Category Archives: philosophy

moral propositions are true or false; the problem is method

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(Washington, DC) Moral propositions are true or false. For example, “Genocide is evil” is a true statement. If you disagree with it, you’re wrong. So I believe, and so do most moral philosophers. This assumption violates the fact/value distinction that we teach kids as early as elementary school. We teach them that values are opinions, in contrast to facts. But I as little doubt that genocide is wrong as I doubt Newton’s laws of motion or the existence of the chair on which I sit right now. If the chair turned out to be an illusion, I wouldn’t be thoroughly crazy. If I started to favor genocide, I would be.

So what leads people to the theoretical view that moral propositions are mere opinions, neither true nor false? The problem is one of method.

We believe in natural facts because from our earliest days, nature is obdurate. Fire burns, and we form a solid belief that the fire has caused our pain. The same sensory perceptions and logical premises that we use to reach such simple conclusions also underlie scientific method, which extends our knowledge vastly, pays practical dividends, and sometimes generates counter-intuitive findings that turn out to be correct. We are almost all naturalists now, believing that science (broadly defined) yields truth, and that what is true is what science yields.

With morality, we also draw firm impressions about vivid cases. Even if you are skeptical about moral truth (in theory), you will feel with virtual certainty that it is wrong to kill someone in cold blood for one’s own amusement. You may have convinced yourself that “wrong” is just an opinion, or just an instinct inbred by natural selection, but you will oppose cold-blooded murder with as much certainty as you believe in cause-and-effect or the persistence of objects in nature.

But many other cases are more ambiguous. We know that our moral knowledge is unreliable, because we disagree with one another and because our assumptions have changed over time. For many centuries, virtually everyone (female as well as male) believed that men were superior to women in many respects. Now I and many others are sure that was wrong. But if I had been born 200 years ago, I would have been mistaken about gender. If I had been born a gentile German around 1900, I assume that I would have supported Hitler in 1939, because almost everyone did.

When we study nature, we also face ambiguity and commit errors. Like moral views, scientific theories change. It’s just that with morality, we lack an agreed-upon method for addressing uncertainty and correcting error.

That is not to say that we lack methods altogether. Philosophers often propose them. For example, John Rawls proposed developing the rules of a just society while imagining that one does not know one’s own circumstances. Putting oneself behind an imaginary “veil of ignorance,” as Rawls suggested, is a method.

But the reception of Rawls is characteristic of philosophy. Critics quickly said that too many moral assumptions were built into his method. You had to be a liberal individualist, they said, to endorse the method that led Rawls to his liberal conclusions. Moral methodology doesn’t seem separable from substantive moral views.

I acknowledge that problem, and I don’t think we are likely to find a moral method that wins consensus and  solves one controversy after another. But it doesn’t follow that morality is mere opinion. Alas, moral propositions are true or false and yet we have no agreed-upon way to know which is which in a range of ambiguous situations.

Edmund Burke would vote Democratic

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Edmund Burke stands for the proposition that the status quo is likely better than any ambitious reform. Even if current institutions are based on unjust or foolish general principles, they have gradually evolved as a result of many people’s deliberate work, so that they now embody some wisdom. People have accommodated themselves to the existing rules and structures, learned to live with them and plan around them, and have woven more complex wholes around the parts given by laws and theories. Meanwhile, proposed reforms are almost always flawed by limited information, ignorance of context, and downright arrogance. In politics, as in medicine, the chief principle should be: “First, do no harm.”

In any debate, the Burkean conservative position is worth serious consideration. I come down on that side pretty often. And given the alternatives, I almost always vote for the Burkean political party in the United States, which is the Democratic Party.

It is the Democrats, after all, whose main goal is to defend the public institutions built between 1900 and 1960: neighborhood public schools, state universities, regulated capital markets, federal health programs, science funding, affirmative action, and the like, against untested alternatives based in the abstract theories of neoliberalism. Importantly, Democrats defend existing institutions without heartily endorsing them. A typical Democratic position goes something like this: Neighborhood public schools are inequitable and sometimes oppressive, but they need our support because lots of teachers and families have invested in them, they are woven into communities, and the radical critiques of them are overblown.

What about health care reform? The actual reform of act of 2010 is classically Burkean in that it weaves together existing private and public institutions in an effort to prevent change (in the form of cost inflation) and fill a fraying gap in the existing system. To be sure, many grassroots Democrats wanted a more radical reform, a single-payer system. But that was an official plank of the Democratic Party platform starting in1948; it is unfinished business from a time when the party was still “progressive” in the root sense of pushing for progress.

What about gay rights and the redefinition of marriage? First of all, this is one of very few exceptions to the general Burkean inclination of the Democratic Party: a case where the Party does want something new. But the President himself holds an almost perfectly Burkean position on gay marriage: It will be OK when it comes, he doesn’t have a principled objection to it, but he doesn’t want to push it from Washington because society needs time to adjust to it, state by state. Local norms vary and deserve some deference.

The Burkean conservatism of the Democratic Party is not merely tactical, a way of staving off undesired change by playing defense. It has philosophical roots. On the center-left, after all, is where you encounter the strongest endorsements of indigenous cultures and traditions, of deference to community norms and assets. It’s also on the Democratic side where “sustainability” (i.e., preserving something that is) seems most attractive as a guiding principle, and where people are highly sensitive to fragility, unanticipated consequences, human arrogance. Conservation, preservation, and respect for tradition are in tension with the technocratic inclinations of the Party, but they represent a powerful current in center-left thought.

The most reflective and consistent recent American Burkean was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He opposed the War on Poverty in the 1960s because he thought it would destabilize communities and was based on arrogant abstractions dreamed up in academia. He then opposed the Reagan-era cuts in those programs on the same grounds. Another politician might have been blowing in the political winds, but Moynihan wrote rather extensively against both reforms on Burkean grounds. In the 1960s, he was marginal as a Democrat, excoriated by liberals and hired by Nixon. By the time he voted against Clinton’s welfare reform in 1996, he stood right at the heart of a now-Burkean party.

Aren’t the Republicans also conservative, in a Burkean sense? Maybe some are at the grassroots level, but the national party’s leaders seem eager to revolutionize America by adopting libertarian experiments. They often characterize their reforms as a return to the American past, but they mean the relatively distant past and its forgotten principles. The Paul Ryan budget would take us back to before the New Deal. Rick Santorum would move us back to before the sins of the 1960s. Burke never argued in favor of radical backward steps or original principles. It was the messy status quo, not the distant past, that attracted his respect.

I do not mean this post as a critique of the Democratic Party. I am often inclined to support the Burkean side in an argument. I do lament that our two parties are (respectively) Burkean conservative and right-radical. We would be better off if an ambitious, reformist left also existed to press for change. At least, we would be better off if people realized how the current political spectrum is arranged and voted accordingly. The choice is not really between left and right but between Burke/Hayek/Niebuhr conservatism and Milton Friedman/Antonin Scalia/William F. Buckley conservatism.

Ito Jakuchu at the National Gallery

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In the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, a large room replicates a Zen monastery in Kyoto where originally 30 large silk panel paintings of animals were hung with a triptych of the Buddha between two bodhisattvas. Ito Jakuchu painted all these panels between 1757 and 1766.

They are superficially uniform: all the same size and shape, hung on the same luxurious cloth backgrounds, showing small animals in shallow scenes that are gently or evenly lit so that barely any shadows emerge. But they are far from monotonous. Some are placid; others vibrant, crowded, even violent.

The technique varies widely. White paint is sometimes spattered on the back of the sheer silk panel to shine through and represent snow. In other cases, the artist builds up a large patterned area by coloring small planes that are surrounded by negative space (blank silk) instead of painted outlines. Certain objects are depicted with radical abstraction: a stream is just a serpentine block of paint. Other objects are represented in obsessive detail.

The room as a whole is arranged according to subtle patterns, with interesting parallels between each panel and the one facing it from the opposite wall.

I know little about Jakuchu’s cultural context and have read only that he was somewhat eccentric, independent of artistic schools, and a Sinophile Buddhist. But I imagine him saying something like this. “The snow doesn’t form subtle patterns above a pond for our delectation or by anyone’s design. It just falls that way because of what happened to occur before it fell. There is no plan or purpose to nature. Yet, because of the way we have evolved, we happen to find it lovely. We also love any physical object that represents such a scene. It too is the result of random and impersonal forces, the forces that created Ito Jakuchu and ultimately ended his life. Those white paint spatters on the back illustrate the “dependent origination” of this work. And yet they are not random. They were spattered by a man who was trying to recreate nature for his own delight and yours.”

Life may be a bridge
Between darkness and darkness,
But look at the birds.

Hegel and the Buddha

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{May 2022: I see that this old and rather casual post gets a fair amount of traffic, presumably from people who are searching for combinations of “Hegel[ian]” and “Budd[ism].” A better post of mine would be “a Hegelian meditation.” See also: T.C. Morton, “Hegel on Buddhism” or Ariën Voogt, “Spirituality in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: An analysis in the wake of Foucault,” Metaphilosophy 52.5 (2021): 616-627.}

Contrary to popular belief, Hegel’s dialectic has nothing to do with “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” The characteristic pattern is rather:

  • Consciousness: one experiences, thinks, and acts according to habit, custom, or instinct;
  • Self-consciousness: one becomes aware of one’s habits, customs, or instincts, leading to irony, discomfort, conflict, and creativity;
  • Reason: One chooses a particular way of thinking and being.

The cycle can repeat if one realizes that what looked like “reason” was, from a more distant perspective, an arbitrary choice.

I studied Hegel long ago and have found his structure widely applicable. Only lately have I paid serious attention to the thinker we call the Buddha. A characteristic pattern for him is:

  • Suffering: the experience of all sentient beings, which inevitably includes frustration, fear, pain, and loss;
  • Attachment: suffering that arises from wanting something that one cannot control (and often from knowing that what one wants cannot be had);
  • Cessation of suffering, which arises from renouncing attachment;
  • Equanimity, which is not complete dis-attachment or lack of concern but rather deliberate engagement with the world without a futile sense of frustration.

The parallels seem to me interesting and fruitful, although not exact.

unhappiness and injustice are different problems

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The ancient sources do not specify which specific miseries flew out of Pandora’s box, but I would suggest they came in three groups.

Some forms of suffering happen to human beings because of the kinds of creatures we are. We can postpone death, aging, disease, pain, and fear, but they are inevitable. These are the natural woes. Our very existence requires the death of other people, or else the earth would be too crowded for the living.

Injustices are miseries for which we rightly blame our fellow human beings. What counts as an injustice (as opposed to a natural phenomenon), is a matter of dispute. I would include sins of omission, such as my own failure to help people even though I own superfluous resources. I would include both unjust actions and inequitable states of affairs. Those are controversial claims, but no one doubts that some kinds of injustice exist.

The third category, unhappiness, is a failure to flourish, thrive, enjoy, and achieve equanimity or satisfaction.

These three categories of woe are empirically related. For example, even though death is inevitable, injustice causes millions to die early. It is difficult to be happy if one is suffering from disease and pain, or if one is a victim.

Yet the connections are loose, not logical or inevitable. In a wealthy suburban subdivision where injustice is absent and natural afflictions are normally remote, people may still be miserable to the point of suicide. In a poor village under a repressive government, people may be happier.

Even if injustice does not necessitate unhappiness, it is still an evil, not to be excused. But unhappiness is evidently a separate problem.

We pay far more attention to mitigating or postponing natural afflictions than to fighting injustice–and even less to unhappiness. Also, European and American philosophy since 1800 has much more to say about injustice than about unhappiness.

A just society harnesses science to reduce suffering. Science is also beginning to give attention to positive states of mind, like flourishing and equanimity. That opens the possibility that we could develop new methods of enhancing happiness. But if freedom is also valuable, or is a component or aspect of happiness, then the idea of engineering happiness is disturbing.

Politics is a tool for mitigating natural afflictions and preventing injustice. In liberal democracies, happiness is not seen as a political objective. A government cannot make people happy and may threaten their freedom if it tries.

Some authors (Nietzsche, Emerson) have said something like this: My duty is limited to avoiding injustice. I cannot make other people happy. At best, I can contribute to the happiness of children or partners in intimate relationships. Thus I should concern myself with achieving equanimity for myself and perhaps serve as a model for others.

I can’t accept that such a high degree of self-involvement is either ethically acceptable or compatible with happiness, properly understood. So then the question becomes how to achieve happiness while helping other people to be happy without abridging their freedom.