Chapter Five: Moral Identity
© David Weissman, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0197.05
Personal identity has several principal markers: the structure, look, and skills of one’s body; intelligence and sensibility in their several modes; purposes; and moral identity. Moral identity, absent free will, is the function of social roles and the accidents of one’s circumstances: the bills one pays. Acknowledge free will, and autonomy explodes: no longer the creature of my circumstances, I am responsible for roles I choose and for responses to situations I deplore. Kant worried that will is the only power one controls when intentions are thwarted by the complexity of the ambient world. But this is the burden of moral identity: each will shows itself as a distinct voice amidst the sea of contrary aims, inclinations, and deeds. Moral identity without free will is a mask one can’t shed; with it, the moral will is a force directing action.
Moral postures drift over a range, with variations as frequent as the virtual points on a line. My concern is the difference made to this variety by free will, an issue complicated by the two perspectives from which it’s discerned: the self-perceiving subject and his or her observers. These perspectives are imperfectly aligned. Both see moral identity as it evolves, but their judgments may not cohere: observers formulate an idea of an agent’s behavior while inferring his or her intentions; the agent challenges their view with his own. Integrating memories of his motives and actions, he reconciles their effects with his values, telling a rounded story that excuses his faults. Subjects usually credit themselves with meaning well; observers aren’t so sure.
We may suppose that moral identity is intrinsic, like height and weight, or that it’s assigned, like reputation. But neither is accurate. This chapter argues that we acquire it in four ways: i. by acting on behalf of one’s needs and interests; ii. by one’s choices and behavior when duty-bound to others; iii. by choices and actions resulting from participation in a society’s tribal or public life; and iv. by an agent’s self-appraisals. Which of the four dominates? How do they integrate and evolve over time? The chapter has four sections: one for each of these perspectives. The fourth reverts to the first: the perspective of agents assessing themselves while confused by moral ambiguity.
1. Three Perspectives: Agents
Vulnerability makes us self-interested, but dependent on others for resources and conditions that make us secure. This dynamic has contrary tensions: self-interest can’t be altogether disentangled from one’s relations to partners and public concerns. Moral solutions are responsive to both, though the concerns of others sometimes oppose one’s own.
1a. Moral will. Personal identity is established with a name, address, and (in the United States) a Social Security number. Self-interest, closer to one’s existential core, is a desire to live as needs, talents, or inclinations prescribe. Why call these interests moral? Because their expression is the authentic voice of the person having them, and because well-being is compromised when that voice is suppressed. Why is their expression a task for moral will? Because self-expression is, before any other function, will’s task. That role is disguised because personal traits and choices emerge in cross-currents where they encounter three other centers of moral gravity: the trajectories of other people, organizations, and established social practices. Agents’ responses to them are legible if they live in societies having well-established rules and practices: all of us observe the traffic code, but some cars are flashy and new; others are plain but serviceable. How much diversity is tolerable in a society that prizes coherence? There is an inclination to understand what other people want or do by seeing them in the context of standardizing rubrics. But what’s to be done if moral intelligibility founders for want of socially agreed styles or desires?
Social confusion doesn’t confirm the moral value of laws or imperatives, though their absence is notable because anarchy is a likely result when agents are deprived of guidance. This is our quandary: avoid incoherence, demand uniformity when moral ambiguity makes it likely that conceptions of self-interest will vary; or tolerate differences that defy rules or laws when circumstances and inclination provoke distinguishing responses. We’re generous when conceding that relationships vary; why not extend this freedom to individuals whose attitudes and practices vary from accepted norms while respecting Mill’s no-harm principle? For there is a middle ground: those who do no harm to others can safely be allowed to fulfill ideas of themselves, given our understanding that offense is not harm. Others need feel no right or obligation to impose their tastes or scruples on people having inclinations different from their own. These intruders may tell a story justifying their interference: it’s what their god requires. But this is a rationalizing excuse for their inclinations, however they’re explained or justified. For why, fear aside, should people tolerate those who hinder or abuse them if their actions are not harmful to others?
Moral will, so construed, is the power directing one’s intentions so far as they express one’s interests, talents, and the rules establishing social coherence. There is also this other understanding: it interprets moral will as an expression of self-identity and resistance. Often focused by vulnerability and grievance, it responds with anger or pride, given evidence that some personal aspect of race, gender, religion, or ethnicity isn’t acknowledged or respected. This is personal and moral identity as they pursue social recognition or esteem by way of political action. The coupling of diversity and democracy makes this demand justifiable and unavoidable, but my focus is different: it emphasizes moral will as the voice of agency. Grievance in the face of insult is one of its likely effects, but not its principal expression. That ground is agency: deliberation, choice, and action as they satisfy one’s interests or needs while expressing one’s intellect, sensibility, and duties.
1b. Judgment. Moral identity is a function of the judgments provoking choice and the will directing action. Declaring our needs, values, and reasons, we appraise our circumstances, choose our partners, and act. Judgment is quick if the cost of alternate choices is slight or if there are other choices to make and work to do; though responsibility is qualified when social values and interests supply convenient rubrics. Deliberation slows when choice is confounded by options that are mutually exclusive: stealing is bad, caring for others is good; though Robin Hood’s moral standing was ambiguous because he did both. What is one to do if feelings of duty, guilt, or fear intensify because costs are considerable either way? Resolution comes with judgments that are safe because conventional, or with choices that promise bountiful effects though costs are high or unforeseeable. Both inclinations establish a moral profile: others safely predict what we’ll likely do, given that will is constrained by habit. Soft determinism acknowledges this developmental limit on choice without yielding to the harder version: judgment’s determining conditions form within the deliberating agent as he or she responds to evolving circumstances, not only to affects more ancient (DNA or social caste, for example).
Judge and judgment are two of those allusive mental action terms that are freely used but hard to substantialize: we often affirm or deny one or another aim or plan without knowing how mind/brain does it. Judgment seems unproblematic when events are sharply defined, emotion is plain, and social directives elide with personal norms. Though it often happens that reflection provokes conflicting emotions while exposing complexity in one’s interests or situation: the pity and terror expressing the moral conflicts and intellectual complexity of Greek tragedies are emblematic. Social practice eases resolution by supplying formulaic answers, but complexities multiply. Having few conventional rubrics but many problematic situations, each of us makes judgments that express his or her singular moral posture.1
Moral posture is an agent’s cognitive-affective balance in its prescriptive, imperative mode: it develops over a lifetime of making and acting on one’s decisions, then appraising their effects. Yet history is not so determining that agents can’t deviate in ways confusing to observers: that happens because complexities evolve and because emotions change as we see and weigh them differently. Inclinations make us predictable, but insight is liberating. Altered gestalts impel altered judgments. Hume declared that reason is and ought to be a slave to the passions.2 He ignored judgment’s context: the understandings (accurate or not) that provoke and disrupt emotional responses.
1c. Privacy. Which actions are authentically one’s own when so much we do is determined by context, rules, and roles? There are principally three possibilities. First is Descartes’ affirmation—I am, I exist—a discovery repeated in the second couplet of a John Lennon-Paul McCartney song:
Would you believe in a love at first sight?
Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the time.
What do you see when you turn out the light?
I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine.3
What is the sense of “me again” accompanying every experience? Is it direct access to mind’s formative power when creating experience; or is this the experience of resonant sensibility (hearing music, feeling the wind)? Is one of these two the authentic test of selfhood? Or is there no direct measure because self-awareness is always compromised. For I only know myself when discerning the degree to which I satisfy pertinent rules or roles. This would entail that “It’s mine” is always socialized; I know of myself only what observers know of me.
Lennon, McCartney, or Sartre4 wouldn’t agree. Each would likely insist that he is never rightly perceived by others. They hear a voice or acknowledge his vocation when all should look past the message when listening for the messenger. But what could that mean: are we looking for the existential core or the raw, unschooled sensibility? The core isn’t observable to third parties; even the person conscious of him- or herself can only say “me” or “me, again.” Are we nevertheless close to the existential truth if we imagine a person remade by a different education and circumstances, as if his or her untutored sensibility might be identified when abstracted from its historically contingent formations? The verificationist dilemma is here: what could we know of capacities and inclinations that would have emerged had education or opportunities been different? We turn away from innate capacities out of regard for the only evidence we have: namely, observable achievements. Presented with unschooled children, teachers make the plausible assumption that education will transform them as surely as water boils when heated. This becomes a strategy and doctrine: knowing little or nothing of our children’s unformed talents, we defer to education’s likely effects. Ignoring innate variations, hence the distinctive private spaces they condition, we forsake the idea that we educate raw capacities. Opportunity and motivation may expose talents that education ignored, but most students will never know what they might have done or been.
Our narrow focus seems reasonable because teachers don’t have access to student talents, apart from practices that hone student skills. But this is a narrow window, one responsible for our cramped perception of human nature, achievement, and satisfaction: we see what’s done, hence the skill for doing it, not what could have been done. We teach the average skills appropriate to effective social and economic roles; we’re careless with people having skills or imagination out of scale. People who could do more are suppressed or marked as troublemakers. They fight back or struggle, then capitulate. We say little about a student’s nature because nurture is the only way to reveal it. Closer analyses of DNA may fill this gap when its structure is correlated to practice and behavior, though our emphasis on conformity provokes a question we can’t answer: is deficient behavior evidence of insufficient capacity, poor training, or resistance?
Agency, properly extended, would signify unknown wells of capacity in the undifferentiated many. It would acknowledge people frustrated; those who believe that something of worth in themselves is unexplored. Why honor or nourish an unknown; why extend the idea of agency to acknowledge inferred powers unless circumstances are propitious to their cultivation and use? Our habitual response is careless; most cultures ignore the intelligence of women without acknowledging that anything valuable is lost. It’s easier to suppose that the uneducated are uneducable. But two costs subvert us while unacknowledged: the loss of useful skills, and the frustration of people who feel unfulfilled or cheated. Privacy is a sanctuary, but also a trap, a place to which one comfortably withdraws, unless it’s a site of grievance. People perpetually denied the opportunity to express themselves are rankled by disappointment, however well disguised. This is costly: calculate all that’s lost when fractions of a population are furious or demoralized when their talents are ignored.
1d. Idiosyncrasy. Kant assumed the affinity and good will of people who share values and circumstances; his imperative would reduce conflict among agents who may provoke it merely because of complexity, confusion, or competition for scarce resources or opportunities. But those are not the limits of our differences. How are agents to be cut from the same moral cloth when each has a character developed from a specific history, an intellect formed by certain challenges, and a sensibility cultivated in disparate cultures or domains? Why be surprised, given resources that qualify us for judgment, action, and reflection, that we are morally variable while satisfying society’s common tasks or loyalties?
Why suppose that people who vary in either way will apply the categorical imperative with the same results? Is lying always the same violation; does it imply the same community-destroying effect if you construe it as purposively spreading misinformation, while I regard it as strategic subterfuge? Kant was aware that personal desires and moral perspectives diverge; his imperative would make them cohere without violence. The imperative needn’t be applied in ways that suppress variety because difference—wear clothes that suit you—doesn’t always provoke conflict. It doesn’t suffocate personal and situational differences until construed as the demand for a framework of universalizing rules. Never be late, no disloyalty, worship no other god; let everyone show his or her commitment to the local community by respecting its rules. This is good sense when the rules are traffic laws, though Kantian uniformities violate moral sense in other circumstances. Don’t feed this child, until everyone in your situation could feed whom? This child, some comparable child, or all children?
Is there a common ground for morality when we abstract from the idiosyncrasies of people or their situations? Kant ignored variability and ambiguity by supposing that moral identity has a simple condition: wills are true to a rational standard—consistency universalized—if they satisfy the categorical imperative. Morality of this sort resembles a pure note, low-D or high-C, rather than an octave located somewhere on the scale between them. Why so many notes? Because moral identity is fluid as we move in and out of complex situations where significant aims and virtues conflict: choices have good effects while motives are confused and information is imperfect, or we’re clear headed and well informed though satisfaction of one value requires betraying another. Societies cohere morally because participants agree about the values and aims appropriate to everyday affairs, not because all have the same response to situations perceived differently.
What is the least society requires of me as I make decisions appropriate to my aims? Kant’s aim was a rule that inhibits choices and actions sure to sabotage the possibility of community, hence the freedom of individuals otherwise going their separate ways. Coffee or tea? Your choice because neither threatens community. His standard—adherence to a principle that would inhibit community-subverting choices—isn’t cogent if action is to be efficacious in two domains that don’t always cohere: the community where cooperation makes us productive and rules mitigate conflict, versus the private lives of that society’s participants.
A law requires that one stop at red lights. Every Kantian would observe it, but what should a man do when driving his pregnant wife to the hospital moments before she delivers? Private interests are often threatened by universal laws; does a logical standard (consistency) override individual welfare, especially when inconsistency (violation of a universal) is the only cost? What good does the universal serve if not the distributed well-being of those it covers. If the driver collides with other cars when going through a red light, we have a disaster that focuses a moral dilemma; but if not, we have a logical conflict—the universal and its exception—misdiagnosed as a moral conflict. Does this imply that individual, situational choices always trump social/moral universals? No, it affirms that universals have no moral authority apart from the instrumental value achieved by promoting stability and reliability when individuals negotiate social complexity at minimal cost to themselves, their partners, and neighbors.
This pragmatic test is sensitive to the variability of people, their capacities, situations, and attitudes. Violinists play together in a section that sounds as one when its virtuoso yields a little to the slower speed and articulation of his partners. Theirs is a difference of skill; moral variations have different conditions. Their bases are the coupled faculties—principally intellect, sensibility, and self-control—responsible for the moral identity acquired as we choose and act. Intellect discriminates and integrates; sensibility is feeling and taste, a cultivated power for perception and delight that responds as quickly to people, sport, or circumstances as to ideas, music, or food. Where all see or hear, it is sensibility that explains what we look for and enjoy. Self-control is founded in habits and attitudes that routinize thought and will as they respond to ordinary tasks and circumstances. This is character, our stabilizer.
Acknowledge this range of powers for discriminating one’s interests, feelings, needs, and aims, then consider the diversity of roles and rules, partners and circumstances where these powers are brought to bear: why is it plausible that this diversity of motives and circumstances should yield to Kant’s simple rule? Isn’t it too simple when everyday life requires the coordination of two sometimes conflicted aims: maximize social stability, while facilitating individual choice and well-being? Kant deferred to his rational ideal—universality and consistency—though his standard is crippled by contrary aims (save the young or save the old when you can’t save both) and by social interests at cross-purposes with individual needs and abilities. He rightly feared personal choices that sabotage the possibility of choices that are coherent when generalized, but societies are not defenseless: people know and discount their liars; banks raise interest rates to cover losses from borrowers who renege on their loans.
Moral identity is the product of an unstable coupling: it emerges when personal idiosyncrasies are formed by roles, reciprocities, and vocations while disciplined by laws and traditions. A singer’s talent is formed by her teachers, then by her parts and partners. She learns scruples appropriate to rehearsals, performances, and critics. We might describe her ascent to universality with Hegel, but that would lose all the detail of her history: how could she sing any role without drawing on the particularity of moral intuitions acquired as a maturing woman in a culture that biases experience in ways peculiar to itself? Yet there are also countervailing, stylized, and generic forces. For much we do is learned, when established structures or traditions limit our choices. We speak our parents’ language, learn their virtues, and think largely as they did. Accessible vocations are those of one’s society, so one’s job is likely a variant of those common or familiar to one’s neighbors.
Roles one acquires entail a moral posture for which practitioners are responsible: being a lawyer, nurse, or lifeguard carries moral and legal duties specific to these roles. Does this imply that the impression of personal choice is an illusion? This isn’t the whole burden of responsibility because every such duty is less than the weight of moral identity. Josef Mengele was doubly culpable: because he violated his oath as a doctor, and because conscience didn’t countermand his sadism. Moral identity is the inhibiting force that intercedes when roles or circumstances encourage behavior averse or abhorrent to morality.
1e. Constraints. Rules, laws, or vocation give us social standing, hence some degree of respect, while disguising the anxiety—shared by all—that deference to rules is prudent because we are vulnerable and all the more fragile because competitive. We learn these two constraints: give everyone his or her due; live and let live. Collaborate when doing so is mutually useful; find viable bases for cooperation when interdependence is acknowledged. Are there discrepancies in nature or society that embellish some while degrading others? Rebalance life’s chances if the answer is yes. Finding causes but no justifications for these differences, finding them sustained by embedded inequities, we challenge or correct them.
This is moral identity of the second order, moral identity as it amends the unregulated effects of the morality governed by rules or roles. People accepting this responsibility justify the trust of their fellows, for this is the posture of those who participate in Rousseau’s general will: it wills the good for all. We acknowledge that others want well-being as much as ourselves, and that many won’t likely achieve it if we are not personally and collectively self-regulating. There is no guarantee that altered practice, personal or social, will not have other malign effects, but it is practical wisdom that deliberation and experiment are conditions for altering the unintended effects of personal or social behavior. This is the morality of creatures whose lives are managed by their powers of self-control, not merely by whim, accident, or the unforeseen effects of complexity and conflict.
The morality described here has three constituents and an override. Inclinations are the point of reference: what do I want to do or be? How do I go about doing or being it? Next are my roles, their tasks and duties. Third are the practices, rules, and laws that constrain social relations. The override? Acquiring foresight; practicing inhibition. We modulate one of the three when its exercise distorts one or both of the other two: we relent, for example, when a partner’s vulnerability supersedes his or her role and duties. Which of the three is usually determining? Ideally, there is balance among them: we are effectively socialized while distinctively ourselves. But this is smug when said, and easier said than done.
1f. Interiority. Which duties are determining? Morality’s three social anchors (the relations of intimates, relations that are commercial/vocational, or holistic) suppress autonomy in the name of affiliation, reciprocity, loyalty, efficacy, or safety. Resisting them makes one alien or an outlaw, yet individuality can’t form without psychic space. Nietzsche described its genesis in a passage quoted more fully above:
Meanwhile the organizing ‘idea’ that is destined to rule keeps growing deep down—it begins to command; slowly it leads us back from side roads and wrong roads…it trains all subservient capacities before giving any hint of the dominant task, ‘goal’, ‘aim’, or ‘meaning’.
Interiority is our sensitive core. Favored pursuits give it purpose; meanings and taste give it valence. Interests are common, though inclinations are personal: I’m at peace with myself when doing this well (whatever it be). “To thine own self be true” is advice from the center.
Where does interiority form? Farms or a town—Dewey in Vermont, Emerson in Massachusetts—are likely sites. Cities are oppressive to those who hate congestion, but they liberate initiative and experiment in people who prize anonymity. Urban complexity intensifies specialization and competition: one needs quick wit to discern opportunity, then education, connections, or money to seize it. Abilities are honed for specific tasks in law, finance, medicine, science, government, or education, but all who succeed are distinguished by intellectual and emotional autonomy. Communities of professionals are, in the best of circumstances, self-monitoring and self-correcting. Each of their commercial, industrial, or cultural spheres has a discipline where behavior is reliably safe and steady. But these vocations are loci of privilege and advantage, not the only sites where privacy resonates. No one escapes interiority, because human physiology guarantees it: everyone seeks a clear path through his or her near-world. Public policy is challenged because no social order of any scale does for all what cities do for some.
1g. Meaning. Personal identity is often fixed by the accidents of birth and one’s circumstances, though the array of identities available in principal cities is reminiscent of the masks and costumes offered in popup shops that open before Halloween: one chooses what to do or be from an array of personas. Trajectories that were once unimaginable are now familiar and tempting. But duties are askew, moral identity is unstable when core loyalties are misaligned. Before, character, church, and commerce assured that people would have habits and expectations likely to change slowly, if at all. Now, when irony or cynicism makes commitment less assured, we do what we’re afraid not to do, or we do it because it’s advantageous. Where commitment is shallow and willed, we use laws and inducements—money, status, or threats—to enforce it.
What explains this shift from disputes about practical priorities—pay the grocer before paying the electric bill—to seismic shifts of attitude regarding one’s obligations to families, work, the church, or state? A principal reason is that practical interests aren’t a sufficient basis for distinguishing the zones of moral concern. More than life-preserving, each taste or affinity is also life-affirming, because infused with meanings that justify or explain one’s commitment. Why be loyal to this spouse or team? Because each positions the agent in a firmament of meanings. Loyalties would be unintelligible or unworthy without them. For meaning is one of the two ways we locate ourselves in the world: is this Jerusalem, Riyadh, or Rome; a city with a mayor and a street plan, or the place where human history acquired significance? Visitors from Mars need warning signs or maps; but there are no maps for people who have lost their faith. Where do they go when the signs of personal and moral identity have altered or lapsed?
Meanings, like practical needs, color-code our circumstances: this, not that—apples, not stones, are edible; this, not that, is my child or church. Moral identity is an array of vectors illuminating the people, things, practices, or tasks we value. Their worth is often doubled: eating is a devotion, an opportunity for thanking our god for his beneficence: work, as in medicine, is the duty of care. But this balance—need or significance—is unstable. We dress for warmth and propriety, with or without regard for style. But fashion may be our over riding aim, so we’re careless about discretion and safety: she wobbles on six-inch heels.
2. Three Perspectives: Nodes
Nodes are steady sources of effects that create, sustain, or affect other things. Agency is nodal because human alliances make us dependent on one another, but also responsible to and for one another. Systems too are nodal: families, businesses, and states have consequences for constituents, others, and themselves. Socialized autonomy, zone morality, and tradition are three venues where nodality is morally consequential.
2a. Socialized autonomy. Morality is often construed in either or both of two ways: one makes regulation personal and private by pitting reason, judgment, or discretion against impulse or appetite; the other uses law and punishment as a guarantor of acceptable behavior when self-control isn’t reliable. These strategies have converging aims: subordinate desire for the sake of personal discipline and public order; enhance safety and productivity by regularizing individual actions and their effects. We justify our rigor by saying that people are often reckless.
This, number twenty-two of Jonathan Edwards’ Resolutions, is a sample of attitudes that may have been common in 1723 when America was mostly a frontier:
Resolved, to endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness, in the other world, as I possibly can, with all the power; might, vigor, and vehemence, yea violence, I am capable of, or can bring myself to exert, in any way that can be thought of.5
Self-love was familiar to Augustine, Descartes, and Spinoza. All affirmed it as a universal instinct, though Edwards reduced sensibility to grievance and self-assertion. This is autonomy unmoored from the reciprocal causal relations that sustain productive activity. They embody negative feedback: argue too forcibly and friends ask you to stop. Hence the equilibrium where interiority—deliberation, judgment, and choice—defends autonomy while acknowledging shared aims and one’s partners.
The analogy of a previous chapter—woods or a copse—is useful here. Each tree has roots, trunk, and foliage. Each is physically autonomous and responsible for effects on things of the sphere it creates and sustains, but all owe some part of their well-being to the environment established by the ensemble. Extrapolate to people in social environments: individuals establish families, neighborhoods, businesses, or states that nest and overlap, creating environments where individuals are relatively autonomous while mutually sustaining.
This contrariety—autonomous but mutually affecting—expresses off setting pressures. We know and hardly disguise our personal aims and frustrations, but all is discounted when familiar accounts of social activity emphasize standard responses to generic circumstances. Individuality is only numeric difference: we are young or old, buyers or sellers. Vocations, genders, and fads have a similar effect when invoked to classify us indiscriminately. This isn’t foolish if similarity is all that matters, though the effect is pernicious—idiosyncrasy loses relevance—when individuals are stripped of all but generic agency: I am whatever marketing reports say of me. But is it true that my aims and values are only those of my kind?
We may blame that implication on laws and the conditions for social coherence, but they don’t, in themselves, justify this Procrustean bias. Laws that coordinate complex activities are essential facilitators; traffic laws, for example, separate moving cars for their mutual safety and efficiency. There are many such techniques for separating agents having an identical aim: different keys for the locks of different homes. Yet separation and safety, like traffic lights, are means, not ends. Every individual has an essential devotion to his or her well-being, but also tastes, inclinations, and signature ways of satisfying common aims. Each is a node from which multiple effects ensue, some intended, not all controlled.
Trees in a wood are overlapped by the roots and canopies of their neighbors. Effects proliferate because reciprocity relates each node to some or many others. There are opportunities for doing as one likes, but sometimes the whole is a plenum where each space is confined by other spaces and their occupants. Late for an appointment, I stop a cab that stalls in traffic: autonomy languishes because qualified by events. No agent fully controls him- or herself, because all respond to circumstances and other agents. Each has a trajectory; but all are encumbered by genes, history, aims, and circumstances.
Psychic posture is the social product of these powers and constraints. It has character, attitudes, intellect, and sensibility, but its shape is elusive; like a rough surface, it reflects light in several directions at once. Steady when seen from one perspective, it has a different cast if one steps left or right. This variability is apparent in communities of every size, though most conspicuously in cities, because their complexity enables diverse choices while restricting autonomy. Each precinct is a complex of niches where choice is qualified by restrictions imposed by partners, neighbors, rules, laws, or local customs. Residents usually restrict themselves to the familiar streets of home and work, though local transport facilitates ventures into neighborhoods where they encounter people whose attitudes and expectations differ from their own. Nothing untoward usually happens because public encounters require behavior that is reliably benign throughout the city. Suppose, however, that a rider mistakenly leaves a bus or train at a stop different from his own. The neighborhood is unfamiliar, people are different. Uncertain that the attitudes and look of his local neighborhood are acceptable here, he treads carefully. If diffidence is a bad idea, swagger would be reckless. How do we bind disparate neighborhoods and tribes if one travels abroad merely by taking a city bus?
Is moral identity always local, so postures amicable in one precinct look belligerent when addressed to visitors from another? Several responses soften apprehension and avert conflict. One is repression or disguise in people who are careful not to betray their differences. Are they guarded out of respect for others; because difference is punished; or because one represses traits that elude social approval? Conflicts are sometimes provoked by the reasonable fear that opponents would deny us life or the means to live, but one may be prudent without being defensive or belligerent. Why not acknowledge that otherness is usually benign; grant what others need to live, then consider issues that still divide us? Many disputed interests assure that conflicts will be hard to solve or never solved, but this attitude would mitigate disputes if conscientiously practiced. It isn’t encouraged because of fear, and because we imagine that a first strike will devastate the other side. Though usually it doesn’t, so conflict intensifies until we destroy one another. States and corporations do this to one another; people do it too.
Conflicts are envenomed by personalities whose self-esteem requires their control of others. There isn’t always redress for the worst of them, because their victims are intimidated or seduced. This too is socialization, though its pathologies are complementary: the autocrat needs deference; his admirers find courage and standing by identifying with their shameless guide. Their relationship is the inverse of agent-health. The autocrat’s psychic autonomy is often crippled; he’s desperate for admiration. His admirers want self-esteem but can’t achieve it without attaching themselves to one who sees evidence of his worth in their rapture. Compare contrarians or conscientious objectors; both reject the autocrat’s blandishments because they dislike thoughtless consensus. Contrarians reject views that may seem plausible, because they feel entrapped by collaboration. Conscientious objectors reject affiliation because they’re offended by ideas or practices that seem false or perverse. Neither can tolerate an autocrat’s wiles. Yet socialization is, quixotically, one of autonomy’s conditions: we’re free to be ourselves, doing whatever is distinctive about us, in the company of people with whom we collaborate.
2b. Zone morality. Zone morality signifies moral interests and codes that apply in four domains. One is the zone of autonomous moral agents; the three other zones are morally consequential social relationships: systems that are core, vocational/commercial, or holistic (civil, statist, or tribal).6 Each is a node, hence multiply consequential; every agent participates in zones of all four kinds. Core systems are families and friendships. Interactions are regular; members are mutually familiar. Roles are well-defined but supple and diverse: one is a younger sister, parent, or friend. Transactional relationships—in stores, work, or school—are normalized by formalities specific to a task: student and teacher, customer and clerk. Each responds to the other in ways appropriate to his or her roles. The relationships of totalizing systems—states or religions—are more detached: there are civic, criminal, and commercial laws, religious rules and rituals.
Every such relationship is moral by virtue of its fulfillment conditions: namely, the causal reciprocities that bind a relationship’s participants. These are systems that embody the two kinds of feedback: negative and positive. Negative feedback implies both a range of viability, and a response by one or more of a relationship’s members if that range is exceeded. So, buyers and sellers continue to do business while prices rise or fall within a range, though business is disrupted if prices exceed that range at either end: buyers stop buying if the price of goods exceeds their limit; sellers stop selling if it drops below a limit. Each advises the other if the rise or fall exceeds their tolerance; business resumes when the price falls or rises to a range that is viable for both. The control on positive feedback is steady satisfaction: people pour into a rising stock market, as miners rushed to California when there seemed to be endless gold in mountain streams. How is morality embodied in causal reciprocities? It establishes the satisfaction conditions for a relationship’s members: this (whatever it be) is what each participant need do to maintain an exchange relation to his or her partner.7 Each has the same message for the other: be honest and consistent; give me what I need to maintain our relationship. Disappointed expectations—no more gold—quash feedback of both sorts.
Core systems satisfy basic interests and needs. Moral demands vary among families or friendships, but certain duties and attitudes structure the feedback relations common to all: receive support but take care that you also give it. Commercial or vocational relationships are narrowly functional: their efficacy requires that participants satisfy their roles: buyers and sellers, students and teachers. Obligations are stark: work for a salary; study for a grade. Corporate—holistic—relations are typically prefigured by its rules or laws, then expressed by its practices. A strong church or central government reduces conflict by imposing its rules. A democracy responds by encouraging participation in forums where competing claims are argued and negotiated; its legal procedures promise fairness. Systems of both sorts encourage the consistency that promotes social stability and predictability: coordination is eased because actions required are those expected.
Imagine that nothing breaks the rhythm of a small community: population and resources are stable; people are productive and mutually respectful. Members are predictable and safe when circumstances are benign because all defer to the mores prescribed by local stories and rituals. But this isn’t uniformity. Members acknowledge their different interests and attitudes: young and old, men and women, shopkeepers and their customers. Variability expresses the paradox that stability is fluid to some degree as practices alter with circumstances, meanings, and one’s perspective. There is diversity, but social diversity, like that in art or music, can generate harmonies or dissonance: practicalities cohere, or they’re mutually inimical because of scarce resources, political discord, cost, or inefficiencies. Shall our town pay for schools or transportation; unable to agree, we do neither.
What is stability’s ground: its structured zones—families, businesses, the state—or the autonomy and discipline of its citizens? Abraham Lincoln, or the Union Army? The answer is surely both: no stable systems in any zone without people to sustain it. What percentage of the population does it require? Numbers vary with circumstances, but we know when the number is too low because basic systems are degraded: schools, marriages, or businesses can’t fail everywhere without affecting every system coupled to them. Now consider that the practical foci of social zones are augmented and distorted by the personal zone. Its focus is oneself: what do I need or want? Practical decisions that were fraught when social zones were the only focus—work or family—are intensified by guilt or lust. Which has priority if I want an expensive dinner when my children, or the neighbor’s children, need shoes? We may allege that choices are principled, though evidence usually reduces to the practices historically favored by the local community. Does local sentiment affirm that neighbors are responsible for the welfare of other people’s children? Because if not, one isn’t blamed for ignoring them.
The four zones fill most of the space where morality is invoked, but not all of it. There are, for example, casual or chance relationships that seem to fall beyond all the zones: someone trips on a leg carelessly extended; cars drench a pedestrian when turning a corner in the rain. But these are not anomalies; they fit the corporate, totalizing zone where reciprocity requires the recognition of others’ dignity, and a standard of behavior like that of Mill’s no-harm principle. For we are often in mutually affecting relationships with people who are otherwise unknown. Those occasions provoke the obligation of care: knowing that we may affect people adversely, many of them unknown, we control what we do and how we do it. Discretion at these extremes expresses our tacit self-regard. For we, like Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Mill, ground morality in an idea of ourselves and our deserts before generalizing to all who are like us. This, like the idea that we are souls made in the image of God, expresses the secular hope that there may be empathy and safety in the presence of difference.
2c. Tradition. Tradition is history learned osmotically: we absorb its beliefs and practices while hearing its stories and performing its rituals. Its lessons and meanings tell us who we are; its history distinguishes us from those who are alien because they don’t share our memories. This is tradition from the inside, the warmth and comfort of the tribe. But tradition is fragile. Clothes, haircuts, or sociality distinguish sects in secular cities where other visible differences have lapsed. Nor does history survive in many people beyond loyalty or aversion. This is a significant loss to societies where traditional stories and practices were the moral glue infusing young and old with standards, permissions, and prohibitions. Communities reduce to aggregates; the analogy to forests of separate trees is ever more accurate when anomie8 pervades us. We reduce to ourselves, hence the vulnerability of people having free will: responsible for what we choose and do, we can’t hide behind social identities we’ve renounced. Women once expected men to open doors for them; men expected patience from women less tolerant of their foibles. Each is somewhat disappointed in the other; many of both won’t defend the old way
3. Three Perspectives: The Whole
Agents perceive that each is one of many, and that the whole is an interest distinguishable from those of individual agents, core and intermediate systems. All are helped or hurt by totalizing interests: divine grace or climate change, for example.
3a. Kant and Hegel. Kant’s emphasis on will’s autonomy pries individuality from the tide of unconsidered choices. Sovereign wills exhibit their freedom by withholding assent from practices that can’t be universalized without contradiction: pay your bills, don’t lie. Kant’s intention was sober: limit diversity at the point where it subverts order and productivity. He knew that people go different ways, but Kant is ambiguous: which has priority in his thinking: order and uniformity, or freedom and difference?
This uncertainty is intensified by several dubious assumptions: i. Kant assumed that contexts where decisions are made are often enough alike to be considered identical for the purposes of universalizing a maxim (a rule or plan for prospective action). But are they identical beyond a superficial inspection? Imagine three people waiting on a station platform when there is space for just one additional passenger on the arriving train. What’s the next step: should no one board; should all the current riders descend because only one can board? Which of the three should have priority—the person going to work, another to a movie, a third to a doctor—if urgencies differ? This example is no problem for Kant, you say, because these differences disqualify their situations as identical. Alright: suppose each of the three is going to a doctor, though for ailments of different severities. Still not identical? Refine them more: each suffers the same illness to the same degree, but in different parts of the body. Identity is elusive. Is it secured by considering candidate mental states; are agents enough alike to be considered identical when comparing their aims, values, and history? Surely not: the interests and motives of one may be unlike any other. Circumstances may never be the same. ii. One may never have information sufficient to know that an action would satisfy Kant’s imperative, because observable effects ramify forever, while others, some immediate and nearby, are never observed. I don’t know the totality of my effects, pernicious or not, when testing a maxim. iii. Kant’s test for consistency is too simple: do nothing that everyone in situations of a kind can’t do without contradiction. You order chocolate, I order vanilla: this seems coherent, though conflict is a short distance away if the choice of either entails bankrupting costs for the other. iv. Kant’s examples—credit and lying—mislead because they are narrowly chosen. Imagine a culture where people hesitate to marry anyone their parents oppose. Would the culture teeter if one person were to violate parental wishes? Would confidence plunge were five to do it? Would credit or honesty cease if several or many were to cheat or lie? We know that doesn’t happen, because credit and communication persist though some people ignore Kant’s imperative.
Kant’s argument for withholding assent derives from Descartes’ fourth Meditation: don’t affirm any maxim that can’t be consistently universalized by everyone in circumstances like those of the agent; inhibit the will until reason is satisfied that all the implications of a proposed action are clearly and distinctly perceived.9 That formulation frees will of its immediate social burden (other people’s expectations) when its freedom of action is reduced to two possibilities: don’t choose because the categorical imperative isn’t satisfied (a maxim’s implications aren’t clear and distinct), or affirm a choice that satisfies the imperative, however banal (everyone breathe).
This outcome evolved when Hegel evoked reason to control sensibility. Kant required only that the cacophony of desires be regimented by employing the imperative to eliminate the maximally destructive effects of contradiction: no trust if all can lie, therefore, no collaboration. This could be elaborated with a series of ad hoc prohibitions, each alleging a risk to social coherence if generalized: no gambling, no adultery, no fast driving. But social control requires measures more systematic. Hegel supplied the rationale: reason should introduce a suite of laws, rules, and roles.10 Max Weber’s efficient bureaucrats were Hegel’s clerics: they could be trusted to rationalize any public service that seemed disorderly.11 Kant (like Mill) tried to honor the autonomy of individual moral wills; let them do as they wish up to the point of violating the categorical imperative (or Mill’s no-harm principle). Hegel supposed that we are imperfectly moral or free until private wills have achieved the perfected coherence, the righteousness of the Absolute: moral laws are to conduct and conscience what natural laws are to nature. The latter are known; the former are willed. Nature is created as the Absolute entertains and affirms ideas that nature embodies; we internalize the moral law by affirming and applying it. The convicted murderer is elated on the way to being hanged because he acknowledges that this sentence locates him accurately in the moral order of being; there is no gap, no discrepancy between his desert and his will. This is theology repurposed as ethics: human consciousness loses its finitude by rising to the consciousness of the Absolute; will is relieved of moral error when godhood is achieved by consciousness thinking itself: I desire only what reason and a god’s law would have me desire. What is moral autonomy in our less exalted human domain? Just the affirmation of laws that socialization prescribes: the Ten Commandments, for example.
Kant might have deplored Hegel’s coercive morals and their implications for personal differences and freedom, though their shared emphasis on the universal applicability of mind’s transcendental faculties is reminiscent of Plato: normative reason ought to prevail over ephemeral personal impulses. Kant’s divided account of mind—an ego that is empirical and/or transcendental—entails that will, too, is ontologically complex: one part is responsible for motor action; the other makes decisions from outside space and time. That dualist formulation (one that locates mind both in the world and out of it) obscures the circumstances of people having scanty information and imperfect self-control but demanding partners, exigent duties, and scarce resources. His emphasis—reason is noble, desire is base—loses its categorial force if reason is understanding, a faculty that sorts, organizes, and appraises information through the narrow window of need and opportunity. Kant’s holistic emphasis—what all should do—is an aristocratic interest, one that abstracts from the urgencies and vulnerabilities of improvident people. He left no moral space for those whose choices are forced.
3b. Justice. What can justice be to those for whom autonomy is a principal value? Does self-love trump justice? For everyone is self-concerned: all have memories and plans focused squarely on themselves. What’s to be made of other people, if one’s purposes are foreground, while their concerns recede into obscurity? Where is the middle way between Hegel’s absolutes, and the variability of inclinations, priorities, and states of affairs?
Justice requires perspective: all can say, with Descartes, I am, I exist. Each has a claim on resources needed to satisfy wants and aims; their satisfaction usually requires the competence and support of other people. We come to acknowledge that each person has duties and aims comparable to one’s own, and that cooperation is usually the only way to satisfy all. Mutual tolerance is nevertheless slow to gel if every day is a competitive struggle for partners and resources: Live and let live isn’t compelling while defending oneself from someone who doesn’t believe in it. Forbearance comes more easily if one starts with ample opportunities, and a network of family and friends. There, where collaboration is assumed and empathy is generous, distributive justice seems easy because partners are recognizable versions of oneself.
Is it preferable that we cite empathy rather than prudent self-interest when defending the laws and practices of a just society? Fellow-feeling is critical to its emotional tone; but implementing a just distribution of rights and resources doesn’t go well if equity is widely resented. Distributed rights and benefits are resisted where factional advantages make Kant’s starting point—the Kingdom of Ends—unintelligible. Rousseau made unanimity—an equal voice for every participant—a condition for founding a society that originates in the general will and a social contract.12 But people preoccupied, vain, competitive, or tribal don’t accept the equalizing implications of saying “I am, I exist.” Distributive justice is their bête noire because agency is solipsistic: one doesn’t see beyond the clash of people opposing one’s anxiety or indulgence. Or a circle of entitlement founded in tribal meanings—of loyalty, purpose, or belief—establishes the only reality acknowledged.
Injustice is endemic. Why is it tolerated? Because of solipsistic fantasies, greed, and the pleasure of controlling other people. But also for this reason: corporations, schools, or teams are organized for the efficient production of goods or services: not everyone is qualified to play third base. Is it good enough that outcomes are unequal because talents and opportunities aren’t equal? Marx was prescient: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.”13 This is contentious at times of scarcity. But suppose that productivity is ample, and that education and opportunities inspire discipline and deter free riders. Why isn’t this a reasonable policy in favorable circumstances? Why on this condition would we, why do we, tolerate the indulgence of some at cost to many?
4. Reflection. Ardor and frustration are well distributed at all three levels: individual, nodal, and the whole. Failure is sometimes useful if one acknowledges complexities we can’t avert.
4a. Self-regulation. Kant had emphasized that action’s effects exceed will’s control. Moral responsibility starts here, where agency is causality and causal power includes self-control. Others hold me responsible for acts chosen and performed when I could have acted differently, or not at all. I am, on these occasions, praise- or blameworthy for effects that accrue (absent extenuating conditions: “you couldn’t have known”).
Learning to play the piano requires self-control: where do my fingers go? Roles in businesses and families require it, too: we learn what to do, with whom, where, and when. Many tasks are difficult, but each has lesson plans or directives that ease the way. The self-regulation appropriate to moral identity has heuristics, but no book of instructions; rules are generic, though moral perception is specific and nuanced. We learn it by considering action’s effects, their costs, and beneficiaries. The surgery was a technical success, but the patient died: was it worth doing? This isn’t a calculation for which there are a priori answers. Appraisals inform a discipline’s procedures, as they’re improved or proscribed. But equally, each is a moment of self-reflection in the negative feedback loops that monitor individual choices and actions: is this a procedure I should be doing?
Self-regulation is capacity and opportunity disciplined by oversight—inhibition, deliberation, judgment, and choice—given information about partners and resources, costs, and benefits. Most choices are made without this conscious inventory, though we imagine being able to justify our aims and values. Hard determinists suppose that this persuasion is window-dressing; we may be self-inhibiting for historical reasons, but not because self-regulation is a response to opposition or opportunities discerned as we assess a problem. This was the question of Chapter Two: do acquired abilities enable us to address novel or surprising situations; or is every solution conditioned by the tide of previous responses? Oversight and control are a test of this dispute because they exploit skills acquired as we learn to regulate ourselves in distinctive circumstances: learning the skills has a history, though any occasion for applying them may have no precedent in one’s experience. Why did you turn left? I saw a gas station.
Deliberations provoked by oversight are three dimensional: forward, current or lateral, and past. What is our aim, and the plan for achieving it? How do we mark our progress? All this is prospective. We also look to the rear: what have we learned? Reflection spreads laterally as we consider the complex webs of mutual dependence that condition progress: what are we doing, how, and with whom? We know the partners directly engaged, while ignorant of supply chains unknown and unimagined. Are there duties owed to partners more remote, debts we don’t recognize or pay? Oversight enhances efficiency; it covers these bases to some degree, while reducing costs to those affected, near or far.
Regulation appears in a different light when oversight is contrasted to stubborn persistence. Peirce described four methods for fixing belief.14Authority, a priori intuition, and scientific method prescribe or correct private opinions. Tenacity, the most primitive of the four, is fiercely personal. Adherents resist revision or correction because they know or imagine no better way, though tenacity needn’t be crude: Edwards’ “vehemence” and Napoleon’s mastery were memorialized in William James’ “The will to believe.”15 Persistence sometimes works: circumstances are transformed, facts on the ground are created when tenacity is allied to initiative and imagination. Notice too that action sometimes resists oversight, and that tenacity is action unadorned by prudence and regulation. For their relation expresses the suppressed tension between action and its control. We discount the pleasure children have when banging on a piano’s keys; we want them to learn how to play. Yet we’re aware of a competing interest: regulation is inhibiting; we lose spontaneity and power. This is tenacity’s beauty (and often, its abuse): it sets agency—unrefined, honest, and bold—apart from its critics and controls.
4b. Responsibility. Consider the phrases responsible for and responsible to. Every agent is responsible mechanically for causing its effects. Responsible to has the additional implication that agents are responsible to those requiring justification for one’s choices and actions. Demands and responses would be rhetorical if hard determinism were correct, because there would be no preventing the effects of a causal lineage. No one would be responsible for his or her effects, or responsible to anyone for justifying them because we, no more than wind or weather, would have freely chosen them. Yet there are forks in the road, situations large and small that may go different ways. People discern and seize these opportunities, making choices undetermined by their causal histories.
Morality enters the flux of causal activity when effects are determined, all or in part, by our intentions, actions, and the range of our control. For then, there are questions: Who is affected, how? What are our duties to them? Answers simplify our judgments of people and their conduct when perfect overlap—doing effectively what is beneficial, reasonable, and prudent—would be perfect virtue. Yet this is an unreasonable aim, given that it requires finesse, appropriate resources, and omniscience about the character and range of one’s effects.
Tornados are responsible, but not culpable, for their effects. We are both: being responsible, we exhibit our moral identity by regulating ourselves. But there are ambiguities. Here are two sets of questions—distinguished as 4bi-viii and 4bix-xiii—and possible answers. The first set is pragmatic: i. What are intention’s morally legitimate aims and concerns? ii. Which effects should we foresee? iii. Do available controls prevent unwanted effects? iv. How should we choose when an intended action will probably affect other people or things in disparate ways, some to their disadvantage? v. What are agents’ duties to those adversely affected? vi. Effects ramify; how far does responsibility extend into remote, unforeseeable effects? How far should it extend? vii. Should we limit intention or action when foresight and control are known to be insufficient? viii. What is one’s responsibility for social behavior one doesn’t approve and can’t prevent?
My responses tilt in the direction of prudence and responsibility. This is a consequentialist inclination, one sensitive to effects that ramify unforeseeably in complex situations. Reckless behavior sometimes punishes many people, including the agent responsible. Cooperation and the general will require the personal discipline that would reduce these effects.
4bi. What are intention’s morally legitimate aims and concerns? Actions that enhance well-being or minimize harm to those affected.
4bii. Which effects should we foresee? Those normally resulting when people act as intended in familiar circumstances. We also extrapolate: what could happen?
4biii. Do available controls prevent unwanted effects? Some controls—inhibitions—are internal; other—laws, circumstances, or unwilling partners—are external. Acting many times a day, often carelessly, we assume that conditions are amenable to the actions intended, and that adequate controls are in place. But we aren’t surprised that action misfires for want of personal care, or that circumstances weren’t suitable to choices that seemed reasonable when made.
4biv. How should we choose if a considered action would likely affect other people, things, or ourselves adversely? We drive cars knowing that the pollution they cause is bad for us and the climate. We choose a short-term advantage—easy transport—for a long-term cost to health and the environment. Prudence would have us make other arrangements, though individual drivers aren’t equipped to alter large-scale solutions (roads and cars) for distributed private advantages (driving as one chooses). Measures of harm for personal choices (opening an all-night bar) are often shallow and self-interested. A tolerance for pain and disruption—for oneself or others—is partly cultural: the more we value initiative, the less we calculate its effects.
Why are we reckless? Partly because action leaves so much unchanged, and because we lack graphic evidence of middle- and long-term effects. There are no pictures of cancerous lungs on cigarette packages sold in the United States. Tobacco companies don’t want us to see the risk.
4bv. What are agents’ duties to those adversely affected by their actions? Foresee the damage, when possible. Repair or compensate for it when foresight was too little or late. Courts and insurance companies have rough measures of the compensation appropriate to damaged people or things. Action is careful in proportion to the knowledge that agents will pay for their carelessness. But this is legalistic rather than principled: foresight and actions based on reasonable assumptions are a more stoutly moral defense
4bvi. Effects ramify; how far does responsibility extend to unforeseeable effects? How far should it extend? Every action has effects that exceed our ability to track them, but that isn’t an excuse for ignoring the likelihood of effects we can anticipate. What happens if children aren’t educated? Nothing grave tomorrow, but severe costs for days to come.
4bvii. Should we limit intention or action when foresight and control are known to be insufficient? What should be done when future effects are undecipherable? Socrates advice was plain: don’t act if you can’t see far enough ahead to confirm that action’s implications aren’t malign. But this advice falters when the effects of inaction are unacceptable. A patient needing surgery dies on the operating table: should the doctors have proceeded? The risks were known; there was no good answer.
4bviii. What is one’s responsibility for communal behavior one doesn’t approve and can’t prevent? What is one to do when society has policies or practices one opposes? This is sometimes the effect of being a minority when the majority prefers a different course. One may be patient: experience and judgment may alter opinions when the issue is next considered. Though decisions may never be corrected because the majority always favors what was done or because it never considers that its actions have effects that are pernicious and irreversible. Personal responses may be no stronger than irritation; but what if they rise to moral outrage: what should such people do? Demonstrate; try to rouse others. But what if those who respond lack the social or political influence that would alter policy or practice? Is there a point at which moral outrage may be regarded as protest enough? Is one excused of responsibility for practices one opposes if one has expressed indignation?
Dispersed individuals, vulnerable, and afraid alienated but mostly passive, are no challenge to complex systems acting for reasons that are tribal, economic, or political. Organization alone may frustrate moral judgment, as tyrannies and slave states do. But organization alone is not always the issue: America abuses immigrants at its southern border despite being democratically organized. States and societies of its design are more consistently benign because their procedures were designed for equity. Yet government and bureaucracy are moral agents of the second order. Designed to minimize the harm they do, they regulate but can’t always control people responsible for official choices. Does the state do horrible things in our name because of officers protected constitutionally from our strictures and remorse; are we complicit in their crimes whatever our reservations? We’re trapped in a political system designed for good will and self-correction. That design betrays us if elected officials and constitutional controls are too lame to withstand willful leaders.
Questions of the second set are more theoretic: ix. Am I responsible for anything I choose to do or be, given that DNA, circumstances, and educational history are decisive for all I do? x. Is moral responsibility additional to causal responsibility? Is the moral burden incrementally different from the causal burden? Are there are extra-material principles—whether natural or conventional—supervening on our actions such that the morality of an act is founded in the satisfaction or violation of these principles, not merely in the act or its material effects? xi. Moral responsibility is uncertain when circumstances are complex. A first cause is sometimes hard to identify. Who started the quarrel that eventuated in a death; for what reason? xii. Are we praise- or blame-worthy for a moral difference if we haven’t chosen it? Stepping in front of a car saves a child’s life, because the driver sees me, the adult, when he hadn’t seen the child. But I, too, hadn’t seen the child or acted on her behalf. Do I earn moral credit, or only recognition for my causal role? Is choice the desideratum: the act is moral only if chosen when its effects are foreseen? xiii. Is moral education additional to education that prepares one to make causal differences? xiv. One defers to authorities because of their power. Is that because power is their right; because power is intimidating; or because we believe that authority is virtuous?
These are questions that might be asked of any intention, action, or effect. The range of possible answers is indeterminate because each of the variables has a range of finely differentiated values. We are saved these large numbers because circumstances, partners, resources, and laws usually reduce to the small range of values acceptable within a culture or tradition. Stray outside approved values and you risk slipping into zones of infinite reproach. You didn’t know that your mother-in-law was allergic to scotch? Should you have asked?
The diversity of variables and their values is not the end of moral trouble, because choices and actions are complicated by layered contexts of zones and meanings. Two are conspicuous: contrary demands are made by two or more of the core, vocational, or civic zones, or by the interpretive frameworks (church and school, for example) that infuse choice with significance. One yearns for simplicity when actions approved in one zone or framework are condemned in another. Kant supplied direction, but his imperative is not the solution when zones or meanings are mutually confounding. Not every conflict is resolved when all participants tell the truth.
4bix. Am I responsible for any part of what I am or do, given determinist strictures? This issue resolves in two ways: hard determinists believe that there are no free choices; the soft version affirms that information, values, and interests—not ancient precedents—are determining when emergent capacities for imagination, thought, or language address situations for which history has no responses. Why call ahead when late? To alert someone waiting for me. But why is she waiting? Because we agreed to meet, not because our meeting was foreseen and arranged in ancient times. The hard alternative requires that every agreement between independent beings express a synchrony established at the beginning of time. We’re to believe that history perpetually resolves its complexity, all its parts in harmony. If I call, she’s forewarned. Though hard determinism implies—when conflated with Leibniz’s internal relations—that I needn’t bother to call because, consciously or not, she’s alerted already.
Purpose and responsibility might be adult fantasies: make life significant by instilling a sense of duty and contingency; encourage us to believe that what happens is up to us. But this explanation is more troubling than reassuring: designing and executing nature’s harmonies would be enormously expensive in attention and effort. No agent less powerful than an omnipotent god could do it. Agree with Descartes and Leibniz that a god is the only cause, and there is no obstacle to saying that we have no responsibility for anything. The alternative is less theological: it explains our adaptation to current circumstances by citing emergent powers, current circumstances, and each person’s intentions, skills, information, and scruples. They enable the choices and actions with which one responds to the ambient world. Are we deceived by trying to master time, circumstances, and our nature; why believe that we live into the future if all of us are playing out a history we can’t override or redirect? These are silly illusions if each of us is a complicated windup toy. But we resist the idea that every current causal relation is the present moment in trajectories that meet or diverge because of a cosmic design or its determining natural laws. There is this simpler explanation: interventions in situations unforeseen are calculated, controlled, and often effective. All are enabled by agents who do or can inhibit responses while calculating the action most likely to satisfy partners or themselves.
4bx. Is moral responsibility additional to causal responsibility? Is the moral burden incrementally different from the causal burden? Local peasants catch rabbits on the lord’s estate. The groundskeeper does it, too, but they’re guilty of theft; he does it with the sanction of his job. Is this a conventional difference founded in social norms, or a qualitative difference in the act, its performance conditions, or its effects?
Probably the greater part of moral activity is in the habitual performance of one’s duties. There is no difference between the moral and causal aspects of choice and action in these cases: parents care for their children; people work as colleagues or partners expect. Seeing one or the other, causation or duty, in the work they do is a function of perspective. Though a difference is sometimes visible: effects fall short of an agent’s duty, because childcare is haphazard; or discrepancy goes the other way when friends or neighbors exceed reasonable standards of care. Actions often satisfy social norms because people learning what to do typically learn behavior prescribed by a norm. They may hardly register that standard behavior is also the standard for satisfying one’s duty. Social norms are usually sufficient to achieve desired effects—children are nourished and schooled—though effects like these aren’t so elevated that morally committed agents can’t do better.
This issue—the relation of moral to causal responsibility—is also pivotal in discussions of free will. Causation acquires its moral face when voluntary action or inaction affects people or goods they value; the moral side is effaced if the two elide. Theologians exculpate God when explaining evil by supposing that finite souls have free will; more than causes, we have judgment and the ability to discipline our passions. Evil is our fault.16 What would be implied if we didn’t have free will? There would be no distinction between actions and effects that are causal, and those which are both causal and moral or immoral, because we would have no power to intervene in the causal tide. Hard determinism would befall us. Hence the challenge of Chapter Two: confirm the distinction between causality, simpliciter, and moral causation without invoking immaterial souls or Kant’s transcendental ego.
Someone feeling himself pushed accidentally inhibits the inclination to push back when all are standing in a crowded subway car. Live and let live, we think. This is the vow of people competing amiably for resources, opportunities, or space; though mutual hostility is also possible, and sometimes expressed. Which is the viable response? Either may seem appropriate given one’s circumstances, but neither is extra-material because each is a coping strategy designed to maximize one’s advantage now or over time. Nor is the choice immaterial if judgment is mistaken: you respond to an elbow without retaliating only to be knocked down. We make decisions based on information and values that include safety and well-being. Self-defense—a moral power and cause—is their adjunct. Morality sometimes rides on the cause.
4bxi. Moral responsibility is uncertain when circumstances are complex. Moving toward the exit, you step on someone’s foot. Was there space to avoid her; were you being careful? Yes, I lost my balance when the bus stopped abruptly. Fixing responsibility is straightforward when an effect has one sufficient cause—”You called”?—though not when several or many causes would have been sufficient to produce an effect to which one’s action contributed. Uncertainty is challenging for agents who take responsibility for making the difference at issue; it’s an opportunity for those who wish to disguise their effects. We limit these ambiguities by reducing choice, hence responsibility, to rules: what do they require; what was your role; did you act as the rule prescribed? Discerning what was done under the aegis of rules enables us to assign responsibility to the participants, though most tasks engaging several or many agents are accomplished with discipline, but without rules. People shopping in a busy market go their separate ways while employees stock the shelves. Who is responsible when people slip and fall because customers tracking slush from outside have made the floors slippery? Not individual customers? Not the management that mopped, and spread sawdust? Moral responsibility isn’t easily apportioned when there is no rule for dividing it. Three issues stand out in circumstances where any judgment or choice is plausibly challenged: bxia. judgment; bxib. duties near or far; and bxic. inhibition:
4bxia. Judgment: Everyone is active to some degree in situations of various kinds. Some actions and effects are morally indifferent, but all may have consequences that are morally sensitive. Those are effects on people, their interests, or the environment. What’s to be done, or averted? We appraise our circumstances, consider our values, and rank our priorities. Choice and action are quick because habitual, or slow because we deliberate when circumstances are complex.
Practical experience values safety, predictability, cooperation, and mutual respect. Rules and rule-bound practices defend these values; behavior is moral to the extent that it satisfies them. Many such rules are formulated and imperious, but many more—thanking a cashier, holding a door for the person behind—are subtle and familiar, but uncodified. Deontologists want us to know that rules of both sorts may have few or no exceptions, yet there seem to be no occasions when one or more values aren’t compromised in situations where two or more conflict: sustaining one, we concede the others.
Rules are the standards on which we rely when deciding what is permissible, but how do we decide what to do when applying a valued rule would violate a valued practice (telling the truth at cost to an honest man)? This is the task of judgment: having learned relevant values and the means for satisfying them, we rank competing interests or values. Is this determination any kind of demonstration? No, other people, with other interests, would decide differently because they disagree about circumstances or likely effects, or because they rank interests differently. Acknowledging this variability, respecting other choices, we make our judgments and act accordingly. This is the “situation ethics”17 disparaged by people who prefer the severity of exceptionless rules: they never lie. And one agrees: truth-telling is a condition for cooperation, efficacy, and social stability. Yet there are other values. Hence the ambiguity of moral choice: what is best to do when serving one value violates another?
Evolution is slow, but change is often quick: will is free to experiment within the domain of elastic rules at the frontier, where circumstances are uncertain or unforeseen. This is morality in a Nietzschean space, where agency creates, tests, and justifies its choices. Old rules are adapted to new situations; or we adapt to circumstances of our making when new practices stabilize our altered conduct. Consensus forms, most of our life-sustaining values survive, but we’re unsteady. How much change can we anticipate; is it likely that the remote effects of current actions will be appraised with material, moral, or aesthetic values like those approved today? Will our heirs rue effects that seem desirable to us?
4bxib. Duties near or far: Agency is moral in the respect that intentions and behavior are responsive to the interests and well-being of others and oneself; purpose is steady as we try to make circumstances favorable to partners, duties, and our interests. Most tasks are common to all; crystallized norms—rules, laws, roles, or traditions—stabilize behavior, while making it predictable. Yet solutions vary with circumstances and change with technology and aims. Choices appropriate at one time, in one locale, may be unsuitable later or at any time in another place. Are there also duties to people and things remote in space or time, duties incurred because they or their interests are helped or harmed by things we do? Uncertainty about this moral burden is a reason for agency’s variable focus: here and there, short term and long. We may try to anticipate our long-term effects but doing that effectively requires knowledge of circumstances that may not resemble any we know.
4bxic. Inhibition: Some things shouldn’t be done because rules, roles, or traditions preclude them; learning what to do and how to do it, we also learn when not to act. This is the essence of Kantian morality: do no harm to the conditions for sustaining community. There is also a margin for choice where care and control—prudence, respect, or discretion—override inclination or opportunity. Which is suppressed: action or the thought or desire motivating it? None but the agent may know which is inhibited or why.
4bxii. Are we praise- or blameworthy for a moral difference if we haven’t chosen it? Imagine that a careful driver strikes a pedestrian who runs into traffic without warning from behind an obstacle making him invisible to traffic. The driver is a cause of the accident, though he bears no moral responsibility for it. This is an example of the difference between agents and agency. Agents are causes, whatever their character and whatever the character of their effects. Agency is causation with purpose, responsibility, and control. The driver had no intention of causing an accident; driving carefully with no control of its victim, he had no responsibility for hitting him (though vehicular law rules otherwise).
Kant warned that one never controls the effects of one’s choices, hence his belief that will is the only power we control.18 This ignores the considerable evidence that agents often produce intended effects. For we are nodes: rightly praised or blamed for our intentions, choices, and actions.
4bxiii. Is moral education additional to education that prepares one to make causal differences? Military training is the inverse of medical education. The Hippocratic Oath infuses action with moral concern for those whom doctors treat; military education reduces concern for enemies. This difference expresses the contrary values that frame human interests and action. We educate for this diversity: doctors to heal us; a military that defends us. Fact and value seem fused; students and trainees are discouraged from distinguishing them. But one can distinguish them: soldiers herding prisoners, like doctors working for violent regimes, are encouraged to avoid excess. But moral discretion is fraught: how does one inhibit the dominant impulse required by the work one is recruited to do? There may be no recourse short of refusing the job.
4bxiv. One defers to authorities because of their power. Is that because power is their right; because power is intimidating; or because we believe that authority is virtuous? Constitutional authority is assigned to people filling offices within the system of relations prefigured by a state’s foundational laws. Their authority extends only to the particular duties of their respective offices; it terminates when they leave office. The character of their authority—its force and applications—is manifest in the founding plan or its elaborations. It may have been designed with the purest of intentions; though a state’s officials sometimes misconstrue their authority as a right to interpret its applications in ways that violate its aims. We the citizenry hesitate: we’re respectful of the state’s authority; we don’t want to believe that its officers are outlaws abusing their positions. But we’re skeptical: we know that authority is not essentially virtuous. We need to be willing and ready to use constitutional means to control or terminate officials who believe that legal authority is a weapon defending personal interest.
4c. Empathy. Relating to other people often feels mechanical; there’s something to be done, little time to do it. Partners are utilities: work goes better because they’re efficient; or we’re annoyed because they slow it down. But there is a contrary impulse, one that may hardly show: we’re sometimes attracted to other people out of affection, sympathy, or respect. Emotionally binding responses are an evocation of core relations to family or friends. Some people believe that this response is prefigured in every mortal’s deference to his or her god. Though explaining it doesn’t require an appeal to the supernatural: one is more likely to recognize feelings in others if comfortable in oneself. Some cultures formalize warmth for others in the salutations exchanged between buyers and sellers when entering or leaving a shop: each acknowledges that the other’s dignity is more significant than a possible sale. People dismayed by the harshness of city or business life often look for ways to intensify the exchanges of feelings; this is the “spirituality” of which they speak. One achieves it with others, but equally when it’s provoked by nature, music, or poetry.
Sentiment is the moral engine of Mill’s Utilitarianism, though empathy is purged as a moral motive in Kant’s Groundwork and (for all but its dedication) in Mill’s On Liberty. Judgment is its necessary condition, given the risk that sympathy will be perceived as naive or weak.
4d. Conscious/unconscious. Self-awareness is often missing when choices are made and action ensues, but should we infer that our frequent experience of choosing because of intending or acting because of deciding is always illusory? Careful studies suggest that consciousness is incidental to many actions and their initiating decisions.19 But it would be odd if this were always true. Conceding that introspection is an imperfect lens into mental functions, granting that its evidence is often misdescribed, is it sure that consciousness is always misleading or incidental? Does evolution usually do things in vain? This question isn’t evidence or an argument, but it should make us suspicious of claims that introspection is always unreliable. Is that also true of percepts, dreams, and headaches?
Moral identity is precarious because it’s suspended between motives that are often unconscious and one’s awareness of rules, roles, or laws. One recalls Plato’s characterization of the man who feigns good intentions while having no interest in any benefit but his own.20 Social harmony requires that he be controlled, though moral identity is cosmetic if appetites control him while he feigns submission to social rules and practices. This tension is identical to the one that unsettles autonomy: does moral identity pivot on attitudes and behaviors society prescribes; or is it qualified and revised by each person’s understanding, sensibility, and interests?
Freud’s three-part distinction—Id, Superego, and Ego—tracks this dilemma. Id signifies subconscious drives and desires that would sometimes be destructive if expressed; Superego indicates their controlling social constraints; Ego implies acquired powers for self-regulation.21 These three trace a Hegelian triad: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But the progression implied is too facile if conceptual only: for how does Ego achieve autonomy if independence is suppressed by mechanisms of social control? Freud also alerts us to another issue central to moral identity. The story I tell of my moral posture is an aestheticized summary of my history; one that reconciles and justifies, often without acknowledging costs, fault, or motives. How accurate is it to the unconscious motives and passions that energize my choices and actions?
It isn’t surprising that disagreements about selfhood are commonplace: self-perception (self-persuasion) may vary considerably from the motors of agency. There is, however, this control on a story’s accuracy: does it square with the evidence known to observers? How close is one’s impression of his or her moral posture to theirs; which is more accurate if there’s a discrepancy? Conflicts are frequent: others see my actions and effects; I counter by citing my intentions. But disputes can be resolved when actions misfire if there’s accord that agency is a cause having effects: what went wrong: plans or motives? We learn what to fix, what to avoid.
How accurate is the perception of one’s moral identity when many of its triggers are unconscious? The discrepancy seems reduced as one ages: there’s less one does that’s surprising. But the implication is alarming: selfhood is real, but elusive; we have moral identity, but only a distorted idea of the attitudes and values provoking us. Hence the persuasion that moral identity resembles an unbalanced three-legged stool: one leg is the characterization of people who accurately predict what I’ll do, given situations like those previously observed; another is the rounded moral story—the apology—I tell of myself; a third is the uncertainty of future behavior given the unpredictability of responses that elude repression in situations that surprise both myself and those who observe me.
4e. Equity. Anger and alienation are often the effects of having talents but no opportunity for discovering what they are, or how to use them. Compare the many people educated to high standards. Ambitious and capable, neither threatened nor angry, they relate amicably to others while pursuing aims for which talent has prepared them. Marx imagined the initiative and autonomy of medieval craftsmen. We learn as much by watching someone carrying a double-bass down subway stairs; doing it is clumsy, but he knows where he’s going. Self-alienation would be minimized if talent and training were matched by opportunity. Frustration would be reduced because personal depth, initiative, and self-regard would be cultivated and acknowledged. No economy we imagine can be as productive as we desire while responsive to the particularity of all its members. But the burden shifts: how do we compensate the many people whose autonomy is sacrificed to the organizational features of the economies we have? Are there no substitutes, no supplements, for goods, stories, and games? Is the unconscious a sink where Ego atrophies because punished, bribed, or afraid?
Would we be bland if all were saved from the distress and confusion that come when talent and purpose are blunted or denied? Only a little. The opposition prefigured in Freud’s dialectic—Id or Superego—would be largely drained, but life might seem too generous, too forgiving. Less ambition might entail less discipline, with no guarantee that one’s judgments or choices would cohere.
4f. Self-appraisal. How well am I doing it; how do others see me; is this what I should be doing? Commentary may be distracted and forgiving or careful and severe. It’s impelled by a desire for well-being or by the anxiety that one’s actions are substandard or damaging to others; let me see what I’m doing, the better to control it and myself.
People lacking self-awareness seem decorticated; they resemble windstorms with no measure but their impact.
Aristotle construed well-being as happiness:22 one achieves it by tempering appetites, establishing viable relations to other people, and using one’s skills. The result is eudaemonia, a steady feeling of well-being. Discovering and educating one’s talents seems a topic better suited to morale than morality, though both are relevant, because well-being is a perpetual aim, a duty to oneself and a hope that’s slow to yield. Happiness is often conflated with pleasure for the good reason that the words signifying them often have the same referent: “Are you happy? Yes, I’m pleased.” But the two are sometimes distinct. Imagine a parent awake all night with a child whose temperature rises inexorably. She prays for relief until it comes: his temperature falls quickly; he stirs. His mother would be exultant if she weren’t so tired.
John Stuart Mill distinguished three kinds of happiness/pleasure: animal, intellectual, and moral.23 Animal pleasure and its sources are familiar to all. Intellectual pleasure is different in kind. The pleasure that comes with sugar or drink is intense, addictive, distinguishable and separable from its sources. Intellectual pleasure is lambent, hard to isolate, and always dependent on the continuing support of the activity promoting it. Do you like algebra or poetry? You don’t get the pleasure they provoke without engaging them. Moral pleasure is, again, different in kind: there is no pleasure, Mill wrote, like that of taking responsibility for the well-being of another person.
He ignored two other sorts of moral happiness, both implied by Aristotle’s remark that happiness is the accompanying tone of activities that use one’s faculties appropriately. Powers include those common to all—perception, thought, feeling, and will—but also one’s talents. Athletes are never so alive as when playing their favorite game; but that is also true of card players and pilots. Hence this other source of happiness: imagine a nurse who dreamed since childhood that this would be her working life. Doors opened, chances fell in line, and now, close to retirement, she looks forward and back declaring herself content, no regrets, the ego ideal of her childhood long ago realized and sustained. The well-being Aristotle described brightens her days and relations to other people. She’s happy; they see it. Animal pleasures are episodic; they come and go. Happiness of this sort abides. But this isn’t everyone’s state of mind. On Liberty is oddly abstract; there is hardly a phrase that evokes fellow-feeling or responsibility. Yet there is an exception: Mill dedicated the book to his late wife in paragraphs having a confessional quality all but unknown in modern philosophy.24 Death is deplored for many reasons, but one most affecting is the wound to happiness: there will be no personal renewal in the presence of a beloved child, partner, or friend. Why is it moral? Because one is diminished: grieving for another, but also for oneself. An agent reasonably asks of himself: Am I happy? The answer depends in part on the perception of his moral posture. How is it appraised; how does one measure the morality of his intentions, or the actions they provoke? There are two criteria, one social, the other personal and private. The answer is a function of the two, though their sum is problematic because their separate estimates don’t always cohere.
4g. Guilt. Moral identity is also weighed by this other variable: how are others affected by my aims and actions; am I virtuous? Granting that plans don’t always go as intended, how much guilt lodges in the design of my aims and their likely effects? We’re saved embarrassment because conscience is often rigorous: guilt or inhibition flashes stop when passion, advantage, or one’s job says go. Descartes’ Meditations has a complementary emphasis: suspend beliefs or practices whose truth or cogency is unsupported by evidence; are they accepted as true or moral merely because one affirms what others say or do? Descartes refined his warning in three words: doubt, deny, refuse.25 Renounce laws and practices that make life predictable, while having no other justification.
Skeptics make others uncomfortable: what motivates them? Contrarians predictably oppose whichever thought or practice draws their attention. Conscientious objectors are more detached: unmoved by innocuous things, they challenge whatever violates their principles. The rest of us are stolid; we honor personal scruples and social duties without excessive calculation. A question that objectors might put to the rest of us is the inverse: what would we have to do—what must be done in our names—for us to grieve or feel guilty for harms others suffer? This is two things; how to accept public responsibility—how to be known—for acts harmful to others; and how to let that responsibility penetrate one’s sensibility—I helped do this. Public responsibility is easier because no one is likely to turn on a neighbor and blame him for effects ascribed to both. We take cover by hiding in crowds, where guilt or grief seem reduced because each is saved from feeling the weight of the moral burden, a load further reduced by face-saving confessions of weakness. How guilty could I be if I had no power to prevent the event, and have no way to avert its recurrence? Distress intensifies in people who dare to stand alone; those are the conscientious objectors who feel guilty merely by virtue of living in societies responsible for effects they deplore.
4h. Moral ambiguity. A will is moral, whether its effects are good or bad, when it controls a person’s aims and actions. An effective moral will is, accordingly, the measure of one’s moral identity. What does she want; what does he do; where, when, with whom, and why? Answers may vary, as when turning a kaleidoscope radically alters the display. There may be several reasons for the change. Four are principal: i. Rules or laws sanctioning behavior may be inconsistent. Endorsing one bars the other: be generous, except to enemies. Conflict is apparent in the relations of the various zones: respect for fellow-believers; scorn for those who don’t share our beliefs or practices. ii. Autonomy differentiates agents who satisfy the same rules or practices: some people drive slower than others, because of their concern for the safety of all; others do it to frustrate the drivers behind them. iii. Intentions change: I no longer want the car I thought I needed. iv. Altered circumstances provoke the realignment of interests and values: diminished health makes one more tolerant of others moving slowly.
These are independent variables. Their complexity doesn’t foreclose prediction; agents are typically consistent or regularly inconsistent. But they do complicate an observer’s expectations. Does she know better than I what she’ll do? How pressing is her aim; will she compromise a principal value in order to succeed? Moral ambiguity is sometimes the guise of people whose self-interest is their dominant value; other values shift opportunistically with circumstances and the promise of personal satisfaction. But ambiguity is also characteristic of those whose respect for others is unqualified; they, too, choose and act in ways that alter with circumstances and changes in themselves.
We live amidst the moral anarchy that comes with dislocations of family and local life, opportunist business practices, and bad luck. What would I do if the local police began beating the homeless or arresting law-abiding immigrants? I’m not sure. A simple formula—Kant’s, for example—promises virtue at the cost of relevance: don’t do anything that everyone in your circumstances couldn’t do without contradiction. Never lie; never sabotage the likelihood that you will be believed when telling the truth. What if I sometimes want my lies to be construed as truths? One never knows—to the point of logical certainty—the actions Kant’s rule would approve, given the conflicting demands of overlaid moral zones, and the obscurity of effects that trail off in several directions.
Not having an a priori rule to direct us, we revert to modest declarations of practical wisdom. Live and let live is a principle of charity: others, too, have interests; don’t subordinate them when pursuing your aims. To thine own self be true declares that responsibility can’t be extenuated: do nothing that would violate your sense of right. This formula is aspirational: it assumes a degree of self-knowledge, rectitude, and control that eludes us when virtuous motives conflict: help others, help yourself. Join the two, and we have attitudes favorable to social peace. But notably, these are slogans directing us in situations for which we have no a priori cure.
The solution for social complexity is Darwinian and adaptive, not Kantian. Solutions arise when choices and actions satisfy consequentialist calculations: where accidents are bad for all concerned, we settle on efficient ways of averting them. Ambiguity acquires its second-order, conceptual gloss when philosophers comment on established societies. Compare, for example, the ideas of freedom and responsibility in Rousseau’s Social Contract and Mill’s On Liberty. Both assume that societies do or should operate within a framework of rules and rights established by the democratic processes regulating assemblies of free people. Their disagreement about the moral identity of a society’s members is, however, a point of confusion among us. Are we free because we participate in communities that enable the formation of specialized talents: musician, cook, or surgeon? Or because we are social atoms liberated to do as we please up to the point of harming others? Do we imagine being unencumbered by duties to others, or regard partners as the necessary adjunct to needs and talents we’re ardent to satisfy and express? We could disperse for lives uncompromised by duties to others, but wouldn’t that frustrate the wish to be a parent or spouse?
Autonomy wants a solution to these contrary impulses and ideas. We don’t expect it will be cheap: freedom without community, liberty without duties. There will often be occasions when judgment is stymied by having to adjudicate between duties to others and duties to oneself. Observers are confused if we do one or the other in no predicable sequence. But this is judgment, decision, and will showing themselves in complex situations where one has multiple interests and duties. Like muscle, they atrophy without use.
4i. Truth. Two notions of truth have implications for morality and identity. A sentence that’s meaningful because it signifies a possible state of affairs is true if the possibility obtains: ‘There’s a cat on the mat’ is true, if there is a cat on the mat (abstracting from the context of the utterance: when and where). The sentence is satisfied by a state of affairs correctly represented by the sentence. The other notion—being-in-the-truth—requires an interpretation that bestows significance or purpose on a belief or practice: idealizing one’s family or school, for example. Everyone invokes truths of both sorts; we value our friendships, and dress for the weather. Yet these notions are sometimes acutely opposed. That happens when all of reality is consumed within the meaning-bestowing narrative of a social class or nation. The schism is plain when religions, like philosophy, ask basic questions: what am I, or what are we; what is the character of the reality we address, and what is our place within it; what is it good or bad to do or be? Religions are cosmologically and ontologically ambitious, so it matters that religious narratives provide a context for all reality. God did it is an all-purpose explanation.
Moral identity may be grounded in truths about our material circumstances, and commitments to valued others; or in truths expressing one’s dedication to tribal or religious beliefs or practices. Neighborly relations may be moral in either way: because of interdependence and mutual regard; or because our orienting story requires that we respect one another. Yet agents may be confused: where should they look for information or guidance when performing practical tasks: to circumstances and people experienced at solving problems, or to those who interpret our meanings? Is pregnancy a biological function, with deep personal significance; or is its meaning enlarged by the prospect that a god has created another soul? Is farming a practical art requiring persistence and skill; or one best achieved with prayer? Both, you say. But which of the two is less reliable?
Why say that identities of both sorts—practical or pious—are moral? Because each enables agents to appraise their choices as good or bad, right or wrong. Yet the two seem categorially different. Being-in-the-truth expresses one’s estimate of the moral equilibrium in a god’s world, and the steps required to honor or sustain it. Truth as satisfaction or correspondence seems bloodless and aloof by comparison. An array of truths tells us where we are or have been, while seeming to have no implications for moral identity: acknowledging someone’s pain is not, in itself, an offer to reduce it. But this persuasion mistakenly supposes that the moral transparency of being-in-the-truth—gods want good works—is also required of truth as correspondence. Its moral implications are not so close to the surface.
Peirce understood truth as the successful outcome to inquiries that test hypotheses: a sentence or belief is more likely to be true if there is empirical evidence of the effects predicted. We alter failed experiments; mistaken hypotheses are reformulated or abandoned. Why do either? Because truths reporting actual states of affairs are the steady condition for effective engagements with other people and things. Action is contrary to intention if misinformation about partners or resources motivates behavior that violates morality because detrimental to them or oneself. There was once a popular song: “I didn’t know the gun was loaded.”
Truth as correspondence is instrumental; we can’t negotiate our relations to other things without it: a call for help draws me to the person calling, not to a Ouija board. It is unsettling that that so many of the “truths” we affirm and defend are dogmas having no cogency apart from the beliefs and practices commended by their supporting stories. It is morally significant and causally effective that I know the loyalties constraining belief and behavior in my community. But there is also an overriding moral interest in the character and existence of things independent of anything said or thought about them: the health of one’s children and friends, for example.
Truth-telling of both sorts has a social context. William James imagined an ethos where every individual is free to imagine and commit himself to a cosmic story of his or her invention: see, for example, his Varieties of Religious Experience.26 Doing this exhibits our liberty, though it requires vast tolerance because it makes us mutually unintelligible. Truth as reality-testing has a different social sanction, one apparent when people coordinate their aims and work. That’s not possible if we don’t agree about the facts at hand, because collaborations are embedded in testable, mutually acknowledged assumptions about matters relevant to our tasks. We trust the speeches of people who regularly tell the truth because that coheres with our knowledge of them, and because truth facilitates the ordinary pace of communication and practice. We’re disoriented by talk laced with error: what is there to do when every other assertion misdirects us? And equally, cooperation is disrupted when partners disoriented by one another’s world-views struggle to identify aims and states of affairs about which they agree.
Collaboration is perpetually sabotaged by our inability to distinguish these notions of truth. The flag is raised, we sing the national anthem: thinking of our history and ideals, we affirm our solidarity. Anyone feeling otherwise shouldn’t be here. A church’s congregants and fans of a team have similar feelings. All share a commitment to a practice, garb, song, or prayer. Responses are true to their feelings or beliefs; but why speak of it as truth? Because meanings locate believers in sentiments and expectations where many things are plain: I know who and where I am; what it’s safe to do and be; my allies, hopes, and prospects. A newspaper reports that a team’s fans are less affected by wins than losses. Hopeful already, fans suppose that victories vindicate their loyalty: all will go well. Losers feel sabotaged: things aren’t going well; events aren’t as they seemed or promised.
These two ideas of truth are prefigured by a passage in Plato’s Euthyphro: “Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy”?27 The first implies being-in-the-truth because one defers to the preferences of the gods, an authority such as a priest, poet, or statesman. The second invokes truth as the outcome of inquiry, be it the inquiries of the gods or the reality-testing of people who coordinate their work while sharing an aim. Morality for people who acquire identity with a belief or practice can be many things: perhaps loyalty to a city or team. Religions and ideologies are more comprehensive: each prescribes right practices and a conception of reality. There are books to learn, but also ideas to quarantine, attitudes to disparage. How do believers justify their beliefs and practices when nearby alternatives are familiar? By citing people who believe and act as they do. Why is this a decisive test? Because conviction intensifies when mirrored by others. Why trust them? Because other believers are an objective measure of my beliefs: that others see what I see is evidence for the truth of beliefs we share.
Is there no middle ground between the truths of reality-testing and those postulated by meaning-bestowing interpretations? There may be accord about actions encouraged or proscribed, though reasons diverge. All is sacralized—murder and theft offend the gods—or laws and rights are conventions justified by their effects. The first encourages reverence; the other expresses the practical history of people joined by their deliberations on social comity and its conditions. One construes law as divinity’s plan for creating order; the other sees order as the effect of prudent management.
Which is the preferred idea of truth when moral identity is its focus: truth as a set of favored meanings; or truth as an accurate characterization of what one is and does? Meanings may be flattering but unreliable: this devoted fan tithes his income and knows all the words to the national anthem. Compare truth as correspondence: it promises honesty without comfort. We prefer that weather reports be accurate; we’re less comfortable with unvarnished accounts of ourselves, though sobriety requires it. Why be sober? Because, by and large, we want accurate information about ourselves and our circumstances. Though “by and large” doesn’t cover everyone. It may not cover anyone all the time: self-perception is often self-persuasion. But is it acceptable that stories informing one’s identity are false?
Agency falters without the resistance that nature and society provide. But that is not the lesson philosophy has drawn. Its principal voices in modern times were romantics: Mill’s On Liberty largely removed us from society after Descartes had expelled us from nature. Freedom was the prize, after centuries of ecclesiastical and political oppression; imagination would be our free space. But that was a mirage; too many fantasies lack substance or coherence. There are many things we can’t do, and don’t imagine we can. Immersed in a world of other people and things, we act in concert, often to avert having to act alone.
Why should anyone care about this subjectivist romantic tradition, philosophy teachers apart? Because the existence and character of the opportunities and obstacles we encounter are the everyday realities of people we address. They don’t construe themselves as brains in a vat, or egos in the void. Circumstances are sometimes confounding, but people have some degree of freedom when ranking and pursuing their aims. Frustration doesn’t hurt as much if one can imagine tasting the flavors one prefers, but should we lose the difference between reality and fantasy, between making a difference or enjoying a dream? There is always a tension between facts known to inquiry and the meanings dear to significance-bestowing stories. But did we intend to alter the balance at cost to reality and our place within it? Bold staring eyes were once philosophy’s signature; truth was our motive. Was that a mistake?
1 David Weissman, Hypothesis and the Spiral of Reflection (Albany: State University Press, 1989), pp. 187–89, 195–96.
2 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), p. 415.
3 John Lennon, Paul McCartney, The Beatles, “With a little help from my friends,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Capitol Records, June, 1967, © Northern Songs Ltd, England.
4 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Citadel, 2001), pp. 52–53.
5 Jonathan Edwards, Resolutions: and Advice to Young Converts (Philipsburg: P and R Publishing, 2001), no. 22, p. 2.
6 See David Weissman, Zone Morality (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2014).
7 David Weissman, A Social Ontology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 50–52.
8 Emile Durkheim, Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 145.
9 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in: Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 84–90.
10 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. G. B. Baillie (New York: Harper, 1967), pp. 384–89.
11 Max Weber, Economy and Society, Volume 2, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 1381–461.
12 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 57.
13 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (Rockville: Wildside Press, 2008), p. 27.
14 C. S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes 1-V1, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934–1935), paras. 377–87, pp. 223–47.
15 William James, “The will to believe,” The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (New York: Modern Library, 1968), pp. 717–35.
16 Thomas Aquinas, Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Timothy McDermott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 286–316.
17 See Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1966).
18 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), pp. 474–75.
19 See Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).
20 Plato, Republic, 364a-365b, pp. 611–12.
21 See Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Dover, 2018).
22 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1095a, p. 937.
23 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979), pp. 7–12.
24 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), p. 2.
25 Descartes, Meditations, p. 66.
26 See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin, 1982).
27 Plato, Euthyphro, p. 178.