Chapter 10
DEMOCRACY came into the modern world opposing the representatives of a feudal and theocratic past. Among its opponents on the global scene today are terrorists, dictators, and crime lords, who use cruelty, intimidation, and extreme poverty to infuse populations with fear and hopelessness. Meanwhile, some multinational corporations strike deals with thugs wherever this advances their economic interests. In return they receive a supply of docile workers, most of them women, willing to work for low pay, as well as the freedom to run sweatshops and abuse the environment as they please. In nominally democratic states, they buy elections, break unions, and attempt to control the flow of information. They strive to create a workforce that is anxious to curry favor with the boss and willing to work for unjust wages. As marketers, they specialize in appeals to greed and envy. What they want is our cash and our tolerance of what they are doing to the land, the ozone layer, their employees, and their customers. Their plan for the latter group, which includes our children, is to turn them into consumers who identify mainly with costly emblems of lifestyles that can be merchandized to specific enclaves—Armani suits and espresso machines for one set, rap music and basketball shoes for another. Ethnic and religious strife abounds, racial divisions deepen, the gap between rich and poor widens, and millions are now enslaved to outlaws who traffic in people.
When international communism fell, pundits were smug enough to declare global victory for democracy. In fact, however, democracy is losing more ground in most settings than it is winning in others. In the era of a globalized economy and widely shared concerns about international terrorism, the need has never been greater for democrats to assert claims and exchange reasons with people here and there around the world who show no sign of being committed to democracy. And yet it seems painfully evident that one thing we cannot take for granted in this effort is the existence of a common morality, a single way of talking and thinking about ethical issues that is already the common possession of humankind. The failure of democratic movements and institutions in settings where fear, hatred, greed, and docility are the rule makes this clear. Oppressed peoples have often been in a position to find democratic ideals attractive from a distance, but those ideals are first of all expressions of a democratic culture. They are meaningless when abstracted from the inferential practices and behavioral dispositions of a people in the habit of trusting one another and talking things through in a certain way. Writing democratic ideals into a constitution or a treaty without first initiating a people into the relevant social practices accomplishes little.
The first part of this chapter defends a piecemeal, pragmatic approach as the only realistic means of building a common democratic morality. Part of the democratic project is to bring as many groups as possible into the discursive practice of holding one another responsible for commitments, deeds, and institutional arrangements—without regard to social status, wealth, or power. Because the entire practice is involved, not merely the ideals abstracted from that practice, a common morality can only be achieved piecemeal, by gradually building discursive bridges and networks of trust in particular settings.
Some philosophers who are friendly to democratic principles think this approach underestimates the moral resources all human beings have in common. They also worry that my approach, despite its affirmation of unconditional obligations and human rights, makes democratic commitments seem too contingent, too relative, too dependent on a particular culture’s perspective. They appeal directly to a morality that is already, in their view, the common property of humankind. And this morality, they say, is not simply a common way of thinking and talking about moral issues (that is, a discursive practice) but a body of moral truths that need only be applied to yield concrete moral guidance on the questions currently under dispute. It is a law higher than, better than, the mores of any people. Traditional natural-law theorists take it that we all have cognitive access to this law, at least to some significant degree. If they are right, the democratic project will prove easier than it now seems. Later in the chapter I will argue that they are not. The argument leads quickly into deep philosophical waters, where questions arise about the nature of justification and truth in ethics. These are daunting questions, and will occupy us in the next chapter as well, but they must be faced if the argument is to be pursued very far. The point of the argument, as I see it, is to help us return in the end to the practical tasks of community building with our moral confidence intact. As a character in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story says, “Sometimes it is necessary to go a long distance out of your way in order to go a short distance correctly.”
WHAT ARE THE PROSPECTS FOR A COMMON MORALITY?
The place is Bosnia, Jerusalem, Zimbabwe, or Chicago. Two groups are in conflict over some issue, and we would like to see the conflict resolved reasonably and peaceably, if possible by appeal to democratic principles. One thing we will want to know is the extent to which the moral vocabularies and patterns of reasoning employed by the two groups resemble or can be made to resemble one another. If the extent of similarity is great, we say that the groups in question have a common morality. If high similarity can probably be brought about by acceptable means, and members of the groups are willing to employ such means, we say that the prospects for a common morality are good. In this context, a question about the prospects for a common morality expresses a practical concern; for democrats on the scene, it may be an urgent one.
The same question can express another sort of concern as well. We notice that not everybody thinks and talks about moral topics in precisely the same way, and we would like to explain the differences philosophically. Nobody doubts that there are differences. But if the differences extend too far, we may feel compelled to become nihilists, skeptics, or radical relativists. The nihilist abandons the idea that there are moral truths. The skeptic abandons the idea that we are justified in believing whatever moral truths there may be. The radical relativist abandons the idea that we can justifiably apply moral propositions to people, deeds, and practices outside of our own culture. With these alternatives in view, good prospects for a common morality would offer consolation. If moral diversity occurs within a single framework globally shared, and the differences in how people think and talk about moral matters can be explained in terms of deeper similarities, then confidence might be restored in moral truth, in justified moral belief, and in the possibility of cross-cultural moral judgment.
Practical and philosophical concerns can arise independently, but they often become intertwined. Doubts about how to respond in practice to a specific instance of moral conflict can induce philosophical reflection on the nature of morality, and philosophical reflection can influence one’s practical approach to the conflicts one faces in life. Yet it is worth distinguishing the two sorts of concern when we can. Otherwise, we risk confusion over what ought to count, in a given context, as a common morality. Where we are concerned to resolve a conflict between two groups, we will mean one thing by the prospects for a common morality. Where we are concerned to assess nihilism or skepticism, we will usually mean something else.
Our question about the prospects for a common morality is a daunting one, too unwieldy to answer well. It needs deflation. What makes it so unwieldy? It is really a congeries of questions, each of which can be put in the same words. It needs division. How to proceed? By distinguishing various questions in the congeries, tracing each to the concern that makes it matter, and then seeing whether answers come more easily: by means of analysis, but with pragmatic intent.
It goes without saying that two groups would share a common morality if their ways of thinking and talking about moral topics were exactly similar in all respects. But there is obviously no such pair of groups to be found. In a trivial sense, each group’s morality is unique, differing in some respect from everybody else’s. No ethical theorist denies this. When we make comparisons among moralities, we count some respects of similarity and difference as relevant and others not. Which respects count as relevant in a given context depends on which concerns motivated the comparison. By the same token, we count varying degrees of similarity in relevant respects of comparison sufficient to establish that two or more groups hold a morality in common. Again, the relevant degree of similarity depends on the concern at hand.
Not everybody thinks and talks about moral topics. Newborns do not, nor do some of the insane or the comatose. Perhaps some societies do not. But it goes without saying that for any two people who think and talk about moral topics, their ways of doing so (in short, their moralities) will resemble each other in some respects. Anybody’s morality resembles everybody else’s in some respects. The fact that all of the moralities are ways of thinking and talking is itself something they have in common, something that guarantees formal and functional similarities of various sorts. The fact that all moralities are about roughly the same kind of topic is also something they have in common, such that the substantive moral commitments of any two groups can be expected to resemble each other in some degree. Let us say that a uniformity is some respect in which all moralities resemble each other closely. Theorists differ on what the actual uniformities are, the closeness of the similarities in which they consist, and the relevance they have to various practical and explanatory concerns. They do not differ on whether there are any uniformities.
“Moralities,” as I have been using the term, are ways of thinking and talking about a particular kind of topic. Even if I were to specify precisely what a way of thinking and talking is, the term “moralities” would still be vague, given the fuzziness of the boundaries around the topics we call moral. For the most part, the vagueness is tolerable, and for two reasons: first, because it rarely comes into play, since most cases we discuss are some distance from the fuzzy boundaries; and second, because when it does come into play, it is usually resolved by context. When we confront an alien group and its strange ways of thinking and talking, we take our initial cues from the habitual uses of the term “moral” that are embedded in our ordinary discourse at that time. If some of the topics the strangers think and talk about exhibit overall similarity to the topics we habitually call moral, we can, for most purposes, safely designate their way of thinking and talking about those topics a morality. Overall similarity is itself a vague notion, consisting as it does “of innumerable similarities and differences in innumerable respects of comparison, balanced against each other according to the relative importances we attach to those respects of comparison.”1 The vagueness derives from the fluctuation of relative importance across contexts. We can resolve the vagueness, if need be, by specifying which respects of comparison are important given our current concerns.
Suppose our concern is practical and quite limited. We ask what the prospects are for a common morality in Belfast. What we want to know, ultimately, is whether the conflict among the Catholics and Protestants who live there can be settled through democratic discussion and what can be done to achieve that end. The scope of the relevant comparison-class is relatively narrow. We need not concern ourselves, in this context, with distant tribesmen, ancient Egyptians, or humanity as a whole. What respects of comparison matter? Mainly, the differences most responsible for creating or sustaining the conflict and the similarities most likely to facilitate settlement.
Most of us are concerned about many different moral conflicts. It would be fortunate if the theorists could show that all such conflicts are capable of being adjudicated in terms of one set of moral uniformities. (Presumably, these will involve either a very large set of truths about particulars together with some certain means of knowing them or a small set of principles together with some determinate means of subsuming cases under them.) Then we could say that there is a common morality in a very strong sense—a sense relevant simultaneously to a wide range of practical and philosophical concerns. Many theorists have tried to prove the existence of a morality that possesses these powers of adjudication. But even if they have all failed, as I suspect they have, and even if they will all continue to fail, as I suspect they will, it remains possible to proceed piecemeal. This might mean taking each conflict as it comes and trying one’s best to find the means of adjudication in whatever makes the moralities in question similar. (If that fails, one can always attempt the more painstaking approach denoted by the term “conversation” in chapter 3.) The possibility of adjudication in a given case does not depend on a guarantee of adjudication in all cases. And it seems likely that adjudication will succeed in more cases if it allows itself to rely on local similarities, not merely on the ones that are also global uniformities. Of course, not all types of similarity will help, and some will hinder.
Some moralities are akin to each other. Kinship is a special kind of similarity, the kind brought about by sharing a common history of development up to a certain point and then separating. Protestantism and Catholicism are members of the same ethical family. Their moralities branch off from the same stem. Their kinship helps determine the character of conflict in Belfast, both for good and for ill. It engrains many close similarities in vocabulary, attitude, and inferential commitment that could turn out to be useful in adjudication. It also means, however, that each group defines itself over against the other, thus hardening whatever differences there might be. In comparative ethics, as in folk-genealogy, a family tree is especially rigid where branches diverge from the stem.
The moralities of two groups in conflict are parallel to each other just in case they have developed along closely similar lines without branching from the same stem. Many rural societies have parallel moralities structured around a hierarchical system of roles. The moral world consists of fathers, mothers, eldest sons, younger sons, daughters, friends, neighbors, strangers, enemies, and so on. To know how to respond to others in such a world, you need to know what roles you occupy, what roles they occupy, and what relations obtain between your roles and theirs. Duties and entitlements are all specific to roles and pertain mainly to the distribution of honor, which is recognized as the dominant good. Conflicts between such groups often start with an insult, move through a cycle of violent vengeance, and end at times in a negotiated settlement designed to limit disproportionate bloodletting. Parallel distinctions between strangers and enemies, accompanied by parallel rules requiring hospitality for the former, can keep such groups out of conflict over prolonged periods. But parallel commitments to honor as the dominant good and to vengeance as a means of protecting it can keep conflict going.
Two groups with independent histories and relatively dissimilar moralities can come into conflict when one conquers or subjugates the other. If Antonio Gramsci and Michael Walzer are right about such cases, the dominant group virtually always tries to justify its dominance to the oppressed.2 In the course of making its justificatory arguments, the dominant group introduces its victims to unfamiliar moral concepts, principles, and ideals that, when applied in new ways, may be used by the oppressed themselves to justify rebellion. Let us say that when this happens, one morality acquires Gramscian similarities to another. Anticolonial and revolutionary struggles are nowadays defended mainly in terms of borrowed ideas, detached from one morality and grafted onto another. Gramscian similarities can increase rather than decrease the likelihood of conflict between two groups. They have also, however, significantly increased the overlap among existing moralities in a way that is beneficial to the prospects of democracy. One unwitting result of imperialism and global capitalism is that many emerging groups on the periphery of the world-system justify themselves in a language of rights, liberation, and self-determination—a modern European scion grafted onto to many varieties of native stock. The moralities of these groups are to some extent parallel with each other while each has Gramscian similarities with the moralities of the colonial powers.
Cases of moral conflict, then, come in kinds. I have mentioned only a few, but even this limited sample suffices to show that the task of adjudication takes very different forms from one kind of case to another. Anybody who really cares about resolving moral conflicts had better proceed on an ad hoc basis, keeping the scope of comparison as narrow as can be. This policy maximizes the similarities available for adjudicatory work on each occasion by minimizing the number of groups to be compared. If we knew in advance what the moral uniformities are, we would always be in a position to call on them, if they are relevant, no matter what the setting. That would be welcome. But we can get by without such knowledge, for practical purposes, trusting that whatever uniformities there are will necessarily turn up locally among the similarities obtaining in the case at hand. If we are unable to tell which are which, so what? In real-life adjudication, it does not matter. The more similarities that help, the better.
JUSTIFICATION
Philosophers have their own reasons for wanting to tell which from which. One reason is that they would like to know what resources there are for responding to moral skepticism. Those resources would be very powerful indeed if there were a common morality in something like the “very strong sense” mentioned in the preceding discussion. Any set of uniformities among moralities able to adjudicate all moral conflicts should also be able to refute all moral skeptics. It would do so by showing skeptics not only that they are justified in holding moral beliefs but what some or all of those beliefs are. I reject moral skepticism. I affirm that many of us are justified in holding some of the moral beliefs we hold. Whatever reasons make the skeptic feel compelled to deny this leave me unswayed. Yet affirming that many of us are justified in holding some of the (nontrivial) moral beliefs we hold is not the same thing as affirming that somebody has established a set of (nontrivial) moral beliefs that any human being or rational agent, regardless of context, would be justified in accepting. Doubting the latter claim does not, therefore, make me a moral skeptic, as defined here. It only makes me skeptical of one especially grandiose attempt to refute moral skeptics.
Behind my doubt is the idea that being justified in believing something—being entitled to believe it—is a status that can vary from context to context. Because one context differs from the next, not everybody is justified in believing the same claims. This goes for nonmoral and moral claims alike. Quine was justified in believing Gödel’s Theorem, that a complete deductive system is impossible for any fragment of mathematics that includes elementary number theory. Euclid believed no such thing, though through no fault of his own. Quine, unlike Euclid, was trained to think and talk in the language of twentieth-century logic, so he was able to entertain claims Euclid did not have the conceptual wherewithal to entertain, including some that figure in the reasoning that led Gödel to his Theorem. Quine also had the advantage of access to Gödel’s proof itself, which was not worked out until 1931. The proof served as Quine’s evidence, justifying his acceptance of its conclusion. Once he had studied the proof and understood it, Quine would not have been entitled to disbelieve its result. If you could travel backward in time to visit Euclid, and you induced him to entertain the conclusion of Gödel’s proof without otherwise altering his epistemic context, he would not be justified in believing it. If he disbelieved it, you would not fault him by judging him unjustified, for you understand that two people can be justified in holding different beliefs, given the vocabularies, styles of reasoning, and evidence available to them in their respective contexts.
Now consider Ignazio Silone’s novel, Bread and Wine, which is set in Italy in the 1930s.3 The novel’s protagonist is Pietro Spina, a socialist who returns from exile, disguised as a priest, to live among the peasants of his native Abruzzi, whom he hopes to organize into a revolutionary movement. The Abruzzi peasants adhere to a morality of the type described briefly in my discussion of parallel moralities among rural groups. Despite its assimilation of certain Christian beliefs about unconditional obligations, it remains for the most part a morality of role-specific duties and one in which honor dominates other goods. Spina has travelled in circles the peasants have not. His epistemic context differs from theirs. He entertains claims couched in moral vocabularies they do not know, his reasoning follows different patterns, and he therefore disbelieves much of what they believe.
Spina’s time among the peasants changes him. It, too, contributes to the context of his ethical reasoning. He therefore abandons some moral beliefs he held in exile, acquiring others in their place. But he does not simply convert to the peasant morality. Silone is no Romantic. He is careful to show that someone with Spina’s life history would not be entitled to accept certain peasant beliefs—for example, about the causal efficacy of using ox horns to ward off evil, the moral consequences of resignation to fate, or the just treatment of unmarried pregnant women. Spina rejects such beliefs and is justified in rejecting them. He does not, however, fault the peasants for believing what they believe. They are justified in believing even many of the falsehoods they believe, given the limitations of their context.
It may be, of course, that Silone was giving an untrue picture of who was justified in believing what in Italy circa 1935. What matters, for my purposes, is simply that there are differences among moralities like the ones described in Silone’s novel and that they make the kind of difference to our judgments about entitlement to ethical commitments that I have been suggesting. Silone’s novel illustrates the fact that there are important differences in what moral beliefs people in various contexts can justifiably accept. Could it not still be, however, that there are some (nontrivial) moral claims everyone is justified in believing, a common morality for philosophers? For all I have said so far, it remains possible that there are, though I assign a low probability to the prospects of showing that there are.
I have been speaking of “everyone.” It would seem that the scope of comparison could not be broader. Yet not every human being need be included. In this context, we may ignore newborns, the insane, and the comatose. To exclude them, let us say that we are confining our attention to rational users of norms. Can we not, then, define rationality strictly, so that anyone who fails to accept certain moral claims falls outside of the comparison class? We can indeed. We can achieve a similar result by defining the term moral narrowly, so that human rights or respect for persons as ends in themselves are the only moral topics. Nothing prevents us from defining such terms as we please. But if the definitions are arbitrary, designed solely to exclude potentially relevant counterexamples to the theses we are testing, they accomplish nothing.
The only relevant notion of rationality would be one that we could use in making defensible normative judgments about the various human beings who actually engage in moral reasoning, ourselves included. It is perfectly conceivable that we will someday be justified in deviating significantly from the beliefs we are currently justified in believing. It would therefore be foolish to define rationality in such a way that our future selves, with all their possibly good reasons for deviating from our path, would nonetheless be disqualified by definition from the class of rational agents. Our future selves deserve better treatment from us. So do Abruzzi peasants, distant tribesmen, and ancient Egyptians. Anybody—past, present, or future—might turn out to be less than fully rational, human beings being what they are. But our normative verdict on someone’s rationality cannot sensibly be settled by definition a priori, and it needs to proceed in any case by attending to details of context, with the burden of proof falling to the prosecution.
I see no way of telling what new moral vocabulary, style of reasoning, or form of evidence might turn up next, either in the findings of anthropologists and historians or in the handiwork of creative geniuses and moral reformers still to come. Nor do I see a way of telling in advance how such novelties will affect the list of commitments people are entitled to accept. Euclid would have been very surprised to be told about Gödel’s Theorem. Kant would have been very surprised to be shown the bearing of Einstein’s theory of special relativity on the status of some claims he deemed universally justified. Neither Euclid nor Kant had any way of knowing how later developments would alter the standing of the relevant commitments. We are in no better position in ethics. Perhaps our distant ancestors had no way of anticipating some of the considerations that make us diverge from their moral conclusions. Chances are, our distant descendants will discard some moral claims that we find deeply intuitive or that a clever philosopher has “proven” to the satisfaction of his followers; which claims, we cannot say. Humility is the best policy.
Humility, I say; not skepticism. For I am not denying that we are justified in holding various moral beliefs, as moral skepticism does, by the definition assumed here. How can we claim to be justified in believing something and also suitably humble in what we claim to know? By saying that being justified is relative to context and that the relevant features of context might change in unexpected ways. Until they do change, we remain justified in believing certain things. The possibility of change is not yet a reason to abandon any particular belief. But it is a reason to consider our moral knowledge fallible. If being justified in believing something depends on context, and context can change, perhaps for the better, then we should do our best to remain open to the possibility. Democratic discursive practices are designed to hold themselves open in this way.
The line of reasoning that counsels humility with respect to our own beliefs also counsels charity toward strangers. People from distant times or places are apt to believe some things we deem false, even if they and we are equally justified in holding our respective beliefs. That is what we should expect if being justified in believing something is a contextual affair. Unless we are prepared to give up our own beliefs at the points of conflict, we shall have to say, on pain of self-contradiction, that some of their beliefs are false. But unless we can show that they have acquired their beliefs improperly or through negligence, we had better count them as justified in believing as they do. And while we are at it, we had better consider the possibility that their context affords them better means of access than we enjoy to some truths.
Earlier I remarked that being justified in believing a claim is not the same thing as being able to justify it or to justify believing it.4 The idea requires further explanation here. There are many legitimate ways of acquiring beliefs. Accepting the conclusion of a sound justificatory argument is only one of them. Many beliefs are acquired through acculturation. I say, with Wolterstorff and others, that we are justified in holding such beliefs, except in those cases where we have adequate reason to doubt or reject them or where for some other reason (like culpable neglect of evidence) we are not doing our best as inquiring minds.5 I say, with Wittgenstein and others, that many of these beliefs are such that we would not know how to justify them in a noncircular and informative way even if we tried, and that life is too short for us to supply arguments in support of many of them. I say, with C. S. Peirce and others, that if we ceased taking the vast majority of them for granted, far from enhancing the capacity to think scrupulously, we would lose the capacity to think at all. It makes sense to say that we can be justified in accepting a belief acquired through acculturation even in the absence of a justifying argument. It is unreasonable to demand justifying arguments across the board. Skeptics have been wrong in making this demand, their opponents wrong in trying to meet it.
Justifying a claim, unlike being justified in believing one, is an activity. The result of the activity is a justification. Let us say that a justification of the claim that P is an answer to the question, Why believe that P?6 If the answer is successful, we say that the claim in question is justified. In what, then, does the success of a justification consist? In eliminating relevant reasons for doubting that P. What reasons for doubting P are relevant and what suffices for their elimination? That depends on context, in particular, on the people to whom the justification is addressed. Call the class of such people the justification’s audience. Reasons for doubting P are relevant if they prevent or might prevent an epistemically competent and responsible member of the audience from being justified in believing that P. Relevant reasons for doubting P have been eliminated when everyone in the audience is justified in believing that P.
We sometimes speak of justifying a claim to someone, either oneself or someone else. In such cases, the audience of the justification is specified. I justify a claim to myself when I construct or rehearse an argument that makes me justified in believing it. I justify a claim to someone else, S, when I construct or rehearse an argument that makes S justified in believing it. More often, we speak simply of justifying a claim, allowing context to specify the audience. Philosophers have long tried to discover, in abstraction from any context in particular, what conditions a successful justification of a moral claim ought to satisfy. In doing so, they have usually attended exclusively to features of ethical justification qua argument, and often ended in puzzles about the status of first principles or the logical transition from nonmoral premises to moral conclusions. We are now in a position to see why they have met with little success. If my analysis is correct, abstraction from context in a theory of justification is bound to end in frustration. Justifications are answers to why-questions of a certain sort. As such, they are dependent on context: first, because conversational context determines the question to which a justification counts as an answer and thus the sort of information being requested; second, because conversational context determines a justification’s audience; and third, because a justification’s success can be appraised only in relation to its audience, including their relevant reasons for doubting and the commitments they are entitled to accept.7
Now consider a bit of ethical fiction. Someone proposes a candidate for the title of supreme moral principle. Being newly minted, it is not already accepted currency, and we have our doubts. So the question arises, Why believe it? A brilliant philosopher constructs a justification. The justification consists of a relatively complicated argument, but not so complicated that the philosophically astute cannot follow it. Suppose that, after diligent study, we accept its premises as true. We find no mistakes in the proof, no reason to question its validity. We are prepared to say, as Gödel’s fellow logicians were in the case of his Theorem, that the justification is successful. We therefore come to accept the new proposal as the supreme moral principle, and we are justified in believing it true.
I do not deny that this could happen. I do want to insist, however, on the importance of considering the limits on who might plausibly be expected to look upon such a justification as a reason for accepting its conclusion. Otherwise, we shall be tempted to exaggerate what will have been shown by the justificatory argument. Let us distinguish a justification’s intended audience from its actual audience. Whatever a justification’s intended audience may be, its actual audience cannot extend beyond the class of people who understand the vocabulary in which it is cast and have mastered the patterns of reasoning required to follow it. The limits of an actual audience are not set; they can be expanded by pedagogical means or by missions to the heathen. But it is worth reminding ourselves that the actual audiences of all justifications produced so far in human history have been limited, the philosophical justifications especially so. Saying to ourselves that we are addressing our justifications to all rational agents does not by itself affect what other people are justified in believing. We can increase the membership of a justification’s actual audience only up to a point.
The democratic ethical analogue of Gödel’s Theorem, even if it were justified to the satisfaction of all living philosophers, would not thereby become the common moral property of humankind. Many people, including Abruzzi peasants and (in all likelihood) members of the great philosopher’s own family, would still recognize no real reason to accept it. The reasons there would be for accepting it would be other people’s reasons, not theirs. It would be uncharitable on our part to fault them for not accepting it, just as it would be uncharitable of Quine to fault Euclid for failing to anticipate Gödel or Kant for failing to anticipate Einstein. If Pietro Spina’s favorite peasant or my nonphilosophical relative accepts a belief at odds with our newly justified supreme moral principle, they might still be justified in believing what they do. Our proof has no place in their epistemic context.
There is another sense in which our justifications ought to be addressed to a limited audience, a sense related to the policy of humility. Future generations will find themselves in epistemic contexts unlike ours. We do not know what the respects of dissimilarity will be, so we cannot know what their reasons for doubting will be or what they will be justified in believing. It follows that we cannot know how successful our justifications will be for them. So it would be foolish to address our justifications to the audience of all rational agents, regardless of time or place.8 All we would accomplish by doing that would be to make the success of our justifications impossible to determine, thereby making the question of success pointless. We know from experience that justifications are fallible. To require that they be infallible to count as successful is to misunderstand the indispensable role they play in our lives. Justifications are successful if they eliminate relevant reasons for doubting. The reasons future generations might have for doubting, being necessarily unknown to us, hardly count as relevant in our context.
No logician is tempted to reject Gödel’s Theorem simply because there are some people who would dismiss Gödel’s reasoning as gobbledygook. Yet many philosophers devote serious attention to the question of what one would say to the philosophically inclined Nazi. Their worry seems to be that if one cannot justify one’s moral beliefs to the imaginary Nazi, then one is not justified in holding those beliefs. The worry might derive from any number of sources. One of these might be a tendency to confuse being justified in believing something with being able to justify it; another might be the mistaken idea that successful justifications must be addressed to a universal audience. We are now concentrating on the latter, so perhaps we should ask whether any philosopher seriously intends to say that Nazis are morally competent. If not, why should a Nazi’s reasons for doubting be considered relevant to the appraisal of our moral beliefs? People whose lives prove them unwise, and especially the extremely vicious, are obviously not good judges of moral truth. Nazis are extremely vicious in ways that can be expected to corrupt their responsiveness to our reasoning. If they doubt our moral conclusions, we should expect to have trouble in persuading them by rational argument. Their reasons for doubting need not be eliminated before we consider ourselves justified in rejecting their beliefs as false. Of course, if we found ourselves strongly tempted by Nazi reasoning, we might feel that we needed to refute their conclusions in order to be justified in holding ours. But this wouldn’t necessarily be a matter of persuading actual Nazis, who might dig in their heels and spit on our perfectly valid refutation.
My mother is no philosopher and no Nazi. She may not be a competent judge of sophisticated philosophical proofs, but she is a wise woman, a competent judge of moral truths of many kinds. So if she doubts the truth of a supposedly supreme moral principle because it obviously conflicts with her settled convictions about specific cases, her reasons for doubting may be relevant to the principle’s epistemic status. If the principle conflicts with her view of the wrongfulness of murder, for example, that is something the philosopher will need to take into consideration. The task will be to explain how she could have come to believe a claim incompatible with the truth of the proposed principle. Her competence as a judge makes her reasons for doubting relevant. When other people differ with us over the truth of matters they are competent to judge, we often need to justify our own view by explaining how they came to believe a falsehood. Failure to work out a good explanation of their apparent error sometimes leaves us unjustified in believing a claim we would otherwise have adequate reason to accept. It may be more reasonable for us to change our minds on the disputed point than to assume that our disputants believe wrongly and let that go unexplained.
TRUTH
The epistemologist’s interest in refuting or assessing skepticism is only one of the concerns that make philosophers debate the prospects of a common morality. It is one thing to ask whether there are moral claims everybody is justified in believing or whether we need to seek a universal audience for our justificatory arguments. It is another to ask whether there are moral truths, whether in calling them true we can sensibly mean more than that they are true for us, or whether some moral claims apply to everybody. Doesn’t the contextual view of justification defended in the previous discussion require me to answer these questions negatively by committing me to a relativistic conception truth?
The first thing to be said is that I have used the notion of moral truth liberally throughout this chapter. Far from denying it, I have been presupposing it. For example, at one point I said that Pietro Spina disagreed with the Abruzzi peasants on what constitutes just treatment of unwed pregnant women. In saying this I meant to imply that Spina and the peasants entertain the same claim, that the claim is either true or false, and that in disagreeing on the issue either he believes a falsehood or they do. So long as Spina remains committed to his view on that topic, he is logically committed to rejecting the conflicting peasant view on that topic as false. Nihilists, who dismiss the very idea of moral truths, could not describe a case of moral conflict in this way. They would have to redescribe it without relying on the notion of moral verity, most likely construing Spina and the peasants as mistaken about the nature of their conflict. But I see no adequate reason for redescribing it in that way, let alone one that derives from my contextualist account of justification.
Someone might want to claim that the peasant view is true for them, just as Spina’s is true for cosmopolitan Italian socialists. If this means only that the peasants accept their view as true and Spina accepts his view as true, there is no point in discussing the claim, for it merely paraphrases what I have already granted. We do sometimes use the expression “P is true for S” as a synonym for the expression “S believes P” or “S accepts P as true.” What if the claim were intended to imply that we should take “P is true” to mean “P is true relative to M,” where M names the morality of the speaker? This would make the claim more interesting, but it would also put it in conflict with my account of moral diversity. At no point have I introduced a relativist conception of truth in describing a moral conflict. Nor would I want to do so.9
A relativist conception of truth erases disagreement among groups rather than making it intelligible. To say that Spina’s view is true relative to his group’s morality and that the peasant’s view is true relative to theirs would imply that both views could be right simultaneously and that neither party’s view entails rejection of the other’s. But Silone does not describe the relation between Spina’s moral beliefs and the peasants’ in this way. If he did, his novel would lack moral tension: Spina would be neither genuinely at odds with the peasants on the issues where he eventually holds his ground, nor able to learn from them on matters where he eventually changes his mind. I stand with Silone in holding that there are such cases of genuine moral conflict in life. Nazis and I differ in many respects. We belong to different groups, each with its own way of thinking and talking about moral topics. I also differ with Nazis in another respect, for I reject various moral commitments they accept, including their view of what constitutes just treatment of Jews. The fact that we have different moralities should not be allowed to obscure the equally important fact that we disagree about the moral truth. If I am right about justice, then the Nazis are wrong. Using a relativist conception of truth to redescribe our differences would be to dissolve the conflict in which we take ourselves to be engaged.
Yet have I not been defending a version of relativism throughout the first two subheadings of this chapter? And if so, is it not too late for me to be distancing myself from a relativist conception of moral truth? The first section does imply that the prospects of adjudicating a moral conflict between two groups depend upon what their respective discursive practices are like. Say, if you like, that this makes adjudication relative. The second section does argue that being justified in believing a moral claim is a relational status and that the success of a justificatory argument is a contextual affair. Say, if you like, that this makes both entitlement and the activity of justification relative. But do not assume that these doctrines commit me to a relativist conception of moral truth, for they do not.
Adjudication, justification, and truth are distinct concepts, requiring separate explications. The first two are very closely related, for the obvious reason that rational adjudication of a moral conflict typically involves offering justifications to people in the hope of changing what they are justified in believing. If justification (in both senses) is relative, it should not be surprising that adjudication is, too. None of this implies, however, that every concept we encounter in ethics (and other cognitive endeavors) will exhibit a similar relativity. My claim is that the concept of truth does not. It would therefore be misleading to summarize my position as the claim that morals are relative. “The thesis of moral relativism,” like “the thesis of a common morality,” is not in fact a thesis at all, but an intersection in conceptual space where distinct ideas tend to be run together and need to be disentangled before thought can responsibly proceed.
When Spina believes that a given practice is unjust and the peasants disbelieve it, either he accepts a falsehood or they do. It is not possible for a claim and its negation to be true simultaneously, in ethics or anywhere else. But when Spina believes the claim and the peasants believe its negation, they can both be justified. Similarly, Spina can be justified in believing a moral claim at one point in his life and justified in rejecting precisely the same claim at a later point, whereas the truth-value of the claim has remained the same all along. By considering these possibilities, we can see how differently the concepts of truth and justification behave. It is because they behave so differently that it makes sense to combine a contextualist account of justification with a nonrelativist account of moral truth. This is exactly what my version of pragmatism does. In the next chapter I will respond further to the worry that there is something paradoxical about this combination of theses.
Contextualist epistemology is compatible with the idea that there is a moral law in this sense: an infinitely large set consisting of all the true moral claims but not a single falsehood or contradiction. Being infinitely large and including truths cast in myriad possible vocabularies we will never master, this set boggles the mind. We will never believe, let alone be justified in believing, more than a tiny fraction of the truths it encompasses. Most of them are inaccessible to us—and therefore not truths it would be wise for us to pursue. If the God of the philosophers exists, he believes them all, and is justified in believing them all, but nobody else could come close.10 Notice that the moral law in this sense is not a morality in the sense under discussion earlier in this chapter. It is merely a set of truths, not a way of thinking and talking (that is, a discursive social practice).
There is no harm in granting that there is a set of truths like this, provided that we rigorously avoid treating it as something we could conceivably know and apply. This conclusion ties in closely with what Mark Johnston has called “the practical element” in pragmatism. This, he says, “is best presented as a normative claim, the claim that our interest in the truth should always be a practically constrained interest, an interest restricted in principle to accessible truth (at least to this and probably to something more practically accessible).”11 Notice that this normative claim, as Johnston nicely formulates it, is not a definition of truth. It does not define truth as inherently accessible, so it does not lead to the problems associated, for example, with Dewey’s definition of truth as warranted assertibility. I am happy to grant that accessible truths are not the only truths that there are. But Johnston’s formulation does have strong implications for the governance of our cognitive and justificatory practices. The main reason for confining attention to accessible truths is simply that taking an interest in truths that are inaccessible is at best a waste of time and at worst a source of seriously confused cognitive strategies. One need not define truth as Dewey did to support this conclusion.
THE HIGHER LAW AS AN IMAGINATIVE PROJECTION
Human beings are less than perfect in knowledge and virtue. It should not surprise us that they construct imperfect moral codes. The beliefs their codes embody are all too often untrue. We therefore honor women and men who, in the name of moral truth, have risked their lives in defiance of imperfect codes and the powerful people intent on enforcing them. But much of what these heroes say in their own defense is hard to believe. Antigone, in the Sophoclean tragedy that bears her name, defended her defiance of the mortal Creon by invoking the “unwritten and unfailing laws” of the gods. Speaking of the decree that her brother be left unburied, she said: “For me it was not Zeus who made that order. Nor did that Justice who lives with the gods below mark out such laws to hold among mankind.”12 Thomas Jefferson, declaring independence from British tyranny, appealed to the “laws of nature and nature’s God.” The God in question was deism’s. The laws, which he held to be self-evident, were largely Locke’s. Martin Luther King, Jr., writing as a Baptist preacher from a Birmingham jail, claimed that an “unjust law is no law at all” and defined an unjust law as “a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.” His authorities for this doctrine were Augustine and Aquinas, but the content of the moral law he envisioned derived from the personalism he learned while earning his doctorate at the Boston University School of Theology: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”13
The theologies of Antigone, Jefferson, and King could hardly be further apart: pagan polytheism, Enlightenment deism, and Trinitarian Christianity. When they claim that there is a law higher and better than the artificial constructions of human society, they differ drastically over the source and substance of that law. Is there anything left of the idea they had in common once the hubris and the dubious metaphysical trappings are stripped away? Let us see.
F. P. Ramsey once hypothesized that laws are “consequences of those propositions which we should take as axioms if we knew everything and organized it as simply as possible in a deductive system.”14 Ramsey’s hypothesis belonged to philosophy of science. The laws he had in mind were laws of nature in the natural scientist’s sense. He held this conception of lawhood only briefly, in March of 1928, but in 1973 David Lewis revived and revised it. Lewis’s modified version does not rely on the idea of what we would know if we knew everything:
Whatever we may or may not ever come to know, there exist (as abstract objects) innumerable true deductive systems: deductively closed, axiomatizable sets of true sentences. Of these true deductive systems, some can be axiomatized more simply than others. Also, some of them have more strength, or information content, than others. The virtues of simplicity and strength tend to conflict. Simplicity without strength can be had from pure logic, strength without simplicity from (the deductive closure of) an almanac. Some deductive systems, of course, are neither simple nor strong. What we value in a deductive system is a properly balanced combination of simplicity and strength—as much of both as truth and our way of balancing will permit. (Counterfactuals, 73; emphasis in original.)
An ideal deductive system achieves a best possible combination of simplicity and strength—if not the one and only best combination, one of the combinations tied for first place in the ranking of all such systems. The notion of an ideal deductive system allows Lewis to reformulate Ramsey’s explication of lawhood: “a contingent generalization is a law of nature if and only if it appears as a theorem (or axiom) in each of the true deductive systems that achieves a best combination of simplicity and strength” (Counterfactuals, 73; emphasis in original).
It should be possible to develop similar conceptions of lawhood for ethics. Imagine an infinitely long list including all of the true moral sentences that human beings could possibly devise.15 Assume that these sentences can be organized into innumerable deductive systems of moral truths. Assume further that these, like Lewis’s systems of empirical truths, achieve varying degrees of simplicity and strength. Of them, one or more achieves a best combination of simplicity and strength. Now we can define the moral law. It is precisely those generalizations appearing as theorems or axioms in each of the best moral systems.
To employ the notion I have just defined, you need not be a theist. But you do need to have an active imagination. First, you need to imagine the possibility of all the various conceptual improvements that could be made in the ways we think and speak about moral matters. Second, you need to imagine the possibility of the various sentences that could appear in the resulting language games. I do not mean that you need to be capable of knowing in what all of these possibilities consist. There are too many of them for that—infinitely many, in the case of the sentences. And there is no way of knowing the conceptual improvements we could adopt until somebody invents or discovers them. If we knew in what any possible improvement consisted, we could instantaneously make it actual by changing our ways. The point of the present exercise is to imagine the full range of possible improvements not yet actualized, while remaining agnostic about the details. In addition to performing these acts of imagination, you need to accept the standard apparatus of deductive logic and grant that systems of moral sentences can be more or less simple and possess varying degrees of strength. Finally, and most importantly, you must be prepared, as I am, to apply the concept of truth to moral sentences.
Call the concept of the moral law just defined the minimal version. The minimal version is metaphysically austere. Its definition explicitly treats the moral law as an imaginative projection. The improvements it projects above and beyond the already existing moral codes are indefinite. To speak of the moral law in this sense does not commit us to a view of what those improvements would look like. It merely holds out for the possibility that improvements are possible. Of course, many philosophers are less parsimonious than this. By adding commitments not presupposed by the minimal version, you can get increasingly controversial versions of the concept. If you are a theist, for example, you might wish to add that God is the author of the moral law. You might go on to describe the moral law as promulgated providentially, as an ordinance of divine reason for the common good. By making these additions, you would be taking the moral law closer to what Aquinas calls the “eternal law.”
Even so, the two notions will not be identical. To see why, consider a remark Lewis makes when elucidating his concept of scientific law: “Imagine that God has decided to provide mankind with a Concise Encyclopedia of Unified Science, chosen according to His standards of truthfulness and our standards of simplicity and strength” (Counterfactuals, 74). A published version of the moral law would be like Lewis’s imaginary Encyclopedia. God’s standards of truthfulness would prevail in that He, being omniscient, would be in a position to edit out all traces of falsehood. But our standards of simplicity and strength, vague as they are, would also constrain the resulting system. Because these standards tend to conflict, it is likely that our need for reducing complexity to manageable levels will lead to significant sacrifices in strength. In contrast, there seems to be no such concession to human standards in Aquinas’s concept of the eternal law.
The Thomistic eternal law satisfies God’s standards of truthfulness, but what standards of simplicity and strength does it satisfy? In a word, God’s. Aquinas would not presume to know what such standards are, but he does at various points seem to assume that the eternal law is maximally strong. No moral truth falls outside it. It forbids all of the sins there could ever be, including those secreted away in the human heart. It encompasses all of the moral truths and none of the moral falsehoods. Is the eternal law also maximally simple? Assuming that God is omniscient, there is no need for simplicity in this system. An omniscient being would know every detail of an infinitely long almanac of moral truth. If the eternal law is simpler than that, the simplicity must come without loss of strength. If God prizes simplicity for its own sake, then the eternal law may tentatively be defined in terms of the generalizations appearing as axioms or theorems in each of the simplest of the maximally strong deductive systems of moral truth. How simple that might be we have no way of knowing. God only knows, if anybody does.
We have seen that the minimalist definition of the moral law does not presuppose commitment to theism. We can similarly strip the theology from the Thomistic concept of the eternal law by settling for the tentative definition just given while dropping the requirement that the standards to be satisfied are God’s. Even if we accepted this formulation as our definition of the eternal law, it would remain distinct from the moral law in my nontheological senses. The reason is this. If a system is the simplest of the strongest systems of its kind, it is not necessarily a system that achieves a best combination of simplicity and strength for systems of that kind.
Suppose a logic professor has given you several deductive systems of moral truths and the assignment of judging some of them ideal in the two senses just distinguished. The method for finding the simplest of the strongest systems is to begin by isolating the strongest and then to select the simplest of those. The method for finding a best combination of simplicity and strength is to begin by isolating systems that are both simple and strong in high degree and then to select the ones that strike an ideal balance overall. It is possible but not necessary that the two methods would yield the same result. Given sufficiently various systems to pick from, the second method is likely to pick out systems that are simpler and weaker than the first.
What good will the minimalist definitions of these notions do me? They will allow me to use such phrases as “the moral law” and “the eternal law” in good conscience should I ever want to do so. Hereafter I shall know what I mean when I echo Sophocles, Jefferson, or King and refer to a law higher and better than the codes of my peers. I will know how to mean what I say about that law without meaning too much.
Why preserve these locutions at all? They have long been a rhetorically effective means of emphasizing that the all-too-human codes we confront in society are always likely to include moral falsehoods and conceptual deficiencies. This fact makes room for conscientious objection to such codes. It underscores the need for social criticism. It assures us that a lonely dissenter or critic, taking a stand against the crowd or the powers that be, might be right.
Admittedly, the same point can be made without the concept of a higher law. What matters most in this context is the underlying concept of truth and resistance to any reductive definition of it. If truth were a function of what the powerful dictate or what one’s peers accept—or even what we, in our humble epistemic condition, are justified in believing—then we would have less reason to give dissidents a hearing or to entertain the possibility of becoming critics ourselves. But truth, I have claimed, cannot be reduced to any of these things. On the minimalist reading, the rhetoric of a higher law is little more than an imaginative embellishment of the gap between the concepts of truth and justification, between the content of an ideal ethics and what we are currently justified in believing. It evokes a picture of what some of our codes would be if they were perfect. It thereby gives the project of discovering particular imperfections an imaginative ideal to strive for. The picture is less diffuse than the image of an infinitely long list of true moral sentences, and more inspiring than the image of an ideal moral almanac. Since our codes are sometimes expressed systematically in law-like form, the image of a higher law encourages striving for something of the same kind but better.
Natural-law and divine-command theories become mystifications whey they assume that an ideal system or its axioms can function—or is already functioning—as our criterion for deciding which moral claims are true.16 How could we ever know that the standard we were actually applying belonged to the ideal system? To know this would be to know that there was no possibility of improvement in our cognitive capacities and inferential commitments. Being finite and aware of the long history in which our fallibility makes itself manifest, we have reason to believe that even if we had achieved the ideal system, we could never be justified in believing that we had. To believe this would close our minds to the possibility that further rational revision of our moral outlook might well prove necessary. We have no way of knowing what it would be like to be at the end of ethical inquiry.17 At any time, the ideal system (if there is such a thing) might differ in some respect from what we justifiably believe.
This does not add much to my earlier remark that truth and justification are distinct, that the two concepts behave differently—in ethics, as elsewhere. To say that some of the moral propositions we are justified in believing might not be true is to remind ourselves that no matter how well we now think and talk about moral topics, it remains possible, so far as we can tell, to do better. To strive for moral truth as finite beings conscious of our finitude is to keep that possibility in view, to keep alive the struggle for this-worldly betterment of our commitments, not to wish for a final revelatory moment, a moral philosopher’s eschaton.
The Concise Encyclopedia of Ethical Truth is merely the philosophical imagination’s variation on three themes: the notion that the totality of moral truths would not embrace a contradiction, the hope that the fraction of it we care about is not infinitely complicated, and the realization that it cannot be reduced to what we already know. It is not a handbook anyone can use, even at the end of inquiry. Therefore, it is not something we can expect to do justificatory work when we are trying to resolve disputes. Our practice of thinking and talking about moral topics will continue as long as we do. It will not be brought to conclusion by the discovery of an ideal moral system.