The Birth of Ethics: Reconstructing the Role and Nature of Morality

by Philip Pettit, Kinch Hoekstra (Editor)

Imagine a human society, perhaps in pre-history, in which people were generally of a psychological kind with us, had the use of natural language to communicate with one another, but did not have any properly moral concepts in which to exhort one another to meet certain standards and to lodge related claims and complaints. According to The Birth of Ethics, the members of that society would have faced a set of pressures, and made a series of adjustments in response, sufficient to put them within reach of ethical concepts. Without any planning, they would have more or less inevitably evolved a way of using such concepts to articulate desirable patterns of behavior and to hold themselves and one another responsible to those standards. Sooner or later, they would have entered ethical space.

While this central claim is developed as a thesis in conjectural history or genealogy, the aim of the exercise is philosophical. Assuming that it explains the emergence of concepts and practices that are more or less equivalent to ours, the story offers us an account of the nature and role of morality. It directs us to the function that ethics plays in human life and alerts us to the character in virtue of which it can serve that function. The emerging view of morality has implications for the standard range of questions in meta-ethics and moral psychology, and enables us to understand why there are divisions in normative ethics like that between consequentialist and Kantian approaches.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

400 pages, Hardcover

Published November 12, 2018

About the author

Philip Noel Pettit (born 1945) is an Irish philosopher and political theorist. He is Laurence Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University and also Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He was a Guggenheim Fellow.

He was educated at Garbally College, the National University of Ireland, Maynooth (BA, LPh, MA) and Queen's University, Belfast (PhD). He was a lecturer at University College, Dublin, a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and professor at the University of Bradford. He was for many years Professorial Fellow in Social and Political Theory at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He is the recipient of numerous honours, including an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland. He was keynote speaker at Graduate Conference, University of Toronto.

Pettit defends a version of civic republicanism in political philosophy. His book Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government provided the underlying justification for political reforms in Spain under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Pettit detailed his relationship with Zapatero in his A Political Philosophy in Public Life: Civic Republicanism in Zapatero's Spain, co-authored with José Luis Martí.

Pettit holds that the lessons learned when thinking about problems in one area of philosophy often constitute ready-made solutions to problems faced in completely different areas. Views he defends in philosophy of mind give rise to the solutions he offers to problems in metaphysics about the nature of free will, and to problems in the philosophy of the social sciences, and these in turn give rise to the solutions he provides to problems in moral philosophy and political philosophy. His corpus as a whole was the subject of a series of critical essays published in Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Reviews

[Per Kraulis · Rating 1 out of 5]

The title of this book by Philip Pettit points to an intriguing and important question. As the subtitle has it, the goal of the book is "reconstructing the role and nature of morality." It attempts to analyze how ethics came into being. How did humans invent, or discover, ethics? A description of how ethics fits in with human evolution could potentially tell us a lot about both humans and ethics. But the way this book goes about it does not, in my mind, deliver the goods. The starting point is not very believable, and the explicit constraints put on the narrative by the author do not help. The result is disappointing. In fact, the most useful part of the book is the criticism of its main text by Michael Tomasello in a short section at the end.

The narrative begins with Erewhon, a hypothetical human society in which people can communicate by natural language, but in which ethics or morality as such does not exist. Pettit is explicit that this is a thought experiment. Erewhon has not actually existed. The question Pettit poses is: Given this state, how has ethics emerged? In my mind, this makes his narrative vulnerable to the same kind of criticism that can be leveled at John Rawls theory of justice, or for that matter at any hypothetical tale of how a social contract has been arrived at. The starting point is always open to criticism: Why define the starting point in exactly those terms? There is always the worry that the starting point has been designed to produce the justification of a particular moral theory that one desires. That is, the argument is not really a derivation from axioms, as it purports to be, but rather a construction of a particular set of axioms that gives the requested result.

Pettit posits several constraints on the narrative: it must be naturalistic, i.e. it cannot invoke any supernatural interventions. Fair enough; we are not interested in yet another explanation of ethics that tries to avoid Euthyphro's dilemma as stated by Plato. Another constraint is that the narrative must not rely on luck. Pettit view is that the emergence of ethics from within Erewhon must be a process that more or less inevitably had to follow. To rely on luck for this process to occur would be a kind of cheating, is my interpretation. To some extent, I can understand why Pettit imposes this constraint. But this unfortunately means that the theory will be proving too much. Evolution, in actual fact, and the emergence of novel features that it entails, contains an essential component of randomness, luck if you will. At no point in the evolutionary history of the ancestors of us humans was it inevitable that Homo sapiens would emerge. Therefore the idea that a narrative of how ethics emerged must rely on inevitability is too strong. It proves too much.

Tomasello's criticism of Pettit's text relates to the issue of cooperation. When Pettit starts his narrative with the existence of human language as a means of communication, Tomasello asks whether it is not in fact cooperation that was the starting point for why we even invented language. In his view, morality starts with the problems caused by cooperation, and language is a secondary issue in that respect. I notice that the cover of the book shows a painting "Group of five men working with a net". The men are not primarily talking, they are collaborating.

The book is not an easy text to read. At times, it seems that there is no progress in the argument, simply a stating and restating of a number of thesis, again and again. It has a number of words that recur in a vast array of permutations, such as "desiderata", "avowal" and "pledging". There is a lot of splitting up of issues into multiple subarguments in ways that do not contribute to clarity. Given the weakness of the argument, I cannot really recommend it.

[Csimplot Simplot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book!!!