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Оглавление1. The Self
Much of traditional Western religious thought contends that selves are simple unified soul substances. The Cartesian mind is a philosophical variant of this tradition. Separable from its body, or any particular perception, thought, or emotion, the self is the thing that senses, thinks, feels, and has a body. Traditional Eastern thought often holds that there are no selves. Here selves are either mythical beings with no reality at all, or illusory beings, all appearance, shimmering inconsequentially on the surface of reality.1 It is not my purpose to argue against either of these traditional ideas of the self, rather I acknowledge these views, and dismiss them. Instead of rebutting opposing views of the self, I will simply roughly describe the conception of the self I accept.
The self is a complex, ever-changing entity, extended in time, which performs a set of functions we label “mental.” Prominent among these mental functions, using crude, broad, but familiar categories, we find believing, perceiving, and acting. The intimate and unique causal relations these functions have with each other, especially relations of memory, and the ongoing awareness of these relations, constitutes a particular self. As best we can tell, such relational complexes are most fully realized in human brain tissue. You, and I, do not have logical, emotional, moral, and aesthetic capacities, we do not have beliefs, feelings, dispositions, perceptions, aches, pains, loves, hates, memories, principles, fears, motives, and thousands of other mental properties—we are networked clusters of those capacities and properties. Although some of those features play more enduring, central, and influential roles in the grouping, no small subset of properties is definitive of the group. Empirically, your brain may be essential, but conceptually no one aspect is necessary or sufficient to you being you. But want of a strict definition does not make you a mythical creature or an illusion. It makes you vague. We all have loose boundaries. Our beginnings, ends and synchronous catalog of constituents all elude precision. But if the real were restricted to the precise, and responsible philosophical talk restricted to the real, at best we might be able to speak of subatomic particles, and that would make for a dull sermon. So there you are. More or less.2
Selves, and the goodness and rationality, of which they are capable, develop from humans’ peculiar social nature. Moreover, they can only be manifested in society. Society is the stone out of which selves are carved and only in relation to other selves can selves maintain their form. The autonomy of the self, the self-sovereignty which is the fulfillment and measure of the self’s reason and goodness, rather than being independent from others, is achieved and exercised with and through others. Later, I will say more about the social production and sustenance of the self.
2. Our Freedom
This conception of the self is the setting of a coherent notion of “free will.” Indeed, to a large extent, selves are conceived and formed to explain freedom. The potpourri of variously related elements that cause human actions are theoretically welded into an entity of which we can predicate character, responsibility, and agency. Selves are the things that are free.3
The ancient debate on free will has concerned itself with the question of whether the will can be free in a determined world, that is, a world whose entire condition, down to the last detail, is a function of its fully specified condition in the previous instant. In the history of a determined world, each and every event ensues from the constellation of earlier ones. Given the initial constellation, the events of this world admit of no alternatives.
My acts are of this world, and if they are determined by the state of the world from the first syllable of recorded time, or first fluctuation of unrecorded first being, well before I am at all, then surely I have not determined my acts. And if I do not determine my acts, I am unfree. Or so say the free will deniers.
I take no position on metaphysical determinism, and think it irrelevant to an adequate conception of free will, which needs only that there be sufficient determinism, that is, that we live in a world where we can truly say that some things are caused, among them our acts. A free act of will is simply an act that is caused by certain processes of the self. “Free” is the name we give acts with a favored pedigree. Although no act has untainted ancestry, and there is no perfect freedom, to the extent that an act is the result of careful deliberation, considered values, enduring and cherished desires, clear logic, true beliefs, realistic hopes, reasonable fears, and a recursive reflective awareness of these processes, all of which are possible constituents of a self, the self has acted freely. It matters not a whit how the self came to include these elements. An uncreated God-like self that had these elements eternally and necessarily, and because of them chooses to sacrifice his only begotten son so that others may live, acts no more freely than a man who has acquired them from contingently fluttering butterfly wings last week, and because of them chooses to perform a painful act of loving altruism. Who you are is conceptually independent of how you became who are,4 and what you did is even further removed from how you came to be the sort of being that does that sort of thing. Even if you were the creation of an intelligence that crafted you to inevitably perform specific acts, still, should the proximate causes of those acts be your thoughts, values, principles, and uncurtailed reflective deliberations, your acts would be free. You would not be your creator’s puppet merely acting out her will, rather you would be her like-minded collaborator, the immediate instrument of your fully aligned mutual wills. First, causes are not the only causes, and rarely the most salient. For my purposes, the most salient causes are reasons, for my object is to show how they can cause goodness.
There is much more that needs to be said to counter those who believe a fully determined world leaves no room for a meaningful human freedom. I believe it has been said by others.5 My goal here is simply to state the notion of freedom that is operative in what follows.
3. The Adversaries
Goodness, at least the moral goodness discovered by sound moral judgments, has its skeptics. I spoke earlier of a renewal of ancient challenges to the possibility of objective moral justification. The details of the challenges will emerge as we develop a response to them. However, a preliminary distinction between types of moral doubters will be useful.
First, we have the deniers of the possibility of moral justification, those for whom “doubt” puts things rather mildly. These deniers—we may call them “amoralists”—find the world empty of anything truly meriting the term “morality.”6 There is doctrinal variety among the amoralists, but they hold in common the view that moral justification requires something that either could not exist, or simply does not exist. Amoralists believe moral justification needs some supernatural, transcendent moral standard, which some amoralists hold incoherent, others hold coherent but fantastical, and all hold nonexistent. If Santa does not exist there can be no gifts from Santa, and similarly amoralists believe if transcendental moral standards don’t exist, there can be no moral justifications. According to amoralists my quest for self-justification is as deluded as a child’s wish to get a gift from Santa, for the standards needed for moral justification are as unreal as Santa.
Other opponents of morality do not deny its reality; instead, they lower its status, limit its domain, and shrink its authority. Call these opponents “relativists.”7 With the amoralists, the relativists disbelieve in any supernatural, transcendent moral standards, but unlike the amoralists, such disbelief is prelude to demotion of moral justification, not denial of its existence. Relativists, in contrast to amoralists, hold that moral justification needs no transcendent standards, but the absence of such standards in the relativists’ eyes results in considerably more tepid justifications than is commonly sought by the seekers of moral goodness, myself included.
I share with the amoralists and relativists disbelief in supernatural, transcendent, moral standards, but I think we are in no need of such—indeed, they would be of no help in achieving, robust, objective, moral justification. All we need is Reason—natural, this-worldly, historically evolved, Reason.
4. Reason
Like a pious polemic that would prove the divine provenance of a holy book by citing its opening verse—“This is the word of God”—any reasons given for the value of Reason, any justification of justificatory practice, only convinces the faithful. Justification is the provision of good reasons, and there are no good reasons without it. I am not trying to justify Reason, a point I’ll make repeatedly, because, I would not be accused of the presumption. Reason cannot be its own character witness. Nor can anything else justify Reason. The temptation to seek other Gods to testify to one’s own monotheism is idolatry masking as piety. The will to justify that which justifies, is incoherent (my faith’s term for sinful), and the truly rational must rest content within their rational faith.
I set the bar low for membership in the church of Reason. I count among the faithful everyone to whom I have ever professed anything in the expectation that I would be understood, and anyone who has made a profession to me with the same expectation. This “professional” relationship is transitive, and forms a fellowship that includes all who have offered or will offer into our common reservoir of beliefs their beliefs, and understand it as a truth offering. Regardless of the degrees of separation, stretching across space and time, if there is a chain linking communicants, I view them as belonging to the same community of devotees of truth. I term this community “the social system,” and it embraces every person you or I have ever known of or will ever know of, as well as every embraced person’s embraced persons. The nature of the embrace is simple: to say or write “this is so.” The social system consists of those who have opinions about what’s true and what’s not, and whose opinion may come our way. When I say “us,” that is whom I speak of. The social system is the set of connected makers of claims. Active church members offer justifications for their claims, but even reticent worshippers of truth take their beliefs to be justifiable. It is what one needs to be, and perhaps all one needs to be, a self.
Rationality (Reason’s less reified name) is the capacity to be sensitive to reasons.8 If a reason can serve as a cause of one’s belief, then one is capable of rational belief. If a reason can serve as a cause of one’s action, then one is capable of rational action. Philosophers have called the first theoretical reason, the second practical reason. Neither theoretical nor practical reason is a widespread capability. Like most capabilities, it comes in degrees, but full-blown cases seem to be limited to humanity. Admittedly, there are aspects of Reason in the capabilities of computers and nonhuman creatures, and there is room for debate regarding the rationality of smart phones and simians, of Watson and Washoe.9 However, no ape or algorithm at present gives us grounds for believing that it approaches the rational capabilities of humans, even if the most rational of humans, let alone a typical one, is only partly characterized by rationality. As far as we can tell, only humans routinely cross the rational threshold, even if they spend a good deal of time on the nonrational side of the boundary.
Although reasons are its elemental elicitors, rationality is manifested by one’s relationship to structured constellations of reasons called “justifications.” Indeed, a statement or a belief only becomes a reason as part of a justification. I use the term “justification,” unless otherwise indicated, only to refer to sound justifications. That issue will be discussed later.
Rather than thinking of rationality as sensitivity to individual reasons, we ought to think of it as sensitivity to justifications. Reasons are the pixels for our rational sense, but justifications are its images. When we are rational, we are responding to a justification as a whole—to the justification’s constituent reasons in relationship to each other—rather than to the individual reasons. When it is raining, we have reason to wear boots, but only because we wish to have dry feet, the boots are waterproof, we will be leaving the house, and so forth. By itself, the fact that it is raining justifies nothing, and it would not be rational to always put on boots whenever it is raining, even though rain is a reason to wear boots.
What sort of things are reasons, the building blocks of justifications, the sensitivity to which makes for rationality? Strictly speaking reasons are propositions, expressed as sentences or beliefs. Less formally, reasons are what the sentences or beliefs are about, and as such, reasons come in many ontological types.10 They may be external astronomical facts or internal biological ones. A full moon can be a reason for a hayride, high cholesterol a reason for a statin. They may be social institutions, or rules, or principles. A wedding may be a reason to buy a gift, a third strike to call a batter out, and a solemn oath to remain loyal. Reasons may even be beliefs and sentences, for beliefs can be about beliefs, sentences about sentences. The umpire’s belief that a shoulder high pitch is a strike is a reason for the batter to swing at it, the beauty of a sentence a reason to memorize it. Indeed, no ontological type could be ruled out as a potential reason, for anything can be the subject of a proposition, including other propositions.
Not all propositions are reasons. What makes a proposition a reason is that it has a role in a justification of a belief or of an action. The proposition “it is raining,” becomes a reason when it is employed to justify my belief that I ought to wear boots or justify my actual donning of the boots. A proposition playing a role in a justification of a belief or an action need not be a proposition which does any work to create the belief or action it justifies. The rain may justify my wearing boots, even if their chic styling is the sole cause I wear them. All of our beliefs and actions are caused, and some are caused by propositions, but only some of those propositional causes, and those only some of the time, will also find a place in a justification of the belief or action. At those times, when a cause of a belief or action could also be a proposition doing justificatory work, it will have taken on an added designation: it will be a reason, and we will be acting from reason when reasons are both causes of our action and their causal efficacy is attributable to the role that they play in the justification of that same action. We act from reason when the proposition “it is raining” is part of a sound justification for wearing boots and the justification caused us to put them on.
A reason need not cause anything, and beliefs and actions need not be caused by reasons constituting a justification. But when beliefs or actions are so caused, we are in the domain of the rational. The more extended examples in the following sections should further clarify when beliefs and actions are rationally caused and when not.
5. Justifications
The reasons forming a justification relate to each other as premises and conclusions, for a justification is an argument. But unlike some other arguments, a justification solicits a commitment to a belief or an action. In theoretical reasoning, a justification seeks belief, in practical reasoning, action.11 A justification implicitly claims to be decisive, or, at least, worthy of commitment all things considered. It suggests that after subarguments have been summed and counterarguments weighed, its deliverances ought to be accepted. Only an argument which is understood as soliciting belief or action in accordance with its conclusion is a justification.12
Like any argument, and on the same basis as any argument, a purported justification can be sound or unsound. Its premises may or may not be true, and, if true, they may or may not entail or provide strong support for its conclusion. Therefore, we must further refine the notion of rationality; rationality is a sensitivity to sound justifications.13 It is an inclination to believe the conclusion of a sound theoretical justification or to act in accordance with the conclusion of a sound practical justification.
This conceptualization is an idealization. It describes Reason when it is successfully being itself. But, what passes for Reason, is often not the thing itself. We colloquially refer to failed attempts at reasoning as a kind of rationality. We feel rational when we are sincerely trying to be rational, that is, whenever we are moved by an (usually implicit) argument. Alas, sensitivity to unsound purported justifications is common among the creatures we call rational—and indeed, this quasi-rationality may be as close as we usually get to true rationality. I think we are frequently moved by justifications, but because rationality is sensitivity to sound justification, our actions are rarely fully rational. Vague, if not outright false premises, often undermine full rationality, and even when all the premises are precise and accurate, the arguments that motivate us are usually too complex to be supposed free of faulty inferences. Even with the best epistemic will in the world, we will more often than not act with less than full justification. Quasi-rationality is the rational faculty gone astray, but this is not necessarily the faculty’s fault. We often lack the resources to discover the flaw in a purported justification. “Quasi” in quasi-rationality simply means a mistake is being made, and mistakes lurk in all unsound justifications, or they would not be unsound. However, mistakes are often guiltless and unavoidable. Our inability to be perfectly rational no more makes us irrational than our (related) inability to be perfectly good makes us evil. Still, in the complete absence of a capacity to respond, on occasion, differentially to sound and unsound justifications, or at least to understand the distinction, we would not even have this quasi-rationality. An aspiration to rationality is an essential ingredient of rationality.
At least as common as quasi-rationality, but more distantly related, is pseudo-rationality. We often construct justifications, whether sound or unsound, to decorate our beliefs or actions, although these proffered justifications play absolutely no role in generating the belief or action. We call this “rationalizing,” pretending rationality, rather than being rational. To adapt an epigram, rationalizations are the compliments that prejudice, habit, feeling, and instinct pay to Reason. Our approval and pride in rationality is demonstrated by how often we assign our beliefs and actions rational parentage, regardless of the true circumstances of their birth. Sometimes pseudo-rationality is meant to fool others. More often, we are after self-delusion. Frequently, both self and other are the target dupes. A politician may use bad arguments to persuade voters to elect him, but these arguments are probably most effective at persuading the politician that he ought to be elected. It is pleasant for him to think that Reason caused him to seek office, regardless of the true cause. This is pseudo- rather than quasi-rationality, because the politician is not running as a result of mistaking an unsound argument for sound. Rather the argument played no role at all in his seeking office. Whether sound or unsound, the argument, causally speaking, was pure window dressing.
Surely many of our beliefs and actions are not caused by justifications, let alone sound justifications, and so our rationality is very partial. We can act and believe without reason, for no reason at all, even against reason, and we often do. We can act and believe in accord with reason, although we might not be acting from reason when we do so. That too is surely common. Still, if with sufficient frequency, we believe or act because of Reason, or perhaps more importantly, if at any given time we are liable to be moved by reasons, we are capable of Reason. Capabilities need not be exercised to exist, but it is consoling to note, that our rational capabilities, however underutilized, are not left completely idle. Justifications, including some which may be sound, do cause us to believe things and do things—at least once in a while.
An illustration may be helpful: it is raining and I put on my boots. The rain, in company with a number of other elements, is a reason for me to put on my boots, because there is at least one justification for my wearing boots that includes the rain.14 But that justification which includes the rain may have nothing to do with how I dress. It may happen that I put on my boots as a fashion statement in complete ignorance of the rain. In that case, the rain would still be a reason for me to wear boots; however, I would not have acted from that reason. Indeed, the rain may not be a reason causing me to put on the boots even if it causally contributed to my wearing the boots and is a reason for me to put on the boots. Maybe the rain sounded like hoof-beats on my roof, which caused me to dream of cowboys, which caused me to wear my boots. So the rain, while being a reason for me to wear boots, and a cause of my wearing boots, in this instance would not have been, in its role as a reason, a cause of my wearing boots. I was not acting rationally when I put on the boots (although, because the rain did justify boot-wearing, I was acting in accord with reason). A reason is a constituent of a justification, and rationality is the capacity to believe or act because of a justification. The justification for my putting on boots that included rain was not why I wore boots.
This description of believing or acting out of reason does not require consciousness of the role that reason may be playing. A justification, in whole or in part, might be causally effective without one’s being conscious of it. Indeed, we philosophy teachers are often engaged in excavating and bringing to consciousness justifications which have shaped our students’ beliefs and actions. This is not to deny that we probably spend considerably more time constructing justifications for beliefs and actions whose causes are quite other than that those dialectically constructed justifications. But these rationalizing processes should not to be sneered at. Building a sound justification is a first step in being moved by it.
Benjamin Franklin quipped that the advantage of being a rational animal is that you can rationalize anything.15 It was not meant as a compliment, and the cynical construction of insincerely offered rationales are indeed a vice. But our rational aspirations, the capacity and penchant to construct and be moved by justifications and to judge ourselves by standards of rationality, are unavoidably accompanied by their natural, although perverted, cousins—sophistical rationalizations. Pseudo-rationality honors the real thing even as it betrays it.
The inclination to believe the conclusion of a sound theoretical justification or to act in accordance with the conclusion of a sound practical justification, attests to a desire for consistency, the soul of rationality.16 Practice, has a higher threshold of rationality than does theory, because there are more way to act inconsistently than there are to believe inconsistently. The possibility of truth is sufficient to confer theoretical rationality. Beliefs’ rationalities are only challenged by other beliefs, for even evidence doesn’t contest theory until it inhabits belief. Rain is not inconsistent with my belief it is not raining, but a belief that it is raining is. Rational belief need only get along with other beliefs. But rational action must be compatible with a more diverse ontological array: an action can conflict with a belief or an action. There is inconsistency in believing that you ought to, all things considered, never torture cats, while knowingly torturing a cat, for the action is inconsistent with a judgment of the action—a belief. An action can also fail to be consistent with another action. It is irrational to torture a cat right now, while also attempting to prevent that cat from being tortured right now, regardless of any relevant judgments. When the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, they may have incompatible goals, in which case the hands’ owner stands guilty of irrationality. All of the goals of an agent’s actions must be realizable in the same possible world if the actions are to qualify as rational. And so practical is more complex than theoretical reason. 17 The beliefs constituting a practical justification must meet all of the requirements of theoretical rationality, and then some: first, the rationality of a practical justification requires the theoretical rationality we term “soundness.” Next, the rationality of acting from sincerely held judgments, which we call “character,” or “will power,” is needed, as is the rationality of practice itself, which, when it avoids subtle inconsistencies, we may term “strategic coherence,” avoiding blatant inconsistencies we call “sanity.” Finally, it is the burden of this book to persuade you that there is an additional criterion of practical rationality, morality, consistency in the treatment of self and others.18
6. Justification and Explanation
When we say “let me explain myself,” we usually mean “let me justify myself.” In “explaining ourselves,” seldom do we say how we came to do a questioned deed; mostly, we want to “explain” that its doing was blameless. This is justifying, not explaining, but the confusion is understandable, for while explanation and justification are distinct, they are entangled and are often playing a game of one-upmanship.
There are formal and informal explanations. The informal explanations of daily life aim either to provide enough information to enable the adequate performance of a relevant task, or to satisfy the curiosity of a relevant inquirer. To be a truly good informal explanation, besides succeeding at the provision of sufficient information or the satisfaction of curiosity, the explanation must consist solely of true statements. If you ask why I bought a bed from Ikea, and I explain that my old bed broke, and I’ve been satisfied with other Ikea products, the explanation counts as good if you have no lingering questions about what drove me to the purchase. If I ask you how to assemble it, your explanation is good if it provided me all the information needed to complete the task.
The orthodox view of formal, that is scientific, explanation, goes by the daunting moniker “the deductive-nomological” model of explanation.19 In the deductive-nomological model, that which is to be explained is explained when it is shown to be a deductive consequence of statements that include at least one law. The boiling of a particular liquid is explained by noting that (1) the liquid is water; (2) the liquid’s temperature has been raised to 100 degree centigrade, and (3) (here comes the law) all water boils at 100 degree. Given statements 1, 2, and 3, it deductively follows that the liquid boil, and so its boiling is explained. It is well explained if 1, 2, and 3 are true.
The notoriously murky idea of causation, which was cavalierly invoked in the discussion of Reason above, lurks about both the informal and formal conceptions of explanation. The statements in the deductive-nomological model can be viewed as citing the causal factors for the boiling (the heat and the kind of thing being heated) and the claim that they are indeed causal factors in such situations (the “law” that water boils at 100 degree centigrade). Regarding the less formal “explanations,” it seems that curiosity is normally satisfied when we believe we have seen the causes of the curious phenomenon (we believe an old broken bed and good experience with the Ikea brand would cause buying a new Ikea bed), and to know what causes an achievement is to have all the information (albeit perhaps not all the skill or resources) to achieve it. Hence, we can speak generally of “explanations,” whether everyday informal ones or formal scientific ones, as causal accounts (although I will leave “causal account” philosophically undefined and rely on unanalyzed intuition of the notion) of the things explained.
Whether we possess them or not, there are causal accounts of all that we do, and the true causal accounts doubtless would cite all manner of facts and “laws.” Not only do different sorts of acts likely have different sorts of causes, but highly similar acts may have very dissimilar causes. One man reddens because he is allergic to peanut butter, another because he is embarrassed that he ate too much peanut butter. The resulting complexions may be identical, not the causes. One woman kills her pained, dying husband because of a merciful, loving heart, another the quicker to get her hands on the dying man’s fortune, a third because she is hallucinating and imagines herself to be playing Othello and her dying husband to be performing Desdemona. The act of smothering may have been the same in all three instances, the causes of each act quite different.
In principle, everything is liable to being explained, for presumably a causal account, however difficult to find, is there to be found. The existence of everything, the occurrence of every event, the sequence in every process, the performance of every act—in principle there is some story that uncovers the causes, and thereby the thing, event, process or act is explained.
Justification has no necessary connection with causation. Sometimes justifications cause things or invoke causal claims, sometimes they don’t. Our interest in justifying may ultimately be that we wish to cause an action or belief, but justifications need make no causal claims. Justifications make claims of adequacy—claims that a belief or act meet a relevant standard or belong to a relevant category. A belief or act’s adequacy may well be affected by its causes, but it is determined by some criterion of adequacy—whether a benchmark of correctness, a standard of rightness, or a principle of goodness, truth or beauty. The existence of those justifying criteria may or may not have played a role in the causal story that created the item of interest. A yardstick may have been used to create a football field of regulation length, or merely invoked to demonstrate that it is of regulation length. It can build the field or prove its adequacy, or both. This possibility has confused many and led them to deny that there is anything more one can do beyond explanation, or to assert that to explain all is to justify all. But to only explain, regardless of how thorough and accurate the explanation, is to justify nothing. An explanation need never invoke any standard of adequacy or include a judgment as to whether the facts meet the standard. An explanation tells us how something came to be, a justification tells us how to categorize it.
However, these distinct processes of explanation and justification can engulf one another. Like all things, justifications can be explained, and like all things that are subject to judgments of adequacy, explanations are liable to justification. To further complicate things, explanations can be explained and justifications justified. Finally, whenever we are sincerely attempting rationality (acting from Reason, not merely in accord with Reason), the explanation and justification of our belief or action overlap. The rain both justifies and causes me to wear boots when I act from Reason. I am sometimes kind because I accept a principle endorsing kindness, and that same principle may justify my kindness. A true explanation of how something came to be often does most of the work required to categorize it correctly.
But justifications and explanations do not always coincide. Commonly, justificatory principles play no causal role: I may be kind (or cruel) because of unreflective sentiment. Sometimes a justificatory principle causes but fails to justify an act: I am kind to my plants because I believe nothing should suffer, but if plants are incapable of suffering, my kindness principle does not justify my behavior. (This is not to deny that my kindness to plants may be justifiable on other grounds, grounds which are not playing a causal role in this particular case. Perhaps kindness to plants sharpens gardening skills). Whenever justifications and explanations do coincide, the relevant beliefs are playing a dual role. We may have one set of beliefs in play, but distinct functions are present when that set serves to explain and justify.
The possible divergence of justification and causation enables a further source of confusion: the failure to distinguish between justifying an act and justifying its particular motivation. A kind act may be justified, even when motivated by greed, an unjustified motive. No true principle may support the general cultivation of greed, nor even its occasional empowerment, and yet greed may cause a fully justifiable act (surely many a justifiable gift-giving has occurred because of some greedy hope for reciprocity or vainglory: behold the names on hospital wings and contemplate the cause of their funding. Yet the gift was justifiable).
The dance of explaining justifications, justifying explanations, explaining explanations, justifying justifications, has no end of steps and moves. After a few basic turns, most people are made dizzy by the dance, that goes on (to their mind) ad nauseam. Philosophers are obsessive choreographers of the explanation/justification tango and are exhilarated at a dance that makes others wish to throw-up.20
7. The Soundness of Practical Justifications
When applied to action, the phrase “sound justifications” rings hollow in the ears of the denigrators of morality. If this skepticism regarding the justification of action is correct, then there is no such thing as practical reason, for justification is the heart of practical reason, as it is of theoretical reason. But the skepticism is unwarranted; justifications of practice operate as sure-footedly in their own domain as justifications of belief do in theirs. True, the domains are at a remove, but there are no grounds for judging practical reason the lesser realm. Each domain is a human capability composed of similar types, functioning in similar ways; it is apt that they share the name of Reason. But some central inhabitants of each domain belong to different species, neither of which can directly produce the offspring of the other. Nonetheless, the kinship relationships within each species are the same, and they live a common life, the life of Reason, in constant intercourse and mutual support. Although they do not breed the other type, their union is not barren. Their progeny is the rational made real. Sound justifications, theoretical and practical, causally empowered, combine to create a more rational world.
Being a sound justification in either domain is a matter of logic and truth. If the premises of the justificatory argument are true, and by the rules of standard logic they entail or make probable the conclusion, the justification is sound. This is the conventional account of soundness: true premises and good logic. The use of logic in practical reason is standard and involves nothing contentious. It follows from the principle that one ought not cause avoidable suffering, and the fact that eating animals causes avoidable suffering, that one ought not to eat animals. The logic of practical reason is no more at issue than the logic of theoretical reason.
The possibility of sound practical reason is questioned not on its logic, but on the grounds of its premises’ truth, with the skeptics arguing against the very possibility that all of the premises needed for a justification of a practice can be true. The moral skeptic denies that a principle of action can be (objectively) true, and no justification of an action can be sound without including a true principle of action. This radical claim should not be confused with the commonplace observation that moral disagreement is found at every level of moral discourse. We often dispute the truth of particular premises of the prudential and moral arguments of daily life and politics, and also when we contest the normative theories that posit adjudicating principles. The moral skeptic’s point, however, is a metaethical one: no principle of action can be true, and so no practical justification can be sound. The “ought” statement, the “imperative” claim, the principle of action which is a necessary premise in any justification of practice is simply, according to the moral skeptic, not a candidate for truth. Some skeptics say this is so because the principle “says” nothing, others because what it says is metaphysically false.21 So, beyond the question of whether it is true that one ought not to cause any avoidable suffering, is the question of whether any proposition expressing a principle of action can be true. If it cannot, then there are no practical justifications with all true premises, and therefore no sound ones. And that would mean that in the realm of action there can be no rationality, for if there are no sound justifications of practice, there can be no sensitivity to sound justifications of practice. That would be a lethal result for my project of rooting goodness in Reason. Fortunately, practical principles can be true, but unfortunately defending that claim requires an excursion into the theory of truth.
NOTES
1. A vast oversimplification of a diverse philosophical/religious intellectual realm that contains a large range of subtle views on selfhood. See Garfield (2015) for an excellent, concise account of this range. Still, I think it fair, if somewhat broad-brush, to characterize the core of the Eastern philosophical view of the self as I do, even if some streams in that tradition come close to the view of the self I will presume.
2. Cf. Parfit (1984).
3. See Silver (2002).
4. When I say “Who you are is conceptually independent of how you became who are” and “It matters not a whit how the self came to include the elements constituting self-hood,” I am not denying its necessarily social origins and nature, I am only asserting that given the reality of those properties which constitute selfhood, a reality which perhaps could have only emerged from a certain history, the powers of the properties are immanent in the present.
5. In contemporary philosophical taxonomy, the position I take on free will is “comptibilist,” or “soft-determinist.” Hume (1748) is the classical source for this position. I think Dennett (1984, 2003) provides its most subtle and thorough justifications.
6. For example, Marks (2013), Garner (1994). Marks and Garner don’t deny there is widespread, and consequential belief in morality, but they hold that belief to be false, and think it better if morally inflected terminology disappeared. Others find some positive uses for moral terms, but in my view still qualify as amoralists, for example, Mackie (1977), and Joyce (2001).
7. Relativists, an older and more common breed than amoralists, come in even more varieties than do amoralists, and some varieties I consider relativists might bristle at the “relativist” label.
8. That we have this capacity is nicely asserted by Robert Nozick: “We are creatures who are amenable to being inducted into a world of norms.” Nozick (1993, 27). I’ll use the term “rationality,” to refer to the capacity to engage in Reason, the semantic process that renders truth. I’ll use the upper case “R,” to distinguish Reason from a reason which is an element in a bit of reasoning. Partfit (2011, 111) call’s rationality “responsibility to reasons” rather than my “sensitivity” to reasons.
9. An IBM computer that plays Jeopardy well and a chimpanzee that spoke ASL poorly.
10. As the reader who continues for a while will see, I take talk of beliefs and sentences being “about things” and “propositions” as a convenient shorthand. See chapter 4 for the sense in which beliefs and sentences are, and are not, “about things,” and for further details regarding meaning.
11. Although we might treat any argument for a belief or action as a prima facie “justification,” it is best to reserve the term for those overall arguments making a claim for truth or rightness.
12. We can think of “argument” as labeling the locutionary content and “justification” as the illocutionary, or perhaps the implicature of beliefs were those beliefs to be manifested as speech. See Austin (1962) and Grice (1961).
13. If it is unsound then, strictly speaking, it is only a purported justification. I am using “sound” as synonymous with “good” when modifying arguments. Valid deductive arguments with all true premises, are sound, as are (in my usage) inductive arguments with all true premises that are logically stronger than any arguments to contradictory conclusions. Although most logicians reserve the term “sound” only for good deductive arguments, here I follow Paul Herrick (1994) in applying it to inductive arguments with true premises and sufficient logical strength.
14. For example, I do not like wet feet, I ought to avoid what I do not like, if it is raining then the best way to avoid wet feet is to wear boots, it is raining, therefore I ought to wear boots.
15. Franklin (1787, 18).
16. The nature of consistency is discussed in chapter 3, section 2, chapter 4, section six, and especially chapter 5, section 2.
17. Although actions can be inconsistent with each other, ultimately, this reflects an inconsistency at a theoretical level or between at least one of the inconsistent actions and a belief. See chapter 5, section 2, especially note 19 of that chapter.
18. I am not claiming that “reality” is overall less constraining of rational “factual” beliefs than it is of rational practical principles. Insofar as factual beliefs must be most responsive to a narrower range of reality than principled belief, factual beliefs have it easy. But that range tends to be far less fluid than the realities practical principles are most sensitive to, so the candidates for rational factual belief are more fixed than those for rational belief of practical principles. In the sections on pragmatic justification and objectivity, I discuss the sense in which all rational belief must be sensitive to all of reality. In chapter 2, section 6, and chapter 4, sections 4–7, I argue that nonetheless some aspects of reality will be more influential in determining various domains of belief.
19. Hempel (1962).
20. For those with a stomach for more details and examples: I voted for Barack Obama in 2008. An Initial Justification (IJ) of my act may go as follows:
IJ a. It is right to vote for the candidate most likely to respect human rights and bring peace and prosperity to the nation by constitutional means.
IJ b. Barack Obama was the candidate most likely to respect human rights and bring peace and prosperity to the nation by constitutional means.
IJ c. Therefore, it was right to vote for Barack Obama.
But perhaps we are less interested in a justification of my vote than we are in an explanation of it. Here is an Initial Explanation, the one I like to think is true:
IE a. I accept the principle that it is right to vote for the candidate most likely to respect human rights and bring peace and prosperity to the nation by constitutional means.
IE b. I believed that Barack Obama was the candidate most likely to respect human rights and bring peace and prosperity to the nation by constitutional means.
IE c. As a result I voted for Barack Obama.
Although similar, and easily conflated, the IE and the IJ are quite different. The latter makes no reference to the acceptance of any principles, only to a principle itself, nor does the IJ refer to belief in any facts, only to the facts themselves. And unlike the IE, the IJ suggests no causal relationships. While my acceptance of certain principles and my belief in certain facts may have caused me to vote as I did, the principle and the fact adduced in the IJ do not cause the rightness of my vote, they imply it.
Now it is true that the D-N model of scientific explanation also has the “explaining statements” serve as premises that imply the statement explained (the “explanandum”). So isn’t this explanation the same inferential form I am claiming for justification? Yes, but it has a different deep inferential structure because it is trying to get at causation. In an explanation, we are not trying to prove the explanandum true. We assume it is true, and claim to show how it, in fact, came to be true. A good formal explanation doesn’t simply involve true premises that imply the explanandum. The explanation also asserts (in that “as a result”) that if the premise with the law were not true, the explanandum wouldn’t be either. If IEa were false, we are meant to infer that I would not have voted for Obama, for it claims to be part of the explanation of my voting for Obama, not just evidence that I did. But if IJa were false, my voting for Obama might still have been justified on other grounds.
There are other possible justifications and explanations, besides IE and IJ of my vote. An alternative explanation (AE) might go as follows:
AE a. I am a baby boomer, New Left veteran, humanities Ph.D., Newton Massachusetts’ resident, and secular Jew, with a microscopic Wall Street portfolio.
AE b. All such baby boomer, New Left veteran, humanities Ph.D., Newton Massachusetts residents, secular Jews, with a microscopic Wall Street portfolios vote for the liberal candidate.
AE c. Obama was the liberal candidate
AE d. So I voted for Obama.
Whether AE or IE is the correct or a better explanation of my vote is immaterial to the justification offered as IJ. The justification of the act stands apart from any explanation of it. Perhaps political scientists and sociologists would be inclined to think that the AE is the better explanation of my vote. We may ask them to explain why I offered the IE as to account for my vote. In other words, how would they explain my explanation. Perhaps they would offer us a the following “social science” explanation, SSE, of IE:
SSE a. All people want to believe that their acts are motivated by principles and a correct understanding of the facts.
SSE b. Silver is a person.
SSE c. IE claims that Silver’s vote was motivated by principles and a correct understanding of the facts.
SSE d. So Silver believes that IE explains his 2008 Obama vote.
I am partial to a different explanation of IE. My “personal explanation” of IE is
PE a. People offer explanations they believe to be true.
PE b. I believe that my acceptance of the principle that it is right to vote for the candidate most likely to respect human rights and bring peace and prosperity to the nation by constitutional means along with my belief that Barack Obama was the candidate most likely to respect human rights and bring peace and prosperity to the nation by constitutional means led me to explain my voting for Obama by referring to that acceptance and belief.
PE c. As a result, I explained my vote for Barack Obama with IE.
We now have two competing explanations (SSE and PE) of my initial explanation (IE) of why I voted for Barack Obama in 2008. We can go on to attempt to explain SSE or PE, or shift modes and try to justify one of them, that is, try to show that its premises, for example, SSEa, SSEb, SSEc, are true, and that its conclusion, SSEd, follows from the premises. The justification would be subject to explanation or justification. And so it goes.
21. I am using “skeptic” to mean a denier of objective morality rather than just one who is doubtful about it. The primary school of skeptics in the morality “says nothing” category are emotivists/expressivists, for example, Stevenson (1944), and Ayer (1936), who hold that moral statements make no claims, but rather give voice to attitudes or feelings—a sort of “Boo” or “Hooray.” Expressivists do not neatly fit into my division of moral skeptics into relativists and amoralists. Like amoralists, they maintain that there are no, indeed cannot be, true moral claims. Like relativists they believe that morality actually exists as a variety of effects of various groups or individuals. The “metaphysically false” view of moral principles is held by amoralists.
