Begin, again?
Note: click on the footnote here1 for a tl:dr summary of this post. Some new and different stuff happens in (4) below, so feel free to skip to that!
I was really pleased that the Daily Nous featured my first Substack post as a guest post, and I’m grateful for the discussion it generated. In this post I’ll review my previous post, with the benefit of a little hindsight - and quite a bit of feedback - and respond to some of the objections raised. The aim of the original post was to call into question the orientation of moral theorizing. With such a grandiose goal, I didn’t (and don’t) think of the post as giving a complete case for it. My main hope for it was to have moved people some slight amount in the direction to which I was pointing.
Photo by Avram Hiller, Creative Commons License CC BY-NC4.0. Hover over for alt-text description.
First, a very brief summary: Bernard Williams says that we ought to begin moral philosophy by asking Socrates’ question, “How should one live?” I perhaps should have also noted that another nearby question often gets moral theorizing off the ground: “Why be moral?”
I argued that these questions are (1) individualistic and (2) about agents. It is understandable for us to start with these questions, but doing so is problematic.
Here are four points I’d like to elaborate on.
(1) Why care about what question moral philosophy should begin with?
A couple commenters asked what difference it makes where one begins philosophizing. One should end up in the same place regardless of where one begins.
A first response to this is that if it didn’t matter where one begins, then why do a number of people think that Socrates’ question, or “Why be moral?”, are the best places to begin? There must be at least a little something to the claim that one’s starting point matters.
I think discussing the originating question matters because questions have presuppositions, and also push people to look in different directions, some potentially better than others. In the context of how moral philosophy has developed, nowadays we have quite different, competing theories. So it may be helpful to track back from the resulting theories to see how they might have been motivated by very different presuppositions. Perhaps it will turn out that they were talking past each other the whole time, because they were trying to answer different questions. Or perhaps the presuppositions on one of the sides are wrong or biased.
(2) The prioritization constraint
I suppose I could reframe the post as arguing for a constraint on moral theorizing. I’ll call it the prioritization constraint: A moral theory shouldn’t prioritize moral agents over moral patients. Instead, moral philosophy should give theoretical priority to discussing how things ought to be over a theory about how to act/live. This constraint requires a lot more development and defense than I can give in a blog post (or two), but I’ll try to do a little of both here.
Some commenters questioned whether it actually is true that other moral theories don’t prioritize agents. I won’t say much about the discussions in the Republic and Gorgias, except to say that it focuses on what is the good life for a person (and whether or not this includes being just).
Kantian philosophy really does give great import to patients. But my point wasn’t that these theories downplay moral patiency in how the theory says that one ought to act. Rather, it is that they begin by focusing on agency.
Here’s Christine Korsgaard (The Sources of Normativity, 25):
“Kantians believe that… the laws of morality are the laws of the agent’s own will and… its claims are ones she is prepared to make on herself.”
I am pushing for a very different orientation for “the laws of morality”. Of course, I can’t pretend that I am here successfully tearing down the enormous edifice built by Kant and Korsgaard. But I do want to mark that it prioritizes the agent from the very outset of moral theorizing, and I want to raise doubts about the enterprise, especially since the agent-based orientation leads to some counterintuitive results (like in the Jim and the Indians case).
(3) Thought experiments
One way in which the prioritization constraint plays out in moral theorizing is in our reactions to thought experiments.
A couple commenters raised questions about my account of thought experiments. One of my aims for the original post was to argue that when we are thinking about a thought experiment, we should take steps to ensure that we are not biased in focusing too much on the agent’s perspective.
One respondent said that the nature of thought experiments is not to take any perspective but to test theories by determining whether what they say about certain hypothetical situations is true to our neutral, pre-theoretic judgments about the situations.2
Now, I agree that it is an ideal for a thought experiment to function in that way. But in reality, thought experiments are conducted on subjects who bring their own biases to the table. There is a great deal of experimental philosophy literature that tries to uncover these kinds of biases, as in Joshua Greene’s work. And what I am saying is that in making judgments about hypothetical situations, we may be biased insofar as we disproportionately focus on the agent’s perspective.
In the original post, I discussed the Jim and the Indians case, but I’d like to say something about the George the chemist example. One thing that people tend to like about Williams is that he gives richer detail in his thought experiments than just, say, talking about an unnamed, nondescript agent and 1 vs. 5 unnamed, nondescript people tied to tracks. But look at the details Williams gives in the George the chemist case: they are all about George and the goings-on at the chemical company. There is no detailed discussion of the suffering by victims that is more likely to happen if George doesn’t take the job. No mention of people dying horrific deaths, of families ripped apart, that sort of thing. So I happen to think that the George thought experiment as presented by Williams is actually a worse and more biased thought experiment than the naïve switch case. And it is that way in virtue of the very fact that Williams gives more rather than fewer details.3
(4) Justifying the prioritization constraint: an analogy
We all are interested in food. And it is not hard to see that there are a lot of value-laden features of it: the healthiness of various food, tastiness (or other aesthetic properties), norms of appropriateness of food production (such as about treatment of farmworkers and of animals used in agriculture), table manners, and deeply ingrained cultural norms embedded in traditional food practices.
We could conduct a purely descriptive project in studying food: what is going on in regard to all these norms/values? But one could also engage in a normative/prescriptive project: some of these practices are probably better than others, and perhaps some conflict with others. I’ll call this the normative food project. What’s for the best, as far as food is concerned?
Now, where should one begin the normative food project? Is it: How should I eat? How many chews per mouthful? How should I hold my fork? Or should I be using chopsticks, or my hands, or something else? I think those are good questions to ask, and maybe by asking them one can end up talking about the bigger issues.
But in general, one who wants to engage in normative food theorizing would be better off asking something more like: How should our food systems be? Start by describing better and worse food-related states of affairs, and then try to work one’s way down to the agents making it happen.
One reason for this is that it’s not clear at the outset who the relevant and most important food agents/agencies are. Is it governmental agencies like the US FDA? Nutritional scientists? Food anthropologists? Trade organizations for farms/restaurants/groceries? Individual consumers?
A second reason is that even if we do focus on individual agents, there is so much more to food normativity than what individuals do at the consumer level. The role of an individual food eater is small relative to other agents, like those who are parts of these larger organizations. Why focus on just the ones who are eating?
I think that what holds for the normative food project also holds for moral philosophy more generally. “How should one act?” is the “What should one eat?” or (to hyperbolize) “How many chews per mouthful?” of normative philosophy. Sure, Socrates’ question is a very important one. But in looking at the whole of the vast terrain of normativity, most start too small. I won’t repeat the argument in my first post, but the main idea is that we are both agents and patients, and we should care at least equally about how things should be for patients as about how we should act. In fact, we should care even more about how we are as patients, given that so much of our lives is out of our control.
This is in some ways an institutional critique of much of moral philosophy. Of course, philosophers don’t neglect institutions - there is a separate sub-field of political philosophy. But my sense is that political philosophy should be part and parcel of moral philosophy - and perhaps the most important part, from close to the beginning. I see the process moving this way: How should the world be? And, given that, how should institutions be structured to help make it that way? And then, at some point later on: How should one act/live?
In this post, I argue that:
It is a worthwhile enterprise to discuss where moral philosophy should begin.
That a lot goes on under the hood of thought experiments, and we should be careful not to be biased in thinking about them.
I can reframe the point of my original post as a constraint on moral theorizing: the prioritization constraint, and I explain (rather briefly) how it differs from the approach of both Socrates and Kant/Korsgaard.
I make the case (again) that ethics should not begin by asking about what individual agents should do, using an analogy with food ethics.
This leads to an “institutional critique” of moral philosophy. Let’s start with how the world should be, then move on to how institutions should be structured, and then after that, get to how one should act/live.
In fact, that’s not quite how Williams himself uses the Jim and the Indians and George the chemist thought experiments. As Sophie-Grace Chappell and Nicholas Smyth write in their Stanford entry on Williams, “Counter-examples, then, are not the point: ‘If the stories of George and Jim have a resonance, it is not the sound of a principle being dented by an intuition’ [in World, Mind, and Ethics, 211]”.
One can imagine a different framing that begins by focusing on Ahmed, a refugee in Syria who was killed (in a horrific manner) by chemical weapons. At the end of a detailed description, the experimenter might then tell subjects that there are things that some people like George could do to lessen the chances of this happening again. How might intuitive judgments given that framing differ from Williams’s? That of course is a question for the experimental moral psychologists. But I encourage all of us moral philosophers, even prior to doing that empirical work, to frame things in that way.