I have finally (after more than three months) finished reading Raimond Gaita’s Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Routledge, 2nd. Edition 2004). It is a dense, brilliant, and in many ways, wise book. It was very much worth reading it slowly—not just because of the intricacy of many of its arguments, but also to give myself time to ponder their implications before hurrying on. The book is, in many ways, a mess; Gaita chases any number of hares and their relevance to his central concerns are often tenuous at best. Plus he is full of prejudices—some of which lead him into taking positions that are egregiously wrong and are simply asserted, not argued for. In addition, he likes to argue against positions others are claimed to have taken without even naming who these mistaken souls are, and having his representation of their views stand as accurate since they don’t get to speak for themselves.
All these flaws are readily forgiven because there is something to stir reflection on just about every page. And now that evil (after the Hamas assault and Israel’s response) is being pondered as it was in the aftermath of 9/11, a book offering its “absolute conception” of that term should be welcome.
On one reading, Gaita’s absolute conception is awfully thin. His starting point (at least as I see it) is to accept the Kantian prescription that there is a non-negotiable obligation to respect the other; that human beings are only to be treated as ends in themselves, never as means to some other end. What Gaita adds is that this obligation is “absolute”—and that philosophers are badly mistaken when they think they can argue their way to making that obligation rational, or binding, or some such substitute for its simply being obligatory.
He presents this first assertion by way of an argument against Kant. Basically, he says it is a travesty of the sort to which only a philosopher could subscribe to think our obligation to help a suffering human being is based on a rationally arrived at conclusion that I could not will that everyone neglect that suffering person (i.e. Kant’s categorical imperative). The direction of obligation runs in exactly the opposite direction. The appeal to me to help that person is direct; it does not go through the detour of a rational calculation (of either a Kantian or a utilitarian—or even a virtue ethics—kind.) I don’t think of what the consequences of my helping will be, or what I owe myself as a rational being, or what action would reinforce my virtuous character. I am called to simply respond to the need of another. That call is absolute. Nothing more to be said.
Except of course there are 300 plus pages of more to be said. But let me first offer some of the ways Gaita strives to express this “absolute” notion of good and evil. This vision of “goodness” is grounded on “the inalienable preciousness or the infinite preciousness of every human being” (xv). “Sometimes I speak of seeing the full humanity of someone” (xv). Moral probity entails “an understanding of the distinctive kind of limit another human being should be to our will” (xix). “When we say that we are treating someone as a means to our ends, we mean that his reality as a human being does not limit our will as it should. Or, to put it more accurately,: it is part of our sense of the reality of another human being, that he be the kind of limit to our will that we express when we say that he must never be treated merely as a means to an end but as an end in himself. We express this more simply when we say we must treat him as a human being. To acknowledge the reality of another human being is to have our will engaged and limited” (278). Gaita is fond of recalling Iris Murdoch’s understanding of the “ethical task” as “seeing the world as it is,” with the primary requirement of “coming to see the reality of another person” (211), which means seeing that person as a “human being” with claims upon us. But an adequate undertaking of that task is not a matter of correct knowledge or correct principles or of following a rational procedure of either observation or decision-making. Rather, it “depends on what we attend to and on the quality of our attention” (269); such qualitative attention is best characterized as “love,” and best understood as “not prompted by love as an investigation might be prompted by curiosity, but . . . [as] itself an expression of love” (211). Goodness is a way of being in the world, a stance of careful (in every sense of the word) attention to all that occupies the world apart from one’s own self, especially attentive care of other humans.
Evil, then, is the failure to acknowledge, and actions that follow upon that failure, the preciousness of the other. A failure to attend to and to care for the other. “Because evil, as I understand it, requires a conception of preciousness violated, and because people can do evil for banal reasons, the concept of evil (that I develop) has little or no place in the characterization of people or their motives. For that reason, people who say that the concept of evil does not help explain the actions of evildoers are right. Sometime, however, appeal to the concept is necessary to characterize adequately people’s responses—the person whose remorse is informed by a sense of his victim was infinitely precious, or a spectator who responds to wrongdoing in a way informed by that same sense” (xxvi).
We might conclude from this statement that Gaita’s whole project is hopelessly abstract since it will not offer any help in solving the “mystery” of evil (i.e. how it is that people can do evil things). But what Gaita does think long and hard about is how people might be brought to “an understanding” of how others are precious or should be a limit on their own will. He calls that realization “moral understanding” and is especially good on how such understanding does not coincide with what most philosophers would understand as “knowledge” or as “justified belief.”
Thus, he wants to reject both sides of the cognitivist/non-cognitivist argument in meta-ethics. To understand the preciousness of other human beings is not like knowing that water is H2O because moral understanding is not definitive or conclusive; it doesn’t end an inquiry but in fact opens one up. How am I to act on that understanding in the almost infinite varieties of my encounters with other people? And the way I do act on that understanding is constitutive of my own character, my own way of living a life. The understanding, and how I act on it, is therefore individuating. I have not gained some general truth in reaching that understanding; I have instead been given the puzzle of how to instantiate the understanding. The ethical “task is one that cannot be completed in the sense of issuing in results that could count of the realisation if its end(s) (291). There is no recipe or formula that answers the relevant questions and gives me a blueprint for how to proceed. I can’t ever “know” all there is to know about how to act ethically. How to live a good life, one that eschews evil, means taking into account at every turn the obligation I have toward treating others as precious. What that means in different circumstances is something I need to discover in the specific instance. And there are other considerations besides avoiding evil that influence my choices about how to live—just as there are different circumstances that offer widely various options for actions that are “good.”
In short, Gaita is arguing that “true” means different things within different discourses or different “conceptual spaces” (a term he likes). His point is derived from Wittgenstein. The cognitive/noncognitive choice is forced upon us by a too rigid positivism; that false choice derives from an overly constrictive account of what counts as “true” or “real.” Either we must join the cognitivist and say that the statement “murder is bad” is “true” exactly in the same was that 2 +2 = 4 is true—or we are trapped into saying that “murder is bad” is not cognitive because it cannot meet that positivist standard of “true.” Appeals to “ordinary language” do no good here; either they are used to say moral assertions come with a claim to truth and thus underwrite “moral realism,”, or to say that people making moral assertions are just in “error” and need philosophers to show them that their truth claims are unjustified. Gaita is surely right (in my humble opinion) to say we should avoid this whole unproductive and wrongly framed debate. The whole empirical tradition from Hume through to Dewey that aspired to articulate moral truths that would be as non-contestable as mathematical ones simply failed to see that the standards of truth internal to the edifice of mathematics could not be transferred wholesale over to the standards of truth for moral statements. The canons of persuasiveness, evidence, argumentation etc. are very different in the two discursive domains.
Of course, Gaita’s “absolute” conception of good and evil means he can look very much like a non-rationalist. That is, he does seem at time to be saying that the preciousness of each human being is not something open to argumentation, to refutation by way of rational or philosophical argument. His final chapter offers a very unconvincing (to me) claim that the moral skeptic cannot be “serious”–and therefore should not be argued with. To argue with the skeptic is to already cede the terms of debate to him. Instead, the “absolute” position of an a-rational or pre-rational preciousness of every human being must hold the floor since no one (Gaita implausibly states) really denies that position. (I will have more to say about this stance in subsequent posts, partly because it returns us, I think, to the “mystery” of evil.)
Oddly in light of this grounding claim about the preciousness of the human being, Gaita insists that his argument is non-foundational. “[My] book is marked, on the one hand, by its strong opposition of fondationalism and, on the other, by its equally strong commitment to a version of the Socratic claim that an unexamined life—a life that does not rise to the requirement to be lucid about its meaning(s)—is unworthy of a human being”(xxii). What he means is that “my affirmation [of preciousness] is as firm and unreserved as it is metaphysically groundless” (xxvii). There is no philosophical demonstration available to prove that each of us is precious—just as there are no conclusive arguments to show that one fails to live a “worthy” human life is one is not “lucid” (a favorite Gaita word) about what one is doing with that life. And there is no ontological claim about the status of human beings apart from how human beings regard (and attend to ) one another. Gaita calls his position “non-reductive humanism” (xxiv); that is, the assertion of human preciousness does not “reduce” to something else. It is absolute in and of itself; self-standing, not resting upon something underneath or more fundamental than itself. Morality, he is claiming, can only rest on this absolute; attempts to ground morality on other bases—reason, consequences, notions of virtue or of flourishing, or some metaphysical reality—obscure what is actually (and awfully, in the fullest sense of that word) at stake: our treating others and ourselves in a way that attends (in the deepest and fullest possible way) to our humanness, which is given to us absolutely (no rationale for why one exists instead of not existing, and no rationale for what humans are capable to doing with that existence they have been given.)
One last point and I am going to leave it for today. The result of all this can seem like Gaita spends much of his book hectoring us (in the fashion of his hero Socrates) for not living up to the full possibilities our humanity affords us. It is true that it would hard to read this book without feeling that one has failed to live up to snuff. The other side of that coin, however, is that Gaita has an inspiring view of what a life worthy of being human could (should) look like. Much of the book plays out this vision of what can seem like super-human virtue. Far better, it seems to me, to take it as inspiring than to respond defensively to its portrait of one’s shortcomings. I will try to take that approach in future posts on the book—even as I am afraid that I will also be arguing at points that he asks more of humans than they are capable of delivering. And following that second line will bring Hamas and Israel back into focus.
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