Rutgers University Undergraduate Philosophy Journal

Issue 2, Fall 2008 Acknowledgments

As always we would like to acknowledge Mercedes Diaz for her invaluable help in making this Journal a reality. Rutgers University Undergraduate Philosophy Journal

Executive Board Editor-in-Chief Kamil Kaczynski Editor-of-Content Max Mintz Publisher Barbara Saramak Secretary Henry Yeh​

Editorial Staff

Brandi Bernoskie Hillel Herzfeld Uriel Carni Stephanie Horowitz Nicole D’Amore Elizabeth Jacobs Pat Dennis Tim Morey Alex Firsichbaum Yuri Roh Chase Freed Said Saillant Steve Gallagher Abe Stanway Erik Grisham Volodymyr Takhistov E.J. Green

Table of Contents

On Going Above and Beyond the Call of Duty ���������������������������������������� 1 Michael Licciardi Rutgers University

Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and Sexual Oppression �������������������������� 15 Luke Roelofs Oxford University

Meno’s Paradox of Inquiry and Socrates’ Theory of Recollection �������� 27 Ross Harman Oxford University

Referential Descriptions and Communication �������������������������������������� 37 Jim Hutchinson University of Toronto

Reverence & Rationality: A Utilitarian Account of Belief ����������������������� 49 Sigal Samuel McGill University

The Aftermath of Moral Realism ������������������������������������������������������������ 63 Jordan Jolly University of Texas at Austin

On Going Above and Beyond the Call of Duty

Michael Licciardi Rutgers University

Abstract: In this paper, I endeavor to discuss and analyze the concept of morally supererogatory acts—of going above and beyond the call of moral duty. There is reason to suggest that the topic needs more clarification, and that a presumed understanding of it is not wholly sufficient. I will present these reasons before pursuing an investigation as to what further reflection yields when we examine the concept more closely. Ultimately, I intend to show that the concept of moral supererogation is not so coherent a concept as we might initially have thought. 2 Michael Licciardi In this paper, I endeavor to discuss and analyze the concept of morally supererogatory acts—of going above and beyond the call of moral duty. There is reason to suggest that the topic needs more clarification, and that a presumed understanding of it is not wholly sufficient. I will present these reasons before pursuing an investigation as to what further reflection yields when we examine the concept more closely. Ultimately, I intend to show that the concept of moral supererogation is not so coherent a concept as we might initially have thought. Stilts

Ethics, as a sub-discipline of philosophy, similar to most sub-disciplines thereof, must, in a certain sense, stand upon stilts. That is to say, if one wishes to see far, one’s natural gifts alone will not be enough, and, invariably, the shoulders of a number of artificial giants will be necessary—which is really just to say that one cannot gain ethical insight, propose substantive ethical theories, or even assign oneself to the task in the first place without taking a number of things for granted, assumptions on which one’s theories can rest, stand, or run for that matter. As such, if one wishes to provide the philosophical community, or at least one’s ethics professor, with a theory involving ethics, it would seem most prudent and honest of that individual to provide a brief account of exactly what assumptions he/ she is making. This seems only fair to all parties involved. Believing, or at least wishing, myself to be the prudent and honest type, this will be my first task. Before I approach the problem of supererogation directly, I will lay out those prejudices in my ethical theory, which, for lack of space and time, I cannot defend in this essay. First and foremost, I suppose, I assume that there is some thing1* called “the good,” some thing called the “bad,” possibly even the “evil,” some actions which are “right,” and some which are “wrong”. As such, I assume that there is a moral fact about every morally relevant act or situation, rendering it either good or bad, right or wrong—excluding those cases which we might call morally neutral. The meaning I assume for the word “good” is somewhat abstract, but possibly helpful—by good I mean, that which one should do (or possibly value).2** I assume, then, that bad is

1 * I use the word thing here because I do not wish to commit myself to exactly what the good might be—whether Form, property, or otherwise. 2 ** While this definition is certainly only provisional, and by no means perfect, it seems, in its current formulation, to bridge the epic gulf between meta and normative ethics—generally phrased in the assertion, “no theory or definition of what the word ‘good’ means will ever give us a directive to, or show us why we should, be good.” If we assume that the good is that which we should do, then it follows analytically that we should be good. On Going Above and Beyond the Call of Duty 3 that which we should not do, that right is any action which is, or leads to, good, and that wrong is any action which is, or causes things to become, bad.

Next, I assume that moral situations are of such vast uniqueness and complexity that, on the whole, general normative theories will not be able to encompass them. Thus, normative theories will be able to provide no more than guidance to individual moral agents, rather than definitive accounts of the absolute moral fact regarding a given situation. In this way, I assume a special brand of moral particularism, which, as noted, cannot be defended here. Given that this sort of particularism requires certain epistemic conditions/ qualifications, those conditions/qualifications will comprise my next assumption. I assume a sort of ethical intuitionism, whereby individuals, upon reflection, are presented with the moral fact of their individual situation. These moral facts are disclosed privately, and are, ultimately, unimpeachable by any moral theory or the judgment of other individuals3*. Lastly, I must assume a certain definition of “supererogation,” or at least an approximation of its meaning. I assume “supererogation” to mean: doing more than one is obligated to do, or going above and beyond the call of duty. It is my hope that this definition/approximation will conform to most everyone’s judgment about how the word is typically used, in order that it not have been constructed solely to serve my own theory—as such a construction would make my theory vacuous and unimportant. I hope also that the simplicity of my definition will not count against it, but rather, will leave room open to fit our general understanding of the term. With these assumptions out in the open, I will now proceed to outline my theory of moral supererogation, detailing, first, why I believe the concept to need further

3 * (A somewhat lengthy point)—It might be objected that this allows one to do what one wants, provided one can tell a convincing story about one’s ethical intuitions. This is not necessarily true, though. For one, one’s ability to cheat a system does not make the ideal of that system inherently false. Second, ultimately, we may only be punished, deemed worthy of censure, or officially blamed for some act via the imperfect laws of the legal system. In that we must all live together, we must all be governed by the same laws, even if these cannot, or could not, mirror moral fact. In so far as morality is concerned, we stand alone as individuals, and, for better or for worse, ultimately, we cannot fully know that our moral judgments of others are correct, in virtue of the fact that we are not them (although it is not uncommon that individuals are presented with similar, if not the same, moral intuitions, making moral judgment, if not infallible, not always unreasonable). In summation, law is rigid, and, while it can be cheated as well, it provides more objective standards for judgment. As far as ethics is concerned, one cannot fully cheat oneself. Thus, this theory does not prevent one from being judged by the law; it only prevents one from being conclusively judged by others. The inability to be judged conclusively by others, however, does not make one’s actions right when one wants them to be. 4 Michael Licciardi clarification, moving on to a theory of moral worth and character, before explaining why the concept’s presumed coherence does not hold up to scrutiny. Pre-Reflection on Supererogation It is often assumed that morally supererogatory actions are, in some sense, morally superior to morally obligatory actions. This assumption seems to come from the generally accepted view that morally neutral supererogatory acts are, in some sense, superior to obligatory actions. For instance, James, Greg’s boss, will think more highly of Greg, if Greg stays late once a week—not out of any contractual obligation, but out of a desire to increase productivity at the office—than he will of Steve, who only works the hours that he is required to. This is not a terribly uncommon phenomenon: students are admired by their teachers for reading ahead; our friends greatly appreciate it when we pick them up from the train-station at short notice; and restaurant-goers are generally very grateful—their gratitude often expressed in the form of a higher tip—for exceptional service provided by waiters and waitresses. The pertinent question is whether this principle extends to the moral realm. In other words, would it be correct to assert that actions which go above and beyond the call of moral duty are morally superior to actions which are simply in accord with moral duty? By way of a sort of analogy, we might think that the answer to this question is simple: of course morally supererogatory acts are superior to morally obligatory acts. Consider an example, however, that might complicate this idea. Suppose that Mary sees her daughter drowning out at sea, and, quite naturally, swims out and saves her. Suppose, next, that Carol sees her dog drowning out at sea, and, in a moment of courage, swims out and saves it. Each, Mary and Carol, has taken a great risk, but, given that Mary has a greater moral obligation to her daughter than Carol has to her dog, we would say that, while Mary has fulfilled her moral obligation, Carol has gone above and beyond her duty. If morally supererogatory acts are somehow morally superior to morally obligatory acts, then we seem to be pushed into claiming that Carol is more praiseworthy for saving her dog than Mary is for saving her daughter— this result, however, seems unacceptable. This leads us to the more reserved assumption that morally supererogatory acts are, in some sense, more praiseworthy than morally obligatory ones, but only in certain ways—ways, which we are given the task of describing. Determining exactly what these ways are, however, does not seem to be a promising task. Perhaps this is due to what would seem to be a problem in our method. It may be argued that we are On Going Above and Beyond the Call of Duty 5 attempting to discuss certain features of morally supererogatory acts—namely, in what ways they do or do not warrant greater moral praise than morally obligatory acts— before having a real understanding of what a morally supererogatory act is—we are, as Socrates would say, forgetting the priority of ousia over pathos. Thus, it seems, if we are to make any claims regarding the relation between morally supererogatory acts and morally obligatory acts, we need to have a clearer understanding of the former. These considerations seem to strongly suggest that our presumed understanding of supererogatory acts is unsatisfactory. It might be wondered why, if we really are so in the dark on the matter, any presumed understanding of the concept has arisen in the first place. In other words, if we don’t understand, why do we think we do? While I do not pretend to have a conclusive answer to this question, I would hypothesize that our understanding of merely supererogatory acts—supererogatory acts which are not necessarily moral acts—leads us to believing that no further thought is needed to understand morally supererogatory acts. Let us ask, then, what we would want from an account of what a morally supererogatory act is. It seems that such an account would need to help us, somehow, to distinguish between morally supererogatory acts and neutral supererogatory acts, as well as between morally supererogatory acts and morally obligatory acts. There are two ways which we might approach the first of these requirements: we might give an account of neutral supererogatory acts, and then seek to show how we would want morally supererogatory acts to differ from them; or we might begin by giving an account of some necessary condition of an action having moral character, and then proceed to show how neutral supererogatory action lacked this condition, and, subsequently, to show what ways in which morally supererogatory acts would need to satisfy this condition, to be worthy of the title. Each method has its merits, but, for the sake of perspicuity, or so I would like to believe, I am going to choose the second method. Moral Credit and The Kantian Moral Characteristic I would like to defend a semi-Kantian view about what makes an action moral. It is important, however, for me to emphasize that I am not making any claims about what makes an action morally good or bad, right or wrong—merely what makes an action moral. Along Kantian lines, then, I would like to assert that, in order for an action to be a moral one, it must be grounded in a desire to do the right thing, because it is what is right—in other words, to do one’s duty for the sake of doing one’s duty. This account does not presuppose a more detailed ethical theory—one may believe, on 6 Michael Licciardi this view, that one’s duty is to maximize the good, just as well as one may believe that one’s duty is to follow a set of deontological rules.

My motivation for accepting this view derives from a theory of praiseworthiness, proposed by Holly Smith, which I will be provisionally accepting. Smith’s claim is that an agent’s being worthy of praise for their performing of a certain action is a function, first, of that action being a good action, and second, of that action arising from a commendable configuration of desires and aversions in the agent. Smith stresses that the idea of configuration is an essential element of her account. This is because it is not necessarily the possession of certain desires or aversions which makes our actions good or bad, but rather, their relative strengths. For example, we would not want to assert that the desire to promote one’s own self-interest is inherently an immoral desire, but rather, that it’s being a stronger desire than other, more morally commendable desires is what makes the configuration of desires to which it belongs an immoral one, or at least one worthy or moral criticism. Smith divides our desires/aversions, with respect to some act, into three categories: cooperative, countervailing, and morally good4*. To illustrate how these operate we can take an example of a moral action, and show how these desires relate to it. Suppose, then, that John decides, based on his relevant desires/aversions, to donate money to charity. His cooperative desires are those which might give him reason to donate to charity, but which are not necessarily moral desires—for instance, the desire to get a tax refund, or the desire to be regarded as a philanthropist. His countervailing desires are those which might give him reason not to donate to charity—for instance, the desire to use the money in question for some other end, say, to buy his wife a nice anniversary present. It is important to understand that countervailing desires need not be immoral ones—in fact, their being morally neutral is somewhat crucial to Smith’s theory, as it stands. Finally, morally good desires are those which are in accordance with generally accepted moral principles—for instance, the desire to give what one can to those in need. It should also be noted that morally good desires have the ability to be directed either for or against the commission of some action. For example, John might have both the moral desire to give what he can to those in need, as well as the moral desire to make some person—namely, his wife—happy. Each of these conflicting moral desires comes to bear in his reasoning. According to Smith, then, the relative strengths of these three types of desires will determine one’s choice in performing some morally good act, and it is this configuration that enables us to bestow praise upon an agent when he performs a 4 * Morally Wrong can be added to this list, but, for our purposes, it need not be. On Going Above and Beyond the Call of Duty 7 good, or right act (or, conversely, blame, if he performs a bad, or wrong act). More specifically, she claims that, in order for an agent to be praiseworthy for his action there must be a relation of moral fitness between his configuration of desires/aversions and his action. She lists two conditions for moral fitness: (1) the agent must have at least one moral desire that comes to bear in some minimal way on the agents decision; and (2) this desire must be strong enough—although, not necessary—given the strength of the agent’s other desires, to result in his making the morally right decision.

While this account is both insightful and well developed, there is one element which, I believe, it lacks. It seems to me that, as it stands, this account leaves a number of cases underdetermined. For instance, imagine that, given John’s configuration of desires/aversions, his final desire—assuming, for the sake of convenience, that we can quantify such matters—has a strength of negative-10—in other words, his overall desire not to donate to charity it ten points stronger than his overall desire to donate. As we have been, thus far, framing it, our account, I believe, leaves an answer to the question of what John will do underdetermined. It does not seem unreasonable to say that, despite, given his other desires, not really wanting to donate to charity, John will, nevertheless, donate anyway. It seems accurate, here, to say that, the final factor, which plays a role in determining John’s ultimate decision—allowing us to truly credit a moral action to him—is what I would call the moral desire: the desire to do the right thing. In other words, one can, given his general set of desires and dispositions, want to, or not want to perform some moral act M, but his final decision will—if his decision is a moral one—depend upon the strength of his desire to do the right thing, either in accordance with, or in the face of his other relevant desires. Now, I mentioned that this must be so, in order that John’s act M be a moral act, and such a claim seems to require further justification—let me turn to that now. I would like to suggest that Smith’s category of morally good desires is an artificial one. This is not to say that the desires contained therein do not have morally good acts as their object, but rather to suggest that these desires are accidental. I mean, by accidental, not that the acts themselves, or the desires directed thereat, are only accidentally, contingently, or conventionally morally good—my argument rests neither on conventionalism nor realism—but that John’s possession of these desires is accidental. In other words, John has a whole set of desires which he cannot help—we can call these first-order desires. His biology, schooling, rearing, and social training have left him the way he is—John could not choose his desires before he became John, and becoming John involved, at least in part, a process of desire, belief, and disposition implantation. Accordingly, by the time John has any say in the matter, 8 Michael Licciardi John already is who John is—he cannot help this. In that John cannot help what types of first-order desires he has acquired in, and as a result of, his early life-stages, they are accidental—and thus he cannot be morally credited with their moral goodness. In other words, in so far as John has, what I’d like, for now, to call a blind desire to help others in need, he is merely morally lucky that such a desire happens to have morally good actions as its objects. I would like to suggest that it is in his grounding desires— namely, his desire to do the right thing, to do what is morally required of him—that John’s actions take on a moral character. In other words, the desire to do good things, which provides the ground for his other desires, the reason upon which he acts on or does not act on those others, is what gives those others their moral character—what makes them, what I would call, fully intentional, and deserving of moral praise. In this way, I have tried to show why one should accept a semi-Kantian model for what makes a moral action a moral one—and subsequently what makes an action worthy of moral praise. Moral action, worthy of moral praise, must be rooted in a desire to do what is right, because it is right—to do one’s duty for the sake of doing one’s duty. The Incoherence of Moral Supererogation I will now indicate how neutral supererogatory acts do not have the characteristic just described—that of being grounded in the desire to do one’s duty for the sake of doing one’s duty—and how they are, thus, essentially extra-moral. We need only one brief example to show this. Consider, again, Greg, the employee, who puts in extra hours in the office. We would say that, in so doing, Greg has gone above and beyond the call of duty. But such an act, or set of actions, has no moral character. Greg works more than is required of him to increase productivity at his office—this is true—but his desire to increase productivity does not arise out of any desire to do his duty, for the sake of doing his duty. His desire to increase productivity might arise from a desire to keep his office open—and thus to keep his job—or it might arise from a desire to have his boss like him more, thus creating a more pleasant working environment, or providing him with a positive professional reference in the future. Of course, in providing these possible motivations for his desire to increase productivity at his office, I seem to be leaving open the possibility that Greg might have some other motivation that would constitute a moral choice—and thus, perhaps, leaving open the possibility that this supposedly neutral supererogatory act could possibly have been a morally supererogatory act. In this way, the character of a supererogatory act would not play a determining role in whether it was moral or not; rather, its motivation would. This indeed would be true, if it were possible to On Going Above and Beyond the Call of Duty 9 have such motivations with respect to supererogatory acts. I am now going to argue, however, that this is not possible.

I will give two main reasons that, in the light of what we have been discussing, will show why I believe the concept of a morally supererogatory act is an incoherent one. The first falls out of my acceptance of what, in the first place, makes an act a moral act—this one we can deal with more quickly before moving on to a more substantive line of reasoning. My first argument is this: given that any moral action must be motivated by a desire to do one’s duty for the sake of doing one’s duty, it is not coherent, then, to claim that doing more than one’s duty is motivated by a desire to do one’s duty. Issues of linguistic comfort aside, an objection of a slightly more substantive nature could be made to the proposed claim that would run as follows: practically speaking, one could certainly do more than necessary with the intended outcome of doing what is necessary. Consider the college student, Tom. Tom knows that for his philosophy class he needs to get a 90 on his last exam, in order to get an A in the class. One might object that my theory implies that it is incoherent to speak of Tom trying to get a 100 on his exam, with the intended outcome of getting an A in his class, even though a 90 is all he needs. This might be called the covering-one’s-bases objection. The main idea is that one can attempt to do more than one believes is necessary in order to make sure that what is necessary does get done, in virtue of its being a subset of the set of actions which one does take. I cannot deny that this is a common phenomenon, but I contend that there is a crucial difference between covering-one’s-bases in an extra-moral context— specifically, this type of context—and covering-one’s-bases in a moral context. There seems to be an epistemic condition present in this example that allows Tom’s actions to make sense. Tom does not know which questions he will answer correctly on the aforementioned exam. Moreover, Tom knows that he does not know which questions he will answer correctly. In this way, Tom’s attempt to get a 100 on his exam is really an attempt to answer every question correctly, and this attempt is a function of his knowledge of his own fallibility. In other words, in an ideal situation, where Tom knows when he answers a question correctly, and where his only relevant goal is to 10 Michael Licciardi earn an A in his philosophy class5*, it becomes far more difficult to make sense of his actions.

We can call the characteristic that Tom manifests, in his attempts to get an A in his philosophy class, the A-student characteristic—this is in opposition to, let’s say, the impressing-the-teacher characteristic, or the learning-the-most-material characteristic. If Tom is to display only the A-student characteristic, then Tom must be motivated solely by his desire to earn an A in his class—he cannot be motivated by the desire to learn all the information he can, as well as he can, nor by the desire to impress his teacher, or others. Casting the situation in this light allows us to see its relation to moral action. A moral action must be motivated by a desire to do one’s duty for the sake of doing one’s duty, and not by a desire to appear philanthropic to others, or to receive a tax refund at the end of the fiscal year. Thus, Tom, in exhibiting only the A-student characteristic is like John exhibiting the moral characteristic. There seems to be an impediment to reasoning analogically here. While it seems true that if Tom were motivated solely by the desire to earn an A in his philosophy course, and if getting a 90 on his exam would earn him an A, and if Tom could know when he answers a question correctly, then we could not make sense of his attempt to get a 100 on his exam, if John is motivated by the desire to do his duty for the sake of doing his duty—i.e. if he is to be motivated by moral desire—and if John believes that his duty, given his situation, is to donate 90 dollars to charity, then we might still be able to make sense of John donating 100 dollars instead of 90. Being able to make sense of this situation might lead us to accept that morally supererogatory acts themselves make sense, but to reason in such a way would be to move too quickly; for there is still a crucial difference between these two accounts, which, once understood, will allow us to see more clearly why, if John were to donate 90 dollars—instead of 100—to charity, his act would not be a morally supererogatory one. The difference is that, in the case of Tom, we know, as well as Tom, who does himself know, what is required of him, if he wishes to earn an A in his course. John, on the other hand, presents us with a different problem, because not only can we not be sure of John’s moral duty, John’s own understanding of his duty might change or be reevaluated. Hence, if John decides to donate 100 dollars—rather than 90—to a charity, and if such a decision is a moral one, then his decision to do so must arise

5 * We can, thus, leave aside possible motives of learning the material as best he can, and so forth. On Going Above and Beyond the Call of Duty 11 from his realization that, while he might initially have thought that donating 90 dollars to charity was his moral duty, donating 100 dollars to charity is his actual moral duty.

This leads to our second, more substantive argument—the disjunctive argument against moral supererogatory action. The reasoning is as follows: suppose John decides to donate 100 dollars—rather than 90—to charity. His decision to do so can be motivated by one of two types of desire: moral or extra-moral. We do not want to say, if we are defending the concept of a morally supererogatory act, that his desire is extra-moral. Thus, if we have any hope of attributing to this supererogatory act a moral character, needless to say, his motivation must itself be moral—but first let’s take a step back. We can, to simplify, say that John donates 100 rather than 90 dollars to charity because: a.) Doing so would benefit him in some way; or b.) He believes donating 100 dollars is his duty. If John’s motivation is of the first kind, then it is not moral—if it is of the second kind, it is not supererogatory, but merely obligatory. My argument, then, is that moral actions must be obligatory to be moral—and hence, an action can never be both moral and supererogatory, given the definition stipulated and defended of moral action, and its relation to human motivation. I understand that my account entails that one can realize and come to further understand his moral obligations over time, and that such a process, along with the final answer cannot always be fully known or understood by others. These shifts in realization can shift according to circumstances both internal and external to the agent in question, and only he can be the final arbiter of the outcome of his ultimate recognition of duty. In this way, we cannot say what John’s actual moral duty is— whether it be to donate 90 dollars to charity, 100, 700, or none at all. As stated above, I realize that I commit myself to a Moral Particularist and Intuitionist standpoint— the defense of such a standpoint cannot adequately or appropriately be addressed here. I will briefly reiterate, now, how these commitment/assumptions, along with my proposal of a sort of Kantianism regarding the moral character of action/motivation, apply to my argument: 1.) An agent has the capacity to recognize his moral duty; 2.) Such a recognition can reorient itself as circumstances, both internal and external to the agent, change; 3.) Once an agent has recognized his moral duty, he is obligated to perform such a duty, for the sake of performing his duty, if his action is to be a moral one; and lastly 4.) Other agents may not always, or ever, be able to fully learn or understand the exact moral obligation that a given agent recognizes as his own. Therefore, what most people take to be morally supererogatory acts are 12 Michael Licciardi actually morally obligatory acts—given an agent’s own understanding of his moral obligations—or are simply neutrally supererogatory acts, disguised as moral ones. Conclusions Having given reason to believe that the concept of the morally supererogatory act is an incoherent one, a couple of questions still present themselves. First, what can we say, now, about acts which we initially took to be morally supererogatory—such as Carol saving her dog from drowning—and their relation to morally obligatory ones—such as Mary saving her daughter from drowning? Most immediately, we can state that Carol’s action is not morally supererogatory; it is morally obligatory for her. Thus, Carol’s action holds the same moral-metaphysical status, so to speak, as Mary’s—each is a moral action, and thus a morally obligatory action. The complex and difficult relation that we initially perceived has fallen away. We see then that acts of the sort that Carol performs cannot be rightly called superior to acts of the sort Mary performs, on the basis of some distinction between obligation and supererogation, because such a distinction is empty—as morally supererogatory acts do not exist—but on what grounds can we justify our remaining intuition that Mary is more praiseworthy for her action than Carol is for hers? The only standard, it seems, by which we could evaluate the praiseworthiness of agents in situations like these, might be to compare the values of the various obligations which they are fulfilling. The question of whether such evaluation is possible is the second question which our account leaves open. For better or for worse, the answer seems to be no. If our moral obligations become apparent to us on an individual and situational basis, and if our obligations cannot always be fully known to others, then we cannot compare moral obligations across people, for a lack of an adequate epistemological perspective. The only criterion, on this model, that we might use is force and relevance of obligation. For instance, if Peter knows that he has an obligation to cook dinner for his mother one night, and an obligation to volunteer in a soup kitchen that night, and supposing that his obligation, by his own understanding, to volunteer is more of a pressing and morally necessary nature, then we can assign his level of praiseworthiness based on which obligation he chooses to fulfill—in relation to whether he chooses the more pressing obligation. This form of evaluation does not seem possible between people, epistemological factors aside, given both that the strength of obligations will differ from person to person, and the somewhat brute fact that an obligation binds a given individual, On Going Above and Beyond the Call of Duty 13 regardless of its value in relation to the obligations of others. We are morally required to fulfill our own moral obligations, not the moral obligations of others. We can neither be praised nor faulted for not fulfilling the obligations of others, if those obligations are not our own. Mary’s strongest obligation is to save her daughter and Carol’s is to save her dog—each is acting in the most morally praiseworthy way, given their situation—as such, we are back to square one, and adjudication of praiseworthiness seems impossible.

Without a theory of what types of acts precisely are objectively morally best6*— which would amount—answering the question of whose morally obligatory act is more praiseworthy seems profoundly difficult, and is not a task we have the ability to undertake here*7*. This issue aside, we have at least eliminated the problem of comparing morally obligatory acts with morally supererogatory acts, by showing that, given a number of reasonable assumptions, moral supererogation is incoherent. Works Mentioned

Smith, Holly, “The Varieties of Moral Worth and Moral Credit,” Ethics v.101 No. 2 (January, 1991), pp. 279-303

6 We might use such a knowledge of which obligations are best to fulfill to claim that the strength and desert of moral praiseworthiness is a combination of our own fulfilling of our moral obligations, and the luck of the draw as to which obligations we happen to faced with in a given situation—this type of analysis, however, does not seem promising. It does not seem like we would want to claim that two people who each fulfill different obligations, which each involve actions of different relative moral value—say, volunteering at a soup kitchen versus jumping in front of a bullet meant for someone else—can have different levels of praiseworthiness based on these relative differences in these values, when the two individuals do not, and could not, choose their obligations. 7 Adjudication might be feasible by a counterfactual analysis of the strength of one’s moral desire versus one’s other desires, in comparison to someone else’s—i.e. theoretically determining how much more countervailing desire one’s moral desire could withstand in comparison to another’s. This solution, however, has its problems as well. Unfortunately we cannot discuss them here. For a further discussion of moral praise and blame see Smith The Varieties of Moral Praise and Moral Worth (1999).

Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and Sexual Oppression

Luke Roelofs Oxford University

Abstract: This essay seeks to cast light on the origins on patriarchy by an analysis of Hegel’s “Master-Slave Dialectic”, in particular its conclusion that mutual recognition and self- consciousness emerge out of violent conflict, a phenomenon more common among male than female animals. 16 Luke Roelofs Hegel was not a feminist. He wrote at one point that women are related to men as plants are to animals. And yet if nobody else has ever fully understood all the implications of Hegelian philosophy, why should we imagine that Hegel did? In this essay I want to develop a feminist interpretation of Hegel master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Mind, and in so doing to use Hegel’s philosophy to answer a question central to feminism, namely, the origin and basis of patriarchy itself. Different answers have been developed to this question by various writers, often making reference to men’s supposedly greater physical strength and the inconveniences of child-bearing and rearing. These may well be true, but I feel that certain further issues are important. To fully appreciate the oddness of patriarchy we might make some observations. Firstly, among humans self-adornment, concern with appearance, and a sense of being-looked-at are overwhelmingly associated with women. Women, not men, expend a lot of energy, money and time on looking good, and judgements of their appearance are often given a weight substantially greater than judgements of men’s appearance. But among all other animals, the sex that plays this role is either neither, or it is males. It is male peacocks, for example, who display spectacular plumage to tempt females, not the other way around. The same holds true of other birds, of fish, or reptiles and mammals and insects. Wherever there are courtship displays they are made by males. A similar point can be made more generally. It is male deer, not female deer, who grow large and, for non-sexual purposes, usless and costly, antlers, solely for the sake of competing for females. It is, in general, male animals that must exert energy and bear costs to compete for, and hence in a way make themselves dependent on, female animals. And even the greater size of some male animals manifests itself principally in polygamous species where those males must fight each other to breed – in pair- bonding species, or species where males do not need to be large and strong to breed, the sexes are either equal in size, or females are larger. Yet among humans, in almost all societies (with the modern one a very debatable exception) the dependence of women on men far outweighs the dependence of men on women. Women need to battle each other for male attention in order to have financial security and social status – whereas men can remain largely aloof from any concern with women and still be accounted great successes and secure themselves material plenty. There are certainly contrary indications, most notably the fact that where there are status hierarchies within animal societies, there are very often males at the top – male lions, for example, dominate their pride and get first access to any kill. Yet this Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and Sexual Oppression 17 still co-exists with the fact that the status hierarchy itself has a bigger impact on the males.

In summary – human patriarchy seems to be, in many respects, a direct reversal of the more widespread situation among animals. To understand this a little better we might ask why the situation among non-human animals, the relative dependence of males and independence of females, is as it is. To this a fairly easy answer can be given: the nature of our reproductive systems is such that males must compete with each other, while females need not. And in this case as in general, internal division and conflict weakens a group. So why is it that among humans this weakness of the male sex, its drive to internal strife, has somehow given birth to its overwhelming strength and dominance? Merely to phrase the question in this way is to recall Hegel, who famously located the struggle between people as the seed of higher developments of self-consciousness. So let us consider section of Hegel’s work that explicitly deals with this, often called the ‘Master-Slave Dialectic’. In this, two consciousnesses encounter each other – both are referred to by Hegel as ‘he’ (when not in neuter terms) and I will do the same for reasons that will become apparent. Hegel describes this experience, the encountering of another consciousness, as profoundly ambiguous, as having a double meaning. On the one hand, each consciousness sees in the other simply another object – a thing of identifiable size and appearance, perhaps useful, perhaps dangerous, that to be ascertained. But basically just one more thing for me, the great and wonderful consciousness, to perceive, understand, judge, act on, and conquer. On the other hand, each also sees in the other a rival consciousness, an experience which is inseparable from coming to see themselves as an object. I am now something of identifiable size and appearance, because that creature there can see me. I am something that may be useful, or dangerous, to that creature there. My nature is to be ascertained – by that creature perceiving, understanding, judging, me. And then to be acted on and conquered. As Sartre puts it, in describing the same double-meaning later on in Being and Nothingness, the world ceases to be centred on me, it flows away to a new, different centre, and I become something existing at its periphery. Hegel seems to suggest that each consciousness is likely to dislike the second aspect of the experience, and to want to resist it somehow, to re-assert that no, I am consciousness, everything that exists is an object for me, you are simply a thing. The particular form in which this happens, he says, is a struggle to the death – both 18 Luke Roelofs creatures try to kill the other. Why does this form of activity somehow prove the consciousness (or, we might say, the personhood) of the struggling creatures?

It is a philosophical commonplace to say that there are two forms of causation – causation through physical objects and causation through human (or animal) actions. Even if we think this distinction is metaphysically wrong, we must still admit it’s great importance as an everyday way to relate to things. And we may observe that physical causation takes the form of and input and a predictable output – the bullet flew from the gun because it was moved by the explosion, the explosion happened because the trigger was pulled, etc. Whereas the choice to pull the trigger – that, in some sense, “starts itself ”, it was not the transmission of some other input, it was a decision the person took themselves. A person’s action can be made to conform to the nature of physical causation if they follow predictably from certain inputs, for in such a case, if one knows the right inputs, one can manipulate and control them as one would any other tool. The most obvious way to do this is by threats: ‘do this’ we say ‘or I will take your thumbs.’ As long as we can threaten something sufficiently bad, we can (we hope) make the person do whatever we want. We can then forget about their choices, their free will, and simply regard them as an object, a tool. The struggle to the death is the rejection of manipulability. For if I am trying to kill you, then clearly you would do anything you can do to make me stop – i.e. the severity of the threat I present to you implies that if I can continue to fight, you must be positively unable to stop me. And if you are trying to kill me, then clearly you cannot threaten me with anything worse – i.e. the severity of the threat you present to me implies that if I continue to fight, you must be positively unable to stop me. So together, the reciprocal threats of death represent the strongest possible case for you to manipulate and control me. And yet you do not – I continue to fight you. Hence you cannot control me, cannot manipulate me. I stand independent of any materical concern, even my own death. My will, my determination and resolve, are elevated above the whole world. Thus I prove my personhood. This idea, it should be noted, is a fairly common one – that it is by struggle that we ‘prove ourselves’, is something that plenty of people otherwise very different Georg Hegel have affirmed. But of course, taking a critical step back from Hegel’s writings, we might consider the obvious fact that animals and humans actually quite rarely fight. Typically, when two creatures meet, they will either ignore each other, or one will run away. Sometimes they will respond with spontaneous friendship. So we should not interpret Hegel as Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and Sexual Oppression 19 saying that the most common way for any consciousnesses to interact is by trying to kill each other. Rather, he is focusing on this scenario because this is the form of interaction that leads to greater development of consciousness. The reason for this, presumably, is that it involves the active demonstration of each participant’s personhood – it clarifies that and brings it into sharp relief. If we spontaneously feel a liking for someone, we are still basing our concern for them on our own feelings, which may change or fluctuate. The struggle teaches us that the other person is independent and cannot be ignored, however we might feel about them. This forces us to work out ways to interact that are more enduring and stable, able to continue even when we strongly dislike each other. But what happens next? One possibility, quite common in conflicts between creatures of different species, is that one of them gets killed (and, quite possibly, eaten). This is however quite rare when the combatants are the same species, since most such conflicts are heavily ritualised, and may not involve any actual conflict. Another possibility is that the two simply separate, possibly with one running away. But the most interesting and significant possibility, and the one Hegel focuses on, is that one combatant, driven by the fear of death, surrenders to the other and says, or implicitly communicates, something like “I will do whatever you say, just let me live.” In doing so, Hegel argues, it fails in the project of proving its personhood and thus ‘admits’ its own objecthood to the winner, also thereby recognising their claim to be a person, a consciousness. But how, precisely, does this state of objectification work out? For Hegel it is through enslavement, i.e. putting the loser to work, having them labour for the winner. But this is only one form of objectification, ‘instrumental objectification’, the turning of a human being into a tool. What Hegel does not discuss is an option that is in some ways more like the first, of ‘eating’ the loser. For what one eats is an object, what one drinks or enjoys looking at or enjoys lying on – all these are objects, but not tools. Rather, they are objects of desire. And one way that a person could be objectified would be by turning them into, and reducing them to, an object of sexual desire. That is, one outcome of the submission of the loser is rape, and if that arrangement of rape is prolonged and made formal and permanent, made into an ongoing state of sexual ownership mixed with absolute domination, then it is marriage. Some will no doubt protest at the association of the wonderful and benign institution of marriage with sexual violence, but I do not think it can be denied that, as individual consent as a precondition of marriage is relatively rare in history, and as for almost all of history sex 20 Luke Roelofs within marriage has been independent of any question of consent, consequently the historically most prevalent form of marriage is as something suffused with violence.

To see the significance of this we can consider how the structure of a ‘marriage’ of this sort differs from the structure of enslavement, as Hegel describes it. Superficially, or in its goals, the state of enslavement that Hegel describes is one in which the master is supremely a person and the slave is supremely a thing. The master enjoys and repeatedly affirms that he is greater than and more powerful than mere nature, for he can make things happen, not by having to work, and engage his body and his understanding of physics, but rather by simply speaking: he says “let there be light”, and there is light. Whereas the slave is completely subservient to mere nature, for he cannot make there be light simply by demanding it, but only by submitting himself to learning the rules of fire and then working according to them. This true both concretely, in the power they have to produce results, and symbolically, in that one respects, admires, and praises the other, while the other gives no recognition or respect in return. And yet, Hegel argues, the real situation is in some ways the opposite of this, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the master is dependent on the slave – though the master has greater power, he has that power only because the slave continues to obey him. But the slave’s power, such as it is, does not depend on the master. Secondly, the master cannot really get the recognition and respect he craves, for the respect he gets is from the slave, and he does not himself see the slave as having any status, and hence any ability to give recognition. Thirdly, the master’s domination, which is meant to prove his superiority and his independence of the world, actually rests of various contingent facts – that he was strong enough to win the fight, or that he has burly guards, or that there are chains on the slave’s feet, or some such. Fourthly, in practical terms, the master’s position is prone to give him no particular impetus to reflection or self-awareness, because all he has to do is express his immediate desire and then enjoy its satisfaction. The slave, on the other hand, is exposed to a number of pressures that seem to generate greater self-knowledge. The slave, after all, has done the work, and so sees the product (the sculpted statue, the built house, etc.) as a representative of his own activity – the plans he had to make, the facts he had to learn, the effort he had to exert, all stand before him in their concrete outcome. At the same time, he must suppress his own desires in order to obey his master’s will, and in Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and Sexual Oppression 21 doing so must observe and become aware of his own thoughts and feeling in a more reflective way than if he just acted on them.

For all these reasons, the situation is inherently unstable. Not only because, as a matter of fact, it is false to imagine a gulf separating the master (a person) and the slave (a thing), but also because the tendencies of the arrangement themselves work to slowly make this clear – to make it clear by bringing out, however much the master and the slave who obeys him might struggle to deny it and delude themselves, that the real power belongs to the slave, and that the master, far from being the most important, most powerful, most awesome, is in fact…a parasite. Hence the struggle goes on – the forms it takes need not concern us, nor Hegel’s particular view of them. It is enough to witness the endless roundabout of revolutions, wars, upheavals and political turmoil that stem from this basic idiocy at the bottom of society. Yet all those revolutions, wars, upheavals and political turmoil seem to involve men killing other men. How is the situation of that other slave, the wife, different? If the key activity of the male slave was his labour, the key activity of the female slave is her sexual abuse. This first activity, Hegel seems to suggest, generates in him a consciousness of himself as active, as powerful, as a person, for in it he masters raw nature. But the consciousness generated by the sexual abuse of the female slave is likely to be precisely the opposite, for here she is not the actor, she is not powerful, she does not achieve anything. Her master acts on her. Moreover the labour of the male slave affirms his basic similarity with the master – they both act on and thus control nature. The sexual abuse of the female slave reinforces her basic difference from the master, for it focuses attention on the aspects of their bodies that are most different. If this is the case, we might expect her psyche to be more completely adjusted to this state of objectification. And since any human life must feature pleasures and satisfactions, if only as a contrast to other experiences, she is likely to come to find pleasure and satisfaction in being an object, in being beautiful, in pleasing her master, in being desired and treasured. If she is to be an object, after all, she might as well seek to be a jewel-encrusted object made of precious metals than a cheap and worthless object. A further issue might be raised: the wife will no doubt work for the master as well, but will be assigned tasks that do not give her sense of her own agency because they do not involve any change, any production, but merely the maintenance of things as they are: the preparation of food, the cleaning of the house, the changing of a baby’s nappy. She pours her effort into making the bed: it is slept in, and becomes messy again. So she repeats her work, repeats it every day, and as a result teaches herself not that by her actions she can change and master the world, but that her work is 22 Luke Roelofs simply static, something that exists and does not change or end, i.e. an object. This is likely to also come out in the most distinctively female form of ‘work’, pregnancy and childbirth. By the most extreme exertion and sacrifice, the wife serves not to change the population but to maintain it, not to produce but to reproduce. Even in so far as the detailed forming and education of the growing child is not taken over by male professionals, whatever self-expression she may gain here is still mediated through another, and cannot strengthen her sense of herself specifically as person.

So whereas the servitude of the male slave undermines itself, that of the female slave reinforces itself. Any of the factors that might give the wife a sense of her own personhood – pre-eminent among which is the fact that she is a person – can be counter-acted by the experience of rape. The result is a far more durable and stable form of oppression, the strength of which is indicated by the fact that even Hegel himself, filled with enthusiasm for equality, liberty, and fraternity, writing an account of the delusiveness of male-male enslavement – even he dismissed women from most of his work, and when he comes to consider them, degrades them in the strongest terms. Certain of these issues have been given prominence in feminist theories. For example, Susan Brownmiller, in “Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape”, speaks of the profound significance of rape and sexual subjugation, ranking it “with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe.” She writes that “one of the earliest forms of male bonding must have been the gang rape of one woman by a band of marauding men. This accomplished, rape became not only a male prerogative, but man’s basic weapon of force against woman, the principal agent of his will and her fear. His forcible entry into her body, despite her physical protestations and struggle, became the vehicle of his victorious conquest over her being, the ultimate test of his superior strength, the triumph of his manhood.” Simone de Beauvoir, on the other hand, emphasises the importance of childbearing and the way in which the biological species-preserving work of the female body prevents her from fully participating in the species-transcending work of the human individual, in activities such as writing, building, ruling, which are monopolised by men. Women, she says, “have within them a hostile element – it is the species gnawing at their vitals.” But I do not think that either of these two themes by itself is enough to answer our initial question. For we have dwelt upon the case where a male creature subjugates a female one, and have thus not explained how this basic state, of male domination, Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and Sexual Oppression 23 arose. Even observing that women must deal with childbearing still doesn’t quite explain why they should be so wholly, so actively, so artificially, excluded even from combining some small measure of politics, literature, or whatever with this. With the right social support women could probably take an equal part in such activities, and certainly so in a modern technological society. Why is it, then, that society has been designed not to empower but to suppress women? Why has there been an active political thrust against women?

To address this, we must consider the situation with more than two creatures – for humans became social creatures long before they became humans. It is unlikely that they will all either enslave each other or be enslaved – rather it is likely that there will be a multitude of individuals who have in whatever way enslaved other individuals. And among these individuals, the original conflict, the sense of each one’s sense of personhood being threatened by all the others, can be mitigated. Master 1 meets Master 2: both wish to preserve their sense of themselves as supreme, yet they cannot both be supreme. The solution? Master 1 will be supreme over a certain sphere (slaves 1 to 3) while Master 2 will be supreme over a separate sphere (slaves 4 to 8). This is not perfect – they both still would like to be supreme master if they could. But in order to avoid an uncertain and perilous war, and enjoy their respective private dominions, it may well be the best option. In a very abstract form, I believe that such an arrangement is the most historically accurate way to interpret the idea of a ‘social contract’, as described by philosophers such as Locke or Rousseau. The social contract was an agreement between masters, to end the war not altogether, but only after they had already won substantially against the slaves, who were not parties to the contract. In concrete form such a contract might be the agreement of mutual recognition between the heads of different states; the agreement to the rules of the market by the owners of different companies; the signing of a ‘Magna Carta’ between barons and the king; or the erection of a grand Athenian ‘democracy’, in which a minority of the people would explicitly and triumphantly proclaims itself the whole people. But all these forms, of course, depend on certain contingent and quite complex political and social arrangements. Presidents can make peace only if there is a conflict between states; barons only if there is feudalism, etc. But there is a conflict which exists in all societies, based merely on the biology of reproduction – the struggle between males for access to females. And to end that conflict, there will thus be a contract between men to end their competition for females by allocating to each of them the right of sexual access to different females. Since the consent of these females 24 Luke Roelofs is not at issue, and they are not involved in the contract, this is equivalently a contract of systematic rape. So what had, in less developed species, been a source of collective weakness for the male sex, namely their endemic conflict, becomes for humans a source of collective strength, for it is the fact of conflict which forces men to make peace with each other, to explicitly and publicly establish the rules by which they will regulate their dealings. Women were not constantly attacking each other, and so there was no need to include them in this ‘contract’. As a result, men were able to form society and exclude women from it, and to propagate and maintain that exclusion by the objectifying effect of prolonged, systematic sexual abuse. We see the beginnings of this in the more social animal species, among baboons and lions for example, where the first developments of a social order tend to leave males in the top position. Among humans, precisely by virtue of our spectacular sociality, our amazing intelligence and ability to develop and understand ourselves – precisely by virtue of this we have turned the conflict-proneness of males into a political society of males, collectively and collaboratively denying the humanity of women.

Meno’s Paradox of Inquiry and Socrates’ Theory of Recollection

Ross Harman Oxford University

Abstract: In Plato’s “Meno”, the eponymous character suggests that inquiry is impossible. The argument he constructs for this has come to be known as “Meno’s Paradox”. As a solution to this paradox, Socrates proposes his “Theory of Recollection”. This essay proposes that, whilst Socrates’ Theory of Recollection is an inadequate response to Meno’s Paradox, the Paradox can nevertheless be overcome in a simple manner. 28 Ross Harman There are two main notions which this essay is based around, namely, “Meno’s Paradox” and Socrates’ “Theory of Recollection”; the latter notion is often considered to be a solution to the problem of the first. In this essay, I will begin by explaining, in brief terms, the two notions, before looking critically at each of them. By doing this, I hope to show several things. Firstly, I want to show that Meno’s Paradox can be overcome without too much difficulty. Secondly, I want to show that, even though Meno’s Paradox can be overcome without too much difficulty, Socrates’ Theory of Recollection is not a way of overcoming it, and cannot be used as a response to the paradox. Finally, I wish to show that, even though the Theory of Recollection cannot be used as a direct response to Meno’s Paradox, it is nevertheless a clever and creative theory, which cannot be shown conclusively to be false, though by the same token, nor can it be shown conclusively to be true. Meno’s Paradox, proposed at Meno 80d-e by the dialogue’s eponymous character, and stated in clearer terms by Socrates is as follows: “a man cannot inquire either about what he knows or about what he does not know – for he cannot inquire about what he knows, because he knows it, and in that case is in no need of inquiry; nor again can he inquire about what he does not know, since he does not know about what he is to inquire.” This, then, is Meno’s Paradox: inquiry is impossible, and by extension, learning is impossible. We can never acquire new knowledge. Socrates does seem to take Meno’s Paradox seriously, and he responds by proposing his Theory of Recollection, which runs as follows. The soul, says Socrates, is immortal (81a-b). This is a fundamental, primary belief upon which the rest of the theory rests. The soul has been born many times, and has experienced an enormous amount of things; when we make inquiries or do what we call “learning”, we are in fact merely recollecting the knowledge which our soul has acquired before our human lifetime: “Inquiring and learning are wholly recollection.”1 This is the theory, and Socrates goes on to use a slave-boy for the purposes of demonstrating his theory (82b-85b). Socrates makes the boy tell him that a square, whose sides are 2 units long, has an area of 4 square units. S then asks how long the sides would have to be in order for the area to be double, i.e. 8 square units. Initially the boy imagines that the sides of the square would have to be double, and so his reply is “4 units”; obviously, though, this will produce a square with an area of 16 square units, and so this is the wrong answer. The boy understands that he has given the wrong answer, and so after his initial confident answer that the square needed to have sides 4 units long, he is reduced to a state of perplexity. Through his own “recollection”, so Socrates claims,

1 Meno 81c-d. Meno’s Paradox of Inquiry and Socrates’ Theory of Recollection 29 he has realised his error. Socrates uses the way that this boy started off knowing nothing but ended up by realising his errors and reaching some true opinions, to make the claim that “he who does not know about any matters, whatever they be, may have true opinions on such matters, about which he knows nothing” (Meno, 85c). Socrates makes the additional observation that the boy will be able to have as firm a grasp of mathematics as anyone, if the right questions are put to him, so he does not actually need to be taught as such, but rather just needs to be helped along his path of recollection: “without anyone having taught him, and only through questions put to him, he will understand, recovering the knowledge out of himself ” (Meno 85d). Socrates says that the boy holds true opinions about these geometrical matters, and that if he did not acquire them during this lifetime, then he must have learnt them at some other point; this must have been before he was a human being, maintains Socrates. If truth of all things is always in the soul, then the soul must be immortal (Meno 85e-86a). Socrates points out an additional benefit of believing in his Theory of Recollection, namely, that it will make us “better and braver and less helpless”2. It does this by making us challenge our assumptions and “look into our soul” to find the correct answers to questions.

Before moving on to a criticism of these notions, I will first briefly talk through a passage in Plato’s Phaedo, in order to elucidate further, and provide greater justification for, the Theory of Recollection. When someone sees something, says Socrates, it reminds him of something it is like; for example, when one sees a picture of Simmias, it reminds him of Simmias (Phaedo 73e-74a). When this sort of thing occurs, that is, when one has a recollection caused by like things, one considers whether the recollection offers a perfect likeness of the thing recollected (Phaedo 74a). To use a more abstract example, when one sees some “equal” pieces of wood, one recognises that they fall short of a perfect likeness with the abstract property of “equality” (Phaedo 74d), as no pieces of wood will be perfectly equal in length. Anyone who says that something he perceives is like something else must necessarily have knowledge of the thing it resembles but falls short of (Phaedo 74e). It is through the senses that we recognise that all sensible objects fall short of absolute equality; but it is before using the senses (in other words, before being born) that one must have gained a knowledge of the abstract concepts themselves, such as that of perfect equality (Phaedo 75b). The knowledge of these abstract concepts thus comes from an

2 Meno 86b. 30 Ross Harman immortal soul, which gained knowledge of abstract essences such as “to kalon” (“the fine”) and “to agaqon” (“the good”) before human birth.

It is now time to criticise Meno’s Paradox and Socrates’ Theory of Recollection. The former is in my opinion nothing more than a piece of sophistry, like most paradoxes, and so it can be dealt with relatively quickly. For the sake of clarity, I will write out Meno’s Paradox in a more formal manner than has hitherto been used. It runs thus:

1) Something is either known or not known. 2) If it is known, then there is no need for inquiry, since it is already known. 3) If it is not known, then no inquiry can occur, because we do not know what the object of our inquiry is. Proposition 1) is, undoubtedly, correct. This is basic logic: something is either “x” or it is not “x”; in this particular instance “x” just so happens to equal “what is known”. We might say, then, that proposition 1) is necessarily correct. One might object that something can be “half-known”, or at some point along the “knowledge spectrum”. For example, a man might be able to remember seven of the eleven digits which constitute his mobile phone number; as for the other four, he does “know”, them, but he just cannot remember them at present. If someone were to say the remaining four digits to him, then he would instantly remember them and recognise them as his own. It might seem a little inaccurate, then, either to say definitively that “He does not know his telephone number”, or that “He knows his telephone number”. My response to this objection is simple: the person in the analogy did not know his telephone number, as he was not able to think, at the time in question, what it was. The same will be true in all analogous situations. People might have some of the “pieces” required for knowledge of “x”, but if they do not have all the “pieces”, then they do not know “x”. To talk in less abstract terms, the man who could not remember his phone number had some of the digits needed in order to have knowledge of it, but he did not have all of the digits; therefore, he did not know his phone number. “Knowledge” entails a present state of mind, and so it is of no account that the man happened to know the phone number in the past, or that he might have known it again at some point in the future. If he does not know it in the present, he does not know it. Proposition 2) is correct, but not necessarily correct, by which I mean that it is not a logical necessity for it to be correct. Proposition 2) is correct for practical, Meno’s Paradox of Inquiry and Socrates’ Theory of Recollection 31 rather than logical reasons. If someone knows something, he is perfectly entitled to make an inquiry to find out what he already knows; it would, however, be a stupid and pointless thing to do. Thus, whilst proposition 2) is not necessarily correct in the way that proposition 1) is, it is nevertheless correct, and so requires no further investigation. Proposition 3) is the only one of the three propositions which I consider to be false. Since it is a universal maxim, providing but one counter-example will be sufficient to show that it is false. We might not know the object of our inquiry, but that does not mean that we do not know the methods of inquiry which are necessary to find out this object. For example, in my college, there are code-locks on doors, and one must know the correct code in order to pass through the door. I want to go to the computer room, but I have no idea what the code is. However, I have a very simple way of finding out: at the Porter’s Lodge there is a list of codes, and I only have to go there and ask, and I will immediately be told the correct code for the door. In this instance, I started off not knowing something, but my ignorance did not render me helpless to inquire; I had in mind a very simple method of inquiry, I followed this inquiry through to its conclusion, and I reached the knowledge that I desired. One might object to me that a distinction needs to be drawn between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. A priori knowledge is that which can be known without reference to experience, whereas a posteriori knowledge can only be known through reference to experience. The knowledge in the aforementioned example was of the a posteriori sort, whereas Meno had in mind a priori knowledge. Evidence for this is the fact that the ensuing dialogue deals purely with geometrical truths, which are examples of a priori knowledge. It is true that Socrates used diagrams in order to clarify his discussion with the slave-boy, but that does not render the type of information in question a posteriori, as the diagrams were only used to elucidate the rational processes which were going on inside the heads of Socrates and the slave- boy. Indeed, as Vlastos rightly says, diagrams were unnecessary in this section of the dialogue, and indeed the whole section from 82b9-85b7 could be replaced with a much more simple discussion of some of the mathematical implications of adding various numbers to one another, without making any difference to the content of Socrates’ conclusions3. It is clear, then, that this section of the dialogue is concerned

3 Vlastos does in fact make his own Platonic-style dialogue in order to demonstrate his point, and in my opinion it works very well. See G. Vlastos, “Anamnesis in the Meno”, represented in J. Day (editor), Plato’s Meno in Focus, Page 90. 32 Ross Harman solely with a priori knowledge, and so perhaps I was in error, the critic would say, in not making this distinction when I claimed that proposition 3) was false.

I can answer this objection in two ways. Firstly, if proposition 3) is intended to be concerned with a priori knowledge only, then it exceptionally-poorly written, as this fact can in no way be inferred from looking at the proposition itself. If proposition 3) is intended to be aimed solely at a priori knowledge, then this fact makes an absolutely enormous difference as to how we interpret it, and so it is a very bad error indeed to make no mention of this fact. I would almost go so far as to say that it is absurd to suggest that it has in mind a priori knowledge only: so great is the difference that this would make, that it is entirely ridiculous for it to have wholly neglected to mention this fact. My second answer is that, even if proposition 3) is aimed merely at a priori knowledge, it makes no difference, as we can learn new a priori knowledge anyway. Socrates induces the boy to learn new knowledge4; to use a simpler example, I can learn, a priori, that 1,389,987 + 1 = 1,389988 (and one cannot claim that this is a posteriori knowledge: it is inconceivable that anyone might have had sensible knowledge of such large numbers). Proposition 3) is incorrect, and thus, the whole of Meno’s Paradox is incorrect. Before evaluating Socrates’ Theory of Recollection, I will first explain why it cannot solve Meno’s Paradox, whether or not it is true. The reason for this is that a new and very similar paradox can be made out of it, simply by substituting Meno’s terminology for Socrates’; White composes this new paradox better than I could, and so I quote in full White’s words:

“You will not of course attempt to recollect what you have already recollected, since you have no need to. But how will you attempt to recollect a thing of which you have merely unrecollected knowledge? What sort of thing, among those things of which you have only unrecollected knowledge, will you set up as the object of your search? Or to put it otherwise, even if you happen to come right upon it, how will you know that it is that of which you had merely unrecollected knowledge?”5

We can see, then, that the Theory of Recollection cannot be used in order to solve Meno’s Paradox; but that is not an objection against the Theory itself. Simply because

4 For ease, I use the term “learn”, even though S is at great pains to explain that the boy is not in fact “learning”, but rather, “recollecting”. However, since this is irrelevant to the subject in hand, I consider it easier simply to use the normal term “learn”. 5 N. White, “Inquiry”, represented in J. Day (editor), Plato’s Meno in Focus, Page 163. Meno’s Paradox of Inquiry and Socrates’ Theory of Recollection 33 it cannot be used for the end towards which it was created is not an objection against its veracity. I shall therefore now evaluate the veracity of the theory itself.

I made the distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge when I was evaluating Meno’s Paradox. The same distinction must be made when looking at Socrates’ Theory of Recollection. When it comes to a posteriori knowledge, it is clear that recollection plays no part in its acquisition. If I want to find out the colour of somebody’s hair, I will look at their hair, and through the medium of sight, will acquire the knowledge that their hair is, say, “black”. This has nothing to do with recollection, and it is clear that, if I do have an immortal soul of the sort which Socrates is claiming that I have, then this is not the sort of knowledge which is known by it. Empirical knowledge is simply not its realm. For this reason, I can quite confidently say that the Theory of Recollection is only applicable to knowledge which can be acquired purely through reason, and I do count this as a major objection to it. The reason why I count it as a major objection that the Theory of Recollection only accounts for knowledge derived by reason is that this sort of knowledge is pointless without knowledge derived by the senses as a compliment to it. Scientific progress relies upon empirical evidence. Undoubtedly, rational thought plays a major part in any academic inquiry, and I would not go so far as to say that all a priori truths are analytic and trivial. Advanced mathematics, for example, whilst being an example of a wholly a priori science, can be usefully applied to less abstract fields, such as engineering, economics, and physics; in conjunction with empirical evidence, mathematical truths help a great deal in our understanding of the world. Nor is it necessarily the case that all a priori truths are analytic: Kant cited as examples of synthetic a priori concepts causality, space, and time - he said that these were concepts which it was necessary for us to grasp, a priori, before we could make any sense of our experiences of the world. For these reasons, I am not by any means understating the importance and value of a priori knowledge. At the same time though, I am making the point that in isolation, a priori knowledge does not achieve much; the empirical evidence gathered through our sensory faculties is the most important tool in learning about the world, and since this is not accounted for by Socrates’ Theory of Recollection, his theory does not account for how we acquire a very substantial portion of our knowledge. Even if we accept that Socrates’ theory is limited, since it only deals with a priori knowledge, there are still problems with it. When Socrates gives the geometrical demonstration with the slave-boy, he seems to ask questions which could be construed 34 Ross Harman as “teaching”; if this is the case, then the boy is not really recollecting at all, but rather, he is simply being taught. Many of his questions demand simply “yes” or “no” answers, and, we presume, the slave-boy can tell from how the question is phrased what answer S expects. For example, when Socrates begins a question with “ouk”, then he clearly is expecting the answer “yes”. I do think, however, that Socrates’ demonstration with the slave-boy can be defended against the charge that Socrates is merely teaching the boy. As Moravsick says, there is a difference between questioning and understanding, which comes in the form of understanding. In his words, “There is apparently, according to Plato, a gap between the question and the response. This unobservable gap is understanding.”6 I would be reluctant to accept this answer, were it not for an additional fact, namely, that the slave-boy cannot rely upon Socrates to guide him directly, as we might expect, for the reason that on several occasions he deliberately misleads him. Vlastos says, and I agree with him, that Socrates is not teaching the boy, “because he cannot cite Socrates’ attitude toward p as evidence for its truth. Socrates makes sure of this both by instructing him, ‘Answer just what you think’, 83d2, and also by the more painful method of laying booby-traps for him along the way which teach him that he cannot rely on Socrates to make the right suggestions to him”7. For these reasons, I think we can say with justification that Socrates is not teaching the boy, and so we have not yet shown that the slave-boy is not “recollecting” the knowledge which he seems to acquire. We can tell, then, that something is needed to bridge the gap between understanding and input (i.e. what Socrates tells the slave-boy). However, whether that something is necessarily “recollection” is another matter. We might just as plausibly claim that this “something” is a capacity for rational thought, with which we are born. Some might be inclined to say that the Theory of Recollection is in fact saying just this, and in this case it should be treated as an elaborate metaphor for a rational capacity. However, I do not think this is the case. For a start, it is probable (but not necessary) that any set of ideas which is quite as elaborate and grand as the Theory of Recollection has more substance to it than mere allegorical usage. Moreover, we must remember that the historical figure of Socrates was himself supposed to be a religious man, who did actually hold to be true his beliefs about the immortality of the soul. Vlastos says, “Those who come to our text without sympathy for its religious inspiration are apt to look at its union with annoyance and to think that Plato might have been a great philosopher or, at any rate, a good one, had it not been for his

6 J. Moravscik, “Learning as Recollection”, represented in J. Day (editor), Plato’s Meno in Focus, Page 123. 7 G. Vlastos, “Anamnesis in the Meno”, represented in J. Day (editor), Plato’s Meno in Focus, Page 98. Meno’s Paradox of Inquiry and Socrates’ Theory of Recollection 35 religion.”8 I think that this viewpoint is a little unfair, though I am not criticising Vlastos for it as he is not claiming it as his own view but rather saying that this is what some people think. Socrates, or Plato, whoever these religious beliefs belong to9, did very well to fit his philosophy around his own belief system, and I think he is to be admired for sticking by his religious beliefs whilst exploring philosophical ideas which were consistent with those religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, if we do not believe in the immortality of the soul, and what is more reincarnation, then we are going to find it very hard to believe any of the subsequent beliefs which Socrates builds upon it, including of course his Theory of Recollection. This rules out a lot of people: any Christian, for example, or Muslim, or Jew, is not going to be able to agree with Socrates’ theory for this very reason. Even those with religions which do believe in reincarnation, for example Hindus and Buddhists, are not going to believe in Plato’s theory, because he is proposing a very particular form of reincarnation which is inconsistent with the beliefs of the aforementioned religions. At the same time, though, it would be an impossible task (and I mean “impossible” in a literal sense) to disprove that there is an immortal soul which is reincarnated many times, in the way Socrates says that there is.

In conclusion, Meno’s Paradox can be overcome fairly easily. The Theory of Recollection is an original and inventive way of accounting for the understanding of mathematical kinds of truth. I would shrink from calling it “plausible”, as it is based on the questionable assumption that there is an immortal soul which has been reincarnated many times before entering the human body, a soul which has experienced and so has knowledge of everything. However, at the same time, it is impossible to rule out the possibility that such an immortal soul does exist, and Socrates’ Theory of Recollection is indeed correct.

8 G. Vlastos, “Anamnesis in the Meno”, represented in J. Day (editor), Plato’s Meno in Focus, Page 104. 9 And I will not, at this time, delve into the issue of whether the ideas proposed in the Platonic dialogues represented the views of Socrates or of Plato himself.

Referential Descriptions and Communication

Jim Hutchinson University of Toronto

Abstract: In this paper, I discuss Saul Kripke’s objections to Donnellan’s understanding of referential descriptions, which is set out in “Reference and Definite Descriptions”. Kripke’s objections are seen to only have weight in the absence of a principled reason to think that Donnellan is correct in his view(which is that descriptions used referentially differ in semantic content from those used attributively). I then show that there are indeed principled reasons, deriving from considerations about communication, that show that Donnellan must be right. 38 Jim Hutchinson In his paper ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’1, Keith Donnellan identifies two distinct uses of definite descriptions: those he calls ‘referential’ and those he calls ‘attributive’. He believes that a single definite description can be used in these distinct ways because it makes different contributions to the propositions expressed(has different ‘semantic content’) in different contexts. Saul Kripke, in his ‘Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference’, argues that though Donnellan is right that descriptions can be used in two different ways, it can and should be explained without appeal to differences in semantic content. In this paper, I will first explain the distinction between the two uses. and present Donnellan’s evidence for his view. I will then present Kripke’s reasons for disagreeing with him about how this evidence is to be explained. Given some plausible premises about communication, I will show that Kripke’s view cannot be right--descriptions used referentially and those used attributively must differ in semantic content. Lastly, I will briefly point to two important questions that this paper must leave unanswered. Section I Donnellan’s distinction is as follows. An attributive use of the definite description ‘The Φ’ in ‘The Φ is F’ is one in which we intend to state that whatever object satisfies ‘The Φ’ is F. A referential use is one in which we intend to state of a specific object that it is F, regardless of whether it satisfies ‘the Φ’ or not. Consider the following case: At a party, S spies a man she knows to be very boring drinking what appears to be a martini. S says to H, ‘The man drinking the martini is boring’. H sees the man with the martini glass, and forms the belief that he is boring. In fact, the man had only water in his martini glass. In this case, S has used the description referentially--she had a particular individual in mind, and meant to talk about him, no matter whatt was in his glass. Her communicative intentions have also been satisfied--H has formed a belief about the right man. This is the phenomenon Donnellan notices: when we use descriptions referentially, we can achieve our intentions in making the utterance even if the intended object is not the satisfier of the description. This is also true of non- assertoric sentences involving definite descriptions used referentially--when we ask questions and make commands, our intended questions can be answered and our intended commands obeyed. This ambiguity is meant to be pragmatic--features of the context, especially our intentions, determine how we are using our descriptions. Beyond this, Donnellan does not tell us what is required for us to be in a position to

1 pp 247-259 of The Philosophy of Language. Martinich ed, 2001. New York, Oxford University Press Referential Descriptions and Communication 39 use descriptions referentially. This is the first question to which I will turn at the end of this paper.

Donnellan thinks that these facts about what we can do with our utterances are explained by our descriptions’ making different contributions to the proposition expressed, and thus having different truth conditions. He does not, however, provide a principled reason for thinking that the differences in the properties of our descriptions are to be explained by semantic content--he simply states that the truth conditions of the two utterances are different. In addition to this intuition, he is implicitly appealing to principles which connect the epistemic and inferential properties of our descriptions with the semantic content--but in the absence of an explicit argument, it is all too easy to dismiss Donnellan’s evidence. He also does not say anything about what he thinks the semantic content of descriptions used referentially is. This is the second question to which I will turn at the end of this paper. Section II

In ‘Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference’2, dismiss Donnellan’s evidence is exactly what Kripke does. In presenting Donnellan’s case, Kripke explains the distinction and then attributes to Donnellan a ‘substantial intuition’ that in cases of descriptions used referentially in which the intended referent does not satisfy the description, the speaker has still said something true of the intended referent. This intuition is all he cites in favour of Donnellan’s conclusion. He makes a distinction, which I will adopt, between a speaker’s general and specific intentions in making an utterance3. For any designator(word or phrase which picks out an object), there is an intention to use it the same way each time to pick out an object. This object is the one that fulfils the conditions for being the referent of the designator. For example, whenever I use the phrase ‘the present Prime Minister of Canada’, I have an intention to pick out whatever object is the current Prime Minister of Canada, conditions fulfilled currently by Stephen Harper. This intention Kripke calls the general intention. The object, I will call the object of our general intention. The conditions for being the object of our general intention in uttering a designator can be specified independently of context of utterance, though the object it picks out may change with context. Sometimes, however, accompanying this intention, a speaker has an intention to talk about a particular object the speaker has in mind.

2 pp 225-256 of Definite Descriptions: a Reader. Ostertag, Gary ed. 1998 Bradford, MIT Press. 3 Ibid, 238. 40 Jim Hutchinson This is the specific intention. Often, a speaker’s specific and general intentions in making an utterance will coincide, and pick out the same object. Sometimes, however, the object of the specific intention is not the object of the general intention. For example, in the case mentioned in the last section, S has a general intention to use the description ‘the man drinking the martini’ to pick out the unique man drinking a martini. She has a specific intention to pick out a particular man, however, regardless of whether he is drinking a martini or not. In this case, he is not--so the intentions have diverged. With this in place, we can now say: Donnellan thinks that sometimes when we use a description and our specific and general intentions diverge, the referent of the description is the object of our specific intention, rather than our general intention. Kripke disagrees, and thinks that the referent of the description is always the object of the general intention. He offers the following methodological reasons for thinking that the object picked out by our designators should always be that of our general intention. 1) ‘Considerations of economy’. We should not postulate ambiguities and senses beyond what is necessary. 2) The phenomenon Donnellan discusses is not limited to descriptions. Something very similar can happen with proper names. Suppose S sees someone on Jones’ lawn who appears to be doing something interesting. S asks, ‘What is Jones doing?’. A hearer, H responds: ‘Raking the leaves’. It may be true the the man on the lawn is raking the leaves, and this is what S wanted to know--thus, her question has been answered. However, the man on the lawn is not Jones--it is Smith. In this case, says Kripke, we would not explain the fact that S’s question has been answered by appealing to an ambiguity in the name ‘Jones’. Rather, we would explain it in another way--such as Grice’s theory of implicature. Since this is essentially the same phenomenon, it would be puzzling if we explained it differently in the case of descriptions--since Grice’s theory could explain this case as well. 3) We can expect ambiguities to be disambiguated in other languages. However, we would not expect to find the referential/attributive ambiguity disambiguated. This is a reason to think there is no ambiguity in our descriptions. For these reasons, Kripke favours the view that the semantic content of descriptions used referentially and attributively is exactly the same, and the object contributed to the truth conditions of the utterance is the satisfier of the description in all cases. Referential Descriptions and Communication 41 The facts that Donnellan points out are to explained in another way--Kripke points to Grice’s theory. The notion of specific intention accounts for Donnellan’s ‘intuition’ that something true has been said. If all that Donnellan had to motivate his view was this intuition, then these considerations would indeed tell in favour of Kripke’s view. If however, if there is a principled reason to think that the semantic content of descriptions used attributively differs from that of the same description used referentially, then Kripke’s methodological points will not have any force. It is not clear how we are supposed to follow the prescription of 1), since we do not know how many senses are ‘necessary’, nor is it clear that 3) is true of all ambiguities, especially of pragmatic ambiguities. Kripke’s point 2), however, deserves some consideration. I will return to it in section IV. First, however, we will see that there is such a principled reason for thinking that Donnellan is right. Section III Given some claims about the relation of semantic content to communciation, the claim that the semantic content of definite descriptions is the same whether they are used referentially or attributively reduces to absurdity. Suppose we accept the following principles, suggested by Richard Heck in his paper ‘The Sense of Communication’4,

4 Mind, New Series, Vol 104, No. 413, pp79-106 42 Jim Hutchinson governing what it is for a hearer, H, to understand an utterance, u, made by a speaker S:

4) S succeeds in communicating with H by way of u if and only if H understands u. 5) H understands u if and only if H knows what is said by u. I adopt the following general account of semantic content: 6) What is said by an utterance is its semantic content. These three entail that when and only when H understands the semantic content of u(the proposition u expresses), S has succeeded in communicating. Now consider Kripke’s view of descriptoins: K) Any utterance containing a definite description will have as semantic content a proposition about the object which satisfies the description, and contribute that object to the truth conditions of the utterance. Consider the following case:

C1) At a party, S spies a man she knows to be very boring drinking what appears to be a martini. S says to H, ‘The man drinking the martini is boring’. In fact, the man had only water in his martini glass. H has recently had a fascinating conversation with a man who is in fact the unique man at the party drinking a martini. Remembering this, H remarks, ‘Oh, I found him to be quite interesting!’

In C1), communication has obviously failed. This is intuitively clear, as well as being supported by a consideration of why we are interested in successful communication. We wish to communicate successfully, to understand one another, so that we can transmit beliefs, knowledge, and achieve reactions in others. When we make an utterance intending to do these things, and communication is successful, hearers are in a position to form the appropriate beliefs, etc. In case C1), H will form the wrong beliefs, take the wrong actions, and not understand the actions of S. For this reason, communication has failed here. If we accept K), the sentence uttered by S expresses a proposition about the actual man drinking the martini. In C1) H certainly seems to have grasped that proposition(the details of which depend on what we think propositions are). Referential Descriptions and Communication 43 Supposing she has, 1), 2), and 3) entail that communication has succeeded. However, as we have just seen, it has in fact failed. Hence, one of our premises is false.

If we are committed to K), we ask: can any of 1), 2), and 3) be doubted? I see no way to deny 2) and 3)--they are essentially definitions. 1) however, is the best place to object. I will consider some possible objections that a supporter of K) might make. It seems communication has failed in C1) because the speaker made a mistake. We might place stricter requirements on speakers, and replace 1) with 1*): 1*) S succeeds in communicating with H by way of u if and only if S’s specific and general intentions in uttering u coincide, and H understands u. This will not count anything as successful communciation that 1) does not, and will thus avoid counterexamples like C1). However, it is too strong. Showing us this is the value of Donnellan’s ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’--it is exactly his point. Communication can still succeed when our general and specific intentions come apart. Consider: C2) At a party, S spies a man she knows to be very boring drinking what appears to be a martini. S says to H, ‘The man drinking the martini is boring’. H sees the man with the martini glass, forms the belief that he is boring, and resolves to avoid that man. In fact, the man had only water in a martini glass. Just as clearly as communication must have failed in C1), it can succeed in C2)5. Just as what is important about communication did not obtain in C1), it can obtain in C2). Though S’s general and specific intentions have diverged, H has attained at least a belief, and perhaps knowledge, that a certain man is boring. H will take the intended action and avoid the man. 1*) is too strong a requirement, since it holds that C2 must be a case of communication failure, when there is no reason to think that it has not succeeded. A second possible modification of 1) suggests itself. This is, I believe, what Kripke, or anyone serious about using Grice’s theory to explain the case of descriptions used referentially would wish to say: S succeeds in communicating with H by way of u if and only if H accesses the proposition intended by S(a proposition about the object of S’s specific intention),

5 I say can, because of concerns arising from Heck’s paper--to ensure that communciation is successful we have to know what the semantic content grasped by the hearer is, and we have not specified yet what the content is. 44 Jim Hutchinson either by understanding u, or by performing a Gricean derivation of the intended proposition from the one expressed.

To understand the proposal, we need to say a little about what Gricean derivation is. Grice believes that there are certain maxims governing conversation, based on the very general rule, called the cooperative principle, that we should not say things which do not make sense given the conversation6. If a speaker makes an utterance which expresses a proposition that is not in accordance with these maxims, those who hear the utterance realize that something has gone wrong. In this case, hearers can, given the proposition expressed, access other propositions by a particular mode of reasoning called a ‘Gricean derivation’. The details of this procedure are not important here, but the maxims whose violations cause a hearer to begin deriving other propositions are. The relevant maxims which must be satisfied by a proposition expressed by an utterance are:

Quality: Do not say that for which you lack evidence.

Relation: Be relevant.

Manner: Be brief and orderly, avoiding ambiguity and obscurity.

Quantity: Be as informative as required by the current exchange, and not more informative. So, the Gricean apparatus explains how it is that a hearer accesses a different proposition than the one that is expressed by an utterance when and only when the hearer thinks that an utterance violates one or more of these maxims, and derives another proposition. This proposal rightly counts C1) as an unsuccessful, because the intended proposition was not the one expressed by u, and H did not derive the intended one either. Let us consider how this proposal will analyse C2), assuming K. S does have evidence that there is a man drinking a martini, and that he is boring; thus, the maxim of Quality is adhered to. Referring to the intended man makes sense given the context of the conversation; thus, Relation is adhered to. The utterance is perfectly unambiguous and brief; thus Manner is adhered to. Quantity remains. It certainly

6 see ‘Logic and Conversation’, 165-175 of The Philosophy of Language. Martinich ed, 2001. New York, Oxford University Press Referential Descriptions and Communication 45 seems that S has given the proper amount of information--just enough to identify someone in a crowded room.

The Gricean, however, can make a case that the maxim of Quantity is being violated, and that the speaker will recognize this. In this circumstance, the description is, strictly speaking, more informative than is required. When the intended referent is right in front of S and H, a simple demonstrative would do. If this is right, even though H believes that the description is true of the man in question, she still, finding that the maxim of quantity is being violated, will do a Gricean derivation of a different proposition--presumably a proposition with the semantic content of a demonstrative in place of that of the description(i.e. ‘That is boring’). Given that the S, in uttering u, intended the demonstrative proposition, and H derived it, the Gricean who holds 1**) can account for the fact that in C2), communication has succeeded, while still adhering to K). Whether this is plausible or not, there are cases of descriptions used referentially in which the object of the speaker’s specific intention does not satisfy the description, and communication succeeds, though all the maxims are satisfied, so H will have no reason to perform a Gricean derivation. Consider one final case: C3) At a party, S spies a man she knows to be very boring drinking what appears to be a martini, who promptly goes into a different room. S says to H, ‘The man drinking the martini in the next room is a bore’. Later, H enters the room, and, spying the man who appears to be drinking a martini, resolves to avoid that man. In fact, the man had only water in a martini glass. There was in fact a unique martini drinker in the room, but H did not see him. Just as in the last case, the Maxims of Quality, Manner, and Relevance are satisfied. But in this case, the maxim of Quantity is satisfied too--there is no other, simpler way for S to pick out the intended object. S is no longer in a position to use a demonstrative to refer to the man. Thus, the maxim of Quantity is adhered to, and H will have no reason to perform a Gricean derivation of a different proposition. However, just as before, communcation can be successful in this case. But, supposing K is true, the intended proposition is not the semantic content u, and no Gricean derivation of another proposition has taken place. Thus, 1** cannot count this as a case of successful communication. The only route I see open to a Gricean about referential descriptions is to claim that even here, the maxim of Quantity is being violated. Any information is too much 46 Jim Hutchinson information--what S really intends to express is a something like a singular proposition. Recognizing this, a hearer will perform a Gricean derivation of this proposition.

This would be an odd view. It would be a view in which the maxims are no longer really governing conversation--in C3) S could not, in talk, pick out the intended object except by some description. Thus, anything S says would violate the maxim of Quantity--even if the description chosen were true. This seems absurd--obviously there is nothing wrong with S’s utterance, especially not if the intended man actually did satisfy the description(and remember, H thinks he does, so finds nothing amiss with the utterance). Grice himself expresses doubt about the second part of the maxim of Quantity, ‘Do not be more informative than is required’. He says, ‘It might be said that to be overinformative is not a transgression of the Cooperative Principle but merely a waste of time.’7 At any rate, I think the view that in many cases we really intend singular propositions, and accessing that proposition is what is required for communication is ultimately unstable, largely because of considerations arising in the above mentioned paper of Richard Heck’s--but it requires a full exploration of the proposal, which I cannot go into here. Assuming this move is unacceptable, however, 1**) will not do as a replacement of 1) if we wish to maintain K). I can think of no other plausible modifications of 1) which are compatible with 2), 3), and K). In the absence of any other proposals, we should accept 1) as an account of communication, and reject K), as it leads to absurdities. Section IV

In the fact that successful communication occurs when and only when the semantic content of an utterance is grasped by the hearer, we have the missing link between Donnellan’s evidence, which is evidence of successful communication, and semantic content. Sometimes, when we use descriptions referentially, the description must contribute the object of our specific intention to the truth conditions of the utterance, and must contribute something which determines that object as semantic content. With this in place, Kripke’s first and third methodological consideration no longer need concern us. However, as stated above, his second objection suggests something interesting. The phenomeon Donnellan has noticed is not limited to descriptions. As Kripke points out, something very similar can occur with proper names. It would be very puzzling, he says, if we were to explain the analogous phenomenon in 7 Ibid, 168 the case of descriptions in an entirely different way--and he is right. I believe that the analogous case of proper names should be treated in the same way as that of referential descriptions. For the same considerations about semantic content and communication serve to show that even proper names cannot always have the same semantic content--analogous arguments to those given above would show that there is a ‘referential’ use of names as well. Just as we can communicate successfully about ‘the man drinking the martini’, even if our intended referent is not drinking a martini, we can communicate about ‘Jones’ in the distance, even if the man does not meet the criteria associated with the name ‘Jones’(the criteria to be supplied by whatever theory of names we adopt). Section V

With it established that there is a referential use of descriptions which must differ in semantic content from the attributive use, I would like to highlight, before closing, the two important questions mentioned earlier, and point in what I believe is the right direction for answering them. These are:

Q1) What relation must hold between a speaker S and an object o which permits S to use a description, ‘The F’, to refer to o whether or not o satisfies ‘The F’?

Q2) What is the semantic content of such a description?

It seems to me that Gareth Evans’ notion of a type of situation apt for producing knowledge that something is the F8 is at work when we use descriptions referentially, and thus might hold and answer to these questions. In the ‘martini’ cases discussed, it is crucial that the speaker S is in a situation which would often produce knowledge that a man is drinking a martini--namely, seeing a man drinking from a martini glass. It also seems that providing an account of the semantic content of utterances involving referential descriptoins, which must determine which object will be referent, could need this notion, or something like it, to explain how the right object is picked out each time. Of course, much more must be said about Q1) and Q2) than I can go into here. At any rate, the considerations in this paper have shown that these remaining questions must have answers, for they have shown that Donnellan was right in his explanation of how referential descriptions do what they do. 8 See ‘The Causal Theory of Names’, pp 247-259 of The Philosophy of Language. Martinich ed, 2001. New York, Oxford University Press

Reverence & Rationality: A Utilitarian Account of Belief

Sigal Samuel McGill University

Abstract:

One of the perennial issues in theistic discourse concerns the rationality, or lack thereof, of religious truth-claims and behaviors. Moreover, rationality constitutes an important problem in the philosophy of mind. This article is an exposition of the relationship of rationality to belief in general and to religious belief in particular. In it, religious belief is investigated both as a means of revising the model proposed by philosopher of mind Ruth Marcus, and – more importantly – as a means of devising a more sophisticated theory of the rationalist aspect of theistic belief. Drawing upon Wittgensteinian notions for support, this article proposes a shift away from traditional definitions, suggesting instead that rationality be reconceived in utilitarian terms. One ramification of this move is that theistic claims be deemed ‘irrational’ only insofar as they minimize the cognitive economy of the believer; any belief that maximizes assonance and efficiency must henceforth be regarded as rational. 50 Sigal Samuel One of the perennial issues in theistic discourse concerns the rationality, or lack thereof, of religious truth-claims and behaviors. Moreover, rationality constitutes an important problem in the philosophy of mind. This article is an exposition of the relationship of rationality to belief in general and to religious belief in particular. In it, religious belief is investigated both as a means of revising the model proposed by philosopher of mind Ruth Marcus, and – more importantly – as a means of devising a more sophisticated theory of the rationalist aspect of theistic belief. Drawing upon Wittgensteinian notions for support, this article proposes a shift away from traditional definitions, suggesting instead that rationality be reconceived in utilitarian terms. One ramification of this move is that theistic claims be deemed ‘irrational’ only insofar as they minimize the cognitive economy of the believer; any belief that maximizes assonance and efficiency must henceforth be regarded as rational. In a 1990 paper entitled “Some Revisionary Proposals About Belief and Believing”1, philosopher Ruth Marcus puts forth an account of belief with the hope of resolving some of the difficulties plaguing various theories on the topic. Paramount among her goals are to present an account that will be non-linguistic, dispositional, and capable of providing a more adequate and natural description of rationality. Marcus makes it clear that she is not dealing here with any and all types of belief. She is concerned only with beliefs that are “making an historical claim about the actual world”, not with beliefs “about fiction or myth or the like”2. Hence, it seems that Marcus is deliberately excluding the genre of religious belief, among other things, from the purview of her paper. There are some obvious reasons for doing so. If one views the content of religious belief as “fiction or myth or the like”, then an account which wishes to speak to such beliefs would be equally obligated to deal with beliefs, say, about Cinderella’s godmother. Marcus has her eye on a different ball. Despite the obvious reasons for Marcus’ division, one wonders whether something important might not be lost to an account of belief in general by neglecting to include a discussion of religious belief in particular. In fact, an investigation into the special nature of theistic convictions – a tremendous line of inquiry in its own right – may prove to be an excellent window onto the nature of other (secular) types of belief. It is precisely this genre which I should like to examine in this essay. Thus, in what follows I will be interested in the question whether it is possible, in dealing with religious belief, to meet the philosophical aims on Marcus’ agenda without appealing to her type of account. To this end I will turn to the writings of Wittgenstein (whose views Marcus makes use of in her paper, but to different effect) and attempt to coax from his philosophy of religion a good example of this prospect. Finally, I will attempt Reverence & Rationality: A Utilitarian Account of Belief 51 to draw some broader conclusions from this discussion of religious belief as to what can be said about belief in general, and as to the consequences of such a discussion for certain types of arguments made against the claims of theism. Marcus On Rationality

Though Marcus’ paper is replete with varying concerns, the main crux of her argument seems to centre on the problem of rationality and belief. Thus, in order to motivate a discussion of rationality and religious belief, it is important to examine both why she takes issue with the ‘mainstream’ view, and what might be offered in its place. Marcus’ unease with the traditional view, whereby irrationality is typically defined by belief in contradiction, is that it creates what seem like unnatural distinctions. Her own case of Sally (who believes that St. Jean Perse is and is not a poet)3, or Kripke’s case of Pierre (who believes that London is beautiful and ugly), illustrates the difficulty well: in both cases, the believer has come to believe P&~P, and yet no one would think to label such a person irrational, since it is only through a lack of information that these beliefs have been adopted. According to the traditional view, however, both hold contradictory beliefs and have therefore committed the crime of irrationality. Marcus’ solution to this puzzle is to limit the power of contradiction in her account of rationality and belief. Instead of simply granting that Sally believes a contradiction, Marcus explains that what Sally assents to is (unbeknownst to her) an impossible state of affairs. The result of such an explanation is that Sally remains worthy of being regarded as a fully rational agent. An account such as this, however, seems problematic. One has the impression that Marcus is somewhat artificially manipulating how we are to view what is essentially a very simple story. Why is it necessary to appeal to such an unintuitive rephrasing of the situation? Is it not possible to admit that Sally does indeed believe a contradiction, while still safeguarding her rational status? Four Types Of Contradiction In Religious Belief What I would like to point out is that in the realm of religion, every believer is akin to Marcus’ Sally, in that each one unwittingly assents to contradictions. Yet, one would not be likely to call most religious believers ‘irrational’. After all, such believers assent to science’s basic claims about the way the physical world works. Some of them are excellent mathematicians, perfect logicians, and renowned scientists. The fact that they believe contradictions does not tarnish their reputations as rational agents in the 52 Sigal Samuel popular mind, and (as in the case of Sally) most people feel no impulse to doubt this assessment. How is this so?

To answer this question, one must first examine in what sense contradiction may be viewed as a fundamental aspect of theistic belief. I wish to illustrate this from four different angles. The Nature of Religious Language

The first sense in which one might argue that contradiction is inherent to religious belief has to do with religious language. According to Wittgenstein, all ethical and religious discourse is rooted in metaphor: “Thus in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes. But a simile must be a simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it. Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the simile and state the facts which stand behind it, we find that there are no such facts. And so, what at first appeared to be a simile now seems to be mere nonsense.”4

All metaphors work precisely because we do not believe what they speak about, but what they speak to. This is especially salient in religious discourse, wherein the fundamental axiom is that this is a domain in which it is impossible to speak about, since by definition God defies definition. Thus any attempt to speak about when using religious language results in Wittgensteinian ‘nonsense’. But how does a metaphor speak to a reality? Arguably, the function of the metaphor is nothing other than the upholding of terms which, through their contradiction, serve as a prism that speaks to (i.e. makes apprehensible) a deeper reality. Thus, a believer who is able to properly grasp religious metaphor should be able to believe both of the following claims:

1) The Lord redeemed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt with a strong hand and a mighty arm. 2) The Lord is incorporeal. This type of anthropomorphic metaphor could not be more common in religious discourse, yet it in some important sense, it is rooted in contradiction. Of course, no one would dream of labeling the users of such metaphor ‘irrational’. Why not? The Reverence & Rationality: A Utilitarian Account of Belief 53 answer is that it is understood that the metaphor is being used to speak to something greater than the words or imagery it employs. The metaphor is designed not to impart knowledge, but to produce an effect. As is arguably the case with all poetic devices and all art, the desired effect is a pointing away from the two-dimensional world of truth/falsity and validity/invalidity, and a pointing toward a transcendence, a third dimension of deeper and softer truth5. The Relevance of Historical Truth The second sense in which one might argue that contradiction is a fundamental feature of religious belief has to do with the relevance of historical truth to religious belief. Wittgenstein has the following to say on the subject: “Queer as it sounds: The historical accounts in the Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing by this: not, however, because it concerns ‘universal truths of reason’! Rather, because historical proof (the historical proof-game) is irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e. lovingly). That is the certainty characterizing this particular acceptance-as-true, not something else.”6

As Wittgenstein points out, then, historical truth is irrelevant to religious belief, precisely because this belief is seized ‘lovingly’. That is, this type of belief is adopted not as we adopt regular beliefs, but in a different way, on a different plain; the success of belief on this plain is thus measured by different criteria, and is not susceptible to categorizations such as ‘invalid’, ‘contradictory’ and so forth. It is worth noting why, according to Wittgenstein, religious beliefs are evaluated on this other plain (‘lovingly’). “It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It’s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation.”7

What is interesting to observe here is that Wittgenstein has provided a view of belief not unlike what Marcus aims for: a dispositional account, whereby “x believes that S just in case […] x is disposed to act as if S, that actual or non-actual state of affairs, obtains”8. Religious belief is essentially a way of living. Its true purpose is simply to inform one’s behavior, to style and shape the way one interacts with one’s world. A believer 54 Sigal Samuel is meant to act as if S (here, the tenets of one’s theology) obtains – but what counts is the action, the behavior. Accordingly, the success of a religious belief is a measure of its impact on one’s lived faith. For our purposes, however, what is important to note is that historical truth is irrelevant to religious belief, and that this fact opens the doors to contradiction. For example, a religious believer may have no trouble believing both of the following: 1) The Lord redeemed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt with a strong hand and a mighty arm. 2) Historical evidence proves that the Israelites never were slaves in Egypt. Of course, most religious believers, not wishing to view themselves as irrational, take pains to believe nothing of the sort. This discomfort, however, is simply a result of confusion over the ‘grammar’ of the religious language game, Wittgenstein would say. In truth, both of the above claims, albeit contradictory, are perfectly compatible precisely because of the plain on which they are properly adopted – namely, the loving one. The Relevance of Scientific Truth

There is another sense in which contradiction is linked with religious belief, which, though it is closely connected with the relevance of historical truth, is perhaps worth discussing in its own right. It concerns the relevance of scientific truth and its bearing on the nature of magico-religious beliefs and rituals. The debate around the nature of ritual centres upon the intellectualist anthropology of the Victorian period and its violent rejection by the expressivist interpretation of religious belief and practice. While the intellectualist camp asserts that religious and magical rituals were conceived as attempts to influence the course of natural events, the expressivist camp asserts that ritual is a way of expressing feelings and attitudes. Wittgenstein’s view lies closer to that of the latter camp. He writes:

“Burning in effigy. Kissing the portrait of a loved one. This is obviously not based on a belief that it will have a definite effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at some satisfaction and it achieves it. Reverence & Rationality: A Utilitarian Account of Belief 55 Or rather, it does not aim at anything; we act in this way and then feel satisfied.”9

In another important passage, Wittgenstein considers rain-making ceremonies:

“I read, amongst many similar examples, of a rain-king in Africa to whom the people appeal for rain when the rainy season comes. But surely this means that they do not actually think he can make rain, otherwise they would do it in the dry periods in which the land is a ‘parched and arid desert’.”10

In both of these passages, Wittgenstein emphasizes his view that ritualistic actions are not based on a belief in their power to achieve empirical ends. Shocked by the intellectualist insistence on depicting magico-religious beliefs as mistaken hypotheses, and portraying magic and religion as mistaken science, Wittgenstein attempts to show that religious belief, insofar as it is expressive rather than descriptive, is not susceptible to this type of ‘mistake’. The upshot of this view is that scientific truth is irrelevant to religious belief. So-called contradictions between the claims of modern science (e.g. that rain-ceremonies cannot produce rain) and the ‘claims’ or beliefs behind religious practice are dissolved, just because religious practice does not rest on beliefs of this sort. Before leaving this topic, it is worth taking a moment to notice the distinctly non- linguistic thrust of Wittgenstein’s view. Religious practice “does not aim at anything; we act in this way and then feel satisfied”. A ritual is an ‘instinct-action’, a spontaneous deed which is not the product of deliberation or ratiocination; this suggests that it is “pre-linguistic: that a language game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought”11. As Clack points out12, Wittgenstein does not limit the scope of this view to religious belief; rather, it is part of his overall interest in emphasizing the human believer’s primitive, instinct-based, non-linguistic nature. Intellectual and Emotional Theologies The fourth sense in which contradiction is intimately bound up with religious belief has to do with what for many intellectually self-aware believers can be a psychologically agonizing problem: the yawning discrepancy between the ‘theology of the heart’ and the ‘theology of the mind’. Those who move in religious circles are painfully aware of the number of people who grapple with this divide, struggling to reconcile the emotional and intellectual parts within them. I am thinking here of those religious 56 Sigal Samuel believers who have trouble believing, for example, in metaphysical truth-claims, but who emotionally find themselves in need of the God (and God-talk) on which they were reared. Often what happens in such cases is that the believer comes to believe in a self-contradictory manner. It may be, for example, that when she is thinking philosophically, she denies the possibility of revelation, or of resurrection, or even of God, in spite of the fact that when she prays, she prays to God whole-heartedly. What is one to say in such a case? Is the believer irrational, possibly even delusional? If we are tempted to answer ‘Yes!’ here, we might do well to examine an exchange between Wittgenstein and Turing which Marcus herself quotes in her paper: Turing: What puzzles one is that one usually uses a contradiction as a criterion for having done something wrong… Wittgenstein: Yes – and more: nothing has been done wrong…where will the harm come? Turing: The real harm will not come unless there is an application in which a bridge may fall down or something of that sort. Wittgenstein: …But nothing need go wrong, and if something does go wrong – if the bridge breaks down – then your mistake was of a kind of using a wrong natural law.13 The basic assumption about believing contradictions is that they will cause one to run into problems, or prevent one from achieving one’s goals. However, as Wittgenstein remarks in this passage, one does not always pay a price for a believed contradiction. This might be applied to the case of the split-thinking religious believer described above. What is wrong with what she is doing? After all, ‘where will the harm come’? Such a believer’s theology exists on two separate plains: the intellectual and the emotional. They speak two separate languages (colloquially, ‘the language of the heart’ and ‘the language of the mind’). Therefore, though they may contradict one another, they cannot dispute one with another. What is interesting in this case is that for this type of religious believer, self-contradictory belief may be not only harmless, but actually helpful. Indeed, insofar as it allows the believer to achieve her goals, it may be the most rational choice. By permitting herself this type of Orwellian doublethink or ‘religious schizophrenia’, such a believer is economically ensuring the fulfillment of her various intellectual, emotional and religious needs. Far from paying Reverence & Rationality: A Utilitarian Account of Belief 57 a price, such an adept playerof the religious language game stands to gain much from believing contradictions. Evaluating Significance And Generalizability What can be learned from the four cases presented above? One might respond by drawing the conclusion that believing contradictions is not a sign of irrationality. However, the natural question is whether one can properly generalize from these findings about religious belief to belief in general. Indeed, there is good reason to suppose that the category of religious belief may be sui generis. The goal of religious thinking may be to project one’s consciousness into a transcendent realm-above- reason, but this is certainly not the aim of thinking in regular situations. In these situations, it is likely that believing contradictions will cause harm by impeding rational deliberation, thereby preventing one from achieving one’s goals. At this point I invite the reader to accompany me on a flight of fancy. Let us imagine that Marcus’ Sally and Kripke’s Pierre arrange to meet for lunch one day. Each one, having become aware by now of having held contradictory beliefs, relates his or her experience to the other. What tone is most likely to accompany such a conversation? Undoubtedly, they are much more likely to laugh over the incidents than to become disturbed or angry because of them. The fact that Sally and Pierre can laugh about their respective moments of ‘irrationality’ should be enough to demonstrate that the term ‘irrationality’ is not an appropriate one to use here. As noted above, at the core of what we believe about ‘real’ irrationality is that irrational people will incur losses as a result; Sally and Pierre have incurred no losses, and are therefore not really irrational. However, it is not that they are saved from irrationality because they merely assent to an impossible state of affairs, as Marcus would have it. Rather, the simplest explanation is the correct the one: they do indeed believe contradictions, but since these contradictions cause no harm, practically speaking they are irrelevant, and those who espouse them are therefore not irrational. Some skeptical readers, I imagine, may still be squirming in their seats, pestered by the niggling intuition that this type of account is, indeed, only applicable to religious belief, but not, say, to some quotidian domain thereof. Again, I invite such readers to recall that the common definition of irrationality requires the incurring of loss. The above-mentioned scenario of Sally and Pierre is only one of many situations in which this criterion does not obtain. It is hardly difficult to conceive of examples of believing in the quotidian domain where people act ‘irrationally’ (say, by exhibiting contradictory beliefs) without paying any sort of pragmatic price. Indeed, everyday life 58 Sigal Samuel is rife with examples of how contradictory beliefs may be held not only innocuously, but to good result. A simple example of this may be found in psychological studies of belief in ‘good luck’ and lucky charms. One such study14 considers baseball players who try to replicate the ‘good luck’ they had in previous games by wriggling their legs, or their bats, or whatever the case may be, a certain way before stepping up to the plate. Now, the majority of these baseball players do not believe that these movements will actually ensure a better performance; yet they act as if they did. Do such players pay a price for their ‘irrational’ behavior? No; on the contrary, they are aided psychologically by the encouragement afforded them by this ‘lucky’ act. Examples of this sort serve to demonstrate the weakness of the traditional conception of rationality, which is inept when it comes to explaining the pragmatically neutral or positive effects of irrational behavior.

Thus, it is not only in the realm of religion that contradictory beliefs may be held without adverse effects. Accordingly, I think it sensible to propose an account on which beliefs of all types be evaluated not on the level of surface formal properties, but rather on the functional or utilitarian level. Indeed, to a large extent this is how we assess beliefs. The cases of formally contradictory but pragmatically impeccable religious beliefs are proof of this; the fact that we generally do not take issue with such beliefs reveals our tendency to evaluate belief on a utilitarian scale. A good (i.e. rational) belief, then, is nothing more than a useful mental tool – or, in the Buddhist idiom, a raft whose purpose is to allow for navigation across the river and which may be abandoned once this purpose has been met15. On this view, the more a belief maximizes cognitive assonance and economy, the better it is; the more it minimizes these effects, the poorer it is. Therefore, in both the religious and secular realms, a belief should be deemed irrational only insofar as it produces unwanted results. This is not the case with Sally and Pierre, and it is certainly not the case with religious believers, many of whom are not only unharmed but are actually helped by their contradictory beliefs. A Caveat Concerning Truth And Falsity Having laid out my proposal for a utilitarian account that distinguishes between rational and irrational beliefs on the basis of their pragmatic effects, I would like to make clear what it is that I am not arguing. I am not arguing that we should eliminate the distinction between true and false beliefs. I see no reason to deny that beliefs may be either true or false; indeed, one of my main aims in this essay is to avoid such unintuitive formulations. Rather, what I wish to combat is the notion that the truth Reverence & Rationality: A Utilitarian Account of Belief 59 or falsity of a belief (or set of beliefs) is the ultimate standard by which the rational integrity of the believer ought to be judged. Beliefs may be true or false, but a false belief is not necessarily a harbinger of irrationality. The term ‘irrational’ I reserve for beliefs that are harmful to the believer, again based on the assumption that irrationality means incurring losses. That the falsity of a belief does not in itself signify irrationality, then, is evinced by the fact that oftentimes false beliefs may be held innocuously. For example, superstitious beliefs (e.g. opening an umbrella indoors will bear negative consequences) generally do not harm the believer. Furthermore, false beliefs may be held to excellent result. For a powerful example of this, one need look no further than the placebo effect, where a false belief in a pill’s curative capabilities actually produces health. It is interesting to note, too, that the advantages of falsely held beliefs are apparent even on the most basic physiological level: as cognitive psychology reveals, the human perceptual system is designed to ‘lie’ to us on a regular basis, leading us to believe that we see or hear certain things which in actuality we do not, for the sake of cognitive economy or self-preservation16. The upshot of these instances is that one may indeed hold false beliefs, but as these are just as apt to prove helpful as detrimental, a one-to-one mapping of falsity onto irrationality is unjustified. Concluding Remarks What I have attempted to do in this essay is to show that one can develop a sophisticated theory of the affiliation between rationality and belief, and can thus achieve some of the chief aims on Marcus’ agenda, without resorting to her type of belief-account. Using Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion as an illustration of this feat with regard to religious belief, I have endeavored to explain that one can give a non-linguistic, dispositional account of belief that provides a solid understanding of rationality without introducing unnecessarily convoluted formulations. The advantages of such an account are thus threefold: 1) The account is more comprehensive in that it takes into consideration not only secular belief, but religious belief as well, thereby affirming a reality about how we naturally tend to assess beliefs (i.e. on the scale of utility). 2) The account affirms our instinct that, in cases such as Sally’s and Pierre’s, a contradiction is in fact believed. 3) The account avoids complex formulations and the difficulties that arise from them. Furthermore, this essay has endeavored to shed new light on one of the most vital and oft-debated aspects of theistic belief – namely, its rational status. According to 60 Sigal Samuel the utilitarian parameters for the definition of rationality outlined above, arguments which inveigh against the central claims of theism by critiquing religion’s so-called irrationality should henceforth be assessed rather more harshly than many have been wont to do in the past. It is clear that the meanings and broader significances of the theistic discourse lie well outside the purview of such criticisms, which, in the final analysis, appear to be more a reflection of the mistaken ‘grammar’ of their representatives’ definitions than of any inherent fault in the theistic discourse itself. Endnotes

1) Ruth Barcan Marcus, “Some Revisionary Proposals About Belief and Believing,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (1990): 133-153. 2) Ibid., 139. 3) For a full account of this case the reader is referred to Marcus. Ibid., 147. 4) Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” in The Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 3-12. 5) One is reminded of Picasso’s apt aphorism: “Art is a lie through which we perceive the truth.” 6) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G.H. von Wright, trans. P. Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990; revised edition, 1998), 32. 7) Ibid., 64. 8) Marcus, 140. 9) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, ed. R. Rhees (Doncaster: Brynmill Press, 1979), 4. 10) Ibid., 12. 11) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 541. 12) Brian R. Clack, “Wittgenstein and Magic,” in Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Religion, ed. R.L. Arrington and M. Addis (London: Routledge, 2001), 26. 13) See Marcus, 142. Reverence & Rationality: A Utilitarian Account of Belief 61 14) Jeremy M. Burger and Amy L. Lynn, “Superstitious Behavior Among American and Japanese Professional Baseball Players”, Basic and Applied Social Psychology 27 (2005): 71-76. 15) See Nanamoli, Bhikkhu and Bodhi, Bhikkhu, trans. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995. 228-229 16) For instances of this phenomenon, the reader is referred to Philip G. Zimbardo and Richard J. Gerrig, “Perception,” in Foundations of Cognitive Psychology, ed. Daniel J. Levitin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 133-188.

The Aftermath of Moral Realism

Jordan Jolly University of Texas at Austin

Abstract: In “The Aftermath of Moral Realism”, I try to argue for the existence of a supernatural moral authority - namely, “God” - as a direct consequence of accepting moral realism as fact. Then, I attempt to draw further conclusions from the truth of the existence of God that affect the theory of ethical intuitionism. I maintain that the depravity of mankind is objectively true, and that moral intuition is rendered subjective as a result of this. I conclude with this statement - that “we do not gain moral knowledge by way of moral intuition, but perhaps we gain access to it.” 64 Jordan Jolly In developing the ethical theory of intuitionism, we begin by laying out the presuppositions. In the process of laying out these presuppositions, there is the thesis of “moral realism” typically discussed as a theory which has been generally accepted as true by most intuitionist philosophers. This theory basically states that there exist mind-independent moral facts. My project is to demonstrate that there are further ideas implicit in the theory of moral realism that, in our accepting or rejecting them, drastically affect our development of the rest of the theory of intuitionism, especially in the realm of applied ethics. Ultimately, my postulation is that there are certain consequences of moral realism that usher us into the realm of theology, and that various theological conclusions will reveal holes in the intuitionist argument in the realm of applied ethics, making intuitionism by itself a dubious ethical theory. In this paper I will argue that the truth of moral realism entails the existence of a supernatural moral authority, and argue for the ensuing inclusion of theology in the discussion of ethical intuitionism. I will also discuss further how exactly theological conclusions affect the development and validity of the ethical theory of intuitionism. Central to the view of moral realism is that moral propositions (e.g. “Raping your mother and killing your father is wrong”) are statements of fact, just as the statement “two plus two equals four” or “the chemical composition of water is H20” is fact. Crucial to our understanding of the argument for moral realism is the epistemological view called “foundationalism”, which states that there must be some set of epistemologically basic propositions, lest justifications of beliefs build and build onto each other into infinite regress. Classic foundationalism posits that there are irreducible facts about reality - facts that are entirely self-evident and thus completely unwanting of justification. In moral realism, foundationalist thought is applied to moral principles. Statements such as “injustice is wrong” are thought to be self-evidently true. In response to this simple assertion, an anti-realist might respond that moral realists beg the question of the truth of moral statements, since they simply assert that it is obviously true. However, moral realists would also claim that moral claims such as “injustice is wrong” or “kindness is good” are more obviously true than any premise of any possible skeptical argument. As our purpose is to explore the implications of accepting moral realism rather than defending moral realism itself, we will say little more than the aforementioned ideas that constitute the views of moral realism. Basically, if one can admit to there being moral properties that are just as real as mathematical properties, one can call him or herself a moral realist. From here on out, we will assume the truth of moral realism. Now, to the person who has recently made a decision to become a moral realist, this is a giant step - in my opinion the most significant step to take in the study The Aftermath of Moral Realism 65 of ethics. The reason why I should place such emphasis on the magnitude of the acceptance of moral realism is because of the grand implications of and colossal conclusions to be drawn from the idea that there exist mind-independent, objective moral truths - conclusions that will radically alter the development of any ethical theory with moral realism as its presupposition. Because of our adherence to moral realism, it behooves us to inquire into the nature of moral truth. For instance, on the source of morality - Where do moral truths come from? How do we know they are true? These questions and more will be answered as we delve into what must be true about the nature of morality. Firstly, humans discovered good and bad - we did not create it. We, as humans, have found ourselves with self-evident moral principles such as the goodness of justice, and the evil of suffering and pain. Following from the foundations of moral realism, it follows that injustice is to bad as 2+2 is to 4. There are moral axioms that humans can neither create nor change. In fact, it is impossible for a human, animal, deity or any being capable of action to make something good that is evil; to make 2+2 = 7; to make rape a righteous action. Such axioms are inseparable from the nature of existence, and could not be created or altered (one might even define such axioms as being “eternal”). This view, that humans discovered good and bad, flies directly contrary to the views of various existential philosophers. For instance, Jean-Paul Sartre maintains that there are no objective moral guidelines in life; that morals are created by individuals, just as artists create works of art without any aesthetic rules or guidelines. Of course, Sartre then fails to account for Thomas Kinkade - an artist who makes bad art. One look at a Kinkade painting and one will see plainly that there must somehow be a standard for aesthetic beauty. There is good art and there is bad art, and thus the conclusion that follows from Sartre’s own analogy ultimately leads to the downfall of his philosophy. People can certainly lead better lives than others (i.e. the life of a caring mother is better than the life of a child rapist), just as artists can certainly make better works of art than other artists. There remains then an inescapable, universal, and timeless standard of good and bad (in both ethics and aesthetics) that, in its traversing of geography, culture, and time, leads us to believe that humans contriving moral facts such as “justice good, rape bad” is most improbable. And so, if we did not create it, where did morality come from? Remember, in trying to answer this question, we are assuming that there is a “moral intuition” by which we can perceive moral truth, and that moral properties are real properties in the real 66 Jordan Jolly world. If you tend to hold to a naturalistic ontology, you might attribute the “sense” by which we are perceiving moral properties to evolution, genes, or cultural memes. But this is most odd, because by way of this explanation, the naturalist’s category of moral properties inevitably reduces to mere chemical reactions, by way of which they seem to lose any claim to the term “moral”. Despite this fact, the naturalist will still maintain that some purely physical properties produced by chemical reactions and evolution are indeed mind-independent moral properties representative of reality. Even if this dubious claim is true, that these “moral properties” would exercise some kind of physical force which would be required for a “moral sense” to evolve in humans seems even more unlikely. It seems then that a naturalistic ontology states that we evolved into a way of thinking, and thus could not account for moral properties being real, mind-independent properties, and could not hold up as the most probable explanation for the nature of real morality. It must also be considered that many philosophers are simply not bothered by the thought “where do moral truths come from”, but consider moral truths to be “brute facts”. These philosophers, for instance, would accept “2+2=4” as necessary truth, and would not think it reasonable to look for further truth from whence this truth originates. The same, these philosophers would say, should be said for moral truths. However, if it is true that moral truths are not necessary truths, but contingent truths, then they still want explanation. And I maintain that moral truths are indeed contingent. They are contingent on the existence of humans. Two plus two would equal four with or without the human race existing on planet Earth. However, moral truths would not. Would we say that it is wrong for a fish to eat another fish? No. Yet we would say that it is wrong for a human to eat another human. Thus, moral truths are contingent on whether or not humans exist, and thus the inquiries into the nature and source of moral truths remain valid. From here there are a few different options to lean towards, but it seems that any movement from this place will lead us to the conclusion that morality is of a non-natural source. However, many philosophers (i.e. intuitionist philosophers G.E. Moore, W.D. Ross) will make a distinction between what is “non-natural” and what is “supernatural”. According to an article called “Moral Epistemology” by Richmond Campbell in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, those that believe that moral knowledge has its basis in the “non-natural” aspects of the world maintain that “Moral reality, so conceived, is posited as sui generis, reducible to neither the natural nor the supernatural.” Sui generis is a Neo-Latin expression, literally meaning of its own kind/genus, or unique in its characteristics. Little else than this is said about the actual source of morality, other than that it must be “sui generis” and that it is non- The Aftermath of Moral Realism 67 natural, but not supernatural. What the non-naturalist philosopher intends to say by this is that although morality is non-natural, it is in no way related to or based in a supernatural deity of any sort. It must be said that I agree with the non-naturalists’ philosophy on the nature of morality up to the point where the possibility of a deity or supernatural moral authority is excluded from realm of non-nature. (Note: there is a bit of a semantic issue to be discussed here before moving on - in my opinion, I don’t think it is appropriate or reasonable to distinguish between what is non-natural and what is supernatural. I think they mean the the exact same thing.) In any case, the definition of “supernatural” in this paper will be “that which is non-natural”. Still, the view of the “non-naturalist” remains clear: morality is not of natural nature, and also it is not related to a deity of any sort. The “non-naturalist” disagrees with morality based in a deity primarily for the following reasons: 1. God probably doesn’t even exist anyways - if it were demonstrated that God didn’t exist, right would still be right and wrong would still be wrong. 2. Even if he did exist, it’s impossible to interpret the commandments of God as moral without first having moral knowledge (this problem arises from something called the Euthyphro Dilemma - will be discussed later). I maintain however that the existence of a supernatural moral authority (e.g. God) can be argued using conclusions drawn from what we have already established as true about moral reality. Further, I believe that the objections given by non-naturalists about the Euthyphro Dilemma can be responded to such that the argument that God is the source of moral truth is neither inconsistent nor circular. In approaching the question of the existence of God, it is important to establish which presuppositions we are permitted to have in order to come at the argument in an unbiased manner. First of all, we have already ruled out the possibility of morality being a natural, physical trait evolved in humans over time. We have also admitted to the high probability of morality being of a non-natural source. It is important for us now to clear out any presumptions we might have about the likelihood or unlikelihood of the existence of God. We should come at the question with as little outside presuppositions on the subject of the existence of God as possible. Now, it must be said that God, being supernatural, is inevitably included the realm of non-nature, even as defined by the non-naturalist opinion. Therefore, God is at the very least a plausible source of morality, given what we have already established - that morality is non-natural. The fact that we have actually admitted to there being something in existence outside of what is natural should be taken careful note of. We must remember that this presupposition is crucial in our attempts to assess the probabilities of what is true about the source of morality. Any future argument against deity-based morality because of the fact that it seems like magic, or it seems physically impossible, is hereby invalid because we have already admitted to things 68 Jordan Jolly in existence to which the laws of physics and nature do not apply. Going along this same line of thought, for instance, is the especially frustrating case of a theist who, just after admitting to the existence of a supernatural deity who is not subject to the laws of physics, denies any possibility of Jesus Christ doing miracles because “that’s magic and magic isn’t real”. To me, this seems blatantly illogical and stems from a lack of realization of the implications of one’s philosophical presuppositions. This kind of thinking is prominent among Deists - who believe that God created the world, but does not intervene in it. The belief that God would create the world but couldn’t or wouldn’t intervene in it grows out of a larger reformation of beliefs and ideals (a.k.a. the Enlightenment) that has molded what is now the common conception of the laws of the universe - the conception being that scientific laws are absolutely universal, exceptionless, and unvarying. The fear of deists and of your typical academic is that God’s intervention would undermine this concept. The fear, I believe, is irrational, and the widely accepted concept of scientific law as invariant is probably a mirage. We must remember that we have admitted to the existence of the non-natural, and therefore must tread carefully as we consider what is most probably the source of morality. Also, we must accept that there is a source of morality. We established earlier that we discovered morality, we did not create it, and we certainly did not evolve into it. Therefore, it must come from somewhere. That is the question we are faced with - what is the source of morality? The source of morality, it should be said, is also inevitably the authority of morality. This is an important transition to make because it forces us to realize the implications of there being a source of morality outside of ourselves - the implications being that wherever/whoever absolute morality comes from has absolute authority in “determining” what that morality is. Because we have already determined that there must be a source of morality, we can in turn say that there must be a moral authority. So the question now becomes - what or who is most probably the non-natural moral authority? Answering this question is essentially a game of probabilities, given that there are a certain number of viable answers to choose from, and given that the answer “it is impossible to know” is not an acceptable one. The options as to what stance one would take on this question are limited. To weigh our options, we must consider things such as direct perception, history, and testimony. Incidentally, many religions attempt to provide an answer to this question, and despite whatever biases we might carry against religion, we must consider these religions as plausible answers to the necessary question of moral authority. Indeed, in exploring the history of world religions, we find that some trace back as far as the study of history can take us. We The Aftermath of Moral Realism 69 find that the question of moral authority has been at the core of the heart of inquiry of mankind for as long as we know that man has existed. Thus, the study of religion is a perfectly valid pursuit of inquiry into the question of moral authority, mostly because it is the only option we have for going about such an inquiry. This pursuit should be made with goals of testing religions for historical validity, and also with goals of testing the theology of religions with what we know to be true about morality given that that knowledge is correct (for example - an ancient pagan religion that promoted cannibalism is most likely not the source of moral authority). In sum, the most important conclusion reached so far for the purposes of my paper is that there must be a non-natural moral authority given the truth of moral realism, and that that moral authority somehow “determines” what morality is. We will now proceed to defend the consistency and validity of the existence of a moral authority.

The objection that follows from the above conclusion relates to the alleged inconsistency implicit in the view that a moral authority, namely God, would “determine” what morality is. In order to respond to this objection, it is important to clarify what we mean when we say that God “determines” what morality is and isn’t. But first, let us expound upon the nature of the aforementioned objection. The objection arises from a philosophical and theological problem called the Euthyphro Dilemma, posed in Plato’s Euthyphro. In this dialogue, Socrates famously asks a man called Euthyphro whether the gods love the pious because they are good, or whether the pious are good because the gods love them. In the context of our paper, it makes more sense to put Socrates question in the following form: are things good because God has commanded them, or does God command things because they are good? An objector to the existence of a non-natural moral authority would bring up this dilemma because there appears to be horns, or stings involved with accepting either side of the Euthyphro Dilemma. For instance, if one were to accept the first horn of the dilemma (that things are good because God commands them), it entails that morality becomes completely arbitrary - that morality is based “merely upon God’s whim” (Campbell - “Moral Epistemology”). This implies that God could feasibly decide one day to command that rape and injustice be the highest goods - and so they would be, just as arbitrarily “good” as we would consider justice and honesty to be good things. Of course, this is most unreasonable given that, via our a priori moral intuition (i.e. our conscience - we will address this topic in greater depth later on), we learn certain morals to be as true and unchangeable as mathematical axioms. Recall that earlier we addressed the impossibility of “a human, animal, deity, or any being capable of action to make something good that is evil; to make 2+2 = 7; to make rape an honorable action - such axioms being inseparable from the nature of 70 Jordan Jolly existence, and unable to be created or altered” in our discussion of the necessary implications of moral realism. Also, the possibility of God commanding something evil is unacceptable “...for believers who regard God as supremely moral” (Campbell - “Moral Epistemology”). Thus, we must rule out the acceptance of such an idea that what is good is based merely upon God’s whim. In order for our view of moral authority to remain consistent then, it must be true that even God himself is confined to what we know to be good in terms of morality. This brings us to the second horn of the Euthyphro dilemma - that God commands things because they are good. The apparent sting to accepting this horn is that it implies that God really isn’t the highest authority - that God doesn’t really “determine” what morality is. God is reduced to a communicator of what is good and what is bad. And so, it appears that there are consequences implicit in accepting either horn of the Euthyphro dilemma that make dubious that claim that “a moral authority, namely God, would ‘determine’ what morality is”. What do we do then? I would insist on punting to the second horn of the dilemma, as described above, while making certain clarifications about the nature of God and about what is meant by God’s “determining” morality that should suffice to make consistent a view of deity-based, non-natural moral law. While things are not good merely because God commands them (as with the first horn), God does determine what is good by virtue of his unalterable character. To respond to the objection that accepting horn 2 dilemma leads to circular reasoning, one need only remember that we’ve already determined that there is necessarily some sort of moral authority (God), and to make the qualification that God’s very nature is itself moral goodness. Thus, God “determines” morality not necessarily by the standards that He commands, but by the standards which comprise His very being. God determines what morality is by virtue of His being the source of moral goodness. The source of evil is another issue. I am partial to the view of evil which sees it as a negation - a failure of someone or some situation to be what it was intended to be, not requiring creation, but only that those things which are created having the capacity to change what they were supposed to be, which itself may be part of what they were supposed to be - that is, having the ability to change, not the changing itself. This is compatible with the classic “free-will” defense of the existence of evil. Moving down the line of objections to this developing philosophy, the proceeding objection is roughly as follows: If God equals moral goodness, and God commands things that are compatible with his nature, what about the book of Joshua? God seems to command things there that are, at least intuitively, not good (e.g. killing women and children). A possible response to this objection goes along with Kierkegaard’s classic “teleological suspension of the ethical” - that God can temporarily suspend The Aftermath of Moral Realism 71 ethics for the sake of accomplishing a higher purpose. But then, a further objection to this response would be: God’s suspending the ethical sounds a lot like Divine Command Theory, which brings us back to Horn 1 of the Euthyphro Dilemma, which we have already thrown out. So, how do we respond to this objection? First, it is important to mention that this solid objection should really sting the Judeo-Christian intuitionist/moral realist who has just professed adherence to the 2nd Horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma. The only response one Christian intuitionist moral realist can make at this point is to, rather than suspend the ethical on behalf of God as did Kierkegaard, suspend the ethical intuition we apparently have in regards to the violence commanded by God in the book of Joshua. It is permissible to do this for the following reasons: My ethical intuition stems from an intuition that killing innocent people is wrong. When I think of killing women and children, I immediately equate such actions with killing innocent people. However, I can’t be certain that the women and children killed in Jericho were indeed innocent. Indeed, according to Judeo- Christian belief, no human is innocent, yet it remains that some humans allegedly go to heaven and some don’t (narrow is the way). Given the existence of the free-will of a mankind under the dominion of a God who ordains things to happen - judging the actions of an eternal God in relation to humans from a temporal human perspective seems difficult, if not useless. It must be understood that an all-powerful, all-knowing God may have faculties of intuition that I do not have. When it comes to God’s actions that don’t seem to line up with my moral intuitions, it seems more reasonable to attribute fault of judgment to myself - the human - rather than to attribute the fault of judgment to God, who we’ve already determined is the embodiment of moral goodness. Remember, “that God equals moral goodness” is a proposition that was determined to be true before and in spite of the Joshua objection. Therefore, we are stuck with it as a foundational proposition. Unless the Joshua objection (the objection that says - “God’s actions seem wrong to me”) provides evidence that outweighs our initial evidence arguing for God’s equaling moral goodness, the fundamental proposition that God equals moral goodness remains undefeated. So far, I hope to have made the case that morality is supernatural in nature, and that the truth of moral realism necessitates the existence of a moral authority (assumed in this paper, namely, to be God). From here on out, the study of theology inevitably will have great influence on the philosophy of ethics, and specifically on the intuitionist philosophy discussed in this paper). We will now turn our focus towards 72 Jordan Jolly dealing with how previously deduced theological truths affect the validity of the intuitionist argument in the realm of applied ethics. The key theological proposition that will affect our development of the ethical theory of intuitionism is roughly as follows: that there is something radically wrong with mankind, and it is the problem of moral failure. While there isn’t something initially wrong with our faculties of moral intuition, there is certainly the inevitability that there will be as a result of our experiences with what is actually wrong with mankind - this being not our faculties of moral intuition themselves, but our ever- present tendency fail to do what we know (via accurate moral intuition) to be right and good. Our moral failure is not our inability to know what is right a priori, but our inability to act rightly. This inability results in a posteriori alterations of our moral beliefs. For example, we know that we ought to be kind to people, but we must make a concerted effort to be able to act this virtue out in our daily lives. This seemingly universal defect of mankind has drastic psychological effects on us (and thus on what were our initially unscathed faculties of moral perception) at a very young age, and continues to affect us throughout our lives. Our inability to do what is right when we know it’s right affects ourselves and affects others (for example - someone who was abused as a child may develop certain dispositions leading to failure of faculties of moral intuition and may likely turn out to be an abusive parent when they grow up). In addition, guilt psychologically affects us. If we know something to be right, yet we fail to do that action and instead do something wrong, an individual may experience guilt. Guilt should be distinguished from shame, as it is a crucial and undeniable component of our faculties of moral intuition. Universal and timeless examples of moral failure followed by guilt provide evidence that guilt is something related to the conscience, which is unique to humans (e.g. a puppy can feel shame, but not guilt. A human can feel shame and guilt). A strong feeling of guilt, brought about by what was described above as the real problem with humans, may also alter a person’s moral beliefs. This is how we get universally varied manipulations of consciences and consequently the most solid objection to the intuitionist argument in the realm of applied ethics - that of the subjectivity of the morals of individuals. In order to unconditionally accept the application of the intuitionist argument in applied ethics, one must be willing to trust the moral judgments of a sociopath. Needless to say, your average person would not place such trust in such a person. If there were a system by which we could distinguish between a person whose moral faculties are functioning properly and a person whose moral faculties are not (e.g. a sociopath), then perhaps we could accept intuitionism as a viable theory of applied ethics. The fact is, however, The Aftermath of Moral Realism 73 that we cannot know who is a sociopath and who isn’t, nor can we know that we ourselves aren’t making a mistake in our moral judgments. Our moral beliefs are scathed by virtue of their being formed a posteriori in a world full of broken people.

The moral beliefs of a human, we could say, are hit or miss. For although moral intuition is a priori, moral beliefs certainly aren’t. Moral intuitions in all people are superseded by the moral beliefs that people form as they grow up - these moral beliefs being inevitably warped to varying extents based on experiences had . As to how exactly peoples’ consciences are manipulated is shrouded in mystery. Nevertheless, we must admit to the fact that, by virtue of our being humans who interact with other humans, it happens. Although we are all capable of correct moral intuition (sometimes we hit, sometimes we miss), we are all rendered deaf and blind, to varying extents, to correct moral intuition because of the “human condition” as described in the paragraphs above. Moral intuition should thus be “conditionally trusted”, or “partially trusted”. It should be conditioned on that “varying extent” to which the person under whose moral intuition is under scrutiny has been rendered blind to properly functioning moral intuition. The a priori nature of moral intuition allows us to draw probable conclusions on the nature of morality that, if moral properites are real properties, lead us to the acceptance of a non-natural moral authority as most probably true. We can allow ourselves to trust that these basic moral intuitions (i.e. injustice is wrong, rape is bad, charity is good) lead us to fact, but we can’t know it for sure. We cannot unconditionally trust the moral intuitions of any given human to lead us to what is truly the absolute right thing to do in a situation, the reason being that, as previously discussed, any given human is bound to have a warped conscience, even if to a very slight extent. Even if one is not a sociopath, as in the extreme case described above, any person could have any degree of warped moral perceptions based on the experiences the have had with other people or with their own consciences. It is impossible for us to know, however, exactly to what degrees of deviance from absolute moral truth any given person has strayed. Because we all are a part of the human race (that for some reason must struggle to do that which is right and good even if we already believe it to be right and good), we are all susceptible to being wronged or hurt by others, and we are all susceptible to the powerful guilt described above. Thus, we are all susceptible to having wrong intuitions about what is morally true. The correctness of our moral intuitions will vary directly with the amount of manipulation our faculties of moral perception have undergone. This amount, even if trace, seems to be inevitably existent in any human being by the very virtue of that human being’s existing in society. All of this argument gives weight to the objection of subjectivity widely held against intuitionism. The objection ultimately renders intuitionism as a dubious theory in the realm of applied ethics. Moral intuition should be trusted on 74 Jordan Jolly the condition that the person isn’t a sociopath, or at least has relatively little deviance from what is actually moral truth. Still, we are only trusting in the lack of deviance of an individual from moral truth based on what we perceive about the person’s character, and our own perceptions and judgments could still be wrong. Thus, we cannot know by ourselves what is moral truth. We can only make good guesses. And so, the ethical theory of intuitionism initially (in its propositional foundation of moral realism) takes us to some fascinating places in the realm of theology, but consequently falls short of validity in the realm of applied ethics. We do not gain moral knowledge by way of moral intuition, but perhaps we gain access to it. Special Thanks I thank Professor Daniel Bonevac, Jonathan Reibsamen, Taylor Wagen, and Elliot Lee for their comments and conversation that encouraged me in my writing of this paper.