Tag: Ethics

Willing, Unwilling

Book 3 chapter 1 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics deals with willing and unwilling actions. “Praise and blame come about for willing actions, but for unwilling actions there is forgiveness and sometimes even pity…” (Sachs translation, p. 36.)

Unwilling acts are those that are forced by someone else, or come about through ignorance. Those that come about through ignorance include cases when people are talking and something slips out unintentionally, as well as all sorts of mistakes. Things done on account of spiritedness or desire, as well as those done on account of reasoned deliberation, are considered willing.

There are mixed cases in which the act would normally be done only if it were forced, but in particular circumstances it is done willingly to avoid a greater evil or to realize a greater good. Tradeoffs of this sort generally deserve praise or blame based on the goodness or badness of the tradeoff, but in extreme cases, mixed actions may just deserve forgiveness or pity.

Aristotle says there are perhaps some things one should never do regardless of the tradeoff, but that these cases are difficult to distinguish. He notes that it is in general not easy to say whether or not the ends justify the means. (See also What We Really Want.)

Nicomachean

I am fond of repeating Hegel’s dictum that Plato and Aristotle are the great educators of the human race. Of all their works, if I had to pick one, it is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that stands out most for its combination of excellence and broad relevance to the human condition. This is the same one I would recommend to someone starting out reading Aristotle. It is exceptionally well balanced in considering many angles of the subject matter, and very accessible to the nonspecialist. All rational animals should read it.

That said, translations of Aristotle can also make a huge difference. I especially like the one by Joe Sachs, which goes straightforwardly from Greek to English without introducing traditional Latin-based terminology that often obscures Aristotle’s meaning for English readers. Sachs, who has done outstanding translations of many works by Aristotle and Plato, also preserves more of the original syntax, which yields additional insights into the way the philosophers thought. Like Sachs’ other translations, this one comes out very lively and engaging. It is supplemented with excellent notes, introduction, and glossary. (If you have enough Greek to use a lexicon, it is also good to consult the Loeb edition or the old W.D. Ross Oxford edition, both of which include the Greek text.)

Aristotle himself would caution that only people who are fortunate enough to have had upbringing and life experiences leading to the formation of a disposition to be emotionally reasonable will really benefit from this. (See also Reasonableness; Intellectual Virtue, Love; Ends; Willing, Unwilling; Choice, Deliberation; Practical Judgment; Mean; Happiness. )

Deontic Modality

I just realized that linguists have been using a concept of deontic modality to express various degrees of “ought”, “may”, “can”, and the like. This is interesting in a couple of ways.

Brandom often talks about a pair consisting of deontic normative and alethic modal things, while sometimes suggesting that truth is actually subordinate to normativity. “Alethic modality” is the phrase used by the linguists to express modalities of truth. I’m not sure why Brandom chose not to similarly adopt the linguists’ exact phrase for the deontic one (perhaps to save “modal” for its standard, hyperstrong logical sense), but it is certainly interesting to note that the linguists see the deontic one as also modal.

It is also very interesting to see that the linguists apparently see deontic modality as expressed in terms of degrees, which seems eminently reasonable. I tend to see deontological ethics as promoting untenably unconditional ground-level requirements, so this is a welcome relief. (See also Necessity in Normativity; Binding; Evaluation of Actions; Modality.)

Epistemic Conscientiousness

I see something like epistemic conscientiousness as almost the highest value, only potentially surpassable by what I will broadly call concern for others. This principally involves a commitment to understanding, which means always seeking deeper and better and more nuanced understanding (see Objectivity of Objects). But equally, it involves taking strong personal responsibility for our acceptance of claims. (See also Assumptions; Error.)

If I have accepted a claim — especially if I have acted on the basis of that acceptance, or encouraged others to accept it — and then encounter reason to question that claim, I have a responsibility to resolve the matter in some appropriate and reasonable way. If I accept a claim, I have a responsibility to also accept its consequences. I have a responsibility not to accept materially incompatible claims.

An epistemically conscientious person will also naturally care about the acceptance of claims by others. Particular concern for particular others will naturally tend to accentuate this. We also want to treat those others with respect and kindness, and combining this with questioning claims they have accepted can be delicate. (See also Things Said; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love.)

Syntax, Semantics, Ethics

How we understand one another in our social interactions is of paramount importance for ethics. Pointing, gestures, and similar cues can get us started, but we cannot get very far without considering linguistic meaning, and we cannot get very far with natural language meaning without considering implicit and explicit inferences.

In concrete utterances, syntax still plays a large role in specifying the overall shape of the inferences a speaker is implicitly asking us to endorse with respect to some content in question. Here we are concerned not with formal definition of syntactic features, but with specific, concrete usage that we implicitly, defeasibly take as specifying definite higher-level inferential connections by virtue of the grammar employed.

By understanding the structure of a speaker’s overall argument from syntactic as well as semantic cues, we get all sorts of nuances like intended qualifications and specifications of scope that can be all-important in assessing the reasonableness of what is being said. How well we do this depends at least partly on us as well as what was said, and also on our familiarity with the speaker’s particular speech patterns, which may vary from what is common or usual. We can also silently compare the speaker’s speech patterns to what is common or usual, and wonder if what they seemed to say was what they actually meant; or kindly point out to them that what they actually said could be misunderstood. (See also Inferential Semantics; Honesty, Kindness.)

Mutual Recognition

Hegelian mutual recognition puts ethical considerations of reciprocity with others to the fore. In part, it is a more sophisticated version of the idea behind the golden rule. It also suggests that anyone’s authority and responsibility for anything should always be evenly balanced. It is also a social, historical theory of the genesis of meaning, value, and identity. Hegel’s notion was partly anticipated by Fichte.

Brandom reads mutual recognition as central to Hegel’s ethics or practical philosophy, and Hegel’s practical philosophy as central to his philosophy as a whole. Prior to the publication of A Spirit of Trust (2019), what I take to be Brandom’s own deep ethical engagement was often not recognized. I hope the situation will soon improve.

Consistent with Brandom’s general approach, the ethics of A Spirit of Trust appears in a highly mediated form. Much of the work of ethics for Brandom comes down to the implementation and practice of normative pragmatics and inferential semantics, which he has been expounding at least since Making It Explicit (1994). So, I think he has been laying the groundwork for a long time.

One recent commentator (Lewis 2018) suggested that ethics proper was just missing from Brandom’s earlier accounts. His citations for this were to Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard, whose readings of Hegel are often compared to Brandom’s. I cannot find the text of Pinkard’s 2007 article, but Pippin in the course of his searching but still very sympathetic review “Brandom’s Hegel” (2005) had suggested there was at that time an important gap in Brandom’s reading, related to Hegel’s lifelong concern with a critical treatment of positivity, i.e., received views and institutionalized claims.

Pippin cited an ambiguous argument from Making It Explicit that seemed to support the social legitimacy of a commitment to enlist in the Navy by a drunken sailor who was tricked into a contract by accepting a shilling for more beer. Brandom has since clarified in several places that he did not mean to himself endorse this argument, based as it is on a partial perspective (see, e.g., Hegel’s Ethical Innovation). In Spirit of Trust terms, Brandom’s point in such a context would be to emphasize that the freedom associated with agency does not entail mastery, and in particular that we do not have mastery over the content of our own commitments. The issue for Pippin in 2005 was that Brandom appeared to put sole responsibility and authority for determining the content of commitments on the audience. Pippin found with respect to positivity “not so much a problem as a gap, a lacuna that Brandom obviously feels comfortable leaving unfilled” in Making It Explicit. I suspect Brandom’s lack of discomfort was directly tied to a deferral of such considerations to his 40-year magnum opus project, A Spirit of Trust.

For years, something like Pippin’s positivity issue was a main topic of discussion between my late father and me. For both of us, it was the big hurdle to overcome in fully recognizing Brandom as the world-historic giant we both thought he would probably turn out to be. I thought the positivity issue already began to be addressed in the early web draft of A Spirit of Trust, and I suspect it was a significant focus while Brandom was working on the final text.

In any event, I think it is clear that in the published Spirit of Trust, the determination of the content of commitments is envisioned not as stopping with an immediate audience, but as involving an indefinitely recursive expansion of mutually determining I-Thou relationships. On my reading, normative statuses that are both fully determinate and unconditionally deontically binding would only emerge from the projection of this expansion into infinity. But in practical contexts, we never deal with actual infinity, only with indefinite recursive expansions that have been cut off at some relatively early point. (See also Hegelian Genealogy.)

We always work with defeasible approximations — finite truncations of a recursive expansion through many relationships of reciprocal determination. This means in particular that judgments of deontic bindingness are defeasible approximations.

Further, the kind of approximation at issue here is not a statistical one, but a more Aristotelian sort of “probability”. It therefore cannot be assumed to monotonically improve as the expansion progresses, so it is not guaranteed that further expansion will not suddenly require a significant revision of previous commitments or concepts, as Brandom explicitly points out (see Error).

This means that the legitimacy of the queen’s shilling and any other received truth is actually open to dispute and therefore open to any rational argument, including those the sobered-up sailor might make. In Brandom’s favorite example, new case law — though of course subject to higher-level canons of determinate negation in its own future interpretation and evaluation — may significantly revise existing case law in unforeseeable ways.

I believe this gives us all the space we need for social criticism. We need have no fear that Brandom’s version of the mutual recognition principle will bind us to positivity. Nothing is out of bounds for the autonomy of reason. We only have to be honest about the conceptual content we encounter in the detail of the recursive expansion. I believe this is the answer to the lingering concerns I expressed in Robust Recognition and Genealogy. Even if Brandom himself were to turn out not to go quite this far, I think at worst this is a friendly amendment that does not disrupt the framework. (See also Edifying Semantics; Reasonableness.)

The recursive expansion of mutual recognition pushes it toward the kind of universality on which Kant based the categorical imperative. Practical outcomes from the two approaches ought to be similar. Hegel’s version is useful because it is grounded in social relationships rather than a pure metaphysics of morals, but still escapes empirical, “positive” constraints by indefinitely expanding the network toward the concrete universality of a universal community of rational beings. (See also Mutual Recognition Revisited; Pippin on Mutual Recognition; Hegel’s Ethical Innovation).

Rational Ethics

When Hegel said that Plato and Aristotle were the great educators of the human race, I think he had in mind not only their exemplary nondogmatism, but also their rational ethics. The advent of rational ethics was a world-historic advance. I even think it might be unequalled. (See also Reasons.)

This suggests a further clarification of my view on the vexed modernity debate. At a more elemental level, I had suggested that philosophy — understood as the recognition of genuine questions in normative matters — might almost be substituted for modernity, hypothetically understood typologically as any step away from the unquestioned governance of pre-given traditional norms. At issue then was philosophy as a whole, the content of which I believe is all at least indirectly normative. But a more specific argument could also be made about rational ethics, where the content is by definition normative.

Aristotle would remind us that if we speak of this flowering of expressive metaconcepts as an “event”, it is said in an extremely different way than a bare reference to an empirical event, the content of which is completely undetermined by the reference.

This suggests a clarification of something else that has been nagging at me in the modernity debate, and why I have been anxious to substitute an explicit typological criterion of modernity for references to what sounds like a chronological threshold. A chronological threshold is just an abstraction for some empirical events associated with it. The geistlich content we might attribute to empirical events is not made evident at all by reference to them, so there is a lack of determination in all simple, putatively empirical references to “modernity”.

Anyway, I’d like to suggest that the greatest watershed in the development of Geist was the advent of rational ethics. Then the next biggest thing after that could be said to be the making explicit of the mutual recognition model.

This also clarifies another perplexity I had about the relation between valuations of modernity and Brandomian postmodernity. Phase two of three in Brandom’s schema seems objectively to be mainly characterized by what really did turn out to be understood by him as negatively valued alienation, but in other passages he lauds phase two as the main event of progressive history. In that case, I would have expected the positively valued big event to be the phase three synthesis resolving the alienation, rather than the phase two alienation itself. But if we instead specify phase two as something like rational ethics and phase three as its enhancement by the mutual recognition model, then it does make more sense to assign the highest value to phase two. Since it restores to norms an emergent, synthetic objectivity — arising out of the mutual recognition process — the mutual recognition model can be understood as the (second) negation of the questioning (first negation) of the traditional putative simple, pre-given objectivity of norms from which rational ethics begins.

(As the above paragraph illustrates, it takes real interpretive work to identify something like a Hegelian triple and give it reasonable semantics.)

Theology

I believe there is an implicit suggestion in Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel that sound theology must include extensive concern with a universally accessible common ground of ethics understood by means of reason with no appeal to external authority.

My own view is that the highest form of faith is intransitive. It could not have articles. It is not a belief in some propositions, but a pure affective attitude and way of being and doing. Anything else is just a way to get to that, if it is a way to anything at all. This would be somewhat akin to traditional negative theology. (See also Plotinus; God and the Soul; First Principles Come Last; Affirmation; Belief.)

Democracy and Social Justice

Through most of the 18th century, democracy was mainly associated with what would today be called the far left (see Enlightenment). Historian Richard Hofstadter reports that in the debates that led to the American constitution, worries were expressed that the people might just vote to redistribute wealth. This led to an elaborate system of checks and balances designed essentially to limit democracy. (Of course, I am oversimplifying. Democracy can have serious issues, as Plato would remind us, and a constitution is a good thing overall, as Aristotle would remind us. See also Justice in General; Authority, Reason; The Autonomy of Reason; Freedom from False Freedom; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love.)

The American and French revolutions temporarily gave the cause of democracy more of a mainstream status. But after the 1848 events in Europe led to more worries over possible redistribution of wealth, further progress in the direction of democracy again depended on mainly the activity of the left. (See also Fragility of the Good; Economic Rationality?; Rights; Stubborn Refusal.)

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the strongest support for democratic advances worldwide actually came from the socialist movement, which had an amazingly vibrant and fertile tradition of rational debate on principles of theory and practice. (After Stalin and Mao and their imitators and successors substituted cynical, corrupt, and repressive nationalist populism for the ideals of socialism, it may be hard to remember this. Stalin brutally suppressed all debate and especially exterminated criticism from the left, while systematically betraying everything the movement had stood for. Mao was even further removed from the historic rational tradition of left-wing social democracy. But all such monstrosities do nothing to invalidate the rational ideas of social justice they travestied.)