A Geographical Guide to the Real and the Good

Robert Sack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780415944854
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134955596
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

In this original and ambitious work, the renowned geographer Robert Sack argues for places that expand our awareness of reality and that increase the variety and complexity of reality. The joint application of these two criteria is the basis of a geographically informed moral theory that emphasizes the role of altruism. As well, it sheds light on the connection between the real and the good. Place-making that is guided by these criteria can affect our concepts of justice, our concerns about nature, and our views of democracy and the economy. What emerges is a geographical theory of morality based on the concepts of space, place, and place-making. Using historical and contemporary examples at all geographical scales to illustrate his theory, Sack forces readers see their geographical actions and everyday surroundings in an entirely new way.

I

Instrumental Judgments

3

SITUATEDNESS AND RELATIVISM

THE OVERARCHING POINTS OF THIS CHAPTER and the next are that instrumental judgments promote moral relativism and moral absolutism, and that moral relativism cannot be a defense against absolutism, and can turn into it. How this is so can be summarized briefly this way.

If I am a relativist, and you want to impose your view on me, I have no grounds to say you shouldn’t, for your view would be as important as mine—just different. But if you do impose yours on me you then are acting as an absolutist and I, as a relativist, am allowing and even abetting it.

Since relativism does not deter absolutism and can even encourage it, this chapter is about relativism. It explores how the situatedness of instrumentalism is part of relativism. Simply put, an instrumental position argues morality to be a product of, and a rationalization for, particular positions and self-interests. Hence, moral claims are relative to these. Exploring moral theories that make such claims or come close to doing so is the object of this chapter.

Place’s loomlike quality can explain how it helps twist virtues such as truth, justice, and the natural to conform to our self-interest. So convincing are these twists that it may come to seem that there is no escape: self-interest makes all moral judgments circular and relative. Let us consider those philosophies that seem to be explicitly and positively claiming an instrumental position, and thus are rejecting the possibility of intrinsic judgments.

Theories such as these differ in what they think the significant forces to be. Sociobiologists would see the realm of nature as playing the determinate role. Other theories would have the dominant factors lie in the social realm (class, gender, or simply social “power”) and still others in the mental or the realm of meaning. I am not after the details of these arguments, but rather their shared and general idea that our moral positions are results of and instruments for these forces.

I will start with the simplest kind of claim, and go on to more complex ones found in communitarianism and postmodernism. Even though these two support situatedness, they show some signs of dissatisfaction with it. In postmodernism the situatedness usually refers to the unique character of different places. I will end the chapter with a consideration of some themes in Marxism. The situated and relativistic strand of Marxism comes from its general emphasis on the unfolding power of social relations (especially class) and the capacity of this power to mold our ideas and values—to make them products of this situatedness (which, as opposed to postmodernism, is a situatedness that can be repeated in countless places)—and on Marx’s pronouncements that morality is simply a rationalization for this class interest or situation. I want to juxtapose this Marxist theme with another strand from Marxism, its appeal to what might be taken as an intimation of the good, and how the tension between the two cannot be overcome without having Marxism become less of a social and more of a moral theory, a point which will be taken up again in Chapter 7.

FROM EMOTIVISM TO COMMUNITARIANISM

At the smallest scale are those views of morality that claim it to be nothing more than a means of rationalizing what is important to particular individuals at the moment. If I enjoyed walking in a nearby forest that is being threatened by developers, I may join a group that hopes to preserve the forest by having the land transferred to a state-controlled park. Justifying my position, I may say that this transference of land will lead to natural conservation, which is morally right. What I really mean is only that I want very much to preserve this area because I value the natural. Claiming this is morally right is simply a way of saying natural conservation is important to me, or that I prefer it.

An emotive theory of morality is the philosophical claim that not only do people use moral terms this way, but that this is probably the only way they are, or can be, used. According to Alasdair MacIntyre, “emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.”¹ Since these preferences and feelings are caused by forces surrounding us, we and our moral judgments simply become agents of these place-specific forces. The use of truth, justice, and the natural become defined by context, is a rationalization of context, and is relative to context. Emotivism is instrumental.

A closely related view is that morality is simply what is customary to, or practiced by, a group in a place. Morality is equivalent to mores or customs. As with emotivism, the moral is being used as a justification for what is practiced and preferred, but now it is a group, a collectivity and the place they occupy, rather than a single individual, making this claim and reinforcing it for others. The moral conventions of a context or a place act as a force and stipulate what should be done.

Variants of emotivism and morality as mores or custom can apply to larger-scale places and contexts, and fill in the intermediate range of our instrumental continuum; these arguments become more complex and subtly change when we consider the position of communitarianism at the other end of the continuum.² This moral position (or collection of positions) argues that what is good is not simply what is motivating us or what is customary, but rather finds the good as an ideal embodied in the proper and best performance of particular roles and social relations.

Communitarianism draws upon the Aristotelian conception of a moral life, which extends the older Homeric view that sees moral action as behaving in a way appropriate to one’s function in society: being a good and moral father, host, or warrior means performing admirably what these roles require. Aristotle abstracted and amalgamated these role-specific functional definitions so that they became appropriate to the conduct of an entire human life. Humans have specific needs and goals by virtue of their constitution, and being good means mastering those virtues that lead us to—that are instrumental for—our peculiarly human purpose, or telos. Because these virtues are means to this most important end, they constitute living a good life. But for Aristotle, these purposes are not possible to conceptualize outside of, or beyond, the life of roles, duties, and obligations in particular communities. And for him, there was only one good place or context for a human life to be lived, and that was the city-state. (One cannot be fully human outside of this context.) The human being should then follow the purpose of a human life, which in the broadest and best sense, is defined by the duties and obligations of a citizen in a Greek city-state.

Communitarians, too, consider what is good and bad in terms of one’s duties and obligations in the context of living a human life, but this time in the modern world. A fundamental difficulty in adapting the Aristotelian view to contemporary life is that expectations placed on individuals within a modern community are shifting and contestable. Indeed, Aristotle was confident about his statements concerning human purpose and the virtues required to live a moral life because they were reinforced by the relatively cohesive set of social practices of the Greek city-state (although one can argue about exactly how cohesive Athens was in Aristotle’s time). But as modern culture becomes more dynamic and its places more fragmented and yet integrated in a global system, meanings and social contexts are no longer stable and self-reinforcing.

A communitarian such as MacIntyre would like to retain the Aristotelian view of the moral, but modern conditions have forced him to rephrase the position so that it no longer stresses human life and telos in general, but focuses instead once again on human practices. His is still a more abstract position than the Homeric, for practices are more general than roles, which can be included as practices. A practice is “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.”³

Because of the dynamic—and what Maclntyre would argue the immoral—qualities of modern life, the kernels of good practices reside in our smaller day-to-day activities, in our games, our work, and our roles in family and occupations. At this level people can achieve competence and control over their actions and thus exercise virtue. “A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such good.”⁴ Virtues then according to MacIntyre, though not necessarily organized around the three—of truth, justice, and the natural—which arise from a geographical focus, nevertheless still are products of and embedded within practices, projects, and places.

Reliance on the Aristotelian idea of projects embedded within contexts is characteristic of other communitarian thinkers. Michael Walzer, for example, uses “spheres” of justice rather than practices and projects as the primary focal point. A sphere is a rather general conception identifying a social nexus of practices within which particular concepts of justice pertain. Within these spheres, “different social goods ought to be distributed for different reasons, in accordance with different procedures, by different agents; and all of these differences derive from different understandings of the social goods themselves—the inevitable product of his torical and cultural pluralism.”⁵ The family, the school, the workplace, and the polity are such spheres. Each tends to focus on particular types of social goods and the appropriate or just way they are distributed. For example, in modern Western culture, free exchange may be the criterion for distributing goods in the marketplace; in the school it may be in terms of merit or dessert; while in the home one may focus on a range of criteria. The critical point is that “all distributions are just or unjust relative to the social meanings or the goods at stake.”⁶ While Walzer does not focus on place but rather on a set of spheres and their meanings of justice, his argument at this point is similar to how the weave of the virtues and their significance depends on place (and my arguments about variety and complexity and the evils of tyranny draw upon his). In the classroom, for example, the most important strand of justice would be expected to be different from that in the soup kitchen; but unlike Walzer’s analysis, our focus on place allows us to consider the apparent situatedness of other virtues as when the strand of the natural in a wilderness area differs from that in a hospital.

These meanings as well as the spheres develop historically. Since practices change, and their boundaries are fluid, only careful observation of practices within particular spheres in actual cultures reveals the appropriate principle of justice. If principles in one sphere spill over and dominate another, then this is unjust for the dominated sphere. It is a form of tyranny. If, for example, the market place, which may be the appropriate model for the sphere of the economy, becomes the model for the political, or the educational, then we lose control over that portion of our life.

MacIntyre, Walzer, and other communitarians focus on practice. The good is in and defined by these. There is little “place” for a nonrelativistic good. The idea that there might be, they argue, comes from abstracting us too far from the particular situated cases and from the conditions of being human. Indeed, much of communitarian motivation is a response to what they see as the limitations and dangers of the more abstract approach. For Bernard Williams: “The belief that you can look critically at all your dispositions from the outside, from the point of view of the universe, assumes that you could understand your own and other people’s dispositions from that point of view without tacitly taking for granted a picture of the world more locally familiar than any that would be available from there; but neither the psychology nor the history of ethical reflection gives much reason to believe that the theoretical reasonings of the cool hour can do without a sense of the moral shape of the world, of the kind given in the everyday dispositions.”⁷

For communitarianism, the abstract and the concrete do not mix well. Indeed, pursuing the abstract runs the risk of our no longer being in touch with the contexts and particularities that make us individuals with moral interests. “How can I that has taken on the perspective of impartiality be left with enough identity to live a life that respects its own interests?”⁸

The way they handle these concerns constrain communitarians from moving farther along the path to a more universal view. Their preferred position is situated, or in Walzer’s terms, “radically particularistic”—“One way to begin the philosophical enterprise—perhaps the original way—is to walk out of the cave, leave the city, climb the mountain, fashion for oneself (what could never be fashioned for ordinary men and women) an objective and universal standpoint. Then one describes the terrain of everyday life from far away, so that it loses its particular contours and takes on a general shape.”⁹ In contrast to this, Walzer means “to stand in the cave, in the city, on the ground.”¹⁰ For him, as for other communitarians, morality is situated, contextual, place-dependent, and thus relative.

In many respects, the instrumental uses of the structure and dynamics of place described in Chapter 2 can help inform the communitarian ideas of the individual practices of excellences in MacIntyre’s view, or the spheres of justice in Walzer’s. In this vein, a good society is one in which the instrumental values of the place are allowed to be played out mostly on their own, independently of other places. This relative isolation allows the weave of empirical elements to produce a weave of virtues that become accepted by the weight of tradition. This process can lead to a richer set of contexts, a greater set of options for living life. But on its own, instrumentalism or communitarianism cannot then address the questions: Are these good? How do we tell? Communitarianism does not develop a good that is independent of these contexts. It leaves too much room for the possibility that a local practice and particular realm of life, or a sphere of justice in Walzer’s terms, may in fact be an oppressive realm, one which is different from the others, but which exploits or subverts or tyrannizes its own members. Because of communitarianism’s premises, there is little it can say that helps identify such cases or that provides a means of redressing them. Again, the problem is that the particular practices, spheres, or places generate their own purposes, telos, or goals, which are then to be evaluated on their own terms, and not according to some more abstract set of principles.

Even though these philosophies stress situatedness and shun the idea of an independent good, they nonetheless seem to assume something like it. For example, in order for the assumption that people should be allowed to develop according to their own inclinations to make sense, it must rest on the deeper and more universal claim that people deserve autonomy and respect. Or the idea that such developments will create a variety of practices, which in itself is good, must rest on a more universal value of variety and complexity. Most communitarians, though advocating a form of situatedness, are not happy with relativism, but have little ammunition to fire against it. There is little in MacIntyre’s position that decides what is a good or a bad practice, still he feels compelled to offer something as an alternative to relativism. He does so in his not very clear notion that the reflexivity of a tradition and its ability to confront crises and inconsistencies will somehow lead away from relativism’s excesses, while Walzer has suggested that there may be a “kind of minimal and universal moral code”¹¹ to which we can appeal. But again, if sharing values and respecting the rights of people who share values to develop their own projects is important, is it not because we assume more generally that human beings have rights and duties that go beyond the particular? And if Walzer thinks such shared positions that may comprise the foundation of his own theory are so “thin” as to be virtually devoid of meaning, then how does he expect the details of communitarianism to have moral weight for others than himself and those wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Instrumental Judgments
• Part II Intrinsic Judgments
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index