The Moral Philosophy of William James: an Annotated Bibliography

I have always been interested in the philosophy of William James, especially his moral philosophy, which little is ever heard of. Over the years I have written a couple of papers in which I explore or make use of James's ethics ("Foolish Little Children in the Eyes of Reason" and "Believing in the Dignity of Human Embryos"), but nothing approaching a systematic account and appraisal of it. This year I'm going to teach, for the first time, an undergraduate seminar on James's Pragmatism, which I'm hoping will prove a useful starting point for a more extensive engagement with his work. Preparing for this, I have asked one of our students, Tom Goodsir, to undertake a literature survey on James's moral philosophy, and since he did such an excellent job with it, it would be a shame not to share it, so that's what (with Tom's permission) I'm now doing. What follows is all Tom's work.

The Moral Philosophy of William James

Literature Review

Tom Goodsir

Overview

The literature on James’s moral views is largely confined to chapters in larger works, and much of the analysis at present is explanatory and intended for a more generally inquisitive reader who is interested in a broad picture of James’s views. Two important texts are Franzese’s Ethics of Energy and Gale’s The Divided Self. Both of these are primarily concerned with systematising and exploring James’s moral views and although both treatments seem to overlap in a variety of areas, Franzese’s Ethics is premised on a specific, non-utilitarian reading of the “Moral Philosopher”. Gale’s specific focus is on accounting for the philosophical subject in James, and from here he derives an account

of James’s morality.

As of yet, there is no systematic treatment of James’s moral thinking per-se, although Perry’s classic text treats James as a moralist, and this interpretation has been followed - although not always with much thought - by a number of scholars. I have listed below a number of works not specifically on James (such as Misak’s) but that provide interesting and alternative perspectives on some of James’s thinking. Particularly Goodman’s characterization of James as a kind of romantic is particularly nice, and it seems to fit well with what one can read into “On a Certain Blindness”.

One particular discrepancy which seems to occur commonly in the literature is the relationship (or the distinction) between morality and ethics. It is not clear (at least to me!) that James makes any such distinction and it does not appear to fit neatly into James’s wider pragmatism. Scholars tend to use the two terms quite indiscriminately and some sharpening on James’s thought here is required. In terms of journal articles, much of the discussion on James’s moral or ethical thinking is confined to the proceedings of the Charles Peirce Society and there is a limited amount of really contemporary scholarship on the subject.

Primary Texts

The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life

James’s most explicit treatment of the subject of morality. Most importantly here, he develops a critical principle of his ethical philosophy, that we should “satisfy at all times as many demands as we can” (WB, 205).

James, W., “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” in The Will to Believe and Other

Essays in Popular Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979

The Will to Believe

James’s discussion of the possibility of holding a belief without first holding prior evidence. Important in determining how we come to formulate ethical and moral beliefs.

James, W., The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, Cambridge, MA

and London: Harvard University Press, 1979; first published in 1897.

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

Interesting (if fleeting) treatment of morality. I think this points to two important thoughts. Firstly, he argues we are “afflicted” with a blindness towards the views of others, and naturally self-concerned. From my reading, this stands both as a rejection of any notion of duty or obligation towards others, but also imposes the idea of a plurality of moral views which we ought to recognize on the grounds that the feelings of others are no less important than our own feelings.

Secondly, he continues this thought, citing Wordsworth, who argues natural things have “limitless significance”, and may as such be attributed a “moral life”. For James, there is no reason that ‘morality’ has to refer explicitly to action between humans but should also concern our natural environment. Again, he seems eager not to prioritise human feeling over animal or natural feeling.

James, W “On a Certain Blindness” in Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some

of Life's Ideals. New York: Henry Holt, 1899

The Letters of William James

Many of James’s letters concern the subject of morality, and his use is often curious. He refers frequently to the ‘moral’ characters of a country or an individual (see letters to H.G. Wells, 1906, Bill James, 1907 and François Pillon 1898). James also refers also to his own moral state (“I am better both physically and morally than I have been in four years”) in a letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman, 1903.

It would imply from this usage that James takes morality as applicable only to a particular (not necessarily human) subject. He explicitly rejects notions of morality which rely upon “invisible, molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual”, again in correspondence with Mrs Whitman in 1898.

I have also explored an early unpublished letter from James to William Darwin on the subject of morality. This is now published in a paper by Ignas Skrupskelis: see below.

James, W., The Letters of William James, Boston: Little Brown, 1926

Secondary Literature

Books

Misak, C., The American Pragmatists, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013

General but persuasive chapter on James, with a short but considerable treatment of the relationship between MP and WB (see p65-76).

Pawelski, J., The Dynamic Individualism of William James, New York: SUNY Press, 2012.

Important discussion on what Pawelski calls James’s moral choice to invoke free will (p56 onwards) and direct criticism of Gale’s view in the ‘Divided Self’ (see p99). Recent summation of much past scholarship.

Gavin, W., William James in Focus, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013

Interesting perspective on our obligation to be moral, according to James – links to discussion of the time constraints faced when making decisions and James’s rejection of moral scepticism in MP.

Bernstein, R., The Pragmatic Turn, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010

Bernstein dedicates a chapter to the “Ethical Implications of William James’s Pragmatic Pluralism”. I am not convinced that the traditional distinction between ethics and morality holds up in James’s case, and this may be something worth exploring.

Slater, M., William James on Ethics and Faith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009

Slater’s theological treatment focuses heavily on the relationship between James’s ethics and his religious thought. Slater argues that James has a series of ‘moral arguments’ for faith, which seems counterintuitive but I think is ultimately well argued.

Franzese, S., The Ethics of Energy: William James's Moral Philosophy in Focus, Berlin: Walter de

Gruyter, 2008

Comprehensive treatment of James’s moral philosophy, with a particular focus on the Kantian idea of moral effort. Franzese believes that it is incorrect to interpret James as a version of a utilitarian (as many have) and bases his efforts on this misunderstanding.

Richardson, R., William James: In the Malestrom of American Modernity, Boston: Hardcourt,

2007.

In his biography of James, Richardson draws out the lineage between James’s psychology and his moral philosophy. He argues (p309 onwards) that James’s morality (and his rejection of deontological morality) is grounded in an almost utilitarian acknowledgement of the existence of desires.

Gale, Richard M., The Divided Self of William James, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1999

This work gives a comprehensive treatment of James’s moral thinking over around 100 pages. Gale gives a good exposition of James’s rejection of moral truths and the distinction between James’s ethics and morality before drawing the link to his religious views.

Perry, R., The Thought and Character of William James, Nashville: Vanderbilt University

Press, 1935

Although this work is old, this appears to be a classic account of James as a moralist and Perry’s discussion of James’s moral individualism is good. This theme is picked up on and developed by James Campbell (see below).

Cotkin, G., William James: Public Philosopher, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994

Cotkin touches on numerous areas of James’s morality and its linkage with religion. Of particular interest are his arguments against determinism (pp. 83-94) and the link with what Cotkin calls James’s ‘discourse of heroism’. For Cotkin, the heroic man or woman is a moral man or woman.

Goodman, R., American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1990

Goodman argues that James relies heavily on our romantic sentiments (our passions) when we ascribe a moral nature or character to things and when we make moral decisions. He cites James’s arguments from MP (see p81).

Myers, G., William James: His Life and Thought, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Myers dedicates an introductory chapter to James’s ‘moral thought’. He leans heavily on many of the moral intuitions James developed as a young boy to explain his ongoing concern for morality, even though his pragmatism seemed to disavow it. This contradiction between James’s desire to invent moral principles and his pragmatism seems of great importance.

Fernstein, H., Becoming William James, New York: Cornell University Press, 1984

Passages on how the interaction between religion and morality developed in James’s work, particularly with reference to the work of his brother and father (p84). Again, Fernstein brings out this apparent struggle between James’s desire to have a moral philosophy within a framework which seems not to allow one.

Wilshire, B., William James and Phenomenology, New York: AMS Press, 1979.

Alternative perspective on James’s metaphysics, worthy of consideration as it adds weight to the thesis that James is not seeking a ‘morality’ in the Kantian sense, but is trying to forge a gap between traditional philosophical categories. Many of these ideas resurface in Benoist’s article (see below).

Journal Articles

Putnam, H, “The Ideas of William James” in Raritan, New Brunswick, NJ, Winter 1989,

pp.17-44

Putnam seeks to give an account of James “first and foremost” as a moral philosopher. Analysis of James’s ‘utilitarian’ viewpoint and his distinction between moral and scientific truths (p25).

Benoist, J, “Phenomenology or Pragmatism” in Pragmatism: Critical Concepts in Philosophy,

ed. Russell Goodman, London: Taylor and Francis, 2005.

Not strictly on James’s moral thought, but an interesting and alternative perspective that links James with Husserl. This is particularly important from the perspective of thinking who the moral subject might be in James’s philosophy.

Koutstaal, W., “Lowly Notions: Forgetting in William James's Moral Universe”, Transactions

of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Fall, 1993), pp. 609-635

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40320441

Interesting account of James’s idea of a ‘moral holiday’. Also the idea that we can forge a middle way between traditional rationalist and empiricist notions of morality.

Skrupskelis, I., “Evolution and Pragmatism: An Unpublished Letter of William James”,

Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Fall, 2007), pp. 745-752

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40321224

(I think) a critical discovery of a very interesting letter addressed to William Darwin (son of Charles) in which James goes into depth on his early moral ideas. Very important in showing development of James’s ideas from his younger days.

Smith, A., “William James and the Politics of Moral Conflict”, Transactions of the Charles S.

Peirce Society, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter, 2004), pp. 135-151

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40320978

Discussion of James’s ‘political thought’. This is more focused on James’s discussion of the right (ethical) action in a particular circumstance, but may be useful in drawing out James’s moral views.

Genter, R., “Of Mystics and Lighthouse Keepers: The Moral Visions of William James

and Josiah Royce”, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), pp. 87-108

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27744909

Genter sets James’s pluralism in contrast to Royce, and gives an interesting account of James’s relation between theory and practice – or rather James’s preference to think in terms of practice.

Campbell, J., “William James and the Ethics of Fulfillment”, Transactions of the Charles S.

Peirce Society, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Summer, 1981), pp. 224-240

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40319924

Campbell explicitly explores James’s ethics with a view to drawing broader conclusions about his views on morality and morality in general.

Boyle, D., “William James's Ethical Symphony”, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol.

34, No. 4 (Fall, 1998), pp. 977-1003

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40320736

Detailed textual analysis of MP in which Boyle interprets James’s maxim that we should satisfy as many demands as we can as a utilitarian idea, but a qualitative one in which the greatest (most pressing?) demands should be satisfied, rather than the largest quantity of demands.

Pihlström, S., “William James on Death, Mortality, and Immortality”, Transactions of the

Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Fall, 2002), pp. 605-628

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40320916

Brief introduction on the nature of James’s morality in which Pihlström (following Cotkin) emphasizes the need for an ethical hero. Pihlström also attempts to place ethics as prior to James’s metaphysics.

Putnam, H., and Putnam, R.A., “The Real William James: Response to Robert Meyers”,

Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), pp. 366-381

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40320699

The Putnams take on Meyer’s characterization of James as an ‘anything goes’ pluralist in the Cambridge Companion. There is some dispute between these scholars as to an interpretation of the first line of MP.

Kauber, P., “The Foundations of James's Ethics of Belief”, Ethics, Vol. 84, No. 2 (Jan.,

1974), pp. 151-166

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2380112

Kauber attempts to trace James’s ‘mature’ ethical thinking in WB to his earlier work, enquiring particularly into the problem of where our ethical (moral?) beliefs originate. 

Other Journal Articles

Aiken, H., “William James as Moral and Social Philosopher”, Philosophic Exchange 3 (1981):

55-68.

Putnam, R.A., “William James and Moral Objectivity”, William James Studies, 1.1 (2007).

Putnam, R.A., “The Moral Life of a Pragmatist”, Identity, Character, and Morality: Essays in

Moral Psychology (1990): 67-89.

Perrin, J., “The Incoherence of William James’ Moral Philosophy”, Aporia vol. 21 no. 2 (2011)

11-17.

Two New Thought Experiments for the Ethics Classroom

1. The Callous Terrorist: a dangerous terrorist is on the loose. He tried to bomb your government’s headquarters. Fortunately he failed. However, he has announced that he would try again until he succeeded. Now the police have got a lead on his whereabouts. It appears that he is hiding amongst the crowd in a busy marketplace. The police come to the conclusion that their best chance of taking out the terrorist is to machine-gun the crowd. It is either that or risk letting the terrorist escape. They decide to shoot, killing everyone in the process, including the terrorist. When questioned after the shooting, police say they had had no intention of killing all those people, but that unfortunately the terrorist had left them no choice, so that all responsibility for the incident lies solely with the terrorist who callously chose to hide amongst the crowd. 

Questions for discussion:

Who is responsible for the deaths of the people shot by the police?

Was it morally acceptable for the police to shoot into the crowd?

Is there a morally relevant difference between the way the police have acted in this scenario and the way Israel is acting in Gaza? If yes, what is it?

2. The School Burning: after I took away your house and your livelihood, you are determined to take back what is yours, so you threaten me and make several unsuccessful attempts on my life. When I finally decide to eliminate the threat and get rid of you for good, you hide in a school, which you are hoping I won’t dare attack. However, it turns out that in this you are mistaken. I burn down the school. You narrowly escape with your life, but all the children in the school die. I say that this wasn’t my fault and that you alone are to blame for this. I was, after all, only defending myself, and you should have known that I would do whatever it takes to stop you.

Questions for discussion:

Who is responsible for the deaths of the children in the school?

Was it morally acceptable for me to burn down the school?

Is there a morally relevant difference between the way I have acted in this scenario and the way Israel is acting in Gaza? If yes, what is it?

The Allure of the Number Game

Many people still die of organ failure whose lives could be saved if there were only enough organs available for transplantation. Unfortunately, there aren’t. Various solutions to the problem have been proposed, but those that promise to be most effective also tend to be rather unpalatable. Thus Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu have recently suggested that we suspend the dead donor rule (i.e. the rule that we should not remove organs from patients prior to death), and instead of merely withdrawing life support from critically ill patients in intensive care whose lives are deemed to be no longer worth living, we should just kill them and harvest their organs as long as they are still fresh and in good working order. Alternatively, we could establish a system of organ conscription, where you can no longer even opt out: never mind what you or your family want, once you’re dead your body belongs to the state (“Should We Allow Organ Donation Euthanasia? Alternatives for Maximizing the Number of Organs for Transplantation”, Bioethics 26/1 (2012): 32-48).

The typical bioethicist is rather fond of radical solutions. He dislikes waste, has no patience with what he sees as people’s squeamishness, and believes that we should be rational about things, which mostly means that we should rethink our morality, our established views of right and wrong, if there is no other or better way to solve a problem quickly and efficiently. Do you believe that people should have a say in what happens to their bodies when they are dead? - But then they may not allow us to use their organs, which we urgently need. To save lives! To help people! So we really cannot afford letting those organs go to waste, and that means we cannot afford allowing people to decide for themselves whether they want to “donate” their organs or not. Do you believe that organs should only be taken from dead people who no longer need them? - But some who are still alive are in fact as good as dead, so that they would not really miss those organs. And besides, we urgently need them now. We really cannot afford to wait until people are completely dead. After all, there are people’s lives at stake here. Actually, come to think about it, we cannot even afford to wait until people are almost dead. It would be so much more efficient if we could just take the organs we need from the living, if we could kill a few to save many others. It’s all for the greater good. Yes, of course, killing people for their organs is currently frowned upon, but hey, it doesn’t have to stay this way. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the common good, and anyway, we may quickly get used to it and see the error of our previous ways.

This is what the Manchester-based philosopher John Harris suggested in a paper published almost 40 years ago (“The Survival Lottery”, Philosophy 50/ 191 (1975): 81-87), in which he proposed that we solve the problem of not being able to procure enough spare organs to save the growing number of people who need new organs to survive by establishing a lottery. Each of us is assigned a number, and whenever there is a shortfall of organs, a number is drawn and the lucky bastard whose number it is gets killed (or rather called upon to “give his life”). All his organs can then be used to preserve the lives of those who need them. This way a lot less people would have to die.

To me this is the stuff that dystopian nightmares are made of. Yet when I put the question to my students, asking them in an exam whether they thought that Harris’s survival lottery was “a morally acceptable way to tackle organ shortage”, I once again found that a majority of them did not only think that it was morally acceptable, but in fact that it was clearly what was morally required. They showed themselves quite convinced by Harris’s utilitarian reasoning and the crucial assumption that there is no morally relevant difference between killing and letting die, so that if we have to kill one to prevent two or more people from dying, then that is exactly what we should do. The numbers speak for themselves. They appear to have an enormous persuasive power. As one student put it: “Such massive consequential benefits to society as a whole seem to me to rather morally outshine the far rarer occasional acts of killing.” As if the legalisation of “occasional acts of killing” by an agency of the state could ever be justified. That is the kind of argument that Hitler and Stalin must have used when they justified their policies before themselves and others. It blindly follows the imperative of maximisation. And I think I get its allure. It makes things so much easier. Who needs a conscience when we’ve got numbers, right? But I’m still surprised, and also dismayed, by how easily people can be persuaded to endorse inhuman practices and how willing they are to believe that everybody is expendable and that to be treated solely as a means to an end is perfectly all right, so that the state should have the power to take our lives whenever it is deemed expedient. As another student put it: “As utility is the maximisation of pleasure, then people can rightly be viewed as interchangeable parts in a mechanism, designed to promote as much happiness as possible.” Rightly! How can people be so willing to give up their most basic rights, to see themselves as an interchangeable part in a mechanism? We are all oil on the wheels of the great utilitarian happiness machine. Is that really what we are or how we want to see ourselves? And for whose sake really? Other people’s lives? But those other people are just as expendable as we are. Surely there is a contradiction at the heart of this terrifying proposal: human life is proclaimed to be so important that anything is acceptable to save it, including the killing of a healthy, innocent and perfectly alive human being. But by finding this acceptable we implicitly declare the life of that human (and with it the life of any human) for disposable. If the individual human life doesn’t count, then we don’t seem to have a good reason to want to save it at all costs. Then we can just as well let people die. The truth is that the reason why we think that we should save people’s lives if we can is in fact the same reason that makes us (or, if we were thinking straight, should make us) reject Harris’s proposal.

Sometimes I think that, on the whole, applied ethics might be doing more harm than good, that more often than not it doesn’t aid our moral thinking, but corrupts it. It makes the unthinkable thinkable. I used to believe that this was an advantage. I’m not so sure anymore. 

Jim and the Indians

I spent the last ten days reading and marking a large number of essays for a course I’m teaching on the „philosophy of morality“. One of the available essay questions, which many students selected, was “Should Jim kill the Indian?” The question of course refers to a thought experiment that the British philosopher Bernard Williams used forty years ago in his critique of Utilitarianism (in: JJC Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against, 1973) to illustrate the morally dubious consequences that Utilitarianism would have us accept. In case you don’t know it or have forgotten the details, here’s the situation as Williams describes it:

“Jim finds himself in the central square of a small South American town. Tied up against the wall are a row of twenty Indians, most terrified, a few defiant, in front of them several armed men in uniform. A heavy man in a sweat-stained khaki shirt turns out to be the captain in charge and, after a good deal of questioning of Jim which establishes that he got there by accident while on a botanical expedition, explains that the Indians are a random group of the inhabitants who, after recent acts of protest against the government, are just about to be killed to remind other possible protestors of the advantages of not protesting. However, since Jim is an honoured visitor from another land, the captain is happy to offer him a guest’s privilege of killing one of the Indians himself. If Jim accepts, then as a special mark of the occasion, the other Indians will be let off. Of course, if Jim refuses, then there is no special occasion, and Pedro here will do what he was about to do when Jim arrived, and kill them all. Jim, with some desperate recollection of schoolboy fiction, wonders whether if he got hold of a gun, he could hold the captain, Pedro and the rest of the soldiers to threat, but it is quite clear from the set-up that nothing of the sort is going to work: any attempt at that sort of thing will mean that all the Indians will be killed, and himself. The men against the wall, and the other villagers understand the situation, and are obviously begging him to accept. What should he do?”

The vast majority of my students had no qualms accepting the obvious utilitarian answer, namely that Jim should clearly kill one Indian to save the rest. It’s simple maths that led them to that conclusion: one dead is better than twenty dead (especially if the one is among the twenty). Most students interpreted Jim’s case as a mere variant of Foot’s and Thomson’s trolley problems, where you have to decide whether it is justified to kill somebody (who would survive if you didn’t intervene) to save the lives of (more than one) others (who would die if you didn’t intervene). These cases are usually used to discuss the question whether killing is really worse than letting die, and if yes, why. The default position for Utilitarians is of course that we are just as responsible and culpable for what we let happen as for what we do ourselves. Not saving somebody is just as bad as killing somebody, and not saving two or more is worse. It follows that not killing somebody if that is the only way to save two or more is wrong.

Now, although I don’t think that ethics can and should be reduced to mathematics, I’m willing to accept or concede that, if all things are equal, our moral responsibility extends not only to what we do, but also to what we allow to happen. But Jim’s case is in one crucial respect very different from the usual kill-or-let-die situations, and I’m a bit puzzled that very few of my students noticed this and that none of them seems to have realised the significance of that difference. What I’m talking about is the fact that, in contrast to the trolley problems discussed by Foot and Thomson, Williams’s scenario involves another agent, or rather two, namely “the captain” and “Pedro”. This means that if Jim refuses to kill one of the Indians, the others will not just die, but rather they may, or may not, be killed by somebody else. If they are killed, then this does not happen because Jim has not killed anyone, but because the captain gives the order to kill them, and Pedro executes the order. Nothing that Jim could do or not do, would cause or compel the captain to give the order, nor Pedro to execute it. It’s entirely up to them to decide whether the captured Indians live or die. If Jim does what they ask him to do, they could still kill the rest of the Indians. Conversely, if Jim refuses, they may still decide to let everyone go. The only real power that Jim has in this situation is the power that is given to him by the captain: to either kill one of the Indians or not to kill one of the Indians. Or more precisely, he has been granted the power to kill someone, but he does not have the power to save anyone (because neither his killing someone nor his not killing anyone prevents any of the Indians from being killed). This means that he would be responsible and culpable for killing one of the Indians, but he would not be responsible and culpable for the death of the Indians if he refused to kill anyone and they were subsequently killed by Pedro.

The situation in which Jim finds himself is not really one in which he has to decide whether it is better to kill one person than to let more than one person die. The situation is rather one in which somebody asks him to do what they tell him to do (namely commit a terrible crime: that of killing an innocent person) or else they will do something very nasty, namely murder lots of people, including that one. Imagine somebody came to you and told you that you had to rape and kill your little sister and that if you didn’t they would explode a bomb in the crowded city centre which is sure to maim and kill several people. Would you do it? Would you say that it’s clearly “the most moral action”, as one of my students said about Jim’s killing of the Indian? Of course you may argue that in that case you have to decide between your sister and people unknown to you. From a utilitarian perspective that should, of course, make no difference, but let’s say that we do agree that personal ties are important and should have some weight. But what if the person threatening you told you that if you didn’t rape and kill your little sister, he would first kill you (or your mother) and then rape and kill your sister himself? In that case it seems that if you raped and killed your little sister you would at least save your own life (or that of your mother), whereas if you refused, then she would be raped and killed anyway, and in addition you or your mother would die too. So that’s an easy choice then, isn’t it? Clearly raping and killing your little sister is “the most moral action” here because it is better for there to be only one person killed rather than two. Except of course that it isn’t. It would just mean that you become complicit in the crime. You would allow somebody else to turn you into a rapist and murderer. The only right thing to do here is to refuse, to not take part in an evil deed.

Let’s look again at Jim’s situation. Jim is asked to kill one of the Indians. He is being told that the others will be free to go if he complies. So he picks one of them - let's call him Joe – and he kills him. Now what would happen if he refused? Most likely Pedro would kill all of the Indians, including Joe. We can assume that killing the Indians is morally wrong. They are innocent people. Their killing is an act of state terrorism. It’s the worst kind of crime. When Pedro finally kills Joe, then he does something that is deeply reprehensible. It is clearly morally wrong. It is an act of evil. But if killing Joe is an act of evil when Pedro does it, why then should it suddenly be morally right, even laudable, when Jim does it? Killing Joe is an evil act, and it remains an evil act no matter who does the killing. Therefore Jim should not kill the Indian.

 

 

I wonder why my students don’t see it that way, and it worries me.

Morality and Religion

Can one be moral without believing in God or at least in something, some unknown power that gives permanent significance to what we do? It sure seems one can be a good person without any such belief, somebody who is a good neighbour who doesn't lie to you or try to hurt you and who behaves decently. Someone who, by and large, does the right thing. Yet can one actually believe that actions are good or bad in themselves or that it really matters what we do and what we don't do without some kind of faith? If there is no God, just an unfeeling universe, if there's nothing and nobody that cares what we do, so that in the long run it doesn't make any difference what we do or don't do because it will all go to hell anyway (humanity will go extinct, or the sun will explode, or something else will happen that will destroy all traces of our existence), then it seems pointless to try to do the right thing. Because there is no right thing, and because no matter what we do, the result will always be the same: we are dead, and everyone else is too. All in vain. In order to be moral, deliberately moral, and not just accidentally so, we need to believe that it matters what we do, that it makes a difference, not just now and in relation to our present, transient interests and concerns, but absolutely. That there are more important things than our own existence and well-being. But what could there be more important than that if there are no permanent achievements, nothing that might actually change the course of the world?

I'm an atheist, but I share some of the intuitions that seem to inform the faith of religious people. I don't believe in God, but I do believe that things matter, and I'm trying to understand how that is possible and what it means. That is the reason why I'm currently organising, in collaboration with the theologian Nigel Biggar, a conference in Oxford on the question whether morality needs religion. The conference will take place at the MCDONALD CENTRE FOR THEOLOGY, ETHICS & PUBLIC LIFE and will run from 10.30am on 16 May to 1.00pm on 17 May. The cost is £50 (£30 for students),  including lunch. There will be an optional dinner in the Great Hall on Thursday evening. Limited space available. If you want to attend the conference or simply find out more about it, here's a link to the respective website: www.mcdonaldcentre.org.uk

The Best about Two Chairs

A contemporary German philosopher (I forget who) once said that the best about two chairs is that you can sit between them. Right now this is the comfortable position that I happen to find myself in. In a critique of an article published earlier this year in the Journal of Medical Ethics (Giubilini and Minerva on "after-birth abortion") I claimed that morality was fundamentally irrational in the sense that there is no moral belief that is, as Don Marquis put it, "utterly compelling to any rational person". Moral convictions can always be contested, and it is never unreasonable to do so. Moral beliefs are not the results of rational reflection, but rather starting points. They are more like axioms upon which we build our world: foundational bricks in the house that constitutes the way we look at, think about, and relate to ourselves and the people and things around us. To believe, for instance, that it is wrong to torture people, is neither rational nor irrational. We may, of course, be able to explain why we think it is wrong, but nothing that we can say by way of an explanation is such that no rational person can deny its moral relevance. In that particular article, however, my main point was that the appearance of rational compellingness that many bioethicsts (especially those with roots in the analytic tradition) attempt to lend to their personal views is just that: mere appearance. It is a rhetorical device that is often used to trick the reader into accepting conclusions that intuitively they are inclined to reject.

Anyway, voicing this view - that morality is, ultimately, irrational - has now landed me in trouble. Readers of the Hasting Center Report, in which my critique was published, strongly reprimanded me for making such an obviously unreasonable claim. How could I! It was the academic equivalent of hate mail. The funny thing, however, is that this strong response came from both people who are convinced that abortion is morally wrong (and just as wrong as the murder of an adult human being) and people who are equally convinced of the exact opposite, namely that abortion is perfectly all right, as is infanticide. So the two opposing parties both believe that the reasons for holding their respective views are, or should be, "utterly compelling to any rational person", without realising that the very fact that they disagree so much about the moral permissibility of abortion shows clearly enough that their arguments simply cannot be as compelling as they think they are. I find it rather bizarre how anti-abortionists and pro-abortionists suddenly stand side by side, united against the common enemy: the ethical, or rather metaethical, non-cognitivist.

This of course raises the deeper question why it is so important to people to be able to see their moral views as rational. It is almost as if we feared that we might have to give up our moral convictions if they turned out to lack a rational foundation. We seem to need or want some assurance that we are right and those who don't agree with us are wrong. We want our moral convictions to be true, and the idea that they might not be is disquieting. Makes it more difficult to stand up for one's views, to feel righteous about them and to fight those who oppose them.

Wrong, Wronger, Wrongest: the Presumed Binary Logic of Morality

I often wonder why moral philosophers and ethicists are so obsessed with trying to determine "what is right" and "what is wrong", "morally permissible" and "morally impermissible" and whether that obsession is not a huge mistake. It seems that many ethical arguments focus on the question whether a certain action or practice is right or wrong. And usually those who participate in the argument tend to assume that if the action or practice in question is not right (i.e. not permissible), then it must be wrong, and if it is not wrong, then it is right. There are no other options. Is abortion right or wrong? Some are for, others against it. For some it is murder, for others a morally neutral medical operation. You need to decide which side you are on. Is lying always wrong or sometimes permissible? Kant believed it was always wrong; most people would say that often lying is okay. Murdering someone? Yes, definitely. But then again, not all killing qualifies as murder. So is killing someone morally wrong? Very often, but not always. Where it is not, it is justified. It is permissible.

However, here's the problem: even if we accept that things really can be right or wrong (and can be determined to be so), which is far from obvious to me, it seems that merely distinguishing "right" from "wrong" is an almost ludicrously inadequate response to the complexity of the moral world. Lying is wrong. Not paying for your bus ticket is wrong. Stealing a CD from the music store is wrong. Raping someone is wrong. Torturing a small child to death is wrong. Well, maybe. But shouldn't we attempt to say more about how wrong exactly it is? Isn't that what we really want to know? Do we seriously think that stealing a CD is as wrong as raping someone? No, actually we don't. So obviously some actions are more wrong than others. But moral philosophers and ethicists do not talk much about that. We are too busy finding out what is right and what is wrong, and it doesn't really occur to us that even when we are successful in our endeavour we have at best brought a very crude form of order to the moral world. It is as if we were bewitched by the binary logic of the words, for both the word "wrong" and the word "right" have no comparitive. Actions are not "righter" or "wronger" than others, and it even sounds odd to say that an action was "more right" or "more wrong" than another. The very grammar of those words thus strongly suggests that things are either wrong or right, and that there is nothing in-between. There is no scale that reaches from the very wrong or "wrongest" to the very right or "rightest". But isn't that exactly what we would need to do justice to the diversity of actions, situation, and circumstances that we have to deal with, and to our moral intuitions regarding them?

Is Casual Sex Morally Wrong?

A while ago I was invited by the Exeter Debating Society to argue against the claim that casual sex is morally wrong. Although I thought that was a strange question to ask, I had never been to a debating society event and was curious to see how it was. So I accepted. Somewhat naively, I thought that it would be very easy to defeat the claim, not the least because I imagined that most students would not feel that there was anything wrong with it. However, I was in for a surprise. As it turned out, the majority of the house voted with yes: casual sex was indeed morally wrong. I was a bit taken aback, but then did my best to argue persuasively that even though having lots of casual sex might not be as desirable as it may seem, it is certainly not morally wrong.

Meanwhile my opponents, one of which was a colleague of mine, said a lot about the good life, true intimacy, and commitment, and how casual sex destroyed all that, none of which, I thought, was in any way relevant to the question. Yes to my shock and dismay, when the debate was over and the house was asked once again to cast their vote, nothing had changed: the majority still thought that casual sex was morally wrong. For me that was an almost traumatic experience. It certainly ruined my day (and night). Not that I'm a big fan of casual sex; it's just that I didn't expect British students to be so morally conservative and so immune to reason.

 Casual sex is when two people decide to have sex with each other without having any intention to enter into a long-lasting relationship with their sexual partner. They just want to have sex with the other person, nothing more and nothing less. Now how can that be morally wrong? Of course we can imagine situations in which it is. When you're in a relationship, then having sex with someone else might be a breach of trust, or a breach of the implicit promise to share a certain degree of intimacy only with your partner. But then it is these circumstances that make the act morally wrong, or at least morally dubious, and not the casualness of it. Casual sex may certainly be unwise (though it doesn't have to be), or it may turn out that for one of the participants it was less casual than for the other. If there are different expectations, then this may well result in tears and hurt. But that still doesn't make it morally wrong, unless one is deliberately misleading the other. The fact that someone is hurt by something I do, is not sufficient to declare my action morally wrong. There are all sorts of things that we do that hurt other people without being morally wrong. I might, for instance, hurt a student by giving them a bad mark. Yet as long as the mark is fair and reflects their actual achievement, they may hurt all they want and I still haven't done anything that would qualify as morally wrong. Conversely, however, it seems to me that if nobody is hurt by something we do, then it cannot possibly be morally wrong. So clearly, if two people give each other pleasure, sexual or otherwise, and then part and each go their own way, there is nothing whatsoever morally wrong with that.

Zero Degrees of Empathy? Baron-Cohen on Human Cruelty

I must say I had expected more from Simon Baron-Cohen's new book "Zero Degrees of Empathy. A New Theory of Human Cruelty and Kindness" (London: Allen Lane 2011), which I finished last night. If the main goal of this book is, as the author expressly maintains in his preface, "to understand human cruelty" (xi), then he fails rather spectacularly. The idea that he pursues in the book is that cruelty or what is commonly called "evil" should be understood as "empathy erosion". In other words, people who do really bad things to others do so because they have "zero degrees of empathy", which allows them to "treat others as if they are mere objects" (4). Baron-Cohen claims that this "new theory", i.e. thinking of human cruelty in terms of empathy erosion, provides an explanation, whereas speaking of "evil" does not. "Why did the murderer kill an innocent child? Because he was evil. Why did the terrorist become a suicide-bomber? Because she was evil." (4) Doesn't sound like much of an explanation, that's true, but look what happens when we replace the word "evil" with "complete lack of empathy": Why did the murderer kill an innocent child? Because he had no empathy. Why did this terrorist become a suicide-bomber? Because she had no empathy. Obviously, even though a lack of empathy might be necessary to do certain things to others, it is hardly sufficient to explain those actions, as the author himself occasionally admits. In fact, he spends most of the book discussing personality disorders that are also characterised by zero degrees of empathy, such as borderline, narcissism, Asperger syndrome, and classic autism, but that are not accompanied by a tendency to acts of cruelty. In fact, people with Asperger Syndrome are often very kind and gentle, which Baron Cohen tries to explain by distinguishing between a cognitive and an affective component of empathy, but the distinction remains largely obscure, although we can probably relate it back to his conveniently ambiguous definition of empathy, which is defined as: "our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling, and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion." (12) So there are allegedly two "stages" of empathy: recognition and response. It is hard to see, though, how one should be capable of responding to someone else's thoughts and feelings (the affective component, presumably) without first identifying (the cognitive component) what they are thinking and feeling. And surely someone who enjoys torturing another person, must do more than just know (in an abstract, unaffected way) what they are feeling. For the one who has zero degrees of empathy, Baron-Cohen explains, the other person's feelings do no longer exist. But surely they do for the cruel person. They must respond to it affectively in some way, though obviously not in what Baron-Cohen thinks of as the "appropriate" way. They are not just objects (though perhaps means to an end), but living, feeling beings. So is that what makes a person capable of enjoying (!) the suffering of others really a lack of understanding? Indifference, which certainly gives rise to many terrible acts, can perhaps be understood that way, but not cruelty. Even if we are charitable and understand Baron-Cohen as saying that a lack of empathy is necessary, though not sufficient for cruelty, we are not really any wiser than before, for all it means really is that someone who is capable of hurting others badly usually doesn't give a shit about the other person and their interests and feelings, and that is not exactly news, is it? Baron-Cohen squanders any explanatory value that the concept of empathy, or lack thereof, might be thought to have by declaring that a mother who kills her two children, must "by definition" (111), at least while she commits the deed, lack empathy. So this doesn't get us any closer to understanding why she did it. And it might not even be true that you can only kill your children, or do other terrible things to people, when they and their feelings "don't exist" for you. I don't see why a parent, in desperation, should not kill their children and at the same time feel love for them and suffer immensely in response to their distress. Is this really impossible? So at best, "lack of empathy" doesn't explain anything, and at worst it is misleading.

Notwithstanding, in the very last section of the book Baron-Cohen even goes so far as to praise empathy as a kind of panacea, a "univeral solvent" (132). If we only had more of it, everything would be just fine. Peace on earth and all that. Sure, if people were nicer to each other and thought more about others than themselves, there would probably be less violent conflicts in the world. But unfortunately they aren't and Baron-Cohen does not tell us anything about how we might change that.

What I found most interesting (because it is relevant to the possibility and meaning of moral enhancement) is an experimental finding that Baron-Cohen only mentions in passing (57). Persons with damage to certain brain regions related to empathy are far more likely to judge it morally permissible to kill an innocent person in order to save the lives of others. In other words, the psychopath is the better utilitarian. Who would have thought?