Humanism & Ideology Vol 4

James Robert Flynn, James R. Flynn

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317831976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This is Volume IV of a series of seven of Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion. Originally published in 1973. To deal with the problem of ethical scepticism, to show why it is of particular interest to political activists and students of politics, these are the principal aims of this book.

1The Problem of Ethical Scepticism

DOI: 10.4324/9781315823478-3

To deal with the problem of ethical scepticism, to show why it is of particular interest to political activists and students of politics, these are the principal aims of this book. This problem is variously called that of ethical truth versus ethical scepticism, value absolutism versus relativism, value objectivism versus subjectivism, etc., although, as we shall see, all of these terms will eventually be found wanting. However, to make a beginning, the problem might be described as this: Imagine that we are locked in debate with an opponent whose basic values differ from our own, let us say a Nietzschean, about whose way of life is best; and assume that we want not only to defend our ideals but also to persuade uncommitted men, men who are genuinely torn between our ideals and his. Can we make a claim on behalf of our way of life fundamentally different from any claim he could advance, for example, a claim that our way of life was somehow valid even for those who did not champion it? In other words, how can we justify our basic ethical and political ideals against such an opponent, justify them perhaps not so much to him as to those who are as yet uncommitted. I will attempt to deal with this problem, but the reader should mark this: I promise no sure solution. What I will try to provide is a hope (albeit a hope that empirical evidence may prove to be in vain) of a semi-solution, words that will become clearer by the close of this work.

A word about the title, Humanism and Ideology. First, as a political philosopher, I am primarily interested in the clash of ideologies rather than the choices that confront individuals in everyday life. Therefore, my attempt to provide a solution to the problem of ethical scepticism will take place in the setting of ideological competition and will be heavily coloured by that context. Second, the way of life that I wish to justify against its ideological opponents is often called the humanist ideal. The content of the humanist ideal will be elaborated later on, but for now I will refer to it as a life of humane love and creative work. There are variations on the humanist ideal, of course, and I have selected out the Jeffersonian ideal, one that sets a high value on political freedom, as perhaps its highest expression. But I want to emphasize that I have selected Jeffersonianism primarily to add some specificity to the humanist ideal, primarily as a concrete example of what humanism ought to mean in a certain social setting, namely, that of America. I am well aware that political freedom has certain social pre-requisites which to date are rarely present and that significant humanist experiments have taken place that give it a far less prominent role than Jeffersonianism does. To justify the humanist ideal is my major concern and I hope that no one will be distracted by the peculiar features of what is used mainly as an illustration of it.

As for the subtitle, ‘an Aristotelian view’, it reflects the fact that this work has a secondary purpose, a polemical, or to use a more respectable word, a pedagogical one. Perhaps the most exciting development in political ethics in recent years is the resurrection of schools. The traditional division of political thinkers into schools resulted from differing approaches to the problem of justifying their ideals (plus related differences over just whose ideals were capable of being justified), a problem that is essentially an epistemological one. But when intuitionism and emotivism came to dominate ethics (particularly in England) during the interwar period, the schools went into decline, for now justifications of the traditional kind were thought to be either unnecessary or impossible or both. In this atmosphere, the rise of linguistic analysis bolstered the view that the traditional schools were passé: it was believed that as thinkers came to agree on the meaning of ethical propositions, they would also agree on the extent to which such propositions could be verified; which meant that thinkers would share a common position on the epistemology of ethics, on the problem of justification, thus leaving no reason to divide into schools. In fact, however, linguistic analysis has not brought unity on the epistemology of ethics. Beginning in the fifties, and particularly since 1960, thinkers have begun to divide in terms of their approaches to the problem of justification, a trend which has promoted discussion of substantive issues such as just what sort of life men ought to live. Schools that were bullied into a subterranean existence are beginning to re-emerge, to punch their way through linguistic analysis and come out on the other side, albeit altered because of the experience. I refer to the rise of Hare's neo-Kantianism, Mary Warnock's neo-utilitarianism and von Wright's neo-Hobbesian approach, the latter being combined with a strong humane commitment and a considerable debt to the ancients. I want to add neo-Aristotelianism to the lists, to show that a natural law approach is a viable contender in the post-analysis competition between the schools.

This polemical purpose helps to explain why I have chosen to deal with ethical scepticism, something that poses the problem of justifying one's ideals in its most acute form. For it is my view that neo-Aristotelianism can do more to clarify this problem than any of the other new schools and also, that no problem is of greater potential interest to students of politics, what with their often passionate commitment to certain ethical and political ideals. Indeed, it is hard to think of a problem better suited to convince students that ethical and political philosophy is relevant to the great issues of the day. To drive this point home, I have tried to dramatize the debate of ethical truth versus scepticism by putting it in an actual social setting, an American one, to demonstrate that flesh and blood men, struggling to effect actual social reforms, have found it of great importance. I have also tried to keep my style as non-technical as possible with the hope of being comprehensible to students nearing the end of an introductory course and the general educated public. Hopefully, however, the analysis has not emerged so simplified as to fail to interest my academic colleagues.

It was remarked above that all the new schools have been altered by the experience of absorbing the findings of linguistic analysis. The major adjustment I have found necessary in my brand of Aristotelianism is to purge it of its metaphysics, while salvaging the core of its conceptual approach to ethical and political problems. Thus, my analysis will involve no references to a transcendental realm, nor the positing of any entities beyond human experience, nor the making of any assertions of fact that cannot be tested empirically. It may be asked if, in view of this, I have the right to call myself a neo-Aristotelian or my approach that of natural law. In reply, I only know that the works of Plato and Aristotle, their concepts and vocabulary, took me into a world of distinctions far more helpful than anything I have encountered before or since, particularly when dealing with the agonizing problem of ethical scepticism.

The above purposes, particularly the pedagogical one, can be achieved only if certain common opinions, prejudicial both to my problem and my school, are overcome. It is often contended that the problem of ethical scepticism is not significant—or that if it is significant, it is best left unsolved in that a solution would promote intolerance—or that if it is to be solved, this will not be done by any variant of natural law. This last reflects the widely-held view that all naturalistic schools have been discredited, the view that both classical natural law (stemming from Plato and Aristotle) and modern natural right (stemming from Locke and Rousseau) can be lumped together for purposes of critique and shown to be guilty of muddled thinking at best and the naturalistic fallacy at worst. In view of all of this, I would like to postpone my actual attempt to use an Aristotelian approach to deal with the problem of ethical scepticism and spend the first four chapters of this work on the following tasks: (1) Clarifying the problem of ethical scepticism and showing why it ought to make a difference to politically committed men, particularly humane men—which will be attempted in this chapter plus the next; (2) showing that this problem has made a difference to politically committed men, namely, certain prominent Americans—Chapter 3; (3) refuting the contention that a solution to this problem ought to be feared by humane men as destructive of their ideals, a fear common in America—also in Chapter 3; (4) showing that the approach of natural law does not stand or fall with the doctrine of modern natural right, a doctrine open to devastating critique—Chapter 4.

* * *

Thus far, we have tried to clarify the problem of ethical truth versus scepticism by referring to a hypothetical dispute, a dispute between two men engendered by conflicting basic values. Here it is necessary to elucidate, the word ‘basic’, for men can fall into dispute about a subordinate question of value even though they share the same basic values. For example, two men may hotly dispute the rightness of capital punishment and then discover that what they really disagree about is whether or not it deters potential murderers. That is, one may think that it does and that the lives saved thereby outnumber those lost on the scaffold, while the other may think that it rarely deters anyone; but they may agree on the basic question of value that the prime objective should be to preserve human life as much as possible. In that case, their dispute can be resolved by settling a question of fact, by evidence as to whether capital punishment actually reduces the murder rate. Or another example, there may be a dispute about the desirability of socialized medicine. During the debate, it may become obvious that both disputants are humane, that both want their fellow men to live as felicitously as possible, but that one of them believes that whatever may be gained by more comprehensive medical care will be cancelled out by a loss of initiative, a loss that will encourage men to lapse into a languor which will rob them of happiness. Such a debate might then be resolved by settling questions of fact, such as whether or not the Swedes (who have socialized medicine) really show less initiative than Americans.

In these two examples then, the disputes were not really rooted in conflicting values; rather they were engendered by differing assumptions about facts or causes and effects. Thus, they were disputes about subordinate questions of value rather than basic ones, for the difference between these two is precisely that the former hinge on questions of fact while the latter do not (at least in any simple way). But what if our opponent in a dispute about capital punishment or socialized medicine grants all our factual evidence and still disagrees? What if he says, ‘prevention of murder and preserving human life are all very well, but the relatives of the murdered man have a right to revenge’, or if he says, ‘most men can be as sick and miserable as misfortune allows for all I care, just so long as superior men are free to live as they please’? Then we would know that we were dealing with a man who could agree with us on all questions of fact, or at least on all ordinary facts (later on we will try to confront him with certain facts about human nature), and yet oppose us. For he has fundamentally non-humane values and therefore, the very facts that settle questions one way for us because of our humane values affect him in precisely the opposite way! On the level of ideological disputes, we often run into something similar, that is, an opponent who recommends to mankind a way of life we find abhorrent essentially because his basic values are opposed to our own, e.g. a Nazi. Or we can envisage ourselves in ideological debate with a Nietzschean, who would recommend a slavish life for the mass of men and the life of the superman for an élite.

This technique of clarifying the problem of ethical scepticism by way of envisaging disputes engendered by conflicting basic values has recently come under attack as too artificial. The claim is that no actual dispute ever comes down merely to a conflict of values, that all actual disputes involve disagreement about facts as well and that the two sources of the dispute cannot be neatly disentangled. This objection seems to me quite to miss the point. Philosophers utilize hypothetical disputes, like those described above, neither because such disputes actually occur in pure form nor because they hope thereby to discover ways of actually resolving disputes (that is a job for educators, politicians, diplomats, and sometimes, sadly, armies). Rather, philosophers utilize them for two purposes: first, to illustrate what they mean when they say that we sometimes encounter men whose basic values differ from our own—and this, as we have seen, requires that all extraneous disagreements about facts be stripped away; and second, to show how hard it is to justify our basic ideals when faced with such persons, to focus on the peculiar problem of justification that a conflict of values, as distinct from a disagreement over facts, poses. Now certainly no one will deny that different men actually do have differing values; this comes out in all sorts of ways, both in disputes and other situations. And certainly no one will deny that the basic values of men are important both personally and politically, that men with opposing values will live differently and preach different ideologies. And finally, if our basic values are so significant, then the problem of justifying them may also be significant, as I hope to show.

While on the subject of the sort of disputes that pose the problem of justifying our fundamental ideals, recall that we are primarily interested in ideological disputes rather than those about personal ethics. Ideologies are complex things often involving a metaphysics, an epistemology, a theory of history, a theory about the roots of political authority, etc. But most ideologies also involve what I call ideological appeals, statements which claim that a certain way of life is better for mankind than other ways of life, statements that generate counter-claims and thus ideological disputes. Indeed, those of us who have lived through the cold war and suffered through the speeches of its statesmen have heard such claims almost daily on the international scene; further, they are hardly absent from domestic politics, as we shall see when we take a look at the clash between Jeffersonians and conservative Social Darwinists in America. No doubt, when discussing the validity of these claims, we will incidentally shed some light (or dark) on the personal ethical problems of the disputants, such as how they should live. But again, our principal preoccupation will be with the validity of a disputant's ideological appeals, with whether or not it is legitimate for him to claim that his way of life is somehow best for mankind, perhaps even best for his opponent.

There is a complication here in that not all ideologues hold up their way of life as an ideal for all mankind. For example, racist ideologues (like the Nazis) and élitist ideologues (like Nietzsche) divide mankind into two ethical species, a fully human species and a sub-human one, and urge only the former to espouse their ideal way of life. It might be better to say that ideologues tend to claim that their way of life is best for either mankind or an élite sub-species of mankind. But this would be cumbersome, so I will stick to the simpler phrase and let the reader read in the qualification whenever appropriate.

* * *

Having clarified the nature of a dispute involving conflicting basic values, we can now analyse the difference between ethical truth and ethical scepticism. The believer in ethical truth, when faced with such a dispute, feels that he can fall back upon some method of gaining ethical knowledge, of establishing whose values are nearer the truth about good and evil, or at least, some method of determining whose values have objective or non-partisan status. Some believers in ethical truth turn to non-empirical methods, or better, methods distinct from those normally utilized by the natural or social sciences. On a simple level, a religious man may feel that an omniscient and benevolent God tells men, either through scripture or direct inspiration, what is truly good and evil; a Platonist may believe that dialectic allows one to plumb the contents of the Platonic Ideas and thus discover the perfect state of man and the nature of justice. Others turn to empirical tests, for example, an Aristotelian might feel that one could study mankind's experience with different ways of life over thousands of years and determine which of them perfected man's nature. However, what unites all believers in ethical truth is belief in their ability to make a case to this effect: that certain values or ideals are worthy of respect even from those who do not value them—that a certain way of life has objective or non-partisan status, which is to say that it has validity not only for its partisans (those who appreciate and champion it) but also for men who do not appreciate it and espouse some other way of life. Thus, they believe that their opponent, even though his basic values diverge from theirs, should concede that their values or way of life have a validity superior to his own.

In effect, believers in ethical truth...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Errata
• Studies in Ethics and The Philosophy of Religion
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Problem of Ethical Scepticism
• 2 The Significance of Ethical Scepticism
• 3 Jefferson and James
• 4 Hobbes and Modern Natural Right
• 5 Aristotle and the Status of Ideological Appeals
• 6 Von Wright and the Naturalistic Fallacy
• 7 The Problem of the Moral Hero
• Appendix: Note on the Phrase ‘valid for him’
• Index