The semester has obviously gotten the better of me. Loads of things to catch up on in these notes. So let me try to make at least a beginning.
I am reading Bertrand Russell’s 1953 book, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (Simon and Shuster, 1955), which is a summary of his ethics and political views. Russell’s prose is extraordinary. He is so clear, so direct, and so ready, in every instance, with an illustrative example. He really seems to have mastered that Wordsworthian goal of being a man speaking to men (sic). The tone is conversational, ever even-toned and reasonable, with a trick of his taking you (the reader) into his confidence when he reaches those knotty moments where he has no surefire solution to offer.
Russell is just about 100% a Humean utilitarian. His position is that there is only one kind of reason: instrumental reason. Reason is only at play when we are determining what means are most appropriate to the achievement of a particular end. What Kant called the “hypothetical imperative”—willing the means that will lead to our announced goal. For Russell, ends are determined by desire or passion (in the classic Humean formula). Furthermore, Russell is pretty wedded to the notion that a pleasure/pain calculus can explain our desires—even if he rejects the idea (so loved by economists) that self-interest is “rational.” The pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain is passional for Russell, not rational, based in feeling, not thought or logic. Pleasure as an end is not a product of rational calculation, although figuring out how to achieve that end is a matter of rational calculation.
Russell even ends up asserting (as do Adam Smith and Hume) that there is a “natural” (and, hence, presumably universal) tendency in humans to sympathize with the pain/suffering in others in ways that make the observation of others’ sorrows painful to the observer. But he has to admit that this “natural” emotion is not everywhere present. “Sympathy with suffering, especially with physical suffering, is to some extent a natural impulse: children are apt to cry when they hear their brothers or sisters crying. [Not true in my experience.] This natural impulse has to be curbed by slaveowners, and when curbed it easily passes into its opposite, producing an impulse to cruelty for its own sake” (87).
A thin reed indeed, if it so “easily” turns into its opposite: a delight in the suffering of others. Yet it is very hard to see how you can even get ethics founded on emotion rather than reason started if you don’t posit some kind of sympathy. That is, if your ethics must be derived from a primitive pleasure/pain impulse, then you have to figure out a way to ground caring about others’ pain in the fact of feelings of pleasure and pain confined to the self. Here’s Russell again; “I do not think it can be questioned that sympathy is a genuine motive, and that some people at some times are made somewhat uncomfortable by the sufferings of other people. It is sympathy that has produced the many humanitarian advances of the last hundred years. . . . Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy” (155-56). The extremely cautious language here (some, somewhat) perhaps reflects Russell’s recalling how Hume, despite his thoughts on sympathy, speculated/worried that it is not irrational for me to care more about a cut to my little finger than about 10,000 deaths in China. If you begin from egotistic premises about pain and pleasure, that Humean thought is hard to refute. I experience my pain quite differently from the ways I experience the pain of someone else, no matter how deeply I might feel for them.
The Continental tradition, ever hostile to utilitarianism, has sought to solve this problem by appeal to another kind of reason—one that is quite distinct from instrumental reason. In Kant, it’s the reason of logic. Ethics is to be grounded in the pain (I use this word advisably) we feel at self-contradiction. The categorical imperative basically says that I cannot, except on the pain of contradiction, assume goods to myself that I would deny to others. A radical egalitarianism is the only path to an ethics that avoids contradiction—and, this goes mostly unsaid in Kant, our sense of self-worth, of dignity, and integrity would be lost if we contradicted ourselves. Just what our stake is in self-worth, dignity etc. is never specified. It is simply assumed that we desire to esteem ourselves. Russell, along with other utilitarians, would say that Kant, at bottom, also relies on pain—just the pain of being inconsistent instead of the pain of witnessing the suffering of others. Then the question becomes which of these two pains would we take more pains to avoid, which is the more powerful motive.
Habermas’ version of a second kind of reason is “discursive reason.” It shares some features with Kantian reason, especially in its egalitarian strictures that all are provided with equal access to the discourse that Habermas identifies as central to human interactions. But Habermas also adds the rationality of being convinced by arguments (or viewpoints or even conclusions) that are best supported by the evidence and by the “reasons” provided to believe them. Our beliefs, in other words, are potentially rational for Habermas—and those beliefs are not just confined to the designation of efficacious means. Our ends can also be determined (at least in part) through rational argument, through discursive processes of intersubjective consultation/contestation that yield conclusions about what ends to pursue. Desire is important, but does not entirely rule the roost. We don’t necessarily have to express it as desire being tempered or corrected or revised by reason. We can imagine desire and reason as born in the same moment, that way avoiding giving desire some of temporal or psychological priority—a priority that may get translated into thinking desire a stronger force or one that must be tamed (as in Plato’s image of desire as the horse that must be controlled by the weaker, but smarter, rider). I think Habermas (like Martha Nussbaum in a somewhat different way) would want to say that desire and reason are intertwined (perhaps completely inextricably) from the start—a position that makes human beliefs and behavior susceptible to argument/persuasion, thus giving “discursive reason” a space in which to operate.
Reason in Habermas and Nussbaum, then, is secular and immanent; it is produced in and through human sociality. And I think they would say that it works to create “sensibilities,” that our “moral intuitions” are the products of cultural interactions. Certainly, I read Dewey as taking that position, which is a way of reconciling what can seem his over-optimistic faith in “intelligence” (that key Deweyean term) with his equally firm insistence that “morality is social.” There is no transcendent rational dictate (as there is in Kant) that grounds morals, that even pronounces its fundamental “law” (i. e. never do anything that you cannot will that everyone do). Dewey’s social historicism tries to account for both the variety in moral beliefs/intuitions across time and space and to capture the “force” of those intuitions, the fact that they are motivating and that we feel shame/guilt when we do not act in accordance with them. The “intelligence” on which Dewey relies does seem to be consequence-based. He seems to be saying that things go better for human lives—whether focused on individual lives or on the collective life of societies—when we adopt modes of “democratic association” that stress cooperation over conflict/competition and proved the means for all to actively pursue their chosen ends.
Still, the rub is there: what cultivates the sensibility of, commitment to, enhancing the well-being of others. What, in Kantian terms, keeps me from using the other as means to my self-fulfillment, just as I use various non-human things that the world affords as means. The Kantian path basically says we must have some way to designate some things (primarily human lives) as sacred, as never to be used as means. Otherwise, utilitarianism will run roughshod over the world—and the people in it—during its pursuit of pleasure. What is unclear is whether “reason” can get us to that designation of “the sacred” (defined as the “untouchable,” or as that which is always an ends, not a means).
The alternative seems to be some kind of arbitrary fiat, the kind of decisionism that Derrida seems to adapt in the later stages of his career, or perhaps the kind of pre-rational “call” (or intuition) upon which Levinas bases his ethics. The sacredness of the other is just asserted; it is not justifiable in any rational or argumentative way. Just what the nature of its appeal is remains unclear. What motivates one to heed the call? To what within the self does the call touch? One answer leads to a kind of pantheism (I would read Hegel this way): the call resonates with that fragment of the spirit (or of the divine) that lurks within us, but which lies buried until activated by this voice from without. That path, not surprisingly, is too mystical for me. Yet it is clear that I am almost as equally suspicious of “reason” as some kind of power that can pull us up by our bootstraps, that can give us the terms of an ethics that we embrace as our own.
I am left, I think, with the idea that there are certain images of human possibility—both of individual exemplars (call them “saints” if you like) and of livable communities (call them “utopias” if you like)—that appeal to us as desirable visions of the forms life could take. These visions are given to us by history (by religion, by literature, by philosophy, by the stories we tell)—and can become the focus of desire/aspirations, as well as the standards by which we criticize what does exist now. In other words, articulations of the ideal (of ideas of justice) by philosophy and imaginations of the ideal in stories and literature, as well as certain concrete examples pulled from history form the basis of commitments that also are seen as ethical obligations, since it is shameful to act in ways that make realization of those ideals unlikely or impossible. Is this “rational”? Not fully or categorically. But it can involve the deployment of reasons (in the plural), of arguments. And in that sense Dewey’s appeal to “intelligence” might not seem quite so silly. Intelligence is not a bad term to use for the assessment of our ideals and of the reasons they give us to act in certain ways as well as for assessing the possibility of the realization of those ideals. At the same time, it seems to me that ideals do make an emotional appeal, so that the passional nature of our commitments can be acknowledged as well.
“Intelligence,” then, is a smudge term. It’s meant the bridge the classical divide between passion and reason—in much the same way that Martha Nussbaum, in her work upon the emotions, has worked hard to demonstrate the contribution to “cognition” made by them. Of course, the term “emotional intelligence” has entered the language in the past fifteen to twenty years. It’s hard not to think that “intelligence” is doing a similar work to “judgment” in traditional faculty psychology. In other words, as opposed to the Plato/Hegel line, which appeals to a transcendent Reason (with a capital R), or the Catholic theological line, which appeals to Revelation (with a capital R), we get the Aristotelean line, which aims to remain firmly grounded in the human and the here and now. No divine interventions or even implanted divine sparks, just what our inborn mental capacities and emotional make-up renders possible. Russell is as addicted to appeals to intelligence as is Dewey. “I would say, in conclusion, that if what I have said is right, the main thing needed to make the world happy is intelligence. And this, after all, is an optimistic conclusion, because intelligence is a thing that can be fostered by known methods of education” (158). I think it is almost inevitable that liberals will always end up appealing to education as the motor of improvement because they believe our ills are not permanently grounded in some kind of “nature” that cannot be re-formed. Education is the means toward that re-formation.
But in that line (to which Hume and Kant, despite all their differences, both belong), the other sky hooks (besides education) that can get us out of being the mere pigs of J. S. Mill’s fears turn out to be either the needs generated out of human sociality or the mysterious processes of judgment (the topic of Kant’s third critique). A utilitarianism shorn of both of these mechanisms can either throw up its hands at the issue of ends, just taking them for granted, in all their variety and perversity, as modern economic thought does. Or it seems doomed to finding “altruism” and various other moral behaviors a deep puzzle, one only slightly assuaged by notions of “enlightened self-interest.” In short, the problem for an utilitarianism—for any one who, like Russell, says there is only instrumental reason—is that it leaves us no way to talk about the formation of, the fixation on, ends. (This is the most customary complaint about pragmatism.) Those ends are just the product of passion, of the fundamental desire to gain pleasure and avoid pain. Yet the actual variety of human ends, the number of things to which people are committed defies a simple calculation of pleasure or pain, indicates that utilitarianism’s psychology, its understanding of human motivations, is woefully inadequate to the actual complexities of human desires and calculations.
That said, accounting for the production of ends still remains a puzzler. “Judgment” merely names the puzzle, gives it a site to reside. It hardly solves it. Judgment stands as a way to explain that our moral views and our desired ends are not completely dictated to us by our culture. That individuals in all worlds that we know of have the capacity to stand out against the prevailing practices and beliefs of their society. They can, in short, submit those practices and beliefs to judgment. But where do the standards by which the judgment is made come from? That’s where some kind of notion of “intelligence” or “reason” or “cognition” (aided or not by the emotions) comes in. Even in cases where the fact that judgment can be refined by education, where it can be developed in particular ways by particular exercises, there is still the sense that judgment also imparts an ability to stand apart from that education and those practices, to sit in judgment upon them. I will be looking to see how Russell smuggles something like this capacity into his account of morals. Judgment, I am saying, takes the place of that second kind of reason, that other “faculty,” that can do more than just indicate suitable means, instead offering us a way to make choices about ends.
McGowanBlog 