AN EXTENDED RESPONSE TO MATT

OK, I have rehung our bird feeders, which were taken down to allow the windows to be washed, so now I have some time to attend to a less urgent matter, namely, the foundation of morality.  Let me begin by reprinting the comment of Matt, who very nicely poses the issue for us.  He starts by quoting a line from my post and then responds:

““Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?” You cannot determine the fundamental principles of morality by reasoning about them. You must make an existential choice. 

“I have recently been reading the (in)famous work _The Concept of the Political_ by Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, and will admit that this sounds uncomfortably close to his take on politics as based around an a-rational friend/enemy distinction. I don't mean this to be a guilt by association claim, and it's not that I think that Schmitt's views are false because they are dangerous, but rather that they are dangerous because they are false - it's not the case that these choices are a-rational, or existential, or based or necessarily based on this sort of "friend/enemy" basis. It's a choice to see and base politics that way, and an optional one. But, seeing it that way very predictably leads to bad results, even if you're on a fundamentally good side. wallerstein's example of people being hesitant to criticize Stalinism is a fine example of it, I think. If you see politics this way, you'll tend to see anything done by "friends" as good, and anything done by "enemies" as evil, and will see the other side as something that needs to be crushed. But, the other side will see the same, leading to endless conflict, needless repression, and so on. There are other ways to see politics - as looking for ways that people with diverse conceptions of the good and nonetheless live together, for example. This seems to me to be a better approach. This need not mean that you accept anything. People who reject the idea of living together in some way must be, at best, quarantined. But, it does mean rejecting the decisionist, a-rational, approach to politics.”

Rather than respond immediately to Matt, I should like to take time to remind us all of the history, at least in the Western tradition, of this debate about the foundations of morality.  The oldest view of which I am aware is that our knowledge of the principles of morality is grounded in Divine Revelation.  The Lord gives to Moses the Ten Commandments and the debate is over.  To be sure, later philosophers fussed over whether God said the Commandments were the truth about morality because they were right or, alternatively, that they were right because God said they were to be obeyed.  “Whatever …” as young people are prone to say today. 

An alternative view was put forward in the Gorgias by the dramatic character Callicles as a deliberate and provocative paradox which later was embraced by the Stoics as foundational truth, namely that there are normative as well as descriptive laws of nature, or Natural Laws, which are grounded in the natural order.  This Natural Law tradition has had a long and distinguished career, most recently in the theorizing of Roman Catholic scholars.  The theory played a central role in post-war debates about the Nazis and the operations of the Nuremburg trials.  [Thus, Matt’s reference to Carl Schmidt is quite apposite.]  I first became aware of this debate sixty-one years ago when it took the form of an argument in the pages of The Harvard Law Review between two legal theorists, Lon Fuller and H. L. A. Hart.

There have, of course, been other attempts to find an objective grounding for our moral convictions, most notably in the writings of the Utilitarians in the British Isles and those of Immanuel Kant on the continent.  As some of you know, I spent a good deal of time and effort in the ‘60s and ‘70s trying to find a defensible version of Kant’s claim that the Moral Law, as he called the fundamental principle of morality, can be demonstrated a priori to be unconditionally biding on all rational agents as such.  My failure is what led me to the position Matt disputes.

Before I turn directly to Matt’s remarks, let me re-tell a story about a dinner I had during my first visit to South Africa, in 1986.  I quote, with excerpts, from my Autobiography:

“Quite the eeriest episode of my first visit to South Africa was my dinner in Pretoria with Koos Pauw, a philosopher then serving as the number three man in the Ministry of Education.  I had gone to Pretoria to meet with the director of the Human Studies Research Council….That evening I had dinner with the Director and Koos Pauw.  Our dinner table conversation was an eye opener for me.  Pauw was intelligent, relaxed, well-spoken, and utterly evil.  I imagined it was what it would have been like to dine with a sophisticated Nazi.  I challenged him about apartheid [my parents, you will recall,  had taught me to speak up if anyone passed an anti-Semitic remark at a dinner table, and this was the closest I had ever come to putting their advice to use], but he was totally unfazed by my objections, all of which he had of course heard many times.” 

It was obvious to me that no philosophical argument could bridge the gap between us.  Since I had chosen to throw in my lot with, to make common cause with, to choose as my comrades those who had committed their lives to the defeat of Apartheid, Koos Pauw were enemies.  Oh, I did not stab him with my dinner knife, nor would I have slipped poison into his beer if I had been carrying some.  Perhaps some of you will find “enemy” needlessly provocative and strong.  But we were on opposite sides of a struggle and we were there because we had made choices.  Were there Afrikaners who rejected Apartheid?  Indeed there were.  Were there Americans who chose to cooperate with the Nationalist government?  Of course there were, including the then President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.

Matt and I do not disagree at all in the belief that we ought always to “look… for ways that people with diverse conceptions of the good [can] nonetheless live together.”  The alternative is civil war, and although there are times when civil war is unavoidable, Americans should know as well as any people what its costs are.  But the effort to find peaceful resolution of differences does not rest – it cannot rest – on the belief that there are sound arguments for fundamental principles of morality, because such arguments do not and cannot exist.

Let us be specific for a moment.  There is a large group of Americans [a minority, fortunately] who are deeply, irreconcilably, religiously convinced that the termination of a pregnancy at any stage is the murder of a person with an immortal soul, and hence that both the doctor who performs the abortion and the woman who seeks it are murderers who should be charged, tried, convicted, and punished as such. Matt suggests that “[p]eople who reject the idea of living together in some way must be, at best, quarantined.”  Really?  The passive voice of that sentence leaves it quite undetermined who does the quarantining and who gets quarantined.  There is a large group of Americans [happily no longer a majority] who say it is wrong for my son to marry.  There are still very large numbers of people, most of whom keep their mouths shut, who believe that Black people are getting too uppity and should be held down.  And even now most of the people whose voices are heard in the modern version of the public square believe that no claims on a share of the product of our common labors can be allowed that threaten the monopoly ownership currently exercised by a small group of entitled men and women.

There is no objective pou sto when it comes to morality, not Revelation, not Natural Law, not Utilitarianism, not Kantian reason, not even the Original Position.  When all is said and done, each of us must decide,

Which side are you on?