The Moral Powers

A Study of Human Nature

P. M. S. Hacker

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119657798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A milestone in the study of value in human life and thought, written by one of the world's preeminent living philosophers

The Moral Powers: A Study of Human Nature is a philosophical investigation of the moral potentialities and sensibilities of human beings, of the meaning of human life, and of the place of death in life. It is an essay in philosophical anthropology: the study of the conceptual framework in terms of which we think about, speak about, and investigate homo sapiens as a social and cultural animal. This volume examines the diversity of values in human life and the place of moral value within the varieties of values. Its subject is the nature of good and evil and our propensity to virtue and vice. Acting as theculmination offive decadesof reflection onthephilosophy of mind, epistemology, ethics, and humannature, this volume:

• Concludes Hacker's acclaimed Human Nature tetralogy: Human Nature: The Categorial Framewor k, The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature, and The Passions: A Study of Human Nature
• Discusses traditional ideas about ethical value and addresses misconceptions held by philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists

The Moral Powers: A Study of Human Nature is required reading philosophers of mind, ethicists, psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and any general reader wanting to understand the nature of value and the place of ethics in human lives.

PART I
Of Good and Evil

1
The Roots of Value and the Nature of Morality

1. The place of values in a world of facts

No fact‐value gap

In worlds that lack life, there is no value. For all that, there is no mystery about ‘the existence of values in a world of facts’.¹ The world does not consist of facts; rather, true descriptions of the world consist of statements of fact. It is as much a fact concerning the world that there are things that are of value to living things, that human beings value things and possess valuable characteristics, perform valuable deeds, and stand in valuable relationships to others, as it is a fact that there is life on earth. There is no ‘gap’ between fact and value, and we don’t ‘jump’ across a logical gulf when we judge some things to be good or bad for the roses, some artefacts good or poor, some artisans good or incompetent at doing things, and some people virtuous or wicked. But, to apprehend this, we have to take into account the needs of living things and the preferences of sentient animals, human abilities and their cultivation, human relationships and activities, human societies and their histories. And these have to be seen in the presupposed framework of the nature of the world we live in, on the one hand, and of our nature, on the other.

Human biological nature

It is important to realize that human beings, like all animals, have a biological nature that was determined by evolution and is transmitted genetically. It is not a social construction. We have a large variety of basic physiological needs for certain types of foodstuffs, without which we sicken and die. Our basic perceptual capacities are determined by our neurophysiology, even though they admit of some degree of training and refinement through experience and culture. We have a large variety of reflexes: numerous eye reflexes, such as the corneal reflex, pupillary light reflex, and pupillary accommodation reflex; various limb reflexes, such as the triceps reflex, the biceps reflex, and the patellar reflex; numerous reflexes of internal organs; coughing, yawning, and sneezing reflexes, which can be partially inhibited. Some reflexes are distinctive of neonates and disappear later, such as the sucking reflex and the Palmar grasp reflex. We have an orienting reflex to attend to anomalies, which is the root of perceptual consciousness (in which our attention is caught and held by some anomaly in the periphery of our perceptual field) as well as of our curiosity and tendency to investigate anomalies. We have a large variety of social interactive instincts manifest in body language: sexually attracting instinctual behaviour, facial expressions in response to stimuli, eye contact instincts, voice modulation, and so on. There are gender differences that are predetermined and can be measured statistically, behavioural age differences, intelligence differences, and so on. Some of these are amenable to modification and sometimes improvement through training and teaching; some are not.

Autonomy of morals misconceived

It was a persistent feature of much analytic philosophy in the twentieth century to restrict reflection on the place of value in the world and the role of axiological concepts in our conceptual scheme to moral values. Non‐moral values were commonly assumed to be limited to instrumentality, which was interpreted as an unproblematic causal concept: something is good as a means if it causally contributes to the attainment of some contingently desired goal of an agent in a given circumstance. Moral values were held to be ‘intrinsically good’. This dichotomy was also characterized as being between absolute and relative value, and it was assumed that if any account could be given of absolute value, it would be independent of any consideration of other forms of non‐moral value. This might be characterized as a degenerate residue of the salient Kantian thesis of the autonomy of morals: the thesis that the nature of moral value is to be elucidated independently of any contingent facts about the empirical world and about the nature of human beings as creatures with a vegetative psuchē and a sensitive psuchē in addition to their rational powers.² Moral value was argued to be intelligible only in terms of the dictates of the rational will. It was left to Nietzsche, and more generally to the twentieth century, to abandon the role of reason and to endeavour to explain the nature of moral value in terms of the will alone. Moral values were accordingly viewed as the creation of the untrammelled individual will. This conception gave rise to existentialism, on the one exaggeratedly dramatic hand, and to emotivism and prescriptivism, on the other rather feeble hand.³

Von Wright’s varieties of goodness

It was above all Georg Henrik von Wright, in his book The Varieties of Goodness (1963), who challenged this approach to the philosophical study of value in general and of moral value in particular. He reverted to the great tradition of Aristotelian naturalism. His salient negative claim was to deny the thesis of the autonomy of moral value. His great achievement was to present a brilliant overview of what he called ‘the varieties of goodness’ in which the morally good is presented as a derivative or secondary form of goodness dependent upon the primary forms of non‐moral goodness. The following discussion is much indebted to his insights. Although I shall have reason to depart from his account of moral value and to suggest minor modifications to his analyses of some of the varieties, I shall be standing firmly on the staircase he built. However, I am less concerned than he was to investigate a reductive ordering of the varieties of goodness, that is to pursue the question of whether there is a primary form of goodness in terms of which all others can be explained. I am more concerned to arrive at a connective analysis (as in the previous three volumes of this tetralogy) and to investigate what natural phenomena and what human needs link the various forms and render their existence intelligible.

Grammar of ‘good’

As a first step in the investigation of the place of values in the lives of living beings in general and of human beings in particular, and of the point and purpose of our axiological concepts and their position in our conceptual scheme, a brief overview of the use of ‘good’ is needed. ‘Good’ is the most general axiological concept. This expression can occur as an adjective, a noun, an adverb, and an exclamation. Its comparative is ‘better’ and its superlative is ‘best’. It has a variety of opposites (contraries and contradictories) depending on the noun the adjective qualifies, for example ‘poor’, ‘weak’, ‘bad’, ‘wicked’, and ‘evil’. One can be well, that is in good health, or be ‘unwell’ or ‘ill’ – in ‘poor’ health. ‘Good’ is the most general adjective of commendation. But not every assertoric predication or attribution of goodness is a commendation, let alone a recommendation. Nor are occurrences of ‘good’ in the antecedents of hypotheses, in interrogatives or imperatives. Goodness is intrinsically connected with preferential choice, but not all things that can be said to be good in one way or another are objects of choice, nor is what is chosen always good or even thought to be good. Some things may be said to ‘be good’ or to be ‘a good’ such‐and‐such. The range of the subjects of such attributions or predications determines, together with the context, the nature of the goodness attributed or predicated. Notoriously, ‘good’ (unlike, say, ‘yellow’), used attributively (as an operator on a noun) is not detachable (otherwise one could infer that a good soldier is a good man). Something may be good for a being, or do good to a being. Something may be good for a purpose or for an artefact. A creature, animal or human, may be good at an activity. Someone may be or do good to another, or be good with other beings (e.g. children or horses) or with an instrument (musical or otherwise), implement, or weapon. Things may be good of their kind and may be good as such‐and‐such a kind. A human being may be good as a tinker, a tailor, or a candlestick maker. He or she may also be a good person or a good human being – which are not social roles. It may be good to do such‐and‐such or good to be a so‐and‐so. One may make good or make something good, and something may come good.

The concept of a variety

It takes great acumen and uncommon insight to be able to find order and put order into this welter of detail. For this we are much indebted to von Wright. He pointed out that these manifold forms of goodness are not a matter of lexical ambiguity – if it were, one would not find it trans‐linguistically ubiquitous, since lexical ambiguity is a local linguistic accident not preserved in translation. The multiple forms of goodness are patently not related to each other as species of a genus sharing a common feature and distinguished by specific differentia. Nor is the concept of a form of goodness a family resemblance concept, since it is not open to the addition of new members of the family (as are the concepts of art or of number) and is not explained by means of a series of examples together with a similarity rider ‘and other things like that’. It is not a f...