Chapter 11: An Introduction to Graduate School
I. Teaching Introduction to Philosophy
I quickly discovered that graduate school is not a remake of undergraduate school at a higher level. It was a significantly different experience, with a new set of rules and a new set of responsibilities.
Some of those new responsibilities centered on the fact that I had to teach. As a first-year graduate student, I was put in charge of three discussion groups associated with a large lecture course, Phil 0101: Introduction to Philosophy. I worked with another first-year graduate student, who also ran three discussion groups. We worked for the lecturer, a visiting professor from Australia, Jan Crothwaite.
I had this continuing fear of going into a discussion group and facing this throng of mean and vicious undergraduate students out for blood. I would be pretending that I knew what I was talking about, and find myself facing some genius student who would prove to his classmates just how little I actually knew. Having lost the respect of my students, class would degenerate into a fiasco.
This fear was justified, in part, because I had focused so heavily on moral philosophy. The other fields of philosophy, such as ontology and epistemology, were nearly alien to me. I listened to the other graduate students talk about these things within the department, and I felt like I had walked into a foreign country. Many of the words they used sounded like English, but I could not make sense of them.
However, I wanted to teach. When I was thirteen years old, I remember, I viewed teaching as one of the greatest of all professions. That does not mean that I was good at it, or that I could get up in front of a class without being terrified. It did mean that, if I could get through those problems, I would be doing something I could be proud of.
II. The Objectivist/Subjectivist Debate
One of the issues that I was concerned about was that of objective vs. subjective morality.
A. The Nature of the Question
From the time that I first started seriously studying ethics, I was told that I had to make a choice. I had to accept that morality was either objective, or it was subjective. I had to join one of these two teams in its perpetual battle against the poor deluded individuals who had opted for the other side.
The problem was, I hated both options. I did not want to be on either team because neither of them made any sense.
Honestly, I thought the ‘objective’ team made the least sense. The ‘objective’ team thought that there were intrinsic values. ‘Intrinsic values’ referred to a special power that some things acquired to make them worthy of being pursued. I could find nothing in the laws of physics or chemistry to account for this special property, so I could not accept the idea that morality was ‘objective’.
However, the people who said that morality was ‘subjective’ did not make any sense either. The subjectivists told me that I had to accept morality as just a matter of taste. I had distaste for slavery, but it was not really wrong in any strong sense. If I happened to have a taste for taking people and forcing them into slavery, then that would be okay, simply because I liked doing it. The fact that the slaves suffered was irrelevant — as long as their suffering did not bother me. Even the torturing of young children could be made permissible, even obligatory, if I had acquired a taste for torturing young children.
Neither option was satisfactory. Yet, I was told that these were the only two options. There was nothing else that morality could be.
This topic came up in this first philosophy class, and I knew that I would have to discuss it in the discussion groups that I lead. Even though I was a graduate student, and this was an introductory freshman-level class, I was hoping that the teacher would provide me with some insight that would allow me to solve this problem.
The lecture on this subject presented the same pieces of information I had heard in the past, and left me with the same confusion. I was still bothered by the fact that those who asserted that morality was objective was asserting the existence of something that did not exist, while those who asserted that morality was subjective asserted the existence of something that made no sense.
I was lost.
B. Permission to Question
Shortly after Dr. Crothwaite lectured on the subject in class, she and I happened into a conversation on the front steps of the Skinner building, where the Philosophy Department was housed. In that discussion, she reported to me that there were parts of this lecture on moral objectivity that did not make any sense to her.
Moral objectivists said that the objectivity of moral value meant that moral claims had to be true for everybody. It can’t be the case that ‘X is good’ for one culture or person and ‘X is bad’ for another culture or person. X is either good or bad, period. This wrongness had to be true at all times, under all circumstances, without the possibility of exception.
But, there are a lot of things that we talk about that are relative that are not subjective. “Mt. Everest is highest peak on Earth,” is a relative statement. It is not true at all times. There was a time when Mt. Everest did not exist, and some other mountain was the tallest mountain on the planet. However, this does not allow us to argue that the height of mountains is subjective. Instead, nobody had any trouble saying that the statement was as objective as any statement in any field of science could be.
Why does ‘objective’ morality require that things be the same everywhere at all times, when ‘objective’ science is perfectly comfortable with things changing over time and being true of one thing but not another?
We did not come up with an answer to this question in our brief conversation. However, it did weaken a fear that I was just too dense to understand this stuff. I had permission to explore the option that maybe these concepts are not as clear and distinct as people take them to be.
There was room for even somebody like Dr. Crothwaite to be confused. So, I started to ask questions.
III. Understanding the Debate
This is how I understood the dispute at the time.
A. Objectivism: First Pass
On the one hand, we have objectivists. Objectivists, so the story goes, believe that there are unchanging moral absolutes — things that are good or bad no matter what. Sure, different people can have different beliefs about what is right or wrong — one group could believe that justice demands the execution of murderers while another holds that any killing except for immediate self-defense was immoral. However, there is still only one right answer, and those who did not accept that right answer were mistaken.
In this, moral claims were like scientific claims; the fact that one group believes that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and another group believes it is 6,000 years old does not impact the fact of the matter. There was one right answer. If people had different beliefs, then at least one of them was mistaken.
One problem with objectivism is that there is no reason to accept any value that is independent of people actually wanting something. There is nothing in the universe driving us to think that value is ‘intrinsic’ to anything. If it were intrinsic, then what is value made of? How do we perceive it? How does that perception of value translate into a prescription for doing something to promote or defend that value?
There’s no mystery in the idea that the human brain had a preference for some things over others. We can appeal to evolution to explain how these preferences came about. Our ancestors came to like those things that helped propagate the species, and dislike those things that did not. Or, more precisely, we are the descendents of those whose desires lead them to propagate the species.
We have absolutely no evidence supporting the claim that we have a faculty for perceiving intrinsic merit, or that there is anything like intrinsic merit for us to perceive.
B. Subjectivism: First Pass
Subjectivists, I am told, believe that moral answers depend on the attitudes of the individual (or culture). If a person feels that slavery is permissible, then slavery is permissible for him. The rightness or wrongness of slavery (or abortion, or capital punishment, or torturing children in a public arena) did not depend anything at all on the nature of slavery (abortion, capital punishment, or torturing children in a public arena).
More importantly, the wrongness of these things did not depend on its affects on anybody else, not unless the agent cared about those consequences.
One of the implications of this view is that, if the agent felt that torturing a child was wrong, for example, he had an option other than to refrain from torturing children. He could seek professional help — a therapist who will help him get over his aversion to torturing children. If he and the therapist were successful, then torturing children would cease to be wrong for him.
All value depends on desire. That proposition seems pretty solid.
However, the subjectivists did not stop with this simple truth. They went on and said, in effect, that whenever any person made a value claim, they referred pretty much solely to their own desires, ignoring the desires of others except insofar as they cared about those others.
The claim is that I cannot use the word “good” unless I feel some reason to pursue the end that I am talking about. In the absence of such motivation, there is no sensible use of the word “good”. However, there is no motivation without a desire. So, I must, on this account, report only how things stand in relation to my own desires.
The slave-owner only had to consider his likings and dislikings with respect to slavery to evaluate the morality of slavery, according to the subjectivist. He could ignore the harm done to the slave, so long as he did not care about the fate of the slave.
Now, though I know that all value depends on desire, I also know that I am not the only person in the world with desires. I know that others disliked pain just as I do. I know that others also want to live (some more than I do, and some less). Most, if not all, want their own freedom, just as I do.
Since I know that other beings besides me have desires, why can’t I talk about how things relate to those desires? Why am I limited, as the common subjectivist wants to limit me, to talking only about my own desires?
I imagine a subjectivist responding to this question would tell me to ignore these petty concerns and pay attention only to what I wanted, that my desires were the measure of all moral worth. “Do you get a kick out of kidnapping and torturing children? Well, go for it. Of course, I get a kick out of stopping people like you so we will have to see who wins in the end. We can make a game of it.”
On this account, nobody is ever right or wrong. Murderers and torturers just happen to have different likes and dislikes then the rest of us do. We have decided to do battle against them. There is no moral high ground. We cannot say that they are “wrong” and we are “right”. All we can say is that we are going to impose our completely arbitrary will on them, rather than allow them to impose their completely arbitrary will on us.
This is supposed to cause me to say, “Oh, yes. I see it now. Picking a side in the battle between NAZIs and their victims is really no different than picking a team in sporting event. There is no wrong team to pick. Anybody who says that I have made the wrong choice if I should side with the NAZI team is mistaken. There are no wrong choices.”
Really?
C. A Missing Option
Back when I was an undergraduate, utilitarian theories made the most sense to me. As I learned this distinction between objective and subjective morality, I asked myself, “Where do utilitarian theories fit into this scheme?”
Some utilitarian theories were clearly in the objective (intrinsic) value camp. Hedonism holds that pleasure is intrinsically good and pain intrinsically bad. Eudaemonistic utilitarianism holds that happiness is objectively good and unhappiness is objectively bad, in the classic sense of the term.
Why do we pursue pleasure or happiness? Because we somehow sense the ‘ought to be pursuedness’ in pleasure or happiness and respond accordingly. Pleasure simply radiates “Pick me! Pick me!” and we have a special organ in the body that hears this and makes the pick.
Let’s avoid, for the moment, the question of whether we need these intrinsic properties to explain how ‘pleasure’ or ‘happiness’ work. This is one possibility, and it fits the ‘intrinsic value’ framework.
However, there are forms of utilitarianism that reject this framework. Consistent with the idea that there is no intrinsic value, they acknowledge that some things are liked or disliked. Likes and dislikes do not respond to an intrinsic property, they simply existed. Furthermore, these likes and dislikes came in different strengths — people like some things more than others. Yet, we could still take these different sentiments and ask which were liked most or least.
This view is even easier to find in contractarian ethical theories. Within contractarianism, right and wrong were determined by the contents of a hypothetical social contract that rational agents, each with their own likes and dislikes, would agree to live by. It certainly did not say, “Do as you, the agent, like, and impose your likes on others to the degree that you are able.” Contractarianism says, “Take all likes and dislikes into consideration, and design a contract that will be the best possible for all those who would sign onto it. Certainly, what you, the agent, likes might not make it into the contract.”
This does not fit into either the objectivist or the subjectivist camp. It does not postulate any sort of intrinsic values — the only value it recognizes is the likes and dislikes of different agents. Yet, it says that the final result is substantially independent of the desires of any given individual. A particular agent might like a lot of things that would not meet the criteria of “morally good” because, like murder and rape, it would not make it into a contract that considers all likes.
It would seem that these theories are neither objective nor subjective.
Yet, I was told that that all moral theories had to be “objective” or “subjective.”
There is a problem here, somewhere.
As I write this, I am already virtually deafened by the shouts of objectivists on my right and subjectivists on my left, insisting, “That’s because you do not understand what we are saying!” The shouts are equally loud from both sides.
IV. The Second Round
THE SUBJECTIVIST. I want to focus on the subjectivist first. Let me imagine a subjectivist ‘advisor’, who has agreed to give me free advice on all matters of morality and ethics.
My imaginary subjectivist advisor reminds me of the method that I used as an undergraduate to examine the question of free will. At that time, the question was whether free will offered me anything new, anything not already accounted for. If I did not need free will in order to do some task — to account for some observations that could not otherwise be accounted for — I could discard it.
In examining free will, I looked at my own choices and asked if I could find anything going on when I made a choice that could not be explained in the absence of free will. When I could not find anything, I concluded that free will did not exist.
This did not imply that my capacity to make choices did not exist. It only implied that I could find nothing involved in making a choice that I needed “free will” to account for. I could account for all of the elements of choice (being aware of more than one option, evaluating the options, and selecting the one which had the highest value) within a deterministic world. After all, my chess-playing computer could make choices and it did not have free will.
“Okay,” said my imaginary token subjectivist, “I want you to do the same thing here. See if you can find anything in the real world that requires intrinsic values.”
Did I need intrinsic values to explain anything that actually happened in the world? I look at all of the behavior that I could think of that surrounded the assessment that murder is wrong. I looked at it from the point of view of the potential murderer, who decided not to commit murder because it was wrong. Actually, he decided not to commit murder because he believed it was wrong, and because he did not want to do something if he believed it was wrong. No actual, objective wrongness was required. His own beliefs and desires were sufficient. In fact, this came directly out of my thoughts on free will, where beliefs and desires are the sole cause of all human action. There was no “third thing”, no intrinsic value that magically caused the muscle contractions of which human action consisted.
Or, let’s say, the murderer goes ahead with the murder. Everybody else starts shouting for his head and planning for his execution, saying that he deserved it because he did something wrong. Again, the angry mob believes that the murderer did something wrong. They have a clear desire to punish people who do something that they believe is wrong. But these subjective states are still quite sufficient to explain everything that everybody else was doing. They acted solely in the way their beliefs and desires told them to act. I could find no role for the wrongness itself to play, so I could find no reason to say that it was real.
THE OBJECTIVIST. The Objectivist advisor stands and shouts, “Now, wait a moment. You explain these actions in part by using the concept of objective value. I can show this by looking at what happens when we take that away.
Now, you say that the belief that murder is wrong is a part of the explanation for how people behave. But what is it to believe that murder is wrong? If there is no wrongness, then all beliefs that murder is wrong is false. These false beliefs may well influence people’s actions. However, it cannot justify those actions. If I believed that a large dragon would eat me if I left my house, I probably would not leave my house. However, if there is no dragon — is there is no way that by belief that there is a dragon can be true — my behavior is irrational.
In addition, if you want to accept this subjectivist’s advice, you need to decide which type of subjectivism you are going to accept, because there are literally countless varieties.
One type of subjectivism holds that right or wrong is determined by what the agent believes. If Fred believes it is permissible to torture a child, then it is permissible for Fred to torture a child. We can call this agent-belief-subjectivism.
Or, Fred may decide to let his conscience be his guide and to measure the legitimacy of torturing the child by how much he likes torturing children. If this is the case, it is Fred’s desires or emotions that determine right from wrong, not his beliefs — his beliefs are merely beliefs about his desires and emotions. So, we must distinguish between agent-belief-subjectivism and agent-desire-subjectivism.
Some subjectivists are not going to like the equation, “If Fred believes it is permissible to torture children, then it is permissible for Fred to torture children.” What it is permissible for Fred to do does not depend on Fred at all, but on what the rest of us will allow Fred to do. If we are not comfortable with allowing Fred to torture children, then it is not permissible. Then again, if we are not comfortable with Fred marrying somebody of another race or of the same gender, or with having children when Fred seems to us to be of inferior breeding stock, then these things are not permissible either. Any person, under these hypothetical circumstances who says that these things are permissible would be mistaken. Clearly, we are not permitting them. This is assessor-subjectivism. This, too, comes in two flavors; assessor-belief-subjectivism and assessor-desire-subjectivism.
Of course, where do we get these beliefs and these desires?
They come to us through our culture. When we learn that something is right or wrong we are not being taught our own beliefs and desires on these things. We are internalizing the beliefs and desires found within our culture. So, perhaps we should go with some sort of cultural subjectivism. Right or wrong depends on the beliefs and desires that dominate a culture. Of course, now we must ask whether we are to use cultural-belief-subjectivism, or cultural-desire-subjectivism, and mix these options with the distinction between agent and assessor subjectivism.
Your subjectivist advisor typically does not like you to know that you have all of these choices. IT is because different types of subjectivism have different problems. When you start to identify the problems with one type, your subjectivist advisor wants to be able to slip, unseen, into a different type of subjectivism that has different problems. If you are made aware of the differences, you may insist that the subjectivist cease this practice of equivocation. Then, he is stuck.
Let us take cultural subjectivism as our standard. Now. I am living in America in, say, 1750. I say that slavery is wrong. Fortunately, people living in America in 1750 were objectivists. They interpreted my statement that slavery is wrong to mean that anybody who said it was right was mistaken.
If America in 1750 was dominated by this cultural-subjectivist way of thinking, “Slavery is wrong” would mean “The dominant view in this culture says that people ought not to own slaves.” However, this statement would have been absurd. Eighty percent of my culture would see nothing wrong with slavery. If I were to stand up and say, ‘Slavery is wrong, by which I mean that most of you do not approve of slavery,’ I would be laughed off my soapbox for making such a clearly false statement.
Here is where my subjectivist friend gets slippery. He will then slide off of cultural subjectivism and onto some sort of individual subjectivism. It no longer matters what the culture thinks, it matters what the individual thinks. If the individual thinks that slavery is wrong, then it is wrong for him. The statement ‘slavery is wrong’ under this interpretation is not clearly false. Yet, the subjectivist who tried to object to slavery would find that he had nothing to say against it.
Because, while slavery is ‘wrong for me’, under this type subjectivism, it would be ‘right for you’ if you approved of slavery. If I should walk up to any of them and say, ‘It is wrong for you to own slaves,’ the slave owner would have just cause to laugh in my face and answer, ‘I assure you, young man, slavery is not wrong for me. I am quite content as a slaver owner. Now, get your hands off of my property.’
In short, if you would have selected our subjectivist advisor’s counsel in 1750, we would never have abolished slavery because we would have never seen a reason to. All of those who said that slavery was wrong would have been dismissed as idiots who could not see the obvious truth that society approved of slavery, or as some sort of degenerate with their own personal distaste of slavery trying to push their abolitionist agenda on a population that has chosen to accept slavery.
If you believe that the abolition of slavery was a real improvement, then you have to believe in objective values.
If you believe that the belief that slavery is wrong was responsible for the abolition of slavery, you also have to believe that it is possible for “slavery is wrong” to be true to prevent the abolition of slavery from being irrational, like hiding from a non-existent dragon.
THE SUBJECTIVISTS. Your crop of straw men is particularly stunning this year, Mr. Objectivist. As a matter of fact, our moral opinions are only partially based on our moral attitudes. We mix these with matters of fact from which we draw our conclusions. Those matters of fact are subject to debate, and that debate can change opinions.
For example, though you must not take me as saying that this argument actually holds water, many who defended the institution of slavery did so on the basis that blacks were like children, and incapable of handling the rights and responsibilities of adults. It was irresponsible to treat a black as a full adult as it is to do so to one’s preteen child. What slave owners were doing, or so they claimed, was taking care of these child-like humans. The owner has the slave do chores, just as a parent has a child do chores. In return, the slave owner gives the slave food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. There is nothing immoral about such a relationship, it is the same relationship that parents have with their children. Again, I insist that you not take this as meaning that I think blacks really were like children. I am simply illustrating how factual elements that have weight in a subjectivist ethics.
THE OBJECTIVIST: Sure, all decent parents fasten their disobedient children to a post and whip them. And all parents, when they capture a child that has run away from home, will have that child hung as an example to others. Not to mention the common parental practice of buying and selling one’s children based on how many chores they can do.
THE SUBJECTIVIST: If you ever join a shooting club, remind me to move out of the state because those comments completely miss the target. I’m explaining how a subjectivist handles the relevance of fact in debate. An owner who believes that blacks were like children would have cared for his so-called slaves like children, and been convinced of his or her error by evidence that blacks are not like children. Whether or not blacks are like children was, at the time, subject to debate, but the proper way to treat a child is ultimately subjective.
You, my objectivist friend, are going off in a whole different direction here. You are bringing in different values into the debate — values that you cannot objectively defend but which you insist have some sort of intrinsic merit. No matter how loudly you scream, or how often you repeat the same boring argument over and over again, you can’t give me an objective proof of any value.
THE OBJECTIVIST: So, you are saying that if only the Southern culture had gotten this claim about blacks being like children right, then all of this stuff about death ships, whippings, executions, prohibitions against teaching blacks how to read, masters raping their slaves and setting them up for selective breeding, all of that would have been justified, if only the southern whites had gotten the science right.
However, why would the slave owner need to go through all this effort to show that blacks were like children to justify their institution? If you’re view is correct, all they needed to show was that they liked treating blacks this way, and that would be justification enough. What’s wrong with the slave owner who says, ‘Okay, you’re right. Blacks aren’t like children, but I don’t care. BRING ME MY WHIP!’
THE SUBJECTIVIST: Look, you may crave living in a universe with objective values. However, nothing you say about how great the universe would be if only intrinsic values were real will ever make intrinsic values real. I want to live in a world where people do not get old and die. However, no tear-jerking story about how painful death is will make a valid argument against the fact that people die. The universe is notoriously stubborn when it comes to refusing to conforming itself to my wishes — or yours. When you say that slavery is wrong, you have nothing to go on but the fact that you have been raised to wish that slavery did not exist. Maybe you don’t want to hear that, but it does not make it any less true.
THE OBJECTIVIST: All it takes for it to be legitimate for a white plantation owner to force himself on his slave is a desire to do so. Sure, that’s what morality is all about. I see that now,” counters the objectivist.
THE SUBJECTIVIST: Listen, you take it to be an absurdity. I take it to be a tautology. Those who do not oppose masters forcing themselves on slaves do not oppose masters forcing themselves on slaves. If I am required to accept the absurd assumption that I see nothing wrong with a master forcing himself on a young slave, then of course it follows that I would conclude that there is nothing wrong with a master forcing himself on a young slave. How can you reasonably expect any other answer?
On the other hand, your premise is false. I am very much opposed to masters forcing themselves on slaves. Your attempts to argue that I am neutral on this issue, or don’t care one way or the other, have no traction at all.
THE OBJECTIVIST: The fact that the slave gets raped isn’t important.
THE SUBJECTIVIST: Hey, don’t go dropping the word ‘if’ out and pretend you are still saying the same thing. If, in some hypothetical world you create, it does not matter to me, then, in that world, it does not matter to me. But, in the real world, it does matter to me.
THE OBJECTIVIST: Oh, listen, a moral imperative coming from a subjectivist. I am all a quiver. Aren’t you really just saying that you don’t like it when I take the word ‘if’ out and pretend I am still saying the same thing? Why should I care what you think? That’s the problem with you subjectivists. Sure, you can make sense of claims concerning what you care about or do not care about. However, statements like, ‘I should care about this’ and ‘I should not do that’ make no sense to you. Yet you keep saying them. You keep telling me what I should and should not do, just as you keep telling the slave owner what he should or should not do. But that ‘should’ just means that you don’t like it. Tell me, how do you get, ‘I should not do X’ from ‘You don’t like me doing X’? How does what you like and dislike transform itself into some obligation on my part? If intrinsic values do not exist, then anything you say about ‘should’ and ‘should not’ is just so much hot air.
Besides, you are arguing into the wind. Alonzo has already said that he thinks the abolition of slavery was a genuine improvement, That means he believes in intrinsic values. You lose.
THE SUBJECTIVIST: No, it only means that he likes living in a land without slavery more than he likes living in a land with slavery.
ALONZO: At this point, I would have to turn to the Objectivist advisor and say, “Sit down and shut up. Of all of the questions that I have, the one thing that appears the most certain is that there are no intrinsic values. It sounds like you are saying that, in addition to electrons and photons, certain collections of matter emit goodons and badons, and that we have some sort of goodon detector in the brain that tells us to maximize the universe’s total level of goodon emissions. That is not happening.
Yet, I would still have to turn to my Subjectivist advisor and say, “Is that it? Slavery or no slavery? Smoking or no smoking? A country without slavery is ‘better’ than a society with slavery in the same way that a pizza without anchovies is ‘better’ than a pizza with anchovies? Abolitionism is a fad like hoola hoops and frisbees? The objectivist tells me that ‘better’ means increasing emissions of goodons that do not exist. You tell me that ‘better’ simply means ‘more to my liking’; and if I liked torturing children to listen to their high-pitched screams then that is what I should do.
Sorry, there has to be more options than this.
V. The Subjectivist’s Commandment.
Against many who called themselves subjectivists, I had another problem. Repeatedly, I heard subjectivists assert what I have since started to call, “The Subjectivist Commandment.”
Thou shalt not force thy morality upon others.
The argument tended to go like this: All morality was simply a matter of personal preference. Nobody’s moral attitude was better than anybody else’s moral attitude (because they all equally lacked intrinsic merit). Whenever one person attempted to force his morality on another, he was acting as if his moral attitudes were superior to that other. Because his attitudes were not superior, acting as if they were superior was unjustified. Thus, “Thou shalt not force thy morality upon others.”
But, the Subjectivist’s Commandment is a moral claim, and it is one that subjectivists are very willing to force upon others. They bring it out whenever they see Subculture A (e.g., Christian fundamentalism) force its morality on Subculture B (e.g., homosexuals). They march, carry signs, give speeches, and threaten the careers of politicians who refuse to make their prejudices the law of the land.
When somebody points out to the subjectivist that she is forcing her morality upon others, the subjectivist quickly responds, “You can’t condemn us for what we are doing. All morality is subjective. That means that you can’t criticize me for criticizing Subculture A for performing the unjustified act of criticizing Subculture B.”
Whoa! Where can one even start to untangle this tangled knot?
VI. Moral Debate
Yet another problem with subjectivism, hinted at in the fictitious debate above, is that subjectivists cannot engage in moral debate — or at least nothing like moral debate the way it is traditionally practiced.
Going back to the slavery example, one group is protesting, “We do not like slavery,” and the other group is protesting, “We do like slavery.” What is there to argue over? When it comes to eating chicken, I like dark meat, my wife likes white meat. We are not disagreeing. There is nothing to argue over. It would not even make sense to start a debate over these preferences.
One thing it seems that the real subjectivist would have to give up is the idea that he is actually disagreeing with others. According to the subjectivist, when the slave says he has a right to be free, and the slave master says that the slave has no such right, they are not disagreeing about anything. They just have different tastes. One likes chocolate, and the other likes vanilla.
But, when the master denies the slave his freedom, is he not saying that the slave is wrong to claim a right to that freedom? And when the slave demands his freedom, is he not contradicting the master’s claim that he has no right to be free?
Though ‘I like dark meat’ does not entail anything about what my wife should or should not like, ‘I have a right to be free’ (spoken by the slave) does contradict the Master’s claim that the slave has no such right. Each implies by their statement that the other is in error.
Even ‘I don’t like my wife eating dark meat’ does not entail anything about what she should or should not do (unless one added a completely unwarranted assumption that she should do whatever pleases me and nothing else).
Whatever these two people are talking about when saying that the slave has a right to be free, they cannot both be right and both be wrong at the same time. If the slave is right, then the master is wrong. If the master is right, then the slave is wrong.
So, something is messed up on the subjectivist’s side of the equation. While the objectivists have to worry about deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’, the subjectivist needs to worry about deriving an ‘ought’ of moral strength from ‘I would like it if you would...’. Subjectivism needs to somehow derive a statement of sufficient strength that “It would be wrong for Susan to have an abortion,” and, “It is permissible for Susan to have an abortion” are contradictory statements. To borrow a phrase from David Hume, it seems altogether inconceivable how this may be done.
VII. The Role of Objective Values
Yet, the subjectivist will immediately protest, “You can’t have that without objective values, and you have already said that what you are most certain of is that there are no objective values.”
I want to clarify something. What I objected to was not “objective values”, but “intrinsic values” — the goodon/badon theory of merit. On the issue of objective values, I started to wonder — maybe we can have objective values without having goodons and badons.
When I was about 13 years old, I tripped, and my hand came down on a hot piece of metal. I remember my mind tapping me on the mental shoulder and saying, “Um... excuse me... can I have your attention please... I have something I want to say... um... DON’T YOU *EVER* LET ANYTHING LIKE THAT HAPPEN AGAIN!”
That pain was real. As far as I was concerned, “OUCH!” was just as much an accurate description of the real world in which we lived as “1 + 1 = 2.” Anybody in the world who dared to proclaim, “Alonzo is not in pain,” would have been dead wrong — as wrong as if they had said that the world was flat or that the sun orbited the earth.
I did not need to invent goodons and badons to account for this objective fact.
Perhaps, in a sense, we are talking about something that depends on my mind in order to exist. That’s fine. However, my mind exists, right here, between my ears and behind my eyes. One of the objectively true facts about that world is that my mind is a part of it. One of the objective facts about my mind is that it has serious objections to raise against the state of affairs that is created when my hand comes into contact with a hot piece of metal.
Subjective, right? Perhaps. But it is objective, too. Minds are real. Facts about minds are facts about the real world. ‘Subjective’ and ‘objective’ are not mutually exclusive categories. There is a realm of overlap between them, where we have objective facts about mental states.
Could anything be done with this? Is there anything in here that allows an option somewhere between the goodon/badon account of objectivism and the “you are morally obligated to do what I like and prohibited from doing what I dislike” account of the subjectivist?
VIII. Moral Clubs
In order to solve this problem, I once considered putting moral theory in the context of moral clubs.
Thinking back on my burn, I could hear my mind telling me not to let anything like that painful experience happen again. I had every reason to believe that society was filled with others telling them the same thing — not to let things like that happen to them.
These common interests made it possible to arrange a deal. Those of us wanting to avoid this type of agony, as much as possible, will form a club. We will call it the “DON’T YOU EVER LET ANYTHING LIKE THAT HAPPEN AGAIN!” club. We can’t control nature, so accidents — true accidents — and acts of nature are not of interest to those of us in this club. But we can control people. We can control them by raising them so that they have internalized a prohibition against causing such pain to people. We can control them by setting up a system of laws that threaten harm against those who would do such evil. With these tools, our club would work to make people generally behave in such a way that they do not let things like this happen again.
We can also form other clubs. People who have been raped, who live in fear over the possibility of being raped, or who care about those who may be subject to rape, have an incentive to form an anti-rape club. The same rules apply. They would fight rape by causing within others an internal revulsion to rape, and by subjecting others to the threat of legal punishment. Those who are unfavorably inclined to the idea of living life as another person’s property can all get together and form an anti-slavery club. And so on.
All the while the Objectivist advisor folds his arms, offering a condescending grin. “I tell you what. My friend amd I have a lot of very powerful weapons, and we want to form a little club of our own. We will call this the “DO WHAT WE TELL YOU OR ELSE,” club. And, believe me, we have put our heads together and came up with some very, very creative ideas for our ‘or else’ file. So, what are you going to do about it? You can rant as much as you want about slavery and the like being “wrong.” But, as a matter of fact, the person with the biggest army gets to determine what is “wrong”.
“No, Mr. Objectivist. ‘Might makes right’ implies that everybody should be a member of the most powerful club — that because you have the biggest army I should agree with you about the legitimacy of slavery. No, I can still argue that the anti-slavery club is the better club, all things considered, even as you force us to live by a different set of rules. There is nothing in the fact that you have the more powerful army that invalidates my belief on this matter. You have to come up with something better than that. An actual argument would be useful.”
Of course, the leader of the “DO WHAT WE TELL YOU OR ELSE” club would simply kill me at that point, and walk away from the body mumbling, “Don’t you be telling me what I have to do.”
If a psychopath has me bound and gagged on a woodshed floor and is holding a gun to my head, there may be nothing I could say to prevent him from pulling the trigger. It would be nice if there were some magic words that I could utter that would melt through that thick skull of his and revive whatever humanity lies underneath. However, magic words are a fantasy. It does not follow from this that my membership in the “no-murder” club is a mistake. The only thing that follows from this is that the implementation committee of the “no-murder” club still has some issues it will need to address at its next meeting.
“But you still have not given any reason to believe that your club is really better than the DO WHAT WE SAY OR ELSE club,” the Objectivist advisor would quickly add. “Even if you succeed at promoting your no-murder club, unless you embrace intrinsic values you cannot say that you have made the world a better place. You have made the world more “no-murder club friendly” and less “do-what-I-say-or-else club” friendly. But that is not objectively better, it is just a world in which one club dominates rather than the other.
At times, I wanted to simply reach out and club the Objectivist advisor into silence. Unfortunately, he was not real. He would simply smirk. The annoying thing is that too much of what he said made sense. Yet, none of it supported the idea that goodons and badons were a part of the real world.
IX. Making a Choice
At times, I think that the subjectivists looks at the absurdities of objectivism, the absurdities of claiming that the universe had goodons and badons in addition to the other known elements, and feels compelled to endorse subjectivism. Whatever subjectivism brings with it, it cannot be nearly as absurd as believing in the intrinsic moral properties floating out there in the universe.
Objectivists, on the other hand, look at the absurd conclusions that subjectivists seem compelled to reach — that a society without slavery is no better than a society with slavery, just different — and holds the absurdity to be so self-evident that anything must be better than this. Denying the truth of intrinsic values is like denying the existence of one’s own hands — the type of conclusion that could only be brought about by slavish devotion to the newest pop philosophy.
At the time, I certainly looked at these opinions this way. I could not bring myself to proudly declare membership in either camp.
What I needed to do was to figure out more about this idea of intrinsic values. When Dr. Levinson offered a graduate student seminar on the topic of “Intrinsic Values”, naturally I was at the head of the line to sign up.
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