Sometimes I am amused at my own relationship with my Reason. About 99% of the time, I act as if I have deep-seated faith in its power to yield valid conclusions. But then there are other times when I see how limited it is. There is a certain category of issues --the mind-bogglers-- before which my rational capacities seem simply to break down.
One of these mind-bogglers that had unsettled me since I was a young kid has to do with beginnings and endings. Take time. (Yeah, good luck, take all the time you want with this puzzle.) My reason tells me that either time had a beginning or it didn't. If it did begin at some point, my mind is boggled by the question, "And what was there before that?" If it didn't, I am completely mystified by the questions, "How can there be no beginning? How can an infinite amount of time already have passed?" There are lots of questions to which I don't know the answers, but questions like this are much worse: I can't even imagine an answer that would make sense to my reason. As with time's beginning, so also with space: "What is there beyond the universe?" Existence itself turns out to be a mind-boggler. A philosopher friend of mine used to joke by throwing into various conversations the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing at all?" I’d laugh. Years later, I realize I cannot grasp how there could be either something or nothing at all. Yet obviously there is something. Somehow the universe has found solutions to all these obviously insoluble problems.
So confronted with my Reason telling me that what is demonstrably is true is also impossible, I sensibly turn away from such ponderings and try to pretend that such boggling of my mind never happens. Eventually I manage to return to my customary sense of the adequacy of my reason. Which seems to serve well enough on less mind-boggling matters than the origins of time and existence. And it seems to me that these moral issues are, if somewhat wild, at least a great deal tamer than those "Where did the universe come from?" kinds of questions. The sensible conclusions of my rational process thus seem persuasive to me. And I don't see how sensible people can think otherwise. And despite my humbling encounters with questions way over my head, I continue to act as if I should take my reasoning seriously.
A philosopher friend of mine --who has encouraged me to write this book, and to do so and with my mind not "dulled" by the mastery of the philosophical literature –the fresher my moral vision was, he imagined, the more likely that I might contribute something original-- gave me a quick review of some of the main ideas in the field of moral philosophy. A variety of these thinkers, he told me, have assumed that reason could produce incontrovertible moral truth, and proceeded to articulate that truth. Unfortunately, he continued, they all came to different conclusions.
With all those cautions in mind, let me to proceed to explore what I believe are put forward as serious moral positions that regard the moral project in very different terms from my morality-as-consequences. Whether or not I do justice to those other positions, this exercise should at least help to clarify where my own quest for moral understanding has brought me. And it is this, rather than an account of previous philosophical thought, that is the purpose of this investigation.
<em>But what's so good about it? </em>
Though rules are fine, I argue that any rule with specificity --like all those rules of our usual structural moralities-- are inadequate and must be trumped by that unspecific, results-oriented rule I say the angel would operate by: namely, "Do your best to act in a way that will result in fostering the greatest possible good-feeling experience for sentient creatures."
Let's take promise-keeping. It's a good place to start because I myself am obviously attached to the maxim, "Always keep your promises." Clearly, in most situations, keeping promises is not only compatible with my Angel Rule but actively supports it. As my children have grown up, I've been very conscious of serving them with my promise-keeping. Particularly for my older two children, who were the fruits of a marriage that broke apart when they were still very young, I quite deliberately made of my promises a solid underpinning for their lives, feeling deeply as I did their pain at having a most important solidity taken away from them. When I was supposed to pick them up after school, I would move heaven and earth to make sure that when they came out, there was Daddy. Not only did my keeping those commitments contribute to the good-feeling of my kids, but obviously just thinking about my serving them in this way still gives me good-feeling even now.
But it does not take a great deal of imagination to conceive of situations in which breaking a promise would be the morally right thing to do. I hate to think of my little kids wondering "Where's Daddy?" but if something even more important required me to break my promise --maybe saving a life, or taking care of some other emergency that won't wait -- I would regard my choosing instead to keep my promise as immoral. What would justify it? The distress of the kids is a factor, but greater suffering by far might weigh on the other side. And it hardly would be worthy to let someone drown in the river, say, so that I could keep saying, "I've never broken a promise." No way the means can justify the ends there.
That situation, you might say, isn't really promise-breaking because it is not really bad faith. All promises, it might be argued, have some unstated boiler-plate attached that says something like "Unless some unforeseen circumstances make it really necessary to break it." If that qualification were always implied, what would be left of the rule about the morality of promise-keeping? Breaking promises to achieve a greater good sounds like following my non-structural maxim. Perhaps it is the unforeseen nature of the greater good. Maybe the maxim would be, "Never make a promise you don't intend to keep." Would that hold?
Not with me. Imagine this situation. I find myself in a concentration camp in Bosnia. The Serb guards think I'm on their side. They've rounded up a group of women, and are planning to begin their systematic rape. But first they want to have dinner. Will I make sure that the women don't go anywhere? Sure, I say, go, enjoy your dinner. I'll guard them. Do I promise, they ask, that I'll stand my post for them, and make sure all ten of these women are still ready for their cruel fun-and-games when they return from dinner? Yes, I say with resonant sincerity in my voice, already thinking about how I'm going to get them out of the camp as soon as they are out of sight. I promise.
Do you think the angel on my shoulder would object? I don't. The angel might say that she regrets that those Serbs will have this experience of someone acting in bad faith with them. But better they have that experience than that the Bosnian women have the experience the Serbs had planned for them.
As with promise-keeping, so also with any other moral maxim I can imagine. "Thou shalt not kill" is a pretty good maxim. But if a Nazi was about to burn down a barn into which he had locked two hundred innocent people, and I had a weapon with which I could kill the Nazi and prevent his terrible crime, would it be moral for me to refrain from pulling that trigger? Not in my book. I'd regard that as unjustifiable non-homicide.
Another friend and I are emailing an exchange about another rule. He is a philosopher (not the one who advised me not to dull my mind on too much of the philosophical literature), and a proponent of Kant. According to my friend and, I'm given to understand, to Kant, "It is always morally wrong to tell a lie." Of course I raise a choice-for-good-while-dealing-with-evil situation, and I'm told it's a commonly adduced dilemma: if a Nazi asks me if I know where the Jews are hiding, and I do know, would it be morally wrong to lie? I say I'd lie without any hesitation or moral qualms whatever. He says it's still wrong. No amount of concern with consequences, he says, can make something right that is inherently wrong. I should not lie to the Nazi.
We're evidently talking in different moral universes, and I don't understand his. Just what's so good about it, I'm trying to find out, that it can outweigh such immense value as all these rich and worthwhile human lives that might be snuffed out by evil?
(At one point, it sounds as though he'll concede that maybe I should lie, but it is still morally wrong. To me that sounds like a contradiction: how can it be morally wrong to do what I should do? how can it be morally right to do what I shouldn't do?)
Sometimes it sounds as though, in the view of my Kantian friend, there is something inscribed on our nature as human beings, and the knowledge that it is morally wrong to lie is one of them. To me, that sounds indecisive even if it were true. I have Christian friends who believe that we have an inborn nature that is morally sinful --that "Look out for # 1" or some such immoral maxim-- is what is inscribed on our nature; but they do not conclude that the most important thing is to live according to what has been inscribed in our nature. Thus it is not persuasive to me that, even if we come with the moral maxim "Thou shalt not lie" pre-programmed into our software, that means that deference to our inborn moral sense is necessarily the moral course for us. Whatever inborn moral telos (Greek for purpose) we may have, it would seem to me that, like the other "authorities" considered in Chapter 2 (God, law, tradition), it needs to be evaluated according to a moral understanding derived otherwise before it can be certified as an adequate guide.
One of these mind-bogglers that had unsettled me since I was a young kid has to do with beginnings and endings. Take time. (Yeah, good luck, take all the time you want with this puzzle.) My reason tells me that either time had a beginning or it didn't. If it did begin at some point, my mind is boggled by the question, "And what was there before that?" If it didn't, I am completely mystified by the questions, "How can there be no beginning? How can an infinite amount of time already have passed?" There are lots of questions to which I don't know the answers, but questions like this are much worse: I can't even imagine an answer that would make sense to my reason. As with time's beginning, so also with space: "What is there beyond the universe?" Existence itself turns out to be a mind-boggler. A philosopher friend of mine used to joke by throwing into various conversations the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing at all?" I’d laugh. Years later, I realize I cannot grasp how there could be either something or nothing at all. Yet obviously there is something. Somehow the universe has found solutions to all these obviously insoluble problems.
So confronted with my Reason telling me that what is demonstrably is true is also impossible, I sensibly turn away from such ponderings and try to pretend that such boggling of my mind never happens. Eventually I manage to return to my customary sense of the adequacy of my reason. Which seems to serve well enough on less mind-boggling matters than the origins of time and existence. And it seems to me that these moral issues are, if somewhat wild, at least a great deal tamer than those "Where did the universe come from?" kinds of questions. The sensible conclusions of my rational process thus seem persuasive to me. And I don't see how sensible people can think otherwise. And despite my humbling encounters with questions way over my head, I continue to act as if I should take my reasoning seriously.
A philosopher friend of mine --who has encouraged me to write this book, and to do so and with my mind not "dulled" by the mastery of the philosophical literature –the fresher my moral vision was, he imagined, the more likely that I might contribute something original-- gave me a quick review of some of the main ideas in the field of moral philosophy. A variety of these thinkers, he told me, have assumed that reason could produce incontrovertible moral truth, and proceeded to articulate that truth. Unfortunately, he continued, they all came to different conclusions.
<em>But what's so good about it? </em>
Though rules are fine, I argue that any rule with specificity --like all those rules of our usual structural moralities-- are inadequate and must be trumped by that unspecific, results-oriented rule I say the angel would operate by: namely, "Do your best to act in a way that will result in fostering the greatest possible good-feeling experience for sentient creatures."
Let's take promise-keeping. It's a good place to start because I myself am obviously attached to the maxim, "Always keep your promises." Clearly, in most situations, keeping promises is not only compatible with my Angel Rule but actively supports it. As my children have grown up, I've been very conscious of serving them with my promise-keeping. Particularly for my older two children, who were the fruits of a marriage that broke apart when they were still very young, I quite deliberately made of my promises a solid underpinning for their lives, feeling deeply as I did their pain at having a most important solidity taken away from them. When I was supposed to pick them up after school, I would move heaven and earth to make sure that when they came out, there was Daddy. Not only did my keeping those commitments contribute to the good-feeling of my kids, but obviously just thinking about my serving them in this way still gives me good-feeling even now.
But it does not take a great deal of imagination to conceive of situations in which breaking a promise would be the morally right thing to do. I hate to think of my little kids wondering "Where's Daddy?" but if something even more important required me to break my promise --maybe saving a life, or taking care of some other emergency that won't wait -- I would regard my choosing instead to keep my promise as immoral. What would justify it? The distress of the kids is a factor, but greater suffering by far might weigh on the other side. And it hardly would be worthy to let someone drown in the river, say, so that I could keep saying, "I've never broken a promise." No way the means can justify the ends there.
That situation, you might say, isn't really promise-breaking because it is not really bad faith. All promises, it might be argued, have some unstated boiler-plate attached that says something like "Unless some unforeseen circumstances make it really necessary to break it." If that qualification were always implied, what would be left of the rule about the morality of promise-keeping? Breaking promises to achieve a greater good sounds like following my non-structural maxim. Perhaps it is the unforeseen nature of the greater good. Maybe the maxim would be, "Never make a promise you don't intend to keep." Would that hold?
Not with me. Imagine this situation. I find myself in a concentration camp in Bosnia. The Serb guards think I'm on their side. They've rounded up a group of women, and are planning to begin their systematic rape. But first they want to have dinner. Will I make sure that the women don't go anywhere? Sure, I say, go, enjoy your dinner. I'll guard them. Do I promise, they ask, that I'll stand my post for them, and make sure all ten of these women are still ready for their cruel fun-and-games when they return from dinner? Yes, I say with resonant sincerity in my voice, already thinking about how I'm going to get them out of the camp as soon as they are out of sight. I promise.
Do you think the angel on my shoulder would object? I don't. The angel might say that she regrets that those Serbs will have this experience of someone acting in bad faith with them. But better they have that experience than that the Bosnian women have the experience the Serbs had planned for them.
As with promise-keeping, so also with any other moral maxim I can imagine. "Thou shalt not kill" is a pretty good maxim. But if a Nazi was about to burn down a barn into which he had locked two hundred innocent people, and I had a weapon with which I could kill the Nazi and prevent his terrible crime, would it be moral for me to refrain from pulling that trigger? Not in my book. I'd regard that as unjustifiable non-homicide.
Another friend and I are emailing an exchange about another rule. He is a philosopher (not the one who advised me not to dull my mind on too much of the philosophical literature), and a proponent of Kant. According to my friend and, I'm given to understand, to Kant, "It is always morally wrong to tell a lie." Of course I raise a choice-for-good-while-dealing-with-evil situation, and I'm told it's a commonly adduced dilemma: if a Nazi asks me if I know where the Jews are hiding, and I do know, would it be morally wrong to lie? I say I'd lie without any hesitation or moral qualms whatever. He says it's still wrong. No amount of concern with consequences, he says, can make something right that is inherently wrong. I should not lie to the Nazi.
We're evidently talking in different moral universes, and I don't understand his. Just what's so good about it, I'm trying to find out, that it can outweigh such immense value as all these rich and worthwhile human lives that might be snuffed out by evil?
(At one point, it sounds as though he'll concede that maybe I should lie, but it is still morally wrong. To me that sounds like a contradiction: how can it be morally wrong to do what I should do? how can it be morally right to do what I shouldn't do?)
Sometimes it sounds as though, in the view of my Kantian friend, there is something inscribed on our nature as human beings, and the knowledge that it is morally wrong to lie is one of them. To me, that sounds indecisive even if it were true. I have Christian friends who believe that we have an inborn nature that is morally sinful --that "Look out for # 1" or some such immoral maxim-- is what is inscribed on our nature; but they do not conclude that the most important thing is to live according to what has been inscribed in our nature. Thus it is not persuasive to me that, even if we come with the moral maxim "Thou shalt not lie" pre-programmed into our software, that means that deference to our inborn moral sense is necessarily the moral course for us. Whatever inborn moral telos (Greek for purpose) we may have, it would seem to me that, like the other "authorities" considered in Chapter 2 (God, law, tradition), it needs to be evaluated according to a moral understanding derived otherwise before it can be certified as an adequate guide.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
