Some comments on What is Good? by A C Grayling (2003).
The bottom line: The issues in moral philosophy that he broached have been left unresolved, with favourable handwaving in the direction of science and negative handwaving in the direction of religion.
“The search for the best way to live” is the subtitle of this book , a guide to the history of ethics and morals written for general readers. It is a well written book, gracefully carrying a large burden of historical scholarship, delivering a keen view on the downside of various revolutions in thinking that were supposed to deliver sweetness and light but often as not delivered the opposite (the classics are the French and Russian revolutions).
The interesting thing for critical rationalists is the way that Grayling has posed some problems that are solved by CR.
A subtext of the book is the relationship between religion and morals, because he is an aggressive secularist he sees the religions of all kinds as essentially obscurantist, “perfumed smokescreens of sophisticated apologetics and interpretations”. He sees progress in terms of emancipation from the entanglement of religious precepts as the foundation or justification for the moral principles of the good life.
In view of the way that people are talking about the revival of the “Enlightenment project” it is interesting that chapter 5 is The second enlightenment and chapter 6 is The third enlightenment.
The first enlightenment he traced to Greece of the classical epoch, the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the time of Pericles, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. He acknowledged Thales as a forefather of the spirit that produced Socrates. This recalls Popper’s tribute to the pre-Socratics who he nominated as the inventors of the critical tradition.
The second enlightenment is Renaissance humanism. For him, this enlightenment represents an attempt to work within the religious tradition, which he considers a failure.
The third enlightenment, of the eighteenth century, and still in progress, represents for Grayling an attempt to abandon religion altogether. Kant and Hume are the leading philosophers from this period. Popper was especially excited by Kant’s call for intellectual autonomy. Kant wrote “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity…the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed…Dare to know! Have courage to use your own understanding.”
Am emblem of this spirit was the Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonne des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers. Edited by Denis Diderot and Jean D’Alembert the idea was “to collect all knowledge scattered over the earth” and transmit this accumulated wisdom to the living and to future generations. It was published between 1951 and 1772 in seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of illustrations, with 72,000 articles composed by 140 authors including Voltaire, Rousseau, Marmontel, d’Holbach and Turgot.
Grayling noted that the opponents this movement fell into two categories, the conservatives and the romantics (though he does not distinguish between rigid conservatives and the nuanced conservatism of Burke). The Romantics objected to aspects of science that we would now call “scientism” – mechanism, determinism, inductivism (I feign no hypothesis).
The crux of the argument here is the place of reason in the good life. “On the Enlightenment view, reason is the armament of ideas, the weapon employed in the conflict between viewpoints. This suggests that reason is absolute…One main opponent is religion [claiming revelation as the absolute] and another is relativism [all views are equally valid].”
Moving on to Hume and Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals where his aim was to settle the question about “the general foundation of morals” , whether they are derived from reason or from the emotional responses of agents – whether “we attain the knowledge of [moral principles] by a chain of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and inner fine sense”.
At the time there were three schools of thought (1) moral truths are apprehended by reason (2) self-interest (possibly enlightened) provides the key (3) there is an innate moral sense which is fundamentally benevolent [this was Hume’s view].
Hume also spelled out the dualism of “is and ought”, arguing that you cannot derive a statement telling you what you ought to do from a statement describing some aspect of the world.
Before getting back to Grayling’s narrative (leaving out Hume and the nineteenth century, and skipping to the 20th century) I will break off to suggest the CR response to Hume’s quest for the foundations of moral sentiments.
First, replace the notion of sentiments with “rules of the game” of social life.
Second, never mind about foundations, just try to improve the rules.
What counts as improving the rules? Well first specify what you want the rules to achieve, and then see how well they are doing. This does not proceed in a vacuum, we start with the rules in place around us and we can aim to improve them in a piecemeal manner.
Are the rules promoting peace, freedom and prosperity? Why aim for peace, freedom and prosperity? Fine, if you want to argue, suggest some other objectives.
In a chapter called The Rediscovery of Ethics he examines “the shameful 20th century” and makes the case that the carnage of the century did not represent a decline of moral standards, merely increased destructive capacity (and more people to start with), an opinion which is fair enough if you contemplate the blood-soaked ancient and modern history of (what is now) Turkey (and places East) and the appalling record of conquest and mass murder.
Moving on to “the moral philosophers in the shameful century” in a four pages he takes us from “The first significant work in moral philosophy in the 20th century” – G E Moore’s Principia Ethica, an inspiration for the Bloomsbury Group, through Freddy Ayer’s “emotivism” (moral principles are expressions of feelings) and Hare’s revival of the Kantian notion of “prescriptivism” to Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971) which he described as” the most significant event in moral philosophy in the later 20th century”. This is essentially about social democracy, fairness and equality but has served mostly to prop up demands for redistribution and the confusion of justice and social welfare.
It is tempting to suggest that nobody should pontificate about moral principles unless they understand enough political economy to understand the pitfalls of social democracy and redistribution, like fourth generation welfare dependents, poverty traps and the like.
The final chapter “Laying the Ghosts” asserts humanistic values against the charge of religionists that this will not work for want of appropriate foundations. He argues that at bottom, the religions are incompatible with each other and all tend to fundamentalism as they approach the foundations of their faith. At the very least he wants religion out of “public space” by which he means public funding so they have to sustain their faiths by their own efforts and not use public funds to set up faith-based schools (the British and Australian situation).
His target for this section is the philosopher Anthony O’Hear who, he tell us, argues that Progress in the form of science and the humanistic values of reason, atheism, democracy and human rights have not delivered the goods, instead they have degraded our experience, promoted shallow materialism, and banished the recognition of life’s higher purpose. It is not hard for Grayling to identify weak spots in O’Hear’s case, pointing out the progress in life, liberty and well-being that have been achieved in modern times, especially in the western nations and in other in areas that are not infested with chronic war or civil strife.
However his conclusion, on “science and hope” misses the point of the philosophical problems that he ought to recognise. He writes “our major hope for the future is science…when science replaces mythology as the framework for understanding the world, it brings with it its inquiring, questioning, open-minded attitudes, and that in turn makes possible a better and finer understanding of what conduces to the human good”.
He has missed the point that scientific knowledge is conjectural knowledge, derived from myths corrected by criticism and tests, moreover, driven by metaphysical research programs and conducted by scientists who have moral values that cannot be derived from science but are rooted in other (religious) mythologies and traditional rules and practices, again corrected by criticism and tests.
The scientific enterprise is a human and social matter and can easily be corrupted by bad practices, by uncritical normal scientists, by the need for Big Money to drive Big Science, by political directives.
The issues in moral philosophy that he broached have been left unresolved, with favourable handwaving in the direction of science and negative handwaving in the direction of religion.
A fundamental problem is common to much epistemology, much of the philosophy of science, political philosophy and moral philosophy. That problem is foundationalism, justificationism, what you will, resulting in the wrong questions being asked, questions that cannot be answered in a satisfactory manner but serve a purpose of keeping philosophers of various kinds off the streets.
That same problem occurs in theology, in the great religions and so from a CR point of view both philosophy and religion are unhelpful to the extent that they sustain the justificationist, true belief tradition, obsession, quest, metacontext or whatever.
