Why Be Moral?

Beatrix Himmelmann, Robert Louden, Beatrix Himmelmann, Robert Louden

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110386332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

What reasons do we have to be moral, and are these reasons more compelling than the reasons we have to pursue non-moral projects? Ever since the Sophists first raised this question, it has been a focal point of debate. Why be Moral? is a collection of new essays on this fundamental philosophical problem, written by an international team of leading scholars in the field.

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Part I: Investigating the Question

Dieter Birnbacher

Why Be Moral – A Pseudo-Problem?

1Introduction

The question what reasons we have to do what is morally required instead of what we happen to want for nonmoral reasons is one of the oldest questions of moral philosophy. It looms large already in the Platonic dialogues, especially the Gorgias and the Republic. At the same time it is one of the most controversial problems. This is true not only in the sense that there is controversy about which of the solutions proposed for it has the best chances to be true or adequate but also in the sense that it is an open question whether it is a real problem or what Carnap and others called a “pseudo-problem”, i.e. an apparent problem which, for some reason or other, proves to be undeserving of philosophical effort. Though the Why-be-moral-problem is only rarely given the label “pseudo-problem” (but see Thornton 1970, p. 453), there is a presumption that it is in fact a pseudo-problem given the futility of the numerous attempts to solve it.

A problem may be classified as a pseudo-problem for a number of reasons: that standard formulations of the problem are semantically meaningless or otherwise unintelligible; that statements of the problem start from wrong or contradictory presuppositions; that it is trivial because its solution is obvious; or that, to the best of our knowledge, it is unsolvable for reasons of principle, so that further attempts at a solution can be expected to be futile. Not all of these justifications for reducing a problem to the status of a pseudo-problem are relevant to any purported pseudo-problem. A paradigm case, however, for which they are all relevant is the problem to which Heidegger gave the name “fundamental problem of metaphysics”, i.e. Leibniz’s question why there is something rather than nothing. There are good grounds to think that the Grundfrage is in fact a pseudo-problem though not for the reasons given by Wittgenstein and the Logical Empiricists (cf. Birnbacher 1990). In many ways, the role the Why-be-moral problem plays for moral philosophy is comparable to the role the “riddle of existence” (Rescher 1984) plays for metaphysics. It is a foundational question which nevertheless is only rarely made the focus of philosophical inquiry, not least because of its controversial status.

The aim of the following contribution is to see how far the suspicion that the Why-be-moral problem is a pseudo-problem can be supported by applying strategies and arguments similar to those that have been deployed in throwing the Grundfrage from its metaphysical throne.

2The Triviality Thesis

One strategy to expose the Why-be-moral problem as a pseudo-problem is to argue that it is trivial because the solution of it is analytically implied by the terms by which it is formulated. The term that is supposed to do the job is the term “moral”. This term, according to the triviality thesis, prejudges the question why morality should have priority and thus renders any further reflection about the Why-be-moral problem superfluous.

There are, as far as I can see, two variants of this thesis. The first variant was put forward by the Australian philosopher D. H. Monro. According to Monro, there is no reason to ask why we should do what is required by morality because the concept of morality covers anything that we prioritize in our personal aims. “Morality” refers to the values that are most important to us, no matter whether these are egoistic, altruistic, or impersonal, whether these values are universal or idiosyncratic, constant or transitory. Morality, thus understood, stands for an individual’s highest priorities, irrespective of their content, their temporal stability and the degree of the individual’s commitment to them.

At first sight, Monro’s position looks like a sleight-of-hand. It is, however, not as extreme as it may appear. It does not imply that we necessarily follow morality because whatever we do is directed at the realization of our highest values. Instead, it reserves the name “morality” for whatever we think are our highest and most important values. Thus, it leaves room for akrasia and other failures to conform to these values in our actual behaviour. Morality is not the name for what in fact drives us in our actions but what we think should drive us. In this way, the question, “Why should I be moral?” is not exposed to the criticism of meaninglessness. There may be a considerable gap between a person’s priorities (whatever they are) and a person’s factual choices. Nevertheless, it may be doubted whether admitting so much reduces the triviality of the question. It is evident that a person always has a good reason to do what the person thinks it is important to do, and that the best reason a person can possibly have for a course of action is that it is the course that is, given the background of this person’s values, the most important. Therefore the question why I should do what I think I should do has a trivial answer: Nothing could be more obvious.

This result, however, essentially depends on the acceptability of Monro’s explication of the concept of morality. Whence comes this concept of morality? Monro appeals to common usage:

We sometimes use ’morality’ of any over-riding principles, whatever their content (’Satan’s morality, ’his morality is purely selfish’). (Monro 1967, p. 225)

In a similar vein, Kurt Bayertz thinks that this comprehensive use of the term “morality” is at least “one of the ways the word ‘morality’ is used in everyday language”:

In a first use, “morality” designates a complex of norms, values or ideals that provides each individual with a general orientation for leading his or her life. (Bayertz 2004, p. 34)

Is this plausible? I think the answer has to be negative. Were we to accept Monro’s and Bayertz’s thesis, we should be compelled to give the name of morality to absolutely whatever an individual puts in the first place. This would not only be incompatible with widespread usage, it would be positively misleading. Not only would the amoralist whose maxims glorify pure egoism or arbitrariness have to be credited with a morality. The same would have to be done even in the case of the immoralist who deliberately breaks the most essential moral rules (such as the character Lafcadio in André Gide’s The Caves of the Vatican). We have to accept, I think, that morality is not to be equated with any system of norms, values and ideals a person happens to adopt or to follow. It is something distinctive with specific formal and material features. Of course, it is no easy task to define these features in a general and coherent way. Most of the properties attributed to morality as necessary and/or sufficient conditions do not stand the test of confrontation with counterexamples. On the contrary, the failure of the search for strictly defining conditions of the concept of morality (see, for example, Wallace/Walker 1970) suggests that the characteristic features distinguishing moral from other (aesthetic, personal, or technical) norms and values are to be conceived not as necessary and sufficient conditions but as family resemblances in the Wittgensteinian sense or as conditions characterizing typical instances of the concept, i.e. as features that do not claim strict universality.

In a recent publication, I proposed four interrelated features that might be candidates for typical features of moral norms and values in this sense: community-relatedness, obligatoriness, subjective importance, and association with emotions (Birnbacher 2013). It is easy to show that individually, these four features are neither necessary nor sufficient: Not all moral values are community-related, and many sorts of norms are community-related without being moral norms. A morality can entirely consist of ideals or virtues that imply evaluations of behaviour, motives and character traits without containing or directly implying norms or obligations. Neither is obligatoriness by itself distinctive of morality. Again, moral demands are typically, but not necessarily, associated with an emphasis and seriousness that is foreign to prudential, aesthetic and conventional demands. This feature explains, at least to a certain extent, the inherent tendency of moral principles to objectification (Mackie 1977, p. 30 ff., Blackburn 1986, p. 181 ff.), the tendency to be projected into entities beyond human subjectivity and interests, into the “nature of things”, transcendent values, or God’s will. A further typical feature is the close association of moral norms and values with moral emotions, each of them having an important role in motivating moral behaviour.

Even if the above list of the typical features of morality is only provisional, it suffices to make it probable that Monro’s thesis is wrong and that morality is not to be equated with any system of norms and values whatsoever by which a person orients his or her life. Even if morality is one, and a very important, system of norms and values by which we orient our lives, it is not the only one. Morality is a distinctive system of norms even if it lacks a clear-cut demarcation against other systems of norms, whether individual or social. It follows that the question why we should follow these norms and not others cannot be trivial.

According to the second variant of the triviality thesis the answer to the question, “Why be moral?” is trivial not because of the indistinguishability of morality and other kinds of norms but because of another assumed defining feature of morality, the overridingness of moral norms in contrast to other norms. The thesis is a natural consequence of the view that “overridingness” is an inherent feature of morality and that, therefore, it is analytic that moral norms claim priority in situations in which a person is in doubt whether to follow the moral course rather than a course suggested by egoism, social convention, or spontaneous feeling. The thesis of the overridingness of morality has a respectable provenance that reaches back to the Platonic Socrates. There is a suggestion of overridingness also in the Kantian tendency to associate morality with Unbedingtheit, unconditionality. The most explicit statement of this position is to be found in the writings of the British philosopher Richard Hare:

There is a sense of the word “moral” (perhaps the most important one) in which it is characteristic of moral principles that they cannot be overridden […], but only altered or qualified to admit of some exception. This characteristic of theirs is connected with the fact that moral principles are […] superior to or more authoritative than any other kind of principle. A man’s moral principles, in this sense, are those which, in the end, he accepts to guide his life by, even if this involves breaches of subordinate principles such as those of aesthetics or etiquette. (Hare 1963, p. 168 f.)

This variant of the triviality view differs from the first one in maintaining that overridingness is a necessary and sufficient feature of morality without at the same time making morality a purely formal concept. For Hare, unlike Monro, there can be nothing like a “Satan’s morality”. Morality has material features beyond its formal ones. Nevertheless this variant shares with the first variant the view that moral norms and values are necessarily of supreme importance and prejudge the issue of which of two or more conflicting kinds of norms is given priority: Moral norms are by their very nature the most important norms and claim a privileged position so that the question which kind of norms should be given priority in cases of conflict does not arise.

This variant is exposed to two sorts of criticisms, each of which, I think, makes it lose much of its attraction. The first is that the inherent overridingness of moral norms and values is far from evident. Though moral norms are in most cases important considerations to be taken account of in one’s choices it seems mistaken to say that they are by necessity the most important norms in any situation. There are situations in which nonconformity with moral demands, whether social or individual, seems excusable so that conflicts between the moral course of action and the prudential course of action cannot be categorically ruled out. In these situations, at least, questions of the sort “Why follow the moral course instead, say, the prudential one?” are anything but trivial. Amartya Sen gives the following example:

There is nothing particularly schizophrenic in saying: “I wish I had a vegetarian’s tastes, for I disapprove of the killing of animals, but I find vegetarian food so revolting that I can’t bear to eat it, so I do eat meat.” (Sen 1974, p. 63)

It does not at all seem obvious that moral principles are, as Hare claims, “superior to or more authoritative than any other kind of principle,” or that moral values necessarily take precedence over nonmoral values. Nor is it obvious that “overridingness” is an inherent feature and part of the very meaning of morality. It is true, most people in fact see themselves as moral evaluators. But they do not see themselves as moral evaluators throughout. Their evaluations of their own and other’s behaviour take many forms, and these vary with context. In many contexts – e. g. the economic one – they orient themselves primarily by prudential norms of individual rationality, in others – e. g. the family – by “self-referential altruism” (Mackie 1977, p. 84), i.e. with partiality for the near and dear. People usually live in a number of different normative worlds, a moral, a social, a prudential and an aesthetic world. Of course, from the perspective of the “moral point of view”, we necessarily give priority to the moral aspects of a given case. But from this it does not follow that we necessarily give priority to this point of view. Even if moral norms and values are associated, as a rule, with particularly strong and sustained emotions, such as guilt, shame and indignation, this does not imply that whoever accepts these values gives them priority. The selfsame prominent role that moral emotions like guilt, shame and indignation play in the decidedly moral person may be played by emotions like envy, anger and pride in the rational egoist.

The second criticism of this variant of the triviality thesis is that even if overridingness were a necessary feature of morality this would not render superfluous or trivial the question whether it is followed, in toto or in an individual case. Normative priority does not entail factual priority. Even the most authoritative and absolute moral norm cannot prevent its adherents from acting against it. There is no pre-established harmony between the norms and values held by a person and the person’s actions. It is perfectly thinkable that someone sincerely holds a certain moral principle and frequently acts against it. Espousal of the principle is not necessarily invalidated by deviant behaviour. That there is a considerable “gap” between judgment and performance is also supported by moral psychology. Empirical evidence strongly suggests that the capacity to make moral judgements is largely independent of the readiness to act in accordance with them (cf. Montada 1993, p. 268). Though internalists about moral motivation will dispute the possibility of accepting a moral rule without integrating it into one’s moral outlook, this leaves open the possibility that the internalization of moral norms and values is too weak to counteract motivationally stronger nonmoral impulses and desires. I think that internalism is perfectly right in maintaining that the adoption of moral norms and values cannot be seen as a purely cognitive affair but has emotional and motivational components that dispose whoever adopts these principles to act in accordance with them. But though a firmly internalized moral conviction will, as a rule, be accompanied by a certain conformity in action, this does not exclude that ...