Responses to Naturalism

Critical Perspectives from Idealism and Pragmatism

Paul Giladi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351720571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This volume offers critical responses to philosophical naturalism from the perspectives of four different yet fundamentally interconnected philosophical traditions: Kantian idealism, Hegelian idealism, British idealism, and American pragmatism. In bringing these rich perspectives into conversation with each other, the book illuminates the distinctive set of metaphilosophical assumptions underpinning each tradition's conception of the relationship between the human and natural sciences. The individual essays investigate the affinities and the divergences between Kant, Hegel, Collingwood, and the American pragmatists in their responses to philosophical naturalism. The ultimate aim of Responses to Naturalism is to help us understand how human beings can be committed to the idea of scientific progress without renouncing their humanistic explanations of the world. It will appeal to scholars interested in the role idealist and pragmatist perspectives play in contemporary debates about naturalism.

Part I

Idealist Responses to Naturalism

1 Moral Natural Norms

A Kantian Perspective on Some Neo-Aristotelian Arguments

Katerina Deligiorgi

We are human beings. That is to say, we are an organic life form, living, breathing, moving, hurting and mending, doing and suffering beings. It would be an odd moral philosophy that loses sight of this fact. This chapter is concerned with a contemporary Aristotelian position in moral philosophy, defended originally by Philippa Foot (2001) and subsequently by Michael Thompson (2003, 2004, 2008), that aims to put this fact at the heart of our philosophical reflections about morality. This strand of neo-Aristotelianism¹ is of special interest from a Kantian perspective for a number of reasons. Both ethics are objectivist. Whereas Kantian ethics, at least as it is usually presented, is rationalist, absolutist and abstract, the neo-Aristotelian version has its roots in nature, addresses human beings as natural beings, and is attentive to the particulars of human life.² Perhaps the best way to capture the difference from which others flow is that nature and reason are not contraries in the neo-Aristotelian account; rather, it is natural for human beings to be rational, to reason about the good, and act on the basis of practical reasoning. From a contemporary perspective, this is particularly attractive because it allows for a naturalistic defence of moral value that fits within the broader trend towards ‘liberal’ or ‘expansive’ naturalism.³ Finally, because natural goodness rather than moral legislation is the guiding notion, the problem of the authority of the moral law, a problem originally identified by Elisabeth Anscombe (1958) as being particularly tricky for Kant’s moral philosophy, simply does not arise for Aristotelianism.

In summary, Aristotelian ethics has the resources to address a range of first- as well as second-order ethical questions precisely in those areas in which Kantian ethics is traditionally supposed to be weak. My aim in this chapter is to examine some of these questions, narrowing my remit to those concerning the nature of the good and the authority of norms. In particular, I want to motivate and sketch a non-naturalist Kantian response to the neo-Aristotelian challenge that targets specifically its meta-ethical and meta-normative naturalistic assumptions.⁴

I

The Idea of the Good

Kant begins his ethics with the good. Clearing the ground for a metaphysics of morals, he states that it is “impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will” (GW 4:393; emphasis in original). So before even philosophy starts properly, when the topic is simply common human reason, Kant asks his readers to think about a good that is “without limitation” (GW 4:393) and “absolutely good” (GW 4:394). The answer, ‘good will’, leads to the further question: ‘what makes the will good?’ to which Kant replies, it is not good on account of the “effects or accomplishes” (ibid.), but rather because of its form. The question then is how to characterise this form apart from saying that it is good. Kant’s imagined interlocutor, someone endowed with common human reason, must be thinking of something when thinking of the good will as absolutely good. The idea of a will that can be ‘good in itself’ and favoured above everything else simply in itself (ibid.) seems slippery, however.

Not only does Kant not allow any content to be thought here, such as effects produced by the will, he gives no clues as to how to direct thinking about such a good; indeed he grants that there is something strange in this train of thought, which could be a “mere high-flown fantasy” (ibid.). Some would agree straightaway; abstracting the will from its “fitness to attain some proposed end” (ibid.) takes away from us the resources to think about the good. More seriously this abstraction signals a “break with the concept human”,⁵ because seeking to imagine a perfectly abstract willing as good willing means already imagining a disembodied willing and this is an early and decisive wrong turn.⁶ I shall return to this shortly. First, I want to pursue another obvious line of attack.

In these opening lines of the Groundwork, Kant talks about the good as such, good without qualification, limitation, condition. This kind of talk, however, is possibly questionable and should be done away with. Following Geach (1956), Foot recommends an ‘attributive’ understanding of adjectives such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’.⁷ It is important to dwell on this point because it plays a foundational role in shaping Foot’s position. Accepting Geach’s argument is a first move intended to provide a further, more fine-grained analysis of the ‘logical grammar’ of moral evaluative terms.⁸ This is a long-standing commitment. In ‘Goodness and Choice’ (1961), Foot develops an account of the good that is tied to function. She argues that there is a very large range of words which are not ‘functional’ in the sense that philosophers use—e.g. ‘knife’, ‘pen’, ‘eye’, ‘root’—“whose meaning determines criteria of goodness”.⁹ Her examples include ‘farmer’, ‘rider’, ‘liar’, ‘daughter’, ‘father’. The criteria of goodness in this latter category are not fixed by the use the thing is put to, but rather by the kind of interest we have in something and “what we expect from it”.¹⁰ This takes us towards the point that Thompson then develops about goodness having human form. Given its significance for both Foot and Thompson, it is important to attend to the original Geachian point.

Geach’s target is the search for the good, principally exemplified in G. E. Moore’s non-reductivism. Geach aims to show that ‘good’ behaves in a way that is not compatible with non-reductivism. Descriptive adjectives as in the sentence ‘this is a red shoe’ can be parsed as ‘this is red’ and ‘this is a shoe’; attributive ones, such as ‘this is a good horse’ cannot be so parsed, because for ‘good’ ascriptions to be meaningful there need be always something to which they are attributed (‘ … is a good A’, ‘A’ is a placeholder for a noun term). The argument is also applicable here, since I attribute to Kant the view that he has a good without qualification in his sights. Although it looks as if he is making attributive use of it, as in the good will, what guides the enquiry is the search for something that is good without qualification. ‘Something’ functions grammatically as placeholder for a noun term but conceptually the enquiry belongs with the tradition that searches for the good. So, the Geachian point still has a target in Kant. The way to respond to this challenge is to show that the idea of the good is conceptually well-defined, that it has a shape by which we can recognise it. This is exactly what Kant does when he tries to show that the good can be a form and connects the form of goodness with duty. Duty captures the common moral notion that moral goodness is about doing the right thing just because it is the right thing to do. Our pre-philosophical moral life then allows us to capture a form of goodness that is not dependent on anything external to it, such as inducements or consequences. Therefore, the thought of goodness we started with is not empty, or fantastical. It is rather common. It may be that Kant’s further attempt to specify this thought through the notion of law as an elucidation of the principle of duty goes wrong. But, so far we have no reason to abandon the path Kant opens for us.

We may decide to part ways when confronted with the issue of locating the form of goodness. Foot aims to show that “evaluations of human will and action share a conceptual structure with evaluations of characteristics and operations of other living things, and can only be understood in these terms”;¹¹ and again: “moral judgment of human actions and dispositions is one example of a genre of evaluation itself actually characterised by the fact that its objects are living beings”.¹² The point is forcefully made by Thompson, who argues that what keeps us “from accepting a naïve Aristotelianism or a practical naturalism or a natural goodness theory” of the sort Foot presents is the idea that the concept human does not have the right sort of relation to knowledge to “count as anything relevant to fundamental ethical theory”.¹³ This is why he thinks Kant “is so emphatic about dispensing with (what I am calling) the concept human within practical philosophy; it is something alien, impure, empirical” that must be replaced with “the pure concepts of a rational being in general or of a person”.¹⁴

To address these points, I propose to proceed as follows. First, I want to respond to the negative claim implicit in Thompson’s discussion of Kant and it concerns Kant’s motivation for the move to pure ethics. Once this is cleared, and it is shown that it is not excess fastidiousness with the messiness of humanity that moves Kant, I will turn to Foot’s positive doctrine about natural goodness, taking into account Thompson’s eloquent elaboration of it, on the importance of the ‘concept of human’, of keeping in our sights the life form that has arisen “on this planet, quite contingently, in the course of evolutionary history”.¹⁵

Kant explains the move to pure moral philosophy and the need for such a move in different but compatible ways. In the Groundwork he presents it as a result of a “natural dialectic” (GW 4:405); it is not speculation, he writes, but “practical grounds themselves” that push us to step from our common practical assumptions to “the field of practical philosophy” (ibid.). The natural dialectic consists in this, that on the one hand we have the notion of goodness that fits our various purposes and then also the notion of doing the right thing just because it is the right thing to do. This latter, Kant says, is perfectly perspicuous to common human reason and without need for philosophy; common human reason distinguishes what is good and what is evil in a way that fits this notion of duty (cf. GW 4:404). We may challenge Kant that he has not shown that all such evaluations are indeed translatable into the vocabulary of duty. I think this is true. However, if we think of duty as a stand-in for the “condition of a will that is good in itself, the worth of which surpasses all else” (GW 4:403), then duty and ordinary judgments of moral goodness do seem to coincide in that they capture goodness that shapes behaviour that can go against someone’s interest at least narrowly conceived. The thought is that there is a good that is not translatable by saying ‘in my interests’, and which more generally does not take the form of qualified goods. Happiness promoting goods are of that sort. This is merely a conceptual distinction at this juncture, and it is a conceptual distinction Kant detects in ordinary moral thinking.

So why leave this happy place? What Kant thinks creates the need for philosophy—which, like Socrates makes common reason “attend to its own principle” (GW 4:404)—is what happens when one “feels within himself a powerful counterweight to all the commands of duty” (GW 4:405). If we stay at the level of common reason, there are solutions to this; we can either train ourselves better or try to fit better with the moral teachings we have been given, by attending to exemplars and so on. However, none of these addresses the philosophical worry about the ground of morality and the validity and authority of its commands. So practical philosophy is introduced to help us learn about the ‘source of its principle’ (ibid.). This is not the full explanation of why Kant then adduces an a priori ground for moral laws, but at least it shows that it is not the idea Thompson (2004, 2013) attributes to him, namely that the natural kind ‘human’ is alien and external and so unable to contribute anything fundamental to ethical theory. The concern, rather, is with identifying a domain of a goodness that is moral and can serve as “ground”, “source” (GW 4:405) or “basis” (MM 6:125) for such good. That the search turns to an a priori and not natural domain has to do with the question of authority of morality and the nature of agency, issues to which Foot is highly alert as I will now try to show.

Let us now turn to examine Foot’s positive proposal. In Natural Goodness, Foot offers a systematic argument for the thesis about moral evaluations being a species of evaluations of natural good...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Idealist Responses to Naturalism
• Part II Pragmatist Responses to Naturalism
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index