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Earl of Shaftesbury, early writings, Hans-Georg Gadamer, law, Martha Nussbaum, Niko Kolodny, Parimal Patil, Robert E. Goodin
One of the biggest problems with analytical ethics, as it’s usually practised, is the reliance on “moral intuitions” as data for ethical judgements. “Intuitions” themselves are not the problem, as long as we think of them as Martha Nussbaum does in The Fragility of Goodness, as “prevalent ordinary beliefs,” the relatively commonsense understandings that make up our starting point, like Gadamer’s Vorurteilen (prejudices). We have to start our enquiry where we are, making sense of the beliefs we already have, rejecting some in the light of others.
But contemporary ethicists often go further than this, giving our unreflective “intuitions” a high status they do not deserve. Robert E. Goodin’s Protecting the Vulnerable is one of the worst examples of this pernicious practice. In attempting to make a particular substantive point about promise-keeping, he notes:
Here again, our moral intuitions are likely to vary, depending on which theory we embrace. Those who are not under the sway of any philosophical theory would, however, surely concur with Kronman’s assessment… To prevent us from ‘cooking’ the evidence upon which our choice between rival theories is to be based, however, let us again focus upon law as the formal codification of our community’s standard moral intuitions. (p. 50)
Let’s leave aside Goodin’s curious assumption that pretheoretical “intuitions,” and not theoretically developed judgements, are codified in law. Even if that were the case, it is difficult to see why such “uncooked” pretheoretical judgements would be a good source for normative moral claims. But this is exactly Goodin’s assumption; elsewhere he refers to certain moral intuitions in a particular case as “hopelessly contaminated by the very moral theories which are supposed to be validated by them.” (p. 45)
I could see advantages to Goodin’s method for purely descriptive ethics. If there were normative judgements “uncontaminated” by general moral theories – a questionable assumption – then an anthropologist studying an alien culture might find such judgements valuable data for making sense of this foreign world. But Goodin claims nowhere to be an anthropologist. He is concerned only with his own society, and takes the “uncooked” and “uncontaminated” judgements he finds codified in law as evidence for the normative claims he wants to make to that society (most generally, that we should attend to special responsibilities because of special vulnerability rather than contracts or consent).
This approach seems curiously anti-intellectual. Surely a judgement unaided by theoretical reflection would be of lesser value than one based on such reflection. It would seem that the whole point of theoretical reflection is to make our judgements more thoughtful, more considered, more reflective. If theoretical reflection “cooks” and “contaminates” our judgements to the point that pretheoretical judgements are more valuable than theoretically informed ones, then that reflection — which Goodin nevertheless engages in — seems a waste of time at best.
You could perhaps defend Goodin’s approach by making an analogy between ethics and an empiricist conception of natural science. Our moral intuitions, on this view, would not be presuppositions to be modified, but data to be codified. Moral theories would be based on induction from intuition data, and one would throw out theories that did not fit the data. As far as I can tell, a method like this seems implicit in Goodin’s approach to “uncooked intuition,” which he does not explicitly defend.
But for moral intuitions to function like sense data in this way would require something like the “moral sense” of Shaftesbury and other eighteenth-century British philosophers, a faculty of the mind comparable to sight or touch which is analogously capable of perceiving the moral qualities of actions. The problem is that few today argue for such a “moral sense,” and Goodin himself is not among the few. On his own account, his method is merely to clarify “the shared moral code of a given society,” which “itself may be no more than a negotiated order” (p. 10) — not something directly perceived, “intuited,” by the society’s members. If particular moral judgements are indeed handed down socially (as I agree they are) rather than intuited, surely we should work from them in their existing, theoretically informed forms, and not try to look for some “uncontaminated” root form.
I suspect that Goodin’s approach rests at least in part on the misleading connotations of the term “intuition.” Recall the uses that this term has outside of ethics. As a philosophical term it often means sense perception (as in standard English translations of Kant: “conceptions without intuitions are empty, intuitions without conceptions are blind”). In popular usage it refers to some special faculty of knowing, extra-sensory or an additional sense (as “women’s intuition”). Given these uses, the term “moral intuitions” implies a strong connotation of a “moral sense,” which I think can easily lead one to confusions like Goodin’s. In short, unless you actually accept the kind of moral-sense theory that Goodin (and most people today) do not, let’s have no more talk of “intuitions.” Let’s speak instead of “prevalent ordinary beliefs,” of “considered judgements” – or better yet, as Gadamer does, of “prejudices.”
(This post draws mostly from a paper I submitted to my PhD advisor, Parimal Patil, based on ideas in a class I audited from Niko Kolodny.)
Hi Amod,
Some fragmentary observations.
Intuitions, it seems to me, are those things that you know directly/immediately without the need of ratiocination. What sets those intuitions in train in the moral sphere? Is it our training? Aristotle had this idea that what seems to the good man to be good is good.
Nichomachean Ethics: X.6
I imagine that Shaftesbury would have been drawing from that well. What the good man would do becomes a pattern for the bewildered remnant. Rama for Dharma, Hanuman for loyalty and service. Arjuna is steadied by Krishna’s reminder of the duty of a warrior. He is urged to forgo the error of consequentialism, not for him the felicific calculus. Other cultures have the cult of sport – ‘play up, play up and play the game’. In any case we are constantly reminded until it becomes our mind.
In all societies there are blind spots, there is slavery and untouchability existing along with high mindedness as in India today and we wonder whether Americans like Americans when we look at the health care provision debate going on there. Using the best of the old models we need to think our way through to a new mind so to speak.
There is the saying of Yeats:
Hi Michael – I think the trick in Aristotle’s quote is the question of how you define the good man, and how you know what the good man is. In Ethics book I, Aristotle tells us we need to argue to and from first principles; we may get to those first principles by starting from our “intuitions,” but they’re not going to be the same thing. It’s reason rather than intuitions that makes us wise and good.
Trying to assess the position of the Gita (let alone the epics more generally) is a lot tougher. It often seems, at least, like a divine command theory – what’s dharmic is dharmic because Krishna says so. Which then raises the same kinds of questions that Western divine command theories face: how do we know that this particular god or scripture is really the divine truth whose commands we should be following?
From what I know of the neuroscience of morality, the current idea is that ethics arise from neural and endocrine systems “designed” to promote community-building and trust. In any specific case, they answer an open-ended constraint-satisfaction problem, rather than following a logical progression. That is, they don’t lead to single specific solutions, but case-specific answers that arise from optimizing multiple dynamic constraints.
What does this mean? I would posit that “moral intuitions” do not map cleanly onto philosophical reasoning. Rules and logical analysis cannot fully capture or codify natural human morality. (Not that such morals can never translate into explicit analysis, but it might require something more like a dynamic systems/network approach than rules, and I would hazard that we’re a long way from being able to hold coherent philosophical arguments about network weights.)
Which means, ultimately, I agree with you: the process of trying to codify and exalt moral intuitions is silly. But you can still use moral philosophy to produce new and different moral ideas, to try and replace and improve upon the behaviors arising from our natural “intuitions”.
Most of my understanding comes from the following paper, or the expanded talk version thereof that I heard at the Society for Neuroscience conference last year:
http://philosophy.ucsd.edu/faculty/pschurchland/papers/neuron08impactofneuroonphil.pdf
Yes, I think we basically agree. You’re right that I should have said more about neuroscience here – as I mentioned, this is from an old paper, one before a lot of the recent empirical work has been done. The upshot of the post would remain more or less the same, but the way to characterize “intuitions” is different. We can reasonably imagine some element of biological basis for “moral intuition”; but that doesn’t give us any reason to believe in the correctness of that “intuition” (or prejudice). To learn how we in fact come to think and feel about morality doesn’t necessarily tell us much about what actually is moral, any more than to learn how we come to think about the physical world tells us about that world. It’s most useful, I suspect, for explaining our errors, such as why we perceive the world is flat. One thing I’ve noted about some of these empirical studies (Jonathan Haidt’s in particular) is how strong the drive to retribution is in our untutored sense of morality. I’ve been wondering whether that drive to punish for retribution’s sake (as opposed to preventing future bad actions) is a similarly great inborn error. (I addressed some related topics in my “Ethics without morality” post.)
Point taken Amod, but as you will know the good man is a good something or other. The knowledge of what makes for a good x develops for a society over time. So in a way it is a sort of adaptation to a particular niche. It may be indeed the emergence of our inner prairie vole or something. The empirical question is: are we capable of recognising excellence and choosing to pattern ourselves on it. That capacity may be good enough for ‘the good’.
On the Gita: I’ve always understood that Krishna was urging Arjuna to discover again his own dharma as a warrior, re-minding him of it rather than commanding him to it.
In both these cases, I think, we’re still left with the question: how do we know? If it’s not about Krishna deciding what Arjuna’s dharma is (and I agree that can be a legitimate reading of the Gita), then how does Arjuna know? I’m not sure the text spells that out.
As for the larger question about a good man being a good x (in Aristotelian terms)… a question still remains about which x we decide to be good at, which practices to follow. Some of our most important life decisions (what work to undertake, for pay or otherwise; whether or not to have children) rest on this point. Not everything one can be good at is necessarily a good; does a man become better by being a better thief, a better torturer?
From a quick scan of B.G. II I find Krishna reminding Arjuna of what Arjuna must already know viz. The duty of a warrior in a righteous war. The assumption is that following your dharma is a good thing. I don’t see a suggestion that this is a good thing because Krishna is for it, that its goodness is conferred on it for that reason.
Further on reasons why following your dharma is a good thing are offered.
Good is an equivocal word. The good carpenter will be competent, prompt, charge a fair price, not scamp the work, all good things but not having a single mark which unites them yet we seem to know what we mean by good in each case.
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