Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
Callahan, Daniel
Commonweal: 534 Books: CAN MORALITY BE REASONED? ETHICS AND TIE LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHY Bernard Williams Harvard, $17.50, 230 pp. Daniel Callohan Contemporary Anglo-American analytical philosophy...
...The emotivist assault on ethics of the 1930s through the 1950s (abetted by a popular anthropological relativism) has well saturated the culture, its power lingering on beyond its relatively short life within academic philosophy...
...In particular, why should it be conceptually simple . . .?" In thinking about Williams's questions, I began wondering to what extent ordinary people, and not only rationalistic moral philosophers, think that ethics does, or should, reduce to some simple, clear principles...
...If ethics cannot provide answers reducible to such principles, then it is assumed that all is chaos, mere taste, power, or private inclination...
...But the very message of this book is the foolhardiness of that quest, and it is a case persuasively, if sometimes disjointedly, made...
...Even David Hume, with his famous claim that "reason is the slave of the passions," believed that reason can and does tutor those passions...
...Of course an answer to that question depends upon what is meant by "philosophy...
...There is nothing like a book of this kind to make one long for an old-fashioned architectonic, rationalistic argument, one that has a clear beginning and end...
...I think that message is quite right, but it leaves one with none of the satisfaction and sense of lovely (however false or irrelevant) coherence of single-premise moralities...
...Yet it may produce a deeper satisfaction in the long run: that morality is being grappled with in a way much closer to our lives and experiences...
...Philosophers like Bernard Williams may take a more moderate, and ultimately more reasonable, tack in seeking to disgorge the lump of pure reason in philosophy's throat...
...The British philosopher Bernard Williams has achieved some prominence in recent years not so much for presenting any striking moral perspective of his own, but for steadily chipping away at that rationalistic ambition...
...Williams puts the issue this way: "If there is such a thing as the truth about the subject matter of ethics . . . why is there any expectation that it should be simple...
...arguments must be rationally persuasive...
...but some extension of ancient thought, greatly modified, might be able to do so...
...I suspect they do, if my own experience is any guide...
...Can a rational procedure for resolving moral conflicts be developed...
...In keeping with his complex vision, Williams presents no single, well-developed thesis...
...4 October 1985: 535...
...Yet to play too heavily to the demand for rational justification is to remain infected by the very disease that needs to be cured...
...The absence of a significant role for feeling and emotion, on the one hand, and for historical and social knowledge, on the other, is striking...
...This is meant to be no-nonsense, unblinking rationalism, clean as a whistle...
...The philosopher's demand for a foundation secure against such assaults is matched by a widespread lay belief in the same need...
...The way he poses the general issue is to ask whether philosophy can answer the fundamental question of Socrates: how should one live...
...His general contention is that "the demands of the modern world on ethical thought are unprecedented, and the ideas of rationality embodied in most contemporary moral philosophy cannot meet them...
...the book is mainly an extended critique of rationalism...
...Of course they are frequently a mess, but not without possibilities for some rational, though not rationalistic, order...
...Along with Alasdair Maclntyre and a few others, he has tried to present some alternative routes to moral knowledge while remaining firmly within the mainstream academic boundaries...
...Once it threw out emotivism — the view that ethical statements are nothing but expressions of feeling and taste — the ethics branch of that establishment turned its attention to normative theory...
...This is a discursive, at times wandering, book, as elegant in its individual paragraphs, aphorisms, and arguments, as it is loose and open-ended in its structure...
...Except for a few hints here and there, he actually says little about the way in which "ancient thought" might be profitably modified...
...Daniel Callohan Contemporary Anglo-American analytical philosophy has been on a rationalistic binge for at least three decades...
...If one strays too far from rationally persuasive foundations for morality, one runs the risk of losing philosophical credibility altogether...
...It is a sufficient contribution of philosophy if it can succeed in dethroning that long-standing form of reductionism that seeks some final, irreducible pattern for moral reasoning, one on which a much larger edifice to handle our everyday lives can be constructed...
...but they are nonetheless left with a sharp dilemma on their hands...
...For Plato it meant an abstract, general, rationally reflective mode of inquiry...
...Would it be possible to discover a solidly rational foundation for ethics, preferably in the form of a few utterly secure propositions that would allow the generation of compelling moral rules...
...To Plato's belief that questions about how one ought to live could be answered by that mode of inquiry, Williams counterpoises a more skeptical account of philosophy's capacity, but not one that would be any means jettison it altogether...
...for morality ought to commend itself to reason in some sense...
...Might a structure of moral propositions be devised that would commend general assent...
Vol. 112 • October 1985 • No. 17
