Metaphysics or Meta-Ethics?

The work we know as Aristotle’s Metaphysics is at least as deeply interwoven with the Nicomachean Ethics as it is with the Physics.

The title meta ta physika (“after the physics”) is a bit accidental, and definitely not from Aristotle himself. It is attributed to the principal editor of Aristotelian manuscripts, Andronicus of Rhodes (1st century BCE), for whom it very mundanely referred to the placement of those writings sequentially “after” the writings we know as the Physics in his edition, which was apparently the main source of later manuscript traditions of the surviving Greek.

What is at issue in my objections to scholastic, early modern, and Heideggerian notions of “metaphysics” has little or nothing to do with this lexical issue as such, but a common feature of these views is that they neglect the all-important connection of first philosophy to ethics.

In contrast, an implicit view of meta-ethics as second-order ethics, or inquiry into the foundations of ethics, has been seen in historical philosophers as far back as Plato. I would even say that philosophical ethics has always been mostly meta-ethics.

One of the themes I have been developing here is a sort of “general meta-ethics” that would be a legitimate heir of what Aristotle called first philosophy or wisdom, decoupled from speculative astronomy, while offering some lessons of its own. I have also been inspired by Brandom’s idea of “normativity all the way down”, which extends the Kantian thesis of the primacy of “practical” (ethical) reason.

I see Plato and Aristotle as inaugurating a tradition of “rational ethics” that separates ethics from appeals to authority, and emphasizes thoughtful inquiry and dialogue. Although never socially dominant in its purer forms, this philosophical approach to ethics has been historically quite influential.

Even very traditional theologians have often tempered their emphasis on revelation with recognition of at least a relative autonomy of ethics. Some have gone further and explicitly acknowledged that the highest degrees of ethical goodness can arise independent of their own particular faith.

Medieval discussions on “intellect” reflect various fusions, extensions, and decorations of Aristotelian and neoplatonic notions both of the highest good absolutely, and of the more specific highest good for humans. Spinoza entitled his magnum opus simply Ethics, and spoke of a purely philosophical beatitude, as did Averroes before him. Leibniz advocated a “wise charity” that is both gentler and more generous than law, while also reviving and further sharpening Plato’s critique of one-sided emphasis on God’s will, power, and authority. Kant reversed traditional wisdom and argued that ethical reason is more fundamental than modern notions of theoretical reason. Hegel made a fundamental contribution with his meta-ethical idea of mutual recognition, which Brandom and Pippin have importantly expounded in our own time.