Hermeneutic Moral Realism in Psychology

Theory and Practice

Brent D. Slife, Stephen Yanchar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429949968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Traditional sources of morality—philosophical ethics, religious standards, and cultural values—are being questioned at a time when we most need morality's direction. Research shows that though moral direction is vital to our identities, happiness, productivity and relationships, there is a decline in its development and use, especially among younger adults.

This book argues that hermeneutic moral realism is the best hope for meeting the twenty-first century challenges of scientism, individualism, and postmodernism. In addition to providing a thorough understanding of moral realism, the volume also takes preliminary steps toward its application in important practical settings, including research, psychotherapy, politics, and publishing.

Section 1

1
Hermeneutic Moral Realism, Participational Agency, and World Disclosure

Stephen C. Yanchar and Brent D. Slife

Moral conduct is intimately connected to the issue of agency (or free will) and determinism. If human action is lawfully governed and, in that sense, strictly automatic and machinelike, then no particular activity could be seen as moral or immoral; rather, it would be just what the determinant factors involved (biological processes, social pressures, etc.) caused it to be. Human conduct, in this regard, would not differ fundamentally from the purposeless workings of machinery or natural processes such as photosynthesis or oxidation; it would be the necessary effect of natural laws. On the other hand, if people are agents in some sense and able to act for themselves, then their conduct can be meaningfully evaluated according to moral classifications such as good and bad, generous and selfish, brave and cowardly, and so on. In this sense, agency is often considered to be central to moral conduct: one’s actions are one’s own, from an agentic perspective, and thus worthy of praise or blame (for more on historical positions regarding agency and determinism, see Kane, 2005; Sappington, 1990).

Like many other positions on morality, hermeneutic moral realism entails a kind of agency; but given its rejection of the commonly assumed subject-object split, as described in the introductory chapter, the agency it entails is unique. Our purpose in this chapter is to clarify this unique form of agency and in so doing, clarify the claims of hermeneutic moral realism itself. As we offer this clarification, we will suggest how humans qua agents encounter the world as a moral ecology, and thus how phenomena show up in terms of their relevance and fit for agents within such a moral space.

The Moral Space of Practices

As the introduction to this book suggests, the classic subject-object split has been influential with regard to how values and moral judgments are understood to exist. Hermeneutic philosophers, however, have called this subject-object split into question, seeing it as one historical way of conceptualizing the nature of reality, but finding neither option (objectivity or subjectivity) to be compelling or necessary when trying to make sense of human involvement in the world (Dreyfus, 1991; Heidegger, 1962; Merleau-Ponty, 1962; for a philosophical review of the subjective self, see Solomon, 1988). The hermeneutic alternative for making sense of human experience entails non-dualistic, fully embodied, lived, in-the-world practices (Heidegger, 1962). Humans are viewed, from this perspective, as inevitably situated in the world itself. No dualism is posited, thus there is no subjective realm of consciousness to be fundamentally differentiated from an external, objective reality. Rather, an agent-in-the-world is a unitary phenomenon of meaningful action, using equipment to achieve her or his purposes, fundamentally with others, contextualized within a shared historical, cultural horizon. Moreover, from this hermeneutic perspective, the world itself is not a neutral, meaningless, and value-free space functioning as a repository of isolable objects waiting to be granted purpose or meaning. The world, on the hermeneutic view, is a lived context of co-involvement replete with significance.

As an example, one does not encounter a particular piece of equipment as a neutral object that must have meaning or purpose projected onto it (or cognitively constructed whole cloth) through one’s own subjective mental processes. Rather, the piece of equipment already exists as a useful, meaningful part of a historical, cultural context—for example, a compass for orienting oneself in an unfamiliar landscape—or is invented as the result of a particular real-world need in the context of living and participating with others, for certain purposes. Thus, one encounters a piece of equipment as something that is already meaningful within a context of action in the world, with other equipment, people, and so on. The world, in general, exists in this way. It is a whole configuration of people, practices, equipment, dwelling spaces, and so forth that is already underway and full of meaning. A person, then, is born into this already-meaningful configuration and learns to participate in its practices (e.g., learns to use a compass to determine direction or take a bearing) through increasingly sophisticated practical involvement (Dreyfus, 2002; Yanchar, Spackman, & Faulconer, 2013).

But there is more to participation in practices than the use of equipment in a historical, culturally meaningful context. Hermeneutic philosophers have arrived at the insight that practices themselves, as ways of being involved in the world and achieving certain purposes, must be informed by something not solely dependent on human participation, even human preferences and cultures. For these thinkers, the purposes of a given practice are thought of as moral goods, in that they are the good that the practice is supposed to achieve (Brinkmann, 2004, 2011; Hatab, 2000; Stigliano, 1990; Taylor, 1989; see also MacIntyre, 1984; for a neo-Aristotelian account). Practices, then, are historical, cultural ways of achieving certain goods. For instance, the good of being an automotive technician as a practice might be thought of as maintaining vehicles in operating condition so they may be used to engage in other worthwhile practices. These goods are thought of as moral, not only because they are designed to make some contribution or produce some desired outcome, but because they presuppose values or standards that appropriately guide their achievement. For example, good automotive technicians go about their duties in certain ways, and those ways demand integrity, accurate knowledge, quality workmanship, and so on. In this sense, practices—due to their inherent value-ladenness—exert a claim upon those who would engage in them: to take up a given practice correctly, one should learn, and be committed to, the goods and values central to it.

Understood this way, practices entail moral goods and values that function as practical-moral reference points; they issue a kind of moral call regarding how one ought to participate in a given practice to achieve its goods. In taking this position, hermeneutic theorists hold that moral goods and values are not abstract principles that must somehow be applied in real-world settings; rather, they are intrinsically practical, or practice-oriented, in that they are what make practices coherent and meaningful in the first place. In this sense, a practice does not exist independently first, as a set of neutral activities, and later become endowed with meaning by having moral goods and values brought to it; rather, that value-laden meaning will be constitutive of the practice from the outset—thus, no moral goods and values, no practices. As Taylor (1989) suggested, a lack of such goods and values would be disorienting; without them there would be no reference points to guide what one does. For example, there could be no automotive repair practice without some purpose to guide it and without intrinsic values regarding how one achieves competence or excellence as one of its practitioners.

It has been further argued in the hermeneutic literature that the moral goods and values of practices are ontologically real and actually exist in the world along with people, equipment, dwelling spaces, plans, roles, routines, and so on, because they are entailed within practices which are real, in-the-world parts of human life and experience (Brinkmann, 2011; Hatab, 2000; Stigliano, 1990; Taylor, 1989). This means that those who engage in a given practice, or who seek to learn it, cannot operate in accord with any values and activities they personally choose; rather, these people are called, in a sense, to become like those who already live those values, because those values are constitutive of the practice in question; they are part of the reality that the participating person finds herself living amidst and coping with. Even for a person who does not live up to those values, they are real and authoritative in this moral sense; they are what allow for judgments of “not measuring up” or “doing it wrong” to be made. Put another way, it might be said that if there is no true subject-object or inner-outer split, but rather ontologically real, in-the-world practices, then values are neither subjective nor objective, but real, in-the-world aspects of practices. Practices thus constitute an ontologically real configuration of moral goods and values through which people orient themselves and participate—what has been termed a “moral ecology” (Brinkmann, 2004, p. 59; see also Hatab, 2000; Stigliano, 1990).

It is these practice-endemic goods and values, then, that provide a basis for how one might engage in a given practice and how priorities and desires can be evaluated in so doing. While values as such are not thought to reside in the mind of the agent, from this perspective, the agent does indeed take a stand on them through his or her fully embodied, in-the-world comportment. Goods and values, in this sense, provide a moral orientation that lies beyond any single individual’s personal viewpoint. For instance, an automotive technician’s personal desire to maximize profit in certain ways—for example, sacrificing caution and quality by working quickly, recommending not-quite-necessary repairs, and emphasizing simple but expensive maintenance tasks—will allow for greater profitability in a purely monetary sense (i.e., what Taylor terms “weak evaluation;” 1985, p. 16); but the technician may eventually come to see this approach as coming up short, in the moral sense we speak of, through its lack of integrity in light of the goods and values of excellent practice (i.e., what Taylor terms “strong evaluation;” 1985, p. 16). From a moral realist perspective, values that offer a basis for making such “distinctions of worth” (Taylor, 1985, p. 17), such as notions of integrity, seem to be intrinsic to the vast majority of practices in which one might engage in everyday life; they offer reference points that provide a sense of what the good really entails, at least in part; and excepting very atypical cases, they function as “human constants” (Taylor, 1981, p. 205).

Human Agency in the Moral Space of Practice

This hermeneutic emphasis on practices and moral ecologies, we contend, leads to a particular view of agency—one conceptualized primarily in terms of meaningful engagement in the world. This is a nondualist view that makes no appeal to inner workings of an isolated, subjective mind and thus no appeal to internal, rational powers that have the ability to act, in some sense, on an external, objective world. Moreover, agency is not, from this hermeneutic perspective, explained by deeper causal variables (as in some forms of compatibilism) or extra factors (Kane, 2005) that allow for freedom of choice, at least on occasion, in an otherwise mechanical universe. Indeed, agency of this sort is not subject to explanation at all, at least in the same way that objects and natural processes would be explained in terms of natural laws, physiochemical events, and so on. While there certainly are ways of describing and explaining agentic human action in the world from a hermeneutic perspective (e.g., Guignon, 2002), those ways are not framed in terms of underlying causes that, ipso facto, become the actual causal reality operating on human beings (Guignon, 2002; Slife & Williams, 1995; Yanchar, 2011).

Based on this hermeneutic theorizing, agency is meaningful engagement in the moral ecology of practices; it is fully embodied and actional, conceptualized in terms of humans doing things in particular ways in the lived space of everyday situations, a kind of situated participation in practice, and thus what might be referred to as participational agency (Yanchar, 2011). From this perspective, meaningful participation in the significant, yet quotidian flow of living is agency; it is situated involvement in the everyday, non-momentous doing of things in family, professional, and community life, in addition to deliberate decision making. But, as we will clarify, this everyday participation entails an existence structure that differs significantly from what is seen in mainstream accounts of human action and personhood.

One significant difference concerns the role of tacitness (Heidegger, 1962; see also Dreyfus, 1991; Okrent, 1988). While deliberate decision making and problem solving (e.g., determining what caused a problem and determining how to solve it) are clearly a part of everyday living, and thus are relevant to hermeneutic accounts, participational agency also encompasses pre-reflective, tacit forms of participation. For example, a good deal of what automotive technicians do in their everyday work is not the subject of conscious deliberation. They use their tools in familiar and unreflective ways, which enables them to focus on the automotive problem they are trying to solve (unless, for example, a tool is malfunctioning).

As hermeneutic theorists have argued, a good deal of human activity is of this tacit sort and is thus not explicitly reflected on and analyzed “in the moment” (though reflection and analysis are modes of being involved in the world also, and sometimes useful; see Dreyfus, 1991; Heidegger, 1962); but it is nonetheless part of agency in that it is entailed within the ordinary and purpose-filled tasks of life such as working a job, preparing food, driving a car, recreating, and so on. Participational agency thus includes both tacit and deliberate aspects of involvement in practices. While this two-fold emphasis clearly follows from hermeneutic theorizing, it is not included in libertarian or other perspectives that conceptualize agency in terms of detached rationality or deliberate decision making against a background of lawful necessity (Bandura, 2006; Baumeister, 2008; see also Kane, 2005).

To adequately understand this tacit and deliberate agency, however, one must also be aware of Heidegger’s (1962) observation that human action is meaningful in the sense that it is characterized by existential concern and functions as a kind of concernful involvement. The various aspects of human existence that Heidegger phenomenologically identified (e.g., dwelling in a world, with others, with equipment, oriented toward possibilities, and so on) can, he noted, be brought into a kind of ontological unity by recognizing that they all point to one key insight: people care or are concerned about the nature of human existence in general and their own lives in particular. Humans are, Heidegger contends, the beings that take a stand on their own being, or put differently, the beings for whom their own being is an issue.

This concern with being manifests not only in people’s efforts to make sense of human existence in general—for example contemplating the meaning and purpose of life, or perhaps more formally, constructing social theories about human phenomena—but also in their concern with matters central to their own situation, for example, the projects in which they are invested (e.g., family, profession, upward mobility, a social cause, a political movement), what they have accomplished, the health of loved ones, and so forth. Even relatively mundane considerations that arise in average everydayness are part of this concern, such as being at a meeting on time, staying within a budget, planning a vacation, or maintaining property. In this sense, existential concern does not necessarily refer to benevolent acts and kind consideration toward others (though it certainly may), but rather more broadly to whatever makes a difference to people in their lives, whatever that may entail. From a hermeneutic perspective, existential concern is a primary feature of human life and agency, as it is intrinsic to how humans participate in the world. And as humans act concernfully in the world, they are taking a stand on their own being.

Although concernful involvement does not necessarily entail benevolent acts and kind consideration, it would be incorrect to conclude that it bears no relation to the goods and values that constitute a moral ecology of practice....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editor and Contributor Biographies
• Introduction: Moral Grounds in the Postmodern Era: The Reality of Hermeneutic Morality in Psychology
• SECTION 1
• SECTION 2
• Index