Richard Hanania hits on an important truth about ethics and our morals in Clown World:
I think indulging in what are today called “sexist,” “homophobic,” and “transphobic” instincts – up to a certain point, of course – can be defended on utilitarian grounds. But even if I was convinced it couldn’t, and someone proved to my satisfaction that, for example, encouraging children to explore their gender identities at a young age would somehow lead to a happier and healthier society, I would still oppose it.
Without realizing it, he’s hit on something quite interesting about our moral attitudes.
Many of our moral instincts, feelings, and judgments do not reflect higher, abstract, universal ideals.
Read the whole post. It’s worth the (longish) read for his analysis of SJW woke-ism as it applies to the university in The Current Year.
In the rest of this article, I’m going to unpack some of this from an ethicist’s point of view.
Earlier on in the piece, Hanania discusses a real and key difference between our moral assertions in different contexts.
While we may feel a certain outrage towards actions or choices of low relative significance — liberals towards “oppression of minorities” and conservatives towards “pronouns” — these are intuitive reactions.
Get us together in a room and our reflective, deliberative sides take over.
Yes, genocide is a worse action than misgendering xir with the wrong pronoun.
We can agree on a space of broadly applicable, dare I say universal, norms and judgments that apply to big questions like genocide, while acknowledging that we experience different responses to the granular issues.
So far so good.
But now comes the question that any moral theory must face.
Why should anyone care about these moral judgments?
What is it, exactly, that makes the abstract, the universal, the impartial and impersonal more compelling than a moral sense grounded in one’s own intuitions, feelings, desires, and attachments?
Why do we (those of us who ever spend the time to think about such things) believe that our own desires and preferences are of lesser standing than the cool logic of objective universality — even if we reject it?
The difference between intuitive responses to moral situations and the reflective, thinking responses that generate universal norms and rules is based on recent thinking in cognitive psychology.
One part of our mind, System 1, makes snap judgments, quickly and efficiently, based on limited data. It’s very good at orienting us in social environments.
Another part, System 2, is slow and inefficient, though making up for this by its ability to step back from immediate feelings and judgments and bring them into question.
Among the trendy set, it’s popular to degrade System 1 as instinctive, self-serving, even reactionary. System 2 trades in rational, reflective, deliberative judgments.
System 1 is “selfish” and stupid, while System 1 is “altruistic” and intelligent.
So the story goes, anyway.
I have my own problems with this System 1/System 2 distinction and the way it’s brought into these debates. For starters, it’s not clear to me why System 2, which is often defeated by the canny intuitive part of ourselves, is any better equipped to tell us interesting things.
Our intuitive snap judgments often disclose more interesting things about ourselves and our relationship to the world than our explicit rational thoughts.
But my present quarry is a different problem.
How is it that we’ve put morals downstream from thinking?
Why is it that thought, reflection, and deliberation gets us to morality, and in a way superior to our immediate experiences?
If that sounds like a weird question to ask, it’s worth spending a few moments to think of how peculiar our beliefs are when considered historically.
As simply as I can compress it, the idea is this.
Morality, with capital letters and bold fonts, is indeed abstract, universal, and impartial. Morals are therefore different from mere self-interest, intuition, feeling, and desire in the person.
Now this is an old idea, one that extends all the way back into the roots of early Christian ideals. St. Augustine would be one of the first to expand on this concept of agape, the universal, unconditional love that Christians associate with God’s unlimited benevolence.
In modern times, as the Christian way of life began to fade, secular thinkers took up the challenge of keeping the universal benevolence without the actual deity.
Thinkers like Kant, who found a way to keep morality holy and sacred while detaching it from the objects of experience.
Thinkers like Bentham and Mill, who defined moral goodness as whatever brings about the greatest happiness in the greatest number.
The problem is, once you get rid of God and opt for the secular path, that word “moral” loses its meaning.
You can talk meaningfully about a universal “love of humanity” in a context where God is the source and ground of moral belief. Actions done under the umbrella of universal benevolence are judged so, and have their meaning as such, because of God’s love.
In an age of scientific skepticism where secular politics replaces metaphysics, you get no such luxury.
Kant tried his damndest to move God’s role into the necessary form of the rational person. Fascinating as his system is, it convinces few today — with the added irony that those most apt to self-label as ‘rationalists’ are most allergic to his moral thought.
The Utilitarians, Bentham and Mill and most every British moralist since, tried to re-define moral as happiness, which creates its own problems. I’ve discussed some of this in my recent writings.
The short summary is that defining “good” as happiness, or well-being, or “greater good” or “better world” is not possible without first making one’s own moral decisions.
If you have no higher principle of God or Good (capital G) to make these terms intelligible, then you’re using your own intuitions, desires, and preferences to make the call.
Summed up in a tidy formula:
Evaluation is everywhere.
Humans cannot live or think or act without value judgments. Even the cold neutrality of utilitarianism depends on value judgments held in advance of that theory.
The utilitarian’s desire for “a happier and healthier society” is not dealing with objective concepts of happiness or health.
Those terms get their meanings from the beliefs and desires of the moral theorists using them.
While the modern-day liberal preaches universality and impartiality, these are empty words, fueled by his/her/xir own palette of preferences.
They’ve defined the universal good in self-interested terms, what appeals to their own intellectual attitudes and temperaments and conventional moral beliefs.
Value judgments fix the theory, not the other way around.
All of which makes the whole System 1/System 2 thing a bit redundant.
If that’s the right way to look at our value judgments and evaluations, then EVERY human judgment is subject to this dynamic between intuitive feelings and conscious rationalizations.
Nobody is really putting the universal good above their own perceived self-interest.
Woke-libs and Effective Altruists included.
I’m no moral skeptic, mind you.
Quite the opposite. I have strong views on the reality and factual truth of moral ideals and the words we use to express them.
But I am in the camp that believes modern moral theories are wildly off the mark.
As I asked above, why is it that we think that morals are downstream from thinking?
Q: Why is it that we start with a belief in reasoning and rationality and then work our way to moral evaluations?
A: Because we’ve collectively inherited a legacy of Christian values and virtues that no longer fit into our picture of reality.
Effective Altruists and woke liberals are both trying to assemble a coherent picture of right action — a response to the question “what ought one do on such an occasion?” — out of the burning wreckage that was once our moral concepts.
What’s the remedy?
Allow me to drop a provocation in your lap:
Morality, in its truest and fullest meaning, cannot be analyzed, divided up, and broken down into a subject matter for reason to chew on.
You don’t “think your way” to moral goodness.
Morals are not like the objects of a science that you can study with math and empirical experiments.
The Good is not a consequence of the Right.
The divide between my intuitions and desires, on one side, and the true universal morals, on the other side, is fake. An illusion generated by the peculiarities of philosophical theories.
Your own personal experiences and desires can have as much ethical weight and moral value as any transcendent moral good.
Any universal good must include the concrete, particular, and the personal.
Many of the goods we value, speaking as individual persons, relate us to a higher, impersonal, and non-anthropocentric reality.
Reason, whether we call it System 2 or not, has no special privilege here. Disclosing what is valuable, what is worth caring about, cannot be the task of reason alone.
This is my main quibble with Hanania’s piece.
He’s far too generous to the utilitarian point of view. As if it were a default standard that all our moral ideals must meet, rather than a specious holdover of theology, a misguided quest after impossible universality, and in any case, no less a product of self-serving psychological mechanisms at work in those defending it.
A morality that does not address our personal interests, projects, desires, and relationships is no morality worth having.
A morality that deals exclusively in universals, concerned with “better worlds” and “good outcomes” and such things, is capable of great immorality exactly because it neglects the individual person and his concrete concerns.
The utilitarian takes such things as family, friends, and children for himself, and then requires an argument from you to take them back.
But these are not his to take. No theory grants anyone that right.
The outrageous authoritarian over-reach that began in 2020 is an example of what happens when “greater good” justifications take priority over other goods.
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt once wrote a paper, “The Importance of What We Care About”, in which he distinguished modern-day ethics from the study of what is worth caring about.
Ancient writers, starting with Plato and Aristotle and Confucius, didn’t draw that line. Our ethics, asking what is right to do, was for them inseparable from the question of what is worthy and desirable.
The ancient Greeks didn’t ask what was right to do. They asked after the good life for a human being. Such a good life included what, today, we call justice and altruism. But the good life, the eudaimon life, was not defined by them.
Nor did any special concept of “moral” stand outside of the good human life, only to press in on it with categorical duties compelling or forbidding certain actions. The moral, as we call it, was part of the fabric of a human life taken as an undivided whole.
The ancients understood what Hanania and others are beginning to understand. The goods that we value are not a mere function of human activity, or fulfillment of human needs.
Morality is not what makes the most happiness. You can’t even define that term “happiness” without already supposing a moral point of view. It isn’t a given property, beyond debate. The same formal argument goes for whatever concept you may wish to slot in place of happiness, from “pleasure” to “preference”.
The goods we value are not good in respect of their universality, or their connection to some “greater good”, or any specific form of satisfactions.
They are goods because they help us define what is worth valuing and what is good in a human life.
No nerds are going to reason their way to an “impartial good” without the aid of those intuitive feelings and emotions and desires that ground us in human reality. Not only does such an impartial good not exist, and could not exist. There’s simply no way for reason, in and of itself, to decide what is good without starting from inside a concrete human point of view.
Even as an ideal, impartial moral goodness fails.
There would be no people in that world, nothing worth caring about. It would be the most alien kind of reality you could imagine.
If it’s not worth caring about, why care about it?
You shouldn’t.
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> A morality that does not address our personal interests, projects, desires, and relationships is no morality worth having.
The split between tribal interest and transactional interest (Haidt) defines how morality can have different flavors. The opportunistic solution against the multitude of ideals is to simply render whichever is inconvenient obsolete (Gervais Principle).