Unsettling Obligations: Essays on Reason, Reality and the Ethics of Belief (Center for the Study of Language and Information - Lecture Notes)

Copyright © 2002 CSLI Publications Center for the Study of Language and Information Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States 06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wood, Allen W. Unsettling obligations: essays on reason, reality and the ethics of belief / Allen W. Wood. p. em. - (CSLI lecture notes; no. 146) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57586-394-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 1-57586-393-6 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. Faith and reason. 2. Religion-Philosophy. 3. Ethics. I. Title. II. Series. BT50.W55 2002 190-dc21 2002007779 CIP The acid-free paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

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Preface The following nine essays were originally written on different occasions and for different purposes. But there are common themes connecting then1. The first four deal with topics relating to the ethics of belief, the middle two of these dealing specifically with religious beliefs. The next three essays are concerned with the reality that beliefs are about, the last two of these especially with defending and exploring the reality of values, especially moral values. The final two essays deal with philosophy, the first with the way it relates to its own history, the second with its worth and its limits. The connections run still deeper. In the sixth essay, the objectivity of values is defended on the basis of a conception of ourselves as active and self-regulating beings who communicate with one another about our actions and the principles that govern them. This is a conception also underlying the ethics of belief defended in the first essay, and whose application is found explicitly in the second, and may also be perceived in the three that follow. The sixth essay also makes explicit a certain kind of argument that can be given for some philosophical claims, one based on achieving coherence between what we do, or commit ourselves to doing, in the course of our thinking and acting, and our reflective representation of ourselves as thinkers and agents. This kind of argument is distinctive in that it does not directly establish the truth of the claims to which it applies and its soundness is compatible with their falsehood. That we cannot choose, or even decide the question whether there are objective values, except by committing ourselves to the proposition that some values are objective, might be true even if it is false that there are any objective values. But this point, however correct, is cold comfort to anyone who proposes to deny that there are objective values, since it remains the case that this denial plunges that person into an incoherence between what they are asserting and what they are comix

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mitting themselves to assert even in the act of asserting it. If there are any truths from which we are cut off in this way, they are truths that are inaccessible to any rational thinker. They are truths that could be believed only by someone who falls into incoherence, and who therefore we may be sure is cut off from many other truths, as well as from the kind of thinking that is necessary if we are to represent the person as able reliably to acquire any true beliefs at all. Propositions that might be true in this way are therefore propositions that we cannot coherently represent to ourselves as true; we have no choice but to regard them as false. And our inability coherently to regard them as true is not a weakness that some superior thinker might conceivably overcome; it goes along with being any kind of being at all that has thoughts and beliefs. The need to maintain such a coherence was already part of the argument of the first four essays in defense of the claim that our intellectual integrity requires us to proportion our beliefs to the evidence rather than letting them service our wishes and fears. The sixth essay uses an argun1ent of this kind to defend our commitn1ent to the reality and objectivity of the reasons on the basis of which vve both believe and act. Motivated failures to n1aintain this kind of coherence is used in the fourth and fifth essays to give an account of what goes on when we deceive ourselves. It also accounts for the ten1ptation to certain kinds of relativism, whether in regard to ethics or in philosophy generally. The gap between what we do and what we represent ourselves as doing plays a role in the anti-moralistic theories discussed and explored in the seventh essay. The need for reflective understanding of our practices that coheres with these practices is also fundan1ental to the conception of philosophy presented in the ninth essay. The same conception underlies the eighth essay's argument that the interpretations of past philosophers n1ust be integrated into our present philosophical reflections if these interpretations are to remain a living part of philosophy and philosophy itself is not to become impoverished and opaque to itself. This last point about the relation between philosophy and its history is also illustrated throughout virtually all the essays, which typically take the critical interpretation of historical philosophers as the vehicle for advancing philosophical claims and arguing for them or criticizing them. The first essay proposes an ethics of belief based on an ethical principle formulated by the nineteenth century philosopher W. K. Clifford, and it defends that principle on the basis of (a reinterpretation of) arguments given by Clifford, and also of the moral theories of Kant, whose views about revealed religion are also en1ployed in the

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third essay. The second essay discusses various views about religious belief by considering them in the historical fornl they take in thinkers such as Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Locke, Kant and Kierkegaard. The fourth essay investigates self-deception through a critical interpretation of Sartre's famous discussion of the topic. In the seventh essay, antimoralism is discussed via the views of Nietzsche and others. And even the account of philosophy itself in the ninth essay is presented via an exposition of the apology for philosophy included in Diderot's Encyclopedia. I would never maintain that philosophy cannot be done well without presenting and criticizing ideas and arguments in terms of their expression in historical representatives. There are simply too many obvious counterexamples to that claim among important figures in the history of philosophy themselves. But I do maintain that critically examining the thoughts that belong to the history of philosophy is one perfectly respectable way of doing philosophy, and that it has certain advantages that non-historical approaches to the subject do not have. Historical texts and positions are not useful merely for the sake of exhibiting erudition. Still less should one appeal to the authority of famous names by way of compensating for what might be lacking in philosophical argument. The writings of past philosophers often earn the respect of those who study them, and thereby create in us the well-founded expectation that we will learn more from them by patient exegesis than by arrogantly looking for opportunities to dismiss what they say. But that respect is earned only if we keep even the greatest historical texts under close critical surveillance. When we do this, we find that we learn from them by attaining to the understanding they exhibit and the insights they afford, but equally by exposing the mistakes they commit and the errors they contain. Further, by engaging in a dialogue with these texts we not only to learn from them about philosophical issues but we also come to understand those issues by seeing how they are products of long traditions of thinking to which all philosophers are always attuned (whether they realize it or not). Dealing with philosophical ideas through their historical vehicles is perhaps the best way of making this inevitable aspect of philosophical thinking fully explicit. So another theme running through these essays, and especially culminating in the final pair, is the attempt to articulate certain ideas about what philosophy itself is and what philosophy as an activity is for. In certain respects, these ideas stand in contrast to what a lot of the tradition says about philosophy, and to much of what comes to most people's minds when they hear the word "philosophy" .

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Perhaps the first thing people are likely to think about "philosophy" is that it means the stating of grand opinions about the largest and most controversial questions, such as whether life is worth living, whether we can know anything or not, and whether God exists. Accordingly, to talk about "philosophy" means to deliver a disquisition on one's own philosophy, which is more or less assumed to be a set of baseless opinions to which other "philosophies" (as other sets of equally baseless opinions) may be contrasted. This view arises naturally from the obvious and indisputable fact that philosophical questions are-and if we let experience be our guide, probably always will be-controversial questions. Whatever one philosopher asserts, another can be expected to deny; whatever one philosopher regards as settled and proven, another will try to call into question. From this people infer that "philosophy" is an arena in which anything at all may be claimed, without concerning yourself overly much with whether your answers to the questions might be right or wrong. In philosophy you can believe anything you like without caring whether you have good reasons for it or not; if you want what you believe to have some solid basis, then you should turn to other questions (scientific ones, for instance), to which there are (son1etin1es) right answers. But the essays in this volume put these inferences themselves into question. They argue that however endless (or even seen1ingly pointless) philosophical controversies may be, you owe it to yourself and to others, as a thinking person, not simply to state "your opinion" on the basic issues of life but also to care about reasons for what you believe. The obligation to have good grounds for our beliefs is perhaps n10st urgent of all regarding questions about which there is probably going to be endless disagreement. In matters on which all inforn1ed inquirers agree, discharging this obligation is usually easy and comfortable. But on questions where any answer you give is going to be challenged, discharging it forces you into ever renewed inquiry, and probably also into endless doubt. Whatever opinion you reach (even the opinion that you must hold no opinion but must suspend all judgment), if it is reached in the right way, is never going to be something settled or fixed. It is rather something continually reachieved (and perhaps also subtly reshaped) through time, rather like the apparently stable result of a homeostatic equilibrium in nature. We must resist, too, the appearance of consolation afforded by the skeptical thought that philosophical questions are unanswerable, that no decisive arguments regarding them are possible. For when they embrace that consolation, the skeptics then1selves are too dogmatic, since the possibility of a decisive argument on one side or another of a philo-

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sophical question is something they can never know to be impossible. The ancient skeptic's ideal that we should, or even can, reach a perfect balance between opposed assertions on every question is at least as inflexible and implausible as any dogmatic illusion ever taught by any other school of philosophy. This leads us to question a second common opinion about "philosophy" (which would in any case be hard to reconcile with this first one). This is that the "philosopher" is a special kind of person, distinguished by "wisdom", and that this philosophical wisdom provides the philosopher with a certain special tranquility in facing all the problems of life, including the terrible riddle of death that stands at the end of it. For the ancient skeptics, this was the ideal of ataraxia to be attained by the philosopher through a perfect suspense of judgment; for the epicureans, it was the calm of the one who lives modestly and accepts the human being's limited place in nature; for the stoics, it was the en10tionless resignation of the sage whose reason has comprehended the rational order of the cosmos. In Western culture, Plato's portrait of Socrates is perhaps the paradigm of this image of the philosopher. Like in1ages of the philosophical sage are also a strong current running through ancient Chinese philosophy, as represented by Confucius or Lao Tzu. As these examples indicate, this conception of philosophy, and of the philosopher, are products of a high culture, but also an essentially premodern one. The idea that a final grasp of the profound truths about life could be accessible of some lone individual is no longer sustainable in light of the achievements of the collectively self-critical enterprise of modern science, which has taught us to distrust all claims to final truth of any kind, and has also led us to expect whatever truth we achieve to come from the slow and patient labors of many more or less ordinary individuals working in co-operation, not from the special insights of some especially revered person. The ideal of the philosophical sage seen1S to me long overdue for the same kind of fond but devastating parody that Cervantes brilliantly gave to the equally outdated ideal of the knight errant at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Although this conception of philosophy· and the philosophical sage unquestionably has had a kind of afterlife in modern European culture (in Hegel, for instance, and even in the Enlightenment conception of the philosopher represented by the "apology" discussed in the ninth essay of this collection), it seems to presuppose the possibility of con1ing to terms through thought with the fundamental questions of philosophy in such a way as to achieve a kind of "final position" with regard to them (whether of knowledge, conviction, doubt or dismissal), which would afford a special sort of peace of mind fron1 which the ordinary

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or unphilosophical mind is excluded. The intellectual elitism of this conception seems to me not only unconvincing but even repugnant; any final reckoning with philosophical issues, moreover, seems incompatible with any honest assessment of where philosophical inquiry has led us in the past or seems likely to lead us in the future. Though Plato's image of Socrates may be in part responsible for the ideal of philosophy against which I am arguing, the Socrates of Plato's Apology also illustrates something rather close to the point I am trying to make. When the oracle says that no human being is wiser than Socrates, Socrates interprets this as meaning that whereas others do not know and think they do, he alone has the truly human wisdom of knowing that he does not know. My slightly different claim is that the closest you can come to possessing a philosophical wisdom making you superior to ordinary people is to realize that there is no such thing as a philosophical wisdom that could n1ake you superior to ordinary people. If the task of philosophy is to reflect on our beliefs about large and controversial questions and to demand good grounds for those beliefs, then from what we know about the state of those questions and the proposed answers to then1, the genuine philosopher will not turn out to be a person essentially wiser or calmer than ordinary people. Still less will a genuine philosopher be exempt from perplexity or anxiety in the face of the troubling questions of human life, or able to adopt an attitude of superior serenity in relation to those questions. On the contrary, a philosopher should be fully aware of the obligation to take these questions seriously, and the obligation to demand of oneself good reasons for holding beliefs about them. These obligations leave honest people to be eternal wanderers without any comfortable home as regards our basic beliefs about life and its meaning. Our duty as thinking beings involve frequently raising again the deepest questions, worrying about them, looking for and at new arguments (and revisiting the old arguments) that are relevant to them, forming or re-forming one's views about them, which should never be so firm or confident that they cannot be easily unsettled by such reflections. Perhaps no one lives up to these obligations perfectly, just as no one does absolutely everything they can to make the world a better place. No one is in a position to be entirely content with what they have done, or what they are, or what they think and believe. No one is ever entitled to the sublin1e tranquility that is supposed to belong to the philosophical sage. In this respect Martin Heidegger was quite right to think that modern science and the Enlightenn1ent have made modern human beings

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rootless and homeless. But he was deeply wrong in wanting to escape this condition through some sort of meditative philosophical thinking or mystical religious ekstasis. Still nlore repulsive is an escape through "returning to one's roots" by identifying oneself with some national or ethnic or religious tradition. Whenever people turn away from "rationalisnl" and "universalisnl", seeking to become "nlore human", they actually make thenlselves less human, and often enough, they become inhuman. The world is a mysterious and frightening place in which to pass our short lives beset in countless ways with contingencies and dissatisfactions. Pascal was right to look up into the heavens-as modern science was then beginning to reveStl thenl-and exclaim: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies nle." But it is the social world especially-the world for which human beings themselves are responsible-that is a very bad home. That world cries out to be changed, in some ways that ought to be quite clear to us, and also in others, no less urgent, where no one can be very sure how to bring about the changes that are needed. It is up to us to change this world, to make it better, and where we do not know how to make it better, to find out how. There is no guarantee, however, that we will ever find the solution to some problems, and where we know what to do, no guarantee that those struggling to do the right thing will win out over those who want to keep things as they are or even to take the world in a backward direction. When faced with such a deeply dissatisfying world, the serenity and complacency of the traditional philosophical sage is not a rational attitude-not even a morally decent one, especially for anyone who benefits from its evils and injustices. Of course these facts about human life are not our fault. It is no single individual's fault that human beings generally are foolish, selfish, fearful, vengeful, shortsighted. Even less is it anyone's fault that human life is delivered over to contingency and chaos, that the awful riddles of life and death have no consoling solutions. Being weighed down with anxiety and guilt is therefore no more reasonable than being totally complacent and serene. Guilt too can be a }<:ind of consoling illusion when its psychological function is to make us think that things make more sense in relation to ourselves than they really do. Nietzsche was therefore quite right to attack the "spirit of gravity" in philosophy, and to recommend light-heartedness in the face of life's absurdity as one essential ingredient in a properly philosophical attitude toward life. But if correctly understood, that too is compatible with taking seriously our responsibilities as active, reflective, reason-giving

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and reason-demanding beings, and trying to live up to the unsettling obligations they impose on us. Thanks are due first to my son, Stephen, who diligently and skillfully copy-edited this book for CSLI Publications. Because the essays collected here were composed over a number of years and in a variety of contexts, the thanks owing to others for helping to shape them is great, but the number of people deserving of it is too large for me to list them all. My way of thanking them collectively therefore has been to dedicate this book to my colleague of over twenty-five years, David Lyons. His intellectual integrity, rigor, and commitment to human equality and progressive social thinking make him the best representative I have known in my life of the philosophical spirit I have shared with all my colleagues and student's, and have tried to express in these essays. Since David is a modest person, and since we have not seen much of each other since we both left Cornell University, I suspect that he will be surprised by this dedication. But I hope the contents of the book come close enough to meeting the standards of philosophical excellence he has always represented to me. A.W.W.

Acknowledgments "Kant's Deism," was previously published in P. Rossi and M. Wreen (eds.) Kant's Philosophy of Religion Re-examined (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). "Self-Deception and Bad Faith," was previously published in A. Rorty and B. MacLaughlin (eds.), Perspectives on Self-Deception. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. "The objectivity of value," was previously published in New Literary History (Autumn, 2001). "Attacking Morality: A Metaethical Project," was previously published in Jocelyne Couture and Kai Nielsen (eds.) On the Relevance of Metaethics: New Essays in Metaethics, (Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume XXI) (Vancouver: Calgary lUBe Press, 1996). "What Dead Philosophers Mean" was previously published in D. Schonecker and T. Zwenger (eds.) Kant-Interpretationen. AnalysenProbleme-Kritik. Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2001 "What is Philosophy? Enlightenment Apology, Enlightenment Critique," was previously published in S. Heidt and C. S. Ragland (eds.) What is Philosophy? New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. The above essays have been newly revised in various ways for this volume.

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Abbreviations References to most of the texts cited are given in the footnotes. In three cases, it makes more sense to cite in a more standard way, using the following abbreviations: Writings of Plato will be cited by title and Stephanus number. Writings of Aristotle will be cited by title and Becker number. Writings of Kant will be cited according to the following abbreviations: Ak Kants Bchriften, Ausgabe der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1902-). All page references (except to the Critique of Pure Reason) will be to volume:page number from this edition. Ca The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel.Kant (New York: Cambridge University Press). Cited below by Volume title where the translation of this work is to be found. A Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufkliirung? Ak 9 Ca Writings on Practical Philosophy G Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Bitten, Ak 4 Ca Writings on Practical Philosophy I Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbiirgerlicher Absicht (1784), Ak 8 Ca Writings on Anthropology, History and Education KpV Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788), Ak 5 Ca Writings on Practical Philosophy KrV Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Cited according to standard AlB Pagination from the first edition (1781) and second edition (1787) Ca Critique of Pure Reason KU Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), Ak 5 Ca Critique of the Power of Judgment

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MA Mutmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte, Ak 8 Ca Writings on Anthropology, History and Education MS Metaphysik der Sitten (1798), Ak 6 Ca Writings on Practical Philosophy o Was heif1t: Sich im Denken orientieren? Ak 8 Ca Writings on Religion and Rational Theology R Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1793-1794), Ak 6 Ca Writings on Religion and Rational Theology SF Streit der Fakultiiten Ak 7 Ca Writings on Religion and Rational Theology VpR Vorlesungen iiber die philosophische Religionslehre, Ak 28. Ca Writings on Religion and Rational Theology

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K. Clifford and the Ethics of Belief Most of us probably first learn of William Kingdon Clifford ("that delicious enfant terrible") by reading William James's famous essay "The Will to Believe" . But few of us ever investigate Clifford's writings themselves. This is too bad, both because James's account of Clifford's views is distorted, and because Clifford's views on the ethics of belief are much more right-headed than James's more famous ones. Clifford is most famous for stating and defending a principle regarding the ethics of belief: "It is wrong always, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence" (Clifford, 77).1 I will call this "Clifford's Principle" .2 1 W. K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999). Cited by page number as "Clifford." 2The view that we ought to have evidence for what we believe, hence any view that holds something like Clifford's Principle, is also commonly called 'evidentialism.' This nan1e is more often used by opponents than by defenders, and sometimes refers to a position that is not quite the same as Clifford's Principle. Thus Alvin Plantinga distinguishes 'evidentialism', which he takes to be the view that belief on insufficient evidence is unreasonable or irrational, from 'deontologism', which is the view that it is morally wrong to hold such unreasonable or irrational beliefs. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 81-88. Cited below by page number as "Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief." This, however, suggests that Clifford's Principle must be defended by a certain argument of the form: 1. It is irrational or unreasonable to believe on insufficient evidence. (Evidentialism) 2. It is morally wrong to hold irrational or unreasonable beliefs. (Deontologism) Therefore, 3. It is morally wrong to believe on insufficient evidence. (Clifford's Principle) Now I think this argument is valid and that there is a relevant sense in which both premises are true. But the argument forces a defender of Clifford's Principle into a detour which may involve more obfuscation than clarification. As Plantinga himself insists (Warranted Christian Belief, 108ff), there are many notions of "rationality".

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When it comes to Clifford's Principle, many people just don't seem to get it. This is the way things used to be about other moral issues, such as sn10king in public places or sexual harassn1ent on the job or in the classroom. It used to be that nearly everyone thought that subjecting others to the danger and annoyance of second-hand smoke, and employees or students to unwanted sexual advances, raise no moral issues at all, or at least none worth making a fuss over. They were in moral denial about these matters. The state of moral denial about Clifford's Principle may take a variety of forms. Some people don't think we are in any way responsible for what we believe, or they think that what we believe is our own business and not a matter for morality. Others sin1ply see nothing wrong with believing whatever makes you feel good (or makes you feel bad, if that's what you want), whether or not there is any evidence for it. Or maybe they think that son1etin1es there could be something morally objectionable about people's beliefs, but they think Clifford's Principle picks out the wrong thing, or goes too far, or makes a big deal out of something that should be no big deal. In this essay and the next, I hope I can help at least son1e of these people to get it about Clifford's Principle. Perhaps too few people even know who Clifford was. Born in 1845, he studied at Cambridge University and was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of London at age 26, a position he held until his untimely death from tuberculosis at the early age of 33. Although a mathematician and physicist by profession, Clifford was an individual of universal learning, a student not only of philosophy but also of history and of classical languages and literature (he knew Arabic and Sanskrit as well as Latin and Greek). He won prizes as an orator as well as a scientist, and though his health was always fragile, he led an active life. He was an accomplished gymnast, and he traveled extensively (once surviving shipwreck on a scientific expedition). While he is It is not clear that in all of them, belief on insufficient evidence is irrational, or that every irrational belief is morally wrong to hold. Clifford may grant that it could be be instrumentally rational, for instance, to hold a belief on insufficient evidence. If one's end is to achieve a certain comfort and joy, Clifford adrnits that holding unsupported religious beliefs is a good way to achieve this end. Further, it is not clear that every irrational belief is morally wrong: Some beliefs unjustified by evidence are called irrational because they are part of a psychosis or other serious mental illness (for instance, the belief of a present day mental patient that he is Jesus Christ). We might not consider such a belief morally wrong because we do not think the mental patient is morally responsible at all, for his beliefs or his actions. Clifford's Principle itself, however, is simply that it is wrong (of course for people who are morally responsible) to hold beliefs on insufficient evidence (whether those beliefs count as rational or irrational in some particular sense of 'rational').

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best known for his attacks on the morality of religious belief, Clifford was an ardent high church Anglican in his early years at Cambridge.

1.1

Clifford's Principle

Both Clifford and his critics have been chiefly interested in the application of Clifford's Principle to religious beliefs. I will consider that application in the next essay. But it is not only in religious n1atters that people are prone to violate Clifford's Principle, and in any case it is worth considering the Principle initially without focusing specifically on any particular application of it. The first thing to do is understand better what Clifford's Principle means. Here I am going to offer an interpretation of it, which I think is consistent with what Clifford says, and faithful to Clifford's basic intentions (though I will express reservations about Clifford's way of defending the Principle, and offer arguments on its behalf that Clifford does not). The interpretation also results in a moral principle I believe to be correct, and whose validity I am prepared to defend independently of whether Clifford held it. 1.1.1

Epistemic Justification

Clifford's Principle is about the holding of beliefs, and about their justification. As I understand the Principle, it assumes that there are two distinct ways in which we may regard our beliefs as justified or unjustified. First, we may regard beliefs as justified or unjustified epistemically, in relation to the evidence we have for them. And second, we may regard our beliefs as justified or unjustified morally, insofar as believing is something which it can be morally right or wrong for us to do. In this terminology, Clifford's Principle could be stated as follows: a belief can be morally justified only if it is epistemically justified. 3 31 do not think a belief's being epistemically justified is a sufficient condition for its being morally justified. For example, if there are certain matters about which we have a moral obligation to think for ourselves rather than relying on the authority of others, there might be beliefs that are epistemically justified because held on the basis of a reliable authority, but nevertheless wrong because the believer should not hold them on the basis of any authority, but only on the basis of her own independent thinking. Susan Haack claims that both Clifford and James neglect the distinction between epistemic justification and moral justification: Haack, "'The ethics of belief' reconsidered," in Matthias Steup (ed.), Knowledge, Truth and Duty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 27-29. Cited below by page number as 'Haack'. It is true that neither draws the distinction explicitly, but clearly the positions of both, and even the issue they are arguing about, is hard to make sense of without it, and no charitable reading of either can fail to regard them as assuming it. Haack's attempts to argue that James waffles between epistemic and moral justification seem to me unconvincing, though he does sometimes want to argue from the pragmatic utility

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The notion of epistemic justification is widely used among philosophers, because it corresponds to something that all responsible people must do constantly in managing their intellectual lives. In the contexts of ordinary life, people are not usually unclear about what these standards are. But epistemic standards are also subject to some vagueness, and it can sometimes be a matter of controversy what epistemic standards apply to a given belief. This is why notions like "reasonable doubt" and "a reasonable person" (as used in the law) are sometimes regarded as problematic. A bit later on we will have more to say about the fact that the appropriate epistemic standards vary with context, and also with the notion of strengths or degrees of belief, both of which are relevant to applying epistemic standards. As philosophers talk about it, however, the concept of epistemic justification is not entirely unambiguous. First, the notion of epistemic justification we need in talking of Clifford's Principle is not necessarily the same one used in accounts of knowledge that take knowledge to be justified true belief. Some very plausible accounts of the latter kind employ notions of justification that are "externalist" -that is, they count a belief as epistemically justified or unjustified on the basis of facts that may not be cognitively accessible at all to the subject. For example, some accounts hold that a true belief counts as knowledge whenever it is produced by a normally functioning mechanism for producing beliefs, a mechanism that reliably produces true beliefs when functioning normally under normal conditions. On these accounts, it is not in the least necessary that the subject knows, or even could know, what sort of belief-producing mechanism this is, whether it produces true beliefs reliably, or whether it is now functioning normally and under normal conditions. Thus a belief could be justified (in this "externalist" way) without the subject knowing, or even being able to know, that it is justified. This notion of epistemic justification may work just fine in explicating the concept of knowledge (or at any rate one concept of knowledge). But it is unsuitable for explicating Clifford's Principle. For the whole point of Clifford's Principle is to tell us, as reflective cognitive beings, when we are morally justified in believing sonlething. This principle claims that we are morally justified in believing only when we have so managed our cognitive life that we are epistemically justified in believing. Such a principle could be used to regulate our cognitive activities only if we could be sufficiently aware whether a belief to which it is of a belief to both its epistemic and its moral justification. I see such arguments as carried on against an implicit background of a set of intellectualistic standards of epistemic justification that James wants to reject in favor of pragmatic standards.

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applied is epistemically justified that this awareness plays a role in our voluntary conduct as cognizers. Thus it makes sense for us to apply this principle only in terms of a conception of epistemic justification that is to that extent "internalist" -a conception such that we are able to specify conditions of epistemic justification we can employ as critical norms in governing our conduct as cognizers. The second point to make is that Clifford's Principle is not committed to any specific conception of (internalist) epistemic justification. In particular, Clifford's Principle does not commit us, as Alvin Plantinga has maintained it does, to a foundationalist conception of epistemic justification-one that treats all epistemically justified beliefs either as self-justifying or else as derived from other beliefs that are self-justifying (Plantinga, Reason and Belief, pp. 47-63).4 On that basis, Plantinga infers that "evidentialism" (regarded as the endorsement of Clifford's Principle about what it is right or rational to believe) stands or falls (he insists that it falls) with foundationalism (the epistemological position). Plantinga's inference is obviously incorrect, as Norman Kretzmann and others have pointed aut. 5 Clifford's Principle is not committed to any particular theory of epistemic justification. It does not deny, or affirm, that coherence among beliefs might be the final ground of their justification. It says only that given the correct standards for epistemic justification (whatever they turn out to be), we are morally justified in holding only beliefs that meet those standards. 6 To say that Clifford's Principle employs a conception of epistemic justification that is internalist does not mean that it holds that we have to be explicitly or reflectively aware of the epistemic justification for our beliefs, still less that we must be able to articulate it to ourselves or to others. We often correctly speak of people as following, and as being justified by the fact that they follow, norms of which they are not explicitly conscious and which they cannot articulate. For instance, people form gramn1atically correct sentences in their native language, 4S ee Plantinga, "Reason and Belief in God," in A. Plantinga and N. Wolterstorff (eds.) Faith and Rationality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 16-94. Cited by page number as "Plantinga, Reason and Belief." 5 Kretzmann, in K. Clark (ed.), Our Knowledge of God: Essays on Natural and Philosophical Theology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992). 6More recently Plantinga appears to have backed off this argument a bit, making only the (quite correct) historical point that classical early modern evidentialists (especially John Locke) were also foundationalists (Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 81-103). I think it is clear that Clifford too is a foundationalist (see Clifford, pp. 79-96). Foundationalist epistemologies were no doubt more fashionable when Clifford's Principle was first enunciated than they are now. But there is nothing in Clifford's Principle itself that commits those who hold it to foundationalism, or to any other specific theory of (internalist) epistemic justification.

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and what makes the sentences grammatically correct is that they conform to certain norms, but native speakers probably cannot tell us what those norms are, and it may take a quite sophisticated linguistic theory to tell us that. It is not merely the case that the utterances of competent speakers of the language can be justified by linguists (as though we cannot ascribe to the speakers themselves the conformity to the rules of grammar, but n1ust regard their performances as only "externally" justified). Rather, we must say that competent speakers of a language have in some way "internalized" those rules; their correctly forming grammatical sentences is to be explained by the fact that they are guided by them. 7 The same is often true of people who hold epistemically justified beliefs (in the sense relevant to Clifford's Principle) in relation to the epistemic norn1S they follow and the evidence they have for their beliefs. Philosophical talent and philosophical training frequently help people to articulate the grounds for their beliefs (even of quite obvious comn1on sense beliefs, such as that there is an external world). But Clifford's Principle can and should be followed by people who lack this sort of talent and training. To be sure, it is sometin1es important for us to be able to articulate the epistemic grounds for our beliefs if we are to manage our intellectual lives properly. That is one reason that philosophy is a valuable activity. Skill in reflecting on the grounds for our beliefs and in articulating them is often useful in criticizing and correcting beliefs, but the possession and exercise of this skill is by no means necessary in all cases for the holding of epistemically justified beliefs. 7Robert Adams says: "Children acquire a large body of beliefs about the meanings of words long before they have either the intellectual capacity or adequate evidence to justify those beliefs. Indeed it is doubtful that we can ever have adequate evidence to justify large part of the beliefs that we rightly hold about other speakers' meanings. Even among adults communication would be gravely impoverished if we understood each other's verbal and nonverbal signs only so far as we could give a compelling justification for our interpretation." Robert M. Adams, The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 13-14 (cited below by page number as "Adams"). But it is one thing to have adequate epistemic justification for what one takes a word to mean, or for one's interpretation of what someone says, and another to be able to articulate it-to "justify" it in the sense of "giving a compelling justification (to someone else) ." Adams' claims are correct if they refer to the latter, but the former is all that Clifford's Principle claims we must have for the belief to be morally justified. Having epistemic justification (in this internalist sense) must be distinguished both from being able to give a justification and from "having" an epistemic justification in some externalist sense in which one may not "have" (or even be able to "have") it at all in the sense that it belongs to one's mental processes in a way that makes it part of the conscious epistemic regulation to which Clifford's Principle says we are required to subject our beliefs.

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1.1.2 Belief and the Will One way of disagreeing with Clifford is to deny that beliefs can be objects of moral assessn1ent at all. According to this view, actions may be morally justified or not, but beliefs cannot be. The usual reason given for this view is that we can n10rally assess only what is subject to people's voluntary control, and beliefs are not subject to voluntary control. Some have used this argument to question whether it even makes sense to consider beliefs epistemically justified. 8 First, it is not so clear that beliefs are not under our voluntary control (or in what senses they mayor may not be said to be). There is a long and strong philosophical tradition (claiming members as diverse as Aquinas, Descartes and Fichte) that parcels out cognitive tasks to human faculties in such a way that belief is assigned to the will. I think those who regard this whole tradition as wrongheaded badly underestimate both the difficulty of the problems it is trying to solve and the sophistication of its solutions to them. Second, even setting this tradition aside, beliefs do seem to be subject to the will at least indirectly. For people can try to cultivate beliefs in themselves (as religious people sometimes speak of cultivating their faith by doing certain things, such as praying, associating with people who believe, acting as if they believe, and so on). These efforts have ugly side-effects on the character of those who make them, but sometimes they are successful in producing the wished-for belief. Third, there are many things about people (character traits, desires, habits, emotions) which are no more subject to voluntary control than beliefs are, but which nevertheless fall under norms and are even objects of moral assessment. Anyone who thinks that people can be held responsible for their rage, recklessness, cowardice, or thoughtlessness of the needs of others should think that they can also be held responsible for their beliefs. Fourthly, and most decisively, this line of objection entirely misses the point of Clifford's ethics of belief. What interests Clifford primarily is not beliefs themselves, but the processes and procedures through which we form them. Clifford admits that "sometimes a man's belief is so fixed that he cannot think otherwise, [but] the question of right and wrong has to do with the origin of his belief, not the n1atter of it; not what it was, but how he got it; not whether it turned out to be true or false, but whether he had a right to believe on such evidence as was before him" (Clifford, 71). 8For instance, William Alston, Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), see especially p. 73.

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I do not interpret Clifford's talk of the "origin" of a belief or "how someone got it" as talk merely about the history of its acquisition (though of course that is doubtless involved in some way). It is rather talk about the agent's conduct in the course of forming and maintaining the belief. Did the agent raise the right questions regarding the issue the belief is about, inquire honestly and diligently enough in answering them, and pay due attention to the evidence on all sides that arose during these inquiries? Did the agent then judge freely, fairly and honestly on the basis of that evidence? Does the agent's mind remain open and receptive to new evidence, so that the belief not only was rightly formed at the time, but is also maintained by intellectual processes that are honest and free from bias, self-deception, wishful thinking, and other forms of motivated irrationality? This set of queries is not meant to be complete, but is meant to indicate the kinds of considerations, regarding the voluntary behavior of agents in managing their intellectual lives, that are relevant to the question whether Clifford's Principle has been followed. If this is right, then Clifford calls a belief right or wrong according to the rightness or wrongness of the process by which it is formed and maintained, much as some might call an action right or wrong according to the rightness or wrongness of the intention with which it is done, or a distribution of property in society right or wrong according to the justice or injustice of the institutions and transactions from which it results. Perhaps a closer analogy is this: I would be to blame for killing someone in a drunken rage even if in the drunken rage it were no longer in my power to control my aggressive actions. This is because my act of getting drunk while angry was voluntary and blamable. I should have been aware of what I might be like if I drank to excess, and I should have controlled my rage to the degree necessary to prevent myself from falling into that state. Likewise, it might be true that if I allow my wishes, biases or interests to influence my cognitive processes-for instance, by letting myself attend only to the evidence supporting what I want to believe and turn away from the much stronger evidence against it-then I cannot help believing as I do, given the way my belief was formed. But that would not show that I am not to blame for holding the unjustified belief. In order to use a criterion of voluntariness to show that beliefs are not subject to the moral judgments Clifford wants to make about them, critics would have to show that the processes and procedures through which people form and maintain their beliefs are not subject to voluntary control. No doubt these processes often operate by habit and we are often not aware of them. But this does not show that we cannot

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come to be much more aware of (and in rational control of) these processes than we are. It is precisely the thrust of Clifford's Principle to claim that we have a moral duty to become aware of the manner in which we form our beliefs, and to see to it that they are formed by due consideration of the evidence and not by wishes, fears or other factors that lead to epistemically unjustified beliefs. Another version of this objection says that Clifford's Principle is superfluous because genuine belief that p is nothing but an indication of the strength of the evidence one takes there to be for p. Since the strength of one's belief is no different from one's estimate of the strength of the evidence, Clifford's Principle is not something it would be possible to violate. The closest approximation to violating it would have to be misestimating the strength of the evidence one has for what one believes. This objection is correct in seeing a conceptual connection bet\veen believing something and estimating the strength of the evidence for it. But the objection overestin1ates the tightness of this connection, and underestimates the hun1an tendency to exploit the slack there is here in forming beliefs through fearful or wishful thinking, deliberately biased readings of evidence, self-deception and other mechanisn1s of motivated irrationality. Son1e thinkers who advocate the direct defiance of Clifford's Principle like to pretend there is son1e sort of wonderful miraculous freedom to be had in consciously believing something when the evidence is overwhelmingly against it (Kierkegaard's "knight of faith" in Fear and Trembling is a striking illustration of this). I would concede to the spirit of the present objection that beliefs of this kind are unstable and that something like self-deception in relating the belief to the perceived evidence regarding it is aln10st certainly necessary to sustain them. But surely thinkers such as Kierkegaard are not entirely mistaken in maintaining that there exist some beliefs that are reasonable approximations to this "ideal". The point of Clifford's Principle is to condemn the "ideal" itself, and show what is wrong with it. We will see in the fourth essay that beliefs are ways of integrating our experience with a view to directing our responses to it. For the same reason, many of our beliefs are (and should be) tentative and even unstable, open to critical reflection and correction, and we are rightly cautious about delivering our conduct over to them, even though we have no choice but to do so. The complexity of our lives is often such that beliefs do an imperfect job of integrating the evidence, and they may also determine our practical responses only imperfectly or approximately. It is precisely because beliefs are neither directly voluntary acts nor entirely under our voluntary control-that is, because they

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are states we to some extent undergo, and to which we are passive, as we are to feelings, emotions and desires-that Clifford's Principle is especially important. For in all these cases, it is important to us as rational and self-directing beings, if we are to live as responsible adults, that vve should take a critical stance toward states that must (and even should) influence our conduct without being directly under our voluntary control. We take a responsible attitude toward our conduct only if we gain a measure of self-knowledge about these states, and also cultivate habits of mind and emotion that protect us from being in them when we should not be, and especially from being carried away by them when we should not be. We never can refrain from having emotions or desires, or acting from them, nor should we, nor should we have only weak states of this kind. A person wholly lacking in strong desires and emotions would not be fully human; certainly such a person could not be rational, since rationality often requires reacting emotionally to what goes on. But when we are moved by a strong desire or emotion, we should be aware of what is happening to us, and we should be able to moderate the effects of such states on our conduct when they threaten to be excessive. To the extent that beliefs are not under our voluntary control, the very same thing is true of them. This sort of failure of self-knowledge and self-control (about desires, emotions, and also about beliefs) is central to all forms of addictive behavior. In extreme forms, it is more like a disease than an ordinary moral failure. (There is probably no determinate answer in general to the question at what point addictive behavior ceases to be conduct for which the person can be blamed.) Clearly it is irresponsible to let oneself be unaware of the desires or ernotions that control one's behavior or, if one is aware of them, to omit to reflect on whether their influence on our conduct should be as great as it is. Clifford's Principle says that we have a similar responsibility regarding our beliefs, and that one criterion (perhaps the chief criterion) that beliefs must meet if we are to discharge this responsibility is that their presence and their strength should be responsive to the evidence we have that pertains to them. Unjustified beliefs can sometimes be held in a way that is involuntary and not the believer's fault. Sometimes people, when faced with a complex set of evidence, make honest mistakes, good faith errors. They inquire diligently, are guilty of no negligence in seeking or processing evidence, do not deceive themselves, and are not swayed by such self-manipulative mechanisms as wishful thinking. But they blunder, miscalculate or misjudge in weighing the evidence. As a result, they bold beliefs that are epistemically unjustified by the evidence, while

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thinking, unculpably but mistakenly, that it is justified. Such people's cognitive processes can be criticized epistemically, but they are not morally at fault for holding an epistemically unjustified belief. 9 However, this kind of case provides no counterexan1ple to Clifford's Principle, any more than the moral commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is invalidated by the fact that sometimes people cause the death of others accidentally, through honest Inistakes in regard to which they are not at fault. No moral principle is reasonably understood to condelun acts that are involuntary, or the result of errors for which the agent is not to blame, even if the acts are of the kind otherwise condemned by the principle. Clifford's Principle is exactly the same as any other moral principIe in this respect.

1.1.3

Belief and Other Propositional Attitudes

The point that beliefs are more like desires or emotions than like voluntary actions can be brought out by comparing belief with other propositional attitudes somewhat similar to it. Asserting a proposition, for instance, is directly a voluntary action in a way that believing it is not. There is also a difference between accepting or assuming a proposition and believing it. I can, for instance, assume or accept something as a 9This kind of case is presented as falsifying Clifford's Principle, and supporting James's side of the "will to believe" controversy, by Susan Haack (Haack, p. 23). But of course it does no such thing, any more than blameless accidental deaths would show· that killing is not wrong, or justify murder for profit. Haack thinks there can be both "personal cognitive inadequacy" and "cultural cognitive inadequacy", the latter occurring where the believer relies on erroneous background beliefs that are prevalent in the community. But the latter sort of case is very different from the former. Often there are good grounds for me to rely on commonly accepted background beliefs in my culture (e.g. the principles of the best existing scientific theories), even if a later age or a different culture proves them to be wrong. In those cases, the agent's belief, even if false (and known by others to be false), is epistemically justified relative to the believer's situation, and Clifford's Principle approves of it. Of course sometimes a person ought to question the prevalent background beliefs because they lack epistemic justification (as Clifford wants us to do with received religious beliefs). In that case, the background beliefs are epistemically unjustified, and Clifford's Principle condemns them (unless, once again, they are accepted as a result of an honest mistake-as though we had to append this qualification to any and every moral principle we enunciate). Haack also seems to think that Clifford's Principle has to require us to "cultivate one's capacity to judge evidence to the very best of which one is capable (a very demanding assumption)" (Haack, p. 25). But the excessive demand here is purely Haack's invention. We obviously should understand Clifford's Principle as saying that a belief is to be judged epistemically justified or unjustified in relation to the normal human cognitive capacities for people in the agent's situation, and by epistemic standards that are reasonable (neither overly lax nor excessively demanding) under the agent's circumstances. (You might as well say that the moral prohibition on killing is excessively demanding because it requires everyone to become a trained paramedic.)

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hypothesis to be tested, or in order to act as if it were true, to see what follows from it. These too are voluntary actions, which we decide to do for reasons. Accepting or assuming is often something I do only relatively, for certain purposes, whereas believing is an attitude that is not conditioned, restricted or qualified in such ways. Other propositional attitudes that are like believing that p in this way, but different from it in other ways, are guessing that p, hoping or fearing that p, and being ready to bet that p. Betting is a voluntary action, and guessing is often something like one, whereas hoping or fearing, though different from believing, do not seem to be something one can simply choose to do at will. The special place of belief among propositional attitudes is related to the fact that, as C. S. Peirce observed, belief is an end of inquiry. 10 Belief is a state we seek in order to have a stable basis for our actions, our interpretation and integration of evidence, and in general for our relation to the world our beliefs are about. It is partly for this reason that belief is less subject to immediate choice than many other propositional attitudes. This is why the cognitive-and the nl0ral-stakes are also higher in the case of belief. Ceteris paribus, it is a nlore serious misstep, both cognitively and morally, to believe something for which we lack epistemic justification than to adopt a provisional hypothesis that it we have inadequate reasons to adopt.

1.1.4

Variation in Epistemic Standards

There are different epistemic standards for different propositional attitudes. In general, we need a lot less evidence that p to justify provisionally assuming that p than to justify believing that p. Further, epistemic standards for belief also vary with context and with the strength or degree of the belief. In his own statements of his Principle, Clifford talks as if belief is simply an all or nothing matter: One either believes p or one does not. But it is in the spirit of Clifford's Principle to hold that more or stronger evidence is required for a strong belief than a weak one. 11 There is no reason why Clifford could not state his principle by loPeirce, "The Fixation of Belief", in Collected Papers, ed. Hartshorne and Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), V:232. But Peirce seems to me to exaggerate the claim that we seek belief and flee from doubt. Doubt may not be as satisfying an end to inquiry as belief, but it is one end that inquiry may have. And we do not always seek belief, or seek to fix our beliefs with greater certainty than we have. Few people, for instance, would want to have a firm and well-grounded belief about the exact day and time that they will die. For most of us, the longer this remains a matter of uncertainty and doubt, the better. 11 We often use the notion of strong or weak belief, but some theorists have proposed to analyze "degrees of belief" in terms of probability estimates. To believe p

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saying, with David Hume, that "a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence" (Hume, Enquiry 73).12 Different degrees of evidence may, moreover, be required in different contexts. If someone on the street is taking a poll with the intent of correlating political opinions with nationality, it might be perfectly all right to simply to accept your word that you are an American citizen without asking for further proof. But it would be irresponsible for the person on duty at Passport Control to do this. I propose, then, that we understand the notion of "sufficient evidence" as contextual in its implications, varying both with the epistemic context and the degree or strength of belief we are talking about. Clifford's Principle directs you to look for the kind and strength evidence that is epistemically appropriate to the context, and to require that kind and degree of evidence before you believe. Further, in line with Hume's dictum, it also says that you should not believe strongly on evidence that would justify only weak belief-nor, for that matter, should you believe only weakly on evidence that mandates strong belief. 13 more strongly is to assign p a higher probability of truth. This equivalence seems to be motivated by the misguided intention to analyze strength or degree of belief in terms of quasi-mathematical theories of probability. But the analysis will not work in general. Suppose I am shown a coin and asked to estimate the probability that its next flip will turn up heads. I estimate this probability at 0.5. I believe the probability is 0.5. If I have reason to think the coin is a normal "fair" coin, this belief may be quite strong. But now suppose someone suggests to me that the coin may be weighted or "doctored", providing me with some (but not overwhelming) evidence for the suspicion. My belief that the probability of heads on the next toss is 0.5 will now become weaker than it was. I will have more doubts about it than I did. But the probability estimate will not change at all, unless I am given some information about how the coin might have been doctored. 12Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977). Cited by page number as "Hume, Enquiry". 13Sometimes people say that it is reasonable to believe a proposition when it is reasonable to assign to it a probability of 0.5 or greater. This seems to me a typical example of the tendency to offer illusory precision in a matter that does not admit of any neat, easy technical formulation. Epistemic standards for believing vary greatly with context, and with the strength of the belief we are talking about. Believing that p is not the same as being willing to bet that p, and the epistemic standards for the one are not the same as the other. Suppose I have been told on good authority that for people in my demographic group, the probability that they will die of heart disease is slightly greater than 0.5, and the probability that they will die of some other cause is slightly less than 0.5. So (in the absence of other information) it is reasonable for me to assign a probability slightly greater than 0.5 to the proposition that I will eventually die of heart disease. Perhaps if I am compelled to bet on what I will die of, and given even odds or better on the chance that I will die of heart disease, then it would be reasonable for me to bet that I will die of heart disease (even though I would never be in a position to collect on the bet). But is it reasonable for me to believe that I am destined to die of heart

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Just as the appropriate standards for the accuracy of a n1easurement depends on what the measuren1ent is of, and what it is for, so too the kind and strength of the evidence required to justify belief will vary with the nature and importance of the question. High standards of evidence, for instance, are generally required to establish that a medication is safe for public sale and use. In other matters, of n1uch less vital importance to us, we often believe on much lower standards of evidence. For instance, we accept newspaper reports that one corporation has made an offer to buy another, or that a certain politician has been having an extramarital affair or was arrested for drunk driving. 14 Perhaps that is because these beliefs are not so in1portant to us, and we never need to hold such beliefs as strongly, or with a high degree of certainty, as we would need to if they mattered n10re. In light of this, it is not clear how much variation there really is in the standards that justify belief as contrasted with non-belief, once we take into account two other ways in which we may consider variations not in epistemic standards themselves, but in their use. Scientists sometimes establish looser or stricter standards of evidence, so that they can determine the nurnber of cases in which a kind of event very certainly occurred frorn cases in which it probably occurred, or may have occurred. 15 Meeting a high standard of evidence justifies a strong disease? On the contrary, on the basis of my present information, the right thing to say is I simply do not know what I will die of and have at present no good reason to form any belief whatever about this. 14In "The Will to Believe," Willian1. James n1.ight be read as claiming only that our practical interests sometimes playa role in determining what are the contextually appropriate epistemic standards for justified belief. George Mavrodes, "Intellectual Morality in Clifford and James," tries to argue that James's defense of a "will to believe" is really not incompatible with Clifford's Principle. See Gerald D. McCarthy, ed., The Ethics of Belief Debate (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986) pp. 205-220. But this involves a serious misunderstanding of James's position, and of the disagreement between him and Clifford. James's claim is that beliefs favored by our "passional nature" may be morally justified irrespective of any evidence for them (if only they are psychologically "live hypotheses" for us). He is not concerned with determining the epistemic standards to be used in different contexts, but with defending an unconditional moral title to hold beliefs that fail to meet any epistemic standards at all. The legitimate variation of epistemic standards, based (among other things) on our practical interests, does not include lowering the standards of evidence required for religious beliefs merely because we want to hold them, or wish them to be true, just as little as it justifies raising the standards of evidence for the theory of evolution just because we hope it is not true, or fear that coming to believe it will make people act more like monkeys than they do now. 15For instance, archaeologists, in examining evidence from bones, have established such a scale in determining whether cannibalisn1. occurred at different sites where traces of prehistoric hominids have been found. See Tim D. White, "Once Were Cannibals," Scientific American, Volume 265, Number 2, pp. 58-65.

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or quite certain belief, but perhaps meeting even a fairly low standard of evidence justifies belief that the event occurred-but only a weak belief, or a belief qualified by reservations or doubts. Or again, we sometimes require the justification of a stronger belief for the taking of SOlne practical decisions than for others. (In court, questions that must be decided "beyond a reasonable doubt" are distinguished from those in which all that is required is "a preponderance of the evidence.") These cases do not, strictly speaking, involve different standards for belief, but rather require different degrees of belief (perhaps using uniform epistemic standards) to justify a given action (i.e. rendering a given verdict) .16

1.2

Objections to Clifford's Principle

The real question about Clifford's Principle is: Why should our beliefs (via our belief-forming and -maintaining conduct) be held morally accountable to the contextually appropriate standards of epistemic justification? Let us first consider some common objections to Clifford's Principle, since responding to them may help us further clarify what the principle means. Then we can turn to arguments in favor of Clifford's Principle. 1.2.1

Skepticism and Common Sense

Some who reject Clifford's Principle maintain that we cannot hold our beliefs to this standard because doing so would be utterly impracticable. If Clifford's Principle were consistently followed, they say, it would deprive us of many beliefs we need to get along in everyday life. William James, for instance, threatens Clifford with the loss of all beliefs based 16This is the kind of case Mavrodes uses to illustrate contextual variation. "Imagine that you have some meatloaf in the refrigerator for several days. It occurs to you that it might have spoiled. Consider, then, the possible belief (or "Jamesian option") that the meatloaf is still OK. And assume that if you have this belief, you will eat the meatloaf, while if you do not have it, you will throw the meatloaf away. Under these circumstances, we may say that this belief is valuationally asymmetrical [because the consequence of being wrong in believing the meatloaf is spoiled is minor (the loss of a little leftover meatloaf), whereas the consequence of being wrong in believing it is OK might be major (a serious illness)]" (Mavrodes, "Intellectual Morality in Clifford and James," cited above, p. 213. But of course a much more reasonable view of the situation is that you would be wise to avoid eating the meatloaf even if you believe it is OK, if that belief is not strong or if there is some substantial reason to doubt. The reason why this kind of case easily gets merged into cases about the evidential standards required for belief where religion is in question is the highly suspicious fact that many religions (especially Christianity) do not distinguish belief from acting on belief, but regard belief itself as essential to the state required for the practical consequences in question (namely, salvation by faith).

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on human testimony, of all moral beliefs, even with the loss of the belief in truth, that there is such a thing and that our minds are capable of attaining it (James 19-20) .17 On an even lower level, it is a tedious commonplace for religious apologists to assert that every view of the world, even science itself, rests on an "act of faith." Science, they say, has faith that there is an external world, that other minds exist, that nature is uniform and the future will be like the past. Some such apologists are fond of rehearsing familiar skeptical arguments on these points to show that we cannot live at all without epistemically unjustified beliefs. James seriously distorts Clifford's Principle by representing its motivation as an excessive fear of believing what is false, supposedly entailing a deficient motivation for coming to believe what is true (James, 24-25). The point of Clifford's Principle, however, is simply we should form our beliefs in accordance with the evidence-~neither believing what it does not support nor omitting to believe what it does support. Christian fundamentalists are violating the spirit of Clifford's Principle just as much when they withhold belief in the theory of evolution as they do when they believe alternative "creationist" theories for which there is little or no evidence and for which the arguments given are pseudoscientific sophistries. Clifford's Principle does demand that we be critical of our beliefs and scrupulous about the grounds we have for them. But it does not propose to raise the epistemic standards for our beliefs. For example, Clifford allows (as every sane person must) that our beliefs may be epistemically justified by appeal to the testimony of others whenever we find what they report plausible and have reason to trust their knowledge and veracity (Clifford, 79). Clifford intends us to follow the appropriate standards of science and common sense in deciding when our beliefs are epistemically justified. What Clifford's Principle condemns is the holding of a belief without regard to whether or not it meets the appropriate standards. One cannot show that Clifford's Principle is paradoxical or has paradoxical consequences merely by arguing that it has such consequences when combined with some form of radical skepticism about the epistemic justifiability of common sense beliefs. For the paradoxical conclusion is all too evidently the result not of Clifford's Principle but of the paradoxical (or anti-commonsense) view with which one is cornbining it. To try to discredit Clifford's Principle in this way is rather like trying to argue against the moral principle that one should not cause 17William James, "The Will to Believe," The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Carnbridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). Cited by page nurnber as "James".

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unnecessary pain to others by employing solipsistic arguments to show that others cannot feel pain. The ancient skeptics regarded suspense of judgment as a desirable condition, conducive to a philosophical calm (or ataraxia). They therefore saw their arguments not as threats to the tranquil state of belief but as therapies, whose result was to be a mode of life free from dogmatic belief but in accord with the spontaneous necessities of human nature. It is still controversial whether the tranquil state they sought was one of a total absence of belief or rather the holding of those beliefs that come naturally to us when all philosophical dogmatism has been removed r neutralized. 18 It is also unclear whether they thought of their ilosophical goal of achieving an equal balance of arguments on both sides of any question as justifying their suspense of judgment or merely as causing it (as a drug might), simply in order to reach the desired state of mental peace. If the skeptics were uninterested in the whole question whether our beliefs are justified or unjustified, then it is hard to see how their arguments could bear on Clifford's Principle either way. The skeptics could be seen as opponents of Clifford's Principle if they saw themselves as removing all rational grounds for believing anything, but still approving the "natural" beliefs they thought people would have when these grounds have been ren10ved. In either case, however, they were enemies of any state of belief that would have to be sustained by a "will to believe" that overcomes doubts produced by an absence of evidence for what is believed (or by contrary evidence). So they make strange bedfellows with the religious opponents of Clifford's Principle who sometimes claim kinship with them. It is far from clear what effect skeptical arguments ought to have on those of us who do not share the goal of achieving skeptical ataraxia. A proponent of Clifford's Principle might well think (as I do) that no honest view of the hun1an condition as a whole is compatible with complete peace of n1ind. One of the chief aims of philosophy, it seems to me, is rather to unsettle complacent minds, to make them think critically and restlessly, so that they can act in a world that calls constantly for new ways of thinking and acting. The ancient skeptics were foes of dogmatism, but if their aim was to manipulate themselves (by any means available) into a more comfortable state than is compatible with intellectual honesty, then they begin to look a lot like dogmatists and we can't see their strivings as morally admirable. 18S ee M. Burnyeat and M. Frede (eds.) The Original Sceptics: A Controversy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). Frede thinks the ancient skeptics did permit themselves some beliefs, while Burnyeat thinks they sought a state free of any beliefs.

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The constantly changing uncertainties of the human condition tend to make life uncomfortable for an honest person, and this n1akes it easy and tempting to flee from this condition by settling on some safe and comforting system of beliefs to which one has resolved to comn1it oneself irrespective of the evidence. In that way, it is possible to see certain forms of religious faith as having the same goal as ancient skepticismthe goal of achieving peace of mind in a confusing world. But it is precisely the point of Clifford's Principle to raise a moral protest against this tendency-to insist that comforts won in this way are something to which a rational human being has no right. Perhaps the most implausible skeptical contention of all is that it is ever possible to reach an exact and stable balance of the evidence on any question (much less on all questions). What frank inquiry often finds is a confused welter of argument and evidence on both sides of a question, with the relative strength of the evidence for our beliefs shifting and changing as we consider them further. As Diderot says, "In all things our real opinion is not the one from which we have never wavered, but the one to which we have most regularly returned." 19 Skeptical arguments play a valuable role in philosophical inquiry by making us question received beliefs, even very fundan1ental common sense beliefs. But we are challenged also to take the measure of these arguments then1selves, to decide what a reasonable person should believe in the face of then1. It is only people of very bad judgment (or unsound mind) who can be brought by the arguments of philosophical skeptics to have serious and persistent doubt about such things as the existence of the external world or other minds or the continuing validity of laws of nature. Opponents of Clifford's Principle son1etimes cite Hume on behalf of the proposition that many of our common sense beliefs really do fail to meet the epistemic standards we norn1ally accept, hence that we should not abandon common sense, but only learn to live with epistemically unjustified beliefs. I think their view is incoherent and even directly self-refuting. For (as Hume himself emphasizes) the use of evidential standards in deciding what we are (epistemically) entitled to believe is also a part of comn10n sense, as is the belief that common sense beliefs meet the appropriate epistemic standards. These beliefs are as much a part of common sense as are the other common sense beliefs whose epistemic justification the skeptics want to call into question. The skeptic who professes to hold to common sense, therefore, cannot 19Denis Diderot, "D'Alembert's Dream," in L. Tancock (ed. and tr.) Rameau's Nephew / D'Alembert's Dream (London: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 164.

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consistently say that common sense beliefs lack epistemic justification; for that is to deny one of the beliefs of con1mon sense. There is certainly some textual support for a reading of Hume that takes him to be trying to undermine the force of all rational argument, with the aim of leaving us in a position where we will believe what "nature" dictates (Hume, Enquiry 107-110, Treatise, 270).20 But Hume also frequently expresses (and tries to evoke in his readers) the sense of perplexity and confusion that an honest person must feel when confronting skeptical arguments (Hume, Treatise, 268-269). One of his chief aims is to unsettle dogmatists (especially religious ones) and encourage a spirit of critical reflection. Thus Hume holds something akin to Clifford's Principle: We should proportion our belief to the evidence. 21 His rejection of miracles is grounded firmly on this principle. 1.2.2

Beliefs and Practical Assumptions

It is noteworthy that Clifford himself regards both the uniformity of nature and the existence of other minds as "assumptions" which it is necessary for us to make in applying the scientific method, but which are not directly confirmable by that method (Clifford, 95). Clifford seems to think that these assumptions are epistemically justified (as assumptions) by the indispensable role they play both in science and in practical life. Clifford recognizes that we must sometimes act on the 20Hume, A Treatise On Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). Cited by page number as "Hume, Treatise". John Rawls applies the term "fideism of nature" to Hume's supposed view that we ought to believe as nature dictates, even if what we believe lacks epistemic justification because the alleged reasons for it can be undermined by skeptical arguments (Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, edited by Barbara Herman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 24, 51). There is no space here to defend an alternative view of Hume, but I think a correct reading of Hume on belief must distinguish between a) what Hume says when his aim is to present a naturalistic theory of hun1an nature, accounting for what people believe and the causes of belief, and b) the norms of belief that he (usually implicitly) subscribes to as an investigator, as a philosopher, critic and historian. We should not confuse his claim that few beliefs are caused by "reason" (in a specifically philosophical sense of that term) with the fideist view (which Hume did not hold) that it is permissible or even inevitable for an inquirer to hold beliefs in the absence of good evidence for them. Hume as an inquirer never condones the latter, and he often exposes to censure or ridicule those who seem to him credulous or otherwise deficient in adhering to proper standards of justified belief. 21 Admittedly, it is not clear that Hume regards this as a moral principle. He says only that "a wise man" proportions his belief to the evidence. Hume also insists that belief is an involuntary state, so he might have been persuaded by some of the arguments (which we have already rejected) that beliefs are not proper objects of moral assessment.

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basis of hypotheses, guesses or assumptions for which the evidence is insufficient to justify belief "There are many cases in which it is our duty to act upon probabilities, although the evidence is not such as to justify present belief; because it is precisely by such action and by observation of its fruits that evidence is got which may justify future belief. So that we have no reason to fear lest a habit of conscientious inquiry should paralyze the actions of our daily life" (Clifford, 79).

Perhaps someone will object here that to act on a hypothesis or a piece of guesswork already is to believe it, that the distinction between acting on a possibility or probability and believing it is a mere verbal dodge on Clifford's part. But this is not so. We have already noted that there is a significant difference between believing and other doxastic attitudes, such as guessing that p, being willing to bet that p, assun1ing that p for the purposes of a certain practical aim or theoretical inquiry, and so on. Thus it is quite possible to act on a hypothesis while positively disbelieving it. A doctor, for instance, n1ay treat a patient for a very serious disease as a precaution, while regarding the possibility that the patient actually has the disease as very remote. If asked whether she believes the patient has the serious disease, the doctor will unhesitatingly reply that she does not. What justifies her action on the hypothesis that the patient has the serious disease is her belief (which ought to be epistemically justified) that the benefit of dealing with the remote possibility that the patient has the serious disease outweighs the risks and disadvantages involved in treating the patient for it. 1.2.3

Trust

Another sour~e of objections to Clifford's Principle is cases of personal trust. It is alleged that trusting others and showing faith in them is sometimes morally permissible, even praiseworthy, in cases where doing so involves the holding of beliefs stronger than the evidence warrants. 22 22Robert Adams says: "Belief that goes beyond the evidence is as important in trusting people as understanding them. Trust in other people is based on a conviction of their honesty and good will. When this conviction is strong, it usually outruns any evidence for it that we could specify" (Adams, p. 14.) It seems to me, again, that Adams is uncharitably misinterpreting Clifford's Principle to say not that one must have sufficient evidence but rather that one be able to state or articulate clearly for others (to "specify") that evidence. The latter standard, however, would be an unreasonably high one for any ethics of belief. If Adams' claim is really that most of the time when people trust others they have no good grounds to believe in their honesty and good will, then what he is saying is quite extraordinary-and implies that most trust is as dangerous and irresponsible as the trust of a young child when it gets into a car with a stranger. Perhaps Adams believes that, but there is no reason why a defender of Clifford's Principle must agree. It is

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There is room for considerable variety in such cases, and how a defender of Clifford's Principle should respond to them depends on the details of the case. Some examples involve trust between close friends or loved ones, cases where long and intimate personal acquaintance gives the trusting person quite good epistemic justification for believing in the person trusted. In some cases it may be virtually impossible to put any third person in possession of the justification, because it depends in effect on a kind of special knowledge or expertise that no one else may be in a position to acquire. But as we have already seen, Clifford's Principle does not demand of me that I be able to provide others with an epistemic justification of what I believe; it requires only that I have this justification myself. Nor does Clifford's Principle prevent us from being influenced in our judgn1ents by our emotions, when emotions can play a positive role in weighing the evidence rather than merely distorting our view of it. Consider the following case, as described by Robert Adams: "Suppose a close friend of mine is accused of a serious crime. I know him well and can hardly believe he would do such a thing. He insists he is innocent. But the evidence against him, though not conclusive, is very strong. So far as I can judge the total evidence (including my knowledge of his character), in a cool, detached way, I would have to say it is evenly balanced. I want to believe in his innocence, and there is reason to think that I ought, morally, to believe in it if I can. For he may well be innocent. If he is, he will have a deep psychological need for someone to believe him. If no one believes him, he will suffer unjustly a loneliness perhaps greater than the loneliness of guilt.... And who will believe him if I do not?" 23

Adams distinguishes between "viewing the evidence in a cool, detached way" and viewing it in some other way that might result in my believing in my friend's innocence. He seems to be taking it for granted that Clifford's Principle would require me to abide by my consideration of the evidence "in a cool, detached way." He is then insinuating that the only alternatives to this would be to allow wishes, the bias of friendship or moral pressure to influence what I believe. But neither the assun1ption nor the insinuation is correct. Emotions constituting a relation of intimacy with a person may also dubious to appeal to the doxastic behavior of children in discussing Clifford's Principle, since this is a moral principle, and it is inherently problematic how far children should ever be held morally responsible for what they do. It is especially doubtful that they are as responsible as adults are for the reflective regulation of their beliefs by epistemic standards. 23 Adams, The Virtue of Faith, p. 154.

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sonletinles distort our judgment, but they can also be an indispensable way of knowing such things as whether the person you are talking to is being truthful with you. If viewing the evidence "in a cool and detached way" means cutting yourself off from this kind of evidence, then Clifford's Principle clearly does not tell you to view the evidence in a "cool and detached" way. On the other hand, if the alternative consists in letting my belief follow my wish that my friend should be innocent, or giving in to a bias that won't let me question the truth of whatever my friend says, or to my biased propensity to believe whatever my friend says, then Clifford's Principle would tell me not to do that. If the alternative involves letting myself be swayed by the belief that I ought, nl0rally, to believe in my friend's innocence if I can (irrespective of whether he is innocent or guilty), then too I should reject it, since this moral belief is obviously false--it only elevates my bias to the status of a moral principle. Besides, what my friend would want of me here, to the extent that he is being honest with me and not merely trying to exploit our friendship, is not a belief in his innocence that results from wishful thinking, bias or misguided feelings of guilt, but one in whose formation the decisive role was played by my sympathetic perception of his truthfulness. It may of course be very difficult for someone in this position to separate the perceptions that depend on my emotional relationship to nlY friend from the biases that may also proceed from it. But making those distinctions would be precisely my moral task here-not only my task as a rational knower who is being honest with himself, but even as a genuine friend. In short, Adams' conclusion about what I should do here might very well be correct, but if it is, then it would be completely consistent with Clifford's Principle. The example in no way supports the view that we should let our wishes or other biases to influence our interpretation of the evidence. Other cases of trust do not necessarily turn on beliefs at all. Trusting someone can sometimes consist simply in being willing to leave yourself open to the risk of betrayal by the person trusted. This is something you may choose to do without having to believe that you will not be betrayed. Clifford's Principle does not forbid the generosity and preparedness to take risks that would be displayed in this willingness. Clifford's Principle does forbid us to trust others where trusting them would indeed involve holding beliefs not supported by the evidence. There are, after all, cases in which it is wrong to trust a person, cases where it is an intolerable imposition to expect to be trusted and where it is irresponsible to bestow one's trust. (If I try to get on an airplane with

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an assault rifle, should I expect the airport security guard to trust me not to misuse it?) Clifford's Principle is not discredited merely by the fact that there are some cases of trusting of which it must disapprove. 1.2.4

Advantageous Belief

James's favorite objection to Clifford seems to be that it might sometimes happen that it would be advantageous for us to believe something for which there is insufficient evidence, because such belief n1ight help to create the fact believed in (James, 28-30).24 For instance, belief that there is a God with whom we may enter into a saving relationship might be necessary in order to create that relationship. Clifford's Principle is not consequentialist in form. It tells us what we ought and ought not to do in matters of believing, regardless of the consequences. It is no objection to such a principle that violating it might son1etin1es have better consequences than following it. Clifford's Principle might, however, have a consequentialist justification: It might be justified by the fact that following it consistently has the best consequences on the whole. (Consequentialist justifications are sometimes given for similar principles, such as those forbidding lying or enjoining us always to keep our promises.) Even consequentialist moral theories are not cornmitted to saying that an action is justified whenever it can be shown to have some beneficial consequences. The fact that it would benefit us to believe something never by itself provides us with a reason for thinking the belief is true. (At most it is parasitic on one, since in most circumstances true beliefs benefit us more than false ones.) Reflecting on the advantages of belief can never by themselves produce the belief. Believing something advantageous that is not justified by the evidence is possible only by means of some psychological process (such as wishful thinking or self-deception) that subverts our rational processes of deliberation and belief formation. In that sense, it can never 24Susan Haack says that if believing on insufficient evidence is sometimes "harmless or beneficial," then Clifford's Principle is clearly false (Haack, p. 14). But this is obviously incorrect, or at least it depends on some extremely dubious ethical principles that even a consequentialist need not endorse. From the fact that an action is harmless, or even beneficial, it does not follow that it is morally permissible. There are cases of lying, for instance, or interfering in the lives of other people, which could be truly claimed to be either harmless or even beneficial, but which most people would regard as wrong. We will see later that not all violations of Clifford's Principle involve grave wrongdoing, but neither do all lies, or all meddling in the lives of others. Sometimes we wink at "white lies" and tolerate busybodies, when they do no harm and especially when the results are beneficial. Yet despite that, it is correct to say that lying is wrong, meddling in other people's lives is wrong, and-in the same spirit-believing on insufficient evidence is wrong.

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be rational to do it, even if there is good evidence that it would benefit us to hold the belief. But we can also ask whether James himself thinks that there needs to be such evidence. Indications are that he does not. Rather, James seems ready to n1ake this claim part of what is to be believed without epistemic justification: The first affirn1ation of religion, James says, is that "the best things are the eternal things," and "the second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true" (James, p. 30). But in a way, James is being quite consistent here. If we think it is all right to let our cognitive processes be corrupted in the ways needed to form an advantageous belief, why shouldn't we allow the same processes to produce the belief that this first belief is advantageous? Having gone that far, however, James n1ight just as well have dispensed with the pretense of rational argument altogether, and made it directly a third affirmation of religion that we should believe whatever religion tells us, whether there is evidence for it or not, whether believing is beneficial or not. James writes: "A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there would be an irrational rule" (James 32). This may sound like sweet reason itself, but a moment's reflection should convince us that it is nothing of the kind. Any rule whatever that restricts belief in any way might conceivably shut us off from some truths. A Cartesian evil demon might have arranged things so that people believe what is true only when they believe what, following all the evidence they have, seems certainly false. In light of that merely notional possibility, what James says above entails that it is irrational right now for us to follow the rule that we should withhold belief from that which all the evidence shows to be certainly false (assuming, of course, that believing it remains psychologically a "live option" for us).

1.3 1.3.1

Arguments for Clifford's Principle The Appeal to Intuitions

Having answered some common objections to Clifford's Principle, I turn now to reasons for thinking it is correct. Moral epistemology is a notoriously murky subject, and there is no universally accepted procedure for justifying even the most uncontroversial moral beliefs. There are even some poor misguided souls who think that no moral belief can ever be rationally justified, owing a reputedly unbridgeable metaphysical chasm between facts and values. It is a common practice, however, and perhaps even a respectable one, to appeal to what are euphemistically

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called our "intuitions" about particular examples, real or imaginary, in order to justify the moral beliefs evoked or engaged by these examples. The strategy is to cite an example about which our spontaneous moral convictions are strong and confident, and then to argue that the validity of a specific moral principle is the only, or at any rate, the best, way of accounting for those convictions. This is what Clifford himself does in the opening paragraph of The Ethics of Belief "A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant ship. He knew that she was old, and not over-well built at the first; that she had seen n1any seas and climes, and had often needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he should have her overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales" (Clifford 25).

Clifford expects us to condemn this shipowner morally, and to condemn him because he nurtured in hin1self the epistemically unjustified belief that his ship was seaworthy. Further, Clifford expects us to agree that the sincerity of the man's belief is no mitigation of it. He expects his example to evoke or engage in us the moral conviction that at least part of what is wrong with the shipowner is that he formed and maintained a belief on insufficient evidence. In me, at least, Clifford's expectations are fulfilled. His shipowner may be guilty of things other than nurturing an epistemically unjustified belief, but it seems to me that that crime is central to the wrongdoing depicted in the example. Further, the example shows how the crime of holding a belief on insufficient evidence n1ay lead to terrible consequences, and is not necessarily something to be taken lightly. It remains to say why I think the example should lead us to this conclusion. Clifford realizes that the example may not strike everyone in the

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same way. No one, of course, is likely to react by saying that the shipowner is justified; but Clifford considers the objection of someone who says that it is only the shipowner's action (of sending the ship out "\vithout overhauling or even adequately testing it) and not his belief that is morally wrong. Unfortunately, Clifford's reply to this objection is not very satisfying. "It is impossible," he says, "so to sever the belief fron1 the action it suggests as to condemn the one without condemning the other" (Clifford, 73). If we take this to mean that the shipowner's belief "suggests" his immoral action in the sense that it is responsible for the immorality of the action, then Clifford is just begging the question; for to hold the belief responsible for the immorality of the action is already to consider the belief immoral. On the other hand, if Clifford means that we must morally condemn any belief that plays a role in generating an immoral action, then what he says is obviously false. My belief that you are about to take a sip out of your coffee cup may play a vital role in generating my immoral action of poisoning your coffee. But that belief may be a perfectly innocent one. The objection still has no force, however, unless the objector can specify something besides the shipowner's belief to which the immorality of his action could be attributed. Surely the bad consequences of the action by themselves do not make it wrong. Nor is there anything wrong in the two main desires that motivated the shipowner: namely, that he should not be put to unnecessary expense and that the ship should have a safe voyage. It seems only to be his belief that the ship was seaworthy which, in light of these two desires, n1ade his course of action possible. If that belief is also morally justified, then on what grounds can he be morally criticized? For given that he was justified in having that belief, it would be unreasonable to expect him to act otherwise than he did. And is there any ground on which the belief could be morally criticized except the fact that it was not epistemically justified? For my own part, I cannot see that there is. 1.3.2

Role-specific Obligations

A more sensible worry about Clifford's example is whether it licenses the generalization to Clifford's Principle that sufficient evidence for belief is required "always, everywhere and for anyone". Van Harvey argues that the obligation to have sufficient evidence for our beliefs is always a "role-specific" obligation (Harvey, pp. 189-203).25 The shipowner is required to have good grounds for believing his ship is sound because, as owner of the ship, he is charged with the responsibility of taking ap25Van A. Harvey, "The Ethics of Belief Reconsidered," in McCarthy (ed.), The Ethics of Belief Debate, cited in Note 14 above. Cited by page number as "Harvey".

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propriate steps to ensure the safety of the people and goods that travel on his ship. Likewise, it is incumbent on a physician to keep informed about new developn1ents in the treatments of disease, and on a professor of ancient history not to express himself on controversial matters in his field in disregard of recent developments in the relevant research. For the forn1er to advise or treat patients, or the latter to make pronouncen1ents to his students or to the press, without being suitably informed, is an act of professional irresponsibility, even a breach of ethics. But, Harvey maintains, there is no general obligation of this kind incumbent on all people. The passengers, on the ship, for instance, do not have the same obligation as the shipowner. They need not have the same evidence for their belief that it is seaworthy that he ought to have. There is definitely something right in what Harvey says, but this element of truth does not have the implications for Clifford's Principle that Harvey thinks it does. Clearly there are role-specific obligations pertaining to what specific people ought to know, or requiring them to have beliefs (and well-grounded beliefs) about specific n1atters that fall under their responsibility. Moreover, Clifford's own way of defending his principIe theoretically (to which we will come next) even encourages us to think that he regards his Principle as governing a role-specific obligation. But that appearance may be misleading. Clifford's Principle need not be seen as imposing only a role-specific obligation (unless the "role" is simply that of being a rational adult human being). I do not think Harvey really disagrees with this: "Tit/hat we n1ay reasonably believe can only be contextually determined, seen against the background of a fiduciary framework of a culture; but that we can and must believe reasonably as a role-invariant virtue of our culture" (Harvey, p. 200). The first clause of this sentence is entirely consistent with Clifford's Principle; the second clause states something closely allied to Clifford's Principle. The shipowner's obligations regarding beliefs about the condition of his ship are clearly more specific than most people's, and answerable to different standards. To begin with, if he is going to send his ship out with other people and their goods on board, he clearly ought to have a belief about its seaworthiness. You or I, however, as tourists walking along the waterfront and casually glancing at his ship, need not have any belief about this at all. If we get curious enough to form a belief about whether a particular ship is sound, the epistemic standards of evidence to which we should hold ourselves would also be lower than those to which the ship's owner, or son1e government inspector employed to certify the soundness of ships, are answerable. This is

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because nothing obliges us to be as certain of the ship's soundness as the owner or the inspector are required to be. Parents have role-specific obligations to make sure that their children are fed, clothed, and do not freeze to death in the winter. They son1etimes neglect these duties. Parents also sometimes physically abuse their children, breaking their limbs, beating them into unconsciousness or even killing them. There is something particularly heinous about this because the parent is charged with a specific responsibility for the child's welfare. A stranger does not have the same obligations regarding the child's welfare that its parent does, but a stranger obviously has some obligations. The stranger has no responsibility to know where my child is spending the night, or whether it has had a good dinner. But the stranger has an obligation not to kill or injure the child. According to Clifford's Principle, something analogous is true of people and beliefs: The shipowner, or physician, or professor, is responsible for knowing certain things, or at least having beliefs about them that are well-founded according to applicable epistemic standards. People without a role-specific obligation to know those things have a lesser responsibility, but there are still episten1ic standards to which they are answerable. A flagrant disregard of episten1ic standards is wrong for them too. For example, Clifford holds that your having no professional expertise in religious matters does not entitle you to believe or disbelieve just as your fancy suits you. Nor does your lack of opportunity to inquire provide you with an excuse for believing whatever you feel like believing. "'But,' says one, 'I an1 a busy man; I have no tin1e for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the nature of the arguments.' Then he should have no tin1e to believe" (Clifford, 78). 1.3.3

Moral Theories and Values

Besides appealing to moral intuitions, another way of justifying a moral belief is to derive it from some moral value or principle or theory. Clifford tries this too, using his own favored moral theory, which is a forn1 of social Darwinism with a highly collectivist bent (see "Right and Wrong: The Scientific Ground of Their Distinction," Clifford, 28-69). I will not discuss this defense in detail, because his Spencerian moral theory is unlikely to appeal to very many today. But I think we can find theoretical grounds for Clifford's Principle that are quite sufficient. Some of these grounds are even present in Clifford's own defense of the

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principle, even though they are obscured by his less plausible theoretical commitments. Before we consider theoretical defenses of Clifford's Principle, perhaps a word should be said about what we should expect of them. A well-founded moral belief seldom has just one ground. On the contrary, most sound moral principles are based on a great many different considerations, most of which are much more relevant to some circumstances than they are to others, and relatively few of which apply under any and all circumstances. (I think, by the way, that it is mainly this heterogeneity and complexity of the grounds we have for our moral beliefs, and not the mythical fact/value distinction, which makes the justification of these beliefs seem such a problematic thing.) Thus the point that we need to forn1 our beliefs according to the evidence in order to look out responsibly for others' welfare is very powerful in the case of the shipowner due to his role-specific obligations, but it is virtually irrelevant in n1any other situations. I am going to propose two theoretical considerations that seem to me to count in favor of Clifford's Principle under virtually all circumstances, though each of them may be far more compelling, or ground a far more serious moral claim, in some situations than in others. 1.3.4

A Duty to Humanity

Clifford's idea that we have a duty to humanity to form our beliefs according to the evidence, when it is abstracted from the social Darwinist context in which he placed it, seems to me to have a lot to be said for it. As Clifford puts it: "No one man's belief is in any case a private matter which concerns hin1self alone. Our words, our phrases our forms and processes and n10des of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age." (Clifford 73). As an ideal, we should try to view humanity collectively as a community of inquirers, and also agents, striving to know the truth and to bring about, in concert, what is right. Regarding inquiry, we should think of hun1an beings, both in any given age and even throughout the ages, as engaging in a dialogue (which might better be called a 'multilogue') or conversation, in which each person tests the thoughts of others through their own thoughts, and has their own thoughts tested in turn by the thoughts of others, all with the ultimate aim of reaching agreement on that which is humanity's best effort at knowing the truth. 26 26 An inspiring presentation of this idea of humanity as a community of inquirers seeking both what is true and what is good is found in J. G. Fichte, Lectures on the Scholar's Vocation, in Daniel Breazeale (tr. and ed.), Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1988), especially in Lectures 2

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Each person's participation in the collective effort consists above all in representing his or her own perspective-in space and time, in experience and cultural heritage, in needs, interests and values-in the universal process of inquiry. The first duty of each person in this regard is to represent that perspective worthily. This means, first, representing it authentically. You should not permit your perspective to be effaced or substituted for by the perspective of someone else, as happens when oppressed people are browbeaten into accepting the ideology of their oppressors, or unenlightened people are afraid to break with old traditions (that might represent the perspective of their ancestors). It also means, second, representing your perspective critically, thus transforming it into a contribution to the universal conversation of humanity. This involves presenting your perspective the light of a conception of universal standards of truthfulness and epistemic justification, rather than merely as an expression of your personal needs, prejudices and self-conceit, or that of some culture or group from which you con1e. The obligation to humanity imposed by Clifford's Principle derives above all from this last condition for turning your thoughts into a worthy contribution to humanity as a community of inquiry.27 and 4, pp, 153-161, 169-177. Fichte's vision is, I believe, quite close to Clifford's at this point. I confess I find its theoretical background (in Kantian and German idealist ethical theory) more congenial than Clifford's crude social Darwinism; but equally I find Clifford's comn1itment to the values of empirical science more congenial than Fichte's occasional tendencies to religious enthusiasm and the intellectual compromises that involves. 27Harvey (pp. 199-200) thinks that Clifford's Principle is best understood against the background of a Victorian assumption that there is a class of educated persons who have a role-specific responsibility for maintaining the intellectual standards of the community. Harvey doubts that we believe in this any longer. But Clifford plainly does not limit the obligation imposed by his principle in this elitist way, since he thinks belief on insufficient evidence violates a duty to humanity "always, everywhere and for anyone". In that respect, Clifford seems to be quite free from the Victorian idea to which Harvey wants to condescend as something no one believes anymore. Perhaps it is true that few people believe any longer (if they ever did believe it) that everyone has a responsibility to the human community to think, inquire and believe reasonably according to the appropriate epistemic standards. But it may also be true that few people believe (if they ever did) that we have responsibilities toward the welfare of people in distant nations, or to future generations, or to preserve what is valuable in our environment or in the intellectual and aesthetic treasures that we have inherited from our ancestors. That few people believe we have these obligations does not entail that we do not have them. So the fact that few people believe they are morally obligated as Clifford's Principle says they are does not entail that these obligations do not exist.

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A Duty to Ourselves

There is another such universal consideration in favor of Clifford's Principle, which is never mentioned explicitly by Clifford, probably because his nloral theory is oriented exclusively to the collective good of society. Clifford appears to acknowledge no duties to oneself, and he flatly denies that there can be any self-regarding virtues (Clifford, 66). But the consideration I have in mind involves regarding the duty imposed by his Principle as a duty to oneself and the virtue of abiding by it as a self-regarding virtue. This argunlent for Clifford's Principle is based on the value of autonomy or self-rule. Of course the value of autonomy is especially associated with the moral theory of Kant, who treated autonomy as the foundation for all morality. But one does not have to be a Kantian to think that it is an important human good that each person should be fundamentally self-governing, should follow a plan of life which is self-chosen through his or her own rational faculties of deliberation and decision. The value of autonomy is closely allied to our sense of human dignity. We regard the life of an individual who lacks autonomy as empty and degraded, however full of joy and satisfaction it may be in other respects. We therefore value a social order which fosters the autonomy of its members, and we deeply hate and fear one which stifles autonomy, whether through force or through manipulation. Autonomy is self-government. This is not at all the same as just doing whatever we like. In fact, doing what we like is one thing that can destroy autonomy when our likings are not arrived at in the right way. Autonomy consists in taking possession of our lives by forming ourselves and directing our actions through the proper exercise of our rational faculties. The person who acts thoughtlessly, irrationally or through aims and motives which are not self-understood and self-accepted is no more autonomous than the person whose conduct is controlled by external compulsion. The value of autonomy imposes duties that may be regarded as duties to myself in the sense that the chief point of fulfilling them is to create and maintain a morally desirable state in my own self. Some philosophers reject the idea of a duty to oneself, but their position seems to make sense only if we assume that the whole point of moral duties is to guarantee that an agent should bring about desirable states external to that agent's own self. Such an assumption is clearly incompatible with regarding autonomy as an important value on which moral duties may be based, since autonomy is precisely a state of myself as an agent. Kant of course does recognize duties to oneself. Among such duties

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he classifies those that forbid lying, avarice, servility, and the pursuit of sensual pleasure in ways that are degrading or debilitating to us. The point of these duties seems to be to forbid acts that either deprive me of the capacities I need in order to act autonomously or else express a disvalue or disrespect of myself as regards my capacity to act autonomously. Avarice, Kant says, slavishly subjects me to an excessive desire for wealth, depriving me of the capacity to weigh my need for wealth rationally against other considerations (MS 6:432-433). Servile conduct is an open denial of my own value as a free agent possessing a dignity beyond all price (MS 6:434-435). To be autonomous we must exercise rational control over our conduct. But in a deeper sense, autonomy means that the factors in our psychic life on which our conduct depends must bear the stamp of reason. It means, for example, that we must have rational mastery over our desires, so that any desire powerful enough to affect our conduct should be a desire we understand and rationally accept as part of ourselves. I cannot be autonomous as long as I am subject to the sway of desires I do not acknowledge or of desires I cannot accept as expressions of myself because I experience them as urges or compulsions I cannot integrate into my image of myself as a rational agent. What is true in this respect of desires is equally true of beliefs. Just as the value of autonomy imposes on me the duty of knowing what I desire, understanding why I desire it and regulating my desires by reason, so it also imposes on me the duty of knowing what I believe, understanding why I believe it and submitting my beliefs to my rational faculties for forming, maintaining and correcting them. I submit that when we reflect on the den1ands of autonomy as regards belief, it becomes clear why we must violate a duty to ourselves whenever we permit ourselves to believe anything on insufficient evidence. For the faculties we possess for the rational regulation of beliefs simply are our faculties for weighing evidence and proportioning belief to it. There is no other way of forming and maintaining beliefs that pern1its us to understand why we believe as we do and to know our beliefs as the results of rational self- government. Good evidence produces belief irresistibly, and yet in a way I experience not as a constraint on me but as the most evident exercise of my own freedom. When anything except the evidence produces belief in us, we do not experience the belief as an exercise of our freedom but as a process in which some factor foreign to our faculties is needed to maintain the belief.

w. 1.4 1.4.1

K.

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The Moral Point of Clifford's Principle The Value of Integrity

If we want to sum up the moral claims that lie behind Clifford's Principle, we could not do better than to say that the duty it lays on us is the duty of intellectual integrity.28 When we are unduly lax in regulating our beliefs, when we believe what it is comfortable to believe rather than what the evidence pern1its us to believe, when we deceive ourselves in order to make things easier or more pleasant, or let ourselves believe something because we wish it were true-in all these cases we show contempt for ourselves as beings with faculties of perception and reason, and we do a disservice to all those who might need our honest, good faith judgment in helping them to form their own opinions. Violations of Clifford's Principle are not always cases of lying, either to others or to ourselves, but they are shameful in something of the same way that telling lies is shameful. One significant disanalogy between lying and violating Clifford's Principle is that we think it is justified to tell a person a falsehood when they have no moral right to the truth from us (such as when their inquiry constitutes an invasion of privacy, or a truthful answer would give them inforn1ation they could use to do harm-as in the famous case of the would-be murderer who asks us to tell us the whereabouts of his intended victim). But there is no similar class of exceptions to Clifford's Principle. There are no matters about which we do not owe it both to ourselves and to others to maintain our intellectual integrity by forming our beliefs according to the evidence. In the nineteenth century Clifford still had to contend with the objection that regarding received religious teachings it is sinful and presumptuous to question them or inquire into their grounds. But even the worst religious dogn1atists are unlikely to say that today, and if they did, Clifford's response to the objection would still be right on point: "Where it is presun1ption to 28Susan Haack correctly sees that this is the real issue involved in Clifford's Prin"'" ciple (Haack, p. 30). But despite this she chooses, like n1any who consider and reject the Principle, to dwell on supposed exceptions to it, at the expense of theimportant value it represents. My diagnosis of this tendency is that moral philosophers have become accustomed to viewing moral principles as something to be used like mechanical devices (such as handmills or meat-grinders) to churn out conclusions about what to do. Thus they reason as follows: If a principle has exceptions, then some of what it churns out is false, and so it should be rejected. (People who think this way may infer from the fact that I am prepared in principle to allow exceptions to Clifford's Principle, that I do not really accept it at all. I regard that attitude toward moral principles as showing not only bad moral judgment, but even a kind of moral bankruptcy.)

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doubt and investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe" (Clifford, 96). 1.4.2

Serious Wrongs and Minor Wrongs

One common reaction to Clifford's position, especially when it is expressed with his "robustious pathos," is to regard it as an exaggerated view, perhaps even ridiculously so. It may seem absurd and even offensive to level stern moral criticism, as Clifford evidently intends to do, against all religious people who believe in miracles or religious dogmas on insufficient evidence, even though many of them are widely believed to be among the most saintly men and women who have ever lived. Some may also consider Clifford's position offensively intolerant, and wonder how he might propose to enforce the duty to believe only on sufficient evidence-perhaps not an unfair worry, given the degree of public and social in1portance he appears to attach to this duty. First let's reply to this last objection. We do hold people accountable for acting in light of a well-grounded assessment of the facts, especially when they are specifically responsible for knowing the facts and the interests of others are involved. (Thus we might very well think that Clifford's shipowner ought to be sued, or even criminally prosecuted, for sending people to their deaths in an unseaworthy vessel whose soundness he did not even take the trouble to investigate.) But there is no sign that Clifford intends that society should punish people simply for holding beliefs he regards as insufficiently justified. Clearly the point of the duty on which he lays such stress is that each of us is morally accountable for forming our beliefs on the basis of an honest appraisal of the evidence as it is presented to liS. Any attempt to enforce such a duty through coercive sanctions would obviously be counterproductive to that end. Clifford's writings contain nothing to suggest that he was unaware of this point. Clifford, simply as one rational individual speaking to other rational individuals, is urging and exhorting each of us to fulfill the duty of intellectual integrity. No one ever puts the value of personal liberty at risk merely by doing that. Violations of Clifford's Principle do vary greatly among themselves in their degree of gravity. Believing on insufficient evidence may be (as Clifford insists) always wrong and a vice, but it is not always a serious vice, nor does it always involve a grave act of wrongdoing. 29 How 29 "My believing, on inadequate evidence, that the apples I just selected are the best in the supermarket is, like many inconsequential beliefs, harmless" (Haack, p. 24). Probably the compromise of Haack's intellectual integrity involved is also Iso minor that it is a bit comical to dignify it with that phrase. (Frankly, I also Idoubt that very many shoppers form precisely the belief Haack ascribes to herself

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serious it is depends partly on what things are believed and partly on other traits of the believer's character. If such belief binds a person to doctrines that are dangerously unenlightened or perniciously false, and leads the person to actions that are unjust or cruel, then believing in this way may just as serious a crime as the one con1mitted by Clifford's shipowner. If such belief is combined in a person's character with other intellectual and moral vices, such as simple-mindedness, bigotry, willful ignorance and intellectual dishonesty, then it can be a very serious vice indeed, which can not only undermine the believer's autonon1y, but also confirn1 the believer in conduct having highly pernicious effects on the legitirnate interests of other people. On the other hand, I might violate Clifford's Principle merely by being somewhat negligent in exercising critical surveillance over the processes through which my beliefs are formed and maintained. Clifford's Principle does say that such conduct is always wrong. But if I direct my beliefs to propositions that are epistemically justified anyway, and if these beliefs keep company in n1Y character with intellectual subtlety and integrity, open-mindedness, tolerance, and a liberal and enlightened outlook, then a Cliffordian should take a permissive attitude toward such beliefs rather than a strict one-as we should do with all moral trespasses that are minor and harmless.

1.4.3 Why We Should Insist on Clifford's Principle This is the element of truth in the common reaction to Clifford that finds his ethics of belief either ridiculously or offensively misguided. To people who don't get it about Clifford's Principle, the evils that result directly from its violation do not usually seem serious. They usually think of the kinds of religious beliefs that are mixed with such insipid or saccharine sentiments that it seems hard to see how they could do harm, forgetting about cases such as Clifford's shipowner, as well as about the fact that many religious beliefs, when people get serious about them, are not so nice. It n1ay also seem difficult to distinguish here. More likely they form the epistemically justified belief that the apples they have chosen are without blemish and are among the best available that day.) But those, such as James, who seriously dispute Clifford's Principle, are not intending to defend only beliefs they regard as inconsequential, such as Haack's reported belief about the apples. It is one thing to point out that a moral principle may condemn acts that are harmless and only trivially wrong, and another thing to reject the principle itself on account of this fact, or to suggest that the principle is of no moral importance because some acts it condemns are of no real importance. Lies too can be either inconsequential, harmless peccadilloes, or they can be some of the most profoundly evil acts a person can commit.

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violations of Clifford's Principle from simple errors in judgment, which are not culpable. But our chief reason for caring about Clifford's Principle is not that its violation sometimes results in individual acts that are horribly evil. It is rather that the habit of disregarding Clifford's Principle is profoundly corrupting, not only to individuals but even more to public discourse. People come to feel that it is simply a legitimate part of free thought and expression to hold whatever views they please, and to employ all sorts of rhetorical manipulation to persuade others of these views, without paying any regard to whether what you say has any evidential support. If we do not see the profound evils all around us for which this habit is to blame, then I think we are suffering from a serious moral blindness. When we consider Clifford's writings as a whole, we must be struck by the extent to which he was inspired by a certain historical and moral vision that he had derived from the progress of science. "Scientific thought," he said, "is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself" (Clifford, "On the Aims and Instruments of Scientific Thought", 26-27). Clifford belongs to an intellectual tradition that began in the Enlightenment. It regarded modern science as representing above all a certain moral commitment to fearless and honest inquiry, and to governing our lives rationally on the basis of a clearsighted appreciation of the truth as far as we are capable of coming to know it. Clifford thinks of the spirit of science, in this sense, as above all a spirit of human liberation from unenlightened authority and tradition, and from the human traits that keep people enslaved to them. What Clifford rejects above all in religious faith is an attitude of complacency mixed with fear, a refusal to live in the condition of doubt and restless inquiry that is the fate of all mature human beings in the modern world. He does not underestimate people's desire for consolation, but he considers it a violation of our duty to humanity to give in to it. The duty to believe only on sufficient evidence, he admits "is a hard one, and the doubt which con1es out of it is often a very bitter thing" (Clifford, 75). But Clifford entertains a historical hope that humanity can eventually be transforn1ed by the spirit of scientific thinking, so that human beings will become nobler creatures than they have been up to now. It is easy now for us to condescend to Clifford's vision of the n10ral promise of the scientific spirit. We rightly doubt whether there ever was anything at all that could be called "the scientific n1ethod" -much less anything deserving of admiration as a model for imitation in all

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spheres of human life. 3o It is not hard for us to turn sour on science as a social enterprise, given its history of co-optation and corruption in the despoliation of nature, in evil social institutions, in war. Yet this reaction itself is due at least as n1uch to the way we have come to take for granted the obvious virtues of the enlightened scientific spirit, and the benefits-intellectual, social and technologicalthat it has brought us. But it is not those benefits that lead people like Clifford to think of science as the chief model of human thought and communication. Science is one department of human life in which being responsible to the evidence is acknowledged as a condition for entering into the community of discussion and inquiry. This is the spirit of science as Clifford and the Enlightenment understood it. Thus it is all the more important not to give up on that spirit, and to admit to ourselves that the Enlightenment, and its radical followers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Clifford, were basically and importantly right. Above all, we must not blame science for depriving us of our comfortable beliefs and our peace of mind. In as complex and ambiguous world as we live in, tranquility and complacency are bound to be disrupted by all responsible thinking. We must learn to let them go, and learn to live without them. Here Clifford's Principle, and the spirit behind it, are just as right and just as important today as they were in his time. Perhaps in the past the human race had to compromise its intellectual integrity and to depend on credulous belief in miracles, mysteries and an emotionally compelled attachment to dogmatic articles of faith in order to sustain some things that were good and to reach for the moral heights of sainthood. But we must face the hard fact that in the modern world a different and more fearless spirit is necessary. If we do not, we will inevitably forfeit our integrity and our sense of human dignity. Our communication with one another will lose its honesty and its relentless quest to ground our collective decisions on our rational agreement on the truth. Once that is lost, there is no kind of evil in human affairs that will not follow. 30 A thoughtful discussion of what does distinguish science is to be found in Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). The same author has provided valuable reflections on two popular and pernicious pseudo-sciences in other books: Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982) and Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 1985).

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1.4.4

Absolute Moral Rules

One final point that needs to be made is that Clifford's Principle should be insisted upon simply because sets our n10ral compass in the right direction. It states a correct moral rule with an absoluteness suited to all moral rules that are correct and important. Clifford's Principle provides a suitable occasion, in fact, to reflect for a moment on what moral rules are, and what they are for. The phrase in Clifford's Principle that is n10st vulnerable to attack is "always, everywhere and for anyone." In morality there are virtually no absolutes, probably nothing that is always wrong or never permissible. (If this last sentence expresses 'relativism', then 'relativism' is a correct and important doctrine.) A sensible person is therefore tempted to say that there are no moral rules without exceptions-in that sense, that nothing whatever is "wrong always, everywhere and for anyone." But a sensible person would not say it, for the simple reason that that this 'nothing whatever' would be a flagrant example of the very inflexibility the sensible person would be trying to avoid. And attacks on Clifford's Principle based on its absoluteness are cheap and wrongheaded. The point of a moral principle, against killing, or lying, or believing on insufficient evidence, is not that there are never exceptions to in the sense of acts it apparently forbids which one may, or ought, all things considered, to do. Probably there are no principles (none that are simple and general enough to be of use, anyway) to which there are no justifiable exceptions. But there are principles representing certain moral values (such as humanity, honesty or intellectual integrity) or forbidding certain kinds of actions (such as killing, betraying a friend or believing on insufficient evidence) that should move us to follow them except under the most extreme circumstances, and to feel qualmish and conflicted about actions that violate them even when we decide that these actions are legitimate exceptions. Philosophical discussions about whether exceptions may be made to moral rules seldom acknowledge some important truths that ought to affect the way we think about these issues. Probably there is no significant moral rule-not even against killing or torture-to which no legitimate exceptions could be found. But there is also a powerful human tendency to use such admissions to make exceptions that should not be made. People in power are especially prone to make such claims-that this war is just, that in this case deception, or torture, or concealment of government misdeeds, or circumvention of law, is permissible. Surely much less harm and wrongdoing come from those who follow moral rules inflexibly, acting on the false beli~~~~_tb-~~_C~D_b~

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no exceptions to them, than from those who invoke the true belief that all moral rules admit of exceptions to defend their doing things they should not do. Thus in relation to particular circumstances, the speech act of asserting the reasonable and true belief that there can be exceptions to moral rules is more likely to involve a wrong moral judgment than the speech act of asserting the inflexible, false belief that there cannot be. This entails that although in abstract philosophical discussions, those who insist that there are exceptions to moral rules are asserting an important moral truth, those who invoke this truth in practical life will most often be doing so in order not only to assert moral falsehoods, but even to give a color of legitimacy to wrongful acts. Thus in 1780, the soi-disant "Philosopher King" Frederick the Great proposed an essay competition on the question whether it could ever be useful for a ruler to deceive the people. No doubt he was supposing that the right answer, even the only enlightened and reasonable answer, would have to be that in sonle cases it could be. Just as certainly, the point of the exercise was to provide a ruthless tyrant like himself with a ready-made philosophical justification for telling any lie he found expedient. But you don't need to be a king to take advantage of this particular royal prerogative. All the tinle ordinary people abuse the flexibility of moral standards to rationalize their misconduct. This ought to color the way we look at issues about making exceptions to moral rules, even in philosophy. For a practical moralist, the right thing to do regarding moral principles is just what Clifford does: You should state, with due absoluteness, the right moral rules. If there are significant classes of exceptions to them (as there seem to be in the case of the prohibition on lying, but not in the case of Clifford's Principle), they should be noted if they seem likely to apply to the case in question. Beyond that, however, you should leave the exceptional cases to be discovered ad hoc by experience, guided by the virtues of tolerance, good sense and good judgment. Someone who lacks those virtues won't acquire them by learning more rules, or by adding qualifying epicycles to the correct rules. The person who is most hopelessly addicted to absolute rules is the moral philosopher who won't permit exceptions to any rule unless there is an additional rule saying that exceptions to that rule are permitted. When it comes to moral rules, the main thing is to insist on the right ones. In applying them, you should appreciate the complexities of life and the need for tolerance and flexibility. But you should not let people get away with watering down the right moral rules by corrupt quibbling, or with perversely stating moral falsehoods whose only

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appeal is the cheap sense of liberation afforded by any paradox. Some people think they are courageous and open-minded when they do this. They say they are only resisting 'political correctness'. But such people are not admirable. Whether cynically or only credulously, they are merely serving as apologists for evil and, in the process, n1aking themselves complicit in it. For example, there are those who proclaim selfishness a virtue,31 or try to sell us the slogan that "greed is good." Son1etimes people undertake to defend "racial pride" , ethnic superiority, or flattering myths about our nation's past on the ground that these are necessary for a sense of identity or community. Even the most fundamentally evil emotions, such as racial hatred, have their occasional defenders. The much-admired Senator John McCain has been quoted as saying about his combat experiences in Vietnan1: "I hated my enemies even before they held me captive because hate sustained my in my devotion to their complete destruction and helped me overcome the virtuous human impulse to recoil in disgust from what had to be done by my hand." 32 But selfishness is not a virtue, greed is not good, and ethnic hatred is evil. It is especially evil when it motivates soldiers to do things that are repugnant to their humanity (and this was conspicuously true of American soldiers in Vietnam). Those who try to represent the moral facts otherwise ought to be challenged as often as they assert such pernicious falsehoods. Likewise, it is wrong to hold beliefs on insufficient evidence. Whenever people assert that there is something virtuous or blessed in the disposition to hold such beliefs, we should follow Clifford in contradicting them firmly and relentlessly.

31 Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, a new concept of egoism. With additional articles by Nathaniel Brandon. New York: New American Library, 1964. 32Quoted by Richard Falk, "The Vietnam Syndrome," The Nation, Volume 273, No.2 (July 9, 2001), p. 18. Someone might suggest that ethnic hate can't be what is meant here. But I think it is. 'Gook' is a word Senator McCain still uses with neither hesitation nor shame.

2

Clifford's Principle and Religious Faith Clifford's Principle is that it is wrong always, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence. Clifford himself thought that religious faith stands condemned by this principle. Apparently many religious people agree with him, since attacks on Clifford's Principle have most often come from those who see then1selves as defenders of religious faith. Obviously it is not only in religious matters that people are often prone to violate Clifford's Principle. Yet it is mainly among religious believers, chiefly among Christians, that the misconduct cited by Clifford's Principle has had the impudence to parade openly as a distinctive virtue. For this reason, in the following essay I want to consider the relation of Clifford's Principle to religious belief, and in particular to certain forms of Christianity. I do not doubt that Clifford's Principle has much to say about other religions-especially about religions such as Judaism and Islam, which also stress a revealed faith involving belief. Some of the following discussion would doubtless carryover to them. But in the Western philosophical tradition, issues about the agreement or conflict between reason and religious faith have most often been aired in relation to Christianity, so that is the most natural way to consider them. Not all Christians would accept the claim that their faith is belief on insufficient evidence. In the modern Western tradition, what I am calling Clifford's Principle was first articulated by Christians who maintained that true Christian faith must involve a reasonable belief, grounded on good evidence. It would also be quite false to the nature of faith and the religious life to treat faith as nothing but a state of belief (justified or not) in 41

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religious propositions. Belief that there is a God is far from sufficient for faith in God. "The demons also believe, and they tremble" (James 2:19). Faith need not be interpreted so that it is opposed to Clifford's Principle. Some theologians have interpreted faith as an attitude of courage in the face of our cosmic or existential predicament.! Others treat faith as basically an attitude of trust toward God; for them, the sin of unbelief is a willful, sometimes also a fearful, rejection of something God has communicated to the sinner (and which the sinner, at some level, is supposed to know to be true). 2 To the extent that faith involves epistemically justified beliefs, Clifford's Principle must approve of it. If faith is something like courage, a strength to persist and to fight back fear, then it has something in common with Clifford's Principle. That principle tells us to have the courage to face the truth and the uncertainties of life, to form our beliefs according the evidence rather than to hide from it by letting them be determined by our fears or wishes. If faith consists at least partly in a steadfast willingness to live up to one's beliefs, then it is like fidelity to a promise. It represents a kind of integrity with affinities to the intellectual integrity that grounds Clifford's Principle.

2.1

Fideism

It might be thought that the only questions about the relation of Clifford's Principle to religious faith are simply epistemological questions about whether the belief-components of faith are well supported by theoretical proofs or evidence. 3 But we can best appreciate the bearing of Clifford's Principle on religious faith, at least as it has been conceived by a wide range of Christian thinkers, if we see that it does not depend directly on whether we think the evidence for Christian doctrines is strong or weak. We can see this if we consider a position within Christianity that I will call "fideism". By "fideisn1" I mean the view that there are religious doctrines such that it is morally permissible, or even morally meritorious, to believe then1 in the absence of sufficient evidence for them, or at least to be disposed to such beliefs. A fideist is therefore lSee Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952. 2See Robert M. Adams, "The Virtue of Faith," in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. 3 A very good (and refreshingly frank) discussion of the state of issues about scriptural documents and their historical reliability is found in Van A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: the morality of historical knowledge and Christian belief (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981).

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committed to condoning, and even praising, conduct which Clifford's Principle condemns. Fideism comes in different forms. It can be, and is, held even by some who think there is strong evidence for the truth of Christian doctrines. Even these more moderate fideists run afoul of Clifford's Principle.

2.1.1 Christian Rationalism Not all Christians are fideists. Some Christians, as I have already mentioned, were the earliest proponents of Clifford's Principle. The most prominent of these is the great modern philosopher John Locke (though a case can also be made for Rene Descartes as the first modern advocate of Clifford's Principle).4 Locke's anticipation of Clifford's Principle is especially explicit and pointed in relation to religious beliefs: "However Faith be opposed to Reason, Faith is nothing but a firm Assent of the Mind: which if it be regulated as is our Duty, cannot be afforded to any thing, but upon good Reason; and so cannot be opposite to it. He that believes, without having any Reason for believing, may be in love with his own Fancies; but neither seeks Truth as he 4Locke takes the chief blame for 'evidentialism' in Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 67-81. But Descartes says the following: "It is clear by the natural light that perception of the intellect should precede the determination of the will" (Meditation Four, Meditations on First Philosophy, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Paul Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1964-1976) VII: 60). In other words, our intellect must clearly perceive the grounds for holding a belief before we exercise the act of will in which (according to Descartes) an act of believing consists; and it is a wrong use of our free will to perform this act prior to or in the absence of that perception. Descartes muddies the waters, however, by including divine grace as well as the perception of the intellect among those causes of belief that do not diminish freedom (Meditations, VII: 58). But he never suggests that divine grace should (or would) cause someone to believe something in defiance of the rule just quoted, and never takes up the question what would (or should) happen if divine grace gave us an impulse to believe something in violation of that rule. It is hard to resist the temptation to think that Descartes' references to divine grace were intended to mollify the theologians, but not intended to play any positive role in his theory of the rules for conducting inquiry or forming beliefs. This last remark is not intended to question the depth or sincerity of Descartes' adherence to Christianity (as some have done). On the contrary, it is to suggest that Descartes could have been (and was) both a sincere believing Christian and a consistent adherent of Clifford's Principle. At the same time, however, he was well known to be a philosopher who wanted to avoid theological controversy, and who was willing to suppress writings (such as his treatise On the World, when he learned of Galileo's condemnation) and to make modifications in stating his views (that he regarded as philosophically inconsequential) in order to avoid offending religious authorities or provoking criticism from theologians. It seems clear that Descartes thought his remarks about beliefs caused by divine grace were consistent with the Cliffordian principle quoted earlier in this note, even if he never explained clearly how they are consistent.

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ought, nor pays the Obedience due to his Maker, who would have him use those discerning Faculties he has given him, to keep him out of Mistake and Errour. He that does not this to the best of his Power, however he sometimes lights on Truth, is in the right but by chance; and I know not whether the luckiness of the Accident will excuse the irregularity of his proceeding. This at least is certain, that he must be accountable for whatever Mistakes he runs into: whereas he that makes use of the Light and Faculties GOD has given hill1, and seeks sincerely to discover Truth, by those Helps and Abilities he has, may have this satisfaction in doing his Duty as a rational Creature, that though he should miss the Truth, he will not miss the Reward of it. For he governs his Assent right, and places it as he should, who in any case or matter whatsoever, believes or disbelieves according as Reason directs him" (Locke 687-688).5

Locke's view, in effect, is that because Clifford's Principle is correct, God will surely reward those who believe according to the evidence before them, whatever the content of their beliefs turns out to be. Locke is unsure what God will do to those who hold true beliefs without adequate justification, but he is sure God will hold people responsible for their errors whenever they believe without sufficient evidence. Locke is also convinced that the evidence favors the truth of Christian belief, as he argues in his treatise The Reasonableness of Christianity. So he thinks there is no conflict between Christianity and Clifford's Principle. Let us give the name Christian rationalism to Locke's version of Christian belief, one that holds Christian belief to be tenable because, and only because, it can be supported by sufficient evidence and good reasons. Perhaps since Locke's time it has become nlore difficult to be a Christian rationalist, because not only the metaphysics of theistic belief but also the historical credibility of Christian scriptures has become more doubtful. To the extent that this is so, there has been pressure, on the one hand, for Christians to reinterpret their beliefs, in nontraditional ways, with the hope of restricting them to what can be epistemically justified. There has also been pressure for Christians to adopt some form of fideisnl, and to dispute Clifford's Principle. It is for Christians to decide anlong themselves whether either step is necessary, and which (if either) represents "true Christianity". But no one who accepts Clifford's Principle can regard the fideist alternative as morally acceptable. 5John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975). Cited by page number.

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Some Examples of Fideism Fideism seelns also to appeal to powerful impulses deep in the religious life itself-albeit impulses foreign to Christian rationalists such as Locke. To some Christians it has seemed essential to the Christian virtue of faith that it should be belief that is held consciously in the absence of sufficient evidence. For example, in a famous passage from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, S0ren Kierkegaard insists that "If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast to the objective uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith" (Kierkegaard 182).6 Blaise Pascal is also a fideist. Christianity, he says, is a religion for which no proofs can be given. Using a fan10us argument we will be examining more closely later on, he contends that the risk of faith is nevertheless an advantageous one, because no matter how improbable Christianity may be, the infinite reward due to faith in case Christianity is true outweighs any finite advantages the unbeliever may gain in case Christianity is false. Pascal clearly realizes, however, that we cannot produce belief in ourselves simply by reflecting on the advantages of believing. Hence he recommends that we produce belief in ourselves by using expedients other believers have found effective: acting as if we believe, taking holy water and having masses said. This, he says, will "deaden our acuteness," "stupefy" our stubborn reason, and remove the intellectual scruples that stand in the way of belief (Pascal, Pensees 233, p. 68).7 Kierkegaard and Pascal are extremists. They approve of using reason in thinking about religion chiefly with the purpose of revealing the weakness, misery and sinfulness of reason itself, so as to open the way to an essentially non-rational (or even irrational) religious faith. But some Christian philosophers are disposed to fideism even though they regard reason as capable of supporting many religious beliefs. St. Thomas Aquinas defends the position that reasons in support of what we believe do not lessen the merit of faith (Aquinas II-II Q.2, a.10).8 This is clearly an anti-Kierkegaardian position; it seems to be an antifideist one. Yet Aquinas also holds that those who believe with reasons can lay claim to the merit of faith only if they were disposed to believe 2.1.2

6S0ren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1941). Cited by page number. 7Blaise Pascal, Pensees (New York: Dutton, 1958). Cited by aphorism number and then by page number. 8St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, cited by part, question and article.

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before having those reasons and would still be disposed to believe if they did not have them. Reasons preceding and conditioning the volitional act of assent to Christian doctrines do for Aquinas dilninish the merit of faith. Thus Aquinas too seems to be a fideist: for he holds that it is permissible, even meritorious, to be disposed to believe Christian doctrines in the absence of reasons. St. Augustine seems to be advocating an anti-fideist view when he claims that to understand or know the truths of Christianity is superior to merely believing them. According to Augustine, Our Lord Jesus Christ did not say 'This is life eternal so that they nlay believe.' Instead he said: "This is life eternal that they may know Thee, the one True God and Him whom Thou didst send, Jesus Christ [In 17: 3] ... Then... He said: 'Seek and ye shall find' [Matt. 7: 7]. For what is believed without being known cannot be said to have been found" (Augustine, 39).9 Yet Augustine's unmistakable view, expressed in the very same passage, is that "no one can become fit for finding God unless he believes first what he shall know afterward." Thus for Augustine it is only through faith, that is, belief antecedent to reasons or evidence, that we can beconle worthy of God's gift of understanding. That is a form of fideism. Fideism is motivated by much more than the need to deal with the problem of inadequate evidence for Christian doctrines. Its fundamental motivation seems rather to be the idea that it is morally meritorious to want to believe something and to try to believe it, sinlply on account of its content, and irrespective of the evidence for it. Thus for fideism, the virtue of faith consists not so much in believing what Christianity teaches as in wanting and trying to believe it, irrespective of the evidence for it. This means that fideist Christianity is involved in a fundamental moral disagreement with Clifford (and equally with Christian rationalists such as Locke). For to the fideist, the virtue of faith consists precisely in wanting and trying to violate the very moral obligation Clifford's Principle imposes on us. Fideist Christians count themselves blessed when they find in themselves a faith strong enough to enable them to violate this obligation as often as proves necessary to sustain their belief in Christian teachings. 10 9St. Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will (Indianapolis, 1964). Cited by page number. laThe Franciscan philosopher Adam Wodeham argues that those who are unable to believe an article of faith cannot be faulted for unbelief, as long as they have sincerely tried to believe it. Indeed, says Wodeham, the merit of such people may even exceed that of those who believe the article if the latter have put forth less effort to believe than the former. Adam Wodeham, Lectura Oxon IV, q. 10, - 14. Edition in Rega Wood and Marilyn Adams, "Is to Will It as Bad as to Do It?" Franciscan Studies 41 (1981), p. 58.

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It follows that Clifford's Principle still represents a powerful attack on jideist Christianity even if it should turn out that there is strong rational evidence for the truth of Christian doctrines. For if Clifford's Principle is correct, then it is morally wrong to have what fideist Christians esteem as the rnerit of faith, even if the evidence for Christian doctrines is strong enough that it is not wrong to share the fideist Christian's belief in these doctrines. Of course, if there is sufficient evidence for Clifford's Principle, then there cannot also be sufficient evidence for some fideist Christian doctrines which directly conflict with the Principle, such as that faith is a virtue and that a morally good God demands faith of his creatures. It is therefore worth considering what religious motives might lead a person to embrace fideism., either in its more radical or its more moderate form, and also to see what an adherent of Clifford's Principle might have to say about such n10tives. To this end, I want to consider two peculiarities of Christian faith: its use of creeds, and its conviction that salvation itself comes to us only through faith (of which belief is an essential element). 2.1.3

Creeds

It is a peculiar feature of religious belief generally, and especially of Christian faith, that it employs creeds. These are formulaic statements in which, as part of a religious exercise, practitioners of the religion declare that they believe certain things: "I believe in one God, the father Almighty, maker of Heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible; in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, descended into Hell, rose on the third day according to the Scriptures; and in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, in the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Amen." 11

One function of creeds is clearly what we n1ight call a disciplinary one. It is an attempt to impose on members of a religious community a uniformity in what they say and think about certain things. This enables the community to maintain its identity, but also gives to priests and prelates a certain leverage they can use to control the souls that are under their care. If a member of the community departs in words or deeds from what the creed says or commits him to, he can be brought 11This is a fragn1ent of the Nicene Creed. Nearly all of it is also included in the shorter Christian creed called the Apostles Creed.

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back into line by being threatened with exclusion from it or with other sanctions. An even more interesting function of the creed, however, is that individual believers feel a need to say the creed in order to help define and bolster their own faith. This purpose of the creed has an obvious affinity to fideism. For it is hard to see how people could have a psychological need to recite a creed if they had good evidence for what they believe and felt bound to their belief only by the intellectual respect they owe that evidence. To a person who is painfully conscious that his beliefs are lacking in evidential support, however, the ritual declaration that you believe is an obvious expression of the wish to believe them, and the intention to let that wish influence one's belief. Fideists often try to conjure up our sympathies for a person of troubled faith, so as to get us on the side of those who want to believe, hope to believe, and are trying to make themselves believe by professing their belief. It would ruin their sales pitch, however, if they attended to the other side of the coin, that reciting a creed in such a spirit is really only a way of deliberately undermining one's intellectual integrity. If belief in the creed is supposed to lead to different (and better) actions than unbelief, this strategy is also usually a conspicuously ineffective way of altering one's conduct, and usually results only in a continuation of the same conduct, now combining it with the additional vice of hypocrisy, not only before others but even (or especially) in relation to oneself. This characteristic of religious professions of faith becomes more and more pronounced to the degree that a creed is recited warmly and sincerely, with the passionate heart of one who is struggling to believe. The predictable result of this conduct is perceptively, and more dispassionately, described by Hume: We may observe that notwithstanding the dogmatical, imperious style of all superstition, the conviction of the religionists, in all ages, is more affected than real, and scarcely ever approaches, in any degree, to that solid belief and persuasion, which governs us in the common affairs of life. Men dare not avow, even to their own hearts, the doubts which they entertain on such subjects: They make a merit of implicit faith, and disguise to themselves their real infidelity, by the strongest asseverations and most positive bigotry. But nature is too hard for all their endeavors, and suffers not the obscure, glimmering light, afforded in those shadowy regions, to equal the strong impressions, made by common sense and experience. The usual course of men's conduct belies their words, and shows, that their assent in these matters is some un-

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accountable operation of the mind between belief and conviction, but approaching much nearer to the former than to the latter. 12

A creed or credal formula, when recited not to express what one believes but rather in the hope of solidifying a belief of which one is uncertain, also inevitably endangers the belief itself, by insidiously sapping it of its content. What I believe gets reduced to what the creed says I believe, and my believing itself degenerates into merely saying I believe. If I say week after week that I believe "Jesus Christ was the Son of God," or "the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son," or that I believe in "the communion of saints," then those words become what I believe. If I let myself seriously ask questions about what the words mean, then I am in danger of finding out that I don't understand what I say I believe. And if I don't understand it, how can I believe it? Worse yet, if I were to read books about theology, or even ask my pastor to explain it to me so that I do understand it, I would be in danger of discovering that I don't believe it after all. Perhaps I would not even see the point of believing it. It's safer just to say the words and not worry too much about what they mean, or (therefore) about what I really believe. Such thoughts, involving such dilemmas, dishonesties and compromises, seem inevitable for anyone who holds beliefs in the way that someone who recites a creed must hold them. 13

Salvation by Faith A second peculiarity of Christian faith is that it places so much stress on faith-in which belief is a central element-as an indispensable vehicle of salvation. It is a central Christian doctrine that we can lay hold of the gifts God is giving us through Christ's sacrifice on the cross only through faith in Christ. This faith, though it may consist in much more than belief, nevertheless centrally involves believing that Jesus did certain things, that he allowed himself to be crucified, that he rose from the dead. Christians believe that that his spiritual work, along with 2.1.4

12Hume, "The Natural History of Religion," in J. C. A. Gaskin (ed.) Dialogues and Natural History of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 172. 13 "Let no one suppose that what I have said about ·the impossibility of proving the truth of religious doctrines contains anything new. It has been felt at all timesundoubtedly, too, by the ancestors who bequeathed us this legacy. Many of them probably nourished the same doubts as ours, but the pressure imposed on them was too strong for them to have dared to utter them. And since then countless people have striven to suppress them, because they thought it was their duty to believe; n1any brilliant intellects have broken down over this conflict, and many characters have been impaired by the compromises with which they have tried to find a way out of it." Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, translated by W. D. RobsonScott (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1964), pp. 41-42. Cited below as "Freud" by page number.

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the miraculous happenings attendant on it, have a spiritual efficacy in saving us, but they have this efficacy only if we believe that they do. It is as if believing in something we wish for would magically make the wish come true. On some theological accounts, the gift of God's grace is supposed to work morally good effects in souls of Christians, making better people of them and its effects playa vital role in achieving either salvation itself or else a state of soul that merits salvation. Insofar as 'faith' refers to these effects, we can see how it might contribute to salvation. But this makes it no easier for a Cliffordian to see how belief, especially belief insufficiently supported by evidence, could constitute part of a good state of soul, a state in virtue of which the believer is supposed to merit salvation. The suspicion is that fideist Christians think there is moral merit in the intellectual humiliation they perpetrate on themselves in order to maintain a belief not supported by the evidence. Perhaps they regard self-contempt and violence to their cognitive processes as a fitting self-abasement before the Deity, or a sacrifice, like the offering up of worldly goods. What they are slaughtering on the altar, however, is not a goat or a lamb, but their own intellectual integrity. What sort of God, we should ask, would accept this sort of sacrifice? Why, on this view, would God not ask us to perform analogous sacrifices showing like contempt for our faculties by committing theft, murder or other acts that our reason tells us are wrong?14 Or perhaps more to the point, what sort of person could think that God (a good God) would demand, or even accept, sacrifices of this kind? 2.1.5

Sin and the Darkenin.g of the Mind

The most conlmon fideist response to these kinds of questions depends on certain way of following out St. Paul's teaching that human sin involves a "darkening of the mind" (Romans 1:21). God gave us faculties for distinguishing truth from falsehood, including knowing God himself and his commandments to us. But sin involves a misuse of these faculties. Sinners defy and dishonor God not only by defying his commandments but also by suppressing their own knowledge of him, and perverting even their power to know him. The only remedy for sin is their recovery of that power, which they cannot achieve through their own efforts but only through God's gift of faith through his act of grace. 14Was it in this vein that Kierkegaard wondered about the "teleological suspension of the. ethical" involved in Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his innocent son in obedience to an "absolute duty to God?" Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, translated by Howard V. and Edna H, Hong. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 54-81.

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Even apart from St. Paul or the Christian doctrine of sin, it is clear enough that hun1an beings are highly inventive in devising ways of misusing their cognitive faculties, hiding the truth from themselves, deceiving themselves, engaging in many forms of what is sometimes called "motivated irrationality". Adherence to Clifford's Principle therefore requires us to be constantly alive to the possibility that our tendency to believe son1ething (or our reluctance to believe it) might be due to one of these devices. So we must take steps to make ourselves aware of our propensities to self-deception, and avoid being influenced by them. Given the kinds of beings we are, however, it is also clear that in many matters we are never going to be in a position to be absolutely certain that we have uncovered or corrected all the forms of motivated irrationality we might have perpetrated on ourselves. Our best chance of adhering successfully to Clifford's Principle comes in doing our best in this regard, even though we can never be entirely certain of success. Clearly St. Paul's conception of the "darkened mind" also refers to self-deception or motivated irrationality. According to Paul, although God's nature is invisible, his presence is shown clearly in the things that he made (Romans 1:20), but people rejected him out of pride and ingratitude, because they did not want to honor God or give thanks to him. This is what led to the darkening of their minds (Romans 1:21). "Unbelief" as Paul understands it, consists in a very deep-seated state of denial or self-deception. So far, however, Paul's account would seem to support Christian rationalism more than fideism, and it looks better suited to illustrating the truth and importance of Clifford's Principle than to providing any rationale for ignoring or violating it. As Paul tells the story, the power and deity of God are clearly attested by the evidence, and the failure of people to believe in them is belief directly contrary to it. So he would seem to be firmly on the side of Clifford's Principle. According to Paul's story, however, sin changes everything. In our present condition, all attempts to regulate our own beliefs or form them according to the evidence will be futile without God's help. They can only result in evasion, falsehood and wickedness. Yet if we think that God is good, we will reasonably think that he is also generous, and therefore disposed to help us. So we will still have good reason to use the faculties that God has given us, both to weigh the evidence as it appears to us and to try to determine how best to avail ourselves of the help he would be willing to provide in correcting the errors that are due to our sinful choices. Those who succeed, with God's help, in correcting their errors, perceive the evidence in favor of Christianity and become believers, while those who refuse God's help will continue in their sinful state, which involves

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holding beliefs that are both false and contrary to the evidence that is available to them. Christians typically hold that God's help here involves supernatural revelation providing us with knowledge that goes beyond what our natural faculties can afford. No doubt Clifford would reject the claim that there is such knowledge, or at least deny that we have sufficient evidence to believe in it. But that is not any part of Clifford's Principle itself, or his ethics of belief proper. Clifford's Principle does not say that we must restrict ourselves to only one kind of evidence (for instance, to 'natural' as opposed to 'supernatural' evidence). A Christian rationalist, such as Locke, holds that if God has given us natural faculties for the regulation of beliefs, he will provide us with this supernatural aid in such a way that our reception of it will constitute a confirmation rather than a violation of the principles governing the proper use of those faculties. The natural faculties, even of sinners, used as well as the sinners can still use them, will enable them to hold on good evidence the beliefs they need to hold in order to open then1selves to God's grace, and then that grace will enable them to hold on good grounds any beliefs they need to hold in order to possess a saving faith. God's supernatural grace will supplement rather than subvert reasonor, in more traditional theological language, grace will perfect rather than destroy nature. Thus Locke holds that it is reasonable to believe in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and the revelations they contain. Whether he is right or wrong about this depends not on Clifford's Principle but on the state of the evidence for the claims of scriptural revelation. 15 151f we distinguish natural evidence from supernatural (or revealed) evidence, then we might be able to interpret the views Aquinas and Augustine in a way that puts them more in the Christian rationalist than the fideist camp, and reconciles their views with Clifford's Principle. Suppose they held the following: there is sufficient natural evidence for some beliefs, such as that there is a God and that the biblical scriptures are credible authorities regarding what God has revealed to us. Faith, as distinct from reason, is a disposition to believe what God reveals independently of any natural evidence for it (though not independently of the natural evidence that there is a God and that the Bible is a credible authority regarding supernatural divine revelation). A Christian would then believe, for example, that Jesus Christ died to save us, even though there is insufficient natural evidence for it, because there is sufficient supernatural or revealed evidence for that belief, while this revealed evidence is in turn is credible on the basis of natural evidence. On that interpretation, 'faith'-as a disposition to believe certain revealed doctrines independently of natural evidence-would not be a violation of Clifford's Principle. This is an interpretation of Augustine and Aquinas that was defended to me in conversation on several occasions by Norman Kretzmann (though he should not be held responsible for the above presentation of it). I must confess that I am still doubtful that this gives us the right interpretation of either Augustine or Aquinas. I am n1.ore inclined

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2.1.6 The "Fideist Picture" There are, therefore, quite reasonable ways of understanding central Christian doctrines such as sin, grace and the darkening of the mind that do not force us to be fideists. But fideist Christianity is often motivated by an interpretation of these doctrines, to which I will give the name 'the fideist picture.' The fideist picture goes something like this: Sin has so corrupted our natural faculties that they are entirely unreliable as guides to the truth. Our every atten1pt rationally to assess the evidence for Christian doctrines is so infected with sinful denial, evasion and self-deception that the result can never be anything, in form, except culpable lying, and in substance, wicked falsehood. We may have begun with what John Calvin calls a sensus divinitatis, but sin has utterly numbed that sense, or even destroyed it. Every tendency to rely on our own faculties, every intention to do what their proper use seems to us to require, is merely an expression of sinful pride, and it takes us farther and farther away from the truth. In our present fallen condition, then, our only reliable access to the truth is divine grace. Our access to this grace is, on son1e accounts, the deliverances of immediate inspiration, while on others its criterion lies in scripture or church authority. But any use we make of our rational faculties to decide whether our beliefs originate from supernatural grace, or criticize putative deliverances of grace for their authenticity, or even to interpret these deliverances so as to reconcile them with the deliverances of reason and experience, is nothing but sinful evasion, and will only lead us further astray. Genuine effects of grace are bound to appear to us as contrary to reason-for this is what they are, since our reason is corrupted by sin and always stubbornly determined to reject theme In short, anything that n1ight appear to us as a well-founded doubt about the truth of Christianity must be a sinful falsification, and true belief in the teachings of Christianity must appear to us as groundless and irrational. On the fideist picture, there is no route that could lead sinful unbelievers through reason to Christian belief. Nor is there even any such route that could lead to confidence in God's revelation, and hence to a to interpret both as holding it permissible and even meritorious to believe Christian doctrines even in the absence of any rational ground and thus as advocating the violation of Clifford's Principle. Such an interpretation, with specific reference to Clifford and the ethics belief, has been presented (with greater sympathy than I would show for the resulting position) by James Ross, "Believing for Profit," in Gerald D. McCarthy (ed.), The Ethics of Belief Debate (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), pp. 225-235.

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reasonable faith. This entails that believers and unbelievers occupy, so to speak, two entirely separate epistemic worlds, entirely cut off from each other, with no possibility of meaningful communication between them. Further, it entails that believers themselves are cut off from. any rational access to the truth about how they themselves believe. The beliefs they hold by faith through grace can appear to them only in the shape of something they must accept in defiance of what their senses and intellect tell them. The true beliefs they hold by faith are imposed on them by divine grace, always against the resistance of their sinful reason. In short, on the fideist picture the hun1an condition is one in which everything in which faith plays a part is, so to speak, topsy-turvy, epistemically speaking. Beliefs that appear to reason to be solidly grounded are the results of sinful deception, while beliefs that are true, and have a reliable connection to truth through divine grace, always appear to be irrational and groundless. Whatever might appear to the unbeliever's reason to show Christian doctrines to be false is bound to be other than it appears, not only to him but to the believer as well. Christian beliefs produced in the believer by divine grace are always true, despite the fact that to even the believer's reason they appear groundless. These beliefs are, however, 'warranted' (to use Plantinga's term) in the purely externalist sense that they are true beliefs produced by mechanism that reliably produces true beliefs. (Thus perhaps they, and only they, also truly warrant being called 'knowledge,' while rationally justified beliefs, insofar as the process of their formation has been corrupted by sin, might never be anything but culpable errors.) The fideist picture, as just drawn, may seem fantastic, but it is not at all far from the theological views espoused by some fideist Christians. It seems to me quite a fair rendering, for example, of the account of sin and faith that we find in Kierkegaard's so-called "project of thought" in the Philosophical Fragments. 16 A picture of religious epistemology very similar to this one has recently been defended at length, and with considerable ingenuity, rigor and resourcefulness, by Alvin Plantinga in his book Warranted Christian Belief Fideists need not accept what I have called the 'fideist picture'. But the fideist picture does embody a certain (extreme) interpretation of some central Christian doctrines, and it permits the fideist consistently to regard beliefs on insufficient evidence as warranted or justified (in an externalist sense). 16 Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, translated by David Swenson, revised by Howard V. Hong. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).

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The fideist picture must remind us of Descartes' skeptical hypothesis that there might be an evil demon, who subverts our intellectual processes and causes us to be mistaken even in those beliefs for which we have the strongest evidence. It does so in at least two ways: First, according to this picture it is we who play the evil demon to ourselves, subverting our own intellectual processes, and do this so perfectly that when it comes to matters relevant to Christian religion everything we do (or even rationally can) take for evidence against the faith is really deception. Second, God plays the role of an inverted, beneficent demon, insofar as he creates in the faithful beliefs that are both true and reliable, even when these beliefs directly contradict everything the believers might accept on the basis of reason or experience. Probably no fideist understands the picture in its most extreme form, according to which all beliefs formed through our rational processes are false and corrupt, whereas the only beliefs that are warranted and true are those caused by divine grace in direct opposition to what reason tells us. Even fideists who accept the picture rely on their rational faculties in everyday life and in science for most of their beliefs. They avail themselves of the picture only when they need to in order to protect Christian belief against the assaults of argument and evidence. God permits them to believe according to reason and experience as long as the results do not threaten faith. Divine grace steps in only where sinful reason tempts them to unbelief. But it is worth considering the fideist picture in its extreme form because once the picture is adopted, it can be invoked arbitrarily to warrant or reject any belief at all, wholly irrespective of the presence or absence of epistemic justification for it. (That, in fact, seems to be precisely the point.) Fideists might respond that the picture warrants only those beliefs that belong to Christian faith. But the picture itself makes it entirely arbitrary which beliefs these are. And of course an analogous picture could obviously be devised for the beliefs of nonChristian religions, or indeed for any set of beliefs at all. It would do no good to defend Christian beliefs against other belief-sets that are actually or notionally possible by appealing to other beliefs we hold by common sense or on rational grounds. For it is precisely the point of the fideist picture that any of these may be directly discredited as the product of a darkened mind whenever it clashes with the faith. In effect, then, there are an indefinite number of possible fideist pictures. Any set of beliefs, however insane or morally objectionable, could be 'warranted' according to some picture of this sort. For any set of beliefs anyone might hold, it could be claimed that they are the effect of God's grace and that the apparent evidence against them

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is a product of sin and a darkened mind. In fact, it even belongs to the essence of the fideist picture that all such claims must be of equal epistemic merit. A Christian fideist who appeals to moral common sense or rationally justified beliefs in refusing to allow that a fideist picture might be constructed defending a different, non-Christian, or even a quite monstrous religious faith (for example, a faith in some pagan deity who has commanded the murder of all infidels) is on a slippery slope toward accepting rational arguments against Christianity itself. It is true that the slide could be arbitrarily arrested anywhere in a way that is consistent with any particular version of a fideist picture, but the point once again is that this would be utterly arbitrary. I call it a 'fideist picture' partly to evoke the fact that it is an internally self-consistent representation of a way things might be (or might have been). But it would be self-refuting for any fideist to represent either their faith or the fideist picture (of sin, the darkened mind and faith given by divine grace) corresponding to it as something for which there is credible evidence or good reasons. This n1eans that it would be inconsistent for any fideist to represent their faith either as something they believe for good reasons or son1ething the person with whom they are communicating should adopt for good reasons. This point is inseparable from the fideist clain1 that the warrant fideists claim for their belief is wholly independent of rational episten1ic grounds for the belief. For any argun1ent or evidence that an unbeliever (or even a Christian rationalist) n1ight possibly offer against it has already been dismissed beforehand as the futile ravings of a darkened mind. This rules out the possibility that a fideist Christian could have good epistemic grounds for Christian faith. 17 The fideist picture began with the Pauline idea that human beings are subject to self-deception and motivated irrationality-to the "darkened mind." But fideism turns out to be the very reverse of a healthy response to these human failings. It does not recommend that 17Fideists are often fond of emphasizing the way in which their faith is closed off in this way from rational criticism, even to the point of anticipating the charge that their beliefs are irrational, as though their awareness of this point constitutes some sort of defense against it. Thus Kierkegaard regards it as "an acoustic illusion" when human reason discovers that Christian revelation is a paradox, that it violates rational standards and offends the human being as a rational believer. For, he points out, the Christian message, in confronting the human being as a sinner, directly present~ itself as a paradox and an offense (Philosophical Fragments, p. 60-67). Or again, Pascal puts the point this way: "Who, then, will blame Christians for not being able to give a reason for their belief, when they profess a religion for which they cannot give a reason?" (Pascal, 66). But is that a defense? It is as if a terrorist should say: "Who reproaches me with showing no respect for human life, when I belong to a movement that declares it has no respect for human life?"

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we respond to them being skeptical or critical of thoughts or beliefs in which motivated irrationality might be implicated. Its injunction is rather that we should give in wholly uncritically to certain impulses to believe, which it declares to be exempt from all criticism. The fideist picture even turns rational self-criticism itself into the enemy, telling us to refrain entirely from it regarding certain privileged beliefs. It is not unusual for religious believers with a tendency toward fideism to lay great stress on the point that there is an objective truth, a way things really are, and to think that there is something very in1portant about strenuously denying the claims of relativists, antirealists, postmodernists, who try to call the notions of reality and truth into question. 18 The point on which they are insisting-that there is such a thing as truth, and a way things really are-is of course correct, even trivial. But there is· something rather suspicious about the in1portance they attach to it. I diagnose the suspicious feature as follows: According to the fideist picture itself, nothing can be said to reason on behalf of the fideist picture except perhaps that it is not self-contradictory and hence that it might possibly be true-so that if it is true, then Christians are saved by belief in it, and their belief is even (in an externalist, reliabilist sense) warranted. 19 In maintaining his own belief, therefore, the fideist has no possible recourse except to cling desperately and dogn1atically to a bare assertion that the fideist picture really is true. For the fideist picture, moreover, this truth is necessarily conceived realistically--that is, it cannot be reduced to what passes certain verification procedures, or is supported by the best arguments, or to what the human community of inquirers would agree upon under some ideal conditions of rational inquiry and communication. For all these 18Thus Plantinga takes on the monsters of postmodernism in the penultimate chapter of Warranted Christian Belief. 19Kierkegaard, however, insists that Christian truth must be a paradox, incomprehensible and even offensive to reason (see Philosophical Fragments, pp. 60-67). He doesn't say that it is self-contradictory, since that might allow us to conclude simply that it is certainly false. But he does hold that it must be experienced by reason as unacceptable and repellent. In this I think Kierkegaard is a more consistent fideist than is someone like Plantinga, who frustrates the rationalist by painting a picture maddens because it is obviously indefensible and yet it apparently receives, from a plainly clever philosopher, an impressively lucid, deft and even sweetly reasonable defense (at least against self-contradictoriness, and on the terrain Plantinga carefully marks out). But for just these reasons, Plantinga's version of the skandalon is likely to offend only analytic philosophers, whereas Kierkegaard's description of the Christian paradox is broader and better suited to convey the outrage that fideist Christianity is supposed to effect in any reasonable person, even one who lacks training in analytical philosophy and the acute sensitivity to patent nonsense that it usually creates.

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might well be only the products of sinful lying. Any suggestion that the nature of truth itself is somehow entangled in the web of human uncertainty or the ambiguity of interpretation must be rejected. For it threatens to take from the fideist the one positive thing he can assert with the hope of being understood: namely, that in defiance of all reason and experience, what he believes in really exists, what he believes is true. Locke is surely right to question the consistency of maintaining that a morally good God wants creatures he has endowed with rational powers not to use them. We would not think it good for a powerful human being to want to take over the lives of others who are capable of autonomous self-direction, even if this human being's intentions toward his charges were entirely benevolent, and even if he knew better than they did what was good for them. Why should we think any differently about God? It is contrary to what we believe about benevolence toward rational beings to suppose that a good God would demand an irrational faith of his creatures, or that he would supply them with it. A God who respected the autonomy of his rational creatures and also wanted them to believe certain things would not degrade them by imposing heteronomous belief states on them. Instead, such a God would produce belief in them autonomously by providing them with knowledge, based on good evidence, for what he wanted them to believe. Contemplating the fideist Christian's conception of God in this regard, a Christian rationalist therefore would have good reason to exclaim, along with Goethe: Wie einer ist, so ist sein Gatt, Darum ward Gatt so oft zum Spott. 20

(Loosely translated: "Each of us fancies God to be like ourselves, and that's why God is so often made to look ridiculous.")

2.2

Religious Beliefs as Illusions

Christian doctrine says that that faith is caused by the miracle of God's grace. A Christian rationalist could point out that this doctrine is not necessarily inconsistent with saying that we have good reasons or evidence for what we believe by faith. But the fideist picture gives that doctrine a specifically anti-rationalist interpretation, and invokes it as part of the 'warrant' fideists claim for their beliefs. But of course this explanation for their beliefs can no more be supported by evidence than many other implausible beliefs they hold by faith. Parroting the fideist 20Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe's World View, ed. F. Ungar (New York, 1963), p. 46.

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picture, David Hume concludes his essay on miracles with the following exclan1ation: "The Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a deterll1ination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience." 21

Hume's irony bears tacit witness to the fact that more mundane explanations for religious beliefs are readily forthcoming. Even fideists themselves often acknowledge the role of familiar, non-rational psychological mechanisms in motivating their beliefs, and they offer various excuses for permitting or even encouraging these mechanisms in themselves. 2.2.1

Beliefs, Wislles and Fears

Perhaps the most obvious and natural of these explanations is the one offered by Sigmund Freud. "Religious ideas . .. which are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection-for protection through love-which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this tin1e a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfillment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfillments shall take place" (Freud, pp. 47-48).

In calling religious beliefs "illusions", Freud means "they are derived from human wishes" (Freud, p. 48). This implies, however, that they are not derived fron1 a consideration of the evidence, since in the case of beliefs we wish to be true but which we also know to be well-grounded on the evidence, it would be not only gratuitous but false to attribute our belief to the wish rather than to the state of the evidence. So we 21 Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), p. 90.

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may regard an "illusion" in Freud's sense as a belief disproportionate to the evidence that we wish to be true and which we hold on account of this wish. Freud stresses that 'illusions', in this sense, are not necessarily false (even if they are not supported by the evidence). Some most certainly turn out to be true: "For instance, a middle-class girl may have the illusion that a prince will come and marry her. This is possible; and a few such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is n1uch less likely" (Freud, p. 49). The point is that if a belief is motivated by wish-fulfillment, this is plainly no reason at all for thinking that it is true. On the contrary, that is an obvious reason for being skeptical about it. Such reasons for skepticism are especially strong in the case of religious beliefs, because of other things we know about them: "We know approximately at what periods and by what kind of men religious doctrines were created. If in addition we discover the motives which led to this, our attitude to the problem of religion will undergo a marked displacement. We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. And it would be more remarkable still if our wretched, ignorant and downtrodden ancestors had succeeded in solving all these difficult riddles of the universe" (Freud, pp. 52-53).

Not all religious doctrines answer to our wishes. Some religious doctrines, in fact, seem specifically designed to frighten us. The doctrine that after death most people, perhaps including ourselves, will be consigned to eternal torment in Hell is hardly the way we would wish things to be. Of course, if we think of ourselves as escaping this fate which awaits our enemies, or even awaits all people who do not happen to be our co-religionists, then this belief clearly answers to some of the most despicable wishes we could possibly have. Yet if not all religious doctrines are motivated by wishes, that shows only that wish-fulfillment is merely one side of the picture. People sometimes hold beliefs disproportionate to the evidence not because they wish them to be true, but because they fear that they might be true. Thus we n1ay speak of fearful illusions in addition to wishful illusions. About the belief in an afterlife, with the possibility of both eternal rewards and eternal punishments, Hume remarks: "All doctrines are to

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be suspected which are favoured by our passions. And the hopes and fears which give rise to this doctrine, are very obvious." 22 Wherever their hopes or their fears are engaged, people have a tendency to leave the evidence behind and fly to extremes in their beliefs. They fornl beliefs of these kinds not only in religion but in many other matters besides. Lovers imagine all sorts of things about those they love. In the absence of any encouragement at all, they sometimes believe that their love will be returned, while under the influence of jealous fear some people form the groundless belief that their beloved is deceitful and unfaithful. I have been experiencing an abdominal pain: today I confidently tell myself that it is nothing at all, but tomorrow I may be seized by the terrified certainty that I an1 dying of cancer. A parent whose child is fifteen minutes late home from a date will believe one minute that there is nothing wrong, only to be overcome the next minute by a horrible premonition that the child has been murdered or has died in an auto accident. Religious beliefs often follow the same pattern. They are beliefs about very large and important things, about not only the most basic things, but also-and this seems n10re to the point from a religious point of view-about the things that are supposed to matter most to us-the things we think are most important to determining our good or bad fortune, in this life and even beyond it. When brought face to face with our instinctive fear of death, people sometimes portray this fear writ large (no doubt aided by their awareness of their moral shortcomings) by imagining that they will be plunged eternally into an infernal lake of fire and brimstone. But then they take consolation from this fear in their faith that God will save them and has elected them for an afterlife of peaceful pleasures in Heaven. Religious people then put themselves under the further wishful illusion that if they succeed in holding both these groundless beliefs, then their "saving faith" will even make their wishful illusions more likely to be true, and their fearful illusions true only of people who believe differently. Many of what Hume calls our "passions" can influence our beliefs, causing us to believe in the absence of sufficient evidence, or even contrary to the evidence. Wishes and fears, love and hatred, gratitude and vengeance, self-conceit and feelings of guilt, can all subvert our cognitive processes. Emotions can also play a positive role in cognition. Different religious beliefs too n1ay have a variety of complex psychological causes. But surely Freud's explanation, that religious beliefs 22Hume, "Of the Immortality of the Soul," in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Posthumous Essays, ed. Richard Popkin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), p.96.

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are illusions-beliefs motivated by wishes-clearly identifies the most obvious and most pervasive cause of these beliefs. Whatever role divine grace may play in causing religious beliefs, for most of thenl this Freudian account is surely the explanation that answers best to the evidence.

2.2.2

The Hunger to Believe and the Meaning of Life

Freud's characterization of religious beliefs as illusions is in1portant because it is the sober and critical way of saying what religious people themselves often say about their beliefs. Religious beliefs, it is said, are consoling, they bring us joy, they give our lives meaning, and we hold them by "faith" -not through the operations of our intellect but with the warmth and fervor of our desires. It is often said that people have a "hunger" for faith-"for something they can believe in." This hunger is represented as something healthy, even something noble, as evidence of their "spirituality." Yet what could this hunger be except a will to put themselves under some illusion? They wish that their life, or perhaps that human life generally, had a different meaning, what would seem to them a greater meaning, than the evidence shows it to have. And they wish to be aware (if only through a form of unjustified belief) that their lives have the meaning they wish it to have. From the fact that our lives have a meaning different from the meanings we might wish for them, it hardly follows that they have none at all. It is part of being honest with ourselves-and also properly humble about who and what we are-that we should be willing to accept our lives for the meaning that they have rather than the meanings we wish them to have. Religions claim to teach us humility, but a fideism motivated by this "hunger for meaning" does not represent humility but instead a kind of dishonest arrogance. We must also face the fact that our lives may have meanings that n1ay be hidden from us but will become clear to people in the future. Religions also claim to celebrate the mystery of life, but to this hungry fideism, n1ystery is apparently endurable only to a certain extent, or in certain prescribed forms. It must be surrounded by cornforting assurances, so that its effect must be to relieve us of the anxiety that goes with taking responsibility for the meaning of our lives and with the sin1ultaneous awareness that that meaning is never guaranteed to us. The hunger for faith is the wish to find some teaching that is not rationally credible, but is still capable of captivating us emotionally so as to persuade us that life has some meaning or other that we wish that it had. This hunger is a wish to be protected from reality-from the particular realities of my life, or from the reality of the human

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condition generally-protected from them magically, through the mere belief that one is protected from them. "The heart has its reasons," said Pascal, "which reason does not know" (Pascal, Pensees 277, p. 78). This is only another way of saying that religious beliefs portray reality to us as we wish it to be, that we hold them either in order to give ourselves pleasure or to ease the pain of life, and that in forming and maintaining these beliefs, we indulge our feelings and wishes rather than facing up to our lives as they are. Pascal's "reasons of the heart" are not reasons for believing anything at alL They are reasons only for perpetrating intellectual subterfuges that result in belief. To speak of the "heart's reasons" is not to justify our beliefs but only to offer a lame excuse for our bad conduct in believing; and the only excuse we have to offer is the self-indulgent one that these acts of bad faith make us feel better. When all the sentimental euphemisms are stripped away, this is what fideists themselves often admit about their beliefs, and what they offer as grounds for us to share these beliefs. The difference between accepting their apologetics and rejecting it is simply whether we let ourselves succumb to the pity (or self-pity) through which they hope we will excuse their (or our own) intellectual misconduct. Freud is simply letting us hear for what it is the indictment that fideist apologetics has drawn up against itself. Once we permit ourselves to hear this indictment soberly and honestly, we can never again regard these beliefs as the apologists would like us to. We can react to them as Freud does, with a sort of tolerant, pitying condescension. Or else, like Clifford, we can look upon them with sympathy, yet mixed with indignation, since that shows greater respect for religious people, who are rational men and women, responsible for the self-indulgent harm they do themselves. But we can never again regard these beliefs as lovable or innocent, because we ourselves will have lost our innocence regarding the impulses in ourselves that might favor them. It is not only at the abstract level-concerning the existence of God and immortality of the soul-that people are disposed to religious illusions. It is a central part of the religious experience of n1any devout people to think they can detect God's presence in their lives. They are not only assured in the abstract that God has some purpose for them, but they often think they have been blessed with a knowledge of what it is. This supposed knowledge, and the confidence that they can obtain it about some event even if they don't have it already, is frequently part of their interpretation of whatever good fortune or success they meet with in life. It is also what sustains many people through the terrible and questionable things that happen to them, such as catastrophic

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upheavals in their lives brought on by illnesses, natural disasters, personal failures of all sorts, or the unexpected death of loved ones. Fideist religion would like to persuade us that there is something noble and uplifting, or if not that, at least something "human", deserving of both our sympathy and respect, in people's illusions about God's "plan" for them and their intimations of what that plan is. But an honest person will not be persuaded. For there is, on the contrary, something presumptuous and self-centered, even something unattractively childish, in the assumption that we can discern the divine plan for the universe in the detail necessary to know God's purposes regarding the accidental occurrences-for good or ill-that make up a good part of the substance of our individual lives. For many people, in fact, self-centered illusions of this kind about particular events are what they chiefly mean when they talk of "religious experience" and even constitute the primary rationale for their believing in God at all. Once again Hume's observation is acute and right on target: Even at this day, ask any of the vulgar, why he believes in an omnipotent creator of the world: he will never n1ention the beauty of final causes, of which he is wholly ignorant. He will [instead] tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one: the fall and bruise of such another; the extensive drought of this season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate operation of providence: And such events, as with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it. 23

Human beings are specimens of a naturally evolved life form. Evolution and natural selection are natural effects that operate largely at random, through chance. It is therefore entirely to be expected that what is most significant in the lives of individual human beings should be delivered over to chance events. In short, we should not expect most of what happens to us, for good or ill, to make sense or to have any meaning; such expectations are both childish and self-centered. It is arrogant to interpret our good fortune as something we deserve, and although many of the bad things that happen to us are due to our own foolishness, greed or lack of self-control, it is superstitious to think that every mischance that befalls us is a punishment or a lesson to be learned. Societies show their humanity chiefly by the way they collectively protect their individual members, as far as they can, fron1 the blows of ill fortune. In a decent society, the fortunate would be happy to forego some of the benefit chance has bestowed on then1 for the sake of helping those who have had worse luck. The society would be organized 23Hume, "The Natural History of Religion," p. 153.

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so that good and ill fortune are distributed as equally as the limited powers of hun1an beings can make it. But the regime of capitalism triun1phant makes it a point of honor to repudiate its collective humanity, and even cherishes institutions that exaggerate the effects of chance on its individual n1embers. In a society like ours, that has chosen inhuman absurdity over humanity and meaningfulness, people can be expected to feel especially strongly a need for illusions about the meanings of the absurd accidents that determine the course of their lives, and superstitiously to look to unseen powers to perform the duties their fellow human beings have chosen to neglect. Of course there are sometimes meaningful patterns in people's lives. Chiefly this is because people themselves are sometimes successful in creating meaningful patterns through forming meaningful intentions and then carrying them out in action. Most of the meaning our lives have will therefore be rather obvious; it will depend on us, usually in light of the actions of others, and often consciously through cooperation with them. Once again, in a decent society people would take collective responsibility for the meaning of that part of their lives in which they impact on one another (in the political and economic spheres), while in self-regarding spheres of life (such as those involving taste, sexuality or religious belief and practice) they would try to empower one another to give to their lives the meanings they seek them to have. (In our society, however, the collective spheres are put in thrall to the market, and to the powerful individuals and institutions that control it; while in self-regarding matters moralists and religious fanatics often succeed in limiting the freedom of individuals.) If we want our lives to be meaningful, therefore, we must take action (both individual and collective) to n1ake them so, but always in full recognition that there can be no guarantee in advance that we will succeed in creating the meanings we try to give our lives. Sometimes human intentions, under the influence of circumstances unknown and unintended, also give rise to meaningful patterns in human life. The ways of life people adopt can be explained by geography, climate and other factors that necessarily influence the conditions under which they can survive and achieve their other goals. Perhaps these factors, along with the contingent history of human actions, can be used to explain large-scale structures and changes in human affairs, occasionally perhaps even individual events that people regard as significant (such as wars and revolutions). Such explanations, however, need to be regarded with caution and skepticism, if for no other reason than that our beliefs about them are likely to be open to influence by our wishes, hopes and fears.

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Regarding those events in our individual lives that are in no way planned or intended (individually or collectively) by hun1an beings, and do not belong to large scale changes that might have the kinds of explanations just described, there is no ground at all for believing that any discernible meaning or purpose exists. Why one person rather than another is stricken with cancer or their property wiped out by a natural disaster, and why this happened today rather than last year or next year-for this sort of question there simply is no answer. This is often a hard fact for people to face in relation to concrete events, whether they represent good or bad fortune. People want their happiness to signify son1ething about them (most often, they want to see it as deserved). They are also sometimes generous enough to want there to be some benevolent power to thank for it. When faced with personal tragedies, many people lack the courage to believe that they can pass from the stage of despair and denial to the stage of consolation and emotional acceptance without some supposed insight into the event's meaning. They succumb to the illusion that they need to know what the event means. When this attitude is raised to a level of generality, the argument in favor of religious belief is often given a sense of urgency; the consolations of religion are depicted not merely as something that makes life more pleasant, but something without vlhich human life would be miserable, intolerable, without meaning and without hope. We are presented with a fearful dilemma: either we hold epistemically ungrounded beliefs that cater to our hopes and fears or else we are doomed to lose our psychic moorings and plunge into the abyss of nihilism and cosmic despair. 24 Here the fear-inspired illusion that they cannot accept their life without some belief about its meaning gives rise to the wish-inspired illusion that it has a meaning, and then to illusions about what that meaning is and about their ability to discern it. One illusion serves another in enabling them to retreat from dealing maturely with the realities of human life. The sad thing is that all these illusions often direct people's attention 24 An eloquent statement of this point of view is found in Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, translated by J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Dover, 1954), who portrays Cervantes' Don Quixote as the archetypal representative of the human condition, and exhorts us to follow hin1. in indulging the religious illusions necessary to sustain a sense of meaning in life, for which (Unamuno claims) a belief in personal immortality is required. But it might be more natural to read Unamuno's philosophy as a candid confession that Freud is quite right about the psychological status and functions of religious beliefs, and to see the cosmic condition of illusion, for which Don Quixote's pitiable madness is Unamuno's chosen metaphor, as a fate that can be avoided by rational people who are honest with themselves.

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away from the one genuine source of consolation-the one thing that is no illusion because it provides no shortcut around their pain, but is strongly supported by the facts. This is the recognition that despite the misery and weakness of human nature, it also contains somewhere deep within it-perhaps partly at some animal level, but also at a level involving rational knowledge and strong emotions presupposing such knowledge-the courage, strength and resilience, given enough time and suffering, to look the ghastly absurdity of the human condition straight in the face and to go on living. The only honest way to face our condition is first to see it clearly without illusion for what it is, and only then take up the question whether the kinds of meanings and hopes it actually affords us are enough to make life worth living. 25 Living on the basis of illusions, whether about your health, or your marriage, or your cosmic destiny, is not a suitable way for any self-respecting rational being to live. If a nlan lives longer because he hides from himself the fact that he has terminal cancer, or a woman retains economic security because she nlanages to deceive herself into thinking her husband really means it this tinle when he promises to stop beating her, these advantages are purchased at the cost of their human dignity. Religious illusions, even if they could be shown to benefit us, would be no different. What seems too good to be true is usually not true. All other things being equal, when some doctrine has that appearance, we should withhold belief in it. Yet the recognition that psychologically, most religious beliefs are 'illusions' in Freud's sense does not necessarily discredit the content of those beliefs. The world can sometimes turn out to be the 25Freud himself tends to treat religious illusions with a sort of weary patience. He does not think they are harmless, but he thinks they are ineradicable. He regards them as a comprehensible if cowardly reaction to the human condition-which, like many apologists for religious illusion, he too apparently regards as both wretched and comfortless without religious consolations. I wonder whether I am alone in finding his condescending tolerance as offensive, in its own way, as the religious apologetics he is rejecting. Religion may well be psychologically ineradicable among human beings, and for the very reasons Freud thinks it is; but very likely so are many other forms of deplorable human conduct (greed, war, racial and ethnic hatred, drug and alcohol addiction, physical abuse in sexual and family relationships). The fact that we will never finally put an end to any of these evils fact no doubt gives us reason to deal with such conduct realistically, in terms of the actual harm it causes and using the best strategies for preventing that harm. In some cases, at least, such realism might lead us to take a more tolerant attitude toward these evils than we do. But people should not be excused from bad conduct of any kind when they are capable of refraining from it. And even if people are too weak to n1.ake the abolition of some evil a real possibility, that should not stand in the way of our declaring cruel conduct to be cruel when it is cruel, despicable when it is despicable, or childish and cowardly when it is childish and cowardly.

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way we wish it to be. More to the point, there can sometimes be good evidence that it will turn out as we wish it to be. In that kind of case, the belief that it will turn out that way need not be an illusion (if it is held on the basis of the evidence rather than due to our wishes), and even if it is an illusion (because psychologically, the belief is motivated by wish-fulfillment rather than by the evidence), the belief is still one we ought to hold. These points show that Freud's critique of religious beliefs as illusions does not necessarily discredit Christian rationalism. At most, Freud's critique should incite Christian rationalists to take special care to be sure that their beliefs are indeed supported by the evidence. They should do their best to see to it that in them (at least) Christian beliefs are not held psychologically in the form of illusions. 2.2.3

Are Religious Illusions Beneficial?

The supposedly beneficial effect of religion on our happiness and our conduct is the most pervasive element in all religious apologetics. In n1any cases, this argument directly takes the form of claiming that religious beliefs are beneficial qua illusions, that is, that they are beneficial precisely because they are motivated by wish-fulfillment rather than on the basis of the evidence. Thus apologists claim not merely that religion portrays human life as meaningful, but further that holding these beliefs because you want your life to be meaningful is what makes life meaningful. Moreover, it is argued that religious beliefs are beneficial because they are the expression of good wishes, and that this fact is what n1akes them beneficial. This lies behind the argument that the belief that the world is governed by a just Providence tends to strengthen our commitment to morality and our confidence in the ultin1ate victory of what is right, whereas agnosticism or atheistic materialism offer our moral efforts no such support. It is no doubt a consequence of our own moral imperfection that we are sometimes deeply self-alienated in our relation to our own moral comn1itn1ents. This can take the form of seeing those commitments as something insufficiently grounded from the standpoint of our 'intellectual' or 'rational' self, and therefore sustainable only through some supposedly 'higher' part of ourselves, which we represent as our emotional attachment to morality. Then our "rational" self can seem like the part of us that is selfish and prudently unwilling to take the risks involved in trusting others or being generous to then1, or in general putting moral principles ahead of our fear and greed. A commitment to morality then seems to require a "faith" that goes beyond anything compatible with a coldly rational reading of the realities of hun1an life. But this way of representing our corrupt alienation from morality is

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not the only possible way, or even a defensible way. Selfishness, mistrustfulness, fear and greed are not traits we find in truly happy people. They are rational policies only for people living under desperate conditions, in which one must live in immediate fear of the ill-will of others and where trust and generosity are likely to be disastrous policies-in other words, under conditions where a decent, happy life is very likely impossible no matter what policies we adopt. For anyone living in less desperate straits, to view a commitment to morality as clashing with a rational reading of the evidence about the realities and prospects of our lives is already a form of self-deception about our situation, expressive of the irrational forms of fear and greed that constitute our own moral corruption. The idea that we need some sort of "faith" that might violate Clifford's Principle in order to sustain our commitment to IIlorality can only be regarded as an expression of the same evil tendencies. To interpret our alienation from our own moral commitments in terms of this idea is therefore already to represent our moral struggle as one we have lost. We can't reasonably expect people to be committed to morality as long as we think the evidence fails to support such a commitment. And we won't expect this of ourselves either. When people think they will do the right thing only if they hold unjustified beliefs, what this shows immediately is that their own commitment to morality is already very weak, and even more dangerously, that they have begun to integrate this lack of commitn1ent into their comprehensive view of the world at a pretty deep level. There is little reason to think that attempts to induce the supposedly morally beneficial beliefs, in people who are in this condition, even if these atten1pts are successful, will do much to strengthen anyone's commitment to morality. In effect, to think that my commitment to morality is contingent on illy holding beliefs that I regard as insufficiently supported by evidence is already to think that my commitment to n10rality itself is irrational. If I am the kind of person who judges that it is irrational to be honest or generous, then I am not apt to make myself into an honest or generous person by adding conspicuous violations of Clifford's Principle to the catalog of my vices. 26 Arguments associating religious belief with moral commitment look more promising if we think of a person whose commitment to morality as already strong, and the religious beliefs as some sort of fitting ex26 As Hume's Philo puts it: "The smallest grain of natural honesty and benevolence has more effect on men's conduct than the most pompous views suggested by theological theories and systems" Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion edited by Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), p. 83.)

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pression of that commitment (on the level of a world-view or attitude toward life as a whole). But this picture too looks pron1ising only if the belief that supposedly expresses a strong moral commitment is represented as one the agent knows to be supported by the evidence. For only then do the agent's practical commitments honestly cohere with the agent's true and stable world-view (for that would have to include the agent's assessment of the evidence for what is believed). 27 Another defense of illusions as such is Willianl James' argument that in general, believing things will go well, believing we will succeed in what we undertake, will aid us psychologically in achieving that very success-perhaps it will even be a necessary condition for it. "In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly and indispensable thing" (Jan1es, p. 29). He regards hopeful religious beliefs as a prime example of what he is referring to. But the fact is that sometimes optimistic beliefs help you and sometin1es they don't. Such beliefs can be very harmful. There are a multitude of cases in which a person's confident and self-satisfied belief that "it is impossible to fail" can be directly blamed for the person's miserable failure. Athletes who need to "psych themselves up" for events usually try to be "confident" but not "overconfident". Admittedly there is rOOln in logical space for a divergence between what the person is justified by the evidence in believing and what it would be most beneficial for them to believe. But it is a separate question how often this divergence is a genuine reality frorYl which we might hope to reap sonle benefit for our projects. Denis Diderot says: "Although a lie may be useful for the moment, it is necessarily harmful in the long run, and truth necessarily does good, even though it may be harmful at the moment.,,28 In the eighteenth century there were still people who dared to maintain the opposite of this: but it is hard to believe that there is still anyone who would have the nerve to do so. There is, however, no other responsible guide to what beliefs are true than what the evidence indicates, or what epistemic standards justify 27We also have to question the kind of moral commitment that would find expression in beliefs that violate the duties of intellectual integrity that we owe both to ourselves and to others. Thus there is something to be said in favor of the reaction of rationalist theologians, such as Moses Mendelssohn, to Kant's theoretical critique of the traditional proofs for God's existence, and their refusal to be satisfied with his attempt to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith. Their aim was not merely to preserve traditional religious beliefs, but also to make it possible to retain their intellectual integrity while holding those beliefs. 28Denis Diderot, "Rameau's Nephew," p. 39 in Rameau's Nephew / D'Alembert's Dream, edited and translated by Leonard Tancock. London: Penguin Books, 1966. See also "D'Alembert's Dream," p. 218.

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(this is true by the very meaning of the terms 'evidence' and 'epistemic standards'.) So Diderot's saying entails that violating Clifford's Principle can be beneficial only in the short run, and must be harmful in the long run. If Diderot is right (as I think he is), then the divergence between what it is epistemically justified to believe and what is beneficial to believe may sometimes be real, but it can never be anything but local and temporary. Permitting or even encouraging such a gap is always a counterproductive policy on the whole and in the long run. Opponents of religion might also counter the argument that religious illusions are beneficial by directly denying that religious beliefs have beneficial effects. They could point to all the terrible deeds that have been done in the name of religion, the holy wars, inquisitions, pogroms, persecutions, to the profound harm wrought at every level by the pernicious authority priests, prelates, preachers and prophets have exercised over society and over people's hearts and minds. Is there any limit to the depth of the evil that lies behind the fact that for centuries religion has treated 'freethinker' as a pejorative term? In response, the defenders of religion might respond, as Hume's Cleanthes did to Philo, by warning us not to let our zeal against false religion undermine our veneration for the true, and perhaps also by insisting that "religion, however corrupted, is still better than no religion at all" (Hume, Dialogues, pp. 86, 82). The first of Cleanthes' remarks may be right-minded. The second is certainly false. We ought to admit from the start, however, that there is no hope of answering the question whether religious beliefs are on the whole harmful or beneficial. Religion is so deeply interwoven into so much in human life that there are few goods in life for which it cannot plausibly claim some credit, and equally few evils from which it is exempt from some share of the blame. The attempts of both religious and antireligious people to evaluate religion are seldom more than exercises in the familiar duplicity, characteristic of religion but practiced often enough by its opponents as well, of portraying an unassailable prejudice as if it were a theory open to reasoning and en1pirical disconfirmation. Let us therefore ask instead what sort of reason for believing p it would be if it were true that believing p is beneficial (regarding human happiness, or morality, or whatever end you like). The first thing to notice is that if Diderot is right, then the benefits of believing something that the evidence indicates is untrue could never be anything but shortterm and temporary, while the long-term result would inevitably be harm. But even if we waive this point, there is a deeper problem: The fact that a belief is beneficial never gives you any epistemic justification at all for holding the belief. At most it is parasitic on one. For instance,

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it would be beneficial to believe that a certain n1edication will be good for you because the evidence shows that this medication really is good for you. This is why, as we saw in the previous essay, it is never possible to produce a belief that p in yourself merely by reflecting on the fact that it would benefit you to believe that p. Unless there is also good evidence that p, some further mechanisn1 subversive of our cognitive processes, such as the motivation of belief by wishful thinking, or acts of intellectual dishonesty or self-deception, will be needed if you are to enjoy the alleged benefit. Thus even if it is true, and justified by the evidence, that believing p is beneficial, this latter, well-confirmed belief cannot play the decisive role in producing the belief that p. To use the beneficial effects of a belief as an argument for holding the belief (even if these effects are well-confirmed by evidence) is part of a way of thinking whose intellectual integrity has already been subverted and corrupted. It is symptomatic of this that James regards the beneficial effects of religious beliefs as also something that religion teaches us, and that we require our "passional nature" to believe in. Where it works, this kind of argument usually serves mainly as a way preventing yourself from thinking too much about a belief you want to hold on to, but feel slipping away because the weakness of the evidence for it, or the strength of the evidence against it, is becoming all too clear to you. The appeal of James' argument is not really to the evidence that religious illusions are beneficial in the long run, but simply the experienced fact that they give us the momentary pleasure of a rosy outlook or relief from the pain of dealing with reality. An unshakable "faith" in such illusions merely means that the state of anaesthesia has been prolonged indefinitely. In this regard, religious illusions have all the benefits of postponing an unpleasant task, running away from a danger you eventually have to face, or seeking refuge from the stresses of life in alcohol or drugs. 29

2.3

Practical Arguments for Religious Belief

The argument we have just been considering-that religious beliefs can be justified by the (alleged) fact that they have beneficial results-is 29Religion occasionally incorporates chemical abuse into its rites, but often shuns and conden1.ns intoxication, probably because substance abuse is one of religion's n1.ost serious competitors. Marx was right in saying that religion is the form of opium that is in widest uS y because even the poorest can afford it. James acknowledges the affinity between religious experience (in particular, mystical experience) and the debilitating mind-expansion of drugs in The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Random House, 1929), pp. 377-385.

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actually only one species of a larger genus, and certain other members lof that genus have been at least as famous and as promising. The genus is one I will call "practical argun1ents." They defend religious belief, even in the absence of evidence for them, through the way that these beliefs relate to pieces of practical reasoning. The argument we have been considering, for instance, can be seen as doing this in a very straightforward way: 1. We should do whatever is beneficial.

2. Holding religious beliefs is beneficial. 3. rrherefore, we should hold religious beliefs. The argument seems to be valid, but we have seen there are problems with both premises. Even a thoroughgoing consequentialist should have trouble accepting (1) without qualification; Clifford's Principle purports to identify a class of exceptions to it that are directly relevant to this argun1ent. The truth of (2) seems impossible to decide. Even if we grant the argument is sound, we have just seen that the conclusion does not get us all the way to a genuine reason for holding religious beliefs. Assun1ing (3) is true, what it tells us is that we have reason to wish that we held religious beliefs. It does not, however, create such beliefs, justify our forming them, or even justify our retaining them if we have them. In that respect, (3) is analogous to a proposition like: (L)We should be in possession of the winning lottery ticket. It would be easy to give a sound argument for (L) analogous to (1)(3), but that argun1ent would not supply us with the winning ticket. We have reason to wish n1any propositions true which we cannot directly make true or are forbidden directly to make true. The truth of (L), for instance, does not entail that we are entitled to steal or forge the winning lottery ticket. Practical arguments for religious belief, considered in light of Clifford's Principle, put us in a similar predicament. Other practical arguments relate religious belief to pieces of practical reasoning in different ways. Perhaps the two most famous practical arguments are Pascal's Wager and Kant's Moral Argument. 2.3.1

Pascal's Wager

Blaise Pascal was a philosopher and theologian, but also a brilliant mathematician, and one of the founders of what is now called 'decision theory' or 'rational choice theory'. He offered an argument that represents an attempt to use theorems of such a theory to argue for theistic belief. The argument admits that theistic belief cannot, at the theoretical level, be justified by reason. It therefore tries to show that it

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is rational to believe in God even contrary to reason. Or as Pascal also puts it: "There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavo,val of reason" (Pascal, Pensees 272, p. 78). Pascal is a fideist, even in a certain sense an irrationalist, and he thinks it is essential to religion itself that it go beyond reason and even require the sacrifice and submission of reason. But he is rationalist enough that he thinks irrationalism itself must be given a kind of reason if it is to be acceptable: "If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous" (Pascal, Pensees 273, p. 78). Some fideists, such as Kierkegaard, seem willing to embrace a religion that offends reason, and is therefore "absurd and ridiculous." Pascal is not one of them. His way, to put it in more Kantian-sounding language, is to provide an argument that gives us a practical reason for sacrificing theoretical reason. Pascal expresses the argun1ent that is supposed to answer to this paradoxical description in the following words: "If there is a God, he is infinitely incomprehensible, since having neither parts nor limits, he has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what he is or if he is. This being so, who will dare to undertake the decision of the question? Yes, but you must wager. It is not optional. Which will you choose, then? You have two things to lose, the true and the good, and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing the one than the other, since you must of necessity choose. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. It is all divided; wherever the infinite is and there is not an infinity of chances of loss against that of gain, there is no time to hesitate, you n1ust give all. And thus, when one is forced to play, he must renounce reason to preserve his life, rather than risk it for infinite gain, as likely to happen as is the loss of nothingness. This is demonstrable; and if men are capable of truths, this is one" (Pascal, Pensees 233, pp. 66-68).

The basic principle of decision theory used in Pascal's argument was stated in Arnauld and Nicole's The Art of Thinking (the so-called 'Port-Royal Logic')-probably they learned the principle from Pascal: "In order to decide what we ought to do to obtain some good or avoid some harm, it is necessary to consider not only the good or harm itself, but also the probability that it will or will not occur, and to view geometrically the proportion all these things have when taken togeth-

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er" (Arnauld, pp. 274-275).30 Pascal's conclusion from this proposition regarding religion is also stated a couple of pages later: "This is why even the slightest bit of help for acquiring salvation is worth more than all the goods of the world taken together. And the least peril of being lost is n10re important than all temporal harms considered merely as harn1s" (Arnauld, p. 275). We n1ay represent Pascal's argument this way: When we are presented with a set of options where with each option we have sonlething to gain or lose, and also a certain probability that the gain or loss will occur, the most rational choice is the one maximizing the product of the gain and the probability of its occurrence. Suppose, for instance, that I have to bet a dollar on the flip of a coin, and you give me the following odds: If the coin comes up heads and I bet heads, you will pay me two dollars, if it comes up tails and I bet tails, you will pay me a dollar and fifty cents. If I guess wrong, I lose my dollar. Then there are four possibilities:

1. 2. 3. 4.

Heads where I bet heads: I gain $1. Tails where I bet tails: I gain $0.50. Heads where I bet tails: I lose $1. Tails where I bet heads: I lose $1.

Probabilities range between 0 (meaning the event will certainly not occur) and 1 (meaning the event will certainly occur). Assuming the probability of heads is 0.5 and tails is 0.5, then the rational bet is heads. This is because the product of 0.5 and $1 is $0.50, whereas the product of 0.5 and $0.50 is only $0.25. We can represent a wager on the existence of God in similar terms. There are again, as Pascal presents it, four possibilities: 1. I believe in God and God exists: I gain infinite happiness. 2. I do not believe in God and God exists: I lose infinite happiness. 3. I believe in God and God does not exist: I lose finite happiness. (Pascal, whose religious temper was ascetical, supposes that belief costs the believer finite earthly pleasures in which the unbeliever may indulge.) 4. I do not believe in God and God does not exist: I gain finite happiness.

What is the probability that God exists? Pascal's argument concedes that it is far less than one, and requires only that it be greater than zero. 30 Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Logic or The Art of Thinking, ed. Jill Vance Buroker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Abbreviated as 'Arnauld' and cited by page number.

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For the product of the infinity to be gained and any nonzero probability, however small, yields infinity, whereas the finite loss or gain to be had by betting on God's nonexistence will always yield only a finite quantity. Therefore, no matter how improbable the existence of God may be (no matter how much evidence there is against the existence of God, so long as it does not render God's nonexistence certain), the rational bet is on belief, and it is irrational to bet on unbelief. Let us concede that the argument is valid (though this has not gone unchallenged in the literature on the argument). 31 Even so, Pascal's framing of the options open to us is problematic in a number of respects. Pascal supposes first that if there is a God, then whether you get eternal happiness or not depends on God's will, and second, that God makes his decision depending solely on whether you believe in him or not. If you believe in him, you gain eternal happiness, if you don't believe in him, you lose it. This second supposition is far n10re problematic than 31 For an excellent discussion of the argument, and citations of many other good discussions of it, see Alan Hajek, "Pascal's Wager," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 1999 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL == http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fa1l1999/entries/hajek. Hajek argues that, in addition to the other objections commonly raised against the argument, it is actually invalid. "There are strategies besides wagering for God that also have infinite expectation-namely, mixed strategies, whereby you do not wager for or against God outright, but rather choose which of these actions to perform on the basis of the outcome of some chance device. Consider the mixed strategy: 'Toss a fair coin: heads, you wager for God; tails, you wager against God'. By Pascal's lights, with probability 1/2 your expectation will be infinite, and with probability 1/2 it will be finite. The expectation of the entire strategy is: 1/2*00 + 1/2[f2*p + 13*(1 - p)] == 00 That is, the 'coin toss' strategy has the same expectation as outright wagering for God. But the probability 1/2 was incidental to the result. Any mixed strategy that gives positive and finite probability to wagering for God will likewise have infinite expectation: 'wager for God iff a fair die lands 6', 'wager for God iff your lottery ticket wins', 'wager for God iff a meteor quantum tunnels its way through the side of your house', and so on. The problem is still worse than this, though, for there is a sense in which anything that you do might be regarded as a mixed strategy between wagering for God, and wagering against God, with suitable probability weights given to each. Suppose that you choose to ignore the Wager, and to go and have a hamburger instead. Still, you may well assign positive and finite probability to your winding up wagering for God nonetheless; and this probability multiplied by infinity again gives infinity. So ignoring the Wager and having a hamburger has the same expectation as outright wagering for God. Even worse, suppose that you focus all your energy into avoiding belief in God. Still, you may well assign positive and finite probability to your efforts failing, with the result that you wager for God nonetheless. In that case again, your expectation is infinite again. So even if rationality requires you to perform the act of maximum expected utility when there is one, here there isn't one. Rather, there is a many-way tie for first place, as it were."

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the first. A Christian rationalist such as Locke does not believe God would decide matters this way: He thinks God would reward people not according to what they believe, but according to how they have made use of their faculties in forming their beliefs: "He that makes use of the Light and Faculties GOD has given him, and seeks sincerely to discover Truth, by those Helps and Abilities he has, may have this satisfaction in doing his Duty as a rational Creature, that though he should miss the Truth, he will not miss the Reward of it" (Locke 687). Pascal, as a fideist, is taking it for granted that if there is a God, then he is a God who approves of fideists and places no value on the intellectual integrity prized by Christian rationalists. This is not the only doubtful assumption of this sort concealed in Pascal's argument. Pascal knows perfectly well that there are many different gods in which people have believed (or not believed): Ra, Zeus, Baal, Jaweh. Even if we restrict ourselves to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, different religions and sects do not regard belief in him as salvific unless combined with the right other beliefs, practices, attitudes, and sacraments. Jews, Christians and Moslems each usually think the followers of any religion but their own are excluded from salvation. As Diderot observed, "An Imam could reason just as well this way" .32 Later in the Pensees, Pascal himself reflects at length on the fact that there are other faiths besides the Christian, and on the fact that reason cannot decide between them, yet also tries to vindicate the 'proofs' of Jesus Christ against the erroneous beliefs of Jews and Moslems. (Pascal, Pensees 736-801, pp, 222-237). He seems to have thought that non-Catholics were all damned; even within Catholicism, Pascal apparently thought that Jansenists are more likely to be saved than Jesuits. To set up the wager realistically, therefore, even by Pascal's own lights, we would need to estimate the probability not merely that there is a God, but that there is a God believed in and worshipped in a certain way, through certain practices and with certain attitudes, mediated by a certain history of prophets and historical testan1ents or dispensations. Even if the 'proofs' of Christianity are stronger than those for Judaism and Islam, for instance-that is, even if they make belief in a Christ more probable than in Jaweh or Allah-it seems unlikely that in Pascal's estimation the proofs would diminish the probability of Judaism or Islam to zero. In that case, and if each religion promises infinite happiness (if it is believed in) and threatens infinite loss (if it is not), then 3 2 Diderot, Denis. 1875-1877. Pensees Philosophiques, LIX, Oeuvres, ed. J. Assezat, Vol. 1.

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this infinity wipes out the differences in probability between the different faiths. So the wager does not provide us with any way of choosing one religion over another. Further, if a Lockean or rationalist God is considered a possible hypothesis with nonzero probability of truth (and how can Pascal exclude it?), then the fideist must reckon with the possibility that believing as he does (that is, in the conscious absence of good reason to think that what he believes is true) threatens the loss of infinite happiness too. As Locke says: "He that does not this [nan1ely, believing only as reason directs him to believe] to the best of his Power, however he sometimes lights on Truth, is in the right but by chance; and I know not whether the luckiness of the Accident will excuse the irregularity of his proceeding. This at least is certain, that he must be accountable for whatever Mistakes he runs into" (Locke, 687). Following Locke, even if the fideist lights by chance on the truth, there seems a nonzero probability that he will forfeit his infinite happiness anyway. Perhaps a rationalist, or Jewish, or Moslem God will give the fideist Christian believer only a finite reward (as a sort of consolation prize for getting it partly right). How shall we estimate the probabilities of all these various chances? In short, Pascal's wager is like a great many later applications of rational choice theory (for instance, in microeconomics), in that it involves an unrealistic idealization that abstracts from many things that he himself perfectly well knows, but would hopelessly complicate the elegant mathematics if we took them into account. As soon as you begin to consider the practical problem under assumptions rich enough to approximate the way we see things-or even the way Pascal himself sees things-then the reasoning becomes profoundly more complex and ceases to yield any determinate result at all. It is the same with a lot of economics and game theory, when their proponents try to apply them to the real world. In more recent applications, the theorist typically begins with a set of facts resulting from the way people have made choices. For instance, oil is currently selling for $15 a barrel or Microsoft for $67 a share, or some diplomat or businessman or labor representative has taken this or that position in some negotiation. Then the theorist engages in a dizzying idealization, ignoring massive amounts of exceedingly complex information directly relevant to why the people actually made the choices in question. The idealization yields a simple mathematically compelling argument that provides a putative rationale for the choice or behavior with which we began. The simple beauty of the reasoning becomes too ravishing for the theorist to resist. So the theorist claims that the argument 'explains' that choice or behavior by showing it to be 'rational'. More

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an1bitiously, a structured theory is then devised, consisting of similar abstract arguments and a set of hypotheses (also true only under idealized conditions, almost never in the real world) about the cumulative effect of all this putatively 'rational' behavior. It is then claimed that the theory provides 'microfoundations' for an entire system of human social behavior. A new science is born. But the proposed theories, explanations, and claims of 'rationality', when applied to the behavior of actual human beings, are worth nothing-or even less, since they present a deceptive appearance of rational behavior and its comprehension where there really is neither. It may seem tasteless to compare Pascal's wager argument to these shabby sophistries of modern econon1ics and game theory. Pascal was not only a brilliant m.athematician but also a man of undoubted sincerity and true religious sensitivity, while the more recent theories have been used chiefly as apologetics for the collective rationality of systems human behavior (war, politics, and above all markets) that often make fideist religious belief look good by comparison. Sadly, however, in respect of his wager argument Pascal is indeed the father of modern decision theory.

2.3.2 Kant's Moral Argument In1manuel Kant famously denies knowledge to make room for faith (KrV B xxx). By 'faith,' Kant means belief in something the evidence or theoretical proofs for which would warrant skepticism or suspense of judgment, and not belief. Yet Kant thinks that in certain cases, such as the belief in God, 'faith' in this sense is something for which a kind of rational argument can nevertheless be given, on moral grounds. Kant's argument works this way: Kant holds that if we make some state of affairs E our end, then we rationally commit ourselves to believe that E is possible of attainment through the actions we propose to take in its pursuit. The denial that E is possible of attainment, even the avowal of a suspense of judgment about E's possibility, is inconsistent with the profession of an intention to pursue E as an end. According to Kant's moral philosophy, however, we are morally obliged to promote a supreme moral end which Kant calls "the highest good". This end includes the apportionment of happiness to moral agents in accordance with their deserts. Thus anyone who fulfills the duty to promote this end is committed to believe it possible of attainn1ent. But Kant claims that the highest good is possible only if there is a God, a omniscient, omnipotent and morally perfect author of nature, through whose providential care alone the highest good could be actualized. Therefore, although in Kant's view the theoretical evidence regarding the existence

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of such a being would demand suspense of judgment regarding God's existence, moral agents who fulfill their duty to pursue the highest good are rationally committed to believe in God's existence. 33 Different versions of this moral argument are found near the end of all three of his Critiques. It represents in effect the culmination of Kant's philosophical reasoning in all three works. This is a sign of the fact that the argument has a number of presuppositions, both metaphysical and moral, which would need something like his own system of philosophy for their vindication. Instead of worrying about those assumptions (which would require us to evaluate the critical philosophy as a whole), I propose to step back and take a look at what the argument can show even if we grant that it is sound. We will see that Kant himself expresses the conclusion of the argument in different ways. Sometimes he thinks it justifies belief in God-that is, justifies our believing that there is a supremely perfect being, with an omniscient understanding and a holy will, who created the world and governs it. But sometimes his expression of this conclusion is weakened in various ways. I will argue that the argument, even if sound, does not adequately support the strongest form of the conclusion-that we are justified in believing there is a God-but it may justify some of the qualified forms, which are still philosophically and religiously significant. Kant's moral faith is apparently intended to be a belief held on insufficient evidence, without adequate epistemic (or theoretical) justification. Yet Kant did not intend it to be a belief incompatible with the demands of rational autonomy. He was very much aware of the fideisms of contemporaries like his friend J. G. Hamann or F. H. Jacobi, which he regarded as irrationalist, and wanted to distinguish his views sharply from theirs. Kant's most explicit statements on this point come from his essay "What is Orientation in Thinking?" which was his contribution to the famous controversy over reason and faith between Jacobi and the rationalist deist Moses Mendelssohn. The closing words of the essay indicate how far Kant is from Jacobi's fideism: "Friends of the human race and of what is holiest to it! Accept what appears to you most worthy of belief after careful and sincere examination, whether of facts or rational grounds; only do not dispute that prerogative of reason which nlakes it the highest good on earth, the prerogative of being the final touchstone of truth" (0 8: 146) . 331 have given an extensive explication of this argument in Kant's Moral Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), Chapters 1-4. This paragraph is a very brief summary of that account.

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2.3.3 Th.inking for Oneself How can Kant think that his defense of faith is compatible with this injunction to follow reason exclusively in matters of belief? He seems to suppose that the demands of rational autonomy are satisfied in regard to belief so long as the belief is arrived at through one's own reasoning, whether that reasoning rests on empirical evidence ("facts") or a priori arguments ("rational grounds"), whether they are theoretical proofs or practical arguments such as the one sumn1arized above. The fundamental principle of Kant's ethics of belief is not Clifford's Principle, but rather the principle of thinking for oneself: "Thinking for one's self means seeking the supreme touchstone for truth in oneself (i.e. in one's own reason); and the maxim of always thinking for oneself is enlightenment" (0 8: 146 note). Kant's ethics of belief is based on the principle that in matters where one's autonon1y is at stake, one's beliefs n1ust be arrived at through one's own rational thought rather than from reliance on the authority of others. The principle of thinking for oneself surely is an important principle for the ethics of belief. Kant held that we violate the principle of thinking for oneself, for example, when we defer to physicians in matters of health, or to books in forming our opinions about various things, or especially to clergymen in matters of religion and morality, and let doctors, authors or priests do our thinking for us (A 8:35). The proper scope of Kant's principle is not clear, however, since if left wholly unrestricted it (unlike Clifford's Principle) would deprive us of many beliefs we need in common life. A great many of our beliefs do depend on the testimony and sometimes on the thinking and expertise of others. In forming our beliefs, it would surely be irrational of us to try get along entirely without the testin10ny, thought and authority of others. Kant clearly does not intend the scope of the principle to be unrestricted, however. He thinks that our dignity and autonomy are compromised by reliance on others in some matters (in matters of health and religion, for instance), but by no means in everything. Once we determine in which matters our autonomy is compromised by reliance on the thinking of others, and restrict the principle of thinking for oneself accordingly, Kant's principle ranks alongside Clifford's Principle as part of any well-constituted ethics of belief. Kant's principle and Clifford's Principle, however, are quite independent. Both principles n1ight be valid (indeed, I think both are). A belief might be condemned according to one principle even though it satisfies the other. An epistemically justified belief could be condemned according to the principle of thinking for oneself if it is adopted on the

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authority of another but belongs to a province of life where one ought not to defer to authority, but should work the matter out for yourself, even where the authority provides you with a sound epistemic justification. And a belief that is arrived at through your own thinking can be condemned according to Clifford's Principle if your thinking does not provide you with sufficient evidence that the belief is true.

2.3.4 Belief from a Need of Reason. T'his is exactly what happens in the case of Kantian moral faith in God. Assuming that Kant is right that the theoretical evidence warrants suspense of judgment about God's existence, then belief in God's existence stands morally condemned by Clifford's Principle even if it passes the test of Kant's principle. Kant is therefore wrong in supposing that his moral faith is morally permissible simply because it is arrived at through one's own thinking rather than through reliance on authority. We can see that Kantian Inoral faith does indeed violate the denlands of rational autonomy if we reflect on the fact (already noted) that no practical argument can ever by itself produce belief in God. What Kant's argument shows, assuming it is sound, is that a conscientious moral agent is rationally committed to believe in God, and hence that such a belief would be a very desirable thing for such an agent to have. The desirability of belief, defended by a different practical argument, was Pascal's reason for recommending that we take steps to stupefy ourselves so as to bring about a practically advantageous (but epistemically unjustified) belief. Kant would no doubt have been horrified by Pascal's recommendations, and rightly so. But it is Pascal who shows the deeper insight into the psychological dynamics of a faith which, lacking sufficient theoretical justification, is forced to defend itself by practical arguments such as Kant's, or his own. 34 Kant actually says very little about how moral faith is to be acquired and maintained. He describes faith as an "assent from a need of reason" (KpV 5:142), and says that it results from a "voluntary determination of judgment" (KpV 5:146). But he never describes any way in which reason might be capable of satisfying its need, or explains how belief might ever arise from a voluntary determination based on a practical argument. "This is the only case in which my interest, because I may not give up anything of it, unavoidably determines my judgment" (KpV 5:143). 3 4 The explanation for Pascal's greater insight on this point, I think, is that he was a troubled soul, painfully aware of the difficulty of believing the gloomy doctrines of his Jansenist Christianity; whereas Kant was a man of more serene faith, whose austere deistic creed was specifically designed to place less strain on the intellect of a sincere and thinking person.

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This suggests that Kant is inclined to accept Clifford's Principle in general, but thinks of moral faith as a unique exception to it, because the "interest" and the emotional attachments to faith in God are bound up with n1orality. But that reasoning involves a non sequitur. The interest would give us a reason to want to believe, but it does not give us the belief itself, or indeed any means at all of satisfying the want. And if we found such a means, the question could still be asked whether it is permissible to take it.

2.3.5 The Minimum of Theology We must admit that if Clifford's Principle, Kant's theoretical agnosticism about God's existence and Kant's moral argument that unbelief in God is practically inconsistent with a moral disposition are all correct, then moral agents face a serious difficulty. But it is not obvious that the only solution to this difficulty is to make an ad hoc exception to Clifford's Principle. A more natural response to it might be to make an exception to the principle relating purposive action to belief in the attainability of one's purpose, so as to say that a person behaves consistently in pursuing an end while remaining agnostic about the possibility of its attainn1ent. At times Kant appears to accept this modification, though there he seems to be motivated more by considerations of religious tolerance than by worries connected with Clifford's Principle. Kant maintains that although "dogmatic" atheism is inconsistent with morality, "skeptical" atheism (which holds God's existence to be neither provable nor disprovable) suffices as a "minimum of theology" consistent with a moral disposition (R6:154n VpR 28:998). Given Kant's theoretical agnosticism about God, however, this would seem to be both the minimum and the maximum of theology that can be n10rally allowed by Clifford's Principle. 2.3.6 Religious Belief and Moral Motivation It might be argued that while this minimum might be enough to prevent a direct conflict between pursuit of the highest good as an end and belief about its possibility, a positive belief in God would harmonize better with a genuine moral commitment to bringing about a better world. For one's commitment would be strengthened by the confidence that the world's author is co-operating with one's efforts. This might seem to bring us back to the clain1 that religious faith is supposed to have beneficial effects. But here the argument does not appeal directly to those effects. The crucial claim is rather-as we also put it earlier at one point-that religious belief would be a fitting ex-

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pression of a strong commitment to morality. Strong moral motivation harmonizes with religious faith in a way that it does not harmonize with other beliefs. We could look at Kant's clainl simply as an empirical thesis about the relation between religious belief and the actual psychology of human motivation. People who believe there is a good God presiding over the world are in fact motivated to do good deeds, because they see these as co-operating with his efforts. People who lack these beliefs will get discouraged and quit. As an interpretation of Kant's moral arguments, however, this doesn't look convincing. The arguments are not presented as empirical sociology. As an empirical thesis, the claim that religious belief either produces or expresses moral motivation looks like a glittering generalization, and one that would be hard to evaluate just in general. But there seems to be considerable evidence against it. Criminal behavior, for example, is not negatively correlated with assent to religious doctrines. 35 Empirical studies have also shown that those who believe that the world is governed by a benevolent and just power tend rather to think that existing conditions are already just, and they tend to think this even when they themselves are victims of evident and severe injustices. People with such a belief tend, as compared to those who do not have such a belief, not to perceive the injustice and their own disadvantage, they attribute more blame for their disadvantages to themselves rather than their oppressors and to identify more with the standpoint of their oppressors, they tend to be more fatalistic about their situation, and they tend to be more resistant to change. 36 This suggests that people may be at least as well motivated to bring about the highest good if they believe that there is no humanity or justice built into the cosmic order, so that bringing about a better world is entirely up to us humans, and that there is no inevitability about the victory of good over evil (or, for that matter, about the victory of evil over good). This, moreover, on the basis of the imperfect evidence we have, would seem to be the kind of world we live in.

2.3.7

Belief, Assent and Acceptance

In its most appealing form, Kant's moral argument seems designed to show not that religious people are in fact more strongly motivated to 35 See Robert Adams, The Virtue of Faith, p. 156. In support of this claim, Adams cites Michael Argyle, Religious Behavior (London: Routledge, 1958), pp. 96-99. 36For a review of the evidence, see John T. Jost, "Negative Illusions: Conceptual Clarification and Psychological Evidence Concerning False Consciousness," Political Psychology, Volurne 16, No.2 (1995), especially pp. 402-413.

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act morally, but rather that there is some sort of inconsistency or failure of rationality involved in being morally motivated while denying God's existence. What the argument shows, if sound, is that there is sonie sort of clash between our moral conlnlitment and a denial of certain religious teachings. But what is not yet wholly clear exactly what would be required to resolve the conflict, and whether belief in God is precisely what is needed to resolve it. I think that if we become clearer about this, we can see how Kant's argurnent might, in a different way, take us at least a little beyond the 'minimum of theology' though it will not get us all the way to a justification of belief on insufficient evidence. There is some variation, to which scholars have seldom attended, in the ways Kant expresses the conclusion of his moral argument. He does often speak of moral "belief" or "faith" (Glaube). Yet he also says, as we have seen in some of the passages already quoted, that the conclusion of the argument is an "accepting" (Annehmen) of God's existence, or "assent" (Fiirwahrhalten) to the existence of God, even an assent "in a moral respect" (in moralischer Absicht) (KpV 5:146). Assenting to or accepting a proposition is not necessarily the same as believing it, and it might be that a practical argument such as Kant's could justify these propositional attitudes even if it does not justify belief. This way of reading Kant makes sense of the passages we quoted above that seemed problematic when we tried to understand them as saying that a practical argument could result in belief Avoiding the threat of incoherence between what you do in setting the highest good as an end and what you think in refusing to agree that this end is possible of attainment might be seen as a reason to assent to the existence of God or accept it (in thoughts or words), even if you do not have enough evidence to believe it. Your commitment to pursue the highest good as an end, plus your resolve to avoid incoherence between your practical and theoretical commitments could easily lead to a "voluntary determination of your judgment" that you should consistently accept and assent to the existence of God. Acts of assent and acceptance, unlike beliefs, can be direct results of a voluntary decision. It even makes sense to speak of assenting to a proposition "in a practical respect" or "for practical purposes." For the point of the assent is to avoid a practical incoherence between one's beliefs and one's moral commitment to pursue an end, so it seems right to say that one's assent is only relative to, or in respect to, that end. Thus if Kant were to draw a distinction between saying that his argument justifies assent or acceptance, and saying that it justifies belief or faith (Glaube), he nlight conceivably avoid violating Clifford's Principle while still deriving a significant conclusion froln his practical

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argument for the existence of God. Of course there is a danger here of falling into a sort of dishonesty with oneself somewhat analogous to the sort we saw earlier in the case of those who profess belief according to a creed. To assent to or accept a proposition is usually a sign that you believe it. If you habitually assent to or accept a proposition you do not believe, it looks like you are simply lying--to others, or even to yourself. But not necessarily. It all depends. The sort of assent or acceptance without belief justified by Kant's argument n1ight be not only consistent with maintaining our intellectual integrity, but actually required by it. We philosophers often not only assent to and accept but also argue in favor of theories of reference, or views about the nature of mind, or ethical theories such as Kantianism and consequentialism, or philosophical theses such as the indeterminacy of translation, or the tenability of the analytic-synthetic distinction, and we also defend these theories and theses against the objections and arguments of other philosophers. We often not only feel the force of these objections and counter-arguments, but we regard it as part of our honest consideration of the issue to try to sympathize with the opposing position while we are considering it, and to let the considerations in favor of it have their way with us, so to speak, while we are considering them. Not only in writings and conversations, but even in our private thoughts we may never cease to assent to and accept the theories and theses we continue to defend. Doing this is not only compatible with intellectual honesty and strict adherence to Clifford's Principle, but it is arguably required by them. Despite this unwavering assent and acceptance, it is not clear that our attitude toward our pet theories and theses could always be accurately described as belief Sometimes philosophers obviously do believe the theses they defend, just as they believe in all sorts of common sense facts and in the results of science. In other cases, however, this is less clear. On many matters, philosophers may find that the best we can ever hope for regarding the philosophical views we defend (and it is often quite good enough) is a firm but always tentative acceptance, expressing itself in a consistent assent (whenever the issue comes up). If we have beliefs regarding these issues (that conflict with the beliefs of other philosophers), they usually concern the cogency of certain arguments or objections, or the relative strength of the considerations on either side of the issue. That is, we believe that the arguments in favor of the thesis we accept and assent to are rationally stronger than the arguments against it. That, in fact,

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is why we accept it and assent to it. 37 But do we always believe the thesis itself, or think that our belief about the state of the arguments requires us to believe the thesis? I think in some cases the answer is no, and in others it is very hard to say, or it depends on when, how and by whom the question is posed to us. 38 Further, I submit that our vagueness and uncertainty on this point is not only consistent with our acceptance of Clifford's Principle, but it is even one of the clearest possible expressions of it. Suppose Kant regards the existence of God as a philosophical thesis regarding which there are various arguments, for and against. The theoretical arguments, on both sides, prove to be inconclusive. No genuine belief is therefore possible either way. But there are practical arguments to the effect that we can maintain our moral commitments coherently with our theoretical ones only by accepting and assenting to the proposition that God exists. If we are to set the highest good as our end and not to fall into practical incoherence, we have a rational need to assent to the proposition that God exists. So because we believe (or perhaps even know) that these arguments are of compelling strength, we consistently make the voluntary determination of judgment to accept and assent to that proposition. This reading of the conclusion of Kant's moral argument for God's 37Hume's Philo, toward the end of his dialogue with Cleanthes, drops the irony and "raillery" he has been practicing while Demea was party to the conversation, and finally delivers his "unfeigned sentiments on this subject." Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, p. 82. He then makes the following declaration: "If the whole of natural theology resolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous proposition, That the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence, ... what can the most inquisitive, contemplative and religious man do more than give a plain, philosophical assent to this proposition as often as it occurs, and believe that the arguments on which it is established exceed the objections which lie against it?" (Hume, Dialogues, p. 88). Philo's words here are well chosen. He assents to the philosophical proposition, and reserves his expression of belief for the claim that the arguments for it preponderate over those against it. Philo is not speaking here as a skeptic, but is conceding to Cleanthes the conclusion he has disputed through much of the dialogues. But his concession is the more admirable because it is made in a manner suited to an honest man with a genuinely philosophical mind. 38 1 have heard it reported that shortly after the publication of A Theory of Justice, and while he was fully engaged in defending the contents of that book against objections in the large literature it was generating, John Rawls was asked by a graduate student whether he believed the theory contained in his book was true. Rawls, who has always spoken with a slight stutter, is supposed to have thought for a moment, looked the student straight in the eye, and said: "P-p-probably not." This story, whether it is true or not, is entirely credible. I have never met anyone in the field of philosophy whose intellectual honesty and seriousness I would rank clearly ahead of Rawls', and this story only provides further evidence for that.

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existence certainly appears to conflict with his use of the tern1 Glaube in such contexts. Just as surely, it makes extremely good sense of his use of terms like Annehmen, and expressions like "assent from a need of reason," "voluntary determination of the judgment" and even "assent in a moral respect". Such a purely philosophical attitude toward the existence of God should not satisfy religious people who are looking for faith in God. It is not close enough to belief to merit the award of eternal happiness from Pascal's fideist God. But a rationalist or Lockean God would understand and sympathize with it. One thing I do firmly believe-and with good reason-is that a wise and good God would sooner reward someone with that attitude than he would the kind of self-despising, self-stupefying believer fideist Christians aspire to be.

Kant's Deism 3.1

What Is Deism?

Kant defines a "deist" as someone who admits only a "transcendental theology," that is, who ascribes to God only properties which can be derived fron1 a priori concepts; by contrast, a "theist" is someone who also admits a "natural theology," applying to God, by analogy, the properties of creatures known to us through experience (VpR 28:1001,1023). In his concept of God, says Kant, the deist "understands merely a blindly working eternal nature as the root of all things, an original being or supreme cause of the world" (VpR 28:1047). A deist, therefore, will say that God is supremely perfect, necessarily existent, a single extramundane substance, immutable, impassible, all-sufficient, omnipresent, omnipotent, timelessly eternal, and a cause of the world (VpR 28:1031-1046). But only a theist predicates of God the qualities drawn froln the human mind; only the theist can say that God lives, knows, and wills (VpR 28:1047-1062). In this sense, of course, Kant is a theist and not a deist. He thinks that we are justified in ascribing to the ens realissimum the predicates of finite things, especially of the human intellect and will, so long as we do so by analogy (VpR 28:1047-1048) and are careful not to ascribe human imperfections to God; and Kant insists that only the idea of God as a living, knowing, and willing being is adequate for the purposes of our moral faith in providence (VpR 28:1001-1002). Kant's definition of "deisn1," however, is idiosyncratic, less a reflection of common seventeenth and eighteenth-century usage than a device to deflect reproach from Kant's own heterodox religious views. 'fhe first known use of the term in a sense opposed to "theism" is found in the Calvinist theologian Pierre Viret's Instruction chrestienne (1563). Viret characterized deists as "those who profess belief in God as

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creator of heaven and earth, but reject Jesus Christ and his doctrines." 1 Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, probably best known for his exchanges with John Locke, described the addressee of his polemical "Letter to a Deist" (1677) as "a particular person who owned the Being and Providence of God, but expressed mean esteem of the Scriptures and the Christian religion."2 The poet John Dryden, in the preface to his poem "Religio Laici" (1682), defined "deism" as "the opinion of those that acknowledge one God, without the reception of any revealed religion."3 In his Dictionary of 1775, Samuel Johnson defined deism as "Belief in a God, but rejection of all other articles of religious faith." 4 All these characterizations are given by people who are trying to display deisn1 in an unattractive light. Nevertheless, the main significance of the term is clear enough from them, and Dryden's definition, at least, is both clear enough and fair enough to be quite usable. A deist is a monotheist who believes in the goodness and providence of God but refuses to embrace a revealed faith based on the biblical traditions of Christianity. In other words, a deist is a believer in a natural religion, a religion founded on unaided reason, but not in a revealed religion, a religion founded on a supernatural revelation through scripture. My purpose here is to consider how far Kant is a deist in this sense and to examine some of Kant's arguments in favor of deism. The very title of Kant's principal work on religion, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blojJen Vernunft, clearly raises the issue. In that title, the word "blojJ" n1eans "unassisted" or "unaided," that is, without the aid or assistance of supernatural revelation. The reference of the title, therefore, is precisely to the deist's natural or rational religion: a religion within the boundaries of unassisted natural reason, religion without the supernatural aid of miracles, signs or other divine revelations through mystical experience, ecclesiastical tradition, or holy scripture. But the title by itself does not necessarily imply that Kant embraces the deistic position that religion can get along without revelation. Some of Kant's own formulations are meant to appease those who think it cannot. III the Preface to the Second Edition of 1794, Kant has this comment on the book's title: 1 Pierre Viret, Instruction chrestienne (Geneva, 1563), vol. 2, Epistle 2Edward Stillingfieet, Bishop of Worcester, A Letter to a Deist (London Moses Pitt, 1682). 3John Dryden, Religio Laici; Or, a Laymans Faith (London J. Tonson, 1682), Preface. 4Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London. W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton, 1775). See also my article "Deism," in Mircea Eliade, et al., eds., The Encyclopedia of Religion (New York Macmillan, 1987), vol. 4, 262-64.

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Since, after all, revelation can at least comprise also the pure religion of reason, whereas, conversely, the latter cannot do the same for what is historical in revelation, I shall be able to consider the first as a wider sphere of faith that includes the other, a narrower one, within itself (not as two circles external to one another but as concentric circles) (R 6:12).

Moreover, at crucial junctures Kant indicates that the religion of reason has need of revealed traditions: owing to "a special weakness in hun1an nature," he says, a church cannot be grounded solely on the religion of unassisted reason but requires an "ecclesiastical faith" based on an empirical revelation (R 6:103). The preservation of pure religious faith unchanged over long periods of time, he says, has been best facilitated not by tradition alone but only with the help of revered scriptures or holy books which, he wryly adds, are treated with the greatest reverence by those who do not read them (R 6:107).

3.2

Ecclesiastical Faith and Human History

As these remarks indicate, Kant thinks of the necessary function of revealed religion as social or historical, and so his conception of the relation of revealed or ecclesiastical faith to the religion of pure reason must be understood in the context of his philosophy of history. Kant does not think that experience enables us to resolve the question whether in its history the human race is improving, getting worse, or remaining about the same; but he does hold that we can look at the evidence in light of our practical vocation to improve ourselves and try in this way to form conjectures about the way nature or providence might contrive the progress of our species (SF 7:81-84, I 8:29-31). According to the Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Standpoint (1 784), the chief goal nature has set for the human race is the fashioning of a "universal civil society" which is able to protect the freedom to which rational beings have a fundamental right and thereby enable them fully to develop and perfect their manifold capacities (I 8:22). The means nature has used in working toward this end is the human trait of "unsociable sociability," the human passion to "achieve a rank among one's fellows, whom he cannot suffer but also cannot leave alone" (I 8:21). People are thus driven together into societies, all seeking dominion over the others, abusing such freedom as they have and struggling to violate the freedom of others. This struggle leads to the founding of states, in which a supreme authority achieves mastery over the lawless wills of its subjects, forcing them to obey a law that is universally valid and confining each within its rightful sphere (I 8: 17). The remaining task of the human race in the political realm is to establish a constitu-

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tion in which the powers of the state are administered with complete justice; Kant is convinced that this task cannot be fulfilled completely until states establish a lawful order regulating their external relations with each other and this is son1ething which Kant thinks there are definite historical tendencies for states to do (I 8:24-26). Nearly a decade later, in Religion, Kant attempts an analogous historical conjecture as regards a purely ethical society founded not on public laws of external right but on moral laws which ought to govern people's inner dispositions. "The species of rational beings is determined objectively, in the idea of reason, to a common end, namely the furthering of the highest good as the good of a community" (R 6:97). Kant claims that the highest moral good cannot be brought about only through individuals striving after their own moral perfection, rather, the highest moral good requires them to unite into a whole for the promotion of the moral improvement of each and all, a "universal republic according to laws of virtue" (R 6:98). Because the laws of this community have to do with morality rather than strict right, membership in it must be optional (R 6:96) and the scope of this community should be in principle universal, extended to the whole of humanity rather than lin1ited to anyone people (R 6:97). Just as Kant finds in the political state the empirical ectype of a realm of external justice, so he finds the empirical ectype for the universal ethical republic in the churches of various empirical religious faiths (R 6:100). And as empirical states have been highly imperfect, often straying far from their rational end of establishing external justice, so churches and ecclesiastical faiths have regularly fallen short of their task. Their chief failing has been to encourage not morally good conduct of life, which is their proper office, but rather the performance of statutory observances, in themselves morally indifferent. Instead of cultivating a disposition to moral freedom, they have typically promoted cult and prayer, often combining such activities with superstitious belief in miracles, enthusiastic pretensions to supersensible experience, and fetishistic attempts to produce supernatural occurrences through ritual acts (R 6:53,86,106,174,177-78). Worst of all, they have subjected the consciences of individuals to a hierarchy of priests, undern1ining the individual freedom of conscience which is the very essence of rational religion and enslaving the very soul itself, where the proper function of true religion is precisely to liberate it (R 6: 134n, 175-80, 185-90). The historical function of ecclesiastical faith is to serve as the vehicle for pure rational religion (R 6:106). But it is also the shell in which rational religion is encased and from which it is humanity's historical

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task to free the religion of reason (R 6:121, 135n). It is not Kant's view that this n1ust involve the actual abolition of ecclesiastical faiths: "Not that [the shell] should cease (for perhaps it will always be useful and necessary as a vehicle) but that it will be able to cease" (R 6:135n). Kant does, however, look forward to the time when "the form of a church itself is dissolved, the viceroy on earth steps into the same class as the hun1an being raised to a citizen of heaven, and so God will be all in all" (R 6:135). The plain intent here is eventually to abolish the church's hierarchical constitution and, with it, the tutelage of humanity to a class of priests who (in Kant's view) usurp the authority of individuals over their own beliefs and consciences. To think for oneself, Kant says, is the vocation of each and every human being (A 9:36). When someone's thinking is subject to the guidance or direction from others, as the thought and conduct of children is to the direction of their parents, then that person is in the condition of "tutelage" or "n1inority" (Unmundigkeit) (A 9:35). The greatest human indignity occurs when free adult human beings are also in a state of tutelage. There is nothing offensive, of course, about acquiring information and advice from others, or in listening to and being persuaded by their arguments, or treating the informed opinion and wisdom of others with the deference and respect it deserves. What disturbs Kant is the way that people tend simply to let others do their thinking for them, the way they substitute deference to the authority of others for the critical use of their own reason in matters of central importance to the conduct of their lives. To do that is not to show due respect for the wisdom and expertise of others but utter disrespect for oneself as a rational being. Religious faith is not the only form taken by such degrading tutelage; people put themselves in tutelage not only to priests but also to teachers, lawyers, physicians, and the printed page (A 9:35). (This last, of course, was virtually the sole mediun1 of mass communication available in Kant's day. The list of media threatening critical thought would have to be greatly expanded to apply to the twenty-first century.) But Kant lays stress on religious tutelage because, of all the forms of tutelage, he regards it as "the most harmful and degrading" (A 9:41). Hence the most fundan1ental change which Kant demands in .ecclesiastical faith is what he calls "enlightenment." Kant defines "enlightenment" as "release from self-incurred tutelage." Tutelage is "self-incurred" when it is due not to the immaturity or incapacity of one's faculties but to the lack of courage and resolve to think for oneself (A 9:35). This does not mean, however, that Kant lays the blame for tutelage entirely on the individuals subject to it. He recognizes that ecclesiastical faiths have

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devised highly effective means of inculcating "pious terror" into people and powerful means of playing on the human propensity to a "servile faith in divine worship" (gottesdienstlich Frohnglauben). Such methods regularly destroy people's confidence in their own capacities, frightening them away from honest doubt and thus preventing them from ever acquiring a faith free of servile hypocrisy (R 6:133n, 188-90). Kant is confident that in the long rUll, the powers of "inner compulsion" must inevitably yield to the progressive forces of moral insight; but he urges the secular authority not to hinder this progress by "supporting the ecclesiastical despotism of some tyrants in his state over his other subjects" (A 9:40). Perhaps there was a time when most human beings benefited by the paternal guidance of priests and could do no better than to follow the revealed statutes of the church, handed down by tradition and recommended on the supernatural authority of divine revelation. But to be in such a condition is to be treated both by oneself and by the authorities as less than a human adult, less than a fully rational being. Kant sees the highest vocation of his age as that of putting an end to this condition, which still harms and degrades the vast majority of people. That is why Kant describes his own time (soberly) not as an enlightened age but (optimistically) as an age of enlightenment (A 9:40). The leading-string of holy tradition, with its appendages, its statutes and observances, which in time did good service, become bit by bit dis..;. pensable, yea, finally, when a human being enters upon its adolescence, turn into a fetter. So long as he (the human species) 'was a child, he was as clever as a child', and knew how to combine learning too, and even a philosophy helpful to the church, with propositions imposed upon him without any of his doing: 'But when he becomes a man, he puts away childish things.' The degrading distinction between laity and clergy disappears, and equality springs from true freedom, yet without anarchy, for each indeed obeys the law (not the statutory one) which he has prescribed for himself, yet each must regard it at the same time as the will of the world ruler as revealed to him through reason, and this ruler invisibly binds all together, under a common government, in a state inadequately represented and prepared for in the past through the visible church (R 6: 121-122).

3.3

Rational Religion

Essential to any deism is the view that there is such a thing as rational or natural religion, religion based on natural reason and not on supernatural revelation. Kant clearly holds that there is rational religion in

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this sense. Kant defines "religion" as "the cognition of all duties as divine commands" (R 6:153). But this definition is in need of commentary on several counts. Kant understands religion not as a matter of theoretical knowledge but as a matter of subjective practical disposition (KpV 5:129, KU 5:481, SF 7:36, VpR 28:998; cf. A 9:818). Thus the definition must be understood in the sense that religion is "the n1.oral disposition to observe all duties as [God's] con1mands" (R 6:105). Kant is emphatic that there need not be any special duties to God in order for there to be religion; he also denies that theoretical cognition of God's existence is required for religion-naturally enough, since he thinks that no such cognition is available to us (R 6:153-54n). What does seem requisite to religion is that (1) we have duties, (2) we have a concept of God, and (3) we are capable of regarding our duties as something God wills us to do. Now Kant holds that these three requirements for religion can all be met solely through reason. That we have duties is presumably proven in rational moral philosophy. That we have a concept of God as a supren1.ely perfect being is argued in detail and with sophistication by Kant in the unjustly neglected second section of "The Ideal of Pure Reason.,,5 That God wills the fulfillment of our duties follows from his supreme perfection as the ideal of pure reason and the fact that duties are imperatives of reason. A purely rational or natural religion, therefore, is possible. Of course, Kant plainly associates religion in this sense with rational or moral faith in God's existence, in the immortality of the soul, and in God's forgiving grace, which makes it possible for us to satisfy the den1.ands of the moral law despite the propensity to radical evil in our nature. He holds that while we cannot have theoretical cognition or knowledge of any of these matters, we can attain to practical cognition, rational conviction, or faith in them through the famous (or infan1ous) moral proofs with which Kant's name is associated. 6 But although Kant himself credits these proofs and sees them as harmonizing with rational religion (R 6:3-7), it is far from clear that he regards the acceptance of his proofs-or any other rational arguments, theoretical or practical, for their conclusions-as necessary for a rational "religion" in the strict sense. Kant is emphatic in Religion that for religion "no assertoric knowledge (even of God's existence) is required; . .. but only a problematic assumption (hypothesis) as regards specu5S ee my book Kant's Rational Theology (Ithaca, N. Y. Cornell University Press, 1978), 25-94. 6These moral arguments are expounded sympathetically in nlY book Kant's Moral Religion (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970).

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lation about the supreme cause of things." Though Kant refers to this requisite as a "free assertoric faith," he explains that "this faith needs merely the idea of God . .. only the minimum cognition (it is possible that there is a God) has to be subjectively sufficient" (R 6:153-54; cf. VpR 28:998). Apparently I can be a religious person in Kant's sense even if I am an agnostic, so long as my awareness of moral duty is enlivened with the thought that if there is a God, the fulfillment of my duties is commanded by him. Kant wants to broaden rational religion in this way because he thinks that a religion of reason must be open to all rational beings who use their reason honestly. To demand an "assertoric knowledge," even of God's existence, as a prerequisite for rational religion would be to demand for religion more in the way of theoretical faith than that "to which all morally serious (and therefore faithful) striving for the good must inevitably lead." It would be to demand "a confession which might be hypocritical" due to "our lack of insight into supersensible objects" (R 6:153-54n). It is worth emphasizing the extreme modesty of the theoretical demands for Kantian rational religion, because the usual strategy of deism's most formidable religious opponents, from the acute Bishop Butler in the eighteenth century down to the present day, has been to charge that if revealed religion stands on shaky epistemic foundations, so equally does the deist's natural religion. 7 It has always seemed to me that this line of argument would better suit the aims of those who want to reject all religion than those who want to affirm revealed religion rather than natural religion. As a way of shoring up conspicuously shaky claims to knowledge, this strategy of indiscriminate skepticismwhich has been aptly called the strategy of "poisoning the wells"s-is surely bound to fail, since it does not alter the relative strength of the evidence for different views but only raises dust in the faces of us who are examining the evidence. But however all this may be, Kant seems to be very much aware of the skeptical strategy and intends to counter it by emphasizing how modest the claims of rational religion are and how little they need to strain the intellect of an honest person. Of course, the standard antideist response at this point is to ridicule natural religion for its aridity and emptiness as compared with the fulsome heart-swelling fantasies of revealed faith. But such reproaches miss the mark at least partly, since the point for Kant is to guarantee the flexibility, not the poverty, of ra7 Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham, The Analogy of Religion to the Constitution of the Course of Nature (New York Frederick Ungar, 1961). 8Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (Harmondsworth, U. K. Penguin, 1978), 26n.

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tional faith. Kant regards the content of rational religion for any given individual as including whatever that individual may believe through reason about the God whom we regard as commanding the fulfillment of moral duties. Some may be led by rational reflection only to the "minimum of theology" necessary for rational religion, while others may be able to convince themselves of considerably more than this: Kant himself, for instance, is convinced of immortality, divine providence, and even of God's forgiving grace. Kant's Religion itself exhibits a concerted effort to provide a rationalist interpretation of Christian doctrine and imagery so as to include as much as possible of it within the religion of pure reason. The only unequivocal concession which Kant must make at this point concerns the uniformity of belief in rational religion. But as Kant sees it, genuine religious solidarity does not rest on the confession of a uniform symbol or creed anyway; Kant suspects such credal formulas of contributing more to a spirit of hypocrisy within people and between them than to anything else. What unites believers in rational religion is not the content of their beliefs but the morality of their dispositions and their propensity to associate their moral vocation with the thought of God. On what they believe, rational believers may differ each being led by reason to a wholly personal creed. But as Kant sees it, this is quite as it should be in a religion which encourages us to regard ourselves as free adult rational beings whose basic convictions should always be the results of our own thinking.

3.4

Rationalism and Deism

A deist is someone who believes in a natural or rational religion rather than a religion based on supernatural revelation. We have seen that Kant does believe in a natural or rational religion. What we have now to examine is his attitude toward the claims of revealed religion. The authority of ecclesiastical faith rests on its claims to empirical or historical revelation as preserved in scriptural documents and ecclesiastical tradition. Hence Kant's views about the claims of revelation, and consequently his position as regards deism, are intimately bound up with his view of the function and the shortcomings of ecclesiastical faith. Kant provides us with what is probably the most explicit account of his position on revelation at the opening of Book IV, Part I of Religion (R 6:153-55). But the account is a bit confusing, and Kant is a trifle coy about exactly where he stands. Kant begins with a flurry of definitions. Religion in general is the recognition of one's duties as commands of God. A religion in which my

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knowledge of something as a duty depends on my knowledge of it as a divine command is a revealed religion whereas a religion in which my knowledge of something as a divine command depends on my knowledge of it as a duty is a natural religion. Kant calls a "rationalist" anyone who holds that natural religion alone is morally necessary. A rationalist may either believe or deny that there is revealed religion. A rationalist who denies the reality of all supernatural revelation is a naturalist, whereas one who accepts the reality of such revelation (while of course regarding it as morally unnecessary) is a pure rationalist. Someone who not only believes in revealed religion but also holds it to be morally necessary is a pure supernaturalist. Though he does not avow it in so many words, it seems clear that Kant's position is a rationalist one. From this it follows that he is comn1itted to denying pure supernaturalism, since pure supernaturalism affirms, while rationalism denies, that a revealed religion is morally necessary. But it is equally clear that Kant is not a naturalist: he insists that it would transcend the limits of human insight to claim that supernatural revelation has not occurred (R 6:155). What may be less clear is Kant's attitude toward pure rationalism, the view that recognizes the reality of supernatural revelation but nevertheless denies that belief in it is morally necessary. But "pure rationalism" seems scarcely deserving of its nan1e, and it is hard to imagine anyone who would hold it. For it apparently takes the position that God has given us certain commands supernaturally while denying that we are morally bound to carry them out. This surely cannot be a position Kant intends to en1brace. Kant's only purpose in mentioning pure rationalism at all seems to be the rhetorical one of cushioning his evident denial of pure supernaturalism. Kant is plainly a rationalist because he is simply an agnostic about supernatural revelation. Kant's disavowal of all claims to transcendent knowledge justifies his refusal to assert that there is no such thing as supernatural revelation. On the other hand, it justifies equally his refusal to admit the possibility that anyone might have adequate grounds for claiming the authenticity of any particular putative revelation. This is stated most clearly in The Conflict of the Faculties: "If God actually spoke to a human being, the latter could never know that it was God who spoke to him. It is absolutely impossible for a human being to grasp the infinite through the senses, so as to distinguish him from sensible beings and be acquainted with him" (SF 7:63). Kant's position, then, is that there may be such a thing as supernatural revelation but, if there is, no human being can ever know that there is and no particular claim to supernatural revelation can ever be deserving of our

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rational assent. For that very reason, belief in supernatural revelation cannot be required of us as a duty: for it would be a duty which one could fulfill only by holding a belief which no human being could ever be theoretically justified in holding. In his own terms, then, Kant's position is simple rationalism: natural religion alone is morally necessary. He rejects not only pure supernaturalism, which holds that belief in supernatural revelation is morally necessary, but also naturalism, which denies that there is such revelation; and he eschews pure rationalism, which affirms that there is such revelation while denying that it is morally necessary to accept it. Of these four positions, naturalisn1 most clearly deserves to be called a "deist" view, since it alone positively rejects the existence of supernatural revelation. But Kant's rationalism also fits Dryden's definition of deism as "the opinion of those that acknowledge one God, without the reception of any revealed religion"; for although Kant does not deny the possibility of a supernaturally revealed religion, he seems plainly not to accept such a religion himself, and he denies that it can be morally necessary to accept it. In that sense, it seems accurate to say that Kant acknowledges one God, but his position involves no "reception" of revealed religion; and so I think we ought to conclude that Kant is accurately described as a deist.

3.5

Reason and Revelation

We have already become acquainted with two of the main premises on which Kant's deism rests: the theoretical premise that our faculties afford us no cognition of the supersensible and the practical premise that the vocation of every rational being is thinking for oneself. But it is now time to look at Kant's arguments for deism in a bit more detail. For it is not immediately evident that the two premises just mentioned preclude the possibility of a revealed religion or even the possibility that such a religion might belong to what God might morally require of us. Kant himself acknowledges that rational thinking, in the form of the moral arguments for faith in God, justifies a religious faith which goes beyond what our powers of theoretical cognition can afford us. Why might not such thinking also justify us in embracing a faith in supernatural biblical revelation as a consequence of our predicament as moral beings? Such a direction was actually given to Kant's doctrine of rational religious faith by Hegel's sometime teacher, the Tiibingen

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biblical theologian Gottlob Christian Storr (See R 6:13).9 Does Kant have good grounds for rejecting Storr's alternative? The main lines of the Religion's argument on this point are clear and are repeated a number of times in the book: only that can be morally required which is universal and common equally to all human beings. The commands of rational morality and the modest requirements of rational religion can meet this universality test, but the claims of an empirical revelation cannot. Pure [rational religious faith] alone can found a universal church, because it is a faith of unassisted reason, which n1ay be comn1unicated with conviction to everyone; but a historical faith, insofar as it is grounded merely on facts, can extend its influence no further than the news of it, in respect of time and circumstances, can acquire the capacity to make themselves worthy of belief. (R 6:102-03)

Kant's claim is apparently that rational morality, and the religion founded on it, is equally credible to all people, irrespective of time and circumstance, but any faith based on empirical (historical) facts about a putative divine revelation is necessarily more credible to those more closely acquainted with the facts and the tradition which preserves the record of them than to those who have the misfortune to be less well acquainted with these matters. From this Kant concludes that if we regard belief in a revealed faith as morally necessary, we are committed to giving the historically learned an inherent moral advantage over the unlearned, a consequence Kant regards as morally unacceptable (R 6:164; VpR 28:998-999). This line of argument seems to me rather dubious. First, it seems empirically false that any kind of knowledge or human capacity is distributed to people with perfect equality, so that if the only moral demands on people 'were those resting on completely equal capacities, then the conclusion would have to be that nothing whatever could be morally demanded of people. But even worse, it also seems untrue that rational religion holds any advantage over revealed religion as regards the empirical extent of its accessibility. If there is a determinate history to the dissemination of the Christian message, and determinate temporal and geographical limits to the credibility of this tradition, a morality founded on reason seems equally to belong to a determinate culture and its dissemination has a determinate tradition, much more limited in spatial and temporal extent than that of Christian revelation. Part of the trouble with Kant's argument is the tempting and char9Gottlob Christian Storr (1746-1805), Annotationes quaedam theologicae ad philosophicam Kantii de religione doctrinam (Tiibingen Typus Fuestianus, 1793).

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acteristically Kantian but sadly unrealistic idea that before the cosmic bar of moral judgment, all must somehow ultimately stand as perfect equals, to be judged solely on their intrinsic merits. But its even more obvious and flagrant defect is the way in which it seems to insist on taking the spatiotemporal extent of a faith's dissemination as the sole measure of its credibility. This seems neither plausible in itself nor likely to bring out the advantages which rational religion might reasonably claim over revealed religion. For if the contest turns solely on historical pedigree and control over the cultural engines of dissemination, the victory will of course go not to the religion of reason but to revealed faith, and even within revealed faith the rankest and most pernicious popular superstitions are likely to score higher than the traditions representing wisdom and goodness. (We need only to consider the forms of revealed faith which have greatest access to the media of mass communication today.) Moreover, despite being deprived of the opportunity to watch the "700 Club" on television, Kant seems acutely aware of these regrettable facts (VpR 28: 117-118); and this should make us wonder whether we have misunderstood his argument or whether perhaps he has misstated it. Of course the basic issue raised by the argument is not how widely religious doctrines are disseminated but rather how rationally credible they are. Kant's statement of his argument seems encumbered with a certain tact, or even fear, which makes him reluctant to express with perfect candor what he really thinks about this issue. Kant's real view is expressed clearly enough on occasion, when he asserts that a revealed faith "can never be universally communicated so as to produce conviction," so that when a church founds itself on claims to supernatural revelation, it "renounces the most important mark of truth, namely a rightful claim to universality" (R 6:109). But for the sake of tact, Kant tries to pretend that this defect of revealed teachings is due only to the indisputable fact that their dissemination is spatially, temporally, and culturally limited. But as we have seen above, this is not what Kant really thinks. He thinks that even for those who are most intimately acquainted with a putative revelation, and even supposing the revelation to be wholly genuine, there could never be sufficient grounds for a human being to attain a justified conviction of its authenticity. This defect of claims to supernatural revelation has nothing to do with the fact that they are based on historical reports or with the fact that not everyone has access to these reports. Historical evidence, if it is strong enough, is surely capable of convincing any rational being who is in possession of it, and it has this virtue even if many people do not have access to it (0 8:300). The problem with supernatural revelation

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is rather that because the idea of a God or supremely perfect being is an idea of reason, to which no experience can ever correspond, it follows that no empirical evidence that a finite being may possess is capable of licensing the conclusion that some empirical event is the special revelation of a supremely perfect being (0 8:142). Kant's real argument, then, depends on neither of the two dubious premises we looked at earlier. Instead, the argument is that belief in supernatural revelation cannot be morally required. In Kant's view, the morally required cannot extend beyond what a rational being might justifiably be convinced of, and no rational being could ever be justifiably convinced of any claim to supernatural revelation. The argument does not require that people cannot be morally judged on matters where one person may possess more morally relevant information than another; it requires only that people should not be morally required to hold a belief for which no person could ever, under any circumstances, have adequate grounds. And the argument does not depend on the claim that rational religion is n10re widely available to people than revealed religion; it depends instead on the clain1 that it is possible in principle for any rational being to be justified in holding the extremely modest and highly flexible tenets of rational religion but impossible in principle for any human being to authenticate any alleged case of supernatural revelation. It is this line of argument, I suggest, which is really intended in the Religion. But it is expressed much more clearly several years later in The Conflict of the Faculties: It is a contradiction to demand universality for an ecclesiastical faith (catholicismus hierarchicus) because unconditioned universality presupposes necessity, which occurs only where reason itself sufficiently grounds the propositions of faith, and so these are not mere statutes. On the other hand, pure [rational] religious faith has a rightful clain1 to universality (catholicismus rationalis). Sectarianism in matters of faith will therefore never occur with the latter, and where it is met with it always arises from an error of ecclesiastical faith that of holding one's statute (even a statute of divine revelation) for an essential piece of religion . .. and so passing off something contingent for what is necessary in itself. (SF 7:49-50)

In the passage just quoted, however, Kant's explicit reason for denying the universality of revealed faith is the equivalence of universality with necessity, and the claim, familiar fron1 the first critique, that only reason and not experience is capable of supplying either one (KrV A12/B3-6). "Universality" here refers to the fact that rational grounds for belief apply universally to all rational beings, that when I am convinced of something by rational grounds, I am convinced by grounds

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which would be valid for any rational being who happened to be in possession of then1. It is apparently Kant's view that the claims of rational religion are universal in this sense, but claims to supernatural revelation cannot be. Those who are convinced by such a claim may hold it sincerely and fervently, but they do not hold their conviction on grounds which would be valid for any rational being who had them. In Kant's view there is a close connection between the universality of reason in this sense and Kant's fundamental principle of the ethics of belief, the principle of enlightenment or of thinking for oneself. This connection is made explicit in Kant's 1786 essay, "What is Orientation in Thinking?": Thinking for oneself means seeking the supreme touchstone of truth in one's self, i.e., in one's own reason; and the maxim of always thinking for one's self is enlightenment ... To make use of one's own reason means nothing more than to ask oneself with regard to everything that is to be assumed whether he finds it practicable to make the ground of the assumption or the rule which follows from the assumption a universal principle for the use of one's reason. (0 8:145-46n)

The principle of thinking for oneself is nothing but a special case of the Kantian principle of autonomy applied to our intellectual conduct. The moral test is to ask oneself whether the grounds on which one holds one's belief could serve as a universally valid principle of reason. Thinking for myself no more licenses me in believing whatever I please than the principle of autonomy licenses me in doing whatever I please. Kant apparently thinks that it is consistent with the principle of thinking for oneself to hold certain beliefs in the absence of sufficient theoretical evidence for them if there exist practical or moral considerations, valid universally for all rational beings, that are capable of sufficiently grounding one's belief. But it would be a violation of the principle of thinking for oneself to permit oneself to believe something in the absence of any grounds, or from grounds which do not proceed according to a rule which might be a universally valid principle of reason. Beyond this, however, I confess it is obscure to me what consequences Kant intended this to have. We might give it a lenient interpretation analogous to the universal law formula of the categorical imperative, which says that one is permitted to follow any rule which would not involve any impossibility or any contradictory volitions if it became a universal law of nature. On this reading, the principle might license beliefs which are not grounded on reasons universally valid for all rational beings, so long as no contradiction results from supposing that all rational beings might hold the same belief on the same grounds. It is not clear to me what would have to be true about the grounds of a

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belief for it to violate the principle on this interpretation, but it seems likely that at least some beliefs based on enlpirical revelation might turn out to be morally permissible. But presumably the denial of any such belief would be equally permissible, and this would yield Kant's rationalist conclusion that no belief based on empirical revelation can be morally required. Alternatively, however, we might interpret the principle of thinking for oneself more strictly as saying that a belief is not permissible unless it is held on grounds which actually are universally valid for any rational being who possesses them. In other words, it would be immoral to hold a belief unless one held it on rationally adequate grounds, grounds which would be sufficient to convince any rational being who had them. Kantian rational religious faith would still be permitted by the principle in this interpretation, because Kant's moral arguments, though practical rather than theoretical in character, are supposed to be universally valid for all rational moral agents. In effect, Kant's principle of thinking for oneself would entail a variant of W. K. Clifford's renowned principle that it is wrong for anyone ever to believe anything on insufficient evidence. The only variation would be that for Kant a belief could be grounded, and thus rendered morally permissible, by practical grounds as well as by theoretical evidence. But in this interpretation the consequences of the principle for ecclesiastical faith based on empirical revelation would be dire. For Kant holds as we have seen, that no universally valid grounds can be given for beliefs based on en1pirical revelation. In this more stringent interpretation of the principle, then, any religion which goes beyond the boundaries of unassisted reason is not merely gratuitous; it is also necessarily immoral.

3.6

Revelation through Reason

Kant does provide one way of rescuing revealed religion, however, or at least certain parts of it. For he holds that supernatural, empirical~ or external revelation, revelation through scriptures or extraordinary experiences, is not the only kind or even the most important kind. Revelation is either external or inward. An external revelation can be of two kinds: either (1) through works, or (2) through words. Inward divine revelation is God's revelation to us through our own reason. It must precede all other revelation and serve as a judge of external revelation. It has to be the touchstone by which I know whether an external revelation is really from God and it must give me proper concepts of him. (VpR 28:117)

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It may seem a wretched subterfuge for a shameless rationalist such as Kant to lay claim to divine revelation simply by identifying revelation with the deliverances of human reason. But this reaction is too hasty. For in the first place, Kant does not describe just any result obtained by human reason as a case of divine revelation. Principally, he identifies inward revelation with our pure rational concept of God as a most real being but he also identifies inward revelation with our knowledge of our moral duties, since these can be represented as divine commands and thus go to make up our concept of God (R 6:87). And in the second place, we are justified in regarding all rational knowledge of God as an instance of revelation because it hardly makes sense to suppose that we might acquire any knowledge of God whatever except through revelation. No doubt we are capable of finding out n1any things about the natural world solely through our own initiative; and through similar ingenuity we are often able to discover the truth about other people against their will, by spying on them or by interpreting the hints they give us unintentionally through slips of the tongue or other such behavior. But in the case of an omnipotent and omniscient being, no such ingenious prying could possibly avail us. Any knowledge of any kind which we might acquire of such a being would have to depend on the decision of such a being to reveal itself to us. Kant also regards our rational concept of God as a case of divine revelation because he is convinced that there is no other source from which we can derive a suitable concept of Deity: "The concept of God and the conviction of his existence can be met with only in reason; they can con1e from reason alone, and not fron1 inspiration or from any tidings, however great their authority" (0 8:142). Of course Kant is aware that the concept of God possessed by many people, perhaps by most, derives from some other source: fron1 the conten1plation of the works of nature, for instance, or fron1 some religious tradition claiming supernatural authority. But these are precisely the concepts of God against which we should be especially careful to guard ourselves: "Of what use is the natural concept of God as a whole? Certainly none other than the use actually made of it by most peoples: as a terrifying picture of fantasy, and a superstitious object of ceremonial adoration and hypocritical high praise" (VpR 28:118; cf. R 6:168-69). Just as the principle of thinking for oneself is the touchstone of morally permissible belief generally, so inward revelation is the touchstone of permissible belief about God. As such, it can also serve in a certain sense to authenticate claims of revelation based on nonrational illumination and the external revelation claimed on the authority of scripture by ecclesiastical faiths. We cannot prove whether such expe-

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riences and records are in fact the result of special divine deeds, but we can judge whether, as regards the content communicated, they could have been. "If I encounter an immediate intuition of a sort that nature, so far as I know, cannot afford, a concept of God must still serve as a criterion for deciding whether this appearance agrees with the characteristics of the divine" (0 8:142; cf. R 6:169n). The inward revelation of reason is also our only criterion for the possible authenticity of external revelation. And in this connection Kant views it as the sole legitin1ate interpreter of any scripture or ecclesiastical tradition which claims divine authority (R 6: 109-10; SF 7:46-48). Kant is very blunt about what this entails: "If [a scripture] flatly contradicts morality, then it cannot be from God (for example, if a father were ordered to kill his son who is, as far as he knows, perfectly innocent)" (R 6:87). "Frequently in reference to the text (the revelation) this interpretation [given by reason] may appear to us forced, it n1ay often really be so; and yet it must be preferred to the literal interpretation if the text can possibly support it" (R 6:110). But by now Kant's God may seem to some very far from on1nipotent. For it now appears that God is incapable of revealing himself to human beings except through the operations of their reason. Kant appears not to admit the possibility that God might take it upon himself to make his presence known or to reveal his saving truth to us, simply by causing us to believe in that presence, irrespective of our rational scruples, to believe by faith through a grace which transcends and humbles the feeble powers of human reason. For were God to do this, as orthodox Christianity insists that he has and does, Kant would deny us the capacity to receive such a gift. Worse yet, he would blasphen10usly forbid us to accept it. It is quite true, I think, that Kant would be reluctant to admit that God ever provides us with revelation in any such way. But it would be an error to think that Kant denies to God the power to provide it. Instead, Kant would have us reflect on what sort of being it is that would create free, rational creatures, with the vocation to selflegislation and to thinking for themselves, and then exhibit contempt for this vocation in his own conduct toward them. An omnipotent being surely has the power to take such a degrading course with its rational creatures, but the real blasphemy would consist in asserting that a good God actually chooses that course.

4

Self-Deception and Bad Faith 4.1

The Problem of Self-Deception

Self-decerltion is so undeniable a fact of human life that if anyone tried to deny its existence, the proper response would be to accuse this person of it. But Jean-Paul Sartre begins his famous discussion of bad faith in Being and Nothingness by raising a problem about how self-deception is possible. 1 In general, to lie or deceive someone is not simply to tell that person something false or to create a false belief in that person. In order to lie or deceive someone, I must myself disbelieve what I am telling that person, or disbelieve what I am causing the other to believe-typically, I must know that it is false. Accordingly, Sartre says, when I deceive or lie to myself, I must as deceiver know the truth that is masked for me as the one deceived. Better yet, I must know that truth very precisely, in order to hide it from myself the more carefully-and this not at two different moments of temporality, which would permit us to reestablish a semblance of duality. but in the unitary structure of one and the same project. (BN 87-88/89)

This means, however, that I must believe something as victim of the lie which as liar I disbelieve. It now looks as if self-deception cannot occur; a self-deceiver must simultaneously believe and disbelieve the same proposition, and this looks like a contradiction. One straightforward way out of the contradiction immediately presents itself. For in general it is not a contradiction to say that a 1 References to Being and Nothingness will employ the abbreviation "BN" and will cite both the French text, Jean-Paul Sartre, L 'Etre et Ie Neant (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1949), and the standard English translation, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Pocket Books, 1966). The pagination in the French will be cited first and then the pagination in the English, separated by a slash U). All translations from Being and Nothingness in this paper are my own.

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thing simultaneously has two contradictory properties, if one says that it has then1 in two different respects. I may be both hot and cold at the same time, that is, hot in my forehead and cold in my feet; a piece of prose may be good and bad at the same time, that is, good in the ideas it expresses, but bad in its grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Accordingly, one way out of the problem about self-deception is to say that when I believe and disbelieve the same proposition, I do so in two different respects. But not just any distinction of this kind will do, because any systen1 of beliefs involving the simultaneous belief and disbelief in the san1e proposition will be inherently unstable in a way that the state of self-deception is not inherently unstable. A stable condition of self-deception seems to require that there be in a single person two distinct subsystems of belief, one of which involves the belief in a proposition and the other disbelief in it. Self-deception thus seems to require us to hypothesize what we may call a "divided mind." The commonest way to do this is to distinguish a subsystem of conscious beliefs from a subsystem of unconscious beliefs. When I deceive n1yself into believing that p, then what happens is that I consciously believe that p, but unconsciously I disbelieve p (or know p to be false). In self-deception my unconscious mind is aware of the falsity of what n1Y conscious mind believes, and it hides this falsity from my conscious n1ind. Freud, for example, holds that certain mental processes are kept out of our conscious mind by unconscious mechanisms of "repression." Sartre, however, rejects this solution to the problem he raises, along with the whole concept of unconscious mental processes. Because of this, he is committed to accounting for self-deception as an entirely conscious process. And the special Sartrian concept of "bad faith" (mauvaise foi) refers to this wholly conscious type of self-deception. Sartre's discussion of bad faith in Being and Nothingness is designed to serve the larger ends of the book, and so the concept of bad faith is developed in paradoxical terms, as part of his ontology of consciousness or the "for itself," whose being is "to be what it is not and not to be what it is." This makes it less than wholly clear what bad faith is, or how Sartre thinks he has solved his problem about self-deception. In §2 of this essay we will critically examine Sartre's reasons for rejecting the Freudian appeal to the unconscious in solving the problem of bad faith. In §3 we will look briefly at Sartre's famous description of several examples of self-deception or bad faith, and see how much his solution to his problem is illuminated by his attempt to relate it to his theory of human freedom. In §5 we will try to develop Sartre's concept of bad faith and see how it is supposed to solve the problem of self-deception. And in §6 we will decide how successful the solution is.

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109

Ull.conscious Deception

The Freudian theory of repression is a great deal more than a solution to Sartre's problem about self-deception, and it is not clear that Sartre has correctly interpreted Freud's account of the mechanisms by which repression works. But beyond a brief consideration of Freud's reasons for believing in unconscious mental processes, it will suffice for our purposes simply to take up the Freudian solution to Sartre's problem in the (perhaps caricatured) form in which Sartre presents it. For even in this form we will see that it easily withstands Sartre's objections. As Sartre depicts it, the Freudian solution is this: My mind includes not only an ego or consciousness, but also an id, a set of instincts and drives. These drives are originally unconscious, but they display themselves to my consciousness in the form of "conscious symbols," such as desires and impulses, which take the form of "real psychic facts" (BN 88-89/90-91). At the "border", between the conscious n1ind and the unconscious mind there is a part of me which acts as a "censor," (conceived, at least half-seriously, as a sort of psychic custon1S office or passport control). The censor decides which desires are to be permitted entry into consciousness, and it also determines the form in which my instincts appear as facts of consciousness (BN 88-90/91-93). The censor has cognitive access to the instincts, it knows the real truth about them; it also has access to the psychic facts as they exist for consciousness, and is capable of selecting these on the basis of the conscious states (e.g., beliefs, emotions) that will result from them. On this model, when we deceive ourselves what happens is that our consciousness forms a belief that the censor has brought about in it, and that the censor knows to he false. In self-deception, I as deceiver am the censor, while as victim of the deception I am ego or consciousness. The ego and the censor represent belief systems divided from each other, and this is what makes self-deception possible. There are many things in this picture which Sartre cannot accept. He scorns the "mythology" of physiologically detern1ined instincts and drives (BN 91/93: cf. BN 707/784). He also rejects the whole conception of "psychic givens" (BN 17/11), and in particular rejects the idea that any conative or motivational states, however "basic," can be given to us as brute psychic facts independent of our choices (BN 516-519/567569). Sartre's attack on the Freudian solution to his problem, however, is directed at difficulties that it allegedly incurs in its account of the censor's activities. "The censor, in order to apply its activity with discernn1ent, must know what it is repressing. If we renounce in fact all those metaphors

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that represent repression as an interaction of blind forces, we are forced to admit that the censor must choose, and in order to choose, it must represent itself' (BN 91/93) If it is to carry out its activities, Sartre alleges, the censor must have it second-order knowledge both of the activities themselves and of the information it uses in acting. Not only must it know the truth about the drives it is repressing but it must also represent itself as knowing, it must know that it knows; not only must it select which drives are to become conscious and choose the form in which these drives are to appear in consciousness but it must also represent itself as choosing, it must know that it is making these choices. Why does Sartre think the Freudian must grant the censor this second-order knowledge?2 Sartre himself seems to think that all knowing and choosing involve second order knowledge of then1selves (BN 18/12),3 but a Freudian need not agree. Sartre seems on the right track in suggesting that the censor needs such knowledge "in order to apply its activity with discernment," but to clinch his case this suggestion would have to be spelled out in more detail. Sartre's next step is to claim that the second-order knowledge that the censor must have must be conscious knowledge, on the ground that "all knowing is consciousness of knowing" (BN 91/93). From this he argues that the censor's knowledge must belong to the same consciousness as the false beliefs the censor is creating. Hence the censor's consciousness can only be "consciousness (of) the tendency to repress, but precisely in order not to be conscious of it." (BN 91-92/94). But 2David Pears, "Motivated Irrationality, Freudian Theory and Cognitive Dissonance," in Philosophical Essays on Freud, ed. Richard Wollheim and James Hopkins (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 273-274, supplies on Sartre's behalf the argument that if the censor were ignorant of its own knowledge and activity then this ignorance would have to be explained by a process of repression, thus leading to an infinite regress. But I find this neither persuasive nor in Sartre's text. For all that has been shown, the censor might just happen to be ignorant of its own cognitive states and activities, without any process of repression or self-deception entering in. 3 Actually, Sartre rejects the formula (which he attributes to Alain): "To know is to know that one knows" But he rejects it because he interprets the word "knows" very narrowly, as expressing a relation between a subject and an object different from it. Hence Sartre thinks that Alain's formula entails that all knowing of knowing must be "reflective," or "positional" -involving an objectification of the self and an act of distinguishing it from the consciousness for which it is-whereas Sartre wants to insist that every mental state is "prereflectively," "nonpositionally," and hence "noncognitively" conscious of itself conscious of itself while completely coinciding with itself (BN 1623/9-17). This, however, is not a denial of the thesis that "to know is to know that one knows" as it is usually understood, but is instead an unusually strong form of its affirmation, since it affirms not only that there is second-order knowledge but also that this second-order knowledge must be conscious.

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that is only to say that the censor, entirely on the conscious level, is deceiving itself. The problem about self-deception has returned in its original form. This argument, however, assumes both that the censor must have second-order knowledge of its activities and that this second-order knowledge must be conscious. But the Freudian has been given no reason for accepting these assumptions, and especially the second. One reason that might be given is to be found in an explication of the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious given by Colin McGinn. 4 For McGinn, not to be conscious that you believe p is simply not to have the second-order knowledge that you believe p. From this it would follow that if the censor has the second-order knowledge of its knowledge or its activities, then it is eo ipso conscious of them. But surely all this shows is that McGinn's way of drawing the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious is defective. For why could there not be unconscious mental processes involving second-order knowledge of themselves which is also unconscious? If we suppose that I have second-order knowledge of a mental state, that should not by itself decide one way or the other whether either the state or the knowledge of it is conscious. Another argument Sartre might use is this: If the explanation for the repression or disguising of my knowledge that p requires the act of a censor, then if my knowledge of that act is also supposed to be repressed or disguised (rendered unconscious), this must in turn require the act of a second censor. And if the act of this second censor is to be rendered unconscious, this will require yet another act of censorship, and so on. Either we face a vicious regress or else we are forced at some point to imagine an act of censorship performed consciously. But this argun1ent overlooks the obvious possibility that the censor's act might be self-repressing. (If it were not, it is hard to see how it could accomplish its aim.) We postulate a "censor" (that is, a subsystem of beliefs and mental activities independent of my consciousness) in order to explain how I can believe something consciously which I at the same time disbelieve, and whose falsity I hide from n1yself. But there is no need to postulate a third subsystem to explain the censor's keeping its knowledge and activity out of consciousness, because there is no incoherence in the censor's system of mental activity. Hence there is no need for the regress to begin. Of course the Freudian can grant the obvious fact that in actual cases 4Colin McGinn, "Action and Its Explanation," in Philosophical Problems in Psychology, ed. Neil Bolton (London: Methuen, 1979), pp. 20-42.

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of self-deception there is nearly always some awareness of the processes through which the deception is maintained. For instance, in the conversation between Ivan Karamazov and Smerdyakov before Ivan's departure for Moscow, the two men make a compact: if Ivan announces the intention to go to Tchermashnya, then Smerdyakov will murder their father, Fyodor Pavlovich, while Ivan is away. Throughout the conversation, and even while he is agreeing to the compact, Ivan prevents hin1self from becoming consciously aware of its terms, or even of its existence. He does this largely through a single device: when there is a danger that Ivan will become consciously aware of what Srnerdyakov is proposing, Ivan loses his temper and demands that Smerdyakov stop insinuating and state clearly and explicitly what he means. 5 Ivan is clearly conscious of his own anger, impatience, and his conscious desire that everything between Smerdyakov and himself should be kept wholly explicit and aboveboard. Since these are in fact the devices by which Ivan prevents the compact from entering his consciousness, Ivan is in a sense conscious of what the "censor" in him is doing. But this is not the kind of consciousness of the censor's acts which Sartre's argument requires Ivan to have. For Ivan is not conscious of these desires and emotions as devices for keeping his knowledge of the murder compact out of his consciousness-indeed, they seem to Ivan to be no more than expressions of his fervent desire that there should be nothing at all unstated or merely implied in his relations with Smerdyakov, and hence Ivan's awareness of the devices by which he deceives himself only contributes further to the deception. What Sartre thinks the Freudian must concede is that the self-deceiver is consciously aware of the censor's acts of repression precisely as acts of repression, as the keeping out of consciousness of what is to be repressed. But why should Sartre think that the Freudian must concede this? The answer to this question, I am afraid, is disappointingly simple and from the standpoint of Sartre's argument, flatly question begging. Sartre thinks that the censor's mental activity must be conscious because he holds as a dogma that all mental activity must be conscious. Sartre's frequent references to the "transparency of consciousness" are really assertions that the mental is reducible to the conscious. For Sartre, there can be no unconscious knowledge at all (BN 91/93), no unconscious believing (BN 117-118/121-122), no unconscious intending (BN 20/14). The dogma that the mental is reducible to the 5 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Random House, 1950), pp. 314-325.

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conscious belongs to the phenomenologist's peculiar interpretation of the project of founding everything on what is self-evident, and then taking for granted (what is far from self-evident) that mental processes, both their occurrence and their nature, are something self-evident, or at least something that can be made self-evident by the right epistemic techniques. As one sympathetic interpreter describes it, Sartre's rejection of the Freudian unconscious is due to Sartre's "mistrust of the hypothetical," and especially of science hypotheses. 6 In effect, Sartre simply accepts Descartes, definition of "thought" (his inclusive ternl for nlental) as "everything which we are aware of as happening within us in so far as we have awareness of it.,,7 Strictly speaking, this definition does not even allow for latent or dispositional mental states, for dispositional knowledge, belief, desire, and so on. If Descartes can account for such dispositional mental states at all, it must be by saying that they are not mental but bodily states (perhaps states of my brain which dispose my mind to have certain occurrent thoughts at certain times). It is not clear that even this account of dispositional mental states would be open to Sartre, since he entertains a radical skepticism about dispositions generally, derived partly from Hume and partly from Hegel (BN 33-34/29,139-142/147-150). Descartes himself does not adhere consistently to his definition of the mental, since he believes in innate ideas, which are plainly supposed to be dispositional states, and states of the mind rather than the body. 8 A more moderate version of the Cartesian view of mind would hold that all mental states are either states of consciousness or else dispositions to have states of consciousness. Freud is well aware of this view as a source of "philosophical" objections to his concept of unconscious mental activity, to which he responds frequently and thoughtfully, not without condescension. Freud points out that we do not hesitate to ascribe mental states (and occurrent states, not merely dispositional ones) to other people on the basis of their behavior, despite the fact that we ourselves are not conscious of these states. The same principle, however, he says, might be applied to ourselves: on the basis of our own behavior, and in the same way we infer mental states from the behavior of others, we nlight ascribe to ourselves mental states of which we are 6Peter Caws, Sartre (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 8l. 7 J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, trans. and eds. Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 1:195. 8 Philosophical TIVritings of Descartes, 1:303-304.

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not conscious. 9 Such unconscious mental states, Freud argues, turn out to be reasonable hypotheses, even necessary ones, which are required in certain cases to fill in the gaps between conscious states. 10 The states whose existence we may infer in this way, he says, are not merely dispositions to conscious states (these dispositions Freud calls "preconscious" states) but themselves occurrent or "active" states, some of which remain unconscious however strongly active they may be in their influence on our behavior. 11 Freud is convinced that the web of unconscious mental states which is required to explain people's behavior is sufficiently large and complex that it makes sense to regard unconsciousness as "a regular and inevitable phase in the processes constituting our mental activity; every mental act begins as an unconscious one, and it may remain so or go on developing into consciousness, according as it meets with resistance or not"; far from its being true that consciousness is the hallmark of the mental, Freud maintains that "what is mental is in itself unconscious." 12 Freud's concept of the mental harmonizes well with contemporary functionalist accounts of mind, which treat categories of mental events and activities as states of an organism, distinguished by the functional role they play in the physical mechanisms through which the organism processes its informational input and generates its behavioral output. Mental states need not be consciousness in order to perform their functions; indeed, sometimes they can perform them better if they· remain unconscious. When this is so, a theory of the organism's mental functioning ought to be able to explain why. And this is what Freudian psychology tries to do. Freud acknowledges that this ambitious role for unconscious states in people's mental lives must be established by a complex set of inferences, each of which must be tested for its soundness;13 and many people are rightly skeptical of some of Freud's claims about our unconscious memories, wishes, and decisions. But surely there is no good reason in principle why the workings of our minds might not be explained better by a theory attributing unconscious mental states to us than by one 9Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study, trans. James Strachey (New York W. W. Norton, 1963), pp. 58-59. 10Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1949), pp. 105-106. 11John Rickman, ed., A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 46-53. 12 A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud, p. 51, Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, p. 35. 13Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, pp. 106-107.

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limiting itself to conscious mental states. For example, the hypothesis of an unconscious subsystem of mental activities acting on our conscious beliefs provides one plausible way of solving Sartre's problem about selfdeception and explaining how self-deception is possible. Whether selfdeception works in some such way in real life is an empirical question. There is nothing either original or persuasive in Sartre's attempt to reject the Freudian unconscious a priori on philosophical grounds.

4.3

Facticity and Transcendence

Once he has dismissed the Freudian solution to his problem, Sartre makes a new start by describing several cases in which he thinks we will recognize self-deceptive conduct at work. The examples are well known, even famous. A woman ignores the sexual overtones of her escort's conduct because she does not ¥,Tant to "break the troubled and unstable harmony that makes for the charm of the hour" (BN 95/97). She seems not to notice when he takes her hand, because at that moment she happens to be pure intellect, divorced from her body. Then there is the waiter in the cafe who plays at being a waiter in a cafe in order to persuade himself that he is nothing more than that. There is the homosexual who refuses to acknowledge that he is a pederast, insisting that his case is "different"; and, finally, there is his friend, the champion of sincerity, who tries to get him to admit that he is a pederast and no more than that (BN 94-108/96-112). Sartre describes these examples so skillfully and vividly that it is easy to overlook the fact that they do not tell us much about self-deception. They neither provide a clear solution to Sartre's problem about self-deception nor support his claim that self-deception must be a wholly conscious phenomenon. In fact, they are little more than a series of illustrations of Sartre's own radical and idiosyncratic views about human freedom. What they say about self-deception is almost incidental. In each case, Sartre claims, the self-deceptive behavior turns on a distinction between "facticity" and "transcendence": between the brute givens of my situation (my body, my occupation, my past) and the total freedom in which I confront these givens as someone who must be the person given through them and yet must be that person freely, unconstrained in any way by them. The self-deceivers in these examples are all depicted as exploiting this inevitable ambiguity in the nature of free selfhood. The woman "transcends" her body and the homosexual his past behavior. Both have a truth on their side when they dissociate themselves from their "facticity," but each misinterprets this truth so that it turns into a falsehood. The woman uses her freedom in relation

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to her body as an excuse for disavowing responsibility for the decision she must make about what she will do with her body; the homosexual uses his freedom in the face of his past to disavow the only plausible interpretation of that past. On the other side, the waiter and the champion of sincerity recognize that one cannot flee from one's facticity, that one must be that facticity. Yet they interpret this truth in such a way as to deny our total freedom in the face of facticity. The waiter wants to become nothing more than the social role in which he has cast himself (and has been cast by others); the champion of sincerity wants his friend not only to admit the pattern represented by his past behavior but also to identify himself wholly with this past, disavowing his freedom in the face of the past. There seem to be significant philosophical issues between Sartre and the waiter or the champion of sincerity, and it is not self-evident that Sartre is right about these issues. The waiter behaves as he does because he wants to realize his condition (BN 99/102), that is, to actualize hin1self, to live a life in a way which is consonant with his nature. Of course Sartre thinks that human freedom precludes having a "nature" in this sense; and it is easy to make fun of the aspiration to actualize one's nature when that nature is identified with being a waiter in a cafe. But it is not quite so easy to discredit a theory of self-actualization as it is put forward by Aristotle or Aquinas, or even by F. H. Bradley or T. H. Green. Likewise, it is far from self-evident that to be a homosexual never means anything more than to have a certain past, in the face of which we are always totally free to reconstitute our desires through a radically new choice of ourselves. But even if Sartre were right on the philosophical issues, that would not necessarily show that those who disagree with him are victims of self-deception. 14 What is worse than this, however, is that Sartre's philosophically loaded discussion of his examples contributes nothing at all to the solution of his original problem about self-deception. The common pattern in the examples is that the self-deceiver misinterprets a truth drawn from the Sartrian ontology of consciousness. 15 What he or she believes 14This is an objection brought against Sartre by Arthur Danto, Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Viking Press, 1975), pp. 76-79. 15The initial description of the case of the woman in fact illustrates not the ambiguity of facticity and transcendence but only the original problem. The woman "knows very well the intentions that the man to whom she is speaking nourishes regarding her. She knows also that she will have to make a decision sooner or later" (BN 94/96). But she does not want to make the decision and would find it unpleasant to be aware of the man's intentions, so she "refuses to take his desire for what it is," and "postpones the moment of decision as long as possible" (BN 94 95/97). These are clear examples of someone who believes two propositions (namely, that

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is true taken in one sense, but not in the sense in which he or she takes it. ("I am not my past" is true, but not in the way in which the homosexual interprets it; "I am my past" is true, but not in the way in which the champion of sincerity interprets it; and likewise for the other examples.) Mistakes of this kind, however, do not necessarily involve selfdeception at all-in philosophy we run across them all the time. Selfdeception occurs in such a case only if I assent to a statement that I know I am interpreting in a false sense while nevertheless believing the statement on that interpretation. But if this is what has happened, then we simply have one more kind of case-and not a distinctive, or a fundamental, or even an especially illuminating kind-in which an individual believes a proposition while disbelieving it (knowing it to be false). It contributes nothing to resolving Sartre's problem about self-deception that the subject matter of the simultaneous belief and disbelief is the dubious Sartrian ontology of free selfhood. Sartre identifies "the unity we find in the different aspects of bad faith" as "a certain art of forming contradictory concepts, which is to say, concepts that unite in themselves an idea and the negation of that idea. The basic concept thus engendered utilizes the double property of human being, that of being a facticity and a transcendence" (BN 95/98). Does Sartre really expect us to believe that every case of self-deception involves attributing a contradictory concept to something? And does he think that all contradictory concepts derive from the facticity-transcendence relation? Neither claim has much plausibility, and neither receives any real defense from Sartre. But leaving that aside, my attribution of a contradictory concept to something counts as a case of self-deception only if I believe the attribution while at the same time knowing that the concept is contradictory and that a proposition ascribing a contradictory concept to something must be false-that is, only if I believe the self-contradictory proposition and simultaneously disbelieve it (because I realize it is self-contradictory). Once again, even if it is correct that all self-deception concerns the facticity-transcendence relation, we are still no closer to a solution of Sartre's problem about self-deception. the man's intentions are merely respectful and that there is no need to make any decision about whether she will go to bed with him) while also disbelieving themknowing that they are false. As far as I can see, Sartre never gives an account of these central examples of the woman's self-deception in terms of her exploitation of the facticity-transcendence relation.

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The Project of Believing

Sartre's problem about self-deception arises because it seems that in order to deceive myself I must simultaneously believe and disbelieve the same proposition at the same time, and this looks like a contradiction. But it looks like a contradiction because it looks as if believing p entails not disbelieving p and vice versa. I will suggest that Sartre's own solution, presented briefly in the section entitled "The 'Faith' of Bad Faith," operates by questioning this assumption. How might we argue that there is no contradiction in saying that I simultaneously (and consciously) believe and disbelieve the same proposition? We might say that it is not a contradiction for me to believe and disbelieve p, just as it is not a contradiction for me simultaneously to want X and to want not-x. When Don Giovanni asks Zerlina to give him her hand, Zerlina reports her mental state as "Vorrei e non vorrei." This would be a self-contradictory report if it is taken to mean: "I want to give you my hand and it is false that I want to give you my hand." But it is not self-contradictory if what it says is: "I want to give you my hand and I want not to give you my hand." What Zerlina is reporting is a conflict between two wants. The two things she wants cannot both occur at the same time (she cannot at the same time both give Don Giovanni her hand and not give Don Giovanni her hand), but there is no contradiction in her consciously wanting both things at the same time. The obvious problem with this suggestion is that while it seems perfectly possible to be wholly conscious of conflicting wants coexisting in oneself, the same does not seem to be possible with contradictory beliefs. If I am shown a contradiction between two of my beliefs, then my reaction-like Zerlina's-is confusion, but not the same kind of confusion. Zerlina's recognition of her conflicting wants does not necessarily weaken either of the wants or cause her to doubt that they conflict. But when someone claims that two of my beliefs conflict, then that either tends to weaken at least one of the beliefs or else causes me to doubt that there really is a conflict between them. Of course I can be inclined to believe p and also to disbelieve p, but this is not a state of both believing and disbelieving p: rather, it is a state of being uncertain. The remark "I believe it and I don't," seems to make sense only if it is taken as an expression either of such uncertainty or else as a report of my vacillation over time between incompatible beliefs ("I believe it and I don't: one day I will find myself believing it, but then the next day I will tell myself that it can't be true"). We can, of course, describe Zerlina's state too as one of being uncertain what she wants. But this is misleading if it suggests that she is

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unsure whether or not she wants the thing in question (i.e., to give Don Giovanni her hand). For that suggestion is simply false: Zerlina does quite strongly want to give him her hand, and at the same time she quite strongly wants not to give it to him, and she is painfully conscious of the strength of both wants. Zerlina is uncertain about what to do, because although she can both want and not want the same thing, she can't both do and not do the same thing. She must make up her mind not about what she wants (that's clear enough), but rather about what she will do in the face of her conflicting wants. Believing, however, appears to be in this regard like doing, and unlike wanting. Just as you can't do and not do the same thing at the san1e time (unless you do them in different respects or with different parts of yourself-e.g., saying 'No' with your lips and 'Yes' with your eyes), so you can't believe and disbelieve the san1e thing at the same time unless you believe two different things in two different respects (e.g., consciously and unconsciously). It is well for Sartre, therefore, that he does not try to solve his problem about self-deception by arguing that believing is in this respect like wanting. But his solution does resemble this abortive one. Both work by arguing that the two apparently contradictory doxastic states involved in self-deception are really compatible, and arguing this through an appeal to son1ething allegedly special about the nature of believing and disbelieving. "The true problem of bad faith comes evidently from the fact that bad faith is faith," that is, belief. "But if we take belief as the adherence of being to its object when the object is not given or is given indistinctly, then bad faith is belief, and the essential problem of bad faith is a problem of belief" (BN 108/112). The problem of selfdeception, as we have seen, is that it looks like a contradiction for me to believe p and yet at the san1e time and in the same respect to disbelieve p. Sartre maintains, however, that the typical case of belief is one in which belief is combined with disbelief. "To believe is not to believe," he declares. "No belief is enough belief, one never believes what one believes.... No belief, strictly speaking, is ever able to believe enough" (BN 110/114). As in the case of Zerlina, these assertions would be self-contradictory if we took Sartre to be saying: "One believes p and (at the same time and in the same respect) it is false that one believes p." But there is not necessarily a contradiction if what Sartre means is: "One believes p and (at the same time and in the san1e respect) one disbelieves p." This is not necessarily self-contradictory if sense can be made of the idea that I can simultaneously and in the same respect believe and disbelieve p, so that my disbelieving p does not entail that it is false that I believe p.

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Sense can be made of this if we recognize that Sartre is alluding to what might be called the imperfection of beliefs, taking that term in its etymological meaning. That is, he is describing belief as a project that all too often fails, which fails short and is consciously left incomplete, owing to the unfortunate circumstances of our lives. When this happens, what we are left with as beliefs are things that are made to do the job of beliefs but which we recognize as insufficient to do this job. Insofar as what must serve as the belief that p is forced to serve in this capacity it may be said that I believe p. But insofar as I recognize this same iten1 as insufficient to do the job of a belief, I consciously disbelieve p. As a result, it can be simultaneously true that I believe p and that I disbelieve p, since my disbelieving p does not entail that it is false that I believe p. We must note to begin with that Sartre uses the term "belief" in an unusually narrow sense. "Belief," he has told us, is to be understood "as the adherence of being to its object when the object is not given or is given indistinctly." Because this sense of "belief" is artificially narrow and because it will be necessary below to use "belief" and its cognates in their ordinary senses as well as in Sartre's special sense, I propose to refer to "belief" and its cognates, when used in Sartre's sense, as "belief*." We do not believe* what is self-evident or undeniable on the basis of the evidence presented to us. Belief* is only what we believe on the basis of inadequate, mixed, or ambiguous evidence. A belief* is not some thing for which we can claim "an intuition accompanied by evidence" (BN 109/114). You do not believe* anything for which the evidence you have is so overwhelming that you have no choice but to believe it. Exactly which of our beliefs we count as beliefs* depends on how charitable an epistemology we subscribe to, how high its standards are, and what we think meets those standards. 16 But for my own part, I would claim to believe, though not to believe*, such things as that 2 + 2 == 4, that Napoh~on died before I was born, that there are at least 16Belief* seems to be very close to what Locke calls "Faith, or Opinion," as opposed to "Knowledge." John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding edited by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 536-537. Locke thinks we have "knowledge" of our own existence, of God's existence, of certain truths of mathematics and metaphysics, and (in his charitable rather than his stricter moods) of the existence of corporeal bodies while we are actually sensing them. But he denies that we ever have anything more than "faith" or "opinion" concerning the existence of other minds or these same bodies at any time when we are not actually sensing them. I suspect that most of us are less certain than Locke is about God (even if we believe in him), and more certain about other people's minds and about bodies we have very recently sensed.

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five automobiles now in Paris, and that right now my eyes are focused on a piece of paper with words written on it. Belief* is something that we to some degree sustain in ourselves, something we hold at least to some degree by choice. Hence Sartre associates belief* with "faith" in a religious sense. "1 believe it means I give way to [je me laisser aZZer a] my irnpulses to rest confidence in it; I decide to believe it and to maintain myself in that decision, I conduct myself as if I were certain of it, all in the synthetic unity of the same attitude" (BN 109/114). Sartre's claim that "to believe is not to believe" is thus really the clain1 that all belief* is imperfect, that it falls short of what it has to be to perform the function of belief. But what is this function? We may look at all believing (including believing*) as a way of dealing with the world, and more especially with facts about this world as they present themselves to us in the forn1 of direct sense information, reports heard or read, pieces of reasoning presented to or engaged in by our minds-in short, what we call, in relation to our beliefs, the "evidence" for them. Every belief is an atten1pt to "integrate" that evidence into a coherent whole. A belief of course tries to be consistent with all the evidence, but it also tries to explain this evidence, and it tries to do so in a tidy and nonarbitrary way. Finally, it tries to win out in a competition, using the above criteria as its standards, with other possibilities for belief which we see as alternatives to it. We do not bother to form beliefs about everything, perhaps not even about everything concerning which we have evidence available to us. On the whole, we form beliefs about things that matter to us, things concerning which we need to integrate the evidence because we need to establish a settled way of reacting to the world-where "reacting" includes verbal behavior, and even tacit speech or thought directed only to ourselves. The function of believing is to give ourselves a stable way of reacting to the world in the face of the evidence. A belief best performs this function when it fully integrates all the evidence that the believer faces. A belief*, however, is by definition a response to the world not totally fixed by the evidence, perhaps even one integrating some pieces of evidence while clashing with others. A belief* is something I hold in the clear consciousness that other, alternative beliefs* are also open to me, while no belief that is not a belief* is open to me. Whatever I believe*, the evidence I face will be less than fully integrated, n1Y world will be less than fully intelligible, and there will be a distinct danger of instability, ambiguity, and tension in my reactions to it. From the standpoint of the project of believing, this result is unsatisfactory. To

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believe* is always to fall short of success in the project one has in every believing. Now we can see why Sartre might hold that "to believe is not to believe," that "no belief is enough belief," that "we never believe what we believe." All belief* is imperfect, a project we are unable to complete. To believe* is not to succeed in doing what every believing-and that includes every believing*-tries to do. No belief* does enough of what beliefs* aim at doing. What we believe* never does the job a belief* is supposed to do, and so in that sense we never quite believe* what we believe*. Sartre thinks our consciousness of the imperfection of our beliefs* becomes especially acute when we reflect on them, when we become aware of them as beliefs*. "To know that one believes is no longer to believe. Hence to believe is no longer to believe because it is only to believe" (BN 110/114). In becoming aware that my belief* is only belief*, I become aware that it is I who maintain myself in nlY belief*, and I see clearly too that nothing in the state of the evidence prevents me equally from adopting this or that alternative belief*. But to see that is already to see nlyself as not quite believing what I have defined myself as believing. It is in this act of reflection that we are most clearly aware of the conlplete compatibility, in all cases of belief*, of believing and disbelieving the same proposition, and even the reciprocal dependence of belief and disbelief in these cases. If we could regularly achieve a perfect integration of the evidence we face, so that beliefs* were a rarity, merely a marginal phenomenon in human life, then the phenomenon of faith (good faith or bad faith), would not be central to our dealings with the world. But I think Sartre is convinced that the human condition is sufficiently shot through with complexities, anlbiguities, uncertainties, and tensions that we cannot live without believing*, that a wide range of our responses to the world must consist of beliefs* that are conscious of their own inadequacy. Moreover, these complexities, ambiguities, and uncertainties often hit us right where we live, in our beliefs about ourselves, about our character traits and the meaning of our actions, in our beliefs about our relations to others, in our beliefs about what is worth living for, beliefs about morality and philosophy, politics and religion. If Sartre is right about this-if in the things that matter we almost never find ourselves in the enviable position of the perfect knower, with our reactions to the world fixed scientifically by a complete integration of the evidencethen the typical case of believing is after all a case of believing*.

SELF-DECEPTIO

4.5

AND BAD FAITH

I

123

Good Faith and Bad Faith

The imperfection of belief*, the fact that no belieh ever succeeds in being what it needs to be, is what makes bad faith possible. Every belief* is faith but not every belief* is bad faith. Sartre insists that there is also the possibility of good faith, and that good faith is belief* every bit as much as bad faith is. Both good faith and bad faith come to terms with the fact that we must believe* and with the fact that no belieh is ever enough, that we never quite believe what we believe*. But good faith and bad faith come to terms with the imperfection of belief* in different ways. Both good faith and bad faith want to flee the imperfection of belief*. The difference is that "good faith wants to flee the 'not believing what one believes' into being; bad faith flees being into the 'not believing what one believes" '(BN 111/115). What this seems to mean is that good faith is forever discontent with its own imperfection and strives to complete the project of believing, it believes* but only in order to convert its belieh into an integral response to the world. Good faith therefore involves "critical thought," its beliefs* are always open to revision in the light of new evidence; good faith even strives to alter its beliefs* whenever the alteration brings it closer to completing the project of believing. Bad faith, by contrast, is less quixotic and self-alienated, more realistic, more modest in its demands; it may be less "rational," but it is more reasonable. Bad faith realizes that the condition of "not believing what one believes" is inescapable, that all belief* is inevitably a decision in a situation of ambiguity. It is resigned to the fact that whatever it says it believes will be something that fails fully to integrate its world. So it is "resigned in advance to not being fulfilled by the evidence," and all evidence for it becomes "unpersuasive evidence," since belief* can never rest solely or squarely on the evidence anyway (BN 109/113). Bad faith defines itself as believing* something that at the same time it quite consciously disbelieves, insofar as its belieh fails to integrate certain elements of its world, leaving them outside its belief* and clashing with it. No belief is enough belief, one never believes what one believes. And consequently the primitive project of bad faith is only the employment of this self-destruction of the fact of consciousness. If all belief in good faith is an impossible belief, then there is a place for every impossible belief. My inability to believe I am courageous will not deter me, since no belief, strictly speaking is ever able to believe enough. As my belief I shall define this impossible belief. Certainly I cannot hide from myself that I believe in order not to believe, and that I do not believe in

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order to believe. But this subtle and total annihilation of bad faith by itself cannot surprise me: it exists as the foundation of all faith. (BN

110/114-115)

Both bad faith and good faith are counterexamples to the central assumption behind Sartre's problem of self-deception: the assumption that there is a contradiction in consciously believing and disbelieving the same proposition at he sanle time. For both good faith and bad faith involve belief*, a state of mind in which believing some proposition p (adopting it as one's integrating response to the world) can without contradiction coexist consciously with disbelieving p (recognizing its inadequacy as an integrating response to the world). The difference between good faith and bad faith, and the reason why we may call the one and not the other a form of "self-deception," is that in good faith the project of belief is still being carried on in earnest, belief* is still striving to perform its function as integrating evidence for a stable response to the world, even if its striving is unsuccessful. In bad faith, however, this is no longer the case. In bad faith, belief* has become content with itself as belief*. But why then do people fall into bad faith? Why should I consciously be content with a belief* that fails to complete the project of believing*? The answer is obvious enough. For our beliefs are often called upon to do far more than integrate the evidence. Beliefs also interact with our desires, wishes, feelings, and emotions, which make demands on them which diverge from the demands placed on belief by the evidence. Bad faith is a state in which we consciously satisfy these extraneous demands. It is open to us to satisfy them because we can never do n10re than believe*, and that liberates us to some degree from the cruel constraints of the evidence. For bad faith, as for the honest Kant, it is well that we cannot know, but must believe*. But if believing can serve to satisfy our desires and cater to our feelings, why not treat these as functions coequal with that of integrating the evidence? The answer to this question is clear enough in cases of belief which are not cases of belief*. Where beliefs successfully integrate our response to the world, there is no room for selecting them on the basis of their service to other needs, and people do not worry about whether they are doing any good or harm by holding the beliefs they hold. It is only where belief has admittedly failed, where it has taken the consciously imperfect form of belief*, that the question can arise, and only there that bad faith's answer is an option at all. The question whether anything except the evidence should determine vvhat we believe is a question that can be raised only in bad faith.

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Yet in a sense the question remains a real one, because it is part of what Sartre calls "the Weltanschauung of bad faith" to behave as if the function of believing is as much to cater to our desires and feelings as it is to conform to the evidence and produce an integral response to the world (BN 108/113). Because bad faith has its own Weltanschauung, it is not surprising that it should have its defenders too. We see this Weltanschauung exhibited often enough, perhaps most conspicuously by a certain style of tender-minded religious apologetics, but in other places too-in that aestheticism that calls it philistine not to prefer the beauty of poetic fancies to the petty facts and displeasing truths of science; or in that comfortable (pseudo-Humean) skepticism that counsels us to ignore shrill reason in favor of the mellower promptings of nature. The first two essays in this volun1e have already tried to say what is wrong with this Weltanschauung of bad faith. 17

4.6

Bad Faith as a Form of Self-Deception

How successfully does Sartre's conception of bad faith solve his problem about self-deception? We have seen that in belief*, in good faith as well as bad faith, Sartre has given us a counterexample to the central assumption behind his problem: he has shown how believing something can coexist consciously with disbelieving the same thing. In bad faith, Sartre has also displayed for us a case of belief* in which the pressure of wishes, emotions and so on, might consciously influence belief, bringing about a state we are probably inclined to describe as "self-deception." Yet there is no need to appeal to either a divided mind or unconscious mental processes in explaining how bad faith works. Despite Sartre's success on this point, I doubt that his concept of bad faith can account for all the phenomena of self-deception, even for all the phenomena Sartre himself appears to recognize. It cannot, for example, account for a case in which "I as deceiver know the truth that is masked for me as the one deceived, and know that truth precisely, 17 "Bad faith does not preserve the norms and the criteria of truth as they are accepted by the critical thought of good faith. The thing it decides first, in effect, is the nature of truth" (BN 108-109/113). These remarks may mislead. They are accurate if they are taken as describing the unreflective conduct characteristic of bad faith, but they are false if they are taken to indicate a catalog of beliefs that someone in bad faith must hold. It would even undermine Sartre's project of solving his problem about self-deception on the conscious level if he thought that when you are in bad faith you must have deceived yourself about the essential function of belief and its proper standards-believing one thing about these matters while knowing that your belief is false. For this would make bad faith rest on a kind of self-deception for which, as we shall see in §6, Sartre has no account. Fortunately, however, there is no need for to make the claims that would get him into this trouble.

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in order to hide it from myself the more carefully" (BN 87--88/89). In bad faith, I disbelieve what I believe* to the extent that I recognize my belief* as an imperfect attempt to produce an integral response to the world. But bad faith is not a case in which I disbelieve what I believe* in the stronger sense of knowing that what I believe is false while nevertheless believing it. If there are cases of self-deception which involve this stronger sort of disbelief of what one believes, then we can give no account of them in terms of bad faith alone. The devices available to Sartrian bad faith seem, on the whole, to be restricted to what Harry Stack Sullivan calls "selective inattention." 18 In bad faith, I n1aintain my belief by consciously attending to those aspects of the world that the belief integrates, and directing my attention away from those aspects that clash with my belief. (I permit myself to do this consciously because I am aware in advance that I cannot do more than believe*, and that whatever belief* I hold I will have to be selective in this way.) Sartre's own description of the woman in bad faith exhibits a clear preference for selective inattention as the device by which her state is maintained. 19 But it is doubtful that selective inattention by itself can satisfactorily explain her success in deceiving herself, because it cannot account for its own selectiveness. As Sartre himself depicts her, the woman knows her companion's intentions, and uses this knowledge to select what to attend to in his behavior, so as to avoid becoming conscious of what she knows. Some sort of "divided mind" explanation, most likely involving unconscious knowledge and unconscious choices, seems required to account for this conduct. Bad faith and self-deception involving unconscious mental processes seem to be two quite distinct and equally tenable ways of responding to Sartre's problem about self-deception. But in the actual conduct of self-deception, is bad faith wholly distinct from self-deception involving unconscious processes? Consider the case of Mr. Nicholas Bulstrode, the pious, prosperous, and respected banker in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Bulstrode was not always so rich, however, or so respectable. And his past comes back to haunt him in the forn1 of the sickly, bibulous, and garrulous Raffles, who knows too much about how Bulstrode made his money, and forces himself on Bulstrode as an unwelcome houseguest by threatening to 18Harry Stack Sullivan, Clinical Studies in Psychiatry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1956), chap. 3. 19 "She interests herself only in what is discrete and respectful in her companion's attitude," "She does not take his conduct as part of the 'first approach' ," "She refuses to take his desire for what it is," "She does not notice that she is leaving [her hand in his]" (BN 94/96, 96/98, 97/100).

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tell what he knows. Dr. Lydgate has told Bulstrode that Raffles' illness is not at present life-threatening, but Lydgate has warned Bulstrode repeatedly not to allow Raffles to indulge his taste for brandy, since in his present diseased state this might be very dangerous Bulstrode admits to himself his desire for Raffles' death, but as a God-fearing man he vows not to let this desire influence his conduct: he will obey the doctor's orders. Should Providence in this case award death, there was no sin in contemplating death as the desirable issue-if he kept his hands from hastening it-if he scrupulously did what was prescribed. Even here there might be a mistake; human prescriptions were fallible things; Lydgate had said that treatment had hastened death-why not his own method of treatment? But of course intention was everything in the question of right and wrong. (M, p. 644)20

Wearied by the thought of what Raffles' loose tongue might do to his reputation in the town, Bulstrode decides not to watch the night with his patient, but to go early to bed, putting the sick man in the care of his servant, Mrs. Abel, who knows nothing of Dr. Lydgate's orders but what the master has told her. But then when Mrs. Abel urges that Raffles be given the brandy he craves, Bulstrode strangely fails to mention Dr. Lydgate's orders (has he forgotten them?) and gives her the key to the wine cooler where the brandy is to be found. Before Dr. Lydgate sees him again, Raffles has sunk into a sleep from which he will never wake. When the end comes, however, Bulstrode's conscience is at rest, "soothed by the enfolding wing of secrecy, which seemed then like an angel sent down for his relief" (M, p. 650). Bulstrode accordingly offers his sincerest prayers of gratitude to Providence, which has chosen to release him from the cause of his anxiety. As to his own behavior in the matter, "Who could say that the death of Raffles has been hastened? Who knew what would have saved him?" (M, p. 651). Bulstrode surely knows (at some level) that by letting Raffles have the brandy, he has killed him; but consciously he does not let himself believe it, for he is a Christian and a man of conscience, who could not bear the thought of committing a cold-blooded murder. He conceals from himself the link between his conduct and the consummation of his desire, although the link is plain enough to him. A man vows, and yet will not cast away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way 20George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Bantam Books, 1985), abbreviated throughout as "M" and cited by page number.

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into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow (M, p. 647).

Even in his inmost prayers, we are told, Bulstrode cannot "unravel the confused promptings of the last four-and-twenty hours"; but then private prayer, after all, "is inaudible speech, and speech is representative; who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?" (M, p. 650). Bulstrode's state is not merely one of bad faith; his self-deception requires for its explanation some appeal to a "divided mind," some sort of partition between what Bulstrode unconsciously knows and what he consciously makes himself believe. But bad faith is plainly there too, in his conscious thoughts. On the one hand, there is the attitude of cautious doubt, used in the manner of bad faith to show that he does not have to believe what it would prove inconvenient or painful to believe: "Human prescriptions were fallible things," "Who could say that the death of Raffles had been hastened? Who knew what would have saved him?" Bulstrode makes full use of "the common trick of desire-which avails itself of any irrelevant skepticism, finding larger room for itself in all uncertainty about effects, in every obscurity that looks like the absence of law" (M, p. 645). On the other hand, there is also bad faith's selective appeal to argument and evidence, its use of plausible arguments that one nevertheless knows in advance can never be wholly convincing. In Bulstrode's case, these argun1ents take a special form because he is a man who values not only righteousness but also the appearance of righteousness, and who values both so highly that he has gotten out of the habit of distinguishing sharply between them: "For who, after all, can know how much of this most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other n1en to have about him?" (M, p. 629). Hence Bulstrode has a certain weakness for arguments that might perhaps convince others, even if not himself-yet they are offered precisely to himself, and not to others. Thus, just as Bulstrode tells Dr. Lydgate the next day, "I was over-worn, and left [Raffles] under Mrs. Abel's care," (M, p. 651) so he had told himself the night before, "It was excusable in him, that he should forget part of an order, in his present wearied condition" (M, p.649). In Mr. Bulstrode, some form of self-deception involving a divided mind seems not only to coexist with bad faith, but even to use bad faith for its ends. Bad faith serves as the solicitor, as it were, for thoughts and deeds Mr. Bulstrode refuses to acknowledge, representing the interests of these thoughts and deeds before the forum of Mr. Bulstrode's

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consciousness. We may suspect that it is not uncommon for bad faith to be employed in this "vay as the conscious agent of some deeper form of self-deception.

5

Relativism Many different ideas have been given the name 'relativism', and the term has been used to pillory all sorts of views (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad ones). It is mere posturing to say that you are for or against "relativism" unless you say what you mean by the term. Here I want mainly to discuss (and to criticize) a view I have encountered among students in philosophy courses, who say things like this: "What anyone believes is true for that person. What you believe is true for you, what I believe is true for me." We can call the view expressed in such statements 'relativism' because it denies that there is any such thing as "absolute" truth, holds that all truth is relative to the person who believes it.

5.1

Protagorean Relativism

Though relativism is strangely attractive to some beginners in philosophy, there are virtually no relativists among significant figures in the history of philosophy. The principal exception to this last claim is Protagoras of Abdera (c. 485-410 B.C.), a Greek philosopher who apparently put forward a version of relativism in a treatise entitled Truth. Protagoras traveled to many city-states, taught many influential people, and became very wealthy. He was possibly the most successful of the teachers in fifth century Greece who were known as 'sophists'. None of Protagoras' writings have come down to us, but his views are reported by others, chiefly by Plato in the dialogues Protagoras and Theaetetus. According to Protagoras, "The human being is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are, and of those that are not, that they are not." 1 By this Protagoras apparently meant that each 1 Plato, Theaetetus, tr. J. McDowell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) 152A. Relativist views were also put forward in an anonymous document, called the Dissoi logoi (or "double accounts") which was composed at about the same time. See

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individual person is the measure of how things are to that person: things are or are not (to me) according as they appear to me to be or not be. Protagoras was thinking of cases like this: To me the wind feels cold, while to you the wind feels warm. About this case Protagoras wants to say the following: The wind isn't (absolutely or in itself) either cold or warm; "cold" and "warm" are merely subjective states or feelings. To me the wind feels (or is) cold, and to you it feels (or is) warm, and beyond this there is no fact of the matter concerning the temperature of the wind. 2 Protagoras' relativism may have been a response to some of the metaphysical assertions made by his contemporaries, such as Parmenides of Elea. Parmenides' view was: What is, is; what is not, is not. What falls under the senses, however, is always changing, always different from what went before and will come after, and comes before us only by seeming this way or that way to us. What truly is cannot become or change, must be different from anything it is not, and cannot be perceived by the senses. The only reality is Being or the One. What merely appears is nothing at all. If the mere seeming of sense perception falls short of total Being, it can have no reality whatever. Against this, Protagoras understandably wanted to defend the reality of sense perception, and say that there is such a thing as the way something appears. According to Plato's account, however, Protagoras wanted to extend his defense of appearance to the point of saying that appearances are completely real, as real as it gets. He also wanted to extend 'appearances' beyond perceptual feelings to other kinds of seemings, such as beliefs. If I believe that the world is a certain way, then that's how the world seems to me, and so that's how the world is (to me). If you have a different belief, then that's how the world appears, and therefore how it is, to you. From this Protagoras concluded that error and false belief are absolutely impossible. 3 For a belief says only how things seem to someone, and how they seem to anyone is always how they are (for that person). In fact this view is not so far from Parmenides' own view, which emphasized reality to the extent of denying appearance altogether. Protagoras, by contrast, inflates the "appearance" side of the appearance/reality distinction to the point where it completely excludes the "reality" side. So he too is denying there is any room for a difference between appearance and reality. Jonathan Barnes, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 516-535. 2Plato, Theaetetus 152B. 3Plato, Theaetetus 160C.

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Let's try to imagine a world of which Protagoras' relativism would give us a correct account. Suppose a world composed entirely of independent sets of private sensations or experiences (such as my feeling of cold, which is present only to me and not to you, and your feeling of warmth, which is present to you and not to me). I have access only to my private experiences, you have access only to yours, and neither of us has access to anything we might share in common-to a public or "objective" world, containing things like material objects. To get Protagoras's view, however, we must suppose not only that myexperiences are there only for me, but also that I can't be mistaken about any of them. And in order to exclude the possibility of any sort of error, we have to suppose, finally, that in this world people can formulate judgments only about things with which they are acquainted, so that I couldn't make any erroneous judgments about someone else's experiences. But in the world we're imagining now, there isn't anything about which two people could either agree or disagree. Each of us is shut up in our own private microcosm; my seemings don't even exist in your little world, and yours don't exist in mine. There couldn't be any error or falsehood, because the only things a person can make judgments about are exactly as that person thinks they are. In that sense each person's beliefs in that world are (necessarily and infallibly) true, but they are true only for that person since no one else could possibly have access to that truth. But for this very reason, it could equally be argued that in such a world there would be no place at all for the idea of "truth". Truth applies only to judgments about a shared world, which can be either as son1eone believes it is or otherwise than it is believed to be. For the possibility of saying or believing son1ething true goes hand in hand with the possibility of saying or believing something false; in a world where there is no possibility of ever calling a belief or assertion "false", there would also be no use for the word "true". In such a world, however, there would also be no use for the word "belief". For beliefs aim at truth, and to believe that p is exactly the same thing as believing that p is true. If I can't apply "true" to my thoughts or speech acts, then none of my thoughts could count as a belief And since to assert that p is no different from asserting that pis true, nothing anyone says in that world could even count as an assertion. We don't think we live in a world of that kind. We take ourselves to have beliefs and make assertions, and we think our world contains public objects for beliefs and assertions to be about. We even think of our "private" sensations as public objects in the sense that other people can have beliefs about them that can be true or false. If you say that

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the wind feels warm to you, I might believe you lying to me, or even that you are lying to yourself This could not happen in a Protagorean world. In fact, even our ability to imagine a Protagorean world shows that for us this world is not Protagorean at all. For although we have been thinking of that world as one in which people's private experiences would not be public objects in that world, we have nevertheless been taking it for granted that the judgulents we have been making about their experiences are shared and public between us.

5.2

Is Relativism Self-Refuting?

What this suggests is that Protagoras' view isn't true in our world. But perhaps relativism couldn't be true in any world. That is what Plato thought. He argued that Protagoras' relativism is necessarily false, because it refutes itself 4 The problem arises as soon as Protagoras tries either to assert relativism or believe it. If Protagoras asserts relativism, then he asserts that relativism is true, and that those (such as Plato) who deny relativism say and believe something false. But relativism denies that anyone can say or believe anything false. Hence to be consistent Protagoras nlust concede that the denier of relativisnl says and believes something true. Consequently, relativism is committed to saying that its own denial is true, and in this way it refutes itself. Protagoras might try to escape the problem by saying that relativism is true for the relativist, while the denial of relativism is true for the non-relativist. He might even try to say that when he asserts a proposition, he isn't asserting that the proposition is (absolutely) true (since the notion of absolute truth is just what a relativist wants to get rid of) but only that it is true for him. But what is "true for" supposed to mean here? Suppose you and I disagree about something. I think there was once life on Mars and you think there never was. In such a case, we do say things like this: "For me it is true that there was life on Mars, but for you it is true that there never was." What this means is: In my opinion, it is (absolutely, objectively) true that life once existed on Mars, while in your opinion it is (absolutely, objectively) true that life never existed on Mars. Or again, we say things like this: "For me, it is true that dot-com investments in the 1990s were disastrous, while for you it is true that they were profitable." This might refer to our respective opinions about dot-com investments in the 1990s: whether we think that they were in 4Plato, Theaetetus 161C 162A.

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general good or a bad investn1ents for people at large; but it might also mean that it is (absolutely, objectively) true that I lost my shirt investing in dot-com companies in the 1990s, while you made big bucks investing in such companies. None of these uses of "true for" succeed in getting rid of the notion of (absolute, objective) truth; on the contrary, when we spell out what they mean, we see that this notion is indispensable to explaining what they mean. When pressed, relativists usually say that p is "true for me" if I believe that p. But this answer is no help, because believing that p is once again no different from believing that p is (absolutely) true. If relativists say that this isn't what they mean when they assert a proposition or say they believe it, then they are apparently using the terms "assert" and "believe" in some new and mysterious sense. Until they explain the meanings these words have for them, we can't be sure what (if anything) they are really saying when their mouths make noises that sound (to us) like assertions of relativism. Understanding their words in the usual sense, if you try to assert or believe that there is no (absolute) truth, it has to follow that you can't believe anything at all (not even relativism), and so nothing can be true even for you (not even relativism). Relativism is self-refuting simply because it has no way of using or making sense of the expression "true for me" without relying implicitly on the notion "(absolutely) true," the very notion relativism wants to reject. 5 5There are "antirealist" theories of truth that deny that the truth of a thought or assertion is correspondence with the real world and hold instead that it consists in meeting some criterion or passing some test of verifiability. See Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). Such theories are not usually intended to be relativistic, but they would be if we suppose that there could be different and competing criteria or tests of verifiability, since the identification of truth with a criterion or test would then entail that there are a plurality of truths. One could say that when an assertion meets one certain criterion for truth but fails to meet another, then it is true for those who accept the first criterion but not true for those who accept the second. But this would be misleading, since on an antirealist theory of truth, what each criterion is a criterion for is being identified with passing that criterion itself, and so different criteria could not really be criteria for the same thing ("truth"), nor (for the same reason) could they really be competing criteria. But what this really shows is that as soon as an antirealist theory of truth admits a plurality of criteria, what it calls 'truth' ceases to behave the way the notion of truth is supposed to behave on either a realist or an antirealist theory of truth. Hence this is not going to provide any intelligible account of the relativist notion of "true for" either. On this point, see Chris Swoyer, "True For," in Michael Krausz and Jack Meiland (eds.) Relativism, Cognitive and Moral (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 84-108. The fact that we might be tempted to take antirealist theories of truth in this direction really illustrates the point that wherever there is a criterion or test for verifiability, it is always conceivable that there should be other, competing criteria or tests for the same thing

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If their own assertions of relativism are to make sense, relativists must allow at least one proposition to be absolutely true, namely relativism itself. Suppose we let the relativist make relativism itself an exception (the sole exception) to its own claim that all truth is relative. The relativist now says that relativism is true absolutely, and all beliefs except relativism and its denial are true only relatively (true for those who believe them). This retreat seems to save relativism from direct self-refutation, but it looks extremely ad hoc. Before it looked as if the relativist's view was that there is something wrong with the very idea of absolute truth; but now the relativist can no longer say that. And once we're allowed to use the notion of absolute truth in asserting relativism, then it's natural to wonder why there couldn't be any other absolute truths except relativism. And of course if there are any others, then relativism itself is absolutely false, since it denies that there is any absolute truth (except itself). Even with this retreat, relativism becomes just as self-refuting as it was before as soon as the relativist tries to apply the notion of relative truth to what anyone believes. For it is still true that to believe that p is to believe p is true (absolutely). Thus in order to assert that anything is true jor someone, the relativist has to say that something else besides relativism is true absolutely. For instance, if the relativist holds that "p is true for Socrates" n1eans "Socrates believes that p" , then in order to assert that p is true for Socrates, the relativist has to assert that it is true (absolutely) that Socrates believes that p. But then "Socrates believes that p" is an absolute truth other than relativism, which entails that relativism is absolutely false. ("truth"). And what that shows, in turn, is that antirealist theories of truth are fundamentally mistaken in simply identifying truth with any proposed criterion or test for truth. In general, it belongs to the nature of criteria or tests for something's being X that its really being X is logically distinct from its meeting any particular criterion for being X. This holds for any property X that is not simply conventionally defined by some criterion (as being "one meter long" might be conventionally defined by being the same length as the standard meter stick in Paris). But few properties are like this. For instance, someone might consider having won the Most Valuable Award in the American League for 2002 as the correct criterion for having been the most valuable player in the American League that year; but someone else might consider the sportswriters to have made a mistake, and think that some other criterion (such as the player's statistical performance in batting average, runs batted in or game-winning hits) would be a better criterion for saying that someone was the most valuable player. Truth is like this case rather than being like the case of the standard meter, in that different metaphysical or epistemological or semantic theories may offer different and competing criteria for truth. Such a situation makes sense only if we realize that a proposition's being true is something logically distinct from its meeting any particular criterion for truth (even the criterion we think is the right one).

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Ideas Not to Be COll.fused With Relativism

People who think they are relativists are often trying to express one (or more) ideas different from relativism and not threatened with selfrefutation. Here are four such ideas: I. Skepticism: All beliefs are uncertain; no belief is justified. Relativism looks something like skepticism in that they both put all beliefs in the same boat. 6 Further, people are often attracted to relativism by the feeling that others are too confident in the absolute truth of what they believe, and skepticism is the view that no one is ever entitled to such confidence. But skepticism is not the same as relativism, and is even in a way its diametrical opposite. Relativism says that whatever anybody believes must be true (for that person), so that no belief can ever be mistaken, unjustified or even uncertain. Skepticisnl does not deny that some beliefs are (absolutely) true, it denies only that we can ever be sure which beliefs these are. Skepticisnl is quite an extreme position, and probably false; but it is not threatened with self-refutation, as relativism is. For it is perfectly self-consistent to say that you hold beliefs that are uncertain, or even unjustified. (Religious people sometimes say such things about beliefs they hold on faith.) A consistent skeptic must hold that skepticism itself is uncertain, but there is no self-refutation involved in doing that. If a relativist catches you audaciously suggesting that there is such a thing as (absolute) truth, then you are bound to be asked the rhetorical question: "But who is to decide what the truth is?" Apparently the relativist thinks that if you hold that there is an absolute, objective truth, then you have to believe there is some authority whose word on that truth must not be questioned. The rhetorical question appears to be meant as a challenge to your presumed right to set yourself up as such an authority. It is supposed to make you either abandon the whole idea of absolute truth or else reveal yourself for the arrogant dogmatist you are. But the possibility of skepticism shows very graphically that this is· a false dilemma. Skeptics don't deny that there is an absolute truth, but they are as far fronl dognlatism as it is possible to be, since 6Thus Barry Barnes and David Bloor want to identify "relativism" with the view that "all beliefs are on a par with one another with respect to the causes of their creditability. It is not that all beliefs are equally true or equally false, but that regardless of truth and falsity the fact of their credibility is to be seen as equally problematic." "Relativism, Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledge," in Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds.) Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 23). Whether or not one finds their position plausible (I must admit I regard it as extremely implausible), the thesis Barnes and Bloor call "relativism" is not what we are discussing under that name, and is not self-refuting in the ways we have described.

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they deny absolutely that anyone (least of all then1selves) could ever be in a position to say with certainty what the truth is. Even if you aren't a skeptic, you can believe there is an (absolute) truth without thinking that anyone counts as an infallible authority about what it is. Even though skepticism is the exact opposite of relativism, I sometimes suspect that people have arrived at relativism by going through skepticislu. First they became aware that there is widespread disagreement on fundamental philosophical issues, which fostered in them a commendable (though perhaps exaggerated) sense of intellectual modesty. This led them (perhaps rashly) to the extreme skeptical conclusion that nobody knows anything at all about anything and that all opinions are equally doubtful. But that conclusion panicked them, so they began looking around for a way in which people can be certain about something even in the face of this universal uncertainty. As a quick way out, they hit on this compromise: If everyone just stops trying to claim absolute truth for what they believe, then in return we can let each person's beliefs count as "true for them". But this attempt at a negotiated settlement is bound to fail, because it is nothing but an attempt to combine two mutually contradictory assertions, namely: "All beliefs are utterly doubtful" and "All beliefs are unquestionably certain". If the point of relativism is to try to cOITLbine these two assertions, then it is easy to see why it has to be self-refuting. II. Different people can be justified in holding different beliefs. In the eighteenth century, chemists such as Georg Ernst Stahl and Joseph Priestley held that when something burns, it loses a substance called "phlogiston" . Later, after the researches of Antoine Lavoisier, chemists came to reject the phlogiston theory in favor of the theory that combustion involves not the loss of something, but the gain of something, namely, oxygen. 7 Before Lavoisier, the most informed chemists in the world all believed the phlogiston theory; very likely they were justified in doing so: perhaps evidence for the phlogiston theory was so strong that they would have been unreasonable if they had not believed it. But Lavoisier acquired new evidence, which justifies rejecting the phlogiston theory and believing the oxidation theory instead. There is nothing relativistic in claiming that Stahl and Priestley were justified in believing the phlogiston theory while Lavoisier was justified in rejecting it. That is not at all the same as claiming that the phlogiston theory was "true for Stahl, but not true for Lavoisier." It is one thing for a person to be justified in holding a belief, and a very different 7S ee I-Ienry Guerlac, Lavoisier: The Crucial Year (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966).

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thing for the belief to be true. If you and I hold mutually incompatible beliefs, then what at least one of us believes must be false; but it could still be true that my belief is justified on the evidence I have and your belief is justified on the evidence you have. In a case like this the obvious thing to do is to communicate with one another as we inquire, sharing evidence until (hopefully) we eventually come to agreement on (what we hope is) the truth, But we shouldn't deceive ourselves into thinking that this is a simple or easy process, or that the atten1pt to reach agreement will always be successful. Priestley was a good scientist, and he knew of Lavoisier's results, but he died still believing in the phlogiston theory, even after most chemists considered it discredited. The fact that intelligent people often can't reach agreement does not show that there is no true or false, no right or wrong. III. People sometimes hold conflicting beliefs without any of them being wholly mistaken because they each see different aspects of the same reality. Suppose you are climbing a mountain from the south and I am clin1bing the same mountain from the north. The north side of the mountain is covered with evergreen trees; the south side is barren and rocky. On the basis of what I see around me, I judge that the whole mountain is covered with forest; on the basis of what you see, you judge that the whole mountain is barren rock. Here each of us holds a true belief about the part of the mountain we see, but a false belief about the mountain as a whole. Different religions have sometimes been depicted as different paths up the same mountain (whose summit is God, salvation or religious truth); each describes a different path to the summit, and describes it accurately, but there is more to the mountain (the religious life) than any of them realizes; so every religion is in error when it denies the experience of other religions. The claim here is not that any religion is "true for' its believers. It is rather that every religion contains some of the (objective, absolute) truth by correctly representing the side of God or religious truth the religion genuinely experiences. But this also implies that each religion is limited and fallible, containing some falsehood to the extent that it regards itself as complete and in exclusive possession of the truth. The point of the picture n1ight be that each religious tradition deserves respect because it has part of the truth; but it implies equally that the adherents of each religion should be wary of its blind spots and open to the elements of truth in other religions that are missing in their own. This last point, however, is one that a relativist can't make, and must even deny. For since relativists are committed to saying that every person's beliefs are wholly true (for that person), relativism rules out

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the possibility that anyone's beliefs are open to correction or completion by considering some other viewpoint. IV. Fallibilism: We might always be mistaken in what we believe. Rene Descartes thought that we can be infallible in some of our assertions: for example, that when you attend to your own thinking, your assertion "I think, therefore I exist" could not possibly be mistaken. 8 This denies fallibilism, since Descartes holds that son1e of our beliefs could not be mistaken. But Descartes thought that many of his own beliefs had turned out to be erroneous and many beliefs we need for everyday life are always going to be somewhat uncertain. He held that we can achieve infallibility only about a few things, and then only if we follow the right philosophical method very cautiously and carefully. Other philosophers, however, such as Charles Sanders Peirce, have disagreed with Descartes, maintaining that we are always going to be fallible in everything we believe (the term "fallibilism" was Peirce's invention). 9 Son1e relativists seem directly to equate relativism ¥lith fallibilism. When you deny relativism (or assert that there is such a thing as absolute truth), they can interpret this only as a denial of fallibilism. But this is a confusion. When you assert that p, you take the risk that you will have to take the assertion back if it is shown to be wrong; at the same tin1e you assert that p, you commit yourself to the claim that you aren't in fact mistaken in your assertion that p, and you risk having to take that back too. But in asserting that p you aren't thereby committing yourself to saying that your assertion that p is infallible and couldn't possibly be proven wrong in the future. If p turns out to be false, you don't have any claim of infallibility to take back because you neither made nor implied such a claim when you asserted that p. Not only is fallibilism perfectly consistent with holding beliefs about what is (absolutely) true, but fallibilism itself makes sense only if you are prepared to n1ake some assertions about what is absolutely true, since unless you do this there is nothing at all for you to be fallible about. Actually, it is the relativists who are committed to denying fallibilism. For according to them, they can't be fallible in any of their clain1s that son1ething is absolutely true (since they make no such clain1s); nor can they have false beliefs about anything they believe to be relatively true, since relativism says that whatever I believe is true (for me). Therefore, relativists are committed to being total 8Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, tr. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), pp. 17 and 61. 9See C.S. Peirce, "The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism," Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by J. Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 42-59.

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infallibilists-infallibilists not merely about a special class of their beliefs (as Descartes is), but infallibilists about absolutely all their beliefs.

5.4

Ethical Relativism

In §2 we tried (unsuccessfully) to save relativism from self-refutation by exempting relativism itself from the claim that all truth is relative. We might have better luck if we try admitting that most beliefs (especially scientific or purely factual beliefs) are true or false absolutely, but holding that relativism is nevertheless correct for some limited class of beliefs. Since relativists are often interested in applying their view chiefly to ethical issues, we might try ethical relativism. It says: There is no absolute truth about ethics, but only relative truth. What I believe is morally right (or wrong) is right (or wrong) for me, and what you believe is right is right for you. If I think abortion is wrong, then it is true for me that abortion is wrong; if you think abortion is OK, then it is true for you that abortion is OK. A natural question is: Why pick on ethical beliefs in this way? The answers most often given are these two: A. People never agree on ethical questions. B. There is no way of knowing any absolute truth about ethics. Critics of ethical relativism often point out that there is more agreement on ethical questions than (A) admits: for instance, when you take account of the differing circun1stances and factual beliefs of different cultures, it is not so hard to account for their differing ethical custon1S and opinions on the basis of a comn1on set of fundamental ethical principles. There is also a very practical reason for assuming that eventual agreement on ethical questions is possible: namely, that if people are to treat one another with mutual respect and seek rational agreement on disputed questions, they have to proceed on the provisional assun1ption that the agreement they seek is at least possible. The critics also clain1 that (B) is a wild exaggeration: For some ethical truths seem virtually impossible for anyone to doubt. Who, outside the artificial atmosphere of a philosophical discussion, could seriously claim to doubt that it would be wrong to torture a child to death before its parents' eyes just for the fun of it? But let us grant both (A) and (B), at least for the sake of argument. The problem for ethical relativism is that they don't entail ethical relativism. Further, ethical relativism isn't the only (or even the best) way of accounting for them. (B) seems to assert ethical skepticism, which would provide a natural explanation for (A) as well, since if no one

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knows anything about a subject, then that explains why people have widely differing opinions about it. When we limit relativisn1 to ethical beliefs, relativism itself no longer has to count as only relatively true, so it looks as if it has been rescued from the threat of self-refutation. But the rescue will be successful only if: (i) Ethical relativism itself is not an ethical belief; and (ii)Ethical relativism does not share with ethical beliefs the features which make them only relatively and not absolutely true. But both (i) and (ii) are doubtful, or at least very difficult for ethical relativists to hold consistently with their relativism. The relativist's main reason for thinking that ethical beliefs can't be absolutely true is that they are endlessly controversial. Ethical relativism shares this feature with ethical beliefs: people don't agree about ethical relativism either. Moreover, ethical relativists often want to treat ethical relativism as if it were an ethical belief, or as if it implied certain ethical beliefs. For instance, they think ethical relativism implies that we should be tolerant of people with ethical beliefs different from our own (however, see §6 below.) If either (i) or (ii) is false, then ethical relativism must regard itself as only relatively true, and so it 'would be self-refuting after all. So if ethical relativism is to avoid self-refutation, ethical relativists cannot treat ethical relativism as if it were itself a substantive ethical view (supporting tolerance, for instance). And as long as ethical relativism remains as controversial as many ethical views are, they have to explain why we should regard it as any n10re true than these views. Even if these objections are waived, ethical relativism still inherits some of the serious problems of unqualified relativism. Ethical relativists still haven't explained what (if anything) they mean by "true for me". Since an ethical relativist doesn't believe that it's true (absolutely) that killing is wrong, then the ethical relativist doesn't believe that killing is wrong, and so it can't be true for the ethical relativist that killing is wrong. Thus ethical relativists can't consistently have any ethical beliefs of their own. Once again we may learn something if we look at some other views which might be confused with ethical relativism even though they are quite distinct from (and even incompatible with) it: I. Ethical Skepticism: No ethical belief is certain, all ethical beliefs are unjustified. As before, ethical skepticism is the diametrical opposite ofethical relativism, and as before, ethical skepticism is more defensible than ethical relativism. Even so, unqualified ethical skepticism seems exaggerated, to put it mildly. We need only think again of our belief,

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which no sane person could seriously doubt, that it would be wrong to torture children before their parents' eyes just for the fun of it. II. Ethical nihilism: All ethical statements are false. Ethical statements predicate moral properties ("right," "wrong," "good," "evil," "just," "unjust") of people or actions or social institutions, etc.; but (according to the ethical nihilist) the world does not contain any of these properties; the belief in then1 is an error or a superstition, like believing in gods or black magic or the bad luck which will happen if you spill the salt. As Nietzsche puts it: "There are altogether no moral facts. Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no realities. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena-more precisely, a misinterpretation." 10 Ethical nihilism and ethical relativism both deny that any ethical beliefs are absolutely true, but ethical nihilism doesn't sugar-coat this denial by adding the mysterious qualification that ethical beliefs are all nevertheless "true for" the person who holds them. Ethical nihilism does have one problem in common with ethical relativism: Since you can't believe that p unless you believe p is true, if you are either an ethical relativist or an ethical nihilist, then you are committed to having no ethical beliefs at all, not even beliefs like the one about torturing children cited in the previous paragraph. III. Emotivism: Ethical statements do not make assertions at all, but instead express emotions or attitudes. According to the emotivist, ethical statements do not really assert anything that could be true or false. Instead, they express emotions of approval or disapproval, rather like exclamations of joy or distaste. 11 On this view, to say "Kindness is good" is like saying: "Hooray for kindness!" To say "Cruelty is bad" is like saying: "Cruelty-Yuck!" Imperatives, like exclamations, aren't true or false. So "prescriptivism", a variant of emotivism, holds that ethical statements are not assertions but imperatives: "Killing is wrong" means something like: "Don't kill!" 12 Emotivism has to be different fron1 ethical relativism because ethical relativism says that all ethical beliefs are true (for someone), while emotivism says that no one really has any ethical beliefs at all! Like ethical relativists and ethical nihilists, emotivists can't have any ethical beliefs, but this doesn't lOWalter Kaufmann (ed.), The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 501. 11See C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944) and A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover, 1946), pp. 102-115. 12See R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1952).

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bother them because they have ethical sentiments or attitudes instead. For example, emotivists can't believe anything about the wrongness of torturing children, but they can have very strong negative feelings about such practices and they can try to get others to share their feelings. Emotivists try to reinterpret (what look like) ethical assertions as really disguised expressions of emotion and commands or exhortations to share emotions. On the basis of such reinterpretations they then claim that their view has the advantage that it rids us of the confused and difficult task of justifying moral beliefs but otherwise makes no difference to normative ethics. Accordingly, emotivists subscribe to normative ethical the9ries such as utilitarianism and Kantianism just as they would if they thought these theories involved beliefs about ethical truth. 13 Emotivism is probably the most defensible of the views being considered here; it is still defended by some philosophers, though it is no longer nearly as popular among them as it was in the mid-twentieth century. IV. Cultural relativism: Different cultures have different ethical standards and the standards by which the conduct of any individual should be measured are the mores of the community to which that individual belongs. 14

5.5

Cultural Relativism

Cultural relativisn1, taken in this sense, deserves a separate discussion all to itself. For it is not really a form of relativism at all in the sense we have been using that term. If taken as merely a collectivized form of ethical relativisn1, then it inherits all the other problems of ethical relativism. But as just stated, cultural relativism does not deny that ethical beliefs are true. It is a view about which ones are true and why. Those who subscribe to cultural relativism about ethics are often trying to make a point, which is both correct and important. Ethics or morality itself can, in a certain sense, be seen as a social or cultural phenomenon. The ethical beliefs by which most people guide their lives and measure themselves tend to come in systems that are conjoined with cultural practices and acquired by individuals as part of their 13But can they really preserve everything about normative ethics that they want to? See Nicholas Sturgeon, "What Difference Does It Make if Moral Realism Is Thue?" Southern Journal of Philosophy 24 (1986). 14For some defences, criticisms and other discussions of cultural relativism, see Edward Westermarck, Ethical Relativity (New York: Humanities Press, 1960); Richard B. Brandt, Ethical Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N J: Prentice Hall, 1959), pp. 98-105, 285-286; David Wong, Moral Relativity (Berkeley: University of California, 1985; and Richard Miller, Moral Differences (Princeton: Princeton University, 1992).

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socialization. Systems of ethical belief differ from culture to culture in significant ways that anthropologists may study with profit. When we deal with people in or from cultures different from our own, not only prudence but also n10ral decency requires that we attend to these differences and consider then1 with care and sensitivity in light of the respect we owe the members of other cultures simply as human beings. If that were what 'cultural relativism' or 'ethical relativism' meant, then it would be an (objectively, absolutely) true doctrine relating to the sociology and anthropology of moral beliefs, and to some of the practical implications of those studies. It also would have nothing to do with the 'relativism' discussed in the preceding pages. But sometimes the people who rightly insist on the truths just stated think those truths have the substantive normative implication that whatever any culture believes is right is right for mernbers of that culture. This is the position I have just named 'cultural relativism'. In effect, cultural relativism holds that there is a single, absolute, objectively right answer to any moral question about the rightness or wrongness of a given action: If you want to know whether an action is right or wrong, simply find out what the agent's culture believes about it. If they think it is right, then it is right; if they think it is wrong then it is wrong. 15 Anybody who holds that there are (absolute) ethical truths must admit that the rightness or wrongness of an act is relative to the circumstances in which it is performed. Because people's circumstances differ, what is (absolutely, objectively) right for one person, might be different fron1 what is (absolutely, objectively) right for another. For instance, even the most extreme moral absolutist might very well hold that it is right for Joe to have sex with Joe's wife but wrong for Sam 15 Anthropologists who consider then1selves cultural relativists are not always consistent at this point. William Graham Sumner, for example, sometimes seems to be giving a cultural relativist account of moral rightness in the sense just provided. But at other times he seems to think that what makes an action right is its that it is well adapted to life in the given set of circumstances, and he takes cultural normS to be a generally reliable guide to this. See William Graham Sumner, "Folkways," in John Ladd (ed.) Ethical Relativism (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1973), pp. 23-39. Similar ambiguities are detectable in Melville Herskovits, "Cultural Relativism and Cultural Values," ibid., pp. 58-78. The latter sort of account of rightness, depending on adaptedness to life, would not really be culturally relativistic at all. For it would provide instead an absolute, not culturally relative, criterion for rightness (whose precise meaning would depend on how one conceived of the ends of life and what behavior is well adapted to them under a given set of circumstances). The ideas touted as cultural relativism would come in only with the additional (contingent, empirical, and perhaps controversial) thesis that prevailing cultural norms are always reliable guides to which behavior is well adapted to life.

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to have sex with Joe's wife. Such cases of "right for you, wrong for me" obviously do not support any form of ethical relativisn1. Cultural relativism, as we are now considering it, could be understood in a similar way, as simply a special view about how moral right and wrong vary with the agent's circumstances. It holds that (absolute, objective) moral rightness and wrongness depend on the prevailing culture's beliefs about a given action. If you want to know the objectively right answer to the question whether a given act is right or wrong, just find out what the agent's culture believes on that question: their belief determines what is objectively true. 16 Accordingly, a moral judgment such as "Joe's killing Sam was wrong" would be like the judgment "It is raining" in that both have implicit reference to a context determining their objective truth. "It is raining" always means that it is raining at a certain time and place (e.g. in Fresno at 6 pm on September 12, 2002). "Joe's killing Sam was wrong" means that Joe's killing of Sam was wrong in a certain culture at a certain time (e.g. in white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Eastern seaboard American culture early in the 21st century), where acts like 16This assumes what David Lyons has called "agent relativism" (see David Lyons, "Ethical Relativism and the Problem of Incoherence," in Krausz and Meiland (eds.) Relativism: Cognitive and Ethical, pp. 209-225). Alternatively, one could propose a very different doctrine-"appraiser relativism" which says that an act is right (or wrong) if the appraiser (the person judging the act, or perhaps the appraiser's culture) considers it right (or wrong). If we allow, as relativists often want to insist, that there are different judgments among different appraisers (or different cultures), then appraiser relativism would immediately yield inconsistent judgn1ents about an actions rightness or wrongness. A relativist might want to express these by speaking of the act being "right for me" and "wrong for you" or even of different ethical judgments being "true for" different appraisers. As Lyons is quick to point out, this would only lead us back into the quagmire of incoherence we found in relativism earlier in this chapter. It is not unusual for culturally relativistic anthropologists at this point to fall into saying that when someone says an action is right, all they mean is that the act satisfies their own culture's standards of rightness (see Lyons, pp. 221, 223, 225, who cites both Sumner and Ruth Benedict as examples of this move). However, this is quite clearly not all that most people mean by calling an act 'right', since they believe that because it meets certain standards, the act also deserves some sort of approval which they know it would not get from someone who knew it met those standards but did not endorse the standards. The error of these anthropologists is quite analogous to that of antirealist theorists of truth (see note 5 above), when they identify the truth of an assertion with its meeting certain criteria or tests of verifiability. In both cases, the point to insist on, once again, is that (unless we are talking about qualities defined merely by an arbitrary convention), actually being X is always logically distinct from meeting some criterion or standard for being X. And the sense in which moral standards might constitute "social conventions" is not such a sense, since no one thinks that these standards are conventional in the purely arbitrary way that the standard meter in Paris is conventional.

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Joe's act of killing are widely disapproved. Cultural relativism then holds that what a culture believes about an act determines the truth about its objective rightness or wrongness in something like the way that spatio-temporal location determines the truth about the weather conditions obtaining then and there. Cultural relativism and the affirmation of cultural diversity. Much of the appeal of cultural relativism has come from the perception that different cultures have different moral standards and moral practices from ours, but nevertheless get along at least as well with their standards and practices as we do with ours. This perception is often conjoined with the idea that it is wrong for Western culture to be intolerant of other cultures and impose its ways on them. But this last idea does not imply cultural relativism, and is probably even inconsistent with it. Perhaps the intended connection between cultural relativism and cultural tolerance is based on an argument of the following kind: 1. We shouldn't blame, or interfere with, actions that are objectively right. 2. The actions generally approved in other cultures are objectively right just because they are generally approved there. (Cultural relativism) 3. Therefore, we should not blame or interfere with the actions of people in other cultures when they are generally approved in those cultures.

But can a cultural relativist consistently put forward such an argument? Cultural relativists often charge that among the ethical beliefs of Western culture is Western Supremacy: Western Supremacy: Western values should be imposed on other cultures, and members of Western culture should blame and interfere with the actions of people in other cultures whenever these actions violate Western values. If the cultural relativists are right that Western Supremacy is a belief of Western culture, then what cultural relativism tells us as members of Western culture is that it is absolutely, objectively right for us to impose our ways on others and objectively right for us to blame and interfere with the actions of people in other cultures whenever our values condemn them. That means that cultural relativism supports not (3) but its contradictory. Further, what account can a cultural relativist consistently give of the ethical principle stated in (I)? If the principle is supposed to have absolute or trans-cultural validity, how can this be consistent with cultural relativism? If the principle is valid merely because it is one of our culture's ethical beliefs, then it deserves no priority over Western Supremacy. And then it looks as if (1) and Western Supremacy taken

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together imply the falsity of (2) (that is, of cultural relativism). In that case, cultural relativism is self-refuting for us Westerners (and, indeed, for the members of any culture whose ethical beliefs happen to be incompatible with cultural relativism). It follows from this that cultural relativism is totally incapable of combating any form of culturally entrenched imperialism, racism or ethnocentrism. For whenever we find these ugly things built into a culture's beliefs, cultural relativism is committed to endorsing them; and if cultural relativism is interpreted in such a way as to conflict with these beliefs, then it becomes selfrefuting in that culture. In practice, cultural relativism is sometimes used as a pretext for following whatever ethical beliefs one finds convenient. For instance, a Western-based multinational corporation operating in other parts of the world comes from a culture that believes that it is all right to seek the highest profit you can within the law; cultural relativism therefore says they may do that (even if it means disrupting the traditions of that culture). But cultural relativism also says that they need not blame or interfere with practices within that culture which might be considered wrong in their own culture: practices such as police-state terror directed against workers who protest the brutally low wage scales and miserable working conditions through which the corporations reap their profits. So interpreted, cultural relativism allows these corporations to do whatever they like. The above results suggest that cultural relativism doesn't do justice to the actual views of those who really want to promote cross-cultural tolerance or oppose Western imperialism. It looks like those views really consist in holding to certain (absolute, objective, trans-cultural) ethical principles about how the members of different cultures should act toward each other, such as that people should be open-minded and tolerant toward all human beings, always treating them with dignity and respect. Perhaps the anti-imperialists are embarrassed to avow such principles because they obviously come from the modern, Western Enlightenment tradition, and avowing them will imn1ediately expose you to the dreaded charge of ethnocentrism. By contrast, cultural relativism's principled stance of absolute cross-cultural neutrality seems to buy us immunity from this charge. But of course cultural relativism is a n10dern Western idea every bit as much as Enlightenment moral principles are; the only difference is that, as we have seen, cultural relativism is actually hostile to cross-cultural tolerance and n1utual respect, whereas certain other Western Enlightenment principles do favor them. Very likely we end up in this paradoxical position because we start from the correct perception that everyone's standpoint is limited by

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their cultural perspective, and then (directly contradicting this insight) we try immediately to occupy a sublimely neutral standpoint which is above all such limitations. We would be wiser to align ourselves with some standpoint situated within a definite culture which, despite its inevitable limitations, at least makes an effort to be critical of itself and tolerant of other cultural standpoints. We are reluctant to take this wise course because we know that it is hard to identify such a standpoint; we realize that the biases from which we start will doubtless lead us into mistakes, probably culpable ones; and we are aware that by this route we can never hope altogether to escape the accusation of ethnocentrism, but will just have to learn to live with it (as part of our human condition). We find cultural relativism far more appealing because its empty gestures enable us to announce our good intentions and repudiate our cultural biases in the abstract, with a mere wave of the hand. It enables us to absolve ourselves all of our cultural limitations in general without ever having to overcome any of them in particular (as we have seen, it even provides an endorsement for them, when that is needed). But perhaps what we have really wanted all along is a license to behave like brutal, arrogant imperialists while at the same time thinking of ourselves as tolerant, humane cosmopolitans who have transcended all their cultural prejudices. This makes it unsurprising that cultural relativism has had widespread appeal among the more sophisticated members of Western imperialist culture. Difficulties in accepting cultural relativism. Even if it lived up to its billing, cultural relativism would still be extremely implausible. It commits you to the objective rightness (in the context of the culture in question) of all the moral beliefs and practices which have ever existed. Slavery was objectively right in ancient Greece and Rome, and even in our own country not so long ago. Human sacrifices were objectively right for the Aztecs; so was the Indian custom of suttee, requiring a widow to burn herself to death on her husband's funeral pyre; and also the pogrom-the periodic indiscriminate slaughter of Jews-which has long been part of the folkways of Christian peoples in Europe. Also objectively right is the genital mutilation of women, which is still practiced in a variety of cultures. Cultural relativists sometimes refuse to back down even when presented with the most outrageous and grisly cases; but I can't help thinking that if they hadn't been backed into this position by the stance they hastily chose in a philosophical discussion, these same people would be the first to condemn these practices as strongly as anyone. The moral problems cultural relativism is trying to address are cer-

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tainly real ones. In sonle cases it is simply not obvious what we should do (or even think) when confronted by practices of another culture that offend our moral sense and contradict our deepest convictions. Some things that people do to one another in different cultures are quite evidently the results of wretched superstitions and the brutally unjust distributions of power and authority that are traditional in those societies. On the other hand, we can often see that in other cultures certain actions have a different meaning, and we are quite aware that we lack the capacity to understand and evaluate the practices of alien societies. If we do nothing in the face of evident moral evil, we completely forfeit our integrity; but if we act on the basis of convictions held from our admittedly incomplete perspective, then we run the risk of arrogantly setting ourselves up as infallible moral judges of people who may know more than we do about what is being judged. If traditional cultures in other parts of the world are changing so that they become more like modern Western culture in ways we approve, should we applaud and support this process as the victory of moral progress, or should we deplore, regret and oppose these changes because they amount to the violent extinction of that culture's priceless heritage? What is most objectionable about cultural relativisnl is that it pretends to have found a simple, general, tidy and unambiguous answer to questions where any answer of that description is aln10st certainly wrong. Difficulties in applying cultural relativism. Another problem with cultural relativism is that the general criterion of right and wrong which it proposes is actually very unhelpful because it is inherently unclear and impossible to apply in the real world. Cultural relativism tells us that the rightness of an act depends on what the agent's culture believes about it. But most societies today are a complex network of cultures and subcultures, sometimes having widely divergent moral beliefs about controversial issues. For a given person in a given situation, how are we supposed to decide which culture or subculture the person belongs to? How many of us can be entirely sure what culture we ourselves belong to? Can people set up a new culture whenever they want to? How few people would it take to do this? In most cultures (our own, for instance), many ethical questions are the subject of endless disagreement and debate (this, after all, was what got ethical relativism started in the first place). How are we to determine what the ethical beliefs of the prevailing culture are? Does this require an overwhelming consensus among the culture's mernbers, or is it a matter of simple majority vote? Or does cultural relativisnl imply that the most old-fashioned and ethnically traditional moral opinion is always the right one? Wherever there is any intra-cultural disa~_~-=-

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ment at all, the effect of cultural relativism will then be to support the dominant view within the culture and to de-legitimize all dissenting views without giving them so much as a hearing. Cultural relativism implies that on any moral question within a culture an opinion is always necessarily wrong whenever it goes against traditional beliefs in the culture which are still very widely held. That means not only that those individuals who raise moral questions about accepted practices are always in the wrong, but also that any movement for moral reform within a culture, even if it eventually succeeds, must have been in the wrong at the tin1e it got started, and therefore that it must always be absolutely wrong to try to reform any culture's accepted moral beliefs and practices. Cultural relativism seems to give plausible answers to ethical questions only in a culture (utterly unlike our own) that is homogeneous, unreflective, unchangeable and free of serious moral disagreements. Ironically, the very social complexities, mutabilities and controversies that make relativism attractive also render it useless, unclear and implausible as an account of ethical truth.

5.6

The Appeal of Relativism

Relativism and dogmatism. Why does relativism appeal to people? People are often attracted to relativism because they think it expresses and supports attitudes of open-mindedness and tolerance, and that the rejection of relativism commits you to arrogant dogmatism and narrowmindedness. Since the opposite of "relative" is "absolute," the opposite of "relativism" seems to be "absolutism", a word that usually connotes "authoritarianism" or "dogmatism". Besides, dogmatism and intolerance always seern to be based on the idea that I am right and the other is wrong about something. But if everyone's belief is equally true (because "true for them" ), then there never could be any occasion to think that I am any more (or less) right than anyone else about anything. Consequently, it seems to follow that there could never be any possible reason for treating anyone with hostility or disrespect if they hold a belief different from mine. If you want to avoid a bad thing, however, it isn't always a good idea to fly to the opposite extreme, since that might turn out to be just as bad. If "absolutisn1" is bad and "relativism" is its opposite, it still doesn't follow that relativism will be good. However, it is not clear that relativism really is the opposite thing from authoritarianism, dogmatism, closed-mindedness and intolerance. In fact, it may even be just another version of the same thing.

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Relativism never declares any belief absolutely true or false; this may make us think that it is open-minded. But to be open-minded is to be disposed to think that you are fallible, that you could be mistaken in what you believe (so that what you now think is absolutely true might on closer examination turn out to be absolutely false). This is a thought a relativist can never have, because relativists are convinced that at any time all their beliefs are necessarily true (for them). You show open-mindedness by leaving open the possibility of changing your beliefs (coming to disagree with what you used to believe) when you are given good reasons to. But relativists can never have any reason for changing their beliefs, since relativism says that at every point their beliefs are already true (for them). Of course relativism doesn't give anyone a reason for not changing their beliefs, since if I just happen to change my beliefs, then relativism says that my new belief is just as true (for me) as, but no truer (for me) than, myoId belief was. In short, relativism implies that that the right attitude toward our beliefs is always one of total, uncritical self-con1placency. Relativism is anti-authoritarian only in the sense that it takes away any reason you might have for considering the opinions and arguments of others in forming your beliefs (for instance, the opinion of someone better informed than you are). For relativism says that your beliefs are all true (for you) no matter what anyone else may say or think. Relativism thus undercuts any reason anyone might have for being critical about their own beliefs. As we have already noted, relativism implies that you are always infallible in whatever you believe. The closed-minded arrogance of this view is not diminished by saying, in effect, that everyone else is infallible too. This merely adds to my own dogmatism the provision that it is all right for everyone else to be just as dogmatic as I am. Tolerance is the willingness to let others be different from us, especially to let them disagree with us, even if they are wrong. Relativism cuts down on the need to be tolerant, since it denies that anyone is ever wrong. But this doesn't make the relativist tolerant for exactly the same reason that successfully fleeing from every danger doesn't make you courageous. It is as if relativists can't even conceive of actually tolerating those they think are in the wrong, and the closest thing to tolerance that they are capable of imagining is the principled refusal ever to admit that anyone could ever be wrong about anything. But relativisnl does not altogether eliminate the need for tolerance because people can be intolerant not only of those whose beliefs they think are wrong, but also of those who differ from them in other ways (in skin color, customs and folkways, or emotional sensibilities) even when

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the difference involves no disagreement in beliefs. And when the need for tolerance does arise, relativism provides no reason at all for being tolerant rather than intolerant. If I believe it is wrong to hate people who differ from me, relativism tells me that that belief is true (for me); but equally, if I believe in persecuting others, then relativism tells me that this belief is also true (for me). In short, relativism is just exactly as likely to encourage intolerance as it is to encourage tolerance. But this is precisely what we should have expected. In saying that every belief is true for the person who holds it, relativism is absolutely neutral between all pairs of opposed beliefs. But that entails directly that relativism is absolutely neutral between the belief in tolerance and the belief in intolerance. What this shows is simply that tolerance is not the same thing as neutrality. Tolerance requires some positive convictions about why, when and to what extent we should let people believe and do what we take to be wrong. Relativism can never support or even admit any convictions of this kind, because it can't even admit that anything is ever wrong. Relativism and conservatism. Religious or political conservatives or traditionalists often attack "relativism". When they are accused of maintaining their views dogmatically or intolerantly, they sometimes reply that all they are doing is maintaining that there is such a thing as "the truth" , and that it is right to stand by the truth. Or when some view of theirs is challenged, they sometimes engage in the rhetorical move of asserting that their dogmatically held opinion is true (as if this would be sufficient to justify the dogmatic and intolerant manner in which they hold it). The right reply to them is simply to point out that it is one thing to believe that there is truth and quite a different thing to believe that you are in sole and certain possession of it. They also often need to be told that if their beliefs were true, that would not automatically justify forcing them down other people's throats. But their bad habits do probably encourage the idea that it is inherently conservative to believe in "truth" and that "relativism" is the right name for any view that is open-minded, tolerant, liberal and progressive. What the traditionalists are usually opposing is not relativism in the sense we have been discussing here. Their target is more often the following views: 1. Traditionally accepted moral principles may not be correct; this is

at least something about which intelligent people may disagree. 2. Which moral rules and principles are correct is subject to change with time and circumstances. 3. Moral principles apply differently to different circumstances, so that

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what is right for one person in one situation can be wrong for another person in a different situation. 4. There are sometimes justified exceptions to even a moral rule that is correct in general. 5. Even if an accepted moral principle is correct, we should sometimes be tolerant of people who disagree with it and refuse to follow it. Each of these views might be described as "relativist" in the sense that it asserts that moral rules and principles should be considered "relative" to son1ething-in (1) and (2), relative to the grounds or evidence for them, which may not, or may no longer, be sufficient, in (3), (4) and (5), relative to the conditions of their application, which may justify flexibility in applying them. But these forms of "relativity" do not imply "relativisn1" in the sense we have been discussing, and are even inconsistent with it. For all of (1)-(5) presuppose that there is truth in moral matters, since they challenge traditional ideas about which principles are objectively correct, how certain we can be about this, whether moral truth can change, and how flexible we should be in adapting moral principles to different situations. Those who want to defend views such as (1 )-(5) should not let traditionalists get away with suggesting that they are vulnerable to the charges of incoherence and self-refutation that can be brought against relativism. Relativism itself is a very conservative position. In ancient Greece, Protagoras was well known for advocating very conventional views about how to live and what is right and wrong. Cultural relativism, as we have seen, tends to lend uncritical support to dominant cultural views and practices. Those who want to question or criticize traditional creeds and values at least have to admit that they n1ight be wrong. But since relativism holds that everyone's belief is already true (for them), it implies that there is never really any need for anyone to change their views about anything. You don't have to attack the very notion of objective truth in order to challenge traditional ideas about what it is, where it is to be found, or whose views have to be taken into account in looking for it. On the contrary, it is only by presupposing that there is such a truth that you can legitimize challenges to mistaken ideas about what it is and how it should be sought. In fact, since absolute truth is not truth for anyone in particular, this implies that everyone's standpoint needs to be taken into account in searching for it. Relativism, humbug, hype and spin. Here is a somewhat speculative hypothesis about why relativism appeals to some people in our culture. Much of what we are exposed to in mass culture is what Max Black

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used to call "humbug" .17 Humbug is when I say something to you that isn't true, where I know it isn't true, I know you know it isn't true, and I know you know I know it isn't true, but I know that if you hear it enough, it will probably influence your behavior (typically, in my interests). "Hype" is a special kind of humbug: it makes wildly exaggerated claims for something: no one believes them, but the hype-artist foresees that people will end up acting as though they believed them, if only just a little. "Spin" is a transparently self-serving interpretation of the world, such as the contrasting versions of events narrated by openly self-advertised representatives of political parties, or by the ostensibly "right-wing" and "left-wing" debaters on those television shows in which important issues of the day are reduced to half-serious shouting matches for the amusement of the audience. Nobody expects the spin artist to be objective or fair or even credible-indeed, he or she would not be doing the job if what is said could be taken as meant in good faith. Most political rhetoric and nearly all advertising is "spin" and "hurnbug" , a lot of it is also "hype". Nobody believes either of them, or even takes them seriously. But the politicians who spend their donors' money are the ones who get elected and the products that are hyped on TV are the ones that sell. To be hun1bugged is to be exposed to something that seen1S at first at least to pretend to be truth, but which you know fron1 the start is less than truth. You reject it as truth, but then gradually come to accept it as less than truth, but also as not quite nothing either. Hurnbug therefore works partly by dulling your appetite for truth, getting you used to filling your mind with what you know is less than truth, with what is self-consciously phony, a glitzy but of course unconvincing imitation of truth. Hurnbug does not function on the level of reality but on the level of subjectivity (the perceptions of the recipient and the interests of the hype- or humbug-artist). Pleasing fictions work well as humbug. We know that James Bond is not a real person but we get emotionally involved with the story anyway, and we even end up cheering the hero and wanting to be like him (so that we wear the clothes he wears, buy the car he drives, we live in reality some sad imitation of his glamorous fictional life). We don't take the fiction seriously as reality, but in chasing after it we expend real energy and often spend serious money. The psychological result of constant bon1bardment by spin, hype and humbug may help us to understand what relativists might mean 17Max Black, The Prevalence of Humbug and Other Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). The American word for 'humbug' is 'bullshit'. See Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit", The Importance of What We Care About. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

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by "true for me": humbug is something other than and less than truth, something designed to dull my appetite for truth, son1ething I don't believe (yet eventually sort of believe), a substitute for truth that functions effectively not because of its relation to reality but because of its relation to our subjective susceptibilities (to being deceived and manipulated at least partly with our own knowledge and consent). Humbug puts itself forward as a sort of truth (which will affect my behavior as if I believed it, even though I really don't). This is one way in which the confused and self-contradictory notion of "true for me" might acquire a semblance of intelligibility. Relativism might express the consciousness of someone whose whole cognitive environment, so to speak, has been taken over by humbug. Nothing anybody believes is really believed, nothing anybody asserts is meant seriously, so nobody would be so crude as to say that it was "true". Nobody would care about the truth even if it can1e up and hit them in the face. Such a person would have come to regard being humbugged as the normal state. This person thinks of really believing something (holding it to be true, period) as abnormal, a relic of a more innocent age in which people didn't yet realize that everything is hun1bug. This also explains why relativists often think of themselves as sophisticated compared to people who haven't gotten over the idea of 'absolute truth'. Relativism might even seem to be a way of protecting yourself against being deceived by humbug, since it makes it explicit that no assertion is to be taken at face value and nothing anybody ever says is really to be believed. But of course people who hurnbug others do seriously hold some beliefs, even if they don't express them: They seriously believe that if the others are humbugged often enough, they will behave in ways that serve the humbugger's interests at the expense of the humbuggee's interests. And it is only because the hun1buggees seriously believe this too that they have any reason to protect themselves against humbug by not taking it seriously. So however prevalent humbug might become, it never really abolishes genuine belief or assertion, or renders the notion of (absolute) truth obsolete. In fact, it is a self-defeating strategy to try to protect yourself from humbug by not taking ·it seriously. For humbug is by its nature something that is not seriously believed, and it manipulates you despite-sometimes, even because-you do not seriously believe it. Therefore, however prevalent spin, hype and humbug may become in our cognitive environment, we can't ultimately avoid challenging them directly and unsophisticatedly by just recognizing them for what they are and declaring bluntly that they are false. Admittedly, this is not "cool". But it is the nature of humbug that it manipulates those who are cool even more successfully than it does those who are

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uncool, since being cool means slouching into the acceptance of the very notions that let hurnbug work on you. The only way really to oppose humbug is by being uncool, chopping logic and just insisting squarishly on the obvious if boring fact that there is after all a distinction between telling the truth and telling lies. Relativism as an intellectual defense mechanism. Relativism says that whatever you believe is true for you irrespective of anyone else. In effect, relativism marginalizes everybody's standpoint except your own. In relation to humbug, relativism tries to protect me from being manipulated by being cool, blocking the beliefs others are trying to iInplant in me against my knowledge and will by cutting me off from any pretense at serious communication with them. In relation to what I do seriously believe, however, relativism also cuts me off from serious communication with others and thereby serves as a self-protective mechanism in another way. When I begin the study of philosophy, I may suddenly discover powerful arguments and theories I never considered before which challenge the opinions I have always taken for granted. This can be very disturbing, and make me feel intimidated and insecure. Relativism comes to the rescue by protecting my opinions (making them all "true for me"). Because relativism is absolutely neutral between all particular opinions, it enables me to remain above the fray, taking the high ground away from those who, by lobbying for their particular version of the absolute truth, make it all too obvious that they have an axe to grind. As a relativist I never have to bother with the frustrating details of any philosophical dispute because relativism explains to me ahead of time not only why the dispute will never get resolved, but also why this is perfectly all right. I can agree that inquiry, reasoning and argument are fine (if someone happens to feel like paying attention to them), but I can rest assured that they need never seriously threaten my own beliefs (which remain true for me however the arguments come out). In this way relativism will encourage the one kind of tolerance for which I have the most desperate need: tolerance toward my own intellectual cowardice, laziness and incompetence. And when it protects me against all those whose powerful arguments might threaten my comfortable little world of convictions, relativism also makes me think I am tolerant toward others, since it releases me from the need to experience their alternative views as a threat to mine, and hence from the need to resist their arguments or to argue back: I Gan just live and let live. Both the appeal of relativism and its claim to tolerance would then be found in the way it immunizes my dogmatically held opinions against any facts or reasonings that might possibly call them into question.

6

The Objectivity of Value 6.1

Issues in Metaethics

When we ask whether "values" are "objective", what are we asking about? What is at stake? The agendas of different questioners are varied, and the issues are seldom entirely clear or explicit. When issues about the 'objectivity of values' are raised by people with certain kinds of political Inotives, one typical ainl is simply the short ternl legitimation or de-legitimation of certain kinds of rhetoric in certain limited argumentative or political contexts. Sometimes the assertion that there are 'objective' values (or even 'Objective Truth') is merely a crude rhetorical device used on behalf of dognlatic and intolerant individuals who see themselves as courageous defenders of The Right, and view anyone who questions what they believe in as enemies of What is Right. But this superficial ploy works, when it works at all, only by focusing attention on self-answering nleta-questions (about whether there is anything Right at all, and whether one should try to be on its side), thus distracting attention from the real issues, which are whether what they believe really is true, whether they have any good reasons for believing it, and whether any truth at all could possibly warrant the dogmatic and intolerant spirit in which they act in the name of what they believe. Sadly, the ploy often succeeds at least to this extent, that their confused opponents are led to think that in order to resist dogmatism they must challenge it directly on the rhetorical terrain it has marked out. Thus they think they have to reject the thesis that values are 'objective', and this has attracted them to extreme skeptical or nihilistic theories according to which any assertion of the objectivity of values as nothing but a rhetorical device used by dogmatists representing entrenched power structures, whose only possible use is to enforce uniformity of opinion, or exclude nlarginalized interests, or suppress legitimate ques159

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tions about existing relations of power. The evident iconoclasm of such theories (which may be "subversive" even to the point of showing contempt for all standards of intelligibility) perhaps makes them seenl like suitable vehicles for radical questioning of everything that exists or is accepted. In fact, however, these theories merely deprive us of the capacity to raise meaningful questions or objections regarding anything. They are therefore very well suited to express the spirit of sonle of the pretentious, hyper-intellectualistic, self-deceptive and quietistic forms that political radicalism has fashionably assumed during the left's period of weakness, confusion and despair at the end of the twentieth century. When analytical philosophers in the twentieth century have raised questions about the objectivity of values, their interests have often had little in comnlon with these. They are often motivated by metaphysical or epistemological concerns about what there is, and how it is known-and therefore whether and how claims about values can be understood to be about what is genuinely real or what is knowable about the real. They also care about the psychology of human motivation and how a naturalistic understanding of it can be integrated into our understanding of practical reasoning. The questions they raise fall under a distinct variety of different headings. There are, to begin with, metaphysical questions about whether terms like 'good' refer to real properties of things, properties as real as those talked about by physics or mathematics, for example. Then there are epistemological questions, about whether there is, or could be such a thing as knowledge about what is good or has value. There are also semantic questions about whether what are formally or grammatically assertions about values, such as 'pleasure is good' are really assertions having truth values, or are better understood instead as expressions of attitude or emotion, or as commands or exhortations, which should no more be considered as having truth values than shouted expletives or sentences in the imperative mood. In this context, the view that there are 'objective' values, about which true assertions can be made, is called realism; 1 cognitivism is the thesis that assertions about values (whether or not they are about 1 Following G. E. Moore's discussion in Principia Ethica (1903), the view that 'good' refers to a real and knowable property, such as pleasantness, was called 'naturalism'. (This view was rejected by Moore as the 'naturalistic fallacy'.) But more recently 'naturalism' has come to refer, as we shall describe below, to a different set of views which bear no clear relation to issues about the objectivity of values. Besides, there are metaphysical or theistic forms of moral realism which should be described as 'supernaturalistic' rather than 'naturalistic', such as that defended by Robert Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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objective 'realities') can be known, or justifiably believed, to be true. Against them, there are n1any versions of antirealism, and noncognitivism, including 'fictionalism' and 'error theory', which take statements about values to be semantically realist but deny that there are any real value properties or truths, and hence deny that there could be any knowledge about values. 2 These controversies make up the subfield usually known as 'metaethics'. 3 In contrast to the nihilistic positions first mentioned, which are advocated in part directly on political grounds, it is controversial among analytical philosophers whether metaethical questions have any practical bearing whatever. Antirealists often attempt to show how their view enables them to mimic the talk and thinking of realists, so that they may reap the supposed benefits of antirealism about value in metaphysics, epistemology, psychology and semantics while leaving our everyday language, thought, morals and politics exactly as they were. 4 (To the extent that they succeed, analytical philosophy confirms the thesis that antirealism about values is socially quietistic in its import, at least to the limited extent that it would have no substantive moral implications in any particular direction.) 20 ne influential defense of such an 'error theory' is J .L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Pelican, 1977). 3The issue whether there are objective values in general might be, but is not often, distinguished from issues relating more specifically to certain kinds of values, such as moral or aesthetic values. People wonder whether rational argument about moral questions is really possible at all, or about its possible scope and limitswhether it always must presuppose a certain framework of custom or convention or form of life, which can never be rationally called into question within moral argument itself. And there are very real questions about the real significance of certain specific values, such as justice or moral virtue-whether these are really functions of social ideology and manipulation, merely devices for social domination through deception, or symptoms of psychological pathologies of various kinds. Some theories on this score raise profound questions about whether how far we ought to be committed to these values at all, both in general, or in certain contexts, such as political ones. There are also some very old problems about aesthetic values-whether there are such things at all and whether, if there are, they have an 'autonomy' with respect to moral values or are only a species of moral value or a special way of representing moral value. Most discussions of the objectivity of value take it for granted that when we talk about 'value' we have to mean moral value, or at least that if there are any values at all, there are moral values. I think this is a mistake, and that metaethics would benefit from greater attention to challenges that have been brought against specifically moral values by thinkers such as Marx and Nietzsche. See the next essay in this collection. 4See Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) for one influential attempt to do this. For a reply on behalf of a naturalistic version of realism, see Nicholas Sturgeon, "What Difference Does It Make if Moral Realism Is True?" Southern Journal of Philosophy 24 (1986).

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The Unavoidability of the Deliberative Standpoint

The approach to the question of the objectivity of values I mean to suggest here is derived from the conception of ourselves that we have, and must have, as beings who are active, reflective, and in more or less constant communication with other human beings who are likewise active and reflective. Let n1e take these three points in turn. L We are active judges. First, we are active beings. In our lives we are constantly presented with choices that have to be made, and moreover that we have to make. The one thing about these choices that is not up to us is whether to regard them as issues for us. They are issues for us, and we must settle them by judging what we should do on the basis of what we take to be good reasons that justify the judgments and choices we n1ake. It is sometimes represented that along with seeing ourselves from the "first person" standpoint of the "agent", it is also possible to look at ourselves (and all other people) from a "third person" standpoint of "pure observer"-for whom (according to one picture of what "pure observation" is) our actions are seen not as choices to be made for reasons but only as events in the natural order that happen in accordance with a causal laws. When we regard them this way, so the story goes, then justification, reasons and the like are irrelevant. 5 Yet even if it were possible to look at others in this latter way (as I will presently argue that it is not), or even to look at most of one's own actions in this way, it would still not be possible to adopt unqualifiedly the stance of a "pure observer" of oneself. For even as an observer, I have to decide what observations to make, and in understanding what I observe, I have to choose which theories guide my observations, what observational and experimental techniques to employ, and what conclusions to draw from the observations I make. And I must decide all these questions on the basis of what I take to be good reasons that justify my choices about how and what to observe and what to conclude from it. In this sense, even the purest possible observer is always even more fundamentally an agent. This means, however, that the very conception of the standpoint of the "pure observer," as conceived above, is a bogus 50 ne important text in the history of philosophy from which one might get this picture is Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (KrV A547-558/B575-586). See also Christine Korsgaard, "Morality as freedom," Creating the Kingdom of Ends (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Hilary Bok, Freedom and Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). For an alternative reading of Kant, see my book Kant's Ethical Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 171-182.

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one. There is no alternative of viewing our own actions as merely natural processes subject to observed regularities. Our only alternative in thinking about our own actions is to see them as subject to self-directed processes of practical reasoning, and hence to rules that we regard as normative for them. We do of course often need to understand ourselves as failing to follow these rules, or falling short of acting for the best reasons. But that is also part of seeing ourselves as deliberating beings. In holding that we must necessarily see ourselves as deliberating beings, hence as rational beings, I do not mean to suggest that we must see ourselves as successful deliberative agents, or that we always (or even usually) act rationally. But only a being that is seen as having the capacity to act rationally can be seen as an irrational being, in the sense of a being that sometimes or usually fails to act rationally. Hence if we did not presuppose that we are rational beings, then it would make no sense to claim that we are irrational. If we did not inevitably adopt the deliberative viewpoint, from which we must see and represent ourselves as acting (or at least trying to act) for reasons, then there would be no interest in the fact that we often fail to act rationally. Some people, including romantics and religious enthusiasts, occasionally say that we should act irrationally. This at least makes sense (whether it is true or not) as long as what it means is that we should act otherwise than in some specific way that has been represented as 'rational'. But it is directly self-contradictory if what it is supposed to mean is that we should act directly contrary to whatever way we decide there are the strongest reasons for us to act. For to say that we should act that way is to represent that way as the way we have most reason to act, and it is therefore self-contradictory to say that we should not act that way. I do not say that people who hold such views cannot mean them, since it is quite common for people to contradict themselves. But like those who knowingly hold self-contradictory beliefs, their position is inherently unstable, and can continue to be held only in some sort of bad faith. If we also understand our actions as natural processes, then we have to understand these natural processes as giving us the capacity to regulate our actions according to normative rules and by what we take to be good reasons that justify them, as well as inflicting on us various possibilities of failing to act for good reasons or to follow the rules we recognize as norms over our actions. It is a non-starter to try to understand our actions as following merely the kinds of observed regularities that belong to inanimate and non-rational things in the natural world, such as the orbits of planets and the mechanically impelled motions of billiard balls.

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ii. We must reflect in order to act. The idea that we must act for reasons that seem to us to justify our action involves us already in the second point. We must not only act on rules and for reasons, but we must also understand ourselves as so acting-whether through conceptual structures we call scientific theories or in ways of thinking that we do not dignify with that name. For as agents we are also reflective beings, who are aware of our agency, and whose awareness of their agency is an essential part of that agency itself. Acting involves judging how to act, and to judge how we should act we must reflect on ourselves, on our judging and our acting, and represent it to ourselves as justified by reasons. In order reflectively to weigh competing reasons, I have to think of myself as the one who weighs them. I have to be conscious that I should, and hence that I can, determine which of them deserves to predominate in n1.Y deliberations, and thus I have to presuppose that I have the capacity to regulate my own conduct according to the determination about this that I will make. 6 I cannot view the outcome of my deliberations as already preordained by something outside what I think of in this context as myself. Likewise, when I am in a situation where a momentary impulse threatens to distract me from a rational plan I have made, I can hold myself to the plan only by reflecting on the fact that I have adopted it, and for good reasons, which I recognized as good when I chose the plan, and which I still recognize as good. The thoughts I have here about'!, and 'myself'- -and the active capacities I implicitly ascribe to this '1'-are inseparable from the thinking I engage in, and have to engage in, as an agent-of course including, once again, the thinking I have to engage in when I adopt the standpoint of a theoretical observer of the world, and even of myself. The'!' that acts must think of itself as acting for reasons. If I later come to see that these reasons were bad ones, or that I did not act for the reasons I thought I did, then this judgment about my past choice is one that I must now see myself as making for good reasons. So although in any given case my judgment that I am acting 60f course, in many cases when we act for reasons, we do so habitually and unreflectively. When I am driving a car, for instance, and signal before making a left turn, I signal for a reason, but I do not stop and think: "Now I am going to turn left, so I have to pull down the lever to the left of the steering wheel in order to signal." Even the decision to turn left is probably made unreflectively, though it may also be made for good reasons. But not all our behavior as rational agents is of this kind. Sometimes we are confronted with situations in which we must reflect on the reasons we have if we are to act on them. This happens whenever we are faced with competing reasons for alternative courses of action, and also when we are tempted to depart from the practical course we know we have the best reasons to follow.

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for reasons is fallible and revisable, it can be questioned and revised only from the standpoint of an'!' who judges its fallibility for what are taken to be good reasons. Hence the standpoint of a self that sees itself as acting for reasons can never be called into question absolutely or in toto, since whenever it is called into question, it has to be called into question only by someone who sees himself as actually occupying it. The very act of calling it into question is possible only for someone who presupposes that he is an I who calls it into question for good reasons. iii. Acting, judging and reflecting are communicative activities. So far I have been discussing what some philosophers would call the 'first person' standpoint of agency. But I think this is a n1isleading way of putting it, because it ignores a third crucial feature of ourselves as agents which is just as important as the two we have already examined. This is the fact that deliberation is always either explicitly or implicitly a communicative activity. The justification of a belief or action is always a justification to someone, an attempt to respond to more or less determinate questions or demands. We learn from others how to ask for and give reasons for what we think or do. The business of requiring and providing justifications is a kind of social practice, a kind of communication that people develop over time in concert with one another. 7 This is why it is fundamentally misleading to represent the deliberative standpoint on our own actions as a 'first person' standpoint-as if it were somehow a merely 'subjective' standpoint, that might contrast with a more 'objective' standpoint of a mere observer who would understand our actions more impartially or less perspectivally. For insofar as our deliberation involves communication with others, the perspective of deliberation is as much a perspective on others' actions as it is on our own. It presupposes a stance toward them which is as far fron1 that of an observer of natural regularities as the stance it presupposes toward ourselves. When we offer others reasons for what we are doing, 7By this I do not mean that a satisfactory justification is to be identified merely with what in fact satisfies some person or some community. Authoritarian practices of justification-those that regard some actual authority figure, or some de facto consensus of opinion as definitive of what is right-may exist at certain times and places, but they are not what we have to think of as genuine justification, and in fact they are not what critically minded people ever think of as definitive of it. But asking ourselves for justifications, and answering ourselves, is always an internalization or an extension of answering someone else's questions. We aren't content with the reasons we think we have, or at least we shouldn't be, unless we think that they would satisfy someone else who understood our problem, or at least that they should satisfy such a person.

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we must suppose them to be able to understand and weigh reasons in the same way we do. And we have to suppose the same thing when we listen to their arguments and keep ourselves open to being convinced by them. In that sense, the standpoint of agency is every bit as much a "second person" perspective as a "first person" one. But if we are willing to think about offering arguments to, and considering arguments from, other parties with whom we are not presently discoursing, then we must also attribute the same perspective of agency to them as well, so it is every bit as much a "third person" perspective on human actions too. When we regard other human beings as rational agents, there is simply no alternative of considering them as natural automata whose observed behavior we are to bring under natural regularities by a process of induction or inference to the best explanation. On the contrary, we can make sense of their behavior (as we can make sense of our own) only by bringing it under normative principles, such as intentions, rules of conduct and the recognition of reasons. When we deliberate or reason together with others, communicating about what we, or they, or some third person should do and why, the reasons we consider are by their very nature public or common or objective reasons, not reasons tied to a particular person or particular perspective. Philosophers have sometimes distinguished between 'agent-relative' reasons and 'agent-neutral' reasons-the former consisting in reasons that are capable of motivating a certain particular agent to do something, the latter reasons that might be offered by this or another agent to someone (or anyone) else, to justify his doing it. 8 The distinction 8For one influential account of the distinction between agent-neutral and agentrelative reasons, see Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). The distinction was introduced earlier by Nagel (using the term "subjective" and "objective") in The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). The terms "agent-neutral" and "agent-relative" were introduced by Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). As Parfit uses it, reasons are agent-relative if they have different normative force for different agents-giving me, for instance, an agent-relative reason to value my happiness that you do not have for valuing my happiness. It is true that sometimes I have reasons for doing something that other people do not have, owing to my particular circumstances, or resources, or the ends I have set. (This seems to be Parfit's main point, and I don't dispute it.) In the course of drawing the distinction, Parfit says that if all reasons were agent-neutral, then it would never be rational for people to have incompatible or conflicting aims. This is true enough, but it does not follow that agent-relative reasons do not ultimately rest on agent-neutral ones. For a Kantian, who believes that we are all bound by the laws of a realm of ends (a system of ends in which all the ends of rational beings form a harmonious unity), it is entirely correct to say it can never be rational for there to be an ultimate conflict between human aims. It is rational for our aims to conflict only to the

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is all right in its place, but as it is sometimes used, it is bogus. If I have good reasons, then they are reasons that would justify anyone in my circumstances, with my resources, and with my ends, in doing the thing. And they are also reasons I could offer to others for my doing it, and expect them to accept. Further, if I have genuine reasons for valuing my own happiness, then there ought to be genuine reasons for others to value it too (even if those reasons do not have the same normative force for them). And this means that there n1ust also be some reasons for any agent to value my happiness-hence some sort of 'agent-neutral' reason for valuing it. 'Agent-relative' reasons are genuine reasons at all only insofar as they are capable of being presented in such an 'agent-neutral' way. Theoretical reasons are practical reasons. An important aspect of my argument depends also on challenging the fundamental status of another distinction. There is no ultimate or essential difference between theoretical reasons, reasons for believing propositions, and practical reasons, reasons for doing things or trying to bring about states of affairs. Inquiry is a species of agency, and reasons for believing are a species of reasons for doing. I don't deny there is room for drawing a distinction between reasons for acting-including such theoretical actions as seeking out information, forming hypotheses and weighing competing evidence-to which we respond by voluntary actions, and reasons for wanting or believing to which, when they are sufficiently strong, we can't help responding to with the relevant wants or beliefs. But the more important point is that both are equally cases of responding to reasons, and what I am saying about rational agents as active judges applies equally to both. Belief is tightly bound up with action; the inquiry necessary for belief is a kind of action, which in turn rests on belief. A being who might have beliefs but no volitions is impossible. Beliefs are not purely passive states; they are dispositions to assert, investigate, and connect other beliefs with actions in determinate ways. If there are reasons to believe, then there are reasons to act. For to represent oneself as acting for a reason is to represent oneself as believing there is a reason for one to act. And to represent oneself as believing is to represent oneself extent that the conflict rests on a more fundamental unity. Thus when you and I playa game of chess, we each seek to win, and our aims conflict; but if our play is to be compatible with the laws of a realm of ends, this conflict must rest on a more fundamental aim which is the same-for instance, the aim of our both enjoying the game, or of perfecting human skill in playing chess. In this sense, a Kantian must hold that although there may be agent-relative reasons, all genuine reasons (even these agent-relative ones) must rest ultimately on agent-neutral reasons.

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as having a reason to act in the ways that the belief gives you to act. Consequently, if we were to deny that there are any genuine reasons to act, then we would also have to deny that there are any reasons to believe, and vice-versa. If I tried to deny that there are any genuine reasons to act, and to represent myself as having reasons for this belief, then I would thereby contradict myself, since to deny that there are any reasons to act would involve the denial there are any genuine reasons to believe, including any genuine reasons to believe there are no reasons to act. Desires as reasons. Philosophers often think that reasons for doing something always consist ultimately in desires. Desires are subjective \ states, belonging to an individual, which cause the individual to do certain things. My desire gives me a reason to do things to satisfy it, but it does not give any other person the same reason, so it is essentially an "agent-relative", never an "agent-neutral" reason. If all reasons can be reduced to desires, then all reasons ultimately come down to agentrelative reasons. But this entails that if all reasons are basically agentneutral, as I have been claiming, then reasons cannot ultimately be reduced to reason-independent desires. One thought behind these reductions, I think, is that if we can reduce reasons to desires, and explain actions through a combination of desires and beliefs, then we can reduce the subjective or "first person" perspective of the agent who acts on reasons to the more objective perspective of the observer, who explains the agent's behavior by citing the states that cause it. 9 Desires are then seen as causal states of an agent, much like the momentum of bodies in mechanics. Such a state is particular to that body, and gives it a disposition to move in a certain direction at a certain velocity. Taken together with facts about the relation of the body to other bodies i it explains, in terms of inductively observed natural regularities, how the body actually does move. On this picture, the 'subjectivity' of desires plays the role of reducing reasons (which by their very nature are communicable, hence universal there for all rational beings) to something particular about this subject, and allows its behavior to be explained in the same way as that of beings who do not deliberate or judge or communicate about reasons. But in fact we can see that the reduction will not work if we consider the matter from the deliberative standpoint of someone who acts for reasons. For then we can see clearly that desires could not play the 9There is a more moderate view which, while not trying to be reductive in the way here described, takes reasons for action to be supplied by desires. The arguments to follow, however, seem to me to cast serious doubt on the moderate view as well as the reductive one.

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role they are assigned on this picture. No desire by itself could ever be the sole, sufficient and unconditional reason for any action-even when it is combined with beliefs about how to satisfy the desire. When I ask what I should do, or why I should do it, I can never answer the "Why?" question satisfactorily merely by citing a desire to do it that I find in n1yself. On the contrary, the existence of such a desire usually presupposes that the question has been answered already-the existence of the desire is SilTIply an effect or expression of that answer. In giving the reason for an action, I should cite not such "motivated desires" but instead the reasons why I have them. 10 If I simply find a desire in myself (such as hunger), this does not automatically give me a reason to satisfy it, but rather raises practical questions about how and whether to act on it, perhaps even whether I should have it at all. I might say the reason I go to a movie this evening is that I feel like going or that I desire to see this particular film. But this counts as a reason only in a context where it can be taken for granted that it is not unreasonable to satisfy the desires I avow. And I can always be asked (or ask myself), on many different grounds, why I want to go out, or to see a movie, or to see that particular movie. The foul weather, the dangerous downtown streets, the generally deplorable state of commercial cinema, the tedious predictability into which the director of the film has slouched in recent years, or the bad reviews the film has received, can all be cited as grounds for asking pointedly why I want to go out at all, or go to a movie, or go to this movie. The question has now become: "Do you (really) want to?" Or "should you want to?" In response to these challenges, therefore, "I (just) want to" will not even have the general form of an adequate answer. 11 lOThe term "motivated desire" is drawn from Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, p. 29. 11 Much the same goes for pleasures and pains. Some standard empiricist accounts try to reduce all reasons to subjective sensory states, such as pleasure and pain, taking the quest for reasons to end always in the fact that it self-explanatory why we should seek the former and shun the latter. The idea that all reasons reduce to a desire to seek pleasure or avoid pain is so obviously oversimple that it practically wears on its face that it is motivated by some misguided reductionistic philosophical theory. Some sensory states are such that we intrinsically seek them or avoid them, and unless we are in a situation where the pleasure is not "worth it" or the pain is "worth it" (as measured by other kinds of reasons), we take this to be a sufficient reason to seek the one and shun the other. If someone says that he tortures kittens because he finds it "pleasant," or avoids all sexual encounters because he finds them "painful", we do not accept these statements as putting a self-evident end to the inquiry into the reasons for, or the rational justifiability of, his conduct. Pleasures and pains themselves can be reasonable or unreasonable, as reflecting desires or tastes that are reasonable or unreasonable. They can be symptoms of conditions in a person that there is good reason for the person to alter. Philosophers such as

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The suggestion that all reasons must ultimately reduce to unmotivated desires, depends for its entire plausibility on the appeal of the project of reducing reasons to mere blind dispositional states (like momentum). Its hopelessness is indicated by the truth of the scholastic adage: Nihil appetimus, nisi sub ratione boni ("We desire nothing except under the species of the good" ) .12 In other words, we regard son1ething as desirable for a reason (the reason that we consider it good). Desires are ultimately based on reasons, not reasons on desires. The incoherence of total skepticism about reasons. As agents and as inquirers, we have many options. But one option not open to us is holding no beliefs and making no choices. The ancient Pyrrhonists are supposed to have held that the arguments on each side of every question are so perfectly balanced that there is never any reason for believing or doing one thing rather than another. According to Diogenes Aristotle take being pleased and pained by the right things as a sign of virtue, and taking pleasure or suffering pain in the wrong things as a sign of vice. We typically enjoy doing something because we already value it for good reasons other than the pleasure it brings; our enjoyment of it is then merely the subjective expression and confirmation, on our sensory side, of this valuation. When pleasures do not have this relation to other values, it is unreasonable to give the enjoyment of them a very high priority in our lives. We usually avoid pain in part because it is a kind of harm to us, and we have reason to avoid harms not only when they are painful but even when they may be pleasant. Derek Parfit has suggested to me that the felt character of intense pains by itself gives us a reason to avoid them (he doubts, I think correctly, that the same holds for pleasures-even intense ones-and reasons to seek them). Even if Parfit is right about intense pains, this is still a case where the desire to avoid the pains rests on a reason (namely, their felt character). It is not a case where a brute desire, unmotivated by a reason, counts as a reason for doing something. 12This saying is quoted by Kant (KpV 5:59). It is contradicted, with the more or less open intent of rendering human actions mechanistically explainable by reducing reasons to desires, by Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.6, E. M. Curley (ed.), (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), pp. 28-29 and Spinoza, Ethics 3p9s, E. M. Curley (ed.) Spinoza, Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 1:500. Some desires (such as, perhaps, the desire to go out on a miserable night to see a bad film) tend to go away when they are recognized to be unreasonable, while others (such as hunger, or sexual desire, or the addict's craving for nicotine or alcohol) usually do not. This fact sometimes bears on rational deliberation about what to do about our desires, but it does not always bear in the same way. There is no simple relationship between the reason-independent strength of a desire and the reasonableness of including its satisfaction among the ends we choose to pursue. Sometimes desires do not go away because, although it may be unreasonable to satisfy them under the circumstances, they are in general healthy, and good to have. Others may not go away precisely because they are bad, dangerous and harmful to us. Which desires we ought to cultivate and satisfy depends on the kinds of reasons there are for having and satisfying them. Some of these reasons themselves arise from unmotivated desires and some do not. Hence there is no way of reducing the strength of reasons to the strength of reason-independent desires.

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Laertius, Pyrrho is supposed to have lived this doctrine so consistently that he needed to be guided in daily life by his (less consistent) skeptical followers, who saw to it that he ate and kept him from walking off precipices. 13 In the same spirit, Hume writes about "excessive" or "Pyrrhonistic" skepticism, that if its principles were to prevail, then "All discourse, all action would immediately cease; and men remain in a total lethargy, until the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence." 14 This, however, is still too optimistic, since it supposes that a life according to the principles of Pyrrhonism, though perhaps neither long nor pleasant, might at least still be somehow possible. But for an agent who thinks there is no reason to believe or do anything, there is not only no reason to get up or eat, but no reason not to get up or eat. In fact (and this shows why Pyrrhonism, so understood, is simply an untenable doctrine), there could also be no reason for holding that there is no reason to believe or do anything, hence no reason to become or remain a skeptic. That is, the doctrine that there is no reason to believe or do anything is one which could not self-consistently represent itself as being held for reasons. And that means it could not be held at all by beings like ourselves, who necessarily take the deliberative standpoint. 15 13Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (London: Loeb, 1925) IX, 62. 14 Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in .David Hume: Enquiries, Third Edition, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 160. 15Sextus Empiricus appears to hold that it is possible (and desirable) to hold no beliefs and do no actions for reasons. Skeptical arguments are therefore not to be viewed as reasons for holding beliefs, but rather simply as therapeutic causes, bringing about in us a total suspension of all beliefs. But he seems to think that it is consistent with this to live "according to nature and custom"-in effect, to do what you would have done if you had never thought about reasons for believing or doing anything (see Sextus Empiricus, Selections from the Major Writings on Skepticism, Man and God, tr. Sanford G. Etheridge, ed. Phillip P. Hallie (Indianapolis: Hackett: 1985), pp. 79-86, 98). But this is not the way that beings like us could ever behave. In order to do as Sextus bids, we would have to be unconscious, or at any rate lose our capacity to deliberate, so that our behavior is prompted solely by blind instincts and never by anything like choices. This, however, is precisely the one option we do not have. See Myles Burnyeat, "Can the Skeptic live his skepticism?" in M. Frede and M. Burnyeat (eds.), The Original Skeptics: A Controversy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). More modest forms of skepticism, of course, are still self-consistent. It is quite consistent to say, for instance, that no belief can ever be certain or fully justified. The skeptic can then self-consistently say that his own skepticism is doubtful and not fully justified. Above all, it is perfectly all right to present the skeptical arguments on both sides of every question, leaving us to judge whether they are exactly equal, and if they are, to be perplexed by then1. and figure out what

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A DefeIlse of Realism About Values

For quite a while now I have not been discussing directly the question whether values are objective, or real, or objects of cognition, or proper predicates in genuine factual assertions with truth conditions. But the points I have been making do seem to me to bear on these questions, if they are taken in the right way.16 For what they seem to me to show is this: For anything that is offered as a reason for believing or acting, we can always question whether it is as good a reason as the reasons that can be adduced on the other side, or even whether it is a sufficient reason, or a good reason, or a genuine reason of any kind at all. It is always legitimate in the case of any given putative reason to wonder whether it is not merely a deception or illusion to regard it as a reason. What we cannot do, however, is to deliberate without taking for granted that there are some genuine reasons for doing either what we are deciding to do, or for some other alternative (which, if the better reasons are on its side, we should have resolved on in place of what we are in fact deciding to do). To be an inquirer or an agent at all is to presuppose that there are sonle reasons for believing and for acting-whether or not we have found them, or ever will find them. In this way, to be an inquirer or an agent at all is to presuppose that some values are real. To think of an action as good is to think that it is one for which there are reasons; to think of a state of affairs as good is to think of it as one that we would have a reason to bring about, if we could; to think of any object at all as good in any way at all is to think of it as having a property such that this property might give someone a reason for doing something. To consider something good is to consider it as having value. Thus deliberating at all presupposes that something is good, and hence that something has value. Further, as deliberative beings we are also communicative beings, to do on the basis of them. For this still treats the reasons as reasons, and leaves us with the choice what to do on the basis of reasons. 16Lanier Anderson has pointed out to me that an argument somewhat similar to mine was presented several times by the neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert. See Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung (1902) (Tiibingen: J.e.B. Mohr, 1929), pp. 673-696, "Vom System der Werte," Logos 4 (1913), pp. 295-327, System der Philosophie (Tiibingen: J.e.B. Mohr, 1921), pp. 112-145. I do not think Rickert's argument is quite the same as mine. Rickert places less emphasis on the communicative presuppositions of value questions and does not admit, as I do, that there is a distinction to be drawn between the objectivity of values generally, which is a presupposition even of raising questions about the objectivity of values, and the objectivity of certain specific values (e.g. moral values),which depends on a more specific (and possibly controversial) vision of our questioning and communicative situation. But I accept that there are resemblances between Rickert's position and rr:!in!i. -----------------------

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who take our reasons to be genuine only insofar as they are reasons others should accept. Hence the values we presuppose in deliberating are also objective, because I cannot regard them as reasons while thinking of them as values merely for me (this particular subject), but can regard them as genuine reasons only insofar as I think they ought to be recognized as such by any other subject who understands the situation and the decision to be made. This is why it is entirely natural and proper to treat statements claiming that things are good or have value as statements having truth values and truth conditions, and as predicating real, objective properties of the actions, states of affairs or other entities that are their subjects. If we presuppose that deliberation is looking for good reasons, we presuppose also that we can find them, and therefore that some of the statements we make (using terms like 'good') that express what we think we have found may be not only believed by us, but justifiably believed, and also true. If knowledge is anything like justified true belief, then it follows that we also presuppose that it is possible for us to know some of these objective truths about value. Therefore, I think the positions on metaethical issues that are generally called realism and cognitivism are correct, and the positions usually called antirealism, noncognitivism and emotivism are incorrect. 17 'Naturalism' and antirealism about value. In one sense, to be a 'naturalist' about human conduct is merely to believe that human beings are part of the natural world, so that the understanding of what they are, how they have evolved, what they are capable of, and what they do must all somehow be part of our understanding of nature. Nothing I have said so far is intended to question naturalism in this sense. Of course there have been philosophers who question whether it is possible that beings who act for reasons in the way I have said we cannot help thinking of ourselves as doing could be part of the natural world as we understand it. Some philosophers have held that acting for reasons, and directing one's own conduct freely in ways necessary to act for reasons, must be impossible for any being that is subject to natural causality and whose conduct follows the laws of nature as 17In this paper I am not defending any particular account of the ontological status of values. Some think that value properties are natural properties (for instance, those constellations or clusters of natural properties that correspond to reasons for acting), while others more platonistically think they are nonnatural properties, like mathematical properties, that are real and playa role in our cognition but do not interact causally with objects in the natural world. I am more inclined myself to the former sort of view than the latter, but I think it is important to make the point that one can have decisive reasons for being a realist about values without having to take any definite position on questions about the ontological status of values.

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we know them. Some philosophers who take this position hold that we cannot be (or cannot be "only") natural beings, and hence they deny 'naturalism' in the above sense. Others, holding fast to 'naturalism' conclude that it cannot be the case that we really act 'freely' in the way I have been describing, so that acting for reasons must be some sort of illusion. I think the first of these views has been adopted too hastily, usually by people who have religious motives for adopting it. We still know too little about how human mental capacities relate to their neural and physiological basis to judge that these capacities would have to be supernatural in character. The scientific evidence seems to me overwhelming that human beings are naturally evolved parts of the physical world, and no more than that. So it seems to me that until there are absolutely conclusive arguments to the contrary, we should take ourselves both to act for reasons (as I have argued we cannot help doing if we are to avoid self refutation) and to be entirely natural beings who have the capacity to act for reasons. 18 The second of the views, however, the one that regards naturalism as precluding the possibility that we act for reasons, seems to me selfrefuting. For those who pretend to argue for that view must at least represent themselves as judging for reasons that naturalism is true and that naturalism precludes the possibility of our acting for reasons. But in that case what they want to assert, namely that we cannot act for reasons, is directly refuted by what they must presuppose in order to assert it, since they must presuppose that they can judge for reasons that naturalism is true and that it precludes their acting for reasons. For the remainder of this discussion, I am going to assume (what I believe to 18To this extent, the position I am arguing for a 'compatibilist' position on the issue of free will and determinism. I do hold that regarding ourselves as 'free' in the sense appropriate to genuine agency is compatible with regarding ourselves as part of the order of nature and subject to whatever natural causality obtains there. But 'compatibilism' as it is often defended comes in a variety of shades, some of them involving views about causality, and also about agency, that I find very uncongenial (or even incoherent). I think that many philosophers who consider themselves compatibilists tend to underestimate both the metaphysical demands required by free agency and also the modifications that need to be made in traditional conceptions of natural causality in order to account for free agency. In order to integrate free action into our theory of nature, we probably have to follow Leibniz in admitting natural causes that "incline without necessitating," and Locke in ascribing to free agents natural causal powers that can be exercised either by doing something or by not doing the same thing. Leibniz and Locke are both usually described as compatibilists. But some self-described 'compatibilists' with whom I have argued concerning these two points think my position on these points is more 'incompatibilist' than 'compatibilist'. So out of deference to their feelings I hesitate to use either term to characterize my view.

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be true), that human beings are wholly natural beings, whose behavior follows laws of nature, but who, in accordance with those laws of nature, act for reasons in the way I have said we cannot help presupposing. In the previous paragraph, I have used 'naturalism' in a broad sense, in which I regard myself (tentatively) as a naturalist. Sometimes, however, 'naturalism' is given a narrower meaning in this context, because certain doctrines are presupposed about what must be required for human actions and choices to be 'natural' or consistent with the workings of the natural world. Specifically, the view sometimes held is one we looked at briefly earlier, that all actions are caused or prompted fundamentally by desires. Following this view, it is held that the only things that could count as 'reasons' for action would have to be beliefs about how to satisfy desires, and specifically about the causal connections that link possible actions we might choose as means with the states of affairs we desire as ends. From this it is inferred that values, as distinct from beliefs about means-ends causal connections, could never play a role in human action, at least if human action is understood 'naturalistically'. Since values play no explanatory role in hurnan action, they are superfluous from the standpoint of a 'naturalistic' account of the world, and so there is no reason to believe they exist. This leads to antirealism about values. 19 The reasons why I reject this kind of 'naturalistic' antirealisrn about values should already be clear. Desires are not the starting point for the explanation of actions. Desires are not causal states of an agent, analogous to states of momentum or energy in bodies as their motion is understood by mechanics. Human desires playa role in actions that is determined by the reasons the agent has, or believes she has, for acting. Desires explain actions only insofar as they are expressions of reasons, or apparent reasons , which are independent of desires, or else desires are accepted as reasons for action because they figure in a con1plex picture of the objective good held by an agent, according to which the agent judges that she has good reasons to satisfy these desires. A rational agent's actions are made intelligible by understanding the actions as done for reasons. The reasons need not be good or even genuine reasons, but they have to be understood as reasons the agent 19This kind of view is found many places, for instance in Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Harman's challenge to realism based on the explanatory redundancy of objective values has been challenged by Nicholas Sturgeon, "Moral Explanations," in D. Copp and D. Zimmerman (eds.) Morality, Reason and Truth (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984). Probably the most sophisticated version of naturalistic antirealism is the speculative Darwinian version presented by Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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believes to be good and thinks of as (at least ideally) representable to other agents as objectively good. If the agent's beliefs about these reasons, and the objective values underlying them, are mistaken, they must at least be understood as attempts at finding the truth about vvhat is objectively valuable, and those who judge that a given agent has false beliefs about what is objectively valuable presuppose some beliefs about what is valuable merely in thinking of themselves as having good reasons for supposing that those with false beliefs are mistaken about what is objectively valuable. 20 Those who think about values antirealistically from this 'naturalistic' standpoint often attempt to account for our realistic way of thinking and talking about values by providing 'error theories'--according to which we think values are real because we mistakenly project our desires onto the world~or 'fictionalist' theories, according to which 20Some who are 'naturalists' in this second or narrower sense are realists about value, because they take values to be those properties which relate to desires in the right way. Two somewhat different versions of naturalistic realism about value can be found in Richard Boyd, "How to Be a Moral Realist" in Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (ed)., Essays in Moral Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) and Peter Railton, "Aesthetic Value, Moral Value, and the Ambitions of Naturalism," in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998). While I agree with their realism, I do not think their naturalism yields the right kind of realism because in the end it reduces to saying that the sole, sufficient and unconditional reason we have for valuing something is simply that we desire it. But for reasons I have already tried to give, this is never a sale, sufficient and unconditional reason for valuing anything. A variant of this kind of naturalism holds that something is valuable if all hUHlan beings in fact desire it. But the plausibility of this position varies greatly depending on what we take to be universally desired by all human beings. Sometimes, of course, the fact (if it is a fact) that all human beings naturally have a certain desire (for example, a desire for happiness or a desire for the affection of other human beings) can be part of the reason why the desire should be satisfied. But the whole reason must consist in a picture of the objective human good, in the context of which this natural or universal desire is seen as expressive of that good. Where a universal natural desire conflicts with the good, its naturalness and universality do not at all tend to show that its satisfaction is good. Suppose, for instance (what some have thought is actually the case), that all human beings naturally desire not to live on equal terms with other human beings but desire to exercise dominion over as many other human beings as they can and to avoid being on merely equal terms with anyone. If, however we also suppose (what I actually I believe to be the case) that it is objectively bad for human beings for one to dominate another, and objectively good for human beings to live on equal terms with one another, with no relations of domination and subordination obtaining among them, then the fact that all human beings naturally desire to dominate others does not entail that there is anything valuable at all about dominating other human beings. On the contrary, what this would show is that all human beings have good reason to resist their natural desire to dominate other human beings and to set up social arrangements in which it is impossible for people to satisfy this natural desire.

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our behavior is to be understood as a sort of pretending or acting 'as if' there were objective values, even though there are none. All such views become self-refuting as soon as they take their error or fictionalist theories to be justified by the reasons or arguments they offer in favor of them. For they cannot self-consistently represent the reasons they give for their theories, and on which they expect others to accept these theories, as mere projective errors, or as merely fictional or "as if" reasons.

6.4

An Enlightenment Vision of Objective Values

So far my argun1ent has proceeded entirely on the basis of the fact that the practical standpoint is unavoidable for us and of what we necessarily presuppose in taking that unavoidable standpoint. This very abstract basis has enabled me to articulate the reasons why I think we must be realists and cognitivists about values and cannot, on pain of selfrefutation, be antirealists, noncognitivists, emotivists, fictionalists or error theorists about all values. But as I have already indicated, this argument by itself leaves me in no position to defend any particular claims about objective value, and it does not even enable me to argue for the reality of whole categories of value that have been taken to be fundan1ental to all values, such as moral and aesthetic values. For all I have said so far, there might be no objectivity to any of the values invoked in morality or politics or aesthetics. The only values that might be real and objective are those necessary to decide rationally that some values must be real and objective, and that everything anyone has ever proposed under the heading of moral, political and aesthetic values are not among them. 21 In order to show how I would argue for the reality of the values I take to be most central and important, I would like to 21There are many grounds for doubting many of the claims that people make about values, and even about whole categories of values, such as moral or aesthetic values. People notoriously disagree about questions of value at all levels, both individually and across cultures. Such widespread and seemingly endless disagreement easily leads to the thought that no one really knows what they are talking about, which may be extended to the thought that perhaps all sides are laboring under some kind of pervasive illusion. Many of what people propose as objective judgments about values held on rational grounds are easily seen as self-serving declarations made in the course of strategic maneuvering. Other such judgments can be interpreted, with greater or lesser difficulty and plausibility, as symptoms of irrational psychological disorders or the pernicious effects of social ideologies. Nothing I have said so far should be taken as agreeing or disagreeing with such theories, or with any of the grounds on which people challenge the specific claims about value that others make. What I have been arguing so far is quite consistent with the thesis that all claims about moral or aesthetic value are bogus and illusory, and that all of what are offered as moral reasons for doing things are not genuine reasons at all but only false rationalizations, which should not be taken at face value but diagnosed

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articulate a certain specific vision of our practical standpoint, a vision I think we inherit fron1 the Enlightenment. (My argument so far has been quite recognizably Kantian in spirit and substance-a fact of which I am not in the least ashamed. As I proceed, it will become even more explicitly and recognizably so.) This vision is centered on the kind of community we take to be the basis for the public or communicative aspect I have argued is essential to the practical standpoint. It is one which sees this community as not limited or conditioned by any contingent geographical or historical boundaries, but as essentially encompassing all human beings, or even all beings existing anywhere who are capable of taking the practical standpoint and hence of understanding what it is to believe or act for reasons and to search for objective values. According to this vision, our practical standpoint as rational agents must be one governed by mutual communication with a universal or cosmopolitan community. 22 as either neurotic delusions or tactical ploys in a game of social power. What my argument so far does attempt to exclude, however, is the tenability of holding an antirealism about value: the position that all possible claims about value are false or nonsensical, and that there are no genuine reasons of any kind for believing or doing anything whatever. For all such positions necessarily refute themselves as soon as they are represented by their proponents as being held on good grounds or as being something others should come to hold on good grounds. In fact, antirealism about value would directly undermine all particular critiques of value claims, based on intersubjective or cross-cultural disagreement, on psychological theories or on social theories. For antirealism is committed to the position that there can never be any good reasons for believing, asserting or acting in accordance with any of those arguments or theories-in fact, that there could never be any reason for holding antirealism about value itself. There would, to be sure, be no incoherence in simply asserting antirealism, perhaps not even in believing it, or attempting to bring about belief in it in others. But an antirealist could never represent herself as holding antirealism for any reasons, or represent herself as offering to others reasons for adopting antirealism on the basis of which these others would be justified in holding antirealism. For antirealism itself denies even the possibility of such reasons, hence the possibility of discovering or having them, or communicating them to others. 22The Enlightenment vision begins with Descartes. In Descartes' Meditations, the meditator appears to have abstracted himself from every form of human community-to be merely an isolated individual human being, or even (as it turns out) a single disembodied mind, considering its metaphysical beliefs completely solipsistically. But this appearance is deceptive. For the point of the Meditations is to invite each of us to think about the fundamental questions of philosophy from an entirely universal standpoint. The basic idea of the Meditations is that each of us, any of us, should be capable of occupying the standpoint of the meditator. Descartes' vision of rational inquiry as involving a universal community of rational inquirers all treating one another with equal respect, is expressed boldly, yet ironically, in the humorous opening sentence of the Discourse on Method: "Good sense is the best apportioned thing in the world: for each thinks he has been so well provided with it that even those who are hard to content in all other things are not accustomed to desire more of it than they have" (Descartes, Discourse on Method, Oeuvres,

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From the standpoint of this community, some empirically actual and limited communities-of families, nations, cultures and so on~-can be justified as legitimate, or even as indispensably valuable to us. But all such communities gain their legitimacy solely through being able to justify themselves through reasons that can be understood and ought to be accepted by any member of the universal community of all rational beings. Universalism and cosmopolitanism are sometimes attacked on the ground that they are merely a cover for privileging dominant (perhaps Western imperialist) social structures, cultural attitudes, and so on, since these will inevitably be the ones regarded as "universal" and "cosmopolitan" . I agree this is sometimes an abuse to which cosmopolitanism has been subject, but it is no more a part of cosmopolitanism itself than is the rhetorical abuse by dogmatists of the ideas of truth and the objectivity of values discussed at the start of this paper. In general, it is a bad form of argument to criticize a moral or political theory by citing cases in which it has been abused so as to justify wrongdoing. For there is no doctrine whatever (however correct and free from error) that is, or ever could be, immune to abuse in this way. So arguments of this form, however correct their factual premises and however deep the experiences of wrong on which they rest, are equally valid against any conceivable philosophical doctrine--which means that they are invalid against all. 23 ' ed. Adam and Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1965), 6:2). The point is that none of us can approach rational deliberation in common with others on the assumption that the other will defer to our good sense, or suppose that our arguments, just because they are ours, are more worthy of belief than any other person's. The rules governing rational discussion is that all in common are seeking for the objective truth, each with a fundamental respect for his own rational powers; everyone's viewpoint is to be considered, no one's excluded; and the endless quest after objective truth is the quest for an ideal agreement between all rational agents where each is convinced by the objective reasons. These same three rules were later formulated by the greatest of all Enlightenment philosophers, Immanuel Kant: 1. Think for yourself. 2. Think from the standpoint of everyone else. 3. Think consistently. (Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:294-295; cf. 7:200, 228-229, 9:57). 23It would be valid, of course, to argue against a doctrine that its correct and consequent application would result in wrongdoing-assuming we agree on what 'wrongdoing' consists in. But that case will of course be impossible to make out clearly in the case of any philosophical doctrine that is true, since it is trivial that no doctrine would advocate anything that counts as 'wrongdoing' by its own lights, and if the doctrine is assumed to be true, then only what it counts as wrongdo-

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By seeing ourselves as part of a universal community, we see all other rational beings as in principle equal participants in the process of giving and critically evaluating reasons for belief and action, or (what is the san1e thing) giving and critically evaluating claims about what is objectively valuable. This vision therefore accords fundamental and primary value to those beings themselves who are members of this community, and who are entitled to a voice in deciding questions of objective value. And it is therefore committed to treating them as all of equal value. Treating all people as having equal value does not immediately commit us to treating them in the same way in any particular respect, or giving then1 equal shares of anything. Exactly how, and how far, it has such implications depends on what we think is required in order to treat people as equal. To n1e it seems fairly obvious that fundamental human equality is incompatible with all forms of involuntary servitude, whether based on legal relations or merely on the results of received property relations and market transactions, with the subservient position occupied by women in virtually all traditional societies, and with all the varied forms of racial or ethnic domination that are found throughout the world-especially those that have characterized the history of European colonialism. Taken together with the earlier idea that searching for the objective truth about values must be a collective and communicative enterprise aiming ultimately at rational agreement, this implies that we ought to seek a society in which people are free to use their reason and to con1municate with others about matters of general interest. Yet for this last reason, it cannot be a society in which what predominates is narrow self-interest based on human separation and individual rights, but a human community based on universally valid reasons and shared goals. In these respects, Enlightenment values are radical in their import, and stand opposed to any ideology that would give its blessing to any of the forms of traditional privilege that are involved in the phenomena just described. Metaethical realism in general may not have any ing really is wrongdoing. Sometimes, as a matter of political tactics, an authentic cosmopolitanism must support some 'particularist' claims of oppressed peoples, as the only possible way of gaining recognition for their human dignity and defending them against oppression. Cosmopolitan principles, in fact, represent the only way of reasonably distinguishing between unjust claims on behalf of particular groups and proper, legitimate claims. But even with the latter there is also cosmopolitan way of defending the rightful claims of different cultures and particular human identities, which is the right way, and contrasts sharply with the fascist tendencies found among some defenders of so-called 'identity politics'.

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particular practical implications, but the specific form of metaethical realism I am now advocating certainly does have them.

6.5

Aesthetic Values

According to this enlightenment vision, objective truth is to be sought through communication between rational agents on terms of equal respect. The basis of this search is the fundamental objective moral value-that of rational agency itself. In addition to moral principles of reason, there are surely also epistemic principles, governing how we formulate ideas, seek evidence, and form and revise our beliefs on the basis of it. It is beyond the scope of this paper to work out these matters any further here. 24 But I shall try to make a few brief remarks in 24It is a nice question how far epistemic reasons overlap with or are interdependent on practical reasons of various kinds. 'Pragmatic' theories of epistemic justification seem to want us to guide the formation of our beliefs by instrumental or prudential considerations. Some people (myself included) think it is morally wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence. But this position is controversial, and it assumes that there is such a thing as the purely epistemic justification of beliefs, since the claim is that having such a justification is a necessary condition for being morally justified in holding the belief. And I do think that epistemic reasons for believing, disbelieving, doubting and so on are to some extent distinct from moral reasons. As for reasons for action, we can understand reasons for action as being fundamentally of three kinds. First, as agents capable of seeing states of affairs as having objective value, we understand the production of those states of affairs as having value for us in action. Therefore, we must recognize the principle that if we have decided that a state of affairs is to be brought about as an end, then we ought to seek a set of means to this end, and if possible perform some set of actions making it likely that we will attain this end. This is the basis of instrumental reasoning. Notice that this basis is not solely, or even primarily, the value of the states of affairs we take as ends; it is rather the value we place on ourselves as rational agents, who have reason to plan for and carry out the creation of states of affairs they find to be valuable as ends. But instrumental reasoning is not selfish; it gives no one's ends any priority over anyone else's, but demands only rational means to whatever ends we have set. Second, as rational agents capable of weighing and co-ordinating the objects of our rational desire, we ought to form a comprehensive idea of the ends we pursue, taking into account the priority among these ends and also the availability of means to them. This is the idea of the happiness of an individual, or a group, or a community, or of all rational (and even non-rational) beings taken together, insofar as they are thought of as having a good, or interests or well-being. The principle here is that whenever some individual or collective is under consideration, we ought to pursue its happiness, and prefer that happiness to any of its more particular, limited or temporary aims that might conflict with or threaten that happiness. This principle is the basis of all prudential reasoning. Prudential reasoning is not reasoning about means to ends, but reasoning about ends. The basis of prudential reasoning, however, is not solely, or even primarily, the value of happiness. It is instead the value of the rational beings themselves (whether considered individually or collectively) whose happiness has value because they have fundamental and primary value. Prudential

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closing about aesthetic values-the beauty of a painting or a piece of music, the capacity of beautiful-and sometimes also of unbeautifulobjects-such as works of art-to move us, to bring to life for our feelings the meanings of things that we recognize but to which we n1ight be emotionally dead were it not for the way the work of art portrays them. Aesthetic objects also sometimes reveal new meanings to us to us that we did not previously recognize, or even suspect. Works of art n1ay make assertions of fact, or of value, and those assertions, like all such assertions, are a matter of objective truth and falsity. But the experience of beauty is a subjective experience, fundamentally a pleasure (sometimes also mixed with pain). The same is true of emotions, and the experience of meanings. All these are essentially subjective and perspectival, not matters that admit of objective proof. If I am not moved by a certain poem or piece of music that moves you, there is no point in your haranguing me with arguments intended to convince me to be moved. In that sense, it is true that when we respond to a work of art, we are not responding to reasons. This is also the truth in the proverb, De gustabus non est disputandum ("There is no disputing about taste.") But we also make judgments about the value of our reasoning is not essentially selfish. It concerns the happiness of any individual or collective whose interests we are considering. Finally, as rational agents we are capable of weighing reasons and values unconditionally, and deciding what to do without having to presuppose any end, or set of ends, or any desire, as the starting point of our deliberations. The only value from which we cannot abstract is the value of the capacity to weigh reasons itself, which we find in ourselves, but also equally in every other member of the universal community of rational agents. This is the basis of moral reasoning. Its principle is to treat all rational agents as having an objective value that is fundamental, supreme and equal. It is solely through this moral value that happiness acquires its value, and the principle of prudence beconles binding on us; it is likewise solely through the value of happiness that more limited ends, and hence the means to them, acquire their value. Therefore, the three species of practical reasoning stand in a definite order of priority. Moral reasoning takes precedence over, and governs, prudential reasoning, and prudential reasoning takes precedence over, and governs, instrumental reasoning. The common dogma that all practical reason is instrumental is based on the false idea that all reason must begin with desire (for an end) and that the role of reason is merely to supply the means to the end. But apart from our conception of ourselves as capable of setting ends, and as having reasons to pursue the ends we set, there would be no reason for us to take the means to our ends apart from the momentary desire we might feel to perform the actions that count as those means. However, an agent who always felt that desire, apart from any reason to feel it, would not need instrumental reason. An agent needs instrumental reason at all only insofar as it must create in itself a desire to employ the means it realizes are necessary for its end. It creates this desire through its awareness of its value as a rational agent, and the consequent objective value of the ends it has set for good reasons.

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aesthetic responses, and these judgments are answerable to reasons. Because of such judgments, taste admits of good and bad. Hume is quite correct in saying that no sensible person can take seriously the thesis that all painting or poetry, for instance, are of equal aesthetic merit-that Ogilby is as good a poet as Milton. 25 We therefore do not regard all aesthetic responses as equally appropriate, and this gives us a basis for regarding some aesthetic judgments as true, others as untrue. For example, it is true that Duke Ellington's band played better music than Lawrence Welk's, and false that Norman Rockwell is a better painter than Edward Hopper. People whose aesthetic responses do not conform to the truth on these points simply have bad taste in music and in painting. Further, there seem to be aesthetic truths that do not deal directly with aesthetic value, such as that the mood of Grey's Elegy in a Country Churchyard is wistful and pensive, or that the march that is the third movement of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony is frenzied and unpersuasively optimistic. These kinds of judgments have to do with the directly perceived or felt (Le. aesthetic) features of aesthetic objects, and they are as little susceptible to objective proof as judgments of beauty and ugliness, but they are often relevant to such aesthetic appraisals, since no one could possibly provide a decent aesthetic appraisal Grey's Elegy who so badly misread it that he perceived its tone to be playful and ironic. There do, then, seem to be aesthetic truths, some of them directly judgments of aesthetic value, others not. They are not objective truths, however, both in the sense that they are not about the properties objects have irrespective of our subjective experience of them and also in the sense that they cannot be proved or confirmed by rational argument or empirical evidence. But there is one in1portant point of continuity between aesthetic judgments and objective judgn1ents (whether about values or not): both occur in the context of our communicative interactions, and are answerable to standards we recognize in the contexts of communication in which they occur. Hence although you cannot directly convince me that a piece of music is moving by providing me with a demonstration of that fact, there are many things you might say to me that might lead to n1Y hearing (or remembering) the piece differently fron1 the way I first did, and in consequence being moved by it as I previously was not. Some of the things you might say to have this effect (all those that might be seen as genuinely aesthetic 25Hume, "The Standard of Taste" ,in S. Copley and A. Edgar (eds.), David Hume: Selected Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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discourse about it) will also tend to convince nle that my new reaction to the piece is a truer or more authentic reaction to it than nlY old one was. It is probably the main task of critics, interpreters and scholars of aesthetic objects-especially works of art-to engage in this kind of discourse, to conform what they assert and what they argue to the right standards for it, and to reflect on and (when necessary) to criticize and revise those standards. In this way, not only are there aesthetic truths but there is also a quasi-objectivity about aesthetic truth, which has its basis in the kinds of discourse we engage in about the objects (both of nature and art) to which we react aesthetically, and the standards we recognize for our aesthetic reactions and aesthetic judgments in the context of that discourse. But it is perhaps puzzling that there should even be a discourse of this kind at all. Why should we care about how the feelings and sensibilities of others react to things? What business is it of ours, anyway, what they feel or don't feel, whether they are pleased or pained or moved in the same way we are by the same things? ("If I happen to like Lawrence Welk better than Duke Ellington and Norman Rockwell better than Edward Hopper, who the hell are you to criticize me?") Why should we try to change people's feelings by talking to them about works of art, and even treat different people's feelings as though they corresponded to some kind of truth having something like objectivity about it? No doubt a lot could (and would need to be) said in answer to these questions. But let me give the beginnings of one simple answermotivated by the Enlightenment vision I have sketched. As rational beings who ought to relate to one another, and communicate with one another on conditions of mutual esteem and respect, we have strong reasons to seek agreement with one another on basic questions both of factual truth and of value. We do also have reasons, based on considerations of modesty and caution as well as mutual respect, for not trying to enforce this agreement or to reach it too hastily. But in valuing ourselves and one another, we ought to seek a community of opinion between ourselves and all other rational beings, freely and rationally arrived at, and grounded on principles all can approve and accept. As members of such an ideal community, we rightly seek to integrate into it everything that is important to us. But arllong the most intimate features of our lives are our experiences and emotions, which express our reactions to other things that are important to us-including the natural objects around us, the crucial events in our individual lives, the forms and symbols of our collective life. It is part of our aspiration to a cosmopolitan community that we want to share with others even, or especially, on

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the level of subjective experience, and that we therefore place greater value on those subjective experiences which can be shared than on those we cannot share or about which we cannot communicate. 26 This gives us a legitimate interest in taste, in aesthetic truth and precisely in its quasi-objectivity. Precisely because authentic feelings cannot be forced, it clearly promotes the development of a free cosmopolitan con1munity that we should want to reach agreement at the level of feeling, and ought to subject our own feelings to critical scrutiny in light of the quasi-objective standards employed in the best discourse about those objects that evoke the richest, subtlest and deepest feelings. The objectivity of values is a necessary presupposition of all rational deliberation. The objectivity of moral and political values respecting the equality of every rational being and seeking for the community of all rational beings, especially at the crucial levels of communication, judgment, action and feeling, is a consequence of the Enlightenment vision that takes rational deliberation to define us as human beings having equal value who ought to live in community with one another. 27

26This is what Kant calls our "empirical interest" in the beautiful. See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §41 (KU 5:296-298). 27The present version of this paper has benefited from the thoughtful and perceptive comments of Derek Parfit.

7

Attacking Morality: A Metaethical Project Metaethics is the philosophical study of what morality is. It differs from ethical theory, which attempts to systematize (and possibly ground) n10ral judgments, and also from practical or applied ethics, which reflects on particular moral issues or problen1s. As it has been done in the last century, n1etaethics has usually involved three interrelated projects: a metaphysical investigation into the nature of moral facts and properties, a semantic inquiry into the meaning of moral assertions, and an epistemological account of the nature of moral knowledge. In all three areas, the questions raised by twentieth-century metaethics have apparently been radical, and the dominant position was even openly nihilistic. In metaphysics it was antirealist, maintaining that there are no moral facts, in epistemology noncognitivist, denying that there is moral knowledge, and in semantics emotivist or prescriptivist, holding that moral assertions aren't assertions at all, but are speech acts utterly devoid of truth conditions. 1 Perhaps most nihilistic of all was the comparatively recent variant of this position put forward by J.L. Mackie. His position on moral language was semantically realist but metaphysically nihilistic (or as he put it, "skeptical"). It held that moral talk does assert the existence of distinctively 'prescriptive' properties, but that no such 'queer' properIThis is the best way to put it, since 'disquotational' theories of truth allow emotivists to equate'S is true' with'S.' Even if the semantic function of'S' is solely to express an emotional reaction, someone who sympathizes enough to be disposed to utter'S' is saying something equivalent to'S is true,' end someone who expresses antipathy can, correspondingly say something equivalent to'S is false.' Even utterances whose only function is to express emotions therefore can, in this miniInal sense, be said to possess truth values. But of course there are no truth conditions for mere expressions of emotion.

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ties exist, or even could exist. Moral language is thus to be accounted for only through an 'error theory' which explains why people systematically project their feelings and attitudes on the world. 2 What is strange, however, is that this utterly nihilistic metaethical tradition has almost never seen itself as an attack on morality. On the contrary, it has usually treated with contempt (as an elementary misunderstanding) any suggestion that its views should be seen as undermining the moral point of view or questioning the high esteem in which people ostensibly hold moral values. Mackie, for example, insists that his view concerns only 'second-order' questions or issues of 'conceptual analysis' and not 'first-order' or 'factual' questions about lnorality itself. 3 (Imagine someone who insisted that theistic religion is a system of error, that all belief in divine beings is nothing but a tissue of lies and superstitions, and yet held it to be an elementary confusion to think that accepting this 'second-order' claim has any tendency to discredit the 'first-order' activities of religious people such as sacrificing or praying to deities. 4 ) If the nihilistic metaethical views just mentioned are not n1eant as attacks on morality, this does not mean that such attacks have been absent from philosophy. On the contrary, in the continental tradition they have been quite prominent, associated with such names as Hegel, Stirner, Marx and Nietzsche. Recent critics of morality have included Bernard Williams, Susan Wolf, and John D. Caputo. 5 Of course not all the attacks on morality have been equally radical. Some are less attacks on morality itself than on certain positions in moral theory, or else they are attacks on certain specific moral values or on 'morality' in a technical sense which is contrasted with' ethics' (which is not regarded as vulnerable to the same objections). I will be concerned here with certain ways of attacking morality which are both radical and distinctively metaethical in nature. These views are radical in that they attempt to some degree directly to undern1ine our commitment to all moral values or to the moral point of 2 John L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin 1977). 3Ibid., 22-4. 4We might consider such a person to be either contradicting himself or talking nonsense. But following Mackie, perhaps that accusation could in turn be treated as only a 'higher order' assertion which should not be interpreted as criticizing the philosopher's views on religion. 5Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1985) ch. 10; Susan Wolf, "Moral Saints," Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982); John D. Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993).

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view generally, typically by showing that such commitment is based on illusions about morality, regarded as a psychological or social phenomenon. The distinctively metaethical character of such critiques of morality consists in the fact that they rest on claims about what morality is (and that commitment to the moral standpoint is based on errors or deceptions at this n1etaethical level). Hence I will not be interested in Mackie's view, for instance. For although he apparently regards the moral point of view as involving metaethical error (since according to him it involves the 'projection' or 'objectification' of feelings and attitudes, after the pattern of the socalled 'pathetic fallacy'), he does not think that exposing such errors is going to undermine our commitment to morality itself. He seems to think that exposing the systematic errors of moral language will have no effect on our moral feelings and attitudes themselves or our commitment to them. Mackie's metaethical view could with some plausibility have been developed into the relevant sort of radical metaethical critique of morality, if Mackie had claimed that our commitment to moral attitudes as such is dependent on our understanding them as grounded in objective values, and inferred fron1 this that when we recognize there are no such values, then that n1ust tend to undermine a rational person's commitment to morality. The same could be done with other antirealist and noncognitivist positions, such as emotivism if they were combined with the view that it would undermine our commitment to moral emotions to find out that moral staten1ents are no more than expressions of emotion and make no claims having truth conditions. I have always thought, in fact, that these radical variants of metaethical nihilism are far more interesting and plausible than the tediously complacent and uncritically moralistic versions of metaethical antirealism common among Anglophone philosophers. But it will not be my purpose to pursue that point here. 6 Instead, I will explore son1e specific examples of two general kinds of critique to which morality as a whole has been subjected. One sort I will call 'content critiques,' the other 'formal (or structural)'critiques.' 6" There are no moral facts at all. Moral judgments agree with religious judgments in believing in realities which are no realities. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena-more precisely, a misinterpretation" (Nietzsche, Twilight of Idols, "The Improvers of Humanity," §1). When Nietzsche wrote this, he intended it as a radical attack on morality, as the foundation of his "demand upon the philosopher, that he should take his stand beyond good and evil" (ibid.). Yet English speaking metaethical antirealists usually regard Nietzsche's inference here with impatient condescension, as the sort of thing one might expect from a particularly naive and annoying undergraduate. On this point I have always sided with Nietzsche and the naive undergraduates.

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Content critiques of morality claim that moral norms, principles and ends have a certain unavoidable content, disguised from or misperceived by those who are committed to morality, whose recognition tends seriously to undermine that commitment. Formal or structural critiques deal with features of the psychology or sociology of morality which pertain to it irrespective of the content of moral norms. In this chapter, for example, it will involve a theory about the psychology of two fundamental and indispensable Inoral feelings: indignation and guilt. The critique displays such feelings as irrational or pathological, thus undermining our commitment to all patterns of thinking and feeling in which these feelings are involved either actually or virtually (that is, all properly moral patterns of thinking). The modified form of Mackie's position described in the previous paragraph would also fall under the heading of a 'formal (or structural) critique.' For it would say that our commitment to morality depends on the false belief that moral attitudes are grounded on objective moral facts, so that the discovery that there are no such facts tends to undermine that commitment, at least in a rational person.

7.1 One of the earliest content critiques of morality is the position of Thrasymachus, as presented in the first book of Plato's Republic. According to Thrasymachus, justice is the advantage of the stronger. This theory is based on a piece of sociology or political theory: In societies, there are some who rule, while the rest are ruled. 'Justice' refers to a disposition on the part of the ruled to obey the laws made by the rulers (338c-339a). Those who rule seek their own advantage at the expense of the ruled, as shepherds carryon their activities for their own advantage rather than that of the sheep (343b). This means that to act justly is really to abey laws that are made in someone else's interest (343c), and hence that just conduct is always foolish, disadvantageous and deserving of contempt, while unjust conduct (whenever one can get away with it) is advantageous and therefore wise (343c-344a). Thrasymachus notes that justice is generally praised, but thinks that his theory shows this esteem to be based on deceptions. The praise of justice is due to bold cunning and self-serving bluster on the part of rulers, fear and high-minded foolishness on the part of the ruled (344c). Those who know what justice really is do not praise it, but rather despise it. They consider inj ustice to be good, intelligent and wise (348c-e). In the terminology of twentieth-century metaethics, Thrasymachus' position is best understood as a form of realism (both metaphysically

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and semantically) and cognitivism (epistemologically). 'Justice' refers to a real property of actions, namely, their conduciveness to the interests of the rulers and consequent disadvantageousness for the agent. For example, the assertion 'Paying taxes is just' means that paying taxes has the objective property of benefiting those who rule and harming the taxpayer. Of course Thrasymachus does not suppose that the description 'benefiting the rulers at my own expense' is associated in most people's minds with the term 'just' when they pride themselves on their justice. On the contrary, he maintains that people are systematically deceived about the real nature of justice, and would be quite incapable of identifying justice with the referent of this phrase (at least until they have been enlightened by his metaethical doctrines). But he does think that the property referred to by this phrase is, unbeknownst to them, the real referent of the term 'justice' and what governs their use of this term. It has been noted before that views such as Thrasymachus's are very difficult to make sense of if one accepts an antirealist, noncognitivist and emotivist metaethics. 7 Emotivists hold that 'just' is used most basically to express praise or approval. But that would make a view like Thrasymachus's close to self-contradictory, since its fundamental claim is that justice is contemptible and that what is just receives praise or approval only from the foolish and ignorant. Since Thrasymachus's position, though unconventional and perhaps quite mistaken, is clearly intelligible and in no danger of contradicting itself, it poses serious problems for emotivism. 8 Thrasymachus's definition of justice is like the claim that water is H 2 0 or that gold is the element with atomic number 79. People in earlier ages could not have had these descriptions in mind when they used the words 'water' or 'gold,' but their usage of 'water' may nevertheless have been governed by the property of being H 2 0, and hence H 2 0 may have been the correct referent of the term. The semantics of the term 7See Philippa Foot, "Moral Beliefs," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1958-1959) 420-425; Nicholas Sturgeon, "What Difference Does It Make if Moral Realism is True?" Southern Journal of Philosophy 24 (1986)126-7. 8For similar reasons, the intelligibility of Thrasymachus's view casts serious doubt on any semantical form of 'internalism,' which takes it to be part of the meaning of words such as 'just' that people have some reason or motive for doing what is just. It presents no difficulty, however, for other forms of internalism, such as those which say merely that there necessarily is a reason or motive for doing what is just. Such views are, to be sure, committed to denying that Thrasymachus's account of justice is correct, but they can easily admit that it is intelligible and not self-contradictory. Their contention is rather that justice is a different property from the one identified by Thrasymachus and that of this property it is in fact true that there is necessarily a reason or motive for doing actions which have it.

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'water' need not defer to their mistaken theories about water (their belief, for instance, that it was an element rather than a compound). Likewise, Thrasymachus's theory about the term 'just' does not need to defer to what is associated with the term in people's minds, such as the idea that justice is what is impartially good and that justice is worthy of honor and respect. For these ideas according to Thrasymacus, are nothing but false popular beliefs about justice (in fact, they are the very illusions his theory means to expose). Suppose there were an ignorant people who superstitiously believed that gold is possessed of magical properties, or mistakenly thought that ingesting it cures many sorts of illnesses. If their philosophers engaged in metaethical speculations, making the same mistakes that philosophers have made in the last century, then they might come to regard being magical, or medicinal, or simply desirable, as an indispensable part of the meaning of the word 'gold.' On a view like Thrasyn1achus's, the superstitions of this people would be analogous to our belief that justice is deserving of praise, and the errors of their philosophers would be like the error regarding praiseworthiness as essential to the very meaning of the word 'justice.' A much later and more sophisticated version of Thrasymachus's view is articulated by Marx, when he defines the justice of transactions as their 'correspondence' or 'adequacy' to the prevailing mode of production. 9 Marx does not hold that justice is directly the property of benefiting those that rule, nor does he think of the relation between those who legislate politically and those legislated to as the fundamental power relation in society. But like Thrasymachus, Marx takes justice to be an objective property of transactions, whose content is detern1ined by social facts. He thinks justice is a property usually unknown to people, even disguised from them, when they think and talk about justice, and that ideological illusions are typically involved in their motivation to perform just acts. And like Thrasymachus, Marx thinks that once we gain a clear view of what justice is, we will acquire more sober ideas about how praiseworthy or desirable it is. 10 9 Marx-Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag 1966-) 25: 351-2; Capital vol. 3, translated by David Fernbach (New York: Random House 1981) 460-1 lOSee Allen Wood, Karl Marx (London: Routledge 1981) ch. 9 and "Marx Against Morality," in P. Singer, ed. A Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell 1990). Thus in Thrasymachus's view, someone who holds, for instance, that just laws are those made in the interest of the governed is making a fundamental mistake about what justice is. This is precisely the sort of mistake which benefits the rulers and makes the notion of justice so useful to them. Such a person may nevertheless believe correctly that the actually existing laws are just, and they may in fact be just. If a party came to realize that the existing laws benefit the rulers at the expense of the ruled, it might

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7.2 The most tempting response to all such content critiques of morality is probably to claim that they are based on confusing morality itself with people's erroneous ideas about it. It might be conceded, for example, that Thrasymachus is right in saying that what serves the interest of the rulers is identical to what people (erroneously) call just. But, so the objection goes, the very fact that his definition, if accepted, would undermine our commitment to 'justice' (to what it defines as 'justice') is sufficient to show that Thrasymachus's definition fails to capture what we really consider justice itself to be. This objection certainly coheres with emotivist metaethical theories which hold that the central function of terms like 'just' is merely to express approval, and whatever content they have beyond that is constrained by the requirenlent that what we regard as 'really' just has to be something toward which we have, all things considered, a 'pro'attitude. But its reinterpretation of Thrasymachus does an extremely poor job of capturing his intentions, and in effect it accuses him of quite elementary confusions. From his point of view, however, the objection reveals the objectors' hopeless entanglement in the very errors his own theory is intended to expose. Thrasymachus is clearly not saying merely that what people (perhaps erroneously) call just has the property of benefiting the rulers, any more than when we say that water is H 2 0 or gold is the element with atomic number 79 we are asserting merely that these properties belong to what people (perhaps erroneously) call by those names. Likewise, the notion that the referent of 'just' has to track our pro-attitudes is like propose a new legal code which benefits the ruled, and argue for these new laws on the ground that they are more just than the present ones. In Thrasymachus's view, their argument would rest on the same confusion by which they had previously been hoodwinked; it would be based on the party's substitution of a vulgar and mystified conception of what justice is for a correct one. There is no sign that the Thrasymachus of Plato's dialogue would have shared the goals of this party, but if he had shared them, then he would still criticize the party for articulating its views in terms of an erroneous and mystified conception of what justice is. What this party wants, he ought to say, is not justice, but rather injustice-and he would add (if he agreed with the party's goals) that this injustice is precisely what would make the proposed laws desirable and worthy of adoption. This, in effect, was Marx's reason for condemning those in the working class movement who advocated socialist distribution on grounds of justice (see Marx-Engels Werke 19:8; Marx Engels Selected Works [New York: International Publishers 1967] 325). For what the socialists demand is not a distribution which corresponds to the prevailing (capitalist) mode of production, but rather one which contradicts it. What they demand may be quite all right, but their way of articulating the demand betrays a fundamental misconception about the nature of justice, resting on even more fundamental n1isconceptions about social reality.

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saying that in a society which attributes magical powers or medicinal virtues to the ingestion of gold, 'gold' really refers to nothing at all (if nothing has these powers or virtues) or perhaps that 'gold' might turn out to refer to penicillin (if penicillin turns out to have some significant portion of the medicinal virtues they attribute to gold). The whole point of content critiques of morality is to insist that a term such as 'just' has a referent whose proper content is fixed, or at least severely limited, by certain facts (in the case of Thrasymachus and Marx, social facts )-and limited in such a way as to undermine our commitment to justice once we understand the lin1itation. The objection just considered, on the other hand, is based on a prejudice which is widely held but seldom explicitly stated: namely, that the 'true' content of moral principles is whatever content we decide, in the end and all things considered, these principles should have. This prejudice tempts us to respond to every content critique of morality by reinterpreting it as a clumsy and needlessly paradoxical way of disagreeing with conventional moral beliefs, hence not as a critique of morality but merely a disagreement within morality. For example, if 'justice' has up to now usually referred to what is to the advantage of the rulers, and on reflection we favor the interest of the ruled, then we say that it is what is 'really just' is what favors the ruled. According to this view, justice itself should not be attacked, but pernicious ideas about it need to be reformed. There are powerful reasons, rooted in the cultural fact of modern 'morality' and its history, why this prejudice, and the consequent interpreting-away of any content critique of morality, should be very tempting to us. The same history, however, equally reveals why we should not expect such atten1pts at reinterpretation always to succeed. What we call 'morality' in rnodern liberal society is the outcome of a cultural process through which social norms and customs, n10st of them originally with a premodern (usually religious) basis and content, have been appropriated, modified and rationalized so as to accord with a culturally diverse society whose only workable common basis has proven to be universalistic and secular. Some writers, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, who mistrust the power of thinking with such a basis, have emphasized the moral fragmentation inevitably involved in such a process. Others, such as John Rawls, have more optimistically brought out the indispensable role which must be played in modern society by an 'overlapping consensus' with a liberal content. 11 A strong argument for the pessimistic side of this controversy can be 11 MacIntyre,

After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press 1981, 2d.

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drawn from the value comn1itments of the social traditions out of which modern morality arose. They reflect a premodern society in which the division of society into unequal orders or estates was taken for granted, in which social forms involving personal domination and dependence (slavery, serfdom and various forms of indentured servitude) were common, and in which women were routinely treated as sexual property or domestic labor, to be disposed of as their fathers and husbands saw fit. Partly as a consequence of this last point and partly for other reasons, the norms of traditional n10rality were focused compulsively on the social regulation of the sexual conduct of individuals in ways that are plainly pathological, patriarchal and homophobic. Such morbid obsessions, which undeniably continue to belong to the principal connotations of the word 'moral,' can never be made intelligible on the assumption that the point of morality is the greatest happiness of the greatest number or the self-government of free and rational beings. It may still have been possible for Prussian Protestants (such as Kant) or English Victorians (such as Mill) to deny the obvious contradictions here, but it is no longer possible for us to do so. It n1ay be the greatest lasting contribution of such twentieth-century thinkers as Freud and Foucault to have revealed the patterns of individual pathology and social oppression on which traditional sexual morality rests. One way out of this dilemma-a way which betrays a deep commitment to 'the system morality'-is to say, as Bernard Williams does, that "there is no distinctively sexual morality," that 'sexual matters' engage moral principles only to the extent that they involve issues which are recognizably 'moral' (in a recognizably sane, modern, secularized sense)-issues of 'trust, betrayal, and so forth.' In response to such a view, David Carr is surely quite correct to insist that the virtue of sexual chastity itself constitutes an original and irreducible element of morality.12 Williams is probably correct, of course, in thinking that it would be 'better,' all things considered, if people's sexual conduct were not culturally regulated according to such standards of chastity (insofar as these resist reduction to values which are more rational, healthy, autonomy-respecting, and felicific). But it does not follow that these standards can be either eliminated from the content of morality or reflectively reformed so as to make them acceptable to modern, enlightened sensibilities. Their ineliminability may be merely a reflection ed. 1984); Rawls, Political Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1993) 12David Carr, "Chastity and Adultery," American Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1986) 363-71. Williams's quoted remarks, taken from a 1971 radio broadcast, are cited by Carr on p. 370.

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of the fact that the content of morality, in whatever forn1, contains ineliminable elements of neurosis, patriarchy, homophobia and so on. Yet there is equally little doubt that the content of what we call 'morality' is now decisively determined by the such modern, secular, rationalistic values as human rights, human dignity and human happiness. Even those who crusade against 'secular humanism' have no choice but to conduct their public relations campaigns so as to avoid open conflict with these values (thus betraying the fundamental intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of their position). Whatever their differences, both moral traditionalists and moral modernists are therefore deeply committed to the project of reconciling morality's traditional form with a content suited to a modern secular society oriented to the freedom, welfare and fulfillment of individuals. 'Morality' (whatever its content) is by now most fundamentally a name for just that project, and struggles within morality are merely over the precise terms of the treaty of reconciliation.

7.3 The two perennially favorite moral theories, utilitarianism and Kantianism, are quite transparent attempts to adapt inherited social and psychological materials to the needs of a modern, hence more reflective, individualistic, and rationalistic culture. Utilitarians accept from the tradition the conceptual and psychological substructure of morality, especially the notions of moral right, wrong and obligation, and the supporting feelings and attitudes of praise, blame, guilt and conscience, even sometimes the standards of individual rights and social justice, but seek to reform their content according to the rational principle that conduct should be conductive to the collective welfare of all. Whatever the original cultural or religious meaning of moral concepts, feelings, and forms of reflection, the utilitarian wants to detach them from the contingent and often irrational 'sympathies and antipathies' they usually express. Conscience, as Mill says, is simply an artificial association of a painful sanction with certain rules of conduct, through which a society controls the behavior of its members. 13 The utilitarians' aim is to reform, re-educate and socially re-engineer these associations, directing and manipulating hun1an conduct toward more rational, secular, universalistic ends. Kant recognizes that morality has arisen historically out of social standards of 'decency' (Sittsamkeit) , or 'propriety' (Anstiindigkeit) , that is, forms of customary behavior through which individuals have 13Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. G. Sher (Indianapolis: Hackett 1979) 28-30

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sought to gain social status, or at least to avoid the contempt of others by conforming their conduct to the expectations of social custom. 14 He emphasizes that both the basis and the content of many of these socially enforced norms were originally religious and hardly deserving of rational respect. They were, he points out, statutory observances superstitiously directed to winning the special favor of supernatural beings, and usually designed to maximize the tyrannical power which a class of priests wielded over people's thoughts, feelings and actions. 15 The decisive break with this traditional morality, in his view, occurs with enlightenment, "the human being's release from self-incurred minority," through which people begin for the first time to think for themselves. 16 This gives morality a new basis, not fear of social disapproval or divine displeasure, but the autonomy of reason, through which their own faculties give universal laws which accord with the dignity of their rational nature. 17 Thus for Kant the rational reform which brings us to a consciousness of true morality does not merely modify the content of traditional social norms, as utilitarianism proposes to do, but even revolutionizes their character as forms of social control, turning them instead into laws which realize the freedom of individuals as moral agents. Alasdair MacIntyre has claimed that modern morality is made up of leftover scraps of various social traditions, which Enlightenment universalist rationalism is impotent to unify or to provide with a common ground. He seems to me to underestimate both the power of reason and the distinctive and positive contribution the Enlightenment tradition plays in grounding and shaping the values of modern culture. Nevertheless, I am arguing that in the end something rather like his contentions turns out to be true. For both utilitarian and Kantian theories reveal a deep tension within morality, between its social basis and content and what modern reflection wants to make of it. The culture of premodern society obviously did not rest on values such as the maximal tendency of individual pleasure over pain or the autonomy of the human will. Even modern society, insofar as its basic form is capitalism, though its ideologies are grounded on these values, is deeply hostile to them, so that the tension is not only between modern and premodern values, but also between modern values and modern practice. Since this is so, it should not be surprising that our moral consciousness should resist the radical transformation custom14Kant, 15Kant, 16Kant, 17Kant,

MA 8:113 R 6:151-190 A 8:35 G 4:431-441

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ary moral norms would have to undergo if modern values were fully accepted. It is therefore hard to be convinced by the optimism to which moralists (whether traditionalist or reformist) are irrevocably committed. We should not believe them when they say, for example, that moral principles have always achieved stability only through the unacknowledged influence of the utilitarian standard,18 or that autonomy of the will suddenly solves the problem of grounding morality, which defeated all previous moral theories 19 -in other words, that traditional morality grounded on custom and religion was really modern morality all along, only it did not understand itself.

7.4 The best-known radical critic of morality is, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche. Some of Nietzsche's attacks on morality can be interpreted as content critiques analogous to those of Thrasymachus and Marx. It is a familiar theme in Nietzsche, for instance, that morality's content is determined by its social function of asserting the dominance of society over the individual, hence of controlling or suppressing whatever is 'deviant' or creative in human beings, whatever stands outside or rises above the 'herd' and its perspective. His attack on Christian morality-and even more on its modern, humanist descendants-may also be viewed as a content critique of morality insofar as Nietzsche regards 'slave values' as having defeated 'master values' in the historical struggle, and thus as monopolizing the content of morality. And of course Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to notice the destructive tensions and incon1patibilities in modern morality, and to draw radically anti-moral consequences from then1. For just this reason, however, many of Nietzsche's attacks are not so much content critiques of morality itself as polemics against certain specific moral values-of the value ascribed to compassion, for instance, or of moral principles such as human equality and universal human dignity-which he himself views as competing with other values, such as strength or creativity, which might also be affirmed as part of a 'master morality.' It is significant in this respect that Nietzsche's earliest discussion of the opposition between 'slave morality' and 'master morality' concludes with the observation that "our current morality has grown on the soil of the ruling tribes and castes.,,20 For this reason as well as others, it n1ay be more illuminating to 18 Mill, Utilitarianism, 3 19Kant, G 4:441-445 20 Human, All-Tao-Human, §45

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consider aspects of Nietzsche's polemic against morality which constitute formal or structural critiques. Specifically, I will briefly discuss two themes in Nietzsche's chief work on the topic, On the Genealogy of Morals. The first is the theory of ressentiment, presented in the 'First Essay,' and the second is the theory of self-directed aggression and its rationalization, presented in the 'Second Essay.' We will regard these two theories as structural critiques of two basic moral attitudes, blame and guilt, which are fundamental formal or structural features of morality. Attitudes of blame and guilt, that is to say, are indispensable to any morality, whatever its content, since they are directed toward what is perceived as morally evil, irrespective of what moral good and evil are taken to consist in. Hence, if Nietzsche can convincingly display the psychology of these attitudes in a way that discredits them, then he will thereby succeed in undermining our commitment to morality as such, irrespective of its content. The fundamental psychological mechanism involved in ressentiment is quite simple. Someone does you an injury, trespasses on territory you hope to occupy, takes away something you wanted, or in some other way causes you pain or humiliation. The natural reaction is to strike out at the person who has done this to you, to assert yourself by perpetrating an even greater aggression, to inflict an even greater pain or humiliation, visiting on your tormentor an even greater suffering than the one you have been forced to endure; and this pain you want to inflict is seen by you not as a means to your well-being but rather as desirable for its own sake, simply because it deprives the other of a happiness equal to or greater than that of which you have been deprived. Suppose, however, that you are aware that you cannot strike out in this way, that you are too weak, that you are impotent to do the other any harm, or that this other is so much your superior that if you dare to strike back you will be crushed by the overwhelming power of the one you hate. The fact that your reactive impulse does not find an outlet does not mean that this impulse disappears. On the contrary, Nietzsche theorizes, it merely accumulates, grows and festers. And if you are so aware of your own impotence that you are often offended by external powers and can seldom give expression to your reactive instinct, then the consciousness of your position may easily become psychologically untenable. Your rancor will then change its form, it will be transmuted, disguised. And if it does not dare to assail its real object directly, it will seek out another object, or manufacture an imaginary object on which it may mount an attack with impunity. Nietzsche's theory is that the concept of moral evil first arises as such an imaginary object, and the

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attitude of moral blame is the accumulated ressentiment, assuming a concentrated, purified form. 21 When we confront evil, we get all worked up. We draw on a store of negative psychic energy which is sometimes surprising or even terrifying in its strength and vehemence. Our opposition to evil is not driven by mere anger, still less by any offense to ourselves personally. To the extent that it is, our indignation is felt to be tainted, not purely moral in character. In moral blame, that is to say, we are driven by a force more sublime than any immediate impulse to retaliate against an injury, whether done to ourselves or to son1eone else in particular. The particular object of our indignation is merely an example, and we may feel all the nobler if we feel no hatred of it (him, her or them) as an individual (we 'hate the sin, not the sinner'). The real object of our moral attitude, we tell ourselves, is simply evil itself, of which the miscreant before us is simply an example. It is evil, we tell ourselves, that calls forth blame, as what it inherently deserves. Nietzsche's theory, however, explains this by reference to the vast reservoir of unconscious ressentiment which has built up in us through a long series of injuries to which our in1potence has prevented us from reacting in a healthy and spontaneous way. We require an object on which to vent these feelings, an object distinct from any particular individual, but capable of taking up residence in individuals, when awareness of their vulnerability, or lack of our self-control, or some other contingent factor n1akes them seem fit objects toward which to direct our pent-up hostilities. This is, on Nietzsche's theory, the psychological meaning of evil, regarded specifically as an object of feelings such as an indignation and blame. On Nietzsche's theory, it would be hopelessly naive, from the standpoint of psychology, to ask whether 'evil,' in this sense, is a real property of actions or people in the world. We understand where the idea of evil comes fron1 only if we understand the self-concealing mechanism of creative imagination which produces evil as a way of making our suppressed ressentiment psychologically tenable. We grasp the nature of evil, and of the blan1e it calls forth, only when we understand the sick and self-opaque psychological process through which our imagination was compelled to posit it. Moral evil, as the 'proper' object of blame, is not a moral 'reality' of any sort, which might rationally guide our conduct or figure in the explanation of what happens. It is only a symptom of a psychological process whose irrationality necessitates its being hidden fron1 consciousness. 21 Nietzsche,

On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, especially §§ 10-11, 14-15

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7.5 The 'Second Essay' in the Genealogy provides a similarly psychological (and deflationary) account of guilt feelings. For Nietzsche, as for Kant, the historical origin of morality is to be found in the social customs through which a culture forms and controls its members, a regimen to which Nietzsche gives the name 'the morality of mores' (Sittlichkeit der Sitte).22 The mores of the community frustrate many of the individual's instincts, especially the aggressive ones, since their natural expression would threaten others and make a secure social life in general impossible for all. Once again Nietzsche argues that powerful psychological needs do not go away merely because their direct satisfaction is inhibited. Instead, they once again assume a form which is acceptable-to the psyche of the individual, and also to society. Once the individual human animal has been caged up in civilization, its suppressed aggressive impulses-Nietzsche calls them the "instinct for freedom"-are left with only one acceptable object: the only thing on which it is permissible to inflict pain is oneself 23 As in the case of ressentiment, however, this redirection of a destructive instinct would be psychologically untenable if it were consciously recognized for what it is. Before the individual's consciousness it requires articulation in an acceptable form. Nietzsche argues that this form developed at a comparatively early stage of civilization, based on the then existing social relationship between creditors and debtors. At an earlier stage of culture, Nietzsche observes (he is thinking mainly of the relevant provisions of the Roman Twelve Tables, promulgated about 450 B.C.), when a debtor was unable to pay a creditor what was owed, the latter was permitted to amputate a part of the forn1er's body commensurate with the size of the debt (we are bound to think of Shakespeare's Shylock in this connection). Nietzsche argues that we entirely misunderstand this practice if we see it as a deterrent to those who would voluntarily escape their obligations; voluntariness on the part of the debtor did not con1e into it at all. The point, rather, was simply to compensate the creditor for a pecuniary loss by permitting him to receive an acceptable substitute-"the pleasure of being allowed to vent his power freely upon one who is powerless, the voluptuous pleasure de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire." 24 22 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, §2; cf. also Human, AllToo Human, §96; Mixed Opinions and Maxims, §89; The Wanderer and His Shadow, §48; Daybreak, §§9,14,16. 23Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, §§17-18 24Ibid., §§5

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This way of dealing with unpaid debt, Nietzsche n1aintains, also functioned in people's thinking about crime and punishment. Life in society, under the protection of its laws, was something individuals have been given, and for which they owe society a recompense, in the form of obedience to those laws. When I break the law, I am viewed as a debtor who has not paid my debt to society, and it therefore may inflict pain on me to compensate itself for my transgression. 25 These institutions, Nietzsche hypothesizes, provided people with a way of dealing consciously with the psychological results of social prohibitions. We have a need to inflict pain on ourselves, but we do not understand why, and we have to explain this need in a way we find acceptable. But we understand that when we owe a debt we cannot pay, or have done something wrong, pain is rightly inflicted on us, in compensation to our creditor, or to the law or the authority we have offended. The sufferings we endure at our own hands, then, can be n1ade intelligible if we see then1 as punishments or compensation for unpaid debts. All we need in order to make this explanation work is to find (or invent) an unpaid debt or a crime we have committed, and a creditor who demands our pain as satisfaction. Nietzsche points out that today we think of debt and crime very differently from the ways in which they were thought of back when the concept of guilt and the feeling of bad conscience were first invented. But he finds traces of their genealogy in the fact that the German word Schuld n1eans both 'guilt' end 'debt.'26 The moral attitudes of guilt and bad conscience, owing to the persistence of the social and psychical necessities which gave birth to them, long ago acquired a life of their own, though they are supported today by the same diseased psychology they had at the beginning. As for our need to find debts and a creditor, crimes and someone to take satisfaction in our punishment, the human imagination makes quick work of these requirements. Ancestors and gods are easily viewed as benefactors, to whom we owe more than we can possibly repay.2 7 Crimes are also easily found, all the more easily as we purify the demands of our n10rality, so that we make not only the deed but even the wish into a transgression. This device even does double service in our present predican1ent, since our need to be punished arises precisely from the fact that we have aggressive desires on which we may not act. There is admirable psychic economy exhibited in the fact that we are 25Ibid., §§9, 12-13,15 26Ibid., §6 27Ibid., §19

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finally able to express these desires when we punish ourselves simply for having them. 28 On Nietzsche's theory, there is also a profound symbolism in the Christian doctrine of original sin, the idea that our real guilt lies far deeper than any of our particular misdeeds, and they merely provide so many occasions for this guilt to manifest itself. For Nietzsche the truth in this is that the origin of our feelings of guilt does not lie in any transgression we have committed against the laws of society, but is due on the contrary to society's aggression against us, in checking and suppressing our instinct for freedom, which therefore seeks opportunities to vent itself on us by taking our acts as occasions for punishment. If Nietzsche's theory is correct, then we should expect a somewhat paradoxical consequence: If guilt feelings are the results of aggression suppressed by social mores, then ceteris paribus those who are least outwardly aggressive should be most sensitive to them, while those who express their aggressiveness most freely should be least susceptible to the unhealthy psychology of guilt and hence should feel the least guilty about what they do. And this is what we do see; for it is saintly people like Augustine who still feel guilty over the pears they stole as children, while brutal conquerors seldom feel guilt about what they do (unless, Nietzsche thinks, their innocence has been corrupted by Christian moral sicknesses). 29 Morality, of course, has its own account of all this, telling us that this is because the former type of person, being especially 'good,' is also especially sensitive to his own flaws, while the latter type ignores them because he is 'evil.' But neurotic and ideological patterns of thinking always have resources for explaining away the obvious facts in a manner which keeps us within the circle of illusion. Nietzsche contemptuously rejects such 'moral explanations,' as part of the systematic web of myths, diseased imagining and outright lying which characterizes moral consciousness in general. 30

7.6 Nietzsche writes as if his theories provided a complete account of the nature and psychological origin of morality, of feelings such as blame and guilt, as well as the value Christianity and its successors in mod28The maximal invention of this sort, Nietzsche thinks, is that of the forgiving God who had to sacrifice himself for our sins because these were too profound and heinous ever to be expiated by any punishment we might undergo: the infinite love and infinite beneficence of such a God, and the infinite debt we incur on its account, is sufficient to provide endless occasions for the most exquisite forms of self-torment (ibid., §§20-21). 29Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, §11 30Ibid., §14

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ern secular morality place on such things as compassion and equality. Admittedly, this suggestion is pretty outrageous. It is an example of Nietzsche's ploy (one that often succeeds with his gullible admirers and followers) of impudently parading the iconoclasm and downright implausibility of his ideas as if they were arguments for them. To that extent, when taken at its word, his entire genealogy of morals is fairly easy for a level-headed person to dismiss. There are no doubt any number of more humdrum and saner theories of moral psychology, having greater plausibility, that do not in the least discredit moral concepts or feelings. Nevertheless, we would be too hasty simply to dismiss Nietzsche's outlandish theory altogether. For it is not so easy to discredit the possibility that the psychological mechanisms he describes have-along with the less loony explanations we can think of-some significant influence on the expression of people's moral attitudes, or even that they identify part of what is constitutive of those attitudes themselves. Consider the following possibility: Morality, as a psychological and social fact, for the most part, may be an expression of a perfectly rational set of values, and moral attitudes n1ay usually constitute a perfectly rational set of reactions to the human condition and the circumstances human social life. Yet these rational reactions may sometimes also, at least at the margins, be accompanied by, and at times warped by, the irrational psychologies Nietzsche identifies. Guilt, for instance, may be simply a proper psychological reaction to my having violated norms with which others rightly expect me to comply, and which I rightly impose on n1yself. But it may be that some of the emotional power of guilt feelings is also borrowed from the mechanism of self-directed aggression Nietzsche postulates; and sometin1es the pathology of this mechanislll may influence guilt feelings, leading us to feel guilt when it is not rational to do so. In a few cases, it may even lead guilt feelings to be perverted in their content and expression, hence explaining the neurotic behavior observed by Freud. Blame is likewise mainly a rational reaction to those who violate the proper norms of conduct in a healthy society. But perhaps part of the vehemence of this feeling is also due to the mechanisms of unconscious ressentiment, and this also explains why it is occasionally directed to objects that don't really deserve it. Perhaps this also helps to explain why moral blame sometimes takes the form of the sickening vehemence we observe, for example, among the sizable majority of Americans who still believe passionately in the death penalty, even though they have every reason to know that it is ineffective as a deterrent to crime and also that they (at any rate) are incapable of ever administering it without also turning

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it into a vehicle of the class and racial injustices that continue to make the United States, despite its prosperity, one of the most barbarous nations in the world. It is this more moderate contention, then--that Nietzsche's theory captures only part of the truth about moral concepts and emotions--that I propose to take as a hypothesis, to see what its metaethical consequences might be for the kind of morality theorized by Kant and the utilitarians. We should ask how far the ends and principles of morality, as the theorists portray them, may be plausibly served by a system of thoughts and feelings having such psychological origins, even if Nietzsche's theory of these origins is only part of the story. None of these feelings, to begin with, has anything felicific about it. None involve the pursuit of pleasure or happiness, even for the agent, much less for sentient creation as a whole. All of them aim chiefly at inflicting pain, even pain for its own sake, either on oneself or on someone else. From this point of view, it is at least initially implausible that moral feelings, to the extent that they have the origins Nietzsche ascribes to them, could serve utilitarian ends. Utilitarians sometimes note that certain moral feelings have an origin in vengeful inlpulses, and then like to suggest that in their moral form these feelings, perhaps combined with sympathy, function to deter injury, hence to serve the general happiness. 31 Now to begin with this is just about as plausible as saying that sadistic impulses might be moral feelings in good standing, since they too, if properly manipulated and directed, might conceivably have a felicific tendency on the whole. But to the extent that Nietzsche's theory is correct, there are also psychological constraints on both blame and guilt as regards their object and as regards the occasions on which they're likely to be manifested. The manifestations of pent-up ressentiment will be selected in part because they can be easily associated in imagination with the archetype of 'evil' representing the perceived causes of our past frustrations and humiliations, partly because they are easy and safe targets, suitable scapegoats on which to release all the hostilities we have been unable to vent naturally on their real objects. To the extent that Nietzsche's theory is correct, then, we might expect moral blame to be most commonly directed not at those whose actions pose the greatest threat to the general happiness, but rather at those whom it feels natural to bring under convenient stereotypes associated with people's images of evil, and also at people in vulnerable positions, on whom one may inflict injury with least fear of retaliation. 3 1 Cf.

Mill, Utilitarianism, 50-51.

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We need only look at the social types at which it seems easiest for people to direct blame-people driven by poverty to desperate acts, unwed mothers living on public assistance, racial minorities, people whose lifestyle is readily perceived as 'other' and 'deviant'-to see that Nietzsche's theory has many confirming instances. If feelings with this psychological origin are then combined with a utilitarian morality, the result is that convenient social pariahs are then judged-without much evidence, perhaps, but nevertheless with psychological consistencyto be the cause of all manner of social ills. The frequency with which this happens should provide us with some basis for deciding how far the utilitarians are right when they say that morality puts vengeful feelings in the service of promoting the general happiness. When we consider this question, we may well ask pointedly what is being put in the service of what. On the standard utilitarian account, guilt feelings would be useful when associated in people's minds with unfelicific acts, and as deterrents to committing acts of the same kind in the future. To the extent that they originate in the way Nietzsche supposes, however, there is no reason to expect them to have such an effect. On the contrary, Nietzsche's theory tells us that feelings of guilt, other things being equal, are proportional to the extent to which we have repressed our impulses to harm others. Moreover, these feelings arise along with a need to attribute guilty acts to ourselves, or, if we find that too difficult, a need to commit crimes in order to bring our perception of ourselves into line with our guilt feelings, a phenomenon Freud noted in some of his patients. 32 In that case, far from serving to prevent unfelicific acts, guilt feelings should be expected to cause them. To whatever extent we think a Nietzschean account of morality may explain attitudes such as blame and guilt, to that very same extent we make it more difficult to reconcile the psychology of moral attitudes with a utilitarian account of the purpose they are supposed to serve. But if such a reconciliation is difficult for a utilitarian theory of morality, it surely becomes utterly impossible in the case of a Kantian theory, which takes the autonomy of reason as morality's fundamental principle. For the minimum we could ask of a morality of autonomy is that agents who are influenced by moral feelings and attitudes should act with self-transparency, that their interpretation of their attitudes should be correct, and that they should be able to act on these at3 2 Freud, "Some Character Types Met With in Psychoanalytic Work," Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (New York: Macmillan 1964-)19:53. Nietzsche anticipated this point: see Thus Spake Zarath~stra, First Part, §6: "The Pale Criminal." --------------

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titudes as they understand them. To the extent that moral feelings arise in the way described by Nietzsche's theories, however, they are essentially self-opaque: one has them at all only insofar as aggressive or reactive impulses undergo repression, disguise and unconscious transformation. If Nietzsche's theories of blame and guilt are even partly correct, then those who take such attitudes toward themselves or others are always thereby involved to a degree in the subversion of their own rational autonomy. The same is obviously true of morality to the extent that Freud is correct in regarding the superego as an introjection of the father as a way of resolving Oedipal conflict. 33 To many people it is so obvious that some such account is true of moral feelings and impulses that as soon as they see how far Kant's theory captures the spirit of ordinary moral consciousness, they immediately become unable to take seriously Kant's insistence that his moral theory is founded on the autonomy of reason. It is only on the basis of such a misunderstanding, for example, that Bernard Williams could suppose that Kantian morality might pose any threat to personal integrity.34 The ease and commonness of such a misunderstanding, however, testifies to the deep tension which exists, on the purely formal or structural level, between morality as a social and psychological fact and Kant's attempt to produce a rational theory of it.

7.7 I have claimed that Nietzsche's formal critiques of morality are far more plausible if taken to express part of a con1plex metaethical truth than if taken to be con1plete reductive psychological analyses of blame and guilt. The same should surely be said regarding the content critiques we have examined. Thrasyn1achus's conception of justice, for example, is based on some extren1ely crude social analysis; even its more sophisticated Marxian variant is far more plausible if taken to capture only a partial truth. Appeals to justice generally stabilize the prevailing mode of production, but often enough they also destabilize it. Any view which sees justice as always on the side either of the oppressor or the oppressed has yet to arrive at a fully satisfactory theory of it. Both Nietzsche and Marx were, I think, clearly aware of this point, even if their polemical intentions usually made them reluctant to admit it. Marx pretty clearly regards his reductive, historical materialist account of justice as only a rough approximation, the best that one can (or need) do with concepts in the purely ideological sphere, which ad33Freud, The Ego and the Id, Complete Psychological Works 19: 36, 48, 167 34 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 184-95

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mits of less scientific precision than the economic foundation on which it rests. 35 Nietzsche, on the other hand, was unconcerned with tidiness because he celebrated unsystematic thinking. Like some of his recent admirers, he did not much care that the overall import of his thoughts about morality is in many respects obscure and even self-contradictory. The harder question is what conclusions we should draw from radical metaethical critiques of morality, granted that the theories which undermine our commitment to morality contain a measure of truth but give a partial rather than a total account of the moral phenomena they propose to explain. The most intensive investigations into this question are to be found in the writings of philosophers in the recent continentally inspired tradition. But they are unfortunately of little help. For although they are lucidly aware of its difficulty-and even the difficulty of formulating it properly-they usually content themselves with 'deconstructing, morality, in other words, reveling in confusion for its own sake, tracing out the multifaceted ambiguities and ramified mystifications it introduces into every aspect of the moral life, and show little or no concern with proceeding toward any clarity about the questions it raises, much less toward answers to them. 36 Perhaps they are right, though, to think it is worthwhile merely to make us painfully aware of the mere presence and urgency of such questions. For as we have seen in the case of traditional Anglophone metaethics, there is a powerful resistance to admitting their existence at all. Arguments which purport to undermine our commitment to morality and even to discredit it are likely to elicit fear and revulsion, or if not that, then a detached attitude of idle intellectual amusement which is equally effective in preventing us from thinking seriously about what those arguments imply, if they are sound. Even those who do not consider moral principles to be categorical imperatives, even those who do not consider moral reasons to be overriding in all cases, are apt to be reluctant to admit that there could be shades of grey regarding moral principles and moral feelings considered simply in themselves. We may be frightened that radical critiques of morality threaten to leave us defenseless against all the cruelties and injustices people do to one another, with no support for any of the decent impulses which make human life bearable. If this is our reaction, then we would do 35 "A distinction must be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the ... ideological forms in which human beings become conscious of this conflict" (Selected Works, 183). 36This is obviously true of Caputo, Against Ethics; see also Charles C. Scott, The Question of Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1990).

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well to ask ourselves how much good we think morality actually does in these respects, and how much faith we really place in moral motives to direct people's conduct as we think it should be directed. Moreover, the thrust of most radical metaethical critiques of morality is to insist that morality itself-meaning not the que voulez-vous of philosophical theories but the actual social and psychological phenomena to which a whole system of words and concepts like 'nlorality,' 'justice,' 'evil,' and 'guilt' are correctly applied-is responsible for no small proportion of cruelty, oppression, suffering, and degradation against which we hope 'morality' will protect us. These critiques show us that looking to morality for such protection is like an oppressed people looking to their tyrannical ruler for justice, or an abused wife looking to her husband for protection. 37 The next thought is likely to be that morality is needed even to articulate our objections to the ugly practices with which radical critiques charge morality; hence to undermine our conlmitnlent to nl0rality, as radical metaethical critiques seek to do, is simultaneously to undernline the values on the basis of which those same critiques are carried out, and therefore the radical critiques show thelnselves to be self-refuting or internally incoherent. There is clearly some force in this line of 0 bjection. I think something like it is quite telling against many so-called 'postmodernist' critiques of Enlightenment values (for example, those of Foucault) which make no sense except on the basis of precisely those same modern, Enlightenment values. Yet here it is important to draw a distinction between radical critiques of morality that claim to provide a reductive and deflationary account of the whole phenomenon of morality, and more moderate forms of these critiques claiming only that critical accounts of morality tell a significant part of the story. The former are indeed self-defeating if they're carried out on the basis of values that themselves belong to morality. In order to avoid this self-defeat, these critiques must appeal solely to non-moral values, such as self-interest. 38 But this restriction would make them less compelling. The latter, more moderate versions of a radical critique of morality, however, are not rendered incoherent 37And not only like such things, but, as a matter of culture and institutions, actually entwined with them. Also, the point is not to deny that morality does sometimes protect us from cruelty and barbarism, just as tyrants sometimes do justice among their subjects and abusive husbands sometimes protect their wives. 38Thrasymachus's radical critique of morality, for example, avoids any threat of self-defeat in just this way. Marx's critique of morality is self-consistent only if the values on which his critique of capitalism rests are non-moral values. Most of the controversy over Marx's anti-moralism comes down to the question whether this is a possible interpretation of the basis of his social critique.

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if they appeal to values that themselves belong to morality. Their gist is rather that morality itself is a complex and internally contradictory phenomenon, so that it makes perfectly good sense to be committed to one strand of the tangled fabric in mounting a criticisn1 against other strands. For example, it makes perfectly good sense to appeal to the modern Enlightenment values represented by utilitarian or Kantian morality (that is, to the value of human happiness or rational autonomy) in attacking those aspects of morality (whether contentual or structural) which are premodern, antirational and counter-Enlightenment in nature (that is, to the aspects of morality which derive fron1 such things as psychological dysfunction, religious superstition, social oppression, or sexual repression). 'Postmodernists' usually do not make clear where they stand here. Their love of paradox for its own sake makes them reluctant to distinguish between coherent and incoherent forms of their own doctrines, even where this would make those doctrines more plausible. Moreover, they usually do appeal in practice to Enlightenrrlent values, but they often confusedly identify the very values to which they in fact appeal with the enemy they mean to attack. I conclude that their way of criticizing morality will remain hopeless and undeserving of serious attention unless it places some value on rational coherence and consequently sorts out the (modern rationalist Enlightenment) values to which it is ultimately committed fron1 the (anti-modern, antirationalist, counterEnlightenrnent) features ofrnodern culture which are the proper objects of its attacks. But of course in order to achieve this degree of self-clarity 'postmodernism' would have to abandon that name, as well as most of the vain rhetorical posturings to which its adherents are so devoted. Thus the sort of radical critique of morality I am advocating is one which remains deeply and even ruthlessly committed to the modernist values, such as rational autonomy and the greatest happiness of the greatest nurnber, which ground modern moral theories. But it is nevertheless anti-moral to the extent that it recognizes (as these theories do not) that morality is a less than perfect vehicle for expressing these values, in some ways a vehicle which may be unsuitable or even dangerously self-subverting. It would acknowledge that human autonomy and happiness sometimes come into conflict with morality, that they are worth pursuing even when they do, and that the consequence of such an acknowledgment is not only that we must look at the content of morality as something in need of continuous rational criticisn1 and reform, but that in the name of autonomy and happiness even the essential forms of morality (for example, the feelings which serve

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as its essential psychological vehicles) and its role in human life need constantly to be brought into question. Thus even if Rawls's famous remark that justice is the most fundamental virtue of social institutions is seen as expressive of the moral point of view, that should not prevent us from doubting whether justice should be one of our first or fundamental concerns. Systems of concepts and impulses such as blame and guilt, desert and punishment, for example, may need to be kept under strict rational surveillance; and the fact that these are attitudes fundamental or even dispensable to morality should not be regarded as providing a sufficient defense of them. What I have been saying in the last few paragraphs is, of course, only one of many possible options opened up by the recognition that radical metaethical critiques of morality are a viable sort of enterprise. This option would be easier to articulate, and more such options would be available for development, if metaethics had taken the radical critique of morality as one of its proper tasks. The present essay will have its intended effect if it stimulates metaethical inquiry to focus on these unresolved and even largely unexplored questions.

8

What Dead Philosophers Mean 8.1

Interpreting Dead Philosophers

Those of us who study the history of philosophy spend our time trying to understand texts written mostly in languages other than English by people long dead. Our primary aim, whose successful achievement is presupposed by any other ainlS we may have, is to determine what the text means, or what the author means, or meant (I take these all to be the same).l This is often difficult to do. The writings of Kant, for example, often challenge our ability to understand thenl. This can happen at the level of a single term. (What does Kant mean by "synthesis" or "determination of the will" or "transcendental principle of judgment"?) Or there can be questions about specific assertions (that nlatter is an appearance rather than a "thing in itself" , or that the n10rallaw is a fact of reason). Or it can happen when we try to understand the general structure of his system. (How does judgment mediate between understanding and reason?) 1 I will rnake no distinction between what a text means and what the author means in (or by) it. Nor will I distinguish between what an author now means and what she meant at the time she wrote the text. On the contrary, I think that an author at the time of writing meant everything her text can now be rightly understood to mean. I have been asked if I accept a distinction like that drawn by some philosophers of language between "speaker's meaning" and "linguistic meaning" in the case of such texts. Perhaps I might, but in that case I do not think we are interested primarily in the "author's meaning" (in that sense) of philosophical texts. We might be interested in what the author intended (e.g. which contemporary positions or movements he intended to attack or oppose) but that is not what we are chiefly concerned with when investigating the meaning of the text (such information might sometimes be a means to helping us determine the meaning). I do want to say that the meaning of the text with which we are concerned is also what the author means because for there to be a meaningful text at all it must be the product of a human author (or authors) and because one indispensable way of getting at the meaning of the text is to ask what the author held, or what the author meant in the text.

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But the kinds of questions that I want to ask do not arise only in the case of some philosophers, and the fact that we have to raise them cannot be blamed merely on the regrettable unclarity with which some philosophers write. The texts of Kant and Hegel are famously obscure, but the meaning of even apparently lucid writers such as Descartes and Hume is something that begins to elude us when we ask questions about their views. Descartes says that the mind and body are two distinct substances, which together constitute one thing, the human being. But exactly how do they do so? Hume reasons at length about our idea of causal power or necessary connection, basing his reasonings on the thesis that we have no ideas that are not copied from impressions. But does Hume mean to say that we have an impression of causal power or doesn't he? Asking difficult questions about what philosophers mean in their writings turns out to be an important part of what it is to read a text in the history of philosophy, or at least to read it philosophically. And trying to decide what a philosopher means will also lead us into controversies that often seem to be about philosophy as much as they are about what an author thought or meant. But how can questions about what someone means be philosophical questions? How can controversies about what a text means be philosophical controversies? There have long been disputes, for example, about whether Aristotle regarded form or matter as the principle of individuation of substances. 2 Again, some think that in the famous discussion of the piece of wax in the second Meditation, Descartes was trying to establish that only the properties dealt with by mathematics belong truly and permanently to n1atter, while others think his aim was the more modest one of identifying which properties are necessarily involved in our concept of body insofar as this concept is a distinct one. 3 One set of interpreters holds that Hume intended his philosophy to curb the pretensions of metaphysics and thwart the enthusiasm of religious zealotry by casting 2In the scholastic tradition, the "matter" interpretation was famously defended by Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and St. Thomas Aquinas; the "form" interpretation was held by Richard Rufus of Cornwall, author of the first scholastic con1mentaries on Aristotle's physics and metaphysics in the West, and the last great scholastic philosopher, Francisco Suarez. For a historical discussion, see Jorge Gracia, Individuation in scholasticism: The Later Middle Ages and the Counter-reformation (1150-1650)(Albany: SUNY Press, 1994). Probably the majority interpretation today agrees with Rufus and Suarez. For a good example, see A. C. Lloyd, Form and Universal in Aristotle (Liverpool: Cairns, 1981). 3Compare Edwin A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (New York: Harcourt, 1925), pp. 115-120, and Margaret D. Wilson, Descartes (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 79 88. ---------

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skeptical doubt over all human knowledge and belief; others say that far from trying to discredit human knowledge, Hume was trying to lay a new foundation for it on the basis of a comprehensive empirical science of human nature. 4 Kant scholars ask whether noumena or things in themselves are entities distinct from their appearances and causing them, or whether things in themselves are the very same entities as appearances, distinguished from them only by the ways in which they are considered or referred to. 5 There is a dispute about whether Marx condemned capitalism for distributive injustice or held a deflationary account of justice according to which capitalist exploitation is just but no less objectionable for being just. 6 When we ask these questions and try to settle these disputes about the meaning of a philosopher or philosophical text, what exactly is it that we are trying to find out? And what kinds of arguments and evidence are relevant?7 4The traditional reading until this century was the skeptical one, that was found prominently in Reid, Beattie and the Scottish common sense school, as well as in T. H. Green and the British idealists. The first prominent Hume scholar to defend the "naturalist" reading was Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (London: Macmillan, 1941), and it has been prominent in Hume scholarship ever since, including the excellent work of Barry Stroud, David Fate Norton, Robert Fogelin, Annette Baier and Don Garrett. See especially Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume's Treatise (Cambridge: Harvard, 1991); Don Garrett, Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy (New York: Oxford, 1997). Two studies in the latter half of the twentieth century that have to one extent or another defended the skeptical reading are John Passmore, Hume's Intentions (London: Duckworth, 1968) and Wayne Waxman, Hume's Theory of Consciousness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For a recent attempt to do justice to both readings and find a way of reconciling them, see Graciela de Pierris, "Hume's Pyrrhonian Skepticism and the Belief in Causal Laws," Journal of the History of Philosophy (July, 1999). 5For some recent discussions of this topic, see Gerold Prauss, Erscheinung bei Kant (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971), Henry Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale, 1983) and Idealism and Freedom (New York: Cambridge, 1996), Ch. 1; Allen W. Wood, "Kantianism" in J. Kim and E. Sosa (eds.), A Companion to Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 6The deflationary interpretation is defended by Robert Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York: Norton, 1969), Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx (London: Routledge, 1981); Richard Miller, Analyzing Marx (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1984). The view that Marx condemned capitalism for distributive injustice is defended by Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) R. G. Peffer, Marxism, Morality and Social Justice (Princeton: Princeton Press, 1990), Kai Nielsen, Marxism and the Moral Point of View (Boulder: Westview, 1989). 7 Some of these disputes are about the meaning of a very specific passage in a specific text. Others are about the overall shape of a philosopher's doctrines as expressed in an entire body of writings. Some are even about what a philosopher's doctrines say or imply in regard to philosophical questions the philosopher did not

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8.2

Why Study the History of Philosophy?

But perhaps some will want to ask a prior question. Why does it matter precisely what long dead philosophers, or their texts, really mean? It n1ight be argued that from a historical point of view, all we really have is what the texts say, and what others have said about them. Endless philosophical disputations about precisely what the texts mean is of little use to those who are interested, as historians should exclusively be, in wie es eigentlich gewesen ist. Philosophers might argue that the only job of philosophy is to concern itself with questions about what material objects really are, or what makes a thing the thing it is and different from other things, or whether we can ever know reality as it truly is, or whether capitalist wage bargains are unjust. They might object that we make no real progress in answering these questions by studying the opinions on them held by Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant or Marx-especially if these opinions are so obscurely expressed that even the experts, with all their erudition and fine-grained analysis, still cannot agree on what they are. My aim here is not to defend what I do as a historian of philosophy, but it might help if I at least sketch the reply I would try to make to these objections, since what we are looking for as the meaning of a philosophical text will be conditioned by what we are trying to accomplish in undertaking this kind of inquiry. I do not think that the philosophical importance of studying the history of philosophy can be demonstrated a priori by some rigorous argument. It can be appreciated only by those who engage in philosophical inquiry, and have studied enough of the history of philosophy to experience for themselves, in a variety of ways, how indispensably it contributes to that inquiry. But I will try to offer some general considerations that might summarize the results of such experiences for a scholar who has had them. To the objections of historians I would be conciliatory, at least to explicitly ask. But disputes that may at first look as though they are of wholly different kinds tend to be harder to distinguish when we look at them more closely. Interpretations of the overall aims of Hume's philosophy or Aristotle's views about individuation will have to appeal to specific things these philosophers say in certain specific passages in their writings, and these passages have to be read in light the context where they appear. In trying to determine what Descartes meant in a brief passage of the second Meditation, we may need to look at what he was trying to accomplish later in the Meditations, so as to understand his overall plan in that work and how the second Meditation contributes to it. We may even need to compare the discussion of the nature of matter in the Meditations with the accounts given in later works in trying to decide how his aims and views there fit into his doctrines as a whole.

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a degree. To the extent that historiography is interested only in the historical influence of what philosophers wrote, rather than the significance of what they actually meant, it can afford to ignore subtle interpretive inquiries. But I would also point out that it is extremely hard for a historian to keep away from questions about what philosophers mean, since these questions arise as soon as they try to explain the influence of a text in terms of its intellectual content. It is also very easy to underestimate the danger of being satisfied with what is supposed to be obvious about this. 8 There is also an unfortunate tendency on the part of some (to which vulgar Marxism has contributed) simply to identify the meaning of what philosophers said with the role their ideas have played in social or political struggles or with some set of historical consequences for which the philosopher's ideas are commonly held responsible. The element of truth in this is that texts and ideas, like people and their actions, always have a historical fate they cannot escape. But when we reduce the meaning of a text merely to that fate (or, more often, to some conspicuously lurid aspect of it), this does not tell us what the text means, but only gets in the way of understanding that. 9 8For example, discussions of medieval and early modern intellectual history often refer to a position they call 'theological voluntarism', whose paradigmatic representative is supposed to be William of Ockham. This is supposed to be the view that what is good is whatever God wills. This is understood to mean that if God had commanded us to act in direct defiance of all the dictates of right reason, or had chosen to damn those who love him and bless those who hate him, then it would have been virtuous to defy right reason and we would have the very same reasons to praise and give thanks to God that we have now. This error is well exposed in Marilyn Adams, William of Ockham (South Bend: Notre Dame Press, 1987) and Rega Wood, Ockham on the Virtues (W. Lafayette, Purdue, 1997). Or in more recent intellectual history it is sometimes presented as a commonplace that Hegel taught that the political status quo is always rational and held that all historical change follows the dialectical law of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis." (The curious history of this familiar howler was long ago documented by Gustav Emil Mueller, "The Hegel Legend of 'Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis'," Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (1958). See also Allen W. Wood, flegel's Ethical Thought (New York: Cambridge, 1990.) Such bits of conventional pseudo-wisdom about the history of philosophy involve errors on the same scale as if one said that the Confederacy won the Civil War or that in 430 B.C. the public health conditions in Athens were generally good; historical discussions that assume them are accordingly worthless. No doubt questions about the meaning of difficult philosophical doctrines (such as those of Ockham and Hegel) are subtler and inherently more controversial. And there is usually some basis for the error, such as it would be hard to imagine regarding questions about who won the Civil War or whether the Athenian plague occurred. But when people hold grossly erroneous beliefs about what past philosophers meant, their beliefs are just as false as if they fell into error about other kinds of historical fact. 9Marx himself has been a frequent victim of this erroneous tendency, though the fact that he may have shared it does not make it any the less erroneous to apply it to

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Philosophers' objections to studying the history of philosophy are more fundamentally mistaken and n10re pernicious. Fortunately, in the last generation their credibility has declined sharply in American philosophy. G. E. Moore once confessed that it was not life or the sciences that suggested philosophical problems to him, but rather the things other philosophers had said about them. 10 In the mid-twentieth century, many philosophers in the tradition from which Moore came would probably have understood this remark as meaning that philosophical problems are entirely artificial inventions, of interest only to the peculiar sort of diseased or befuddled mind that might think them up. But I think Moore's point was really quite insightful, and therefore entirely different from this. Moore's remark was his way of acknowledging a fundamental truth about virtually all philosophical questions, namely, that they are inherited from the thoughts of earlier philosophers. All such questions have been created and shaped through a long historical process in which philosophers have, taken over the thoughts of earlier philosophers, criticizing and modifying them. This means there is something fundamentally self-deceptive in the view of those who disdain the history of philosophy on the ground that they are "interested only in solving the problems then1selves, not in endlessly rehashing the failed attempts of others to solve them." 11 For solving a philosophical problem is not like solving a problem in engineering, where the only issue is whether the solution enables you to do something in the future that you couldn't do in the past. Above all, solving a philosophical problem means coming to understand the problem. Since these problems are always products of a history, you can't fully understand then1 unless you understand their origins. him. Hence because Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation were used by the Nazis over a century after they were written, this text, or even Fichte's entire philosophy (whose political tendencies were in fact largely rationalistic, progressive and even cosmopolitan) is sometimes dismissed on account of its association with National Socialism. Even if we deplore the nationalism of the Addresses, as a political act they were above all a courageous defiance of the Napoleonic occupation. 10 "I do not think that the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any philosophical problems. What has suggested philosophical problems to me is things which other philosophers have said about the world or the sciences" in P. A. Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of G. E. Moore (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1942), p. 14. 11 Moore's fellow Bloomsburian John Maynard Keynes once said that "practical men, who believe themselves exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." (Quoted by John Cassidy, "The New World Disorder," The New Yorker, Oct. 26 and Nov. 2, 1998, p. 207). Something very analogous is true, I think, of the attitude toward the history of philosophy that I am here criticizing.

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Sometimes it n1ay look as though you can do this well enough merely by studying the thought of the previous generation of philosophers (the ones who taught you philosophy). After all, problems in mathematics are also inherited, but n1athematicians do not need to engage in deep study of the history of mathematics. One thing we historians of philosophy learn to our chagrin is that most of the philosophers whose works we study with such care were not especially well-informed or accurate interpreters of their predecessors.1 2 Yet from the fact that philosophers have been extremely successful without knowing much history of phi·losophy, it does not follow that ignorance of the history of philosophy is not harmful to then1 as philosophers. (Beethoven and Smetana wrote great and original music after they were completely deaf. It does not follow that being deaf is not a serious drawback to composing.) Philosophical problems relate to more aspects of human life and experience than n1athematical problems. There are many more things that might count as a solution to them, and no solution to a real philosophical problem is ever going to be as elegant, perfect or certain as a n1athematical proof. Truly understanding philosophical problems therefore requires taking a wide view, which means, historically, a relatively long view. 13 12Kant, for instance, was originally a man of science. He absorbed the tradition mainly through reading Wolff and Baumgarten, and knew the history of philosophy chiefly through Brucker's accounts of it. Kant also said, quite correctly, that we often can understand a philosopher better than he understood himself. If this were my theme, I would argue that Kant's own philosophy is better understood when we consider its relation to the historical tradition more accurately than he was able to do. I would try to show how philosophers get an impoverished, blinkered and inadequate conception of philosophical problems, positions and arguments when they consider only the way these problems and views about them have been honed and redacted in the past couple of generations. 13 1 would argue further that we can still learn a lot about grounding claims to knowledge from Descartes, about possible worlds from Leibniz, about theories of meaning from Locke, about causation from Hume and Kant. I would try to show that what we gain in precision on these topics from reading contemporary literature (on the Gettier problem, say, or the writings of and about Kripke and Putnam, Lewis and Stalnaker, or Mackie and Kim), we tend to lose in our blindness to the set of background assumptions these theorists take for granted, and in forgetting a wide variety of alternative options these approaches exclude, apparently without even realizing it. Even more zealously I would try to show that the questions that do absorb the technical skill of analytical philosophers are no more inherently interesting or worthwhile than a lot of other philosophical questions that might preoccupy them if they came to read and be gripped by the writings of philosophers like Fichte and Hegel. I would argue that the critical interpretation of texts in the history of philosophy-the activity of trying to determine what those texts mean, whether what they mean is true, and how good their arguments are-is one thoroughly respectable way of engaging with philosophical problems, and constitutes an indispensable part of philosophical inquiry.

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The Bible tells us that there is no new thing under the sun. 14 Like much that is in the Bible, this is no doubt poetic hyperbole and not meant literally. But in philosophy a fertile source of the new is the reemergence after a tin1e, often in the form of a re-interpretation, of ideas and viewpoints that have for a while been unkno\vn or else despised and neglected as dead, profitless and false. Son1e of the greatest movements in the history of philosophy have been sparked by the rediscovery and revitalization of old ideas: of Aristotle by Averroes and the Western scholastics of the high middle ages; of Sextus Empiricus by Montaigne, Gassendi and Descartes; of Spinoza by the German idealists. Or sometimes ideas that are not necessarily despised contribute to what is new by being reappropriated. Think of the diverse ways in which recent philosophy has been impacted by successive waves of the rediscovery of Kant (by Cohen and Cassirer, Strawson and Putnam, Rawls, Apel and Habermas), or of Hegel (by Sartre, Taylor, MacIntyre, HosIe, McDowell and Brandom), or even of Dewey (by Quine and Rorty). As these examples illustrate, however, there is no Nietzschean eternal recurrence in philosophy; what is old never returns precisely as it was, and often the heritage of a past philosopher or past idea can become a bone of contention. This makes it a matter of far more than antiquarian interest whether past philosophers are being correctly understood and whether revisions and modifications of their views are well-motivated or merely the result of misreadings and distortions, blinkered through the influence of intervening prejudices. Deciding such questions is therefore not merely a matter of intellectual heraldry, but is essential to the proper philosophical assessment of theses, argun1ents and theories. Likewise, it matters for philosophical purposes (and is not of 'merely historical' interest) whether, for instance, as Myles Burnyeat has argued, our modern understanding of skepticism has been based on fundan1ental misperceptions about what ancient skeptics were up to and how they saw the world. 15 One of the greatest services we historians of philosophy can render to philosophy is therefore to prevent the effacement of earlier views, and especially to keep alive what our age is likely to regard as "weird", "foreign", "outdated", "no longer to be taken seriously" -that is, what is incapable of easy assimilation into the prejudices and fashions of our own time. For precisely that (or at any rate some now unidentifiable and inscrutable part of it) is always 14 Ecclesiastes 1:9. 15See especially, "The Skeptic in his Place and Time," in M. Burnyeat and M. Frede (eds.) The Original Skeptics: A Controversy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), pp.92 126.

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the source of virtually every philosophical thing that is new under the sun.

8.3

Thinking Dead People's Thoughts

When we interpret a text in the history of philosophy, a surprisingly varied set of considerations come into play. To begin with, to do it right we need to understand the language in which the text is written. 16 We need to know what other philosophers had thought and were thinking at the time. I7 Sometimes we have to be aware of how the philosophical 16Elementary as it is, this is something philosophers often fail to do. In conversations between Kant scholars, for example, the following scenario used to be fairly common. An English speaking scholar, usually from the analytical tradition, would criticize something found in his copy of the Critique of Pure Reason, which (until recently, anyway) was Norman Kemp Smith's 1929 translation. A German speaking scholar would object that what he quoted is not what Kant says, that the German is such-and-such, which Kemp Smith mistranslated. At times the German in such disputes was merely trying to "pull rank," and the English speaker had hold of a real philosophical issue. Deplorably often, however, the German speaker was right, and despite this the English speaker would not give up, but press on, claiming that the German speaker's information was irrelevant, because what mattered was "the philosophical issue" -by which the English speaker meant merely whatever thoughts he happened to have got from reading Kemp Smith, whether they were expressed in Kant's text ,or not. The English speaker's position was then indefensible, and his arrogant stubbornness a disgrace. 17The decisiveness of understanding the philosophical background is easy to illustrate. For example, Plato maintains that forms or ideas belong to reality rather than appearance and are immune to change (Phaedo 78d-e; cf. Republic 526-534, Symposium 210e-211a). In the course of arguing for these claims he argues that a pair of equal sticks is not really equal because they can seem to us to be unequal, but the equal itself (the form of 'equal') is really equal because it cannot seem to us to be unequal (Phaedo 74b-c; cf. Republic 523e-524a.). These arguments do not draw the distinction between appearance and reality in the way we are now accustomed to do. We do not think that it counts against a pair of sticks being really equal that they may seem unequal to someone. He also maintains that the size of Simmias is subject to change or becoming because when compared with Socrates, Simmias is tall, while compared with Phaedo, Simmias is short (Phaedo 102b-103a; cf. Hippias Major 289a-c). The conception of change or becoming used in this argument is clearly broader than our concept of change or becoming, since we are not inclined to treat as an instance of change in Simmias' height the fact that Simmias is tall considered in one context (or as judged by one standard of tallness) and short in another context (or as judged by a different standard). Yet in interpreting Plato's claims, and assessing his arguments, it is highly relevant how concepts like being vs. appearance and becoming or change were understood by his philosophical predecessors, such as Heraclitus, Cratylus, Parmenides and Melissus, when they argued about whether the real is subject to change or whether the sensible and changing is real. We may have good reasons for conceiving of change or becoming and the distinction between being and appearance differently from the way they were conceived by the early Greeks, and these reasons are certainly relevant to our final assessment of Plato's doctrines. But simply to substitute our notions of reality and

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questions addressed by the text had been shaped by political, religious or other kinds of social forces. 18 Also of vital importance is philosophical expertise-the ability to formulate ideas clearly and precisely, to construct and evaluate arguments, even to build philosophical theories and systems for ourselves. For this reason, the interpretation of texts in the history of philosophy raises a specific set of problems that might be thought to differ from the problen1s of interpreting documents in other fields of the humanities. In literary texts, for example, the author often does not address the reader directly, but speaks through other characters; even the persona of a narrator in a novel or of the 'speaker' in a poem may be a carefully crafted fiction, quite distinct from the person of the author. But problems of that kind arise in philosophical texts too-in the dialogues of Plato, Diderot or Hume, for example, or the pseudonymous writings of Kierkegaard, the aphorisms of Pascal, Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, or in philosophical novels such as those by Dostoyevsky or Sartre. This kind of problem arises even in such a basic philosophical text as the first sentence of Descartes' Discourse on Method: "Good sense is the best apportioned thing in the world: for each thinks he has been so well provided with it that even those who are hard to content in all other things are not accustomed to desire more of it than they have." 19 Descartes' argument here is surely intended ironically; it is a self-conscious joke. What, then, are we to make of the fact that he goes on to treat the thesis that good sense is equally distributed as though it had been adequately demonstrated? Such features of philosophical texts are like the analogous features of poems, novels and plays; they add to the richness of a text, but also make it more difficult to interpret. I think many of the things I am going to say about interpreting texts in the history of philosophy might well carryover into the interpretation of literary texts or other works of art, or even to the interpretation of such things as the aims and intentions of historical agents. But I will change for those current in Plato's philosophical context can result only in a total misunderstanding the claims he is making and an underestimate of the strength of his arguments for them. Conversely, it may help us better to understand our conceptions of reality and change if we become aware of the very different way these concepts were grasped by past philosophers, even by highly influential philosophers in our own tradition. 18It is one of the great merits of Jerome Schneewind's recent book, The Invention of Autonomy, to keep before our minds a variety of such issues as he writes about the history of ethics in the early modern period. J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (New York: Cambridge, 1998). 19Descartes, Oeuvres (ed. Adam and Tannery) (Paris: Vrin, 1965),6:2; Cf. Edwin A. Curley, "Dialogues with the Dead," Synthese 67 (1986), p. 35. This article will be cited below as "Curley".

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not argue for any particular extensions of what I say to other kinds of interpretation. What is the meaning of a philosophical text? R. G. Collingwood is well-known for advancing the thesis that the proper nlethod of all history (including the history of philosophy) is that of re-thinking in one's own mind the thoughts of people who lived in the past. 20 There is a lot in Collingwood's approach that I agree with. One of Collingwood's aims was to rescue important figures in the history of philosophy from what he thought were the shallow, arrogant and shortsighted criticisms of his analytical contemporaries. He wanted thelll to see how difficult it was to be sure they had gotten the questions and aims of past philosophers right when they accused them of failed theories and bad arguments. He urged them to try to rethink the thoughts of the past so that they would not disnliss the thoughts of Plato, or Descartes, or Kant by taking them to express whatever simplistic (and usually erroneous) ideas, drawn from the contemporary analytical fashions, were suggested to their impatient and blinkered minds by a casual reading of the historical texts, thus turning the study of the history of philosophy into little more than a contemptuous survey of the stupid errors supposedly committed by famous dead men. It is easy for me to sympathize with Collingwood's aims here. If the only points he was trying to make were those mentioned above, I would wholeheartedly agree with him. But Collingwood went further. He ended up maintaining that the theories of philosophers in different ages were incommensurable, because they were attempts to answer different questions. 21 That merely invites the thought I have just been 20Robin G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939), pp. 205231. I think this picture appeals to us in many forms, and that it has influenced a lot of people's thinking about methodology in intellectual history. For example, one influential version of it is found in Quentin Skinner's thesis that "the understanding of texts presupposes the grasp both of what they were intended to mean and how this meaning was intended to be taken. [Thus] the appropriate methodology [for the history of ideas] is.the recovery of intentions" (Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory VIII (1969), pp. 48-49). 21 Robin G. Collingwood, Autobiography (Oxford: University Press, 1978), pp. 60-68. Collingwood combined this "incommensurability" thesis with an extravagant version of the "principle of charity" , in such a way as to guarantee a priori the truth of whatever any philosopher said, meant or wrote. He held that we cannot "discover for example 'what Plato thought' without inquiring 'whether it is true' .What is required, if I am to know Plato's philosophy is both to re-think it in my own mind and also think other things in the light of which I can judge it" (The Idea of History, pp. 300, 305). But there is in Collingwood's view such a tight connection between Plato's thoughts on the matter and the reasons in light of which he had them, that when we truly arrive at the question Plato was asking, we must at

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inveighing against, that the history of philosophy is bound to be pretty irrelevant to the philosophy we do today. For the same reason, Collingwood's account makes it hard to explain why not only historical empathy but also philosophical skill is needed in interpreting a text in the history of philosophy. It even seen1S directly to rule out something that good historians of philosophy regard as essential to interpreting texts, namely, the use of concepts and theories that have been developed since the text was composed and therefore could not possibly have been part of their author's actual thought processes. Let me develop Collingwood's idea in a way that may be a caricature of it, but nevertheless succeeds in bringing out more clearly some of the problems I want to discuss. We might think of the meaning of a text as a certain inner mental process that was taking place in the mind of the author as the text was being written. The text is the author's attempt to put down words that will enable the reader of the text to duplicate the succession of those thought-types in the reader's own mind. Following this picture, my task as an interpreter of the text will be to con1plement the author's efforts by bringing before my own mind, as far as possible, exactly the sequence of mental process-types that were in the author's n1ind as the text was being written. For the sake of convenience, let me call this (possibly caricatured) version of Collingwood's clain1s the "Collingwood picture" . One problem raised by the Collingwood picture is whether it is even possible to rethink the same thought-types as people who lived in the past. How should we set about doing this? Even worse, how can we ever kno,v whether we have done it? That way lies skeptical historicism. But the more serious problems arise even if you suppose, as Collingwood apparently did, that we can think the same thoughts as people in the past. I think there are good reasons for doubting whether successfully doing this would really constitute either what we do mean or what we ought to mean by interpreting and understanding a philosophical text. Reproducing the thought-types available to philosophers in past centhe same tinle see why he answered it correctly. In fact, Collingwood thinks, we can identify the problem he was trying to solve only after we have decided what the solution was (and after we have judged that the solution was correct). "The distinction between the 'historical' question 'What was So-and-so's theory on such a matter?' and the 'philosophical' question 'Was he right?' [is] fallacious. We only know the problem by arguing back from the solution" (Autobiography, pp 68, 70). I won't discuss this thesis of Collingwood's, because I don't think he is committed to it merely by the Collingwood picture. But the fact that Collingwood maintained such obvious and outrageous absurdities in this connection makes me feel less guilty about attaching his name to what I suspect of being a caricatured version of his thesis that understanding a philosopher is rethinking his actual thoughts.

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turies would not insure that we are getting them right. In fact, limiting ourselves to the thought-types they had available to them would often cut us off from our best route of access to their meaning, and make it impossible for the study of past philosophers to make a contribution to ongoing philosophical inquiry. It may help at this point to look at an example. In Chapter Seven of his recent book Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza, Michael Della Rocca is trying to understand how three claims found in Spinoza can be consistent: 22 (1) Every mode of extension is caused by another mode of extension (cf. Spinoza, Ethics 2p7) .23 (2) No mode of substance conceived under the attribute of thought can cause any mode of substance conceived under the attribute of extension, or vice versa (cf. Ethics 3p2). (3) "The mind and the body are one and the same thing, conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension" (cf. Ethics 3p2s). Della Rocca is responding specifically to R. J. Delahunty's argument that (3) is inconsistent with (1) and (2). For Delahunty claims that the following form of argument is valid. (i) Mode of extension A causes n'lode of extension B. (ii) Mode of extension A == mode of thought 1. (iii) Therefore, mode of thought 1 causes mode of extension B. 24 Della Rocca, however, argues that, according to Spinoza, clain'ls (1)(3) are consistent. He does so by appealing to W. V. O. Quine's notion of referential opacity.25 A context is referentially opaque when a substi22Michael Della Rocca, Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza (New York: Oxford, 1996). Referred to below as "Della Rocca". 23Spinoza's Ethics will be cited by part and proposition, 's' means 'scholium'. 24See Della Rocca, p. 127. 25W. V. O. Quine, "Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes," in Leonard Linsky (ed.), Reference and Modality (London: Oxford, 1971), pp. 110-111. No doubt Quine was not the first to notice this point. Indeed, it was quite clearly anticipated by Frege's notion of "oblique" (ungerade) reference in Uber Sinn und Bedeutung (see P. Geach and M. Black (eds.), Translations from the Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), pp. 65-68). I cite Quine here only because it is his concept and his terminology that Della Rocca actually uses in interpreting Spinoza. Some have suggested that Quine'S (or Frege's) point was anticipated by philosophers before Spinoza (the name of Buridan has been mentioned in this context), and it might have been their thoughts that Spinoza was using, so that Della Rocca's innovation is merely terminological. I agree that if this (so far undocumented) speculation is correct, then this would no longer be a counterexample to the Collingwood picture. Still others, however, have even suggested that Spinoza himself might have had

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tution of one co-referring term for another yields an invalid inference. For example, (a) John knows that Jim is sitting next to him at the bar. (b) Jim == the serial killer. (c) Therefore, John knows that the serial killer is sitting next to him at the bar. This inference is invalid because contexts like "A believes that" and "A knows that" are intensional. That is, what is true of a subject in those contexts depends not only on the identity of the subject but also on how the subject is referred to or represented. What John knows or believes about Jim depends on how Jim has been presented to him. If Jim has been presented to John as "Jim" but not as "the serial killer," then the fact that 'the serial killer' and 'Jim' refer to the same person does not entitle us to substitute one expression for the other when we are talking about John's knowledge or belief. Della Rocca argues that for Spinoza, causal contexts are also intensional, therefore referentially "the same thought" simply on the basis of common sense-for of course the ancient Greeks, even apart from philosophy, already realized that from "Oedipus knows he is married to Jocasta" it does not follow that "Oedipus knows he is married to his own mother". This idea, if correct, would not only disable the example but make it hard to challenge the Collingwood picture at all, since it would suggest that we could treat any philosophical development on which we might draw in interpreting a past philosopher as something already available to the philosopher from common sense, and hence already part of the philosopher's thought processes. But surely that would be wrong. For although common sense, prior even to the formulation of any logical or semantical theory, might have declined to draw the inference about Oedipus, it is only in the context of a certain kind of logical theory, and a certain theoretically developed concept of valid inference, that the problem of oblique reference or referential opacity could even arise; and only after the concept of referential opacity has been forn1ulated would it be possible to make fully explicit the thesis that the same concept applies to causal contexts. Another objection to this example which I have encountered is that by not allowing that Spinoza was "in some sense aware of the concept of referential opacity" I am not giving Spinoza enough credit for his own insight. But of course my whole point is that Spinoza did (very insightfully!) express the thesis that causal contexts are referentially opaque-that this is the meaning of what he wrote. What I am denying is that in order to credit him with this insight we must hold that the twentieth century conceptions in which we now express his insight were already part of his seventeenth century mental processes. One pitfall to avoid here is thinking that Spinoza must either have had Quine's full blown concept of referential opacity or must have totally lacked it. My point is to affirm that Spinoza held, and expressed, the thesis that causal contexts are referentially opaque, but I deny that he did express, or even could have expressed, this thought in those terms because he could not have had it in his mind in that precise form. That he did express it, (and therefore could have expressed it), does not entail that later formulations of the idea of referential opacity are merely terminological innovations.

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opaque. Granted that thesis, Delahunty's argument (i)-(iii) would be invalid, and (3) would be consistent with (1) and (2). I have spoken of the thesis that causal contexts are referentially opaque as 'Spinoza's thesis', but of course Spinoza never said any such thing. In fact, Spinoza never could have said or even thought it, since the term and even the concept 'referential opacity' was devised by Quine in the second half of the twentieth century and therefore was not available to Spinoza. If, following the Collingwood picture, we identify the meaning of what Spinoza wrote with some thought-processes actually going on in Spinoza's mind sometime in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, then we must dismiss Della Rocca's interpretation as mistaken solely on that ground. Given the Collingwood picture, Spinoza can no more have subscribed to the thesis that causal contexts are referentially opaque than Aristotle can have uttered an English sentence, such as 'All men by nature desire to know'. For just as modern English did not exist in Aristotle's day, and hence was not available to him to speak, so the concept of referential opacity did not exist in Spinoza's day, and hence was not available to him to think. Yet Della Rocca's interpretation of Spinoza seems to me correct. Not only does it provide a simple and straightforward solution to the problem of reconciling (1)-(3), but Della Rocca also shows convincingly that it dovetails with other doctrines about causality and representational content which it is reasonable to attribute to Spinoza, such as his even more famous clairns of substance identity and substance monism, and his belief in the mind-relativity of content (a thesis which Della Rocca also states in terms not historically available to Spinoza). Della Rocca also finds some direct textual support for his interpretation in Ethics 2p6, where Spinoza says that God causes given modes insofar as he is "considered through the attribute of which they are modes." 26 But that Della Rocca is right is not essential to the point I am making. For if it is even possible that Della Rocca's interpretation is correct, then it must be possible that what Spinoza means in the Ethics can be properly understood only in terms of concepts not available to Spinoza, which therefore could not possibly have belonged to the thought processes passing through his mind when he wrote the Ethics. The point I am trying to make here, to put it with a sharpness approaching paradox, is that people can mean things they can't think, and therefore that they must be able to express thoughts they can't have. Accordingly, my criticism of the Collingwood picture could be 26Della Rocca., p. 123.

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put this way: In discerning the meaning of a text, we are interested in the thoughts the author expressed, but not necessarily in the thoughts the author had. We might avoid these paradoxes by stipulating that whatever someone means in what they say or write is eo ipso something that they think, or that there is some sense of 'think' in which it is necessarily true that a whatever a person means is something the person thinks. I have no strong objection to using "think" in that sense, as long as we realize that such a stipulation would no way save the Collingwood picture from my objections. On the contrary, it would be a fundamental rejection of that picture, since the picture holds that we get at the meaning of what the author wrote only through rethinking in our minds what the author thought (which is depicted as there prior to and independently of our process of interpretation), whereas this stipulation would have us get at what the author thought only through deciding what the author meant, and treats what we count as the author's thoughts as derivative from what we count as the meaning of what the author wrote. The study of Kant is a fruitful source of similar examples, because even more than Spinoza, his writings have been subject to a long history of reading and interpreting, and have interacted with the ongoing reflection of each subsequent generation of philosophers. Consider the claims that Kant held a functionalist conception of mental activity or was a constructivist in moral theory, or anticipated Marxian materialism in his philosophy of history.27 Functionalism, constructivism and historical materialism are all positions formulated only well after Kant's death. It is even arguable that in the actual historical sequence of events, it became possible to formulate all three positions only because Kant wrote what he did, and because other philosophers then reflected further on his thoughts in creative ways that Kant could not possibly have known about. If the meaning of what Kant himself wrote is restricted to the mental processes that might actually have passed through his mind, then on that ground alone we can dismiss out of hand the notion that he could have subscribed to these positions in virtue of the meaning of 27See Patricia Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), especially Chapter 4; Onora O'Neill, Constructions of Reason (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially Chapter 11; and Allen Wood, Kant's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Chapter 7, as well as "Marx's Historical Materialism," in J. Kneller and S. Axinn (eds), Autonomy and Community: Readings in Contemporary Kantian Social Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998.

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what he actually wrote. But whether we think the above interpretive claims are true or false, they certainly cannot be dismissed merely on these grounds. There are any number of real questions in the history of philosophy which take the form of asking whether Kant or some other philosopher himself belongs to a certain tradition of thinking that was subsequent to him and was based on certain ways of appropriating his thought. The Collingwood picture, taken literally, would seem to comn1it us a priori to a negative answer to every question of this form, and thus to rejecting a priori a lot of what n1akes inquiry into the history of philosophy interesting and worthwhile. This also shows how the Collingwood picture makes it impossible to understand an important aspect of historical development in philosophy. Ideas seldom spring from human minds Athena-like, fully mature and magnificently armored with cogent articulation and argumentative defense. They usually develop gradually, first anticipated, then adumbrated, and only later, after a long development is it possible adequately to articulate and defend then1. It is part of what Hegel meant by saying that the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk that this is a process that never really ends, so that our access to philosophical thoughts, as to the meaning of all other creations of spirit, is necessarily limited by history and hence reaches its uttermost boundary for us in the present. 28 It follows that an idea may belong to the meaning of a text without its even being possible for it to have been part of the author's actual 28It is absurd to ascribe to Hegel the thesis that history has ended, or that it could ever end. What Hegel does hold is the (apparently trivial) claim that past history ends in the present. This has non-trivial implications, however, if it points toward the ground, and also the limits, of our capacity to comprehend. When Hegel says that philosophy always comes on the scene too late to give the world advice about what ought to be (Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Preface), he means to be asserting the (non-trivial) thesis that spiritual formations belonging to the future always lie beyond what we have the capacity to comprehend sufficiently for us to act rationally with regard to them, and therefore that action can be rational only to the extent that it accepts the standards of rationality arising from present spiritual formations. Hegel does, however, think that we have the capacity to comprehend these, and moreover to comprehend the entirety of past history as having them as its rational result, at least in times when these formations themselves are mature and not in the turmoil of historical transition. At such times, the present is bound to appear to us as the rational end of a rationally comprehensible world-history. But Hegel's own way of putting this, in speaking of a shape of life "grown old", directly suggests the denial that history is in any other sense at an "end", since what we conceive of as having "grown old" is something we think of as eventually to be replaced by something "new" or "young". Hegel's view, however, is that we cannot rationally speculate about what this future thing is, or pretend to say what it ought to be.

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thought-processes. This is also an important reason why Collingwood was wrong to say that philosophers in different ages are always addressing different questions. 29 As we have seen, it is only because this thesis of Collingwood's is false that the history of philosophy can be of interest to philosophers at all. And it is only because the history of philosophy is necessarily of interest to philosophers in the way that it is that philosophical questions themselves are the kind of questions they are. So the Collingwood picture gives us not only a false image of what interpretation is, but also presupposes a false image of what philosophy is--ironically, given many of Collingwood's intentions, an image that would deprive philosophy of any philosophically meaningful history.

8.4

Interpretation as Construction

From these considerations I conclude that the Collingwood picture must give an incorrect account of the n1eaning of a philosophical text. But I also believe it is in part a perception of the falsity of the Collingwood picture that has led to some of the strange and paradoxical things certain literary theorists have said in recent years. Roland Barthes, for example, was apparently prepared to say such things as that the author of Spinoza's text is not really the historical Spinoza at all; rather, the text is a product not of the author but of language, together with the creative reader. 3o Others, such as Derrida and Foucault, have formu29 Another example may help make this point. Stephen Darwall has recently argued persuasively that what moral philosophers call 'internalism'-the thesis that the truth of a moral judgment entails the existence of a motive for acting according to it-arose gradually in the thinking of seventeenth and eighteenth century British Moralists such as Cumberland, Cudworth, Locke, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought' (New York: Cambridge, 1995)). Darwall tries to show how internalism answers a longstanding need in a tradition of thinking, He thereby deepens our understanding of present day controversies surrounding internalism. But of course in fact no one ever spoke of 'internalism' or explicitly articulated that concept until a paper by W. D. Falk published in 1948 (W. D. Falk, '''Ought' and Motivation", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 48 (1947-1948), pp. 492-510). On the Collingwood picture, therefore, internalism could not have developed in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, and no texts from that time could possibly add anything to our understanding of the present day controversies over internalism. In general, if the Collingwood picture is correct, a philosophical idea first occurs only at the precise time when it actually belongs to someone's thought-processes-in the case of internalism, to David Falk's thought processes around 1948. Here again, the point is not whether Darwall is right about internalism and the British moralists. For it even to be possible that he is right, the Collingwood picture has to be wrong. 30Barthes expresses such a view in the following cryptic slogans: "The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text. to close the writing" (Roland Barthes, Image, Music,

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lated similar paradoxes, designed to cast skeptical doubt on the whole idea of a text's having any determinate meaning whatever. I think those who say such things may sometimes be trying to get at something true, especially insofar as they are counteracting romantic views according quasi-divine status to the author of literary texts (analogous fantasies have often been entertained about 'great philosophers'). But I strongly disapprove of the sayings nonetheless. For unlike the brilText, tr. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1988), p. 147). The kind of author of which Barthes most approves is Mallarme, because "Mallanne's entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader)" (ibid., p. 143). Compare the related views of Foucault: "The author is not a source of indefinite significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition and recomposition of fiction. In saying this, I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author. It would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure .... [But] I think that, as our society changes ... the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint-one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to be determined, or perhaps experienced. All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur. We would no longer heed the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse? Instead, there would be other questions, like these: What are the ill.odes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? ... And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking?" (Michel Foucault, "What is an author?" in Paul Rabinow (ed.) Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 118-120.)

No doubt, as some of these remarks illustrate, the reflections of these theorists has been focused on fiction; but Foucault's concluding remarks seem to be intended to apply to discourse generally, including philosophical discourse. Further, the intent of the theorists seems to be at least as much to record recent (or forecast future) changes in the social context of writing and reading as to say something general about what the meaning of a text is and where it comes from. The obvious point to make, however, is that both types of questions Foucault mentions are legitimate, both are relevant to determining what a text means, and we do not have to choose one type of question over the other. The impression that we do is perhaps created by a certain romantic tradition both in literature and in reading, which first absurdly exaggerates the importance of genius and then, by a ridiculous (because equally romantic) inversion of the hyperbole, wants to make the reader rather than the author the divine source of a text's meaning. Joshua Landy has suggested to me, I think correctly, that there is something a bit paranoid in viewing the author of the text as a constraint on its "free" interpretation. This is rather like holding that breathing is a constraint on life.

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liantly ironical remark that opens the Discourse on Method, reminding us of the need for modesty and an egalitarian spirit in conducting all philosophical argument, the paradoxes of these literary theorists in fact only obscure the truth, first by mixing up an important insight with the error it ought to remove, and then further making that insight harder to accept by self-conceitedly calling attention not to it but only to their own outrageous absurdity.31 In what sense, if any, is the author of a text constructed by interpreters? It is true that we find out what a text means only through thoughtfully interpreting the text. To do this we m~y need all our philosophical resources, and the interpretation may be a creative theoretical construction employing concepts and theories not available to the historical author. But the point to insist on is that if we are successful, then what we get at through the construction is what the text itself means, and hence precisely what its author meant. It is Kant, and not we, who created the meaningful texts; our function is to recover, understand and articulate that meaning. It may be true that Kant himself could not have fully understood or articulated his meaning. But we garble this truth if we mix it unawares with the Collingwood picture, and say that because in interpreting Kant's text we aren't reproducing (or even trying to reproduce) Kant's actual thought-processes, therefore the meaning we are finding (or constructing) is not his meaning. Instead, what we should say is that because each new generation of philosophers devises new concepts in terms of which to ask questions and construct answers to them on behalf of Kant's texts, the process of understanding better what those texts mean is forever ongoing. It will not end until people cease to read Kant, or at any rate until they cease to understand him. Especially to be avoided is the (deplorably common, but crudely fallacious) inference from: "In discerning the meaning of a text, we need to engage in creative acts of intellectual construction" to "The meaning of the text is constructed by us, not put there by the author." In general, when people find out facts about the real world (in the natural sciences, say, or in the study of history), they do so by constructing theories (about the origin of the solar system or the causes of the First

31 Descartes' ironical joke at the beginning of the Discourse on Method may, taken literally, be a bad argument, but it calls our attention to the fact that when we converse with others, we cannot expect them to regard us as possessing more good sense than they have, and so we must address them as our intellectual equals. There is a clear difference between, for example, Descartes' use of a joke to make this point and the paradoxes just referred to, which operate by confusing a false picture with its correction and do not help us to distinguish the ~E~_f!'211Ltb~_Qth_eI-,--_-----------

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World War). The fact that the theories are their intellectual constructs obviously does not entail that the external reality the theories are about (the solar system or the Great War) is not real but is only a figment of their minds. On the contrary, the whole point of these theories was from the start to grasp what is true about the real world as it is there independently of us. In this respect, interpretation is no different from any other sort of theoretical inquiry about the real world. There are objective facts, independent of what we think, about what the text of the Critique of Pure Reason means (that is, about what Kant meant in the Critique). Contrary to what the Collingwood picture might suggest, these facts partly transcend anything Kant himself could have actually thought. We get at them through our intellectual constructs. When the constructs are successful, they tell us what Kant means in the text of the Critique.

8.5

Conversing With the Dead

Many of the things I am trying to say here were expressed over a dozen years ago by Edwin Curley in an admirable article entitled "Dialogues with the Dead." 32 One insightful thing Curley said was: "Knowing what a philosopher means by what he says requires, at the very least, having son1e well-founded beliefs about how he would respond to questions and objections he may never have explicitly considered."33 Curley's basic thought here is one that has been famously stressed by HansGeorg Gadamer: namely, that the meaning of a text is revealed only by asking it questions and understanding it as answers to them (though I don't pretend that I am using that basic thought quite in the way Gadamer is). To the basic thought, Curley adds that the questions may, and even must, go beyond the questions the author explicitly asked in the text. Understanding a language requires being able to form original sentences in the language, expressing thoughts no one has ever had before. Likewise, understanding a text requires knowing, or at least having well-founded beliefs about, the answers the text gives to questions the text does not ask and which may never have been asked before. These questions must be our questions, simply because it is we who are interpreting the text and trying to understand it. Because the answers given by the text must be responsive to our questions, the n1eaning of the text must also be expressed in our concepts. But I an1 not happy with one aspect of Curley's formulation of this point. He speaks of "how [the philosopher] would respond to [our] 32 Curley, 33 Curley,

pp. 33-49. p. 36.

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questions." This seems to n1e still too close to the Collingwood picture, since it too identifies the meaning of the text with the author's thoughts, merely substituting counterfactual conditional claims about the author's conjectured thoughts for past indicative claims about the author's actual thoughts. This is connected with another thing Curley says, with which I also do not agree: "If our philosopher were a contemporary, still alive, active and cooperative, we might of course simply ask him what he means [by what he says in a text] ."34 Here Curley writes as if our asking unasked questions and forming well-grounded conjectures applies only to the interpretation of dead philosophers, or at any rate those philosophers from whom, for one reason or another, we cannot elicit direct answers to our questions about what they mean. He seems to be saying that if only Aristotle or Spinoza or Kant were alive and willing to answer our questions about what he means, then that answer would necessarily be correct-absolutely definitive of the meaning of the text. Yet Kant is right in saying that we sometimes understand a philosopher better than he understood himself;35 and this might be just as true of a living philosopher as of a dead one. Suppose I am asked what I meant by a statement in a philosophical essay I wrote five years ago and I give an answer. It is entirely possible that another person should reject my answer and propose an alternative interpretation of my statement. It is also entirely possible that she might be right and I might be wrong. No doubt in most cases, the author of a text is as likely as anyone to interpret his own statements correctly. We might also take the author's interpretive statement as a further text, which as interpreters we must integrate into the construction through which we retrieve the meaning of the original text. If so, then this adds weight to the presumption that the author's interpretation is correct. But even then the presumption is always rebuttable. 36 Sometimes students ask me what Kant would say, if he were alive 34 Curley, p. 36. 35Kant, KrV A314/B370. 36Sometimes people make racist or sexist remarks, and then when accused of having done so, they say "1 didn't mean it that way". This last statement is ambiguous, and people who say such things are often trying to exploit the ambiguity. They could mean: "I didn't intend to be making a racist remark." To this the reply should be: "Maybe you did intend to be making a racist remark and maybe you didn't, but it's certain that you made one just the same." Or they could be trying to say: "I know what 1 meant by my remark, and I therefore can certify that it was not a racist remark." To this the rejoinder should be: "What you say is up to you, but what you mean by it is no more subject to your authority than to anyone else's. We apparently understand what you said better than you do, and we recognize it as a racist remark."

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today, about some philosophical question we raise about his text. When they do, I always point out to them that Kant became senile several years before his death in 1804. Hence if by some ghoulish miracle of medical science he had been kept alive until today, then we would be lucky if he could even drool in response to our questions. 37 This answer is, I think, entirely correct, and the fact that it doesn't satisfy the students is sin1ply a sign that they are asking the wrong question. When pressed, what they think they mean to ask is: "What would Kant say if he were brought back to life in full possession of his Inature intellectual powers?" This new question, however, is both unclear and problematic. Are they or aren't they also supposing that the resurrected Kant is aware of all the philosophical developments that have occurred in the last two hundred years (including the two centuries of Kant-interpretation and Kant-revision) which now shape the interpretive questions we are asking about his texts? If we don't suppose that he is, then we cannot take it for granted that he could even understand n1any of our questions correctly, in which case his answers surely could not be taken as definitive of his meaning. But if we are imagining a Kant who is philosophically up to date (a twentieth or twenty-first century philosopher rather than an eighteenth century philosopher), then our question obviously has even more counterfactual suppositions than were apparent. It is not clear what sort of animal a twenty-first century Kant would be, or whether this animal is any more thinkable than the legendary chimera or goat-stag, which philosophers in many ages have used as paradigmatic of the absurd and the unthinkable. 38 37S ee Karl Vorhinder, Kants Leben (Harnburg: Meiner, 1986), pp. 197-205; also interesting is rrhomas De Quincey, "The Last Days of Immanuel Kant," in The English Mail Coach and Other Essays (New York: Dutton, 1965), pp. 162-209, which purports to be based on the recollections of Wasianski. 38 Jerrold Katz has suggested to me a sense in which we might understand the question "what would X say?" in which it might sometimes be a useful question, even where we have to suppose counterfactually that X is acquainted with philosophical developments since X's death. Descartes denied that the cogito involves a logical inference from "I think" to "I am" . But the logic he knew was late scholastic syllogistic logic. Would Descartes have had the same reasons to say this about the cogito if he had known twentieth century logic? Or again: In the twentieth century it has proven difficult for Kantians to defend the metaphysical deduction of the categories, in part because this deduction assumes eighteenth century logic; but Kant's metaphysical deduction has recently been given new life by taking its own logical background seriously (see Beatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Investigations like Longuenesse's are a good example of what I have said can be most valuable in the study of the history of philosophy, namely, keeping alive historical perspectives that might otherwise be effaced. But we could pose the issue addressed by Longuenesse by asking: "What would Kant say in response to objections to his metaphysical deduction which are

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8.6

Meaning as a Norm for Responses to Questions

I submit that what we really mean to ask is not what Kant would answer to our questions about his text, but rather what answer would be given by an ideally intelligent and inforn1ed person who is.also ideally intimate with the meaning of the Kantian texts. The notion that only Kant himself could perfectly satisfy this last condition probably reflects the baleful influence of the Collingwood picture, which equates such an intimacy with an awareness of what was passing through Kant's mind as he was writing the Critique of Pure Reason; we are supposed to imagine that the resurrected Kant would answer our questions on the basis of a perfect memory of his two hundred year old rnental processes, as well as a perfect knowledge of the last two hundred years of philosophy. It is a mistake to identify knowledge of the meaning of Kant's text with the former sort of acquaintance; what I am suggesting is that the latter sort of acquaintance might turn out to be even more crucial to gaining knowledge of what his text means. Once we free ourselves from the Collingwood picture, we can see that the right question to ask is not a question about what Kant would say when asked about the meaning of his texts, but simply a question about what we should say when we ask about them. The idea we have been examining, when reduced to these terms, might seem to be tautological, hence to get us nowhere. But this is not quite true. For it does make clear that knowing what a text means involves having justified beliefs about how someone (anyone) should respond to interpretive questions, based on the meaning of what the author said in the text. Or: for a text to mean something is for it to have somehow established a norm for such responses. When we interpret a text, what we are basically trying to do is articulate that norm. We do this by asking the text questions and trying to answer them in a manner which is determined by an intellectual construction we have devised on the basis of our understanding of the text. Della Rocca's interpretation of Spinoza, for example, arises from a set of questions, one of which is whether the apparent inconsistency between Spinoza's theses (1)-(3) can be removed. Della Rocca's interpretation articulates a norm for successfully answering that question (and a nurnber of other ones besides). By drawing on twentieth century notions such as intensionality, referential opacity, and the mindbased on prejudices deriving from twentieth century logic?" Notice that this question has to assume that the resurrected Kant is familiar with twentieth century logic, but it is not a twentieth century Kant, but a distinctively eighteenth century Kant from whom we want the answer.

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relativity of content, Della Rocca specifies a norm for answering such questions. The resulting answers are coherent. The norm is grounded in Spinoza's text by referring to things Spinoza actually says, based on what his Latin words mean and on the background beliefs, assumptions and concerns it is reasonable to ascribe to him in light of the historical context in which the Ethics was written. But what makes it the case that the constructed norm gives the right answers, relative to the text, even to questions the author never explicitly asked (and perhaps could not have asked)? Here I will atternpt only a partial and tentative answer to this question. And I will place at least as much emphasis on some possible criteria the constructed norm does not have to satisfy as on desiderata the norm should try to meet. But I will try to say enough to shed some light on the curious fact that although interpretive disputes in the history of philosophy are sometimes endlessly controversial and frustratingly murky, they are nevertheless about something real and there are right and wrong answers to them. I take it to be obvious, to begin with, that the norm does not have to yield correct answers to the philosophical questions we ask the text. 39 To require that it do so would be to claim that what any text means must always be true and never false. But even the greatest philosophers are fallible hUlnan beings like the rest of us. I venture to say that in the writings of every philosopher, whether living or dead, who has written a significant amount about philosophical problems that are hard enough to be significant, there are already some assertions that we can know to be falsehoods. Hence I infer that the corresponding answers to questions the philosopher did not ask would therefore probably include some more evident falsehoods. The first desideratum is that the norm should tell us to say all the things the text actually says, and gives its answers to all the questions it explicitly raises. We may be tempted to say that this is not merely a desideratum but an indispensable condition which any interpretation must meet. But that temptation is one which should be resisted. For the best interpretation of a text might be one that tells us that the author should not have said something the text does explicitly say. This is what Delahunty holds about Spinoza's assertion that the mind and the body are the san1e thing. It is also what some hold about Marx and the 39Collingwood disagrees with me here (see Note 21 above). Others who hold a similar position, based on absurdly exaggerated inferences frolll the "principle of charity", are discussed by David M. Rosenthal, "Philosophy and Its History," Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal (eds.) The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis? (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), p. 176. To his credit, I should add, Rosenthal does not endorse their view.

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justice of capitalist exploitation. All informed interpreters know that Marx explicitly held that capitalist distribution is not unjust. Some, however, think that these assertions must be set aside as inconsistent with Marx's basic position. Their view, as G. A. Cohen once put it (with admirable candor), is that "Marx thought capitalism was unjust, but he did not think that he thought so.,,40 Now as a matter of fact, I think that Delahunty is wrong about Spinoza and Cohen is wrong about Marx. But their interpretations might have turned out to be acceptable; indeed, they would even have been inescapable if philosophical tenacity and imagination had not been successful in devising coherent interpretations of apparently conflicting texts. A second desideratum is that the norm should, all other things being equal, try to maximize the coherence of the responses it yields. This is a version of what is sometimes called the 'principle of charity'. We should suppose, as far as possible, that what the text means makes consistent sense, and that this meaning yields answers to the various questions we ask the text that are at least consistent and mutually supportive, even if they are not always true. It is essential to realize, however, that all other things are often not equal. Sometimes they are not equal because (as Delahunty thinks about Spinoza, and Cohen about Marx) the text says things the author should not have said. Things also may not be equal due to a third important desideratum: An interpretation of a philosopher should try to preserve and do justice to the philosopher's most important and enduring philosophical insights. Sometimes a philosopher is very good at perceiving the pre-theoretical intuitions on a topic which need to be accommodated in a philosophical account, but less successful at constructing an account that accommodates all of them. John Locke seems to me a good example of a philosopher who combines this virtue with this failing. There are also great philosophers, such as I take Nietzsche to be, for whom systen1atic coherence, or even doctrinal consistency, is simply less important than other philosophical aims, such as creatively expanding the philosophical perspectives that we have available to us. If that is right, then any interpretation of Locke or Nietzsche that maximizes overall coherence will require us to ignore or exclude some of their most admirable insights, or at least to twist them or blunt their force. Sometimes the best interpretation of a philosopher is one which 40G. A. Cohen, "Review of Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx," Mind 92 (1983), p, 443. Similar claims are made by Elster, Making Sense of Marx, p. 222, and Norman Geras, "The Controversy about Marx and Justice," New Left Review 150 (1985), p. 270. -

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highlights the tensions or gaps in the philosopher's views, and shows us how (and why) the philosopher is downright inconsistent. A fourth desideratum is that the overall coherence should be not merely internal to the norm itself, but also coherence with background beliefs we have reason to think the philosopher held. It is chiefly in order to achieve an accurate idea of these expectations that we need linguistic mastery of the text, and erudition about its historical context and the background beliefs of its original intended audience. I have said that we must ask a text questions the philosopher could not have explicitly raised and our norm n1ust sometimes give answers the philosopher lacked the conceptual vocabulary to give. But that is utterly different from saying that we may sin1ply substitute our own beliefs for the author's in determining the coherence every interpretive norn1 should seek. At the same time, the coherence must obviously be one that we are capable of grasping since we must regard the text as coherent. To that extent, our own philosophical beliefs inevitably playa role in determining it as well. The task of interpreting a text is further complicated by the fact that sometimes we think a philosopher's views have changed significantly over time. Should we attempt an interpretation of Aristotle on substance that reconciles the position of the Categories with that of Metaphysics Z, or should we decide that the two texts are irreconcilable and interpret each as advocating a distinctive position? Are Kant's conceptions of reason and judgment the same in the third Critique as they were in the first Critique? Depending on which choice we make, what we say about what is meant in the Categories or the first Critique might be quite different. Different interpretive enterprises may also have different aims in this regard: A detailed commentary on the Categories might interpret its statements about substance differently from a study that attempts a comprehensive interpretation of Aristotle's philosophy as a whole. A commentary on Kant's Groundwork must attempt to understand and expound the relation of morality to freedom in terms of the argument presented in the Third Section of that work, even though Kant seems to have abandoned that argument only three years later in the Critique of Practical Reason, and in the Religion he certainly rejects the Groundwork's apparent equation of empirically motivated volition with the determination of the empirical self by a natural causal determinism. No attempt to give an encompassing account of Kant's thoughts about freedom, morality and the determination of the will can afford to limit itself to an exposition of anyone of these texts. Such an attempt has to undertake a sympathetic reconstruction of what the expositor

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takes to be Kant's best thinking on this topic, as presented in a series of writings over Inany years. That may well result in an interpretation which does not perfectly agree with what any individual text says, and yet it might for all that be exactly the right interpretation of Kant's theory of freedom.

8.7 Conflicting Illterpretations and the Truth About What a Dead Philosopher Means I have given only a few desiderata we should try to satisfy in con-

structing an interpretation, regarded as a norm for answering questions. There may be still others, equally important, that I have overlooked. 41 As I have said, I do not pretend that my account is complete. Perhaps it is not even as clear as it properly should be. But I think it gives us enough to make a couple of important points. First, an interpretation that satisfies some of the desiderata-say, maximizing coherence, or taking best account of the background of meaning and belief we may draw from the historical context, may not do as well at satisfying others-say, giving due weight to what strikes us as the philosopher's best insights. For this reason, it is often the case that no single interpretation is ideal. Often the benefits of an interpretation can be got only at significant costs (for example, it highlights original insights that are of direct interest to philosophers today, but forces you to repudiate some things the text says or to acknowledge that the philosopher's view is not well supported by arguments in the text). Second, how well a given interpretation satisfies the various desiderata (or even a single one of them) cannot be reduced to a set of rules or a decision procedure that guarantees a definite answer in every case. Which of two competing interpretations is to be preferred is nearly al410ne addition would clearly be that for any given text, it is n10re important that it should answer some questions than others. If a philosophical text is about epistemology, it mayor may not also seek to answer questions about ethics or rational theology. Plato's Theaetetus focuses on what distinguishes knowledge from opinion, Aristotle's Posterior Analytics on what it takes for knowledge to constitute a science. An interpretation of each of these works should aim at precise and textually supported answers to the questions on which the text focuses, but it might actually be an objection to an interpretation that it ascribes to the text very fine-grained answers to a set of questions that are irrelevant to what the text is about. And not every philosophical problem we might raise about a text is such that we can reasonably attribute to the author some solution to it that we might come up with on the basis of later philosophy. Hence my example drawn from Della Rocca's interpretation of Spinoza cannot be endlessly generalized. It works only because it is reasonable to think that Spinoza was cognizant in some way of the problem of reconciling (1)-(3) and because there is some textual evidence (such as Ethics 2p6) that he endorsed the solution to this problem that Della Rocca QI'9£~~-"---

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241

ways a matter of judgment about the way a set of heterogenous desiderata bear on a specific and complicated configuration of particular facts. Interpreting a text well is the kind of thing Aristotle brought under the intellectual virtue of phronesis. One obvious ground for disagreement about the meaning of a text will be differences between the interpreters' own philosophical views. These may easily lead to opposing estimates of two rival interpretations regarding the value and importance of the alleged insights they capture, or their relative degree of coherence, or the relative plausibility of the philosophical theories they impute to the text. This makes it easier to see why disagreen1ents over what a text means cannot be sharply separated from disagreen1ents about which philosophical views are true and which are false, or which arguments are good and which bad, even though they are always disagreements about what a specific text means and not merely about what is philosophically true and false. This point also helps us to understand why the interpretation of philosophical texts is likely to be a matter of endless controversy. For as long as philosophical questions themselves are n1atters of dispute (which will probably be forever), answers to them will also be subject to change regarding both their content and their evidentiary support. Accordingly, the strength of the evidence for a given interpretation of a certain historical text will vary in subtle ways with the perceived plausibility of varying philosophical viewpoints. Along with such variations, different interpretations of the same philosopher will become more or less defensible than they used to be. Further, the invention of new philosophical concepts and theories will make possible new interpretations, and also new versions of old interpretations that may be stronger than earlier versions were. The quest for what Aristotle or Spinoza or Kant meant will be endless, and these controversies will be, as they should be, deeply entangled with the ongoing collective quest to redefine and understand the philosophical issues with which Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant were grappling. To someone who reads a book about the history of philosophy looking for factual information about what Aristotle or Kant thought, these conclusions may seem depressing, or even exasperating. For it now seems as if we can be no more certain about this information than we can about the answers to philosophical questions themselves-which everyone knows will never be answered definitively. Why even care what these old philosophers meant if no one can ever be sure, and if you have to tackle the insoluble philosophical questions yourself even to form an opinion about it? Perhaps there is no truth at all about what dead philosophers mean, any more than there is about what ultimately

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exists, or the foundations of right and wrong, or about what lnakes knowledge different from mere opinion. That reaction, however, betrays excessive impatience, the most characteristic symptom not only of intellectual laziness, but also of intellectual cowardice. Here as elsewhere, skepticism may seem like a modest position, but it is actually dogmatic, uncritical and too complacent. Perhaps this is because the skeptic is seeking too n1uch of what Sextus Empiricus called ataraxia. For peace of mind is simply not compatible with an honest look at the human condition, or of any significant part of it. Skepticism errs on the side of excessive certitude whenever it holds that we can clearly define an area in which we can at least be sure that we can't be sure. Son1e interpretations of texts, at any rate, are clearly wrong. They are based on mistranslations or obvious misreadings, or ignorance of crucial passages elsewhere in the author's writings. Others are just as clearly right, because they are directly confirmed by what the text explicitly says, make good sense of the philosopher's views, and because, when all the evidence is weighed judiciously, they turn out to have no plausible rivals. Even in most of the disputed cases, like the ones mentioned above about Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant and Marx, I think one side is clearly right and the other clearly wrong, and I think I know which is which. I say this even though I know there are informed people whom I respect who disagree with me. 42 42Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht suggests that in addition to a "philosophical" mode of interpretation, in which we may have to decide between different interpretations, there may also be a "historical" or "literary" mode of interpretation in which different interpretations need not be "right" or "wrong" but only "different". But I reject the idea that the interpretation of literary texts differs fronl the interpretation of philosophical texts in the way this suggests. Whatever the text, when two interpretations differ, they do not always disagree. J. O. Wisdom, for example, interpreted Berkeley's idealism as an expression of oedipal conflict, since it ascribes substantial reality only to God (the Father), denigrating matter (= mater, mother) by declaring it to be unreal (John Oulton Wisdom, The Unconscious Origin of Berkeley's Philosophy (London: Hogarth, 1953)). I doubt that this Freudian interpretation of Berkeley conflicts in any interesting way with standard readings of Berkeley or even takes a particular position on the issues which usually divide Berkeley interpreters. The controversies I am interested in here are controversies about what a philosopher or philosophical text means, that is, about what the philosopher (or the text) asserts or is committed to asserting. Other questions may be raised about philosophical texts, however, such as how it asserts what it asserts (e.g. what tropes or rhetorical devices it uses). It may be that literary scholars are more often interested in interpretive questions other than what a text means, and therefore that it is n10re often the case in literary scholarship that different interpretations do not actually disagree (or contradict one another's assertions). Questions of interpretation, however, do not present us with any exception to the logical laws of noncontradiction or excluded middle. If interpreter A says that a text means that p and does not n1ean that rv p, and interpreter B holds that it means that rv p and not that p, then

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But that makes interpretive issues in the history of philosophy no different from all the other controversial issues that engage philosophers, historians, literary scholars, or, for that matter, physicists and biologists. They are about a truth that's really out there to be found, and to which some of us may even have already found reasonable approximations. But because we are fallible, our knowledge fragmentary, our perspectives incomplete and our judgments sometimes hasty or biased, we still do not, and perhaps we never will, unanimously agree about what it is.

at most one of them can be correct. Their dispute may, of course, be a matter of uncertainty or endless controversy. But that does not mean that there is no correct answer to it. It is, and may forever remain, a matter of uncertainty and controversy whether there was ever life on Mars. But despite that, either it is true that there was, or true that there wasn't.

9

What Is Philosophy? If you ask a philosophy professor this question, there are several things you might hope to be told by w-ay of an answer. You might want to hear how the professor thinks the subject of philosophy fits into an academic curriculum. You might want to watch the professor try to justify the place of philosophy, or of departments of philosophy, within a university. If you ask more than one professor, you might like to see different philosophers, representing different standpoints or specialties within the field, attempting to give an account of the field as a whole. You probably want to listen to them trying to vindicate their own philosophical positions or argue for the centrality (or at least the indispensability) of their own subfield. No doubt what I am going to say can be interpreted as a confession of the reasons why I have chosen to pursue an acadelnic career in philosophy. (I am sure these reasons will strike many as quixotic-they often strike me that way too). Also, because what I will say is shaped by the same things that account for my interests in ethics and in the history of modern philosophy, you will also get something about those subjects. But I have to confess right at the start that in what follows I do not intend to meet any of the expectations I have just described. I will not argue directly for the importance of the history of philosophy or of philosophical theories about ethics or society. I am especially far from the intention of explaining or defending the existence of departments of philosophy within universities. Nor do I attach any importance to the question whether 'philosophy' should designate a branch of inquiry with a distinctive method or subject matter (for exan1ple, one dealing exclusively with a priori as distinct from empirical knowledge). It's not that I lack any of these convictions. I don't deny that reality is, and human knowledge should be, articulated and structured, and that knowledge may have distinguishable a priori and empirical com245

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ponents. Although philosophy is precisely the subject that discusses these issues, I do not think that they bear directly either on the question "What is philosophy?" or on whatever rationale there is for the existence of departments of philosophy within universities. In my view, universities are not (and need not be) organized in ways that either "cut reality at the joints" or reflect the structure of human knowledge. Academic fields are (and should be) a function of the different traditions of research that have been successful in attracting and training members and in contributing something worthwhile to inquiry, scholarship and pedagogy. The only rationale for the separate existence of any academic discipline or profession is that it has been, and is expected to continue to be, successful in this way. I think the academic field of philosophy more than meets that condition at present.

9.1

Is Philosophy Good for Anything?

A perennial claim against philosophy is that it is a useless discipline, divorced from action. Some defenders of philosophy would agree with the claim, but reply that the value of philosophy lies elsewhere than in any utility. If the unexamined life is not worth living, they say, then the value of philosophy is the value it gives to life just by being what it is, and not by any contribution it makes either to setting or achieving other ends. Later in this essay, I will present an Enlightenment critique of philosophy charging that by defining itself as reflection divorced from social practice, philosophy stands condemned by its inherent failure to realize some of its own ends. Thus philosophy as I will conceive of it, and even as I will defend it, cannot and should not reply to the charge that it is useless by claiming that its value is independent of any utility. At the same time, I think there is something right about this reply, but it is not inconsistent with the recognition that philosophy aims at changing human life for the better and must be measured by its effectiveness in doing that. I will try to explain what I have just said by recalling, and then reflecting on, two legendary stories about Thales, who, legend has it, was the first philosopher. One story, reported by Diogenes Laertius, is that one night while Thales was out walking, pursuing his interest in astronomy gazing at the stars, he failed to look where he was going, and fell into a well. He was helped out of his predicament by an old woman, who laughed at him for being so interested in the far off heavens that he could not see what was right in front of him. 1 The second story, from Aristotle, also relates to Thales' interest in astronomy. Through 1 Diogenes

Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, II. 4-5.

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observation of the heavenly bodies, Thales concluded that there would be a bumper crop of olives later that year. He raised the money to put a deposit on the olive presses of Miletus and Chios. When the olive harvest came in, olive presses were scarce, and he rented therll out at rate which brought him a large profit. 2 These two stories, taken together, can be understood as saying something profoundly true about philosophy. Philosophy for Thales studied the distant heavens, and since Thales it has come to be interested in many things that are even farther than that from the practical concerns of life. Thus philosophers looks like-because they are-foolish people who are not at home in the everyday world of practical concerns. They are likely to stunlble into wells because they are so preoccupied with distant, useless things that they do not pay attention to what is right in front of them. Yet sonle of the knowledge they acquire in this way turns out to be extremely useful. Thus 'impractical' thinking is in the lung run the nl0st 'practical' form of thinking, while 'practical' thinking is inevitably too shortsighted. The thoughts that prove most useful in the long run are those we think not because we see can any utility in them, but because we simply find something valuable about thinking them. They are available only to people who are not afraid to fall into wells and get laughed at for their impracticality. The study of philosophy, in the narrow sense, as the academic discipline taught under that name in most universities, certainly can be defended on practical grounds. The training it gives people in reading and understanding difficult texts, and in thinking analytically about questions and arguments, teaches people a very practical (and even salable) skill. It gives them the ability to understand abstract problems and to articulate your reasons for believing what you believe. But the only authentic way to convince yourself of the value of studying philosophy is experiential: expose yourself to what philosophers do and let yourself catch the bug. The moral of the two stories about Thales is that the only people who can benefit practically from the study of philosophy are those who value it independently of its practical benefits.

9.2

Apologetic Questions and Analytical Questions

Whatever else it may be, philosophy is a self-reflective activity, and therefore "What is philosophy?" is a philosophical question in a way that "What is poetry?" need not be the subject of poems (though of course it can be) and "What is physics?" is not a question for physicists (even if a knowledge of physics is needed in order to answer it). Because 2 Aristotle,

Politics, 1259 a 6-23.

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philosophy is a self-reflective activity with quite general scope, these other two questions actually belong to philosophy, along with questions like "What is truth?" "What is knowledge?" and "What is the good?" Very few philosophers, however, spend much time trying to decide what philosophy is. I think philosophers are quite correct in this relative neglect of 'metaphilosophy'. It even tells us something about philosophical reflection that 'What is philosophy?' is not a fundamental (or even an especially important) philosophical question. Philosophical reflection gains its importance more from what it discovers ab ut the objects of its reflection (about the nature of knowledge, goodness, beauty, and so forth) than from its own nature simply as philosophical reflectiondiscoveries which take the form of questions or perplexities as much as answers or assertable truths. Nor do we need to understand (or even to be perpl~xed by) the nature of philosophical reflection itself before we can begin making these discoveries. But I don't deny that philosophers can also ask "What is philosophy?" and they may learn something from this too. Questions of the form "What is x?"-where x is a human trait, faculty, function or activity of some kind-can always be asked in two ways. They can be asked either as analytical (that is, descriptive or explanatory) questions about what x in fact is, or else as normative or apologetic questions about what x should be. In the latter case, their answer tells us what x is only insofar as it is what it ought to be, and it is no objection to such an answer that the present state of x fails to correspond to this. "What is Christianity?" asked by a committed Christian, and "What is the American Way?" asked by a patriotic American, are usually asked as apologetic questions. Because in human life what exists is very seldom perfect-or to put it as Hegel would, because what exists contingently is never fully rational, hence never fully actual-to ask an analytical "What is x?" question about something human is often to invite an openly critical or even deflationary answer. No investigation of (really existing) Christianity can afford to ignore the roles moral hypocrisy and religious intolerance have played in this religion's practices, and no honest inquiry into the American Way can downplay the importance for American culture of such evils as white racism and capitalist exploitation. But for this very reason, apologetic treatments of Christianity will represent self-honesty and tolerance as among the Christian virtues, and an apologetic account of the American Way will include racial equality and liberty and justice for all. In Book One of Plato's Republic, Thrasymachus is annoyed that Socrates and his friends consider the question "What is justice?" only

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apologetically, and proffers his own highly critical account of justice. In the Gorgias, Socrates himself more slyly treats the question "What is rhetoric?" in the same way, denying that rhetoric is a craft of persuasion ain1ing at the good of political power and claiming instead that it is n1erely a certain empirical knack for flattering and deceiving which does more harm than good to those who practice it. 3 There are philosophical views-which go back at least as far as Plato-according to which the right analytical account of anything is one which correctly identifies the thing's true nature and provides the right apologetic account of it. Thus to understand what justice is, Socrates and his friends in the Republic try to construct an image of the perfectly just state and the perfectly just soul. Likewise, he seeks to understand rhetoric in a deflationary way as a false appearance of justice, and then to seek an apologetic account of what justice is. Whether or not this is a correct account of the relation between the two questions about rhetoric and justice, both apologetic and critical questioning are legitimate, and they can supplement one another. In asking "What is philosophy?" I am going to begin apologetically. My answer will not try to encompass everything that has gone by the name 'philosophy'. Nor will it try to sum up all possible apologetic accounts-which include many mutually conflicting ones. As with any apologetic account of anything, I will simply try to say what I think philosophy has been (albeit imperfectly) that it most of all should go on being-hopefully, n10re perfectly. One familiar story has it that philosophy began in ancient Greece with our friend Thales of Miletus, who set out to use hun1an intelligence, unmixed with poetic invention or religious myth, to investigate the nature of things. Whether this story contains historical truth or is itself only a myth of origins, it seems to me at least a myth conveying the right message. For I think an apologetic understanding of philosophy should stress its distinctness from both art and religion, and should focus on the attempt of unaided human reason to understand the world and act in it. 4 Poetry, religion and philosophy are all forms of human thinking, and all seek in some way to define the ultimate ends of life, or at least to reflect on how or whether these can be defined. Poetic or artistic thinking does this in the course of n1aking things (art objects) valued irrespective of their usefulness (e.g. for their intrinsic perfection, 3Plato, Republic 343-348, Gorgias 463-465. 4Perhaps it is not even possible to form the concept of philosophy, in the sense in which I mean the term, except in a context where the natural and self-directed use of our cognitive faculties can be distinguished from other uses, directed from outside by other forces, such as tradition, poetic inspiration or religious revelation.

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or the intrinsic pleasantness of contemplating them or for some sort of special revelatory experience they afford). Poetic thinking may seek and find truth which is of interest to philosophy, just as philosophy may find truth that is useful in producing what is beautiful. But in art the revelation of truth is achieved not through rational thinking but through a direct intuition or perception. Religious thinking is often concerned with ultimate ends and with comprehending the whole of reality. But it seeks truth or ultimate ends through powers transcending the natural reasoning capacities of human beings. Philosophy does not necessarily spurn poetic inspiration or religious revelation-and it may even regard these as essential to achieving the ends of life; but it takes human reason to be the only permissible criterion of what is genuine in them, and in that sense to be their proper measure as well.

9.3

Philosophy and Enlightenment

My own favorite historical paradigm of philosophy is the eighteenth century movement that called itself the 'Enlightenment' (eclaircissment, Aufkliirung). I will accordingly conceive my answer to the question "What is philosophy?" as an Enlightenment answer. Kant defined 'enlightenment' as the human being's emancipation from "self-incurred minority". "Minority" is defined as a condition in which one's understanding is used only under the authority and direction of another, and minority is "self-incurred" when it is due not to the immaturity or impairment of the understanding, but because it refuses to trust itself and prefers the comfort and security of tutelage to the risks and responsibilities of thinking for oneself (Kant, A 8:35).5 The Enlightenment thought of itself as a philosophical age, and its best and most forward-looking thinkers proudly assumed the title of philosophe. They sought to make the independent, collective use of human reason in to the final judge of all things-especially of human systems of thinking and of social institutions. In some quarters there is skepticism about whether there was anything resembling a single project among eighteenth century thinkers who thought of themselves as lumieres or Aufikiirer. In history, as in philosophy, there is always a great deal (too much, in fact) to be said on the skeptical side of every question. The sober-minded are always ternperate in their consumption of skeptical arguments, as they are of all commodities that delight the palate of connoisseurs but are intoxicating and debilitating if enjoyed in excess. The best reason for viewing the Enlightenment as a real and a single 5See also Kant, 0 8:146.

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movement is not that some Enlightenment philosophers saw themselves as part of such a movement. Even more it is that we ought to see ourselves as heirs of the Enlightenment, and therefore ought to include a unified understanding of the Enlightenment as an essential part of our self-understanding. The enemies of Enlightenment, in the twentieth century as well as the eighteenth, often prominently include not only its natural enemies-political tyranny and religious superstition-but also some of its own offspring-those who see themselves (in contrast to what they criticize as Enlightenment's arrogant and false pretenses to intellectual and political emancipation) as the true freethinkers and liberators of the mind. One perniciously distorted view of the Enlightenment sees its essential traits as positivistic dogmatism, the reduction of reason to instrumental reason, and hence leading in politics to a kind of scientistic statism in the service of whatever irrational goals happen to be lying at hand. 6 This in effect identifies Enlightenment exclusively with the deeds of its historic enemies and then criticizes it on the basis of values which the critics draw from nowhere but the Enlightenment itself. Where there is any truth at all in these criticisms-as when they reveal racist or patriarchal assumptions on the part of eighteenth century philosophers-they merely blame the Enlightenment for not being already what precisely it has made us to be. Or even more unfairly, they blame it for not being already what we still aspire to be and are not. The truth hidden in such charges is the acknowledgment that it is the Enlightenment tradition alone that is the source of all these aspirations. But the charges themselves are often nothing but attempts to evade the responsibilities imposed by the acceptance of Enlightenlnent values. We see this in those who want to be always on the enlightened side of any moral or political issue but to adopt a lightheartedly nihilistic attitude toward Enlightenment principles-as though their being on the right side were due merely to their own innate goodness, requiring no rational thought on their part. Critics of Enlightenment have always attacked it for being arrogant, hypocritical and self-deceptive; but the worst forms of self-conceit and bad faith are surely to be found among these critics of it. My contrast of philosophy with art and religion a bit ago may remind some of Hegel's triadic division of the sphere of absolute spirit. But let us refine and correct such an account by looking for a moment 6See Michel Foucault, "What is critique?" in J. Schmidt (ed.) What is Enlightenment? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 388. This portrayal, of course, is only a latter day version of the fan10us diatribe in Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cummig (New York: Continuum, 1973).

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at what the philosophes themselves thought about this question. In his Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia published in seventeen volumes between 1751 and 1765, Jean Ie Rond d'Alembert divides the works of the human mind into three spheres: (l)the sphere of memory, including history (both natural and human, sacred as well as profane) and all useful arts, (2)the sphere of imagination, which includes all 'poetry' in the broadest sense, both sacred and profane, narrative, drama, painting, sculpture and music, and (3)the sphere of reason, whose province is philosophy. This includes first, metaphysics, the science of being in general, theology and the knowledge of soul or spirit, second the knowledge of nature, which is divided into mathematics and physics, and third the knowledge of the human, which comprises logic and ethics (Discours preliminaire, I: xlvii-Iii, especially the table at l-li/144-145). 7 In our day, on the other hand, 'philosophy' is often contrasted with 'science'-whether natural or social science. But as the philosophes understood 'philosophy', and as I intend to understand it, science is not fundamentally different from philosophy, but only one form it can take. It was not until sometime in the nineteenth century that people began using the word 'science' to refer to something that was supposed to be distinct from philosophy. 8 There is no 'scientific method' that distinguishes 'science' from 'philosophy', from 'religion' from 'pseudo-science' or from anything else. 'Science' can be distinguished from "philosophy" only in the same contingent way that all academic disciplines and de7 All citations from Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers, par une societe des gens des lettres. Mis en ordre a publie par M. Diderot (Paris: Briasson, 1751-1765) will be by French title of the article or essay and volume:page number in the original edition. Where translations are also cited, the English edition will be footnoted at the first occurrence and the page number(s) of the translation will be given following the French page number(s), separated by a slash (j). Jean Ie Rand d'Alembert, "Discours Preliminaire," is cited in the following English translation: Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, tr. R. Schwab. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963). 8The full title of Newton's Principia means "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" . In the first half of the nineteenth century, items of laboratory equipment were still referred to as "philosophical instruments". The terms 'philosophy' and 'philosophical', in my view, are entirely appropriate in that title. 'Scientific' thinking can be distinguished from philosophy only by the ways in which specific subject matters have been successfully dealt with through determinate investigative techniques, methods and theories. The idea that there is something called 'the scientific method' which says what the "sciences" have in common, and how they are distinct from "philosophy" or "metaphysics" has always seemed to me a false idea.

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partments are distinguished fron1 one another. Using the term 'philosophy' in the apologetic sense I intend, the sciences are simply parts of it. 9

9.4

An Enlightenment Apology

Let us look at \vhat is arguably the most authentic source for an Enlightenment attempt to answer the apologetic question about philosophy: the Encyclopedia, its article on 'philosophy' and especially its more famous article entitled 'philosopher' (' Philosophe '). Both articles appeared anonymously. The article 'philosopher' was an abbreviation (perhaps by Denis Diderot) of a well-known short essay entitled Apology for philosophy, which was first published in 1743. Voltaire attributed this essay to his friend, the grammarian Cesar Chesnau Dumarsais (1676-1756), whose chief work was a treatise on tropes or rhetorical figures of speech. 10 (The attribution to Dumarsais is doubtful; I do not dismiss these doubts, but here I will bracket them, since for n1Y present purposes it really doesn't matter who wrote the Apology. 11 ) 9Physics can be a part of philosophy without the philosophical question "What is physics?" being part of physics. This is because physics is not that part of philosophy whose business includes asking what physics is. The differences between philosophy and 'science' could be thought of metaphorically as generational ones, where philosophy could be thought of as a (middle aged) parent and science is its (adolescent or young adult) child. According to a familiar stereotype, such children tend to be overconfident and a bit cocky, anxious to be independent of their parents, impatient with the parent's slowness to change, also with the parent's attachment to old ideas and reluctance the throw them over for new ones. The child sometimes rushes headlong into unwise enterprises against which the parent warns it. Sometimes these warnings are wise, but sometimes they show excessive caution and insufficient recognition of the fact that the world of the child is a new one, for which the parent's experience is no longer a secure guide. In a similar way, science sometimes sees no serious point in philosophical questions, thinking that it has found a way either to answer them (if they are worth answering) or else to avoid them (as not worth the trouble). Notoriously, some of the greatest scientific discoveries had to overcome resistance from philosophers who were reluctant to accept the fundamental changes in thinking these discoveries demanded of them. On the other hand, many theories trumpeted by their founders and proponents as 'scientific'-whether they are theories within science or theories about science-have been propounded with great overconfidence, only to be utterly discredited a few generations later, outlived by the philosophical questions and doubts they treated with contempt. More important than the family squabbling between science and philosophy, however, is their intimate kinship and the fundamental continuity between them. IOThis essay is still of interest to literary theorists and has been republished not too long ago: Dumarsais, Des tropes, ou, Des differents sens (Paris: Flammarion, 1988). lIThe history and attribution of this essay is dealt with extensively in Herbert Dieckmann, Le Philosophe (St. Louis: Washington University Studies, New Series, No. 18, 1948). Dieckmann casts doubt both on the attribution of the essay to Du-

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The Apology for Philosophy was well known in the eighteenth century, but since it is not well known today, I will need to summarize it. 12 Dumarsais begins by rejecting the common opinion that a philosopher is anyone who leads a withdrawn and unobtrusive life, as long as he has read a little and gives the appearance of wisdom (Philosophe, XII:509/284). In beginning this way, he is also acknowledging a familiar complaint against philosophers: that they are so proud of having freed themselves from the prejudices of their religious upbringing that they have become unsociable, arrogantly looking down on their fellow human beings, whom they regard as foolish, slavish and pusillanimous. Dumarsais undertakes to reply by describing the true philosopher, and correctly distinguishing between the philosopher and the ordinary person. Ordinary or unphilosophical people, he says, act without knowing the causes of their actions, or even suspecting that such causes exist. The fundan1ental trait of philosophers is to seek such causes and then consciously to let themselves be moved by the causes that move them, so as to avoid being acted on by causes they choose not to move them (Philosophe, XII:509/284). This, he says, is the true meaning of reason, and of leading a rational life: "Reason is to a philosopher what grace is to a Christian" -namely, the principle impelling then1 to act (Philosophe, XII:509/284). "Other men are carried away by their passions; their actions are not preceded by reflection: they are men who walk in darkness. A philosopher, on the other hand, even in moments of passion, acts only according to reflection: he walks through the night, but he is preceded by a torch" (Philosophe, XII:509/285). Rational or free action involves no exemption from having one's actions caused, and no absence of passion. It does not even involve any exemption fron1 the universal human condition of walking in darkness. Through the darkness, however, philosophers walk with a torch of self-knowledge. By becoming aware of the causes that move them, marsais and on the idea that it was Diderot himself who adapted it for the Encyclopedia. English citation of the article 'philosopher' will be to the following translation: Diderot, d'Alembert and others, Encyclopedia (Selections), tr. N. Hoyt and T. Cassirer (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), pp. 283-290. 12The Encyclopedia version of the article omits some explicit attacks on religion included in the longer versions of Dumarsais' essay. There is also a book length study purporting to contain Dumarsais' apology, but apparently written by d 'Halbach: found in Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron d', Essai sur les prejuges, ou, De l'influence des opinions sur les moeurs €:J sur le bonheur des hommes: Ouvrages contenant l'apologie de la philosophe par Dumarsais. Paris: J. Desray, L'an I de la Republique franc;ais [1792]. There seem to be virtually no verbatim quotations from the Apology in this volume, however.

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they acquire the critical capacity of selecting which causes (which thoughts, conditions, sentiments, and passions) these will be. Philosophers, therefore, accept no principle at face value but seek the origins of their principles, so that they may take every maxim from its source, knowing thereby both its true worth and the lirrlits of its applicability (Philosophe, XII: 509/285).13 The philosopher accepts not only the true as true and the false as false, but also the certain and the doubtful for what they are. In other words, to be free or rational, to select which causes will move nle by knowing the origin, worth and scope of my maxims, I must always apportion belief precisely to the evidence. This contrasts with the practice of religious enthusiasts, whose love of truth has taken the corrupt form of a passionate will to believe. Since they cannot precisely confine the causes of their belief to the evidence for it, their belief must always remain in some way opaque and mysterious to them-a deficiency they disguise as an advantage when they ascribe their belief to divine inspiration. (Now we begin to understand Dumarsais' cryptic epigram: "Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian" .) The article 'philosophy' tells us that the two greatest obstacles to philosophy are (1) authority, and (2) the systematic spirit (Philosophie, XII:514). The latter spirit of system actually nurtures the search for truth insofar as it encourages us to find connections between truths, but undermines the philosophic spirit when it leads us to see only what confirnls our opinions and to ignore the arguments against them (Philosophie, XII:515). Authority, however, is the unconditional enemy of philosophy because (as with Kant's "self-incurred minority") it leads us to abdicate responsibility for our own thoughts by putting someone else's understanding in the place of our own. "A true philosopher does not see by the eyes of others and forms his own convictions only by the evidence" (Philosophie, XII:514). It is not reliance on one's own reason, Dun1arsais goes on to point out, that constitutes the worst and most dangerous form of intellectual pride and arrogance. It is rather the compulsive need to judge, the thought that it is shameful not to arrive at a decision and terrible to find oneself in a state of doubt (Philosophe, XII:510/285). "A philosopher is not so attached to a system as to be unable to understand the strength of the objections that can be raised against it. The majority of men are so strongly committed to their opinions that they do not even take the trouble to inquire into the opinions of others. The philosopher 13 As Dumarsais puts it, to the philosopher, even truth is not like a "mistress who corrupts his imagination, and therefore appears to him everywhere" (Philosophe, XII:509/285).

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understands the point of view he rejects as clearly and to the same extent as his own" (Philosophe, XII:510/286). This leads into Dumarsais' response to the common accusation that the philosopher is isolated and unsociable. "Man is not a monster who should live only in the depths of the sea or the furthest reaches of the forest. In whatever condition he finds hin1self, his needs and the desire for well-being oblige him to live in society. Reason demands that he know and study the qualities of sociability and endeavor to acquire them." In social life, therefore, "our philosopher does not believe he lives in exile; he does not believe himself to be in enemy territory" (Philosophe, XII:510/286). On the contrary, "he loves society profoundly". "He looks on civil society as a divinity on earth" (Philosophe, XII:510/287). Dumarsais thus urges that the true philosopher will necessarily be upright, a model of dutifulness and probity, the truest example of the honnete homme (Philosophe, XII:510/287). For the same reason, however, the true philosopher will be "far removed from the impassive sage of the Stoics": "The philosopher is a man, while their sage was only a phantom" (Philosophe, XII:510/288-289). "This love of society which is so essential in the philosopher proves the truth of the ren1ark made by the Emperor Antonius: 'How happy will the peoples be when kings will be philosophers, or philosophers kings!'" (Philosophe, XII:510/288). Dumarsais concludes his portrait by remarking that the true philosopher, who takes pride in the humanity he shares with other human beings, is neither tormented by ambition nor satisfied, like an ascetic, with the bare necessities, but enjoys the comforts of life in that "n1odest superfluity which alone brings happiness" (Philosophe, XII:511/289).

9.5

Philosophical Reflection and Sociability

Because Dumarsais' Encyclopedia article is an apology not for an activity but for a certain kind of person, it does not appear to respond directly to the question, "What is philosophy?" Dumarsais' defense of the philosopher even appears to agree with the accusers on one point that today few philosophers (or at least professors of philosophy) would accept, namely, that the philosopher differs in significant ways from ordinary people. In fact, Dumarsais' reply to the charge of arrogance even adopts a line which most of us must find not only implausible but even openly self-defeating: For in effect his claim is not that philosophers are not arrogant, but instead that their arrogance is justified, because the true philosopher really is wiser, freer and more virtuous than ordinary people.

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Yet it is common enough that enduring philosophical issues are hard to recognize because they assume a different outward appearance in different ages. One of the principal reasons why the history of philosophy needs to be studied carefully is that the differing interpretation of issues in different times is an important part of their identity through time. We may sometimes be blind even to a statement of our own position on an issue because in an unfamiliar historical context, that position may wear a mask which is not only unfamiliar but even repellent to us. The charge that philosophers are arrogant and unsociable is, I suggest, only the eighteenth century version of the familiar charge that "intellectuals are elitists". Of course such accusations are leveled not only against academic philosophers, but are perhaps directed even more often to progressive minded social scientists, literary theorists, feminists and even natural scientists insofar as they try to intervene in social and political debates on a progressive side--that is, one that seeks greater civil freedom, less econon1ic oppression and a more rational community between human beings (in eighteenth century terms: on the side of liberty, equality and fraternity). Now as then, attempts to understand the world rationally (especially the social world) and to agitate for changes in a progressive direction, are regarded as at best as idealistic exercises in irrelevancy with no hope of success. But often, critical detachment is not merely seen as useless, but even attacked as dangerously subversive of the social order (or, in a leftist version of the charge, of this or that favored social movement). Dumarsais' apology for philosophy answers that a true philosopher must "combine a reflective and precise mind with the manners and qualities of a sociable man" (Philosophe, XII:511/288). It is this claim alone that enables him to defend the philosopher against the charge that his rational reflectiveness is merely a form of arrogance which isolates the philosopher from society. Dumarsais does not deny that philosophy may loosen the hold of some of the values its accusers hold dear (in particular, religious values). His reply is that philosophy supports the only kind of sociability that we ought to want in ourselves and our fellow citizens. But the arguments for this claim lie just beneath the surface of Dumarsais' highly rhetorical discourse. Perhaps the one closest to the surface is this: The foundation of the philosopher's rational reflectiveness is her commitment to selfknowledge for the sake of action. The philosopher wants to know the causes moving her so that she may estimate their value and choose to be moved by those worthy of this choice. One obvious result of reflective self- knowledge, however, is the discovery that as a human being the philosopher needs to live with other human beings, and that in order to

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fulfill their human nature philosophers cannot withdraw from society but n1ust cultivate in themselves the right kind of sociability. This argun1ent clearly needs to be filled out by a demonstration that this is a sociability of probity and devotion to the common interest rather than one of self-interested manipulation and opportunistic exploitativeness. But Dumarsais seems to me, at any rate, to be on the right track. There is a still deeper argument suggested by Dumarsais' apology. The philosopher acts freely and rationally because she understands the causes that move her and knows the true origin of the principles she follows. This knowledge liberates her because it enables her to estimate the true worth of her motives and her maxims, and thus to be moved only by causes that can withstand rational reflection. That reflection, as Dumarsais describes it, is grounded on an understanding of principles opposed to one's own and the arguments that may be offered in favor of them. Dumarsais points out that in order to acquire this understanding, the philosopher must attend to the opinions of others and understand the grounds for them just as well as she does her own opinions and the arguments for them. It is impossible for her to do this if she withdraws from society in the arrogant conviction of her own superiority, and it is equally impossible if she refuses to regard others with respect, or takes an interest in their opinions only insofar as she thinks they will provide her with an opportunity to advance her own self-interest. The philosopher's fundamental attribute of free action based on reflective self-understanding thus requires both sociability and respect for others. As I have already observed, today we are much less inclined than Dumarsais to defend philosophy by arguing for the superiority of the philosopher as a special kind of person who is set apart from ordinary people. The argument I have just given points toward such a conclusion, which was drawn explicitly by Kant. For him, the term 'philosophy' refers to a science of wisdom. 'Wisdom' means knowledge of the final ends of action. To call oneself a 'philosopher', then, is to claim (in Kant's words) "to be a master in the knowledge of wisdom, which says more than a modest man would claim; and philosophy, as well as wisdom, would itself always remain an ideal" (Kant, KpV 5:109). Kant does not object to an ideal portrait of the philosopher as long as it serves to humble rather than to congratulate those to whom the title is to be applied: "On the other hand, it would do no harn1 to discourage the self-conceit of someone who ventures on the title of philosopher if one holds before him, in the very definition, a standard of self-estimation which would very much lower his pretension" (Kant, KpV 5:108-109). Philosophers, insofar as this term can refer to actual human beings, are never very different from other people. But we might neverthe-

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less preserve the substance of Dumarsais' apology if we said not that philosophers differ from ordinary people, but rather that it is unfortunately far from usual in human life for people to act, whether individually or collectively, on the basis of a reflection on their principles which understands the origins of these principles and involves a true estimation of their worth. The eighteenth century, insofar as it was the century of Enlightenment, witnessed the birth of many modern attempts at theories which provide this kind of understanding-theories now associated with names such as Rousseau, Smith, Bentham, Hegel, Marx and Freud. Such theories seek to comprehend human life and also to transform it-son1etimes radically. Reason is a capacity to know the world, but chiefly it is a capacity to act in it, and since reason is also oriented toward society, its vocation above all is to transform the social order-actualizing the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. In the eighteenth century, this took the form of the struggle of liberal constitutionalism and republicanism against traditional aristocracies of birth backed by religious hierarchy and superstition. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it has chiefly taken the form of a struggle against forms of oppression based on economic class, race, culture and gender.

9.6

An Enlightenment Critique of Philosopl1.Y

The Enlightenment tradition's record of success in these struggles has been mixed at best. Seen in this light, Dun1arsais' portrait of the ideal philosopher as different from the ordinary man is an acknowledgment of the fact that the possibility of a life (above all, a collective social life) guided by rational reflection ren1ains an ideal which stands in sharp contrast to the ordinary life in which we find ourselves enmeshed, for which what counts is not reason and self-transparent reflection, not free communication and public spirited community, but only a system of collective unfreedon1 driven by the blind competition for power, wealth and prestige, in which forms of communication increasingly take merely the form of tools or weapons which are ever more exclusively at the disposal of dominant powers. These considerations point directly to the analytical (or critical) consideration of the question "What is philosophy?" I confess that this critique, which is required to complement my apologetic consideration of the question, has been delayed too long here, no doubt by my fondness or even partisanship for philosophy. Its starting point is Dumarsais' insight that critical reflection is from and for society-that philosophy arises out of our sociability and is meant to belong to it.

260 / UNSETTLING OBLIGATIONS

Yet as philosophy, critical thinking appears as the individual possession of individuals-even of a few peculiar individuals (philosophers) who must defend themselves against the charge of being unsociable. Even when the Enlightenment grasped philosophy as a social activity of critical reflection, it understood it as an activity set apart from actual social life-an isolation that was meant to win toleration for it, but also made it seem artificial and impotent. For Kant and the German Enlightenment, the social side of philosophy was the province of Gelehrten-"scholars" or "the learned", people who are to be free to address one another in a public forum simply as rational individuals, members of a learned public, even if their actions and speech must also be restricted by their duties to the state and to their professions when they are considered as private persons (Kant A 8:36-41). It was not difficult for Kant's counter-enlightenment friend Hamann to satirize this conception, characterizing the "public use of reason" as merely a "sumptuous dessert" to be enjoyed only after the private use of reason supplies one's "daily bread." 14 Philosophy, then, is condemned to be a form of critical thinking that aims at practical transformation of the world yet remains essentially divorced from that world. Philosophy succumbs to its own dialectic: When we understand what it is, we understand why it can never be what it aims to be. This critique of Enlightenment philosophy, like many more fashionable critiques of Enlightenn1ent thinking, was already understood as clearly by Enlightenment thinkers themselves as by anyone since. In the brilliant satirical dialogue Rameau '8 Nephew, Denis Diderot confronts the Enlightenment philosopher (ostensibly Diderot himself) with the dark, ironical reflections of an envious second-rate musician (who is, however, a first rate wit and social sycophant). The nephew of the famous composer Rameau has just been ostracized from the world of the rich and powerful because, in an unguarded moment of excessive honesty, he has offended his social patron. 15 The younger Rameau represents the corrupt world the philosopher finds around him, yet he also sees its internal contradictions far more clearly than the philosopher 14J. G. Hamann, Letter to Christian Jacob Kraus, 18 December 1784, in James Schmidt (ed.) What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 148. 15Denis Diderot, Le neveu de Rameau; (tr. Goethe) Rameaus Neffe. Dual language (French-German) edition. (Frankfurt: Insel, 1996). Abbreviated as "Rameau", and cited by page number in the French version. The dialogue was composed sometime after 1761, but still published at Diderot's death in 1784, and remained unknown until 1805, when a copy of the manuscript (which was among Diderot's papers left at the court of Catherine the Great of Russia) apparently found its way to Schiller and was published in a German translation by Goethe.

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does. Further, he sees the essential hollowness of philosophy, its uselessness and irrelevance to real life as it is being lived (Rameau, pp. 30-34, 62-66). The moralizing philosopher can only stand aloof fron1 the entire social milieu Rameau so wittily and perceptively analyzes, condemning equally its hypocrisy and Ran1eau's irreverent, amoralistic critique of it. As for Rameau, himself, the philosopher has nothing to advise beyond acceptance of things as they are. He even tells Rameau that he should make it up with those he has offended (Rameau, pp. 32, 62, 40). No one can ever be sure what Diderot had in mind in writing Rameau's Nephew. But the lessons I think we should take away from it are that the social role of the philosopher in modern society is deeply problematic, and that Enlightenment philosophy's exclusively moralistic approach both to personal life and social reform is hopelessly shallow. The rational reflection that is supposed to constitute the foundation of the philosopher's life will always to remain defective unless it includes a comprehension of social reality enabling it to understand the social role and function of philosophy itself and leading to a practical orientation toward that reality which actualizes the goals of reflective reason. We can best put the critical point I am making about philosophy if we use the vocabulary of a later stage in the development of the Enlightenment tradition, and say that philosophy is essentially ideology. By this I mean what Marx meant: that it is thinking separated from social practice, which for this very reason can never achieve its own essential aim of self-transparent rational action. Philosophy is condemned either to endorse the existing social order by mystifying it, or else to stand over against that order as a critical reflection that comprehends and rejects it but has no power to change it. The early Marx stated this best when he said that it is for practice not to negate philosophy but to actualize it, but the actualization of philosophy is at the same time the Aufhebung of philosophy (Marx, p. 28).1 6 If we translate this out of the language of young Hegelianism into the more contemporary language I have been using, what it means is that the critical reflection can direct action only if it ceases to play the kinds of social roles it has played in modern society thus far, and becomes instead an aspect of a social movement transforming society. "Philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, what matters is to change it" (Marx, p. 82). 16Karl Marx, "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction" (1843) in A. Wood (ed.), Marx: Selections (New York: Macmillan, 1988). This source is abbreviated as "Marx" and cited by page number.

262 / UNSETTLING OBLIGATIONS

Of course Marx thought he knew just how philosophy was to be actualized. He offered the remarks just quoted as advice simultaneously to philosophers and to political activists. The proletariat was to find its intellectual weapons in philosophy, just as philosophy was to find its material weapons in the proletariat. The actualization (and simultaneous Aufhebung) of philosophy was to constitute the universal emancipation of humanity (Marx, pp. 33-34). Unfortunately, I have no such knowledge, and do not mean my remarks as the sort of advice Marx thought he was in a position to give. Nor, apart from my reservations about the excessively moralistic emphasis of Enlightenment philosophy, do I mean to criticize the kind of thinking represented by philosophy as Dumarsais describes it-and by extension, as it is represented by the radical tradition of Enlightenment thought down to the present day. Both philosophy and society are unfortunately still at the stage where the world must be interpreted differently before it can be changed. My chief complaint about the radical Enlightenment tradition in this respect is only the obvious one-that its representatives seem to be too few, and their influence on the course of things is too weak. I am especially far from agreeing with the fashionable criticisms of Enlightenment thought which say that 'reason' is just another mode of power, and that the class of philosophers (or intellectuals), with its scientific pretensions, is merely another priesthood seeking to bring humanity under its tutelage. I reject these charges not because there is no truth in them but because they are in no way criticisms of Enlightenment principles. On the contrary, they presuppose not only those principles but even to a considerable extent the Enlightenment conception of society and history. In effect they accuse the enlighteners only of failing to fulfill their self-appointed historical vocation. Foucault is certainly right when he describes the genuine accon1plishment of the enlightenment as "an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them" (Foucault, p. 50).1 7 But when people live in this spirit, then we should not say (as Foucault does) that they are merely seeking the mature adulthood of enlightenment. Rather, they have already achieved it, and their further search for the standpoint of reason is simply the human condition as it must be taken over by mature adults. The obstacle, now as in the eighteenth century, is simply that the world is ruled by enemies of this enlightened ethos, 17p. Rabinow (ed.), A Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984, abbreviated as "Foucault" and cited by page number.

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and hence those who share in it cannot integrate what Foucault here calls the "philosophical life" into their real lives. This in turn is because, as Diderot's dialogue already made dramatically clear, even the most enlightened individuals do not belong to a society whose practical life coheres even minimally with the demands of reflective reason. It seems to me, however, that the real motivation behind the recently fashionable internal critiques of Enlightenment has often been nothing more than that the progressive causes spawned by the Enlightenment have failed--either that they have ceased to move forward or else (as in the case of Marxian socialism) are commonly thought to have met with final historic annihilation. The critics, who sympathize with the ainlS of the vanquished causes, are in a state of confusion because they cannot understand what went wrong and, lacking the maturity Kant took to be the essence of Enlightenment, their first priority is to find a psychological defense against the humiliation of defeat. Their critiques of the Enlightenment are like the curses hurled at a charismatic leader by followers who trusted in his invincibility and now experience his downfall as an act of personal betrayal. What the critics really want is a reconceptualization of progressive thinking and practice. But they have no clear idea of what they are seeking, nor will they ever get any as long as they sink themselves in skepticisn1, aestheticism and self-subversion. rrhey simply have yet to face up to the fact that the historic defeats are due not to internal flaws in Enlightenment but to the superior power, at least for the time being, of its traditional enemies-above all entrenched systen1s of power and privilege, which know very well how to deploy to their advantage the deadly charm of custom, the comfort of old superstitions, and infantile fears in the face of freedom. Those of us who continue to share the aims of philosophy, as the Enlightenment conceived it, cannot pursue these aims in any confident spirit of historical inevitability. Our spirit n1ust instead be one of sober recognition that for an honest, thinking human being-a philosopher, in Dumarsais' sense-there is simply no acceptable alternative. This is why even such twentieth century critics of Enlightenment as Adorno and Foucault do not, in the end, decisively break with it. Supporters of Enlightenment can sympathize with their search for new and less compromised ways to articulate its aims. And of course we too hunger for more effective strategies for realizing them under altered historical circumstances. We must remind them that these can never be more than finding new devices for making the eighteenth century ideals recognizable to a time in which they have been effaced, and discovering

264 /

UNSETTLING OBLIGATIONS

(or creating) new agencies to play the familiar roles in a fundamentally unchanged narrative of human liberation.

9.7

What Can Philosophy be Today?

Writing about the Encyclopedia in the Encyclopedia, Diderot proclaimed that it was "possible only as the endeavor of a philosophical century" (Encyclopedie V:644/18).18 The twentieth century was definitely an unphilosophical century, and so far, at any rate, the twentyfirst century looks equally so. We seem to be living in a time when the social and political climate of the United States, and therefore of the globe over which it self-righteously tyrannizes, has grown ever blinder, nastier, more irrational. The always dominant economic and political structures have become increasingly wealthy, powerful, arrogant, an1bitious, greedy, and short-sighted. In this country, the tradition of democracy (always a name expressing hope more than achievement) has been hijacked by wealth. 'Freedom' is redefined as the license to despoil nature, expropriate resources from those who are too powerless to protect them, and assert the dominion of those who own over those who labor. As life becomes harder and more hopeless for those excluded from wealth and power, numbers of people turn back to ancient enthusiasms and superstitions, outgrown passions and old hatreds. Religion reverts to its age-old powers of fear and ignorance. Parochial forms of community reassert themselves because the only order representing itself as new and rational is devoid of any genuine community, since it holds people together only by entangling then1 in a confused nexus of unbridled power and the most unenlightened kind of self-interest. Some of those who see their culture excluded from power turn their resentful n1alignancy against the modern culture they hold responsible for this new and evil order. Or people turn away from all reason because they believe the new order's false claims to rationality. For them, 'spirituality' becomes the common euphemisn1 for superstition, childishness, slavishness and intellectual dishonesty, self-deceptively posing as inner liberation and a return to innocence. But there is no going home again, and every pretense do so only takes people deeper into pathological forms of spiritual corruption. Progressive social movements, whose vocation for two centuries was to build a free community grounded on the rational dignity of all human beings, must now use their whole strength and courage merely to 18The English citation is to Denis Diderot, Encyclopedie in Isaac Kramnick (ed.) The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York: Penguin, ~92.:u.

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survive in a world grown hostile to them. The task of philosophers-to oppose unreason, speak truth to power, think the way toward a genuine community-is frequently usurped by those who choose instead to apologize for the rationally indefensible, or else by people caught up in the fashionable mood of irony, absurdity and hyper-intellectual self-destruction. Both tendencies exhibit how they have lost the Enlightenment's confidence in the mind's authority over human life and its power to find better ways for people to live. In such an age, the defense of philosophy must ren1ain (as always) self-critical, but its end result, I think, will continue to be mainly the reassertion of the most radical aims of the Enlightenn1ent tradition, in a spirit of sober perseverance and (if need be) of stubborn impenitence.

Index absolute moral rules, 38-40 acoustic illusion, 56 Adams, M., 46, 217 Adams, R., 6, 20-22, 42, 84, 160 addiction, 10 Adorno, T., 251, 263 advertising, see hurnbug aesthetic values, 161, 181-185 aesthetics, 177, 182-185 agent-relative reasons, 166-168 Alain, J., 110 alienation, xiv, xv, 65, 68, 69, 123, 247 Allison, H., 215 Alston, W., 7 analytical philosophy, 57, 218, 223 analytical questions, 247 Anderson, L., 172 anthropology, 144-146 anti-moralism, x, 161, 187-211 antirealism, 161, 173, 175, 177, 187, 189 Antonius, Emperor, 256 Apel, K., 220 apologetic questions, 247 A postles Creed, 47 appearance, 132, 221 Aquinas, T., xi, 7, 45, 46, 52-53, 116, 214 Argyle, M., 84

Aristotle, 116, 170, 214, 216, 220, 227, 234, 239-242, 246 Arnauld, A., 74, 75 assent, 82, 84, 85, 88, 99 assertions, 133 ataraxia, xiii, 17, 242 Athenian plague, 217 Augustine, xi, 46, 52-53, 203 autonomy, 31, 32, 35, 58, 81, 103, 106, 195, 197, 206, 210 avarice, 32 Averroes, 214, 220 Ayer, A., 143 bad faith, 107-129, 251 Baier, A., 215 Barnes, J., 132, 137 Barthes, 230 Barthes, R., 230, 231 Baumgarten, A., 219 Beattie, J., 215 beauty, 182 Beethoven, L., 219 belief, ix, x, 7-13, 15, 17, 32, 41, 42, 48-50, 53, 80, 82-88, 99, 100, 107-109, 116, 118-129, 132-136, 153, 167, 175, 255 imperfection of, 9, 121-129 Benedict, R., 146 Bentham, J., 259 Berkeley, G., 242 bet, 20 267

268 /

UNSETTLING OBLIGATIONS

betting, 12, 13, 45, 73-79 Black, M., 154 Blackburn, S., 161 blame, 199, 200, 203-205, 207 Bloor, D., 137 Bok, H., 162 Boyd, R., 176 Bradley, F., 116 Brandom, R., 220 Brandt, R., 144 British Moralists, 230 Brucker, J., 219 bullshit, see humbug Buridan, J., 225 Burnyeat, M., 17,171,220 Burtt, E., 214 Butler, J., 96 Calvin, J., 53, 89 cannibalism, 14 capitalism, 148, 197, 215, 238, 248 Caputo, J., 188, 208 Carr, D., 195 Cassidy, J., 218 Cassirer, E., 220 categorical imperative, 103 Catherine the Great, 260 Caws, P., 113 Cervantes, M., xiii, 66 chance, 64 change, 221 chastity, 195 Christian rationalism, 43-44, 46, 56, 68, 77-78 Christianity, 15, 41-88, 90, 97, 100, 106, 127, 203, 248, 254, 255 church, 92-94 Civil War, 217 Clifford's Principle, xii, xiv, 1-45, 47, 51, 52, 69, 71, 81-83, 86, 87, 104, 124, 181 Clifford, W., x, 1-3,7,8,20, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 40, 46, 52, 63, 104

cognitivism, 160, 173, 191 Cohen, G., 238 Cohen, H., 220 Collingwood picture, 224-230, 232-234, 236 Collingwood, R., 223, 224, 226-230, 237 colonialism, 180 common sense, 16, 18, 19, 48, 56 con1munication, 165 community of inquiry, 29, 30, 184 compatibilism, 174 Confucius, xiii consciousness, 110-117 consequentialism, 23, 73, 86 conservatism, 153-154, 159 constructivism, 228 content critiques, 189, 190, 194 cool, 156, 157 cosmopolitanism, 178-180, 184 courage, 67, 152 Cratylus, 221 creeds, 47-49, 86, 97 criterion, 135-136 Cudworth, R., 230 cultural relativism, 144-151 Cumberland, R., 230 Curley, E., 222, 233, 234 d'Alembert, J., 252, 254 Danto, A., 116 darkening of the mind, 50-58 Darwall, S., 230 Darwin, C., 29, 30, 175 Darwinism, 28 De gustabus non est disputandum, 182 de Pierris, G., 215 De Quincey, T., 235 death penalty, 204 debt, 201, 202 decency, 196 deism, 89-91, 94, 96-108 Delahunty, R., 225, 227, 237, 238 deliberation, 162-171, 185

INDEX /

Della Rocca, M., 225-227, 236, 237, 240 Derrida, J., 230 Descartes, R., 7, 24, 43, 55, 96, 113, 140, 178, 214, 216, 219, 220, 222, 223, 232, 235, 242 desire, 7, 32, 112, 119, 124, 128, 168-170,175 determinisn1, 174 Dewey, J., 220 Diderot, D., xi, 18, 70, 71, 77, 222, 252-254, 260, 261, 263, 264 Dieckmann, H., 253 Diogenes Laertius, 170, 171, 246 divided mind, 108, 109, 126, 128 dogmatism, 17, 33, 37, 137, 151-154, 159, 179 Dostoyevsky, F., 112, 222 doubt, xii, xiii, 12, 36, 48, 49, 255 Dryden, J., 90, 99 Dumarsais, C., 253-259, 262, 263 Dummett, M., 135 duty to ourselves, 31 ecclesiastical faith, 91-97, 104 economics, 78, 79 ego, 109 Eliot, G., 126-129 Ellington, E., 183, 184 Elster, J., 215, 238 emotions, 7, 8, 10, 21, 60, 61, 112, 124, 184 emotivism, 143, 173, 177, 187, 191 end of history, 229 Enlightenment, xiii, xiv, 36, 37, 81, 93, 94, 103, 148, 177, 178, 180, 184, 185, 197, 209, 210, 246, 250, 251, 253, 259, 261-263, 265 epicureans, xiii epistemic justification, 3-6, 14, 137, 181 equality, 180, 198, 248, 257, 259 error theory, 161, 176, 177, 188

269

ethical community, 92 ethical relativism, 141-151 ethics of belief, ix, xii, xiv, 1-40, 81, 102-108, see also Clifford's Principle ethnocentrism, 148-149 evidence, 2, 8, 13-16, 18-20, 22, 32, 43, 45, 46, 48, 51, 68, 70, 104, 121-124, 128, 255 evil, xv, 36, 37, 84, 200, 203, 205, 209 evil demon, 24, 55 evolution, 14, 16, 64 exceptions, 38, 39 externalism, 4, 54 facticity, 115-117 faith, 7, 16, 36, 37, 41-88, 118-125, 137 Falk, R., 40 Falk, W., 230 fallibilism, 140-141, 152 fuar, x, 12, 42, 59-61, 65, 66, 68, 69 Fichte, J., 7, 29, 30, 218, 219 fiction, 155, 161, 176, 177, 231 fideism, 19, 42-58, 80, 124, 125 fideist picture, 53-58 first person standpoint, 162, 165, 166 Fogelin, R., 215 Foot, P., 191 for itself, 108 formal (or structural) critique, 190 Foucault, M., 209, 230, 231, 251, 262, 263 foundationalism, 5 Frankfurt, H., 155 Frede, M., 17 Frederick the Great, 39 freedom, 32, 34, 92, 115, 116, 162, 174,254-255,258,259,264 freethinker, 71 Frege, G., 225

270 /

UNSETTLING OBLIGATIONS

Freud, S., 49, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66, 67, 108-115, 204, 206, 207, 259 friendship, 21-22 functionalism, 114, 228 Gadamer, H., 233 Galilei, G., 43 game theory, 78, 79 Garrett, D., 215 Gassendi, P., 220 genital mutilation of women, 149 Geras, N., 238 Gettier, E., 219 Gibbard, A., 175 God, xii, 44, 46, 47, 50, 53, 55, 58, 60, 63, 64, 74-77, 84-90, 95-99, 104-106, 120, 139, 203, 227 Goethe, J., 58, 260 good, 170, 172, 173, 176 good sense, 39, 178, 222, 232 grace, 43, 50, 52-56, 62, 95, 97, 254, 255 Gracia, J., 214 greed, 40, 68 Green, T., 116, 215 Grey, T., 183 Guerlac, H., 138 guessing, 12, 20 guilt, xv, 21, 22, 199, 201-207, 209 Gumbrecht, H.-D., 242 Haack, S., 3, 11, 23, 33-35 Habermas, J., 220 Hajek, A., 76 Han1ann, J., 80, 260 happiness, 195, 205, 210, 256 Hare, R., 143 Harman, G., 175 Harvey, V., 26, 27, 30, 42 Hegel, G., xiii, 99, 113, 188, 214, 217,219,220,229,251,259 Heidegger, M., xiv Hell, 60-61

Heraclitus, 221 Herskovits, M., 145 highest good, 79, 80, 85, 87, 92 historical materialism, 228 history, 91-94, 101, 223, 229, 252 history of philosophy, 213-243, 245 Hobbes, T., 170 Holbach, Baron, 254 holy wars, 71 hope, 12, 61, 65 Hopper, E., 183, 184 Horkheimer, M., 251 HosIe, V., 220 human sacrifices, 149 humbug, 154-157 Hume, D., 13, 18, 19, 48, 49, 59-61, 69, 71, 87, 113, 125, 171, 183, 214-216, 219, 222, 242 Hutcheson, F., 230 hype, 154, 155 hypothesis, 20 id, 109 identity politics, 180 ideology, 207, 261 illusion, 49, 58-72 imperialism, 148-149, 179 individuation, 214 instinct for freedom, 201 instrumental reasoning, 181 intellectual integrity, x, 33, 34, 37, 38, 42, 48, 70, 77 intellectuals are elitists, 257 intensional, 226 internalism, 230 interpretation, 117, 213-216, 230-243 of scripture, 106 intuitions, 25 Islam, 41, 77, 78 Jacobi, F., 80 James, W., 1,3,4,11, 14-16,23, 24, 35, 70, 72

INDEX /

Johnson, S., 90 Jost, J., 84 Judaism, 41, 77, 78 justice, 8, 84, 92, 190-194, 207, 209, 211, 215, 249 Kant, 1., x, xi, 31, 70, 79-106, 124, 166, 170, 179, 185, 195-]98,201,205-207,210, 213-216, 219, 221, 223, 228, 229, 232-236, 239-242, 250, 255, 258, 260, 263 Kantianism, 144, 178 Katz, J., 235 Kemp Smith, N., 215, 221 Keynes, J., 218 Kierkegaard, S., xi, 9, 45, 50, 54, 56, 57, 74 Kim, J., 219 Kitcher, Pa., 228 Kitcher, Ph., 37 knowledge, 173, 240, 245 Korsgaard, C., 162 Kraus, C., 260 Kretzmann, N., 5, 52 Kripke, S., 219 Landy, J., 231 language, 5, 6, 233 Lao Tzu, xiii Lavoisier, A., 138, 139 learned public, 260 Leibniz, G., 174, 219 Lewis, D., 219 linguistic meaning, 213 live option, 14, 24 Lloyd, A., 214 Locke, J., xi, 5,43,44, 46, 52, 58, 77-78,88,90,120,174,219, 230, 238 Longuenesse, B., 235 lyin& 23, 32, 33, 35, 38, 39, 58, 70, 86, 107, 134, 203 Lyons, D., xvi, 146 MacIntyre, A., 194, 197, 220

271

Mackie, J., 161, 187-190,219 Mallarme, S., 231 Marx, K., 72, 161, 188, 192-194, 207-209,215-217,228,237, 238, 242, 259, 261, 262 matter, 214 Mavrodes, G., 14, 15 McCain, J., 40 McDowell, J., 220 McGinn, C., 111 meaning and thinking, 221-230 meaning of life, xii, 62-68 Melissus, 221 Mendelssohn, M., 70, 80 metaethics, 159, 161, 187-211 metaphilosophy, 248-265 Mill, J., 195, 196, 198, 205 Miller, R., 144, 215 Milton, J., 183 mind-relativity of content, 227 minimum of theology, 83, 96, 97 minor wrongs, 34-35 n1iracles, 19, 37, 59, 90, 92 Montaigne, M., 220 Moore, G., 160, 218 moral argument for God's existence, 79-88, 95, 99, 104 moral epistemology, 24, 29 moral motivation, 83-84 moral reasoning, 182 moral theories, 28-32 morality, ix, 24-40, 68-70, 83-86, 95, 97, 100, 104-108, 141-151, 153-154, 161, 177-182, 187-211 morality of mores, 201 motivated desire, 169 motivated irrationality, x, 8, 51, 56, 110 Mozart, W., 118-119 Mueller, G., 217 mystery, 62 Nagel, T., 166, 169 natural religion, 90, 92, 94-97

272 / UNSETTLING OBLIGATIONS naturalism, 19, 98, 99, 160, 173-176 need of reason, 82-83, 87 neutrality, 148 Newton, 1., 252 Nicene Creed, 47 Nicole, P., 74, 75 Nielsen, K., 215 Nietzsche, F., xi, xv, 143, 161, 188, 189, 198-208, 222, 238 Nihil appetimus, nisi sub ratione bani, 170 nihilism, 66, 143, 159, 187, 188, 251 noncognitivism, 161, 173, 177, 187 Norton, D., 215 oblique (ungerade) reference, 225 Ockham, W., 217 of knowledge, 4 offense, 57, 74 Ogilby, J., 183 O'Neill, 0., 228 overlapping consensus, 194 Owl of Minerva, 229 pain, 169, 205 paradox, 40, 56, 57 Parfit, D., 166, 170, 185 Parmenides, 132, 221 Pascal's wager, 45, 73-79 Pascal, B., xi, xv, 45, 56, 63, 73-79, 82, 88, 222 Passmore, J., 215 pathetic fallacy, 189 Paul, St., 50, 51, 56, 94 Pears, D., 110 Peffer, R., 215 Peirce, C., 12, 140 phenomenologist, 113 philosopher, xiii-xiv, 253-259 philosophy, x, 6, 86-88, 117, 122, 157, 245-265 philosophy, history of, x-xi

philosophy, social function of, 261-265 philosophy, utility of, 246-247 phlogiston, 138, 139 pious terror, 60, 61, 94, 105 Plantinga, A., 1, 5, 43, 54, 57 Plato, xiii, xiv, 131, 132, 134, 173, 190, 193, 221-223, 240, 248, 249 pleasure, 169, 205 poetry, 249, 252 pogrom, 71, 149 political correctness, 40 political rhetoric, 155 postmodernism, 57, 160, 208-210, 263, 265 Prauss, G., 215 preconscious, 114 priestcraft , 47, 92-94, 262 Priestley, J., 138, 139 principle of charity, 223, 238 probability, 12-14, 20, 74-76 Protagoras, 131-134, 154 prudential reasoning, 181 public discourse, 36 public use of reason, 260 punishment, 202 pure observer, 162 Putnam, H., 219, 220 Pyrrho, 171 Quine, W., 220, 225, 226 racism, 40, 205, 234, 248, 251 Railton, P., 176 Rameau, J., 260, 261 Rand, A., 40 rational choice theory, 73, 78 rational need, 87 rational religion, see natural religion rationality, 1-2, 73-79, 94, 103, 123, 163, 207 Rawls, J., 19, 87, 194, 195, 211, 220

INDEX /

realism, 57, 160, 172-177, 180, 190, 233 reality, 132, 221 reason, 19, 31, 43-45, 51-55, 58, 59, 73, 74, 80, 90, 91, 94, 95, 105, 197, 254, 255, 259, 263 practical, 181-182 reasons, 162-171, 175, 184 reasons for, 175 of the heart, 63 theoretical and practical, 167-168 referential opacity, 225, 226 reflection, 164 Reid, T., 215 relativism, x, 38, 57, 131-157 reliabilism, 4, 54 religion, ix, 3, 7, 24, 35, 36, 89-108, 121, 122, 125, 139, 194, 249, 250, 252, 264 religious experience, 64 repression, 108-112, 207 ressentiment, 199-201, 204, 205 revelation, 51, 52, 90, 91, 94, 97-102, 104-108,249,250 rhetoric, 249 Richard Rufus of Cornwall, 214 Rickert, H., 172 Rockwell, N., 183, 184 role-specific obligations, 26-29 Rorty, R., 220 Rosenthal, D., 237 Ross, J., 53 Rousseau, J., 259 salvation by faith, 49-50 Sartre, J.-P., xi, 107-129,220, 222 Schiller, F., 260 Schneewind, J., 222 science, xiii, xv, 16, 36, 37, 55, 125, 240, 252, 253 scientific method, 36, 252 Scott, C., 208 scripture, 42, 44, 52, 90, 91, 97, 104-106

273

sectarianism, 102 secular humanism, 196 selective inattention, 126 self-actualization, 116 self-deception, 8, 9, 23, 33, 51, 53, 56, 72, 107-129, 218, 251 self-knowledge, 257 selfishness, 40, 69, 182 sensus divinitatis, 53 servile faith, 94 servility, 32 sexism, 234 Sextus Empiricus, 171, 220, 242 sexual morality, 195 Shaftesbury, 230 Shakespeare, W., 201 shipowner, 25-29, 34, 35 sin, 33, 42, 45, 50-58, 200, 203 sincerity, 115-117 skepticism, xii-xiii, 15-19, 55, 113,125,137-138,141-143, 159, 170-171, 242, 263 Skinner, Q., 223 slave morality, 198 slavery, 149, 195 Smetana, B., 219 Smith, A., 259 sociability, 256-259 socialism, 263 Socrates, xiii, xiv, 249 speaker's meaning, 213 Spencer, H., 28 spin, 154, 155 Spinoza, B., 170, 220, 225-227, 230, 234, 236-238, 240, 241 spirituality, 62, 264 Stahl, 138 Stalnaker, R., 219 Stevenson, C., 143 Stillingfleet, E., 90 Stirner, M., 188 stoics, xiii, 256 Storr, G., 100 Strawsol1, P., 220 Stroud, B., 215

274 /

UNSETTLING OBLIGATIONS

structural crtliques, 189 Sturgeon, N., 144, 161, 175, 191 Suarez, F., 214 substance monism, 227 Sullivan, H., 126 Sumner, W., 145, 146 superego, 207 supernaturalism, 98 superstition, 64, 101, 105, 150, 263, 264 suttee, 149 Swoyer, C., 135 systematic spirit, 255 taste, 182-185 Taylor, C., 220 Tchaikovsky, P., 183 terrorist, 56 testimony, 16, 81 texts, xi texts, philosophical, 213-243 Thales, 246, 247, 249 Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, 217 thinking for oneself, 81, 93, 97, 103-106,179,197,250 thoughts, expression of, 221-236 Thrasymachus, 190-194,207, 209, 248-249 Tillich, P., 42 tolerance, 34, 35, 39, 148, 152, 153, 157, 159, 248 transcendence, 115-11 7 true fur, 134-136, 142, 146 trust, 16, 20-23, 42, 68 truth, ix, x, xiii, 43, 44, 70, 80, 125, 131, 133-136, 153, 155, 156, 187 Tucker, R., 215 Twelve Tables, 201 two standpoints, 162-166 Unamuno, M., 66 unbelief, 42, 55 unconscious, 109-115, 126 unsociable sociability, 91

utilitarianism, 144, 196, 198, 205, 206, 210 value, ix, 24, 159-185 vengeance, 199-200, 204-205 Viret, P., 89 Voltaire, 253 voluntariness, 7-11,19,82 Vorlander, K., 235 wanting, 119, 167, see also desire warrant, 4, 54-58 Wasianski, E., 235 Waxman, W., 215 Welk, L., 183, 184 Westermarck, E., 144 Western imperialism, 148 Western Supremacy, 147 white lies, 23 White, T., 14 wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, 216 will, 7-11, 82 Williams, B., 96, 188, 195, 207 Wilson, M., 214 Wisdom, J., 242 wishful thinking, x, 8, 9, 23, 33, 42, 58-72, 124 Wittgenstein, L., 222 Wodeham, A., 46 Wolf, S., 188 Wolff, C., 219 Wong, D., 144 Wood, A., 80, 95, 162, 192, 215, 217,228,238 Wood, R., 46, 217 Wood, S., xvi