I A thought experiment
Let us imagine a task of an unusual sort. Imagine that we have been asked to set out an overall structure for ethics. We have not been asked to design “an ethic,” but rather to outline the overall shape of ethics. Others will then fill in the detail. Let us also suppose that our task is constrained by the existence of a colonial system in which various subordinated peoples are subject to direct political control by a dominant nation. In other words, colonialism in the classic sense. Our outline has to work within this colonial context and it must make room for at least some of the values which prevail within the dominant power. There must be appropriate slots into which the dominant view of what is right and good can then be inserted. And so, we are not just designers, but also what might be called “colonial ethicists.”
We are not, however, colonially minded in the Francisco Pizzaro sense. We do not believe that men on horseback have a right of conquest. Rather, we think of ourselves as a protective barrier against despotic forms of domination. We do not control but protect. Or so our story goes. The evils of earlier times are abhorrent to us. We cannot imagine committing them and object when they are done in our name. Our business model is not piracy practiced on a grand scale. Rather, we have a broadly liberal outlook. Freedoms, democracy, and the rule of law matter too up to a point, although some violations are to be expected as a problem of scale. Overall, we regard our colonial system as a way of helping less advanced peoples to be raised up from their backward condition and as a form of protection from the misfortunes they would face without us. We are all better together. But the “we” in question is a differentiated we. One within which a certain kind of othering occurs. “They” are moral infants who will, in time, become more like us. This is to be thought of as progress. While our remit as the designers of ethics does not extend to detailed commitments over content, the structure of the ethics that we propose will presuppose a benevolent mindset of this sort.
Among ourselves, we the designers will argue about various matters; but one thing we agree upon is that the most basic standards of ethics should be universal. Again, we leave others to decide what these standards are. But once in place, they must be rolled out everywhere. After all, if we are preparing the backward peoples of world to live like us, be like us, and make judgments of right and wrong like us, then a universal set of commitments does seem to be required. It would be odd to say, “We live in one way, but perhaps it is better if you live differently.” Such an attitude would cut across the project of moral progress. These poor people would never learn to be like us, and that would be a bad thing. We take these responsibilities seriously. The lure of the universal is also thought of as the lure of democracy itself. It was part of our own culture’s progress out of the darkness, out of times when one set of rules applied to kings and nobles, another set applied to priests and monks, further sets applied to freemen in the towns, and then to everyone else. Hardly a democratic arrangement. And so, in the name of democracy and an eventual equality of sorts, we decide that it is the best of all things to export a single set of good ethical rules to the less enlightened portions of the world. Our attempt to design a structure for ethics will itself be shaped by the ethical values, which will then slot conveniently into position. From the start, we are already in the middle of things.
Inconveniently, this presupposed universalizability of ethics comes with constraints of its own. It will be placed under strain if ethics involves too many different things or if it has to work regularly with too many concepts. A large conceptual repertoire might then come to mean one thing in one place, but something different elsewhere. If that were to happen, there might be very little that we could do to hold the line. After some shared deliberation, we come to the conclusion that the best safeguard for a universal system of ethics is that it should also be compact and structurally divided between a small number of foundational values and a wider variety of derivative commitments. There should be something manageable in the foundations, and we should also be able to determine when something concerns our basic values and when something is more open to question and discussion. What is applied will then stand a better chance of remaining uniform.
Finally, it will make sense if the small number of foundational values is applied in a consistent way. Otherwise, the universal standing of ethics will again be placed in danger by the inconvenient messiness of the world. To help ensure their consistent application, several of our number argue that there should be a simple set of rules for deciding what should be done, what should be avoided, and what falls outside the scope of ethics. These rules should apply everywhere, in the same way that the rules of mathematics apply everywhere, irrespective of who performs the calculations. While we all like this idea, and some of us want to adopt it, others object that our design for ethics is starting to look a little constraining, and this will make it less attractive. Imperfect humans may reject good guidance if they see it only as control. Constraint creates rebels, dissidents, and dissent. People may be lured by the appeal of rule-breaking if they think of it as a special kind of freedom. This worry strikes all of us as reasonable. And so, to avoid overtones of constraint, we place great emphasis upon an idea of personal autonomy. Rather than using a terminology of “rules,” we refer to “principles.” Rather than presenting ethics as a matter of subservience and control, we paint a picture of agent autonomy, the free embracing of universal principles, and the finding of freedom through this embracing of universal principles. By embracing the universal principles, agents obey only their own truest rational selves and so remain free. As before, the principles will simply be rules under a different name.
Having outlined the structure of ethics, we leave others to identify the right set of foundational values and the ethical principles through which we can all live in accordance with them. Other agents can now build the theories which will help explain why their preferred sets of values and principles are the right ones to adopt. Disputes about these matters will be intense. So ends the fable.
II The limitations of principles
For those who have some knowledge of 20th-century philosophical ethics, parts of this picture will be uncomfortably familiar. The section of the fable about universalizability will look close to Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative on one of its formulations: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (Gregor 1996: 73). It may look even closer to the attempts by Richard Hare to provide an objective and demythologized account of the language of morals, itself set down during the declining years of the British Empire. The language of “universalizability” is drawn from Hare and from his view that “ethics (i.e., the logic of moral language) is an immensely powerful engine for producing moral agreement” (Hare 1963: 97). For Hare, those who failed to apply universal rules in a consistent way were either abandoning the ground of ethics or else they were guilty of a logical error. An important difference between these two thinkers is that Kant favored deontological principles (focusing upon rights and duties) over principles formulated in any other terms. Hare believed that universalizability would work best with utilitarian principles slotted in as the content, framed by structural ideas drawn from Kant. Up to a point, they sat at opposite sides of the room. But this, too, is the kind of thing that the fable of the colonial ethicists will lead us to expect. On either formulation, there is something intuitively plausible about the whole approach. It comes close to the idea that we should treat others as we ourselves would want to be treated, just so long as the circumstances are roughly the same. In fact, the structure of ethics set out in the fable does have persuasive force. We can imagine courses on ethics covering much the same ground, without any mention of colonies, empire, or the raising up of backward peoples so that they learn to follow in our footsteps. In such courses, universalizability would still figure, but these other things would not be mentioned.
In spite of its plausibility, I want to suggest that there is something very wrong with the entire view of ethics set out in the fable. And insofar as it is close to the approach of the dominant ethical theories in the English-speaking world during the 19th and 20th centuries (deontology, consequentialism, and to a lesser extent virtue ethics), we should also feel uneasy about these theories too. Perhaps this claim sounds a little more radical than it really is. Theory building of the sort at stake in the fable has primarily belonged to the analytic tradition of ethics. But within this tradition, the very idea that any single theory can do most of the work of ethics has been eroding for decades in the face of challenges by a succession of figures, from Bernard Williams (2010), to Alasdair MacIntyre (2007), Charles Taylor (1992), and Lawrence Blum (1994). A multiplicity of other kinds of ethics, beyond the analytic tradition, have also made their way into our ways of thinking and speaking about the right and the good, duty, virtues, care, and love. And the greatest of these in my own work has been love.
Some of the concepts and ideas which have helped to open ethics up have come from outside of the West. A concept that I appeal to with some caution, partly because of an overestimation of a cohesive here, but also because of an implied unity of elsewhere. The unity of the East breaks down under analysis. Okakura Kakuzō’s The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (1903) notoriously opened with an announcement that “Asia is one” (1903: 1), but this was as much a political aspiration as any sort of descriptive fact. At the time when Okakura penned the statement, there was a broad struggle to constrain the cultural influences of the West and he was at the forefront of this struggle. The shared need to assert the value of the non-West has always never quite transformed multiplicity into oneness. When I refer to the West and to liberal democracy within it, no projected historic cohesion of the East is presupposed. Western cohesion is perhaps somewhat greater, but largely a product of modernity, both in its democratizing aspect and in its production of racism, domination, and successive reconstructions of antisemitism (Lao 2020). And so, when I appeal to the West as a concept of convenience, I am not suggesting that the liberal democracies of the West are the culmination of some set of historical necessities stretching back to Herodotus and summed up Hegel’s idea that world history moves in a particular geographical direction. Nor do I wish to situate contemporary dissent within the West in a context shaped by a 19th-century overestimation of the uniformity of precapitalist European politico-economic organization. An overestimation promoted by Marx and based partly upon projections of Japanese feudalism back onto European history.
Yet these and other problematic ideas about the West are present within the philosophical traditions that I draw from. They are embedded within familiar conceptions of ethics and even within practices of dissent whose Westernness is all too obvious. Here, I have in mind practices of dissent such as those shaped by social democracy. A tradition now in its late stage and one which has long since achieved high levels of integration into capitalist state structures. Social democracy draws upon racism, and in the case of the social democratic left, upon populist antisemitism, as shapers of dissent as well as its target. It is difficult to get out from under the shadow of such ideas. Perhaps it is impossible to do so fully. They spread in all directions and extend off into the distance. We may accept that social democracy and its related traditions are coming to an end, yet we cannot at present live beyond it, even though that is where we may want to be. But when I say this and appeal to a “we,” perhaps there is a risk of slipping back into the same old view of ethics, although what I am trying to do is to use it as an invitation to reflect upon common predicaments and shared vulnerabilities. In the words of Bernard Williams, “It is not a matter of ‘I’ telling ‘you’ what I and others think, but of my asking you to consider to what extend you and I think some things and perhaps need to think others” (Williams 1993: 171).
The multiplicity of everywhere else has yet to fully impact upon Western traditions of ethics, even in the case of the authors cited above who have done most to shift us away from the kind of ethics that is pictured in the fable. There is an awareness of the problem, even if we lack any complete solution. Alasdair MacIntyre’s introduction to the Hebrew translation of his classic After Virtue (1981) suggests that readers might substitute Maimonides when he appeals to Aquinas. An imperfect fix, and obviously so. Yet it shows an appreciation of the need to appeal beyond the West with its roots in Christianity as well as empire. Yet awareness is not overcoming or allowing to fall away. As yet, ethics in the tradition that this text is part of remains lineally bound to ways of thinking which are shaped by the idea of a Western intellectual canon with all its weaknesses and strengths. A canon that includes Kant as a towering figure of modernity, together with the legacies outlined in the fable.
In saying this, I am not claiming that everything is up for grabs. I am not saying that the legacy of modernity’s Western canon should be set aside rather than worked through. Least of all, am I claiming that the idea of truth has no place in a contemporary ethics and that multiple perspectives are all that we have to go on? After all, there are no circumstances in which the roasting of infants in village squares will be tolerable. No viable perspectives from which it will come out as acceptable. There is a truth about this matter. Similarly, there are no cases of virtuous racism, tolerant transphobia, or admirable antisemitism. There are truths about these matters too. From an ethical point of view, some things do carry over into all cases, across time and irrespective of place. But examples of this sort are not a good overall guide to what a contemporary ethics should look like. Rather, they concern what are sometimes called “platitudes,” familiarity with which is part of our grasp of concepts and not just the concepts of ethics (Smith 2005: 32).
There are rudimentary claims that anyone in the business of ethics is likely to agree to and that most non-ethicists will also regard as noncontroversial: friendship is something to be cherished, murder is reprehensible, and rape is not a good thing. Reflection on these simple ideas may give the misleading impression that the same core or foundational ethical rules apply everywhere. Yet these are not foundations, but only side-constraints. Some are fixed by the requirements of our being social animals or fixed by the kinds of societies in which we now live. Others are set by the avoidance of the more blatant forms of prejudice and irrationality in our judgments about our fellow human beings. A few concern actions which could be taken as indications of psychological disorder rather than difference. Acceptance that side-constraints hold does not imply that there is any single ethic that might be deduced from them and then universally applied. It does not entail that there is some set of foundational values that might be compactly formulated and used to shape some manageable set of principles. As far as we can tell, ethics has no foundations of that sort. It has never had foundations of that sort and does not seem to need them. When we have diligently learned our ethical theories from Plato to Aristotle and from Kant to John Stuart Mill, this idea may initially seem a little odd. But it helps to bring our best abstract thinking about ethics closer to an understanding of what ethical life is actually like. Abandoning the very idea that we have a compact set of foundational values and an associated set of special rules or principles is also no barrier to thinking about ethics as the sort of thing that might involve knowledge. After all, knowledge is rarely structured in such a foundational way. Bodies of knowledge are not buildings, even if their transmission often calls upon the imagery of foundations and applications. The teaching of a “foundations” course in some particular kind of theory is a matter of educational process, not the mapping of knowledge structures themselves.
Comments of this sort may help to convey a set of intentions, but they do not remove the influence of colonial modes of thinking. Even when we know that they are present somewhere, we are not necessarily in a position to say where or to fully remove them. Such influences cannot be controlled through naming or by adding a subtitle and saying that it is “a postcolonial analysis” or a “decolonizing narrative.” My claims about having achieved this are minimal. The text does not entirely escape from the problem that the fable is designed to draw out. Yet it involves a further step away from the kind of ethics that is more obviously suited to colonial times. Besides which, the canonical texts of Aristotle, Kant, Mill, and others still have important roles to play and multiple roles to play, even if they cannot ground everything in the way that they were once supposed to. Their work can help us to sustain a rich conceptual repertoire as opposed to an impoverished one. In line with this, I will look more to the advantages of such a repertoire rather than to compact foundational values or to principles for action. Principles are rule-like, while concepts are more varied in the ways that they may be put to work. And the bun...
