Tag: Valuation

Shaftesbury on Moral Feeling

Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671-1713), third Earl of Shaftesbury, was personally tutored by John Locke as a young man, and the two remained friends in spite of various philosophical differences. Shaftesbury was sympathetic to the Cambridge Platonists, and attracted to aspects of Stoic ethics. He is especially known, however, for his emphasis on the role of feeling in ethics. Rejecting pessimistic Hobbesian and Calvinist views of human nature, he regarded the sense of right and wrong as a kind of second-order feeling — a feeling about other feelings. It is reflective, and while grounded in nature requires the right kind of upbringing and education for its development. The much more rationalistic Leibniz was very impressed by Shaftesbury’s work.

The main role of philosophy for Shaftesbury is to help us “regulate our governing Fancys, Passions, and Humours”, rather than to elaborate a system of the world. Goodness for Shaftesbury is to be understood mainly in terms of motivation rather than results. More objectively, it is grounded in a kind of natural teleology of order and harmony in the world. Something is good if it contributes to the “Existence or Well-Being” of a larger whole such as a species or a world. A virtuous human cultivates “equal, just, and universal Friendship” with humanity as a whole.

Shaftesbury believed in a perfectly good God, and in the argument from design. He opposed voluntarist views that made what is good depend on divine will, and advocated religious tolerance. Motivation by reward and punishment he deemed inadequate as a basis for morality.

Human motivation for Shaftesbury depends entirely on feeling or sentiment, not on reason or belief. He is considered to be a source for Hume’s famous view that in real life, human reason always serves human passions.

Scholars debate the extent to which Shaftesbury’s views should be considered subjectivist, and the extent to which he can be assimilated to the generally egoistic tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and the later Utilitarians. As I have noted previously, “self” has many meanings, from crude to cosmic. Shaftesbury clearly rejects what we would call selfishness, but in other passages promotes a positive view of a broader notion of self. His de-emphasis on reason is tempered by his sense of natural order and purpose in the world and his emphasis on a kind of reflection.

Kant’s emphasis on principles in ethics and his critique of subtler kinds of selfishness in spontaneous moral feeling represent a strong criticism of views like those of Shaftesbury. I think Kant sometimes goes too far in criticizing feeling, but Shaftesbury also goes too far in identifying reason with sterile abstraction. With Aristotle, I see human feeling and human reason as cooperating with one another in producing well-rounded valuations.

Identification as Valuation

It might seem as though the sort of categorial interpretation of experience and general application of concepts as practiced by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason were a purely cognitive affair. Many older readings took it that way, and the passages I quoted from Longuenesse’s commentary don’t explicitly dispel such a notion. My very compressed comparison with Aristotle suggests a reconciliation of Aristotelian practical judgment or phronesis with Kantian judgment, but this relies on an implicit view of the unity of Kant’s thought, partially developed elsewhere. The thrust of it is to overlay the cognitive judgment of the first Critique with the teleological and aesthetic judgment of the Critique of Judgment, and then to read the ethical works in terms of that combined notion.

As a concrete example of how the kind of identification of objects dealt with in the first Critique takes on a valuational angle, Brandom cites the identification of a German by a French person as a “boche” or thick-head, a derogatory term from World War I. This immediately suggests many similar examples of prejudice about various alleged “kinds” of people. Brandom argues that even just by the criteria of logical analysis in Kant’s first Critique, the ethically objectionable “boche” and similar terms are not valid concepts at all. They are a kind of false conceptual “universals” that do not reflect any valid generalization, but are only possible with a sort of poor logical hygiene. This shows that such practices of identification are far from neutral. Identification is after all kind of recognition, and Fichte and especially Hegel developed the ethical consequences of this.

Even claims and classifications that are valuationally neutral in themselves can be made in bad faith for some ulterior motive, but the validity of logical operations applied to the real world implicitly presupposes the ethical criterion that we make our judgments in good faith.