The World Philosophy Made

by Scott Soames

  THE BIOLOGICAL LIMITS OF THE MORAL SENSE VERSUS ITS HISTORICALLY GROWING REACH

  The contrast between the moral concerns of more versus less individualistic cultures presents a challenge. If morality arises from a universal innate moral sense, why do we find different moral conceptions in societies at different times and places, and how should we respond to the differences between them? Not all of these differences need to be resolved. The fact that two cultures solve a moral problem differently needn’t mean they are motivated by different ends, or that at least one must get things wrong. Sometimes what is morally required may not be a unique action, but some action from morally comparable alternatives. Nor are all alternatives equally available in different cultures. Different levels of knowledge, different resources, different economic or social conditions, and differences in climate and geography can limit available actions and thereby determine different moral outcomes. Finally, the same action can have different consequences, and so get different evaluations, due to nonmoral differences in the circumstances in which it is performed. None of this undermines Wilson’s universal moral sense.

  He does, however, implicitly recognize a serious challenge.

  The most remarkable change in the moral history of mankind has been the rise—and occasionally the application—of the view that all people, and not just one’s own kind, are entitled to fair treatment.… Many [on the other hand, think that] morality governs our actions toward others in much the same way that gravity governs the motions of the planets: its strength is in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them.27

  Why does the existence of a universalistic moral aspiration at some places and times, but not others, constitute a challenge to Wilson? According to him, our moral sense develops out of the attachments and sympathies generated from our earliest childhood experiences with parents, siblings, relatives, close friends and companions. These are the ones with whom our interests and identities are intertwined, the ones to whom we are instinctively connected, and the ones to whom we are, in the first instance, morally committed. As we grow older, the circle is enlarged, but the difference between the moral significance of those inside the circle and those outside remains. Up to a point, this isn’t a problem. Our moral duties to the near and dear are different from, and often more urgent than, our duties to arbitrary others. What must be explained is how our duties ever manage to extend beyond our limited sphere and to encompass, at least to some degree, all human beings.

  Wilson offers an historical explanation. He tells us that about 300 CE, family and kinship structure in Europe began to diverge from an earlier pattern in which marriage partners and property inheritance were determined by heads of male-dominated clans, multiple wives were allowed, and it was easy for males to divorce their wives. Over the next several centuries that pattern changed in northern and western Europe to one in which monogamous marriages established outside the clan, by consent of the partners themselves, became increasingly common, leading to growing numbers of independent nuclear families sustaining themselves on their own plots of land. The Church ratified consensual marriage, and banned polygamy, adultery, concubinage, and remarriage after divorce. It also enforced church discipline on people as individuals rather than as clan members. This facilitated the growing recognition that a woman could share an inheritance, serve as her husband’s business partner, and raise her children after his death. The result was a more child-centered family and the development of a more individualistic culture that was susceptible to more universalistic appeals in morality.

  The ground was prepared for the growth of individualism and universalism by the dramatic changes that occurred in family life during some thousand years, stretching from the end of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. In this time, monogamous marriages triumphed over polygamy and male divorce power, and gradually shifted its focus away from parental and kinship concerns to the advantage of the conjugal couple. The family they were founding … consolidated its position as the basic cell of Western society.28

  The final piece of the puzzle was the extension of private property and the codification of rules governing it. Speaking of post-thirteenth-century England, Wilson says:

  Individualism in economic and social life existed, rooted in property rights, partible inheritances, and cash markets. Land was a commodity that could be … bought and sold, fathers bequeathed their land to particular offspring … men and women hired out for cash wages.… Women, unmarried as well as married, could (and did) own property, make wills and contracts, and bring suit.… There were no insuperable barriers dividing poor farmers from rich ones, and so some who began poor ended up rich. The existence of individual property rights made England … a litigious society: if land could be bought and sold, inherited and bequeathed, it was inevitable that there would be countless disputes.… The courts of equity that settled these disputes inevitably decided something even more important than arguments over land; they resolved—or at least shaped—a broader set of claims about individual rights.29

  These changes provided the soil that nourished the Enlightenment celebration of individual liberty, the rights of individuals, equality before the law, and the equitable treatment of all human beings.

  THE ROLE OF SOCIOECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS IN EXTENDING OUR BIOLOGICALLY BASED MORALITY

  Ironically, this story of what Wilson sees as the changing shape of human morality may also be the greatest challenge to his view of morality as founded in an innate moral sense. Human communities in every century in every inhabited region of the earth have shared the components of his moral sense—our native sociability, our prolonged dependence as infants, the bond between parent and child, the social attachments with friends, family, and neighbors, and the intertwining of our self-interest and self-conception with a concern not only for winning the good opinion of those with whom we are connected, but also for their genuine well-being. Yet despite this commonality, only a few human communities have conceived of moral obligations in semi-universalistic, post-Enlightenment terms. Why, if this aspect of morality is grounded in our biological endowment, should its appearance be so unusual, and so late in coming?

  The answer, one might think, is that the moral sense is only one, and not the strongest, part of our human nature, and that moral systems that arise from it are influenced by nonmoral aspects of our nature as well as by our physical, social, and economic environments. Since Wilson recognizes all manner of historical, geographical, and other contingencies that affect what is best for particular societies at particular times, he wouldn’t disagree with this. The real challenge comes from a deeper question. Why do we think that morality ought to include a degree of post-Enlightenment moral universalism? Why is it, all other things equal, morally better for us to recognize some obligations to those outside our tribe? What, from Wilson’s perspective, does this even mean?

  Consider what, following David Hume and Adam Smith, we call ‘utility’—roughly, the advancement of fundamental interests, and hence of the welfare of individuals. Certain actions, habits, rules, and patterns of social organization are more likely than others to advance the welfare of humans living in societies. Ultimately, these welfare-advancing rules require individual agents to extend moral standing beyond family and friends to the tribe, beyond the tribe to the neighboring tribe, and, eventually, to all human beings. Surely, one may think, it is best for humanity that individuals internalize this lesson. It may also be best for individuals whose own moral commitments and self-conceptions have been shaped by a post-Enlightenment culture to live by it. These individuals already value the welfare of distant others. This, it may be argued, is what makes it true that they have moral obligations to such others; that they ought, or ought not, perform certain actions out of concern for them. All this can be admitted, but it doesn’t touch the problem that post-Enlightenment approximations of universalism poses for Wilson.

  Is it true, or not, that individuals whose cultural conceptions of morality don’t incorp
orate post-Enlightenment universalism ought to treat outsiders with sympathy, fairness, and reciprocity? On the account I have been developing, we can’t say that they morally ought to treat outsiders in this way unless we can show that doing so would, in the main, advance the moral and nonmoral interests they already have. Would it? One might argue that such a change in outlook would advance their culture to the overall benefit of their descendants, whom they care about. But such a historical transformation, which might, if successful, take many generations to achieve, is speculative. There is no guarantee that it will ever come, let alone that it will come quickly enough to engage the imaginations of present agents. Must we then say that these individuals have no binding moral obligations to outsiders, even though we take ourselves and other members of our culture to be so bound?

  Not necessarily. Universalistic moral conceptions typically understand fairness as requiring reciprocity. If those from less universalistic, or even strongly tribal, cultures wish to reap the full benefits of cooperative interaction with those from more universalistic cultures, they will, at some point, have to realize that reciprocity in dealing with outsiders is expected, and so come to find it to be in their interest to reciprocate. If they do, then, over time, increased participation in mutually beneficial activities may change the attitudes of all parties, enriching and expanding the moral universe of each. It is, after all, just such reciprocity that, in one way or another, led our ancestors, and most of us at different stages of our lives, to extend empathetic moral concerns we initially felt only for the near and dear to larger groups. Thus, the proper response to the challenge posed by those with limited moral horizons is to work to expand them, not by charity, but by reciprocal social interaction, on the basis of the commonalities they already share with us.

  What is true about the relationship between cultures with mismatched moral universes may also be true of similarly mismatched individuals, or groups of individuals, in any culture. All societies contain some who fail to accord significant moral status to those their neighbors recognize as morally significant others. The centrality of reciprocity to our moral lives dictates that the morally expansive neighbors of their more morally isolated fellows offer them opportunities for cooperative interaction, conditional on the willingness of all parties to engage in genuinely reciprocal behavior. If the required reciprocity is not forthcoming, such offers should be withdrawn. There is, after all, a price to be paid for opting out of practices of mutually beneficial concern. If there weren’t, moral virtues would never be acquired.

  Our view of those with restricted moral universes should, of course, not be confused with those who inhabit no moral universe. Consider the following thought experiment raised by a philosopher in response to the perspective offered here.30

  Suppose that a pharmaceutical company developed a drug that would change our nature in such a way that we became asocial; in particular, we would stop caring about other people’s welfare. The good news, they tell us, is that we won’t care about what other people think of us; so when they disapprove of our asocial behavior, it won’t matter to us. Obviously, it would be wrong for us, with our current nature, to take such a drug—because we are obliged to care about other people, and to try to continue caring. But the question is: what if somebody accidentally put the drug into the water supply, so that we all woke up tomorrow morning not caring about other people? Would this mean that we had suddenly lost any obligation to act in an altruistic fashion?

  The answer to these questions is that those who consumed the drug would cease to be moral agents, and so would have no more moral obligations than nonhuman animals do. If any of us remained who had not consumed the morality-destroying drug, we would see some of the actions of those who did as bad, in the way it is bad when sharks devour a swimmer, even though sharks aren’t moral agents. Nevertheless, we might continue to care about our unfortunate friends and loved ones who had been changed by the drug. We might also treat them with a degree of kindness in appreciation of the fine people they had been, and out of gratitude for what they had, before their misfortune, done for us. We might, in short, treat them in much the same way we treat, and are obligated to treat, those who, from age or injury, are now much diminished versions of their former selves. But we would no longer see them as full moral agents, and so not interact with them as before.

  This is the philosophical conception of morality to which we are led by Wilson’s view of an innate, biologically based moral sense. It is one in which morality is a social institution that is evolving, historically and nonbiologically, into a richer system capable of increasing human welfare by increasing the scope of human cooperation. As social cooperation increases, biologically based values are extended, creating new moral relationships that allow previously underivable oughts to be derived from expanded factual premises about what agents value and are able to contemplate. It is this conception—not of changing moral opinions but of expanding moral reality—the elaboration and refinement of which requires the cooperation of today’s philosophers, biologists, and social scientists.

  ADVANCING CIVILIZATION

  The story told here about the opportunities for progress in our understanding of moral matters is, admittedly, less the celebration of an advance in human civilization to which philosophy has contributed than a sketch of how such an advance may now be possible. Although the needed components for hastening this process exist in philosophy, biology, neuroscience, and social science, they are fragmented and not organized into a coherent, institutionally coordinated search for the advancement of moral knowledge. There is no such current search. If there were, it would exist in the modern university. But, except for various pockets of inspired investigation in a few leading philosophy departments, it doesn’t.

  Other than this growing philosophical interest, the prevailing ethos on campus scarcely recognizes the possibility of advances in moral knowledge founded on fact- and reason-based inquiry. Instead, morality tends to be viewed by too many students, faculty, and administrators as a domain in which genuine knowledge is impossible and consensus can be reached only by relying on strong feelings and unreflective opinions backed by intimidation. Unfortunately, something similar can be said about other social institutions as well. This all-too-common contemporary conception of morality—which runs counter to the central messages of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle at the dawn of western philosophy—has become a danger to our civilization. In order to combat it, more philosophers and their colleagues in the natural and social sciences must step forward.

  CHAPTER 14

  VIRTUE, HAPPINESS, AND MEANING IN THE FACE OF DEATH

  The twin aims of western philosophy: to lay the conceptual foundations of theoretical knowledge, and to chart a path to virtue, happiness, and meaning in life; the urgency of the second in an era of declining Christianity; the goal of uniting philosophical and empirical investigations of human nature; the centrality of knowledge in viable philosophical conceptions of virtue and happiness; the meaning of life, the finality of death, and the centrality of our connections to others, past, present, and future.

  At the beginning of chapter 2, I pulled apart two inquiries the fusion of which by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle generated the intellectual energy that created and continues to sustain western philosophy. One inquiry attempts to lay the conceptual foundations of reason and evidence-based explanations of the natural world. The other attempts to reveal the individual’s ultimate purpose and to chart a path to happiness, virtue, and wisdom. Although I have pursued both inquiries in this book, there is more to say about the second.

  Philosophers can take pride in their contributions to the quality of our education, law, politics, economics, and morality. But the resources of philosophy have not been fully utilized. Although advances in those areas are related to each individual’s personal quest for happiness and virtue, they don’t directly address the existential burden of guiding individual lives. That burden, which had for centuries in the west been lifted
from philosophy and borne by Christianity, has returned now that Christianity is no longer the dominant intellectual force it once was. Nor can political ideology fill the void of existential emptiness, as the massive political tragedies of the last century and the destructive enthusiasms gripping significant segments of the west today vividly illustrate. This is the context in which it has become incumbent on philosophy to make its resources for advancing the individual’s personal quest for meaning more evident—to make visible the contours of a life the value of which to something larger than oneself is great enough to sustain one through all setbacks unto death. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, Socrates suggests that philosophers study and prepare for death, learning that it is not to be feared—a theme later taken up by the Stoics, and by Boethius. Today’s philosophers should think about how they can add to this heritage.