Grounded Ethics

The Empirical Bases of Normative Judgements

Max Hocutt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780765800268
• eBook ISBN: 9781351326742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Scientific naturalism--basing beliefs on empirical evidence--has now triumphed in every field of inquiry except moral philosophy. There it is still thought appropriate to cite otherworldly standards known by divine revelation or moral intuition. In Grounded Ethics Max Hocutt argues that, since there is no transcendent reality on which to base the claims of ethics, normative truth must be sought in the desires of individuals and the conventions of societies.

Hocutt begins with an empiricist analysis of normative judgments. Following B.F. Skinner, he asserts that we call good what reinforces our desires, and that we call right or just what we desire to reinforce. Consequently, desire is the immediate measure of both goodness and justice. Acknowledging that goodness is relative to individual preferences, and justice is relative to social norms, Hocutt denies that goodness is a matter of personal opinion and that every society's institutions are as good as every other's. Instead, he says, the conduct of individuals and the customs of societies must ultimately be evaluated by how well they serve biologically based needs. These must be discovered empirically, because they cannot be known a priori.

In support of this analysis, Hocutt challenges rationalist belief, that normative concepts cannot be defined in empirical terms because they are rooted in divine law or ideals of pure reason. Against this view, Hocutt argues that if the moral law exists only as an ideal, it is not binding in the same sense as the empirically known laws and moralities of actual societies. He also points out that rationalist intuitions are best understood as expressions of animal instinct, socially conditioned prejudice, and personal preference. In addition, he offers extensive critiques of major philosophers, both ancient and modern, who hold contrary views.

All of this is meant to show that there is no escaping the empirical: A sensible ethics must be built on observable facts; it cannot be pulled from a vague but pious rationalist sky. Hocutt's demonstration of this thesis will interest philosophers, behavioral biologists, sociologists and ethicists.

1

Abstract^*

“Ethics, in the empiricist view, is conduct favored consistently enough throughout a society to be expressed as a code of principles. It is driven by hereditary pre-dispositions in mental development—the “moral sentiments” of the Enlightenment philosophers—causing broad convergence across cultures, while reaching precise form in each culture according to historical circumstance. The codes, whether judged by outsiders as good or evil, play an important role in determining which cultures flourish, and which decline.”—E. O. Wilson, Consilience, p. 240.

“If the Empiricist world view is correct, ought is just shorthand for one kind of factual statement, a word that denotes what society first chose (or was coerced to do), and then codified. The naturalistic fallacy is thereby reduced to the naturalistic dilemma. The solution of the dilemma is not difficult. It is this: Ought is the product of a material process. The solution points the way to an objective grasp of the origin of ethics.”—Ibid., p. 249

I

The word ought has two main uses. In one, what someone ought to do is what he would be well advised to do in order to improve his chances of achieving his ends or serving his interests. This may be called a prudential, or rational, use of the word ought. In another use, what someone ought to do is what she is required, or obligated, to do by the rules of law, morality, or etiquette to which she happens to be subject as a member of some society. This may be called a juridical, or moral, use of the word ought.

As Gilbert Harman has observed, the connection between these two uses is that someone ought, other things being equal, to do what there is reason for him to do; it is just that the reason may be either prudential or moral. In a third, derivative, use of the word, we say that a person ought to do not what she has reason to do but what we have reason to prefer her to do, because we think her doing it would be a good thing. Here again the central concept is reason.

Since ethics is about what people ought to do, this means that its central question is “What is a reason, and when does someone have reason to do, or prefer that someone else do, something?”

The oldest and still the best answer to this question is that a reason is anything that can, does, or will, serve as a motive. In day to day speech, we describe as a reason for an event or an action anything that can explain, or cause it. Thus, we say, the reason the lamp fell is that Sarah bumped into it, the reason Sarah bumped into the lamp is that Sam pushed her, and the reason Sam pushed her is that he was angry. To give a reason for someone to do something is, then, to say what could, or under the right conditions would, cause her to do it. In short, a reason is an actual or potential motive.

Specifying such a motive requires constructing what Aristotle called a practical syllogism, which explains conduct by postulating an appropriate combination of desires with beliefs. Thus, we say “Mary is going to the grocery store because she wants some milk and believes she can get it there.” In this syllogism, the desire supplies the motive power; the belief gives it direction.

The prescriptive, or normative, counterpart to this syllogism is “Mary wants some milk and believes she can get it at the grocer, so she should go to the grocer.” Here the desire and the belief are the same as before, but in this case they constitute a potential rather than an actual motive. The motive will become actual when it begins to effect the behavior in question. This simple fact shows how the normative is dependent on the descriptive.

In the examples just used, the motive was desire. There are other motives besides desire, but it is customary in moral philosophy to treat these as kinds of desire, because it simplifies the argument. Thus, fear counts as a desire to avoid something, love as a desire to possess it, anger as a desire to destroy it, and so on. This is a loose way to talk, but it has become conventional, and there can be no objection to it so long as we satisfy the main requirement, which, to quote Hume, is to specify something with the capacity to “move the will.”

For that purpose to be served, we must understand that, in behavioral contexts, talk of desires, interests, and other motives denotes not feelings but dispositions. A desire is what economists call a preference function, an inclination to prefer one thing to another. Thus, a desire for happiness is a disposition to prefer what you believe will make you happy, and a desire for prestige is a disposition to prefer what you believe will bring prestige.

Explaining behavior by invoking desires is pointing out how the behavior manifests the relevant disposition. Thus, we say, “Jones ate because he was hungry,” understanding that hunger is a disposition to eat. Like explaining why dropped objects fall by invoking gravity, the tendency of objects to fall, this has an appearance of circularity. It is, rather, an example of fitting a case to a rule.

An illusion of circularity also attends specification of belief. Despite conventional wisdom, neither beliefs nor desires come to us labeled as such. They must be inferred from the behavior, as its most likely explanation, but we can identify the belief only presupposing a certain desire, and conversely. So, we must identify the belief and the desire together, but how are we to know whether we have identified the right combination?

The answer is that we can not, but we can know whether we have found a combination that will do the job. Since many hypotheses will do that, we can never be sure that we have found the correct one; but it is a truism of science that explanatory hypotheses always exceed the data. So, you pays your money and you takes your chances.

Given that they are such difficult entities to identify and define, why must we invoke beliefs and desires? Because, so far, that is what is meant by explaining behavior. To understand human behavior is just to postulate a combination of beliefs and desires from which we can infer it. Where we can imagine no combination of beliefs and desires from which to deduce the behavior in question, we find it unintelligible. Thus, the behavior of madmen surpasses comprehension.

That understanding behavior requires us to discern the beliefs and desires that motivate it has an important implication. Since what motivates A may leave B unmoved, reasons are relative to persons; nothing is a reason absolutely, in itself.

This conclusion is also evident from grammar. The logical form of reasons is not “R is a reason,” but “R is a reason for person P to do action A.” Thus, it is the bandit, not the honest citizen, who has reason to carry a gun, and it is the peace-loving Christian, not the Samurai warrior, who has reason to turn the other cheek. Reasons are personal. Mine are mine and yours are yours.

Deriding this view as egoism, critics have objected that it constitutes an apology for selfishness, but the objection confuses ownership with object. By all accounts, Mother Theresa’s consuming passion was to improve the lot of the poor; she had little interest in her personal welfare. This entitles us to say that her motives were unselfish. No matter. These motives were distinctively hers. If I had wanted to give Mother Theresa a reason for doing something, I had better have shown her how doing it would serve her personal but unselfish ends. Telling her merely how it would have served my personal but selfish ends would not have sufficed. If a name for this doctrine is wanted, it is better called internalism.

The internalist may be thought to overlook what H.L.A. Hart called external judgment, meaning judgment made from the observer’s point of view. Suppose I say, “Rockefeller ought to give us his fortune.” I do not mean that Rockefeller has reason to give us his fortune. I mean that I have reason to prefer that he do so. Such a judgment is also internal—to the beliefs and desires of the observer if not also the agent.

Many philosophers have objected that this view overlooks “objective” reasons—reasons that do not depend on “subjective” beliefs or desires. This thesis is hard to evaluate, because the word “objective” is ambiguous. When Thomas Nagel uses it, he means impersonal reasons, reasons having no identification with any particular person. In The Possibility of Altruism, he claims that reasons are impersonal in the following sense: If one person has reason to do something, every person has reason to “promote” his doing it. According to Nagel, refusal to respect this principle constitutes “practical solipsism,” denial in practice [if not also in words] of the reality of other persons.

The argument is fallacious. Does Smith want to kill Jones? Jones’s refusal to help Smith find the gun is a denial not of Smith’s reality but his project’s desirability, quite a different thing. The concept of an impersonal reason is a logical and metaphysical muddle.

In another sense of the word, objective reasons exist. In support of Nagel, E. J. Bond has reminded us that there might be a reason that one does not have, or know. For example, suppose that Jones does not know that he could make money investing in the market. Then this fact will not motivate him. No matter. It still constitutes reason for him to invest; he just does not know it.

The premise is true but the argument fails. In the sense just defined, objective reasons exist, but we call them reasons because we can see how they would become motives if they were known. So, they constitute no exceptions to the principle that a reason is an actual or potential motive. Furthermore, the existence of reasons that are objective in this sense provides no support for Nagel’s view. That money could be made investing in the market will motivate Jones, who wants money, but not Smith, who is indifferent to it. Even “objective” reasons are relative to persons.

Also in support of Nagel, Stephen Darwall has objected that reasons are not what do or what would but what should motivate behavior. At first hearing, this sounds right, but it creates a vicious circle. If “x ought to do y” means “x has reason R to do y” and this means “x ought to be motivated by R to do y,” then we have used the word ought to define itself, making no progress.

Following Kant and Plato, Nagel also tries another tack: He argues that one can be motivated to do what one believes to be good, even when one lacks any desire to do it. This hypothesis, which attempts to disconnect reasons from desires, is mystifying. Given that a disposition to prefer something constitutes a desire for it, preference for the good must also count as a desire. If not, what should we call it, and what could it mean to say that someone was motivated to do what he lacked all desire to do? That he prefers to do what he does not prefer to do? Neither Nagel, Kant, nor Plato has answers for these questions.

The mistake all of these philosophers make is to suppose that we can conceive of the good as independent of desire. Plato thought so because he knew that, out of ignorance, people often make mistakes, desiring what is not good and failing to desire what is. Because knowledge that something is good can motivate us to pursue it, he concluded that you can be motivated by simple knowledge, without an accompanying desire.

Anxious, like Plato, to make morality “autonomous,” Kant said the same thing about duty. According to him, you can be moved to do it by Reason alone, without the support of Desire. Just recognize that you have a duty and you will be motivated to fulfill it. Kant believed that, if recognition of duty lacked this motivating power, we could not explain why people do their duty when they would prefer, for other reasons, not to.

This reasoning has a false premise. As B.F. Skinner observed, we call good that which we believe will reinforce desire. So, there is no defining the good without mentioning desire. It is true that the morally good, or right, may not itself be reinforcing, but it will be reinforced by those who are reinforced by it. So, it too falls under the heading of what reinforces desire. We have no conception of the good or the right as something entirely independent of desire.

John Stuart Mill was right after all. Although we cannot equate the good with what is desired, we can attach no meaning to the idea that something might be good but not such as to elicit, or reinforce, desire. G. E. Moore tried to do so by saying that the good ought to be desired, because it deserves to be desired, but this idea is paradoxical. What could it mean to say that some conduct was so good it deserved to be repeated even if, having experienced it, no one would ever want to do so again?

Moore also replied that, if desire were the measure of the good, there would be no bad desires; sweet and fatty foods would be good things. The answer to this is that sweet and fatty foods are good things; just think of the pleasures of butter pecan ice cream! It counts as bad only because we have learned that it can be unhealthy in large quantities and because we desire good health. Although not everything desired is good, desire remains the measure of what is.

If Moore had a different opinion, it is because he assumed, like Plato, that the goodness of a thing or action is intrinsic to it, as spherical shape and, in his view, yellow color are intrinsic to a lemon. According to Moore, goodness is a “simple” quality, one that the good thing would have even if there were nobody in the world to acknowledge it or appreciate it. In short, “x is good” has the same logical form as “x is round” and, Moore believed, “x is yellow.”

Nowadays, its proponents call this doctrine moral realism. It is also frequently called moral objectivism. The essence of the view is, however, that good things are good absolutely, not relatively to persons. So, a better name for it is moral absolutism.

Whatever it is called, the doctrine is demonstrably false. If, as just observed, the good is what reinforces preference for it, then it is relative to persons; for what reinforces A’s preferences will not reinforce B’s. Thus, licorice tastes good to you, bad to me. Thus, my getting the job you wanted is good for me, bad for you. If by intrinsically good we mean absolutely good, then nothing is intrinsically good. Even an act of giving one’s fortune to the poor would not in the required sense be intrinsically good; just good for the poor.

The stock reply is that, since good and bad are contraries, the same thing cannot be both good for A and bad for B. This argument is usually thought to be decisive, but one might as well argue that, since near and far are contraries, the Eiffel Tower cannot be both near Jacques in Paris and far from Jack in New York.

To think in this way is to ignore the main point, which is that good is relative, like location, not absolute, like shape or color. As Hobbes said, the word good is an indexical term, which each of us uses “in relation to himself,” to denote what he prefers. Hence, as “x is near” is elliptical for “x is near me,” so “x is good” is short for “x is preferable to me,” and what is preferable to me might be anathema to you.

It will be objected that this makes value to be a matter of opinion; so, mistake proof. Not by any means. Where the Eiffel Tower is located is an objective matter of fact, one that is independent of Jacques’s, or Jack’s, beliefs. The thing is not near Jacques, far from Jack, because they think so. They think so because it is true. Location is objective, independent of opinions. It is also relative. So is goodness. Licorice does not taste good to you, bad to me, because we think so. We think so because it is true.

The present doctrine is often called subjectivism, but the term is misleading. If a name is wanted, a better one would be objective relativism, or relationalism.

Critics may agree that the aesthetically good is relative to persons, but they will have a different idea about the morally good. According to Kant, the morally good is so independently of everything else. Thus, he held, an act of telling the truth, or keeping your promises, must count as good even when it does not reinforce your desire to do it again.

This is so, however, because people usually like to be told the truth, if not always to tell it. So, the case constitutes no counterexample. It merely hig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Abstract
• Part I: An Empiricist Moral Theory
• II A Critique of Rationalist Moral Theory
• III Applications and Implications
• Index