Raimund Gaita is, by his own account, an absolutist.  “Good” is to show any human being, with no nonsense about worthiness or any other measure, a basic level of care, consideration, and respect. Love is the best term for encapsulating the ways of goodness.  Those ways are multiple; there is no formula for goodness; what goodness calls us to do in any particular circumstances cannot be predicted ahead of time, or prescribed by some sort of rational decision procedure that relies on principles.

Evil is to disregard the reality of the other, our obligation to her as a human being.

But what does it mean to be a human being?  Turns out that Gaita is an absolutist when it comes to that question as well.  The line between humans and other sentient creatures is bright and uncrossable.  In fact, what he writes strongly implies that some human creatures don’t measure up to “full” humanhood.  Basically, Gaita is a hard-ass when it comes to describing a worthy human life.  Yes, even the most unworthy human deserves good treatment at the hands of other humans.  But (and here is one place his favorite word “serious” comes into play) living an admirable human life is a task it would seem not many are up to. 

The leap from considering good and evil as exhibited by human actions to a discussion of how to live a worthy and admirable life is not obvious—but it basically occurs in two steps.  First, as we have seen, “moral understanding” is the focus of much of Gaita’s book.  That means he is not very interested in good and evil actions per se.  Instead, he is interested in how a person acquires the “lucidity” (another favorite term) to understand what is good and what is evil.  (The previous posts considered the means toward reaching such an understanding.)  So it is the moral status of the agent that occupies much of his attention.  The second step follows: what kind of person, what type of character, is developed (produced?) when someone incorporates a lucid (enlightened?) moral understanding as a fundamental commitment of her self? 

“[T]he ethical is constitutive of what it is to be a human being and what it means to live a human life. . . . It also gives sense to the concept of destiny, that is, to the idea that we must discover what, in our circumstances, must be our way of being true to the task of living a properly human life” (135; my italics).  “A morality must claim (though we may judge that it fails) to deepen rather than cheapen our understanding of what we care for.  That fact argues for a deeper integration of morality into a concern for the meaning of our lives than is usually acknowledged by philosophy” (38).

This is where Gaita goes full-scale Socratic.  Basically, he insists that the “unexamined life” is less than fully human.  For that reason, he does not think a capacity to suffer marks a life as worth respecting (and treating well) as a human life. Beyond the animal’s capacity to feel pain, human life also evidences a capacity to shape itself deliberately according to a vision of what it would take to live a meaningful life.  To be blunt about it: humans are concerned with meaning and can try to live a live answerable to meaning’s demands.  Animals have no such similar concern.

“Much (perhaps most) of our reflections on life and morality occurs in a conceptual space of the kind I have been trying to delineate as . . . ‘the realm of meaning’”(338-9; Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception; 2^nd. Edition, 2004). 

“The lives of animals have no meaning, or they have meaning only in an attenuated sense.  I mean that as a grammatical remark [in the Wittgensteinian sense of “grammar”]—partly on the idea of an animal (as when we speak of human beings and animals) and partly on the idea of meaning.  It is what lies behind the contrast between animals and human beings . . . . The sense of ‘meaning’ to which I am appealing is sometimes expressed in the contrast between a concern for the meaning of our lives as opposed to a pursuit of happiness” (116). 

“A biography is a story of a life that tries to reveal its meaning, and that is connected to the way it reveals the individuality of its subject.  It would be absurd to write the biography of an animal, except anthropomorphically as is done in children’s stories. . . . An animal’s life does not have meaning because an animal cannot live its life deeply or shallowly, lucidly of opaquely, honestly or dishonestly, worthily or unworthily” (118).

OK.  So what does one need to do, what kind of way of being-in-the-world counts as living a worthy life?

It is not all that easy to pull out the answer from Gaita’s book.  But certain things come clear.  First, one must be concerned with the meaning of one’s life, with the “significance” of one’s actions.  (See pg. 44). Their significance is not exactly tied to consequences—either for ourselves or upon others (although I think Gaita is squishy on this point).  He definitely wants to avoid being a consequentialist, but he does think—along with Aristotle—that our actions not only reveal character (i.e. show what we care most deeply about), but also develop character.  The key thing for Gaita is awareness (lucidity).  That is, we should always attend to what it is we care about, what we think is significant, and consider how our actions promote or betray those deep commitments.  “The idea that a requirement to lucidity is internal to a certain understanding of life and its meaning is at least as old as Socrates” (211).  A certain kind of attentiveness to the circumstances, to others, and to oneself is a sine non qua of a worthy life.

The second requirement for a meaningful life is more obscure.  Gaita struggles to describe it; he keeps telling us what it isn’t.  Here’s my attempt at reconstructing his view.  With a certain kind of serpent eating its own tale feel, the key seems to be making the quest to lead a meaningful life central to oneself.  In other words, if we take living a meaningful life as our primary task, then we will orient ourselves in the world and toward others in a distinctive way.  The hallmarks of that way are (it would seem) an ongoing and overarching concern with the “significance” of our actions and dispositions, where “significance” (unfortunately) remains rather vague, but seems to be tied to our enacting our love of the things we care most deeply about.  And with a kind of circularity (that, perhaps, Gaita might say is unavoidable) the reason for caring deeply about something is either its meaningfulness (because the goal is to live a meaningful life) or its “preciousness” (as in the ungrounded assertion that every single human life is precious). 

More concretely, the focus on living a meaningful life entails a certain kind of integrity, even of unity. The hedonist (Gaita tells us) can have the unity of single-minded purpose: the pursuit of pleasure.  But the hedonist cannot have the unity of aligning his past actions with his present or future ones.  He is opportunistic, and will do today what promises pleasure, irrespective of its connection to and implications for past commitments.  With Socrates as his example, Gaita describes how “we may betray our past or make a mockery of it.  One of the reasons Socrates gave for not fleeing from prison was that to do so would betray his past.  Judgments like that reveal a concern for the past which is not merely prudential, which is not only a concern to learn from it for the sake of the future.  Someone who takes such judgments seriously sees her life as having a distinctive kind of unity, or as aspiring to such unity” (128).

Gaita moves on to speculate that we might best understand Aristotle’s notion of eudaimonia in terms of such “unity” (rejecting common translations of the Aristotelean term as “happiness” or “flourishing” on the way to his own proposed understanding).  “Human beings are distinguished from animals by the fact that their life has meaning.  That distinguishes them more radically from animals than reference to their capacities and properties does.  Our ergon (taken now as our task, our work, or as McDowell suggests, ‘what it is the business of man to do’) is to be understood according to the claims that meaning makes upon us.  Responsiveness to those claims is the responsive recognition of our ergon.  Eudaimonia is predicated of a complete life (a unity conditioned by meaning) which has been faithful (true) to the distinctive character of our ergon.  If it is distinctive of human beings to lead a life which has meaning that bestows on that life a distinctive unity, then it is perfectly intelligible that the recognition of that should claim us in fidelity to it” (131).

Of course, Gaita acknowledges that many do not live their lives as if the fact of meaningfulness laid a claim (maybe the most important claim) upon them.  If you do not live a life oriented toward meaning, or one that aims to achieve some kind of unity that reflects ongoing commitments, does that mean your life is less than human?  Gaita doesn’t go there.  He is more interested in what morality calls us to be than in chastising those who do not hear or do not heed its call.  But this is where “serious” comes in (as I will discuss in my next post).  Some people are just not serious.  It remains unclear what response Gaita thinks appropriate when encountering such people.  Chiding them for being unserious?  Consoling oneself, Pharisee-like, that such people lead “shallow” lives and thus miss out on what a life can be?  Or more direct forms of punishment?

There is one further point to be made about what characterizes a “meaningful life.”  This point must be drawn out from Gaita because it comes up in the context of his considering why the slave owner cannot recognize the humanity of the slave.  Basically, Gaita seems to be saying (in a tortuous six pages—158-163–that don’t yield any clear passages to quote) that we see someone as fully human when we can ascribe to them the intention and the ability to lead a meaningful life.  That capacity is evidenced by the individual’s making plans (i.e. making choices and then carrying them out; the individual is an initiator of actions), but (even more crucially) evidencing a commitment to an identity.  Individuals want to insert themselves into the world as presences that matter and tie that presence to a certain coherent sense of who they are.  The investment in identity (another way of talking about a commitment to integrity) shows that the individual cares about the meaning of her life.  Again, it is not as if Gaita naively believes that everyone has such a commitment.  Only the “serious” do.  But he thinks we must posit the universal capacity for such a serious investment if we are to accept and act upon the infinite preciousness of every single human life.

It is typical of Gaita that these pages are more focused on the slave owner and what it would take for him to recognize the slave’s humanity than on what constitutes the slave’s human-ness.  But I think we can infer that a meaningful human life for Gaita reveals itself in an orientation that is not directed to happiness, pleasure, or acquiring prestige, power, or material wealth.  Rather, the meaningful life is directed toward the creation of a self (the subject of biography) who deems certain persons and things worth caring for—and finds her meaning in doing that work of care, thus giving her a life she can affirm as well worth living. 

I have finally (after more than three months) finished reading Raimond Gaita’s Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Routledge, 2^nd. 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.