De Officiis by Cicero

For while the orations exhibit a more vigorous style, yet the unimpassioned, restrained style of my philosophical productions is also worth cultivating.

Now I know exactly what I am! I always thought that it was a defect in my writing that I "put my point very strongly", which my supervisor was always trying to stop me from doing, and it was very aggravating, but it is simply that I have the writing of an orator, not a philosopher! I hated the boring, anemic academic style, which was one of the reasons that I hated reading philosophy so much; it put me to sleep. I remember reading all of Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy for my Masters thesis because my associate supervisor recommended it. But I was so God-awfully bored by the whole thing that when I completed it, I did not even know what I had read. However, whenever my associate supervisor did point out something or other that Williams said, I would always go back to the book and find a relevant quote from it. But I could tell you almost nothing about the book in general.

That is what makes the current situation so ironic. A while ago I had emailed my old associate supervisor to ask him for some references for the notion of what makes a theory a moral theory as opposed to a non-moral theory. He graciously supplied me with many different ones, and I noticed that the one at the very top of the list was Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. I remembered that I still had it at Mum and Dad's place, so the next time I was over there for dinner, I took it home with me. Before I did, I read the blurb on the back of the cover, and was surprised to discover that it was all about how philosophy was simply too limited to cope with the modern demands made on ethics. He says that moral philosophy suffers from a 'rationalistic conception of rationality' and that we need older ideas that date back to Ancient Greece. I must admit that that does sound very like my own project, particularly in the first few chapters of my thesis. It also explained why, as my associate supervisor said, he was so hostile to Kant and Singer, who both have such rationalistic conceptions of moral philosophy. My own work seems to be taking a different tack now than it was in my Masters thesis, so I have not seen fit to try to read the Williams book hitherto.

However, I have noticed something recently about the shape that my book is taking. The middle part of the book is taking a survey of different kinds of proposed 'methods' for morality. These methods are not simply a product of modern philosophy, but can be traced all the way back to Aristotle and his 'doctrine of the mean'. Strikingly, they seem to reflect a penchant for a priori approaches to ethics, which although formally elegant, seem completely arbitrary from a moral point of view. They reflect more the philosopher's love of system than the anthropologist's sensitivity to common life. I think that this is because to categorise the practices of common life is considered by the philosopher to be banal, when it is so much more exciting to present an a priori formalism and attempt to pass it off as the absolute prior moral reality. It seems to me that this approach has a lot in common with Williams's criticisms about the current 'rationalistic' philosophical approach to ethics. It is for that reason that I am now starting to read his book, and I am absorbing it with avid interest.

R.M. Hare enshrines this rationalistic practice in his distinction between critical and intuitive thinking. It enables him to deny the validity of any commonsense moral objection to his theory, on the grounds that it merely reflects intuitive thinking. But the justification for this intuitive thinking is his critical thinking, which is too impractical to calculate case-by-case in practice, which is why we have intuitive thinking instead. Needless to say, this approach is putting the cart before the horse. If this so-called critical thinking is to have any moral validity, it is to come from the moral thinking of common life, and not the other way around. Hare claims that his intuitive thinking comes from necessary presuppositions stemming from the language of morals, but the assumptions that he makes to draw this conclusion can easily be questioned. I have elsewhere adumbrated my own analysis of the language of values which does not make his assumptions at all. The point is that his fundamental principles of 'moral thinking' lack an adequate empirical basis.

This empirical basis, if it is to mean anything, seems to me to need to come from common life. I argued for this more extensively in "An Empiricism of Common Life". The only thing that I fear is that such an empiricism may well result in conclusions so banal as to keep most philosophers from ever pursuing it. They would prefer to discover some formalised rule that captures the imagination, if not the intuitions, and run with that philosophical football, especially because of the strange and exciting conclusions that they can draw from it. Yet for all their cleverness, they often do humanity itself not much good--and in the case of a love of system like that of Karl Marx, a great deal of harm. An empirical, even a sociological, approach towards ethics seems, if not essential, then at least a canon against the excesses of philosophical doctrinairity. I think that I need to make at least some attempt in this direction.