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The self thus conceived, utterly distinct on the one hand from its social embodiments and lacking on the other any rational history of its own, may seem to have a certain abstract and ghostly character.
The appearance of an abstract and ghostly quality arises not from any lingering Cartesian dualism, but from the degree of contrast, indeed the degree of loss, that comes into view if we compare the emotivist self with its historical predecessors. For one way of re-envisaging the emotivist self is as having suffered a deprivation, a stripping away of qualities that were once believed to belong to the self.
I am brother, cousin and grandson, member of this household, that village, this tribe. These are not characteristics that belong to human beings accidentally, to be stripped away in order to discover ‘the real me’. They are part of my substance, defining partially at least and sometimes wholly my obligations and my duties. Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast.
Membership in social groups not accidental, but part of ones substance
the peculiarly modern self, the emotivist self, in acquiring sovereignty in its own realm lost its traditional boundaries provided by a social identity and a view of human life as ordered to a given end.
The bifurcation of the contemporary social world into a realm of the organizational in which ends are taken to be given and are not available for rational scrutiny and a realm of the personal in which judgment and debate about values are central factors, but in which no rational social resolution of issues is available, finds its internalization, its inner representation in the relation of the individual self to the roles and characters of social life.
But in fact what is crucial is that on which the contending parties agree, namely that there are only two alternative modes of social life open to us, one in which the free and arbitrary choices of individuals are sovereign and one in which the bureaucracy is sovereign, precisely so that it may limit the free and arbitrary choices of individuals.
The OG postliberal
Thus the society in which we live is one in which bureaucracy and individualism are partners as well as antagonists. And it is in the cultural climate of this bureaucratic individualism that the emotivist self is naturally at home.
When the Catholic mass becomes a genre available for concert performance by Protestants, when we listen to the scripture because of what Bach wrote rather than because of what St. Matthew wrote, then sacred texts are being preserved in a form in which the traditional links with belief have been broken, even in some measure for those who still count themselves believers.
Mozart’s freemasonry, which is perhaps the religion of Enlightenment par excellence, stands in as ambiguous a relationship to The Magic Flute, as does Handel’s Messiah to Protestant Christianity.
In Latin, as in ancient Greek, there is no word correctly translated by our word ‘moral’; or rather there is no such word until our word ‘moral’ is translated back into Latin.
It is certainly, so I shall argue, just this deeply incoherent combination of the novel and the inherited which is the logical outcome of the Enlightenment’s project to provide a rational foundation for and justification of morality.
But it is in fact Kant who in almost every area sets the philosophical scene for Kierkegaard.
Central to Kant’s moral philosophy are two deceptively simple theses: if the rules of morality are rational, they must be the same for all rational beings, in just the way that the rules of arithmetic are; and if the rules of morality are binding on all rational beings, then the contingent ability of such beings to carry them out must be unimportant—what is important is their will to carry them out.
But he nonetheless believes that our conception of happiness is too vague and shifting to provide a reliable moral guide.
Moreover any precept designed to secure our happiness would be an expression of a rule holding only conditionally; it would instruct to do such-and-such, if and insofar as doing such-and-such would in fact lead to happiness as a result. Whereas Kant takes it to be the case that all genuine expressions of the moral law have an unconditional categorical character. They do not enjoin us hypothetically; they simply enjoin us.
On Kant’s view it can never follow from the fact that God commands us to do such-and-such that we ought to do such-and-such.
Practical reason, according to Kant, employs no criterion external to itself. It appeals to no content derived from experience;
But it is not just that Kant’s own arguments involve large mistakes. It is very easy to see that many immoral and trivial non-moral maxims are vindicated by Kant’s test quite as convincingly—in some cases more convincingly—than the moral maxims which Kant aspires to uphold.
The attempt to found what Kant takes to be the maxims of morality on what Kant takes to be reason therefore fails just as surely as Kierkegaard’s attempt to discover a foundation for them in an act of choice failed; and the two failures are closely related.
Kant’s failure provided Kierkegaard with his starting-point: the act of choice had to be called in to do the work that reason could not do.
responding to an earlier philosophical episode, that Kant’s appeal to reason was the historical heir and successor of Diderot’s and Hume’s appeals to desire and to the passions.
Hence those rules which enable us to decide between the claims of, and so to order, our desires—including the rules of morality—cannot themselves be derived from or justified by reference to the desires among which they have to arbitrate.
But in the very act of making this distinction he undermines his own attempt to find a basis for morality in human physiological nature.
Like Diderot, he understands particular moral judgments as expressions of feeling, of the passions, for it is the passions and not reason which move us to action. But he also, like Diderot, recognizes that in judging morally we invoke general rules and he aspires to explain these by showing their utility in helping us to attain those ends which the passions set before us.
It is clear that Hume’s invocation of sympathy is an invention intended to bridge the gap between any set of reasons which could support unconditional adherence to general and unconditional rules and any set of reasons for action or judgment which could derive from our particular, fluctuating, circumstance-governed desires, emotions and interests. Later on Adam Smith was to invoke sympathy for precisely the same purpose. But the gap of course is logically unbridgeable, and ‘sympathy’ as used by Hume and Smith is the name of a philosophical fiction.
Just as Hume seeks to found morality on the passions because his arguments have excluded the possibility of founding it on reason, so Kant founds it on reason because his arguments have excluded the possibility of founding it on the passions, and Kierkegaard on criterionless fundamental choice because of what he takes to be the compelling nature of the considerations which exclude both reason and the passions.
The project of providing a rational vindication of morality had decisively failed; and from henceforward the morality of our predecessor culture—and subsequently of our own—lacked any public, shared rationale or justification. In a world of secular rationality religion could no longer provide such a shared background and foundation for moral discourse and action; and the failure of philosophy to provide what religion could no longer furnish was an important cause of philosophy losing its central cultural role and becoming a marginal, narrowly academic subject.
Suppose that the arguments of Kierkegaard, Kant, Diderot, Hume, Smith and the like fail because of certain shared characteristics deriving from their highly specific shared historical background. Suppose that we cannot understand them as contributors to a timeless debate about morality, but only as the inheritors of a very specific and particular scheme of moral beliefs, a scheme whose internal incoherence ensured the failure of the common philosophical project from the outset.
Thus all these writers share in the project of constructing valid arguments which will move from premises concerning human nature as they understand it to be to conclusions about the authority of moral rules and precepts. I want to argue that any project of this form was bound to fail, because of an ineradicable discrepancy between their shared conception of moral rules and precepts on the one hand and what was shared—despite much larger divergences—in their conception of human nature on the other.
Ethics therefore in this view presupposes some account of potentiality and act, some account of the essence of man as a rational animal and above all some account of the human telos.
Presupposes metaphysics
Each of the three elements of the scheme—the conception of untutored human nature, the conception of the precepts of rational ethics and the conception of human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos—requires reference to the other two if its status and function are to be intelligible.
This scheme is complicated and added to, but not essentially altered, when it is placed within a framework of theistic beliefs, whether Christian, as with Aquinas, or Jewish with Maimonides, or Islamic with Ibn Roschd. The precepts of ethics now have to be understood not only as teleological injunctions, but also as expressions of a divinely ordained law. The table of virtues and vices has to be amended and added to and a concept of sin is added to the Aristotelian concept of error.
How religion changes classical ethics
and the precepts of rational ethics as the means for the transition from one to the other remains central to the theistic understanding
Where does grace fit in?
To say what someone ought to do is at one and the same time to say what course of action will in these circumstances as a matter of fact lead toward a man’s true end and to say what the law, ordained by God and comprehended by reason, enjoins.
Nonetheless the contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos remains and the divine moral law is still a schoolmaster to remove us from the former state to the latter, even if only grace enables us to respond to and obey its precepts.
anti-Aristotelian science sets strict boundaries to the powers of reason. Reason is calculative; it can assess truths of fact and mathematical relations but nothing more. In the realm of practice therefore it can speak only of means. About ends it must be silent.
Since the whole point of ethics—both as a theoretical and a practical discipline—is to enable man to pass from his present state to his true end, the elimination of any notion of essential human nature and with it the abandonment of any notion of a telos leaves behind a moral scheme composed of two remaining elements whose relationship becomes quite unclear.
Since the moral injunctions were originally at home in a scheme in which their purpose was to correct, improve and educate that human nature, they are clearly not going to be such as could be deduced from true statements about human nature or justified in some other way by appealing to its characteristics.
The injunctions of morality, thus understood, are likely to be ones that human nature, thus understood, has strong tendencies to disobey.
For although each of the writers we have been concerned with attempted in his positive arguments to base morality on human nature, each in his negative arguments moved toward a more and more unrestricted version of the claim that no valid argument can move from entirely factual premises to any moral or evaluative conclusion—to a principle, that is, which once it is accepted, constitutes an epitaph to their entire project.
Is-ought distinction
The same general principle, no longer expressed as a question, but as an assertion, appears in Kant’s insistence that the injunctions of the moral law cannot be derived from any set of statements about human happiness or about the will of God and then yet again in Kierkegaard’s account of the ethical.
There are several types of valid argument in which some element may appear in a conclusion which is not present in the premises.
This counter-example not only shows that there is no general principle of the type alleged; but it itself shows what is at least a grammatical truth—an ‘is’ premise can on occasion entail an ‘ought’ conclusion.
It follows that the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch nor the concept of a farmer independently of that of a good farmer; and that the criterion of something’s being a watch and the criterion of something’s being a good watch—and so also for ‘farmer’ and for all other functional concepts—are not independent of each other.
Hence any argument which moves from premises which assert that the appropriate criteria are satisfied to a conclusion which asserts that ‘That is a good such-and-such’, where ‘such-and-such’ picks out an item specified by a functional concept, will be a valid argument which moves from factual premises to an evaluative conclusion.
if some amended version of the ‘No “ought” conclusion from “is” premises’ principle is to hold good, it must exclude arguments involving functional concepts from its scope.
Where is-ought distinction might be true
it is when and only when the classical tradition in its integrity has been substantially rejected that moral arguments change their character so that they fall within the scope of some version of the ‘No “ought” conclusion from “is” premises’ principle.
But the use of ‘man’ as a functional concept is far older than Aristotle and it does not initially derive from Aristotle’s metaphysical biology. It is rooted in the forms of social life to which the theorists of the classical tradition give expression.
Attempts to disconnect Aristotle's ethics from his metaphysical biology
It is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that ‘man’ ceases to be a functional concept.
Within the Aristotelian tradition to call x good (where x may be among other things a person or an animal or a policy or a state of affairs) is to say that it is the kind of x which someone would choose who wanted an x for the purpose for which x’s are characteristically wanted.
