Chapter 11
NOTHING in the previous chapter entails striking the locutions of Sophocles and King from the lexicon of pragmatic democrats. When a great poet or social critic decks out the distinction between justification and truth in a memorable image, and by speaking of a higher law empowers a search for the betterment of our actual codes, the pragmatic philosopher is wise to leave well enough alone. But some readers might worry that my pragmatic approach to the prospects for a common democratic morality and my metaphysically austere treatment of “the moral law” would, if accepted and fully understood, have a strongly demoralizing effect on the culture of democracy.
They might argue that democratic culture needs something more solid to depend on for the justification of its commitments than I am supplying when I refer to the ethical life of a people. Perhaps they will suspect that my discussion of moral truth and the moral law leave ethical discourse without something sufficiently determinate or independent of us to be true of, to be about. For I have taken norms to be creatures of discursive social practices. Moral principles, according to chapter 8, make explicit the material inferential commitments implicit in the practical reasoning that transpires when people hold one another responsible for their actions. Given that the only sense of “the moral law” that I have been able to take on board is an idealized imaginative projection, it is hardly the sort of thing one could appeal to directly in justifying an answer to a moral question. As a regulative ideal, it names something that always transcends our grasp. Have I not, then, implicitly admitted that our reason-giving cannot succeed here and now in holding our attitudes answerable to anything more than our own subjective creations?
The previous chapter anticipated these questions by opposing all attempts to reduce moral truth to a function of what the powerful command, what one’s peers accept, what one is justified in believing, or what one is warranted in asserting. But perhaps these attempts to distance myself from Dewey are more perplexing than reassuring, given my points of agreement with him. For in previous works I have affirmed Dewey’s claim that there is no explanatory value in the notion of truth as “correspondence” to the “real.” I have not changed my mind on this point. I remain committed to Dewey’s criticisms of such “realism” as metaphysical in the pejorative sense, as a bad set of props for our practices.1 And throughout this book I have repeatedly echoed his pragmatic insistence that democratic ideals and principles depend for their conceptual content and justification on contingent social practices. My position may therefore appear to alternate paradoxically between realism and pragmatism—two positions that have long understood themselves to be at odds.
A preliminary rejoinder to these concerns can be cast in terms of the distinctions I have introduced in the first three chapters of part 3. This rejoinder would claim that the standard menu of options in moral philosophy results from conflating a series of distinctions that need to be carefully observed:
• between obligations or rights that we attribute to everybody, regardless of role, and obligations or rights that everyone already has reason to acknowledge;
• between being justified in believing something (in the sense of being entitled to believe it) and being able to justify a claim to someone else (in the sense of producing an argument that successfully undermines someone’s relevant reasons for doubting it);
• between being able to justify a claim to one’s actual audience and being able to justify it to all rational beings;
• between a claim that is justified (in the sense that no relevant reasons for doubting it remain standing within a given discursive context) and a claim that is true;
• between a claim that one is entitled to accept and a claim that is true;
• between the moral law understood as a regulative ideal projected by an active philosophical imagination and a morality understood as a way of thinking and talking about moral topics (a discursive practice);
• and, finally, between the idea that the terms “true” and “false” are appropriately used in reference to moral claims and the idea that a particular theory of truth, such as natural-law realism, offers an informative explanation of their significance in moral language.
If these distinctions are well drawn and have the significance I have attributed to them, the standard array of options in moral philosophy will have to be reconceived. We are not faced with a choice between two package deals, one of which is metaphysically realist with respect to truth, anticontextualist with respect to justification, and cosmopolitan with respect to rights and obligations, the other being metaphysically antirealist with respect to truth, contextualist with respect to justification, and parochial with respect to rights and obligations. A principal objective of chapters 8–10 has been to pick apart these packages, thus putting us in a position to take or leave their various contents as we see fit.
Of course, this analytical work does not by itself explain how the obligations, rights, virtues, and other normative statuses attributed to people by the members of democratic communities can be assessed objectively. Both the statuses and the norms governing their attribution, I have argued, are creatures of a social practice. How, then, can our attempts to apply and perfect the norms also be objective? If the norms are constituted by our social interactions, what sense can there be in saying that everyone in our society might be wrong about what those norms are and what they imply?
IS TRUTH-TALK METAPHYSICAL?
Let us return for a moment to the distinction between truth and justification. When we attribute knowledge to someone, we take that person to believe something that is true, and we take him or her to be justified in holding that belief. But someone who believes a truth might not be justified in doing so. And someone who is justified in believing something might well turn out to have accepted a falsehood. Despite being joined together in our concept of knowledge, the notions of truth and justification can readily swing free of each other. This is what we should have expected. If the two concepts had the same entailments in all contexts, it would have been redundant to combine them by saying that knowledge requires belief that is both justified and true.
Dewey held that truth, like justification, is a relative concept. He identified it with warranted assertibility. Other pragmatists have identified it with utility—with what is useful to believe, which is also a relative notion. But if truth is not a relative concept, must it not be an absolute one? And if it is an absolute concept, don’t I need to account for its absoluteness by defining truth as correspondence to the real, the very kind of theory I have praised Dewey for criticizing?2 I am happy to say that truth is absolute if this is understood strictly as a remark about how the term “true” behaves in our language. But I still hold that defining truth as correspondence has no explanatory value. Furthermore, I have no other definition of truth to offer in its place.3 I propose neither to analyze the concept into more basic ideas, nor to specify the content of truth attributions in what philosophers call an implicit or a contextual definition.4
It might be objected that this refusal to define truth leaves me unable to make clear, in a sufficiently positive way, what I take truth to be.5 If I accept neither the metaphysical realism of correspondence theory nor the truth-relativism of the familiar pragmatic theories, it seems that I still need to say in positive terms what I think truth is. It is not enough to say simply that it is not identical with justification. I must show, at the very least, that my denials leave open the possibility of an acceptable philosophical alternative. Fair enough. But what kind of philosophizing is needed here? Let us begin by taking note of a few standard uses of the term “true,” and asking what sort of account tells us what we need to know about the meaning of the term in these contexts.
One familiar use of the term “true” may be called the inferential use, as when we declare that the conclusion of a valid inference is true insofar as its premises are true. The second I will call the acceptance use of “true,” as in the sentence, “The claim that racial segregation is unjust is true.” A speaker who asserted this sentence would be expressing acceptance of the claim named by the that-clause. The third use may be called the equivalence use, as in the remark, “ ‘Courageous acts deserve praise’ is true if and only if courageous acts deserve praise.” A fourth use is the one Rorty calls the cautionary use, as in the sentence, “We may be justified nowadays in believing P, but P might not be true.”6
Realists typically focus mainly on the equivalence use, construe it as expressing a substantive, nontrivial relation of correspondence, and then try to account for other uses of “true” in terms of that. I do not reject the equivalence use. In fact, I think it is of great practical and theoretical value. My complaint about realism is that I do not see any explanatory value in the notion of correspondence that realists lay over it. If the explanation is genuinely needed, it had better be more intelligible than the thing being explained; yet I find substantive notions of correspondence much less clear than the concept of truth they are meant to explain. So I cannot credit them as explanations, as informative answers to a question about the concept of truth. The harder realists work at trying to elucidate what it is for a proposition to correspond to reality, the murkier things get.
To play its role in the wanted explanation, reality must be taken to come in units that are apt counterparts for the propositions that are supposed to correspond to them. But what might these units be? And how can we specify them without introducing a fatal equivocation into the notion of reality? If the notion of correspondence is going to capture the absoluteness of truth, “reality” will have to mean something like the world as it is in itself—a metaphysical conception if there ever was one. But this conception seems ill-equipped to become involved in a relationship of correspondence that could explain substantively what property one attributes to a proposition by calling it true. To be the sort of thing to which a proposition could correspond, reality has to be divided up into units that bear some resemblance to propositions. Specifying what these units are appears to involve placing reality under a description. But how can one do this without losing one’s theoretical grip on the independence of the world?
The metaphysics of realism wavers between two conceptions of reality, one of which is designed to capture the absoluteness of truth in a theory of the independence of the world, the other of which is designed to find units of a kind to which propositions could correspond. To give up the latter is to abandon the project of explaining in the realist’s terms what the (substantial) property of truth is. To give up the former is to begin the process in which realism mutates into the antirealism of idealists like Berkeley and pragmatists like Dewey, for whom correspondence to reality becomes coherence among ideas, beliefs, or assertions that we accept. Hoping to avoid both of these outcomes, the realist typically tries to have it both ways with “reality,” while coping with recurring charges of equivocation. Meanwhile, the antirealist firmly grasps the inferential and acceptance uses of “true,” and tries to get by without the independence of reality prized by realism. But this move appears to undermine the cautionary use of “true” and to collapse truth into justification. In the more aggressively postmodern versions of antirealism, justification is then collapsed into power, thus yielding the reduction of truth to power.
Hilary Putnam responds to these troubles by focusing on the acceptance use of “true” and then enriching the notion of acceptance so that he can account for other uses of the term as well. Taking inspiration from another classical pragmatist, C. S. Peirce, Putnam argues that truth consists neither in plain old acceptance nor in currently justified acceptance but in idealized rational acceptance.7 This move allows truth and justification to be related—in that rational acceptance is a near-synonym of justified belief—without the two concepts being identical. Putnam’s account is superior to most acceptance-oriented explanations of truth because it does some justice to the cautionary use of the term. It is therefore less reductive than Dewey’s notion of truth as warranted assertibility. If forced to choose between Putnam’s Peircean definition and Dewey’s, I would certainly select Putnam’s. But Horwich, Michael Williams, and others have made telling arguments against it, so I cannot accept that either.8 The notion of idealized rational acceptance turns out to be too close to that of justified belief. If we assimilate truth to idealized rational acceptance, we will not be able to account adequately for the differences between truth and justification. In particular, we will lose our grip on the possibility that there may be some truths we could never, even with access to all of the evidence, capture within a net of justified beliefs. As Mark Johnston has put it, there is something narcissistic about the resulting conception of truth. The truth about some subject matter pertains to that subject matter, yet on Putnam’s view even the truths natural science teaches us about the properties of atoms are actually about what we would be justified in believing under ideal conditions. Johnston rightly asks, “How did we get into the picture?”9
The moral that Arthur Fine draws from these difficulties is that attempting to define truth as a “substantial something” has proven to be a fruitless enterprise.10 He does not claim to have refuted the whole lot of definitions currently on offer, but neither does he find sufficiently good grounds for committing himself to any of them. He therefore suspects that there was something wrongheaded about trying to cast our theorizing about truth in this form. It remains unclear, he thinks, why the truth theorists think truth needs an explanation of the sort they are seeking. Once you have figured out how the term “true” behaves in all of the relevant contexts, what remains to be explained? We should content ourselves with accounting for its characteristic nonphilosophical uses—the ones that do not presuppose a metaphysical picture.
Fine is not denying the intelligibility, value, or legitimacy of the concept of truth. His attitude toward truth—he calls it “the natural ontological attitude”—is permissive with respect to ordinary usage and offers no philosophical grounds for hesitating to speak of truths in any domain where ordinary speakers apply the term “true” to claims and beliefs. Given that ordinary speakers routinely refer to moral claims as true or false, the natural ontological attitude would entail no invidious distinction between ethics and other domains manifestly concerned with discovering truths. Truth-talk in ethics, as in science, is intelligible without help from the metaphysical theories that purport to explain it.
Fine does not himself offer a theory of the concept of truth. But a number of theories are compatible with what he calls the natural ontological attitude. These theories differ on whether truth is a property, on whether propositions are the primary bearers of truth, and on various other topics, but they can all be classified as forms of “minimalism.” Johnston defines minimalism in general as the view that whereas “ordinary practitioners may naturally be led to adopt metaphysical pictures as a result of their practices, and perhaps a little philosophical prompting, the practices are typically not dependent on the truth of the pictures. Practices that endure and spread are typically justifiable in nonmetaphysical terms.” While metaphysicians often present their pictures as an essential buttress for our practices, “we can do better in holding out against various sorts of skepticism and unwarranted revision,” according to the minimalist, “when we correctly represent ordinary practice as having given no crucial hostages to metaphysical fortune.”11 Minimalism can be given a pragmatic twist if one adds that the wanted justification of our practices is to be found, if at all, “in showing their worthiness to survive on the testing ground of everyday life.”12 My own approach to the concept of truth is both minimalist and, in the sense just specified, pragmatic. I prefer to call it modest pragmatism. It rejects any form of pragmatism that proposes, immodestly and unwisely, to reduce truth to some form of coherence, acceptance, or utility.
In Understanding Truth, Scott Soames takes a minimalist approach (in Johnston’s sense) to the analysis of truth. He follows Alfred Tarski and Saul Kripke in claiming that “truth is not a contentious metaphysical notion” and that “a successful analysis of it should not be laden with controversial philosophical consequences.”13 He takes the equivalence use to be the key to the meaning and value of the concept. The utility of the notion of truth, according to Soames, derives largely from the fact that “the content of the claim that a putative truth bearer is true is equivalent to that of the truth bearer itself.” But this is already plain to anyone who reflects on nonparadoxical instances of the equivalence use of “true.” No metaphysical gloss is required:
[S]weeping, philosophically contentious doctrines about reality and our ability to know it cannot be established by analyzing the notion of truth. Examples of such doctrines are the thesis that a statement is true [if and only if] it corresponds to a mind-independent fact that makes it true and the rival thesis that a statement is true [if and only if] it would be rational for beings like us to believe it under ideal conditions of inquiry. These are independent philosophical doctrines that cannot be derived from an adequate analysis of truth. (231)
Soames proceeds to survey and criticize several varieties of minimalism (232–51). He rejects so-called “redundacy” theories, which oppose the idea that truth is a property of any sort. His own version of minimalism aims to improve on the detailed semantic analyses of Tarski and Kripke. He ends up with a view that is not distant from Horwich’s minimalism.14
It would be tedious to go into the details of these theories here. For our purposes, there is no need to declare one of them correct. All that matters is that they represent a plausible and promising theoretical alternative to the metaphysical approaches from which Soames distinguishes them. If some version of minimalism is correct, then we do not have to choose between realism, antirealism, and no theory at all. On the question of which variety will prove strongest, I remain agnostic. My claim is that recent developments in the philosophy of language have vindicated the plausibility of pursuing a nonmetaphysical approach to truth, an approach that makes the notion of truth seem like an inappropriate focal point for large-scale cultural angst. As Soames points out, the minimalist positions that he and Horwich defend do not by themselves entail an answer to the question of whether “normal indicative sentences containing evaluative terms” can be true or false (250). But they supply no reason for suspecting that such sentences lack truth-value. So minimalism as such does not appear to undermine the “objectivity” of ethical discourse. What it does, instead, is to put the burden of proof on those who hope to show that ethical discourse does not involve genuine truth-claims. It also provides encouragement to anyone who, in keeping with the spirit (but not the letter) of Dewey’s pragmatism, hopes to reduce his or her metaphysical commitments to a minimum. The metaphysics of realism is more likely to render the concept of moral truth precarious than to save it from its cultured detractors.
Minimalism is not an attempt to debunk or reform ordinary usage. I favor preserving all four uses of “true” that I have distinguished; they are no less intelligible in ethical contexts than in scientific contexts. In particular, I want to preserve the cautionary use. Because I am sure that some of our currently justified beliefs must be false, but do not know which ones these are, I want to preserve a spirit of self-critically open-ended inquiry. Drawing attention to the gap between truth and justification helps in this effort, because it cautions against cognitive complacency. No less than the realists, I hope that I might someday hold more true beliefs and fewer false beliefs than I do now. In light of the equivalence use of “true,” what this comes to is the hope that (with respect to important topics) I shall believe P if and only if P.15 Does it add something to say that we should strive to bring our beliefs into correspondence with the facts (including the moral facts)? If taken nonmetaphysically, this seems to add nothing. If the point of realism is simply to stress that whether a given proposition is true or false depends not only on its conceptual content, but also on the objects, events, properties, relations, values, and so forth being referred to, then again I have no problem accepting the point.16 I just do not see that this gets us beyond the basic implications of the equivalence use. The equivalence involved in “it is true that P if and only if P” may be trivial in the logician’s sense. But it already serves as a sufficient reminder that inquiring into the truth or falsity of P involves directing one’s attention to what P refers to and holding one’s beliefs and claims answerable to that.17 The metaphysics of correspondence hardly makes the reminder more impressive.
I have been using “realism” strictly as the name for a metaphysical theory that defines truth as correspondence to reality. But, as Horwich says, “The term ‘realism’ is an over-used, under-constrained piece of philosophical jargon, and one can no doubt invent senses of it such that the minimalist approach qualifies either as ‘realist’ or ‘anti-realist’ ” (Truth, 56). It is not hard to see why David Fergusson calls me a realist.18 In the first place, I do employ the term “true” in the way the realist does in ordinary moral discourse—cautionary use and all. Second, I share the realist’s suspicion of what Johnston calls philosophical narcissism. Third, I hold that the truth can transcend our ability to know it, even under ideal conditions of inquiry. And fourth, I accept that whether a belief is true or false depends in part on the objects, events, properties, relations, values, and proprieties to which reference is made. If that is all it takes to be a realist, then I am one, too. This appears to be all Scott Davis means by the “minimal realism” he attributes to Davidson, and it is all Sabina Lovibond seems to mean by the “realism” she attributes to Wittgenstein in Realism and Imagination in Ethics.19 Many people mean more by the term “realism” than that, so I have been reluctant to adopt the label. But it is a mistake, in any event, to get hung up on the labels.
You can have the concept of moral truth and an ethos of fallibility and self-criticism, it seems to me, without adopting a theory that makes moral facts or “the moral law” capable of explaining what it is for true moral propositions to be true. Some realists think a definition of truth is needed to keep the democratic culture of moral seriousness and its spirit of self-criticism intact. I see no evidence that this is so. I fear that persuading people to consider a metaphysical theory essential to democratic culture invites them to give up on that culture when the theory comes to seem unpersuasive. Citizens are better advised to keep their commitment to democracy free from the unresolved disputes of the metaphysicians.
Part of my motivation for favoring a minimalist (as opposed to an antirealist) version of pragmatism is the hope of vindicating the continued use of “true” in moral contexts by freeing it from metaphysical interpretations of its significance that have proven exceedingly difficult to sustain. The concept of moral truth entered modern philosophy like one of the knights who clang their way awkwardly through Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac—wearing enough protective gear to be rendered clumsy and vulnerable. There is no point in rearranging the armor if it ends up being too heavy to wear. The solution is to retain the concept of truth while shedding the weighty armor the metaphysicians have designed for it. Pragmatism prefers to travel light.
Thus far, I have been discussing the meaning of “true,” and I have accounted for this strictly in terms of the uses of the term, without feeling compelled to reduce its meaning to a definition. I have followed Soames and Horwich in beginning with the equivalence use, while acknowledging that other versions of minimalism have started elsewhere. A complete account would cover all of the paradigmatic uses.20 An acceptable form of minimalism would not merely catalogue uses at random, but would rather confer a sort of explanatory order on those uses, thus rendering them more fully intelligible. As an approach to the concept of truth, minimalism proposes to provide this intelligibility without reducing it to a definition. It also promises to shed light on what makes the concept useful—a sticking point for redundancy theories.21
Does modest pragmatism provide an answer to the question of what truth is? I am inclined to grant that truth is some kind of property but not that it is a naturalistic property. Truth does not belong, in my view, to the furniture of the natural world (as conceived by natural science). So we cannot provide an account of it by turning our attention to some feature of the natural world and describing empirically in what that feature consists.22 The concept of truth is normative. It belongs to practices in which we assess claims and beliefs as possessing or failing to possess a sort of status.23 What status do we attribute to a claim by declaring it true? The status that is preserved in valid inference, as the inferential use of “true” indicates. This is the same status that is implicitly imputed when we endorse a claim, as the acceptance use of “true” shows. This status does not involve a relation to evidence, so it is not relative to epistemic context. Truth pertains to the conceptual content of a claim, not the epistemic responsibility of the person who accepts or asserts it. Truth, or accuracy, is an objective status as well as a normative one. We attribute this status willy nilly to the beliefs we currently accept, in accordance with the acceptance use of “true.” But whether our beliefs and claims actually enjoy the status of being true is not up to us.24 Believing that someone has a particular obligation, right, or virtue does not make it so.
Truth-talk has a place wherever we take the subject matter under discussion—and not simply the evidence pertaining to it—as the object of our inquiry. By engaging in truth-talk, we implicitly view our subject matter as something we might get wrong, despite our best cognitive efforts. Adopting this orientation toward our subject matter is the antinarcissistic core of “the natural ontological attitude” and “minimal realism”—“realism” in the nonmetaphysical sense. “Realism” in the metaphysical sense combines this praiseworthy attitude with a dubious doctrine that is meant to legitimate it. Fortunately, the attitude needs no such legitimation.
“Accuracy with respect to the subject matter” does not by itself explain what the property of truth is. It is, in most contexts, an acceptable paraphrase for “truth.” But truth is the more basic concept. We know what it means to speak of an accurate proposition because we know how to use the term “true.” No near-synonym of truth gives an informative answer to the question of what status is attributed to beliefs and claims in truth-talk. “Correspondence to reality” is no better. Is it a rough synonym for truth? Yes. Does it clarify the property we are trying to understand? No.
Most ordinary people, including many children, exhibit a practical grasp of what truth is in their day-to-day speech. It does not appear to be a difficult thing to acquire. How do they acquire it? By mastering paradigmatic uses of “true.” Not by having the property explained to them metaphysically. Their teachers and parents do not introduce the term “true” to them by defining it as accuracy or correspondence. These near synonyms come later in the learning process, and they don’t explain much once they arrive. Building a metaphysical theory around these words, hoping to make them perform explanatory tasks they cannot perform on their own, is to seek clarification in an area of philosophy infamous for its lack of clarity. The order of explication needs to move in the opposite direction—out of the bog where philosophies whole have sunk, onto the solid ground of actual language use. Truth-talk is not an implicitly metaphysical affair, standing in need of metaphysical articulation and defense. It is an aspect of ordinary language use, to be made sense of in terms of an empirically oriented linguistic theory.
The main targets of modest pragmatism are a dubious realist project of legitimation, which aims to identify and firm up the metaphysical basis of truth-talk, and a similarly dubious project of delegitimation that reacts against realism in the wrong way. The latter project includes “postmodern” attempts to unmask truth-talk as implicitly committed to realistic metaphysical ideas that are demonstrably incoherent. Postmodernism of this sort often begins with a high quotient of moral seriousness. Its political instinct is to align itself with ordinary people against the system of power relations that surrounds them. But the narcissistic and self-refuting implications of the antirealist metaphysics it adopts eventually reduce the critical enterprise to a somewhat farcical academic melodrama. The central characters are ironical dandies and their natural enemies, the self-righteous, truth-loving prigs. But what if ordinary truth-talk has been innocent of metaphysics all along? Then disclosing the incoherence of metaphysics might deflate the pretensions of a few metaphysically obsessed professors, yet it hardly promises to uncover a nasty secret about the civilization as a whole. The pragmatic remedy is to drop the identification of truth with power, cut out the narcissism that goes with it, and recover the democratic instinct that fueled the critical project in the first place.
THEOLOGY AND METAPHYSICS: TRUTH, OBLIGATION, AND EXCELLENCE
It might be objected that pragmatism, pursued as a general antimetaphysical strategy within philosophy, is inherently antitheological. But this objection ignores the fact that there are numerous theologians and theologically committed philosophers who hope to free themselves and the culture as a whole from the compulsion of pursuing metaphysics in the pejorative sense.25 Their work is not only intellectually adventurous and rewarding, but also an apt reminder that theological commitments need not be seen as a subset of metaphysical commitments.
The etymology of “meta-physics” is apt to cause confusion in this context. My opposition to metaphysics is not intended to rule out a class of claims simply because they refer to something beyond or above the ontological framework assumed in the natural sciences.26 To see what I am getting at here, consider Timothy Jackson. As a Christian thinker, he affirms (a) that God the Father Almighty made heaven and earth; (b) that Jesus Christ, His Son, is the perfect embodiment of divine love; and (c) that Christ’s love of others is intrinsically good, indeed the most important intrinsic excellence there is. These are theological claims. Jackson’s meditations on (b) and (c) in particular plumb their ethical significance with a degree of eloquence and insight uncommon in recent Christian ethical writing. I would not imagine that these claims came into Jackson’s life as conclusions of a metaphysical argument about how to construe the objectivity of discursive practices.
But Jackson does have such an argument to offer. He proposes “a correspondence theory of truth” and “an objectivist theory of value.”27 These doctrines imply (d) that a substantial metaphysics of correspondence is implicit in both Christian and secular practices of making truth-claims in ethics. He therefore concludes (e) that the primary principle of ethics, which enjoins love of the actual neighbor, would be transformed into mere narcissism if removed from the context of a realistic metaphysics. Solidarity, according to Jackson, is impossible outside “a community that fosters objective self-scrutiny and attention to others as they are in themselves.” For this reason, he fears that abandonment of realism would eviscerate civilization itself, rendering likely a “decline into the … war of all against all.”28 Putting the same point more delicately, he cites “the danger that liberal virtues will not be sustainable under an ironist sky.” We “can’t cultivate kindness in the first place, we don’t know fully what it means to be kind, without attending to the intrinsic worth (and vulnerability) of others.”29 Attending to the intrinsic worth of others must not be reduced to a process in which we project value onto them. As one can tell from the references to solidarity and irony, Jackson is criticizing Rorty in these passages. He offers realism as an antidote to Rortian narcissism.
What in Jackson’s critique of Rorty does a modest pragmatist have a stake in denying? Only such claims as (d) and (e) and the fear of civilizational collapse associated with them. The dispute has nothing to do with claims (a) through (c) unless one grants the truth of (d), which the minimalist does not. In defending (d), Jackson presupposes that we all are bound to accept something like his metaphysical conclusions on pain of incoherence, simply because we use the term “true” as we do. But no one, including Jackson, has yet shown that a metaphysical theory is implicit in ordinary truth-talk. As for (e), Jackson’s arguments are merely variations on the same themes. His arguments for both (d) and (e) make a controversial assumption. They assume (f) that metaphysical realism and antirealism are the only alternatives worth considering.30 Because the latter alternative is obviously narcissistic, he infers that the former must be preferred by anyone who wishes to avoid narcissism. But if minimalism is correct, then (f) is false, and the arguments for (d) and (e) collapse. I have tried to show that minimalism is perfectly compatible with a wholehearted rejection of a narcissistic attitude toward truth.
Jackson and I both endorse the cautionary use of “true.” This is what expressively reinforces the emphasis we both give to epistemic humility and fallibility. It might be supposed that Jackson’s realism provides a stronger emphasis on fallibility than I am able to provide because it makes room for the hope for full-fledged correspondence.31 My problem is that I do not yet understand what we are supposed to be hoping for beyond believing P if and only if P. Jackson sees other-regarding, self-sacrificing love as the single most important value in ethics. While I see no need to give primacy to one form of excellence in this way, I have no trouble acknowledging the value and importance of such love. In the domain of ethics, valuing truth and loving others do typically require us to clear our minds of illusions generated by prejudice and selfishness; to appreciate the needs, pain, and concerns of other people for what they are; and to adjust our evaluative beliefs and claims accordingly.32 Jackson affirms this, and so do I.
Let us now turn to another example of theological metaphysics—namely, Robert Merrihew Adams’s book, Finite and Infinite Goods.33 Like Jackson, Adams is concerned to account for the objectivity of ethical discourse in Christian terms, but he expresses this concern mainly in connection with his accounts of excellence and obligation. While the concept of love plays a major role in the former, Adams is more concerned with love of the good (erotic love in the broad sense) than with self-sacrificial love per se. His theory of excellence identifies it with likeness to the transcendent Good, which he interprets theologically. He offers a social theory of obligation, but one that includes essential reference to God’s commands. A main benefit claimed for these theories is the especially strong sense in which they buttress the objectivity of ethics. If obligation is a matter of what God commands, this makes it “more unqualifiedly objective than human social requirements” (256). If excellence is resemblance to God, then it is a property that “things have or lack objectively, independently of whether we want them to or think they do” (18).
Consider first the distinction Adams draws (15–18) between the question of what the terms “obligation” and “excellence” mean and the question of what obligation and excellence are. The former question is about what conceptual role the terms play. But in his view what obligation and excellence are must be stated metaphysically. Adams and the pragmatist are not at odds on the conceptual issue. What the terms mean in a given language depends on how they are used in that language. It is not a metaphysical matter. Individuals who differ over what we are in fact morally obligated to do and which persons, acts, and things exhibit moral excellence are able to communicate successfully with one another because they use the relevant terms in roughly the same ways. The same holds for individuals who differ over what the nature of obligation or excellence is. Disagreement over this metaphysical question need not prevent us from understanding what it means when a speaker attributes an obligation or a moral excellence to someone. One can know what such utterances mean, and even know how to appraise them as true or false, without knowing what obligation and excellence, as such, are.
To clarify the contrast between semantics and metaphysics, Adams uses the example of water, as discussed by philosophers like Putnam and Kripke. People who are ignorant of chemistry are ignorant also of the nature of water, of the kind of stuff it really is, but many of them have mastered the uses of the term “water” that arise outside of the laboratory. They still know what it means when you ask them for a glass of water or when you say that the water you are swimming in is warm. “But,” says Adams, “the nature of water is to be discovered in the water and not in our concepts” (15). Similarly, even if we were all unable to say what the nature of obligation is, we might still be able to say what the term “obligation” means (a semantic question). We might even be able to reach agreement on what a given person’s obligations are (a moral question). Where, then, is the nature of obligation to be discovered, if not in the use of the term “obligation”? Clearly not in chemistry, or in physics, or in some other natural science. “Metaphysics” is Adams’s term for systematic inquiry into “natures” that fall outside of the scope of the sciences. The metaphysician of ethics does for such topics as obligation what the chemist does for water. Is this activity benign, or is it metaphysical in the pejorative sense?
It is clear that the chemist’s question about the nature of water is about what water is made of, what constitutes it. What constitutes water is a good question.34 We have known for millennia to look for the answer in the water. Where else would one look for its constituent parts? And we have in recent centuries made great progress in improving the methods we use when carrying out such investigations. We are now confident that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, two parts to one. But the metaphysician’s question about the nature of obligation is not about what it is made of, because obligation is not a kind of stuff. So what is being asked here? Where and by what means are we supposed to look for an answer?
The theory of obligation that Adams presents in chapter 10 implies that we should be looking for an answer by attending to certain aspects of social life and our experience of it as individuals involved in social relationships. This is where a pragmatist would expect an illuminating answer to be found. Social relationships tend to impose requirements on those involved in them. Valuing such a relationship “gives one, under certain conditions, a reason to do what is required of one by one’s associates or one’s community” (242). An obligation, Adams says, is a reason of this kind. Thus, obligations are constituted by social relationships, although not in the same sense that the right mixture of hydrogen and oxygen constitutes water. This just means that social relationships and the activities they involve give rise to obligations. This is what it means to say that obligations are creatures of social practices. They consist in a kind of reason that arises in valued social relationships that impose requirements on their members. Some relationships are wrongly valued, however; some are “downright evil.” So we distinguish between obligations that are undermined, as reasons, by defects in the relationship they involve and obligations that can withstand rational, fully informed criticism of the relationship they involve. The latter are morally valid obligations. This strikes me as a very promising theory. Up to this point, I see nothing in it that a pragmatist should find objectionable. If it is metaphysical, it must be in some innocuous sense. I would prefer to call it simply philosophical.
If a personal God exists and chooses to interact with us, then our relationship with God, according to the theory just given, should be capable of giving rise to obligations. If God issues commands to us, these will qualify as a kind of social requirement. The theory holds that the goodness of the social bond is essential to giving obligations their force. A central claim of theism is that divine commands arise within the context of a continuing relationship that can be recognized as good—as excellent—by the human beings involved in it. If God takes an interest in the full range of human relationships, he is free to command that human beings fulfill all of the obligations arising from those relationships that are properly valued. This would transform all morally valid obligations into religious obligations. All of this follows if we begin with a social-pragmatic theory of obligation and then factor in a theistic view of what the relevant relationships are like and who is involved in them. Nontheistic pragmatists will not accept the additions, but that goes without saying. Still, the controversial additions need not involve metaphysics in the pejorative sense, just some questionable ontological claims.
Adams is careful to keep his account of divine commands from having undue influence on the epistemology of moral judgment he proposes. In deciding what to view as a moral obligation, according to Adams, we need consider not only what we think God has commanded us to do, but also whether the content of the putative command survives rational criticism. Such criticism must take into account our best understanding of God’s goodness. A command that we initially take to be from a divine source, but which cannot plausibly be viewed as the sort of edict that a wise and loving God could have issued, should not be viewed as a divine command. This aspect of Adams’s theory makes it vastly superior to most divine-command theories at both the theoretical and practical levels.
Theoretically, it permits him to sidestep Socratic objections to the kind of theological ethics advocated by Euthryphro in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name. Furthermore, it makes the theory much less prone than it would otherwise be to ideological abuses, fanaticism, and cruelty on the part those who attempt to live according to it. For example, Adams forthrightly denies in chapter 12 that the killing of Isaac is something that a loving God would actually command Abraham to do (Genesis 22:1–19). So anyone who believes himself to have received such a command from God is not thereby licensed to obey it, but rather required to change his mind about what the true God commands. Would that all believers subjected their assumptions about divine commands to this sort of testing!35 Adams’s theological conception of moral obligation is a humane vision, which leaves ample scope for self-criticism.
In chapter 11, Adams underscores the theoretical importance of including God in the account of moral obligation. The explanatory advantage of doing so, he claims, is to strengthen the sense in which obligations are held to be an objective matter. Assuming that God’s commands cover everything that is required in every sort of genuinely wholesome relationship, all obligations turn out to be objective in the strongest possible sense. Because divine commands are not, by definition, human artifacts, they would secure a point of reference for the genuinely obligatory outside the realm of merely human social practices—although not outside of social practices altogether. This is the one point in his reflections on obligation where one might suspect that Adams is indulging in metaphysics in the pejorative sense. For God is being called on here precisely to buttress our sense of the objectivity of our evaluative practices.
Adams does not deny that obligations are creatures of social relationships and the practices of accountability they involve. Nor does he deny that rational criticism of those relationships can often disclose the difference between defective and good relationships, thus funding a distinction between defective and morally valid obligations. But he would prefer not to rely solely on an appeal to a human practice of rational criticism in defining this difference. Because morally valid obligations are identified as those arising from good relationships, the objectivity of moral obligation depends on the objectivity of goodness. This is what Adams means when he says that the good is prior to the right in his framework for ethics. The type of goodness at issue here is excellence. So it matters greatly, from Adams’s point of view, that excellence be made out to be objective in a strong sense.
What, then is excellence? What type of goodness is it? Unlike usefulness, but like well-being, it is something that human beings value for its own sake. Adams distinguishes it from well-being by describing it as “the goodness of that which is worthy of love or admiration, honor or worship” (83). The distinction is nicely drawn, and Adams makes effective use of it in an argument designed to show that our interest in our own well-being should lead us to an interest in enjoyment of excellence. Once we have specified the property of excellence in this way, by placing it accurately among the types of goodness, don’t we already have the nature of excellence within our grasp?
The terms “excellent” and “true” have parallel uses. Declaring something excellent normally expresses approval of it. This parallels the acceptance use of “true.” The term “excellent” also has a use analogous to the cautionary use of “true,” as in: “X conforms to our highest ideals as they now stand, but X might not be excellent.”36 With these uses in mind, we can conclude that the action-guiding and objective dimensions of excellence-talk, respectively, are built into the term’s conceptual role. We do not need help from metaphysical theorizing to do what the cautionary use of “excellent” already accomplishes on its own behalf. Excellence, roughly, is the goodness of something worthy of love or admiration; and, given the cautionary use of “excellent,” this kind of goodness must be understood as a normative status about which we can be wrong. There is much more to be said one level below this, in accounting for the types of excellence, such as beauty and virtue, and the sorts of thing that can exemplify them. And these details do enrich our sense of what excellence is. It consists in manifold types, each of which must be understood in the context of the practices in which we acquire and express our interest in and concern for it—the arts, child rearing, and so on. But what more is there to be said in the abstract about excellence as such?
Adams wants more than this, and his reason once again has to do with objectivity. He thinks that the nature of excellence must be described in such a way that its independence from human valuing is guaranteed metaphysically. Something must be done, Adams thinks, to keep excellence from collapsing into what human beings love and admire. Excellence, properly understood, must turn out to be as independent of our responses to things as truth is. Appreciating the parallel between the cautionary uses of “excellent” and “true” does begin to lend credence to the idea that excellence-talk is objective in some fairly strong sense. But this, from Adams’s point of view, is mere semantics. What we need is an account of the nature of excellence. If excellence consisted simply in what human beings love and admire, it would lack the sort of independence that would allow us to speak meaningfully of being wrong in our judgments of excellence. Sometimes we love and admire people who abuse us. We pathologically treasure the relationship that binds us to them, and accept the requirements they impose on us as genuine obligations. Such people do not deserve our love and admiration; such relationships are not properly treasured. To make sense of this, we need an account of excellence as an objective property, independent of what we actually love and admire. The same concern arises, for both Jackson and Adams, in connection with the intrinsic worth of human beings.37
Excellence of a given kind normally manifests itself to competent judges of the relevant sort. What such judges steadily love or admire, when given full information and ample opportunity to reflect critically, is our best guide to excellence.38 A competent judge is someone who has become adept at the patterns of approval and disapproval essential to a social practice involving kinds of thing taken to be worthy of love or admiration. A person who is deeply familiar with jazz, cares about it in the way jazz buffs do, and is capable of reflecting critically on jazz performances would qualify as a competent judge. He or she could tell the difference between a saxophone solo played by a beginner and one played by the mature Lester Young. Indeed, listeners who could not tell the difference, under conditions where they could experience both performances without distortion and reflect on them critically as long as they wished, would immediately be disqualified within the jazz world as competent practitioners.
Moral excellence can be approached along similar lines. Again a competent judge is someone who has mastered a repertoire of appropriate noninferential responses (ranging from revulsion to admiration) and the inferential habits involved in reflecting critically on such responses. Take the practice of child rearing, where talk of moral excellence has its firmest footing and clearest function. One thing we do when engaging in this practice is to correct children who bully their siblings. Suppose, in a given case, the correction is effective. A little boy seems to have overcome his previous tendency to bully his little sister. He no longer screams with rage and punches her when she touches his toys. His parents express their approval by praising him: “What a nice boy!” Such talk attributes to him an elementary form of the virtue of temperance, a cardinal moral excellence. This type of excellence is a status in a process of moral development with which we are all familiar. The boy either has this status or he does not. His parents might be wrong in attributing it to him. Perhaps they have excessive pride and are disposed to approve of everything he does. Surely, the boy possesses the excellence in question only if their approval of it, in their capacity as participants in the practice of child rearing, can withstand critical scrutiny in light of increasingly complete information about the boy’s behavior in particular and child development in general.
I have stopped short of equating the boy’s excellence with his newly acquired disposition to elicit approval from competent practitioners “under conditions of increasing non-evaluative information and critical reflection.”39 Taking that additional reductive step, for excellence in general, is a controversial move, which Adams resists. And I have my own reasons for resisting it. Suppose, in a galaxy far away, there exists an advanced civilization whose excellences would not even register on the scales employed in any human evaluative practice. Or, to take an example more to Adams’s liking, suppose that God exists and that his greatness surpasses the understanding that any finite being could acquire. Then there might well be some forms of excellence that cannot be reduced to a disposition to elicit approval from human beings, even those operating under what, in human terms, would have to be counted as hyperbolically idealized conditions. The term “excellence,” when employed in such thought-experiments, has an intelligible use. There could, it seems to me, be a form of excellence that transcended even an idealized human capacity to recognize it. This would be something sufficiently analogous to our more mundane forms of excellence to merit being classified with them (for the purposes of the thought-experiment) but sufficiently superior to them to surpass human understanding.
Nonetheless, the reason that thought-experiments about distant galaxies place strain on the concept of excellence they employ is that the concept has its natural home in down-to-earth human practices in which the evaluation of persons, traits, and so on has an evident point in relation to our earthly concerns. When theists engage in the practice of doxology, and praise God as one whose greatness surpasses human understanding, they know that they have an excellence in mind, but they admit that they cannot give the idea much positive content. We would not have a grip on what excellence is if this were the only context in which we used the term “excellence.” We understand what excellence is, practically speaking, because we interact constantly with finite things that satisfy the interests in excellence that arise in the context of practices like child rearing, spiritual counseling, philosophy, science, the arts, athletics, and politics. These are all practices in which we are trying to improve on something: a child’s behavior, our grasp of a concept, a set of institutional arrangements, or whatever. And we mark the difference between things we have reason to modify and things we have reason to deem satisfactory or laudable, given the overall point of a practice, by selectively attributing specific forms of excellence to them. Our grasp of excellence—of what it is—consists in our ability to reflect meaningfully on our experience of normative ascent within a number of particular practices. To understand excellence is thus to possess a kind of wisdom that is difficult or impossible to state propositionally. The metaphysical temptation, in this area of philosophy, is to think that an explicit, highly general propositional formulation would represent an advance on the practical understanding gained through experience of particular excellent things.
We must still come to terms, however, with what may be Adams’s deeper worry, the existence of conflicting communities of competent judges. Most of us would know how to tell the difference between a Lester Young performance and a beginner’s. We would respond approvingly to the former but not the latter as a piece of improvisational music. We are also ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with parents everywhere in approving of the child who overcomes his tendency to bully his sister. Unfortunately, however, there are many conflicting communities of competent judges claiming jurisdiction over questions of excellence. Assume, for the moment, that jazz buffs find disco revolting. They might be willing to grant disco fans jurisdiction over the relative worth of disco performances (as music to dance to), but not over the question of whether the best disco performances are excellent. Disco fans might be willing to acknowledge Lester Young’s superiority to a novice, but not the greatness of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme as a musical performance. Similarly, Emersonian democrats and Nazi officers would hardly respond in the same way to such traits as compassion for one’s enemies and submissiveness to one’s military commander. Who is to decide who counts as a competent judge of these matters?
The pragmatist sees this query more as a practical question than as a philosophical puzzle about objectivity. The relative merits of jazz and disco have been transformed into a matter for objective inquiry by the creation of a social practice, music criticism. In this practice various forms of musical expression are studied deeply, both in relation to their social functions and the higher aesthetic aspirations they bring into play. Over time a class of competent judges has established its authority to make disciplined judgments of relative artistic worth, with jazz faring rather better than disco. By the same token, the way to transform the relative merits of Nazi and Emersonian valuations into a matter for objective inquiry is to create a critical practice in which various human ethical practices can be judged comparatively. The hope once again is that the claim to be a competent judge of such matters can at some point honestly be presented as an earned entitlement. Without the construction and development of such a practice, all we have are various communities making ill-informed, biased judgments of each other’s valuations. Until some standards are developed for evaluating these judgments, the judgments themselves are likely to be biased and unreliable. This does not mean that they lack truth-value, for some of them are plainly mistaken. But calling some of them “mistaken” expresses an earned entitlement, according to the pragmatist, only in relation to the incipient metapractice. Making such a claim may or may not be to speak truly, but it does not belong to an objective cognitive endeavor unless it is being presented as a claim for which reasons may be requested.
When one says that A Love Supreme really is excellent, as compared with any performance by the Bee Gees, one is either expressing one’s cultural snobbery in an undisciplined way or implicitly gesturing toward a critical practice in which this judgment could be vindicated. Because this practice exists, I have grounds for my confidence that Coltrane’s performance would elicit steady admiration from fully informed, critically reflective judges who experienced it. Even if this dispositional trait does not exhaustively characterize the excellence in question, it still tells me where to look for it. If I want to experience it, I shall need to approximate, at least to some degree, the characteristics and circumstances of ideally situated, competent practitioners of the relevant kind. A similarly emergent metapractice in the area of ethical criticism has definitively eliminated Nazi claims about the virtues from serious consideration. But as in music criticism, so, too, in disciplined cross-cultural ethical inquiry: there are many alleged examples of ethical excellence and inadequacy that have yet to elicit a stable response from the best-informed, most reflective judges. There are many more arising every day. Still, one can get a reasonably clear sense of what ideally competent judges would have to know and what sort of critical reflection they would be inclined to practice. So there is no reason to suppose that we are dealing here with a merely subjective matter.
Adams, however, is pressing for a propositional statement that will name the substantial something in which the excellence of any excellent finite thing consists. Anyone not already persuaded that this effort is necessary will be disposed to suspect unwarranted reification at work as Adams passes from ordinary uses of “good” and “excellent” to talk of God as the transcendent Good. God, for Adams, is the actual, unchanging paradigm of excellence. The excellence of a finite thing, he concludes, is its resemblance to this paradigm. It is not clear that this explanation works, even if one accepts Adams’s theological premises. In the first place, the value of many types of excellence derives from their roles in the lives of finite, fallible, physical beings situated in a natural world. It is not obvious what parallel some of these types of excellence would have in the life of God.40 Second, as Adams admits, philosophers since antiquity have doubted that the varieties of excellence can be accounted for on a model as unitary as the Platonic one he endorses (38–41). But there are other problems as well.
When we value the excellence of finite things, we are (implicitly or explicitly) applying our norms to those things. Sometimes the norm takes the form of an exemplar with which we compare other instances of the same kind. But it isn’t typically their resemblance to something else that we are valuing when we value their excellence. Usually what we value in them is simply their excellence, or some particular aspect of their excellence, such as the inventive expressivity of the guitarist’s riff or the steadfast courage of the protestor’s defiance. It is not their resemblance to a higher, paradigmatic instance, let alone a being (real or imaginary) nothing greater than which can be conceived.
Suppose that an atheist performs the same act of heroism in two possible worlds and that these worlds are very similar, except that God exists in only one of them.41 Suppose further that in both of these worlds, you witness the act of heroism and come to value its moral excellence. In the God-inhabited world, the act turns out to resemble God in certain ways. Its practical wisdom images God’s own wisdom; its compassion for people in suffering images God’s love; and so forth. Even so, the act’s resemblance to God need not be what you value in deeming it excellent. Is resemblance to God, then, identical to excellence? What you value as the excellence of the act, presumably, is a property that the act and God supposedly share—the very property the sharing of which constitutes the resemblance. This would seem to be a property the act could have in the godless possible world as well. In that world, the act would still have the property but it would lack the relation of resemblance to divinity. Why assume that excellence would be a different property in that world?
It is unclear, in any event, how resemblance to divinity would explain what the property is—what it is that we value when we value excellence—in either world. Whichever possible world we are in, our practical understanding of excellence will depend on the various forms of excellence we experience. That is one reason for trying to experience great art or great philosophy; it deepens our understanding of excellence, thereby orienting us toward enjoyment of excellence in our lives as a whole. By the same token, interaction with a supremely good being would make an enormous difference to our understanding of excellence—even though we might still find it impossible to state this understanding in the form of an informative, workable (metaphysical) explanation. If there is such a being, we should praise its excellence to the highest and hope to deepen our understanding of excellence by interacting with it (or participating in it).
We might then follow Barth in redescribing all finite forms of excellence as pale reflections of God’s excellence. In that event, we might well affirm as an article of faith that God’s excellence is the analogue and any finite instance of excellence is the analogate. Taken out of context, this might seem to be exactly what Adams is affirming. But Barth would be anxious to deny that our mundane conception of excellence, built up from experience of excellent finite things, is capable in itself, without God’s gracious help, of bearing adequate witness to God. Barthian affirmation of God as the archetype of excellence belongs to the theological enterprise in which faith seeks understanding. It takes faith as its absolute presupposition. Theology properly conceived, according to Barth, shatters all attempts to argue on strictly philosophical grounds from the experience of finite things to a God posited as a metaphysical explanans. The contrast between Barth’s conception of analogy and Adams’s conception of resemblance brings the metaphysical provenance of the latter into sharp relief.42
How do we come to grasp the concept of excellence? By participating in evaluative practices. In these practices we interact with instances of excellence, and learn to apply such expressions as “good,” “better than,” “eloquent,” “beautiful,” and “virtuous” in accord with the norms of our community. There is also an important role for the imagination, as we learn to project ideals of excellence on the basis of experience of actual finite things that are good in some respects but not others. The monotheistic traditions unify these ideals in a single conception of divinity—a personal being who not only exemplifies excellence perfectly but is also causally responsible for the creation and destiny of the universe. The alleged actuality of this divinity is then said to explain many things, including the excellence of finite things that resemble it. The prior unification of the ideal and the actual, however, is obviously controversial. Feuerbach, Freud, Santayana, and Dewey denigrate it as wishful thinking. Without denying the element of wish, Pascal and William James affirm it as a reason of the heart. Especially for those on the verge of despair, it might well be a saving comfort to believe that our highest ideals are instantiated in an actual being—not only a perfect paradigm of goodness but a power capable of seeing to it that everything will eventually turn out well.43 I do not gainsay people of good will and common decency who accept faith in such a God. Who am I to judge them? Yet I do question the wisdom of treating the objectivity of ethics as if it depended, in effect, upon a faith shared by only some of the people.
It would be foolish to pretend that religious commitments do not play a major role in shaping intuitions about what a philosopher ought to be aiming for in this area. If God created the earth and immediately declared it excellent, and only then proceeded to create human beings, it makes little sense to insist that excellence, as a normative status, is a creature of human practices.44 But this just means that God has a creative practice the point of which is to improve on something—in this case, the formless void. An improvement-oriented practice gives content and point to a distinction between things that qualify as excellent and things that are relatively inadequate. Assuming that the divinity is either multiple (as the plural Hebrew form suggests at Genesis 1:26 and as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity implies) or has an audience of angelic beings, the practice of creation might even have a social dimension from an orthodox point of view.
Pragmatism, understood strictly as a critique of metaphysics in the pejorative sense, need not be troubled by any of this, taken simply as a story faithfully believed. Its quarrel is not with the God of Amos and Dorothy Day, or even with the God of Barthian theology, but with the God of Descartes, and with the God of analytic metaphysics. Its account of excellence, like its account of obligation, can accommodate whatever persons, social relationships, and practices there happen to be. Its purpose should not be to put theologically inclined citizens on the defensive. The purpose served by pragmatic ethical theory is rather to make clear that a society divided over the nature and existence of God is not thereby condemned to view its ethical discourse as an unconstrained endeavor. If the God of the philosophers is dead, not everything is permitted. There can still be morally valid obligations to constrain us, as well as many forms of excellence in which to rejoice. Pragmatism comes into conflict with theology in ethical theory mainly at those points where someone asserts that the truth-claiming function of ethics depends, for its objectivity, on positing a transcendent and perfect being.45 Metaphysics asserts the need and then posits the divine explainer to satisfy it. Pragmatism questions the need and then doubts the coherence of the explanation.
Our grasp on the objectivity of obligation is firmest in those ordinary contexts where we fully understand the point of requiring one another to live up to the demands of the decent relationships in which we take part. Outside of the context of faith, our grasp on the objectivity of excellence is firmest in those down-to-earth—but still uplifting—moments when we experience a finite thing that is significantly better than others of its kind and our heart spontaneously fills up with admiration. In thinking otherwise, we risk alienating ourselves from the very activities in which evaluative properties and proprieties normally manifest themselves to us. The nature of obligation and excellence is something we lay our hands on in our practices. Their capacity to transcend the awareness of competent judges is disclosed to us when we undergo social and spiritual crises, and are forced to abandon long-cherished rules and exemplars as idols. Such reversals teach human beings something important about our intimations of morally valid obligation and genuine excellence: metaphysical consolation notwithstanding, we have this treasure in earthen vessels, and must make of it what we can.46
“Where do we find ourselves?” writes Emerson. “In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.”47 The stair I am on is higher than the one below me. It affords a better view. This view excels the other. I declare it excellent—but not perfect, for I can imagine a better one. Does this judgment depend, for its objectivity, on whether the uppermost actual stair affords a perfect view? If I cannot yet see to the top, don’t I still know what I’m talking about when I assert the excellence of the view I now enjoy?48