Recalcitrant Moral Intuitions

I have finally finished Terror and Liberalism. It only took me ten days from the time that I bought it, and it was well worth it. I now know quite a lot more about the philosophy of Al Qaeda, although it is a fairly banal form of totalitarianism. But at least I understand our enemy more now than I did before I started reading the book.

Or do I? Paul Berman describes Al Qaeda as simply a pathological mass movement, which cannot be given a rational explanation. This leads one to the question of whether evil itself can be given a rational explanation. This question, however, only occurs to me because I know of a book that addresses it directly. I have seen it in the bookstore now many times, Evil in Modern Thought, by Susan Neiman. This, then, has become my book for this week, and I am currently reading it with avid interest.

I am already intrigued by her argument in the introduction. She begins by discussing the theist version of the problem of evil, which we all learned in first year: Why would a good God allow evil to exist in the world? She then, however, notes that the problem of evil can still be restated in atheist terms: "how can human beings behave in ways that so thoroughly violate both reasonable and rational norms?" (p.3)

Your Masters thesis stemmed from this very question, but flipped it on its head. It asked not how human beings could behave in ways that so thoroughly violated both reasonable and rational norms. It asked how reason could produce norms that normal human beings could be expected to violate so thoroughly. I was, of course, thinking about Peter Singer's version of utilitarianism. On the one hand, the theory is part of the ethical mainstream, yet on the other it is impossible to practise consistently. It seems guaranteed to produce a life of unappeasable guilt. If that is morality, then it would appear that morality is itself inimical to human life. Singer does not help matters when he turns around and says that what is in accord with our biological nature is a separate issue from what is moral. He only succeeds in making morality less relevant to human life in the process. If that's morality, who needs it?

Of course, by the end of the thesis, I have concluded that that's not morality at all. There is a commonsense ethics that people both preach and practise every day of their lives. I decided that this was the only ethics to which it was worth making myself accountable. This is indeed the ethics that inheres in social mores. Of course, it should come as no surprise that Singer doesn't even trust social mores, but then again he has long since made up his mind about the moral truth. He will therefore not trust any evidence that might sway his opinion away from it.

I am very sympathetic to Bernard Williams' main theme in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. I think that academic ethics these days suffers from a "rationalistic conception of rationality". It is an approach that promises to reduce all ethical puzzlement to a formula. Based on a small number of axioms, all moral puzzles can be solved by a formal method. In this way, one is meant to be able to remove all the puzzlement and doubt and conflicts of values, and it's all in the scientific tradition. People think it's all going to add up, but it never adds up, because people don't add up.

Williams argues that ethics is not like science. With science, you can reflect outside your subjective view of the universe into an objective view. But with ethics, you cannot reflect out of your subjective ethical point of view into an "objective" one. This might be like a kind of view from nowhere—except that no one lives in nowhere, so the view ends up not being relevant to anyone. Williams argues that that is what utilitarianism is like, and so it must be totally unacceptable.

I think that ethics is not like science either, but I draw my own distinction about it. First, I note that in both science and ethics, you never find a theory that fits all the facts. No scientific theory matches all the observations. But as Kuhn observed, a paradigm can still be maintained in the absence of a perfect fit with nature. The only thing that matters is that the paradigm seem to promise to fit perfectly if only all the puzzles that pertain to it can be solved. It is only when this no longer appears to be the case that a crisis is triggered that eventually brings about a paradigm shift.

Ethics, however, cannot possibly work like this. For even though we never find an ethical theory that satisfies all our intuitions, we cannot simply abandon those intuitions that do not fit the theory. Some of them might well fall into line with the theory, but others will be resistant. In science, the facts that are the equivalent of these intuitions would simply be disregarded by default. They can be ignored, denied or worked around with ad hoc modifications of the theory. But in ethics, none of the recalcitrant intuitions can be disregarded. They are all morally valid in and of themselves. This means that no theory of ethics can ever replace the intuitions that it is meant to explain. It is also unlikely that any theory of ethics based on a small number of axioms—such as either utilitarianism or Kantianism—can ever do our moral intuitions justice. Hence, the typical rationalistic theory of ethics is unlikely ever to provide an adequate picture of morality. The recalcitrant intuitions that they contradict are all almost certainly legitimate. That is also why they are so difficult to practise consistently.