Tag: Law

Perfectionism?

I have been thoroughly enjoying all the unfamiliar detail of Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy. His next major section I found even more interesting. But as is common with this kind of history, generalizing abstractions can be problematic. Schneewind wants to characterize a counter-trend to natural law in the moral philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries. In so doing, he moves back and forth between two different models that have very different implications.

When he states the top-level thesis of the book, he does so in terms of an ethics of self-governance that stands in contrast to the reduction of morality to obedience. This I find provocative and insightful. But the section immediately following the one on natural law is presented in terms of a model of “perfectionism”. Fortunately, he seems to use this only as a shallow grouping mechanism that does not significantly affect either the excellent detail or his main thesis about self-governance. But the connotations of the term “perfectionism” are nonetheless troublesome.

It seems that the term “perfectionism” was introduced into contemporary discourse by the political philosopher John Rawls in the later 20th century. Rawls uses the term to primarily name an elitist view of justice, that the state should accord special treatment to certain kinds of high achievers, rather than emphasizing equality before the law. He cites Nietzsche as a primary example, and contrasts this with his own view of justice as fairness. But Nietzsche does not like the state at all, and does not concern himself with matters of state policy.

Rawls attributes a more moderate version of this elitism to Aristotle, while also giving positive mention to a benign Aristotelian principle that people naturally enjoy the exercise of more developed capabilities, both by themselves and by others. Some latter-day conservatives have certainly tried to appeal to Aristotle in order to justify views based on presumptions of natural inequality.

Aristotle does along the way make incidental comments about observable differences in achievement. In these contexts, he does not always clearly distinguish between accidental, localized social facts and more general facts of nature. But at the level of principles, Aristotle is the historical source of the notion of justice as fairness that Rawls defends. Aristotle recommends extending the inherently reciprocal model of friendship to politics. He defines constitutional rule as one in which the same people both rule and are ruled. Moreover, Aristotle is in general highly sensitive to the accidental character of accidental facts. Anecdotal reports of accidental facts do not justify generalization about what is natural. In spite of his emphasis on particular cases, Aristotle is far more committed to these matters of principle than to any particular generalization from accidental facts.

Many discussions in contemporary philosophy are conducted at the level of broad generalizations about kinds of positions. In itself there is nothing wrong with this, but people are not always careful about the fit of particular cases to the generalizations. The outcome is that generalizations about kinds of positions are often applied in a sweeping, ahistorical manner.

Many of Rawls’s sympathizers have ended up relaxing his strictures against perfectionism. Stanley Cavell has argued for a concept of “moral perfectionism”, based on the transcendentalist Emerson, that has nothing to do with elitism. But this is even more recent.

In the present case, without really justifying it, Schneewind applies the term “perfectionism” to the whole early modern “rationalist” tradition, which is itself often the subject of overly broad generalizations. Implicitly, scholastic philosophy and ancient philosophy would be perfectionist as well. (He does not mention Rawls at all, though he does in passing mention elitism.) However, Schneewind also discusses the roots of “modern” natural law in scholasticism and Stoicism.

Schneewind includes valuable data on voluntarism and/or anti-voluntarism in many of the figures he discusses, but does not generalize much about it. Across the whole span of material that he discusses, I think a better contrast could be made between voluntarism and obedience theories on the one hand, and self-governance on the other.

Self-governance provides a far more sound and useful notion of freedom than strong metaphysical notions of absolutely unconditional free will. The great value of Schneewind’s book comes from his documentation of a long tradition of thought about practical self-governance, as background for the distinctively Kantian notion of autonomy.

Empiricism and Voluntarism

“We risk serious historical distortion if we insist on piecing together a comprehensive moral theory from writings Locke never suggested should go together. He may not have had any such theory” (Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, p. 142).

“Locke frequently cites Hooker in the Second Treatise, yet, as his strong endorsements of Pufendorf suggest, it is better to take him to be working with the modern natural law framework than to be using a Thomistic view. His description of the state of nature is Grotian without being Hobbesian” (ibid).

For Locke, we humans are divided by money and religion.

“In the Second Treatise Locke refers to money, which, by making it possible for people to accumulate great wealth, also puts us at odds with one another; and elsewhere he adduces a strong tendency in all of us to hold views that naturally diverge greatly and to insist that other people agree with our own opinions on important matters such as religion. He does not appeal to original sin to explain discord” (p. 143).

Law aims to resolve these conflicts.

“Controversies among sociable beings seem therefore to set the problem that gives law its utility. Law directs rational free agents to their own interest ‘and prescribes no farther than is for the general Good of those under the Law. Could they be happier without it, the Law, as an useless thing would of itself vanish’. There is no suggestion here of Hooker’s Thomistic belief in our participation in the divine reason as the source of laws of nature, or of the idea that we all naturally work for the good of others as well as our own. Law does not show us our eternal roles in a cosmic harmony. It just limits our quarrels” (ibid).

Here we see Locke’s famous appeal to rational self-interest, which grounds his ethical naturalism. This is a very individualist view that we have not seen before in the current inquiry. Anselm’s “affection for justice” has no role here. There is not even a conception of the good of a community, only your self-interest and my self-interest.

“The reference to ‘general Good’ here should not mislead us. Locke is not adverting to a substantive common good. He is saying that law gives each of us what we want, namely security in disposing as we please of our person, actions, and possessions. He is at one with the Grotians in refusing to discuss the highest good…. It follows, Locke thinks, that there is as little point in discussing the highest good as there is in disputing ‘whether the best Relish is to be found in Apples, Plumbs, or Nuts’…. [T]he ancient question of the summum bonum cannot be answered in a way that is both valid for everyone and useful in guiding action” (ibid).

The reference to possessions here is decisive in this new stance. There are no innate principles, and conscience is merely an opinion. The best we can hope for in this life is a more enlightened selfishness.

“Locke promises a science of morality. To see why he makes the promise and how he thinks it can be carried out, we must look first at his attack on innate ideas in the Essay concerning Human Understanding, book I. Locke there specifically denies that morality has any innate aspect…. Since there are many ways other than reading what is ‘written in their hearts’ by which men can learn the principles of morals, there is no need to claim that the principles are innate in the conscience. Conscience is simply one’s opinion of the rightness or wrongness of one’s own action, and one’s opinions can come from education, or custom, or the company one keeps. People frequently break basic moral rules with no inner sense of shame or guilt, thereby showing that the rules are not innate. Finally, no one has been able to state these allegedly innate rules. Attempts to do so either fail to elicit agreement or else contain utterly vacuous propositions that cannot guide action” (p. 144).

Schneewind has already told us that Locke never delivers this promised science. But we have already seen a proto-utilitarianism in Cumberland, so I have little doubt that if it had been developed, it would have been based on a kind of utilitarian calculation.

“Locke’s points here are in accord with similar ideas in Hobbes, Cumberland, and Pufendorf…. [M]orality concerns laws and obligation, and these require concepts that can only be understood in terms of a lawmaker. The first lawmaker involved in morality is God. His ability to obligate us requires a life after this observable one, since it is plain that he does not make us obey him by rewarding and punishing in this life” (p. 145).

There is no place here for an attractiveness of the good, only a voluntarist emphasis on reward and punishment, and that only in the promised afterlife. This seems grim indeed. His individualism’s best face is an encouragement to think for ourselves.

“Underlying his many objections to innate ideas is Locke’s belief that God gave us a faculty of reason sufficient to enable us to discover all the knowledge needed by beings such as we are. It would have been useless for him to have given us innate ideas or innate knowledge. He meant us to think for ourselves…. We must therefore be able to reason out for ourselves what is required of us. To claim that a set of principles is innate is to claim that there is no need for further thought about the matters they cover; and this in turn is an excellent tactic for anyone who wants those principles taken on authority, without inquiry. But God could not have meant the use of our rational faculties to be blocked in this way. The theme of the importance of thinking for oneself is as central to Locke’s vision of moral personality as his belief that we are under God’s laws and owe him obedience” (ibid).

That God means for us to use our reason to think for ourselves is a worthy precept. It should be noted, however, that the “for ourselves” language does not really add anything. Insofar as we ever really use our reason to actively think, this can always be glossed as thinking for ourselves.

“We know that the Essay grew out of discussions concerning morality. In denying the topic any privileged place within the book Locke is underscoring the belief he shares with Hobbes and Cumberland, that moral ideas can be explained using the terms that suffice for all our other ideas and beliefs. There is no need for any separate faculty or mental operation as their source” (ibid).

This is the thesis of what is now called ethical naturalism. There are no Pufendorfian moral entities here.

“The divine law, the law God makes known either by revelation or by reason, is ‘the only true touchstone of moral Rectitude‘.” (p. 146).

Ours is but to obey, and otherwise to follow our individual self-interest.

“Willing, he holds, is simply ‘preferring of Action to its absence’. And preference, Locke holds, disagreeing with most of his predecessors, is not determined by our beliefs about what course of action would bring about the greatest good. If it were, no one would sin…. More importantly, we are not mechanically moved by our desires. We are free agents, possessing the ability to refrain from action while we consider the different desires and aversions we feel, to decide which of them to satisfy, and then to act on our decision. Only the person, not the will, is properly said to be free. The will is the power of considering ideas and of suspending and deciding on action, and it makes no sense to speak of a power as free” (pp. 146-147).

Unlike earlier voluntarists, Locke does not seem to hypostasize will as a separate faculty. The idea that it is the person and not the will that is free is a good one, though all the ambiguities of freedom still apply.

“Locke takes these considerations to show that the elements needed to explain our moral ideas — ideas of God, law, good, will, reward, and happiness — can all be obtained from data given by experience. We need no other ideas to build up our complex repertoire of moral concepts” (p. 147).

I don’t think the ideas of God and a divine reward come from experience. Moreover, this is a very impoverished list of moral ideas.

“It is a matter of considerable importance to Locke that moral ideas are complex ideas of the kind he calls ‘mixed modes’. They are constructed by us, not copied from observation of given complexes. They are not intended to mirror or be adequate to some external reality, as ideas of substances are. They are rather ‘Archetypes made by the mind, to rank and denominate Things by’, and can only err if there is some incompatibility among the elements we bring together in them. Consequently if we are perfectly clear about the moral ideas our moral words stand for, we know the real and not only the nominal essences of moral properties” (pp. 147-148).

This does seem more clear than Pufendorf’s invocation of moral entities. But while he does not use Pufendorf’s striking language of “imposition”, the claim that we need only be clear about the meaning of a few words to know the real essence of moral properties does imply something similar. What those words are is fairly well suggested by the impoverished list of moral ideas above. By this reasoning, morality is effectively an imposition because it is obedience to law, and law is an imposition not grounded on anything else. This also suggests the likely content of his easily achievable but never presented “science” of morality.

Locke himself says mixed modes are “the complex ideas we mark by the names obligation, drunkenness, a lie, &c….. That the mind, in respect of its simple ideas, is wholly passive, and receives them all from the existence and operations of things, such as sensation or reflection offers them, without being able to make any one idea, experience shows us. But if we attentively consider these ideas I call mixed modes, we are now speaking of, we shall find their original quite different. The mind often exercises an active power in making these several combinations. For, it being once furnished with simple ideas, it can put them together in several compositions, and so make variety of complex ideas, without examining whether they exist so together in nature” (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. I, ch. XXII, p. 381).

Schneewind says “Locke’s notion of mixed modes so helpfully fills out Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities that it might have been designed for the purpose…. Locke emphatically rejects any explanation invoking God’s immediate action on the mind. All mixed-mode ideas are our creation. They show our God-given reason doing what it was meant to do: providing us with the guidance we need through life” (Schneewind, p. 148).

Reason as a guide for life sounds like the Stoic criterion of right reason that was popular among the Latin scholastics. (Incidentally, Locke had someone translate his Essay into Latin to reach European audiences, and the term selected to render Lockean “understanding” was none other than the intellectus that was the subject of so much scholastic discussion.) This goes along with the salutary injunction we saw earlier, that we should think for ourselves.

“Consider some moral concept, such as injustice. It contains as a part the concept of property, which in turn is the idea of something to which someone has a right. ‘Injustice’ is the name given to the mixed-mode idea of violating someone’s right to something. It follows demonstrably that where there is no property, there is no injustice” (p. 149).

The reduction of justice to respect for bourgeois property rights and ethics to verbal definitions is horrible. I say that justice begins with the idea of fairness in relations between people, which is far more general, and more humane as well.

“Even if no virtuous person ever existed, it is still demonstrably certain that a just man never violates another’s rights…. But he never gave us the science of morality whose foundations he claims to have worked out” (ibid).

If we accept the stipulated definitions, this claim is true, though I don’t see that it has any value. This again strongly suggests that the advertised science consists in nothing more than formal reasoning about the meanings of a few words that are not even the interesting ones.

“In several places, moreover, Locke insists that there is nothing in nature that corresponds to our mixed-mode moral ideas. There can be nothing in nature, then, to set a moral limit to God’s will. If neither law nor nature can constrain Locke’s God, then Locke is taking the voluntarist position, that God’s will is the origin of moral attributes…. The possession of unlimited power merely enables God to be, at best, a benevolent despot, at worst, a tyrant. There seems to be a good case for Burnet’s claim that on Locke’s view the laws God has laid down for us are ‘entirely arbitrary’ ” (p. 150).

And there we have it.

“Locke does indeed hold that we are dependent on a being ‘who is eternal, omnipotent, perfectly wise and good’. He appeals to these attributes when claiming that a science of morality is possible. But his proof of God’s existence does not show that God is naturally good. Put briefly, the argument is this. We know that we ourselves exist, and that we can perceive and know. The only possible explanation of this fact is that we were made by an eternal most powerful and most intelligent being…. Neither in the expansion of this proof that occupies the rest of the chapter nor anywhere else in the Essay does Locke show how to deduce God’s essential benevolence. If the deduction seemed easy to him, it has not seemed so to his readers” (ibid).

“Locke’s view of how to demonstrate moral truths makes matters worse, because it suggests that there could not be a demonstration of a moral principle that satisfies his own standards…. It must not be trivial or vacuous, a mere verbal statement that does not enable us to pick out right acts” (p. 151).

That the just man never violates another’s rights is a tautology based on stipulated definitions. That is to say, it is precisely a trivial and vacuous and merely verbal statement.

“Although Locke says we must start our moral demonstrations from self-evident principles, he also says that there are no self-evident moral principles with substantial content” (ibid).

By Locke’s lights, this is not a problem, because he believes that morality depends only on self-interest and obedience.

“Locke’s moral psychology compounds all these difficulties…. An untrammeled ruler giving arbitrary direction to a selfish population seems indeed to emerge as his model of the moral relations between God and human beings” (ibid). “Some of Locke’s remarks in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) reinforce the rather grim vision of morality suggested by the Essay” (p. 152).

“Locke has argued that reason could have taught even those to whom the Jewish and Christian revelations were not delivered the crucial rudiments of religious truth. Reason could have shown, for instance, that the natural law requires that we forgive our enemies…. But as thus discovered and taught, the precepts would still have amounted only to counsel or advice from wise men about how to live a happy life. The precepts could not have been taught as laws that obligate. Only the knowledge that the precepts are the command of a supreme lawgiver who rewards and punishes could transform them into moral laws” (pp. 152-153).

Locke is justly celebrated as an early advocate of religious tolerance, but he reportedly excluded atheists and Catholics.

“It is not evident how this position can be made compatible with Locke’s view that God has given us reason enough to discover what we need to know concerning the things most important to us, morality and religion…. ‘The greatest part of Mankind want Leisure or Capacity for Demonstration … you may as soon hope to have the Day-Labourers and Tradesmen, the Spinsters and Dairy Maids perfect Mathematicians, as to have them perfect in Ethics by teaching them proofs of moral laws. ‘Hearing plain Commands’, Locke continues, ‘is the sure and only course to bring them to Obedience and Practice. The greatest Part cannot know, and therefore they must believe’ ” (p. 153).

I think the answer is plain enough. “Us” refers to the sons of gentlemen for whom he recommended the reading of Pufendorf, and not to Tradesmen or Dairy Maids.

“Locke makes it clear that he does not view God as a tyrant. He notes that to obey a king merely out of fear of his power ‘would be to establish the power of tyrants, thieves, and pirates’. To avoid charging God with tyranny Locke appeals to the principle that a creator has the right to control his creations” (p. 154).

The first part seems like a laudable sentiment, but the second part is not at all reassuring. Such a right recalls the Roman emperor’s “right” to treat everyone as his property.

“We do know from Burnet and others that his readers had more general worries … about his views on morality. Their worries arose from his voluntarism. And we can see how Locke’s political concerns could well have forced him into voluntarism and into the empiricism that is connected with it” (p. 157).

It is good to hear that people were worried about this. Schneewind’s wording even suggests that voluntarism might be more fundamental to Locke than his empiricism. Apparently some people saw legal positivism as a way to try to guard against the ravages of sectarianism.

“Locke was concerned to combat both skeptical doubts about morality and enthusiastic claims to have divinely inspired insight into it. All of the modern natural lawyers would have shared these aims. Both skepticism and enthusiasm work against the possibility of sustaining a decent and stable society. An empiricist naturalism seemed to Locke, as it did to Hobbes and Pufendorf and Grotius, the only response that could offer a scientific way of settling disputes and avoiding the deadlock of appeals to authority or personal preference” (pp. 157-158).

“Only voluntarism keeps God essential. But Locke’s theory of meaning then forces him to hold that only God’s power makes him our ruler. Nothing else can meaningfully be said” (p. 158).

“In 1675 Thomas Traherne published Christian Ethicks, a systematic if unoriginal exposition of morality. A devout poet and advocate of virtue rather than a thinker, he nonetheless pithily summarized a concern raised by voluntarism quite generally. ‘He that apprehends God to be a tyrant’, Traherne says, ‘can neither honour God, nor Love him, nor enjoy him’…. The combination of voluntarism and empiricism was taken to lead inescapably to a vision of the relations between God and his human subjects that is morally unacceptable” (ibid).

“Locke’s version of naturalism in ethics seems to many philosophers now to be misguided because it gets the meanings of words wrong. Traherne’s remark suggests that the problem Locke’s readers had with it was different. Their problem was that … Locke could not portray God’s dominion over us as resting on anything but his power and skill as creator. He could admit no difference in principle between God’s rule and that of a benevolent despot except at the cost of allowing into his scheme concepts that could not be derived from experience” (ibid).

“It was not the problem about proving the great law of charity, I suggest, that made Locke refuse to publish a deductive ethic. What did so was his embarrassment at his inability to give Burnet a satisfactory explanation of how we could even say and mean, let alone prove, that God is a just ruler…. Locke’s failure drew attention to the moral consequences of empiricism more forcibly than previous empiricist ethics had done. Hobbes argued for the elements of an empiricist ethic, but his epistemology was massively overshadowed by his extremely contentious political views, and his views on religion were in any case scandalous. His work therefore raised problems more urgent than any that might arise from a connection between empiricism and voluntarism. Pufendorf, though an empiricist, did not develop a general theory of the derivation of concepts from experience” (pp 158-159).

“With Locke it was different. Locke was more interested in the epistemology of natural law than in working out a code. As a result the connection between voluntarism and empiricism stood out more starkly…. Locke’s readers could hardly avoid seeing that if, like him, they embraced naturalistic empiricism about moral concepts, then they would be forced into voluntarism — unless they left God entirely out of morality” (p. 159).

Moral Entities and Voluntarism

This will continue the last post’s in-depth look at The Invention of Autonomy, J. B. Schneewind’s insightful history of moral philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. We come to the chapter on the “central synthesis” of the religious but relatively secularized Protestant natural law tradition, carried out by the Lutheran jurist Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694). Pufendorf develops a novel theory of what he calls “moral entities”. Schneewind notes that “Locke recommended Pufendorf’s work for the education of any gentleman’s son. It is, he said, ‘the best book of that kinde’ ” (p. 141).

While the non-naturalist and anti-realist theory of moral entities is only presented rather sketchily by Pufendorf and retains a voluntarist coloring, it is important as an alternative to the ethical naturalism of Hobbes and Locke (Locke’s endorsement of Pufendorf notwithstanding). Despite its clear voluntarist heritage and its emphasis on positive law, Pufendorf’s work also emphasizes government by consent, which — to a degree at least — explicitly undoes the unilateral conception of authority with which legal and political voluntarism, with its emphasis on the will of the sovereign, is commonly associated. (Incidentally, I just learned that Duns Scotus preceded Pufendorf in speaking explicitly of the consent of the governed, which further complicates the picture of Scotus. Locke will later become the most famous advocate of this notion of consent.)

Pufendorf introduces moral entities saying, “[C]hiefly for the direction of acts of the will, a specific kind of attribute has been given to things and their natural motions, from which there has arisen a certain propriety in the actions of man…. Now these attributes are called Moral Entities, because by them the morals and actions of men are judged and tempered” (On the Law of Nature, quoted in Schneewind, p. 120, ellipses in original).

Pondering this material has led to another conceptual refinement on my part, which again further complicates the discussion on voluntarism. Under this heading up to now I have been concerned mainly with worries over the “ideological” kind of voluntarism that plays an important role in sectarian disputes among Western Christians during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; whose origins a number of scholars trace back to the Condemnation of 1277; whose more remote origins I have noted in the creationism of Philo of Alexandria; and which is paralleled in the occasionalism of al-Ghazali.

There is also a “technical” use of voluntarist concepts, in which a voluntarist explanatory model is used in in a more neutral way in the formulation of new theories like Pufendorf’s account of law, or in the earlier Latin medieval formulation of the theory of signification. Encountering a second instance of this in Pufendorf has led me to think more explicitly about this “technical” voluntarism, which could perhaps also describe an aspect of Brandom’s earliest, pragmatist-flavored work on social practices involved in the constitution of meaning.

To express the status of moral entities as different from natural things, Pufendorf employs the term “imposition”, which was previously used in the theory of signification developed by Roger Bacon and others. The slightly odd connotations of this term “imposition” seem in both cases to be very non-accidental. Each of these two theories makes important technical use of what can be called a “voluntarist” model. The signifier is explicitly said to be arbitrary in relation to its signified. This technical use of arbitrariness is paralleled in Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities and positive law.

In contemporary terms, both of these could alternatively be explained as “anti-realist” theories that need not depend on voluntarist claims. A certain verbal allegiance to some strands of voluntarism for a while seems to have become de rigueur in Protestant countries, even though Luther and Calvin emphasized the late Augustine’s rather extreme anti-Pelagianism, which denies any role of human free will specifically in Christian salvation. The “technical” use of voluntarist language is at least as closely related to contemporary disputes about realism and anti-realism, as it is to disputes involving ideological voluntarism. It seems that in this more technical and less ideological use of voluntarist language, its voluntarist aspect may reflect an accident of historical origin that is not essential to its meaning.

These anti-realist uses of voluntarist language partially anticipate Kant’s talk of “taking” of things to be thus-and-such. One of the most common ways in which Kant is misunderstood is by the assimilation of Kantian “taking” to some kind of subjectivism or ideological voluntarism. Before I learned the error of my ways from Brandom, I used to do this myself.

In continuing to use the term voluntarism in spite of these and other complications, and continuing to hold that it is a Bad Thing, I am deliberately practicing a kind of studied vagueness, with the thought that it names a cluster of related concepts — some more closely related than others — each of which is individually a bad theory, whether it be Divine Command Theory, which one-sidedly insists on the absolute freedom of God; an insistence on the absolute sovereignty of the ruler; a claim that law is prior to ethics, and therefore requires no justification; the intemperate attribution of metaphysically absolute or inherently sovereign free will to humans, which not only exceeds what is really required for ethical practice, but tends to undermine conscience, deliberation, and critical thought; or a theory that culture is something that we one-sidedly “impose” on the world, which ignores the extent to which culture is something we are passively assimilated into.

In a very broad sense, though, the notion of “moral entities” plays a positive role, insofar as it asserts the existence of a space for ethical practice and interpretation that is very different from the also valuable investigation and interpretation of facts and “natural” causes. Insofar as talk about imposition plays a more “technical” role, it is an optional vocabulary.

As Schneewind expounds, “Moral entities are better said to arise from ‘imposition’…. God imposes some moral entities on all human beings, and these may be called ‘natural’. The moral entities that we impose are not natural in that sense, but otherwise the two are of the same kind. Both serve to bring order into human life. The natural duties and rights which are central to morality and law obviously have this function. When we organize our affairs by giving individuals and groups socially defined roles such as husband, mayor, and town council, we are imposing moral entities on their physical being. The prices we set for things are moral entities. So also are the esteem we accord to people and all the culturally diverse distinctions constituting the offices, honors, and titles governing the right to esteem. As physical and biological beings we are independent of moral entities; but those entities constitute all the other aspects of the human world” (pp. 120-121, citations omitted here and throughout).

Pufendorf uses the anti-realist language of imposition to distinguish his view of the status of morality from that of Grotius. Grotius sees natural-law-based moral values as directly inhering in actions or things in a realist way, and Schneewind relates this back to the realist way in which natural law is developed by Aquinas. Pufendorf’s critique of Grotius seems to be the proximate historical instance for Brandom’s abstracted contrast between the derivation of normative attitudes from normative statuses, and the derivation of normative statuses from normative attitudes.

“The theory of moral entities is not worked out in any great detail in On the Law of Nature and is omitted entirely from On the Duty of Man and Citizen. But Pufendorf takes it to separate his position on the status of morality quite sharply from that of Grotius. Grotius thinks that there is a ‘quality of moral baseness or necessity’ intrinsic to certain acts, which guides God’s legislation. Pufendorf maintains strongly that it is a mistake to say ‘that some things are noble or base of themselves, without any imposition, and that these form the object of natural and perpetual law, while those, the good repute or baseness of which depends upon the will of the legislator, fall under the head of positive laws’ ” (p. 121).

The term positive law is normally applied to human law, viewed as creating rights and responsibilities. Rather than being grounded in moral valuations, rights and responsibilities on this view always already have a pre-constituted legal and binding character that is posited as prior to any moral valuation. From this point of view, law is prior to ethics and is presupposed by it. This fits hand-in-glove with the view that moral goodness is first and foremost a matter of obedience to law. The concept of law as instituted by God is also closely related to Islamic and Jewish theories that give a central place to a divine law.

In any case, it seems that for Pufendorf, natural law should be understood on the model of positive law. It is a kind of positive law that is founded by God, who is very unknowable to us. However, it is unclear how this is supposed to fit together with Pufendorf’s empiricist side, which will lead him to say that adequate knowledge of moral entities for humans can be derived from ordinary experience. The whole “modern” or “Protestant” stream of thought about natural law that makes up one facet of Scheewind’s book seems to agree that natural law is in one way or another adequately knowable from experience, and that this knowledge is not very difficult to attain.

One way that a command-and-obedience model has been claimed to be justified is by pointing out that a criterion of obedience can also be seen as leading to the idea that all humans are equally subject to the law. It can then be claimed that an interpretive paradigm of ethics, which holds that simple obedience is not an adequate ethical criterion, must be an elitist view because it sets the bar too high for ordinary people. I think this is disingenuous, because it is the obedience criterion that serves in a more direct way to ostensibly justify the view that some people just are superior, and therefore are to be obeyed.

Anyway, instead of grounding the content of law in valuations and reasons in the manner of Plato and Aristotle, Pufendorf seems to want reasons to be grounded in a primordial law. This seems to put all the determination inherent in creation under something that we are asked to think on the model of positive law.

The model of positive law seems to provide the technical basis for a radical foundationalism that has no precedent in Greek philosophy, and was only made possible by the later emergence of strong theism. This brings out an important logical tie between foundationalism and voluntarism that I had not considered before.

As I think about it now, this seems to bring out a constitutive relation between ideological voluntarism and the emergence of strongly foundationalist views, from which logical conclusions are supposed to follow in an absolute and unconditioned way. Such foundationalisms stand in sharp contrast with the classic, ultimately non-foundationalist view of Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian ethical reason, which makes the rightness of law depend on ethical interpretation and inquiry that is in principle open-ended.

“[Pufendorf] offers several reasons for his position. One rests on the claim that the nobility or baseness of action arises from the conformity of action to law, and since ‘law is the bidding of a superior’ there cannot be nobility or baseness antecedent to law. Another is that man’s reason alone cannot account for the difference between bodily motions that are sinful and those that are not. Reason alone might enable us to do more cleverly or efficiently what animals do, and so to make a distinction between what is expeditiously done and what is not. But without a law it would never enable us ‘to discover any morality in the actions of a man’.”

This implies a calculative view of reason rather than an ethical one.

“These rather specious arguments do not reveal Pufendorf’s central concern. It is the voluntarist concern. To set up ‘an eternal rule for the morality of actions beyond the imposition of God’ is to admit some external principle coeternal with God, ‘which He Himself had to follow in the assignment of forms of things’. Pufendorf finds this quite unacceptable. Any such principle would limit God’s freedom of action in creating man. But everyone, he thinks, admits that God created man and all his attributes freely. So God must have been able to give man any nature he wished. Hence there cannot be any eternal and independent moral properties in things. Morality first enters the universe from acts of God’s will, not from anything else” (pp. 121-122).

As Schneewind makes clear, from a mostly secular point of view Pufendorf explicitly defends a number of the classic claims of theological voluntarism. Nonetheless Pufendorf’s God acts not by just any arbitrary will that could be chaotic or random, but by foundational law-giving, which also implies coherence and self-consistency. God’s will on this view can be understood on the model of a legislator who aims to be consistent.

“God does not contradict his own will. He did not have to create man, or to give him his actual nature. But once he had decided to make man a rational and social animal, then ‘it was impossible for the natural law not to agree with his constitution, and that not by an absolute, but by a hypothetical necessity’ ” (p. 122).

Natural law would then be something like a consequence of the creation of elaborated forms. The point about hypothetical necessity is also interesting. Commands are usually compared to an unconditional or absolute necessity that cannot be rationally justified, because commands are not supposed to be questioned. Hypothetical necessity is emphasized both by Aristotle and by the founder of American pragmatism, Charles Pierce.

” ‘Now good is considered in an absolute way by some philosophers, so that every entity, actually existing, may be considered good; but we pay no attention to such a meaning’. With this apparently casual remark Pufendorf breaks with a long-standing tradition in which goodness and being are equated. Grotius would have been at least sympathetic to the tradition, and Cumberland takes it as obvious that ‘Good is as extensive as Being’. Hobbes’s definition of good in terms of desire indicates that he rejects the equation, but he does not think the metaphysical point worthy of note. Pufendorf elaborates on it in ways that separate him from Hobbes as well as from Cumberland” (p. 123).

It is not quite accurate to speak of an “equation” between good and being. The neoplatonic sources of the views Schneewind is referring to do not simply equate the two, but rather assert a kind of inherent syntactic relation between them. The Good is supposed to be the ultimate cause or reason in the constitution of all things, and therefore, it is argued, all things must be good in some way or another.

“[Pufendorf] concentrates on what is good or bad in relation to persons. So understood, he says, ‘the nature of good seems to consist in an aptitude whereby one thing is fitted to help, preserve, or complete another’. Such aptitudes are part of the nature of things and do not depend on what people want or what they think about them. With Cumberland and against Hobbes, Pufendorf takes the relations which make one thing good for another as purely objective. He goes out of his way to indicate that although the good arouses desire whenever perceived, it may be misperceived or overlooked, and in that case desire would mistakenly urge us to pursue an ‘imaginary’ good” (pp. 123-124).

Schneewind is saying that for Pufendorf, the relations that make one thing good for another are part of the nature of things, and therefore fall under natural rather than moral goodness. So it makes sense that he would call them purely objective. Since he is calling them objective and generally claiming they are to easy to know, it also makes sense that he would point out the possible exception that a perceived good may be imaginary. Some reference to the nature of things seems to be inevitable in a natural law perspective, and any such reference is in some sense a counter-weight to voluntarist ways of thinking.

“Moral goodness is quite different from natural. Moral goodness belongs to actions insofar as they agree with law. For complete moral goodness, an act must accord materially with the law or moral rule, and must be done because it does so accord” (p. 124).

This sounds like fidelity in obedience, and obedience for its own sake. There is a kind of formal analogy between this and Aristotle’s notion of ends that are sought for their own sake, but I don’t think Aristotle would agree that obedience is that kind of end.

“In his definition of law Pufendorf breaks as radically with tradition as he does in abandoning the equation of goodness and being — and he does so just as casually. ‘Law’ is defined simply as ‘a decree by which a superior obligates a subject to adapt his actions to the former’s command’. Suarez and Cumberland, following Thomas, held that law is necessarily ordered to the common good, and even Hobbes defined law in terms of what on his view is the supreme good, life” (ibid).

Certainly Aquinas but also Suarez, Cumberland, and even Hobbes do not have a purely voluntaristic conception of law. Pufendorf’s definition by contrast is purely voluntarist, which is in accordance with his conception of law as purely “positive”. This may be the main reason why it eventually fell out of favor. Later on, Schneewind will document the rise of explicit anti-voluntarism.

Schneewind goes on to document a number of ways in which Pufendorf himself already rejects the idea of a purely voluntaristic conception of authority, even though he defends a purely voluntaristic conception of law.

Pufendorf also develops a doctrine of entitlement that acts as a counter-weight to voluntaristic authority. This is likely a source for Brandom’s important idea in our own time that authority and entitlement should balance one another.

“Neither strength nor beauty nor wit necessarily entitles one to anything. Neither do facts about one’s biological parentage. The logic of moral entities entails that nature cannot morally require us to accept hereditary rulers; and power alone entitles no one — not even God — to authority” (ibid).

Pufendorf’s explicit rejection of the Hobbesian idea that the sheer possession of power confers entitlement to use it in any way one sees fit might be his most important contribution. Within the broader proto-deontological paradigm that seems to have first arisen within a voluntaristic context, and while defending a purely voluntaristic conception of law, he effectively rejects the voluntaristic conception of authority. For Pufendorf, empiricism functions as a safeguard against voluntarist excesses.

“Pufendorf is firm in rejecting several views about the attainment of moral knowledge. He denies, for instance, that moral rules are so clearly imprinted in the mind at birth that we have but to look within ourselves to know them. He finds this objectionable first on epistemological grounds. Pufendorf is an empiricist and thinks we must be able to learn the laws of nature from evidence available in experience…. [W]hat he calls the axioms or basic principles of natural law are to be gathered from experience. On these matters Pufendorf is at one with Grotius, Hobbes, and Cumberland ” (p. 127).

“For him conscience is simply the ability of men to judge actions in terms of laws…. Grotius, Hobbes, and Cumberland would have been sympathetic to this way of defining conscience. All of them hoped, with Pufendorf, that insisting on observable evidence to support moral claims would offer a way to damp down some of the fiercest outbursts of human unsociability” (ibid).

We could certainly use some damping down of those fierce outbursts in the world today.

Reasoning ought to seek evidence, rather than claim self-evidence.

The term “experience” hides a deep ambiguity between the substantive practical wisdom of “experience” that can be acquired only over time, and subjective or empiricist “experience”, understood in terms of a simplistic model of immediate sensation or immediate consciousness. (The very notion of appealing to immediacy in questions of knowledge is a late development. It is at best problematic, and at worst a cover for ideological misdeeds.)

Empiricism is another term that is fraught with ambiguity: do we mean a view that focuses on subjective experience? An experimental method? A kind of faithfulness to evidence? A focus on concrete “real world” cases? And again, “consciousness” is profoundly ambiguous. Even sensation is itself ambiguous. Are we assuming that it is somehow inherently and entirely passive? Or not?

“The question of the justification of God’s authority is more difficult for Pufendorf than it is for Cumberland. Neither thinks that the content of God’s command is what obligates; the formality of his commanding is for both what obligates” (p. 135).

The recognition that authority needs to be justified — that authority is a matter of being justified and not one of having power, or of accidents of social position — is however extremely important. I imagine that this is why Brandom sees Pufendorf in such a strongly positive light. But the claim that the content of a command is irrelevant to its justification is again a voluntarist claim.

Seeing all humans as equally subject to obedience to one law and one set of criteria certainly does have a morally good aspect, compared to explicit insistence on alleged foundational inequality. (All moral characters are not equal — we distinguish some as good and some as bad, and much else — but this has nothing to do with alleged foundational or inherent differences between “kinds” of people, or their formal social roles. Rather our goodness or badness has to do with the particulars of our becoming, with patterns of what we do and how we act, and that not just in the present moment but over the whole of a life.) Pufendorf’s emphasis on the formality of command, on the other hand, follows a voluntarist paradigm that undercuts his good emphasis on justification.

Schneewind turns to some of the problems with Pufendorf’s approach.

“Although he rejects any naturalistic reduction of moral to natural concepts, the doctrine seems to entail a kind of reductionism that threatens his desire to hold that God has authority and not only power. Authority can belong only to one who is willing to use power within just limits. But if just limits arise ultimately from God’s will, it is hard to see how God could be held to have authority in addition to strength. It is indeed doubtful that Pufendorf can allow that we can even mean anything nontautologous by saying that God rules justly. His voluntarism seems to force him into pure Hobbesianism” (ibid).

To speak of “authority and not only power” already means that authority is not to be defined in terms of power.

Human authority must be legitimated, but Pufendorf’s limited appeal to divine authority remains unilateral.

“The appeal to sanctions is problematic for Pufendorf as well. He holds a strong doctrine of free will. In this he is again opposing Hobbes. For Hobbes, … will is only an endeavor occurring in a certain position in an alternation of endeavors, wholly determined by the state of the universe preceding it. Pufendorf treats will as a power separate from desires. Its chief quality is that it is not confined intrinsically to a definite mode of action. Given all the things requisite to action, the will is able to ‘choose one, or some, and to reject the rest’, or to do nothing…. Although the will has a general propensity toward good, it can remain indifferent in the presence of any instance of it” (p. 137).

This is a restatement of the common theological claim that the human has liberum arbitrium, or a power of arbitrary choice. It is the distinguishing mark of what I call anthropological or psychological voluntarism, as distinct from the theological voluntarism that is a claim about God.

From a point of view simultaneously secular and religious, Hobbes and Pufendorf share a theological voluntarism, which they both use in a somewhat instrumental way, although Hobbes’s sincerity in reference to God has been questioned in a way that that of Pufendorf has not. They both speak in terms of a voluntarist model of law and obedience.

Hobbes favors enlightened absolute monarchy that is supposed to be reasonable, but is not supposed to be questioned. Pufendorf develops the important notion of the consent of the governed, which the political voluntarist Hobbes ignores.

Pufendorf, however, as we saw, also defends unconditional free will in humans — a stronger concept than the Aristotelian choice that is really needed for ethics — while also claiming that the stronger concept is needed for ethics. In a somewhat truncated form, he carries forward the position of the scholastic mainstream in so doing.

“Freedom of this kind is crucial. Without it, Pufendorf holds, ‘the morality of human actions is at once destroyed’. Only because we possess it are our spontaneous and voluntary actions fully imputable to us. And Pufendorf insists that we are free to accept or reject obligations as well as natural goods. When an obligation is admitted, the will is thereby inclined to do the obligatory act, but it does not lose its ‘intrinsic liberty’. Thus without the capacity freely to obey or disobey, there can be no obligation” (p. 138).

This shows the way in which theological and anthropological voluntarism are analogous. The divine will and the human will are each respectively supposed have a completely unconditional power of choice, even though such a power is not empirically knowable in the way that for Pufendorf all particular values are supposed to be.

More usefully, independent of this, obligation is only relevant when it is possible to do otherwise. He also makes the important point that obligation presupposes some form of consent to or acceptance of what one is thereby obligated to.

“Obligation is a moral entity. As such it has no causal power of its own. Desires, as part of our physical nature, can cause us to act in space and time; but recognition of obligation gives us a consideration or reason for action that does not operate in the field of force in which desires operate. Desires and obligations are thus incommensurable kinds of considerations for and against action. Hobbes could explain action as the outcome of commensurable desires pulling us this way and that. Pufendorf cannot. He therefore needs a separate faculty of free will to explain how moral entities can be effective in human life even though they possess no causal strength. But he offers no account of how recognition of a moral entity can have effects in the physical world. If he was the first modern to find this problem squarely at the center of his metaphysics of ethics, he was not the last” (ibid).

This partially anticipates the views of Kant, albeit somewhat crudely. Pufendorf treats causality in the modern way as a monomorphic field of force, but then insists on unconditional free will. I think both poles of this opposition are ill-conceived, but will forego further comment on that here. This is also not the place for a lengthy digression on the strengths and weaknesses of empiricism. But as an empiricist, Puffendorf might not be very concerned with this conceptual issue.

“The success of Pufendorf’s exposition of natural law did much to make a concern with voluntarism inescapable in European moral philosophy. It affects both our understanding of the ontological position of morality in the universe, and our understanding of our moral relation to God.”

Pufendorf’s aims were mainly practical. His main concern was law, not philosophy.

“The ontological significance of the doctrine of moral entities is fairly definite. It is a major effort to think through a new understanding of the relation of values and obligations to the physical world. It presents a new response to the developing scientific view of the world as neutral with respect to value. Accepting the concept of a purely natural good dependent on the physical relations of things to humans, Pufendorf refuses to see it as the sole kind of value, and insists that moral norms are conceptually independent of it. He denies the old equation of goodness with existence, and the Grotian assertion of special moral qualities built into the nature of things. He equally repudiates the reductionism of Hobbes and Cumberland, the definition of all evaluative terms by means of terms descriptive of the physical world. Moral entities involve ideas and beliefs that do not in any way represent the way things are in the world. Their whole point is to guide action. Moral entities are inventions, some of them divine, most of them human” (pp. 138-139).

The view attributed to Grotius that he denies is not exactly an “equation” of goodness with existence, but more the assertion of an intrinsic relation.

“Pufendorf’s main reason for taking this line is that it alone allows us to have a proper understanding of God. Only voluntarism leaves God untrammeled. Religious voluntarists before Pufendorf might have accepted much of this. What they could not have accepted, and what makes Pufendorf’s voluntarist account of the construction of morality so striking, is that humans are accorded the ability to construct functioning moral entities in just the way that God does, and just as efficaciously. It takes God to get the process started; but God has made us so that constructive willing is part of our normal rational activity” (p. 139).

Pufendorf defends what I and some others call anthropological voluntarism, as well as theological voluntarism. Hobbes by contrast is widely recognized as an anthropological anti-voluntarist, because he not only does not treat free will as central in the human, but denies it altogether.

In all contexts like this, though, it is also important to ascertain what each author means by free will in the human. Some people speak as though any denial of strict determinism should count as an affirmation of free will. Others speak as though free will in the human is something radical and altogether exempt from natural determination. That is what I mean by anthropological voluntarism.

It is important to me to affirm that there is a spectrum of possible positions here. Strict determinism and voluntarism are two extremes. All the views that are called “compatibilist” would fall in between. I hold that Aristotelian choice also falls in between, though I would not call it “compatibilist”, because neither of the extremes had even been explicitly formulated yet in Aristotle’s time. I think the talk about compatibilism is somewhat misguided, because it seems to be understood as the claim that the two extreme views are compatible. I agree with Kant that they are not.

Schneewind’s implication that religious voluntarists as a whole could not accept anthropological voluntarism might be true within the early Protestant traditions, which I have not studied. It is certainly possible to have theological voluntarism without anthropological voluntarism. But while I am from being an expert on the Franciscan tradition, my recent investigations have strongly strongly suggested that a combination of theological with anthropological voluntarism (which would be something like the view that free will is prior or more fundamental in the human than intellect) is in fact the norm in that tradition. The early Augustine of the famous treatise on free will also seems clearly to embrace anthropological as well as theological voluntarism.

“[Pufendorf’s] view of religious language is Hobbesian, but with him there is no question, as there is with Hobbes, about whether his voluntarism is a cover for atheism. Pufendorf was a sincere Lutheran. God, for him, is beyond our comprehension. He is our creator and ruler, whom we are to honor and obey. But he and we are not in any sense members of a single community, as Cumberland thought that we are” (ibid).

“Pufendorf takes it that [God’s] message to us is that in this life we are to rely on one another. Any advantages we have now come to us from ‘men’s mutual assistance’. Reason shows us God’s most general instructions. The rest is up to us” (p. 140).

Beyond Obedience: Brandom’s “Lost Chapter”

Early modern legal and political theory has a significant historical relationship to theological voluntarism that it would be important to understand. This also seems relevant to my recent work on Scotus (or vice versa).

A chapter of Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust that was omitted from the final published version, and mainly traces antecedents of Hegelian mutual recognition in early modern social contract theory, first brought this issue to my attention. I will be devoting a few posts to it.

It seems indisputable that social contract theory has a genealogical relationship to theological voluntarism. But it is no secret that I prefer to ground mutual recognition in Aristotle’s ethical concept of friendship. Among other issues, social contract theories are tainted by an at best only partial emancipation from their voluntarist heritage. It is my contention that Kant and Hegel finally work free of this widespread voluntarist taint that Plato and Aristotle never shared, and this is one of the reasons why they are so valuable.

I was initially quite horrified to see what looked like a kind of historical valorization of voluntarism by one of my heroes. But although it does contain a few valorizing phrases, as I read it now, Brandom’s discussion really has more to do with the existence of counter-trends within trends than with a real endorsement. In any case, this additional complication deserves to be documented. For now I will skip over the first section, which offers a nice recap of his high-level view of Kant and Hegel, on which I have commented several times already.

“The traditional metaphysics of normativity that Hegel sees all subsequent forms of understanding as developing from the rejection of is the subordination-obedience model” (Pre-Hegelian Stages in the History of the Metaphysics of Normativity, p. 6).

Elsewhere, Brandom has referred to this as the authority-obedience model, but the meaning is the same. This bad model puts all authority on one (commanding) side, and all responsibility on the other (obeying) side. Brandom has championed the idea that authority and responsibility should instead be apportioned symmetrically. Aristotle would approve of this.

Obedience has no role in rational ethics. A rationally ethical person will normally obey the law, giving the benefit of the doubt to measures designed to promote safety and social peace. But her motivation for doing so is a general consent to the reasonableness of enacting such measures.

Aristotle’s highest moral ideal is the reciprocity of friendship. He further suggests that we extend the model of friendship to those who dwell in our city. In the same spirit, it could be extended further, and that is just what Hegel eventually did. The only reference to obedience in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is the incidental mention of a sick person disobeying her doctors, in one of his examples.

However, in the development of the Latin tradition, obedience came to be designated as a virtue in its own right. In the early modern period, all virtue was sometimes reduced to obedience. This was reinforced by the concept of “positive” law, which is supposed to be obeyed merely because it is law, independent of whether the law is just or rational or not. This makes goodness a derivative property that follows from the meeting of obligations, rather than being based on independent criteria. An obligation of obedience to authority displaces proper human ends. Meeting such obligations becomes an end in itself.

“The distinguishing feature of this model is that the paradigmatic normative status, obligation, is taken to be instituted by the command of a superior. As an explicit metaphysics of normativity, the origin of theories of this sort is in theology, in a picture of God as the ultimate legislator, whose commands institute laws that his creatures are obliged to obey. The voluntarist wing of Catholic natural law theory represented by Duns Scotus and William of Ockham gave rise to Protestant natural law theorists who to one extent or another secularized and naturalized the approach. (I’ll say something further along about the significance for Hegel of the contrary intellectualist wing of the natural law tradition — paradigmatically Aquinas, but also Averroes — and of Suarez’s characteristic attempt at a synthesis of the two.) Grotius, Cumberland, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Thomasius, and Locke all understood the normatively binding force of laws, their capacity to oblige obedience, as rooted in the antecedent existence of a superior-subordinate relationship between the authoritative promulgator of the law and those responsible for obeying it” (pp. 6-7).

This emphasis on obedience to authority is a big part of what I mean by a “voluntarist taint”. For some, like Hobbes, this is not just a taint, but something wholeheartedly embraced.

“Hobbes attributes God’s natural right to command obedience to his ‘irresistible power’ to punish disobedience. His ‘state of nature’ is identified precisely with the lack of natural social relations of ‘sovereignty and subordination,’ among humans, in which no-one owes obedience to anyone else because power to punish, from which the right to command obedience derives, has not yet been concentrated in a sovereign. Locke, too, thinks that ‘the inferior, finite, and dependent is under an obligation to obey the supreme and infinite.’ But he understands God’s authority to oblige and compel human obedience as consisting not only in his power to do so, but as rooted in another matter of objective fact: his status as our creator. A creator, he thinks, has a natural right to lay down laws creating obligations of obedience for his creations” (pp. 7-8).

Hobbes bluntly affirms political voluntarism and a Thrasymachan “might is right” doctrine as justification for absolute monarchy. Locke is more refined, but adding a creationist justification to a voluntarist justification is not particularly helpful.

“Cumberland offers a characteristically mixed account. He analyzes law into two components, the precept (the content enjoined or proscribed) and the sanctions provided for noncompliance. Possession of the power to punish disobedience is a non-normative matter. But God’s paradigmatic possession of normative authority as a superior to legislate for subordinates depends crucially on his benevolence towards those subordinates. It is his wishing them well (and knowing what is best for them) that is the basis of his normative status as superior in the sense of having the right to legislate. On the one hand, one can think of God’s (or a king’s) benevolence as a matter of objective fact. He either has the attitude of wishing the good for his subordinates, or he does not. On the other hand, the attitude of benevolence is itself a normative attitude: being motivated to act for their welfare, aiming at what is good for them” (p. 9).

The moment authority becomes even partially answerable to something like benevolence or a standard of reasonableness or justice, we no longer have pure authoritarianism or voluntarism. It is debatable whether we still have voluntarism at all if it is qualified in any way, since the distinctive mark of voluntarism is to explicitly allow or “justify” arbitrariness, which means anything at all. But whatever we call them, the existence of mixed forms needs to be recognized.

[quote from Richard Cumberland, A Treatise of the Laws of Nature (1672):] “the Obligation of a Law properly so called, which proceeds from the Will of a Superior,” (p. 9n).

Here we have the voluntarist calling card.

[Cumberland:] “the intrinsick Force of all those Arguments, with which the Legislator (God) uses to enforce Universal Benevolence, is, in my opinion, all that is meant by the Obligation of Laws: The Rewards annext to Universal Benevolence by the right Reason of Men, chiefly oblige, because they promise, beside the Favour of Man, the Friendship of the Chief of Rational Beings, GOD, the Supreme Governour of the World. The Punishments they inflict by the same Reason, are both Parts of the present, and most certain presages of the future, Divine Vengeance” (ibid).

Reward and punishment are sub-ethical motivations. But benevolence is a genuine ethical criterion.

[Cumberland:] “That the End of the Legislator, and also of him who fulfils the Law of Nature, is far greater and more excellent, than the avoiding that Punishment, or the obtaining that Reward, whence the Law receives its Sanction, and which is what immediately affects every Subject; though the Obligation of every Subject to yield Obedience be indeed, immediately, discover’d by those Rewards and Punishments. For the End, that is, the Effect directly intended by both, is the Publick Good, the Honour of the Governor, and the Welfare of all his Subjects” (ibid).

The public good and welfare are again genuine ethical criteria.

Brandom finds greater clarity in Samuel Pufendorf (1642-1694). The next section, to which I will devote a separate post, will go into more detail on Pufendorf as a precursor to Kantian ethics. We get just a taste of it here.

“Pufendorf, too, rejects Hobbes’s claim that the superior/subordinate status relationship that is the source of the normative force of obligations consists solely in the differential power of the one who is owed and the one who owes obedience” (p. 9).

Might does not confer right.

[quote from Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1672):] “Neither strength nor any other natural pre-eminence is alone sufficient to derive an obligation on me from another’s will, but that it is farther requisite that I should have received some extraordinary good from him, or should have voluntarily agreed to submit myself to his direction” (pp. 9-10).

“God, for instance, gave us an ‘extraordinary good’, performed a ‘special service’ by creating us, so this thought might be seen to be behind Locke’s invocation of the right of the creator. Or, as Cumberland has it, God showed us his benevolence towards us by not only creating us, but creating us in his image in the specific sense of making us like him at base universally benevolent. Here we see two rising themes challenging the grounding of obligation in prior objective relative statuses of superior/subordinate, calling forth command on the part of the superior and obedience on the part of the subordinate as the consequent appropriate practical acts or normative attitudes” (p. 10).

Here Brandom’s analysis is extremely valuable.

“One is the idea that the status of superior, having the right to command, to oblige those commanded to obey, has not only normative consequences, but also normative conditions. This is the idea that being a superior is a normative status that one must deserve (for instance, through the fact of service or an attitude of benevolence). This goes beyond the simple idea that authority is more than mere power. For that distinction can be made entirely on the side of the consequences of application of the concept superior. It is the claim that the circumstances of application of that concept are themselves normative in character. One has to have done well by the subordinates through performing a service, or at least had an attitude of wishing them well, that is, benevolence towards them. The second idea is the idea that the status of being a superior, in the sense of having a right or authority to impose obligations and command obedience (as opposed to the mere power to punish noncompliance) might be dependent on the attitudes of the subordinates: on their having agreed or consented to, or otherwise acknowledged that authority” (ibid).

If there is such a thing as a right to command others and not just a power to do so, that right is necessarily conditional and not absolute. This is related to the Enlightenment notion of government by consent.

“Both these ideas can be seen at play throughout early modern thinking about normativity. And they both stand in substantial tension with the traditional metaphysical picture of normative statuses of obligation as rooted in the prior existence of objective ontological relations of superiority and subordination, as epitomized by the neoplatonic scala naturae. The idea that beyond one’s power to enforce obedience, status as a superior with the normative authority to impose obligations is something one might or might not be entitled to — that the normative issues of one’s right to command or whether one deserves to do so are not settled just by how things non-normatively are — threatens to undermine the idea that all normative statuses can be understood to be instituted by the commands of superiors to subordinates. As Leibniz argues in his “Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf” of 1706, if it is acknowledged that besides power there must be reasons justifying commands for them to be legitimately imbued with the authority of a superior, understanding what entitles the superior to command as a normative status instituted by the command of a superior would create a circle ‘than which none was ever more manifest’ ” (p. 11).

Once the issue of entitlement to command is raised, it cannot be answered by simply appealing to another command.

“The subordination-obedience metaphysical model of normativity that explains the normative status of obligation on the part of the subordinate cannot be extended to explain the normative status of being entitled to the authority to command. If the concept of the status of superiority not only has normative consequences of application in the form of authority to impose obligations on subordinates, but also normative circumstances of application in the sense that the one who commands must be justified in doing so, must deserve, be worthy, or have a right to that authority, then some other form of normative status must be acknowledged that is not itself to be understood on the model of institution by the command of a superior. Leibniz, like Cumberland, looked to the attitude of benevolence. The thought that the relative statuses of superiority and subordination are themselves already fully normative statuses is part of what is behind the famous opposition between law and love (for example in the natural law tradition and in the Cambridge Platonists, respectively) as what is taken to be the most basic conception in early modern moral theory” (pp. 11-12, emphasis in original).

“The second idea is even more momentous. For it is the idea that the normatively significant status of having the authority to impose obligations (which according to the first idea also counts as a normative status in the sense that exhibiting it has normative conditions of desert, worth, or entitlement) is, or at least can be, attitude-dependent. Pufendorf’s invocation of ‘consent’ (or elsewhere ‘acknowledgement’) by the subordinate as a condition of the superior’s right to command marks a decisive change from traditional views. The idea that the normative statuses instituted by natural law might be dependent on normative attitudes is a distinctively modern one. Indeed, the core of Hegel’s understanding of the transition from traditional to modern selves, norms, and societies, as laid out in the Spirit chapter, should be understood to consist in a shift in the relative priority of normative statuses and normative attitudes…. The basic thought is that it is of the essence of traditional structures of normativity that normative statuses are conceived of as objective, in the sense that neither their content nor their binding force depends on anyone’s normative attitudes. Those normative statuses set the standard for assessments of the propriety of attitudes. The law is what it is, independently of what anyone thinks about it, and one is obliged to acknowledge one’s responsibility to its authority. The paradigmatic form of this traditional structure is what I have called the “subordination-obedience” model of normativity. In its classic form, being a subordinate or a superior is an objective normative status, and normative subjects are supposed to (are subject to a distinctive kind of criticism, including punishment, if they do not) acknowledge them by adopting practical attitudes of obedience and command” (pp. 12-13).

I would say this a little differently. What is important to the argument is that from a Kantian or Hegelian point of view, normative statuses are never simply given. They are always the result of an evaluation, though the quality of the evaluation may be better or worse. What is important to the argument is that normative statuses are the result of an interpretation.

“By contrast, it is distinctive of modernity to take normative statuses of authority and responsibility, entitlement and commitment, to be instituted by normative attitudes of acknowledging or attributing those statuses: taking or treating someone in practice as authoritative or responsible, entitled or committed. While Hegel insists that this modern model expresses a genuine and important truth about the metaphysics of normativity, in the end he sees both the traditional and the modern models of normativity as one-sided: the first as hyper-objective and the second as hyper-subjective. Just as traditional accounts failed to acknowledge the authority of attitudes over statuses, the responsibility of statuses to attitudes that the moderns had discovered, even the most sophisticated version of the modern understanding, Kant’s autonomy account, though it does also acknowledge the authority of statuses over attitudes, the responsibility of attitudes to statuses, which the tradition had appreciated, fails adequately to integrate the traditional and modern lines of thought. Hegel’s own social recognitive metaphysics of normativity is to give each its due” (p. 13).

Kant already aims at a kind of synthesis of these two perspectives. Hegel, according to Brandom, judges that Kant fails to achieve it, because Kant treats moral judgment only from the point of view of the individual.

“The vocabulary I am using to express these ideas is mine rather than Hegel’s. He does not use the terms ‘authority’ and ‘responsibility’. These are the terms I am adopting to talk about what he discusses under the headings of ‘independence’ and ‘dependence’, neither of which, he insists, can properly be understood independently of its relation to the other, both of which must be understood as themselves interdependent ‘moments’ in a more complex structure. Though he uses these central logical-metaphysical terms in many ways, I want to claim that the normative uses paraphrasable in terms of authority and responsibility are fundamental — their ‘home language game’. Nor does Hegel use the terms ‘status’ and ‘attitude’. These are the terms I am adopting to talk about what he discusses under the headings of what things are in themselves (Ansichsein) and what they are for themselves or others (Fürsichsein). The discussion in the previous chapter of understanding self-conscious selves as beings such that what they are in themselves is an essential element of what they are for themselves introduces the idea of a kind of normative status, being a self-conscious individual normative subject, that depends on (is responsible to) normative attitudes (the commitments one acknowledges by identifying with them). Though ‘in-itself’ and ‘for-itself’ (also ‘for-an-other’) are central logical-metaphysical terms Hegel uses in many ways. For instance, in discussion [of] the Perception chapter, we saw them used to distinguish, roughly, intrinsic from relational properties. But I claim that their use to distinguish normative statuses from practical normative attitudes in the social recognitive metaphysics of normativity is fundamental — their ‘home language game’. This strategy of understanding ‘independence’ and ‘dependence’ in terms of authority and responsibility and ‘in-itself’ and ‘for-itself’ (‘for-an-other’) in terms of normative statuses and normative attitudes lies at the core of the semantic reading of the Phenomenology I am offering here” (p. 14).

This is a good reminder that when Brandom speaks of attitudes, he means to express what for Hegel is part of a broader notion of what something is for itself, or for another. As Brandom points out, relational properties are another example of what something is “for” (in relation to) another. Hegelian self-consciousness is perhaps the most famous “for” relation. Its relational character is the simplest reason why self-consciousness is not properly speaking a (non-relational) thing, and why it should not be identified with any simple term like ego, which is again a non-relational thing. When we speak of attitudes in an empirical way, they may seem like non-relational, simple properties, perhaps of a psychological sort. On the other hand, the Avicennan intentions that are so important for Scotus and others do have an intrinsically relational character. But in all these cases, the meaning of “relation” (Latin relatio) in question is the Aristotelian category of (asymmetrical) pros ti (toward what). It is in view of this well-established and different older usage that Pierce avoids the term “relation” when speaking about the inherently symmetrical mathematical relations that he calls “relatives”.

“Of course ancient and medieval philosophers acknowledged that there were some normative statuses that were instituted by practical normative attitudes. Having the authority or responsibilities exercised by one who holds some elected office, or those conferred by explicit legislation in cases where the aim of the legislation could obviously have been achieved in other ways are central among them. But the most basic norms, those defining the persons or normative subjects of positive laws, were not understood to be of this kind. The whole idea of natural law is intended to contrast with that artificial kind of law. The normative statuses articulated by natural laws are to be construed as necessary, as conceptually and metaphysically antecedent to and independent of the contingent attitudes, practices, and institutions of creatures of the kind whose nature they articulate” (p. 15).

The term “person” names a standing under Roman law. The reference to normative subjects here reflects Brandom’s main philosophical use of “subject”, which is normative and non-psychological, as is also true of his use of “intention” and “intentionality”. (This sharply distinguishes the latter from its Avicennan sense, revived by Brentano in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874). Brentano says that all psychological phenomena and only psychological phenomena are intentional.)

Next, Brandom devotes three paragraphs to medieval voluntarism and intellectualism. This is obviously a very limited engagement, but his concern is with tracing antecedents backward from Hegel. This is the farthest point he reaches, so it makes sense that it would be the least detailed part of the discussion. (In contemporary Hegel scholarship, it is Robert Pippin who has discussed Hegel’s relation to Aristotle in the greatest depth.)

“In this connection it is illuminating to consider the distinction within the natural law tradition between intellectualists and voluntarists. Intellectualists, paradigmatically among the Catholic theologians, Aquinas, held that the authoritativeness of commands issued by superiors to subordinates (expressions of the attitudes of those superiors) answered to (depended upon) reasons rooted in the same objective natures that determined their relative ‘primacy’ as superiors/subordinates. Even God, with the objective status of superior to all, is understood as constrained in the laws he lays down by the demands of reasons concerning the objective good of creatures with the natures with which he has endowed them. God’s unconstrained omnipotence is acknowledged by attributing to him the ‘absolute’ power to have created beings with different natures than the ones he actually created, but his ‘ordained’ power, given the natures he actually created, is understood as constrained by reasons provided by those determinate natures. He could not have made murder or (tellingly) adultery right. Even God’s normative attitudes, as expressed in his commands, in this sense answer to antecedent objective normative statuses” (pp. 15-16).

“By contrast, theological voluntarists, such as William of Ockham reject the constraint on God’s attitudes by reasons rooted in objective natures, as codified in Aquinas’s distinction between his absolute and his ordained power. What makes something right or obligatory (institutes those normative statuses) is just God’s normative attitudes towards them, his approval or commands. Those attitudes are not constrained by reasons stemming from any antecedent objective normative statuses. It is his will alone (which I am talking about in terms of his normative attitudes) that institutes normative statuses of obligation and permission. God could, if he so chose, have made murder and adultery right — though he did not in fact do so. The theological disagreement between intellectualists and voluntarists about the relationship between normative statuses stemming from objective created and creating natures and normative attitudes (obligation-instituting acts of divine will) is intimately entangled with the ontological-semantic dispute between realists and nominalists about universals. Ockham attributes no reality to kinds or natures over and above the reality of the particulars they group. Assimilating particulars by treating them as exhibiting a common universal or nature is itself an act of will, the expression of a practical attitude. The groupings are arbitrary in the original sense — the product of ‘arbitrium brutum’. Understanding universals, including kinds and natures, as the product of contingent activities of naming (hence ‘nominalism’) makes reasons deriving from those natures themselves attitude-dependent” (p. 16).

Brandom here treats will as a normative attitude. What it makes sense to treat this way is any particular, definite will, but not the famous or notorious faculty of unconstrained choice. It is assertion of the latter that defines voluntarism.

I believe Brandom is a truly great philosopher, but Aquinas and Ockham are mere cartoon figures here. Aquinas is indeed more “traditional” in some ways. But Aquinas recognizes the existence of rational ethics, independent of revelation. That to me is huge. Ockham, like Scotus, both makes radically voluntarist claims and endorses ethical criteria of right reason and good intent. I find the combination very confusing.

Later, Brandom mentions that Luther and Calvin were voluntarists. Nominalism also seems to have been strong in early Protestantism. I have no basis for arguing with any of that. But all this together is far from justifying a presumption that voluntarism per se must therefore be considered historically progressive. There are a great many other alternatives to voluntarism besides Thomism. And Thomism itself is far from monolithic.

(But Hegel himself valorizes Protestantism, and Luther in particular, and shares the Enlightenment disdain for scholasticism. But in Hegel’s day as in the Enlightenment, medieval philosophy was virtually terra incognita, especially in Protestant countries. This was true because printed books and pamphlets in vernacular languages had become predominant. Most works of medieval philosophy did not exist in print or in a vernacular language, but only as rare Latin manuscripts that hardly anyone studied, or even had access to. It is easy to be disdainful of what we only know from a caricature.)

The third paragraph devoted to this topic sums up the outcome.

“Divine command theorists understand the obligations — normative statuses obliging the adoption of normative attitudes of obedience — of us subordinates-because-inferiors as instituted by divine attitudes (expressed in commands, acts of will), even if the framework of relative normative statuses of superior-subordinate is understood as objective in the sense of attitude-independent. Where intellectualists see all attitudes as answering to attitude-independent statuses, voluntarist natural lawyers do not see the status-instituting attitudes of superiors as themselves constrained to acknowledge prior statuses. The voluntarists can be thought of as holding a variant of the traditional subordination-obedience model. But compared to the still more traditional intellectualists, they substantially inflate the significance of attitudes relative to statuses” (pp. 16-17).

He is right that both voluntarists and “intellectualists” in the middle ages largely adhered to the obedience model. But if all attitudes are attributed to the will, it is pretty much a tautology that voluntarism puts more weight on attitudes. The voluntarist refusal to acknowledge any constraint on the will is precisely what leads to arbitrariness.

The argument of Plato’s Euthyphro is not mentioned here. According to the internet, this objection to divine command theory is well known to contemporary scholarship. The so-called Euthyphro dilemma is widely regarded as the most serious issue that divine command theory has to face.

At the paragraph’s end is the sentence that I found really disturbing.

“In this sense, theological voluntarism in the Catholic natural law tradition represents the first stirrings of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses that would burst into full bloom among the early modern Protestant natural lawyers: the thin leading edge of the wedge of modernity. (Luther and Calvin were voluntarists.)” (p. 17).

Given Brandom’s sympathy for the classic American pragmatists’ “Whiggish” belief in progress, this “thin leading edge of the wedge of modernity” amounts to a claim that theological voluntarism should be seen as historically progressive. Fortunately, this weak link in this part of the argument is not essential to the larger point he is making. In particular, it does not affect the insightful reading of Pufendorf’s notion of the consent of the governed that is to follow.

“It is still a huge, distinctively modern, step from understanding the normative statuses of subordinates to be dependent on the normative attitudes of their superiors to seeing the normative status of being a superior (‘primacy’) as dependent on the attitudes of the subordinates. It is, of course, the driving idea of social contract theories of specifically political obligation. I quoted Pufendorf above rejecting Hobbes’s claim that objective matter-of-factual power over others could confer the status of superiority in the sense of the right to command attitudes of obedience, when introducing the notion of consent of the subordinates as an attitude that can institute the relative statuses of superior-subordinate. Pufendorf himself recognizes that a thought like this is also present already in Hobbes, quoting him as saying as saying ‘All right over others is either by nature or by compact.’ Pufendorf radicalizes Hobbes by rejecting the idea that power all by itself can confer right over others, insisting that only the combination of consent and power to punish confers such normative primacy” (pp. 17-18).

This notion of consent, of course, is foundational to modern democratic politics.

“Hegel sees a paradigm of the shift from traditional to modern modes of thought in what became the popular contrast between status-based ‘divine right of kings’ political theories and the attitude-based consent theories epitomized by Thomas Jefferson’s resonant words in the American Declaration of Independence (paraphrasing Locke in his “Second Treatise of Civil Government” of 1690): ‘…governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ According to this line of thought, the distinction between possessing matter-of-factual power and exhibiting the normative status of just power is a matter of the attitudes of the subordinates subject to that authority to oblige obedience” (p. 18).

Illocution

Habermas wants to promote a notion of communicative rationality as “uncurtailed communication”, an orientation toward developing shared understanding. He even calls shared understanding the telos of human speech, in something close to an Aristotelian sense, although he generally uses “teleology” only in a negative way, as a mere utilitarian calculation of the means to realize empirical self-interest. But I find the ethical sense that he gives to communication to be very admirable.

“The positivization, legalization, and formalization of law mean that the validity of law can no longer feed off the taken-for-granted authority of moral traditions but requires an autonomous foundation, that is, a foundation that is not only relative to given ends. Moral consciousness can satisfy such a requirement only at the postconventional level. It is here that there first emerges the idea that legal norms are in principle open to criticism and in need of justification” (p. 260, emphasis in original).

He speaks here of the postconventional and posttraditional in law and ethics, as he elsewhere speaks of the postmetaphysical and the postsecular.

“These posttraditional basic concepts of law and morality are first developed and systematized in modern natural law theories. The model for justifying legal norms is an uncoerced agreement, arrived at by those affected, in the role of contractual partners who are in principle free and equal” (p. 261).

I really was not at all familiar with the early modern “natural law” tradition when I first encountered Brandom’s significant references to it. Here we reach another limitation that Habermas finds in Weber.

“Weber stresses precisely the structural properties connected with the formalism of a law that is systematized by specialists and with the positivity of norms that are enacted. He emphasizes the structural features I have elucidated as the positivity, legalism, and formality of law. But he neglects the moment of a need for rational justification; he excludes from the concept of modern law precisely the conceptions of rational justification that arose with modern theories of natural law in the seventeenth century…. It is in this way that Weber assimilates the law to an organizational means applied in a purposive-rational manner, detaches the rationalization of law from the moral-practical complex of rationality, and reduces it to a rationalization of means-ends relations” (p. 262).

This remark by Habermas seems to have large consequences. He points to an important principle of rational justification in the natural law tradition that goes beyond means-ends calculations, and criticizes Weber for deemphasizing it.

“Rational natural law, in its different versions from Hobbes and Locke through Rousseau and Kant to Hegel, … rests on a rational principle of justification and is, in terms of moral-practical rationalization, further advanced than the Protestant ethic, which is still founded on religion. Nevertheless, Weber does not hold it to be purely and simply an element of modern law. He wants to separate it carefully ‘from revealed, as well as from enacted and from traditional law’. Thus he constructs an antithesis between modern law in the strict sense, which rests only on the principle of enactment, and the not yet completely ‘formal’ law of modern natural law theories which rests upon principles of grounding (however rational). In his view, modern law is to be understood in a positivistic sense, as law that is enacted by decision and fully disconnected from rational agreement, from ideas of grounding in general, however formal they might be.” (p. 263, emphasis in original).

I did not realize that Weber had a decisionist theory of modern law. “Decisionist” views of law and politics, as Habermas points out, fundamentally appeal to authority rather than to meaning or reason. In my view, this means they ought to be shunned by anyone who cares about meaning or reasonableness.

“This argument is confusing because it combines, in an opaque manner, an immanent critique of the deficient radicalism of natural law conceptions of grounding that are not yet sufficiently formal with a transcendent critique of the need for principles of justification at all and clothes both in the guise of a criticism of the naturalistic fallacy. One might certainly raise the objection that the concept of natural rights still had strong metaphysical connotations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, with the model of a contract through which all legal associates, after rationally weighing their interests, regulate their common life as free and equal partners, modern natural law theorists were the first to meet the demand for a procedural grounding of law, that is, for a justification by principles whose validity could in turn be criticized. To this extent, ‘nature’ and ‘reason’ do not stand in this context for some metaphysical contents or other; rather, they circumscribe formal conditions which an agreement must satisfy if it is to have legitimating force, that is, if it is to be rational. Weber again confuses the formal properties of a postconventional level of justification with particular substantive values (p. 264).

“[A]ssuming that legitimacy is a necessary condition for the continued existence of every type of political domination, how can a legal domination whose legality is based on a law that is viewed in purely decisionistic terms (that is, a law that devalues all grounding in principle) be legitimated at all?” (pp. 264-265, emphasis in original).

Habermas has a marvelously sharp critique of attempts to separate law and politics from requirements for rational ethical justification. He distinguishes two very different kinds of “proceduralist” views of law. One is reductively empiricist and collapses the distinction between is and ought. At best it orients toward a kind of conformity or obedience. The other aims to ground “procedure” in rational ethics, conditions of dialogue, and what Habermas calls ideal speech situations.

“Legitimation through procedure does not mean here going back to formal conditions for the moral-practical justification of legal norms; it means rather keeping to procedural prescriptions in administering, applying, and enacting law. Legitimacy rests then on ‘belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands’. It remains unclear how the belief in legality is supposed to summon up the force of legitimation if legality means only conformity with an actually existing legal order, and if this order, as arbitrarily enacted law, is not in turn open to practical-moral justification. The belief in legality can produce legitimacy only if we already presuppose the legitimacy of the legal order that lays down what is legal. There is no way out of this circle…. The transitions between ‘agreed upon’ and ‘imposed’ order are fluid” (p. 265, emphasis added).

Empirical, factual conformity to law is no guarantee of moral rightness. The Nazi regime in Germany, for example, had a factual conformity to law, thanks in part to the apologetics of Carl Schmitt. This can hardly be taken to legitimate it.

“Notwithstanding these fluid transitions, the two sources of legitimacy on which the belief in legality depends can certainly be distinguished analytically: rationally motivated agreement versus the imposition of a powerful will” (p. 266).

Here he puts it very clearly. Legal/political “impositionism” is a kind of voluntarism. Like all voluntarism, it elevates arbitrary will above reason. This effectively destroys the space in which ethical reason could flourish, by eliminating the possibility of questioning whatever is imposed.

Habermas is very clear that there is a sharp opposition between any kind of authoritative “imposition” and agreement based on reasons. I find this highly commendable. Unlike Brandom, he does not get caught up in apologizing for the elements of impositionism that can also be found in the natural law tradition.

(Brandom even takes this so far as to retrospectively claim a historically progressive role for theological voluntarism. I think Brandom is a truly great philosopher overall, but on this particular issue Habermas seems to do much better. Brandom is quite right that the natural law theorists like Pufendorf introduced new ideas of holding authority to certain standards of reasonableness. But he takes the voluntarist element in Pufendorf to be an essential ingredient, rather than an unresolved inconsistency. Indeed everyone seems to call Pufendorf a political voluntarist. But my brief examination of Pufendorf did not find him emphasizing the justification of arbitrary actions, which is the sin qua non of voluntarism. Quite the contrary, his avowed emphasis seemed to be on reasonable standards. Pufendorf wrote during the age of absolute monarchies, when any advocate of limitations on the monarch’s prerogative had to write cautiously.)

“Belief in the legality of a procedure cannot per se — that is, in virtue of positive enactment — produce legitimacy” (ibid).

Legality is a mere fact. Rightness is an ideal.

“Weber confuses an appeal to the need to justify legal domination — that is, an attempt to go back to the legitimating foundation of rational agreement — with an appeal to particular values” (p. 267).

Habermas is saying that Weber treats criteria of reasonableness in law and politics as inevitably particularist. Habermas sharply rejects this conclusion, as do I.

“Weber forcefully works out the formal properties of modern law, on the basis of which it is suited as a means of organization for subsystems of purposive-rational action. But he restricts the concept of law positivistically to such an extent that he can neglect the moral-practical aspect of rationalization (the principle of justification) and take account only of its cognitive-instrumental aspect (the principle of enactment). Weber considers the advances of modern legal development exclusively from the standpoint of formal rationality, that is, of a value-neutral, means-ends, systematic shaping of spheres of action, which is tailored to the type of strategic action. The rationalization of law is then no longer measured against the inner logic of the moral-practical sphere of value, as is that of ethics and life-conduct; it is directly connected to the progress of knowledge in the cognitive-instrumental sphere of value” (p. 268).

This is to say that despite his commendable neo-Kantian scruples regarding the importance of values, Weber aims to completely withdraw questions of value from law and politics.

“The assumption — which sprang up with legal positivism and was adopted and overextended by social-scientific functionalism — that normative validity claims could be withdrawn, without any noteworthy consequences for the stability of the legal system in the consciousness of the system’s members, is empirically untenable” (p. 269).

I quite agree with Habermas that a policy that is disconnected from all values cannot and does not govern in real life. But it matters a lot whether we criticize the empiricist freedom from values from a point of view of inquiry into reasons, or from a traditionalist point of view that takes reasons for granted, and treats the questioning of authority as improper.

“This leads to a rather ironic consequence for Weber’s diagnosis of the times. He deplores the switch from ethical to purely utilitarian action orientations…. Thus he ought to welcome movements that are directed against parallel tendencies in the law…. [But] Weber regards as detracting from the formal qualities of law not only traditionalist attempts to reideologize it but also progressive efforts to reattach it to procedural requirements for grounding” (ibid).

Apparently, Weber regards the formal positivity of law (the principle of “enactment”) as having more to do with the rationalization of modern society — which he sees in terms of technique — than any substantive inquiry into reasons. Habermas traces this to defects in the way action is understood.

“It is not my intention to pursue a critique of ideology probing the roots of this inconsistency. I am concerned with the immanent reasons for Weber’s inability to carry through his theory of rationalization as it is set up…. First, I want to unearth certain bottlenecks in the concept formation of his action theory…. Second, I would like to show that the ambiguity in the rationalization of law cannot be grasped at all within the limits of a theory of action” (p. 270).

This is extremely important. Meaning is not adequately explainable by the mental intentions of nominal subjects. Along with Habermas, Paul Ricoeur and Alain de Libera have pointed out major blockages in the 20th-century “theory of action”. Gwenaëlle Aubry has developed an Aristotelian alternative that I rather like. Brandom has developed a new normative pragmatics and a new inferentialist semantics. He sees Kant as having developed a highly original alternative notion of intentionality that is based on shareable notions of responsibility and commitment, rather than on attributions of private subjective consciousness or belief.

“Intentionalist semantics is based on the counterintuitive idea that understanding the meaning of a symbolic expression X can be traced back to understanding the intention of speaker S…. For a theory of communicative action only those analytic theories of meaning are instructive that start from the structure of linguistic expressions rather than from speakers’ intentions” (pp. 274-275).

Linguistic expressions have a degree of objectivity, substantiality, or seriousness mainly because they are shareable. About the private intentions and mental states of speakers we can only speculate in the ordinary pejorative, non-Hegelian sense. With what is said on the other hand (at the level of understandable meaning and what Habermas calls validity claims, not that of putative bare fact or event), we can go much further.

“Starting from the pragmatist theory of signs introduced by Pierce and developed by Morris, Carnap made the symbolic complex … accessible to an internal analysis from syntactic and semantic points of view. The bearers of meaning are not isolated signs but elements of a language system, that is, sentences whose form is determined by syntactic rules and whose semantic content is determined by relations to designated objects or states of affairs. With Carnap’s logical syntax and the basic assumption of referential semantics, the way was opened to a formal analysis of the representational function of language. On the other hand, Carnap considered the appellative and expressive functions of language as pragmatic aspects that should be left to empirical analysis” (p. 276).

“The theory of meaning was finally established as a formal science only with the step from reference semantics to truth semantics. The semantics founded by Frege and developed through the early Wittgenstein to Davidson and Dummet gives center stage to the relation between sentence and state of affairs, between language and the world. With this ontological turn, semantic theory disengaged itself from the view that the representational function can be clarified on the model of names that designate objects. The meaning of sentences, and the understanding of sentence meanings, cannot be separated from language’s inherent relation to the validity of statements. Speakers and hearers understand the meaning of a sentence when they know under what conditions it is true. Correspondingly, they understand the meaning of a word when they know what contribution it makes to the capacity of truth of a sentence formed with its help. Thus truth semantics developed the thesis that the meaning of a sentence is determined by its truth conditions” (pp. 276-277).

This mini-history of 20th-century philosophy of language is very close to that put forward by Brandom, who calls Habermas one of his heros. (Habermas in turn sympathetically cites Rorty.)

Habermas is enthusiastic about Austin and Searle’s work on speech acts, and points out that this belongs to the more generally neglected area of the pragmatics of language. I think this predates Brandom’s major original work on a normative pragmatics.

“The limits of this approach become visible as soon as the different modes of using sentences are brought under formal consideration…. Along the line from the later Wittgenstein through Austin to Searle, the formal semantics of sentences was extended to speech acts. It is no longer limited to the representational function of language but is open to an unbiased analysis of the multiplicity of illocutionary forces” (p. 277).

Here we touch on Habermas’s version of the critique of representationalism. In its place he suggests that we address a multiplicity of illocutionary forces (taking force in the Fregean linguistic sense, rather than the more common one). Habermas strongly ties Austin’s “illocution” — or the doing involved in speech acts — with conditions and practices for evaluation of what he calls validity claims, as distinct from claims of truth.

“The theory of speech acts marks the first step toward a formal pragmatics that extends to noncognitive modes of employment. At the same time … it remains tied to the narrow ontological presuppositions of truth-conditional semantics. The theory of meaning can attain the level of integration of the communication theory that Bühler advanced in a programmatic way only if it is able to provide a systematic grounding for the appellative and expressive functions of language (and perhaps also for the ‘poetic’ function related to the linguistic means themselves, as this was developed by Jakobson)” (ibid).

One of the areas in which Habermas has been criticized has been his avowed commitment to a form of “cognitivism”. But once again, the vocabulary is ambiguous. Cognitivism could mean anything from the view that all judgment is exclusively of a calculating sort, to the view that value judgments depend on interpretation of meaning. Habermas rejects the former, and endorses the latter. He emphasizes that there are also “noncognitive” elements in speech acts.

“For this purpose the paradigm change in philosophy of language that was introduced by J. L. Austin … must be radicalized in such a way that the break with the ‘logos characterization of language’, that is, with privileging its representational function, also has consequences for the choice of ontological presuppositions in the theory of language…. It is with this in mind that I have proposed that we do not set illocutionary force over against propositional content as an irrational force, but conceive of it as the component which specifies which validity claim a speaker is raising with his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what” (pp. 277-278).

Illocutionary force is “the component which specifies which validity claim a speaker is raising with his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what”. This seems like a nice alternative to subject-centered notions of intentionality.

“With the illocutionary force of an utterance a speaker can motivate a hearer to accept the offer contained in his speech act and thereby accede to a rationally motivated binding (or bonding, Bindung) force” (p. 278).

He criticizes the appeals that Weber and others make to consciousness, as if it were a source. We ought to look at shareable meaning instead. The only thing that makes anything binding is the so-called force of reasons.

“Weber does not rely here on a theory of meaning but on a theory of consciousness. He does not elucidate ‘meaning’ in connection with the model of speech; he does not relate it to the linguistic medium of possible understanding, but to the beliefs and intentions of an acting subject, taken to begin in isolation” (p. 279).

“Weber does not start with the social relationship. He regards as rationalizable only the means-ends relation of teleologically [sic] conceived, monological action. If one adopts this perspective, the only aspects of action open to objective appraisal are the effectiveness of a causal intervention into an existing situation and the truth of the empirical assertions that underlie the maxim or the plan of action — that is, the subjective belief about a purposive-rational organization of means” (p. 281).

Here he enumerates symptoms of what he calls a “monological” (opposite to dialogical) exclusive focus on what I would call a modern interpretation of efficient causality as a basis for explanation. He emphasizes the second-person, “I-Thou” communicative aspect of reason over the more common reduction of everything to first- and third-person (“subjective” and “objective”) points of view. He is arguing that the reason we ought to care about and cultivate has an I-Thou character, first and foremost.

“A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot be imposed by either party, whether instrumentally through intervention in the situation directly or strategically through influencing the decisions of opponents. Agreement can indeed be objectively obtained by force; but what comes to pass manifestly through outside influence or the use of violence cannot count subjectively as agreement” (p. 287).

I want to cheer when I read things like this.

“If we were not in a position to refer to the model of speech, we could not even begin to analyze what it means for two subjects to come to an understanding with one another. Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech…. The concepts of speech and understanding reciprocally interpret one another” (ibid, emphasis added).

I think Plato and Aristotle were very aware of this reciprocity between speech and understanding, but it got largely forgotten later on. Plato centrally stresses open dialogue and questioning as the way to truth. Aristotle develops a whole art of simultaneously addressing linguistic meaning, reality, and ultimate rightness in a balanced way that anticipates many points in Kant and Hegel.

“”[E]xamples of the use of language with an orientation to consequences seem to decrease the value of speech acts as the model for action oriented to reaching understanding.”

Here consequences are understood in a modern causal sense, and not a logical or inferential one. Consequences and truth conditions were the main concern of earlier analytic philosophy. There is an ethical view called “consequentialism” that judges deeds strictly by their outcome, and is closely related to utilitarianism.

“This will turn out not to be the case only if it can be shown that the use of language with an orientation to reaching understanding is the original mode of language use, upon which indirect understanding, giving something to understand or letting something be understood, and the instrumental use of language in general, are parasitic. In my view, Austin’s distinction between illocutions and perlocutions accomplishes just that” (p. 288, emphasis in original).

This is very important. Second-person communication is more primary than third-person representation. Habermas recalls Austin’s three-way distinction among speech acts.

“Through locutionary acts the speaker addresses states of affairs; he says something. Through illocutionary acts the speaker performs an action in saying something…. Finally, through perlocutionary acts the speaker produces an effect upon the hearer…. The self-sufficiency of the speech act is to be understood in the sense that the communicative intent of the speaker and the illocutionary aim he is pursuing follow from the manifest meaning of what is said. It is otherwise with teleological [sic] actions. We identify their meaning only in connection with the intentions their authors are pursuing and the ends they want to realize. As the meaning of what is said is constitutive for illocutionary acts, the intention of the agent is constitutive for teleological [sic] actions” (pp. 288-289).

The kind of meaning we should care most about links the “manifest” meaning of what is said with the pragmatics of justification. Representational and truth-conditional semantics are logistical tools that should be in service to a broader pragmatic inquiry. Brandom has developed an original inferential semantics, in close connection with a normative pragmatics that he considers ultimately to be more primary.

“What we mean by reaching understanding has to be clarified solely in connection with illocutionary acts” (p. 293).

This follows from his description of the three kinds of speech acts.

“I have called the type of interaction in which all participants harmonize their individual plans of action with one another and thus pursue their illocutionary aims without reservation ‘communicative action’ (p. 294, emphasis in original).

Now he says that the whole huge topic he has been addressing as distinctively communicative action revolves around illocution.

“Thus I count as communicative action those linguistically mediated interactions in which all participants pursue illocutionary aims, and only illocutionary aims” (p. 295, emphasis in original).

He glosses this in terms of the “acceptability” of speech acts.

“We understand a speech act when we know what makes it acceptable” (p. 297, emphasis in original).

“A speech act may be called ‘acceptable’ if it satisfies the conditions that are necessary in order that the hearer be allowed to take a ‘yes’ position on the claim raised by the speaker. These conditions cannot be satisfied one-sidedly, either relative to the speaker or to the hearer. They are conditions rather for the intersubjective recognition of a linguistic claim” (p. 298, emphasis in original).

“Registering a validity claim is not the expression of a contingent will; and responding affirmatively to a validity claim is not merely an empirically motivated decision…. Validity claims are internally connected with reasons and grounds” (p. 301, emphasis in original).

This is the beginning of wisdom.

“That a speaker means what he says can be made credible only in the consistency of what he does and not through providing grounds” (p. 303).

In an earlier post, we saw that Habermas carefully distinguishes between truth, validity, and sincerity.

“We have distinguished genuine imperatives, with which the speaker connects a claim to power, from speech acts with which the speaker raises a criticizable validity claim” (p. 304).

Claims of authority too are qualitatively different from claims of validity or general reasonableness. In discussions of validity, authority as such has no place. To bring claims of authority into a discussion of reasons, where claims of authority have no place, is a kind of cheating.

“We discover the incompleteness of the literal meaning of expressions only through a sort of problematizing that is not directly under our control. It emerges as a result of problems that appear objectively and have an unsettling effect on our natural worldview. The fundamental background knowledge that must tacitly supplement our knowledge of the acceptability conditions of linguistically standardized expressions if hearers are to be able to understand their literal meanings, has remarkable features: It is an implicit knowledge that cannot be represented in a finite number of propositions; it is a holistically structured knowledge, the basic elements of which intrinsically define one another; and it is a knowledge that does not stand at our disposition, inasmuch as we cannot make it conscious and place it in doubt as we please” (p. 336, emphasis in original).

Next in this series: Second-Person Thinking?

Understanding Social Actions

The concluding section of the introduction to Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action is again very rich with insights. Several different notions of what rationality is are in play.

“With a formal world-concept an actor becomes involved in suppositions of commonality that, from his perspective, point beyond the circle of those immediately involved and claim to be valid for outside observers as well. This connection can easily be made clear in the case of teleological [sic] action. The concept of the objective world — in which the actor can intervene in a goal-directed manner — which is presupposed with this model of action must hold in the same way for the actor himself and for any other interpreter of his actions” (p. 102).

There is a kind of objectivity associated with utilitarian concerns.

“In the case of objectively purposive-rational action, the description of an action … has at the same time explanatory power in the sense of an explanation of intentions. To be sure, even if the objective purposive-rationality of an action is established, this does not at all mean that the agent must also have behaved subjectively in a purposive-rational manner; on the other hand, a subjectively purposive-rational action can of course prove to be less than optimal when judged objectively” (p. 103).

He recognizes a gap between “subjective” and “objective” views of utility.

“In advancing what Weber calls a rational interpretation, the interpreter himself takes a position on the claim with which purposive-rational actions appear; he relinquishes the attitude of a third person for the performative attitude of a participant who is examining a problematic validity claim and, if need be, criticizing it” (ibid).

Like Brandom, Habermas argues for the constitutive priority of the second person, and of I-Thou relationships.

“An actor’s behavior is subjectively ‘right’ (in the sense of normative rightness) if he sincerely believes himself to be following an existing norm of action; his behavior is objectively right if the norm in question is in fact regarded as justified among those to whom it applies…. [But the actor] challenges the interpreter to examine not only the actual norm-conformity of his action, or the de facto currency of the norm in question, but the rightness of this norm itself” (p. 104, emphasis added).

Unlike Brandom, who is wary of “regulism”, Habermas seems to identify norms with precisely identifiable rules and instituted law. This does not prevent him from saying many similar things about how normativity works. In particular, they both uphold a Kantian notion of normativity as independent of causal explanation. They both uphold an essentially intersubjective view of normativity. Brandom acknowledges Habermas as a significant influence.

“If the interpreter adopts … a skeptical standpoint, he will explain, with the help of a noncognitive variety of ethics, that the actor is deceiving himself in regard to the possibility of justifying norms, and that instead of reasons he could at best adduce empirical motives for the recognition of norms. Whoever argues in this way has to regard the concept of normatively regulated action as theoretically unsuitable; he will try to replace a description initially drawn in concepts of normatively regulated action with another one given, for example, in causal-behavioristic terms. On the other hand, if the interpreter is convinced of the theoretical fruitfulness of the normative model of action, he has to get involved in the suppositions of commonality that are accepted … and allow the possibility of testing the worthiness to be recognized of a norm held by an actor to be right ” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Normativity is not to be reduced to anything else. The rightness of norms can always be questioned.

“A similar consequence follows from the dramaturgical model of action…. Again, the formal world-concept provides a basis for judgment that is shared by the agent and his interpreter…. The interpreter can, furthermore, uncover the systematically distorted character of processes of understanding by showing how the participants express themselves in a subjectively truthful manner and yet objectively say something other than what they (also) mean (unbeknownst to themselves)” (p. 105).

Habermas carefully distinguishes sincerity from objective truthfulness. It is possible to be sincere and wrong.

“The procedures of rational interpretation enjoy a questionable status in the social sciences…. In my view these objections are themselves based on empiricist assumptions that are open to question” (ibid).

He defends and builds on Max Weber’s interpretive Verstehen method for the social sciences.

“In communicative action, the very outcome of interaction is even made to depend on whether the participants can come to an agreement among themselves on an intersubjectively valid appraisal of their relations to the world…. Unlike those immediately involved, the interpreter is not striving for an interpretation on which there can be a consensus…. But perhaps the interpretive accomplishments of observer and participant differ only in their functions and not in their structure” (p. 106, emphasis in original).

Validity in communicative action is always intersubjective or shareable.

“Sociology must seek a verstehenden, or interpretive, access to its object domain, because it already finds there processes of reaching understanding through which and in which the object domain is antecedently constituted (that is, before any theoretical grasp of it)” (p. 107).

Underlying explicitly theoretical interpretation is a kind of pre-theoretical interpretation, in which we are always already engaged. Interpretation of one sort or another plays a constitutive role in every activity that is distinctively human. Human uptake of culture is in large measure a preconscious uptake of shared interpretive principles.

“The object domain of the social sciences encompasses everything that falls under the description ‘element of a lifeworld’. What this expression means can be clarified intuitively by reference to those symbolic objects that we produce in speaking and acting, beginning with immediate expressions (such as speech acts, purposive activities, and cooperative actions, through the sedimentations of these expressions (such as texts, traditions, documents, works of art, theories, objects of material culture, goods, techniques, and so on, to the indirectly generated configurations that are self-stabilizing and susceptible of organization (such as institutions, social systems, and personality structures)” (p. 108).

The core of a lifeworld can be understood as a set of interpretive principles, an ethos.

“The problem of Verstehen is of methodological importance in the humanities and social sciences primarily because the scientist cannot gain access to a symbolically prestructured reality through observation alone, and because understanding meaning [Sinnsverstehen] cannot be methodically brought under control in the same way as can observation in the course of experimentation. The social scientist basically has no other access to the lifeworld than the social-scientific layman does…. As we shall see, this circumstance prohibits the interpreter from separating questions of meaning and questions of validity” (ibid).

Scientists are people too. All recognition of validity and invalidity depends upon shareable interpretive principles. For Habermas, meaning is inseparable from justification.

“Historicism (Dilthey, Misch) and Neo-Kantianism (Windelband, Rickert) constructed a dualism for the natural and human sciences at the level of the contrast between explanation and understanding. This ‘first round’ of the explanation/understanding controversy is no longer alive today. With the reception of phenomenological, language-analytic, and hermeneutic approaches in sociology, however, a discussion has arisen in connection with Husserl and Schutz, Wittgenstein and Winch, and Heidegger and Gadamer” (ibid).

“Opposed to this case, the empiricist theory of science has defended the concept of the unity of scientific method that was already developed in the Neo-Positivism of Vienna. This discussion can be regarded as over. The critics … misunderstood Verstehen as empathy, as a mysterious act of transposing oneself into the mental states of another subject” (p. 109).

“The next phase of the discussion was introduced with the post-empiricist turn of the analytic theory of science…. In [Mary Hesse’s] view, the debate concerning the history of modern physics that was touched off by Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, and Feyerabend has shown: first, that the data against which theories are tested cannot be described independently of the theory language in question; and second, that theories are constructed not according to the principles of falsificationism but in dependence on paradigms that … relate to one another in a manner similar to particular forms of life…. Hesse infers from this that theory formation in the natural sciences is no less dependent on interpretations than it is in the social sciences” (ibid).

“Giddens speaks of a ‘double’ hermeneutic because in the social sciences problems of interpretive understanding come into play not only through the theory-dependency of data description and the paradigm-dependency of theory languages; there is already a problem of understanding below the threshold of theory construction, namely in obtaining the data and not first in theoretically describing them” (p. 110).

“This is, of course, not a new insight; it is precisely the thesis that the critics of the unity of scientific method had always put forward. It has merely been placed in a new light because the analytic theory of science has, with its recent postempiricist turn, rediscovered in its own way the critical insight that was held up to it by the Verstehen theorists (and that was to be found in any case along the path of the pragmatist logic of science from Pierce to Dewey)” (pp. 110-111).

This is significant. Habermas joins Weber’s Verstehen method for social science with an explicitly pragmatist view of how science works, opposing both to empiricism.

“One who, in the role of a third person, observes something in the world or makes a statement about something in the world adopts an objectivating attitude. By contrast, one who takes part in a communication and, in the role of the first person (ego), enters into an intersubjective relation with a second person (who, as the alter ego, behaves to ego in turn as to a second person) adopts a non-objectivating, or as we would now say, a performative attitude” (p. 111).

Like Brandom, Habermas emphasizes a constitutive role for second-person forms over the first and third person. Again we see the importance of dialogue. Although by their respective avowals Brandom has a much more positive view of Hegel, they both adopt a Hegel-like critique of objectification and a Kantian/Hegelian critique of the supposed givenness of objects.

“Meanings — whether embodied in actions, institutions, products of labor, words, networks of cooperation — can be made accessible only from the inside…. The lifeworld is open only to subjects who make use of their competence to speak and act” (p. 112).

Meanings are immanently constituted, but the field of their immanence is the world or a shareable lifeworld, not someone’s private consciousness. There is no meaning without interpretation. Interpretation does not just play a supporting role in what Habermas calls communicative action, but is fundamental to it. Conversely, interpretation in its first instance is communicative. Monologue and private thought are derivative; dialogue is primary.

“Skjervheim draws our attention here to the interesting fact that the performative attitude of a first person in relation to a second means at the same time an orientation to validity claims” (p. 113).

The notion of performativity in language was introduced in Austin’s work on speech acts, for kinds of action that find their consummation in language. A performative attitude is involved in a promise or commitment. It is a social act. These are kinds of more full-blooded doing in language that are distinct from mere representation or logical assertion.

“Thus the interpreter cannot become clear about the semantic content of an expression independently of the action contexts in which participants react to the expression in question with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ or an abstention. And he does not understand these yes/no positions if he cannot make clear to himself the implicit reasons to take the positions they do. For agreement and disagreement, insofar as they are judged in light of reciprocally raised validity claims and not merely caused by external factors, are based on reasons that participants supposedly or actually have at their disposal” (p. 115).

The “content” of meaning or assertion depends essentially and not just accidentally on the context in which it is embedded. This context has the shape of reasons and a space of reasons, though I haven’t yet seen Habermas use the latter term.

“These (most often implicit) reasons form the axis around which processes of reaching understanding evolve. But if, in order to understand an expression, the interpreter must bring to mind the reasons with which a speaker would if necessary and under suitable conditions defend its validity, he is himself drawn into the process of assessing validity claims. For reasons are of such a nature that they cannot be described in the attitude of a third person, that is, without reactions of affirmation or negation or abstention. The interpreter would not have understood what a ‘reason’ is if he did not reconstruct it with its claim to provide grounds” (pp. 115-116, emphasis in original).

There could be no “value-free science” of meaning. Interpretation is not separable from evaluation.

“One can understand reasons only to the extent that one understands why they are or are not sound…. An interpreter cannot, therefore, interpret expressions connected through criticizable validity claims … without taking a position on them” (p. 116, emphasis in original).

Evaluation is a matter of reasons and the goodness of reasons.

“We thereby expose our interpretation in principle to the same critique to which communicative agents must mutually expose their interpretations. But this means that the distinction between descriptive and rational interpretations becomes meaningless at this level…. Or better: that interpretation that is rational in conception is here the only way to gain access to the de facto course of communicative action ” (p. 119).

For Habermas, the social scientist and the philosopher in doing their characteristic work of interpretation themselves engage essentially in communicative action that is not fundamentally different in kind from the communicative action that the social scientist is concerned to study.

In sociology, ethnomethodology is concerned with the social construction of lifeworlds. It is commonly associated with the claim of a so-called social construction of “reality”, for which the canonical source is Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1966). These nonphilosophers deny that there is any objective reality, and so fall into a relativistic subjectivism. Habermas, with his very serious concern for the justification of validity claims, strongly rejects this.

“In ethnomethodology and philosophical hermeneutics this insight has been revived and is upsetting the conventional self-understanding of sociology determined by the postulate of value-freedom…. [T]he social scientist … is moving within the same structures of possible understanding in which those immediately involved carry out their communicative actions…. These same structures also simultaneously provide the critical means to penetrate a context, to burst it open from within and to transcend it; the means, if need be, to push beyond a de facto established consensus, to revise errors, correct misunderstandings, and the like” (p. 120).

Here he explicitly rejects the empiricist notion of “value-free science”. At the same time, he stresses the liberating potential of the study of communicative action.

“Schutz makes a remark in passing that suggests the starting point for a solution: ‘Verstehen is by no means a private affair'” (p. 123).

He again cites the socially oriented phenomenologist Alfred Schutz. Schutz too agrees that Weber’s Verstehen is an essentially social kind of interpretation that is irreducible to any individual consciousness. Human subjectivity has its ground in intersubjectivity and shareable meaning, rather than in individual egos. This is not to say there is no ego, but that ego is a derivative result and not a principle.

“In everyday communication an utterance never stands alone; a semantic content accrues to it from the context the speaker presupposes that the hearer understands. The interpreter too must penetrate that context of reference as a participating partner in interaction. The exploratory moment oriented to knowledge cannot be detached from the creative, constructive moment oriented to producing consensus” (p. 125).

“The social scientist also has no privileged access to the object domain…. Ethnomethodological critique … attempts to demonstrate that the usual constructions of social science have at bottom the same status as the everyday constructions of lay members. They remain bound to the social context they are supposed to explain because they fall prey to the objectivism of ordinary consciousness” (ibid).

This “objectivism of ordinary consciousness” has the characteristics of what Kant calls dogmatism. Meaning exists only in relation to other meaning; it is never self-contained.

“Theoretical work is, like religion or art, an activity distinguished by reflexivity; the fact that it makes an explicit theme of the interpretive processes on which the researcher draws does not dissolve its situational ties” (p. 126).

Even interpretation with the greatest explicitness, objectivity, and universality remains tied in principle to some limiting context of interpretation. Definiteness implies limitation.

“Garfinkel [in his work on ethnomethodology] wants to carry out the phenomenological program of grasping the general structures of lifeworlds as such by searching out in the interpretive activities of everyday routine action the practices through which individuals renew the objective appearance of social order” (p. 127).

“Garfinkel treats as mere phenomena the validity claims, on whose intersubjective recognition every communicatively achieved agreement does indeed rest — however occasional, feeble, and fragmentary consensus formation may be. He does not distinguish between a valid consensus for which participants could if necessary provide reasons, and an agreement without validity — that is, one that is established de facto on the basis of the threat of sanctions, rhetorical onslaught, calculation, desperation, or resignation…. The ethnomethodologically enlightened sociologist regards validity claims that point beyond local, temporal, and cultural boundaries as something that participants merely take to be universal” (pp. 128-129).

Habermas rejects Garfinkel’s conclusion that no genuinely objective reality emerges from social construction.

“But if Garfinkel is serious about this recommendation, he has to reserve for the ethnomethodologist the privileged position of a ‘disinterested’ observer” (p. 129).

“In thematizing what participants merely presuppose and assuming a reflective attitude to the interpretandum, one does not place oneself outside the communication context under investigation; one deepens and radicalizes it in a way that is in principle open to all participants” (p. 130, emphasis in original).

This openness to all participants is very important.

“The ethnomethodologist is interested in the interactive competence of adult speakers because he wants to investigate how actions are coordinated through cooperative processes of interpretation. He is concerned with interpretation as an ongoing accomplishment of participants in interaction, that is, with the microprocesses of interpreting situations and securing consensus, which are highly complex even when the participants can effortlessly begin with a customary interpretation of the situation in a stable context of action; under the microscope every understanding proves to be occasional and fragile” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“By contrast, philosophical hermeneutics … is concerned with interpretation as an exceptional accomplishment, which becomes necessary only when relevant segments of the lifeworld become problematic, when the certainties of a culturally stable background break down and the normal means of reaching understanding fail; under the ‘macroscope’ understanding appears to be endangered only in the extreme cases of penetrating a foreign language, an unfamiliar culture, a distant epoch or, all the more so, pathologically deformed areas of life” (pp. 130-131).

When Habermas speaks of hermeneutics, he primarily has the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer in mind. Gadamer is another figure I need to write about in the future.

“The paradigm case for hermeneutics is the interpretation of a traditional text. The interpreter appears at first to understand the sentences of the author; in going on, he has the unsettling experience that he does not really understand the text so well that he could, if need be, respond to the questions of the author. The interpreter takes this to be a sign that he is wrongly embedding in the text a context other than the author himself did, that he is starting with other questions” (p. 131).

“The interpreter … seeks to understand why the author — in the belief that certain states of affairs obtain, that certain values and norms are valid, that certain experiences can be attributed to certain subjects…. Only to the extent that the interpreter grasps the reasons that allow the author’s utterances to be considered rational does he understand what the author could have meant…. The interpreter cannot understand the semantic content of a text if he is not in a position to present to himself the reasons that the author might have been able to adduce in defense of his utterances under suitable conditions. And because it is not the same thing for reasons to be sound as for them to be taken to be sound … the interpreter absolutely cannot present reasons to himself without judging them, without taking a positive or negative position on them” (pp. 131-132).

“If the interpreter would not so much as pose questions of validity, one might rightfully ask him whether he is interpreting at all” (p. 133).

“We credit all subjects with rationality who are oriented to reaching understanding and thereby to universal validity claims, who base their interpretive accomplishments on an intersubjectively valid reference system of worlds, let us say, on a decentered understanding of the world” (p. 134).

“Gadamer endangers his fundamental hermeneutic insight because hidden behind his preferred model of philological concern with canonical texts lies the really problematic case of the dogmatic interpretation of sacred scriptures” (p. 135).

“Our discussion of the basic concepts of action theory and of the methodology of Verstehen have shown that the rationality problematic does not come to sociology from the outside but breaks out within it…. If this rationality problematic cannot be avoided in the basic concepts of social action and of understanding meaning, how do things stand with respect to the substantial question of whether, and if so how, modernization processes can be viewed from the standpoint of rationalization?” (p. 136).

“If the understanding of meaning has to be understood as communicative experience, and if this is possible only on the performative attitude of a communicative actor, the experiential basis of an interpretive [sinnsverstehenden] sociology is compatible with its claim to objectivity only if hermeneutic procedures can be based at least intuitively on general and encompassing structures of rationality. From both points of view, the metatheoretical and the methodological, we cannot expect objectivity in social-theoretical knowledge if the corresponding concepts of communicative action and interpretation express a merely particular perspective on rationality, one interwoven with a particular cultural tradition” (p. 137).

Habermas wants to deeply investigate particulars, without falling into particularism.

“We have, by way of anticipation, characterized the rational internal structure of processes of reaching understanding in terms of (a) the three world-relations of actors and the corresponding concepts of the objective, social, and subjective worlds; (b) the validity claims of propositional truth, normative rightness, and sincerity or authenticity; (c) the concept of a rationally motivated agreement, that is, one based on the intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims; and (d) the concept of reaching understanding as the cooperative negotiation of common definitions of the situation. If the requirement of objectivity is to be satisfied, this structure would have to be shown to be universally valid in a specific sense. This is a very strong requirement for someone who is operating without metaphysical support and is also no longer confident that a rigorous transcendental-pragmatic program, claiming to provide ultimate grounds, can be carried out” (ibid).

He is very honest about the challenge of making his case for an emergence of objectivity out of interpretation and dialogue.

“It is, of course, obvious that the type of action oriented to reaching understanding, whose rational internal structure we sketched above in very rough outline, is by no means everywhere and always encountered as the normal case in everyday practice…. In claiming universal validity — with, however, many qualifications — for our concept of rationality, without thereby adhering to a completely untenable belief in progress, we are taking on a sizable burden of proof. Its weight becomes completely clear when we pass from sharp and oversimplified contrasts supporting a superiority of modern thought to the less glaring oppositions disclosed by intercultural comparison of the modes of thought of the various religions and world civilizations” (p. 138).

He calls a belief in progress in history “completely untenable”. This is a sharp difference from Brandom. On the other hand, he also rejects the pessimism of Adorno. I seek to develop a middle road in this regard, which is one of the reasons for my interest in Habermas.

“I shall take up conceptual strategies, assumptions, and lines of argument from Weber to Parsons with the systematic aim of laying out the problems that can be solved by means of a theory of rationalization developed in terms of the basic concept of communicative action. What can lead us to this goal is not a history of ideas but a history of theory with systematic intent…. Thus for any social theory, linking up with the history of theory is also a kind of test; the more freely it can take up, explain, criticize, and carry on the intentions of earlier theory traditions, the more impervious it is to the danger that particular interests are being brought to bear unnoticed in its own theoretical perspective” (pp. 139-140).

This is another point I would strongly endorse. I like Hegel’s view that philosophy is inseparable from its history, as Habermas says about theory.

“I shall take the following path: Max Weber’s theory of rationalization extends, on the one side, to the structural changes in religious worldviews and the cognitive potential of the differentiated value spheres of science, morality, and art, and, on the other side, to the selective pattern of capitalist rationalization…. The aporetic course of the [“Western”] Marxist reception of Weber’s rationalization thesis from Lukacs to Horkheimer and Adorno shows the limits of approaches based on a theory of consciousness and the reasons for a change of paradigm from purposive activity to communicative action…. In this light, Mead’s foundation of the social sciences in a theory of communication and Durkheim’s sociology of religion fit together in such a way that the concept of interaction mediated by language and regulated by norms can be given an explanation in the sense of a conceptual genesis. The idea of the linguistification of the sacred … provides a perspective from which Mead’s and Durkheim’s assumptions regarding the rationalization of the lifeworld converge” (pp. 140-141).

This is a fascinating project, with much relevance to the work I’ve been pursuing here. I’m still curious for more detail on what he sees in the philosophically oriented social science of Weber, Durkheim, and Mead.

Next in this series: Habermas on Disenchantment

Ethics of Communication

The work of Jürgen Habermas, whom I recently cited, has both significant points of commonality and significant points of contrast with that of Robert Brandom, who first opened my eyes to a sympathetic reading of Kant and Hegel. I’d like to explore how both of these can be related to the broad aims of Platonic dialogue. Eventually, I also hope to relate this all to the needs and circumstances of emotionally sensitive personal communication between individuals.

Most human sayings of things have ethical significance. Many if not most human conflicts are traceable to communication issues. Habermas is mainly interested in exploring this at a broad social and political level. At this point in my life, I mainly hope to have some positive impact on the micro level of personal relationships. But in the world, there are close connections between these, and it would be artificial to try to completely separate them.

Habermas combines a broadly Kantian, procedural and “cognitivist”, rules- and rights-oriented concept of morality with a post-Kantian concern for intersubjectivity. He combines serious attention to German and American sociology, law, and political science, with a sympathy for both American pragmatism and the social criticism of the Young Hegelians and the Frankfurt school. He has a rather old-school, negative view of Hegel, but defends the relevance and usefulness of the broader tradition of German idealism, construed in a way that is compatible with modern science.

Brandom explicitly credits Habermas as an early influence, but also finds great value and contemporary relevance in Hegel. Brandom and Habermas have each written some about the other. Like Brandom, Habermas is a strong defender of modernity, and of the core Enlightenment values of democratic freedom and equality.

Often cited as Habermas’s magnum opus is the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (German ed. 1981; English tr. 1984, 1987). Like Brandom, he regards the pragmatics (simply put, the use) of language as coming before semantics or the study of meaning. Habermas directly associates the pragmatics of language with justification and the giving of reasons.

Habermas and Brandom both connect linguistic pragmatics with American pragmatist philosophy, by recognizing that saying is a kind of doing. They both see meaning in terms of dialogue about reasons, which I think should also be strongly associated with Platonic dialogue.

The theory of communicative action is intended mainly as an explanatory theory dealing with questions of publicly addressable fact. It deliberately straddles the boundary between philosophy and social science.

Unlike Brandom, Habermas talks about a formal pragmatics, and a non-standard formal semantics (inspired by Michael Dummet’s argument that verification comes before truth, which also has affinities with constructive logic). Brandom applies a kind of Hegelian dislike of formalism in developing an account of material inference.

Habermas is also the leading promoter of what he calls discourse ethics, about which I’ll have more to say in upcoming posts. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (German ed. 1983, English tr. 1990) and Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (German ed. 1991, English tr. 1993) develop his more specific views on ethics and morality. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (German ed.1992, English tr. 1996) applies closely related principles at the level of politics and law. These are large and sophisticated developments, with many nuances that are not very amenable to haiku-like summary, but nonetheless, over the course of a few posts, I hope to capture an overview.

I see Platonic dialogue as a kind of ideal model for what Habermas calls communication, corresponding to what Hegel, Brandom, and Habermas all call mutual recognition. At the same time, the various prerequisites for good dialogue are constitutive for meta-level judgment about our practices of communication in life. This applies as much to overcoming misunderstandings between individuals in personal life, as it does to law and politics.

Next in this series: Communicative Action

Foucault on Power

“Power’s condition of possibility… must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything; but because it comes from everywhere…. One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attrib­utes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society” (Foucault, History of Sexuality vol. 1, p. 93).

“I’d like to mention only two ‘pathological forms’ — those two ‘diseases of power’ — fascism and Stalinism. One of the numerous reasons why they are, for us, so puzzling is that in spite of their historical uniqueness they are not quite original. They used and extended mechanisms already present in most other societies. More than that: in spite of their own internal madness, they used to a large extent the ideas and the devices of our political rationality” (Foucault, “The Subject and Power”).

Foucault in his earlier “archaeological” stage made an enormous impression on me in my youth. He began by questioning the tendency to assimilate similar or similarly named concepts from different times and places in history, as if the “same” concepts were always continuously at work. The metaphor of “archaeology” emphasizes a patient analysis of concrete raw materials of historical evidence as a kind of artifacts, with an emphasis on highlighting their diversity, over traditional history writing’s rush to construct simple, continuous, and uniform historical narratives. Larger historical unities — either the alleged uniformity of culture and attitudes at a given time and place, or alleged continuities of identical concepts persisting across time and space — should be established by evidence, and not simply assumed based on conventional wisdom or uses of the same words.

Later he turned to a series of works more concerned with power and the constitution of human subjectivity. First he emphasized that power is not a matter of formal or institutional authority. Power for Foucault is not something that could be a possession; it exists only in its exercise. Next he criticized the reduction of power to its overtly repressive aspects, recommending instead a “microphysics” that focuses on what in popular discourse is sometimes called “power to” as opposed to “power over” — a positive rather than a negative notion of power. Finally he began to say that there is really no such thing as power, and what matters is the way subjects are constituted through “technologies of the self”. The primary way that social control is effected, particularly in modern Western societies, has less to do with symbolic spectacles of extreme violence than with the very formation of our personal identities. (See also Ethos, Hexis.)

One way these developments might be summarized is to say that power for Foucault is something emergent and not something originary: “power”, whatever it is, is a result, and not a cause. Power is not a magical power emanating from a source that somehow directly affects things, but a way of describing aspects of concrete relational situations.

Aristotle too tells us that power is not a cause in a primary or ultimate sense. It may provide a relative “reason why” in particular cases, but ultimately it is something to be explained, rather than being an ultimate explainer.

Infinity, Finitude, and the Good

Plato and Aristotle both attribute great significance to the reality, goodness, and importance for reasoning of limits. Aristotle staunchly opposes assertions of really existing infinity, or of an infinite regress of reasons.

(Despite the opinions of some mathematicians, all that modern mathematics truly requires is “potential” infinity — the ability to construct something arbitrarily large or small through arbitrarily many definite acts of extending, dividing, or whatever of some definite thing. This is consistent, for instance, with the modern grounding of the infinities of calculus in analysis based on the concept of limits. On the frontiers of mathematical research, homotopy type theory and univalent foundations allow the most extravagant “classical” mathematics of higher infinities to be expressed in terms of definite constructions.)

Aristotle’s position on this is closely tied to his central concepts of ends and the good (see also Aristotle on Explanation).

“And since that for the sake of which something is is an end, and this sort of thing is what is not for the sake of anything else, but they are for the sake of it, then if there is any such last thing, there will not be an infinity, but if there is no such thing, there will be nothing for the sake of which it is. But those who make there be an infinite are unaware that they abolish the nature of the good. (Yet no one would make an effort to do anything if he were not going to come to a limit.) And there would not be intelligence among beings; for what has intelligence always acts for the sake of something, and this is a limit” (Metaphysics book small Alpha (II), ch. 2, Sachs tr., p. 31).

This is also central to his argument for the existence of a first cause.

The emphasis on a kind of finitude here should not be taken to imply any dogmatic attachment to particular formulations or representations, such as Hegel for instance objected to. In the following chapter, in part echoing the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle notes, “Some people expect everything to be said with precision, while others are annoyed by precision, either because they can’t keep the connections straight or because of its hairsplitting pettiness. For precision does have something of this sort about it, so that, just as in business agreements, so also in reasoning it seems to people to be ungenerous. For this reason one must have been trained in how one ought to receive each kind of argument, since it is absurd to be searching at the same time for knowledge and for the direction to knowledge; and it is not possible to get either of the two easily” (ch. 3, pp. 32-33).

“Courses of lectures go along with one’s habits; for in the way that we are accustomed, in that way we think it fitting for something to be said, and what departs from this does not seem the same, but through lack of acquaintance seems too obscure and alien. For we are used to what is familiar. And what great strength the customary has, the laws show, in which mythical and childish things are of greater strength than knowing about them, because of custom” (p. 32).

This last remark clearly shows that Aristotle’s emphasis on the shareability and actual sharedness of values does not at all mean he assumes that what is held to be authoritative by one’s own community or society is always right. Unlike Socrates, who after his eloquent defense meekly accepted his city’s ignorant condemnation, Aristotle at one point fled Athens “lest the Athenians sin against philosophy twice”. This lesson is crucial to the understanding of Hegel as well.

Next in this series: Aporias

Legal Uses of “Cause”

According to Wikipedia, two main kinds of “cause” are used in (U.S.) legal assessments of liability: cause-in-fact and proximate cause. A cause-in-fact is anything without which something would not have happened. The same event could clearly have multiple causes-in-fact. Cause-in-fact is a necessary but not sufficient condition for proving proximate cause. Proximate causation involves the additional element that the causing event be sufficiently related to the injury for the courts to consider it “the” cause of the injury for purposes of liability. I think it serves effectively as a kind of model for talk about “the” cause of something in general.

The notion of proximate cause seems close to the naive notion of cause that Russell wanted to remind us plays no role in modern science, and at the same time to the intuition of causal efficacy that Whitehead took to be involved in the common-sense apprehension of medium-sized wholes. I have associated both of these with what I have called “causality in the modern sense”. Proximate causes differ from these insofar as the law is only concerned with the proximate causes of particular events or states of affairs, whereas Russell and Whitehead were both concerned with what are taken to be repeatable cases of causal efficacy.

It is important to point out that the notion of proximate cause is explicitly tied to questions of legal liability. In the wake of Kant and Brandom, it should not be surprising to find that more generally, the descriptive “causality in the modern sense” that allows us to reductively talk about “the” cause of something has this close connection to considerations of blame and culpability. Similarly, Aristotle’s “categories” are etymologically kinds of accusations, and Locke spoke of the person as a “forensic” concept.