more readily than answers. What happens when ‘moral theory is called before the tribunal of psychology—when fact interrogates value? Will the blurring of boundaries advance the aims of ethies or lead to its eclipse? There ate many such questions, but they funnel into one. Can moral philosophy be naturalized? 32 The Case against Character Les circonstancs sont bien pew de chose le erate est tour; est en van qu'on brie ave les abet et es es «extrieurs; on ne saurat brser avec soi-méene, (Circumstances doa' amount to mech, character is eveny- thing: there’ n pine breaking with exterior object and ‘things; you cannot beak with yourself) Bryans Consranr, Ape ‘The Virtue Revival Lyaia Davis, the fiction writes, once published a short story entitled, significantly, “Trying to Learn’—and if you know her work, you won't be surprised to learn that it's a very short story indeed, Here's how it goes, in its entirety ‘Tam trying to learn tht tis playful man who teases me is the same as chat serious man talking money to me so seri= ‘ously he does not even see me anymore and that patient ‘man offering me advice in times of trouble and that angry 2B THE CASE AGAINST CHARACTER ‘man slamming the door ashe Teaves the house. I have of ten wanted the playfil man to be more serous, and the serious man tobe less serious, and the patient man to be more playful As forthe angry’ san, he isa stranger to me and I do not fel i is wrong vo hate hima. Now Iam learn ing that if say bitter words tothe ang the house, amat the same time wounding the others, the man ashe leaves ‘ones I do not want to wound, the playful man teasing, the serious man talking money, and the patient man offering advice. Yet I look at the patent man, fr instance, whom 1 ‘would want above all to protect from such bitter words as mine, and though I tell myself he isthe same man as the ‘others, I can only believe I ssid those words, ot to him, but to another, my enemy, who deserved all my anger! ‘That’ the story. It also the story, more or less, ofa grow= ing body of research in the social sciences: we have met that ‘man, many social scientists say, and he iss. In this chapter, then, Tike ro focus on the seeming clash between tw differ= ent pictures of character and conduct: the picture that scems to underlie much virtue ethics, on the one hand, and the picture that has emerged from work in experimental psychology, on. the other, ‘What does the first picture look like? The power core of vireue ethics isthe idea ofthe virtuous person. virtuous acts fone that a virtuous person would do, done for the reasons a virtuous person would do it. Character is primary; virtues are more than simple dispositions to do the right thing, Those who draw on Aristotl’s ideas are likely to stress, with Rosalind a4 THE CASE AGAINST CHARACTER Hursthouse, author of a recent book entitled On Virtue Bic thatthe dispositions in question are deep, stable, and enmeshed in yet other traits and dispositions. The character trait of hon esty, for instance, is “a disposition which is well entrenched in its possessor, something that, as we say, ‘goes all the way down,” and “far from being a single track disposition to do honest actions, or even honest actions for certain reasons, it is multi-track.” For the disposition “is concerned with many other actions as wel, with emotions and emotional reactions, choices, values, desires, perceptions, attitudes, interests, expectations and sensibilities. To possess a virtue is to be a certain sort of person with a certain complex mindset”? How complex? Well, Hursthouse explains, an honest per- son “chooses, where possible, o work with honest people, to hhave honest fiends, to bring up her children to be honest. She

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