Читать книгу Rationalist Pragmatism - Mitchell Silver - Страница 8

Preface

I start with the urge to preach, to say what is right and what is wrong. The impulse is less didactic than self-justificatory. I want to think of myself as good. For me, this desire shares psychological and philosophical space with the desire to think of myself as rational. Goodness and rationality, although hardly the whole of my character ideal, comprise its central and essential substance, and so I seek reasons for commitment to my idea of goodness, in the hope that the idea will endorse the goodness of Reason, thereby laying a virtuous circle as the foundation of my ideals.

This book of self-justification aspires to make clear the compatibility of my character ideals by demonstrating that a good person can be a rational person. Indeed, its loftiest ambitions aim higher; I want to show that a rational person must be a good one. However, this view has long, and recently with renewed vigor, been challenged. Some challengers say Reason is as comfortable with amorality as it is with morality. Others go further, denying that morality can have any place in a fully rational outlook. In what follows I want to take on these challenges. I want to preach goodness using Reason as scripture so that I may be justified in my eyes.

The self-justificatory impulse of this book, if its argument has merit, can only be satisfied by an objectivist morality. Justification, responsibility, mutually recognizing selves, truth, and rationality are the central concepts that enable self-justification by enabling standards for judging conduct that we correctly apply to all selves—an objective morality. Objective morality makes self-justification possible. Whether my argument for objective morality is motivated by a noble or neurotic desire for self-justification is an issue beyond the manifest topic of the book. But readers can infer what they will.

Some things are right and some things are wrong. In this book, I will mostly be concerned with how that is possible. Only if it is possible that some things are right and some are wrong can we sensibly attempt to sort out which is which. The sorting of right from wrong is named “normative ethics,” and inquiry into the nature of normative ethics is termed “metaethics.” The division is not quite that neat, for a metaethics always has normative implications. A significant motive for writing this book is my belief that faulty metaethics may empower defective normative ethics. I will defend four major claims in what follows: (1) We recognize the truth of a set of beliefs by its utility. (2) The recognition of truth is fundamentally social. (3) Moral beliefs are potentially true. (4) The best articulation of the most general moral truth is “Actions should be judged by a single set of standards.”¹

The first claim is in the pragmatist tradition, and while pragmatism has seen a resurgence of interest and advocacy among professional philosophers, it remains a minority view. Common understanding distinguishes even more sharply between what we should accept as true and what is useful to believe.

The second claim has been maintained and variously developed by philosophers and social theorists for over two centuries. While particular arguments in support of the irreducible social nature of knowledge remain controversial, as do their implications, the irreducibility itself is widely accepted.

Academics label belief in unqualified right and wrong, my third major thesis, “moral objectivism,” and in one version or another it represent the majority view of professional philosophers.² So too in common understanding; although when pressed to do moral theory many might give lip service to a nonobjectivist position, most people, most of the time, act and speak as though some acts really are wrong, some really right.³ I am with the majority of both philosophers and others in holding that there are true and false moral judgments, but believe the only credible philosophical framework for moral objectivism includes a pragmatic conception of justification. The position I develop I call “Rationalist Pragmatism,” and I hope to justify the name in due course.⁴

Lastly, while there are many different formulations of a moral “golden rule,” from the Golden Rule, through Hutcheson’s “Greatest Good for Greatest Number,” to Kant’s “act only in accord with universalizable law,”⁵ I will argue that the principle of “No Double Standards” best comports with the metaethical structure that houses moral truth.

The skeleton of that structure is briefly described: morality is rationality between persons; rationality is the effective pursuit of goals guided by justified beliefs; beliefs are justified when they are known, beliefs can only be known if they are objective, and objectivity is achieved when all persons’ goals are taken equally seriously. The attempt to flesh out this skeleton is made in chapters 1 through 5. The subsequent chapters explore the moral implications of this theoretical framework.

I remain ambivalent about the ordering of the chapters. I’ve a taste for wanting to do first things first, and am inclined to think of definitions, presuppositions, and their immediate implications as first things. Hence metaethics before ethics. “As a philosopher, true to form, I begin a discussion of content by looking at form.”⁶ However, those with limited patience for the abstractions of metaethics may choose to start with the normative discussions of chapters 6–8, and, should they find the moral principles delineated there appealing, might find themselves more inclined to examine the supporting metaethics of the first five chapters.

At the end of his preface to the first volume of The Origins of Political Order Francis Fukuyama defends his engagement as a nonspecialist with areas of specialist inquiry in which he, unfamiliar with the primary sources, is inexpert and therefore vulnerable to error.⁷ Fukuyama, however, thinks the value of synoptic and comparative history is worth the potential loss of precision and nuance. The present book is premised on an analogous judgment regarding philosophy. I can hardly claim deep knowledge of the specialist philosophical literature in epistemology, logic, philosophy of language, action, or even some niches of ethical theory—all areas I nonetheless touch upon because they are relevant to this book’s ambition. Prudence might recommend scaling the ambition back rather than plunging into waters whose shoals and tides I have not mastered. Yet philosophy, perhaps more than any other intellectual endeavor, calls for such recklessness. No region of philosophical inquiry is self-contained. It is not merely that different philosophical specialties rub up against each other at the boundaries, but rather that core questions in every area involve taking, often unacknowledged, positions in other areas. What makes this especially troublesome is that those unacknowledged positions are usually highly contested. A biologist can make her case on the role of a particular gene secure in the knowledge that all of her intended audience accepts that natural selection can create adaptations, but no theoretician of beauty can safely assume her readers come with a common view of truth and goodness. Hence, philosophy stands in particular need of both attempts to tie things together and efforts by its practitioners to lay out their metaphysical and epistemological cards, even if the game is putatively restricted to moral theory. This I try to do, knowing that treating of a large topic and laying out those cards has me playing in fields whose recesses I haven’t thoroughly explored. I write in the hope that the intricacies of specialist arguments and distinctions that I am ignorant of, or positions I take with a minimal defense, although surely making the project needful of some elaborations and modifications, will not prove fatal to it.

A further justification for risking naïve mistakes by attempting breadth has to do with the mission of philosophy. There is a special imperative in philosophy to seek broad understanding, which, after all, is philosophy’s central aspiration.⁸ Uncontextualized philosophical findings are worse than useless; they are pure scholasticism. While it is not every philosopher’s job (at least not all the time) to fit their inquiries into a larger context, setting the highly detailed, exquisitely narrow, professional philosophical investigations into larger contexts is the only way to realize their value—the only way to explain why minutely focused philosophical work matters.

Finally, presenting a broad view is worth doing in a small book that has a chance of being read by those who, although interested in the subject and willing to endure the abstraction, density, and obsessive analyses of serious philosophy, are unwilling to devote months to the massive tome which would be required to dot every specialist i and cross every technical t implicit in a large thesis (not that complete thoroughness could ever actually be achieved). This small book that stakes out many philosophical positions in service of a large thesis is the result of these considerations.

A philosophical view of some complexity is most perspicuously presented in provisional pieces that are revised in the course of assembly. Objections will occur to even the most sympathetic reader as the unrefined cogs and springs of the view make their first few appearances. Serious objections for some readers will doubtlessly survive full assembly, but I hope that as the ideas are developed, polished, and integrated, many naturally arising objections will be addressed. In the end you may have sufficient reason to reject my view, but I plead for some patience before you reach that judgment.

After an introductory apologia for my method, I will begin my sermon proper with the subject of the hoped for justification, the self. I write in the firm conviction, as fundamental as any I have, that there are other selves, and in the somewhat less firm, but still strong, conviction, that many of those other selves share my interest in self-justification. Morality, like sanity, begins in the rejection of solipsism. Moral philosophy begins in the belief that some of those other selves want, as I do, to do the “right” thing, if there is such a thing.

Belief that there are other selves that share an interest in self-justification is more than an initial assumption; it is, in Kantian terms, a transcendental condition of the entire endeavor. The justification of myself to myself must travel through others, for the justification is not a Popeye-an “I am what I am”; rather it is the Spike Lee-an “I do the right things,” and, to be real, this rightness requires others. More of this to come, but the upshot is a quest for “moral objectivism,” a morality that is the same for me and you, all of you.

I do not doubt that a careful reader, and certainly one with specialist knowledge, will have little difficulty finding mistakes. But the book would be considerably more error prone had it not been for helpful friends and colleagues. Rationalist Pragmatism was largely written during the tenures of Mickaella Perina and Christopher Zurn as Chairs of the University of Massachusetts/Boston Philosophy Department, and they did their utmost to make it a place conducive to philosophical reflection. Nelson Lande’s persistent urgings stimulated much of the department’s philosophical life from which I benefited. Many members of the department attended lunch talks where early versions of chapter 2, sections 5 and 6 were discussed. Those meetings generated a number of useful suggestions, as did a presentation of chapter 2, section 3 to a group of UMB philosophy alumnae. Steven Levine and Jeremy Wanderer were generous with their knowledge and time when I needed guidance on an issue in pragmatism or semantics. I am grateful to all my UMB colleagues and students for their contribution to this work.

Joel Greifinger read an early partial draft, and his always sharp observations were of general help, but most particularly his comments caused me to engage more seriously with Habermas, and to realize I needed to explain how my idealized epistemology would function in nonideal contexts (chapter 4, section 7). Hadass Silver also read an early draft and persuaded me that the issue of measuring the value of competing goals required the substantial treatment it now gets in the appendix. Hadass’ reading of a later draft led to useful changes regarding the ordering of topics. Arthur Goldhammer offered a cryptic but encouraging remark that helped push me to complete the project.

For their patient support throughout the editorial process, from Lexington Books, I wish to thank Jana Hodges-Kluck, Trevor Crowell, Sydney Wedbush, Syed Zakaullah, Arun Rajakumar, Len Clapp, and especially Rob Stainton. Two anonymous readers for Lexington Books made suggestions that improved the book. I am grateful to them all.

Of course, none of the people mentioned above bear any responsibility for the resulting book.

Joel Marks, however, does. After decades of debating the relative merits of Kantianism and Utilitarianism with me, Joel dramatically and suddenly rejected all moral beliefs as false and pernicious. This “anti-epiphany,” as he called it, he partly attributed to my critique of modern liberal theism,⁹ and he challenged me to explain why that critique did not apply, mutatis mutandis, to morality. It was this spur which first moved me to think through the philosophical grounds for my belief that some actions are right and some are wrong.

However, although Joel Marks bears responsibility for its existence, he bears no blame for the book’s contents. His meticulous reading and generous, extensive commentary on a late draft was a heroic effort to save me from what he saw as blunders of logic, fact, or style. I have no doubt that the many recommendations of his I accepted made this a better book, but there were also many I rejected, so Joel is guiltless of all remaining infelicities. His interest in the project sustained it through a long gestation, and I am deeply appreciative of that, even if he thinks the baby ugly.

It surely is not always easy living with someone who spends much time staring into space thinking about truth and goodness when he might otherwise be doing truly good things, but Ora Gladstone tolerates it, and even helped proofread the index. I am grateful for her forbearance. Isaac and Hadass make the objectivity of moral goodness psychologically impossible for me to disbelieve.

NOTES

1. In each assertion, by “truth,” or “true” I mean what some feel the need to call “objective truth” or “objectively true.” In general, I feel no such need, and think the modifier redundant. Nonetheless, it is sometime convenient to refer to a belief as “subjectively true,” and so in certain contexts clarity requires using the expression “objectively true.”

2. Like many philosophical labels “moral objectivism” has been slapped on a host of differing doctrines. What I mean by it must await developing its elements, but for now I’ll simply say it asserts that there are true principles of action.

3. I recognize that some recent work in experimental philosophy (e.g., Pölzler 2018) casts some doubt on this claim, but hardly enough to shake me from this conviction. See chapter 5, section 4.

4. Cf. Misak (2000). Although not directly influenced by Misak’s work, this book explores many similar themes and arrives at many of the same positions she anticipated. For a comparison of her views and my Rationalist Pragmatism see chapter 4, section 10. Brandom (2011) who has also used the term “Rationalist Pragmatism,” to describe his views, is in some ways closer, in other ways less close, to the form of Rationalist Pragmatism I espouse than is Misak. See chapter 4, section 9 for a more extensive discussion of Brandom’s rationalist pragmatism.

5. See Kant (1785), Hutcheson (1723). Also Bentham (1789) and Mill’s (1861a) versions of the principle of utility.

6. Nozick (1993, 140).

7. Fukuyama (2011, xiv).

8. “Philosophy is the discipline that surveys all things that we think are true and tries to figure out how they can be true together.” Antony (2016).

9. Silver (2006).