Against Meta-Ethics - Ethics as First Philosophy

 

Where to start? What keeps philosophers up at night worrying?  I can assure you it isn’t meta-ethics, which I will discuss after I’ve  introduced the real villain in this story.  What keeps philosophers up at night is something called “ethical naturalism”.  That’s the notion that there can be a science of morality, a way of explaining what morality does that is non-subjective and avoids the notions of moral freedom, responsibility, and purpose. Historically, past forms of ethical naturalism have morphed into Eugenics and Social Darwinism, practices which, in their crudest forms have led to the death camps. So, yes, it has kept me up at night.  But don’t worry, because there is a philosophical antidote to this horrible disease!  It is called “meta-ethics”; and, although I heartily agree that it does help me to get a good night’s rest, I think it actually makes it harder for all of us to understand how ethics works, and it almost seems as if it is designed that way on purpose.  Was it?

 I’d like to share a thought experiment with you.  Let’s suppose we assign six blind men to the task of examining an elephant.  The first man examines one of the elephant’s legs, the second the elephant’s trunk, the third examines the tusks, the fourth the ears, the fifth the upper mid-section, and the sixth, the elephant’s tail. After the examination they all get together to discuss their findings.  But they can’t come up with any satisfactory agreement on what the real nature of the elephant is, and so they  agree to disagree, thereby creating the brand new academic discipline of Meta-Elephant.  Meta-Elephant is the study of six essences: Treeness, Snakeness, Curved Spearness, Big-Flapness, Wallness, and Ropeness. According to the discipline of Meta-Elephant, one must study all six essences of the elephant to really understand what an elephant is.

We can extrapolate from the Meta-Elephant thought experiment that, when we, like the six blind men, just give up on developing an overarching theory of a “Big” subject like the elephant or ethics, far from improving our understanding, we only increase our confusion. 

 

In the history of philosophy one common solution to intractable problems is to get progressively more abstract.  It’s a professional hazard, almost a philosophical reflex response to problematic situations. And so, sometime in the last century, in Philosophy departments across the land, it was decreed that:  Henceforth there would be two ways to talk about ethics:  “normative ethics” and “meta-ethics''.  In fact, normative ethics was what we used to mean by “ethics”; and meta ethics has just become a grab bag of leftovers from the centuries long disagreements over the exact nature of abstract ethical concepts. And, sure, it’s generated lots of philosophical literature, but has that literature furthered our understanding of ethics?  I think it has generated a lot of scholastic hairsplitting, but no greater understanding.  I suspect that meta-ethics functions as a “Great Wall of Misunderstanding and Confusion”  defending a rearguard action in trying to keep ethical naturalism at bay.  I always thought if you don’t like a theory, make up a better one!  Don’t waste your time trying to create an impenetrable defence perimeter around the mess you’ve got.  It amounts to a kind of surrender, because it’s a tacit acknowledgement that ethical naturalism and evolutionary psychology have the stronger case, and I, for one, beg to differ. The notably correct intuition, that science is not the royal road to ethical knowledge, has led us to a dead end of empty philosophizing.  Instead of furthering our knowledge about ethics, meta-ethicists have inadvertently stumbled onto a new solution for the age-old problem of insomnia.   Meta-ethics is, literally, lulling philosophy students to sleep! 

Meta-ethics was developed as a separate philosophical discipline roughly in the last half of the twentieth century.  Whereas before that time, philosophers studied ethics,  and that involved studying competing theories of ethics and coming up with one’s own variation on one of the several main ethical theories: Utilitarianism, Contract Theory, Virtue Theory, Divine Command Theory, and Kantian Universal Moral theory, it became evident that the project of developing a scientific theory of ethics was threatening the very idea of ethics as a whole.  Something had to be done, otherwise Philosophy was going to lose one of its cornerstones to Science, and what is worse, an unchained scientific ethics would have quickly devolved into an ungovernable monster.  

Ostensibly meta-ethics was developed to clarify and explicate disputes over issues in “normative ethics”, however it has had the opposite effect of muddying the waters by multiplying metaphysical disputes over ethical concepts.  And far from incorporating ethical naturalism as just one among many competing theories, meta-ethics has successfully kept ethical naturalism from disturbing the normative landscape by burying it in metaphysical disputes.  We see this in this development of ethical expressivism, which, not coincidentally, occurred right after G.E. Moore’s popular take-down of Ethical Naturalism, in the 1920’s.

Expressivism is the theory that ethics is nothing more than our expressions of approval and disapproval.  This goes back to Hobbes' question-begging idea  that “good” is equivalent to what we desire and “bad” is equivalent to what we seek to avoid. But, the point is not that there are things we desire and avoid, or like or dislike - the point is - why do we desire or avoid things and why do we insist on approval or disapproval?  By focusing on how we use words that express values instead of what we value and why we value it, we won’t be able to understand what ethics is really doing. In philosophy studying  the way we use words is just avoiding looking at the bigger picture at a time when we most need to.   We should be asking these big picture questions: “ What is ethics for?”   “How are humans different from animals?”  “What’s the advantage of moral systems versus animal dominance systems?”   “What led to the development of moral systems in the first humans?”

  Meta-ethics engages in examinations of what ethical concepts mean and whether or not ethical qualities  correspond to real qualities or to imaginary, or even quasi-real qualities.  Understanding the essence of Treeness and Snakeness is not going to help us understand what an elephant is.  We need to observe the elephant with other elephants in their environment.

 The origin of meta-ethics can probably be traced to the brilliant diatribes of G.E. Moore,   who first brought us the idea of “the naturalistic fallacy”, which amounts to the claim that a basic ethical concept “good”  cannot be equated with anything natural.   This in turn was closely associated with David Hume's famous argument that you cannot derive ought from is. Whereas Hume was attacking religious explanations by emphasizing an unbridgeable gap between is and ought; one hundred and fifty years later, Moore was attacking naturalistic explanations of ethics.  You can see how Moore’s approach, of attacking the equation of good with any natural quality, by arguing that “good means good!”  and is therefore given to us intuitively, could itself lead down the path to meta-ethics, by way of generating lengthy discussions about what basic ethical concepts really mean.  Add to this the dominant tendency of Analytic Philosophy to focus it’s analysis on  the understanding of major philosophical concepts by studying our use of language, and  this had a baneful influence on ethics, viewing it as the sum total of: ethical discourse, statements of moral principles, and  justifications of those principles, as if that is all there is to ethics.  But ethics concerns human existence, the way we experience ourselves in the world, and that world is irreducibly social.

 If we want to create a new understanding of ethics we will need to see it as a consequence of human nature, rather than through a naturalistic approach that  dehumanizes nature.  It would help a lot if we  looked at ethics more from the human perspective and not from a supposed God’s eye view. If we want to understand the elephant better we need to avoid metaphysical disputes about the parts of the elephant.   As Immanuel Kant once argued, what we need is a philosophical anthropology, a philosophy that views what is distinctly human from the point of view of human nature, not metaphysical abstractions. G.E. Moore,  had the right instinct to reject naturalism, he just went at it the wrong way.  If we want to understand what an elephant is we have to see it as one thing.  We can disagree about what that one thing is, but we have to take the risk that we are wrong, by committing to a theory about the whole elephant, not just agreeing to a collection of its parts. This is what the rise of meta-ethics stopped us from doing. By making a temporary  truce between competing ethical theories into an ongoing feature, meta-ethics made progress in understanding the nature of ethics  more difficult and cumbersome, burying the subject in a mountain of minutiae and trivialities.

                                                  II     

                                  Ethics as First Philosophy

  The history of Science seems to be the history of the systematic elimination of  purpose from  explanations of natural phenomenon.  All scientists want to understand how physical and biological processes work, using only natural explanations, only explanations based on physical objects and processes, avoiding the concepts of intention and purpose, (with the exceptions of physiology and medicine, where we  we haven’t been able to eliminate talk about the purpose of body organs as of yet); the incorporation of purpose into explanations of physical phenomena is usually deemed an illegitimate short-cut. 

 I’m the first to agree that it was a good move on the part of Galileo to eliminate purpose and subjectivity from most explanations about the behavior of physical objects.  But humans are not just physical objects.  Since morality is mediated through subjective valuing and judging, we cannot hope to understand what it is by eliminating purpose from our explanations.  To understand humanity  we must inhabit human concepts from the inside, so to speak.   By trying to eliminate purpose and subjectivity from explanations of human behavior, naturalistic explanations end up discarding what is distinctly human  about them. 

                                               

 The title of this section: “Ethics as First Philosophy”,  is borrowed from the twentieth century philosopher Emmanuel Levitas.  I was initially attracted to Levitas’ philosophy because of this essay of his, but actually, my reasons for crowning ethics as First Philosophy are different from that of Levitas.  All we share is the belief that ethics is First Philosophy and not the why and how of it.  My intention here is to point philosophy in the right direction  and jump start it out of it’s meta-ethics induced coma, and for that we need to revisit the central figure of Socrates. 

Socrates, an enigmatic figure, like Jesus, continues to be a focus of renewal in philosophy.   Not only was Socrates influential, he was controversial, because he initiated a major change in the direction that philosophy was taking, from studying the nature of the external world, to studying human nature and human institutions.  In hindsight, it seems obvious that you could only go so far in the ancient world in understanding the world at large, due to their primitive technology.  At a certain point it would have been obvious that knowledge could only grow if we turned our attention to ourselves and our own social institutions.   Socrates went after our ideals:  justice, piety, beauty, love, and demonstrated, through dialogue with supposed experts, how the common notions of these ideals were confused and contradictory. In this respect we are not much different from the ancient Greeks:  we are all equally  suffering the Dunning-Kreuger effect:  we think we know how things that we are immersed in, such as social institutions, work, but actually we don’t. This kind of socially focused critical philosophy angered and upset a lot of complacent people in ancient Athens, and Socrates ended up being executed by the decision of a jury of his Athenian peers;  but this Socratian turn in philosophy got a lot of people like Plato, and other philosophers excited and thinking in new ways,  and it revitalized philosophy from what had become the philosophical dead-end of materialism. 

Knowledge of who we are and who we could be, is at once the most liberating,and the most dangerous.  By turning attention to what makes a society good, Socrates gave  philosophy a powerful and consequential focus.  At various times since, philosophy has lost that focus,  but it has usually come back to the Socratean view eventually. 

 Ethical naturalism denies human purpose.  If we follow it’s precepts we inevitably end up with some form of social Darwinism - the idea that “nature knows best,”  which is the opposite of morality. G. E. Moore was right to despise it.  But the solution to its challenge is not to cast a meta-ethical spell, so that all who study ethics must fall into a deep sleep for a hundred years; the solution is to give ethics its proper place as a defining characteristic of being human -  to realize ethics as First Philosophy.  To understand human nature we must understand how it is different from Nature, and that is why ethics is the key to this understanding.  Deep down, morality forms the basis for all human social systems. Adopting a moral system is what made human nature possible, and what differentiates us from all other animals.

Ethics really is the moral of this story.