Robert Nozkk, the Congenial Philosopher
Herzog, Don
Don Herzog ROBERT NOZICK THE CONGENIAL PHILOSOPHER Explaining why proof is not enough. The history of philosophy, I sometimes think, provides all the materials for a roustabout drama....
...And I must confess that it is hard, even for an amateur devotee of the field, to maintain Don Herzog is a teaching fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University...
...What existentialism suggests, and what some philosophers in the Anglo-American analytic tradition (Philippa Foot, Alisdair Maclntyre) believe, is that we can have a perfectly respectable moral and political theory without uttering even a monosyllable about objectivity...
...Since those choices are not spun out of thin air, but r a t h e r g e n e r a t e d socially, there will be some imposing obstacles on the road from the a b s t r a c t moral theory presented in the book to the politics in,the old o n e , N o z i c k ' s discussion of ethics is wonderfully complicated and challenging, and I have no interest in rendering a brummagem version of it here...
...So it is a pleasure to find Robert Nozick's new book, Philosophical Explanations," bulging with fascinating discussions of questions many philosophers have been diligently avoiding...
...Quite briefly, libertarian views have profited by focusing on isolated individuals: Think of Locke's acorn gatherer, Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain...
...and determinism...
...much of a sense of intellectual urgency in plowing through a book on the syntax of conditionals, or yet another study of illocution, perlocution, and speech acts...
...As metaphilosophy, the discussion is compelling...
...And on both views, there is a real sense in which it is up to us...
...So you think Hitler wasn't wrong, really wrong...
...Sure...
...We can agree there are nonscientific truths and still have a puzzle on our hands...
...We can...
...the foundations of ethics...
...Here I respectfully part with Nozick...
...It is hard to say one shouldn't get his acorns, the other his money...
...19.50...
...In a revealing moment, Nozick urges that there simply can't be a universe in which it's morally permissible to mangle or destroy creatures like us...
...N0zick wants to say now t h a t what r i g h t s we have depends on our domain of autonomy, and t h a t the domain should include " a range of important and significant choices...
...So philosophy becomes a coercive activity...
...Since Socrates, philosophers have often pretended (and surely it must be pretense) to be searching after the truth, whatever it is, with no commitments of their own to defend...
...We can be free when our actions proceed from our will, whether or not the will is caused...
...We want to keep them out of power...
...But consider Kant's strategy ,in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals...
...Anyone even cursorily acquainted with that history, particularly as it relates to the post.Civil War era, wilt confront in these pages "a quite familiar account of the great Supreme Court cases and major doctrinal developments, but with the conventional designations of heroes and villains almost totally reversed...
...Recall that neither side in the n a t u r e / n u r t u r e controversy has anything to say about free will...
...The idea is that to speak meaningfully, as against emitting a piece of verbal behavior, is to concede that Kant is right...
...If true statements describe the world, telling us how the world is, but morality is supposed to tell us how the world ought to be, how could a moral statement be true or false...
...Or I could maintain both beliefs, and tolerate an inconsistency...
...Furthermore, they want to reach the conclusions they do, or conclusions like them...
...As Nozick says, in a related vein, " I n discussions of ethics one sometimes thinks, 'how could one convince some particular evil figure, say Stalin, Hitler, or Mao, that he is wrong...
...Blackstone, and the Founders...
...On another, flaunted earlier this century by the logical positivists, philosophy's decline is nothing but science's progress, and we ought to yearn fervently for the day some bold unified science will have crushed most of the traditional questions of philosophy: We can then dismiss the rest as gibberish...
...Rather, they are to a large extent socially generated+ They have histories of their own, and in the process of becoming persons we are shaped by the values...
...Nozick points out that the sanctions philosophers wield are weak...
...And so does Nozick...
...It doesn't rain manna in Africa because this is the best of all possible worlds, and if it did other things would be even worse...
...I regret still more to report that attempts to argue for such a view often meet with chilly receptions, or worse yet horror and revulsion: "Then you think when two people disagree on a moral or political question, it need not be the case that one is wrong...
...those only question another life hereafter, who intend to lead such a one here as they fear to have examined, and would be loath to answer for when it is over...
...Generally speaking, they can accuse us of inconsistency or irrationality if we refuse to accept their proofs...
...If they exist, dangling out there in some ontologically solid way, or instantiated in concrete realizations as a formal structure can be (as Nozick would have it), a r e n ' t we their puppets...
...Whaop's do we want to explain...
...The transition from the state of nature to the condition of civil society entailed, according to Locke...
...The publication last year of Bernard H. Siegan+s scholarly polemic Economic ldberties and the Constitution" was at: important event...
...And since we don't run int~ cannibals and the like, I wonder why it matters one way or the other what we say about them...
...But we don't want arguments to show why Hitle'rs are wrong, really wrong...
...And yes, I would be glad to stop, using force if necessary, a prospective cannibal, even though I know that on his view what he's doing is acceptable, sensible, even richly meaningful...
...we need a unified theory of the sort Nozick offers...
...Unutterably inhumane, cruel, despicable, yes...
...We want room for autonomy in ethics, room too for some notion of what the point of it all is...
...Note that we need to avoid backsliding into an attempt to hammer out a moral theory with which we can in turn hammer our opponents over the head...
...Then you can't condemn strange practices in faraway societies...
...A run down the table of contents: personal identity...
...Though I do tend to be fairlytolerant about other social practices...
...There are an infinite number of true statements (how many grains of sand at Coney Island, and so on), but philosophers have been interested in just a chosen few...
...and "Philosophy and the Meaning of Life...
...What would be the point of that...
...In 1705, Samuel Clarke protested that moral truths "are so notoriously plain and self-evident, that nothing but the extremest stupidity of Mind, corruption of Manners, or perverseness of Spirit, can possibly make any Man entertain the least doubt concerning t h e m . " John Locke, who held a divine command theory of morality, trumpeted similar gulf some thirty years before: "Those only doubt of a Supreme ruler and an universal law, who would .willingly be under no law, accountable to no judge...
...G • n e of the views philosophers have ~;anted to defend is that morality is objective, that it is part of the fabric of the universe, the very nature of things...
...Louis Brandeis, Oliver Wendell Ho|mes, Earl Warren, William Douglas, and Hugo.Black, among other luminaries of the liberal judicial pantheon, are severely taken to task, while such "tTlivrr~r,.~ ~ffChicag~ Press...
...t l note for those interested in Anarchy, State, and Utopia that the moral theory of the new book will not serve well as the moral foundation lacking there...
...Society doesn't afford us some monolithically unified morality or political theory...
...But, though the tone in the new t~ook is much gentler and more engaging, the drive to show that some view ig correct shines through both.t But Nozick doesn't want to show that morality is objective because he wants to convert immoralists...
...Preeminent among such rights, which because anterior are superior to positive law, are those of acquiring, using, and disposing of property...
...Surely he need not apologize for this commitment...
...Note that my picture of how the argument proceeds looks pretty much llke that of the objectivlst, Each *,ill appeal to the other to recognize unsavory implications of his view...
...But it's no coincidence that we tend to affirm strikingly similar values...
...There are different theories about the fall...
...Of course I can...
...Skepticism about morality, though, need not be motivated by stupidity, corruption, perversity, or downright wickedness...
...So (Nozick thinks) if it turns out that nothing is right, really right, there will be no free will, and we will be the puppets of causes stretching back to before we were born, and--I leave to you the rest of the slippery slope, leaving us valueless beings floundering at the bottom...
...Suppose I subscribe to beliefs in universal equality, but am a racist, or a slaveholder...
...And some engage in rapid-fire, devastatingly dry and witty dialogue which puts Shaw to shame...
...However crude, they represent just the tack Nozick wants to take in replacing philosophical proof with philosophical explanation...
...But I could instead stop believing in universal equality...
...Much of the rest of his tale seems to me excessively complicated, motivated by the quest to make sure that the eehics he is defending will be objective...
...It has its home, I think, in epistemology, the theory of knowledge...
...Finally, he is willing to have us affirm that organic unity, his candidate for value, be value, and not just some descriptive relation...
...But never, I think, do we step all the way back and make up a whole ~ew set...
...Sometimes, says Nozick, what philosophers want to do is take a belief they have and shove it, whether you like it or not, into your head...
...If all our actions are causally determined, by causes stretching back to before we were born, how can we be free...
...There he lends qualified allegiance to the view that, roughly speaking, free will consists in doing something because i t ' s right...
...Hounded mercilessly, then enshrined as the glowing center of educated circles (theirs the "queen of disciplines"), then abandoned a bit contemptuously to prattle on gaily to their minds' content, the chal"acters easily engage our attention...
...And we're used to thinking o.f that as threatening...
...Since there is no magic wand w.e can wave at the disputants to find out which one is wrong, really wrong, insisting that the dispute can " i n principle" be settled makes not a whir of difference so far as our practice goes...
...So we go dutifully marching through life, connecting up with value...
...Why doesn't He make it rain manna there...
...Only some elementary logical confusions mandate my keeping hands off...
...I-erhaps," Nozick muses, "philosophers need arguments so powerful they set up reverberations in the brain: if the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he dies...
...Needless to say, the argument fails, quite grotesquely...
...Nozick sums up the picture well.' "Ethical truths find no place within the contemporary scientific picture of the world...
...We want to explain how- some p could be true, given something else we believe, some "apparent excluder," which seems to make p false or even impossibl& And "The task of explaining how p is possible is not exhausted by the rearguard action of meeting arguments from its apparent excluders...
...The latter group, far more than the former according to Siegan, displayed true fidelity to the constitutional ideals of the Framers and ~ad a sounder understanding of the pl~-ce of judicial review in the American polity...
...For he wants to bring in our basic moral views--that others are to be respected, for example--and begins by wondering what dimension underlies the judgments we actually make...
...but they are attempts to meet the problems, not denials of their existen~:e...
...Animating much of the older philosophical literature, and a good deal more ordinary discussion, is a fallacy of false alternatives: Either morality is objective, or it is "mere personal preference," just like the choice between vanilla and chocolate ice cream...
...We're all libertarian enough to cringe at the prospect of a professionally trained thought police cramming True Beliefs into our skulls...
...Once made explicit, this view of philoso phy is decidedly unattractive...
...Thus private property could be condemned and taken for public purposes, but only upon payment of fair compensation...
...The book stands much of what has long been established as the accepted history of American constitutional interpretation squarely on its head...
...I am pragmatist enough to think that should put an end to this issue...
...It could, moreover, 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982...
...The motive for pursuing the puzzle comes from elsewhere, from his discussion of free will...
...In its guise as a complete picture of the world, 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JANUARY 1982 science seems to leave no room for any ethical facts or truths...
...Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing...
...Typically, philosophical puzzles arise when it appears that a number of beliefs dofi't fit together...
...What are philosophers up to, anyway...
...On both views, we confront an apparently meaningless and valueless (or, in Nozick's suggestive metaphor, "dark") universe, and have to inject meaning and value into it...
...don't undercut it...
...Oh, one could be misunderstanding some principle he holds, or not observing the logic of the moral concepts, or simply contradicting himself...
...free will "Harvard University Press, $25.00...
...It is once again up to us to pursue and respect it...
...Intellectual giants storm across the stage, thundering noble eloquences on being and becoming...
...That can't be right...
...Selfeffacing waifs groan piteously over their sad state and wonder how it was all possible...
...He wishes there to show that his categorical imperative underlies morality, and further that as a rational agent you are committed to accepting that categorical imperative...
...each will argue for the conceptions of humanity embodied in his own views...
...I entertain a rather more prosaic view, focusing on ever-increasing differentiation in economy, society, and academe It's no surprise that philosophers these days turn out forbiddingly technical books with forbiddingly high prices to match...
...That view leads directly to nasty attacks on moral skeptics, those who have denied the objectivity of ethics...
...How's that for a powerful argument...
...Siegan begins by reiterating that, pace Garry Wills, the Founders of the American Republic were for the most part Lockeans in their political philosophy, and hence believed that the principal purpose of government is to preserve and protect rights conferred upon individual citizens by the law of nature rather than by the dispensation of the state...
...And here I respectfully part with the existentialists, who spend G/adzooks ~oo...
...He is willing, even eager, to concede that there are different worthwhile conceptions of the good life...
...what knowledge is, and why skeptical possibilities (couldn't you now be floating in a tank around Alpha Centauri, quite unconscious, with expert psychologists chemically and electrically stimulating your brain so that you experience reading this review...
...One peculiarly ornery fellow sits on the side, wondering aloud whether it is all possible...
...There are competing conceptions afoot, and so we have the working room to step back a bit and question particular commitments...
...But more often they have a good faith, informed disagreement on their hands...
...The salient features of his account are strikingly similar to those of a very different tradition of thought we can lump together under the sadly uninformative rubric of existentialism...
...much time THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982 13 portraying some mythic lonely individual teetering on the edge of some existentialist precipice, blindly and arbitrarily affLrming some set of values...
...Yet it's a long way from acorns and quarters to market institutions, and the argument from one to the other would require b r i n g i n g in extensively social considerations where rights seem less at home...
...But that means the purported explanation will smack of proofi It will at once show how some moral view could be objective (explanation) and show how ours in fact is (proot...
...Otherwise, there may just be a disagreement on ultimate ends, elected arbitrarily: The difference between us and Hitler isn't that we're moral and he's profoundly evil, but that he has one set of ends, we another...
...For meaningful speech, Kant thinks, presupposes a whole, metaphysics and epistemology which lead straight-away to the categorical imperative...
...Not only do values frame the agenda, they make some views look more attractive and compelling...
...The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and best when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, if you believe the premisses you have to or must believe the conclusion, some arguments do not carry much punch, and so forth...
...Instead, I want to defend .(I hope not too cryptically) what might look like a paradox: Objective value, if it existed, would pose an insuperable obstacle to human dignity...
...Nozick wants to defend our status as valuable, dignified, even precious entities in the universe, against debunking attacks by determinists (you can't act freely), skeptics (you don't know anything), and the like...
...Most of us ate ruthlessly pragmatic about such problems, on the rare occasions we notice them...
...We're used to thinking that we could be the puppets of causation, driven willynilly, our deepest desires and aspirations shaped by genes and environment...
...ernmcnt could offer...
...and I regret to report that I haven't such an account up my steeve...
...Oh, if that's what it means I don't like it at all...
...but it is surely one of decline and fall...
...both questions and answers depend on philosophic predilections...
...I am not sure whether to cast the drama as comedy, tragedy, or farce...
...I . f objectivity is to mean that values are (somehow) really out there, and subjectivity that we arbitrarily choose them, then it seems quite legitimate (and tempting) to say that values are neither subjective nor objective...
...It's no coincidence that Hume takes ironic pleasure in his skeptical attacks, that Kant congratulates himself on flaying vindicated reason so as to leave room for God and morality...
...And though he talks of the foundations of ethics, a metaphor suggesting a finally exhaustive and solid grounding, he wants to join ethics in turn to notions of a meaningful life in a way which leaves each coalescing into the other (the values had better be meaningful, and the meaning had better be valuable...
...In what may well be the most valuable discussion of the book, tucked innocently away in the introduction, Nozick contrasts philosophical proof and philosophical explanation...
...No such truths are established in any scientific theory or tested by any scientific procedure--microscopes and telescopes reveal no ethical facts...
...If we're going to die, and eventually no one will remember us, or the universe will wind down, how can our lives be meaningful...
...Don't objective values pose just the same kind of threat...
...But so what...
...If God is infinitely powerful and infinitely good and infinitely knowledgeable, why are there people starving in Africa...
...What we need is an account of how that could be, how value works, how personal identity works, how society is possible, and so on...
...And unlike, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson's universe, which clicks happily along with a Law of Compensation guaranteeing that evil is punished, the universe as Nozick and the existentialists see it is one in which value itself has no causal efficacy whatever...
...A philosopher can quickly demonstrate to me that I'm contradicting myself, what he wants, I suppose, is for my racism to disappear, or for me to free my slaves...
...Unlike our friend Samuel Clarke's objective moral relations, part of the very nature of things and as ontologically respectable and solid as tables and chairs, both Nozickian and existentialist value is precarious, fragile, flirting always with a Tinkerbell extinction...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982 ! i Besides, it's not even a plausible view...
...I include Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Camus...
...live meaningful lives by transcending our finite egos and connecting up to the godhead...
...Nozick pursues the explanation in a way which makes the distinction between explanation and proof doubtful...
...It is still more a pleasure to find that these discussions are profoundly illuminating as well as entertaining, and that they hang together in a unified view...
...objectively wrong, no...
...Nozick diplomatically rofrains from offering examples...
...Mauti~e j . Holland teaches law at Indiana University...
...Nor, I might add, is it simply science which creates the puzzle...
...At the end of the book, Kant tries to back the skeptical reader into a corner...
...What we want instead, on Nozick's view, is an explanation of how there could be an objective morality...
...So the puzzle persists...
...But rather than hunt for better sanctions, Nozick wants to emphasize a different path of philosophical inquiry, as a way both of making sense of the history of philosophy and of offering a more attractive picture of doing philosophy...
...FaLling that, we want m shoot them...
...They believe their view is right, and presumably important enough to warrant the shoving...
...acceptance of certain qualifications on the enjoyment of property and other natural rights in the interest of securing the practical protection for them which only organized society and effective gov...
...Nor need we think that it's a shame that values play into theorizing, and that the disembodied truth is the ideal we should strive for...
...We tolerate massive inconsistencies all the time...
...Those may be bad solutions...
...There remains the question of what facts or principles might give rise to p. Here the philosopher searches for deeper explanatory principles, preferably with some independent plausibility, not excluded by current knowledge...
...No longer celebrated figures or even political actors, philosophers these days push on a bit uneasily on the sidelines, cultural artifacts any comedian can march out for a cheap laugh...
...But philosophers try to work out a solution, a way of showing that the beliefs do fit together, after all...
...No small order, that...
...We forget them...
...Officially, this discussion should be very different from that of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, where Nozick talked unabashedly about finding "the truth about ethics and political philosophy," and wrote in a way intended to assault the reader...
...From my point of view, animated and informed by a set of often inchoate principles oozing with import for ethics, politics, and more, they may be repugnant, even intolerable...
...unlikely figures as James McReynolds, Rufus Peckham, and Joseph Bradley are singled out for praise...
...if the.re is no argument guaranteed to convince him, doesn't that show that ethics re.ally is subjective, merely a matter of preference or opinion ?' " (Echoes of this worry probably play into the M3ral Majority's comic plaints on secular humanism, a lovely catch-all-hence vacuous--concept...
...as psychology, right on the mark...
...And so on...
...What are they seeking...
...We don't each spin our moral and potiticaa views out of thin air...
...For it seems only if this is so can we be sure that one of the pa.rticipants in a moral or political debate--preferably the other fellow--is wrong, really wrong...
...On one view, it is a sign or perhaps even the cause of the decadence of modern society, and what we need now is a return to (oddly enough) ancient Greece, its gruesome and bloody brand of democracy conveniently whitewashed for the occasion...
Vol. 15 • January 1982 • No. 1
