Philosophy: What’s the Point? Part 3: Maybe It Should Stick to Ethics

Kant looks mournful in this portrait, I’m guessing, because he fears his philosophical descendants will destroy the ethical edifice he has so painstakingly constructed. Source: Wikipedia.

This is the third in a series of posts on philosophy. It would be immoral to read it without having read my first and second posts.

It must irk philosophers that any idiot thinks he can do what they do. Take Stephen Jay Gould. He wasn’t an idiot, but he wasn’t a philosopher, either. He was an evolutionary biologist who often pontificated on philosophical matters, like whether science and religion are compatible.

Unlike his bitter rival Richard Dawkins, Gould didn’t denounce religion as harmful claptrap. Gould suggested that science and religion can peacefully co-exist because they occupy different realms, or “magisteria”; science addresses what is and religion what ought to be. Gould called his scheme “non-overlapping magisteria,” NOMA.

NOMA never caught on, because each side thought it conceded too much to the enemy. Atheists won’t let religion dictate values, and theists don't want science to monopolize facts. But perhaps NOMA can answer the question of what philosophy should do in a scientific age: Philosophers should leave facts to scientists and focus on ethics.

After all, ur-philosophers like Confucius, Lao Tzu and Socrates aimed primarily at moral self-improvement. Enlightenment bigshots like Locke, Voltaire and Kant sought to wrest morality away from religion and tradition. Morality, they contended, should be based on reason rather than whims of Popes and kings. 

These arguments, which inspired the American and French revolutions, represent one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Right? Wrong, according to members of my philosophy salon. Here’s the backstory: As we mulled over David Chalmers’s paper “Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?”, I started feeling sorry for my philosophical pals.

Hoping to cheer them up, I proposed that Enlightenment philosophers should get credit for humanity’s moral progress. A philosopher I’ll call "Nigel" retorted: What moral progress? Taken aback, I replied: The end of monarchy and slavery? The rise of democracy and rights for women and other oppressed groups?

Another philosopher said glumly that philosophers don’t deserve credit for these social transformations, because philosophy never really alters peoples’ behavior. I mentioned a friend who stopped eating meat after reading Peter Singer’s 1975 manifesto Animal Liberation. My comment was met with shrugs. These philosophers were rejecting philosophy’s social value! [1]

They were also evincing the self-doubt that riddles moral philosophy. Philosophers resemble Sisyphus with a twist: They roll the stone to the mountaintop and shove it down again. Thus, after Kant, Bentham and others painstakingly constructed their ethical edifices, Nietzsche blew them up.

Nietzsche disdained Kantian ethics, which emphasizes our moral intentions, and utilitarianism, which focuses on our actions’ consequences, almost as much as he disdained Christianity. Nietzsche urged us to go “beyond good and evil.” Wittgenstein, similarly, held that moral propositions, when scrutinized, crumble into incoherence.

Modern philosophers have continued in this skeptical vein. Last year, my salon mulled over “Morality, the Peculiar Institution” by Bernard Williams. Williams admires Kant but rejects his ethics, just as he dismisses utilitarian, Marxist and Darwinian accounts of morality. Williams concludes that “we would be better off without” morality. That doesn’t mean we should behave like sociopaths; rather, we should abandon the quest for a universal moral system, because any such system fails to do justice to the boundless complexity and contingency of life.

Ironically, Williams’s chapter is suffused with a humane, ethical sensibility. The same is true of the brand-new book Reframing Ethics Through Dialectics: A New Understanding of the Moral Good by philosopher Michael Steinmann, my colleague at Stevens Institute of Technology. Like Bernard Williams, Steinmann finds fault with all moral systems.

“Wherever one looks in the field of moral philosophy,” Steinmann writes, “one cannot but notice the failure of the theories and positions that are being presented.” Steinmann nonetheless insists that we must try to be good even if we can’t be sure what “good” means. He quotes Samuel Beckett: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

A few brave souls insist that “moral truth” is not an oxymoron. One is utilitarian Peter Singer, mentioned above. In addition to arguing for animals’ rights, he has made the case for giving money to the needy instead of spending on stuff you don’t need. [2]

Derek Parfit insisted on the existence of objectively true moral laws. In a profile for The New Yorker Larissa MacFarquhar writes: “Parfit believes that there are true answers to moral questions, just as there are to mathematical ones.” But Parfit is admired less for being right than for being “brilliantly clever and imaginative” (as Bernard Williams puts it in a review of Parfit’s 1984 book Reasons and Persons). [3]

In short, Gould’s non-overlapping-magisteria concept won’t work for philosophy, because too many philosophers would reject it—as would some scientists. [4] Philosophy’s efforts to deduce the Good have yielded what Chalmers calls “negative progress,” that is, ever-more-sophisticated disagreement.

And so we circle back to the question: If philosophy can’t tell us what is or ought to be, what good is it? In my next column, I’ll explore whether philosophy can serve as a form of art. If it can’t reveal the True or the Good, maybe it has a shot at the Beautiful. [5]

Footnotes:

1.  Modern philosophers even doubt whether philosophizing leads to personal self-improvement. Owen Flanagan, who focuses on mind and morality, shook his head when I asked whether philosophical reflection makes you a nicer, happier person. “Absolutely not,” he said. Philosophers “are more ill-formed than your average person.” Other philosophers have given me similar responses, and they don’t seem to be indulging in false modesty. Here’s an ethical dilemma: Should philosophy professors tell their students that philosophy won’t make you a better person?

2.   In “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” Peter Singer uses a variation of the trolley problem to prod readers into donating more to the poor. He asks us to imagine a man, Bob, watching a train bearing down on a child. Bob can pull a switch that diverts the train onto another track, but then the train will destroy Bob’s expensive Bugatti sports car. Any sane person, Singer writes, knows that it would be "gravely wrong" for Bob not to pull the switch and save the child. It is equally wrong, Singer asserts, for us to spend on stuff we don’t really need rather than donating to groups that can save the lives of children. Later, a reader pointed out that according to a strict utilitarian analysis, Bob should let the train kill the child, because he could then sell the Bugatti and donate the proceeds to a charity that would save lots of children.

3.   My candidate for an absolute moral rule is that you shall not drop bombs on children. We can all agree on that, right? And yet my own country over the past two decades has blown up thousands of children in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere with little protest from Americans, including philosophers. Philosophers seem more interested in whether ChatGPT is sentient than in the slaughter of civilians by their own government.

4.   In The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris, a militant atheist with a degree in neuroscience, argues that we don’t need religion or philosophy to tell us how to behave, because science can do that for us; brain scans and other tools can help us determine what's good and bad for us. "There are right and wrong answers to moral questions," Harris asserts, "just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics." Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins touted Harris’s embarrassingly bad book, I’m guessing, simply because they share his antipathy to religion.

5.   Moral philosophers who can take a joke should check out “The Good Place,” a witty sit-com about the afterlife. Two primary characters are Eleanor, who is ethically challenged, and Chidi, a professor of moral philosophy who tries to help Eleanor become a better person. The running joke is that Chidi, while steeped in knowledge of Aristotle and Kant, becomes paralyzed when confronted with real-world ethical quandaries. His dithering leads a friend to say, “This is why everybody hates moral philosophy professors.”