Engaged Philosophy: Essays in Honour of David Braybrooke
Engaged Philosophy: Essays in Honour of David Braybrooke
Edited by Susan Sherwin and Peter Schotch
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London
c University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006 ° Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-3890-5
∞n Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Engaged philosophy: essays in honour of David Braybrooke edited by Susan Sherwin and Peter K. Schotch. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-3890-5 1. Philosophy and social sciences. 2. Ethics. 3. Braybrooke, David. I. Braybrooke, David II. Schotch, Peter K. III. Sherwin, Susan, 1947– B63.E54 2006 170 C2005-90614-2
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Introduction: About David Braybrooke Susan Sherwin 1.1 David Braybrooke, the Personal Story 1.2 David Braybrooke, the Scholar . . . 1.3 Overview of Essays . . . . . . . . . 1.4 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Part One: Practical Engagement
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2 Teaching Class: Justice and Privatization in Education Nathan Brett 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Privatization and Costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 Efficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.2 Benefits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Two Normative Contrasts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.1 Exclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.2 Partiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.3 The Public-Private Divide in the ‘Real World’ 2.4 Education, Equality, and Choice . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.1 The Demands of Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.2 Free-Market Choices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 The Priority of Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Education as a Human Need . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7 Fair Opportunity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.8 Teaching Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
23 23 26 27 28 31 31 32 34 35 37 38 40 42 45 47
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3 Determining Health Care Needs After the Human Genome Project: Reflections on Genetic Tests for Breast Cancer Susan Sherwin 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The World after the Human Genome Project . . . . . . 3.3 The Case for Treating BRCA Testing as a Need . . . . 3.4 Some Complicating Features of BRCA Testing . . . . . 3.5 Towards a Relational Understanding of Needs . . . . . 3.6 BRCA Testing Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 The Mutual Limitation of Needs as Bases of Moral Entitlements: A Solution to Braybrooke’s Problem Duncan MacIntosh 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 The Appeal of Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Braybrooke’s Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Possible Solutions to Braybrooke’s Problem . . . . . . 4.4.1 Questioning the Empirical Assumptions of the Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.2 The Defeasibility of Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.3 Is the Location of Needs in Individuals or Groups? 4.4.4 Do People Really Need Indefinitely Long Lives? 4.4.5 Needs to Life Extension Not Really More Pressing Than So-Called Less Basic Needs . . . . . . 4.4.6 Meeting Basic Needs versus Meeting the Needs the Meeting of Which Make Life Worth Living . 4.4.7 Meeting Other People’s Needs as Not Really Being a Cost to the Meeting of Our Own Needs Given That We Are Needs Altruists . . . . . . . 4.4.8 Needs as Relative to Projects Approved by Communities; Re-Choosing Needs . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.9 The Conceptual Analysis of Needs; the Axiomatics of Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
51 52 55 57 61 65 69
77 78 78 80 83 83 84 84 87 88 89
89 90 92
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5 Canadians and Global Beneficence: Human Security Revisited Edna Keeble 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 The Ethics of State Responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 ‘Freedom from Fear’ and ‘Freedom from Want’ . . . . 5.4 The Ethics of Individual Responsibility . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Rethinking Human Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Braybrooke on Public Policy: Precautionary and Fair; Feasible and Ameliorative Sharon Sutherland 6.1 Introduction to Braybrooke’s Strategy . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Approaches to Making Public Policy . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.1 The Rational-Deductive, Comprehensively Rational, Synoptic, or Economics Model . . . . . . . 6.2.2 Satisficing, or Environmental Heuristics: Simon’s Alternative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.3 Some of Simon’s Successors . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.4 Incrementalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Braybrooke’s Citizen Management . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.1 Braybrooke’s Disjointed Incrementalism . . . . 6.3.2 Virtues of Disjointed Incrementalism for the Individual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.3 Virtues of Disjointed Incrementalism in a Social Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.4 Braybrooke’s Cautions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Policy Applications Compared . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Life of Pi and the Existence of Tigers Steven Burns 7.1 Author’s Note . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Toronto and Pondicherry . . . . . 7.3 A Digression on Belief . . . . . . 7.4 The Tiger in the Lifeboat . . . .
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101 102 106 111 117 122
125 126 131 131 134 139 142 145 147 149 150 152 153 161
165 168 170 173 175
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7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8
Ockham’s Razor . . . . . . . . . . Ministry of Transport Investigators Which Is the Better Story? . . . . . Is the Tiger REAL? . . . . . . . .
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Part Two: Theoretical Engagement
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8 David Braybrooke’s Philosophy of Social Science Meredith Ralston 8.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Traditional Philosophy of Social Science . . . 8.3 Braybrooke’s Contribution . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Feminist Epistemologies . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Empathy and Egoism Sue Campbell 9.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Sherman’s Account of Empathy . . . . . . 9.3 Default Egoism in Sherman . . . . . . . . 9.4 Imagining Empathic Selves . . . . . . . . 9.5 Moral Sentiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.6 Common Purpose and Relational Interests 9.7 Re-imagining the Self . . . . . . . . . . .
177 182 185 187
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193 194 195 201 210 220
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221 221 225 227 231 234 237 241
10 The Problem of Moral Judgement Richmond Campbell 10.1 The Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2 Moral Realism: The Default Position . . . . . 10.3 Externalist Moral Realism . . . . . . . . . . 10.4 Internalist Moral Realism . . . . . . . . . . . 10.5 The Belief-Desire Theory of Moral Judgment . 10.6 Two Objections Briefly Considered . . . . . . 10.7 The Opposition between Reason and Emotion
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249 250 252 254 256 259 263 264
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11 Moral Claims and Epistemic Contexts Michael Hymers 11.1 Moore’s Open Question . . . . . . . . . . 11.2 Deflationism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.3 Contextualism: Default and Challenge . . 11.4 Contextualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.5 Ethical Contexts and Meta-ethical Contexts 11.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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271 273 277 279 283 287 299
12 Braybrooke and the Formal Structure of Moral Justification Tom Vinci 12.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.2 Braybrooke on the Open-Question Argument . . . . . . 12.3 Explorations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.4 Three Conceptions of Meta-ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.5 A Side Trip to Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.6 The Main Line of Advance Resumed . . . . . . . . . . 12.7 An Alternative Briefly Considered . . . . . . . . . . . .
301 301 303 306 310 312 315 321
13 David Braybrooke On the Track of PPE Peter K. Schotch 13.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.2 How Track Came About . . . . . . . 13.3 The Basic Set-up . . . . . . . . . . . 13.4 How to Apply Moral Philosophy . . 13.5 Actions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.5.1 When good actions go badly . 13.6 Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.7 Utilitarianism . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.8 Where’s the politics? . . . . . . . . .
323 323 325 327 328 328 332 334 336 339
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14 Bootstrapping Norms: From Cause to Intention Bryson Brown 343 14.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 14.2 Rules in Logic on the Track of Social Change . . . . . . 348
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14.3 Some Worries . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.4 The Bootstrap Argument . . . . . . . . 14.5 The Roots of Normativity . . . . . . . 14.5.1 Evolutionary Advantage . . . . 14.5.2 Naturalism . . . . . . . . . . . 14.5.3 Metalanguage. . . . . . . . . . 14.5.4 The bootstrap . . . . . . . . . 14.5.5 Interpretation of self and others
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350 353 358 359 359 360 360 362
Appendix A Another—Literary—Side of David Braybrooke: The Comic Dialectician Excerpt from Faculty Council Minutes, 29 September 1983 . Excerpt from Faculty Minutes, 11 October 1983 . . . . . . . An Open Letter from David Braybrooke . . . . . . . . . . .
365 368 369 369
Appendix B David Braybrooke’s Publications 1955-2005 Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Journal Articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapters in Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Book Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
373 373 374 378 383
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Notes on Contributors
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References
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Index
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Acknowledgments The editors and contributors to this volume are grateful for the generous support received from various individuals and offices of Dalhousie University, especially the Vice President (Academic and Research), the Dean of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Department of Philosophy.
ENGAGED PHILOSOPHY
Chapter 1
Introduction: About David Braybrooke S USAN S HERWIN
Abstract This chapter introduces the reader to the life and work of David Braybrooke. It identifies key themes in his extensive list of publications and explains the significance of the essays in this collection.∗
This collection of original essays has been produced by faculty members who have been colleagues or students of David Braybrooke in his years of full-time teaching at Dalhousie University (1963-90).1 Our intention is to express our collective affection, admiration, and respect for this important philosopher on the occasion of his eightieth birthday by reflecting on aspects of his life and work as they have inspired our own philosophical thinking. By happy coincidence, the publication of this volume coincides with the momentous publication of his own book, Analytical Political Philosophy: From Discourse, Edification, the fourth in a series of books Braybrooke has published with University of Toronto Press since 1998. ∗ Thanks
to Richmond Campbell and Steven Burns for editorial advice on this chapter.
1 He has been a very active Emeritus Professor since 1990, retaining a summer home in Halifax
and spending three to four months per year in Nova Scotia, enthusiastically engaged in philosophical activities. Hence, all who are themselves situated in Halifax still count themselves among his current colleagues
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The others—Moral Objectives, Rules, and the Forms of Social Change (1998), Natural Law Modernized (2001), and Utilitarianism: Restorations; Repairs; Renovations (2004)—together form an integrated, mutually reinforcing corpus of many of the major ideas he has contributed to the literature of political philosophy and the philosophy of social science throughout his career. So weighty is this four-volume collection, and so absorbing of his philosophical energies over the past decade, Braybrooke has come to think of it, unofficially, as the Summa Philosophica Latirivuli (where ‘latus’ stands for ‘bray’—which is dialectical (Northamptonshire) English for ‘broad’—and ‘rivulus’ for ‘brook’). This working title is vintage Braybrooke, combining his lifelong love of classics, his offbeat, irreverent sense of humour, and an acknowledgment of the collective and far-reaching significance of his influence on philosophical thought. The designation signifies the interconnected complexity of Braybrooke’s philosophical works and makes visible the over-arching program that ties the various pieces together. We fondly share in adoption of this designation and add our own essays to complement the Summa by offering reflections on the themes he explores there and in his earlier publications. To help set the stage for the chapters that follow, I shall review some of Braybrooke’s significant intellectual and scholarly writings in order to provide the reader with a sense of how his many publications weave together to form a general theoretical system; I hope also to provide some insight into why this system is so valuable. I shall approach this task by first reviewing his personal journey through political philosophy and then by briefly discussing three key themes that structure his work.2 Finally, I shall briefly explain the organization of this book and highlight the role of each chapter.
2 I am very grateful to David for his assistance and patient cooperation in piecing together some of the elements of a rich and complex life in a couple of personal interviews in June 2004.
1.1. DAVID BRAYBROOKE, THE PERSONAL STORY
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1.1 David Braybrooke, the Personal Story David3 was born 18 October 1924 in the United States and came of age during the Second World War. He started his university education at Hobart College, where he majored in classics with the intention of preparing for a career in the United States Foreign Service. His undergraduate study was interrupted, however, by the war. He volunteered for service in the United States Army early in 1943 and found himself stationed in Antwerp several months after D-Day. (He notes that Hitler gave up shortly after he appeared in Europe and suggests that perhaps Hitler calculated that if the United States was prepared to send the likes of Braybrooke into war, it must have been very confident indeed.) For the first month and a half in Antwerp, he experienced frequent bombardments of the city by German buzz bombs and rockets. A rocket landed a mere block away from where he was waiting for a tram one day, causing houses and their inhabitants to completely disappear before his eyes. That experience gave him a rich appreciation for life and gratitude for each day he is alive, an attitude that has served him well in all subsequent years; he truly does embrace each day with obvious joy at the opportunities it affords. In the end, his time in the army, like the rest of his life, was largely dedicated to intellectual pursuits. While still in Antwerp, he managed to find a tutor to help him study Latin and Greek poetry. The army also sent him to Louisiana State University then to the University of Illinois to study basic engineering, and, since he found himself on a university campus, he managed at LSU to take courses in literary criticism and sociology. He was even able to persuade the army to send him to Cambridge, England, for a term before he was discharged. After a little more than three years in the army, he returned to complete his BA and prepare for academic work in the area of social and 3 Readers will notice a shift in style of reference to David Braybrooke in this Introduction. It reflects my own struggle, and that of most of the other contributors to the volume, in deciding how best to refer to a man who is both an influential scholar and a personal friend. We have resolved this problem by using the formal ‘Braybrooke’ whenever we are discussing his work, as merits respectful discussion of any author’s work; when speaking personally about the man, as I do in parts of this Introduction, we shift to the more informal ‘David’ to capture the warm regard in which we hold him.
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CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
political theory. He was torn between studying psychology at Yale or economics at Harvard; his decision to pursue economics at Harvard was heavily influenced by Professor Brooks Otis, his mentor from Hobart College and an early role model for his life as a scholar. Otis was a great classical scholar who later became chair at Stanford and then university professor at Chapel Hill; among his other claims to fame is the fact that he introduced David to the work of John Maynard Keynes. David reckoned that it was necessary to have a firm grounding in economics to work effectively in social and political thought. (As well, David did some personal utility calculations and determined that since he would be unlikely to read much economics purely for pleasure, it was important to approach it in a disciplined way.) After graduation, and with the continuing support of Professor Otis, David was invited back to Hobart to teach as an instructor in history and literature within an excellent general education program dealing with Western civilization. But he grew restless in this role and soon embarked on graduate work at Cornell University in the department of philosophy. At that time, Cornell required philosophy doctoral students to specialize in two subfields of philosophy and also to study one field outside of philosophy. David chose ethics and epistemology as his philosophy subfields and economics for his ‘outside’ interest. (Those choices have served him well throughout his career and are well represented within the essays of this collection.) His dissertation was on welfare and happiness, and the economist on his committee directed him to include a chapter dealing with Arrow’s work on social choice theory (much to the chagrin of the philosophers on the committee who thought it was ‘the hardest thing they ever had to read’—‘serves them right!’ in David’s opinion). This led to his first publication, ‘Farewell to the New Welfare Economics,’ a very heartfelt farewell at the time, though he has found himself returning to this subject in later years and now sees it as one of the foundations of his work. He completed his PhD in 1953 and took up an instructorship at the University of Michigan. While this opportunity was considered one of the best jobs in the country for a new philosophy graduate, David thought that the industrial design of the Ann Arbor campus had little
1.1. DAVID BRAYBROOKE, THE PERSONAL STORY
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charm: buildings were ‘depressing on the outside and graceless on the inside.’ He also felt somewhat alienated from his colleagues there since they seemed principally occupied with denigrating the merits of ordinary language philosophy while David’s approach was (and is) much more pragmatic: use ordinary language philosophy where it is helpful and employ other methods where it falls short. He soon left Michigan for Bowdoin College, a small liberal arts college in New England which he found to be more to his temperament; indeed, he remembers Bowdoin as being his version of heaven—just the sort of place he had always wanted to teach. Alas, he was not to stay in this idyllic setting for long. By chance, returning by ship from Oxford in 1953, David had met a professor from Yale who proposed him for a special position that would recognize his distinctive talents, teaching philosophy in an interdisciplinary program and working with Professor Charles E. Lindblom in the honours program in economics and politics for juniors and seniors. This was an offer David found too good to refuse; an ambitious young professor simply did not turn down offers from Yale then (or now). One of the happy consequences of this position was a long-term, fruitful collaboration with Professor Lindblom. Not all of his colleagues at Yale were so pleased with his versatility and tendency to cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, however. It seems that he was judged to be ‘too much of a philosopher’ for the social scientists and ‘too much of a social scientist’ for the philosophers. Moreover, the timing of his stay at Yale was most unfortunate: the entire philosophy department was severely divided between analytical and continental theorists at that time. As a result of these struggles over method and philosophical orientation, David was denied tenure at Yale. Fortunately, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship at the very same time as his tenure decision was being announced, and that honour and opportunity took some of the sting out of the tenure news. (It also helped ease the pain to learn that all of the other analytical philosophers in the department decamped the following year to join the department of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh; clearly, he was not the only one to find the atmosphere inhospitable to analytically oriented philosophers.)
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As a result of having ‘published and perished’ at Yale, David decided he would ‘retire early’ by moving to a site where he would be free to teach and live as he liked with little of the pressure to publish that characterized life in an Ivy League institution. His goal now was to enjoy other aspects of his rich, self-directed intellectual life. Fortunately for the contributors to this volume and for thousands of others he has taught and inspired, he selected Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for that retirement from the fray of academic intensity. When he arrived in 1963, he found Dalhousie to be a small, provincial university by the sea that concentrated on undergraduate education and the training of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. The philosophy department had only recently been separated off from psychology, and its few other members had little interest in publishing; they exercised no research demands on him. Moreover, he was able to secure a position that was to be half-time in philosophy and half in the department of political science; in other words, his interdisciplinary interests were acknowledged and valued at his new academic home. At that time, there were only about a half-dozen serious scholars in the humanities and social sciences at Dalhousie, and it was easy to get to know each of them well. It made for a stimulating, interdisciplinary, intellectual community in which David thrived. And while the Dalhousie library was small compared with what he had become accustomed to at Yale, at least it had the advantage of having the books it owned ready at hand since there was so little competition for the books that interested him. It is worth noting, though, that this calm backwater atmosphere did not last very long. Co-incident with his time at the university, Dalhousie has evolved into a serious research institution with strong departments of philosophy and political science. David played no small part in this transformation, and he is rightly proud of his contribution to a stimulating and supportive environment. I can speak most authoritatively of his impact on the philosophy department at Dalhousie since it has been my own academic home for the past thirty years. Here, David has shown both intellectual and personal leadership. On the intellectual front, he has always shared his work with colleagues and students and encouraged critical discussion with those
1.1. DAVID BRAYBROOKE, THE PERSONAL STORY
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interested in philosophy at every stage of learning. Most of his books have been at least ‘tried out’ in the classroom if not also initiated there. He believes universities should make more of the opportunity for undergraduates to share in a professor’s active research. They have things to contribute partly because they are not already steeped in the literature. He has also been remarkably generous in his willingness to engage with the work of others; no matter how busy he is, he always offers prompt, insightful, and supportive feedback. Moreover, he has insisted on promoting an atmosphere of true collegiality and has conscientiously role-modelled the behaviours that support it. Probably influenced by his painful time at Yale, where he found himself struggling to launch his own career within a deeply divided department, David has worked hard to foster healthy departmental relations at Dalhousie University. Within the philosophy department, this takes the form of a few institutionalized rituals. Faculty members meet for Wednesday lunches at the University Club, which allow us to share ideas and concerns in an informal atmosphere outside of more structured department meetings. Even more important, however, is our weekly philosophy colloquium series, which meets all year round, stopping only for Christmas and the Labour Day weekend. These sessions are scheduled for Friday afternoons and are routinely followed by beer at the Graduate Students’ Club, where students, faculty, and interested others can continue to debate the topic of the weekly paper. Much to our local benefit, David became so content at Dalhousie that he was able to resist several tempting efforts to recruit him to join his analytical colleagues from Yale at their new home at the University of Pittsburgh, despite the fact that their arrival there helped to make it the strongest philosophy department in North America at the time. Although David sometimes wonders if his work would have received even more attention if he had accepted one of those offers and situated himself in a leading American university, he generously credits Dalhousie for providing a stimulating environment that allowed him to be productive and creative. Moreover, it was a place in which he was, for the most part, happy, a condition he thinks played an important role in his achievements.
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CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
Relieved of the pressure to produce that defined life in an Ivy League university, he found himself free to pursue whatever research projects captured his imagination. He soon settled into a very productive publishing pace that seems only to accelerate with age. On reviewing his long and growing list of significant publications, one might easily get the sense that David is a man totally occupied with work. That would be a big mistake. He has always understood that while meaningful work is very important to everyone, it is not the whole of life. It is also important to make room for travel, music, literature, art, romance, and, generally, for fun. (He loves to laugh, and his laughter is infectious. Finding tidbits of absurd news stories to amuse him has become something of a competitive sport among his colleagues and friends. Readers can get a pretty good impression of his mischievous side by reading Appendix A.) Without such activities, he believes, one becomes less rather than more productive, and definitely less creative. As an academic, he takes seriously all dimensions of a professor’s responsibilities: research, teaching, and administrative work. His research accomplishments are readily available to all and form the basis of most articles in this book. His teaching and administrative accomplishments are less visible to the larger world, but they have had a profound impact on the thousands of students and colleagues who have directly benefited from the opportunity to work with him (and on those who have the opportunity of studying/working with others he has inspired). He loves teaching and it shows. (Some recent and cherished evaluations report ‘Braybrooke rocks!’ and ‘Professor Braybrooke is fun to be with.’) It is with much ambivalence that he will finally cease offering formal classes in 2005 as he turns eighty-one. Indeed, it is this love of teaching that eventually took him to Texas. Dalhousie University has long had a rule of mandatory retirement at age 65. David was by no means ready to give up teaching in 1989— it will be difficult enough to do in 2005—so he decided it was finally time to accept one of the many offers he received over the years from the United States and took up the position of Centennial Commission Chair in the Liberal Arts (Professor of Government and Professor of Philosophy) at the University of Texas at Austin. Fortunately for us,
1.2. DAVID BRAYBROOKE, THE SCHOLAR
11
he maintained a home in Nova Scotia and has arranged to spend a few months each summer back at Dalhousie, where he remains an active presence in our summer reading groups and weekly philosophy colloquium sessions. His philosophical engagement with his immediate and distant colleagues shows no signs of slowing, despite the fact that he is now approaching yet another retirement (this time from the University of Texas at Austin).
1.2 David Braybrooke, the Scholar Braybrooke’s work centres around the interrelated themes of needs, rights, and rules with particular attention to the appropriate processes for making changes in existing social rules. He argues that proper understanding of these three concepts helps to constitute a meaningful and practical approach to social justice. Hence, he has been concerned with making clear how to interpret and apply these familiar, but often misused, concepts that figure so prominently in political debates about public policies. While deeply respectful of alternative philosophical schools, Braybrooke situates his own work within the analytic tradition that has dominated English-language philosophy for many decades; it relies on rigour and conceptual analysis as principal tools. His aim is to help guide policy debates by allowing participants to determine appropriate rules for attending to the needs of citizens of nations and of the world in a fair and achievable way. His staunch support of analytic philosophy has meant that throughout his career he has frequently found himself embroiled in what might be dubbed ’ ‘philosophy wars’ (akin to the recent struggles over the nature of science and scientific activities commonly referred to as the ‘science wars’). Indeed, his most recent work, the forthcoming Analytical Political Philosophy, has been written with the principal intention of responding to charges from pro-Straussian colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin who claim there is no value in analytical approaches to political philosophy.4 Braybrooke’s work 4 It is ironic that David discovered Leo Strauss long before any of the people who now challenge David’s philosophical approach in the name of Strauss: After one year of undergraduate
12
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
clearly demonstrates the error of this thesis. His efforts at clarifying and applying the core concepts of needs, rights, and rules add up to a program for democratic action. It incorporates three basic assumptions: (1) meeting certain needs is the basic purpose of public policy, (2) rules are required to make sure appropriate needs are met, and (3) these rules must include rules governing rights. Braybrooke has long been willing to stare down the challenge of postmodernism; indeed, he is even willing to accept the somewhat unfashionable label of ‘grand program’ to describe the intent of these efforts to ‘render political life more coherent, more just, and even more noble.’5 His own grand program is particularly valuable by virtue of the fact that it has been developed in tandem with (and, hence, attentive to) other important philosophers offering their own versions of the grand program in political philosophy, principally, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and David Gauthier. Like them, he sets out his understanding of the basic structure available to a politically organized society. Braybrooke differs from these others in an important way, however: he situates these terms in the context of real-world concerns of daily politics in an industrialized Western democracy (and, hence, the title of this collection of essays). Moreover, he is not one to forget his debts to the history of philosophical ideas; he makes great efforts to relate his own program within two important, and usually considered to be widely different, historical traditions: utilitarianism and natural law theory.6 Let us look, then, more closely at his work on these three key concepts, beginning with needs.7 Braybrooke argues that surely the principal question for all social policies is to consider their impact on human welfare. Such a project requires some way of measuring the relevant impact of policies, and that requires us to identify appropriate criteria for our focus. As countless critics have demonstrated, utility as it is genstudy, David headed off to the New School to take some graduate classes. There he had the opportunity to take a class from the soon-to-be-famous Leo Strauss on the work of Socrates, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. 5 This phrase is taken from the Introduction to Analytical Political Philosophy, draft manuscript. 6 These historical connections are made most clearly and fully in his recent books, Utilitarianism (2004) and Natural Law Modernized (2001). 7 The first comprehensive discussion of needs appears in his 1987 book, Meeting Needs.
1.2. DAVID BRAYBROOKE, THE SCHOLAR
13
erally understood is too problematic a measure for this task, though its principal insight of considering the welfare of everyone is sound. Braybrooke argues that a conception of human needs can better serve the role of evaluating the social worth of public policies. Such a concept must distinguish between mere wants or preferences and the things that are necessary to a life worth living. Thus, public policies should be held accountable for first meeting the latter and, then, for allowing as much room as possible for individuals to pursue their own preferences. Needs may be either course-of-life (what is required for life or health) or adventitious (what is required for meeting particular goals), and it is important to understand the distinction to ensure that policies do not lose track of course-of-life needs in responding to vocal demands for meeting particular adventitious needs. While some course-of-life needs are clearly universal by virtue of biological requirements for nutrition, hydration, shelter, sleep, and so on, others are not (e.g., medical care), and adventitious needs may be very diverse indeed. Hence, public policy must be evaluated in terms of the needs of a specific reference population; those responsible for determining these needs will belong to a policy-making population, which may not be the same as the reference population.8 It is, ultimately, a matter of general public debate what shall be deemed needs that must be met for a given population, the minimum standard of provision of those needs, as well as the policies that should be pursued to meet those needs. Clearly, then, the rules for that debate become very important. So, too, is a measure for comparing the effectiveness of different policies at meeting the needs of the population in question. Braybrooke introduced the census notion (described below) to solve that problem.9 Braybrooke’s work on the concept of rights is intertwined with his work on the concept of rules.10 He argues that rights attach to individu8 I follow Braybrooke’s terminology in his recent work here; it is far more accessible than the alternative form ‘Selfgovliset’ which he used in the original Meeting Needs book. 9 The census notion requires agreement on minimal standards for provision of a need (e.g. what would constitute adequate nutrition for a 150-pound adult), and then everyone in the population is to be surveyed to see whether they are receiving enough calories and vitamins to meet this minimum; priority is then placed on bringing everyone up to the minimum (for their particular size). 10 The first substantive discussion of rights appears in his 1968 book, Three Tests for Democ-
14
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
als, and their administration is largely left to the individual in question. Individuals are not alone in their responsibility for enacting their rights, of course. There is a collective responsibility to ensure that the rights of others are respected. This shared responsibility often requires more than just formal acknowledgment of the rights of others; it may also require us to ensure that the conditions are in place to permit them to exercise their rights. Governments are to be judged according to the respect and protection they provide of individual rights (both our own and those of our fellow citizens). His theory of rights is based on what he has developed as a census notion of welfare. According to the census notion, policies should aim to push as many people as possible into higher categories of welfare, leaving as few as possible behind. In this way, he is able to set measurable tests for democracy that link both rights and welfare (as he has argued since his 1968 book, Three Tests for Democracy: Personal Rights, Human Welfare, Collective Preference). On his account, rights are, ultimately, social: they only make sense within a defined social context. More specifically, they are best understood as a particular type of settled social rule. As such, rights apply and are exercised within particular societies. Things are a bit more complicated yet, since rights actually involve two kinds of rules: those governing what it means to have and exercise a right and those determining who actually has a particular right. Because rights represent a kind of (double) rule, it is useful to understand their formal structure if we wish to make evaluations about governments’ ability to respect rights. This interest in getting clear on the nature of social rules has led him into the formalism of deontic logic (in Logic on the Track of Social Change). As Peter Schotch demonstrates in chapter 13, the formal work on rules permeates multiple dimensions of Braybrooke’s grand program.
1.3
The Structure of the Volume: Overview of Essays
The rest of the essays in this book take up several of the major ideas in Braybrooke’s work and are divided into two major blocks reflecting racy. His work on rules appears in many places but is most thoroughly discussed in Logic on the Track of Social Change.
1.3. OVERVIEW OF ESSAYS
15
the general theme of the book and of Braybrooke’s work. Part I, Practical Engagement, deals with ways in which Braybrooke’s ideas connect up with the practical world of public policy or personal responsibilities. Part II, Theoretical Engagement, consists of essays that explore the philosophical underpinnings of his work and look more closely at some of the theoretical debates that occupied him. More specifically, chapters 2 through 4 focus on his very important work on needs. In chapter 2, Nathan Brett brings this framework to bear on the subject of private education. He explores the threat to justice of increased moves to privatization of education for families who can afford it. Braybrooke views education as a basic need of human beings and warns that justice requires us to ensure that this need is met to a reasonable standard for all young people. With this concern for equal educational outcomes, Brett examines some of the current debates regarding private versus public education services and examines the negative impact on equality of private schooling. He concludes that the trend to increased use of private schooling is resulting in reductions of social justice. In chapter 3, I take up Braybrooke’s work on needs to explore a pressing question about how we should address the potentially growing set of medical demands for services that test for genetic dispositions to contract life-threatening illnesses. I look specifically at the topic of access to tests for genetic susceptibility to inherited forms of breast and ovarian cancer. By reflecting on Braybrooke’s distinction between course-of-life needs and adventitious needs, and drawing on feminist work on relational understandings of personhood and needs, I am able to help refocus the debate and find a basis for distinguishing genuine health needs from health desires; while the latter may be strongly felt, only course-of-life needs should be given priority in allocating limited public health resources. Duncan MacIntosh (chapter 4) takes up the arguments of chapter 3 and some in Braybrooke’s book, Meeting Needs (1987). He considers several possible solutions to the problem Braybrooke first identified as the ‘bottomless pit’ of medical needs for technological support of those whose lives could be extended. MacIntosh argues, contra Bray-
16
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
brooke, that there is no clear and reliable distinction to be drawn between course-of-life needs and adventitious needs. He proposes a strategy that will constrain the bottomless pit of medical demands by only permitting communities to recognize as needs with attached rights those projects that are in fact co-feasible within that community. Edna Keeble (chapter 5) pieces together some of Braybrooke’s ideas about democratic theory and questions of state and personal responsibility in order to address some urgent questions in the philosophy of international relations. She reviews his proposals regarding the personal responsibilities of individuals living in rich countries to relieve the miseries of people living in less fortunate countries. Keeble draws on his philosophical ideas about responsibility to explore the meaning and possibility of global justice in the post-9/11 era, when national security has become the preoccupation of governments. She appeals to his ideas about cosmopolitan ethics while discussing some of his proposals for practically deploying such an ethic and draws from his work a more optimistic view of international relations than is evident within current government policies. In chapter 6, Sharon Sutherland traces Braybrooke’s insight into the importance of incrementalism to debates in public policy that he takes up throughout his career, beginning with his very first book, A Strategy of Decision: Policy Evaluation as a Social Process, published with C.E. Lindblom in 1963. In his ongoing efforts to make public policy responsive to needs, Braybrooke has always recognized the importance of developing institutional processes that ensure debate and revisability as policymakers evaluate the impact of their efforts. She shows how this approach is central to his major contribution to specific policy in his work on traffic congestion (a subject of lifelong interest to him as the son of a highway designer). This dynamic strategy is taken up and vigorously argued most recently in his 2004 book Utilitarianism. The section concludes in a different mood, with Steven Burns’s essay ’Life of Pi and the Existence of Tigers’ (chapter 7). While Burns does not discuss Braybrooke’s publications per se, he does demonstrate an important aspect of Braybrooke’s well-known views about how an individual ought to live one’s life. As noted above, Braybrooke has
1.3. OVERVIEW OF ESSAYS
17
long understood that a productive intellectual life depends on living a rich life overall, engaging in many areas of stimulating activity, especially the arts. His early studies involved work in literary criticism, and his first appointment was in a program of study of great books of Western civilization. Literary examples populate and illuminate all of Braybrooke’s work. Moreover, as we see in Braybrooke’s own description of life as an academic (Appendix A), he thought it important to finish out a day of scholarship by turning to other forms of intellectual stimulation besides philosophy; he was, himself, particularly partial to literature and satire. Thus, Burns’s discussion of philosophical themes present in the important novel Life of Pi pays tribute to Braybrooke’s ideas about how a philosopher should engage with the world. In Part II, Theoretical Engagement, we move from essays that explore some of the implications of Braybrooke’s work in practical or worldly matters to ones that concentrate on some of the more theoretical questions he has published on in greater abstraction. As a bridge, we begin this section with Meredith Ralston’s helpful review of Braybrooke’s work on the philosophy of social science, ranging from his 1965 collection, Philosophical Problems of the Social Sciences through to his 1998 book, Moral Objectives, Rules, and the Forms of Social Change. Ralston explores Braybrooke’s efforts to distinguish three overlapping schools (naturalist, interpretive, and critical social science) that he proposes should be understood as offering ‘mutual support and stimulation’; each has a role to play in particular types of analysis. Ever the peacemaker, Braybrooke argues that we are best served by a philosophy that permits use of multiple methods according to the problem before us rather than a single approach for all circumstances. In reviewing Braybrooke’s contribution to this literature, Ralston finds within it a position that resonates with contemporary feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. In chapter 9, Sue Campbell picks up a theme that is central to Braybrooke’s work on needs and all of his discussions of political philosophy, namely his rejection of philosophical egoism. She looks, in particular, at the way Braybrooke challenges the traditional philosophical approaches to egoism in his book Natural Law Modernized (2001). Sue
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CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
Campbell joins him in asking why egoism is the default account of human motivation; she argues for an alternative starting point that begins with reliance on moral sentiment as the basis for a more social theory of motivation. Like Sherwin and Ralston, she finds within Braybrooke’s work a conceptual apparatus that is very close to the work of feminist philosophers, though she also sees that his work would benefit from making these connections more explicit and holding more firmly to the vision feminists have developed. In chapter 10, Richmond Campbell continues exploring questions regarding the role of sentiment in moral judgment and focuses on an important question in moral epistemology and meta-ethics. He discusses some of Braybrooke’s ideas regarding moral justification and moral judgment. Richmond Campbell revisits a familiar philosophical impasse between cognitivists, who argue that moral judgments are a form of belief that can be true or false, and non-cognitivists, who claim that moral judgments are expressions of feeling or desire. These are always represented as mutually exclusive options. He seeks to resolve this apparent impasse by drawing on an idea found in Natural Law Modernized (2001), where Braybrooke suggests that David Hume can be viewed as someone who embraces aspects of both positions. By building on this insight, Richmond Campbell is able to offer a novel interpretation of moral judgments as constituting a complex, hybrid state, thereby dissolving the apparent opposition between reason and emotion. Chapters 11 and 12 continue to examine the implications of Braybrooke’s work for questions in moral epistemology. Both Michael Hymers and Tom Vinci use a recent essay of Braybrooke’s titled ‘What Truth Does the Emotive-Imperative Answer to the Open-Question Argument Leave to Moral Judgments?’ to discuss themes about the nature of moral knowledge. Hymers (chapter 11) discusses the importance of Braybrooke’s claim that ethical justification does not have to be traced back to meta-ethical justification. Taking a Wittgensteinian approach to the nature of moral propositions, Hymers proposes that justification and, in particular, certainty of moral propositions are a function of epistemic context, not semantic or empirical content. Vinci (chapter 12) takes a different approach to the issues raised in Braybrooke’s stimulat-
1.3. OVERVIEW OF ESSAYS
19
ing paper. He argues that Braybrooke situates his account of moral rules within a theory of meta-ethics. Vinci discusses the structure of this account within the broader theory of formal foundationalism with analogy to epistemic justification. This connection provides a useful model for understanding Braybrooke’s account of moral justification, but it is not without difficulties of its own. We then follow Braybrooke in his decision to turn to formalism to capture some of the important ideas regarding the ways in which societies actually come to decisions and set (and change) policies. In chapter 13, Peter Schotch explores the intersection between Braybrooke’s interests in moral philosophy and social science. Through graphic representations, Schotch helps to make accessible the formal work he, Braybrooke, and Brown have done on rules in order to render more visible Braybrooke’s understanding of the place of political economy in a rulebased picture of morals. This essay draws together the ways in which the concept of rules runs through a substantial body of Braybrooke’s life work. In chapter 14, Bryson Brown continues to expand on the important and difficult role that rules play in Braybrooke’s approach to moral and political thought. He reminds us that in Logic on the Track of Social Change the authors explain how rules combine both descriptive and normative features. In this essay, Brown draws on the work of Wilfrid Sellars to help elaborate the nature of normativity that is built into their shared understanding of the nature of rules. Together, these essays pay our respect to David Braybrooke in the best way we know how, by critically engaging with his work. It reflects his teaching that philosophy is a conversation, best pursued through open discussion. David describes his principal interest in all of his work as that of ‘being useful.’ In that, he has admirably succeeded. I trust this Introduction has given the reader a sense of the importance of David Braybrooke’s contributions to the literature in many dimensions of philosophy. That sense will surely be confirmed by reading the full volume. I may not, however, have succeeded in conveying the other side of David Braybrooke: his irreverent, irrepressible determination to have fun. At his urging, we have included, as Appendix A, some
excerpts from an essay he published in the Dalhousie Review in 1985. It describes the saga of his efforts to have a description of the way a professor spends his time in the summer months included in a document being prepared by the faculty of arts and science for the government. In it, he reveals his sense of how he himself spends his days and also his distinctive sense of humour as he pokes gentle fun at colleagues who, to his mind, take this question altogether too seriously.
1.4
References
Braybrooke, David. 1965. Philosophical Problems of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan. — 1968. Three Tests for Democracy: Personal Rights, Human Welfare, Collective Preference. New York: Random House. — 1987. Meeting Needs. Princeton: Princeton University Press. — 1987. Philosophy of Social Science. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Foundations of Philosophy Series. — 1998.‘Philosophy of Social Science, Contemporary Theories (Schools).’ In E. Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8: 838-47. London: Routledge. — 1998. Moral Objectives, Rules, and the Forms of Social Change. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. — 2001. Natural Law Modernized. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. — 2004. Utilitarianism: Restorations; Repairs; Renovations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. — 2005. Analytical Political Philosophy: From Discourse, Edification. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Braybrooke, David, Bryson Brown, and Peter Schotch. 1995. Logic on the Track of Social Change. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy. Braybrooke, David, and C.E. Lindblom. 1963. A Strategy of Decision: Policy Evaluation as a Social Process. New York: The Free Press.
Part One: Practical Engagement
Chapter 2
Teaching Class: Justice and Privatization in Education NATHAN B RETT
Abstract This paper looks at some of the issues raised by recent moves toward privatization in education. I begin the debate over private-versus-public services by considering the claim that a private system is a more efficient way of achieving the goals of education. The next section takes up this question of differences in goals by examining some basic differences in the normative structures of the public and private spheres. Using (and defending) David Braybrooke’s principle of equality in meeting needs, the paper concludes by arguing that the privatization of educational services undermines in important ways the pursuit of equality of opportunity.∗
2.1
Introduction
David Braybrooke has been a stern critic of moves toward privatization that began with the Thatcher and Reagan regimes in Britain and the United States respectively. In his work he has treated education ∗ An early draft of this paper was present at the Society for Applied Philosophy Meetings: Education in the 21st Century, Oxford, England, June 2002. I would like to thank Steven Burns and Susan Sherwin for their helpful editorial comments. Thanks also to Caroline Sequeira for her help in editing.
23
24
CHAPTER 2. NATHAN BRETT
as a need that requires a public response. This paper explores the implications of moves toward privatization in education and attempts to show why education should not continue down this path toward privatization. This will involve considering some basic differences between public and private enterprises. It will also explore the implications of Braybrooke’s views that education is one of the basic needs of human beings and that a just society aims at equality in meeting needs.1 Judged from the viewpoint of equality, the political regimes that have held power in much of the West over the past twenty-five years have been a disaster. We have witnessed a widening of the gap between the rich and the impoverished countries of the world. Wealth has become concentrated in the hands of fewer individuals. While some people are enormously wealthy, average real wages and employment in full-time work have decreased. In North America (and elsewhere) more wage earners have been moved into ‘flexible’ categories of work, where they do not have job security or health and retirement benefits. Meanwhile, the power of labour unions to resist these changes has been greatly diminished by the globalization of production and markets. These changes toward greater social inequality have also been evident in the reorganization of our educational establishments. Over the past ten years, for example, the amount of public money going to Canadian universities has (in real terms) been reduced, while the costs of this education have continued to rise. One result has been dramatic increases in university tuition. In my own province (Nova Scotia), tuition has increased by 100 per cent over the last ten years. This is not exceptional. A recent study of state-supported universities in the United States found somewhat lower rates of tuition increases (107 per cent over twenty years) but reflected the same shift toward university education accessible only to those who can afford it.2 1 See (Braybrooke, 1987a) Chapter 2 Section 2 ‘Course of Life Needs,’ and Chapter 4 Section 5 ‘Equality in Meeting needs,’ 143-50. See also Section 6 below. 2 Jacques Steinberg, ‘More Family Income Committed to College,’ New York Times, 2 May 2002. ‘While the average amount each state spent on higher education per student rose by 13 percent over that period, to $6,747, state institutions raised their tuition and fees by 107 percent, to $3,512, the study [‘Losing Ground’] found.’ See Losing Ground: A National Status Report on the Affordability of American Higher Education, p. 9, http://www.highereducation.org/ reports/losing ground/affordability report final bw
2.1. INTRODUCTION
25
It does not take an expert to see that these changes will foster greater social inequality. Given that education is a central need of human beings and that it connects in dramatic ways with the meeting of other needs, this inequality is an important source of injustice. There is a corresponding differentiation of opportunity within the universities, as administrators (like their counterparts in industry) have sought a cheaper and more flexible workforce by increasing the proportion of untenured and part-time employees, who lack security and benefits and work for about one-third of the salary of tenured faculty.3 At the same time, universities have become more and more dependent on private corporations to fund research programs. This has meant that private enterprise has sometimes been in a position to determine what questions will be investigated and even what findings will be made public.4 Though this is a direct affront to the ideals of a liberal university, it may not directly contribute to inequality. But indirectly it does. Since these very corporations are the chief sources of the hierarchal dispersion of wealth, research that contributes to their power will ultimately have an inegalitarian impact. Public schools, too, have experienced undermining cuts to their funding. The Halifax School Board recently decided to cut the funding for French immersion schools. Private schools will be the beneficiaries of this change, as parents who can afford it move their children to the private schools. In some provinces (and many states in the United States), such moves to private schools are being reinforced by tax policies that allow tuition to count as a tax deduction. There is a corresponding removal of funds from the public system. Like the universities, public schools have sought ‘partnerships’ with private industry as a replace3 See Wesley Shumar, College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification of Higher Education (London: The Falmer Press, 1997), 52-6. Shumar claims that underpaid part-time faculty now do 50 per cent of the teaching on average in U.S. universities. Canadian faculty have been resisting this trend. (Though it took a protracted strike to settle all of the issues, the Faculty Association at Dalhousie University was successful in holding the line at 10 per cent.) 4 In Canada the names David Healy and Nancy Olivieri come to mind in connection with corporate attempts to control findings about dangerous side effects of products. (These researchers brought to light attempts to control their negative findings about pharmaceutical drugs.). See J. Thompson, P. Baird, and J. Downie, The Olivieri report: The Complete Text of the Report of the Independent Inquiry Commissioned by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (Toronto: James Lorimer, 2001), http://www.dal.ca/committeeofinquiry.
CHAPTER 2. NATHAN BRETT
26
ment for public funding. The results can be alarming: corporations with poor environmental records, for example, are sometimes supplying the video materials used in classroom discussions of environmental issues.5 I begin the debate over private-versus-public services by considering the claim that a private system is a more efficient way of achieving the goals of education. This brief discussion supports two (related) conclusions. The claim of greater efficiency is (often) used in a way that makes it true a priori, though it poses as an empirical claim. Second, efficiency comparisons will not be valid if public and privatized systems have different goals—that is, assume different answers to the question, ‘Efficient at what?’ The next section takes up this question of differences in goals by examining some basic differences in the normative structures of the public and private spheres. The account contrasts the impartiality of public norm structure with the partiality of that which is private. This account is then applied to the question of equality in education. I argue that the privatization of educational services is an important step away from conditions of social justice. In defending education as a public service (comparable to a public health system) I utilize David Braybrooke’s views that education is one of the basic needs of human beings and that a just society aims at equality in meeting those needs. I conclude that the shift of educational services into the private sector is an important step away from conditions of social justice.
2.2
Privatization and Costs
Privatization occurs when some practice or enterprise that has been within the public domain, and financed through tax resources, is moved to the private sector and subjected to the competitive environment of the market. Advocates and opponents of privatization of services, such as education and health care, both make claims of greater efficiency in 5 For
examples, see Maud Barlow and Heather Robertson, Class Warfare: The Assault on Canada’s Schools (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1994): ’A Dow Chemical sponsored video, Traces of Today, created in conjunction with an educational marketing company, Modern Talking Pictures Service, claims “scientific studies and practical experience around the world have shown that incinerators are an environmentally safe method for disposing of combustible material, including plastics”’ (81).
2.2. PRIVATIZATION AND COSTS
27
defending their positions. The former see increased efficiency as a necessary result of removing a non-competitive public bureaucracy. The latter see privatization itself as necessarily introducing extra layers of profit-makers and hence expenses. 2.2.1 Efficiency The ideology of ‘neoconservatism,’ currently dominant in the political decisions of Western democracies, views privatization as progress, a change toward increased efficiency, reduced taxes, and ultimately a higher standard of living. Bringing services into the private sector is, for many proponents, a moral imperative. Even if public operation of the education or health care systems provided care equivalent to that provided by a private system at less cost,6 many proponents of privatization would be against it because opportunities for private enterprise are lost. But many advocates of this ‘new economy’ would find the idea of greater efficiency in a public system simply incredible. On this view, a public service bureaucracy is inefficient by definition. Moreover, state-run monopolies on health care or education involve an absence of competition, which protects inefficiencies. Adherents of this political view seem not to notice that the market itself can produce monopolies and provide room for vast corporate bureaucracies—organizations that impose costs and exercise power but contribute nothing of value to others in society.7 There is an ideology of the left that might be described in equivalent terms. According to this view, whatever is done ‘for profit’ is necessarily done at someone’s expense and is therefore less efficient. Hence, a direct provision of services through the public sector is inherently more 6 According to the Council of Canadians (www.canadians.org) total health care spending in Canada - under public health care—is $3,298 per person as compared with $7,000 per person under the private system in the United States. The Canadian system covers all persons; one person in seven is not covered under the U.S. system. In terms of life expectancy, Canada rated secondhighest worldwide, the United States twenty-fifth. 7 Many private sector institutions can be described in these terms—e.g., those involved in currency speculation, misleading advertising, and organizations of the sort revealed by the collapse of WorldCom and Enron in the United States. Scrutiny of such cases reveals that sometimes the removal of red tape—deregulation—has contributed remarkably to the inefficiency of our economies.
CHAPTER 2. NATHAN BRETT
28
efficient. In both of these positions one can find a claim that is true a priori. Clearly, eliminating unnecessary bureaucracy will reduce costs. Of course, there is a cost in providing government services that we ignore at our peril when we speak of health care or public education provided ‘free of charge.’ On the other hand, it is true that privatization involves the introduction of profit-makers—or perhaps layers of them—into a system that provides these services; and these changes necessarily introduce costs. The huge cost of private medical health insurance in the United States is a case in point. But in neither account is it a necessary truth that the overall cost will be greater. 2.2.2
Benefits
Surely we can compare a publicly run British Rail with its privatized counterpart, and compare them across several dimensions, in arriving at an assessment of greater or lesser efficiency. But to do this, we will have to ensure that we take into account any change in benefits. If privatized trains no longer run on time, or no longer service outlying areas, or are more prone to deadly crashes, the fact that less is being spent shows us nothing about efficiency. Similarly, if changes in the provision of medical or educational services turn out to be less expensive because only those who can afford them get treated or educated, then we can hardly say that this is more efficient until we have reached agreement about this change of benefits. Typically, changes toward privatization end up serving a smaller part of the population and differentiating in the level of benefits received by those who are served. The opposition between these alternatives, therefore, is not merely a question of fact about the best way of doing the same things. The centre of the dispute is inevitably a normative dispute about goals. In the case at hand, it involves disagreement about the proper aims of education. To privatize is to move in the direction of exclusion and competition. A public solution, on the other hand, demands inclusion and cooperation. Moreover, there are different criteria of desert and entitlement that lie in the normative backgrounds of the two approaches. Even the ideal of equality is differently interpreted, depending on whether the approach
2.2. PRIVATIZATION AND COSTS
29
is a public or private one.8 This claim that public and private educational services involve essentially different goals may seem to be contradicted by facts of which we are all well aware. Public and private schools have existed side by side in many communities for years. It is probably true, as well, that the public system evolved out of private beginnings.9 Students often move from one system to the other; exam results from the two systems can be compared; and often the curricula are very similar. It would seem to be nonsense of the sort I have just depicted to insist on a priori grounds that these schools have fundamentally different aims. This point is helpful in clarifying the object of this critique. In raising doubts about the privatization of education, I am primarily interested in changes that aim to move educational services more fully under the control of private corporations. Traditional private schools (as opposed to schools run by businesses such as the Edison Corporation) do not raise all of the same worries. Typically, the traditional private school is not run with the primary goal of making and increasing profits. These schools are voluntary associations aimed at providing distinct and often superior educational opportunities for the students they serve. However, even traditional private schools give rise to some questions of justice that are of concern here. Because they give wealthier parents a chance to provide educational opportunities that are unavailable to others, they exist in conflict with a sense of justice that demands equality in education. I will return to this. In the reassignment of education more fully to the market, schooling becomes a ‘commodity’ which students consume, and the logic of the market governs essential decisions about what will be taught and how instruction will be carried out. Promoters of privatization argue that the competitive conditions of the market provide the best environment for the preservation and enhancement of what we value independently of the market. A Mercedes is a better car than a Lada despite (and perhaps 8 The sense of equality endorsed by a public system goes beyond mere equality of opportunity—if that is construed to mean only an equal chance to compete; it includes adjustments aimed at equalization relative to need. 9 See Myron Lieberman, Public Education: An Autopsy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 14-16.
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because of) the fact that the Mercedes was manufactured by a profitseeking corporation and the Lada was not. The process of extracting a profit does not entail that automotive standards were sacrificed. On the contrary, the successful producer is efficiently producing what people want. And what people want must meet certain standards. Likewise, it may seem, the goals of education could be pursued and enhanced by corporations dedicated to making a profit by advancing the same goals endorsed by public education. On the other hand, a system of public education may be producing the educational equivalent of a Lada, not doing a good job of serving the goals of liberal education. One problem with this argument is the assumption that profit-driven exchanges in the market can provide and enhance whatever we value.10 If this were true, then prostitution would be the ideal form of sexual intimacy. Not all that we value can be reduced to or mirrored by commodity value.11 Education is a part of what makes us fully human, and to allow profitability to dictate its goals is to treat humanity as a mere means. A second problem is the oversimplified conception of the market that is assumed when we claim that the markets can provide superior means to whatever we want. A missing element in this picture is the modern market’s role in producing the ‘educational needs’ that it then satisfies. To survive in the competitive modern economy, vendors of a product or service must ‘stimulate consumer demand’ through advertising. Another key to success in modern markets lies in selling products that must be replaced and services that will need to be repeated. Of course, advertising and obsolescence can work together. Building obsolescence into products may backfire unless one also builds it into the thinking of ‘con10 ’Why isn’t everything for sale?’ asks Elizabeth Anderson in Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1993). Her answer is that we have a plurality of values, many of which cannot be captured in commodity values (chap. 8). 11 But here a common point of the defenders of privatization arises: teachers are paid for what they do. If profiting were incompatible with what we value about education, then it is hard to see why it is not already devalued. That teaching is financed and organized under a market system instead of a tax-based public system will not alter the fact that teachers are already teaching ’for profit.’ One reply to this is that teachers would be doing something else if their motivation were simply to profit from what they are doing. This reply has some salience: teaching is not (most of the time) alienated labour; it is generally valued intrinsically. But the point seems to remain: if pay cheques do not corrupt teaching, why would it be changed for the worse through full incorporation into the market? We will have to dig deeper.
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31
sumers’ by getting them to believe that whatever is not new is obsolete. As education moves further into the private sector, these aspects of the market will become increasingly important. Students and potential students will be further targeted by advertisers. In the competitive market, forms of education that are profitably served will be ‘naturally selected’ over those that are not. The market may not place a premium on critical thinking or the exploration of history. Nor will it be sensible for those directly motivated to increase profits to convey those skills that liberate by enabling a person to learn and think for herself. Rather, market success will be achieved and sustained by teaching quite specific skills that rapidly become obsolete. This will mean that a market system can be expected to move toward specialization of the curriculum. Not only will specific skills be more easily standardized and tested, they will also provide an education market that sustains itself as people return to be retooled to cope with the changing conditions of the job market.
2.3 Two Normative Contrasts between Public and Private† To advance the discussion of privatization in education, I want to consider at a more abstract level some differences between the public and private approaches. On the view that I defend, exclusion and partiality are essential features of the domains we refer to as ‘private.’ This means that we should be particularly vigilant where social changes involve privatizing what has been a public matter. It does not mean that we should always prefer public to private solutions of problems. On the contrary, being exclusive and partial is sometimes a virtue. Let me explain. 2.3.1
Exclusion
A private ‘sphere’ is one in which—in some respects—a person or group is to be left free from interference and from public review or scrutiny. When we use the contrast between public and private nor† This section derives from a discussion of the public-private divide in relation to patents on living things in my ’Private Life: Reflections on Privacy, Patents and Biotechnology,’ written for the Law Commission of Canada. See New Perspectives on the Public—Private Divide (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003), chap. 3.
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matively to mark the sphere of individual autonomy, the private sphere consists of those types of decisions and actions from which the control of the state ought to be excluded. Likewise, the right to privacy is the right to exclude others from information about ourselves. The most obvious connections between privacy and exclusion, of course, are those involved in private property. Property is private when there is a right to use and control something together with the right to exclude others from its use. Private enterprise is structured around such private property rights. Apart from some rights to exclude, we would not have any normative sense in which anything could be private. 2.3.2
Partiality
Private matters are also, in some respects, immune from generalization tests that apply to public matters. Along some dimension of decisionmaking, it is permissible, within the various private spheres, to treat like cases differently. That is, the various private spheres involve relations of partiality among persons.12 This needs explanation by means of examples. Let me take relations of family and friendship as paradigms of private relations. In being part of a family, or in having friends, I am (normatively) connected with specific people in ways that I am not related to others. These relations between certain specific people and myself are relations of partiality. If I treat my friends and family as if they mattered to me no more than anyone else, I mistreat them. I can recognize that two children are equally needy and still be obliged to treat one preferentially, because one child is mine. I am partial to my friends in the same way, and rightly so, according to the moral outlook that prevails in most societies. In entering into promises and contracts, I establish further relations of partiality. I can no longer treat the interests of A and B as of equal importance in all respects, if I have promised something to A but not to B. Much of our normative world is comprised of such relations of partiality. A good chair of an academic department will act in a way that favours her department over others, just as a good 12 See Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. chap. 2.
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33
leader of a corporation will work for its goals and those of its shareholders over the interests of others. Within the outlook that the privacy of property establishes (taken by itself), the owner of private property need not concern himself with the fact that others have far greater need for these resources than he does. All of these partial viewpoints exist in contrast with—and often in tension with—public viewpoints that demand impartiality. In some contexts, the types of loyalties that define the relationships just considered become matters of unfairness and injustice. A judge cannot take pride in giving lighter sentences to her friends. A teacher treats his students unfairly if he plays favourites. There is, in fact, a perspective of public reason from which all such specific relations of partiality can appear to be vices. This viewpoint has sometimes been thought to define the outlook of reflective morality.13 But it is a mistake to suppose that partiality can be eliminated from a defensible reflective morality. It is true that loyalties can easily be, and often have been, taken to excess. A normative world constructed entirely from such partial relations would be one from which justice had disappeared. But the partialities involved in friendship and citizenship are not—like (say) racism—something that we should strive to overcome. A world of wholly utilitarian impartiality, in which people are rendered free from commitments to specific others, and in which caring (in this sense) and loyalty disappear, is itself not a worthy ideal of human perfection. A justifiable social system will incorporate and protect both of these normative structures. In claiming that partiality is a constitutive feature of what is private, I am not saying that impartiality plays no role within areas of life that are predominantly private. It has often been said that a good parent treats her children equally. But this is not to deny that relations of partiality are a constitutive element of the family. My contention is that such relations of partiality are essentially involved in the private spheres un13 This claim represents a tradition that includes most of moral philosophy, including philosophers as diverse as Plato and Hume. For a critique of the view, see, e.g., Bernard Williams’s discussion of integrity in ’A Critique of Utilitarianism,’ in J.J.C. Smart and B. Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), and Nagel, Equality and Partiality. The view has also been questioned by some feminists who defend an ethic of care, e.g., Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
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der discussion. On the other hand, partialities may be involved in the ‘public’ spheres that comprise our social world. But partiality is not a defining feature of what is public; and it is not what we are after when we designate something as a matter of public interest or responsibility.14 It seems clear that we can end up with the various lines between public and private drawn in the wrong place. We are prepared to condemn a totalitarian state in which there is little by way of protection for autonomous decision or informational privacy. The special relationships of partiality are an important aspect of any life worth living. But a social world built entirely (or predominantly) out of partialities, where there is no public perspective from which human actions are constrained by reference to impartial standards, is also not a plausible ideal. 2.3.3
The Public-Private Divide in the ‘Real World’
In our everyday social world the public and private do not exist as neatly isolated ‘spheres’ (despite our use of this term). The normative differences between the public and private that I have described in this section are ideal types that never correspond precisely to our actual situation. In the ‘real world’ the public and private exist in combination with each other. Systems of private property and enterprise, for example, are always dependent upon public law to provide a basis for a certain organization of ownership and competition. Public services, on the other hand, are always provided in ways that involve some dependence on private markets in goods and services. Moreover, public services are generally15 provided by decisions of government, and the government (in a democratic state) is the representative of the public interest. But governments can (of course) fail in this task of representation. Governments can become the representative of private corporations, for exam14 I am also not arguing or assuming that partiality (and hence privacy) necessarily connects with egoism, with the pursuit of self-interest. Not all forms of partiality involve the promotion of self-interest, although, of course, this is a highly important manifestation of partiality. The kind of partiality that is involved in care—for example, care for the members of one’s family—can involve great sacrifices of the time and energy that might have been devoted to one’s own projects. The chair of a department can impose costs on herself—for the sake of the department. In times of conflict, the partiality of loyalty to a state can cost a person his life. 15 There are also non-governmental organizations.
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35
ple, and act in ways that are contrary to the public interest. In light of these features of our actual situation, one might wonder whether there is any point in drawing the sharp contrast between public and private that I have elaborated. One might infer from the complex integration of public and private that there is no real division between these two and that ‘privatization’ is itself intelligible only as an abstraction. This would be a mistake. It would be comparable to the mistake of thinking that there is no useful division between utilitarian and Kantian (or respect for person) ideals, because in our world of everyday decisions and institutions these ideals are integrated with each other in complex ways. These different norm systems sometimes complement and sometimes combat each other; but there is no adequate understanding of the normative bases of our institutions that does not include both perspectives. There is a difference between policies that move us further toward an entrenchment of individual rights, for example, and those that subordinate such rights in the pursuit of a higher level of general welfare. The 1982 entrenchment of a Charter of Rights in the Canadian Constitution is an example of the first sort of change (though the Charter itself aims to achieve a careful balance between consideration of individual rights and the public good). More recently, we have seen the introduction of anti-terrorist laws in both the United States and Canada that impose new security measures at some cost to individual rights to privacy and freedom from search. Understanding the abstract differences between these two theories is essential to understanding what is going on in our social world despite the fact that the real world does not provide examples of institutions which exemplify either in isolation from the other. It is in this same spirit that the normative division between public and private should be understood.
2.4
Education, Equality, and Choice
Obviously no answers to questions about privatization in education follow directly from these abstract differences between the public and private spheres. But these contrasts suggest importantly different visions of education, both of which capture matters of importance to us. One
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is the image of public education in a just and democratic society. From this viewpoint, social justice requires that opportunities for education be provided on a basis that is substantively equal. Education is important to the success of the lives people live. A society that shows equal concern and respect to its citizens will not allow wide disparities in the educational opportunities that it provides. Those who do not know what is going on in their world and in their society will choose from an impoverished range of options. They will compete with others for jobs and opportunities at a disadvantage. They will not have an effective voice in the selection of leaders and policies in their community. The fact that a child comes from a poor family should not mean that she also has to contend with a poor school. Even if the poverty of her family is a function of the choices and lack of effort of her parents (which it often isn’t) this is no fault of hers, and it can provide no justification for thinking that she deserves a less adequate education than children of more well-to-do parents. Set against this egalitarian image is a nest of intuitions about the responsibility of the family in relation to education. We actually have a social system that is not egalitarian, but dramatically hierarchal in many respects, in which there are better and worse jobs, houses, neighbourhoods, universities, and so forth. Viewed from within this hierarchy, it would be odd to suppose that, although in other respects well-to-do parents are free to confer advantages on their children that are unavailable to less fortunate members of the community, they can provide no advantages in relation to education. Education is one of the keys to success in upward mobility, and those who have the means often regard themselves as having a right to spend their income in ways that give their children an advantage. The educational systems that have developed within liberal democracies are an uneasy compromise between these two ways of thinking about educational opportunities. State-funded public education is underwritten by arguments that lead in the direction of equal access and equal opportunity. But private money can often be utilized to obtain access to alternative superior schooling in private institutions.
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2.4.1 The Demands of Justice It will be useful to briefly contrast two extremes on this continuum of public-versus-private norm systems in their application to education. On one side (call it ‘the left’) is a system from which parental discretion is removed. This could be done on the model of public health care as it is provided in many countries (including Canada)—where a ‘two-tier’ system is deemed to be unjust and private medical services are effectively excluded by legal regulations. Applied to education, this would mean the elimination of private schools. The sort of social system defended by Marx and many modern socialists requires that educational opportunities be allocated equally and in a way that reflects need and ability. Of course, this view does not require exactly the same treatment of every child, irrespective of their differences—any more than a public health care system requires the delivery of the same medicines or treatments to everyone regardless of their medical condition. But a socialized system of education does reject the idea that opportunities open to a child should depend on the wealth or the choices of her family. One could also generate arguments for a completely public system from a liberal theory such as that of Rawls.16 A decision from behind a veil of ignorance would provide no good reasons for a caste system in which the resources and quality of early education available to children depends on the wealth and choices of their parents. As we move up from primary education, emerging differences in effort and talents of students will provide some basis for differentiation under the difference principle,17 since investing more in bright and willing students will sometimes provide benefits that can make everyone better off. But, again, there is no reason to suppose that differences selected in this way will correlate with the wealth and choices of parents. A system of public scholarships would be necessitated to implement this use of the difference principle. Of course, the degree to which public schools actually provide substantively equal opportunity is limited. Often, there are quite substantial funding differences between one school district and another 16 John
Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 136-42.
17 The difference principle permits inequalities only where they are to the advantage of the least
well-off member of society.
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(e.g., between middle-class, suburban neighbourhoods and the innercity schools, or between urban and rural schools). Recently in the United States, Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of equal treatment have provided the basis for legal decisions against the inequalities that have often resulted from differences in the property tax base from which schools generally have derived their funding; but other judgments, in both the United States and Canada, protect parental choices in relation to the education of their children.18 2.4.2
Free-Market Choices
On the other side (call it ‘the right’) is the complete elimination of public schools in favour of a free market in education.19 Education, on this view, should be opened up to a free market and treated as a product like any other within that market. Like food and housing (which, of course, are necessary to meet basic needs), and like automobiles and computer systems (which satisfy less vital interests) under a private system, educational products would not be available at uniform price or quality. Opened to freedom of choice, the educational market can be predicted to disperse educational opportunities as widely as the market has dispersed the quality of other products that we consume (think of the range in quality and price of food, houses, computers, automobiles). Proponents of free-market education might ask, rhetorically, what crude form of materialism would permit individuals to reflect their values in the choices they make over wines or automobiles but deny them this opportunity in relation to the education of their children? There are versions of both libertarian and conservative political moralities that support such an educational policy. Consider a libertarian view. If children are taken to be the property of their parents (in a relatively strong sense), then parents are free to invest in their children—or to put their money elsewhere—just as they are free to invest in improve18 A 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case, Rodriguez v. San Antonio Independent School District, actually held that inequalities of funding were not a violation of equal protection, since education is not a fundamental interest subject to judicial review and states do not have to provide education at all. But subsequent decisions in many state supreme courts have found reason to disagree and have held that unequal funding is unconstitutional. See Lieberman, Public Education, 206. 19 Lieberman defends such a proposal in Public Education.
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ments to (other!) real estate.20 This form of libertarianism attempts to articulate a political morality within the private perspective from which substantive universalization tests are excluded. (All adult human beings have the same negative right to choose lives for themselves. But none has any positive right that these choices be realizable.) The libertarian theory takes individual choice to be its central concern, but it finds no objection to a social system that offers a wide range of choices to some that it effectively excludes from others. In this respect, it presents a politics of partiality. The social system that emerges from the patterns of individual choices is one in which the natural differences (e.g., in talents) among human beings are likely to be amplified because the talented will be rewarded (by the choices of others) with additional resources and powers. As long as this is the result of choices that adults have actually made without coercion, there is nothing wrong (according to this view) with a system that offers widely varying educational opportunities to children21 (including none at all). A defender of free enterprise in education need not accept this radical version of libertarianism with its counter-intuitive implications about children. The view can be defended on the basis of a conservative position founded centrally on ‘family values.’ This view credits parents with a right to control the education of their children, a right that is sufficiently strong that it trumps competing social considerations. Of course, such a right would be no guarantee that there are educational options that match the choices that parents will want to make. But (on this view) it is assumed that this is more likely under policies that place education more fully within the economy of the free market. Families can be expected to want to provide their children the best education they can afford.
20 See Jan Narveson , The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), chap. 19, for a discussion of ‘The Problem Children,’ in which Narveson explores some of the troubling implications of the view that children are private property. 21 Narveson, chap. 20.
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2.5 The Priority of Justice By what standards are we to reconcile in a principled way this opposition between individual choice (and privilege) in education versus demands of justice and equal treatment? This question is central to debates over privatization. The question also presents a dilemma with which many of us have struggled personally, in trying to do the best that we can for our own children while recognizing that there are issues of justice at stake and that it is not possible to justify a system that privileges some children over others. Ultimately, I believe the clash that I have described rests on differing conceptions of the relation between the right and the good (in the sense that Rawls uses this dichotomy).22 The libertarian and conservative positions described above subordinate public matters (at least with regard to education) to individual adult decisions about ‘the good,’ about what is worth doing with one’s life. The just society is one in which the rules and institutions provide a framework that protects the rights of individuals to make these choices. This view is combined with a thesis about the relation between parents and children. Until a child has matured to the point where she can make rational choices for herself, it is the parent’s right (libertarian view) or authority and responsibility (conservative view) to make these life choices for her. On the other hand, the egalitarian position that I have described assumes the priority of the right over the good. Individual freedom to act and the scope of the freedom to make private commitments that involve partiality to certain others are always subject to prior constraints of justice. Ronald Dworkin sums up the conflict that has been central to this paper in the following way: Notice what might seem to be a contradiction between two ethical ideals most of us embrace. The first dominates our private lives. We believe that we have particular responsibilities toward those with whom we have special relationships: ourselves, our family, friends and colleagues ... We believe that someone who showed equal concern for all members of 22 Rawls,
A Theory of Justice, 446-52.
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41
his political community, in his private life would be defective. The second ideal dominates our political life. The just citizen, in his political life, insists on equal concern for all.23 The liberal answer to this conflict follows from the priority of justice: A competent overall ethics must reconcile these two ideals. They can be reconciled adequately, however, only when politics actually succeeds in distributing resources in the way that justice requires. If a just distribution has been secured, then the resources people control are morally, as well as legally, theirs; using them as they wish, and as special attachments and projects require, in no way derogates from their recognizing that all citizens are entitled to a just share.24 Applied to the issues raised by privatization in education, this resolution of the conflict between public and private values would cut fairly deeply into the (supposed) right of individuals to provide privileged education for their children. It would also provide grounds to limit the ways in which the market can disperse the resources of a community and thereby lose the initially fair distribution of opportunities. But here we should again return to the real world. We are not at all likely ever to arrive at a new beginning in which the resources to which individuals have access are evenly divided. In practice we will have to live with incremental change, and we will have to be vigilant about incremental changes that take us even further from conditions of justice. In devising social policy we will have to assume a wide dispersion of wealth. It is against this background that we must consider how to structure the institutions that provide educational opportunities. Privatization will move us further in the direction of choices that reflect private loyalties and interests. We have witnessed these changes in many industries, from coal mining to airlines, and we can presume that these changes 23 Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 235. 24 Ibid.
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will not be reversed. Is there something special about education that should lead us to set it apart from full integration with the competitive pressures of the market?
2.6
Education as a Human Need
In much of his work, David Braybrooke aims to reinstate the concept of need in theoretical discussions of social policy.25 As Braybrooke points out, need has never been displaced from the discourse of policymakers. Contemporary theoretical work in economic theory, political philosophy, and ethics, on the other hand, has generally displaced talk of needs by the concept of utility, and utility itself is analysed in terms of preference.26 This is unfortunate, since the resolution of many problems of social policy requires a distinction between what is needed and what is merely preferred. We can utilize this division in arguing that a market-driven educational system will give us the wrong resolution of the conflict between public and private opportunity in education. In addition to the claim that education is one of the basic needs of human beings, there are three claims defended by Braybrooke of particular relevance to the present problem. The first is a criterion of what counts as a need. We can identify what is needed most easily by reference to its absence or insufficiency: failure to meet a need detracts from a person’s ability to function in the social roles that are appropriate to him or her as a human being.27 The second is a normative thesis that Braybrooke denominates the ‘Priority Principle.’28 According to this principle (and common sense in matters of allocation) providing conditions in which human beings can meet their needs takes precedence over permitting or enabling people to satisfy preferences for what is not needed. A third claim concerns distributive justice: to the extent that it is practical, a just society will aim to achieve equality in meeting 25 Braybrooke,
Meeting Needs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Does the Moral Force of the Concept of Needs Reside, and When?’ in Analytical Political Philosophy: From Discourse, Edification (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 27 Meeting Needs, chaps 2 and 3. 28 Ibid., chap. 2.6, ‘A Principle of Precedence.’ 26 ‘Where
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needs.29 Consider the first of these claims. In the sense at issue here, what people genuinely need is what is necessary to their thriving as human beings; and, conversely, the absence of what is needed undermines their ability to function physically and in the social roles that make us human. This is a thesis of modern natural law theory (natural law naturalized, one might say).30 But this claim, too, captures what is common knowledge and common sense.31 As human beings, we need food and water because without them we will cease to function at all; and with inadequate supplies we’ll be impaired. Similarly, we need to acquire some language abilities in order to function in the social roles that give us our identities as individuals and members of cultures. A lack of some linguistic abilities—for example, the capacity to read and write—leaves a person unable to function well in the social roles required by modern societies. The need for education is a generalization over a wide range of capacities of this sort. But it also recognizes that a general level of shared information is itself a condition of functioning adequately within a modern society such as our own. Second, given this conception of needs, the priority principle seems to require little by way of justification. It is more important that we retain the capacity to function as human beings than to get exactly what we want. The utility calculus of individuals will reflect this. But in aggregating preference satisfaction, there is no guarantee that the needs of a few will not be outweighed by the preferences of many. That an automobile factory contaminates its immediate environment, leaving those nearby without an adequate supply of clean air, may be deemed a small price to pay for the greater wealth and economic opportunity that is generated by growth in an unregulated industry—if we are simply trying to maximize the satisfaction of preferences. Similarly, if we have a free 29 Ibid.,
chap. 4.5, ‘Equality in Meeting Needs.’ defends a version of natural law theory in Natural Law Modernized (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). The role of human needs in relation to what is universal in morality is summed up at 239-41. 31 Obviously, the claim does not attempt simply to capture ordinary language. We are prone to say such things as ‘I need a drink’ or ‘I need a second car.’ A view designed to explain and elucidate the contrast between really needing something and merely preferring or wanting it must exclude such claims. 30 Braybrooke
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market in educational services, the costs of providing for those with special needs will be deemed too high and the benefits to low to be justified in terms of economic good gained by the stockholders of competing private businesses. Of course, we could introduce legislation—and some communities have done so—requiring educational corporations to take the responsibility of meeting such needs. But this is just to say that we could hold the line on privatization by retaining public control over this aspect of education. Neither the pursuit of utility nor the pursuit of profit in a free market can be expected to capture the (intuitively plausible) policy of giving priority to needs over mere preferences. Finally, what justification can be given for the idea that a just society will afford its citizens an equal opportunity to meet their needs? I will assume, as the context of this discussion, a level of affluence like that of modern Western societies, in which there are more than sufficient resources to meet the needs of the people. It is not necessary for some to die in order that others live or for some to remain at home in order that others receive an education. In these circumstances the argument is very simple. The requirement of equality in meeting needs follows directly from the priority principle. If there is enough to meet needs, but the needs of some are not met, the allocation system is permitting some to satisfy mere preferences while others do without what they need. Given what needs are, this system will treat some people as if it did not matter that they lack the resources to lead fully human lives while others are able to enjoy luxuries. Braybrooke’s own argument against this degree of imbalance involves showing that it constitutes ideal conditions for exploitation.32 Some will be unable to meet their needs without serving the interests of others. Far from being consistent with social justice, a system of affluence that does not provide equal opportunity for meeting needs maintains the essential conditions of oppression.33 But here we must consider an objection. Food is obviously a need of human beings. It clearly does not follow directly from this that food should be equally distributed or that there is something wrong with the 32 Meeting
Needs, 152-5. 152-5. Charity is a possible alternative to exploitation. It is not, in the circumstances described, an escape from oppression, since it maintains the relation of dominance. For this reason it is resented by those who are aware of the injustice of their condition. 33 Ibid.,
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system in which food is made available by private enterprise and made available in a way that generates a huge range of options in type, quality, and price. A system of private enterprise in food may, in fact, enable everyone to meet their needs in this respect. This is not to say, of course, that our present system of private enterprise in food does adequately meet the needs of all human beings. Clearly it doesn’t. The point of the objection is that, though food is a commodity that we need, justice does not require that it be available on an equal basis. This is because food does not just meet our needs; it also satisfies a wide range of preferences that go beyond what is necessary to avoid starvation or incapacitation. Similarly, while education is a human need, its acquisition satisfies a wide range of preferences that go beyond what is needed for one to be a fully functioning member of a modern society. This point is obviously right. It is important to understand the implications of the fact that as human beings we have a need for education. It is also important to see why a just society will provide the opportunity for a minimum level of education on an egalitarian basis. The above account provides some of the argument behind the ideals that led our communities to a system of public education, one that is protected from the operation of a free market. Braybrooke’s argument also enables us to see how the absence of such a system creates the condition under which people can be marginalized, exploited, and oppressed. But that there is a need for education with these implications does not establish what minimum is adequate. Nor will these considerations, by themselves, provide the basis for a thoroughgoing equality of opportunity in education that extends from kindergarten to university.
2.7
Fair Opportunity
Given that there is not going to be a one-time redistribution of resources (and if there were, it would soon be needed again), attempts to achieve conditions that are consistent with a liberal conception of distributive justice will have to rely on tax policies that redistribute wealth which has been gained in circumstances that do not meet the conditions of justice. But whether tax policies move us closer to justice, are neutral, or
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promote an even greater differentiation between economic classes will depend upon the uses to which tax revenue is put. Systems of public welfare and medicine - as well as education—do redistribute wealth. But often these systems fall far short of achieving conditions of equality even with respect to needs. In many cases it would be absurd to suppose that they were intended to do so. But there are exceptions. When Canadians defend universal medicare and resist a ‘two-tier’ system (as a large majority of Canadians do) it is because they see justice as requiring equality in meeting needs. Perhaps because the needs that are met by education are less immediate, we do not find the same consensus that a two- (or multi-) tier educational system is marked by injustice. In education, meeting needs is necessary but not sufficient for meeting the conditions required by justice. Reflective comparison of public institutions of welfare and medicine with education will reveal that the former do not carry the same potential to move those who benefit from them toward a more fair or just distribution of resources. A safety net is just that—a device that (when it functions successfully) prevents people’s situations from becoming dramatically worse. But lives of mere subsistence, in which one does not perish or suffer incapacitation from lack of food or insulin, should not be the lot of any members of an affluent community—as Braybrooke himself would be the first to insist. Given what we know about human motivation, however, a system that provided affluence irrespective of a person’s contribution to the community would not work. Even if it did work, it would not be fair to those who are productive contributors. So, differences in levels of wealth can be expected even in a just community. But this does not mean, of course, that the opportunities available to individuals in a just society should themselves be quite uneven so that some struggle to gain even a small portion of what others have handed to them. What is needed is a system that moves us toward equality of opportunity in which differences in power and compensation are not simply reflections and amplifications of an arbitrary distribution of wealth. Here public education could play a centrally important role. Given the importance of training and knowledge in gaining access to careers, this access should not be limited by factors that have nothing to do with a
2.8. TEACHING CLASS
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person’s effort or choices. In the real world—as opposed to that of theories in which we can contemplate a total reallocation of wealth—public education is one of the few institutions that has the potential to move us toward conditions of distributive justice. Arguably, no other institution has the same potential to redistribute resources in a way that achieves some main aspects34 of the ideal of distributive justice that liberal theorists such as Rawls and Dworkin have defended. At the centre of arguments for privatization in education, of course, is a rejection of this liberal ideal. But (to translate this into one of the metaphors of advocates of free enterprise) it is hard to see how one could defend as fair a race in which some participants are allowed to start well ahead of others. Pessimism will lead some to view this situation as inevitable. Self-interest may lead those who are well placed to defend their advantage (perhaps by embracing this pessimism). But what excuse shall we find for those philosophers who manage to convince themselves that it is a matter of entitlement that from the beginning some individuals have opportunities for self-improvement that others are denied?35
2.8
Teaching Class
If the argument of this paper is right, the normative division between proponents and opponents of privatization is a deep one. It is an illusion to suppose that this is really a debate over the most efficient means of promoting goals that are held in common. But where does this leave us? Is there some common ground on which to stand in order to decide (or split the differences) between these two views? 34 A system in which people have an equal opportunity to compete—e.g., for marks and hence for positions in higher education—does not solve the problem that human capacities are themselves unevenly distributed. The reduction of that form of arbitrariness—to the limited extent that it is possible—is dependent on need-based policies. 35 Here I am appropriating the cadence and spirit of David Hume’s critique of the ancient philosophers, whose metaphysical views (e.g., of nature’s horror of a vacuum) he deemed to be the products of overactive imaginations. It ends: ‘We must pardon children, because of their age, poets because they profess to follow implicitly the suggestions of their fancy; But what excuse shall we find to justify our philosophers in so signal a weakness?’ See A Treatise of Human Nature, book 1, part 4, section 3.
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48
According to Thomas Nagel in Equality and Partiality, there are no grounds within contemporary morality to resolve this conflict in a principled way.36 I am not convinced that this sceptical thesis is right. But I do see the difficulty involved in finding any resolution that does not beg central questions. My own view accords with that of Dworkin (above), which accords with the views of Kant and Rawls and Braybrooke— that the impartial demands of justice must set limits to our freedom to pursue our own goals in ways that are exclusive and partial. Moreover, I believe that it is a mistake to defend privatization on the basis of greater ‘choice’ in education, where the choices of some will be options that they can’t refuse, for services they would not otherwise accept. I am aware, however, that this objection relies on an appeal to an impartial standard, which proponents of privatization may refuse to concede. On the other hand, I am confident that in the social world to which our theories must be applied, we will continue to find both a sense of justice and an acknowledgment that certain basic choices cannot rightly be dictated by the state. Some compromise will have to be reached between the sense that justice rules out inequality in education and the view that parents should be free to choose, within their means, the education that their own children will receive. Most reflective people will find that they cannot avoid either of these perspectives, and, therefore, they will be willing to accept ways of integrating them. The arguments of this paper aim to reveal the ways in which moves toward privatization bring with them important changes that conflict with the sense of justice that lies in the background of our public systems of education. Our theories must also face the reality of imperfection in the social circumstances to which we apply them. We know that governments are often very imperfect representatives of an impartially conceived public interest. We know that some public schools will be good and others will not, and that some public schools are sufficiently bad that parents will be justified in taking their children out of them, if they can. But there are ways of cheating public schools that will continue to offend our sense of justice—if we are not duped by them. One of these ways of cheating is to impoverish public schools by cutting their resources and then using 36 Nagel,
Equality and Partiality, 3-9.
2.8. TEACHING CLASS
49
their faults as enticements to private alternatives. Another is to utilize tax credits for those who pay for private education as ways of removing funding from public schools so that public schools are left with fewer resources and required to teach those with special needs whom the private schools will not accept. These are familiar strategies of conservative governments committed to privatization. But (you may object) what if these alternative schools actually do a better job? My answer to this question is given above. If those arguments are sound, they show that privatized schools will not be doing the same job. They will be leading us away from the ideal of equality that is a necessary condition of justice and democracy. In amplifying the differences among us, they will be teaching class.
Chapter 3
Determining Health Care Needs After the Human Genome Project: Reflections on Genetic Tests for Breast Cancer S USAN S HERWIN
Abstract This chapter appeals to Braybrooke’s conceptual work on needs and tries to pick up where he leaves off at the end of Meeting Needs when he throws up his hands in an honest admission that his theory cannot deal with the ‘bottomless pit of medical needs.’ I explore how the new genetics is expanding the scope of perceived medical needs and look particularly at the genetic test for hereditary breast cancer now on the market. Building on Braybrooke’s category of course-of-life needs, this chapter proposes developing a relational understanding of persons and of needs as a way to avoid the deeper bottomless pit of medical need attached to the availability of genetic testing. If, as Braybrooke advises, we are careful in our application of the concept of ‘need,’ the pit takes on a different structure and requires different strategies than is commonly assumed.∗ ∗ I had the opportunity to present earlier drafts of this paper at the University of British Columbia (W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics), the University of Toronto (Joint Centre for Bioethics), and Dalhousie University (Philosophy Department). I am very grateful for all the thoughtful feedback I received on these occasions. I am especially grateful for the careful attention provided by Lori d’Agincourt-Canning, Jeffrey Nisker, and Christy Simspon.
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3.1 Introduction In his important book Meeting Needs, David Braybrooke (1987) restores the concept of human needs to a central place in policy considerations. He is responding to a widespread tendency among modern economists and liberal political theorists to substitute individual preferences for the traditional role assigned the concept of needs in social policy deliberations. Braybrooke seeks to stem this tide and restore the concept of needs to its rightful place where it can provide ‘firm guidance in the choice of social policies’ (5). He argues that without a clear understanding of what are legitimately classified as needs, it is difficult to know how to organize government priorities and how to evaluate specific policies according to norms of justice and beneficence. The aim of his book is to develop and defend a substantive, and usable, account of the concept of needs. Rather than producing an analytic definition of needs in terms of a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, Braybrooke offers an account of how the concept can (and should) be used in the practical evaluation of social policies. He finds it necessary to distinguish between two types of needs: course-of-life needs and adventitious needs. The former deals with the needs associated with normal functioning in society and the latter addresses conditional needs that derive from specific projects. Thus, course-of-life needs are common to all and adventitious needs reflect personal preferences. He believes that social policies should try to ensure satisfaction of both types of needs, but, in most circumstances, priority should be granted to course-of-life needs. This comprehensive and persuasive account of the concept of human needs makes a very important contribution to the role of ethics in public policy. Unfortunately, as Braybrooke is well aware, his insightful account faces serious limitations. At the conclusion of the book, with characteristic honesty and humility, he cites two problems he finds intractable. In each case, the concept of needs ‘breaks down’ in the face of needs so enormous that they threaten to drain all public resources. The first area concerns efforts to apply a single, normative concept of needs to the global community because the scale of scarcity and hu-
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man suffering shifts dramatically once we leave the borders of affluent industrialized nations. The second problem area is that of medical services, particularly those associated with expensive, life-prolonging care for the critically ill: providing the full range of medical services to everyone whose life might be extended by such services might easily exhaust all public resources. I should, probably, follow the wisdom of Braybrooke’s leadership and join him in throwing up my hands at the problem of applying his substantive conception of human needs to the messy terrain of medicine, but this does not seem to be an option for those of us who work squarely in the area of health care ethics. According to the crumbling (but still standing) pillars of the Canada Health Act, Canadians are entitled to publicly funded medical and hospital treatments that are judged to be medically necessary. Provinces and territories, responsible for implementing the unwieldy requirements of this Act, face the daunting task of determining which services fall under the category of ‘medical necessity’ or ‘medical need’ and of deciding what level of service counts as discharging this duty. These are moral, as well as political and economic, decisions, and a conception of human need that makes sense in the context of high-tech medical care is an essential element for ethical public policy in this realm. In the mid-1980s, when Braybrooke was writing Meeting Needs, the type of medical care that worried him was the sort associated with resource-intensive, life-saving treatments: organ transplants, prolonged time in the ICU, long-term dependence on expensive technological supports, and the nursing care required to maintain such efforts - that is, the various sorts of life-extension opportunities medical science has been generating over the last half-century. As if these problems were not bad enough, we now find ourselves facing many new demands on our health care system. One large set of these is associated with the growing knowledge that arises from the Human Genome Project and the related promise that access to genetic knowledge may sometimes lead to actions that could significantly increase life expectancy for particular individuals. This is a more indirect approach to life extension than the interventions Braybrooke found overwhelming in the 1980s, but for the
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people in question, the opportunity to avoid or delay life-threatening illness may seem every bit as necessary as traditional life-prolonging medical interventions. Arguably, these needs are even more important to address, since if it is possible to avoid critical illness altogether, not only will the lives of affected individuals be extended, but their health will also be improved (unlike many in critical stages of illness who can hope only for extended quantity of rather poor-quality lives). My aim in this chapter is to reflect on how, as a society still (barely) committed to a publicly funded health care system that is expected to provide people with the health care they need, Canadians should reflect on the added complexities that emerge from the potential explosion of knowledge about individuals’ genetic disposition to develop particular diseases. I shall focus, in particular, on the case of genetic testing for mutations associated with some forms of hereditary breast cancer as an illustration of how to think about the connection between genetic knowledge and the concept of needs. I assume that we may soon see many more options of genetic tests for susceptibility to other adult-onset diseases; therefore, it is important to understand how to approach any such test within a conceptual framework of medical needs. As well, I hope that exploring the question of medical needs in the context of genetic testing will bring us closer to addressing Braybrooke’s initial worries about how to approach other forms of medical technology. I shall argue that in order for an account of human needs to play a meaningful role in public policy deliberations it must support an understanding of human beings as relational entities rather than the more familiar conception of persons as distinct, self-contained beings. First, I shall explain how the problem that confronted Braybrooke’s specific account of human needs in 1987 could now be significantly more threatening as we move rapidly into the era of individualized genetic knowledge, and then I shall show why I believe that the resolution of this conundrum rests with a reinterpretation of the concept of the individual and, correspondingly, of the needs we should perceive as attached to such an entity.
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3.2 The World after the Human Genome Project The Human Genome Project (HGP) is now complete. From the beginning, its promoters have promised that the genetic knowledge revealed by this massive research program would lead to an array of therapeutic interventions designed to correct genetic anomalies associated with serious illnesses. To this point, that promise remains unfulfilled; no significant cures have yet emerged from the genetic knowledge generated from the HGP, and most experts believe that any such innovations are, at best, decades away (Kitcher 2001). If and when such therapies do appear, we may have to revisit the question of medical need yet again in deciding which of the possible genetic ‘corrections’ should be classified as medically necessary. For now, however, there is more than enough to concern ethicists if we limit our focus to the immediate impact of the HGP. So far, its principal fruit is the ability to develop tests for genetic susceptibility to a small but growing number of particular diseases. Heralding this new era of genetic knowledge is the BRCAnalysis test developed and marketed by Myriad Genetics Inc. to identify many of the thousands of mutations that occur at BRCA1 or BRCA2 that have been associated with some forms of breast and ovarian cancer. BRCAnalysis is one version of a number of tests that have been developed to detect mutations at BRCA1 or 2. (For simplicity, I shall speak generically of ‘BRCA testing’ to refer to all of the genetic tests designed to detect the many types of identified mutations at either BRCA1 or BRCA2 and I shall speak of those contemplating testing as ‘women,’ although men also carry the BRCA genes and those who do face elevated risk of developing cancers and of passing on the genetic mutations to their children.) BRCA testing, and especially Myriad’s version of BRCAnalysis, is particularly significant since it is one of the first genetic disposition tests to reach the marketplace. As such, it is the forerunner of many other genetic tests that will likely come on stream if the corporate profits and/or social benefits of this test prove encouraging. As research programs pursuing further genetic tests proliferate, it is essential that we pay careful attention to the question of what should be done with the host of genetic secrets that will soon be revealed.
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Although genetic testing has been around for some time, BRCA testing represents a major shift. Where earlier tests were primarily used on fetuses (or on potential parents worried about the possibility of genetic disease in future children), this test is targeted at adults regarding their own future health status. As well, where some earlier tests did investigate future illness in adults, such as Huntington’s disease, they tended to be limited to a small, identifiable group of people at risk; breast cancer, in contrast, threatens more than half the population. With a one in nine incidence rate, breast cancer affects many Canadian families, and popular media have ensured widespread awareness of the threat of the disease. A genetic test associated with such a widely distributed and highly feared disease is potentially of interest to a very large segment of the population (even though the test is meaningful only for those women who come from high-risk families—that is, less than 1 per cent of women).1 Myriad’s decisions to aggressively market its version of the BRCA test and to try to enforce its patent right internationally also signify important changes to the ways in which genetic tests may be affected by corporate agendas. Because BRCAnalysis raises so many serious ethical questions that will surely be compounded when it is joined by other genetic susceptibility tests, I propose to explore some of these questions as they relate to the place of dispositional genetic tests within the complex array of medical services that should be understood as meeting significant needs. If we do determine that BRCA testing meets a medical need that should be addressed within a public (or private, for that matter) health system, we must be prepared for the possible arrival of a host of additional genetic tests for susceptibility to adult-onset diseases. Together, such tests could easily swamp an already leaky health care system and generate enormous confusion among a population increasingly encouraged to look for single causes and straightforward, technology-based solutions to complex, multi-factorial diseases. It is, therefore, urgent that we seek to identify and resolve the complex question of whether or not 1 Those who might carry the BRCA mutation are thought to come from families with a history of two or more closely related family members with the same or related cancers, a pattern of cancer in two or more generations, and cancers diagnosed at an early age.
3.3. THE CASE FOR TREATING BRCA TESTING AS A NEED
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to view such tests as meeting an important need before we go much further down the path of developing additional genetic tests.
3.3 The Case for Treating BRCA Testing as a Need Breast cancer is indeed a serious disease: all too often, it results in severe illness and death. At present, statistics indicate that one in nine Canadian women will develop breast cancer over the course of their lives—a 13 per cent lifetime risk (www.cancer.ca). It is worth noting that many of these cases involve older women (over 60); however, this disease is no respecter of age. Young women also contract breast cancer: it is the leading form of cancer affecting women under 45 (accounting for 33 per cent of the cancers affecting this group) and the major cause of death among women aged 15 to 40 (www.youngsurvival.org). Moreover, it appears that when breast cancer does appear in young women, it tends to be more aggressive and results in lower survival rates than when it is first detected in older women (www.youngsurvival.org). Although breast cancer is a threat to all women, it has long been known that some women face especially high rates of developing breast cancer. As Pat Kaufert (2003) observed, well before the development of medical genetics, women who grew up in families with frequent cases of breast cancer understood that they faced a high personal risk of developing the disease. In the early 1990s, researchers determined that mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes were associated with some forms of hereditary breast cancer or ovarian cancer. (It is estimated that 5 to 10 percent of women with breast cancer have a hereditary form, and a significant proportion of these have been tied to an identifiable BRCA mutation.) On the basis of knowledge about the role of BRCA mutations, BRCAnalysis and other forms of BRCA tests have been developed to allow some women from families with high rates of these cancers to determine whether they carried one of these genetic mutations, though tests do not yet exist for all apparently hereditary forms of breast cancer. Women who discover that they carry a detectable BRCA mutation will know that they face a lifetime risk of developing breast cancer that is at least one in three and possibly much higher. They will
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also learn that they have a 50 per cent chance of passing on this mutation to their children. And if they do develop breast or ovarian cancer, they face a significant risk of dying an early and difficult death. It is not hard to see, then, why women who come from families with high rates of breast cancer might want to know their personal BRCA status. Those who undergo testing face one of three possible outcomes: a positive result indicating that they have the specific BRCA mutation that has affected family members; a definitive negative result indicating that they do not have the BRCA mutation found in their close relatives; or an indeterminate result that could mean either they do not have a genetic risk of breast cancer or that there is no definitive test for the genetic anomaly that affects them (Sutcliffe et al., 2001). If they are fortunate enough to have a definitive negative result, they will likely be relieved of an enormous emotional burden. They may feel freer to have children of their own, and they may have an easier time getting employment, health and life insurance, and perhaps even a spouse. Those who test positive have available to them an option that could make a significant difference to their life expectancy: if they decide to undergo prophylactic surgery to remove both breasts and both ovaries before any of these organs becomes diseased they will be able to dramatically reduce (though not eliminate) their likelihood of developing breast or ovarian cancer (Eisen and Weber, 2001; Meijers-Heijboer et al., 2001). It is less clear how those with indeterminate results will respond. If we turn to Braybrooke’s account of needs, we can make a case for the claim that access to BRCA testing should be classified as meeting a course-of-life need and, therefore, that society is responsible to provide for this option. Braybrooke’s account is explicitly social and situated. He does not try to derive an exhaustive, timeless, universal set of human needs that every society is responsible for meeting. Rather, he situates needs within the context of a particular linguistic community and tries to capture the sorts of things members of that community recognize some obligation towards addressing. Hence, course-of-life needs are the sorts of needs that members of an existing society (or linguistic community) recognize as important to their pursuit of almost any project one might choose in that society. They are the sorts of conditions necessary for
3.3. THE CASE FOR TREATING BRCA TESTING AS A NEED
59
living a life that members of that community recognize as characteristically human. In the most straightforward sense, this includes the ability to continue to live and function normally. Thus, Being essential to living or to functioning normally may be taken as a criterion for being a basic need. Questions about whether needs are genuine, or well-founded, come to the end of the line when the needs have been connected with life or health. (31; emphasis added)2 Since being connected to life or health generates a course-of-life need, we can make the case that, at least for women from high-risk families, BRCA testing satisfies such a need, since those who test positive may seek medical interventions that will dramatically reduce their risk of contracting breast or ovarian cancer. In this way, we can connect BRCA testing quite explicitly with the core intuition of course-of-life needs. Further, Braybrooke extends the notion of course-of-life needs beyond mere survival. Like many others, he recognizes that human beings are essentially social creatures and we need to attend to the conditions under which most people live and the contexts in which they satisfy their needs. Human existence involves some core relationships that help to structure our lives and shape the ways we seek to satisfy core needs. Braybrooke identifies four ‘ basic social roles’ that he claims are sufficiently generic and central to the majority of adults in modern society to be considered as constituting the sites for addressing course-of-life needs: parent, householder, worker, and citizen (48). Braybrooke reviews some of the many lists others have offered of basic human needs and seeks areas of consensus. Rather than choose any single account, or offer any particular definition (set out by a list of necessary and sufficient conditions), he offers us a criterion for inclusion that captures the intuitions underlying the family of lists of human 2 He then goes on to offer a rather puzzling but intriguing comment in the context of a discussion of breast cancer. He claims, ’Indeed they may already have come to the end of the line [for justifying something as a course-of-life need] when the needs have been connected with keeping important parts of the body’ (31).
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needs. ‘The criterion,’ as he calls it, for a course-of-life need is ‘being indispensable to mind or body in performing the tasks assigned a given person under a combination of basic social roles, namely the roles of parent, householder, worker, and citizen’ (48). The criterion classifies as needs the things necessary to allow people to function ‘without derangement in the[se] tasks and roles’ (49). He believes it is a question of fact whether or not something is a course-of-life need: Something is a Matter of Need, by the Criterion, if there are good grounds in causal evidence for presuming that any member of the Reference Population would be unable to carry out the tasks assigned her by one or more of the roles mentioned if the matter in question were not provided for at the Minimum Standard appropriate to that person’s physique, temperament, and circumstances. (49) Arguably, women at high risk of having BRCA mutations may feel that their ability to function responsibly in some core social roles, especially that of parent, may be facilitated by access to knowledge of their BRCA status. This knowledge may influence their willingness to bear children genetically related to them (since they have a 50 per cent chance of passing on the mutation to their children) and their frankness in discussing the subject with any children they do bear. And for those fortunate women for whom the test provides a definitive negative result, such tests may also facilitate their ability to qualify for health and life insurance and, thereby, for employment in so far as these things are related (as they are in the United States). It would seem, then, that according to Braybrooke’s account of course-of-life needs the case can be made for establishing access to BRCA testing for women who are at significant risk of carrying BRCA mutations on two grounds: both for the contribution such knowledge can make to their prospects for life and health and also for the ways such knowledge may facilitate their ability to function in core social roles. If we decide that this type of genetic test represents a course-of-life need, then we have a social obligation to ensure that our policies reflect its importance. That means we should try to provide the means for satisfy-
3.4. SOME COMPLICATING FEATURES OF BRCA TESTING
61
ing this need for all who are likely to benefit significantly from the test. Similar arguments would have to be considered for any other genetic susceptibility test that is developed. Let us turn now to some of the complexities of BRCA testing and explore reasons (beyond the potentially high financial costs) why we might want to resist the implication that such tests be seen as falling in the category of a course-of-life need.
3.4
Some Complicating Features of BRCA Testing
The case in favour of treating access to BRCA testing as a course-oflife need was based on the potential of allowing women who know their BRCA status to take steps to reduce their risks of contracting breast cancer if they test positive or more confidently pursuing some of their core social roles if they do not. The situation is complicated, however, as so many things in medicine are, by the fact that there is plenty of uncertainty attached to the actual impact of a BRCA mutation in a particular woman’s life. Women who undergo testing must come to grips with the fact that they may receive misleading information. Like other medical tests, BRCA tests are vulnerable to the possibility of inaccuracy: they may provide false positives or false negatives. In this case, the costs of the test, the rush to market, and the significant emotional burden attached to such testing have created a situation in which there has not been enough experience with the test or enough research to indicate the precise degree of accuracy of the various BRCA tests (Kaufert, 2003). Moreover, they face the daunting task of making sense of the probabilistic information that derives from identifying such a mutation. Unlike purely predictive tests for single-gene disorders such as Huntington’s disease, there is no perfect correlation between breast cancer and BRCA mutations. Even women who test definitively negative are not assured that they will not develop breast cancer, only that they will not face a higher rate of risk than other Canadian women (that is, a ‘normal’ rate of one in nine, or perhaps one in ten when we remove statistics of women carrying BRCA mutations).3 Breast cancer is multifactorial, 3 From
a medical perspective, the absence of a BRCA mutation does not confer the absence
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and genetic mutations are just a small part of the causal story (less than 10 per cent), though it is a very important part for the minority of women with family histories of BRCA mutations. For those who test positive, there is no way of determining their personal level of risk because gene penetrance (that is, the percentage of individuals affected who will go on to develop the disease) varies widely with particular mutations (ranging from 36 to 85 per cent) in ways that are not easily predicted. For nearly all of the thousands of variations of BRCA1 or 2 mutations, it is impossible to make accurate predictions of personal cancer risk.4 In addition to the mysteries of penetrance, there is the further complexity that these numbers speak of lifetime risk; there is a set of probabilities to interpret to estimate whether the particular genetic variation will affect particular women in their youth, middle, or old age.5 Adding to the difficulties of determining the value of BRCA testing is the fact that there is no particularly satisfactory response available in the face of a positive test. The options are primarily those of surveillance, chemoprevention, or surgery. Surveillance can be pursued through breast self-examination (BSE) along with frequent mammograms. Besides the fact that neither technique actually prevents breast cancer, both face other obstacles: BSE has been shown to be not particularly effective as an early detection strategy and there are risks attached to performing frequent mammograms on young women, especially in light of the fact that there is speculation that BRCA-associated breast cancer may be radiosensitive. Chemoprevention - that is, taking tomoxifen or other powerful drugs—is unproven with BRCA-associated breast cancer and carries high risks of iatrogenic illnesses (current data of risk. If a person tests negative, it could be because the mutation is not present, but it could also be because the person has a mutation that cannot be detected by current technology or because there is a mutation in another gene not yet identified. So negative BRCA tests are meaningful only when the specific BRCA mutation has been identified for a high-risk family. Hence, most negative tests are considered ’indeterminate’ and the person is still considered at risk because of the family history (Sutcliffe, 2001). 4 In fact, penetrance levels are so uneven with BRCA mutations that the NIH warns that ‘The penetrance of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations has yet to be determined for other than mutations commonly found in Ashkenazi Jews or Icelanders.’ www.cancer.gov/cancerinfo. 5 Statistically, however, women with BRCA1/2 mutations develop breast cancer at an earlier age than other women.
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suggest it is of no benefit to women with BRCA1 mutations, though it may be helpful to women with BRCA2 mutations) (King et al., 2001). The most effective preventative strategy is surgical intervention, requiring bilateral prophylactic mastectomy as well as removal of the ovaries; needless to say, this is a drastic intervention with serious physical and psychological repercussions. Moreover, even this major intervention does not provide complete protection against breast cancer. Women who receive testing face further difficulties in deciding what to do with the results, especially if they are positive or ambiguous. With whom should they share the information and from whom should they withhold it? What should they tell their daughters (and sons) and when? There are no long-term studies evaluating the medical and psychological impact of test results or of the various interventions that follow positive (and negative) test results, though existing data do indicate that women who undergo testing are affected more deeply than they anticipated (Bish et al., 2002; Dorval et al., 2000). The data that do exist are disturbing. Consider the fact that the most effective preventative option available to those with BRCA mutations is radical surgery. A 1997 study in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that, ‘on average, 30-year-old women who carry BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations gain from 2.9 to 5.3 years of life expectancy from prophylactic mastectomy and from 0.3 to 1.7 years of life expectancy from prophylactic oophorectomy’ (Schrag et al., 1997).6 While experts consider this a good outcome, many women clearly expect more from the decision to undergo radical surgery. One study found that ‘at-risk women showed a 70 per cent time-tradeoff value, indicating that the women were willing to sacrifice 30 per cent of life expectancy in order to avoid prophylactic mastectomy’ (Unic et al., 1998) This may explain why a 1995 study found that as few as 10 per cent of women at high 6 Another study found that ‘for a 30-year-old woman, according to her cancer risks, prophylactic oophorectomy improved survival by 0.4 to 2.6 years; mastectomy, by 2.8 to 3.4 years; and mastectomy and oophorectomy, by 3.3 to 6.0 years over surveillance. The QALYs saved were 0.5 for oophorectomy and 1.9 for the combined procedures in the high-risk model. Prophylactic surgeries were cost-effective compared with surveillance for years of life saved, but not for QALYs. CONCLUSION: Among women who test positive for a BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation, prophylactic surgery at a young age substantially improves survival, but unless genetic risk of cancer is high, provides no benefit for quality of life’ (Grann et al., 1998)
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risk of developing breast cancer choose prophylactic mastectomy (Stefanek et al., 1995). It is worth noting, however, that more recent studies that take into account our ability to identify many BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations are giving a different picture. For example, 2001 studies that specifically address the effectiveness of prophylactic surgery for those with identified BRCA1/2 mutations indicate there is definite benefit attached to undergoing surgery; unfortunately, these studies are limited to a three-year follow-up period but most women seek longer-term information (Meijers-Heijboer et al., 2001; Eisen and Weber, 2001). So, here we have a technology that is promoted as serving the function of a course-of-life need, yet we find many women uncertain whether to even avail themselves of the test. In fact, Myriad Genetics, the company that patented the BRCAnalysis test, has been surprised to find that women have not been demanding testing in the large numbers anticipated despite an active direct-to-consumer advertising campaign. If so many of the women who might be BRCA-positive are resisting the test, should it really be classified as a course-of-life need? It is worth noting here that Braybrooke does not require that every person avail themselves of all of the opportunities classified as matters of need, even course-oflife need; there are often good reasons why individuals choose not to claim something that falls under the category of need. So the fact that many women who are at particular risk of BRCA mutations choose not to undergo testing is not necessarily proof that genetic testing should not be classified as a course-of-life need. It should, however, give us pause: the ambiguity in determining the specific harms and benefits of testing for particular women make it difficult to situate BRCA testing in the realm of course-of-life needs.7 7 Perhaps, in light of the uncertainty of outcome and the weighty combination of benefits and burdens attached to testing, we should, for the present at least, treat such tests as responding to adventitious needs, according to how they fit within particular women’s values and life plans. Adventitious needs are captured by a relational formula of the form: x needs y in order to do z; that is, they are relative to the particular ends an agent has adopted, and, as a result, they function largely like preferences. The urgency of an agent’s need for y to accomplish z depends on the importance of z to that agent. Given the wide variety in goals individuals set for themselves, and the wide variety of responses to those goals adopted by their fellow citizens, Braybrooke quite wisely avoids recommending making satisfaction of the large range of adventitious needs a moral requirement of social policy.
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3.5 Towards a Relational Understanding of N eeds We can find helpful direction in Braybrooke’s account as to how to organize our social policy under these sorts of conditions of uncertainty and anxiety—that is, are Canadian provinces and territories morally obligated to provide genetic testing and related medical services for BRCA and similar anomalies under the claim that such services are ‘medically necessary’? Braybrooke makes clear that we cannot restrict core needs to those required for bare survival; many important course-of-life needs are intimately connected to the societies in which they occur. As noted above, he argues that we must make room for meeting needs that arise in the context of playing core social roles. In other words, some needs, even course-of-life needs, are inherently relational in that they arise in the context of pursuing relationships with others. I must disagree with him, however, on the proposal that we can limit the relevant roles and relationships to the basic set of parent, householder, worker, and citizen. I do not believe that we can capture all the morally significant social dimensions of human life within this small set of social roles. For one thing, this list refers only to roles held by ‘responsible’ adults and thereby privileges the socially generated needs of this group while ignoring many other aspects of a richly textured relational life. Further, his account treats these generic roles as if they applied comparably to all social groups without attention to gender, race, class, or other important dimensions of the lives of persons. I propose, therefore, to build on the leadership Braybrooke has provided by tying course-of-life needs to social roles and also to expand on his conception of relational significance. In my own work, I seek to make clear the importance for policymaking of replacing the reigning liberal conceptions of persons as rational, independent beings with an understanding of persons as thoroughly relational beings (Sherwin, 2003). While Braybrooke offers us a significantly more socially complex moral subject than most liberal theorists, he still thinks, ultimately, that our unit of analysis should be understood as generic persons with common characteristics. I believe that this picture needs feminist re-visioning—supplanting his partially relational
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conception of persons with a fully relational account. The relational conception of persons that emerges from feminist theory portrays a subject who is (at least partially) constituted by social interactions. Rather than understanding persons as ontologically prior to society, a relational account envisions persons as beings who are created—in large part—through their social relations.8 Although Braybrooke distances himself from the traditional liberal view of persons as transparent, rational deliberators with well-ordered preferences, he promotes in its stead a view of persons as the locus for a set of needs and personal projects, many of which can be discussed abstractly in generic terms. Where traditional liberal theorists encourage us to respect the existing values of individuals, Braybrooke assigns such individual variation to the sphere of adventitious needs (or preferences) and assigns priority to common course-of-life needs (though even here there is room for preferences in how those basic needs are satisfied). Like other liberal theorists, however, he seems to assume that personal values are either apparent or readily discovered by the individual who holds them through a process of introspection. In contrast, relational theorists believe it significant that most people come to develop many of their values in the social process of dialogue and action. In other words, personal values are formed through social engagement, not prior to such interaction. For this reason, it is essential that we pay attention to the circumstances in which these values are forged. If injustice structures the conditions under which they are generated, then policies that simply respond to those values are likely to at least perpetuate, and perhaps even exacerbate, the original injustice. Needs, like values, emerge from particular social circumstances. Although some needs deal with basic animal survival, the effectiveness of a society’s infrastructure may determine whether or not these crucial needs even become visible (for example, the need for non-toxic air and water). Further, Braybrooke rightly recognizes that the social needs that are attached to core social roles must be seen as developing in partic8 As Annette Baier (1985) explained, persons are always ‘second persons,’ created through social processes; we become persons through learning from other persons how to be persons ourselves.
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ular social contexts. In addition, he notes that some needs are derived from scientific discoveries that support practices capable of sustaining course-of-life needs; medical care seems clearly to fall under this category (83). It is important, then, that we examine the contexts of scientific discovery that generate specific course-of-life needs if we are to resolve the difficult sorts of questions associated with determining medical needs. For example, in the case at hand, it is worth reflecting on the processes that have led us to the current levels of genetic knowledge and those that have led us away from other types of approaches to breast cancer and other diseases (as well as those that generate technology-laden services to extend life for the critically ill and ignore such factors as the value of literacy in increasing life expectancy). There are additional insights feminists can build on within Braybrooke’s theory. He offers explicit recognition that persons are essentially embodied beings. Feminist relational accounts add to this insight the fact that many of the bodily characteristics of persons carry important social meanings. Within contemporary Western society, social and political significance is attached to such features as sex, race, disability, sexuality, and age. These features are the basis of social groups that exist in relations of oppression or dominance with other social groups, and a person’s classification within the complex array of social groups will affect her or his life experiences. In other words, relational persons are inseparable from their particular historical, social, and political circumstances; they cannot be properly understood in abstraction from these contexts. If we accept the need to understand persons—the focus of liberal concern—as relational rather than self-contained beings, then we must modify the ways we understand our principal moral and political obligations to them. In particular, we need to revise the ways in which we understand the traditional liberal concerns of autonomy and justice in order to reflect the fact that persons are now conceived of as a different type of entity. ( Feminism, in my view, does not require us to abandon commitment to the core liberal values of autonomy and justice, but it does demand significant reinterpretation of each concept.) Because social group membership is a principal component of feminist relational
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accounts of personhood, efforts to promote autonomy and justice must consider ways in which these values should be addressed at the level of social groups as well as at the more familiar level of individuals. In particular, we must make explicit the fact that autonomy is both defined and pursued in social contexts. This requires us to reflect on ways in which increased options may sometimes limit real autonomy. For example, feminist researchers have explored ways in which the very availability and normalization of prenatal testing of fetuses, while apparently expanding the control women have over their pregnancies, have the effect of making many women feel compelled to participate in such testing even though it distorts their experience of pregnancy and does not fit well with their deepest values regarding acceptance of children with disabilities (Rothman, 1986; Sherwin, 2001). On traditional views, autonomy is achieved if the women concerned have full information and are free from explicit compulsion; relational interpretations make visible ways in which social practices of normalizing prenatal testing make refusal of such ‘services’ very difficult for many women. Hence, where liberal individualist theories either look at the generic conditions required for any individual to exercise autonomy (in political theory) or focus on the quality of decision-making by individuals as they are presently constituted (in practical ethics), feminist relational accounts explore the social conditions that support—or inhibit—each person’s ability to identify and pursue her own concerns. Feminist accounts are particularly sensitive to the ways in which oppressive structures limit the types of choices available to members of particular social groups. Feminists are also concerned with the fact that social conditions may affect an individual’s very ability to exercise autonomy in that some people who face significant oppression may have fewer opportunities than others to develop the skills necessary to exercise autonomy (Meyers, 1989). Oppressive conditions may interfere with the opportunities people have for developing skills necessary for exercising autonomy generally or in particular types of circumstances. Similarly, f eminist relational accounts of social justice look beyond considerations of fair distributions of benefits and burdens to consider how various policy options will affect existing patterns of oppression
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or privilege. They consider not only what share of society’s limited resources an individual can justly lay claim to (the underlying goal of Braybrooke’s account of needs) but also how patterns of social organization may construct needs and roles differently for particular social groups and how these differences might affect recognition of, and response to, claims of need. The Canada Health Act promises equal access to medical and hospital-based treatments, but it does nothing to provide for equal access to appropriate levels of the various social and economic conditions (such as housing, employment, and education) that affect an individual’s health status and need for medical treatment. To treat all individuals with comparable medical course-of-life needs as making equivalent demands on the health care system is to treat their current situations as if they arose from a level playing field. A feminist relational understanding of social justice would have us look beyond efforts to fairly meet current needs and also examine the social conditions that generate those needs. It would also direct us to ensure that the practices and policies that address current needs do not unjustly worsen the condition of members of disadvantaged social groups, lest we create future distortions in justice.
3.6 BRCA Testing Revisited I am finally ready to return to some of the moral complexities attached to the availability of BRCA testing with respect to the question of whether genetic susceptibility testing should be classified as a medical ( courseof-life) need and treated accordingly by public policy. My claim is that revising Braybrooke’s proposal of socially situated course-of-life needs in accordance with feminist relational theory can help us decide how to respond to the sorts of demands genetic dispositional testing is beginning to generate within a system committed to meeting medical needs. The traditional liberal conception of personhood would have us construct this problem as one of individual preferences and focus on the moral principle of respect for patient autonomy. Indeed, this is the way that genetic susceptibility testing is being promoted: as a matter for individual choice in a context of thorough, reliable information. (In Canada,
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BRCA testing is provided in settings where trained genetic counsellors are available.) Braybrooke’s approach is a significant improvement since it urges us to develop an understanding of course-of-life needs that would take precedence over matters of individual preference and choice; hence, it allows us to see that not all decisions can be reduced to matters of consumer choice. Unlike adventitious needs that are a form of preferences, course-of-life needs are meant to capture something more urgent than the things individuals happen to choose. From what we now know of BRCA testing, it seems plausible to regard it as a course-of-life need for the small minority of women whose family history suggests there is a high likelihood they are at risk of carrying an identifiable BRCA mutation (less than 10 per cent of the 13 per cent of women who will contract breast cancer in their lifetimes). This means that those women who meet strict eligibility criteria, based on scientific evaluation that they are at high risk of having such a mutation, should be granted access to the test (should they so choose) and any follow-up therapy they decide upon in consultation with medical experts. Other women—that is, the vast majority, including many with breast cancer in their families—have such a low likelihood of carrying an identifiable BRCA mutation, however, that testing should not be seen as a course-of-life need. Nor should it be described as an adventitious need, to be available upon informed request. Rather, it should be seen as not meeting any need at all.9 A relational understanding of personhood, autonomy, and justice helps us to understand why it is not acceptable to allow individuals who do not meet scientific eligibility requirements for testing to exercise personal choice in seeking out such tests. Relational theory directs us to pay close attention to the prevailing climate in which women are asked to make these difficult decisions. It is a climate in which all women, especially those considered vulnerable to hereditary breast cancer, are regularly warned about the threat of breast cancer and advised to pursue every avenue that might reduce their personal risk no matter the actual impact of specific measures in their circumstances. In the current con9 In fact, this has been the way BRCA testing has been handled in Canada to date. It is available only to women who meet strict scientific eligibility requirements.
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text of heightened fear, inadequate information, poor understanding of the meaning of available statistical data, and the manipulating effects of marketing, it is problematic to speak blithely of ‘voluntary informed choice.’ Many of these factors actively undermine the ability of women to engage in voluntary, rational deliberation—the basic requirements of patient autonomy. Moreover, these conditions are not ones that can be fully ameliorated by good genetic counselling, since genetic counsellors cannot themselves alter the background social conditions that may be distorting understanding. We need to reflect on how these background social conditions have evolved and how BRCA testing itself fits into a particular, problematic model of medical care. Breast cancer is a highly visible and emotionally charged disease. It has become emblematic of concerns about women’s health to the point of eclipsing attention to many other conditions that threaten women. Public awareness of the availability of BRCA tests contributes to the public’s perception of the pervasiveness of the threat of breast cancer and also to the priority given to individual strategies for breast cancer avoidance in a competitive health research and health services environment. Moreover, as BRCA tests are joined by other genetic susceptibility tests, the growing array of genetic tests is likely to feed increasing public sentiment that most health risks reside in our genes - a tendency that Abby Lippman (1991) has dubbed ‘geneticization,’ whereby complex phenomena are reduced to simple expressions of single genes. This attitude works in conjunction with the complementary perception of genetic determinism (that is, the view that genes determine experience) to foster public beliefs that improvements in health will flow directly from increased genetic knowledge. Lost from these ways of viewing the world is the understanding that genes operate within particular environments and that genetic tendencies result in specific outcomes only in the presence of additional causal factors. Already, the search for genetic susceptibilities is obscuring the need and undermining support for research into other conditions which contribute to particular diseases, including breast cancer. When BRCA testing is joined by an array of susceptibility tests for other diseases that many adults fear (heart dis-
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ease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes), popular understanding is likely to shift even further in the direction of geneticization and genetic determinism and away from other types of programs that can reduce the incidence of many forms of disease. If BRCA and other genetic susceptibility tests are judged to be course-of-life needs for growing segments of the population, then as the number of tests proliferates, we must ensure that the resources needed to deliver the tests in a responsible manner are available to potential users. This will require a significant social investment in training many more professional genetic counsellors. Provincial health plans will need to set criteria that determine what genetic tests will be covered by public insurance and with what degree of support. And, clearly, they will have a moral obligation to ensure that those who receive positive (and perhaps also indeterminate) test results will receive the therapy (both medical and psychological) deemed appropriate by patients and their physicians. Those engaged in setting health research priorities must encourage long-term studies to fill in the current knowledge gaps about outcome measures for various responses to BRCA test results, and similar studies will be required for other types of genetic tests. Before we get too caught up in building the infrastructure for widespread genetic testing, then, we need to recognize that decisions (or non-decisions) about proliferation of such tests made at the policy level have profound implications for patients and providers in all their deliberations. Because breast cancer, like most diseases, is multifactorial, it is essential that we not lose track of other course-of-life needs attached to this and other diseases. This will require policies that provide research and treatment resources that correspond to the various factors that contribute to each disease, perhaps in rough proportion to the degree of involvement of each. Hence, we must not trade an enthusiasm for genetic information for recognition of the enormous significance of environmental and socioeconomic factors in the incidence and severity of disease. Yet, as scientific understanding of the role of genetic mutations increases, those who set health research priorities seem to be losing sight of the well-established fact that most illness and suffering result from
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conditions that can be ameliorated by social and political actions. For example, there is growing evidence that we can probably prevent far more cases of breast cancer by identifying and altering the environmental factors that lead those who are susceptible for genetic and other reasons to develop breast cancer than we can through BRCA testing and radical surgical preventions (Chernomas and Donner, 2004). Looking beyond the impact of breast cancer, we see overwhelming evidence that reducing the economic, social, and political inequalities that plague members of disadvantaged social groups—for example, aboriginals, immigrants, and people who are homeless—will have a major effect on their health and life expectancy. Our collective moral responsibilities require that health research and health services policies not be deterred from these important dimensions. It is significant that the move to geneticization and overinvestment in genetic strategies occurs as individual patients, researchers, and medical specialists pursue paths that make good sense from their particular social locations, each acting responsibly in the context of their own interests and expertise. Given the choice, as individuals we are each likely to pursue any option that offers to reduce the risk of contracting diseases that frighten us, and researchers and medical caregivers will feel the pressure to provide these options. Thus, these social effects cannot be avoided by insisting on more responsible decision-making by individual players. Nor will they be resolved by more complete consumer information. We must, therefore, address the problem at the level of social policies, not individual autonomy. Otherwise, geneticization will continue to threaten efforts to address other, important course-of-life needs. Justice demands that we focus our health policies on strategies that will contribute most effectively to the health of the whole population, especially the health needs of the most disadvantaged. Indeed, it is the fact that these two approaches—individual and collective pursuit of health protection strategies—do not always come to the same conclusions that makes it urgent that we continue with Braybrooke’s project of trying to develop an understanding of needs that can justly guide social policy, lest we end up trying to respond to whatever individual preferences happen to present themselves.
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It may appear, however, that we are now even deeper into the ‘bottomless pit’ of medical needs for expensive life-prolonging therapies that caused Braybrooke to despair of a solution within his systematic account of needs. I believe we have made some progress, though. First, it should now be clear that we can deploy Braybrooke’s conception of course-of-life needs to legitimately limit access to genetic susceptibility tests to those for whom the proposed test is indeed likely to meet a course-of-life need: that is, to those at significant risk of carrying an identifiable mutation for a life-threatening disease with a potential lifesaving therapy available. We can, in good conscience, deny it to others who may very much want to know their BRCA status: they have no need for such testing. Second, it now seems clear that we should not concentrate solely on determining whether or not to treat BRCA and future genetic susceptibility tests as meeting course-of-life needs for some individuals; we should also reflect on how we have arrived at this difficult decision. In other words, we need to think about how our health care system has evolved and where it is heading. We cannot make satisfactory progress in determining how to categorize individual types of medical technology on a case-by-case basis alone, even if the technologies in question do promise to save or prolong lives. Instead, we need to reflect on how, collectively, we ought to approach matters of life and health throughout our social policies. Such reflections make clear that we are obligated to ensure that the scientific projects our society funds and the delivery systems it devises reflect the general health needs of the population. Our goal should be to foster those policies most conducive to protecting and promoting the lives of all citizens. Social justice requires us to work particularly hard at addressing the health needs of those members of society whose health is seriously harmed by pervasive patterns of injustice in society. Hence, we cannot wait to respond to the demands of frightened individuals who seek access to technologies that private corporations have determined to be profitably marketable. In fact, we should make clear from the start that we will not allow our health system to respond to requests for tests that meet, at best, adventitious needs in a consumer-driven climate. Our
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support for genetic susceptibility testing should be limited to those tests that can be shown to meet course-of-life needs for a defined segment of the population. Moreover, we need to take steps to ensure that the health interventions that are being developed are the ones that will best promote health in our society. Braybrooke is correct that health and life are core course-of-life needs. We must be very careful, however, not to read him as directing us down the dangerous path of trying to determine, technology by technology, what medical innovations will be classified as meeting courseof-life needs. These decisions are best made in terms of overall social policy objectives that keep social justice and relational autonomy considerations squarely in view.
Chapter 4
The Mutual Limitation of Needs as Bases of Moral Entitlements: A Solution to Braybrooke’s Problem D UNCAN M AC I NTOSH
Abstract David Braybrooke argues that meeting people’s needs ought to be the primary goal of social policy. But he then faces the problem of how to deal with the fact that our most pressing needs, needs to be kept alive with resource-draining medical technology, threaten to exhaust our resources for meeting all other needs. I consider several solutions to this problem, eventually suggesting that the need to be kept alive is no different in kind from needs to fulfill various projects, and that needs may have a structure similar to rights, with people’s legitimate needs serving as constraints on each other’s entitlements to resources. This affords a set of axioms constraining possible needs. Further, if, as Braybrooke thinks, needs are created by communities approving projects, so that the means to prosecute the projects then come to count as needs, then communities are obliged to approve only projects that are co-feasible given the world’s finite resources. The result is that it can be legitimate not to funnel resources towards endless life-prolongation projects.∗ ∗ My thanks to Heidi Tiedke, Susan Sherwin, and Richmond Campbell for helpful discussion. My thanks also to Sherwin and to Peter Schotch for their editorial work on this volume, and, of course, to David Braybrooke, for the stimulation of his ideas and for the example of philosophical collegiality which he has constituted in the philosophy department at Dalhousie University.
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4.1
Introduction
In his book Meeting Needs(1987), David Braybrooke argues that meeting people’s needs ought to be the primary goal of social policy. He distinguishes two types of needs. First, there are course-of-life needs. These are needs which everyone has and which must be satisfied for people to function normally in society when performing any of the roles of which the society approves and advancing any of the projects it permits people to choose. Second, there are adventitious needs, ones varying from project to project, and which must be satisfied in order for people to advance the specific projects for which they have individual preferences. Social policy should be organized to try to satisfy needs in their order of importance—course-of-life needs first, adventitious needs second. In this paper I moot several possible solutions to a problem that worries Braybrooke. The problem is that using costly, resource-intensive medical technology to meet the basic needs people have to be kept alive at what would otherwise be the end of their lives will consume all the resources available for meeting needs in general. If grounding entitlements in needs is correct, we must find within the concept of needs a way to limit this crisis in a morally acceptable way. Many of the solutions I shall consider have difficulties, but discussing them will refine the problem and point the way to a workable solution.
4.2
The Appeal of Needs as the Basis of Moral Entitlements to Resources
It is attractive to see needs as the basis of moral entitlements. It seems more plausible, for example, to see it as entitling someone to something that they need it, rather than just that they want it, or would be made happy by it. That they have a right to it might seem an even better argument. But what grounds the right? Again, it is plausible to say that a person has a right to something in proportion to her need for it. This seems more acceptable than saying that her right owes to her having found the thing, or her having claimed it, invented it, contracted for it,
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or having mixed her labour with it. For these latter pretexts presuppose principles of justice in the acquisition of goods characteristic of institutions of private property, institutions themselves needing grounding; and, arguably, they are defensible only if their existence results in people’s needs being met. True, such institutions have been defended by Nozick as being required in order to afford everyone unfettered liberty (Nozick, 1974). But on reflection, surely there are things more important than that kind of freedom, specifically, the meeting of people’s basic, undeniable needs. There seems, then, to be something foundational and irrefutable about someone’s having a title to something on the basis of needing it. Taking entitlement to ground in needs has the further advantage that the question of whether someone has a need seems to be empirical, something that can be ascertained by investigation, and on which there could be a consensus compelled by the non-moral facts. Thus it would make entitlement objective. And this would mean that, in one stroke, we had answered three questions of meta-ethics: 1. Question: how can morality be factual? Answer: the question, what, morally, ought to be done, reduces to the question, who needs what, and so who should be given what? 2. Question: how can we infer from statements about what is (true) to statements about what ought to be (true)? Answer: by the mediation of needs: if it is true that someone needs x, it ought to be made true that they are given x. 3. Question: how can apprehending moral facts be reason-giving in the sense of motivating? Answer: our moral duties are to meet needs, and seeing that someone needs something tends to incline one to procure it for them.1 Taking needs as the basis of moral entitlements also provides a basis for forming policy on how to distribute resources among people, for we could then compute which policies are correct from knowledge of 1 For
more on this constellation of issues, see Richmond Campbell’s essay in this volume.
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people’s needs in a needs calculus, much as was hoped by utilitarians for the felicific calculus.
4.3
Braybrooke’s Problem
Unfortunately, there are at least two problems for this view, problems deriving from the possibility of two kinds of ‘ needs monster,’ on analogy with the notion of a utility monster. Utilitarians hold that a world is morally better the more happiness there is in it. There are at least three versions of utilitarianism. On one, what matters morally is how much happiness there is in the world, not how many people share in that happiness. But on this version, if there were a creature who, by being given all of the world’s resources, would be made more happy than the sum total of everyone else’s happiness on any other distribution of resources, that being should get all the resources; and this seems unjust. (This creature is hyper-efficient at converting resources accorded to it into its own happiness, and therefore hyper-appetitive for resources.) Suppose we say instead that a world is better the more happiness there is in it, provided everyone is made equally happy in that world— total quantity of happiness is not all that matters; it matters too how the happiness is distributed. But then there could be another kind of utility monster, a creature so ineffective at converting resources accorded to it into its own happiness that, even distributing most of the world’s resources to it at our expense, so that the rest of us have only enough resources to live lives just barely above being miserable, this creature’s life will still just barely be above being miserable. (If the first creature is the efficient utility monster, the second is the inefficient utility monster, and it too is hyper-appetitive of resources.) This suggests a third kind of utilitarianism, one in which both the total amount of happiness and its distribution matter, but the distribution required is not perfect equality. Instead, if vastly more people could be made vastly happier by not trying to make the inefficient utility monster happy, then that is how resources should be distributed. Equality matters, but only to a degree; it can be outweighed by other considerations using some discounting factor. People do not have an absolute right
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to participate equally in the total amount of happiness, only a weighted right. Their being equal participants is only allowed to weigh down to a certain degree the total amount of happiness. The degree, of course, is problematic to formulate or justify. At any rate, until recently, the existence of such monsters was a largely abstract problem: most of us are in fact pretty similar in our appetites for resources and in our efficiency at converting resources into our own happiness. True, relative to me (a non-disabled person), a disabled person is in some degree an inefficient utility monster; and relative to a disabled person, I am in some degree an efficient utility monster.2 But the resource cost to the rest of us for helping the disabled is relatively small. For many of the disabled are fairly easily helped, so helping them is cheap (we put in wheelchair ramps and so on), while the remainder are fantastically hard to help (they have irreparable spinal cord damage, say), so hard that there is almost nothing we can do (except give them nursing care, say), and so, even doing what we can, it is cheap to help. So barring a massive increase in the number of disabled people, or in the severity of their disabilities, or in the availability of hugely costly means of helping them, redistributions of resources to accommodate the disabled will probably not overly drain the total resources available. But medical technology is getting to the point where, with great cost in resources, it is possible to extend individual lives ; and the longer lives are to be extended, the more resource-costly it is to do the extending. Already the lives of some persons are being extended at great cost in resources, the cost growing as technologies become available for ever-increasing prolongation. (Think of the epidemic of diabetes and the cost of the dialysis sometimes needed to treat those in diabetes-induced, end-stage renal failure—hundreds of thousands of dollars per year per patient.) And if ever more resources are devoted to producing these technologies in order to extend people’s lives, ever fewer resources will 2 I am assuming for the sake of argument that, on average, it would take more resources to provide a disabled person with a given amount of happiness than would be required for a nondisabled person; for I am assuming that extra resources would be required to mitigate the effects of their disabilities. But in a given actual case, this assumption could be false: notoriously, how happy people are can be quite independent of whether or not they have perceived disabilities.
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be available to support the activities that make people’s lives worth living. Pretty soon, we will all be inefficient utility monsters. We will all be said to require for our happiness more and more of the ever-moreavailable but ever-more-costly technologies needed to prolong our lives. The analogous problem for a needs-based morality is obvious, and it is a problem Braybrooke admits he is unsure how to solve (Braybrooke (1987a) chap. 8): if people need anything, they need the prerequisites for being alive; and as our bodies inevitably age, we will all come to a point where only longevity-prolonging technology can keep us alive— we will all need this technology. But not all of us can have it, or at least not without other people, at some point in their lives, not getting the resources to have a decent life. Meeting people’s needs for lifesustaining technologies can only be met at the cost of not meeting many other needs. Perhaps these other needs are less important. And yet they are needs which, if they go unmet, make it dubious whether life is much worth living. On the face of it, Braybrooke’s problem is not solvable. Surely needs should be met in the order of their importance; and surely it is more important to meet someone else’s need to be kept alive (assuming they will have some minimally decent quality of life) than to meet my need to have a life more than minimally decent in quality. It then seems morally obligatory to distribute resources in such a way that as many people as possible are kept alive as long as possible, even if this is to be at the expense of the overall quality of people’s lives. Indeed, the problem seems even more pressing for needs-based ethics than for utilitarianism, or at least the third form of utilitarianism. For the utilitarian can say that all extending a person’s life by a day does is increase one person’s happiness by one day; and if there is a more efficient way to increase more people’s happiness, then since the total level of happiness would be higher that way than by using otherwise deployable resources in heroic medical efforts for one person, that is how they should be used. But it seems that, on needs-based ethics, the need a person has to be alive trumps all other non-life-and-death needs of any and all other persons.
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4.4 Possible Solutions to Braybrooke’s Problem Braybrooke’s problem in a nutshell is this: given that our social and institutional priorities should be meeting people’s needs, in their order of priority, how is this not to oblige us to live lives of drudgery supporting the longevity of ourselves and others? There seem to me to be several possible solutions. I now consider them in order of increasing conceptual ambitiousness.
4.4.1
Questioning the Empirical Assumptions of the Problem
One solution is to claim that the problem makes empirically false assumptions. Maybe it will not prove all that expensive to extend lives; maybe this can be done without much sacrifice in the meeting of other needs, and in the meeting of the needs of other people who do not yet require medical technology to live. For one thing, extended lives may wind up being extended in productivity as well, so that, as the need for life-extension technology expands, so will those resources constituted of a robust workforce. And so we will have resources to meet these needs: people with longer lives will be able to work to pay for ever-longer lives. It may also be possible to innovate not just in inventing life-sustaining technologies, but also in their resource cost—maybe they are likely to become cheaper and more efficient, especially as they are pursued in an ever-expanding market. Further, maybe meeting some people’s prolongation needs will result in others’ needs being met—the person whose life we save can now continue in the workforce; and with her productivity there, she can contribute not only to maintaining her own life, but to meeting the needs of other people, and to meeting needs of other sorts than those of life prolongation. This solution, however, banks on empirical hopefulness and so cannot be counted upon.
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The Defeasibility of Needs
Another proposal recognizes that the needs of a given person or population may be defeasible and may have to yield to the more pressing needs of other persons or populations, so much so that those whose socalled needs are defeased never really had them. To take an example, all women might have been thought to need to be tested for the gene for breast cancer. But in fact, unless there is a specific pattern of breast cancer in one’s family, it is unlikely that one has the gene. So the people with breast cancer in their families need the test more than people who do not; and if the test requires resources that are also in demand for many other, more pressing needs, maybe the people who do not have this known risk factor do not really need the test at all.3 There are attractions to the proposal: it seems right to meet more pressing needs first and to expend resources where they will do the most good. However the proposal presupposes that we have some general principle for balancing out the distribution of resources to people, and this has not yet been deduced from the concept of needs as bases of moral entitlement. Besides, there is no guarantee that, even giving resources first to those who need them most, there will not come a time when resources will be exhausted even by this principle. After all, everyone’s life comes to an end if it is not extended by medical technology, and no one’s need to live a longer life is, other things equal, more pressing than anybody else’s. We will all eventually need costly heroic medical technology. We will all still become inefficient needs monsters. 4.4.3
Is the Location of Needs in Individuals or Groups?
A related solution is to reconceive the locus of needs. It is generally assumed that the thing which has needs is the individual person. But perhaps needs are had not by individuals in isolation, but by populations; or perhaps individuals do have needs, but only derivatively from the needs of the populations of which they are members. Either way, 3 This is an aspect of Susan Sherwin’s proposal which is presented in her essay in this volume. In addition to owing this and the next proposal to her paper, I am grateful for its succinct and lucid summary of Braybrooke’s book and of what I am calling Braybrooke’s problem.
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and returning to the problem of what to do about an aging person who requires costly medical technology to remain alive, our first question therefore should not be what this older person needs, but what older people need. The answer to this is perhaps whatever will keep as many of this population’s members alive for as long as possible with as good a quality of life as possible. And to that end, perhaps, what this population needs is not heroic, resource-costly new medical technology, but better nutrition, community-based, preventive medicine, better education, and a higher minimum income. We could do much more for the population of older people with low-tech preventive medicine and social reorganization than with the limited number of high-tech machines we could produce.4 Notice that, by taking populations rather than individual persons as the bearers of needs, we benefit conceptually by being able to consider what makes a population as a whole well off in terms of needs satisfaction; this notion seems already to embed some of the conceptual apparatus we require in order to do needs balancing: the mere fact that a given member of a group is faring poorly does not automatically mean that the group is faring poorly and so may not mean that there has been a failing of moral duty in looking after that population’s welfare. This could allow us to justify not meeting what would have been the pressing needs of an individual on an individualist analysis of needs. Unfortunately, it is not obvious that groups matter except so far as their members matter individually, so that the needs of the group may ultimately be nothing but the sum of the needs of its members; and if we think of the parts of this sum as constituted of one individual at a time, we are back to each of these people needing heroic technology, their need for it obliging us to drain away resources from meeting other sorts of needs of theirs and of other people. We might reply by saying that the very identity of the members as individuals derives relationally from the identity of the group, so that it makes no sense to see any of the members as individuals except in relation to the group. Or at least it makes no sense to see them as having 4 This
proposal is probably a conceptual generalization of a specific proposal Sherwin makes.
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needs except derivatively from the needs of the group.5 Thus your need for aid in having your life extended merely gives you title to what a policy that advances the longevity of older people in general would give you. So you are specifically entitled only to what, on average (to take one example of a criterion for assessing the state of a population), best serves older people. And since having expensive technology for you would mean not having community-based medicine for the many others who could benefit by it compared with your having your technology, you do not have a need for that technology, but only for the services of, say, community-based medicine. Problems remain, however, for we can still face conflicts of needs between groups—the quality-of-life needs of young people versus the life-and-death needs of old people, for example. We might try to evade that by treating everyone as members of one giant group, therapizing the needs of the population as a whole rather than individual by individual, and giving to each individual only the form of treatment which benefits the most members of the population as a whole. But while no doubt we are all in some sense defined relationally to everyone else, we also have sub-relations in which inhere some needs; and these, again, can conflict with the needs inhering in other sub-relations, or even in ourselves as between the several sub-relations in which we participate. (For example, I am now relatively young but will one day be old.) Moreover, the larger we make the population in the group, the more the problem of what to do for its members becomes our original problem; for the more inclusive we make the group, the more heterogeneous we make its membership, and so the more potential for conflict of needs defined in sub-relations there is among its members. If the group contains the young and the old, for instance, it seems more likely that there will be a conflict of needs between the group’s members. While if we say that what each member is entitled to is determined by the needs of the group, then this presupposes that we have figured out how justly to balance the distribution of resources to people generally. Thus in reconceiving the locus of needs onto groups and away from 5 Again, I am indebted to Sherwin for her work on relational conceptions of persons; there is a close connection between what I am considering here and aspects of her proposal.
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individuals, I have perhaps illicitly assumed that, once needs are located as inhering in groups, the notion of needs would permit helping as many people as possible, and helping them as much as possible; and this may be problematic for allowing us to ignore someone whose inclusion in our policy would reduce the total number of people we could help, or the degree to which we could help them. For how is this to be justified? After all, they too are members of the population. So why are we allowed to ignore them? The answer is presumably that we have not ignored them—they are getting the same treatment as everyone else ( community medicine, say)—it is just that it is not really doing them much good. But then it seems we should have a way of deducing from the concept of needs itself, not just that needs inhere in populations rather than individuals, but also the correctness of using a certain conception of what it is for a population’s needs to be adequately met. For why should not the test be, say, that the least well-off person in the group is made better off by the correct policy, rather than that most people in the group are made better off? But if the former is the correct test, we have our problem back, for the least well-off people will again become inefficient needs monsters relative to us. While if the latter is the correct test, we are efficient needs monsters relative to them. Finally, even waiving this conceptual issue, and even if we can go a long way towards meeting the needs of a group conceived at the group level with low-tech manoeuvres, ones low in resource cost, sooner or later, the only way to go further will be with expensive technology and research, and we will have our problem back; we will once again all be inefficient needs monsters. 4.4.4
Do People Really Need Indefinitely Long Lives?
Another way to solve Braybrooke’s problem might be to challenge directly the idea that the mere fact that something would be a means to extending a person’s life means she needs that thing; for it is disputable whether a person needs to live a very, very long life. Suppose there were a way to keep a rabbit alive indefinitely: does the rabbit really need to live forever, especially if the means involves virtually starving all the other rabbits? Now suppose we can do this for a person. Does
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she really need to live indefinitely? Why? Perhaps it would be nice for her—she might like it or want it, and so might her friends, family, colleagues. But that it would make her and various other people happy does not entail that she needs it. No doubt there are various projects her being alive would allow her to prosecute. But does she need to complete indefinitely many projects? Is there any need that she be the one to do all of them? This line of argument may not work, however, for our conception of what someone needs to have had a full, satisfactory life is probably something whose boundaries gradually expand as the possibility of a longer life expands. Perhaps when life spans were shorter it would have been thought extravagant to have a life much more than seventy years, and it would have been doubted whether anyone needed to live much longer—a seventy-year span would have been long enough to find love, raise a family, have a career or two, be a decent citizen, experiment with alternative lifestyles, see what there was to see of the world, cultivate one’s potentials and talents, make some mistakes and atone for them. What need to live much longer? But now that people can live to be eighty, ninety, a hundred, there seems to be all that much more to experience and do—there is now the prospect of a long, healthy, and peaceful retirement, extended grandparenting, travel, new hobbies, extended education, seniors’ political activism. Our conception of what it is to have lived as long as one needed to live for a good and full life has expanded, and will keep expanding. And why should it not?6 4.4.5
Needs to Life Extension Not Really More Pressing Than So-Called Less Basic Needs
But maybe we are wrong to think of the means to life prolongation as representing greater or more pressing or higher-priority needs than those that would have to go unmet to meet them. Why, after all, does 6 I should acknowledge that Braybrooke was more interested in the problem of the resource needs of those experiencing medical difficulties in mid-life, a time when, by any measure, they had not yet lived a full life; but the logic of the problem is the same for older people, especially as our conception of a reasonably full and long life expands. Indeed, the logic is starker for older people, since aging and its infirmities are inevitable and so ubiquitous.
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a given person need to live another day? Answer: in order to do the things persons trying to live a good life do in a given day—go to a movie, maybe. But a given younger person not on death’s door without expensive technology to rescue her might need to go to the movie too. Looked at perhaps a bit cynically, a life is nothing but a string of days full of miscellaneous projects, and so the need to live, and the need for the means of continuing to live, is nothing but a need to advance projects. But we all have projects, no one’s automatically more valuable or pressing than anyone else’s. So why should the fact that a given person requires a lot of resource-costly medical technology to engage in her next project mean that its requirements should have higher priority than, say, mine, which need nothing but a movie ticket? That you will die without the machinery sounds like a big, trumping argument, but all you are going to do with your technology is, say, go to a movie. So now we are comparing your going to a movie, figuratively speaking, with my going; and why should you win? Why should I renounce my ticket to finance your machine just so you can go to the movie instead of me? 4.4.6 Meeting Basic Needs versus Meeting the Needs the Meeting of Which Make Life Worth Living Relatedly, if you are not even going to go to the movie—maybe no one can afford movies after we all pay for your machine—why stay alive at all? What is the point if you cannot, say, go to movies? It is implausible that we should have to trade off what makes life worth living just to make more life, whether the trade-off is within one person’s life, or between the lives of two. 4.4.7
Meeting Other People’s Needs as Not Really Being a Cost to the Meeting of Our Own Needs Given That We Are Needs Altruists
Yet another way we might go is to observe that people’s needs overlap in this sense: if it is true that one person’s seeing that another person needs something inclines the first person to ensure that the second has her need met (as was hypothesized of needs as part of what makes needs-based
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grounding of entitlements attractive), then perhaps the first person has a need to see the second person’s need met. But if one of our needs is to see other people’s needs met, so that meeting their needs is part of meeting ours, then funnelling resources to them is not seen by us as a resource cost to us and the meeting of our needs. Returning to utilitarianism, relative to me, a disabled person is not an inefficient utility monster if I derive happiness from the happiness of the disabled; for then I would not experience the funnelling of resources to the disabled as a cost to my resources. And relative to a disabled person, I am not an efficient utility monster if she derives happiness from the happiness of the non-disabled, for then she would not experience the funnelling of resources to them as costs to her resources. This can only take us so far, however. For at some point, my needs being defined as needing the meeting of your needs must ground out in a need defined independently of other people’s needs. And in any case, it is certainly false from the start that our only needs are for meeting others’ needs. But if we have any other needs, and if meeting them could require an indefinitely long life, it will be possible for life-prolongation needs to swamp all other needs. 4.4.8
Needs as Relative to Projects Approved by Communities; Re-Choosing Needs
Braybrooke himself in effect provides the materials for a more promising solution. He sees needs as functions of the extension of the term ‘needs’ in a linguistic community. This extension is determined by the projects which the community endorses as permissible or important, with the most basic needs being things that are means to the pursuit of virtually any project. But then it might be an option to have a community alter its conception of appropriate projects, thence to alter what will count as needs; and perhaps one factor in any such self-chosen cultural evolution would be the co-tenability of its projects given finite resources. A community might choose, then, to have the project of living a very long life not be among the projects it recognizes as important. To be sure, there are issues this proposal raises:
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1. It implies that communities choose their cultures reflectively and deliberately; and while this may be true to a degree, much of a culture’s evolution occurs without such self-direction. 2. Even if communities choose their cultures—choose the projects they find acceptable as options for people within the culture— it seems intelligible to imagine a community making a mistake about whether a project should be permitted. But then, in making decisions to put accepted projects into equilibrium with available resources, it is presumably possible for a community unjustly to limit or permit projects. And if the genuineness of a need in turn depends on the correctness of cultural decisions about whether to embrace or eschew projects, it follows that there are cultureindependent standards on something’s being a need. In that case, however, it is not—or not just—the community approving or not approving certain projects that means people do or do not need the means to them, but these independent standards. So it is the standards which are doing the work; and so for us to use this solution, we must figure out what the standards are. But let us waive this worry for a moment; let us suppose then that a community cannot make a mistake: someone needs x just if the community has approved her project and x is instrumental to her prosecuting it. Then there is another problem: 3. Needs then seem less empirical, and more stipulative, and so less suitable to answering the meta-ethical questions the answers to which I advertised as among the attractions of seeing moral entitlements to ground in needs. At the very least, needs would be empirical only in that it is empirical which stipulations a community has made. Another difficulty with this approach is: 4. It solves the problem by an illegitimate kind of fiat: if we find that our community has tacitly embraced the project of people having indefinitely long lives, and if we find that this is draining away resources from every other project, we just decide no longer to
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embrace that project. But this seems no different from simply refusing to meet people’s extant needs. It is too easy a way out, not to say an immoral way. At the least, surely principles of procedural justice are violated. People are entitled to know what the rules are and not to have the prospects of their presumptively community-approved projects yanked out from under them. We could get around some of this by giving notice that, from now on, no new beginnings of projects of a certain sort will be approved; but there would still be all those people who have well begun the project of extending their lives, people who will continue to drain all the resources. A final difficulty with the proposal is: 5. If there are constraints of procedural justice on its implementation, then unless these can be analysed from the concept of needs, again, it is not needs that are grounding entitlements, but something else, or needs plus something else. 4.4.9
The Conceptual Analysis of Needs; the Axiomatics of Needs
I do not have room to deal with all of the difficulties with the previous proposal. But I see a way to begin rehabilitating it if we combine it with some conceptual analysis of the notion of needs. The problem has turned out to be that of how to resolve conflicts of needs, the conflict between basic and less basic needs, and between the basic needs of some persons and the less basic needs of others. It is obvious from the medical technology problem that there is no purely practical solution to the conflict: if living a long time is an acceptable project, then the basic needs of people seem expandable indefinitely as life-prolongation technology improves. The only hope of a permanent solution, then, is conceptual. And the form of conceptual solution I shall suggest is that the logic of needs is more like that of rights: just as your rights and mine stand as mutual limits on each other, so my needs and yours mutually limit each other. This could work in either of two ways: it may be that it cannot be true that you have a certain need if some need of mine would have to go unmet in order to meet yours. Or it may be that, while we can have needs in conflict, the status of one’s needs as serving as a basis for
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one’s moral entitlement to resources is limited by the status of the needs of others as serving as a basis for their moral entitlement to resources. Along these lines, we can articulate, by conceptual analysis, some axioms from the idea that needs are the basis of resource entitlements. All other things equal, surely a It is better that the needs of more people are met than less. b It is better that the needs of a given person are met well rather than poorly. c No one’s needs have automatic title to be met if the cost is that no one else’s needs would be met. d A person has title to have her most pressing needs met even if this is at the cost of other people having their less pressing needs fully met, provided their needs are still met fairly well. e If two people equally need something, and there are resources to give it to only one, a morality of needs is silent on who should get it—something else must break the tie. f If a certain distribution of resources would meet all of everyone’s needs, it is the morally correct distribution (and if more than one distribution would do this, any of them can count as correct, though perhaps depending on the implementation of an appropriate symmetry-breaking technique and the official community acceptance of the chosen distribution). g If, compared with any other arrangement (and failing the possibility in (f)), meeting a given person’s needs more fully than the needs of all others are met would result in more people’s needs being met, and in these needs being met more fully, then this is a correct arrangement (again, with a clause to handle tied systems of doing this, where the other systems do it by privileging a different person). h No person is such that, independently of other considerations, their needs deserve to be met rather than those of some other person.
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i No person is such that, independently of other considerations, their needs deserve to be met more fully than those of some other person.7 These axioms afford a solution to our problem, at least if I am right that the need to live another day is no more pressing than the needs of a person not immediately at risk of dying. For then the need to live another day is just the need to do whatever one was going to do that day; and both of these people have that need. But since this means that these two people have needs tied for being basic and pressing, then, by axiom (e), needs ethics has nothing to say about which of the two should have their need met. We may use a symmetry-breaking technique. Political negotiation might be part of the process of breaking the tie, perhaps the sort of negotiation we see during elections about how much priority to assign health care in the national budget and in the process of interest groups lobbying policymakers. (Axiom (e), then, goes a long way to deriving procedural justice from the notion of needs as entitlements.) Furthermore, if needs are to base moral entitlements to resources, if resources are finite, and if needs come into existence by communities approving potential projects, and approving the choosing of them by certain individuals, then perhaps something is only a legitimate project if its foreseeable resource requirements are not incompatible with those that will result from other people in the community making their approved choices among approved projects. For recall axiom (f), that a resource distribution is correct if it meets all of everyone’s needs. There appear to be two ways to bring about such a distribution: we can find the resources to meet all needs; or, considering the situation ab initio, as if prior to any needs existing, we can be careful to create only needs that the totality of available resources can meet. Let me develop this second strategy: suppose that, by approving projects and their selection by individuals, we in effect allow to come into existence needs not all of which can be met given finite resources; then we have brought into existence an unjust pairing of needs and re7 Probably more axioms could be given than these; these ones could be given a more hierarchical structure, and they could be more perspicuously shown to follow from the notion of needs as entitlements. Projects for another time.
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sources compared with a possible arrangement in which all people’s needs could all be fully met given available resources. So projects must be co-feasible given resources, and people allowed to choose among those projects only in ways co-feasible given the permitted choices of others. This is something we already take care to ensure in our culture. We restrict the number of people who can be members of certain professions, or who can be funded artists; sometimes we require or allow people to compete for the privilege of having a certain project, in part to make sure that people having it is not an excessive drain on resources needed for other people’s projects—think of grant and scholarship competitions. All of this is consistent with the axiomatics of needs. And it solves our problem, provided, again, that life-prolongation needs are just project needs (or provided that living a long life is a separate project able to be approved or not independently of certain other projects); for then life-prolongation needs are limited in their permissible extent by the co-feasibility constraint. That is, if life-prolongation needs are, project-wise, no more pressing than those associated with any other project, then they may be permissibly limited.8 This would be consistent with the possibility I mooted earlier of its being intelligible for a community to make a mistake in approving projects, and so in allowing supposed needs to come into existence by these approvals. For, arguably, no community has successfully created genuine needs if its so-called needs violate the needs axioms. In particular, no community has successfully created genuine needs if its so-called needs violate the constraint (axiom (f)) that needs, and so projects and the numbers of people allowed to participate in certain projects, must 8 It might be objected that, while we can avoid failing to meet people’s needs by failing to approve projects, or by failing to approve individual people’s choosing certain projects, thus preventing the needs from coming into existence, we may also be harming people by doing this; for we are in effect limiting various opportunities of people. The reply is that we are doing this justly, and that allowing these opportunities, because it would result in reductions in the social capacity to meet needs, extant or potential, would itself be unjust; and if Braybrooke is right that meeting people’s basic needs is the first moral priority in entitlement considerations, then failing to meet needs would be worse than not allowing opportunities. Finally, arguably we are not being unjust in restricting opportunities provided we follow procedural justice in distributing them—for example, provided we break ties in unbiased ways.
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be co-tenable given finite resources. We can then say that people who plead that they have a need, where their having the so-called need met would involve a total drain on resources, never really had that need in the first place, because the project that is costing all of these resources was never correctly approvable. This meets the concern of another point raised above that it is wrong to refuse to meet people’s extant needs just because they have become huge resource drains. For the needs in question are now revealed never to have been legitimate, since they violate the needs axioms. But what about the procedural justice issue, people having a right not to have their projects cancelled without notice? Again, axiom(e) to the rescue: the projects of those who are having resources drained away by the longevity project of others also have such rights; it is sad that the resource drain was not anticipated, but we now have a tie on claims; and this can be resolved, again, by political negotiation and symmetrybreaking. Note that all of this solves the problem as I formulated it earlier in terms of needs monsters. For this solution makes both kinds of monster impossible, since both drain all resources in ways we now see are incompatible with the axioms that conceptually define needs as bases of moral entitlements: no one can be allowed projects whose existence would create needs which would consume all the resources required to meet other people’s needs, on pain of violating axioms (f), (h), and (i). Still, there are troubles. For one thing, this solution relies on the claim that something’s being a means to your not dying does not make it something for which you have an especially pressing need. But if that you will die without x does not constitute your having a pressing need for x, what on earth does? Surely there is something special about needs for things required in order for one to go on living. Well, perhaps what is special about continuing to live is that the end of life is not just the failure to advance a project, but the end of all possibility of projects. On the other hand, if life-prolongation needs consume all resources, that constitutes, in its own way, the end of all possible projects too for those denied resources by their deployment on life-prolongation needs. So maybe there is nothing special about life-prolongation needs after all.
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Again, we have a mere tie, one we may resolve by axiom (e). Another objection might be this: are there not biologically given, unrenounceable needs, ones not just in common to all actual culturally approved projects, but to all possible ones so far as we are biologically based, resource-dependent beings? This a plausible worry. But it in effect introduces a different conception of what a need is from the one Braybrooke gave us. His account implies that, given biology and the decisions society makes about how to deal with it, needs are, at least in part, constructed by the community approval of projects and their community-approved adoption by individuals; and so needs are, therefore, hugely plastic. It confirms Braybrooke’s conception over the conception of needs as biologically given, that many people have had projects whose prosecution required renouncing the so-called biologically given needs—think of kamikaze warriors eager to sacrifice their lives in what they see as a just cause, or athletes who knowingly compromise their longevity by using ultimately toxic but performance-enhancing drugs in the project of athletic excellence. Staying alive is not part of every project; so the need to stay alive is not universal, and so not biologically given either. True, many possible projects require one’s being alive for one’s prosecuting of them. But that does not automatically make staying alive a universal, biologically determined, inevitable need; it only makes it a means to certain ends—ends at least in some degree, for some people, optional. There may be a way to accommodate the nerve of this objection more fully in Braybrooke’s conception of needs, however. For it may be that most people, perhaps for biological reasons, value certain things— for example, a long and healthy life—and this would induce people to endorse these things as projects, and so these projects would be found as part of virtually every culture. Nevertheless, the needs axioms still provide both the conceptual framework of needs and a constraint on morally permissible community endorsements of projects— there is still the requirement of the co-tenability of needs given finite resources. While resources should be matched to needs, needs should also be matched to resources.
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The co-tenability constraint no doubt leaves a lot of latitude; probably there are many ways to meet it, and so many different kinds of communities’ approved projects could pass it. But it is also a real constraint. And it may be that, given this, certain projects may be legitimately community-endorsed only by the consent of all needs claimants in the community. Imagine, for example, a community that has become obsessed with astronomy: by consensus vote, it approves the project of devoting most of its resources to producing an extremely long-lived astronomer; the hope is that she can be kept alive long enough, with extraordinary medical and technological efforts, to witness the remaining history of the universe, even unto its eventual heat-death billions of years from now. This would be a case where a co-tenable collection of needs has been created: the astronomer needs to live indefinitely to witness the end of the universe; and all others in the culture are like worker bees who need to do their part in making sure the astronomer lives to see the end. (Offspring are raised to have the same projects.) But had the community not come to a consensus on this enterprise, the astronomer would have been an inefficient needs monster relative to some people in the community, and her needs would not have had automatic title to be met.
There are further complications here, however. For one thing, it now seems that needs are not the ultimate foundation for entitlements. Rather, preferences ground everything; for it is preferences that induce members of communities to approve of possible projects, and to approve individuals choosing projects. So the need for something, x, can come to exist only if people in communities come to a consensus on projects and the having of them by selected persons, projects to whose prosecution x is then a means. And this must make us ask whether, apart from the constraints of the axioms of needs, there are constraints on morally permissible preferences, and therefore projects, and therefore needs. It must also make us wonder how it is to be determined what a community is; who is in it; whether communities are obliged to be such that the projects one community approves are co-tenable, given the
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world’s finite resources, with the projects other communities approve;9 and whether it is permissible to attain consensus in a community by the exile of dissidents. There is no room to deal with these matters here, beyond observing that, while needs may require preferences in order to come to exist, preferences cannot make just anything a need. For possible needs are constrained by the axioms of needs; and if it is needs that create moral entitlements, then at the very least, not just any preferences can accrue moral entitlements to be satisfied. Given the range of possible preferences, a range which has, since Hume, been thought to embed all manner of prima facie distasteful, and yet supposedly ultimately uncriticizeable, preferences—from the purely self-interested to the positively malevolent—this limiting of moral entitlements by the required mediation of needs must be seen as moral progress. For it means that mere preferring does not make right.10
9 These questions figure in another problem which worries Braybrooke: as part of the internationalization of culture, we in the developed countries have begun to see those in the undeveloped countries as members of our linguistic community, so that the extension of our use of the term ‘needs’ now includes their needs. But then we are obliged to provide resources for meeting their needs, again, possibly at the expense of making everyone’s life just barely above miserable in terms of met needs. 10 This may afford a start on a solution to yet another worry of Braybrooke’s, namely, that some needs are prima facie immoral, or at least morally embarrassing; but yet as needs, surely they have title to be met, possibly in competition with prima facie moral needs. How can we justify meeting the latter over the former from the concept of needs? Well, the needs axioms, particularly the co-feasibility constraint, may so constrain genuine needs as to rule out the immoral ones. This connects with work I have done trying to prove that all of people’s possible preferences must be such as to be co-tenable in the sense of being co-advanceable, this ruling out preferences to exploit other people in the sense of arranging the non-satisfaction of their preferences as a means to the satisfaction of one’s own. Note that this would require all beings with preferences to see all other such beings as in the same community, and this would help answer some of the questions of the preceding paragraph in the main text. Similar sorts of moves could be used to rule out for a morality of needs, various extreme, selfish conceptions of ethics, e.g., needs egoism. For more on the required co-tenability of preferences, see (MacIntosh, 1998).
Chapter 5
Canadians and Global Beneficence: Human Security Revisited E DNA K EEBLE
Abstract
This contribution utilizes some of Braybrooke’s philosophical ideas about responsibility to rethink the concept of human security, a notion rooted theoretically in a cosmopolitan ethic. I begin with a discussion of the ethics of state ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine as a new norm in the international arena. Next, I bring out the distinction made between ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’ in human security discussions in order to illustrate that the distinction is a confusing one and that the confusion is propagated in foreign policy. I explain the need to look beyond questions of the state’s responsibility and examine the place of individual responsibility through the lens of Braybrooke’s schema of personal responsibility for global beneficence. I conclude with what it means to rethink human security as a shared responsibility between the state and individuals, particularly in the Canadian context.∗ ∗ My thanks to Stella Gaon for generously giving her time to read the first draft meticulously and help hammer out my argument (literally), to Susan Sherwin and Peter Schotch, for their leadership and comments, and to David Braybrooke, not simply for his response to this piece but also for his exemplary ‘personal responsibility for global beneficence.’
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5.1
Introduction
In ‘A Progressive Approach to Personal Responsibility for Global Beneficence,’ David Braybrooke opens with the question ‘What personal responsibilities do we, people living in rich countries, have for relieving miseries in the less fortunate countries?’1 With this one question, Braybrooke presents an immediate challenge to students of Canadian foreign policy both to reflect on the notion of responsibility in the international arena and to focus on the role of individual Canadians who live in a rich, developed state to alleviate poverty and hardship abroad. On the one hand, Braybrooke’s challenge is a familiar one: students of Canadian foreign policy have become acquainted with what responsibility may mean, given the prominent role that has been played by the Canadian government in establishing and promoting the work of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) to create a new international norm appropriately labelled ‘the responsibility to protect.’ On the other hand, Braybrooke’s challenge is a novel one: students of Canadian foreign policy have looked at the responsibility of the Canadian state, not that of individual Canadians, in addressing global problems and in understanding problems as global in scope. Indeed, the extent to which the individual figures prominently is in terms of the shifts in government thinking (but not, so far, in continued government action) away from simply making the state and individuals at home secure to making individuals and their communities abroad secure. This ‘people-centred’ rather than ‘state-centred’ approach to security is what distinguishes thinking about human security, which the Canadian government has espoused but has failed to pursue fully, from the more familiar national security thinking. My contribution to this volume is reminiscent of Bernard Weiner’s article in The Monist which appeared in the same issue as Braybrooke’s noted above. Weiner, a social psychologist, points out that he is not a philosopher but seeks to bring empirical data that might inform philosophical debates regarding responsibility inferences.2 Trained as a po1 Braybrooke 2 Weiner
(2003a) 301 (2003) 165
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litical scientist, specifically in international relations and Canadian foreign policy, I also find value in the intersections between academic fields but seek to do the reverse of Weiner and utilize some of Braybrooke’s philosophical ideas about responsibility to rethink the notion of human security with respect to its empirical application. This is an important task because human security thinking, which can be arguably grounded within a framework of cosmopolitan ethics,3 has lost currency with the Canadian government. Indeed, the turn to human security thinking could be seen as a harbinger of global justice with Canada, if not in the lead, at least marching in step to create new norms in the international arena, not merely with governmental and intergovernmental actors but more importantly with non-governmental ones. The 1997 ban on anti-personnel landmines, referred to as the ‘ Ottawa convention,’ stood out as a prime example of the realization of Canada’s human security agenda. This was followed by the 1998 Rome statute to establish an International Criminal Court in which Canada also played an important role. It has been commonplace in the field of international relations to distinguish between the post-Cold War era and the post-9/11 era. It may be that the post-Cold War era was indeed a time of optimism for states because the national security question became less pressing with the end of the nuclear confrontation between East and West. But that era which began with the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and quickly followed by the final dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas day 1991 came to an abrupt end with the events of 11 September 2001. The world has changed, it is argued, and in the post-9/11 era, national security trumps all. I make the claim that it is precisely because we are in an age of terrorism that human security as opposed to national security thinking becomes even more important. With the United States in the lead, the focus on retribution as opposed to distribution in the international arena will only serve to undermine the security of all, including Canadians. Human security is rooted theoretically in a cosmopolitan ethic, but this is not being realized by current government practices. My central argument is that Braybrooke’s ideas about personal responsibil3 See
Penz (2001)
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ity help us to think about how this ethic might be more effectively put into practice, and in so doing, point to a rethinking of human security as a shared responsibility between the state and individuals in the society. The literature on cosmopolitanism, as David Hollinger reminds us, has exploded in recent years in critical and democratic theory.4 Samuel Scheffler states that despite different conceptions of cosmopolitanism, at its root it is ‘the idea that each individual is a citizen of the world.’5 The problem, according to Scheffler, is that the idea of world citizenship calls into question the normative status of an individual’s attachments to particular individuals and groups, so that an apparent incompatibility arises between an individual’s commitment to equality and his or her special responsibilities to family, friends, and communities. However, Scheffler argues that this incompatibility only arises in extreme forms of cosmopolitanism, but moderate cosmopolitanism ‘insists only that one’s local attachments and affiliations must always be balanced and constrained by the interests of other people’ and that ‘substantive norms of global justice [exist] in addition to the norms that apply within a single society.’6 This chapter is based on Scheffler’s conception of moderate cosmopolitanism which allows for multi-layered citizenship so that an individual can have ethical commitments to those both within his or her state and outside of it. Beyond that, I also take as a given that there is state responsibility, particularly if the state is a democratic one.7 The 4 Hollinger (2001) Hollinger presents ‘the most prominent features of the new cosmopolitanism [even] at the risk of rendering the movement more unified that it is’ (236) in order to distinguish cosmopolitanism from Martha Nussbaum’s ‘universalism’ and Will Kymlicka’s ‘pluralism.’ An interesting contrast to Hollinger’s review of some of the literature is to be found in Nyers (2003). Nyers uses the term ‘cosmopolitanisms’ because ‘to think of cosmopolitanism in the plural is to upset much of the received knowledge we possess on the subject’ (1072). Nyers prefers the term ‘ abject cosmopolitanism’ not only to bring out the ‘familiar us/them relations’ of Western cosmopolitan theorists versus the global poor of the Third World, but also to problematize the cosmopolitanism of the abject to bring out their voice. 5 Scheffler (1999) 258 6 Ibid., 260. Scheffler points out that the ‘conviction that we have responsibilities to our families, friends, and communities is so deeply embedded within common-sense moral thought’ that the idea of moderate cosmopolitanism appears to be stating the obvious (262-3). 7 According to David Miller, the concept of ‘outcome responsibility’ as opposed to moral responsibility allows us to talk about national as opposed to individual responsibility, particularly if the political community is open and democratic. By virtue of enjoying the benefits of membership
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problem is that after leading the way in making individual (personal) security rather than national security the focus of foreign policy (prime examples being the anti-personnel landmines treaty and the establishment of the International Criminal Court), the Canadian government has shifted back to a national security focus. This has been a retrograde move: it disregards the radical change in the security problem which has shifted from state-to-state conceptions to the dominance of terrorism and insurgency within states and the crossing of borders without the reliance on state sponsorship. This move also disregards the opportunities offered to deal with the changed security problem through engagement with individual persons in developed states, like Canada, via non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These civil society organizations have been capable of mobilizing individual persons in Western states. Braybrooke argues that support of NGOs, or even better fuller participation in them, offers an effective way for individual persons in Western countries to exercise responsibilities toward people in the developing world. His argument is predicated on the recognition that it will be confusing and self-defeating to demand optimal exercise. Indeed, Braybrooke highlights that individuals in developed countries just doing something now, and then periodically doing more following comparisons with expenditures on time and money on luxuries, is what a reasonable ethics will demand. Nor is Braybrooke’s argument simply hopeful thinking: the anti-personnel landmines treaty and the International Criminal Court amply demonstrate how effective NGOs can be in agitating for international measures to protect individual or personal security. At the same time, Braybrooke is not as expressly mindful as he might have been about the reasons that champions of human development might have had for thinking his appeal to needs is too restrictive. However, his conception of needs intersects with Amartya Sen’s conception of capabilities.8 In Meeting Needs Braybrooke uses a criterion in the group, particularly those in the cooperative practice model, dissent alone from the policies of the group does not allow individuals to evade responsibility for the outcome of those policies. Interestingly, Miller points out that national responsibility is even stronger than state responsibility because the concept of national responsibility holds present generations responsible for the actions of past ones. See Miller (2004) 8 Sen (1999)
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like Sen’s of functionings (in Braybrooke’s case, as citizens, householder, worker, parent) and, accordingly, includes needs for companionship, social acceptance, freedom from harassment, and recreation (including also sexual activity).9 This should do something to restore Braybrooke’s credit with champions of human development. In that way, Braybrooke offers a way for us to rethink human security and find avenues for individuals (and not only states) to exercise their responsibilities abroad.
5.2
The Ethics of State Responsibility
The extent to which human security thinking can be grounded in a framework of cosmopolitan ethics is found in the recognition that the referent (or subject) of security should be the individual, and that individuals have an equal claim to fundamental human rights, to lives free of violence, and to minimum necessities of food, shelter, and health. These claims are to be met in the first place by an individual’s fellow citizens through the operation of their government, but failing that, individuals outside of their country are obligated to meet these claims through their governments. In the parlance of international relations predicated on the separation of ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ policy, human security is first and foremost a domestic matter because it ‘raises the obligations of states to their own citizens’ to protect their rights, ensure safety from threats both at home and abroad, and provide a minimum standard of living.10 When states fail in meeting these obligations, it becomes a foreign policy matter for other states because these states must then step in to assist such individuals in need. This stems from obligations of the citizens of one country to those of another with states acting as agents for their populations.11 Thinking about security in terms of the individual is a clear departure from the dominant conventional understanding of security in international relations. To the extent that ethical considerations enter into 9 Braybrooke
(1987a) (2001) 46 11 Ibid. 43 10 Penz
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the state’s calculus, such considerations would apply only to its own citizens. If ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’12 —a phrase that implies that national security issues are not subject to debate and the democratic state must proceed with one voice in the face of the outside world—then ethics is also territorially bounded, and this suggests a Machiavellian understanding for rulers when the state’s interests are threatened. Security in this sense is defined primarily in military terms with the state dealing with external threats in an interstate system characterized by self-help and anarchy. National security must be a foreign policy priority in order to ensure the survival of one’s own state. The state must procure weapons, build armies, and enter alliances in order to prevent foreign attacks. The Cold War that protected Western states, including Canada, under the American nuclear umbrella against Eastern countries, which were in turn protected by the Soviet nuclear arsenal, was predicated on nuclear deterrence. The ‘order’ created by the balance of power between the two sides was also referred to as mutual assured destruction (MAD), given the devastating consequences of a full-fledged war between the Soviet Union and the United States. Accordingly, considerations of international order necessarily preceded international justice because the ‘high politics’ dealing with the survival of the state (and the planet) in the event of a third world war between East and West took precedence over different philosophies regarding the organization of political and economic life. Essentially, it was a good thing that the two sides could co-exist. With each side having second-strike capability, no first-strike took place; and when the Cold War ended with the West emerging victorious, a ‘new world order’ infused with liberal optimism began to renew considerations of international justice and, more specifically, to reorient the purposes of national militaries.13 As the likelihood of interstate warfare involving Western countries declined in the 1990s, intrastate warfare in many parts of the world became more prominent. From northern Iraq to Bosnia to Somalia to 12 This oft-quoted phrase comes from Michigan Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg (18841951), an isolationist turned internationalist, who was a key supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Vandenberg sought to create a bipartisan foreign policy for the United States. 13 See Rosemary Foot and Hurrell (2003)
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Rwanda to Kosovo Kosovo, internal conflicts erupted onto the international scene in ways unprecedented. The distinction between combatants and non-combatants was no longer respected, and the horror, viciousness, and inhumanity of such conflicts were revealed by media outlets covering conflict zones. Gone were the rules of international humanitarian law which governed interstate warfare and protected innocent civilians. These were not wars of one country’s armies against another, but rather conflicts arising out of ‘ ethnic cleansing,’ warlordism, and genocide, where the enemy was the state or specific ethnic groups within it, as governments or self-proclaimed warlords terrorized, maimed, and killed citizens within their territories. These violations of human rights gave rise to humanitarian actions in which foreign militaries intervened on behalf of innocent civilians and challenged the sovereignty of Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, and Serbia. But such acts of international intervention were arguably justified.14 Drawing from the just war tradition, and the ethics of the use of force, Jean Bethke Elshtain develops a doctrine of equal regard as opposed to a model of international victimization as the basis for ‘the use of force as a remedy under a justice claim.’ She states: ‘human beings qua human beings deserve equal moral regard ... [which] means one possesses an inalienable dignity that is not given by governments.’ When governments commit ‘[a]cts of aggression, whether against [their] own people or against those who cannot defend themselves, [these] are stipulated as cases of injustice that warrant the use of force.’15 In essence, these governments had failed in their obligations to provide human security to their citizens, thus triggering justice claims by their citizens on other states. The focus on the rights of individuals is the cornerstone of the ‘ responsibility to protect’ doctrine. Created in September 2000 and 14 The idea of humanitarian intervention is very controversial. As Nicholas Wheeler points out, some question the rights of states to risk the lives of soldiers and other non-military personnel to ‘save strangers’; others point out that the international order among states is predicated on differing conceptions of justice and that states, not individuals, are the primary bearers of rights and duties in international law. Mohammed Ayoob highlights the critiques of postcolonial states of essentially the actions of the West against the rest. Wheeler provides a powerful case for humanitarian intervention, whereas Ayoob carefully examines its major shortcomings.See Wheeler (2000); Ayoob (2004) 15 Elshtain (2003) 67
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releasing its report in December 2001, the twelve-member International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, co-chaired by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, has shifted international discourse from the ‘ right to intervene’ by foreign militaries to the ‘ responsibility to protect’ individual citizens.16 Although this responsibility is borne, first and foremost, by governments, thus reaffirming the sovereignty of the state, governments can no longer do whatever they please to their own populations. The Commission extends the responsibility of protecting vulnerable and innocent populations outside of the state’s borders to other states if the state fails in its obligations or, indeed, is the source of the violations. Recognizing that military force is a deadly instrument, the Commission sees it as but one element of the ‘responsibility continuum’: the ‘responsibility to prevent,’ the ‘responsibility to react,’ and the ‘responsibility to rebuild.’ The focus on the justness of military intervention—that is, the ‘responsibility to react’— comes about because the use of militaries for humanitarian purposes is a relatively new norm, exemplifying human security thinking. Indeed, the personnel of foreign militaries who may have to fight in order to protect vulnerable populations are arguably ‘ just warriors’ because the actions of their governments have been legitimated by the fulfillment of six criteria: right authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, proportional means, and reasonable prospects. The ideal of responsibility of states conceived in this way, however, brings up questions of how it would come into force. One of the primary reasons for the establishment of the Commission was to rectify the inaction of the international community for the massacres in Rwanda, in which 800,000 people were killed as other states stood by and did nothing to help the population. The prevention of another Rwanda impelled the Commission to think ‘realistically’ about how the responsibility to protect doctrine could become a guiding principle for state action; it led the Commission to place the authority in the hands of the United Nations Security Council and to reaffirm the centrality of certain states and their militaries. In that way, the responsibility to protect doctrine, which would nominally obligate each state, was in reality a principle for 16 See
RTP (2001); RTP2 (2001)
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large states and was therefore not unlike the collective security principle already enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which placed responsibility and authority in the hands of the five permanent members of the Security Council (United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and the People’s Republic of China). As Mohammed Ayoob points out, the ‘unrepresentative character of the Security Council and the threat of veto that hangs over humanitarian decisions makes the Security Council a less-than-satisfactory medium for the determination of international will regarding humanitarian emergencies.’17 Moreover, with the end of the Cold War only one state in the world has the military capability to undertake the sorts of interventions that could ensure some reasonable amount of success.18 That is why Elshtain argues that international justice, ‘construed as an equal claim to the use of coercive force’ deployed on behalf of individuals victimized by their own governments, can only be realized with the United States disproportionately undertaking the burden.19 Invoking what she refers to affectionately as the Spiderman ethic that ‘with great power comes great responsibility,’ Elshtain sees the United States, ‘itself premised on a set of universal propositions concerning human dignity and equality,’ as the only country able ‘to enforce international justice as an equal regard norm.’20 Although the United States will likely often act in coalition with others (but not likely through the United Nations because Elshtain sees the power of veto crippling UN action), American commitment to the enforcement of the equal regard norm will result, she argues, in the reversal of the lesson of the Melian dialogue: ‘The strong do what they must in order that the weak not suffer what they too often will.’21 After 11 September 2001, the apparent vulnerability and complacency of the United States galvanized a Republican administration under George W. Bush to undertake a war on terrorism predicated on 17 Ayoob
(2004) 102 might argue that France and the United Kingdom also have the ability to intervene, but it is not altogether clear that they would act alone without the United States. The examples of Bosnia and Rwanda stand out in this regard. 19 Elshtain (2003) 64 20 Ibid. 73-4 21 Ibid. 75 18 Some
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the principle that ‘you’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.’ American military interventions are occurring, as is clearly evident in Afghanistan and Iraq, but these are being justified, not as exercises of the responsibility to protect, but as pre-emptive attacks to protect American national security from, for example, al-Qaeda, who were being territorially housed by the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, who apparently had weapons of mass destruction.22 Although the United States government has argued that the Taliban and Hussein regimes were oppressive, and Afghanis and Iraqis are now better off, humanitarianism was not the reason for going to war. The American government also highlights that young Afghani girls are now in schools after having been denied the right to education by the Taliban, but again the oppression of women was not the reason for military action. As Mary Kaldor has pointed out, the Bush administration describes itself as on a moral crusade in which ‘sovereignty is conditional for other states, but unconditional for the United States because the United States represents “good.”’23 Liberal optimism regarding the humanitarian purposes of national militaries has been eclipsed as the post-Cold War era has given way to the post-9/11 era. The 1990s may simply have been a hiatus, ‘an interregnum, made possible because Western militaries had spare capacity and time to do human rights work.’24 This was a period reminiscent of the two decades between the two world wars, when ‘idealism’ abounded in the international community. But these periods seem to be anomalies; the normal state of affairs appears to be one in which responsibilities of states do not extend beyond their own borders.
5.3 ‘ Freedom from Fear’ and ‘ Freedom from Want’ The responsibilities that I have been discussing have been very narrow in scope. H uman security is not merely about the use of coercion to 22 Kaldor (2003b) This was a forum on whether the U.S.-led action against Iraq constituted humanitarian intervention. A compelling voice in the forum is that of Mary Kaldor, who supports humanitarian intervention ‘if it is understood as cosmopolitan law enforcement,’ which the war against Iraq was not but rather a ‘recipe for more violence and for global polarization.’ Kaldor made these comments as part of the forum. My thanks to Stella Gaon for directing me to this. 23 Kaldor (2003a) 12 24 Michael Ignatieff, as quoted in Tanguy (2003) 148
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enforce claims to protection of vulnerable populations. Human security is a much broader concept that includes meeting the basic needs of individuals worldwide and that is predicated on ‘an ethical responsibility to reorient security around the individual in a redistributive sense,’ obligating those who have to those who have not.25 This conceptualization draws our focus away from world conflict to world poverty, and especially to the extent to which the world’s resources are controlled and consumed by a small, rich minority who should take responsibility for the impoverished, desperate, and often fatal circumstances of the world’s majority. This rich minority, of course, lives primarily in the West, and the problem is that most of us in the West do not feel the weight of responsibility for the world’s poor. Indeed, Thomas Pogge provides compelling explanations as to why global structural and institutional arrangements that benefit the rich harm the poor, asserting that ‘most of us do not merely let people starve but also participate in starving them,’ by ‘failing to fulfill our more stringent negative duty not to uphold injustice, not to contribute to or profit from the unjust impoverishment of others.’26 H uman security defined broadly encompasses global economic injustices and includes demands for changes to the existing socioeconomic order. This more expansive understanding of human security is found in the work of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which introduced the concept of human security in its 1994 Human Development Report as encompassing economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political security.27 Referred to as the ‘ sustainable human development’ view of human security, it is predicated on ensuring ‘freedom from want’ and on fusing the broadened security discourse with the development agenda to address fundamental socioeconomic inequalities and the lack of social justice in the global arena.28 In this case, the obligations of states are not solely or even chiefly met by deploying their militaries for humanitarian purposes but by using development assistance, trade, investment, monetary, and other policies to address global economic injustices. 25 Newman
(2001) 240 (2002) 214, 197 27 Programme-UNDP (1994) 28 Hampson (2002) 26 Pogge
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The Canadian government has focused its efforts on the safety of peoples, defining human security along the lines of ‘freedom from fear’ as opposed to ‘freedom from want.’ It has identified five areas of priority in its human security agenda: (1) protection of civilians; (2) peace support operations; (3) conflict prevention; (4) governance and accountability; and (5) public safety. The government has argued that human security thinking is not merely the development agenda in a new guise but rather a recognition that the nature of conflict has changed in fundamental ways: wars are being fought within states as opposed to between them; threats emanate not merely from military but also from non-military sources, such as human rights violations, terrorist acts, environmental degradation, transnational crime, and small arms proliferation; and the safety and well-being of individuals (as opposed to merely states) are integral to achieving global peace and security.29 The focus must be on the human costs of violent conflict and the means to remedy them. That is why the Canadian government became the principal sponsor of the ICISS when UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan saw the issue of humanitarian intervention as too divisive within the United Nations framework.30 In so doing, the ICISS report is a direct reflection of ‘the Canadian government’s efforts to influence normative developments in international society ... (and indeed) a great deal of the Commission’s language and concepts reflect the human security agenda that was so prominent a part of Canadian foreign policy in the 1990s.’31 Human security efforts on the part of Canada also reflect a changed politics by working with civil society actors in the global arena. For example, the advancement of the treaty on anti-personnel landmines and the Rome statute establishing the International Criminal Court could not have happened without the participation of key NGOs, such as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and the NGO Coalition for an International Criminal Court (CICC), which were themselves acting as umbrella groups for hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller 29 SFP
(1999); FFF (2002); McRae and Hubert (2001) (2003) 202 31 RTP (2001) 491 30 Axworthy
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NGOs.32 For Canada, working with NGOs and other like-minded states became central to advancing its human security agenda. This was a different type of politics founded on rethinking state-society relations in which the process was opened up to groups that had been traditionally marginalized in foreign policy development: peace activists, social justice activists, women’s groups, cultural groups, minorities, students, and so forth. Many of these groups found common cause with the government’s human security agenda as the government adopted notions of economic justice, gender equality, and human rights in its policies. In that way, the revisioning of security along human security grounds included changing the process to bring in societal voices, if not values, to the making of state policy. C ivil society engagement is crucial for bringing about change because NGOs represent the realignment of political identities that are based not simply on national but also on transnational attachments. For example, although the United States remains a non-signatory to the anti-personnel landmines convention, it was an American, Jody Williams, who co-founded the U.S.-based ICBL as six NGOs in 1992 and expanded it to over 1300 members in over 85 countries; who fought tirelessly to ensure a successful treaty by working with other NGOs, like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and with states, like Canada;33 and who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her international humanitarian efforts. Similarly, although the United States voted against the Rome statute to establish the International Criminal Court, it was also an American, William Pace, the executive director of the New York-based World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy, who headed the CICC and who approached then foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy to enlist Canada’s support for the establishment of a new court to hold individuals responsible for war crimes when national judicial systems fail.34 Thus, human security ‘reflects a politics 32 McRae
and Hubert (2001) Mark Gwozdecky and Jill Sinclair point out, the anti-personnel landmines treaty succeeded because of civil society leadership, highlighting that ‘paragraph eight of the preamble of the Ottawa Convention gives formal recognition to the ICBL and ICRC for their efforts, an honour not normally granted in a treaty instrument developed by a state-focused international community’ (37). See Gwozdecky and Sinclair (2001) 34 Robinson (2001) 172 33 As
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of empowerment’ brought about by the spread of democracy, the growth of information technologies, and the impact of non-governmental organizations, particularly in the humanitarian and development fields, on domestic and global issues. What has become of Canada’s human security agenda? On 27 April 2004, the Liberal government under Prime Minister Paul Martin released Securing an Open Society: Canada’s National Security Policy.35 Unabashedly realist in tone, the document identifies threats to the Canadian state with a sense of urgency and impels the government to act. The document spells out distinctions between ‘personal security,’ ‘national security,’ and ‘international security’36 in order to bring out the centrality of national security. Only when personal and international security issues have an impact upon national security do these two matters become important. The government states explicitly: ‘National security deals with threats that have the potential to undermine the security of the state or society,’37 thus invoking, as evident throughout the document, a more traditional conception of security predicated on the state as the referent. The concept of human security has apparently disappeared from Canada‘s lexicon. Precipitated by the events of 11 September 2001, this shift to national security language by the Martin government has led to the identification of threats ’at home.’ This has meant that the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, essentially Canada’s equivalent to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has displaced the Department of Foreign Affairs38 and has taken the lead in defining Canadian security.39 I would argue that the apparent disappearance of human security language in the current government’s thinking stems from the misconception that national security and human security do not go hand in 35 SAOS
(2004) 4 37 Ibid., 3 38 When Paul Martin took over as prime minister, the Liberals undertook major reorganizations of federal departments. Apart from creating the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, the government also separated out International Trade from Foreign Affairs, creating two new departments. 39 I take up what this means for Canadian foreign policy and Canada-U.S. relations in Keeble (2004). 36 Ibid.,
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hand. Domestically, the government’s function in ensuring freedom from fear on the part of its citizens goes alongside its function in ensuring freedom from want. Ensuring freedom from fear stems from the government’s coercive power: at home, that function is undertaken by the police and other enforcement authorities. Abroad, as we see in the responsibility to protect doctrine, that function is undertaken by the military in protecting individuals. Ensuring freedom from want stems from the government’s social welfare responsibilities: at home, this is often referred to as ‘social security’ or ‘income security.’ Abroad, this is manifested in terms of the government’s foreign aid policies. The problem is that despite the recognition that conflict may be rooted in deep-seated socioeconomic inequalities between groups, and that addressing these ‘root causes’ is fundamental to conflict prevention, the Canadian government has seen its human security agenda in a very narrow way. By continuing to make distinctions in human security thinking between ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want,’ the government does not fully address the ‘development’ side of the equation and the responsibility therein. What the government does not appreciate is that policies to ensure ‘freedom from fear’ abroad are actually about restoring the national security of a state by other states like Canada. To truly address its responsibilities to individuals abroad, the government must ensure ‘freedom from want.’ It is true that the record for donor states like Canada in alleviating world poverty, reforming international financial institutions, renegotiating trade arrangements, crafting investment policies, and the like is not good. Since the end of the Second World War, official development assistance (ODA) policies, including those of Canada, have had less to do with humanitarian objectives and more with political and economic ones, despite the rhetoric to meet basic human needs and help the poorest of the poor. That is why Cranford Pratt’s recent survey of Canadian foreign aid policy finds little role for cosmopolitan ethical considerations despite the Canadian government’s commitment to human security, particularly during Lloyd Axworthy’s tenure as minister of foreign affairs from January 1996 to September 2000.40 The Canadian state has clearly not lived up to its responsibility 40 Pratt
(2001)
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to individuals abroad. How might we revive attention to human security in Canadian foreign policy thinking with the effect of giving greater weight once again to what person-to-person responsibility can amount to in the international arena?
5.4 The Ethics of Individual Responsibility A modest proposal for rethinking human security is to locate responsibility at the level of the individual as well as at the level of the state by drawing from the work of David Braybrooke on meeting needs and taking personal responsibility for extending the common good beyond state boundaries.41 Braybrooke provides philosophical arguments for three sorts of claims which, I will argue, may help to revive human security in Canadian foreign policy thinking by placing individual Canadians front and centre in our understanding of responsibility. I address Braybrooke’s arguments here and then conclude in the last section on what his arguments would mean for Canadian foreign policy. Braybrooke provides philosophical arguments for the following three sorts of claims: 1. The concept of needs has moral force for all individuals who live in rich, safe countries of the West, and some choose to accept this claim.42 2. These individuals take on responsibilities in relation to social organizations, and in this case organizations dedicated to global beneficence. As private persons, individuals take on these responsibilities by supporting non-governmental organizations, such as Amnesty International or M´edecins sans Fronti´eres, as well as 41 My specific points of departure from David Braybrooke’s voluminous work are ‘A Progressive Approach to Personal Responsibility for Global Beneficence’ (cited earlier), ‘The Common Good beyond State Boundaries’ (October 2003), made available to me in manuscript by David Braybrooke, pending publication, and ‘Where Does the Moral Force of the Concept of Needs Reside and When?’in Braybrooke (2005). 42 Braybrooke makes this claim, I would argue, explicitly in his ‘Where Does the Moral Force of the Concept of Needs Reside and When?’ and implicitly in his ‘A Progressive Approach to Personal Responsibility for Global Beneficence.’
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specific agencies of the United Nations, such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). 3. Such individuals have taken on the sorts of responsibilities that move in the direction of a world community. In ‘Where Does the Moral Force of the Concept of Needs Reside and When?’ Braybrooke juxtaposes his concept of needs with Amartya Sen’s concept of capabilities. I discussed in the last section that it was the UNDP that first introduced an expansive understanding of human security by conceptualizing it in terms of sustainable human development. The UNDP’s human development approach, encapsulated in its Human Development Report published annually since 1990, is predicated on Sen’s ideas on capabilities: ‘the idea that the purpose of development is to improve human lives by expanding the range of things that a person can be and do, such as to be healthy and well-nourished, to be knowledgeable, and to participate in community life.’43 Sen’s influence on development thinking has been pronounced,44 and his capabilities (also referred to as ‘freedoms’) approach has clearly informed understandings of human security as ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want.’ Indeed, Sen, along with Sadako Ogata, former UN Commissioner for Refugees, co-chaired the Commission on Human Security, which presented its final report to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in May 2003.45 Braybrooke argues that the needs and capabilities approaches should be combined, but that the concept of needs has greater moral force even with those who might be less willing or indeed outright sceptical of 43 Fukuda-Parr
(See 2003, pg. 303) and Deneulin (2002) 45 The Commission on Human Security was established under the leadership of Japan. Whereas Canada took the initiative in establishing the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, as discussed earlier, with the focus on redefining humanitarian intervention—and thus within the context of ‘freedom from fear’—Japanese leadership with regard to the Commission on Human Security signalled that country’s commitment to a broader understanding of human security. Not surprisingly, the Japanese government asked Sen to co-chair the Commission in order to help bring out the fuller ‘freedom from want.’ For more on the difference between the Canadian and Japanese positions on human security, see Acharya (2001). The final report of the Commission on Human Security is available online at http://www.humansecurity-chs. org/finalreport. 44 Stewart
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giving aid to those less fortunate than themselves. He reasons that individuals will be more willing to place others’ needs ahead of their own preferences but most likely quite unwilling to place others’ preferences in terms of leading to further capabilities (e.g., ‘enlargement of their choices’) before their own. Braybrooke points out that needs, often not as expressed as such but rather in ‘surrogate’ ways such as thirst, starvation, exposure, or illiteracy, point to a sense of urgency that often moves people to act by essentially ‘pulling on their heartstrings.’ Indeed, needs expressed in this way tend to eliminate considerations of desert because the needy could not possibly be responsible for their present situations. That may be why Sen’s capabilities approach, which does allow for greater agency on the part of the needy, may be less appealing to those who would address the need. Given the international disparities in the global context, we are talking about persuading those in the rich, safe countries in the West, like Canada, to take responsibility for meeting the needs of those abroad. Every human being does have a right to be treated the same, but the ‘treatment’ (e.g., food, shelter, health) under consideration must be seen in light of those who need it and those who have it and also can provide it to others. The argument for the moral force comes in when we focus not on those in need but on those who could respond to the need.46 In what ways do individuals in rich countries like Canada take responsibility? In ‘A Progressive Approach to Personal Responsibility for Global Beneficence,’ Braybrooke argues that individuals take on responsibilities in relation to social organizations. He focuses on charitable organizations as opposed to governments or corporations in setting up a climate that encourages individuals to give. Braybrooke asserts 46 This statement will appear counter-intuitive to international development specialists who have seen the change in approach to development from ‘basic needs’ to ‘human development.’ Although the basic needs approach places people at the centre of development, it has been seen as defining human well-being in terms of commodities as opposed to capabilities, therefore denying (or being silent on) human rights, freedoms, and agency of those in the developing world, placing them in a further subservient position to donors. See Fukuda-Parr for comparisons between the neoliberal, basic needs, and human development approaches. However, as I stated in the introduction, by bringing Braybrooke’s Meeting Needs into the discussion, we can see more clearly how Braybrooke’s and Sen’s conceptions intersect, thus restoring in part Braybrooke’s credibility with champions of human development.
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that, given an inclination to give (particularly evident when the moral force of needs is invoked), an individual will assign herself or himself personal responsibility to act beneficently, not in terms of a duty being imposed, but rather in terms of ‘rules that the agent makes up for herself [or himself], for instance, rules about the size of current contributions.’47 The point that Braybrooke makes is that individuals living in a rich country such as Canada, which has a tradition of philanthropy like the United States (but unlike Sweden or Japan), may be (ethically) guided to give in order to help remedy global inequalities. Thus, as private persons connected to organizations which work toward aspects of the global good, individuals may be encouraged to continue giving, and indeed giving more as years progress by simply asking them ‘to do more—not optimally more, just more.’48 According to Braybrooke, it might be that individuals would find, for example, that a second sports utility vehicle is simply a luxury that they do not need, and they can redirect such monies to contributions the following year, setting the standard for additional beneficence. Given active members of a tradition of philanthropy, some will give more and others may drop out but new contributors will join, so that with each succeeding round more will be given to charitable organizations such as Amnesty International or Mdecins sans Frontires or specialized agencies of the United Nations, such as UNICEF. Braybrooke states that ‘on the progressive approach, there is no neat end to the question about responsibility and the size of contribution’ because the problem of global disparities never goes away, forcing those of us living in rich countries ‘to bear with the uncomfortable feeling that we are each of us falling short of doing what we could do.’49 Moreover, by taking on these responsibilities, individuals are participating in ways that move in the direction of a world community. In ‘The Common Good beyond State Boundaries,’ Braybrooke points out that NGOs and semi-autonomous UN agencies, particularly those under discussion, are pursuing aspects of the world common good by, 47 Braybrooke
(2003a)310, 316. 312 49 Ibid. 315-16 48 Ibid.,
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for example, providing clean water, increasing literacy, redressing human rights violations, or instituting peace processes. When individuals support these organizations, they help to bring about a sense of the common human good beyond their own state, and ‘if participation could be strengthened ... we would have on the international scene robust elements of a world community, people organized to pursue public goods on the world scene.’50 This would necessitate what Braybrooke refers to as a movement from ‘the mailbox relation to active community practices,’51 predicated on a multi-stage program that would in the end bring together donors, the national staff of the NGO, staff in the field, and recipients, creating robust attachments. Braybrooke accepts that our special responsibilities to families, friends, and fellow nationals may work alongside our general responsibilities to others, particularly those in need, throughout the world. He states that the ‘ multiplication of personal activity,’ along with the works of NGOs, would help to bring into fruition Samuel Scheffler’s conception of ‘moderate cosmopolitanism,’52 predicated on new allegiances which transcend states and national cultures. This may unsettle the self but in the context of creating a m´elange of identities that allows the individual to flourish.53 In the end, individuals taking responsibility for global beneficence by supporting organizations that work for the world common good may be more likely to pressure their government to act in the same way. As Braybrooke states, ‘Judiciously developed, these motivations might achieve a delicate balance between private giving and support for governmental beneficence, so that the very people who gave most generously privately would be most vigorous in supporting humanitarian po50 Braybrooke,
‘The Common Good.’
51 Ibid. 52 Braybrooke applauds Scheffler’s work as do I. According to Scheffler, in ‘Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism,’ ‘moderate cosmopolitanism about justice will be a compelling position only if it proves possible to devise human institutions, practices and ways of life that take seriously the equal worth of persons without undermining people’s capacity to sustain their special loyalties and attachments’ (275). 53 Braybrooke also applauds Jeremy Waldron’s work. Waldron fears the ‘cultural exclusiveness of the identity politics of community’ (113-14) and argues instead for the identity of the self predicated on the management of a ‘variety, a multiplicity of different and perhaps disparate communal allegiances’ (110). See Waldron (1995)
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lices on the part of the government.’54
5.5
Rethinking Human Security
The connection that Braybrooke makes is crucial to rethinking human security: individuals matter as responsible agents moving in the direction of a world community. By supporting private charitable organizations and UN semi-autonomous agencies working towards the world common good, they fulfill their moral obligations not only as private persons but also as citizens to others outside of the state. They may demand that more of their taxes be directed to foreign aid, or more of the state’s efforts be placed in reforming global financial structures that favour rich countries. If human security thinking is truly to be grounded in a cosmopolitan framework, Braybrooke’s arguments bring out that we should be paying more attention to the relationship between individuals and non-governmental organizations as opposed to simply the relationship between states and NGOs. Braybrooke’s arguments present a challenge to students of Canadian foreign policy who see the impact of the Canadian population on the country’s international affairs as negligible. The government is able to make foreign policy according to its own objectives and goals so that when the government sets up public consultation processes or, in the specific case of the Liberal party when it was elected into power in 1993, institutes a ‘democratization’ of Canadian foreign policy, these efforts are merely to legitimize the state’s interests not those of the society. Those interests may play out in terms of vying for prestige on the part of governmental actors (e.g., Axworthy wanting to win a Nobel Peace Prize) or promoting the government’s economic agenda under a smokescreen of humanitarianism. The point is that the government is in control of foreign policy processes so that even when civil society actors play a more prominent role, they are subject to co-optation, and, in that way, their cosmopolitan understandings may not have full force. The maintenance of national attachments is central to when the government acts. This helps to explain why former Foreign Affairs Minister 54 Braybrooke
(2003a) 318
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Axworthy, the strongest proponent of human security in Canadian foreign policy, had seen it not only as ‘new way forward’ but also a way ‘to maintain Canada’s role as a leading voice on the world stage,’55 a voice separate from that of the United States. Axworthy stated explicitly that ‘the best Canadian foreign policy remains an independent policy’ and that ‘Canadians want their country to be more than a junior partner to the United States.’56 However, Braybrooke’s arguments bring out that conceptualizations of human security should include relationships between individuals and charitable organizations. By locating some degree of responsibility at the level of the individual in this way, we begin to see that Canadians through their actions may continue to keep alive the goals of human security despite the government’s apparent reluctance to make it a priority—such reluctance seems to be a response either to pressure exerted by the United States or to its own (mis)perception of greater threats at home. Ensuring ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’ can be achieved both abroad and at home. National security may not trump all if Canadians as private persons continue to take on responsibilities that move in the direction of a world community. Many of the organizations that are part of the Canadian Council for International Cooperation (CCIC), an umbrella organization of approximately one hundred Canadian non-profit organizations working to end global poverty and achieve sustainable human development, receive support from the contributions of individual Canadians. If human security is to be revived in Canadian foreign policy, we must see that responsibility is a shared undertaking between the state and individuals and that the individual’s connection to the world common good through NGOs is perhaps the path to cosmopolitanism.
55 Axworthy 56 Axworthy
(2001, 2003) (2001) 8
Chapter 6
Braybrooke on Public Policy: Precautionary and Fair; Feasible and Ameliorative S HARON S UTHERLAND
Abstract
David Braybrooke’s continuing exploration of how the strategies under which public policies are formulated might be made more responsive to need, and more successful, is the subject of this chapter. The paper situates his work on decision-making alongside two other influential contributions: first, the synoptic vision, alternatively called the ‘comprehensively rational’ approach, the ‘economics model,’ and the rationaldeductive model; and, second, Herbert Simon’s boundedly rational approach. Both alternatives apply only to decision-making by individuals. The paper then takes up incrementalism in the hands of Charles E. Lindblom and Braybrooke before examining Braybrooke’s overall dynamic strategy that provides for decision-making by collectives (as well as by individuals), as set out in his 2004 book on utilitarianism. The paper closes with two recent examples of successful incremental policy in traffic management in Britain and France, a subject that has long interested Braybrooke as a natural object for incrementalist policy strategies.∗ ∗ David Braybrooke is the most collegial of colleagues. I want to thank him for his ready and discerning assistance with sources, for his willingness to share ideas, for solving my puzzles, and for his gifts of excitement, patience, and encouragement for thirty years.
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Introduction to Braybrooke’s Strategy
This chapter is an analysis and appreciation of David Braybrooke’s continuing exploration of how to improve the strategies under which public policy is formulated in regard to their responsiveness to needs and their attentiveness, in deliberative stages, to intelligibility, feasibility, and public safety. His Utilitarianism: Restorations; Repairs; Renovations (2004) recommends an incrementalist-utilitarian policy and decisionmaking strategy that would encourage citizen examination and discussion of policy problems, interventions, and outcomes—activities that could improve and amend appreciation of the problem environments. He continues his ‘renovations’ in his further work on needs, rights, and consequences (Analytical Political Philosophy, 2005), in which he shows how the concept of needs can inform deliberation. In an encyclopedia entry on decision-making systems for individuals and collectivities, Braybrooke notes that there is a public good in having a political system that meets at least the minimal conditions for popular participation and control. Control by citizens can only come about if they participate; if they see their opportunities and feel it their duty to learn about and correct ‘short-sighted policy results’ from the market or from political bargaining: A polyarchal system of decision-making will work as intended by its advocates only if this control in all its aspects is effective (an empirical condition) and a large portion of the population participates (a definitional condition ...). But no system for decision-making will work unless the people who have parts to play in the system actually take part. (Braybrooke (2000), 3316.)1 His strategy is constituted of his prescription to increase participation in deliberation, plus his alternative to the dominant approaches to decision-making in policy literature.2 This latter is an alternative in sev1 Polyarchy is a term originated by Robert Dahl to describe political regimes of the real world that are, comparatively, inclusive and open to public contestation. See Dahl (1971), 7-9). 2 ‘Does Utilitarianism Require Perfect Information about Consequences, Leaving Coordination Problems Aside? No.’ Braybrooke (2004), chap. 2).
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eral ways. First, it is a decision-making approach for collectivities and for individual analysts, whereas the alternative decision-making methods are all designed for individuals. Second, it proposes that policy choices at first stage should meet needs and that the evaluative standard should be whether needs have been met. (Only after needs have been met should policy move to supporting ‘commodious living.’)3 Third, the Braybrooke strategy is able to incorporate, as usable ‘message,’ all contributions short of violence (although civility is to be desired as a value in itself). Therefore those participating and observing can learn from expressions of emotion, evidence-based or logically well-informed inferences, and from experimental exploration. Fourth, it should be explicitly brought to mind that Braybrooke’s strategy, in use in deliberation at either individual or collective levels, is dynamic, proceeding in stages and making use of new information in evaluation and further rounds of deliberation and decision. Braybrooke is a theorist of participation in the developmental democracy tradition, seeing participation as having as much substantive utility for the collectivity as for the individual, with particular insight into how discussions develop concepts. Participation promotes the increasing intelligibility of policy alternatives afoot in the collective discussion, which makes democracy fuller, and it meets individual demands for recognition and reciprocity as well as developing individual capacity for deliberation.4 It is perhaps important to communicate to a reader without a background in empirical political science or policy studies that contributions like those made jointly and singly by Braybrooke and Lindblom—work that is attentive and empirical without being scientistic—are important additions that are also corrective. Braybrooke’s confidence in the general public, although ‘inexpert’ in subjects of which it has little experience, is remarkable, not least in contrast to a stream of American ‘scientific’ political science that was mainstream in what we can now see as the first half of Braybrooke’s career. That is the so-called ‘empirical 3 The
term is from the last chapter of Utilitarianism, Restorations, Repairs, Renovations. his Moral Objectives, Rules and the Forms of Social Change, particularly chap. 4, ‘The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It,’ 54-84. 4 See
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democratic theory,’ perhaps most clearly represented by B.R. Berelson and Herbert McClosky, which held that the undereducated and poorly informed probably could not be safely brought into the polity, and frequently argued that citizen apathy was functional for the system, the opposite of Braybrooke’s position. The ‘average’ citizen was found in empirical studies of democratic beliefs in mass populations to be inefficacious, anomic, lacking information, alienated, submissive, cynical, low in citizen duty, and irrational. In Herbert McClosky’s words, ‘Democratic viability is ... saved by the fact that those who are most confused about democratic ideas are also likely to be politically apathetic and without significant influence. Their role in the nation’s decision process is so small that their “misguided” opinions or non opinions have little practical consequence for stability’ (McClosky (1964), 376; see also Berelson (1952), 313-30). On the other hand, the 5 to 10 percent of the population that makes up the activists, drawn overwhelmingly from educated and well-off sectors of society, had almost uniformly positive personality traits, as dubiously measured by the tests of the era. A typical item of a standard five-item test of political efficacy (said to predict participation) is ‘People like me don’t have any say about what the government does.’5 This statement might appear only realistic to an individual who had never been brought into public life in any capacity. In strong contrast, Braybrooke has developed a plan for democratic deliberation as a part of policymaking. He is confident that interaction between people in general, in the ‘received’ formal institutions of government, or in spontaneous groups that form around problems, will improve the intellectual quality and feasibility of policy proposals. P articipation surely has the effect of supporting the received decision-making institutions, but it can also importantly correct and deepen what they do. Braybrooke believes that participatory processes work best for policies 5 See,
for example, Robinson et al. (1972), particularly chap. 12, ‘Attitudes toward the Political System,’ 441-82. L.W. Milbraith and M.L. Goel Milbraith and Goel (1977) present an excellent summary of this literature. For another view, also empirically based, see Sutherland and Tanenbaum, ‘Submissive Authoritarians’ Sutherland, S.L. and Tanenbaum (1980) and also their ‘Irrational vs Rational Bases of Political Preference: Elite and Mass Perspectives’ (Sutherland, S.L. and Tanenbaum (1984), 173-97).
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for which local authorities have jurisdiction, such as traffic management, as opposed to policies like air pollution that exhaust or exceed the resources and authorities of the jurisdiction nominally dealing with that issue, but even there he believes that participation is feasible. It is also important to take into account how pervasively if fantastically the synoptic or rational-deductive ideal once saturated fledgling political science, with lasting impact in the policy area. Here the work of Braybrooke, Lindblom, and Simon is importantly corrective. Synoptic ambition was particularly striking after the early computers seemed to promise unlimited, instant, and cheap computational labour, and systems theory modelled on biological models took hold. One sample of Harold Lasswell’s thinking, as he laid it out in his 1930 Psychopathology and Politics, expresses a typical form of confidence: As it is today we are on the threshold ... of assessing the realism of the intelligence maps upon which people base their [political] choices. As an aid in this huge enterprise it will be essential to improve the coverage and the depth of the current flow of information that appraises unconscious as well as conscious factors throughout the world social process. For the United States the following questions suggest some of the major points to be covered ... Is the weight of the super-ego becoming less severe upon Americans than it was a generation ago? ... Is the rate of change different in New England, the Middle Atlantic States, and other regions? (Lasswell (1968), 318) In an earlier article, ‘Chicago’s Old First Ward: A Case Study in Political Behavior,’ (Lasswell (1923), 127), Lasswell wanted to first describe and then predict human political behaviour as a first step to control of political behaviour.6 6 See Robert Horowitz’s essay, ‘Scientific Propaganda:
Harold D. Lasswell,’ in Storing (1962). Horowitz cites Bernard Crick’s The American Science of Politics Crick (1959) on Lasswell’s restless futurism: ’Professor Lasswell is not a settler, he is a pathfinder and a border scout ... as the wagons stop moving and the ploughs are dragged out, he always gallops off to yet more virgin soil, leaving the Social Science Research Council to organize a Territorial Government’ (180-1 in Crick; 127 in Horwitz).
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While not everyone was interested in mapping and regulating relative weights of the collective superego from one region to another, the same idea that cheap computational power could generate powerful predictive theory from empirical observations spurred speculative work in social indicators theory and systems theory. Both social indicators theory and the most comprehensive systems theory were taken up in government through the 1960s and 1970s. In the management and allocation aspects of public policy work, this era saw trials across the industrialized world of ‘planning, programming and budgeting systems’ (PPBS), which were abandoned and modified without being thoroughly understood by practitioners. PPBS is by design synoptic and centralizing, intended to increase productivity in hierarchical programs but also to discern and manage ‘horizontality,’ including redundant programming, all based in a fantastic efficiency calculus of both nested and horizontal cost-benefit results.7 The thinking behind the development of PPBS and its comprehensive, scientific, results-oriented style of evaluation (to inform budgetary decisions) is still important in the public policy process, although many practitioners assume it has been replaced by the New Public Management. But the New Public Management, which dominates the modern industrialized world, more nearly incorporated PPBS than it superseded it, and one sees synoptic assumptions underlying the haphazard prescriptions and practices in results measurement in contemporary federal Canada. Because hazard and small ‘p’ politics by administrators can fill in where the synoptic method invariably fails—and in principle must fail—political space is lost in public policy areas. The general purpose of this paper is to put Braybrooke’s highly original contribution into the context of what I take to be, as a student of government, the most influential work on how decisions are and should be made. I present, first, an indication of what it is to try to be synoptically rational in decision-making and then move to the first developed alternative to synoptic or comprehensive rationality: Herbert Simon’s idea that analysts and decision-makers could make efficient strategic choices in 7 On PPBS, it is difficult to best Herman van Gunsteren’s The Quest for Control: A Critique of the Rational-Central-Rule Approach in Public Affairs (van Gunsteren (1976)).
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information seeking, leading to tolerable outcomes as opposed to maximizing. I ncrementalism is the only really seriously developed alternative to satisficing, and Charles Lindblom and David Braybrooke are the dominant figures in incrementalism. In the parts of its development that they do not share, their paths are complementary rather than contradictory. Braybrooke’s ‘strategy,’ drawn from chapter 2 of his 2004 book on utilitarianism, is summarized to give the reader a fair idea of its comprehensiveness and richness. The paper then closes with brief examples of successful incremental policies in an area of Braybrooke’s interest— traffic congestion—contrasted with policy failures that attempted major change in one concentrated effort.
6.2 Approaches to Making Public Policy For more than half a century, it has been broadly accepted by those who work in and write on public policy that the acceptable recommendations for how policy should be made are the synoptic or comprehensively rational method and Herbert A. Simon’s recommendation of ‘satisficing’ or bounded rationality. Both are relevant to the single decision-maker or analyst, not to collectives. Because much of the synoptic prescription has been implicit, each of Simon, Braybrooke, and Lindblom has felt it necessary to describe its general requirements.8 6.2.1
The Rational-Deductive, Comprehensively Rational, Synoptic, or Economics Model
Brian Fry, in his Mastering Public Administration (Fry (1989), 18990), finds in Simon himself a fairly complete version of the ‘classic’ set of requirements for the individual rational decision-maker who would maximize chosen or assigned values. To select the alternative that will be followed by the most desired (valued) array of consequences, the analyst knows at least the following: all the relevant aspects of the decision environment; 8 Braybrooke does credit P.H. Wicksteed’s The Common Sense of Political Economy (Wicksteed (1910)) with a paradigmatic formulation of rational-comprehensive reasoning but obviously cannot rely on reader familiarity with it.
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all the alternative courses of action; all the consequences of those alternatives, or, the probability distributions for the consequences; a stable rank ordering for all possible consequences based on a stable set of values, such that all consequences can be rank ordered and that ordering will endure; and all the relevant computational routines.9 In their book A Strategy of Decision (Braybrooke and Lindbloom (1963)), Braybrooke and Lindblom identify another feature of the ‘ideal’ synoptic policymaking process. Citing Tinbergen’s On the Theory of Economic Policy (Tinbergen (1952), 1), they note that the decisionmaker or policymaker must ‘accept the responsibility of coordinating the policy to be chosen with other policies’ (38). They also acknowledge a similar point made by Marshall Dimock in his A Philosophy of Administration (Dimock (1958), 140) that the synoptic approach should take into account larger institutional goals and objections. In Strategy, Braybrooke and Lindblom adopt the term ‘ rationaldeductive method’ for the full-scale, one-off intellectual attack on a problem. They imagine the form of its precision: Ideally, the system [for ranking possible policies] would be complete, not necessarily in the sense that it mentioned every contingency but in the sense that its ultimate principles were rich enough to supply the intermediate principles or the sequence of intermediate principles that would decide any case that might come up. With such a system, the uncertainties of evaluation would have been mastered on the values side. For, on the values side, determination of policy becomes simply a matter of calculation, a question of feeding in the observed facts and thinking consistently through a 9 Fry draws from Simon’s Models of Man (Simon (1957), 241), March and Simon’s Organizations (March and Simon (1994), 138), and Simon’s ‘Rational Decision Making in Business Organizations’ (Simon (1970), 500).
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sequence of transformations. One discovers the facts, looks up (or derives) the relevant hypotheticals, and deduces by strict logic which policy is to be selected. (10) Braybrooke and Lindblom remark on the apolitical and, indeed, antipolitical nature of accepting the prospect that one analyst or a single team could ever execute an authoritative ‘single-pass’ solution of a public policy problem. The rational-deductive ideal, if it worked, or even if it were only believed to work by enough people, would transfer an ideal of science to the field of values and constitute an attempt to determine the content of the public interest (9, 16). They identify the important difficulties in intendedly comprehensively rational prescriptions such as crude utilitarianism: we have no interpersonal calculus; hence we will have no agreement on conclusiveness; we have no rule for drawing accounts of consequences to an end; and we have no rule for identifying reference groups for whom consequences should be taken into account (vii). Before their joint work on incrementalism in Strategy was undertaken, Lindblom published his astoundingly accessible but equally astoundingly misunderstood article ‘The Science of “Muddling Through”’ (Lindblom (1959)), still reprinted in policy and public administration textbooks. This piece directly challenged the synoptic tradition.10 Lindblom calls the synoptic option the ‘rational-comprehensive’ or root method, and refers to incrementalism as the strategy of ‘ successive limited comparisons,’ the branch method. As well as setting out the characteristics of the two methods in text, he also provides a text table that summarizes their main features. For the rational-comprehensive method, he notes that a preliminary exercise in value clarification was necessary before moving to empirical analysis of alternative policies, with the empirical analysis developing the means to seek the ends that have been isolated; that the test of a ‘good’ policy is that it can be shown to be the most 10 In the 1979 follow-up and clarification, ‘Still Muddling, Not Yet Through,’ Lindblom (1979) Lindblom says that the 1959 essay had then been reprinted in some forty anthologies. The 1959 paper is still found in collections in organization theory, public policy, and public administration, whereas the 1979 paper is rarely even mentioned.
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appropriate means to the desired ends; that every factor is taken into account in analysis; and that theory is important to the exercise. For the branch method, he notes the direct contrasts: that value goals and empirical analysis are closely intertwined and not really distinguishable, and thus means-end analysis is problematic; that the test of a good policy is that it will be recognized as such by analysts who nevertheless may not agree that it is the one best way to reach an agreed objective; that analysis is limited and a succession of empirical comparisons will reduce the importance of theory. Despite the clarity with which he expressed the idea that while, ideally, the root method does not exclude, ‘in practice it must’ (80), and that successive limited comparison is a method in itself, not a fallback, commentators misrepresented his work. The piece was often used in discussions in policy courses as proof that incrementalism was another word for drift, and that there was no alternative to attempts to achieve full understanding. Perhaps the main difficulty was that professional policy analysts working in government felt uncomfortable about analysing means as containing their own values; this would be not value clarity but a threat to their perception of themselves as value-‘neutral’ and to the elected or political leadership. 6.2.2
S atisficing, or E nvironmental Heuristics: Simon’s Alternative
Herbert Simon, in the previous generation of scholars, also observed that the rational-deductive model (or ‘economics’ model as he calls it) does not directly help the decision-maker in a large corporation to perform successfully. It is Simon’s alternative to synoptic rationality that still dominates the applied literature and that has inspired many variations. Simon does not discard the synoptic model, believing that it remained an appropriate normative model for decision-making, a belief he stated at least as late as 1980 in his article ‘The Behavioral and Social Sciences’ (Simon (1980), 75). But he rules out the synoptic model for direct application. On his own, very clearly, in Administrative Behavior (Simon (1976), xxiv), and, with March, in Organizations (March and Simon (1994)), Simon described the ‘bounded’ rationality of the individual decision-maker, who is ‘intendedly rational [in the sense of
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keeping the economics model firmly in mind], but only limitedly so’ (161-2) lacking the cognitive power to attain full rationality.11 The cognitively limited decision-maker should therefore find and be satisfied with an outcome that is better to some extent than the status quo, to which Simon gave the name ‘satisficing’ (in contrast to optimizing). Individual decision-makers, limited in resources of knowledge, technical skill, and time, are however supported and guided by their environment of givens in the organization, which has greater reach and agency. The organization provides, as Richard Scott summarizes in his Organizations: Rational, Natural and Open Systems (Scott (1992)), ‘integrated sub goals, stable expectations, required information [or at least information that is accepted as usable], necessary facilities, routine performance programs, and in general a set of constraints within which required decisions can be made’ (47). Scott here consolidates Simon’s The New Science of Management Decision (Simon (1977), 51.) Reinhard Selten (Selten (2001)) picks out three ideas in Simon’s early writings on bounded rationality in an individual decision—the search for alternatives, satisficing, and aspiration adaptation: He [Simon] described decision making as a search process guided by aspiration levels. An aspiration level is a value of a goal variable that must be reached or surpassed by a satisfactory decision alternative ... Decision alternatives are not given but found, one after the other, in a search process. In the simplest case, the search process goes on until a satisfactory alternative is found ... Often, satisficing is seen as the essence of Simon’s approach. However there is more to it ... Aspiration levels are not permanently fixed but are rather dynamically adjusted to the situation. They are raised if it is easy to find satisfactory alternatives, and lowered if satisfactory alternatives are hard to acquire. This adaptation of 11 Oliver Williamson, in a chapter in his edited book, Organization Theory (Williamson (1995)), titled ‘Chester Bernard and the Incipient Science of Organization,’ says that once Simon had developed his ideas on satisficing, Simon argued that economists should abandon notions of maximizing for satisficing. However, no research tradition on satisficing developed in economics, and satisficing became instead identified with ‘aspiration level mechanics’ (79).
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aspiration levels is a central idea in Simon’s early writings on bounded rationality. (13-14) Simon aimed to operationalize observable definitions of aspects of decisions such that his findings would be seen to be empirically founded, leading to a science. He also distinguished facts from values, thereby isolating values by virtue of their subjectivity and lack of a base in reason. (This is an element of continuity with the synoptic model.) The part of Simon’s work that resonated most with working decisionmakers was what they understood as Simon’s promise of an efficient or summary analytical procedure that could be defended as ‘rational.’ In Administrative Behavior (Simon (1976), 75) Simon stipulates how his summary procedure is ‘rational,’ within bounds or limits. The word ‘bounded’ describes the process of decision, not its substance. Simon defines achievable or bounded rationality as ‘the selection of preferred behavioral alternatives in terms of some system of values [inter-subjectively accepted] whereby the consequences of behavior [decision outcomes] can be evaluated’ (75). He has also stipulated that the satisficing process is rational in that the procedure and its limitations would be set out. In an administrative setting this would point to an individual making a choice, rationally using a selection of the received views of the organization. This action could be reviewed by other officials, probably with a higher likelihood of review if outcomes were poor. Simon also accepts that an unforeseen event or factor can cut into the bounded process and change the outcome. This is to accept theoretical and empirical emergence that will make a heuristic inapplicable to a model that had appeared to fit a problem. Therefore Simon has been forthright that the process of bounded rationality or satisficing makes no guarantees of satisfactory outcomes. In other words, a bounded solution is a routinized decision, where a ‘satisficing’ procedure in analysis is efficient but still contains an element of risk. Repeating in 1990 what he had stated in essence as early as 1956 in his article ‘Rational Choice and the Structure of Environments,’ Simon described bounded rationality in a metaphor: ‘Human rational behaviour ... is shaped by a scissors whose two blades are the structure of the task environments and the computational capabilities
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of the actor.’ And not even the structure of the task environment can always provide good information because it can be misunderstood: ‘decisions begin with goals and values, and are strongly conditioned by organizational loyalties and perceptions’ (Simon (1990), 7). Simon had nevertheless created an expectation that there were discoverable environmental heuristics that could guide routine decisions to good results (in contrast to definitionally uncertain unprogrammed or one-off decisions). There are objections. Those that are most applicable in the public sector have to do with Simon’s steering attention to what appears to be most readily doable, in the efficiency calculus of an organization, whereas the most serious problems that administrators, analysts, and political leaders seek to ameliorate are defined by and exist in a valuebased or political framework. Theodore Lowi, in the course of his address (Lowi (1992)) to the American Political Science Association on assuming his presidency, directed a stinging attack on Simon’s work. He calls it reductively apolitical, because of its minute focus on the decision or decision premise and says it had aided and given comfort to the shift in political science from judgmental and evaluative analysis to a rationalist reduction of government to just one aspect of the economic system. Braybrooke and Lindblom for their parts each generously acknowledge Simon’s role in encouraging theorists and practising analysts to move away from the economics model. But they are not wholly uncritical of Simon’s bounded rationality. Lindblom, in his ‘The Science of “Muddling Through”’ (Lindblom (1959)), offers a succinct explanation of why the choice of an aspiration level cannot do much to limit the margins of a current problem to create a good fit of a received model with a new situation, even if it appears of a type: the problem of sorting through values is ‘always a problem of adjustments at the margin [and] there is no practical way to state marginal objectives or values except in terms of particular policies’ (86)—particular decision situations. This is an example of his settled view, as I understand it, that feasible policy designs are more limited in number than the problems to which they might be applied, so that analysts could readily recognize an attractive
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policy design but support it for different reasons. And to be sure, it is always possible that the analyst is wrong about which environmental heuristic is a good model for a given problem. Braybrooke, in his article in the International Encyclopedia Braybrooke (2000), sees the utility in Simon’s approach of looking for standard features within problems over time and across problems. But he notes ‘the gap that Simon leaves as to where to start with a new [nonroutinized] problem’ or how to start recasting an old problem into a more usefully approachable form.12 This is, to be sure, a point of departure for his own approach to decision theory, his judicious addition of features of utilitarianism to a careful version of incrementalism. Braybrooke of course is harder on synoptic rationality or maximizing because of its absolute infeasibility, in one place saying that ‘at best, it offers an idealized hypothetical basis for criticizing omissions in deliberation’ (3315). For me, however, Simon’s satisficing has never seemed convincing. Given that it is impossible to satisfy the substantive requirements for synoptic rationality because of cognitive, resource, and time limitations among others, any summary procedure for analysis applied to the real world is, in being incomplete, potentially a satisficing procedure. The problem seems to be that satisficing might be any incomplete procedure whatever. Alternatively, its claims to superiority due to strategic completeness might be impossible to prove, because of the lack of a substantial standard as well as for measurement reasons. Even if Simon is not making a claim for his strategic incompleteness as hidden optimization, his recommendation of strategic incompleteness in modelling heuristics to problems seems to suggest that decision-makers can and should rationally tackle tasks in routinized areas by restricting themselves to the big ‘found’ key features, the noses on the face, which the organizational task environment, over time, will have identified. Here it seems too convenient that a cognitively limited decision-maker would live in a world where causality within task environments could collaborate to deliver moderately good results over 12 Personal communication, 12 December 2004. Braybrooke’s treatment of utilitarianism taken together with incrementalism can address both new problems and be useful for recasting and reworking older problems.
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time. Mary Douglas (Douglas (1995)) suggests that Simon made an inferential leap from Chester Barnard’s idea of the ‘zone of indifference’ in the preferences of any employee in the organization (allowing for their performance of directives without hesitation and thus the accomplishment of organizational goals) to what would appear to be the real organizational world such that desires can be satisfied within the organizational context ‘without optimization, and therefore without the calculus’ (106). I take Douglas’s remark to mean that Simon extended Barnard’s notion that persons would execute organizational duties most efficiently when duties are ‘indifferent’ to them in the light of their own convictions, to another idea that the environment behaves similarly: that most factors in the decision environment itself would be irrelevant or neutral in relation to what one could call ‘core causation’ in the environment, and so could usually be safely ignored. Douglas should surely not be understood as saying that Simon would have either believed or argued that satisficing could be a more efficient way of optimizing, but she can perhaps be read as saying that Simon made a leap to a certain isomorphism between the limitations of the decider and the apparently massive clues in the decision environment under routine conditions. Overall, practitioners do tend to accept satisficing as a procedure for operationalizing pragmatism, a local theory of usefulness, in their decision-making environments. Thus, in my opinion, Simon left his field without providing actual robust substantial assistance to practitioners. And, as Lowi said, Simon’s endorsement of the view that facts and values can and must be separated is a problematic contribution to policy studies, although intended to separate politics or values leadership from administration (Lowi (1992), 105). 6.2.3
Some of Simon’s Successors
As one might expect, the hopeful train of thought begun by Simon— who worked in psychology, computer science, economics, and political science—has been as widely taken up. One sees his ideas in use by scholars who try to apply it to describing environments and also by researchers working to discover acceptably reliable prescriptive heuristics
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in particular environments. As a colourful example of the descriptive preference, one can cite Cohen, March, and Olsen’s influential article, ‘A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice’ (Cohen and Olsen (1972)), in which problems and solutions circulate in the decision environment to be sometimes brought together by an astute decision-maker. Gigerenzer and Selten (Gigerenzer and Selten (2001)) illustrate the heuristics thrust. Their collection includes work by anthropologists, economic theorists, mathematical economists, cognitive and other psychologists, computer scientists working in artificial intelligence, zoologists, biologists, and neuroscientists, among others. The many investigators seem agreed that any rationality we may find will be embedded in survival strategies observed in local environments and that there will never be a general-purpose algorithm. (But in his larger project, Simon was notably dedicated to a science of administration.) Only one of the nineteen contributions to the volume considers how a collectivity might reach a decision. In Thomas Seeley’s ‘Decision Making in Superorganisms: How Collective Wisdom Arises from the Poorly Informed Masses,’ (Seeley (2001)) the masses reach what is said to be an objectively correct solution for the collectivity. The masses happen to be honeybees, and their problem is to choose the best site from those available for a new hive. It is worth probing Seeley’s observation-rich essay on a hive as a ‘super organism,’ because it models social behaviour in non-human organisms or ‘systems,’ the kind of work that systems theorists readily extend to human organizational needs (Seeley restricts his conclusions to his bees). In a beehive, Seeley judges that ‘the swarm as a whole is a sophisticated and skilled decision-making agent’ because the cognitive skills of each bee ‘appear to be surprisingly simple’ (249). Seeley does not speculate how the honeybee scouts process the four or five relevant site variables to report in dancing to the other scouts what looks like a summed score over several variables. The dancing by individual scout bees for the sites they have visited among alternative sites varies only in persistence and intensity. Eventually ‘consensus’ (all dancing scouts performing for the same site) is reached. The scouts and the rest of the hiving swarm then leave to establish a new hive.
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The scout honeybees’ collective choice is, in all the occasions observed by the scientists, objectively the absolutely best choice—on the survivalist criteria the human scientists use to rank honeybee housing, and impute to the scout honeybees, to be sure. The persistence of siteoriented dancing correlates with the presence of a number of features describing the site: such features as entry dimensions that afford the hive and its food protection, adequate food storage capacity for the winter, and proximity to a source of food. Scout honeybees stay on topic in the hive site evaluation. No scout honeybee has concerns other than those that define a workable site; no uncle is in bee real estate. Nonfunctional criteria would manifest as ‘irrational’ scout dancing persistence for a site that is mediocre on the criteria necessary to the hive’s survival. There is no such ‘irrational’ persistence promoting sites that are poor, again as assessed by the scientists. I conclude, despite the title of Seeley’s engrossing article, that it is irrelevant whether honeybee masses are ‘poorly informed.’ What is important is that the scouts accurately communicate to one another relevant empirical information for a closed model that defines the best site and that their collective dancing achieves an accurate site comparison. (It is also fortunate in this problem that scouts whose preferences fall by the wayside switch to dancing for sites still in contestation, and that the rest of the hive swarms with departing scouts.) Each site factor in the equation is necessary but not sufficient; all factors must be present for the site to be chosen by the scouts of a hiving swarm. Thus the hiving ‘problem’ unfolds by formula. Seeley is cited above as saying that the skill of the hive or the aggregate is in part the outcome of the apparent simplicity of each bee, and there is a lesson in this remark: simplicity is a form of discipline and it surely works for the scouts’ hiving decision. The aggregated wisdom of all scouts is not a simple extrapolation, but the differences in the preferences of the scouts can be negotiated and summarized in the danced ‘discussions’ without serious loss—as judged by outcomes. The success in choosing a good hive seems almost less important than the idea that the bees have a formal public process by which the scout bees obviously—but only ‘somehow’—aggregate and communicate their information. It is not fully intelligible to the human
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observers as to how the scouts emerge with the maximizing decision. But, as Seeley’s presentation hints, because of the complexity and undisciplined variety of human individuals’ preferences and motivations, human collectives face important uncertainties in outcomes in even highly repetitive situations. In his Micromotives and Macrobehaviour (Schelling (1978)), Thomas Schelling shows that outcomes that are inconvenient and harmful and thus ‘irrational’ in the aggregate often result from the situationally rational behaviour of individuals. If we humans ever have leaders as intendedly rational as the honeybee scouts, they are alarmingly absent in many situations where they could be useful. Schelling notes that the easy cases in decision-making are those in which the aggregate is an extrapolation from an individual. More difficult are those cases, of which the small ‘p’ political environment in a firm or a government bureau could be examples, where ‘People are responding to an environment that consists of other people responding to their environment, which consists of people responding to an environment of people’s responses’ (14). Dynamics can be sequential or reciprocal or both. Schelling uses audience behaviour as an initial illustration. Under voluntary seating arrangements, an audience will fail quite miserably in its use of space. Individual seating choices typically result in a distribution of spectators such that rows of seats will be left vacant in the very front of a hall, creating crowding in the back and thus disturbance by new arrivals of those already seated toward the back. Performers may have the impression of playing to an empty hall, or to one that is sliding away from them. The only process we have developed is to give power to ushers, who take individual preferences into account only insofar as a developing seating pattern permits. The situation where we collectively recognize a settled problem and know what our goal must be and how to implement it seems unproblematic and rare in comparison to dynamic situations, individual and collective. 6.2.4
Incrementalism
For problems that change over time, where information is not complete and may always be misleading to some degree, a strategy that can make doubt part of the decision process is necessary. What is available is
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incrementalism, for which Lindblom and Braybrooke are the leading proponents. One can briefly sketch their shared and distinguishing interests by way of introduction. Lindblom, like Braybrooke, is interested in content-rich policy evaluation and choice, with features of fragmentation and seriality. He has, however, placed less emphasis on deliberation in comparison to Braybrooke, who wants to suggest ways to improve deliberation in collectives, in respect to content and procedure, admitting argumentative elements such as provocation.13 And, although Lindblom has clearly shown persistent interest in and respect for people’s everyday ideas, in his insightful book with David Cohen, Usable Knowledge: Social Science and Social Problem Solving (Lindblom and Cohen (1979)) and in his own tour de force, Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (Lindblom (1990)), Braybrooke alone places emphasis on the concept of needs, for which the most concentrated example is probably his Meeting Needs (Braybrooke (1987a)). Lindblom is keenly aware of the cognitive limitations and the social givens that weigh on individuals. His book Politics and Markets (Lindblom (1977)) emphasizes the indoctrinated character of the citizenry and the weight of business in politics. Elsewhere, more recently in Inquiry and Change, he has described the ordinary person’s cognitive ‘impairment’ and how we might work toward freeing ourselves of some of the received and personal doctrines that burden our thinking. Lindblom believes we may invoke habitual patterns of ideas unhelpfully at moments of decision or expression of preference. Thus, for Lindblom, the ‘givens’—the noses on the faces—that Simon believed would provide helpful frameworks may well be foolish and destructive ‘impaired’ thinking—although, as noted earlier, Lindblom does not engage Simon. In Intelligence of Democracy and elsewhere Lindblom works carefully to distinguish what he calls ‘partisan mutual adjustment’ from incrementalism. In the former, participants who are at least somewhat independent of one another take part in fragmented, decentralized decision-making. The eventual winning policy is more like a happening 13 For example, see his article ‘Toward an Alliance between the Issue-Processing Approach and Pragma-Dialectical Analysis’ Braybrooke (2003b).
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or spontaneous occurrence than a reasoned decision for which relevant reasons can be given. It is unplanned in its content. Neither scholar claims, therefore, that incrementalism is more than a process that holds out modest hope for analysts and collectives that want to ameliorate some of the problems that beset them—although it is surely the only decision-making theory that gives defensible reasons for even modest hope and which can be applied to dynamic problems in collectives. Incrementalist approaches depend on people’s capacities for observation and attentiveness while manifesting doubt constructively as evaluation; continuously thinking, discussing, and amending beliefs, singly in Lindblom’s formulation, and in groups in Braybrooke’s development of ‘discussions with a direction.’ Individual analysts will look at a problem strategically, disaggregate its elements, choose an element that appears to be manipulable in a useful way, and recommend adjustments. To the extent that repetitiveness can be seen as a possible platform for decision-making, this system might be seen to resemble Simon’s bounded rationality. But, in my view, incrementalism is importantly different in that it harnesses doubt and uncertainty as a motor for continued attentiveness. It recommends frequent evaluative phases, continuously ‘probing’ and thus disturbing and amending observers’ grasp of the problem context, amending common wisdom about the problem as the work proceeds. Thus both leading advocates want to see problem stability approached as an empirical question. Both see perceptual fluidity as a good quality. The small number of incrementalist thinkers who contribute to policy journals tend to put their emphasis on the feeling-forward perspective of incrementalism. Terry Connolly (Connolly (1988)) provides a particularly communicative metaphor in comparing tree-felling models— ‘heroic single-pass one-time synoptic analyses’ (38)—with highly interactive meandering analysis, what he calls hedge-clipping models. ‘Clipping’ is a feasible approach to a task or problem when the defining elements of a problem situation are decoupled. The advantages of a situational approach that is at the same time closely evaluative are that consequences can be corrected; solution criteria will typically be tolerant (allowing emergent problems to be taken into account in the process);
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action sequence can be flexible; and the implementation of a sketched plan can safely be interrupted.14 There are many ‘hedge’ problems that we explore only after having made the first small intervention. Overall, however, it seems safe to say that while incrementalism is present in policy journals, and sometimes interestingly so, all subsequent adherents of incrementalism as a tactic for the individual analyst have found it difficult to add to the substance of Lindblom’s 1959 article.
6.3 Braybrooke’s Participatory, Precautionary Citizen Management Braybrooke’s contribution to decision-making theory has long struck me as ground-breaking in that it is an open, political, and highly participatory approach to the possibilities in collective decision-making. In his recent work, he has pointed to the gap in decision-making theory for the problem of collectives: Unfortunately, at the collective level, unless an autocrat or a perfect bureaucracy ... is authorized to act for the collectivity, a problem arises about different criteria with different thresholds being invoked at the same time by different people. Which are to guide the decisions of the collectivity? (Braybrooke (2000), 3315) He invites participation in a variety of forums as a way of assisting people to refine their information and values relating to a problem, and to encourage people to forge their beliefs into intelligible—and therefore usable—statements for use in discussions with a direction, including intelligible statements about needs. He also sees participation as encouraging reasonableness in representation of needs and, of course, as a way of identifying and helping a collective to work through internal opposition in non-violent ways that do not involve suppression 14 See also Connolly’s ‘Uncertainty, Action and Competence (Connolly (1980)). Michael Hayes’s Incrementalism and Public Policy (Hayes (1992)) also takes on ‘the rationalcomprehensive ideal.’
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or exclusion.15 There is no attempt to separate facts from values. On the contrary, he is clear that means cannot be separated from ends. He wants to multiply opportunities for people to voluntarily participate and become significant contributors to long-term deliberations about issues, with a view to increasing the intelligibility of problems and of what others make of them, both for themselves and others. As a theorist of participation, he emphasizes the intellectual aspects of human development through deliberation. While group discussions may on occasion be taken very seriously by the society and by the polity, Braybrooke has no plan for a formal and political machinery along the lines of Dahl’s ‘Chinese boxes,’ in which jurisdictions are multiplied and nested such that all continuing discussion forums lead into the highest state forums where decisions that affect public policy and define public goods are taken (Braybrooke and Bailey (2003)). Braybrooke, like Lindblom, promotes his alternative only to the extent that it will work better than the status quo in bringing attention and evolution to received settlements. A superficially paradoxical feature of Braybrooke’s prescription that is also the key to its richness is his combination of incrementalism and a version of utilitarianism. Incrementalism is by definition a continuing strategy for sequential passes addressing comparatively wellunderstood problems, yielding an improved probability that the trend of change in the problem will be ameliorative and that consequences can be managed—improved over ‘one-time’ or heroic solutions. The strategy is prudent, but not conservative as to ends. On the other hand, the ethics Braybrooke adopts—utilitarianism—emphasizes that the author of an action is an agent who will take responsibility for consequences. The licence to act under an ethics of consequentialism is said to arise from the preliminary, one-time and heroic, assumption that consequences flowing from an act will bear out the choice. Since there is little possibility that potential consequences can be anticipated, and certainly not in one pass, there is no reason to assume that any well-intentioned action will turn out well within the period of judgment. Braybrooke sets out how the strategy of making maximally prudential changes under 15 See chap. 16, ‘Scale, Combination, Opposition: A Rethinking of Incrementalism,’ in his Moral Objectives (Braybrooke (1998a), 311-30).
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disjointed incrementalism—well-considered small moves designed to meet needs—constitutes a more satisfying substitute for the moral permission that would in theory be conferred by working through the sum of benefits over costs in human happiness, the (synoptic) ‘felicific calculus.’ No such calculus is realizable. Braybrooke therefore incorporates the fallibility of human foresight and the tendency of the world to surprise and to provoke blame as conditions of normal decisionmaking. For him, a determination to address human needs through reversible actions undertaken in a mood of cautious humility is the moral and political possible. Chapter 2 in Braybrooke’s 2004 volume Utilitarianism is perhaps his most fully developed view of what might be done better in democratic planning for public policy, and the material that follows has been directly paraphrased from this source. Stripped to its bones, Braybrooke’s recommendation is that both individual decision-makers and collectives (groups, jurisdictions, and so forth) in social and political life might adopt disjointed incrementalism as both a cognitive style and as a strategy, and to do so under an ethics of utilitarianism whose first priority is the provision of needs. 6.3.1 Braybrooke’s Disjointed Incrementalism The summary features of Braybrooke’s formulation of disjointed incrementalism as an ameliorative decision strategy are set out in point form below. The ‘problems’ are those habitually arising from the continued dominance of the synoptic reflex in decision theory. Problem: too many value criteria confuse and overwhelm analysis. Solution: move to a higher-order value for guidance; here needs provide focus. Problem: attempts to take into consideration all consequences before acting will postpone ameliorative activity in difficult problem areas. Solution: align the theory of policymaking with the ‘revisionary process’ active in current machinery and processes of policymaking in which stage-by-stage revisions inch toward a better status. Once a problem has been nudged in the right direction, the revisionary process
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would engage to pursue further improvements or, alternatively, to revoke unsatisfactory changes. Problem: designing policy for large-scale or complex problems forces analysis into ambitious attempts to cover ever more ground in the belief that more work will bring an optimal solution closer; such analysis is still merely incomplete, and still to an unknown degree. Solution: study difficulties that are close at hand and familiar, adopt disjointed incrementalism to separate facets into still smaller problems, make marginal changes to these small problems, and subject them to steady attention (above). An incremental change is defined as change in an apparently relatively unimportant variable that is a feature of a familiar problem, or a less important change in an apparently important variable. A second definition is that an incremental change is one that is planned so that it is readily reversible in substance and in its consequences by current institutional resources and powers, and is by virtue of close examination more intelligible to everyone. Problem: general lack of time and lack of research in the implementing body. Solution: develop public attentiveness strategically. Start with a modest change, invite participants (individuals and groups) to join the process to suggest other alternatives or further adjustments and to bring forward other values. This process allows for values achieved, but not originally intended, now to be recognized and pursued further (supersession): the revisionary process can work with any gain that turns up. Problem: precaution is often limited to the front end of decision-making. Intellectual investment in conventional policy goals can dominate thinking and stymie action; traditional thought patterns can develop into doctrines. Solution: precaution should be part of each phase. One can take an evaluative stance, then deal with things as they stand in cautious action, where attempts are made anew to anticipate possible differences between expected and actual outcomes.
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6.3.2 Virtues of Disjointed Incrementalism for the Individual The individual policymaker or citizen, trying to foresee and evaluate the potential consequences of the possible new policies, following Braybrooke’s formulation, considers the following: P eremptory values: These are sometimes deal breakers; more generally, they establish constraints on how smaller problems can be broken out of larger ones or on what policy alternatives will be carried forward. The analyst considers various possible policies in their light, with the goal of excluding any proposal whose consequences are intolerable (those that infringe minority rights, those that distribute risk unfairly, and so forth). The possibility of deadlock must be accepted. Otherwise it may be believed utilitarianism might be mobilized to argue for overriding minority rights. The task of the collective is to discuss values and to choose policies whose values are ameliorative, within peremptory constraints. R emedial orientation: Because in this approach the analyst will endorse one-step remedies that move in the right direction and are within the range of acceptable practice, Braybrooke conceives of this as a satisficing or ameliorative and remedial approach rather than an optimizing approach. I ncremental alternatives: The single agent can realize a primary benefit of incrementalism by working on small problems and separable parts of larger problems, with the purpose of retaining known benefits of present policy and alleviating known problems. Small moves constitute a form of probing the environment to test its reactions to dosage. On the other hand, if a major change is wanted, it will be brought about in stages by a series of smaller moves, each phase preceded by a fresh-eyed evaluative phase. I nstitutional insurance: A single agent can assess whether current institutions have the capacity to correct for a mistake made within the framework under construction. If security is not assured, the analyst can look again at institutional features, or simply not recommend the proposed move. A manageable policy move is defined by the fact that the institution or organization(s) of primary interest has or have the ability to reverse the move and undo the harm. Braybrooke notes that the ca-
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pacity to remedy the consequences of moves seen in hindsight to have failed is definitional of ‘an adequate political organization.’ Overall, even where insurance is ample, small-scale innovations are obviously more intelligible and easier to absorb and correct. To bring about a new state of affairs in a major social institution such as health care, for example, many nested series of moves, decoupled to the extent possible, and alert to necessary coupling, will allow the ‘insurer’ to monitor change, while reviewing the rate at which insurance is being depleted. R edesigning, supersession: These are the mechanisms of option refinement. Although a single policymaking agent will be less rich in ideas than a group, single agents do hit on ideas that bring efficiency gains, and they can identify workable compromises; they redesign. A second mechanism is supersession of values. Braybrooke uses the term to cover situations where events outrun a policy framework, inciting goal revision. His example is that metered parking may have been introduced to give visitors fairer and faster access to services and shops. But, once in place, metered parking might noticeably reduce the number of private vehicles entering the city centre. Metered parking is then seen as a tool to reduce congestion. Supersession as a mental event is or should be familiar to all of us. The word identifies a useful opportunity for re-imagining one’s area of interest that we often call rationalization. Analysts can likewise experience perspective-shifting insights on causal mechanisms and results within even well-established policies. 6.3.3 Virtues of Disjointed Incrementalism in a Social Process The social processes of discussion, evaluation, and choice are where Braybrooke’s strategy is best fulfilled. Needs will, in the first stage, and only in part, take the place of the ‘greatest happiness principle,’ of traditional utilitarianism. (Once needs have been met, people can move into more abstract deliberations, based in preferences, or additional comforts can be deliberated.) All features of the strategy applicable to the individual are carried over to the collectivity: peremptory values; remedial orientation; incremental alternatives; institutional insurance; and redesigning and supersession.
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In addition, there are other benefits that arise from situating the strategy in a collectivity. Most are part of the shift itself. The traditional ethical-theory focus on the single agent is superseded. In the place of the single agent, one finds, more fittingly in social and political life, a multiplicity of actors with roles and information, and communal discussion and negotiation. Just as the criterion of need guides means and ends for the substance of policy decisions, the spirit of the constituting rules of the overarching system is protected by respect. Participants in ordinary political activity should not exploit by stealth constitutive features of the political settlement.16 Recommended features for collective policy discussions include: P artisanship and fragmentation: Fragmentation in the body politic becomes an advantage for bringing forward information and alternatives. First, under the strategy, the community makes use of what Braybrooke calls the revisionary process (the various levels of evaluative deliberation available) to generate richness for future redesign phases. The collective will work on a problem until it is as intelligible as possible, design rules, and devise institutional insurance. With many groups at work, the stimulation could lead groups to vigorous analysis of different policies. Such constructive competitiveness would uncover bias. And bias itself contains information about fears and desires. Many analysts, deliberating, will also be alert to supersession, as discussed above. F ixing jurisdictions: Subsidiarity suggests the approach. The jurisdiction that is closest to the manifested problem and has the authority to address it will be the focus for group contributions. Ideally, the authority will implement public policy changes and take responsibility for the prudential considerations and consequences, any program of action taking place through many iterations. Thus the ‘formal’ or state jurisdictions, including legislatures and their committees, will, as now, be the agent of change drawing from public resources. But voluntary associ16 In developed democracies, intense partisanship is a considerable danger to institutional performance. For an argument that actions that evade the deliberative phases of judgment constitute a moral offence against the collectivity, see (Thompson (1993)). For an extended application to other cases of Thompson’s formulation, see (Sutherland, S. L. (1995)).
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ations and private organizations will want continuously to evaluate and to press for further movement as it becomes intelligibly feasible, and as they see that institutional insurance is likewise affordable and feasible. Citizens and associations will make use of all their opportunities to engage with the authorities. Any received jurisdiction’s powers and responsibilities can be challenged and shaken by events beyond its control. But Braybrooke does not foresee a great deal of evolutionary reshuffling of powers and duties horizontally and vertically. He believes that old societies with stable working constitutions will by and large continue to work with their received jurisdictions. To be sure, the existing dispensation can well continue to ignore interests not organized into the discussion. Here again Braybrooke signals his intention to press needs as guides to priorities for collectives. 6.3.4
Braybrooke’s Cautions
One would expect that, in a process designed with both individual rights and group welfare in mind, there would be a good number of cautions. Centrally, some interests will be ignored or given a low priority. The dangers of passionate contention are also real. I nstitutionalized interests are vigorously promoted to the public. As well, partisan misrepresentation of policies may capture popular understanding, blocking change that could almost incontestably increase the welfare of most people. The certainty of realization of desired outcomes is always in doubt. The only comfort is that, on the basis of previous experience, there is a good probability that a change that comes through such a process will help to meet needs. But a probability is just that. Institutional insurance might also fail. Braybrooke insists that the capacity of a political organization to produce remedies for its own failed policy, one it undertook and ‘insured,’ is ‘one of the tests of an adequate political organization—indeed, of an adequate social organization of any kind’ (Braybrooke (2004), 60-1). Braybrooke identifies clusters of situations in which the open process of incrementalism cannot be successful: when there is a factually or perceived overwhelming external threat; when an initially promis-
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ing path leads to decremental change (see below on bovine spongiform encephalopathy); when social contestation becomes so intense that participation and the open process is itself impeded; when there is a sudden perception of explosive issues in what had seemed anodyne to others; when there are irreconcilable differences about whether a change is incremental or non-incremental; and, in some cases, when a nonincremental policy may work better than the incremental strategy. Nevertheless, Braybrooke believes that continuous work in open processes by social groups and political institutions will, overall, produce enough consensus, richness, and redundancy to reduce the potential of missing a factor that could lead to disaster. If consequences are signalled in public processes, there is a better chance that the public jurisdiction will draw in enough resources for institutional insurance. Therefore the strategy in its fullest use at the collective level will work better than other approaches in modestly stable environments. Just as single agents can salt away resources to buy future freedom of action, so can communities and agents acting for them behave prudently. The tools are now familiar: retreat, redesign, or reconceive the problem for a higher jurisdiction with more resources.
6.4
Policy Applications Compared
One of the shortcomings of people as political animals is that public policy successes seem to us to be only ‘normal’; we do not reflect that these are the result of careful planning and are maintained by steady coordination and superior vigilance. On the other hand, most of us readily attribute blame when policy is unexpectedly costly or when it fails decisively. One can find successful policy reforms, and in exactly the kind of problem areas that Braybrooke has long thought should most easily yield to incrementalist approaches. In 1974 he published his book on traffic congestion in London, Traffic Congestion Goes through the Issue Machine, whose focus is the serial nature of a ‘conversation,’ a substance-laden debate among the members of a stable discussion network. Braybrooke has continued to use traffic problems as illustrations
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of difficulties that invite incrementalist experimentation. In February 2003, the Greater London Authority, whose predecessor government had been abolished fourteen years earlier by Prime Minister Thatcher, introduced the world’s first traffic congestion charge on individual vehicles entering a charging zone covering 22 square kilometres in central London. The mayor had taken up a proposal that was already seen to be an option in 1969, but was set aside, as Braybrooke recounts in Traffic Congestion. The 2003 implementation has many features of a collective deliberation and series of decisions, as will be seen. Preparations were made for the commuter fee to be paid by telephone, on the Internet, or at some shops and gas stations. Cameras at key intersections filmed the stream of traffic, and car owners who had not paid the fee were mailed penalty charge notices. A six-month review by the London Transport Authority said that the charge had stopped about 50,000 drivers from entering the congestion zone each day, for a reduction of about 16 per cent. The drop in cars reduced the number of traffic jams by a third and accidents by a fifth. Deterred drivers switched to public transport or skirted the zone. It is estimated that road journey times were between 10 and 15 per cent faster. In both administrative and political insurance perspectives, the road charge is thoroughly incrementalist from the Braybrooke perspective. For a factor of interest to political analysts, the policy is led by a protagonist whose personal political insurance is good. The new and former mayor, Ken Livingstone, has never owned a car, and, as mayor, he refuses official cars and takes the underground to work (Finnegan (2004)). The innovation itself has many substantial insurance features.17 First, the road charging policy is the centrepiece of decoupled but enabling initiatives in other areas. For only two examples, bus services were improved notably before the charge was applied, and other initiatives improved safety and movement flow for two-wheelers and pedestrians. To allow for the public’s typical slowness to absorb official information, a call centre that could respond to hundreds of thousands of calls 17 Information for this summary is taken from Transport for London’s Press Centre. The full report Six Months On is available at www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/cc-intro.shtml. See also Mayor of London (2002).
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a week was established. Another salient point is that the charge does not affect those living in London—that is, the voting base—but it does affect people who were adding to the congestion but paying their property taxes elsewhere. Because almost 90 per cent of people coming into London’s congestion zone already travelled by public transport, reducing car traffic by less than a fifth affects only a small proportion of the total commuter flow (although a sizable portion of drivers). Thus the vast majority of people felt the road charge was reasonable. Once this had been ascertained, it could be anticipated that any appetite for protest would be manageable. The close involvement of affected communities in decision-making and planning for evaluation is also incrementalist. The business community, which experienced sales losses, was engaged in what might be called supersession activity, helping to work out the overall impact by including benefits, such as lower costs to them for goods transport through the congestion zone. The Authority’s evaluation of its initiative has been continuous, bulletins being indicator-based and issued regularly. Scrutiny of the implementation has aimed at continual ‘squeezing all the error out of the system’ (Men (2003), 2). One can see that the insurance calculations before implementation have worked out: at six months in, only 110 persistent non-payers have had their cars impounded. Even ‘outsourcing’ provided opportunities to show firmness in evaluation. The company hired by the Greater London Authority to implement and administer the policy ‘failed’ its targets in some respects (targeted revenue was bled by the unanticipated heavy compliance). Stringent penalties were applied in contract renegotiation and were well publicized. In the first six months of operation, compliance with fees increased strongly, payment rates for ‘penalty charge notices’ increased, calls for information dropped from 167,000 per week in the first weeks of operation to 70,000 a week, and the penalized public’s use of the appeal system dropped from more than half of all those who received fines to 16 per cent. After six months, people were being educated and were mostly reconciled. Transport for London’s 2005 document ‘Central London Congestion Charging Scheme Impacts Monitoring Summary Review: January
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2005’ covers the period between the previous review and the autumn of 2004. Overall, traffic levels in 2004 were very similar to the period immediately following the introduction of charging, when the numbers of cars entering the charging zone during charging hours plummeted, with most of the displaced commuters moving to the bus service, for a total increase in bus patronage of close to 50 per cent from 2002 to late 2004. The average reduction in congestion remains at 30 per cent, with reduction in delays for peak-hour car journeys still significantly reduced (compared with the night travel rate). Road traffic accidents have been reduced somewhat further over the gains registered in the year 2002-3. Journey times for buses improved, with a further 15 per cent reduction in 2004 on the indicator, excess waiting time over the 24 per cent reduction achieved in 2003. The enforcement process in 2004 resulted in still further increases in compliance and payments, and in reduced numbers of appeals over the previous period. Interestingly, the Authority continued to press through 2004 for improvements in call centre performance and enhancements to the options for payment of the charge. A survey in the period found that more than 80 per cent of those who used the system were now satisfied with the service, although the media report some sentiment that the initiative involves too much revenue-seeking. Another incremental policy with several related but decoupled facets was initiated in France in late 2002 to reduce deaths and injuries on roads. The president of France, elected in May of that year, had signalled his determination to reduce road deaths throughout France. The government established an inter-ministerial committee, assisted by a planning and policy secretariat made up of members with a significant interest in road security. In February 2003, a bill was presented to Parliament that envisioned three main semi-independent initiatives aimed at the same goal: steeply increased penalties for road offences, particularly for repeat offenders; an automatic system for identifying and fining driving offenders; and a general and evolving reinforcement of severe prevention strategies. At the end of February, the government announced that judges would be given the authority to double the current penalty in aggravating circumstances. Drunk driving and reckless
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speeding would be punished by imprisonment for as long as ten years.18 As the reforms took hold, the prime minister revised and improved the policy with the collaboration of lower-level jurisdictions. The most stunning impact was made by photo radar. With its implementation at the end of October 2003, a fixed and fully automatic fine of 90 Euros for speeding was implemented. The flat fine is supplemented by a heavily graduated points system that gives drivers demerits proportional to their excess speed. Evaluating the initiative after two months, Le Monde (Le Monde (2003), 6) reported that the French, who habitually drove at speeds of 130 kilometres per hour on even the busiest routes, had lowered their speed by an average of 10 kilometres per hour per driver. The results were a 25 per cent reduction in road deaths and 20 per cent fewer accidents and injuries. The greatest decrease month over month was in high-speed driving, defined as a minimum of 50 kilometres per hour over the limit. The following year, 2004, saw a further 10 per cent decrease in deaths; the incidence of speeding at more than 10 kilometres per hour over the limit also dropped, more than 15 per cent from the 2003 figures (Le Monde (2004a), 8). Also in 2004, an ‘accidentologue,’ a specialist in the study of accidents, described the reduction in deaths over the two years as ‘prodigious’ and as having resulted from the exertion of steady and varied pressures on drivers. The expert had never seen the state succeed in such a complex task (Got (2004), 8). Some aspects of the first phase of implementation were not as effective as they could have been. For example, the telephone information service intended to familiarize the national driving public with the photo radar system was implemented with a mere five operators. This almost negligible educational effort made for initial public confusion and disaffection, and of course means that initial call volumes cannot be compared with later volumes to yield information for use in future changes.19 Nor did the first year of the measures decrease deaths to the level in Great Britain: in 2003, estimated road deaths in France were 18 www.premier-minstre.gouv.fr
(2002)). See also the French site, www.zeroaccident.
net. 19 Le
Monde (2003), 6, and Gaetner (2003).
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6,000 compared with about half that in Britain, whose road density is very similar. (The further reduction of 2004 does however bring France closer to the British figures.) And French politicians are taking positions on the ‘radars’ that reflect their constituents’ impatience over the limitation of freedom, the severity of the fines, and the apparent lack of any margin in speed before a fine is levied, such that some fine-payers characterize the income aspect as a racket (Le Monde (2004b), 8). Thus the policy’s gains require steady discussion and marginal adjustments. But over time it becomes clearer to all that it would be next to impossible for policymakers and politicians to ‘insure’ against the resulting certain loss of life that removing the radars would cause. In other words, the policy has succeeded because the public understands it and wants it and it lowers the death rate. I ncremental policies are more often accumulated over time in public organizations, than they are politically led, intricate, multi-stage initiatives such as the two described above. Each of the two examples depends on a complicit if not convinced public, although the two reforms are both attractive and good examples of incrementalist policy. Speaking generally, it is difficult for officials to incite politicians to launch and lead full-scale reviews of accumulated policy in areas that seem routine, are technical, and affect large numbers of the public, because the work will be detailed and based in legal and management concepts that are difficult to master. Also, some of these policies are invisible, until something goes wrong. But developments in other technical areas like food safety make it clear that it could be important for politicians to interest themselves in accrued policy in apparently settled areas. Who would have anticipated, for example, that an established policy of feeding animal waste to ruminants (in this case, cattle), in operation in Britain since 1926, would have become consequential for humans more than half a century later, when temperatures for rendering animal waste into fertilizer and animal food (an almost unregulated activity within the industry) were lowered to save fuel? A single decrement, the lowered temperature that did not kill a particular organism, eventually led to the form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) that is able to move from meals to humans. Unfortunately BSE is now an all-too-familiar exam-
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ple of dramatic policy disaster brought about by apparently incremental shifts in practice that are now seen to be pivotal decrements. Political leaders are more likely to try for a dramatically comprehensive policy accomplishment than to work in near invisibility to understand and improve accumulated policy. Politicians prefer a full-scale analysis and decision followed by a decisive act to move from ‘a wellspecified initial state or unsolved problem to a well-specified final state or the solved problem’ (Connolly (1980), 37). Because the aim is often to build up a career or party legacy of dramatic accomplishments that communicate a message of competence and sometimes of ideology, such ‘mega’ policy is often called, interchangeably, ‘ agenda policy’ and ‘ legacy policy.’ Examples can range from physical projects like the exploitation of tar sands in northern Alberta, to the construction of the Millennium Dome with its anticipated program of continued revenue-generating activities in London, England, to paradigm shifts in established policies, such as privatization of government bodies and services, the American president’s interest since 2004 in implementing private accounts for social security provision, or the implementation of a major symbolic change via the ‘personal community charge’ or poll tax in Britain in 1988 under Prime Minister Thatcher. Political and policy field analysts cluster around these dramatic, politically led policies.20 It is fair to say that they are typically perceived as failures. Michael Moran (Moran (2001)) covers several families of policy failures that began as full-scale, drastic plans. As one example of the failure of a policy intended to be realized in a single pass, the total cost of the Millennium Dome was projected in the second half of the 1990s at 200 million and eventually cost more than 700 million for the physical structure alone. The first projection seemed so unrealistically low that the responsible government accounting officer asked for a written instruction before he would issue the initial payments to get construction underway. The early warning was ignored. Other failures resemble the reverse engineering of a received policy. One sees a shared world-view between an interest, such as the agricultural industry, and its nominal regulator, the government ministry 20 See
Moran (2001); Hood et al. (1999); Bovens and ’THart (1996); Hall (1981).
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responsible, that allows both to perpetuate their construction of reality. The world-view in itself enforces institutional blindness and thus resistance to put anything into question, with consequences for the public goods jointly provided. For example, the dramatic failure to prevent BSE, due to what looked at the time like an inconsequential efficiencyseeking change in rendering temperatures, occurred in such a setting. Shared monetary interest between regulated industry and the regulator is enough to ensure their collaboration and disable critics. Intervention from the top of the political system, brought about by connections, can even suppress free flows of crucial information and prevent the public from looking after its own interests. In such silent decremental failures, the resulting policy catastrophe emerges from the daily routines of an organization. Thus, using Simon’s concepts in the wrong direction, environmental perversity, often rooted in institutional incentives, carries some factor forward to disaster. BSE in Britain is one example mentioned by Moran. BSE is also a worry in Canada. The Alberta Auditor General reported after the first half of 2004 on Canada’s testing record. Testing for BSE in Canada depends on volunteerism. Individual ranchers decide whether to submit for BSE testing the head of an animal slaughtered on their land—usually a ‘downer,’ an animal too sick to get up. Obviously, ranchers also use their personal judgment about whether or not to send a near downer to a licensed facility, where it could be spotted by inspectors and pulled out of the food chain for BSE testing. But the viability of ranchers and of the Canadian beef industry clearly depends on the absence of physical evidence of BSE. The dynamics were made apparent in the fall of 2003, when Alberta Premier Ralph Klein seemed to tell a meeting of U.S. governors and Western Canadian premiers that ranchers should ‘shoot, shovel and shut up’ when faced with a potential BSE cow (Globe and Mail (2003)). Fortunately, the publicity given to Mr. Klein’s remarks, plus the timeliness of the Alberta Auditor General’s Report at mid-year (Alberta (2004), combined to raise consciousness and thus compliance. A failure was averted for 2004, but the incentive system for testing remains worrying.
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6.5 Conclusion In a world characterized by under-examined great leaps and received policy that holds unexamined problems, Braybrooke’s forward-looking policy strategy looks helpful and important. He wants to engage more people in active deliberation on public policy in a style of analysis that amounts to taking apart mentally and incrementally policy elements that were often put together in small increments over long periods of time in the real world. Braybrooke’s claims are modest: relatively incremental policies are more democratic in daily practice because they are more intelligible and therefore more amenable to supervision by those most affected. They are relatively safe in comparison to policies undertaken as tightly coupled ‘single pass’ undertakings and, further, persistent incremental changes in a consistent direction can lead to great change over time. Incremental policies are closely planned to be reversible, and contingencies are closely monitored so that damage can be repaired. The attentiveness to detail in policies planned under incremental strategies becomes more attractive and important as the scale of operations increases (Braybrooke (1998a), chap. 16), because with detail the probability of a smooth implementation improves. The French approach to lowering the number of road deaths is a large-scale policy that took place along with several decoupled but complementary policy innovations, each aspect requiring interventions with individuals. With careful planning for intelligibility, public acceptance is more readily earned (328). As Bailey and Braybrooke note in their essay on Dahl, frustration with unintelligible policy issues feeds ‘the tendency of politics as a meaningful activity to vanish from the lives of more and more citizens’ (Braybrooke and Bailey (2003), 111). Over time, the alienation of citizens from the democratic process undermines genuine self-government and autonomy. The loss of people’s civic faith and activism—their intelligent support, energy, resources, goodwill, and insight applied to meeting their own needs and those of others—causes incalculable harm to the quality of public life and incurs danger. Still more serious, and under-noticed by client-citizens, is the fact that the national political space addressable by those whom
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the vote ‘puts into power’ is much less than it was. P olitical parties were, until at least the final third of the twentieth century, reasonably effective mechanisms for organizing, aggregating, and creating citizen preferences for fundamental state policies. Now central banks direct economies in a globalized world. The efficient part of apparatuses that govern us, to nod to Bageot, has moved beyond national borders, and economic power is not itself subject to national governments. To quote Gunter Grass, ‘Parliament is degenerating into a subsidiary of the stock market.’ What is interesting, even in a world with fewer points of access and influence, is how constructive Braybrooke’s strategy is. Braybrooke is clear that people in groups can with effort and intelligence create new political space around workable ideas—solutions that attract the interest of people whose values differ. Braybrooke would have citizens organize around a problem without partisanship or fixed interests (the process of deliberation will identify interests in any case), and proceed by investigation and debate to parse their problem into the smallest possible uncoupled elements until good starting points can be identified and plans and actions developed. His strategy does not assume that all or even very many citizens must be mobilized for a reasonable start. Nor does it assume that issue-oriented groups must have the ear of ‘power’ from the beginning. Rather it is more likely that a group’s work will attract those with resources once it is well formulated and workable. So-called ordinary people accomplish great things when they collaborate. The Canadian prairies, particularly Saskatchewan, had a large and thriving system of cooperatives in the middle of the twentieth century. Town populations, whose ‘knowledge society’ consisted of a doctor, a banker, and the school teachers, found in themselves the ability and persistence to understand commodities markets, run businesses, and provide leadership to professionals. And they still have it. One sees international renewed interest in health cooperatives, where citizens have a voice in the priorities of medical clinics and provide feedback to their practitioners. Changes in scale, like feelings of impotence, can erode the empathy citizens feel for one another, reducing potential cooperation. In refer-
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ence to scale, Braybrooke holds that our local participation, which we may undervalue, is not to be seen as a first step toward exerting influence in a higher jurisdiction, but rather as a life-long base for our practice of ‘robust civility’ (Braybrooke and Bailey (2003), 104, coined in reference to Dahl). Robust civility is a quality that Braybrooke knows well. He has investigated it in his work and lived it in his capacities as citizen and colleague. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Braybrooke and Lindblom’s prescription for prudently reversible and intelligible policy change was often summarily dismissed by so-called progressive intellectuals. It was interpreted as an endorsement of, or an apology for, the status quo, and therefore as getting in the way of large-scale, comprehensively rational, radical policies. One can hope that Braybrooke’s more complete formulation of incrementalism with utilitarianism addressing needs will encourage more citizens to take up tools to chip away purposefully at public evils.
Chapter 7
Life of Pi and the Existence of Tigers S TEVEN B URNS
Abstract As a tribute to David Braybrooke’s interest in the arts and his ecumenical work in philosophy, this essay gives a critical reading of Quebec novelist Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Martel offers in his novel both argument and illustration of the thesis that, not a principle of parsimony, but a principle of richness and persuasiveness governs which explanatory entities are to be given status in an account of the truth. Pi, as an extreme case, is a believing Christian, Muslim, and Hindu who claims that belief in God is justified by the excellence of the stories that the religions tell. In this essay, attention is focused on the existence of Pi’s tiger companion, which is both denied and held to be necessary ‘in the story.’ Even in the face of contrary evidence, belief in the existence of the tiger is said to be a prerequisite for appreciating the story at its best. Objections to Martel’s ‘best story’ hypothesis are developed against the background of Anthony Savile’s parsimonious account of ‘best explanation’ in aesthetics, and an ontologically more modest reading of Pi’s story is proposed.∗ ∗ The
first version of this paper was delivered to the Visiting Speaker Series at the University College of Cape Breton, January 2004. Subsequent versions have been discussed with colleagues at the Zentrum fr Kanada-Studien at the University of Vienna and at Dalhousie University’s Philosophy Colloquium. I am indebted to the habitus of the Boys’ Book Club with whom I first discussed Martel’s novel, and I am grateful to many others who have also helped me to make my story clearer.
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David Braybrooke surprised me above all by the range of his interests. I first saw the book he co-authored with Lindblom displayed on the mantel of a colleague.1 I was being welcomed to the Dalhousie department as a new junior department member. Not noting the authors’ names, but being surprised by the sociological cast of their topic, I made a lame joke about the ubiquity of little red books with practical ambitions (this was in the 1960s, when Mao Tse-Tung’s ‘little red book’ was on everyone’s shelf). David was present, and unfazed by my tactlessness. He was soon introducing me to new string quartets and new colleagues in other disciplines, to local as well as university politics, to new artists and novelists, and of course to a wide range of philosophical topics pursued with rigour and enthusiasm. He set a standard of multinational, multilingual multidisciplinarity that I and my colleagues could barely recognize let alone emulate. It was he who made it immediately clear to the new appointees that we were expected to publish, and to get us started he sent our names and areas of interest to the book review editor of the Canadian Philosophical Association’s journal Dialogue. David may have led by example, but he was not above shoving from behind at the same time. I had adopted from my doctoral supervisor, Peter Winch, the view that philosophers’ schematic examples and their logical formalizations could obscure as well as illuminate philosophical problems. Here is an example: You are one of two people in a lifeboat that will hold only one person. Should you jump overboard or push the other person overboard? In matters of ethics and philosophy of mind, Winch held, the examples described in subtle detail by good novelists were likely to reveal things to the philosophical analyst that were really worth knowing. I was pleased to find that there was room in Braybrooke’s vision of philosophy for this rebellious view, and indeed that he was master of the detailed example himself.2 It is as a tribute to these aspects of his extraordinary influence on a department in which it has been a privilege and a pleasure to work that I dedicate the following adventure to David 1 Braybrooke
and Lindbloom (1963) one apt case he relished the details of a real-life example, the lifeboat cannibalism of the survivors of the shipwrecked Mignonette. See Braybrooke and Fingard (1985) 2 In
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Braybrooke. It concerns yet another lifeboat adventure, and was first conceived for a general audience. As a result, it begins with a novel and sneaks up on the philosophy, rather than the other way around. There is precedent for this, too, in Braybrooke’s work. He once composed a comic piece for the Arts and Sciences Faculty Council of Dalhousie University, ‘A (Summer’s) Day in the Life of a Professor of Philosophy.’3 It had the serious aim of indicating that professors of humanities do not take four-month vacations between April and September. It had comic consequences: at its next meeting the Council voted to have the text removed from the minutes, apparently on the grounds that some members did go walkabout in the summer and were humiliated by the comparison with the fictional Professor Green’s industriousness. What I remember enjoying most about the ‘Day in the Life’ was that by mid-evening Prof. Green turned to ‘lighter reading,’ though Braybrooke was quick to add that ‘even this may have a bearing on his work.’ It was in just such a moment that I took up Life of Pi, and it has indeed had a bearing on my philosophical work. That I have been moved to write this paper is evidence that David was right yet again. Dalhousie University has a long tradition of teaching a class on philosophical ideas in literature. Begun by J. Gould Schurman (who was professor of English and then professor of philosophy in the 1880s), the class was made famous by Herbert L. Stewart from the 1920s to the 1940s4 and revived by Robert M. Martin in the 1970s and 1980s. I have several times been allowed to teach it, and were I to teach it again I would include Life of Pi, because it is an extraordinary literary experience with ambitious philosophical content. Yann Martel had a degree in philosophy and two earlier works of fiction to his credit when Life of Pi brought him international fame.5 3 Braybrooke
(1985) (Editor’s note: the essay appears in this volume as Appendix A.) which brilliantly analyzed the writings of Hardy, Meredith, Carlyle, Mrs. Humphry Ward, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and others, was an educational experience that had few equals in the country,’ wrote a former student, T.A. Goudge, in Goudge (7 68), (542). Goudge was by then chair of the department of philosophy at the University of Toronto and had been invited to write this pioneer essay on the history of Canadian philosophy by none other than David Braybrooke. 5 Yann Martel, Life of Pi (Toronto: Random House, 2001). The book won the Hugh MacLennan Prize, the 2002 Man Booker Prize, the 2004 German Book Prize, and in 2003 was selected by 4 ‘Stewart’s course ...
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The book has four parts. There is an ‘Author’s Note’ at the beginning, and other, smaller, author’s notes scattered through the text. They are printed in italics. Up to a point the author’s story matches Martel’s biography, and I shall call him ‘Martel,’ but the more sophisticated reader will insist that this ‘author’ is also a fictional character. The body of the book is in three parts; it is the story of the life of a person named Pi, which is short for Piscine Molitor Patel. Part I is called ‘Toronto and Pondicherry,’ because Pi grew up in the south of India, in the Frenchcolonial city of Pondicherry, where his father was the zoo-keeper, and then emigrated to Canada, where he studied at university and now lives as a middle-aged man with his wife, two children, a dog, and a cat. As the author says at the end of Part I, ‘This story has a happy ending’ (103). It is a story that can make your spirit soar. Part II is called ‘The Pacific Ocean.’ This is the most famous, and longest, part of the novel, in which the sixteen-year-old Pi spends more than seven months in a lifeboat accompanied by a 450-pound Bengal tiger and very nearly starves to death. It can strike you with terror and make your heart ache. Part III takes place in the infirmary in Mexico where Pi finally came to shore after his extraordinary ordeal. It is only thirty pages long, but it makes your head swim. Together these four sections constitute a remarkably unified novel, made of strikingly diverse parts. I shall begin at the beginning.
7.1
Author’s Note
The author’s note tells us two key things. First, he went to India to work on his next novel. It was to be set in Portugal, but India was a cheaper place to live, and besides, ‘That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence? What need did I have to go to Portugal?’ (vi). That novel was eventually abandoned. It had many virtues: Your theme is good, as are your sentences. Your characters are so ruddy with life they practically need birth certifia CBC panel for the ‘Canada Reads’ national radio program. In what follows, citations by page number alone are to this edition.
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cates. The plot ... is grand, simple and gripping. You’ve done your research, gathering the facts—historical, social, climatic, culinary—that will give your story its feel of authenticity. The dialogue zips along, crackling with tension ... [However] an element is missing, that spark that brings to life a real story ... Your story is emotionally dead. (vi, vii) This episode gives us a hint about the importance of fiction and its nature. It is to deviate from reality in order to show the essence of reality. As he concludes: ‘If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams’ (xi). The second key thing is that he meets in Pondicherry a man who learns that Martel is a writer. This leads immediately to the familiar phenomenon—have I got a story for you!—and he promises him ‘a story that will make you believe in God’ (viii). It is Pi’s story. Martel then goes to Toronto to meet Pi, hears his story first-hand, and retells it to us. Clearly this story, unlike the one that was discarded, will not be a mere description of crude reality, but will have emotional life. So it does. And ‘it will make you believe in God.’ My central question is, how is the story supposed to make us believe in God, and can we agree that it does? We may think that the answer is that Pi’s survival is a miracle. If you believe that a child can live for seven months in a boat on the open Pacific, hallucinating from starvation and dehydration, and accompanied by an adult tiger, then you have to believe in divine providence. That may be what the man believed who told the author about this amazing story. It is not the point that Martel wants to make. Pi may think that God was with him on the boat.6 But Pi was a believer before his adventure; it was not the adventure that made him believe or should make us believe. In fact, I think that Martel has a very different idea in mind, so I shall propose a much longer answer. 6 Chapter 52 consists of a complete list of the contents of the lifeboat. It ends: ’1 boy with a complete set of light clothing but for one lost shoe / 1 spotted hyena / 1 Bengal tiger / 1 lifeboat / 1 ocean / 1 God’ (162).
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7.2
Toronto and Pondicherry
A word about our hero’s name is in order. His uncle had loved swimming and had studied in Paris. ‘Piscine Molitor’ was the name of his favourite swimming pool, so he suggested that name for his nephew. Piscine Molitor Patel’s schoolmates, however, found ‘Piscine’ an odd name; they teased him and called him ‘Pissing.’ So one school year, Piscine renamed himself ‘Pi’—‘equals 3.14,’ he added. It stuck. (So, too, did the association with water and the idea of mathematical science.) Two important themes are established in the first one hundred pages: God and nature. Nature takes the form of wild animals. Pi studies both religion and zoology when he finally gets safely to Canada and attends university. In fact we first meet him explaining his research on the threetoed sloth. He found its calm and introspective demeanour soothing to his shattered self. In fact, ‘[s]ometimes I got my majors mixed up ... [The sloth] reminded me of God’ (5). Much more instructive is Pi’s childhood experience. His father was owner of the Pondicherry Zoo, and he thought his childhood ‘was paradise on earth’ (15). He was wakened by roaring lions in the morning, soothed by the benevolent gaze of bison and orangutans, and delighted by the brilliant colours of the birds. In the midst of this Garden of Eden he learned that ‘the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man’ (31). It is not that the great carnivores are not dangerous; in fact the reader will not quickly forget the scene in which Pi’s father takes his sons to watch a live goat being released in the cage of a hungry Bengal tiger. ‘Tigers are very dangerous,’ his father shouted above the snarling of the beast. ‘I want you to remember this lesson for the rest of your lives’ (37). Pi later comments: ‘It was enough to scare the living vegetarian daylights out of me’ (39). We are then given a lesson on how humans can create an environment for a wild animal that will allow it to be emotionally stable and stress-free even in confinement. In these pages of ingenious lore about zoos and lion-tamers, and about wild animals that are more interested in comfort and safety than in what we think of as ‘freedom,’ Martel is clearly preparing us for Pi’s great adventure, but we have as yet no idea
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why or how this is going to be relevant. Even less do we know how the ‘God’ theme is going to be relevant. When he visits Pi in Toronto, the author describes his house as a temple. It has shrines to Hindu gods— Shiva, Krishna, Shakti, and Ganesha; it has icons of the crucified Christ and the Virgin Mary, and it has an Arabic prayer rug next to a veiled Koran (chapter 15). His university degree in religious studies was not something that he forgot about after getting his parchment. But this interest in religion begins in his youth. The young Pi is a kind of religious genius. He is raised a Hindu and loves its ‘sculptured cones of red kumkum powder and baskets of yellow turmeric nuggets’; he feels at home in its rites and rituals, and ‘the universe makes sense to [him] through Hindu eyes’ (53). There is a moving lecture on this. We are introduced to the concept of Brahman nirguna, the original oneness, without qualities, beyond understanding and beyond language. There follows Brahman saguna, with qualities, with moral attributes and taking the forms of the distinguishable gods mentioned above. But Brahman is also atman, the breath of the spirit within each of us, a pilgrim spirit which seeks to find its karma, to be at one with the Absolute. Pi is a well-content Hindu when at fourteen he encounters Jesus Christ. In his community Christians have a ‘reputation for few gods and great violence’ (56), but he meets a kind priest who teaches him the extraordinary story of a God who became a humble human, was humiliated, and put to death. Imagine, thinks Pi, if my father had said to me, ‘Piscine, the lions are killing the other animals in the zoo. The situation has become intolerable. Something must be done. I have decided that the only way the lions can atone for their sins is if I feed you to them.’ ‘Yes, Father, that would be the right and logical thing to do. Give me a moment to wash up.’ (58) What a weird story. Pi asks for a different story, but finds that the Christians only have the one Story; it is about love and humility. So Pi finds himself haunted by this new god and becomes a Christian.
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‘Islam had a reputation worse than Christianity’s—fewer gods, greater violence’ (64), but a year later, at fifteen, Pi meets a Muslim teacher whose humble friendship leads him to discover the postures of Islamic prayer, the ritual recitation of the ninety-nine names of God, the soothing beauty of a ‘religion of brotherhood and devotion’ (67). Pi has not, however, abandoned Hinduism or turned his back on Christianity. He believes all three. He is in love with God. ‘I was a practising Hindu, Christian and Muslim’ (71). Of course he is attacked by the representatives of all three faiths; you can only be one of those, they say; the others are heresies or superstitions! But the youngster quotes Mahatma Ghandi: “‘All religions are true.” I just want to love God’ (76). And so he does. It is not at this point clear what this aspect of Pi’s character has to do with his great adventure. It is not obviously his faith in God that gets him through his ordeal on the Pacific. Nor is it clear what his survival adventure has to do with his faith. He believed in the Divinity of all three religions before he left India for Canada. So Martel has created a vivid character as a comment on our relation to nature on the one hand, and our relation to the spirit of religion on the other, but has given us few clues about how this is to relate to the story that will make us believe in God. There is one minor theme in Part I that should be mentioned. Recall the author’s opening remarks about fiction, the story that transforms reality, and his warning that we should not sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality or we will end up believing in nothing. That theme is given some new words by the adult Pi as he retells his story. ‘Dry, yeastless factuality’ is one phrase. ‘The better story’ is another (70). The two phrases appear in what we might consider an argument in favour of believing in God. Imagine an agnostic’s last words as he slips from life: ‘if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, he might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, “Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,” and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story’ (70).
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7.3 A Digression on Belief A philosopher cannot read about Pi’s belief in these varied gods without recoiling. It is bad enough to believe in any unprovable entity, but to believe in three incompatible ones is intolerable. Yet Pi is a wonderfully believable character. How is this? What does logic tell us about belief? That one cannot believe both p and not-p in the same way and at the same time; that is a contradiction. But this tells us precious little. The dialecticians will ask, ‘What is not-p?’ and answer, ‘Anything but p.’ So if p = ‘god exists’ then ‘roses are in leaf outside my window’ is an instance of not-p; and one can easily believe in both p and not-p. That is not the point! By ‘in the same way’ we meant that one cannot believe both that God exists and that God does not exist. Or should that be: “‘It is true that God exists” and “it is not true that God exists”’? Better still, is the problem not this: that one cannot both believe that God exists and not believe that God exists? I am skipping past distinctions of great logical import, but in any case it can be argued that belief comes in degrees. This fact should show that to claim that there are no options other than to believe p or disbelieve p is an irresponsible simplification of the mental life. I can believe in p a little bit or a lot. No doubt I can at the same time and in the same way believe not-p. Surely this is what most of our minds are like most of the time. Philosophers, however, insist on preserving the original insight that it is a contradiction, an impossibility, both to believe and not believe the same thing in the same way at the same time. So they write: ‘Those who prefer to think in terms of degree of belief should read such expressions as “S believes that p” as shorthand for “S believes that p to a degree greater than 0.5 (on a scale from 0 to 1).”’7 Does this really help? If it was implausible that one both believe p and not-believe p, is it equally implausible that one be 0.51 certain of p and 0.51 certain of not-p (or 0.51 uncertain of p)? Surely maintaining that this is a flat contradiction belies our real inner lives. Only a Divine Knower could parse our beliefs that finely! And we are doing epistemology, not theology. If an account that allows for degrees of belief makes matters more 7 Mele
(2001), 10.
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complex, consider what happens when we allow that some people are more capable of believing than others. Some people have big hearts— there are scarcely limits to how much they can love, and those close to them might well wish that they love less smotheringly. Others may love as much as they can, and one might wish that they could have loved more. So it is with the capacity for belief. On an Aristotelian scale, those deficient in belief go through life as sceptics or ironists, while those with an excess of the capacity are as it were gluttons of belief. Pi seems to be a belief glutton. I think that if he believed 0.51 p, he would believe p a great deal more than would an ironist who believed 0.51 p. These are two different scales of ‘degrees of belief.’ Let us construct a paradox: Pi is undecided about something, q; he believes 0.5 q and 0.5 not-q. An ironist, let us say, believes only half as hard as Pi. If she believed 100 per cent q she would be in the same psychological state as Pi with regard to q. She is capable of that. She is also capable of 100 per cent disbelief that q. Now if she were in exactly the state that Pi is in, she would not be undecided, as he is, but would be believing 1.0 q and disbelieving 1.0 q. That is plainly a problem, indeed approaching absurdity. Yet the state is possible, because Pi is in it. Perhaps an Aristotelian prescription for this muddle would be apt. A virtuous believer would be one who sought the mean between these extremes, who believed p to a degree supported by the evidence for p, but no more than that. She would be neither a belief-ascetic nor a beliefglutton, but a moderate or virtuous believer. Aristotle, of course, wisely warns us not to treat the mean as a mathematical point, and says that we should expect no more precision in such matters than is appropriate.8 Nonetheless, on this sort of account we might conclude that Pi is not a virtuous character; he believes much too much, too freely, and too heartily; but of course we should not doubt that he is possible.
8 See, for instance, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I:3. See also II:7, on truthfulness as a mean, and III:9, where after a long discussion of courage he concludes that from this we can form at best a rough conception of its nature (1117b).
7.4. THE TIGER IN THE LIFEBOAT
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7.4 The Tiger in the Lifeboat In the second part of Pi’s story, titled ‘The Pacific,’ we have the heart of the novel. The ship carrying Pi and his family and the family’s zoo animals to Canada suffers an unexplained explosion and sinks in rough wind and water in about twenty minutes. I shall be very sketchy about this story, for it contains much magic that I do not want to spoil. Pi finds zoo animals thundering about the deck.9 Some crewmen throw him into a lifeboat towards which he sees a favourite tiger desperately swimming. The tiger is named Richard Parker because of a clerical error, but that is an anecdote which I shall leave for the reader to enjoy. Suffice it to say, this character effectively does have a birth certificate.10 Pi throws him a lifebuoy and he climbs in the boat before Pi realizes how stupid he has been. He also finds in the boat a zebra, which has broken its leg jumping in, and a spotted hyena. Then an orangutan floating on a bale of bananas reaches them. So he is in a lifeboat with four dangerous, wild animals! Over the course of the next while, as the storm abates and beautiful sunrises break the darkness of the nights, the animals hold the stage. The hyena, vividly described, begins to eat the injured zebra. Then it fights the orangutan and kills her. Pi is about to defend himself by attacking the hyena when the tiger, who has been under a tarpaulin, reappears. Pi flees to a tiny raft that is dragging behind the boat. The tiger takes care of the hyena. By now Pi has found the stock of water and food in the lifeboat. He regains his spirits and then figures out how to train the tiger to recognize a division of territory.11 For instance, he uses a lifebuoy whistle as a 9 ‘I clearly heard monkeys shrieking. Something was shaking the deck. A gaur—an Indian wild ox—exploded out of the rain and thundered by me, terrified, out of control, berserk. I looked at it, dumbstruck and amazed. Who in God’s name had let it out?’ (115). 10 I am referring here to the pedigree within the novel. Martel has explained that he chose the tiger’s name because of several external coincidences. The cabin boy who was killed and eaten by the survivors of the Mignonette in 1884 was named Richard Parker (see note 2, above). Remarkably, so was the man eaten by the survivors of a fictional shipwreck in Edgar Allen Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, written nearly fifty years earlier, in 1837. See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/309590/ (accessed 27 December 2004). 11 See especially the detailed instructions for establishing dominance over a wild animal in
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sort of whip. He even marks his end of the boat with his urine. The tiger eventually settles into his comfort zone at the other end of the boat. And so they travel. Pi catches fish and turtles, and feeds Richard Parker. He figures out the water treatment equipment, and keeps them in a minimum of fresh water. Eventually, ‘It was Richard Parker who calmed me down. It is the irony of this story that the one who scared me witless to start with was the very same who brought me peace, purpose, I dare say even wholeness’ (179). When a school of flying fish, who are in turn being hunted by predators, fly over and into the boat, Richard Parker ... raised himself and went about blocking, swiping and biting all the fish he could. Many were eaten live and whole, struggling wings beating in his mouth. It was a dazzling display of might and speed. Actually, it was not so much the speed that was impressive as the pure animal confidence, the total absorption in the moment. Such a mix of ease and concentration, such a being-in-the-present, would be the envy of the highest yogis. (201) They develop routines. There are the inevitable sharks, some huge storms (chapter 83!), a ship that steams by without seeing them (chapter 86), cycles of boredom and terror, elation and despair. But scarcity of food and water eventually wears them down. They seem about to die. The tiger, gaunt and barely panting, lies in the bottom of the boat. Pi goes blind, begins to hallucinate. There is a conversation with another lifeboat that seems to be imaginary. Then the most wonderful delirium takes over. Pi sees an island, an island of floating algae, with ‘trees growing out of pure vegetation’ (285). There is edible seaweed, pools of fresh water, and marvellous inhabitants, the gentle, sociable meerkat. This story, with its rejoicing and rejuvenation, its secret dangers and surprises, has to be read to be believed. It is an astonishing tour de force, a chapter of thirty pages in a book whose other chapters average three pages each. Within another page their boat is washed up on the shores of Mexico. Richard Parker jumps right over Pi. chapter 71.
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I saw his body, so immeasurably vital, stretched in the air above me, a fleeting, furred rainbow. He landed in the water, his back legs splayed, his tail high, and from there, in a few hops, he reached the beach. He went to the left, his paws gouging the wet sand, but changed his mind and spun around. He passed directly in front of me on his way to the right. He didn’t look at me. He ran a hundred yards or so along the shore before turning in ... [He] looked fixedly into the jungle. Then Richard Parker, companion of my torment, awful, fierce thing that kept me alive, moved forward and disappeared forever from my life. (315-16)
7.5
Ockham’s Razor
Here we must introduce another philosophical theme. Ever since Plato there has been a debate about whether going beyond yeastless factuality can be justified. In Parmenides Plato criticizes himself for trying in his earlier dialogues to explain the phenomena of the world in terms of his theory of Forms.12 There are enough things in the world already without postulating an unchanging Form for every quality or distinction that we see among phenomena. That just adds a multitude of new things to the universe that need explaining themselves. Worse, he adds arguments to show that there are not just many new things, but infinitely many of them! And if that were not enough, he tries to show that even if they did exist they would be so disconnected from the world of apparent things that they could not explain them anyway. It is as if he invented the slogan, ‘Do not multiply entities needlessly.’ That is the principle known as Ockham’s razor.13 Ockham posed an 12 More properly, Plato portrays an elderly Parmenides criticizing a young Socrates for holding these views. 13 William of Ockham is arguably the greatest philosopher England has produced. He was at least the greatest philosopher of his century (c. 1285-1349). He studied and taught at Oxford in the 1310s, spent four years in Avignon in the 1320s being examined for heresy by agencies of Pope John XII, and lived in the court of the Emperor Louis of Bavaria in the 1330s and 40s, where he defended the divine right of kings against the traditional view that only the Pope had a divine right to power and that kings got their power from the Pope. He is believed to have died in 1349 of the black plague.
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enormous challenge to the philosophy of his time. Its central characteristic is known as ‘realism.’ ‘Realism’ is a peculiar term in philosophy. In ordinary language we know that it means roughly this: the world around us is real, we can grasp it with our minds, the world that we are conscious of is not a figment of our imaginations, it is not dependent on our minds at all. It is there whether we think of it or not. Reality is independent of our ideas of it. When philosophers speak of realism in connection with the Middle Ages, however, they mean something quite different. They mean that Platonic Ideas are real. This has its roots in Plato’s teaching that the Forms are the reality of which the empirical world is just the appearance. Forms are the stable and knowable objects of the intellect. What we perceive through the senses is constantly changing; they are objects of belief, but never of knowledge. By Ockham’s time the doctrine was that the human intellect discovers in the particulars apprehended by sense experience an intelligible order of abstract essences and necessary relations [which are] ontologically prior to particular things and contingent events and that from this order the intellect can demonstrate necessary truths concerning first causes and the being and attributes of God.14 Ockham rejected this realism, maintaining that our knowledge is based on direct experience of particular things and events, not on grasping an intelligible essence. He was realist in the ordinary sense, for he thought that the world is real and that we can have knowledge of it, but he was a nominalist in the medieval sense. He thought that the separate forms or essences are not real. The names we give them are just that, names (nomina), words that do not stand for real entities. The name Ockham’s razor is given to a principle that Ockham did not invent but often used. It is often called the principle of parsimony,15 and is usually given as ‘Do not multiply entities needlessly.’ Ockham 14 ‘William of Ockham,’ Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (London: CollierMacmillan, 1967), 8: 307 15 Probably first found in Aristotle, Physics I:4, 188a, 17-18: ‘it is better to assume a smaller and finite number of principles.’
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likely did not use exactly this formulation,16 for the good reason that it seems to imply an ontological interpretation—that a logical principle can lead us to conclusions about the existence or non-existence of things—but he frequently used near neighbours: ‘Plurality is not to be assumed without necessity’ and ‘What can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more.’ These slogans are intended to mean that if you have some things to explain, and two possible explanations of them, the one that requires fewer extra principles, or which is simpler, is the better explanation, the one more likely to be true. What makes a story simple? Compare what makes an explanatory system simple. Leibniz thought that this is the best of all possible worlds because God chose, among all those possible worlds, the one that had the greatest variety of phenomena with the least number of laws. Imagine a world in which when you drop a pencil it falls most of the time. The other times it rises, or floats, or dances a jig. That would be a world with more phenomena, more odd things happening, but much more complicated natural laws—gravity would be overruled by who knows what other varied explanatory principles. (Imagine a world in which the human female had her teats where a cow does, or in which the human male had his penis where a pig has its tail. That would certainly be odd enough. I suppose that the missionary position would cease to be a preferred form of reproductive activity. That would be sad, since having sex face to face is one of the things that makes humans a more loving species, but perhaps we could get used to it. But what if some men had theirs rear-mounted and others forward; or if some women had theirs up and others down? That would not only be a world with weird standards of beauty, but one in which biology was an even weirder science; either the laws of genetics would vary inexplicably, sometimes producing one type and sometimes the other, or else they would be more complicated in ways I shall leave the reader to imagine.) On the other hand, Leibniz thought that if there were fewer explanatory principles—for example, that all bodies seek rest and there is no principle of inertia to keep motion going—then soon all motion would cease. That would be a world with vastly less variety of phenomena. So, 16 As
a Dalhousie student once argued. See Schlosser (1983).
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he thought: this actual world is the one chosen by the creator because it is the best solution to the problem of how to get the greatest variety of phenomena with the simplest explanatory principles. Ockham and Leibniz, of course, used God as a first principle. They did not intend that Ockham’s razor be used against the idea of a creator, let alone to reduce the number of entities in the universe by one, but in fact that is what has happened. The modern world discovered that it did not need God as a hypothesis to explain what could be explained more simply by natural science. So the principle of parsimony is used to adjudicate between competing scientific theories: given equal predictive power, the theory with simpler laws or presuppositions is the better one; and it is used to show that we do not need the concepts of Platonic Form, soul, or God, any more than we need the concepts of phlogiston or aura. Adding God to our explanatory system does not help to explain anything more than what we can explain by other means—it just indicates that we have not discovered the explanation yet. So, to put it in the familiar (if perhaps mistaken) ontological form, God is an extra item in the list of things in the universe, one that is not necessary, and ‘we should not multiply entities beyond necessity.’ It is in this spirit that Anthony Savile wrote his account of best explanation in aesthetics.17 His main aim in this paper is to explain the place of the artist’s intention in appreciating a work of art. His conclusions are that so far as determining the full basic text of the work is concerned the artist has the last word, but so far as determining the correct reading of the text is concerned the artist only has the first word.18 The idea that there is a ‘correct reading’ of a work of art is of course controversial, but invariably some readings are better than others, and typically one is better than all the others. We can call it the best available reading and use this as a gloss on ‘correct.’ This view, that the artist does not have the last word about what is the correct understanding of his or her work, requires Savile to provide an account of how such a judgment is to be justified. His idea, borrowed from Wittgenstein, is that judgments in a 17 Anthony Savile, ‘The Place of Intention in the Concept of Art,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 69, n.s. (1968-9). I shall refer to it as reprinted in Harold Osborne, ed., Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1972), 158-76. 18 Ibid., 164.
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court of law can provide a useful model.19 When a sentence in a contract needs to be interpreted by a court, the signatories’ intentions are not decisive; they are what is at issue. What the court tries to determine is what the sentence in its contractual context means, what the correct reading of it is. Here Savile writes: The closest I have been able to come to finding an account which meets these various demands is to say that the objective meaning of a string of words uttered in a given context is given by that reading of those words which (a) accounts for the presence in that string of as many relevant features of that string as possible and in the best of cases accounts for all of them; (b) which is as simple as any other equally complete reading; (c) which gives as unitary an account as possible of that string; and (d) which makes the production of the string appropriate in the intersubjectively identifiable circumstances of its utterance.20 The correct reading of a work of art, that is, is the one that accounts for the greatest number of relevant features of the work, while being as simple and unitary and appropriate as the competing readings. This gives for aesthetic judgment a set of principles very much like the razor. If you are trying to account for the greatest number and variety of phenomena with the most parsimonious set of principles possible, then you are trying not to multiply entities beyond necessity. There are problems with such an account. I shall not pursue them here, but it should be mentioned that Savile gives us no guidance about how to choose between two readings of equal explanatory power, one of which is simpler and the other more appropriate or unified. Nor does he explain why we should prefer a reading that accounts for a few more relevant details but is much less simple and unified, to one of much greater elegance but slightly less explanatory power. Nonetheless, he is clearly in the tradition of Ockham and Leibniz. The best reading of a 19 See G.E. Moore, ’Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930-33,’ in Philosophical Papers (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959), 315. 20 Savile, ’The Place of Intention in the Concept of Art,’ 169-70.
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work of art will not multiply entities needlessly. I have introduced this to my discussion of Pi because Martel explicitly disagrees with this sort of view. He favours the baroque, he admires multiplicity, he is tolerant of contradictions and incompatibilities, he denies that necessity is a virtue, and he champions the imaginative transcendence of mere factuality. The remainder of my reading of Pi will be aimed at adjudicating this dispute.
7.6
Ministry of Transport Investigators
In the final section of the novel, Martel creates a second framing device for his story. Two officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport, Mr Chiba and Mr Okamoto, assigned to investigate the lost ship, are sent to Mexico to interview the lone, and entirely unexpected, survivor. Pi is now in the local infirmary, beginning to recover from his ordeal. The Japanese officials have imperfect English, so they record their conversations with Pi. These exchanges are very amusing, but also very disorienting. Chapter 96 reports them as asking Pi to tell them what happened to him, ‘with as much detail as possible’ (323). Chapter 97 just says, ‘The story’ (324). That is, the whole story of the ordeal in the lifeboat (chapters 37 to 94) is first told here. What we have read in Part II is Martel’s version of an older Pi’s version of the story that he told to the Transport Ministry men. Presumably, Chapter 97 was shorter and less detailed than the version we have just read. The big shock, however, is that the officials do not believe the story. Suddenly we as readers are shifted from our suspension of disbelief. We have read the story, of course, as a believable adventure. Reality is stranger than fiction, we say, and when we read a story we are in believing mode. Suddenly someone is saying, ‘What about this algae island you say you came upon? ... [It] is botanically impossible’ (326). ‘Now about the tiger, we’re not sure about it either’ (328), and so on. Pi in these pages is a very self-assured teenager. He retorts, ‘What you don’t realize is that we are a strange and forbidding species to wild animals. We fill them with fear. They avoid us as much as possible’ (329). ‘In a lifeboat? Come on, Mr. Patel, it’s just too hard to believe!’
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‘Hard to believe? What do you know about hard to believe? ... Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?’ ‘We’re just being reasonable.’ ‘So am I! I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.’ ‘Calm down, Mr. Patel, calm down.’ (330-1) This sceptical inquisition continues for some time, and the reader must now feel quite disoriented. What is the status of Pi’s story? The investigators finally say, ‘We would like to know what really happened.’ ... ‘So you want another story?’ ‘Uhh . . . no. We would like to know what really happened.’ ... ‘I know what you want. You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality . . . You want a story without animals.’ (335-6) This challenge of course returns us to the theme that was broached in Part I.21 So Pi tells them another story, in which he swam to the lifeboat, only reaching it because the French cook threw him a lifebuoy, and his mother made it to the boat clinging to a bale of bananas. The sailor was already aboard, with his broken leg. But the cook soon went out of control, butchering the injured sailor for food and bait, and plundering the boat’s supplies of water. He killed Pi’s mother when she attacked 21 See
p. 70, as quoted above at the end of section 2.
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him for hitting her son. Pi killed him the next day, when the cook— perhaps mad, perhaps overcome with remorse—did not bother to resist. Pi concludes, ‘Solitude began. I turned to God. I survived’ (345). This story is sometimes viscerally brutal. I shall not quote the gory bits, but I am reminded of a scene in Martel’s earlier novel, Self, in which the female narrator is raped.22 He is capable of evoking profound horror and disgust. The Japanese investigators ignore the horror and quickly point out what the reader has probably already noticed: the two stories match. The zebra and the sailor both have a broken leg. ‘And the hyena bit off the zebra’s leg just as the cook cut off the sailor’s’ (345). So the zebra is the sailor, the orangutan is Pi’s mother, and the hyena is the cook, which means that the tiger is Pi! This is a version of the shipwreck story with four people in the lifeboat instead of one person and four wild animals. We are reminded of several hints in the story itself that this may be the truth. In Pi’s first version, he sees wild animals running about the sinking ship. It is quite unlikely that the zoo animals would have been freed from their cages. It is quite likely that hysterical people would have galloped about the deck in terror, seeming quite beside themselves. We are being led right from the start into Pi’s hallucination, his sense of the incredible story that he is going to experience, and his disconnecting from his everyday sense of reality in order to cope with the extremes into which he is about to be plunged. Again, Richard Parker disappears for three days at the beginning of the story and reappears when Pi has been without food, water, or sleep for all that time. Perhaps it is no wonder that he hallucinates a Bengal tiger. My first reaction, at this point, was to think that the gentle sixteenyear-old Pi is traumatized by these events to such an extent that he must cast the story in terms of animals. This would achieve two purposes: it would allow him to think of the terrible cruelty of the cook as the natural behaviour of a hyena; it would help him to acknowledge the murder of his mother while treating it as more like the killing of a favourite zoo 22 Yann Martel, Self (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1996), 282-312. Martel often pursues cosmic themes. Ways of dying is the subject of at least two of the four stories in his first book, The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1993), including the title story. The other two deal, like Life of Pi, with the relation between art and reality.
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animal. So there are psychological reasons for his having told his tale as one involving animals. That, however, would not make the story true.
7.7 Which Is the Better Story? Now we are given a blunt choice. Pi asks: ‘So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?’ Mr Chiba and Mr Okamoto agree that the story with animals is the better story. ‘Thank you,’ Pi replies, ‘And so it goes with God’ (352). That is the punch line of the novel, or at least of Pi’s and Martel’s argument. We are to accept the story that we prefer, rather than the one that is parsimonious.23 It is not dry, yeastless factuality that we should believe, but the better story, and if you are thinking of the ordeal in the lifeboat, it is the story with the tiger. If you are thinking of the meaning of life, it is the story with God. That is why this is a story that will make the reader believe in God; the stories with God, the stories of the Hindus and Christians and Muslims of the earlier discussion, make better stories than the alternative theories. We remember the agnostic who ‘to the very end, lack[ed] imagination and miss[ed] the better story’ (70). We need to ask ourselves what it is that makes a story better? When we discussed Ockham we assumed that it would be something like simplicity. If the tigers and gods are unnecessary, then surely we should not accept them as true just because we would prefer to have it that way! Wittgenstein has a remarkable comment, towards the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that seems to make room for explanations that are less than the simplest: The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience. 23 In his own account of how the story came to him, Martel writes: ‘reality is a story and we can choose our story and so why not pick “the better story” (the novel’s key words)?’ It will be clear that I do not entirely agree with the first two clauses of this metaphysics. See Yann Martel, ‘How I Wrote Life of Pi,’ http://www.powells.com/fromtheauthor/martel.html (accessed 4 May 2004).
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This process, however, has no logical foundation but only a psychological one. It is clear that there are no grounds for believing that the simplest course of events will really happen.24 That is a purely logical remark. What is best for logic is not necessarily true of the world. Wittgenstein had an elegant metaphysics in mind. The world is made up of facts. Each fact is independent of all the others, so it can be true regardless of the truth or falsity of the other facts. The way the world actually is, then, is a contingent matter. Nothing is necessarily the case. The natural laws, or the patterns we see in events, do not determine how things are, for the facts could always have been otherwise. This is a clever account of reality and its laws. Surprisingly, it leaves us not with Ockham (for there are many interesting similarities between those two philosophers), but with Martel. Ironically, it leaves us exactly in Pi’s position. If the two stories are equally complete—they both explain the murders and the survival ordeal, and neither explains why the ship sank in the first place—what makes us think that the simpler story is the better one? In fact, there are many reasons for thinking that the story with the tiger is the better one. It is more inventive in its appeal to the imagination, it is more instructive about the various characters of its participants, it is more astounding in its demands on our credibility, but having won us over it is more gripping. I think that we are actually more inclined to believe the story with the tiger than we are to think that the bare-bones story is the ‘real’ one. Those are powerful qualities. It is important for the argument that we have not given up explanatory power; each story explains as much as the other. Where we gain, however, is that one story is more gripping, more imaginative, more instructive, more inventive, more demanding, more insightful, and more satisfying. The other story has fewer entities. Martel ends his novel with the official report of the Transport Ministry investigators. It concludes: ‘Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult 24 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr. C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), 6.33-6.331.
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Bengal tiger’ (354). This sentence is presumably deliberately ambiguous. Literally it says that no castaway has survived in the company of a tiger (and thus, not Pi either). As English is colloquially understood, however, it means that no other castaway has survived in the company of a tiger, as Pi has. In its context (the report contains phrases like ‘an astounding story of courage and endurance’; ‘unparalleled in the history of shipwrecks’), the sentence is bound to be taken in the latter sense. If the Ministry of Transport officials accept Pi’s story of Richard Parker, how could we readers not recognize it as the one worth accepting? Similarly, the story with God. We believe in the tiger, and we should believe in God.
7.8 Is the Tiger REAL? Must we believe in God? Must we believe in Richard Parker? I think that the answer is no. At least I do not accept Martel’s argument that we should. But does that mean that I think we have to make do with the yeastless story?25 Not at all. I think that we can appreciate the better story and have our tiger, but without being eaten by him, so to speak. Pi did not make up the Richard Parker story just to amuse or confound the Ministry officials. I do not doubt that this is how he experienced his adventure. Thus there is an important sense in which I believe his story. I have mentioned some of the psychological pressures that would have made it easier for him to see his trials and tribulations through the filter of the zoo animals. I now want to propose that Richard Parker is Pi’s doppelg¨anger. He is Pi’s double. He is a being whom Pi thinks of as separate, but who is a projection of himself. The doppelg¨anger is often a ghostly second person who goes about with you, and advises you, but is invisible to others. This is an old literary device, that of the character who sees himself or herself as someone else. A recent example of it is the alter ego of the Russell Crowe character (John Nash) in Ron Howard’s film A Beautiful Mind. A classical example is 25 Andrew Reynolds (of the University College of Cape Breton) pointed out to me that although ‘yeastless’ is a wonderful metaphor, it can be deceiving if taken to mean that bread is magically raised by yeast. There is a good biochemical account of what the yeast accomplishes; the dichotomy between a ‘yeasty’ explanation and a dry ‘scientific’ one is a false dichotomy.
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Edgar Allen Poe’s story ‘William Williams,’ which remains ambiguous until the end about how many Williams there are. The doppelg¨anger also marks a venerable psychological state: sometimes a person seems to have multiple personalities, sometimes it takes the form of an out-ofbody experience; in any case, one sees oneself as an other and not as oneself. In every case there is really only one person even though there may appear to be two. This is not the first time that Martel has explored this idea. I have mentioned the rape scene in Self, where he uses the technique of writing two columns per page. In one column are expressed the fear and pain and horror of the suffering woman; in the other column are the lucid reflections of a disengaged intelligence trying to figure out how to escape with her life. Martel expresses a very differently divided consciousness using the same technique in the last of the stories collected in The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, ‘The Vita Æterna Mirror Company.’ In this case a young man listens to his grandmother’s recollections (in one column), drifting off at times (in the other column) to his own reflections. These experiments with portraying a divided consciousness can be seen as preparation for telling the story of a deeply divided Pi. The doppelg¨anger often can do things that serve as guidance to the real person. Think of what Richard Parker does that Pi thinks he cannot do: swim to the lifeboat, eat raw turtle, kill the cook, do whatever it takes to survive regardless of the point of it. Pi, the gentle vegetarian who believes that all gods are one, is but part of the whole person. He could not have continued long on his own. We are all animals as well as spiritual beings, and Pi implicitly realizes that Richard Parker is an aspect of him which he cannot do without. His animal nature is of course an aspect that must be tamed and kept in its place, as Richard Parker quite literally is. But it is also an aspect of himself without which he would not be complete and would certainly not have survived. On this reading, no special explanation is needed for the disappearance of the double. A projection that has outlived its usefulness will disappear into the jungle. On the other hand, a motive is required for its appearance. Martel obliges. Clearly it was the terror that reigned during the sinking of the ship. It was Pi’s fear that can be credited with having
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created the tiger. It was a tiger, after all, that had first scared ‘the living vegetarian daylights’ out of him. Now when he really confronts the fear of death it takes the tiger’s form. When things have settled into a routine, and the tiger has been suitably subdued, we get a knowing chapter on fear (chapter 56). It is followed by a line that I have already quoted: ‘It was Richard Parker who calmed me down,’ says Pi. ‘It is the irony of this story that the one who scared me witless to start with was the very same who brought me peace, purpose, I dare say even wholeness’ (179). That wholeness, I am proposing, is the reunification of Parker and Pi. I have told a story about a story about a story—my story about Martel’s story about Pi’s story. It is not the only story that could be told about it. A reader of Life of Pi can surely appreciate it as a simple adventure tale, as a story of survival in a lifeboat with a tiger. Or as a coming of age story: a story of growing up, leaving childhood, going through the tribulations of leaving one’s family behind and struggling with teenage abandonment, before arriving safely at adulthood. Or as a religious allegory: a story of being forced out of paradise, put through the agonies of earthly life, and received at the end in a heavenly afterlife. Or as diasporic biography: a story of leaving India and suffering huge dislocation and disorientation, before finding a new home as an immigrant to Canada. It sustains all of those readings quite effortlessly. The reader need not see it as a doppelg¨anger story, with the tiger as Pi’s alter ego, in order to have appreciated the book. My story, however, has advantages. My account of what is going on in Life of Pi does not have real animals in the lifeboat, and it requires fewer miracles, fewer amendments to the laws of nature, than does the one that Martel recommends.26 My story requires some extra psychological complexity, but overall it is simpler, it is more appropriate to our other convictions, and it explains at least as many of the novel’s relevant details. It does not reduce the story to ‘yeastless factuality,’ but it 26 One should not discuss a story of a boy and a tiger without mentioning Calvin and Hobbes. Bill Watterson’s cartoon Hobbes is a stuffed animal tiger who comes to life only when he and Calvin are alone together. Hobbes is much more than a figment of the child’s imagination; indeed he takes the initiative and often raises the philosophical tone of their discussions. Nonetheless, he is not a real tiger.
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does not accept Martel’s claim that we should believe whatever flight of imagination commands our fancy. It should follow that I also do not accept Martel’s claim that Pi’s story should make us believe in God. I shall leave the drawing of that conclusion, however, to my reader. Finally, I wish to emphasize a different but very important lesson: that the real interest and life in such an investigation begins with the work of literature. Margaret Atwood says that this is ‘a terrific book. It’s fresh, original, smart, devious, and crammed with absorbing lore.’27 She is reminding us that it is the novel that is of first importance. I think that Martel is right that you miss the better story if you are not gripped by Pi’s predicament, and so share his terror and his courage, and believe in Richard Parker. But the considerations that have led me to read it as I have, and to argue that it makes a false claim about metaphysics, have a life of their own. They are the stuff of philosophy.
27 Margaret Atwood in a Sunday Times review, quoted on the front cover of the paperback edition of Life of Pi.
Part Two: Theoretical Engagement
Chapter 8
David Braybrooke’s Philosophy of Social Science M EREDITH R ALSTON
Abstract
This chapter will examine David Braybrooke’s contribution to the philosophy of social science, specifically, and to feminist epistemology, indirectly, through an assessment of his 1987 book Philosophy of Social Science and his 1998 updates in Moral Objectives, Rules and the Forms of Social Change (chapter 13) and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His detailed examples from naturalist, interpretive, and critical social science illustrate how the three ‘sides’ of social science contain and complete the others. The chapter will show how his articulation of the ‘mutual support and stimulation’ within the philosophy of social science has paralleled, and in some ways anticipated, feminist critiques of epistemology and the development of feminist methodologies themselves. To do this, I will look at the traditional field of the philosophy of social science, examine what Braybrooke has added to the debate, and look at how his ideas resonate with the latest ideas in feminist epistemology and philosophy of social science. I will argue that his belief in a unity of method between naturalists and interpretive social scientists melds with a naturalized feminist epistemology of the kind espoused by Richmond Campbell and Lynn Nelson, and may help overcome what seems to be the inherent relativism of Sandra Harding’s feminist standpoint theory.
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8.1
Introduction
In the famous phrase of the now-cancelled television show The X Files, ‘The Truth Is Out There.’ In TV land, the phrase is meant to show that conspiracies are all around us and are being covered up by sinister and unknown forces. With enough investigation, the truth will be revealed and all will be known. This idea of a universal, knowable truth is a popular idea, but how real is it? What does this idea mean for understanding our reality and the world around us? Is this a fair representation of how we know and what we know? Is knowledge just waiting to be found like another planet, perhaps, beyond Pluto? Has it always been there, or do we have to go and create knowledge? These are the issues and questions dealt with by epistemology—the study or theory of the nature and foundations of knowledge—which asks how do we know, what can we know, and, more recently, who can know. These are also the central concerns of the philosophy of social science. This chapter will examine Braybrooke’s contribution to the philosophy of social science, specifically, and to feminist epistemology, indirectly, through an assessment of his 1987 book Philosophy of Social Science and his 1998 updates in Moral Objectives, Rules and the Forms of Social Change (chapter 13) and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His detailed examples from naturalist, interpretive, and critical social science illustrate how the three ‘sides’ of social science contain and complete the others. The chapter will show how his articulation of the ‘mutual support and stimulation’ within the philosophy of social science has paralleled, and in some ways anticipated, feminist critiques of epistemology and the development of feminist methodologies themselves. To do this, I will look at the traditional field of the philosophy of social science, examine what Braybrooke has added to the debate, and look at how his ideas resonate with the latest ideas in feminist epistemology and philosophy of social science. I will argue that his belief in a unity of method between naturalists and interpretive social scientists melds with a naturalized feminist epistemology of the kind espoused by Richmond Campbell and Lynn Nelson, and may help overcome what seems to be the inherent relativism of Sandra Harding’s feminist stand-
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point theory.
8.2 Traditional Philosophy of Social Science How do we know that the tree is ten metres high? How do we know that Mary is sad? Is knowing that the tree is ten metres tall the same sort of thing as knowing why Mary is sad? How do we know whether something is ‘true’ or ‘false’? How do we know that our best friend wasn’t abducted by aliens when she reports that she was? How do we know any sort of crazy thing we see in the tabloids? Do we know anything? Our answers to these questions generally depend on our view of knowledge itself and the relevance of the knower. Is knowledge universal, rational, and objective or is it socially and historically specific? Is knowledge independent of the knower (because the particular knower is irrelevant) or is it subjective and dependent on the knower? Rationalists and empiricists have answered these questions differently and opposed each other particularly in the area of how we know: rationalists relying on reason and a priori knowledge and empiricists relying to a greater extent on the senses, observation, and the scientific method. Today, most philosophers and social scientists are empiricists of some sort, though their emphases on what is knowledge and who can know differ according to what philosophy of social science they follow. Are they objectivists and believe that the idea of knowledge they pursue (at least in the ideal) should be absolute and foundational, or are they relativists and believe that knowledge is contextual, culture-bound, and that there is no ultimate measure of truth? Traditionally, the philosophy of social science has been divided into three main schools: naturalism, interpretive, and critical theory. N aturalists, who take their name from the natural sciences and the study of the natural world, believe that we can know the social world in basically the same way as we do in the natural sciences. We can find patterns in social life; the cause and effect of events and behaviour can be determined. There will be laws of human behaviour to discover, just as there are laws of gravity and motion, and causal regularities to be discerned. There is a reality to be known independent of the knower,
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and this reality can be verified through observation and measurement (Nielsen (1990)). The methods of the physical and scientific world, therefore, can be applied to the social world, and to naturalists, the scientific method ensures that results are tested, replicable, verified, or falsified. This doesn’t mean that scientists believe that they have necessarily discovered the truth but that they are getting ever more truthful accounts of the world and explanations for natural phenomena (though, according to Kuhn, not necessarily through a linear process of accumulation). Everything has a cause, but then that thing has a cause and so on and so on. The scientific method is a spiral process according to many scientists (Kournay (1987)). An experiment starts with observations of a certain phenomenon and then the scientist searches for regularities, trying to discover regular patterns and explanations for why these regularities occur. These explanations help to develop the theory or hypothesis, which is tested and used to make further predictions. The process then starts over with more observations, further predictions, which are verified or falsified and then adjusted (Hempel 1966). A simple chemistry experiment that both tests a law and makes predictions would be as follows: according to the law of conservation of mass, substances cannot lose or gain mass during a chemical change; that is, the mass of a substance before reaction will equal the mass of the substances after the experiment. If mercury oxide (x), for example, is heated and transformed into liquid mercury (y) and oxygen gas (z), one can predict how much oxygen is in the compound by knowing the weight of the mercury oxide before decomposition and the weight of the liquid mercury afterwards (x - y = z). The law itself can also be tested by weighing the two remaining substances and confirming that the mass has indeed been conserved, within experimental error (y + z = x). Many naturalists believe that a logical argument in the form of testable statements of facts and laws creates explanations, predictions, and statistical regularities. For Carl Hempel, a good scientific explanation requires asking the question: according to what general laws and by virtue of what antecedent conditions does the phenomenon occur (Hempel (1966))? A deductive argument gives the strongest possible grounds for believing the conclusion is true and gives strong grounds
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for believing the conclusion if the argument is inductive. For example, if all metal conducts electricity (the law), and this is a copper, therefore metal, wire (the facts or antecedent conditions), then this wire conducts electricity (thing to be explained). Or (more problematically) in the social sciences, if 80 per cent of street prostitutes were sexually abused as children, and this woman is a prostitute, then there is an 80 per cent chance that this woman was sexually abused as a child. Though most naturalists recognize that the social world is a good deal more complex and unpredictable than the natural world, they believe we can still find causal regularities and statistical generalizations within the social world. I nterpretive theorists claim that naturalists fail to recognize human intentionality, motives, social context, and people’s ability to change. They believe that the social world and hence social sciences are not like the natural sciences. To explain some event or behaviour in the social world requires understanding the meaning behind the actions, and that depends on context and particularly on social relationships. In oft-given examples, what does it mean to put one’s hand in the air? Is the person voting, waving, signalling, or saluting? Understanding which it is and why requires knowing the context of the vote, wave, or salute. No causal regularity can cover all the possible interpretations and possible meanings; that is, if a person raises his hand it means x, he has raised his hand, so therefore it means x. In the above example outlining the percentages of street prostitutes who have been sexually abused, what really can be said about the particular prostitute? Though it might be part of the explanation for why this particular woman ended up as a street prostitute, what about all the women who have been abused but who don’t end up on the streets? And what if she wasn’t sexually abused or is in denial about the sexual abuse? The fact that 80 per cent of street prostitutes are sexually abused says little about the individual prostitute, according to the interpretive point of view. How did she become a prostitute? Why does she think she became a prostitute? Did she choose this life? What is life like for her? These questions, argue interpretive theorists, are not dealt with by looking for a logical argument in the naturalist tradition. Many more examples can be found to illustrate the need for understanding contexts. Are you chopping wood for a fire, for
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exercise, for building a house, or for working out frustrations? Why is a piece of paper a bookmark, and not scrap? Why is this death a murder and that one a suicide? Is the cause of death a brain hemorrhage or is it driver negligence, slippery roads, or drunk driving? I nterpretive theorists object to the scientific method on at least five grounds: controlled experimentation, they believe, is impossible when dealing with humans and makes prediction and repeatability difficult; social phenomena are culturally and historically determined, and so it is very difficult to predict changes in communities or individuals; human beings modify their behaviour as a result of acquiring additional knowledge; humans have goals and motivations that can’t be accounted for; and the inherent subjectivity of human behaviour cannot be predicted (Nielsen (1990)). Prediction in the social world is a particular problem for naturalist social scientists, according to interpretive theory, because of human will and decision-making. We may be able to predict with some accuracy that if we mix two parts of hydrogen with one part oxygen we’ll get water (H2 O), or that one part carbon and two parts oxygen equals carbon dioxide (CO2 ), but can we predict with any reliability that combining poverty and poor education in one individual will result in criminal behaviour? And does prediction explain something anyway? A barometer may predict rain, but it’s the change in atmospheric conditions that explains why it is raining. Similarly, spots on a child may predict measles, but it’s the virus that explains why the child is sick. Finally, interpretive theorists argue that the value-neutrality of the sciences is impossible in the social sciences because of the value-oriented bias of social inquiry. This will be developed more fully below. N aturalists counter that controlled experiments are not crucial to the project of the sciences or social sciences. Astronomy and astrophysics, for example, don’t use experimentation but rely on observation, mathematics, and computer simulations. The common denominator is the scientific method, which creates a logical set of procedures for observing change, or predicting behaviour by keeping some factors constant and changing others. For example, though not experimenting per se, astronomers rely on the scientific method’s goals of prediction, testability, falsifiability, and verifying data through simulation. A computer
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program, for instance, is used to show how two galaxies might look after colliding with each other, based on the known elements of the two galaxies. Astronomers then use observational tools to look for similar patterns in the cosmos to see what, if anything, most closely resembles the modelled simulation. Naturalists agree that prediction is difficult in the social sciences but believe that common patterns can be found and human subjectivity, goals, and motivations can be used as social variables and part of the antecedent conditions of the explanation. The goal of a rigorous scientific method should be adhered to because, they argue, it is still the best way that we know of at this point in history to understand natural phenomena. As one scientist friend reminds me, no matter who does the testing, if you drop something it will fall and he’ll be able to predict how long it will take to hit the ground, just as one of Newton’s laws predicts. Or put another way, naturalists believe there are facts about the world, regardless of whether we have discovered them yet (that is, regardless of who is the knower). Pluto (as either a planet or asteroid) would continue to exist whether we had found it or not. Most scientists have faith that though the scientific method isn’t perfect it eventually weeds out theories and ideas that are found to be false—for instance, that the sun revolves around the earth, that the earth is flat, that the universe was created only 5000 years ago. The scientific method, then, is a useful tool to undermine ideas that can’t be tested, like creationism, or fantastical ideas such as the popular science fiction theme in movies like The Matrix that the world has only actually existed for a few minutes and that all our memories, lives, and ideas are continuously re-created. Though it is still the goal of some scientists to elaborate a grand theory that will unify, for example, the fields of electricity, magnetism, and gravity, most scientists recognize that different views are debated until a consensus in the community is reached and that they come into the experiment or simulation with preconceptions and assumptions about certain laws and theories (Kuhn (1962)). Further, we should not forget that in terms of justification of scientific knowledge, philosophers of science like Popper and others argued that since theories can never be positively confirmed, scientists can only falsify theories one at a time.
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Theories that are not eliminated then may be true or may be very probably true. This indicates a far more nuanced view of truth than interpretive and critical theorists usually give scientists credit for. Perhaps the most one can say, even for naturalists, is that truth, or ‘properly justified true belief’ in philosophical terms, is to be seen as an attainment goal or concept, not as truth itself, and always relative to the particular scientific context (Kuhn (1962)). The third traditional school in the philosophy of the social sciences is critical theory. Developed from the Marxist critique of ideology, critical theorists see themselves as doing emancipatory work, uncovering what had been hidden and finding the realities masked behind dominant ideologies (Nielsen (1990)). Knowledge is socially constructed and the context of knowledge is all important to understanding, explaining, and uncovering knowledge. Critical theorists reject the idea of objective knowledge and the disinterested, neutral knower of naturalism, and the emphasis on meaning and understanding in interpretive theory. The point, as Marx famously put it, is not merely to understand the world but to change it. Critical theorists want to unmask ideologies that go against many people’s best interests but are seen to be the only possible ideas or systems, for example, the idea that capitalism is the only efficient mode of production. Or that human nature is naturally aggressive and competitive. There is no value-free knowledge, according to critical theorists, because knowledge is socially constructed and situated. Undermining naturalism’s fact-value distinction is crucial for critical theorists because separating the two out makes it appear that there is such a thing as ‘facts’ on the one hand (objective and true) and mere values or opinions on the other (subjective and perhaps false). This separation, according to critical theorists, hides the ideology and biases that occur even in so-called facts and within the underlying values of the research itself. For instance, if a quantitative research study concluded that because of the massive abuse of the welfare system by welfare recipients people on welfare should be cut off from their support, critical theorists might question what were the essential values and world-view of the researchers in the first place. Do they believe that people on welfare are
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lazy or, alternatively, do they see them as victims? Is the study simply confirming what the researchers think about poor people and/or, more broadly, what a capitalist mode of production needs in order to function efficiently—that is, have a large reserve army of labour? Critical theorists also began the work of standpoint—that is, that disadvantaged groups have the potential for a more holistic view of reality because of their oppressed position in society. As a tool for survival, according to critical theorists, the proletariat, the black slave, and women have a better or more complete view of the world than their bourgeois, white, or male counterpart. The connections between critical theory, anti-relativism, and feminism will be developed below.
8.3
Braybrooke’s Contribution to the Philosophy of Social Science
Outlined so starkly, there seems to be little overlap and agreement between the three schools within the philosophy of social science, and this is Braybrooke’s starting point. He also indicates the helpfulness of an influential article by Brian Fay and Donald Moon, called ‘What Would an Adequate Philosophy of Social Science Look Like?’ (Fay and Moon (1977)). In this article, the authors ask three questions aimed at establishing that the division between naturalism and interpretive theory is unnecessary: What is the relationship between interpretation and explanation? What is the nature of social scientific theory? And what is the role of critique? These questions provide the framework for a sophisticated argument outlining how each side is lacking: the naturalists don’t see the need for interpretation of meaning, and the interpretive theorists don’t see the need for explanation and theories. An adequate account of the social sciences needs both, according to Fay and Moon, and also needs the questions asked only by critical theory. Braybrooke agrees. In his 1987 book, he begins by outlining the distinguishing characteristics of the three sides of the social sciences. Naturalism, as stated above, relies on the methods from the natural sciences and looks for causal generalizations and regularities. Interpretive theory attempts to bring to light what the actions that people do signify,
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looking for ‘settled social rules.’ Critical theory ‘refuses to take at face value the rules cited by the interpretive view’ or the causal regularities of naturalism (Braybrooke (1987b), 4). Regardless of the real differences between the three sides, his aim is to show ‘how robust are all three and how complexly interconnected’ (4). None of them has exclusive truth and the ‘differences coexist with a great number of parallels’ (5). Critical theory, he argues, asks different questions but its methods reduce to those of the other two. Therefore, there is a unity within the social sciences. In his 1998 update, he goes further, suggesting that a ‘settled social rule presupposes the existence of corresponding causal regularities in social phenomena and vice versa’ (Braybrooke (1998a), 251). Moreover, he argues ‘regularities found in social phenomena would not have the foundation in personal choices and actions that they must have to be fully explained in our eyes as producers of social science or as consumers of it if they did not have a foundation in choices and actions guided by rules’ (257). In his 1998 essay in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he also takes on the contribution of postmodernism to the debate about the philosophy of social sciences and claims that though aspects of postmodernism are helpful in understanding the limits of knowledge, some of the claims are so radically sceptical as to undermine the possibilities of knowledge and social science itself, and this he does not want to do (Braybrooke (1998b), 846). Therefore, though postmodernism can be seen as a separate (fourth) option to naturalism, interpretive, and critical theory, Braybrooke takes postmodernism as a variation of critical theory, in terms of his claims about unity (Braybrooke (1998b)). These are strong claims, and adherents of all three schools (and particularly of postmodernism) will object to the explicit idea of a unity. How does he make these claims? First, he shows how naturalism tends to concentrate on different questions, facts, and concerns than interpretive theory, specifically in looking at ‘group facts,’ that is, how groups operate as opposed to how individuals operate within those groups. As mentioned above, naturalism is definitely in the minority among philosophers and social scientists today: as Braybrooke says, it’s ‘quite out of fashion’ (Braybrooke (1987b), 7). He asks the questions, Are all
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group actions, in fact, reducible to individual actions within the group? And are these group facts inherently less interesting than the interpretive emphasis on the individual? Surely not, he says, on both issues. Braybrooke outlines an example of naturalistic social science that relies on group facts and causal regularities: Leon Epstein’s article on the differences between Canadian and American political parties and their cohesion or lack thereof, respectively (Epstein (1964)). In the article Epstein asks the question, Why do Canadian political parties, unlike American parties put in disciplined and cohesive performances in national legislatures? His answer—by looking at the ways in which Canada and the United States are similar and different—is that it is the British parliamentary system (the major difference) which accounts for the differences in the behaviour of their political parties. As Braybrooke says, using Mill’s method of agreement and/or difference (Braybrooke (1987b), 8), Epstein would be correct in arguing that though Canada and the United States share several features in common (including a large land mass, a federal system, and federal and provincial parties), it is the main difference between them that explains the difference in political parties, that is, Canada’s use of the British parliamentary system and the United States’s use of the presidential system. Conversely, though Canada and the UK are quite different in some respects (with the UK having a small land mass, a unitary system, and only national parties), Canada and the UK share the British parliamentary system and therefore both have cohesive political parties. Braybrooke shows that Epstein’s reasoning is naturalistic because the solution is a causal statement (whenever a country has the British parliamentary system, it has cohesive parties; Canada has the parliamentary system, therefore, Canada has cohesive political system), and it implies a counterfactual (if Canada didn’t have the British parliamentary system, we wouldn’t have cohesive parties) and a causal generalization (if you want cohesive parties you need the British parliamentary system) (9). We will come back to this example shortly. For an example of interpretive theory, Braybrooke uses Elliot Liebow’s research on Tally’s Corner, a famous study of a group of unemployed African-American men in Washington, DC (Liebow (1965)). In the study, Liebow observed and
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interviewed the men. He concluded that they start out their adult lives looking for jobs, but because they lack higher education, they are only able to get menial jobs. The menial jobs don’t pay very much and the men don’t get much respect. Their future looks bleak so they give up and don’t work at all. This affects their relationships with the women in their lives and particularly the mothers of their children, whom they don’t treat very well. Liebow then asked the question, Why do these men act as they do? His answer: because they can’t be good family providers, they set up alternative rules, and act in ways that support a macho image of themselves, to deal with their failures as husbands and fathers. It’s an interpretive study, according to Braybrooke, because the study is qualitative—Liebow deals with the meaning behind the actions of the men—and because it’s about social rules and conforming or failing to conform to rules. For critical theory, Braybrooke doesn’t articulate a specific real-life example but instead uses critical theory to critique the naturalistic and interpretive examples. From a critical theorist’s point of view, Epstein’s example would be banal or uninteresting at best, an ideological obfuscation at worst. Epstein takes the current system at face value, doesn’t look at whose interests the political system serves. And the study could rationalize the current system because it fails to show that any opposition is a sham anyway, because no parties will threaten the interests of the property-owning groups. Braybrooke says Liebow would fare better, but, even so, critical theorists would most likely have issues with Liebow’s assumptions about capitalism and the welfare state—that is, that the market is imperfect but generally beneficial—and his lack of recognition that alternative arrangements are available but hidden from the masses by a dominant ideology. None of this deeper critique is done by Liebow, so his example would be considered limited as well, by critical theorists (Braybrooke (1987b), 17-18). Though critical theorists ask different questions and see themselves as delving deeper into critique than naturalist or interpretive theorists, Braybrooke argues that they use the same methods as interpretive theory and naturalism. The interpretive side of critical theory lies in the emphasis on comparing ‘what social scientists aim at doing, under cer-
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tain rules that express their recognized aims and their activities, with what they are doing unawares or unawares omitting to do’ (70). Critical theorists tend to rely on qualitative methods and try to understand the meaning behind or underneath something, like interpretive theorists. Support for pluralism within political science, for example, according to a critical perspective, leads either to ‘ignoring unorganised groups or to postulating that they have special means of representation’ (70). The naturalistic side of critical theory comes out in the Marxist critique of ideology in that it ‘upholds a specific theoretical explanation of the omissions and distortions which it finds in subcritical social science’ (76). That is, a causal connection is used to explain how change occurs historically because of changes within a particular class structure. The major problem for admitting the naturalist bent of critical theory will occur with the fact-value distinction and critical theory’s opposition to this distinction. Braybrooke argues that this should be a problem for critical theory only because it is a ‘fallacy,’ according to him, to argue that because a study can be found to be ideological, that ‘every statement in that body ... has an ideological cast and import’ (81). Put even more starkly, he argues that ‘every single statement in a set of statements about social phenomena can be true, yet the whole set can have ideological, distortive consequences for people’s thinking’ (81). The difference between the two (the possibility of statements of fact vs the ideological impact of those facts and of the study as a whole) must be sorted out and supported by evidence. This will be important later when we look at Sandra Harding’s work. Braybrooke also argues, convincingly, that Marx himself used both naturalist and interpretive methods. Marx’s social science was, according to Braybrooke, naturalistic in explaining the ideas of subcritical social scientists as determined ultimately by the roles given them in social arrangements that are causal consequences of the current system of production. It is interpretative in the details with which this determination works out, including the rules that social scientists accept and conform to because of their class position. (83-4)
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Braybrooke leaves critical theory at this point to concentrate on his main argument that there is a unity within the social sciences, not just a unity of method between critical theorists and naturalist and interpretive theorists. He returns to his examples to show how inadequate they are on their own and how they need elements of the others to be complete. While it may be true, Braybrooke argues, that Epstein’s example is a logical argument (that is, whenever a country has the British parliamentary system, it has cohesive parties [the law]; Canada has the parliamentary system [the facts]; therefore, Canada has cohesive political system [the thing to be explained]), without more information into what explains the law itself (that is, what explains why the parliamentary system creates cohesive political parties), the example is inadequate. The argument, though a logical explanation, still then fails to explain why Canada has cohesive political parties. To do this, Braybrooke argues, we need individual person facts as well as the group facts, and rules as well as regularities. For instance, individual members of Parliament in the Canadian system vote as a bloc because they don’t want to be kicked out of the party, and they don’t want to run as independents. But why don’t American members of Congress worry about the same thing? Because of the rule in parliamentary systems that says that if you are a member of the governing party, you must not vote against it. Again, why not in the presidential system? It is because of elements of the parliamentary system that need to be explained, that is, that in a parliamentary system there are no fixed election terms and a potential vote of non-confidence could bring down a government. If a government falls, an election must be called and MPs could lose their seats. Because of the separation of powers in the American system, and because there is no vote of non-confidence, even the impeachment of a president would have little effect on the majority party in the Congress. Therefore, individual members of Congress are far less likely to vote as a bloc. All of this information is needed in order to explain why Canadian political parties, unlike American political parties, act in disciplined and cohesive ways in our national legislature. We need to know group facts and person facts, social rules, and causal regularities. The regularity shows that Canadian political parties are more cohesive than American; the
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rule that tells individual MPs to vote as a bloc explains why. And vice versa. Canadian political parties are more cohesive than American ones because individual MPs vote as a bloc, and individual MPs vote as a bloc because of elements of the Canadian political system that make political parties more cohesive than American ones. Braybrooke outlines how even loose regularities can be helpful, how laws can be developed, even if transitory or specific to a community, and how the model-theoretic view in naturalism could be used by interpretive social scientists. In his 1998 essay, he particularly concentrates on the model-theoretic view and shows how this approach ‘relieves social science of the burden of finding regularities that hold for all societies’ (Braybrooke (1998b), 840). As he states, even the natural sciences have revised the view that laws hold for all time and now use a system that sets up models that are true for that model only. The model is then used to show how other models ‘resemble one range or another of phenomena closely enough to be more useful than other models in prediction and explanation’ (840). In Liebow’s study, we see the development of social rules that are conformed to, denied, or changed. The men on Tally’s Corner start by following a rule that says they cannot have respect unless they are regular providers, and in order to retain self-respect (because they can’t follow this societal rule) they oppress the women in their lives. Braybrooke then shows how this example, though clearly interpretive, has naturalist tendencies. The conformity or lack of conformity to rules are solutions to problems (how the men cope with their circumstances); the solutions are the explanation and can be put into the form of a logical argument (if you are a married man and want respect, you must provide for your family (the law); this man is married but can’t provide (the facts); therefore, he gets no respect and treats his family badly (thing to be explained); and Liebow’s findings are empirical, meaning he observes the men, he is looking for repeated patterns of behaviour, and the study can be replicated with a similar group and verified or falsified—all characteristic of naturalism, not interpretive social science. Further, these facts could have been quantified (say, more than 50 or 75 per cent of the men in this area act in similar ways), and therefore, statistical regularities can
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be developed. Braybrooke uses examples of other quantitative research studies on unemployment and friendships to demonstrate how use of statistics could help to explain why the men on Tally’s Corner have no jobs (39) and why their friendships are ‘so loose and fitful’ (41). Thus, to complete the picture of the men on Tally’s Corner, group facts (societal rules and regularities) are needed as well as interpretive person facts (how the particular individual gives meaning to his actions). Therefore, Braybrooke gives a very convincing argument that ‘there are both person facts and group facts on both sides’ (60) and that both theories’ methods, questions, and ‘facts’ are needed for an adequate explanation. But as stated in the beginning of this section, Braybrooke doesn’t want to just say that both naturalism and interpretive theory are needed in order to have an adequate explanation for a certain phenomenon. In his final chapter, then, he goes further by arguing that the ‘key idea of each side presupposes the key idea of the other’ (94). Rules, which he defines as ‘prescriptions or prohibitions to which clear forms of punishment attach as deterrents to deviation’ (111), draw on regularities, and regularities (causal explanations like the rates of inflation, unemployment, or divorce) draw on rules for their very definition. From every social rule ‘an observable regularity may be deduced’ (116), and from regularities of inflation, for instance, we can deduce rules for exchanging goods or setting prices. A naturalist’s ideas about rates of employment cannot exist ‘without accepting some interpretative account of what it means to have a job’ (112). In the same way, interpretive social scientists are ‘interested in whether husbands try to be steady providers. It cannot find whether they do without counting how often they turn up for a job when they have one, and how often they bring home their paychecks’ (112). As an article in the local paper described recently, fatal collisions on Nova Scotia highways have steadily decreased since 1984 (the statistical regularity) because of the laws against drunk driving and the increased use of seatbelts (the rules). If there hadn’t been a problem to be addressed (the rate of fatal collisions) there would be no reason for the rules against drunk driving or in favour of seatbelts. If there were no rules against drunk driving, there would probably be the same rates of fatal collisions, or then another cause would be identified, and so on.
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In the case of this article, the increased rate of fatal collisions this particular year was an anomaly to be explained by the increased speeding of drivers, itself a rule that has been violated (Lipscombe (2004), A1). Rules and regularities, therefore, presuppose the other. Braybrooke concludes his 1987 book with a caveat about generalizations: ‘the fact that the generalization applies only to one agent does not prevent it from being a generalization’ (126), and he accepts as fact that generalization is the ambition of social science (128). In his 1998 update, Braybrooke addresses the postmodern challenge inherent in any claim about generalization by undermining the claim of universality even in naturalism. As mentioned above, scientists no longer think of themselves as searching for the truth but argue that ‘scientific success happens in local contexts and only for a time’ (Braybrooke (1998b), 839). The postmodern concern with ‘grand narratives’ and ‘globalizing discourses’ (844) has led to recognition that discourse is power and that claims for knowledge ‘become conflicts of power or to “wills to truth”’ (844). Postmodernists attack the idea of a unified view of the world, yet even Foucault’s theory comes ‘with claims of truth, or at least some approximation of truth’ (844). According to Braybrooke, even these ‘sweeping pronouncements’ can be accommodated by the three schools (845). Braybrooke argues that postmodernists like Foucault and Lyotard bring back the study of rules ... with an emphasis more thorough-going than any other philosopher[s] ... But if there can be models of systems of rules just as there can be models of regularities then how far a model fits a real system, in regard to any universally quantified statement that figures in the model, is a matter for quantitative—statistical—study just as much with rules as with regularities. (845) Methodologically, therefore, both interpretive and naturalist questions are in play with postmodernism and now ‘in a form that is ready to receive the insistence of postmodern writers on truth being local, a matter of limited context that is always subject to supersession’ (845). Though Braybrooke acknowledges the impact of postmodernism on the
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philosophy of social science and accepts certain of their limiting claims on knowledge, he would ‘resist any further-reaching scepticism’ (839). Because some of the postmodern critique is so sceptical of even the possibility of knowledge, Braybrooke argues, we ‘may thus have to allow in the philosophy of social science for a school that (unlike any of the three schools in the framework) holds that social science is not possible. We do not have to join it’ (846). In the next section, I want to show how Braybrooke’s claims about a unity of method, and his arguments about universality and generalizations, anticipate feminist critiques and also how these arguments could be used to overcome some of the polarizing debates currently happening within feminist philosophy of social science.
8.4
Feminist Epistemologies and Critiques of Social Science
The links to feminist epistemology in Braybrooke’s work may not seem obvious at first glance. Braybrooke does not engage directly with feminism in his 1987 book or in the 1998 updates and, therefore, does not think of feminism as a ‘school’ (in its own right) within the philosophy of social science. Braybrooke’s example of naturalistic social science does not on the surface have anything to do with women, and his interpretive example deals only with the male perspective and doesn’t mention at all how the women feel about the men’s behaviour towards them and their children. Nevertheless, I would argue that there are links, overlaps, and resonances with feminist social science and epistemology in four areas. First, his argument that critical theory shares a unity of method with interpretive and naturalist theory is similar to the current debate within feminism about whether there is a distinctive feminist method or whether what makes feminism unique are the distinctive questions and focus on women. In some ways, we could see the development of feminist epistemology as a parallel to critical theory. Braybrooke’s comments about critical theory, though obviously different in content, are therefore applicable at the level of the distinctive questions and deeper critique. Second, Braybrooke defends quantitative methods and acknowledges that interpretive and critical theorists tend to disdain
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quantitative methods and statistics. As Braybrooke writes, ‘they dislike and distrust quantitative methods ... so they are inclined to scorn quantitative methods and denounce them as inappropriate to the study of social phenomena’ (Braybrooke (1987b), 35). This rings true with some feminist researchers and again resonates with current debates. Third, his views on the problems of universality and generalization can be applied to feminist debates about feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint and, particularly, the extent to which research in the social sciences can be generalized without essentializing some aspect of it. Finally, the problem of the fact-value distinction calls for examination in the light of feminist concerns about objectivity and subjectivity, and Braybrooke’s work can be useful here, too. Philosophers and social scientists who have been concerned with feminism have tried several strategies for ensuring women’s voices are heard. One of the first methods in most of the social sciences and humanities was simply adding women in to rediscover women’s history and contributions, to recognize that women’s experiences had been left out, and to ask questions that had not been asked before or which had not been seen as important. Historians discovered women’s lost history, political scientists examined women’s political engagement, and sociologists looked for connections between family violence and women’s economic dependence in the home. The focus shifted over time from adding women in to putting women at the centre of analysis and looking at what life was like for women. So, for example, doing a feminist analysis of Liebow’s study would mean interviewing the women on Tally’s Corner, examining how they felt about their lives, about why their men acted as they did and why they accepted or rejected this behaviour. Like the discovery of X-rays, what was invisible became visible with the new focus on women’s experiences of abuse, family life, work, sexuality, and more. As feminist critiques became more common, new methodologies were created and old, ‘male’ methods were criticized. The scientific method was particularly critiqued for its supposed neutrality, objectivity, and universality. Feminist ways of knowing came to be identified with anti-naturalism and anti-science. Qualitative, participatory, and collaborate research
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methods were identified as feminist, and science and scientific method were rejected as inherently male. Feminist philosophers like Sandra Harding began to question whether epistemology’s concern for objectivity hid a subjective point of view and asked whether a politicized inquiry, ironically, might be less distorted than a so-called point-ofviewlessness. She argued that the scientific method for all its heralded objectivity and universality was actually developed with a particular knower in mind, that is, a white, middle-class, highly educated male, and that its supposed neutrality could not withstand scrutiny. Many other feminist philosophers criticized the maleness of philosophy and the underlying male-as-norm ideology (Lloyd (1984); Westcott (1990)). The knower or researcher became crucial to the project of feminism because it was at this level that feminism identified the distortion and biases affecting the outcomes of research. As well, the separation between researcher and the thing being researched became another problematic of the scientific method, in particular, as feminists saw the separation as objectifying and distancing, not as ensuring objectivity as did traditional researchers. But is it the method that is the problem or is it the underlying methodology and epistemology—that is, are feminists actually doing something different empirically from traditional sociologists or political scientists, or are they asking different questions, looking at different phenomena and coming to different conclusions? The main point of contention between feminist and traditional social scientists seems now to be the question of objectivity, which we will look at in more detail below. Feminist researchers, generally, don’t accept the notion that the researcher should be ‘on a different plane’ from the researched. They reject the idea that in order to keep the research as objective as possible the researcher can’t give opinions or engage in conversations with the researched (supposedly to remove bias and prevent so-called subjectivity) and therefore contaminate the research. But this position is becoming more common even in naturalist social science, as stated above in the analysis of Braybrooke’s work. In a working paper for Status of Women Canada, on the state of feminist research, Damaris Rose parallels Braybrooke when she states that ‘developments in quantum physics
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have established that even in natural science there is no such thing as pure observation uninfluenced by the observer’ (Rose (2001), 6) and that claims for ‘validity based on researcher/research object separations have less credence than previously’ (6). Recent work in feminist epistemology and methodology suggests that there is not a separate feminist method but that feminists tend to use a multi-method approach, somewhat like what Braybrooke is suggesting for the social sciences as a whole. Multi-method means mixing individual interviews with focus groups and perhaps surveys and archival work, that is, qualitative and quantitative research methods (Rose (2001); Reinharz (1992)). The feminism becomes the underpinning of the study, of the questions and critiques that the researcher brings to it. As Braybrooke stated, critical theory may ask different questions and delve deeper into the roots of a problem, but in method it reduces to the methods of the other two. Feminism can bring about an awareness of the pervasiveness of gender and the links between gender and other forms of oppression, but in actually carrying out the research program, the methods reduce to some form of naturalism (quantitative information and surveys) or interpretive methods (interviews, focus groups, and participant observation) or both. What was said above regarding the question of different methods can also be said for the question of quantitative methods. Though traditionally feminists have rejected quantitative methods, for similar reasons as did interpretive and critical theorists, there has been an increased interest in mixing methods and looking for causal regularities in feminist research. Many more social scientists are seeing the utility of knowing rates of divorce or family violence or sexual assault in order to make cases for services, illustrate to the public and funding agencies the seriousness of feminist claims, and empirically prove that women have been systematically discriminated against in various ways. Rose argues that the dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative methods is too simplistic and may be counter productive. While epistemological differences are real, and do lead to different types of questions being asked in relation to the same broad research topic, many of the standard dichotomies become
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quite blurred when placed under closer investigation. This opens up the possibility of developing research strategies that recognize the potential complementarity of certain quantitative and qualitative techniques. (Rose (2001), 4) As I’ve stated above, complementarity was Braybrooke’s argument nearly fifteen years earlier. Further, as feminist researchers’ resistance to quantitative methods fades, Rose argues ‘it is possible to adopt quantitative techniques (that is, methods in the narrow sense) without buying into all of the tenets of positivist epistemology associated with quantitative methodology in the large sense’ (12). Braybrooke and naturalists would concur, I’m sure, but is this view tenable given feminist concerns with objectivity and universality? Philosophers like Sandra Harding would probably still disagree about the question of a unity of methods in the social sciences and particularly the use of the scientific method. Harding is an advocate of feminist standpoint theory and has dismissed feminist empiricism as unable to overcome the androcentric bias inherent within the scientific method. I turn to her work now in greater detail and hope to show how Braybrooke’s arguments can withstand her critique of traditional social science. Harding rejects ‘ objectivism’ because of the dispassionate, disinterested, scientific knower and his value-free, genderless, objective scientific procedures (Harding (1996), 302). She thinks science devalues anything that doesn’t take an inherent point-of-viewlessness. She rejects ‘interpretationism’ as too relativist because, in her analysis of interpretive theory, conflicting interpretations become equally defensible and because they don’t recognize the existing power relations of male dominance (303). Neither school, she argues, works for feminists, not even an explicitly feminist empiricism. Feminist empiricists or feminist scientists have argued that the androcentric bias in some science projects is because it is ‘badly done science’ and that stricter adherence to the scientific method will overcome these biases in the knower (305). It is not the method that is the problem; it is the researcher himself who has not been able to filter out his androcentric biases or stereotypes in the interpretive stage of the research. Harding distinguishes
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between the ‘spontaneous’ feminist empiricists of the 1970s with the more sophisticated philosophical feminist empiricism discussed below (Harding (1993), 51). Harding (and many others who advocate feminist standpoint and the critical theorists before them) argues that the scientific method cannot overcome the problems of its so-called objectivity and universality. It is an illusion to think that science can remove bias with a ‘transhistorical, unitary individual knower’ (Harding (1996), 308), because science has not been ‘particularly welcoming to issues of race, class or cultural differences in women as subjects of knowledge— that is, between women as agents of knowledge’ (307). Instead, Harding advocates feminist standpoint, taking as a starting point the experiences of women to develop ‘potentially more complete and less distorted knowledge claims than do men’s experiences’ (309). For example, looking at “‘men’s work” can provide only partial, distorted understandings’ of the nature of work. Because there is a ‘fault line’ between ‘women’s real experiences and the dominant conceptual schemes,’ phenomena like housework won’t fit traditional definitions of work or leisure and therefore should be analysed through concepts of women’s experiences (310). Standpoint overcomes these problems by starting from marginalized lives and taking ‘everyday life as problematic’ (Harding (1993), 50). The scientific method is too weak to detect sexism, so stronger standards for ‘good method’ are needed, ‘ones that can guide more competent efforts to maximize objectivity’ (52). She takes from intellectual history the ideas of Hegel (master-slave) and Marx (bourgeois-proletariat) to start from the voice of marginal groups (53-4). In this way, her views parallel the ideas of critical theory, as outlined by Braybrooke. Since societies are stratified by race, class, and gender, the ‘activities of those at the top both organize and set limits on what persons who perform such activities can understand about themselves and the world around them’ (54)—essentially, the Marxist critique of ideology as stated by Braybrooke. Putting women at the centre of analysis will lead to less distorted accounts of those women, according to Harding, because starting at the bottom of social hierarchies ‘can provide starting points for thought—for everyone’s research and scholarship from which humans’ relations with each other and the
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natural world can become visible’ (54). Though I haven’t done her ideas justice in such a short treatment, the main problem with her work is her claim that standpoint is not relativist (the interpretive view that we can’t judge between conflicting claims) or essentialist (the postmodern assertion that we can’t generalize) (Harding (1993), 61-2). She spends much of her later work (until Harding (2004)) defending her theory against the claims of postmodernists that by giving up ‘the goal of telling one true story about reality, one must also give up trying to tell less false stories’ (Harding (1996), 314). And here lies the contradiction: She doesn’t want to abandon objectivity since she wants to reject relativism. As she states, ‘standpoint theory does not advocate—nor is doomed to—relativism. It argues against the ideas that all social situations provide equally useful resources for learning about the world and against the idea that they all set equally strong limits on knowledge’ (Harding (1993), 61). She doesn’t want to say that your account is as good as mine, especially if your account is androcentric. More controversial, and harder to sustain within her own account, is her argument that ‘some social situations are scientifically better than others as places from which to start off knowledge projects’ (61). But what makes one situation ‘scientifically better’ than another? On what basis does one make this judgment without relying on some form of empiricism? How do we judge between different accounts and avoid the problem of essentialism, that is, making assumptions about groups of people (women, aboriginals, disabled) that they share essential qualities? How do we avoid the hierarchies of oppression set up by standpoint (which oppression are we privileging: race, class, or gender?), and how do we avoid idealizing oppression of different groups? (On (1993)). Here Harding reaches an impasse and argues for ‘ strong objectivity,’ making the context of discovery part of the research and, therefore, acknowledging one’s own subjectivity to make one more objective. ‘Strong objectivity requires that the subject of knowledge be placed on the same critical, causal plane as the objects of knowledge. Thus, strong objectivity requires what we can think of as “strong reflexivity”’ (Harding (1993), 69). Strong reflexivity means ensuring that the underlying assumptions and positions of both researchers and re-
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searched are observed and reflected upon. The subject of knowledge becomes part of the object of knowledge and the context of discovery becomes part of the method itself (70). But is this really incompatible with feminist empiricism? How can we have the notion of ‘strong objectivity’ without recourse to some form of empiricism? And how is strong objectivity not intimately connected to the individual knower, as in feminist empiricism? As Rose puts it: feminists who work with quantitative methods also want to ‘redefine “objectivity” in terms of the need to make one’s position known rather than invisible, and by limiting claims to universal applicability of findings—whether these stem from quantitative or qualitative research’ (2001, 6). Harding, however, explicitly rejects the work of philosophers of science like Helen Longino and Lynn Nelson (Harding (1993), 51). She argues that though they offer ‘sophisticated and valuable feminist empiricist philosophies of science,’ they are not really empiricists because they accept ideas that would be ‘anathema’ to traditional empiricists, such as the ‘inescapable but also sometimes positive influence of social values and interests in the content of science’ (51). Perhaps Harding should read Braybrooke’s account of the changes within naturalism or look more closely at Longino and Nelson. Helen Longino’s work suggests that we should detach ‘knowledge from an ideal of absolute or unitary truth’ (Longino (1993), 114). Like Braybrooke’s recognition of the limits of naturalism, she uses the ‘semantic or model-theoretic’ view of science and in very similar terms as Braybrooke. Comparisons are drawn between the real world and the theoretical world, and metaphors and semantics are used to assist with the understanding. ‘The adequacy of a theory conceived as a model is determined by our being able to map some subset of the relations/structures posited in the model onto some portion of the experienced world’ (115). Thus, various sub-communities within a larger (scientific or social scientific) community will create numerous theories, models, and ideologies. Knowledge becomes active, not static, and multiple ways of knowing are validated (Longino (1993, 1996)). Lynn Nelson’s work on epistemological communities could also be valuable to the acceptance of feminist empiricism (Nelson (1993,
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1996)). She argues that communities construct knowledge because communities are prior to individuals. What I can know is only what we know (Nelson (1993), 124). She draws on Quine’s work on naturalized epistemology to show how radically interdependent methods and knowledge are, and how we begin knowledge with the historical, social, and scientific practices of a community. She argues that ‘knowledge is socially constructed and constrained by evidence’ (129). Her example of man-the-hunter theories is illustrative here. Quoting Longino, when anthropologists or archaeologists have examined chipped stones and then theorized that the stones were used by the men for hunting (as opposed to the women for gathering), they are filling in the gap between theory and data with their own assumptions, stereotypes, and biases about the relations between men and women (143-4). There is no direct evidence for either theory. Therefore, we have to make gender relations part of the research project itself. Her conclusions suggest that we do not need to reply on ‘one timeless truth’ even as we ‘demand more empirically adequate knowledge’ (151). Similarly, Richmond Campbell and his work on naturalized epistemology would be helpful to Harding, as he seems to accept her view that ‘the influence of feminist values can make the process of testing more likely to track the truth and hence more objective than it would otherwise be’ (Campbell (1998), 2-3). He wants to give a ‘realist conception of objectivity [that] is compatible with feminist political goals,’ that, in fact, requires them, and he ‘doesn’t want to reject the idea of truth or the possibility of impartial inquiry’ (6). What he does that she doesn’t (and probably should) is accept that values and knowledge can be socially constructed and objective. For example, don’t feminists want to be able to say that women are oppressed by such and such and here’s how? That ‘women’s subordination exists and is wrong’ (socially constructed and objective)? (2). Campbell, similar to Braybrooke, recognizes there is a ‘corresponding interdependence between facts and meanings and that meaning and value can’t be ascertained independent of each other’ (3). Many of the arguments he develops over the course of the book align with Braybrooke and would probably help Harding’s own arguments: political values don’t make objective inquiry impossible; science is not
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always value-neutral; realism (‘a world existing independently of how we think of it’) can be reconciled with the belief there isn’t one true description of reality; and finally, as I’ve outlined above, even realists can see inquiry as socially constructed and value laden (2). His naturalized epistemology would recognize the ‘social and reflexive nature of knowledge’ (4), and would ‘reinforce and extend the present feminist critiques of androcentric science and the fact/value dichotomy but it promises to do so by contributing to a politically useful account of objectivity that is uncompromising in its realist implications’ (2). But for the realism, this sounds a lot like Harding. Ironically, Harding may herself be moving in this direction. In her most recent anthology (Harding (2004)), she seems to be suggesting that perhaps epistemological relativism is not the horror that was previously thought. She gives four reasons why ‘relativist fears can be set aside’ (not that feminist standpoint is not relativist, which she has argued in the past) (11). Similar to Braybrooke (and Campbell), Harding argues that just because a research project was shaped by values or interests doesn’t mean that ‘empirical or theoretical quality of the research’ is necessarily contaminated (11), which seems quite different from her earlier writings on androcentric research projects. Second, she argues that ‘claims of any sort only [have] meaning in some particular cultural context,’ which is certainly an interpretive claim that she has previously dismissed. Third, she recognizes that we all have to make choices ‘between value-laden and interested claims’ and yet we ‘gather all the information we can from every kind of source available, weigh it and tentatively choose’ (11). I’m not entirely sure how this helps her argument but I think she means that even if it is relativist, we still act, and therefore judgments and decisions are still made because of relativist information. ‘We would regard as mentally disturbed someone who let himself be paralysed by relativist considerations’ (11). Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of this paper, ‘we need to work out an epistemology that can account for both this reality that our best knowledge is socially constructed and also that it is empirically accurate’ (12), which resonates with Longino, Nelson, Campbell, and Braybrooke. Maybe there is a unity after all.
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8.5
Conclusions
In this chapter, I have tried to show how Braybrooke’s work has influenced the development of the philosophy of the social sciences and how it has paralleled certain feminist critiques of science, social science, and epistemology. Braybrooke argues that there is a unity of method in the social sciences, and I would argue that though a debate still goes on in some circles, many feminists accept that claim as well. He gives good grounds for not dismissing quantitative methods out of hand, and shows how both can and should be used in research projects. He recognizes the changes within naturalism and the natural sciences, which would make feminist criticisms of the fact-value dichotomy more mainstream than before, and less problematic for the dilemma of relativism. The complementarity between naturalism and interpretive theory resonates with the multi-methods of feminists, and a naturalized feminist epistemology would go some distance in addressing standpoint theorists’ concerns about the philosophy of social science. Though not his definitive words on the subject, I’m sure, I’ll leave the final words for Braybrooke: Once the relations within and between the schools have been assessed again, with the lessons about postmodernism allowed for, the relations can be described as relations of inquiries— inquiries concerned with rules, concerned with regularities, concerned with texts, concerned with subjective experience. If one likes, the distinction between the schools, having served all the purposes mentioned, can then be left behind as a historical curiosity. (Braybrooke (1998b), 840)
Chapter 9
Empathy and Egoism S UE C AMPBELL
Abstract In Natural Law Modernized, David Braybrooke raises the important question of why default egoism—that is, egoism as the default account of human motivation—continues to dominate the imagination of philosophical ethics. In this paper, I use recent work by Braybrooke and by Nancy Sherman to argue that reliance on moral sentiment theories can re-inscribe egoism in accounts of moral motivation that attempt a more social starting place, and that this re-inscription blocks our understanding of group identifications. Default egoism slips into Braybrooke’s own account of motivation with his use of Humean moral sentiment. Braybrooke, however, also offers a naturalistic picture of our moral development as persons, which picture is independent of his use of moral sentiment theory. Braybrooke’s conception of moral education does dislodge default egoism, and I highlight the conception of persons that allows him to move away from egoism.
9.1
Introduction
An admirable feature of the political ethics of David Braybrooke is his insistence on a resolutely social starting place for ethics: the conviction that core questions in ethical theory concern and are addressed to members of communities who share or can be educated to share an interest in communal thriving. The conviction is evident in his attention 221
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to needs as the human imperative to which our political proposals ought to respond (Braybrooke (1987a)), and in an account of moral motivation which supports the centrality of meeting needs in his work. To wit, Braybrooke contends that the rational egoist of traditional ethics is a philosophical golem who distracts theorists from deriving a sound account of moral motivation as founded in fellow feeling and shared purposes. Our relationships exhibit ‘mutual commitment transcending the demand that others be able to make a productive contribution to a society of mutual advantage,’ and a complete ethics needs to discern from whence this commitment derives (Braybrooke (2001), 199). Braybrooke writes: The party that wants to found ethics on rational egoism asks this, without any conviction that it can be answered, or even needs to be, as a question about how the commitment can be added to rational egoism as something that goes beyond egoism. The party that does not believe in rational egoism as a foundation for ethics thinks the question needs to be answered, but may understand it in the same way, assuming that rational egoism is at the very least the default case of (mature) human motivation and that we need an explanation of how anything more generous in motivation appears ... It is not rational egoism, however, that comes first, or serves as the default case. (199) Braybrooke in fact contends that as persons are socially shaped towards engaging in common projects and thus towards sharing interests, egoism would have to be understood as, at best, a degraded form of human motivation. I share Braybrooke’s commitment to an account of moral motivation grounded in an understanding of persons as shaped through their communal lives. P sychological egoism is implausible as a description of a widespread psychological orientation. There thus seems little reason to defend egoism as the best that we are capable of morally. More to the point of Braybrooke’s remarks, I believe that habitual philosophical engagement with egoism is not a good use of time for theorists like my-
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self who are concerned with issues of group hierarchy, group conflict, and the need to theorize cosmopolitan alternatives to present relationships of group exploitation and harm. Braybrooke raises the important question of why default egoism—that is, egoism as the default account of human motivation—continues to dominate the imagination of philosophical ethics. A number of ethical theorists have seen our emotional capacities for empathy or fellow feeling as an alternative to grounding ethics in our undoubted capacities for self-interest. In this paper I test Braybrooke’s insights and concerns about default egoism against two such theories of moral motivation. I draw the first from recent work by prominent virtue theorist Nancy Sherman (Sherman (1998b); ?). The second account is Braybrooke’s own, from Natural Law Modernized (2001). Both Sherman and Braybrooke have insisted that philosophers move away from an exclusive focus on reason and pay more attention to emotion in accounts of moral motivation. Indebted to the history of moral sentiment theories, both focus on human capacities to sympathetically engage with others’ feelings and argue that our sociable capacities befit us to support the good of others.1 I pose a potential dilemma for Sherman and Braybrooke: highlighting our capacities for fellow feeling in order to direct an alternative to an ethics of self-interest may simply continue to reinscribe egoism as the default case of moral motivation. I use Sherman’s work on empathy and cosmopolitanism to highlight and expand on the importance of Braybrooke’s concerns about default egoism. Sherman’s theory of empathy represents persons as egoists in ways that conflict directly with the empirical research on which she relies. Default egoism is an assumption of her view. Braybrooke’s insight is that default egoism thwarts our attempts to properly conceive the conditions of communal thriving. Sherman offers empathic altruism as a solution to egoism; in her theory, however, it is merely egoism’s Janus face. I shall argue that the motivational frame of egoism/altruism both fails to capture our collective identifications and blocks attention to their presence. If we do not understand these identifications, there is no possi1 Sherman defends the possibility of moral cosmopolitanism; Braybrooke defends the more modest possibility of a widespread commitment to common goods.
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bility of offering a normative ethical theory that can support communal thriving. Sherman’s theory is an instructive case study of the kinds of conceptual and metaphorical structures in which accounts of empathy and fellow feeling tend to be embedded and which make egoism difficult to dislodge. I shall show that default egoism in fact slips into Braybrooke’s own account of motivation with his use of Humean moral sentiment. Braybrooke, however, also offers a naturalistic picture of our development as persons that is independent of his use of moral sentiment theory. I argue that Braybrooke’s conception of moral education does dislodge default egoism, and I highlight a very different kind of representation of the self implicit in his thinking. I offer two preliminary remarks to clarify the scope of this paper. First, philosophers distinguish between different kinds of commitment to egoism in a theory of moral motivation, and I am interested in only one type. Philosophers have distinguished between advancing the descriptive claim that people act in predominantly or wholly self-interested ways—psychological egoism—and the normative claim that only actions which maximize self-interest are right and/or rational—variously, ethical and rational egoism (Feinberg (1978); Shaver (1998)). Commitments to psychological and normative egoism are closely linked. A description of people as predominantly egoistic places pragmatic limits on what can be expected as ethical or rational action, and a defence of ethical or rational egoism typically depends for its plausibility on the assumption that people are predominantly psychological egoists. Sherman and Braybrooke are interested in deriving normative ethical positions via realistic naturalized accounts of human motivation. I thus take them to be primarily denying that people are predominant psychological egoists.2 The relation of empathy to psychological egoism (to which I refer simply as ‘egoism’) is the focus of this paper. Second, in assessing feminist challenges to the contracting individual of traditional Western political theory, Genevieve Lloyd argues that ‘the exercise of imagination is often central’ to challenges to moral the2 Braybrooke explicitly denies the normative claim that rational action is co-extensive with self-interested action, but does so by showing the implausibility of psychological egoism.
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ory (Lloyd (2000), 113). Lloyd points out that when we confront a familiar theoretical model of the self with an undertheorized area of experience, we often become aware of the inadequate fit between the model and experience. This dissonance can make salient certain unexamined features of our models of the self and press us towards understandings more adequate to the experiences we are discussing. My intent is to make salient how we represent or imagine persons as egoists through accounts of empathy and fellow feeling, and to use Braybrooke’s work on moral education to suggest an alternative.3
9.2 Sherman’s Account of Empathy In recent work, Nancy Sherman seeks a naturalized approach to moral motivation ‘at once sensitive to the rigors of a philosophical account and respectful of the increasing empirical evidence we have of how we are constructed as psychological creatures’ (?, 109). She argues that our capacities for empathy provide an alternative or additional basis for a cosmopolitan ethics to that offered through Stoic or Kantian conceptions of a universal moral community founded on reason: ‘Studies suggest there are more ubiquitous and fundamental ways we step beyond our egocentric perspectives. These involve empathy and its precursors ... What seems increasingly confirmed is that we step out of our egocentric, and by extension, culturally parochial worlds through mechanisms such as empathy’ (Sherman (1998b), 80-1). The concept of empathy has developed through a long and complex theoretical history, and Sherman makes considerable use of this history to explain empathy and map its variations. What seems central to empathy throughout its lineage is the somewhat vague idea of being able to take on another’s perspective to a situation and thereby respond as 3 This paper is generally indebted to Lloyd’s work. It is also indebted to Khadija Coxon’s work on empathy (Coxon (2003)). Coxon advances the interesting position that focus on empathic accuracy as the primary problem for empathy theory is in fact symptomatic of a non-relational understanding of persons. The focus assumes that others’ thoughts and feelings are fully formed and there for us to take up or ignore and does not attend to how our efforts to understand others may shape their experiences and subjectivities. Following Coxon’s lead, I am concerned in this paper not with empathic accuracy but with broader moral considerations involving how we conceive people through theories of empathy and fellow feeling.
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they are responding or would respond. Adam Smith, Sherman’s preferred touchstone, writes: ‘By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation ... we enter, as it were, into his body and become in some measure the same person with him; and thence form some idea of his sentiments, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them’ (Smith (1759), 47-8, quoted in ?, 88). There are two familiar aspects to Smith’s attempt to make concrete empathy as a mechanism for gaining access to others’ thoughts and feelings: an offer of spatial metaphor involving change of location (‘we enter, as it were, into his body’) and reference to the human capacities or tendencies—in this passage, imagination—which might defend the appropriateness of such metaphors. The dual way of concretizing empathy occurs throughout Sherman’s account. On the one hand she refers to empathy as a kind of ‘active transport’ (?, 87). On the other, and crucially given her commitments to a naturalized moral psychology, she offers an extensive survey of recent empirical work on children’s capacities for motor mimicry, shared attention, and imagination, specifically role-playing. For example, three-day-old neonates can and do mimic mouth opening and tongue extension, as well as the crying of similarly aged neonates. Children and their caretakers engage in mimetic synchronies, picking up shared rhythms of behaviour (?, 104). Moreover, children are ‘robust pretenders,’ and this, Sherman writes, ‘undoubtedly contributes to their learning to role play in a way required for understanding others’ beliefs’ (106). Sherman takes the studies she surveys to support claims about the biological nature of our empathetic capacities and the ubiquity of our empathetic responses. In addition, Sherman refers to studies that allegedly support the thesis that empathy predisposes us to sympathy towards others and thus motivates us to behave altruistically. Altruism is sometimes understood as acting on others’ interests in ways that compromise one’s own welfare. Sherman uses the term to mean simply that we act on others’ interests while putting aside our own. This latter use is relatively standard in philosophical texts that contrast egoism and altruism, and I follow it in this paper. Finally, there is a distinction in Sherman’s work between two modes
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of empathic engagement, which distinction is important to understanding her representation of the empathic self. In imagining Ella’s situation, for example, I might try to imagine myself as Ella, attempting to grasp her response through an act of self transformation. Alternatively, I might imagine myself in Ella’s situation, an act of projection, then analogizing from my own response to Ella’s likely response. This latter mode of inference remains empathy-like in its objective of trying to gain access to others’ perspectives in order to share and thus understand their responses. Sherman allows a greater role for projective empathy than most theorists yet concedes that this mode may at best give us information about how we ourselves would respond to a situation. Transformative empathy remains Sherman’s ideal of empathetic engagement, a normative heuristic for our empathy projects, and she suggests our early capacities for mimicry can be seen as its developmental building blocks (101-2). Sherman joins a number of other recent theorists in hypothesizing that empathy is a fundamental way of understanding others. She suggests that the empirical work she discusses gives credence to claims that empathy grounds our ability to form shared conceptions, to form attachments with others, to achieve the self-knowledge that comes from understanding how we are seen, and the self-esteem that comes from feeling understood ((1998a), 84). Most important, empathy should hold pride of place in our accounts of moral motivation. Through empathetic engagement we overcome both egoism and cultural parochialism and develop altruistic tendencies that extend beyond family, associates, and fellow citizens to ‘those outside our borders’ (Sherman (1998b), 103).
9.3
Default Egoism in Sherman
Notable in Sherman are persistent and unreflective references to egoism and altruism as the frame both for understanding the nature of empathy and for persuading us of its moral importance. To use Braybrooke’s language, Sherman’s project is to understand our commitments to others, and she sees this task as one of describing how our commitments transcend or go beyond egoism. Sherman argues that empathy is the
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primary way in which we move from an egoistic perspective to a more generous altruistic one. Because altruism is the motivational structure through which Sherman understands our will to be other-interested, research into our empathetic capacities so as to encourage their development is key to normative ethics. I thus take Sherman to be committed to default egoism in an account of moral motivation. Note that we move from an initial, presumably natural egoism to a developed altruism. I now sketch some of the ways in which egoism creates problems for the coherence of her account and subverts its objectives. Most strikingly, though the importance of empathy allegedly derives from the necessity of overcoming egoism, Sherman’s description of empathy undermines her supposition that we are egoists. Sherman commits herself to a strong position on the epistemic function of empathy. It is, she suggests, a primary way of understanding others’ minds; from the age of five on, we empathize with others in our daily intercourse with them in order to explain and predict their behaviour. On Sherman’s view, the egoist could not get on in the world at all, as such a person would not be able to understand or predict the behaviour of those around her. Sherman’s account arguably renders egoism impossible. Yet, in Sherman, it is the morally problematic place of our naturally egoist perspective to which the moral importance of empathy answers. What I take to be an incoherence in Sherman’s account—that egoism is necessary to generate our commitment to empathy theory, but is not tenably maintained in the face of that theory—obviously threatens one of her objectives. We cannot understand how empathy responds to the problem of egoism if our natural tendencies to empathize make egoism a psychological non-starter. It is important to note that we have no reason to suppose that any account of the empathic egoist would be similarly incoherent. The problem in Sherman is clearly tied to her epistemic use of empathy as our primary mode of access to others’ minds. The problem does serve to focus our attention squarely on egoism and to compel us to ask why it is there as an assumption. In other words, the uncomfortable role of egoism in Sherman’s account can show us why default egoism can be so difficult for empathy theorists to avoid. Before turning to this issue, I
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will outline what further damage egoism does to Sherman’s aspirations. Sherman postulates that through empathy we can overcome our tendencies towards cultural parochialism and, thus, move towards moral cosmopolitanism. Sherman uses the phrase ‘cultural parochialism’ to gesture towards the morally problematic aspects of our collective lives that come from identifying too exclusively with the interests of those whom we take to be similar to ourselves. Some philosophers have worried that empathy exacerbates rather than ameliorates parochialism, a possibility of concern to Sherman: There is one final point of linkage between empathy studies and moral theory that needs to be discussed. And this is the theme I began with, of cosmopolitanism. Can empathy break out beyond parochial boundaries of similarity and familiarity? ... In the end, do we merely trade egocentrism for ethnocentrism, or something like it? (?, 113) The important discussion is never held. Because egoism is structurally situated as the primary problem for moral motivation, the problem of parochialism is simply deferred. It is Sherman’s ‘final point of linkage’ and she addresses it by noting that ‘these are complex matters, but empirical studies can further advance our understanding’ (113). There are also serious and subtle ways in which default egoism misleads us about the problematic dimensions of our collective identifications. Because Sherman positions egoism as the default case of mature human motivation, egoism is the core motivational structure from which other problematic psychological tendencies are held derivative. It is thus an assumption of Sherman’s view that cultural parochialism is an extension of egoism. We have no reason to accept this assumption. As egoism itself has no real descriptive grounding in the account, it is not available to explain group allegiance. Without some understanding of the problem to which empathy responds, there is nothing on which to rest the claim that empathy will ameliorate parochialism. Relatedly, as Sherman pictures individuals as egoists, they are without complex motivational structures derived from their relations to others. Imagining culturally parochial worlds as extensions of egocentric
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worlds homogenizes the character of cultures, distracting our attention from their internal complexities. The term ‘cultural parochialism’ itself paves over differences within culture. When Sherman talks of the will to ally with those outside our borders, she neglects the existence of group hierarchy and harm that is internal to complex and diverse societies. I call these problems serious and subtle because I do not think theorists have properly seen that the tendency to homogenize group life is sometimes linked to beginning a discussion of moral agency from the standpoint of the egoist individual. I will have more to say about this tendency when I examine Sherman’s imagery and when I turn to Braybrooke’s account of moral education. Finally, psychological egoism is a theory of individual moral psychology. Joel Feinberg made the point decades ago that the assumption of universal psychological egoism leaves us without a way to make a distinction between people who really are selfish and those who are not (Feinberg (1978)). Sherman’s claim that parochialism is an extension of egoism may lead us to think that group selfishness is as universal as the individual egoism from which it somehow derives. Sherman’s account displaces our attention from the real global problem of moral selfishness which resides largely in the consumerism, greed, and will to exploit others manifest in Western nations and which requires an analysis of distinctive group characteristics and relations. Sherman’s strong endorsement of an empathy-based account of moral motivation is obviously and explicitly programmatic in intent. This is not the basis of my criticism. My concern is that normative ethics should respond to a description of real moral concerns. Default egoism takes up a place in Sherman’s account that should be occupied by an account of the real-world harms and injustices for which empathetic engagement with others might be a helpful response. David Braybrooke writes: ‘In the world at large, the excesses of group feeling are far more destructive of ethics than the excesses of self-interest. In the face of these excesses, philosophers and moralists are arguing for a possibility of moral community that often fails to be realized, sometimes it seems, on every hand’ (Braybrooke (2001), 146). Sherman offers us no insights into moral failures that derive from our allegiances. Unlike the golem
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of default egoism, these allegiances are very clearly a problem for the cosmopolitan ethicist and they take forms whose variety can only be obscured by the claim that when we see how empathy can help us transcend egoism, we will see that it can help us with parochialism. I take Sherman’s inability to deal at all realistically with group identifications, allegiances, and hostilities to be the most serious cost of default egoism in her account. Whether Braybrooke can deal realistically with these allegiances will be a test of his account. The unstable positioning of default egoism in Sherman’s account, and the problems it causes both for coherence and the promise of an approach to ethics that highlights our capacities for empathy, raise the question of why she is committed to egoism/altruism as a conceptual framework for thinking about empathy. Is there something about Sherman’s understanding of empathy that tends to drag egoism in its undercarriage? It is important to address this question if we are to avoid the common philosophical tendency to re-inscribe egoism in our theorizing.
9.4
Imagining Empathic Selves
Like most philosophers, Sherman pays little attention to the metaphors through which empathy is concretized. The history of describing empathy is strikingly spatial, and Sherman depends on this history as a primary way to locate and elaborate the concept of empathy and to mould her distinctive use of it for moral cosmopolitanism. The metaphors involve both change of place and the idea of empathy as overcoming distance. I suggest these metaphors reinforce a dichotomous motivational structure of self-interest versus other–interest that leaves egoism in place. Many theorists have described taking on others’ perspectives as a change in location. Adam Smith described what he called ‘sympathy’ as a case of trading places with others in fancy. One then brings the case back ‘to one’s own bosom,’ comparing the others’ feelings and thoughts, available through sympathy, to one’s own, and judging the appropriateness of the others’ responses (Smith (1759), 141, quoted in ?, 89). Edward Titchener, who first used the term ‘empathy,’ con-
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ceived it as an exploration of foreign environments: ‘as we read about the forest, we may, as it were, become the explorer; we feel for ourselves the gloom, the silence, the humidity, the oppression, the sense of lurking danger; everything is strange but it is to us that strange experience has come’ (Titchener (1915), 198, quoted in Sherman (1998b), 110). The psychologist Carl Rogers, who developed empathy theory as a therapeutic model, spoke of ‘entering the private perceptual world of another and becoming thoroughly at home in it . . . To be with another in this way means that for the time being you lay aside the views and values you hold for yourself in order to enter another world without prejudice’ (Rogers (1975), 4, quoted in ?, 92). Sherman herself links the development work that she surveys to a five-year-old’s ability to make accurate predictions of others’ behaviour through metaphorical description that continues the theme of changing place: ‘Five year olds can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. In figuring out others’ behaviour, they can leave behind the egocentric point of view ... This developmental transition is important, because it marks the milestone at which we break out of our egocentric world, and begin to see, in a substantive way, through others’ eyes’ (Sherman (1998b), 112-13). Many metaphors of change of place, Titchener’s for example, also involve a sense of distance, and Sherman often adds the connotation of distance to her descriptions by characterizing the places visited as alien and remote. She comments, for example, that ‘several points indicate widely held views about empathy in the clinical domain. First is the metaphor of empathy as perceiving another’s mind in a way that allows one to become familiar with its alien habits and terrain’ (?, 92). The possibility of transformative empathy that is Sherman’s normative heuristic is made concrete through the idea of a change of place. Empathy as active transport is conceived as leaving the self, pictured as one spatial territory, in order to enter a second self conceived as a different spatial territory: a body, environment, world, pair of shoes, or pair of eyes. I can achieve another’s perspective because in empathizing I have left behind the values and responses that characterize my own perspective and might, if carried with me, bias an empathic encounter. The spatial metaphor of leaving oneself to occupy another is not in-
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dissoluble from empathy as a concept, as some empathy theorists have modelled what Sherman refers to as a projective rather than a transformative ideal. However, Sherman’s use of this metaphor to support a transformative ideal makes it difficult to avoid the conceptual frame of egoism/altruism. On Sherman’s model, self-interests are placed in one world bounded and distinguished from a second world characterized by the others’ interests. When we engage someone’s interests through empathy, we transport ourselves to them, leaving our interests behind. This picture leaves egoism and altruism, traditionally conceived as being self-interested versus being other-interested in a way that excludes selfinterest, as the most tempting frame for conceiving the interest structure of empathy. Any serious moral engagement with others’ interests means leaving the self and its interests behind, so the basic egoist individual, one characterized solely by self-interest, is embedded in empathy as its starting point. Sherman utilizes the spatiality of empathy to make it seem especially suitable to moral cosmopolitanism. Sherman describes moral growth as a matter of moving steadily outward from the ego/self towards family, friends, countrymen, and finally the distant others beyond our borders, first gaining access to their interests through empathy and then being moved to action. C ultural parochialism is a result of empathy’s not being sufficiently ‘far-flung,’ and Sherman urges us to overcome this distance: ‘the remoteness of a culture ... may not weigh heavily against understanding the shared dimensions of human suffering and loss’ (Sherman (1998b), 113).4 Sherman’s exploitation of distance allows us to press further on the inadequacy of her treatment of group affiliation. The distance that empathy metaphorically traverses makes it seem like the problem to which our ethics must respond is a lack of engagement with others rather than relations that exploit and harm them. Moreover, the metaphor of distance fixes our attention in the wrong place, away from our local inability to treat others well and thus it contributes to the homogenization of cultures in her account. Many of the harms that result from our group allegiances and identifications—the harms of racism, sexism, ethnocen4 ’Far-flung’
is how Sherman characterizes moral respect.
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trism, homophobia, and so on—are harms to those with whom we are in daily contact in diverse societies. The representation of the spatial self imported through empathy obscures the often destructive role of our collective identifications, specifically issues of group hierarchy in diverse societies.
9.5 Moral Sentiment I have used Sherman’s work to illustrate the force of Braybrooke’s concern about the tendency to understand moral commitment in ways that leave egoism intact. Although Sherman is committed to a naturalized account of moral motivation that shows how we develop towards sociability and concern for others, the egoist is firmly entrenched in Sherman’s view through spatial metaphors for empathy that offer self-interest versus other-interest as the only options for moral motivation. Through spatial metaphor we gain a representation of persons as originally egoist and at a distance from others. Moral growth is seen as the problem of engagement achieved through sympathetic altruism. Although moral sentiment theories are by no means the exclusive home of spatial metaphors for the self, Adam Smith is the primary philosophical influence on Sherman’s account of empathy, and Smith and Hume are key reference points in the history of the concept. I now turn to Braybrooke’s endorsement of Hume to raise my caution about the legacy of moral sentiment theory. Braybrooke musters Hume in support of his interesting thesis that the natural law tradition he defends has had a robust presence in the history of modern ethics. He also uses Hume to develop his own attention to emotion in the theory of moral motivation and he implies that Hume’s theory of moral sentiment is compatible with his own account of moral education. I will go on to suggest that Braybrooke’s imagining of the self is very different than Hume’s. In both the Treatise and the Inquiry, Hume defends versions of the thesis that people are naturally disposed to sympathy with others, ‘and in accordance with this concern, moved to support whatever is useful to them’ (Braybrooke (2001), 129). Our approval of what benefits others
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is referred to by Braybrooke as the sentiment of humanity or humane feeling. Because the sentiment of humanity is universal (common to all and extending to all) and directed to what is useful for others, it seems particularly suitable to an account of motivation that makes a case for our capacity to support communal thriving. There is a great deal of commentary and dispute about the best account of both humane feeling, the Humean ‘moral sentiment,’ and of the sympathy on which it is based. Hume’s account of sympathy (his contribution to empathy theory) suggests that when we are in the presence of another’s passion, we form such a lively idea of it as becomes the passion itself (Hume (1978), 575). Commentators have struggled to make sense of this mechanism. My interest here, however, is not in exegesis of Hume but in how Braybrooke’s reading of Hume represents moral agency. In Hume, capacity for humane feeling may be hampered either by self-interest or partiality for family and friends, or by a distance from others in time and space that challenges the possibility of sympathy. Developing the sentiment of humanity requires compensating for these tendencies. On Braybrooke’s reading, self-interest and partiality are compensated for by our trained capacity to assume a fully disinterested perspective, that is, to bracket or put aside self-interest. Distance remains a problem (Braybrooke (2001), 146). The mechanism of fellow feeling requires real spatial contiguity, and the extension of fellow feeling to those at a distance is, as Braybrooke acknowledges, perhaps never made adequately viable in Hume’s account. Nevertheless, Braybrooke expresses optimism about Hume’s account of human feeling. ‘With hearts and minds unclouded by self-interest or partiality for family and friends, we feel for the sufferings of people long ago or on the other side of the planet; and correcting our judgements to take into account the distance, we find those sufferings a great deal more important than a transient scratch on one of our fingers’ (131). I do not know for certain how committed Braybrooke is to Hume’s sentiment of humanity, but, with Hume, Braybrooke assumes the familiar picture of the egoist self moving through distance towards others via the development of sympathetic bonds, first easily to family and friends,
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finally with more difficulty to distant others. First, we find again the immediate separation of self-interest from other-interest. We are moved to support what is useful to our fellows ‘when [our] own interest is not in question’ (Braybrooke (2001), 129). Braybrooke implies that our interests will either conflict with others’ interests or lead us to be indifferent to others. Second, we put aside our own interests in order to assume the perspectives of others. The sentiment of humanity depends on our being normal human beings, ‘fully equipped with the capacity to feel in a disinterested perspective’ (139). Finally, because distance attenuates sympathy, we are reinforced in the idea that the main impediment to communal thriving is disinterest in distant others, a preference for our near and dear. Hume’s moral sentiment theory does not involve trading places in imagination. But it does continue to represent the egoist self as at a spatial distance from others, moving towards them through bonds of sympathy. Moreover, Hume’s use of distance takes on a metaphorical cast. He remarks that we sympathize more with ‘our acquaintances than with strangers; with our countrymen than with foreigners,’ but given his account of fellowfeeling, we should sympathize equally with all who are spatially contiguous to us, be they strangers or friends (Hume (1978), 580). Felt separateness from others becomes troped once again through the notion of spatial distance. Hume’s account may at best explain why we must make exceptional effort to become emotionally engaged with distant others, but not why those spatially contiguous to us, who may differ from us in class, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, and so on, do not have our sympathy. Joan Tronto has argued that if we think of the actual historic context of moral sentiment theory, it is not odd that the sympathetic self and the egoist self are reciprocally reinforcing representations. In the eighteenth century Europe saw significant transformations in collective life. ‘While humans grew more distant from one another and the bonds between them became more formal and more formally equally, they also had to expand their gaze beyond the local to the nation, and indeed sometimes to the global level’ (Tronto (1993), 31). Because of the erosion of close communal forms of life, ‘the strength of self interest as a
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regulator of human activity became increasingly powerful’ (50). The metaphor of overcoming distance had a multi-layered significance for moral sentiment theorists. On the one hand, it spoke to the loss of communal forms of life whose regulatory function was being replaced by accounts of enlightened self-interest; on the other, of the need to engage with a wider range and variety of people and moral contexts. Sherman and Braybrooke both draw on the tradition of moral sentiment theory to find a description of moral psychology that is realistic and optimistic about our sociability. Both objectives are to some degree thwarted by their use of a tradition preoccupied by the representation of the self as at a distance from others, an egoist capable of fellow feeling.
9.6
Common Purpose and Relational Interests
The description of empathy as distance-reducing and as thereby encouraging other-directed interests is so familiar as an account of moral sociability that we may wonder what our options are. In the chapter on moral education in Natural Law Modernized, Braybrooke elaborates an account of universal childrearing that shows how we develop into persons via our enlistment into common projects and purposes. I shall argue that Braybrooke’s account of moral education offers us the option of relational interest as well as an account of human development that supports its centrality. In the final section of this chapter, I align his writing with recent feminist accounts of the self and emotion to argue that it provokes and requires a very different kind of philosophical imagining for the self than that found in moral sentiment theory, one more adequate to theorizing group hierarchy in complex cultures. Like Sherman’s, Braybrooke’s theory of motivation is modestly naturalized. But it is an account of our natural capacities as trained. Braybrooke’s theory of motivation is a description of moral education, an account of how children are raised to be sociable in ways that may lead them to support rules and laws that have as their end the good of the community. The core of the account is that, universally, we raise children to be persons by continually enlisting them in joint activities. The success of these cooperative activities requires that the participants de-
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velop mutual intentions and commitments towards a common end, understood as the good of that activity. Briefly, parents and other caretakers initially give significance to the innate responses of their infants; that is, they attribute to their infants desires, intentions, frustrations, and so on, and do so in order to devise patterns of interaction that will eventually make room for the child as a partner. As the child develops, the child and the adult come to rely on each other to fulfill their responsibilities in the partnership. Braybrooke writes: Children, like dogs and horses, can normally rely on commitments forthcoming from their mentors in return for the commitments that they themselves make. If Kate desists from throwing her porridge upon the floor, she will be left to eat in peace; it will be supplied in due quantity at due times. If Frank stays out of the street, the walks to the park will continue. Moreover, when things are working well, the commitment leads to achievement of common goods—the Common Good of each joint activity or ritual: Both mother and child act with the object of having the child regularly fed under a form of civility that both respect; both father and child act with the object of walking to the park and doing so in decent order and safety. (Braybrooke (2001), 204) Through these common activities, children’s needs are met in ways that enlist them into partnerships in which they share intentions and goals with others. Children develop not only pride in themselves for their contributions, but also trust in and concern for their partners, a valuing of mutual pleasure in the success of realizing shared intentions and interests, and cooperative dispositions towards other such activities. Parents and children have interests in common, but these interests are also shared interests. Braybrooke’s description of types of interests through which infants are eventually socialized into persons is not to be confused with a familiar philosophical picture of ‘parallel but solitary interests served by a common scheme of cooperation’ (64), that is, of self-interested individuals who act together in narrowly pragmatic ways.
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Participants in a shared activity take on responsibility for their contribution to the activity and hold themselves to be answerable to others for their contribution. But they also often take some responsibility for the contributions of others. They develop mutual care and concern for each other through their interactions and develop emotional dispositions that take as their object the activity as shared. For example, they take pleasure in shared achievement. Finally, they have a commitment to the shared activity. To think of my interests as parallel rather than shared suggests that when my hypothesized solitary interests would clearly be better met by an alternative arrangement, I would shift to that arrangement. But my commitment to a shared activity may make me reluctant to undertake such a shift. Put simply, if Frank’s father is sick and cannot go to the park, Frank may well decide to stay home and keep him company instead of going for his walk with someone else. As I understand Braybrooke, the responsibility, emotion, and commitment that characterize shared interests are neither conceptually nor developmentally independent. The emotional attitudes developed in the course of shared activities—for example, Frank’s concern for his father’s well-being— are partly constitutive of our having shared interests and commitments and act as evidence of them. Braybrooke is aware that too much of a disposition towards cooperativeness can lead to exploitation and that a sensible upbringing will encourage independence and autonomy as well as cooperativeness. But independence and autonomy are not conceived as deriving from egoism: ‘the point of departure . . . is not a person who is bifurcated between being sociable and being self-striving . . . The independence will be an independence that has a cast reflecting the development of cooperativeness’ (207). I gloss this remark by pointing out that our independence and autonomy as persons are cultivated in the kinds of developmental partnerships that Braybrooke describes. Braybrooke also allows that persons have egoistic as well as cooperative tendencies, and that a healthy adult community will include parallel interests. What Braybrooke insists on is that the kind of engagement in joint activities that he describes, engagement through which we develop as persons, puts the partners to the activities ‘outside of egoism’ in their re-
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lations with each other and in their commitments. Braybrooke’s account of the fundamental basis of our capacity to care for each other’s interests does not incorporate egoism as one of its stages. In other words, though Braybrooke responds to egoism, this response does not re-inscribe egoism within his view of motivation. Shared interests will form a dominant part of most individuals’ motivational matrix. Developmental activities, role-related activities, activities in institutions like sports or the military that specifically inculcate shared interests and emotions that bind participants, activities in which we participate as friends and lovers, and communal endeavours that continue over some period of time, can all be expected to give rise to such interests. Over the last two decades, feminist theorists have elaborated an account of persons as relationally constituted, as developing in and through their relationships with others. They have focused on how the facts of our interdependence should cause theorists to reconceptualize human capacities and values. Braybrooke’s work makes a distinctive contribution to this body of theory by attending to motivation. Braybrooke’s focus on shared interests forces us to see that we must look to collective structures and activities first in order to talk about an individual’s agency. This point can be sharpened by looking at a similar suggestion. Elliot Sober and David Sloan Wilson, in their classic study of altruism, recognize that egoism or altruism may be too spare a binary for thinking about the structure of human motivation and propose an alternative, ‘relationalism,’ as a way to think about many of our desires: ‘Relationalism is the view that people sometimes have ultimate desires that certain relational propositions (connecting self and certain others) be true’ (Sober and Wilson (1998), 226). Sober and Wilson’s wording, in response to classic formulations of egoism, is somewhat awkward; however, a great many of my desires are clearly relational under their description. I want it to be the case that the apples be divided equally between us, that I be a trustworthy mentor to my students, that our department excel at undergraduate teaching, that Jan and I have a good dinner tonight and a good trip to Australia in November—in general, that we achieve certain objectives through activities that I participate in as a member of various formal and informal partnerships and collec-
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tives. Nevertheless, Sober and Wilson’s use of desire to sketch an alternative to egoism/altruism leaves open the possibility of an agent with solitary interests in the context of shared activity. Braybrooke offers a model where the motives of individual agent derive from the shared interests formed through their collaborations with others.
9.7 Re-imagining the Self To use the felicitous phrasing of Genevieve Lloyd, Braybrooke forces the philosophical imagination to run from the collective to the individual, rather than, as is more common, the reverse. Lloyd’s writing on re-imagining the self can help us see that this move allows quite a different model of the self than that complicit with default egoism, and I use her work to more sharply distinguish the view of the self adumbrated in Braybrooke from that involved with default egoism. Lloyd talks about two levels of experience that the shift in imagination highlights: the specific experience of taking oneself to be bound up with others when we act and the complex experience of subjectivity that results from our shared activities over time. She writes that ‘spatial metaphors are powerful in our prevailing political ideals of selfhood, helping to reinforce the grip on the philosophical imagination of the sharply bordered individual’ (Lloyd (2000), 121). But such models are an ill fit with the experiences she describes. One of Lloyd’s striking illustrations of feeling bound up with others involves Pat Barker’s fictionalized account of poet Siegfried Sassoon’s return to the front in the First World War. In the first novel of Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, Sassoon no longer supports the war and is able to avoid returning to the trenches. His decision to return cannot be understood, Lloyd thinks, as either egoism or as patriotic altruism. Instead, she writes: ‘Solidarity with the dead sustains the character’s sense of self, and with it a responsibility to those ... doomed to death: “The Battalion in the Mud”, Out of the gloom they gather about my bed They whisper to my heart, their thoughts are mine.
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‘Why are you here with all your watches ended? From Ypres to Frise we sought you in the line.’ In bitter safety I awake, unfriended. (117) The poem is by the historic Sassoon. Lloyd’s point is that to try and pry apart self-concern or interest from other-concern or interest in order to give one or the other explanatory priority would violate the character of Sassoon’s experience of selfhood. She writes that Sassoon acts out of a sense of himself ‘as bound up with others, in ways that resist clear-cut divisions between self and other. [His] taking of responsibility is explicable only through relations that forge identities, in situations where there can be no clear cut distinction between self and other, between egoism and altruism’ (117). Sassoon’s identity is that of a friend, an identity forged through the joint project of men trying to keep each other safe in battle. This is not a project that can be described as having parallel but solitary interests in safety that are best met by joint activity, or we would have no explanation for why Sassoon returns to the front. Lloyd picks an example of shared interest that some might read as involving action in a context of extremity. Braybrooke’s account of moral education provides the basis for understanding the experience of feeling bound up with others when we act and take responsibility as an ordinary and familiar part of our moral lives. Like many ordinary features of our lives, it may only become phenomenologically apparent when it becomes a site of tension, when particular shared interests seem to conflict with our own welfare or with the welfare of others. Sassoon’s shared interests threatened his own survival, and friends urged him not to return to the front. A way of thinking about at least some cases of enmeshment, or over-identification with others, is as situations in which our shared interests may come to conflict with what is best for others. Though philosophers rarely discuss enmeshment as a moral problem, it is common in those relationships, like parent/child or mentor/student, in which more senior partners must eventually shift out of the joint activities that have characterized the relationship and allow those younger to take control.5 Though such examples bring shared interests to the 5 For some discussion, see Stocker and Hegeman (1996); Piper (1991). Sherman makes reference to Piper’s work (Sherman (1998a)).
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fore as a point of tension, they can help us see the wide base of shared interests out of which we act. Philosophers who want to defeat the egoist have sometimes imagined this figure as a psychopath,6 but this imagining has been not been effective in locating and dislodging default egoism, the kind of egoism of Sherman’s theory that is compatible with the claim that people aren’t really egoists because they have transcended egoism. To think about our experience of self and agency in ways made possible by Lloyd and Braybrooke gives us a better way to ask what we are imagining when we understand persons through a motivational structure of egoism/altruism. The interest structure offered by egoism/altruism and offered in Sherman’s account of empathy gives us a portrait of people who have the capacity to sharply distinguish self- and other-interest in ways that fail to reflect common experiences of self and moral agency. The alternative model of motivation that I have forefronted in Braybrooke becomes richer when we follow Lloyd’s advice and move explicitly from picturing selves spatially to explicitly contemplating the temporal dimensions of selfhood. Like Braybrooke, Lloyd regards taking on responsibilities and forming bonds of identification, bonds through which our interests become shared, as reciprocal movements in our development as persons. But she would argue that Braybrooke’s account of moral education gives only a snapshot of human sociability; it captures at a time an ongoing process of developing allegiances that shape one’s sense of self. We may think of this process narratively. We come to think of ourselves as persisting subjects by interpreting and appropriating the events of our pasts through narratives about who we are and why we acted thus (Schechtman (1996); Walker (1998b)). Many of these narratives will, like Sassoon’s, be narratives of relation, and each of us will have many such narratives. ‘The fact that a self is intrinsically something that has a past means that there is an internal multiplicity to selfhood’ (Lloyd (2000), 122). Lloyd affirms with Braybrooke that the formation of selves ‘is a collective matter’ (118) but adds that we must understand persons as bearing this complexity in the way that they experience their identities, responsibilities, interests, emotions, and oppor6 See,
for example, Thomas (1980)
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tunities for agency. We thus no longer have a picture of moral progress as one of moving outward from a self that has a uniform motivational structure to engage with the interests of similar others, which interests are kept distinct from self-interest on pain of empathic bias. It should be clear that this relational model of the self renders Braybrooke’s additional use of Hume’s moral sentiment theory retrograde. Braybrooke’s reading of Hume offers the options of self-interested or other–and–not–self-interested, excluding room for the very forms of relational desire that are so important in the account of common purpose and moral development. Moreover, for Hume, normal moral agency requires that we can clearly distinguish our own self-interests from others’ interests. I have suggested, however, that Braybrooke’s account of moral education leads to a view of self whose interests are bound up with those of others in ways that call into question how far we are capable of distinguishing our own interests from those of others, especially given the complexity of our relational development over time. The alternative, relational representation of the self that I have tried to make vivid through Braybrooke and Lloyd, does, I think, offer opportunities to better understand the moral problems of group hierarchy in complex and diverse cultures. First, in recognizing that individuals themselves have complicated relational identities, we will not inadvertently homogenize cultures by imagining them (as Sherman does) as extensions of single egocentric worlds. Second, Braybrooke and Lloyd encourage us to think of how individuals’ motivational structures are shaped through collective purposes and interests in ways that depend on and shape their emotional development. They stress that our coming to feel certain ways is interwoven with our engagement in joint activities, and the emotional dimension of our engagement is part of what constitutes shared interests. When we picture the self as sharply bordered and at a distance from others, our attention remains on the development of sympathy—the question is how a self becomes engaged with the interests of others. The focus on sympathy, moreover, tends to bring with it this view of the self. If we view the self as shaped already through collective activities and common purposes, we do not have the bare egoist self for whom the main challenge is one of engagement, and we can turn
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our attention from sympathy to the wider range of emotions that play a role in our group life. Margaret Urban Walker has argued, for example, that our emotional responses form one of the primary ways in which we are collectively shaped to maintain political hierarchies (Walker (1998a)).7 She draws attention to the work of Lillian Smith, an anti-racist activist in the American south in the 1940s and 1950s. In her autobiography, Killers of the Dream, Smith writes, ‘I do not think our mothers were aware that they were teaching us lessons. It was as if they were revolving mirrors reflecting life outside the home, inside their memory, outside the home, and we were the spectators entranced by the bright and terrible images we saw there’ (Smith (1950), 83). These words, which invoke Lloyd’s account of our complex subjectivities, are part of Smith’s introduction to ‘The Lessons.’ In this chapter, Smith details how white southern children learned lessons about cleanliness, food, sin, and sexuality in ways interwoven with training in racial segregation: The lesson on segregation was only a logical extension of the lessons on sex and white superiority and God. Not only Negros but everything dark, dangerous, evil must be pushed to the rim of one’s life. Signs put over doors in the world and over minds seemed natural enough to children like us, for signs had already been put over forbidden areas on our bodies ... Each lesson was linked on to the other drawing strength from it. (90-1) Moreover, these lessons involved the inculcation of emotional responses that would maintain this segregation as a joint activity of white southern culture. ‘The mother who taught me what I know of tenderness and love and compassion also taught me the bleak rituals of keeping Negros in their place’ (27, quoted in Walker (1998b), 70). The emotional responses that characterize racist and ethnocentric hierarchies often have nothing to do with physical distance or emotional disinterest, but shape hierarchy in the context of proximity. David 7 have previously linked Lloyd and Walker (Walker (1998a)) on this point in Campbell (Camp-
bell).
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Haekwon Kim argues that contemporary racial segregation in the United States is maintained through a structure of white contempt for racial others (Kim (1999)). Kim describes this contempt as a sense of offence at the ‘base and potentially debasing’ qualities of those racialized (111). The response to this threat is the reinforcement of hierarchy and status, and this can take a variety of collective forms. Kim does use spatial language to describe the kinds of status preservation that ward off the ‘debasing contagion’ of the contemptible: avoidance, marking a boundary, fending off, circumscribing (112). Kim’s work suggests that our felt separateness from others should not be taken as a sign that we are natural egoists who need to move outward to a collective. We may instead be expressing our emotional training in collective purposes. In other words, when we are inclined to describe persons as bounded and at a distance from others, this tendency should direct us to the specific modes and contexts of socialization that reinforce alienation from, distrust of, or contempt for certain others, often those close by. Walker, Smith, and Kim gesture further in the direction that Braybrooke and Lloyd take us. Though neither Braybrooke nor Lloyd completely escapes the traditional focus on collective bonds as sympathetic bonds, together they provide a model of the self that allows for a sophisticated treatment of the links between joint interests and emotional development. In this chapter, I have strongly affirmed Braybrooke’s concerns about default egoism in moral theory that tries for a more social starting point. While I endorse Braybrooke’s and Sherman’s rehabilitation of the emotions in models of moral motivation, I have questioned whether privileging empathy or fellow feeling is a good way to add needed complexity to these models. Braybrooke and Sherman are both indebted to the history of moral sentiment theories in formulating their accounts of empathy. Though this chapter leaves open the possibility that not all theories of empathy re-inscribe egoism, Braybrooke’s work stimulates us to scrutinize these theories for the problematic assumptions that they may embed. Genevieve Lloyd comments that there is no one right model of the self but that we must work back and forth between our experience and our models to find ways of theorizing adequate to the
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present context. I suggest that the empathic egoist is too old–fashioned a self for the challenges that now inform our reflections on moral motivation and that Braybrooke’s writing on moral education describes a more useful alternative.
Chapter 10
The Problem of Moral Judgement R ICHMOND C AMPBELL
Abstract
Is moral judgment a state of belief or a state of feeling and desire? Cognitivists about moral judgment answer: true or false belief; non-cognitivists answer: feeling and/or desire. What is at stake in this disagreement is the possibility of moral knowledge, for if moral judgment is not a state of true or false belief, it cannot embody moral knowledge. Those who defend the possibility of moral knowledge, however, face a dilemma. They must reject, on pain of inconsistency, one of two plausible Humean views: (1) that moral judgments themselves contain motivation to act, or (2) that motivation cannot arise from belief alone. In Natural Law Modernized David Braybrooke portrays Hume as defending the possibility of moral knowledge, thus apparently committing Hume to an inconsistent triad of propositions. This essay defends a novel interpretation of moral judgment as a complex, hybrid state of belief and feeling/desire that would undermine the long-standing dichotomy between cognitivism and noncognitivism and demonstrate how Braybrooke’s understanding of Hume does not lead to inconsistency. In doing so, the essay attempts to bring out the moral significance of the underlying false opposition between reason and emotion that has been with us since Plato and continues to bedevil contemporary moral theory.∗ ∗ I am grateful for the extensive comments on an earlier draft provided by David Braybrooke, Rochney Jacobsen, Duncan MacIntosh, William Rottschaefer, and Susan Sherwin.
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10.1
The Problem
Is a moral judgment a state of belief or a state of feeling and desire? We speak, reason, and feel as if a moral judgment can embody moral knowledge. We thus imply that moral judgment is a state of belief. If, for example, I say, ‘It was wrong of you not to tell her that you are married,’ and you reply, ‘That’s true’ or ‘I know that,’ you imply agreement in belief. Yet at the same time our judgments convey negative feelings about, and even motivation to refrain from doing, what we judge is morally wrong. Yours convey feelings of regret, the desire not to repeat the mistake; mine convey feelings of disapproval and the desire to persuade you not to repeat it. Such are part and parcel of the judgment that one of us has acted wrongly. In sum, a moral judgment appears to be belief and desire, belief and feeling, at once. But is it really possible that a moral judgment can be belief and desire, or belief and feeling? Humean considerations argue against this possibility. Famously Hume maintained that morals move us and excite our passions, while judgments of fact, in themselves and apart from what we desire and feel, are inert. Put into contemporary terms, the argument derives from the following inconsistency. For the reasons just given, we may be inclined to hold: 1. Moral judgments are (or express)1 states of belief; and also 2. In making moral judgments, people feel the force of moral norms that guide their judgments and are thereby moved (to some degree) to act in accord with them, independently of any antecedent desires or feelings that they may have. Yet, according to a widely accepted view of motivation, 3. Beliefs never motivate just by themselves; instead, beliefs move us in combination with antecedent desires and feelings. 1 ‘Judgment’ can refer to a mental state or an utterance expressing it. This essay focuses on the first case, but in ‘What Is Moral Judgment?’ I argue that the cases are parallel.
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Since these views together lead to contradiction, (2) and (3) provide a Humean argument for rejecting (1). If moral judgments are intrinsically motivating [by (2)—see Hume (1978), 413-18] but beliefs are not [by (3)—455-76], then moral judgments cannot be beliefs [contrary to (1)]. The inconsistency, however, also constitutes a problem with the concept of moral judgment, since each of the three views has merit on its own. View (3) is embedded in the dominant and widely shared beliefdesire theory of action, according to which both belief and desire are needed to explain behaviour. I might believe that food is before me but without any desire to eat. The fact of my belief by itself will not predict my eating. On the other hand, if I desire food but do not believe that food is before me, the desire by itself will not predict my eating. In general, only the combination of belief and desire can predict and explain behaviour on this theory. View (2), that moral judgments carry with them their own motivation, is equally plausible. I might desire to do what is right for extrinsic reasons, say to protect my reputation, but thinking something is right is, it would seem, motivating just in itself. Unfortunately, views (2) and (3) entail that my thinking something is right cannot be a belief that it is right and hence that view (1) must be false. But to reject (1) is surely contrary to common sense. It appears, in sum, that one of these views must be wrong, yet it is hard to understand how any one of them can be given up.2 In his Natural Law Modernized David Braybrooke proposes to interpret David Hume as a natural law theorist and thus as a philosopher committed to the possibility of moral knowledge (Braybrooke (2001), 130-5) and therefore the truth of (1). It is clear that the problem just posed is as pressing for Braybrooke’s Hume as it would be for any philosopher who defends the possibility of moral knowledge. Indeed, it is more so, since Hume endorses the very propositions that seem inconsistent with that possibility! Is Braybrooke’s non-standard interpretation of Hume incoherent in light of this apparent inconsistency? 2 Michael Smith (Smith (1994)) formulates a closely related problem in terms of rational belief and motivation. See my ‘What Is Moral Judgment?’Campbell (2005) for how it bears on this problem.
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In this chapter I argue that it is not, since moral judgments may be construed as embodying two different functions, as beliefs representing possible moral truths and as emotion-laden motives to act. This account of moral judgment developed in my Illusions of Paradox (Campbell (1998)) is close to Braybrooke’s understanding of Hume’s theory. While he concedes that Hume may be read as rejecting the realist proposition that moral judgments can embody moral truths, he contends, with some plausibility, that Hume’s theory of morals is best interpreted as being at bottom realist. My aim will not be to defend Braybrooke’s interesting reading of Hume (though I hope to indicate why it is plausible), but to explore whether a hybrid conception of moral judgment can be defended on its own merits and to bring out its significance for the underlying false dichotomy between reason and emotion that has been with us since Plato and continues to bedevil contemporary moral theory.
10.2
Moral Realism: The Default Position
I will be assuming that moral realism, the position that moral knowledge is possible, is the default position in moral theory. Moral realism agrees with common sense and is backed by powerful theoretical considerations that are well developed in the literature (see, e.g., Copp (1995), 15-19). For example, moral realism simplifies our understanding of logical inference in moral reasoning by allowing us to apply the standard of truth preservation for valid inference. It also adds coherence to our understanding of normative claims in general, such as claims about validity of inferences or mistakes in language. We think we know that some inferences are valid, that some uses of languages incorrect, despite the evident normative character of these claims. Why should normative claims in morals have a different epistemological status from normative claims about logic and meaning? Braybrooke presses similar questions in his article ‘What Truth Does the Emotive-Imperative Answer to the Open-Question Argument Leave to Moral Judgments?’ Braybrooke (2003c) Critics of moral realism attempt to counter these defences and to raise objections of their own. Space does not permit even cursory dis-
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cussion of all the main lines of objection to moral realism, though I have reviewed them elsewhere (Campbell (2003)). Here I confine myself to objections that bear on the central problem for moral judgment just outlined. Prominent among these objections is Mackie’s charge that moral judgment is subject to systematic error, with the result that all moral judgments are false (Mackie (1977)). Clearly, if Mackie’s error theory is true, moral realism cannot be. His theory is that moral judgments are about facts that are intrinsically prescriptive and as such imply what is highly implausible from a scientific perspective. Moreover, nothing in science would explain how we could know such facts. For these reasons commonsense moral thinking is dubious metaphysically and epistemologically. Does Mackie’s theory serve to reinforce the doubts just raised about the coherence of moral judgment? The inconsistency among (1), (2), and (3) is more reasonably viewed as being as much a problem for Mackie’s theory as it is for moral realism. The reason is just that his theory is committed to the same three inconsistent propositions. His theory entails that moral judgments are false; hence, his theory entails that moral judgments are beliefs rather than merely states of desire or feeling. Moreover, his theory does not deny either that moral judgments are intrinsically moving or that the leading scientific account of motivation is true. Indeed, his theory implies that even if no intrinsically prescriptive facts exist, we are moved in judging that they exist and he believes that we should accept what science says about motivation. Thus, he is committed to (2) and (3) as well as (1), at least until science offers a better account of what moves us to act. In sum, he shares with moral realism the central problem with moral judgment outlined above. Moral realism has, of course, other ways to address Mackie’s objection. It can, for example, deny that moral realism entails a commitment to intrinsically prescriptive moral facts. Naturalistic forms of moral realism attempt to do precisely that. Nevertheless, even if they can succeed (as I believe they can), the central problem remains a problem for moral realism. Moral realism seems committed to (1), since it is hard to see how there can be moral knowledge without moral belief. It must, therefore, reject either (2) or (3). It must, that is, answer Hume’s argu-
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ment from (2) and (3) to the denial of (1). The next two sections will consider two approaches prominent in the literature on moral realism.
10.3
Externalist Moral Realism
The externalist moral realist rejects (2) in favour of (1) and (3). Why reject (2)? The standard answer, perhaps best developed by David Brink (Brink (1989)), is that we can easily imagine someone who judges something to be morally wrong but just doesn’t give a damn. Not only can we imagine such a person, sociopaths exist who apparently agree that what they want to do is wrong but feel no compunction about doing it. Then there are ordinary folks who at times feel no inclination to do something that on balance is right from their point of view, such as rendering a small courtesy. How can moral judgments be intrinsically motivating in the face of these cases? The standard reply in defence of (2)—the ‘internalist’ reply—is that the cases are described incorrectly. The person who doesn’t give a damn doesn’t really believe that the act in question is wrong (or right). Instead the person thinks that the action is ‘wrong’ (or ‘right’) only in the non-literal sense that this is what most people regard as wrong (or right). Admittedly, it may be difficult or even impossible to settle this dispute, since the cases present conflicting evidence about which description is correct. The person says one thing but the person’s behaviour and feeling are reason not to treat what is said as being intended literally. The externalist, however, provides a way out. She can present a positive account of how motivation arises in cases of moral judgment without necessarily conceding that (2) is true. An example from Braybrooke’s discussion of natural law theory illustrates how such an account might unfold. According to this theory, to judge something to be morally unacceptable is to judge it to be contrary to rules that must be obeyed by and large in order for members of society to thrive (Braybrooke (2001), 3). The concept of thriving, let us suppose, can be given empirical content through reference to meeting basic human needs, say according to Braybrooke’s theory of needs (Braybrooke (1987a)). Thus, on this understanding of what is meant in judging something morally unac-
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ceptable, activities like mugging, fraud, and extortion would be judged morally unacceptable, since they would violate norms that enable a society to thrive. Indeed, on the theory of natural law that he defends, we know that these kinds of behaviour are wrong. But in knowing this must we be motivated not to engage in these kinds of actions? According to the externalist the motivation and the belief are distinct logically and in fact but are linked together causally, for contingent reasons, for example concerning human nature. Let us suppose with Hume that most of us are moved by considerations that impinge on the wellbeing of others, especially when our own needs are not so pressing as to prevent us from having a clear view of the needs of others. Suppose, that is, that we have the sentiment of humanity, to use Hume’s phrase. In that case, normally we will be moved to some degree by what we judge morally because of our independent interest in the thriving of people in general. Notice that the reason that we would be moved is that we have an antecedent desire that people thrive and our moral belief, on Braybrooke’s theory of the content of moral belief, informs us of the means to achieve that end. No entailment is assumed between having a moral belief and having a desire to be moral. Moreover, the states in question are distinct. We care about whether moral rules are obeyed because we care about the consequences of their being obeyed for the thriving of society. For these reasons we will react negatively when others flout the rules and feel badly when, yielding to temptation, we do what we know to be wrong. The position is, therefore, a moral realist position that is at the same time externalist regarding moral motivation. It endorses propositions (1) and (3) but rejects the internalist position contained in (2). The difficulty with this story, and indeed any account of moral motivation that is inconsistent with (2), is that it does not fit with what we know about moral development. As children we learn morals by learning how to feel about certain ways of acting and how to behave in accordance with those feelings. In other words, we learn how to be moved by moral considerations directly. We learn to desire not to do certain things and to feel badly when we do them or see others do them, and also to desire to do other things and to feel good about doing those
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things. We learn, that is, how to be motivated intrinsically by moral considerations. This fact about moral development is exactly in accord with (2). Furthermore, we do not first learn some highly theoretical beliefs about the relation between, say, obeying rules and thriving and then, because of our antecedent desires and feelings about matters contingently connected with these beliefs, come to be motivated to act and to feel appropriately. Not only is such an account of moral development far from what we know through casual observation and scientific study, it is also contrary to the way moral sensibility would have evolved according to our best understanding of the evolution of morals. Moral sensibility, in order to exert immediate and powerful control sufficient to counter contrary impulses, could not have developed in such an indirect way. Setting aside hard cases where moral feelings pull in opposite directions, countless other cases make us react immediately and unreservedly, just as one would expect if (2) were true. In the hard cases, we are unable immediately to make a moral judgment, but when we are able to make the moral judgment, we normally are disposed to feel, desire, and act in characteristic ways just in virtue of making that judgment. An adequate view of the relation between moral judgment and motivation must account for this fact.
10.4
Internalist Moral Realism
The defender of (1) and (2) must reject (3). The difficulties facing those who take this option are equally grave. One that has been mentioned already is that (3) is part of a well-established theory of motivation according to which beliefs motivate only when coupled with desires. As McNaughton puts it: ‘Desires without beliefs are blind; beliefs without desires are inert’ (McNaughton (1988), 21). Many would say that this understanding is part of our folk psychological theory of why we do anything. It is this theory that is reflected also in Bayesian models of rational decision-making. There subjective probabilities of possible outcomes stand in for degrees of belief that those outcomes will result if a given decision is taken and individual utilities of outcomes stand
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for the degree of preference for those outcomes relative to alternatives. Although there is no consensus as to the best theory of motivation, no other approach is so well entrenched in ordinary thinking or in efforts to represent motivation mathematically. To reject (3) is to fly in the face of this formidable tradition. An even more serious difficulty arises from elements in the internalist realism that appear to be incompatible. Consider the precise sense in which the internalist realism, in accord with (1), implies that a moral judgment is a state of belief. A moral judgment is to be a state of belief as distinct from a state of emotion, desire, or attitude. Though the latter can have a cognitive element (the object of the emotion can engage our cognitive faculties), it is only belief that can be fully cognitive in all essential respects. This position is often characterized by our saying that the moral judgment or claim is ‘purely cognitive.’ Consider the following passage from McNaughton, a particularly lucid defender of internal moral realism (see also Dancy (1993); Platts (1988)): To be aware of a moral requirement is, according to the realist, to have a conception of the situation as demanding a response ... The requirement will only be satisfied if the agent changes the world to fit it. But the realist also wishes to insist that the agent’s conception of the situation is purely cognitive [my italics]. That is, the agent has a belief that he is morally required to act. (McNaughton (1988), 109) But now we must ask ourselves how it is possible for a state of mind to be purely cognitive and at the same time be internally connected to feeling and desire as required by (2), since internal moral realism endorses both (1) and (2). I want to urge that it is not possible. Notice that the internalism expressed in (2) does not entail that a moral judgment is a belief. In fact, expressivists deny (1), but because they hold that moral judgments are or express states of emotion, desire, or attitude, they are able to endorse (2). The reason is that by denying that moral judgments are beliefs, expressionists can have an unmediated connection between judgment and motivation. (If a moral judgment is, say, a state of desire, then that desire is ‘internal’ to the judgment just as
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a matter of logic.) Internalist moral realism, however, is not in the same position. It cannot argue that the connection between judgment and motivation is internal in the same way, for this form of moral realism requires, as we have just seen, that moral judgment is a purely cognitive state of mind and thus is not in any part a state of emotion, desire, or attitude. The state of belief that constitutes the moral judgment must be internally connected to emotion, desire, or attitude without being itself an emotion, desire, or attitude. McNaughton thinks that the internal connection can be made intelligible if we understand that a belief about an object of desire can explain why the object is desired. He doesn’t think, for example, that a saucer of mud is an intelligible object of desire, given ordinary beliefs about mud. Those beliefs would not explain why anyone would desire mud. By contrast, doing what is believed to be morally required is an intelligible object of desire, just in virtue of what we believe about it. What we believe about it, that it is morally required, explains why we desire it. In these cases the desire that arises from the belief becomes cognitive itself and is thus dependent on the belief. McNaughton puts it thus: The radical upshot of this line of thought is that ... the desire, as an independent element in action explanation, drops out as redundant. Once we have understood the attractiveness of the desired object, as the agent conceives it, we already understand why he is motivated to act the way he does. Nothing needs to be added to his conception to complete the explanation. (113) Since the desire is not an independent element in the explanation of motivation and is redundant once the belief is fully understood, it is possible, McNaughton thinks, to endorse (1) in the required sense— to understand moral judgment as purely belief - and at the same time endorse (2). This attempt to explain how desire can be internal to a belief state that is purely cognitive and hence be itself cognitive trades on an ambiguity. What makes the desire ‘cognitive’ on this account is the fact that the object of desire can also be an object of belief. For example, that I
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am helping someone in need can be both something I believe that I am doing and something that I desire that I am doing. Moreover, I can desire to do what I am doing because it is truly a case of helping someone in need. I have no quarrel with this conception of the cognitive nature of desire. It is another matter, however, to claim that the desire is purely cognitive. What would that mean? It could be purely cognitive if the desire is present solely because of what is believed, independently of any other desires or feelings, but this understanding of desire is exceedingly strange. It might be urged that the element of desiring (distinct from the object of desire) is itself cognitive, but it is entirely unclear what it would mean for desiring to be purely a state of cognition. Ostensibly, the desiring taken as a whole is not just a matter of thinking of the object of the desire according to a certain belief. It is the distinct state of desiring this object. Were that not so, something would be necessarily desired provided only that one has certain beliefs about it. It would be as if certain facts about a thing that do not logically entail its being desired necessitated its being desired just in virtue of their being believed. Such facts would be akin to Mackie’s intrinsically prescriptive facts and no less mysterious.
10.5 The Belief-Desire Theory of Moral Judgment At this point we need to take stock. The problem is framed between two major alternative views: that moral judgment is a belief and that moral judgment is something else, such as a desire, emotion, or attitude. These alternatives may appear not only to be exclusive but to be exhaustive. That is, they may appear to be contradictories rather than simply contraries. When judgment is understood linguistically as an utterance or a written statement rather than as a psychological state, the corresponding views are called ‘cognitivism’ and ‘non-cognitivism’ respectively (Brandt (1959), 205; Sayre-McCord (1988), 1-23). Thus, cognitivism says that moral claims are true or false and non-cognitivism denies that moral claims are either true or false. Of course, to say that someone’s moral claim is true or false is just to say that it expresses a true or false belief. Cognitivism and non-cognitivism are, therefore, nothing more
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than the semantic forms of the dichotomy that generates the problem, and we can easily reformulate the inconsistent triad of positions in semantic terms (see my ‘What Is Moral Judgment?’). Interestingly, the labels used for the semantic distinction imply that cognitivism and noncognitivism are to be understood as contradictories. We need only add that the terms ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’ applied to forms of realism are meant to be contradictories too, so that there is no in-between position possible. Once we have set aside error theory, only three possibilities appear to remain: externalist moral realism, internalist moral realism, and non-cognitivism. Moreover, each view faces serious objections given the inconsistent triad, since each view must reject a member of the triad despite the independent support enjoyed by each member. What is at fault, I now want to argue, is not any of the claims comprising the triad but the underlying framework used to generate the problem. In particular, I contend that contrary to appearances and contrary to the assumption made throughout a century of meta-ethical discussion, the view that moral judgments are or express states of belief and the view that moral judgments are or express states of feeling, desire, and attitude (non-cognitivism) are either not contraries or else not contradictories. On either alternative the problem of moral judgment dissolves and room is left for a more adequate understanding of the complexity of moral judgment. Let me explain. Once the debate around how to resolve the moral problem moves beyond simple statements of the competing alternatives, it turns out that positions corresponding to (1) invariably are interpreted to entail that moral judgments are or express only beliefs. Positions corresponding to the denial of (1), correspondingly, are invariably interpreted so that they entail that moral judgments are or express only feeling, desire, or attitude (not belief). The alert reader will already have noted this phenomenon in the above exposition of the reasons for and against the main forms of moral realism. Of course, with the key qualification ‘only’ made explicit, it is abundantly clear that the positions are contraries and not contradictories. Even though they are officially defined without this qualification so that the truth of one entails the denial of the other, with the qualification the situation is logically different. Al-
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though the positions so qualified are inconsistent, they do not exhaust all the possibilities. Might it be possible that a moral judgment is (or expresses) not only belief but also feeling, desire, or attitude? This is a possibility that I will explore directly. Note what happens, though, if the qualification is dropped so that (1) is read just as stated and its so-called denial read as the view that a moral judgment is or expresses feeling, desire, or attitude. Then the positions are not even contraries! Either way, new possibilities emerge. No longer are we forced to choose among unpalatable alternatives. What I propose is that we understand a moral judgment as a complex state (or mode of expression) comprising (or expressing) both belief and desire (or feeling or attitude). I should emphasize that what I am suggesting is not a variation of expressivism, where moral judgment is fundamentally a non-belief state that has various cognitive aspects, for example, a commitment to give a rational justification for that state. Expressivism is still, in traditional terminology, a form of non-cognitivism, since moral judgments in this view are not states of belief (Gibbard (1990); Blackburn (1998)). The same can be said for the position that moral judgments are prescriptions rather than true or false statements (Hare (1952, 1989)). The view that I am proposing, however, is neither cognitive nor non-cognitive as traditionally conceived. My position is that a moral judgment is a fully hybrid state of mind (or mode of expression) that functions normally both as a belief and as a non-belief state, such as a non-belief state of feeling, desire, or attitude. Take the judgment that stealing is wrong. Traditionally, a non-cognitivist (e.g., Ayer (1936)) takes the judgment to be a combination of a cognitive representation of stealing coupled with a non-cognitive emotional reaction to what is represented. Though this understanding of moral judgment in a weak sense combines both cognitive and non-cognitive elements, the present suggestion is fundamentally different. The cognitive element is not the representation of stealing per se, but of stealing as being morally wrong. The judgment that stealing is wrong contains the belief that stealing is wrong. It follows that the position is not non-cognitivist. On the other hand, it is not cognitivist, since it holds that the judgment that stealing is wrong is at the same time normally a state of feeling and mo-
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tivation. In making the judgment that stealing is wrong, I am disposed (normally, to some degree) not to steal, to deter others from stealing, to feel shame, embarrassment, and regret if I steal and indignation towards others if they steal, and to defend these feelings and dispositions as being justified. All these elements are combined in the moral judgment, at least in a normal case. The position advocated here allows an important qualification. These hybrid elements can pull apart in certain cases. Suppose I am raised to think that homosexuality is wrong. When I am mature, my attitude changes; I no longer believe that it is wrong. Yet before I am fully comfortable with this new moral perspective, I may have many of the same emotional responses that I had before I changed my belief. In short, I may believe one thing and feel another. On the theory I advocate, this is not a paradigmatic case of moral judgment. My judgment that homosexuality is not wrong does not contain all the elements that such a judgment normally would. By the same token, it could be said that I am still judging it wrong on an emotional level, and that would be true, even though the moral judgment in this case too does not contain all the normal elements. Here it is lacking the appropriate belief. In these respects the theory is like externalist moral realism because it draws no essential connection between moral belief and moral motivation. However, it is also like internalist moral realism because in the normal case, where belief and desire, feeling and belief are present in the moral judgment taken as a whole, there is a direct and unmediated connection between the moral judgment and the feeling and motivation that goes with it. When I make a moral judgment, I am normally motivated to act and moved to feel just in virtue of making that judgment, independently of any antecedent feelings or desires. The theory offered breaks down the externalist/internalist dichotomy. It is easy to see that if this theory is even roughly on the mark, the problem of moral judgment dissolves. How it dissolves depends on how view (1) is interpreted. Without the qualification that makes (1) imply that moral judgment is only a state of belief, there is no incompatibility between (1) and (2) even when they are combined with (3). For a moral judgment in being not merely a belief can easily accommodate (2). Moreover, the implication of (3)
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that beliefs by themselves are inert creates no difficulty. Though beliefs are inert by themselves according to (3), moral judgments are not normally just beliefs. As well, the objections raised against external moral realism and internalist moral realism do not apply, since in each case those objections presuppose the qualification. On the other hand, if the qualification is included and made explicit, then it becomes clear that (1) cannot be true if the hybrid theory is true. In this case (1) can be rejected without sacrificing moral realism.
10.6 Two Objections Briefly Considered One objection arises from a distinction made by Anscombe between two opposite ‘ directions of fit’ ascribed to beliefs and desires (Anscombe (1963)). Anscombe compares a grocery list with a list made by a detective reporting groceries bought (56). The same list can be the content of a belief or a desire (that certain groceries are bought). It functions differently depending on whether it represents items desired to be bought or items believed to be bought. In the first case, what is bought should fit the items desired to be bought; in the second case, what is believed to be bought should fit what actually was bought. In short, the world should fit the desire and the belief should fit the world. The directions of fit are precisely the opposite, and for this reason when the list fails to fit what is bought, we blame the detective’s list in one case (belief) and the grocery store in the other (desire). What might be thought to be objectionable about the hybrid view is that it requires that a single state of mind comprising both belief and desire have opposite directions of fit. This worry has been raised in the literature for internalist moral realism because on this view a moral judgment is nothing more than a belief, yet it is supposed to function as a desire as well. Whatever its merits as an objection to that account, it has no force against the hybrid theory. Let us grant for the sake of argument that beliefs and desires do have opposite directions of fit. What is missing in the objection is any reason for thinking that because the directions of fit are different, a state of mind, especially a complex one, cannot function both ways at once. Consider intention. Arguably, if I in-
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tend to meet you tomorrow for lunch, I both believe that I will meet you for lunch and desire that I will (Millikan (1996)). If I don’t meet you, say because I am unexpectedly detained, then there are two separate failures, one of belief and another of desire, with different implications. The intention, however, was not impossible. It would be especially odd to think the difference in directions of fit is a problem for moral judgment, since what is desired on the hybrid account (that we do not steal) is not the same as what is believed (that stealing is wrong). Another worry is that I do not specify the content of moral belief. Notoriously it is difficult to specify the content of moral belief in a way that will win wide support. Of course, any adequate defence of moral realism needs such an account. But the point of the present theory is to offer an alternative framework that resolves the problem of moral judgment. Admittedly, the alternative leaves other matters concerning moral realism exactly where they were. The hybrid theory is offered as a better analysis of moral judgment. It can be right in this respect even if moral realism is false. Indeed, the present suggestion actually is compatible with error theory, since the hybrid theory is not committed to the position that moral beliefs are true. It would be unfair to saddle this theory with the task of fully defending moral realism. It does, however, provide an advance over the standard internalist and externalist forms of moral realism simply because it avoids the inconsistency with which we began. In the next section, though, I will suggest how the content of moral beliefs might be specified in a Humean form of moral realism.
10.7
Hume and the Opposition between Reason and Emotion
We return finally to the interpretation of Hume as a natural law theorist and hence a moral realist. Can Braybrooke’s interpretation be reconciled with Hume’s opinion that morals are based on sentiment rather than reason? Or with Hume’s claim in the Treatise that to judge character as virtuous is to have a particular feeling of pleasure that ‘constitutes our praise and admiration’ (Hume 1978, 471)? Given his assertions, Hume may appear to be more naturally read as a non-cognitivist who
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identifies moral judgment with feeling and desire. In light of the beliefdesire theory, however, it may pay us to take a second look. Consider first the question whether the belief-desire theory of moral judgment can be squared with Hume’s understanding of moral perception and judgment as involving sentiment. We have framed the former mainly in terms of belief and desire rather than belief and feeling, but it should be evident that nothing in the structure of the theory proposed or in the arguments supporting it should stop us from incorporating feeling and emotion of specific kinds into the dual conception of moral judgment. If I condemn the gratuitous, senseless cruelty of some action, I not only want it to stop and not to be repeated, but also feel displeasure, perhaps revulsion and disgust, in thinking about it, and my emotional reaction arguably is as inseparable from condemnation as my desire to prevent the action. It is the same when I condemn my own action and feel shame and remorse for what I have done. These feelings are as much a part of my condemnation as my desire never to repeat it. We can of course imagine special cases where we make the negative judgment but feel little or nothing, just as we have imagined cases where the desire is absent. In the normal case, though, feeling and desire together go with the judgment. What about moral belief? The argument can be made that feeling does not exclude moral belief as part of the judgment any more than desire does. The hybrid theory accommodates both belief and the combination of feeling and desire. In this respect Hume’s recognition of sentiment as part of moral perception is compatible with the alternative approach to moral judgment that I am advocating. Hume did argue that, since morals excite us to feel and move us to act, morals are not based on reason, which tells us only what is true or false. But this argument is just the argument, in slightly different words, from (2) and (3) to the rejection of (1). We have already seen that this argument is subject to more than one interpretation. If the rejection of (1) is properly interpreted as rejecting the extreme position that moral judgment is only belief, then the argument is sound but does not establish that moral judgment does not contain belief in addition to desire and feeling. In short, Hume’s argument can be taken to show that morals are not based
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solely on reason, not that reason plays no part in the content of moral judgment or in its appraisal. It is true that Hume doesn’t explicitly formulate his position in these terms, but it would be uncharitable to saddle him with the logically stronger, less reasonable position since he does not explicitly exclude it either. We should examine, in any case, Hume’s understanding of moral judgment when it is couched in the context of his more general theory of morals. Two parts of that theory stand out as directly relevant. First, Hume holds that the feelings that are internal to moral judgment are feelings that arise when contemplating the object of those feelings impartially and therefore are separate from feelings aroused by selfinterest. In a familiar passage Hume writes: Nor is every sentiment of pleasure or pain, which arises from characters and actions, of that peculiar kind which makes us praise or condemn. The good qualities of an enemy are hurtful to us, but may still command our esteem and respect. ‘Tis only when a character is considered in general, without reference to our particular interest, that it causes such a feeling or sentiment as denominates it morally good or evil. (Hume (1978), 472)3 The complementary part is Hume’s understanding of human nature such that when we do contemplate aspects of character, bracketing our own interests, we are in fact moved with pleasure in contemplating those aspects that are useful to persons (either to themselves or others, either directly or indirectly) and we are moved with displeasure by the opposite. When the first part, a key ingredient of his theory of moral judgment, is put together with the second part, his idea of a sentiment of humanity that is generally shared, the result is a broadly utilitarian account of moral virtue and vice. Aspects of character that are useful are judged properly to be virtuous and those that are hurtful are judged properly to be vicious. 3 See also Hume’s appendix on moral sentiment in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Hume (1966)).
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Braybrooke would question the description of Hume’s view as utilitarian, since Hume’s focus is not on maximizing utility narrowly defined, but the issue of what to call Hume’s view need not detain us. The understanding of Hume I am proposing is about the status of moral judgment rather than the details of his normative theory. It does not depend at all on how we interpret usefulness as applied to character. All that is essential to assume is that the usefulness of a character is real enough that almost everyone will respond to it positively when they consider it impartially and the opposite when a character is hurtful. For the sake of argument, then, let us grant this Humean assumption. What follows for the status of moral judgment? Can it embody moral knowledge? My argument in support of Braybrooke’s reading of Hume has three steps. The first is to note that Hume’s understanding of moral judgment, that it is a feeling of a certain kind, obviously allows the feeling to be subject to rational appraisal. This can happen in two general ways, as Hume makes clear. Someone can make the case that the person making the judgment is not viewing the subject matter impartially. If the feeling of pleasure or dissatisfaction arises from self-interest rather than from taking a general perspective, then the feeling is not justified as a moral judgment. Whether self-interest explains the feeling is, moreover, a factual matter that can be debated on rational grounds. Second, the feeling can be faulted because it is based on a false view of the facts. The feeling of displeasure can arise from believing that a certain person is in pain when he is not. Again, the validity of the feeling would be undermined based on a matter to which reason can be applied. No defender of non-cognitivism should want to deny any of this, since it is all commonplace and doesn’t by itself entail that the feeling embodies moral knowledge. The second step, however, takes us significantly further along the road to moral knowledge. Suppose our moral judger is not making any mistake about the facts (facts that anyone would concede are facts) and is thinking of the subject matter in a frame of mind that allows his feelings to respond to what is judged apart from its bearing on self-interest. Then, given the broad Humean assumption one paragraph back that we are accepting for the sake of argument, there exist facts that account
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for the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and this feeling is the moral judgment. Although this implication does not obviously reduce to saying that the judger is having feelings about moral facts, it isn’t clear why we should resist this conclusion if we take Hume seriously. The feelings are moral feelings on his view; moreover, they are feelings that would arise in exactly the same way for virtually anyone who is not mistaken about what these facts are and views them apart from their bearing on self-interest. Why not say, then, that the feelings are about moral facts? The answer that the non-cognitivist will urge is that the facts are not really moral facts but quite ordinary facts. We have a situation in which someone has (by Hume’s theory) moral feelings about non-moral facts. This response is, of course, classical non-cognitivism, but we don’t have to read this situation that way. To insist that we do would be questionbegging. One alternative is familiar from the literature. It is to treat Hume as an ideal observer theorist who holds that a moral fact about virtue (say) is a fact about what someone would feel who is in an ideal position to observe the subject matter (has an accurate view of the garden variety facts, is thinking about them impartially, is normal, and so on). Thus, Henry Aiken writes: ‘Hume holds that any morally good act is one which, in the last analysis, would be approved by an impartial spectator as useful or agreeable to ourselves or others’ (Aiken (1948), xxxviii). This alternative has familiar problems, for example, that the judgment is not directly about the object judged but about someone’s reactions to it, even though the moral judgment appears to be directly about the object judged. A better alternative is to say just that the commonplace fact cited earlier about the usefulness of a certain character is a moral fact; and it is a moral fact because it explains what is for Hume almost a universal feeling of pleasure when this fact about usefulness is considered impartially. One could say without too much exaggeration that the moral feelings experienced represent the moral fact to which they are a natural response, at least if one accepts Hume’s understanding of moral judgment and human nature. We are now in a position to take the third step. When we feel the pleasure in this way we also normally believe (rightly or wrongly) that the feeling experienced is justified or warranted by the subject matter.
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We can be mistaken, because we have misunderstood the facts (in a perfectly ordinary sense) or are thinking about what we judge in a biased way. Suppose, however, that we are not mistaken in these ways. Then the belief we have when we experience these feelings is factually true. That is, the belief that we are not in error in these ways is true. Our judgment thus has two elements, one of belief and another of feeling. We can recognize additional ingredients on the side of motivation, such as the desire to encourage what we find pleasurable. Why not also allow on the belief side the further belief that the useful character that we morally admire is a moral character, that is, is truly virtuous as a matter of moral fact? Hume does not go quite this far, at least not explicitly, but the implication is consistent with the rest of his theory. Morals are still based on sentiment, not on reason in the manner of theorists who would nowadays be called ‘non-naturalist.’ Reason alone tells us nothing, but reason is not completely absent either. Moral judgment springs from reason and sentiment; it begins with and is ultimately based on sentiment. It is, after all, through justified feeling that we know what is virtuous and what is vicious. Why isn’t the knowledge embodied in our justified feelings moral knowledge? If this interpretation of Hume counts as moral realism, it is a naturalistic form of moral realism, far from the examples of moral realism that place emphasis on moral belief in contrast to moral feeling and that locate moral facts in a non-natural realm. It is, nevertheless, moral realism in precisely the sense that it entails moral knowledge of moral facts. Though I have not given a full-dress defence of this interpretation of Hume, the foregoing suggests how we can see Hume as a moral realist through the lens of a new conception of moral judgment. Hume appears through this lens neither cognitivist nor non-cognitivist—a surprising conclusion if these terms are contradictories. I have argued, though, that they are at best only contraries. Thinking otherwise has confused us not only regarding the relation between moral belief and moral desire but also about the possibility of moral knowledge based on moral emotion. The age-old dichotomy between reason and emotion dies hard, but we need to move beyond it if we are to understand the
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complex nature of moral judgment and moral knowledge.
Chapter 11
Moral Claims and Epistemic Contexts M ICHAEL H YMERS
Abstract In ‘What Truth Does the Emotive-Imperative Answer to the Open-Question Argument Leave to Moral Judgments?’ David Braybrooke claims that the justification of a moral claim is independent of the justification of morality generally—that ethical justification does not have to be traced back to meta-ethical justification. I support this claim by appealing to a contextualist theory of epistemic justification. Drawing on the work of Michael Williams and Robert Brandom, I contend, first, that every claim is justified by default and requires articulated reasons only when it is challenged. Not every challenge is a reasonable challenge—only those that share the burden of proof are. Second, I hold that sceptics about moral truth and justification, such as J.L. Mackie, are committed to a substantive philosophical position, closely linked to foundationalism, that Williams has called ‘epistemological realism,’ insofar as they hold that moral claims are intrinsically less certain than claims about non-moral facts on which moral facts might be taken to supervene. But there is no reason to believe that any propositions are intrinsically more certain than any others. Certainty is a function of epistemic context, not semantic or empirical content. Therefore, although moral claims may presuppose the truth of some meta-ethical claims, the justification of moral claims does not depend on the justification of meta-ethical claims.∗ ∗ In
writing this essay, I have benefited greatly from conversations with and presentations by
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In ‘What Truth Does the Emotive-Imperative Answer to the Open-Question Argument Leave to Moral Judgments?’ (Braybrooke, 2003c), David Braybrooke arrives at a conclusion that may provoke some disquiet among those with strongly objectivist intuitions about moral judgments: We have, in this conception of moral realism, as explained meta-ethically, ‘true’ used within one structure of ideas that figures among many logically possible structures, in this case, a structure of ideas ultimately invoking thriving, personal and social, and empirical evidence about thriving. It is a loose enough sense of thriving to accommodate some minor variations in conceptions of thriving. At the same time, ‘true’ is used unselfconsciously, without thinking of metaethics, within moral discourse itself with no apprehension, and no compelling reason to apprehend, that the basis for using it is liable to being supplanted. Just so we can habitually rely on one calendar, knowing that it is just one among many possible calendars, many of which have bizarre features, and none of which may be accurate astronomically. (350) The objectivists whom I have in mind will regard Braybrooke’s use of the distinction between ethics and meta-ethics as artificial and illegitimate, contending that applications of the truth-predicate to moral claims are justifiable only if meta-ethical claims about basic moral principles and objective grounds of value are also justifiable. Such objectivist impulses will drive these philosophers either to become Platonists about value or to become subjectivists about value (because they conclude that the conditions necessary for true moral judgments are absent). I shall argue here that the objectivist impulse that leads to these results arises, at least in part, from a commitment to what Michael Williams has called ‘ epistemological realism’ (Williams (1996), 89134; Williams (2001), 84, 193), the doctrine that there are natural relations of epistemic priority among our beliefs and claims. Rejecting this Mason Cash, Richmond Campbell, and Jenna Woodrow. Thanks also to Tom Vinci, Nathan Brett, and David Braybrooke for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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doctrine in favour of a variety of epistemic contextualism, I shall argue that Braybrooke’s use of the ethics/meta-ethics distinction is reasonable, comparing his moral realism to a kind of conventionalism about mathematical truth that sees realism as lying in our ‘deep need’ (Wittgenstein (1978), 65) for conventions.
11.1 Moore’s Open Question, Expressivism, and Truth in Ethics Braybrooke begins his discussion with the observation that expressivist treatments of moral language can be regarded as a response to G.E. Moore’s ‘open question’ argument. Moore contends that any attempt to define ‘good’ is destined for failure because, for any candidate definition, it will always make sense to say of a given action or outcome that it conforms to the definition but is not good. Suppose we define ‘good’ as utility, for example. A critic of utilitarianism can always intelligibly contend that a given outcome has a higher utility than its rivals without being good. However, if ‘the expression of emotions and imperatives’ is ‘the main thing about moral judgments, perhaps the only thing’ (Braybrooke (2003c), 343), then there is clearly no danger of dogmatically closing off debate by insisting that good is pleasure or conduciveness to a thriving society or the display of respect for humanity, whether in one’s own person or that of another. Insofar as moral ‘judgments’ are merely expressions of emotion or imperatives to act or respond emotionally in a particular way, there is a sense in which the question of what is good is left wide open, for no definition of ‘good’ is given by such a theory. ‘The emotive and imperative aspects of your [moral] judgment . . . will always fight free of being tied down,’ as Braybrooke puts it, ‘to one of the exemplary uses or definitions that you offer’ (342). The emotive and imperative character of moral judgments is not by itself cause for any alarm, Braybrooke observes, because any reasonable story about moral language must account for the motivational force of moral judgments, and expressivism does just this. ‘M oral judgments have to be moving, at least in suitable contexts and for a suitable au-
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dience, and both emotions and imperatives are essential to their being so’ (343). This much, indeed, remains compatible with giving an account of which moral judgments are justifiable or right, for although the expressivist holds that moral judgments are not truth-apt, she may yet agree without contradiction that the attitudes expressed or imperatives issued can be measured against some standard of evaluation. For example, some attitudes and imperatives may be held justified because they ‘promote the thriving of a society’ (343) and others unjustifiable because they detract from that thriving. So, at a glance, it seems that there is no role for the concept of truth in moral theory. ‘Ethics can . . . work, both at the level of immediate moral judgments and at the deeper level on which these judgments are justified, without invoking the concept of truth’ (344). However, matters are more complicated than this in Braybrooke’s view. He argues that attempts ‘to dismiss the concept of truth from ethics’ (344) lead their proponents into two kinds of awkwardness. First, there is the awkwardness involved in the fact that truth is the concept to which we appeal when we are engaged in any sort of ‘serious endorsement’ (344), whether such endorsement should arise in the context of particle physics, of history, of small talk about middlesized dry goods, or of big talk about ethics. It is, says Braybrooke, a feature of ‘ ordinary moral discourse’ (345) that we judge to be true those moral claims to which we commit ourselves. And so, deviations from such ordinary practice demand some extraordinary reason. Such an extraordinary reason is not provided by expressivist accounts of moral discourse, such as emotivism and prescriptivism. These positive views concerning moral language arose in response to prior critiques of the truth-evaluability of moral claims and do not themselves provide any such critique. Indeed, Braybrooke argues, a moral realist— someone who holds minimally that moral claims are truth-evaluable and that some of them are true—can happily endorse much of what the expressivist wants to say about the pragmatic force of indicative sentences containing morally evaluative terms without supposing that the meaning of such terms as ‘good’ has thereby been settled. What is needed is simply a plausible story about how to distinguish ‘the distinctive crite-
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ria for endorsing’ moral judgments from ‘the grounds for endorsing or making scientific propositions or common sense reports of perception’ (345). If ‘truth’ is a term of serious endorsement, then we are entitled to apply it to moral judgments so long as we try to ‘work out a general theory of warranting judgments, in which warranting moral judgments would proceed in some respects differently from warranting reports of perception, and warranting aesthetic judgments more differently still’ (345). We might, for example, say that just those moral judgments are warranted that are certified by ‘justified moral rules, most plausibly, rules that promote the thriving of societies and the people who belong to them’ (345). Second, says Braybrooke, when we assert that particular moral rules are justified, we seem clearly to be committing ourselves to the truth of such statements. He summarizes the point: A rule cited to warrant a moral judgment praising an honest action is endorsed as according with the appropriate grounds or criteria for adopting such a rule, the grounds or criteria for justifying it. Here the place of truth is secure, whether or not what is justified by the justification are themselves truthbearers, as in some case, they clearly are not, as long as what are to be taken as appropriate grounds or criteria have been identified, even if only by fiat, and accepted. (345) So, even if we were to retreat and allow the expressivist point that moral evaluations are not genuine assertions, but expressions of (dis)approval or exhortations to act or refrain, and so not truth-value candidates,1 it would not follow that such expressions cannot be candidates for justification, nor that there is no truth of the matter concerning whether or not they are justified. Now it may seem that in trying to hang on to truth in ethics Braybrooke runs afoul of the very open-question argument that he wanted to 1 As Rockney Jacobsen in Jacobsen (1997) has argued, this inference is suspect. The meaning of a sentence is unaltered by the pragmatic force with which it used on a given occasion, but if meaning and truth-conditions are inter-related, then it is not clear that a change in pragmatic force from assertion to exhortation should have any effect on whether or what truth-value a sentence expresses.
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treat expressivism as a response to, because his appeal to the certification of moral judgments by ‘rules that promote the thriving of societies and the people who belong to them’ (345) looks suspiciously like a definition of ‘good.’ Does such a definition not dogmatically forestall debate on goodness in just the way Moore argued was unreasonable? No, says Braybrooke, because Moore failed to distinguish between ethics and meta-ethics (347)—between the making of moral judgments and the discussion or consideration of them without endorsing them—and one can quite coherently express one’s commitment to a particular definition of ‘good’ in one’s ethical judgments, while still acknowledging at the meta-ethical level that such a definition is just one among many possible definitions (347-50). There may, for example, be variation among people concerning ‘what thriving amounts to’ (348), even though most agree that conduciveness to thriving is a key criterion for the justification of moral claims. Or, indeed, there may be disagreement about whether the notion of thriving has any role to play in defining ‘good.’ But neither of these facts, thinks Braybrooke, need impair ‘our commitment to the specific criteria on which we wish to take a stand’ (349). The long course of human experience, he seems to want to say, makes certain criteria of thriving ‘uniquely compelling’ (349) grounds for the justification of moral judgments. And so, Braybrooke concludes, we can endorse the truth of moral claims, even while allowing that the principles that may be invoked to justify them are contingent principles that we might never have adopted—that there are, indeed, other principles that reasonable people might well prefer. But it is at this point that the objectivists I alluded to in my opening remarks will want to interject with the following dilemma: either the uniquely compelling nature of Braybrooke’s principles of thriving consists in our believing them to be the correct definition of ‘good,’ or we cannot possibly be moral realists, for the kind of warrant required if moral judgments are to count as true must derive from the truth of Braybrooke’s principles of thriving. In short, the distinction between ethics and meta-ethics that Braybrooke relies on is illegitimate because it masks the fact that one can get moral truth only by denying that the
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question of how to define ‘good’ is really open.
11.2 Deflationism As I remarked earlier, I plan to defend Braybrooke’s reliance on the ethics/meta-ethics distinction by appealing to a contextualist account of epistemic justification and to an analogy with Wittgenstein’s conventionalist treatment of mathematics. I want to begin, however, with some remarks about the notion of truth most suitable to Braybrooke’s moral realism. Proponents of various deflationary accounts of truth may well give Braybrooke a commendatory pat on the back for his proposal that we preserve the place of truth in ethics by ‘work[ing] out a general theory of warranting judgments, in which warranting moral judgments would proceed in some respects differently from warranting reports of perception, and warranting aesthetic judgments more differently still’ (345). This is because a recurrent—though perhaps not universal—feature of such accounts is their acknowledgment that the application of the truthpredicate is (a) something that can be appropriately done to any wellformed declarative sentence of natural language that can play a role in inferences and be a patient undergoing the standard logical operations, and (b) a distinctive speech act whose pragmatic force consists in the ‘serious endorsement,’ to use Braybrooke’s words, of the claim at hand.2 However, Braybrooke sees in such intellectual chumminess a disguised criticism—namely, that truth has no interesting role to play in ethics because the application of the truth-predicate to moral claims amounts to no more than the reiteration of those self-same claims (348). At least one relevant contrast here involves some sort of correspondence theory of truth. For a correspondence theorist, to call a moral claim true is to commit oneself to there being some objective fact in 2 I want to avoid an issue that divides deflationists—namely, whether a sentence or what a sentence expresses counts as the appropriate vehicle of truth. My own sympathies lie in the latter camp, but I do not thereby wish to be committed to an ontology of abstract, sentence-like entities called propositions. Trying to clarify how that is possible would take me too far afield to be worthwhile here. (See Glock (2003), chap. 4, especially at 134). My fellow deflationists should be able to recast what I say here in terms of Brandom’s version of the prosentential theory of truth. See Brandom (1994), chap. 5).
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the world that makes the moral claim true and which does so in a way that explains or grounds the truth of the moral judgment. Truth has a substantive nature, and moral truth does, too. Starting from these assumptions, the deflationist may seem to be saying that insofar as nothing in general explains truth, nothing in general explains the truth of moral judgments, and so attaching the truth-predicate to such judgments is unconstrained by any moral reality. Indeed, the judgments themselves are similarly unconstrained. They are, perhaps, mere expressions of feeling or personal preference or prescriptions by which we hope to influence the behaviour of others, and the fact that we can apply the truthpredicate to them does nothing to make them more cognitively robust. It seems to me that this interpretation of deflationary treatments of truth reduces them all to ‘some form of redundancy theory of truth’ (347), according to which (b) above exhausts both the pragmatic and semantic roles of truth. However, there is no reason to suppose that deflationism is committed to such a theory, which is doubly implausible. First, it ignores the fact that ‘true’ sometimes has other pragmatic roles to play than endorsement, as when I caution someone that what she believes might well be true, but I see no justification for it,3 or as when I judge that if a valid argument’s premises are true, then so must its conclusion be, without thereby endorsing any of the premises or the conclusion. Second, it collapses an account of the pragmatic use of ‘true’ into an account of the semantic role of ‘true’—a mistake entirely analogous to the one Braybrooke accuses expressivist accounts of moral discourse of having committed (i.e., supposing that an account of the pragmatic force of moral claims tells us about the semantic role of morally evaluative terms). Even someone who thinks that pragmatics is logically prior to semantics should be wary of that mistake.4 A wiser deflationism insists on keeping these two dimensions of truth distinct. Still, it may seem that deflationism has little to say about the application of ‘true’ and ‘false’ to moral judgments beyond the observation that moral judgments are expressed by well-formed sentences that can 3
See Rorty (Rorty (1991), 128) for this ‘cautionary use’ of ‘true.’ Robert Brandom (Brandom (1994), chap. 5), who holds just such a priority-of-pragmatics thesis argues that the mistake of the classical pragmatists was precisely to confuse the pragmatics of truth with the semantics of truth. 4
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be embedded in conditionals, and subject to negation, conjunction, and disjunction. It may seem that way because it is that way. Deflationists do not think that truth has a nature, and a fortiori they do not think that moral truth has a nature. They do not think that truth is an explanatory concept that gives us some non-trivial insight into why some of our scientific theories work so well, and a fortiori they do not think that the truth of moral judgments can be enlisted to explain why we hold some of the moral views that we do. But this need not prevent them from agreeing with the spirit of Braybrooke’s proposal, already encountered, that ‘we can keep the concept of truth in place and work out a general theory of warranting judgments’ (345). A general theory of warranting judgments seems to me to be too ambitious a goal because I do not think that there is anything both general and non-trivial to be said about the nature of epistemic warrant. But, in a way, it is precisely such a lack of ambition that best serves Braybrooke’s desire to see warrant—or justification, as I shall henceforth prefer—as variable according to the context in which a judgment is made.
11.3 Contextualism: Default and Challenge By the term ‘ contextualism’ I mean to designate a view about epistemic justification that is hinted at in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and developed more explicitly by such philosophers as David Annis, Robert Brandom, and Michael Williams.5 I think that Williams’s view is the best thought out of any of these (though it overlaps considerably with Brandom’s), and it dovetails significantly with my own more inchoate views,6 so I shall focus on it here. 5 Jane Duran (Duran (1995)) and some other feminist epistemologists have made some convergent suggestions about the relation between justification and context. Williams is, unfortunately, rather dismissive of feminist epistemology—or, rather, I hypothesize that he would be if he bothered to mention it by name in his Problems of Knowledge. There the closest he comes to it is to refer critically to ‘standpoint epistemology’ (Williams (2001), 220), which he confuses with versions of relativism. The term ‘contextualism’ has also been applied to somewhat different accounts of justification advanced by David Lewis, Stewart Cohen, and Keith DeRose. I shall not be concerned with such views here. 6 See (Hymers (2000), chaps 1, 3, and 4).
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Williams defines contextualism as the view that ‘standards for correctly attributing or claiming knowledge are not fixed but subject to circumstantial variation’ (Williams (2001), 159). This view is best understood in the context of considering how to respond to two kinds of scepticism, which I follow Williams in labelling ‘Agrippan’ and ‘Cartesian.’ Agrippan scepticism is so named because of its relation to ‘Agrippa’s trilemma’ (Williams (2001), 62; Williams (1996), 60), also known as the ‘M¨unchhausen trilemma.’ For any knowledge claim that is advanced, the Agrippan sceptic demands some justification in support of that claim, but the presentation of evidence or argument in favour of the original claim results only in a further challenge from the Agrippan, who incessantly demands of us how we know that which we cite as justification—and so the conversation continues. The Agrippan’s challenge seems to leave us with only three options: embark on an infinite regress of reasons for reasons (and so never complete the task of justifying the initial claim), argue in a circle (and so, fail to give a genuine reason), or dogmatically assert the truth of some claim (and so, fail even to try to give a reason). Because none of these seems to constitute actually justifying our original knowledge claim, we are placed in the uncomfortable position of having to concede that we are ignorant where we thought we knew. Because such a sceptical argument can be launched against any knowledge claim, the scope of our ignorance is immense. Both foundationalism and coherentism are often presented as attempts to answer the Agrippan sceptic. The foundationalist contends that our beliefs can be classified into two kinds: (i) basic beliefs, which do not rely on any other beliefs for their justification and which are ‘intrinsically credible’ (Williams (2001), 82)—justified by their very nature; (ii) non-basic beliefs, which acquire what justification they can get from being inferentially connected to one of more basic beliefs. Such basic beliefs serve as stopping points for the sceptic’s infinite regress without being dogmatic (or so it is contended). The coherentist, by contrast, contends that the foundationalist adheres to an incorrect linear model of justification—a model shared with the Agrippan sceptic. This linear model is mistaken because it is linked
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to a dubious ‘ semantic atomism’ (102) without which the idea of a basic belief cannot be made intelligible. In order for the foundationalist’s basic beliefs to wear their justification on their sleeves, they must be intelligible in radical detachment from any other beliefs. If their content is determined, even in part, by their inferential connections with other beliefs, then it seems that their justification must also be, and so they fail to be basic beliefs.7 Doubts about this sort of semantic atomism make the coherentist dubious that there are any such things as the basic beliefs described by the foundationalist, to which the epistemic credentials of all other beliefs can allegedly be traced. On the contrary, justification must proceed holistically, according to this view. A belief counts as justified only insofar as it belongs to a justified system of beliefs, and a system of beliefs counts as justified, in turn, only insofar as it is a coherent system. But coherence is not mere consistency. A coherent system of beliefs is rich in inferential connections (both deductive and non-deductive), and it is more coherent to the degree that it is both comprehensive and explanatory. All local attempts at justification, the coherentist holds, are ultimately beholden to a broader global coherence of this sort. Williams’s contextualist thinks that foundationalism and coherentism are both committed to two controversial assumptions that lie at the respective hearts of our two kinds of scepticism—Agrippan and Cartesian. The first of these Williams calls the ‘ Prior Grounding Requirement’ (24). (The second, to which I shall return below, Williams calls ‘Epistemological Realism’.) The Prior Grounding Requirement, in brief, says that one is not being a responsible epistemic agent unless one’s beliefs are based on ‘adequate evidence’ (24). This entails, on the one hand, a thoroughgoing internalism, according to which the only justifiers are those within the ken of the would-be knower, and, on the 7 Thus Descartes is led to the view that he has an immediate and utterly simple intuition of his own existence as a thinking thing, and empiricist foundationalists like Schlick find themselves clinging to ostensibly atomistic judgments or expressions of immediate sense experience such as ‘Red here now.’ In order for such Konstatierungen to serve as justifiers for any other beliefs, they must be propositional in form. But it seems that as soon as they are propositional, they involve concepts whose meaning or content is determined in part by their applicability on other occasions. This makes them vulnerable to error, and such vulnerability to error threatens their status as foundations (recent attempts to articulate a ‘modest’ or ‘moderate’ foundationalism notwithstanding).
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other hand, a commitment to the view that one’s belief is justified only if no further evidence would serve as defeating evidence. A consequence of setting the standards of justification so high is that it is easy for a critic to challenge one’s justification. All she need do is ask, ‘How do you know that?’ and the Agrippan trilemma is immediately brought into play. The burden of proof lies entirely and squarely on the shoulders of the knowledge claimant so that every epistemic claim is, as Williams puts it, ‘guilty unless proved innocent’ (149). This legal analogy suggests an alternative. If we adopt the view that beliefs are to be considered ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ then we get something like what Robert Brandom calls a ‘default and challenge’ (Brandom (1994), 177; Williams (2001), 36) model of justification. According to this view, every belief has the ‘ normative status’ (Brandom (1994), 16-17) of being justified by default, and it loses this status only if it is brought into question by a reasonable challenge—a challenge that either gives positive reasons for thinking that the claim is false or, at a later dialectical stage, gives positive reasons for doubting whatever justification may be marshalled in defence of a claim that has been confronted by a reasonable challenge. This model, Williams submits, does better justice to our actual practices of giving and demanding reasons, according to which the burden of proof is something to be shared by the parties involved in a critical exchange. It denies the sceptic the undefended right to enter ‘naked challenges’ (Williams (2001), 150). It might be wondered what, in principle, prevents the Default and Challenge model from leading disputing parties into an infinite regress of reasons. The answer is, ‘Nothing—in principle.’ If people had unlimited lifespans, few practical concerns, and vast intellectual resources, they might continue to debate forever. (Indeed, some debates seem interminable—we politely call them ‘philosophy.’) But in practice many debates do come to an end—an end at which no further reasonable challenge is forthcoming, or an end at which the knowledge claimant fails to respond to a reasonable challenge. Such ends are not the intrinsically credible basic beliefs of the foundationalist, but they are not cases of acquiescing in dogma either. They are reasonable resting points, sometimes temporary, sometimes very stable, and they vary from one context
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of debate to another.8 There is no reason, prima facie, to expect all reasonably resolved debates to end up in the same place. It makes no more sense to ask which points are intrinsically stopping points than it does to ask ‘which points in Ohio are starting points?’ (Quine (1980), 35). Such resting points help to define a context of debate or inquiry. Unlike the classical foundationalist’s basic beliefs, they are not intrinsically beyond doubt, but to entertain doubts about them is to mistake or change the context of inquiry. Thus, to respond without joking to my claim that I left my wallet in my office with the challenge ‘How do you know? You might just be dreaming’ is to enter a challenge that is inappropriate in the context, although it may well have a place in some other context of debate—a class on epistemology, for example. But the latter-day foundationalist will demur, insisting that insofar as all knowledge of the world around us comes from the senses, we can expect that all debates one way or another can be properly resolved only by tracing reasons back to basic beliefs about sense experience. And the coherentist will insist that the temporary or stable resting points at which many debates actually stop do not count as anything more than justification for practical purposes. Such local justification becomes justification proper, only when it has been pursued to the global level (Williams (1996), 290).
11.4 Contextualism: Rejecting Epistemological Realism Both of these objections lead us—if not obviously—to our second kind of sceptical worry. If Agrippan scepticism gets its force from the Prior Grounding Requirement—from the permission of naked challenges to knowledge claims—the same cannot be said of Cartesian scepticism. For Cartesian sceptical problems are problems of underdetermination. To put this in my own favoured vocabulary, the sceptic about the external world assumes that the relation between experience and the world is paradigmatically an external relation—that it is such that we could identify and describe our experience without thereby being assured that 8 There are also unfinished debates that reach no resolution, because of, for example, either intractable disagreement or the death of one or more parties.
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we could identify and describe the reality that we assume to lie beyond appearances. This is because the Cartesian sceptic offers a rival hypothesis for the explanation of experience. Unlike the Agrippan sceptic, she does not simply ask, ‘How do you know that?’ Rather, she suggests that the hypothesis that there is a world beyond my mind, populated by objects, events, and other minds, lacks explanatory power because the evidence in its favour is also evidence in favour of the hypothesis that I am the victim of some evil demon’s deceptive activities. Cartesian scepticism is thus committed to what Williams refers to as ‘ epistemological realism’ (Williams (2001), 84, 193; Williams (1996), 89-134). This is the view that beliefs get their epistemic status from their content, so that some beliefs are by their very nature epistemically prior to others. It is the alleged intrinsic epistemic priority (as opposed to causal priority) of beliefs about immediate experience that makes the Cartesian underdetermination problem pressing. If epistemic priority is a matter of context and not content, then the Cartesian problem can be avoided in many contexts. Williams thinks that both foundationalism and coherentism are also committed to epistemological realism. This commitment is most obvious in the case of the foundationalist, for whom basic beliefs—typically beliefs about the immediate contents of experience—have an intrinsic epistemic priority over non-basic beliefs. But Williams argues that it also characterizes the case of the coherentist, who is committed by a more circuitous route to granting epistemic priority to principles of logic (needed for making assessments about coherence) (Williams (2001), 135; Williams (1996), 301) and to ‘meta-beliefs’ (Williams (1996), 302) concerning the coherence of one’s own total system of beliefs (Williams (2001), 136-7). (Either the meta-belief that my system of beliefs is coherent is justified, or it is not. If it is, then that must be because it belongs to a more encompassing system of beliefs, about whose coherence I now require a further meta-belief whose justification is in question. If it is not, then I have no reason to think that my belief system is really coherent after all and no justification, ultimately, for any of my beliefs.) Coherentism is ‘foundationalism in disguise’ (137). Contextualism, then, is characterized in part by a rejection of episte-
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mological realism (and with it, foundationalism, coherentism, and vulnerability to Cartesian underdetermination problems) and of the Prior Grounding Requirement, in favour of a Default and Challenge Model of epistemic justification. Can more be said in the way of a positive characterization of the view? Briefly, Williams outlines five kinds of constraints on epistemic contexts that determine whether a given belief or claim should be taken to be justified. First, if we are to be engaged in meaningful inquiry or debate at all, we must assume as justified a significant bundle of background beliefs. ‘A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt’ ( Wittgenstein (1972), §450). This is just a corollary of the default and challenge model, which holds a belief justified unless challenged and requires that challenges be reasonable. Williams (Williams, 1996) refers to constraints of this kind as ‘intelligibility or semantic constraints’ (159). Related to, but less general than, such semantic constraints are ‘methodological’ (160) or ‘topical’ or ‘disciplinary’ constraints (117). Such constraints treat certain propositions as ‘methodological necessities’ (Williams (2001), 160; Williams (1996), 123), exempting them from doubt in a way that serves to define a context of inquiry. Thus, it is a methodological necessity of particle physics that there are subatomic particles. If one doubts this, then one has ceased to do particle physics and has moved to a new epistemic context—the context of some radically new physical theory, perhaps, or, more likely, the context of instrumentalist philosophy of science. Similarly, it is a precondition of historical inquiry—Williams’s favourite example—that historians assume that the Earth existed long before we were all born. Such methodological necessities, as we saw earlier, are not themselves indubitable. But to attempt to cast doubt on them is either to misunderstand the context of inquiry or to try deliberately to change it. Once one has embarked on a particular inquiry, one’s claims and questions become subject to a third kind of constraint—‘dialectical’ constraints (Williams (2001), 161; Williams (1996), 117). Whether my claim that Arthur Wellesley’s failed night attack at Seringapatam made him leery of such attacks in the future is justified or not depends on what has already been said by military historians on the subject. If
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evidence has already been presented that offers some rival explanation for Wellesley’s preferences, then my claim will not enjoy the status of being default-justified. But if I am the first one to broach the matter, then default justification is mine. Of course, how stringent we are about demanding justification depends on how much time we have, and what the stakes are in a given debate. The more severe the practical consequences of being wrong are, the tighter the ‘economic’ constraints (Williams (2001), 161) will be. When my life hangs in the balance, I apply a higher standard of justification to the claim that the cup on the left, not the cup on the right, contains the poison than I would if I were doing a high school chemistry experiment. Finally, if my claims about Arthur Wellesley at the battle of Seringapatam are to be justified, it must not only be the case that there is no contrary claim already in play and that sceptical (or, in the case of pre-history, evangelical) doubts about the age of the Earth are held in abeyance; it must, additionally, actually be true that the Earth existed long before we were born. If the Earth is not more than two hundred years old, then no claim about Arthur Wellesley’s early exploits is justified at all. Such ‘situational’ constraints (Williams (2001), 162; Williams (1996), 117) make it clear that contextualism is not a purely internalist picture of justification because my belief’s being justified depends in part upon the instantiation of facts that may be well beyond my ken. Similarly, it must be the case that my eyes are functioning sufficiently well if my claim that the driver who almost ran me over was at the wheel of a sports-utility vehicle and not a sedan is to be justified— even though the proper functioning of my eyes may be in certain respects beyond my own ability to discover. Contextualism thus acknowledges that reliabilism points to something important in our practices of justification, but declines any attempt to reduce normative concepts like justification to ostensibly non-normative ones, like causation by a reliable process.9 9 As Williams points out, ‘reliability’ is a covertly normative term (Williams (2001), 33), since a process is reliable to the extent that it produces results that we value. I take this to be much the same point that John Pollock makes (Pollock (1986), 118-201), when he complains about the
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The contextualist thinks that both epistemological realism and the Prior Grounding Requirement are contentious theoretical commitments. One may be epistemically responsible without having adequate evidence for one’s belief, and beliefs get their epistemic priority or posteriority not from their content, but from their context. If this is so, then sceptical worries about our ‘knowledge of the external world’ can get no purchase, as long as we are not committed to the epistemological realism or the Prior Grounding Requirement that they rely on. Scepticism is not, of course, refuted by such considerations, but its reliance on contentious theoretical premises entails (i) that the sceptic is herself committed to knowledge claims to which we need not be committed—an embarrassing position for a thoughtful sceptic to be in—and (ii) that we need not be troubled by the sceptic’s peculiar worries precisely because they are peculiar—they are of concern only for someone who must accept commitment to the theoretical presuppositions on which sceptical doubts rely.10
11.5 Ethical Contexts and Meta-ethical Contexts It should be clear that this sort of contextualism is friendly to Braybrooke’s suggestion that we view justification in such a way that ‘warranting moral judgments would proceed in some respects differently from warranting reports of perception, and warranting aesthetic judgments more differently still’ (Braybrooke (2003c), 345). Contexts of moral judgment differ from contexts of perceptual judgment and from contexts of aesthetic judgment. It is, for example, a methodological necessity of moral judgments that there are agents and patients who can be harmed or benefited by one’s actions and the actions of others. Without this assumption, morality would have no foothold. In another arbitrariness that faces any attempt to identify the process that produces a belief and then evaluate that process for its reliability. 10 As Williams points out, contextualism also has the unexpected but harmless result that when we take the sceptic’s worries seriously by at least provisionally entertaining epistemological realism—as in the context of discussing them in a class on epistemology—we actually cease to know things about the world around us. But as soon as we emerge from our discussion into the world of practical affairs, the knowledge we had lost comes back again. Williams calls this the ‘instability of knowledge’ (Williams (1996), chap. 8; Williams (2001), chap. 4).
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context—the context of perceptual judgments, for example—it is not clear that the potential harms or benefits of my actions for others have the same constitutive status. Indeed, that same judgment may be called into doubt in some other context (e.g., the problem of other minds). The affinity between this sort of contextualism and Braybrooke’s position is made more manifest if we reconsider his remark that Moore’s open-question argument neglects the distinction between ethics and metaethics. The argument has an important place, he thinks, but its importance is meta-ethical rather than ethical: In meta-ethics, the possibility of alternative definitions of ‘good’ and other moral terms is firmly established. Asking the open question of what is seized upon to define ‘good’ as in ‘Is this really good?’ amounts to asking ‘Could “good” not be defined otherwise?,’ which is the counterpart in metaethics of ‘Is this really good?,’ and displaces it. The answer to ‘Could “good” be defined otherwise?’ is always ‘Yes.’(347) But, thinks Braybrooke, from the possibility of alternative definitions of ‘good’ we ought not to infer that no definition of ‘good’ is ever of any value to us, or, indeed, that every definition is as valuable to us as every other. I think that the situation here parallels a certain form of conventionalism about mathematics that we find in the work of Wittgenstein. According to this kind of conventionalism, certain principles of mathematics are implicit in our practices before we ever articulate them, perhaps for reasons having to do with ‘the natural history of human beings’ (Wittgenstein (1968), §415), in particular, our evolutionary history. That we have the mathematics (or, perhaps, even the logic) that we do is a contingent matter of fact. Thus that certain propositions count as necessary propositions—propositions that seem to tell us about the essence of things—is, ultimately, the result of an implicit convention, but this does not make it arbitrary. ‘[T]o the depth that we see in the essence there corresponds the deep need for the convention’ (Wittgenstein (1978), 65). And given the convention, we have ways of sorting
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the justified mathematical claims from the unjustified ones. Likewise, having accepted a certain contingent definition of ‘good’— perhaps because it is implicit in our behaviour—we may find ourselves under the illusion that it is the only possible one and, so, react with dissatisfaction to any attempt to make that definition explicit, once we realize that such explicit formulation opens the door to alternative possibilities. ( Schlick and Waismann, under the spell of the Tractatus, reacted similarly to the idea of alternative logics.) But, again, given a particular definition of good, we have ways of sorting the justified moral claims from the unjustified ones. A comparison with mathematical conventionalism is not likely to still the unease that a critic may feel upon encountering Braybrooke’s contention that the justification of ethical judgments is a matter entirely distinct from the justification of meta-ethical judgments.11 Here is where I think contextualism can be of greatest use to Braybrooke. If we are inclined to think that the justification of a moral claim presupposes the justification of some meta-ethical principle, then that, I think, is because we are tacitly committed to what Williams calls ‘epistemological realism.’ An example may help to illustrate and justify my contention. Imagine two academic philosophers engaged in debate about the old Republic of South Africa’s policy of apartheid. One philosopher insists that the policy is manifestly wrong and holds that it would be inappropriate, therefore, to extend an invitation to the South African vice-consul to visit campus and speak on the topic ‘Apartheid: The Other Side.’12 The other philosopher responds by asking for some reason to believe in the immorality of apartheid. ‘Well,’ says the first, ‘apartheid is a form of treatment that discriminates on the basis of skin-colour.’ ‘But why,’ asks the second, ‘is it wrong to discriminate on the basis of skin-colour?’— ‘Because skin-colour is a morally irrelevant difference, and it is always wrong to discriminate on the basis of irrelevant differences.’ ‘But what 11 Braybrooke (personal communication) objects that I do not get him quite right here, because there may be cases in which meta-ethical judgments effectively undermine moral judgments—for example, when someone asserts that ‘Moral judgments are nothing but the expression of emotion’ in response to my claim that ‘It is wrong to boil your neighbours’ babies for dinner.’ I am inclined to assimilate such cases to the debate about apartheid that I describe below. 12 I’m not making this up.
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is the justification for such a rule?’ continues the second in his sifting humour. At this point, the first philosopher may respond by citing some general principle—the categorical imperative, perhaps, or the greatest happiness principle, or, as Braybrooke would have it, a principle which says that moral rules are licensed insofar as they contribute to a ‘thriving society’ (Braybrooke (2003c), 342; my little dialogue, here, follows the pattern of Braybrooke’s). ‘But why,’ responds the second, ‘should we care about the thriving of a society or about the greatest happiness of the greatest number or about treating others as ends in themselves? Why think that any of these things tells us about moral goodness? Why, indeed, think that there is any such thing as moral goodness? Isn’t goodness, after all, a rather queer property to expect to find being instantiated by anything in the world?—A property that has the power to motivate those who apprehend it?’13 This debate over the rightness of a particular social practice quickly turns into a debate about whether there are any such things as moral properties or facts. It moves from the ethical level to the meta-ethical level as if that were the most natural dialectical move in the world, and up until the last step the second philosopher employs the very spare tool kit of the Agrippan sceptic, asking ‘why?’ whenever the first philosopher makes an assertion and insisting that the first philosopher bear the burden of proving these assertions. Non-philosophers surveying the debate will, I contend, think that the second philosopher has missed the point or is merely playing games of some sort,14 and if the context of the exchange is as part of a public debate about whether or not to invite the South African vice-consul to campus, then they will be right. Justification of a moral claim does not depend on the justification of any general meta-ethical principle, and in this context it is precisely the moral claim that is at issue, not the meta-ethical principle. Why? Let us apply the default and challenge model of justification to the debate. According to that model, remember, the challenger cannot simply enter ‘naked challenges.’ Challenges must, rather, be reasonable, 13 14
See Mackie (Mackie (1977), 38-42) for this ‘argument from queerness.’ As I said, I’m not making this up.
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where a reasonable challenge is one that either shows fault with some justification already given or provides some reason for thinking that the conclusion being advanced is false. By this standard, the second philosopher is obliged to show either that appeal to a rule or general principle fails to support the claim that apartheid is wrong or that there are positive reasons for thinking that apartheid is morally acceptable after all. In doing so, his position becomes vulnerable to criticism, too, and the Agrippan road to moral scepticism about particular principles, or about the objectivity of morality generally is blocked. However, the second philosopher may well agree to these terms and still try to make a sceptical case (i) about the particular moral claim (apologists for apartheid used to try to meet this criterion by arguing, for example, that the abolition of apartheid would lead to a civil war that would produce far greater suffering than the policy of racial discrimination itself produced), or (ii) about the general principle (‘The notion of thriving is too vague,’ might be the complaint) or (iii) about the very existence of moral facts (‘ Mackie’s argument from queerness shows us that no moral property is ever instantiated’).15 The default and challenge model of justification offers us no ground for complaint here because the sceptic is in fact shouldering some of the burden of proof. These challenges are clothed, not naked, and in this respect they resemble the challenges of the Cartesian sceptic, who does not simply ask ‘How do you know?’ but tries to offer positive reasons for thinking that we do not have much of the knowledge that we naively assume ourselves to have. That much resemblance is too little for us to draw any interesting conclusions about the plausibility of such moral scepticism. But there are deeper resemblances, and they deserve our attention. In particular, the philosopher who tries to push the debate from stage (i) to stage (ii) assumes that claims made at stage (i) lack proper justification unless a justification has been given of general moral principles. And the 15 Of course, there is another kind of moral scepticism, which has no obvious or plausible counterpart in the case of global scepticism about the senses, corresponding to the question ‘Why should I be moral?’ That’s a philosophical chestnut that does not need roasting here, though it is importantly connected with the internalism assumed by Mackie’s argument from queerness (Mackie (1977), 38-42), to which I shall return.
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philosopher who tries to push the debate further to stage (iii) assumes that neither particular moral claims nor general moral principles have proper justification, unless it has been shown that there really are such things as moral facts. In both these moves, I detect epistemological realism. Consider the move from stage (i) to stage (ii). If I am to know some particular moral claim to be true, then, the sceptic seems to be saying, I must know some general moral principle that certifies that particular claim (a necessary condition, not a sufficient one). The justification of the particular claim is only provisional until we have presented the certifying general principle. This is to say that in virtue of their content, particular moral claims are dependent for their justification on another category of claims, also demarcated by their content— general moral principles. And this is to commit oneself to the idea that there are ‘natural relations of epistemological priority’ (Williams (2001), 192). A reason to doubt epistemological realism is thus a reason to doubt that the justification of particular moral claims is incomplete until those claims have been traced to general moral principles. This is not to deny that whatever general principles my particular moral claims may presuppose must be true if I am to have knowledge of those particular claims. As we saw earlier, justification is subject to various ‘situational’ constraints. But it is enough—subject to our other contextual constraints on justification—that those principles be true for my claims to be justified. I do not also have to have demonstrated them.16 The situation here is analogous to one that arises in the context of our knowledge of cause and effect. Humeans about causation hold that wherever there is some cause-and-effect relationship, there is also some general causal law of which the particular case is an instance. But it is not obvious that from this we should conclude that in order to have knowledge of some particular instance of that relation I must have a 16 As Tom Vinci reminds me, a foundationalist can make sense of my not having to give a justification for a general principle in order for a particular claim to be justified by invoking a distinction between there being a justification that could be given and that justification’s having been given. Such free-floating justifications that wait around to be given smell too much of Platonism for my contextualist nose, but that is another debate.
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grasp of the causal law itself. It is enough—subject to other contextual constraints—that there be such a law.17 Of course, if a reasonable challenge suggests that some general principle is false, then that does undermine my justification for particular claims—just as evidence for thinking that documentary reports of the battle of Seringapatam had been falsified would undermine whatever particular claims I tried to make about that battle.18 But I need not first undertake to show that any general principle is correct in order to make justified particular claims. That is, general principles are not by their very nature (by their very content) better known than particular claims. (Nor are particular claims by their very nature better known than general principles.) A comparable case can be made concerning some sceptical doubts about the very reality of moral facts. The logical positivists, for example, doubted the reality of moral facts on grounds that no sense experience would count for or against the truth of a moral claim like ‘Apartheid is wrong.’ The plausibility of such a proposal is, of course, directly linked to the plausibility of holding a verification theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of a statement is its method of confirmation and disconfirmation. Such reductionism not only fails to accommodate the fact that hypotheses are never tested in isolation from background assumptions, as Quine argued (Quine (1980), 42), but it also is clearly committed to epistemological realism, for it treats reports and beliefs about the deliverances of our senses as having an intrinsic epistemic priority over reports and beliefs about any would-be moral data—indeed, over any non-observational reports and beliefs. However, other kinds of sceptical doubts about the reality of moral facts may appear on the surface not to be guilty of anything like this. Take, for example, the general kind of moral scepticism that the sec17
See Davidson (Davidson (1980), 16-17). But contrast this with the case in which I have no reason for thinking the general principle false, but in which a sceptic undermines my positive justification for the principle. Then I lack justification for whatever particular judgments presuppose the principle in the context of discussing the general principle, but it does not follow that in the context of discussing the particular claims I lack justification for them, so long as the general principle they presuppose is, in fact, true. Knowledge may be unstable. See note 9 above and Williams (Williams (1996), chap. 8; Williams (2001), chap. 4). 18
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ond philosopher in my little dialogue tries to press by appealing to Mackie’s ‘argument from queerness’ (Mackie (1977), 38-42). There are, as Mackie notes, really two components to this argument. First, Mackie claims that objective moral properties would be completely unlike anything else whose existence we are justified in believing in: Plato’s Forms give a dramatic picture of what objective value would have to be. The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding motive; something’s being good both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursue it. An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it. (40) Thus, Mackie thinks that objective moral properties must be intrinsically motivating, so that their mere apprehension will automatically dispose us to act in a way that we take to be morally praiseworthy and such that their motivational power has nothing to do with contingent facts about general or individual human psychology. This is the ‘queerness’ of moral properties, for they seem in this respect quite unlike any other properties recognized by mature science. Second, properties that have this queerness and are, moreover, supposed to be objective, present a challenge to epistemology. How could we come to know about such things? [N]one of our ordinary accounts of sensory perception or introspection or the framing and confirming of explanatory hypotheses or inference or logical construction or conceptual analysis, or any combination of these, will provide a satisfactory answer; ‘a special sort of intuition’ is a lame answer, but it is the one to which the clear-headed objectivist is compelled to resort. (39) Let me focus on Mackie’s complaint that we do not obtain moral knowledge by way of ‘explanatory hypotheses or inference.’ His point, I take
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it, is that we are not justified in believing in the existence of objective moral properties by an argument which takes the best explanation of some better-known fact to be that there are such properties. Thus, the fact that we have moral convictions—beliefs that seem most plausibly endorsed by praising them as ‘true’—is not best explained by the existence of moral properties, the apprehension of which induces in us such convictions. On the contrary, says Mackie, there is a rival hypothesis that handles all the data about human moral psychology quite well. Our belief in the objectivity of value is really the result of our tendency to objectify our own ‘wants and demands’ (43). Moral belief involves a kind of fetishism:19 [B]oth the adjective ‘good’ and the noun ‘goods’ are used in non-moral contexts of things because they are such as to satisfy desires. We get the notion of something’s being objectively good, or having intrinsic value, by reversing the direction of dependence here, by making the desire depend upon the goodness, instead of the goodness on the desire. And this is aided by the fact that the desired thing will indeed have features that make it desired, that enable it to arouse a desire or that make it such as to satisfy some desire that is already there. (43) Thus, because there is no objectivity of value, on Mackie’s account, all of our moral claims—which we make with the conviction that there are objective values—prove to be false, and since we cannot know something which is not the case, we have no moral knowledge, despite our many moral beliefs. Mackie relies here on an underdetermination argument, for he contends that my moral experience—my conviction that certain actions and outcomes are right or wrong—is explained as well by the hypothesis that no moral properties are instantiated—just projected—as by the hypothesis that moral properties are instantiated. This might remind us 19 Mackie (Mackie (1977), 42) compares his error theory to Hume’s view that we project causal relations onto the world, even though they are no objective part of the world, but we might extend the comparison to Feuerbach’s discussion of God and Marx’s treatment of commodities in the first volume of Capital.
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of the Cartesian sceptical argument: my experience as if of a world of objects and events beyond my mind is explained just as well by my lack of perceptual contact with such a world (by my being a brain in a vat, for example) as it is by my being in perceptual contact with such a world, and so, I am not justified in accepting the hypothesis of my perceptual contact with the world. But this tempting analogy cannot be trusted to deliver the conclusion that Mackie’s error theory relies on epistemological realism. Underdetermination arguments do not by themselves entail epistemological realism. It is part of the nature of explanation that what is to be explained must be assumed to be better known than that which explains it. However, this assumption may well be provisional, and in another context that which was assumed earlier may now be cast into doubt or treated hypothetically. Only if we think that that which we are trying to explain must be regarded as better known in all epistemic contexts are we committed to epistemological realism. However, Mackie’s view does assume that there is a kind of unity to moral experience, such that it makes sense to suppose that such experience can be identified and described independently of the moral properties to which it ostensibly refers. Consider again Mackie’s contention that we come to believe things to be morally good because we first discover that they satisfy certain of our desires. We then mistake the fact that we desire them for their intrinsic desirability (where intrinsic desirability means that ‘the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it’ (40)). What this story does not tell us is why we do not make the same mistake in the case of non-moral goodness. Ordinarily (there are exceptions), we do not suppose that someone who does not share our taste in desserts is failing to respond properly to some objective feature of the world. We do not suppose that preferring hockey to rugby is a moral failing. But if something’s seeming to be good is just an illusion caused by our desiring it, then we ought, in fact, to be subject to the same illusion regardless of the content of the desire. Mackie’s argument thus presupposes that we can identify certain of our own desires as having moral content, quite independently of being able to identify any moral properties in the world around us (since, after all, there are not supposed to be any such properties instantiated). But how does anybody ever get
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to do that? Mackie seems to be relying here on the very Cartesian model of inner experience that the sceptic about the external world is inspired by. According to that model, my inner experience is known to me independently of the way the world is in the sense that I could have exactly the same inner experience in the absence of what we normally regard to be its typical causes. Likewise, it seems, on Mackie’s account I could have the same inner moral experience, regardless of how the world is, and I could tell my desires with ‘moral’ content from my desires with non-moral content without having to encounter actual moral situations and without being trained and initiated into any particular set of moral practices. All of my knowledge of the world, including my would-be moral knowledge, is ultimately beholden to that which by its very nature is better known—my inner experience. Now Mackie might try to respond that I have misunderstood his position. There is, after all, some social or biological explanation for how it is that we come to make the error only in the case of ‘moral’ goods and not in the case of non-moral ones: Moral attitudes themselves are at least partly social in origin: socially established—and socially necessary—patterns of behaviour put pressure on individuals, and each individual tends to internalize these pressures and to join in requiring these patterns of behaviour of himself and of others. The attitudes that are objectified into moral values have indeed an external source, though not the one assigned to them by the belief in their absolute authority. Moreover, there are motives that would support objectification. We need morality to regulate interpersonal relations, to control some of the ways in which people behave towards one another, often in opposition to contrary inclinations. (42-3) We learn to distinguish our desires with moral content from those with non-moral content by means of social training in ‘patterns of behaviour’ that serve to ‘regulate interpersonal relations,’ not by acquaintance with the form of the good or by way of ‘a special sort of intuition’ (39). But it seems to me that any plausible explanation of this sort will come
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precariously close to granting precisely those facts about ‘the natural history of human beings’ (Wittgenstein (1968), §415) that contemporary moral realists think are all they need to make their case.20 Mackie’s confession that we need this kind of regulation seems to me to concede the most important point: the deep need for moral conventions is what tempts us to look for moral essences, but that makes the need no less deep. Of course, Mackie would demur. Showing that moral desires arise from facts about our evolutionary history or that they have their genesis in a shared, inculcated concern for the thriving of a given social order (or some combination of both perhaps) would not count for Mackie as ‘a reasonably robust version of moral realism’ (Braybrooke (2003c), 347). This is because when Mackie tries to bolster the case for his error theory by undermining the moral realist’s hypothesis, he does so by invoking an account of moral properties drenched in the heady spirits of Platonism, supposing that only such real essences could account for the ‘to-be-pursuedness’ (Mackie (1977), 40) of moral ends. But there is no reason why a moral realist has to accept either the full-blown motivational internalism of such a view or the existence of real universals. To repeat: ‘[T]o the depth that we see in the essence there corresponds the deep need for the convention’ (Wittgenstein (1978), 65). That morality is in some sense contingent may provoke a certain attitude of irony, but it does not deprive morality of its internal necessity.21 As I have been not-so-subtly hinting, the case here is rather like the case of mathematical truth.22 What the mathematical conventionalist offers us is a way of making sense of the truth of mathematical judgments that does not require us to go looking for mysterious mathematical facts in the world or beyond it. Likewise, what Braybrooke offers us is a way of making sense of truth in ethics that does not require acquaintance with other-worldly moral facts whose epistemic ac20 See, for example, Campbell and Woodrow (Campbell and Woodrow (2003)) and Campbell’s chapter in this volume. 21 One might take this as a way of trying to rephrase what I think is right about Rorty’s (1989) view (Rorty (1989))—and perhaps what Braybrooke’s view has in common with it. 22 It is no coincidence that Wittgenstein describes mathematics as ‘a network of norms’ (Wittgenstein (1978), 431).
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cessibility is mysterious and whose motivational force seems ‘queer.’23 The motivational force of moral judgments, according to Braybrooke, is something that derives from a prior commitment to ‘criteria of social thriving’ (Braybrooke (2003c), 346), which in turn is the ‘historically contingent’ result of ‘evolutionary social adaptation to the conditions of thriving’ (350). (And that certain practices and situations promote the thriving of individuals and communities is, thinks Braybrooke, largely a matter of empirical fact.)
11.6 Conclusion I conclude that Braybrooke’s invocation of the ethics/meta-ethics distinction is defensible. Moral claims can be justified by reference to moral principles even though no justification has been given for those principles because moral principles are default-justified and cannot be challenged without changing the context of inquiry or discussion. Consequently, if the proper application of the truth-predicate to claims is governed by contextually specific criteria of justification, ‘true’ may be used of moral claims ‘unselfconsciously, without thinking of metaethics’ (350), even though it may be applied ‘within one structure of ideas that figures among many logically possible structures’ (350). The case of ethics is thus much like the case of mathematics, according to one kind of conventionalism. What contextualism helps to show us is that one can be a conventionalist (at the meta-ethical level) and a realist (at the ethical level) at one and the same time.
23 I think the problem is exacerbated both here and in the mathematical case by commitment to a correspondence theory of truth, but I already have too many axes in the fire (to coin an expression).
Chapter 12
Braybrooke and the Formal Structure of Moral Justification T OM V INCI
Abstract In his paper ‘What Truth Does the Emotive-Imperative Answer to the Open-Question Argument Leave to Moral Judgments?’ David Braybrooke develops several themes in ethical theory, including an account of the nature of moral justification. I discuss his elucidation of the structure of moral justification within a broader account of how formal foundationalism, a doctrine of the structure of epistemic justification, can provide a useful protocol for understanding his account of the structure of moral justification. I conclude by raising some difficulties.
12.1
Introduction
In his recent paper, ‘What Truth Does the Emotive-Imperative Answer to the Open-Question Argument Leave to Moral Judgments?’1 David Braybrooke develops several themes in ethical theory, including an account of the nature of moral justification. Playing supporting roles are arguments showing that the account of justification thus developed can give a measured response to the challenge posed by Moore’s ‘openquestion’ argument. The account draws upon insights in Braybrooke’s 1
Braybrooke (2003c). Hereafter page numbers in parentheses refer to this text.
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own natural law approach to morality2 and in the classical emotiveimperative accounts of Stevenson3 and Ayer.4 There is an apparent tension between these two theories regarding how to handle the concept of truth in contexts of moral justification: natural law theory seems to favour its application to moral claims; emotive-imperative theory does not. One of Braybrooke’s concerns is to show how a theory that incorporates elements of both approaches assigns truth to moral claims in ways that does violence to neither. I approach Braybrooke’s paper as an epistemologist rather than an ethical theorist. For much of the twentieth century, epistemology and ethical theory have been concerned with apparently distinct subject matters, each developing its own set of problems and methods—ships passing in the night. Yet there have been some close encounters in both directions: epistemology looking to ethical theory and ethical theory looking to epistemology. An example of the former is Roderick Chisholm’s program in epistemology;5 another example is virtue epistemology.6 In the other direction, one project looks at whether models of knowledge developed within contemporary epistemology can be applied to ethics—‘ moral epistemology’ as it has come to be called. For example, Robert Audi has recently catalogued various models of knowing in epistemology—empiricism, rationalism, intuitionism, and noncognitivism—and considered which best fit various positions in ethical theory. (He proposes that a moderate version of intuitionism is the best fit for the most plausible version of ethical theory.)7 My own contribution to this volume falls within the general heading of moral epistemology. I am not, however, as Audi is, interested in taking a substantive position in epistemology but rather in looking at a formal account in epistemology about the way in which justification can be transmitted from the general to the particular, Sosa’s formal founda2
David Braybrooke, Natural Law Modernized (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). (1944) 4 Ayer (1936) 5 Chisholm (1966), 11ff. 6 See, for example, Axtell (1997) 7 Audi (1999)). 3 Stevenson
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tionalism.8 The exercise in moral epistemology that I undertake here is to suggest that formal foundationalism is embodied in Braybrooke’s approach to ethical justification, to develop in detail a formal foundationalist interpretation of Braybrooke’s account of justification, to consider how some substantive problems arising within Braybrooke’s substantive ethical theory can be formulated with the model, and to show, with the help of the model, how these problems might be resolved.
12.2 Braybrooke on the Open-Question Argument of G.E. Moore Braybrooke’s paper begins with a discussion of the open-question argument. Moore thought that if you find that something has a certain property that is not in itself evaluative—that it is pleasurable for example—it is then an ‘open question’ whether that is good. It is notoriously difficult to give a precise definition of what Moore may have meant by this, but Braybrooke attempts one: If you purport to define ‘good’ as pleasure or anything else, you will be cutting off any opponent who tries to disagree, saying to her, ‘This is not an open question . . . no one can think otherwise except through confusion.’9 The connection between an ‘open question’ and the possibility of giving a definition for ‘good’ seems to be that if a question like ‘Is pleasure good?’ is an open question in the sense intended then one cannot answer it by saying ‘Yes it is; and that is true by definition.’ Moore’s explanation for this is that ‘good’ is a primitive property; that is, it is a genuine property, something that truly characterizes things, but it is a basic property, not analysable into—hence not definable in terms of—natural components. Of course, classical emotivists also think that ‘Pleasure is good’ does not express a definitional truth, but they think so not because ‘good’ is a primitive term but because the sentence does not express a truth (proposition) at all—it expresses an emotion or an injunction. 8 Sosa
(1980), at 12ff. The passage is from Braybrooke (341); the internal quotation is from G.E. Moore, Moore (1903), 21. 9
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Braybrooke considers several proposals among emotivist-imperativist (‘EI’ for short) theoreticians10 about what is expressed by an utterance of a declarative sentence concerning the moral status of doing X: (1) negative feelings I have about doing X; (2) an ‘injunction, softer perhaps than an ordinary imperative’ for others to feel the same way; (3) an injunction for me to act appropriately, e.g., by way of making ‘reparations’ (341). The combination of these three is ‘what may be described as the emotivist-imperative theory’ (342). Braybrooke is not very sympathetic to the idea that when we say ‘That’s good’ truth or falsity is simply inapplicable. He notes that we quite properly and naturally respond to moral claims by saying ‘That’s true’ (344-5) and is not sympathetic to the idea that this is a sense of truth less robust that we apply to factual assertions (345). But Braybrooke also finds in the EI approach something that is right and valuable both in its commitment to the role of emotions and injunctions in moral judgment and in its giving a satisfactory response to Moore’s open-question argument. What is a bit tricky here, and requires careful navigation by Braybrooke and his readers, is combining the idea that truth is applicable in a robust sense to the objects of moral evaluation with the idea that those objects are to be understood on the emotiveimperative model. Braybrooke does this by connecting truth and endorsement: ‘The word “True” is the normal form of serious endorsement in ethics as in other branches of discourse’ (344). Now there is a high road and a low road between truth and endorsement. The low road is the truth-deflationary road: ‘That’s true’ just stands in for whatever expression ‘that’ refers to anaphorically. In the case where the expression ‘That’s good,’ for example, is understood as expressing an emotion or an injunction rather than a proposition, that status is preserved even when the expression is given in proxy form: ‘That’s true.’ Indeed, Braybrooke mentions some deflationary accounts, including one of the classic redundancy versions, the pro-sentential theory,11 but does not think that these accounts have all the goods on truth: ‘there still seems to be some room for endorsement that cannot be occupied by merely repeat10
He cites Stevenson, Ayer, and Hare. et al. (1975)
11 Grover
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ing the original judgments or anaphorically signifying their repetition’ (348). But what is the high road? Soon after formulating the open-question argument Braybrooke shifts from consideration of goodness to right and wrong, the moral justification (or lack thereof) of actions. Retaining from emotive-imperativism the objects of moral judgment, principally injunctions, Braybrooke then notes that injunctions, like other actions, can be justified or not. It is in an account of the nature of injunction justification that Braybrooke sees truth coming into the picture as more than an element in a redundancy use of ‘That’s true.’ Endorsement is the justification (possessing or being willing to provide same) and justification requires truth: this is the high road connecting endorsement and truth. For Braybrooke, moral justification attaches in the first instance to particular injunctions, ‘You, do x now.’ This attachment is secured by three things: (1) particular injunctions are instances of general injunctions (rules) like ‘Everyone, always do x now,’ (2) rules can themselves be justified, and (3) justification somehow flows from the general to the particular. In saying that a certain injunction is an instance of a general rule, what we say will be either true or false. This is one way in which a non-redundancy notion of truth appears in the account. Braybrooke does not spend much time explaining (3) (though discussing it will occupy a major portion of the second half of this paper), focusing instead on (2), the locus of much of the substantive ethical theorizing that occurs in Braybrooke’s paper. Here, his account is broadly rule-utilitarian: the justification of a rule consists in the positive consequences if most of us follow the rules most of the time. The ‘positive consequence’ is societal thriving. Truth (in a non-redundancy sense) comes in here, too, for the second time: it will be either true or false that a certain rule, universally followed, will lead to thriving, given a determinate account of what thriving is. But this is the end of the line for truth and facticity: there is no fact of the matter about which conception of thriving is the right one. Braybrooke makes a case that moral justification depends on commitments to a conception of human thriving which can in principle vary as widely
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as the limits of the human will and imagination. No one commitment, or set of commitments, is given ‘exclusive status’ (347). What I take this to mean is that, if, after giving the matter as much and as good thought as I am able, I say that I am committed to a conception of societal thriving in which the weak and infirm are left to die, there is no replying, ‘You are wrong: that is not a moral commitment.’ If that is Braybrooke’s view, it is one that I am sympathetic with: I also think that room must be found for individual, ‘existential’ choices in the foundations of moral conduct. But that is not the issue I propose to explore here; rather, I wish to explore the proposal Braybrooke has made about the formal structure of moral justification and his claim that a solution to the open-question argument can be found in the emotive-imperative theory of normative discourse. We will find that the structure of moral justification Braybrooke proposes fits the model known in epistemology as ‘ formal foundationalism’ and that the solution which the EI theory affords for the openquestion problem lies in the doctrine of persuasive definition advanced within a version of the EI theory by Stevenson. I will argue that employing a version of the doctrine of persuasive definition endorsed by Braybrooke in the logical context of formal foundationalism leads to a difficulty for Braybrooke’s account of moral justification akin to Moore’s original naturalistic fallacy. This result, if correct, has special significance for Braybrooke since he states, in the very first sentence of the paper,12 that although there is life left in Moore’s open-question argument, properly understood in emotivist-imperativist terms, the naturalistic fallacy is dead. In the next section I begin the exploratory task.
12.3
Explorations
We have already seen that on Braybrooke’s reading, Moore treats an open question as one that we cannot respond to by saying that a certain 12 ‘The emotive-imperative theory of moral judgments invites treatment as a response to the problem exposed by G.E. Moore’s “open question” argument, which remains in the field after the associated charge is refuted that it is a “naturalistic fallacy” to identify good with any descriptive characteristic’ (341).
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claim is true by definition. In this sense Moore claimed that questions of the form ‘I agree that x is F, but is it good?’ where F is any descriptive predicate, constitute an open question: we cannot settle the matter simply by saying that ‘F things are good’ is true by definition. More precisely, Moore argued that (1) any definition of ‘good’ of the form ‘X is good = df. X is F,’ where F is a descriptive predicate, is either incorrect or circular. Assuming that (2) ‘is good’ is a genuine predicate (genuine predicates assign properties to the subjects of propositions) occurring in a genuine subject-predicate proposition, Moore argued validly that goodness is a primitive property, our understanding of which must come from some source other than explicit definition, for example, a special kind of ‘apprehension’ of goodness. Braybrooke finds the notion of a special kind of moral apprehension objectionable—he does not say why in detail, mentioning a preference for Wittgenstein (346). In any case, let us accept that moral apprehension in Moore’s sense is not a resource available to us in our attempt to resolve Moore’s point about defining ‘good.’ Traditional naturalists would, of course, simply reject premise (1), claiming, instead, that there is a single correct definition of the sort Moore denies. If I understand Braybrooke’s response to both traditional naturalists and to Moore, it is that Moore is wrong when he says that no correct, non-circular, naturalistic definition of evaluative language is possible, and naturalists are wrong when they say that there is a single such naturalistic, non-circular definition of evaluative discourse. Braybrooke’s point takes advantage of the logical fact that in addition to one and none there is the possibility of some. Braybrooke’s position, then, is that there could be a range of naturalistic definitions of evaluative language. In the case of the language of rule justification, the range is determined by the conceptions of thriving to which various people using such language are committed. Now, this account may not, technically, be a form of moral relativism,13 nor does Braybrooke describe it as such, but it is a close cousin. Like relativism, the definition form, if not each definition individually, requires specification of a conception of thriving that is sup13
Thanks to Michael Hymers for helpful suggestions around the issue of relativism.
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plied freely by the agent. The effect of this is that the truth of specific judgment formulations, ‘Doing X is wrong,’ will vary relative to the different extraneous commitments of moral agents. Whether we say that this variability is due to the assertions taking on different meanings in a way that systematically varies with these commitments or that it is due to assertions having the same meanings but with an extra parameter in underlying logical form systematically varying with these commitments, the point is still that truth varies with parameters supplied from outside. As evidence that Braybrooke recognizes the relativismlike characteristics of his account, I note that he spends considerable time in mitigating the consequences of his account for those who would be squeamish about moral relativism (348-9). Finally, we come to the matter of the justification of particular injunctions. On Braybrooke’s account these get their justification derivatively, by being instances of justified rules. So, showing that a particular injunction, ‘You, do X now,’ proceeds in two stages. First, there is the justification of the basic injunction, ‘You, do X now,’ what Braybrooke calls ‘moral judgments of the first instance,’ by appeal to the fact that this injunction falls under a general rule, ‘Always do X in circumstances C’ (345). Then there is the justification of the rule itself. The following two propositions represent these two stages: A The injunction ‘You, do X now’ is morally justified in circumstances C if there is a morally justified general rule, ‘Always do X in circumstances C.’ B The rule ‘Always do X in circumstances C’ is morally justified iff the general practice of following the rule will promote the thriving of society according to a conception T of thriving. Following Stevenson, proposition B is intended by Braybrooke to involve a ‘persuasive definition’ (347n22). A persuasive definition does not purport to report logical equivalences in a set of antecedently existing concepts but is a stipulation of how one will use language, the upshot of which is that we are committed to replace occurrences of the definiendum with occurrences of the definiens in ordinary (non-metalinguistic, non-modal, etc.) contexts. Persuasive definitions are not,
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therefore, true or false. We can then take B as the definition form for which various specific versions are possible depending on which conception of thriving we specify. Different people will now choose different definitions depending on which conception of thriving they are committed to. Proposition A does not seem intended as a definition but serves, rather, to express the way in which particular injunctions receive justification from general injunctions. There is, however, some question of exactly how proposition B ‘involves’ a persuasive definition. We have been operating on the assumption that what is being stipulated in B is the meaning of the words on the left side of the biconditional, ‘The rule, “Always do X in circumstances C,” is morally justified.’ This is what the solution to the open-question problem suggests—many possible definitions of the evaluative language on the left side of a definition form, ‘x is EV iff x is F,’ where EV is a suitable evaluative term and F is a suitable descriptive predicate. This reading is also suggested by the following passage: what . . . Stevenson called a persuasive definition, [was] in this case, that wrong is at bottom a matter of running against the thriving . . . of one’s society. There could be other persuasive definitions, for example, unattractive ones like the one that makes wrong at bottom a matter of interfering with the ¨ plans and activities of the Ubermenschen, or innumerable silly ones, like making wrong at bottom a matter of drinking tar water and passing up beans. (343) I will call this the ‘full-substitution’ reading of the role of stipulative definitions in Braybrooke’s account of moral justification. There is, however, a second reading on which the scope of substitution by stipulation is less than the entire left side of the definition but is, rather, confined to replacing occurrences of T in the definition.14 If I stipulate that by ‘thriving’ I mean ‘non-interference with the plans and activities ¨ of the Uebermenschen,’ then the only substitution that gets made is a replacement of the former by the latter. Call this the ‘partial-substitution’ reading. 14
Thanks to Richmond Campbell for suggesting it.
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There are reading has its advantages and disadvantages. The fullsubstitution reading gives a justification for statement B—it is true by stipulation-but generates a problem with the justification of particular injunctions, a problem I develop later. The partial-substitution reading avoids the validity problem but raises another: what justification can now be offered for the biconditional comprising statement B if it is no longer true by stipulation? The latter problem seems the more damaging to Braybrooke’s program, at least to its meta-ethical dimension, a dimension to which Braybrooke assigns considerable importance (347, 350). So, until further notice, I shall operate with the full-substitution reading. I now turn to a discussion of meta-ethics, its various forms, and what role, if any, it plays in Braybrooke’s account. This topic, of interest in its own right, will also serve as a bridge to epistemology and the notion of formal foundationalism, an account of the structure of epistemic justification that I plan to use in section 6 as a model for interpreting Braybrooke’s account of the structure of moral justification.
12.4
Three Conceptions of Meta-ethics
I begin with a general discussion of the notions of meta-ethics and meta-language. A meta-language is a language that contains terms that refer to words and contains sentences that say various things about the words that are referred to by the terms. Thus, the sentence ‘This sentence has more than one word’ is a sentence in a meta-language because the term ‘this sentence’ refers to words and this sentence says something about those words. What is the relation between the concepts meta-ethics and meta-language? Braybrooke’s account of the former is brief: In meta-ethics, the possibility of alternative definitions of ‘good’ and other moral terms is firmly established. Asking the open question of what is seized upon to define ‘good’ as in ‘Is this really good?’ amounts to asking ‘Couldn’t “good” be defined otherwise?’, which is the counterpart in metaethics of ‘Is this really good?’, and displaces it. (347)
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The second question is meta-linguistic, involving mention of the word ‘good’ in formulating the definition; the first question is not. It looks as if, on Braybrooke’s treatment, the distinction between ethics and meta-ethics rests on the distinction between a first-order language and its meta-language. Call this ‘the first conception of meta-ethics.’ But now suppose that we reformulate the definitions in a way that uses but does not mention ‘good’; thus, ‘X is good iff . . . ’ Because this is not a meta-linguistic statement, the development of this definition would not be occurring within meta-ethics on the present suggestion. This seems unduly restrictive of the conception of meta-ethics Braybrooke is invoking since a successful outcome to the definitional task would still not entail the truth of particular judgments of the form ‘Doing X is morally unjustified/justified.’ Determining the truth of such ascriptions is an important task traditionally assigned to what has been called ‘normative ethics,’ a discourse usually contrasted with metaethics. So perhaps we can say that normative ethics is concerned with determining the truth of propositions assigning the justification predicate to particular actions; meta-ethics is concerned with arguing for the truths of various propositions, definitions, and other such things, that do not entail the truth of categorical propositions assigning moral justification to particular actions. We shall call this ‘the second conception of meta-ethics.’ It will prove helpful to compare meta-ethics so understood with another parallel enterprise, meta-epistemology. Meta-epistemology is often regarded as the theory that deals with questions of whether and how first-order knowledge or justification ascriptions are themselves known or justified. For example, if the way things look yields prima facie justification for the way things are, how is the statement of that proposition—‘If it looks as though p to S, then S is prima facie justified in believing that p’—itself justified? Various answers could be proposed; and the discourse in which answers are discussed is usually called ‘ meta-epistemology.’ Notice that meta-epistemological discourse need not be meta-linguistic15 (although in the present case it is), 15 For example, we can ask, If I know that p do I know that I know that p? This is a central question in meta-epistemology but is not formulated meta-linguistically.
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thus showing a disanalogy with the first conception of meta-ethics; but notice also that the propositions established in meta-epistemology ascribe properties of (epistemic) justification to subjects, thus showing a disanalogy with even the second conception of meta-ethics. The distinction I have in mind is best characterized in terms of the language of ‘first-order’ and ‘second-order’ discourse. This same language can also be applied to ethics. I will employ the terminology ‘second-order ethical discourse’ when the issue is whether a first-order claim that doing X is justified is itself justified. Since definitions need not be second-order (though of course they may be), definitions can be framed and deployed in first-order ethical or epistemological discourse. Second-order ethical discourse therefore comprises a third conception of meta-ethics.
12.5
A Side Trip to Epistemology
In epistemology we might be interested in whether someone’s assertion is epistemically justified, whether he has a right, epistemically speaking, to say what he says. We might also be interested in whether a certain proposition is justified in relation to other statements that potentially could serve as evidence. Whichever subject we choose, the property of epistemic justification has to come from somewhere. There are two potential sources of justification. (1) The first source consists of a true conditional of the form ‘Given that X meets certain conditions, then X is epistemically justified,’ where X is a proposition or an assertion, taken together with a clause affirming that the antecedent is true. The principles can take the form of (a) biconditionals, in which case they count as definitions , or (b) one-way conditionals, in which case they are called warrant principles . (2) The second source for justification attaching to an assertion or a proposition is by transmission from other justified propositions. The most basic candidate for a transmission principle is some variant on If x entails y and x is justified then y is justified. Principles of this kind are entailment transmission principles. I shall bypass some of the most intensely argued controversies in contemporary epistemology and simply postulate that the basic entailment transmission principle (the one given in italics) is true.
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Formal foundationalism16 is the doctrine that any demonstration that an entity is justified must proceed deductively in an orderly fashion employing warrant principles to establish non-inferential justification and then applying transmission principles recursively, first to non-inferentially justified entities to produce inferentially justified entities, and then to inferentially justified entities to establish more inferentially justified entities. Formal foundationalism is broader than traditional foundationalism. Coherentism, for example, counts as a version of formal foundationalism, but not ‘substantive foundationalism.’ (Suppose that a coherentist employs the following definition of justification: x is justified iff x is an element of a maximally coherent set of beliefs.17 This definition can then be used as one premise in a deductive proof that a given belief is justified; the other premise would assert that the belief is in fact an element in a maximally coherent set of beliefs.) Now consider the following reasoning typically proposed by an epistemologist interested in the epistemology of perception:18 Reasoning Pattern A (1a) (S)(p) If it looks to S as though p, then S is prima facie justified in believing that p. (2a) It looks to Jones as though there is an apple on the table. (3a) No counter-reasons against the proposition that there is an apple on the table are available to Jones. Therefore, (4a) Jones is justified in believing that there is an apple on the table. This argument is valid (given a suitable understanding of prima facie justification) and line (1) is a warrant principle. If all the premises are true we have demonstrated the truth of the first-order epistemic assertion at line (4) in accord with the protocol of formal foundationalism. (The justification at line [4] is non-inferential since no transmission principle 16 17
The term and account is due to Sosa. See Sosa (1980) at 12ff. The position that I presenting here is a simplified version of Laurence Bonjour (1985), 87-
18
John Pollock (1974): the position he calls ‘descriptivism,’ 56 ff.
93.
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has been employed in the proof.) Of course the question arises whether the premises are true. If pressed as to the principle at line (1), for example, I could, if I am schooled in epistemology, give a reply, perhaps along the lines of 5a (1a) is justified because it leads to consequences that best accord with our commonsense epistemic intuitions. Line (5a) is a second-order epistemic claim, the argument for which occurs in meta-epistemology. But I do not need to be able do metaepistemology in order to have demonstrated that Jones’s belief that there is an apple on the table is justified: saying in response to a request for a defence of (1) ‘That’s another question’ is a legitimate way to terminate a dialogue without abandoning the legitimacy of one’s claim to (4a). Now consider the following pattern of reasoning: Reasoning Pattern B (1b) Whenever it looks to S as though p and there are no countervailing indications, then p is true. (2b) It looks to me as though an apple is on the table. (3b) No countervailing indications are present. Therefore, (4b) There is an apple on the table. Suppose that Jones believes (4b) and we ask her to justify the claim. Suppose that initially she offers the premises (2b) and (3b). But now I am dissatisfied with the answer because the argument as it stands is not formally valid and I want to find out what premise Jones might offer to remedy this. Jones provides (1b). Finally, suppose that all the premises are true and that Jones believes them all. Is Jones now justified in believing that there is an apple on the table? Notice that the conclusion of this reasoning does not assert that she is, unlike the case with pattern A. If she is justified, what would the source of the justification be? In this case it is an inference. Formal foundationalism says that justification has to come from one of two sources—a warrant principle or by inference from a justified belief in accord with an acceptable transmission
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principle. A consequence of this view is that all steps in an inference, I, to a conclusion, C, must be justified if C is to be justified. This means that the explicit representation of a case of inferential justification must ascend one level from that of pattern B (no justification property attributed: 0-level) to an argument containing premises that do attribute justification to statements (first-order epistemic statements): Reasoning Pattern C (1c) Statement (1b) is justified for Jones. (2c) Statement (2b) is justified for Jones. (3c) Statement (3b) is justified for Jones. Therefore (by a transmission rule), (4c) Statement (4b) is justified for Jones. Pattern C is the pattern of argument that is needed if inferential justification is to be demonstrated of a proposition. It is important to note that although the premises of this argument have to be true, there is no requirement that there be second-order justification—for example, that statement (1c) be itself justified for Jones. So, all the steps in pattern C fall within first-order epistemology. Also, note that because of the difference between being justified and giving a justification, there is no requirement that Jones give the justification alluded to in each of (1c)(3c).
12.6
The Main Line of Advance Resumed
We are now in a position to return to the main line of advance. Recall the two stages in Braybrooke’s account of moral justification: A The injunction ‘You, do X now’ is morally justified in circumstances C if there is a morally justified general rule, ‘Always do X in circumstances C.’ B The rule, ‘Always do X in circumstances C,’ is morally justified iff the general practice of following the rule will promote the thriving of society according to a conception T of thriving.
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Sentence A does not express a definition; sentence B does express a definition, a stipulative definition. Recall that a stipulative definition is neither true nor false but expresses a commitment on the part of the person making the stipulation to replace occurrences of the definiendum with occurrences of the definiens in normal contexts. Braybrooke relies on both A and B in his account of moral warrant. First, there is the stage of an agent a endorsing the particular injunction, ‘You, do X now,’ accomplished by appeal to the general rules. This is the first place where truth comes in. Endorsement expresses warrant, in this case, moral warrant: 1 The particular injunction, ‘You, do X now,’ is morally justified in circumstances C. Where does the warrant come from? Braybrooke’s answer: inference from a general rule. Although injunctions are not propositions and do not, therefore, admit straightforwardly of logical implication, I shall suppose that there is something analogous to the relation of logical implication holding between the rule, ‘Always do X in circumstances C,’ and the injunction, ‘You, do X now,’ when circumstances C obtain. With this in hand in the theory of moral warrant there will be a protocol analogous to formal foundationalism in epistemology. (There is one difference: factual premises—for example, those asserting that conditions in a rule are met—are not, of course, justified in the same category of justification as is being transmitted, namely, moral justification of injunctions.) We can see from Braybrooke’s account that he in effect is relying on this protocol in his theory of moral warrant because he supposes that the warrant of particular injunctions is inferred from the warrant of general rules, and that the warrant of the latter is asserted by a warrant principle, specifically a definition, sentence B. The first stage of the reasoning can be expressed as follows: Reasoning Pattern D (1d) The rule ‘Always do X in circumstances C’ is morally justified. Therefore,
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(2d) The particular injunction, ‘You, do X now,’ is morally justified in circumstances C, in the presence of a principle asserting that justification is transmitted by the analogue for injunctions of logical implication. This pattern of reasoning fits pattern C—occurring within first-order moral discourse. That is, no ascent to meta-ethics, third conception, occurs here. Then there is the stage of endorsing the rule itself: this amounts to showing that (1) is true. Here Braybrooke appeals to its ability to promote thriving (of the right kind) in society. If the rule does indeed promote thriving in society—if it is true that the rule promotes thriving— then, according to Braybrooke, that is a second place in which truth comes into the account: A rule cited to warrant a moral judgment praising an honest action is endorsed as according with the appropriate grounds or criteria for adopting such a rule, the criteria or grounds for justifying it. Here the place of truth is secure, whether or not what is justified by the justification are themselves truth-bearers, as in some cases, they clearly are not. (345) Here, there is also an argument. Taking into account the role of agent commitment as a parameter in statements of the argument, we have the following: Argument E (1e) The rule, ‘Always do X in circumstances C,’ promotes the thriving of society on conception T of thriving. (2e) The definition, The rule ‘Always do X in circumstances C’ is morally justified = df The general practice of following the rule will promote the thriving of society according to a conception T of thriving, is selected by agent a. Therefore, (3e) The rule ‘Always do X in circumstances C’ is morally justified for agent a.
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Line (2e) is the warrant definition; line (1e) provides an auxiliary empirical premise, yielding the conclusion, line (3e). Line (3e) is noninferentially justified in the formal foundationalist sense. (No transmission principle is used here.) Note that even at line (2e), the place where Braybrooke finds an excursion into meta-ethics (350), there is no second-order attribution of justification, hence no meta-ethical discourse conceived in the third way. We now combine the two stages into a single argument. A moral agent, making this argument explicit, would say the following: Argument F (1f) The rule, ‘Always do X in circumstances C,’ promotes the thriving of society on conception T of thriving, which I accept. (2f) I hereby stipulate that the words, ‘The rule “Always do X in circumstances C” is morally justified,’ will mean the same as the words, ‘The general practice of following the rule will promote the thriving of society according to a conception T of thriving.’ Therefore, (3f) The rule, ‘Always do X in circumstances C,’ is morally justified (1f, 2f, commitment inherent in making the stipulative definition). (4f) I hereby make the injunction ‘You, do X now.’ (5f) Circumstances C obtain. Therefore, (6f) The injunction, ‘You, do X now,’ is morally justified. (3f, 4f, 5f and a suitable transmission principle for injunction-warrant) This is the theory of moral warrant that Braybrooke set out to achieve characterized in terms of formal foundationalism. Apart from relatively minor disagreements around the issue of meta-ethics, my verdict is, ‘So far so good.’ But I now wish to make a more serious criticism of the proposal, centring on the special characteristics of stipulative defini-
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tions.19 Stipulative definitions, as we have seen, are conventions, commitments to replace one set of words (the definiendum) with another (the definiens) in normal contexts. The underlying logical form of a stipulative definition is not a biconditional but an injunction. In the case of the stipulations regarding the language of rule justification at issue here, the commitment is this: Commitment made in stipulating a definition of rule justification The stipulator is committed to replacing, in normal contexts, the words, ‘The rule, “Always do X in circumstances C” is morally justified,’ with the words, ‘The general practice of following the rule will promote the thriving of society according to a conception T of thriving.’ It follows from this commitment that our agent is committed to replacing the words, ‘The rule, “Always do X in circumstances C” is morally justified,’ in line (3f) with the words, ‘The general practice of following the rule will promote the thriving of society according to a conception T of thriving,’ yielding (3f*) The general practice of following the rule will promote the thriving of society according to a conception T of thriving. But now the inference expressed in argument F*—argument F* is obtained from argument F by replacing (3f) with (3f*)—aborts. Note that argument F successfully confers inferential justification on the particular injunction at line (6f), as intended. This is because argument F correctly employs a transmission principle to get from (3f) to (6f). But argument F* fails to confer inferential justification at line (6f) for the 19 Mike Hymers has raised doubts about whether I have the notion of stipulative definition right here. He suggests four alternative accounts: that the definition might be simply ‘latent’ in our moral practices; that we might invoke a theory of ‘implicit definitions’; that we might simply be able to re-substitute the left side of the definition for the right after having done the reverse following our commitment in making the stipulation in the first place; and that the definition might be understood as a ‘meaning postulate’—an analytic statement—in Carnap’s sense. All of these are interesting suggestions but it is not clear that they are primarily suggestions for me rather than for Braybrooke. In any case, they all require careful responses which shall have to be left for another occasion.
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reason that there is no justification present in line (3f*) to be transmitted.20 (Readers will note that this problem is akin to that identified by Moore under the heading of ‘the naturalistic fallacy.’) So Braybrooke’s account of a structure of reasoning by means of which we can show how particular injunctions acquire their moral justification, formulated within the protocol of formal foundationalism and in terms of the fullsubstitution reading, fails. There is, however, as noted above in section 2, an alternative reading of the scope of substitution in the stipulative definitions, the partialsubstitution reading. On this reading we are required to replace, not the whole left side by the whole right side of a definition, but only occurrences of the thriving parameter (T) with specific kinds of thriving to which our speaker is committed. In the case of argument F this means that the speaker is not committed to replacing 3f with 3f*, so a crucial move in the objection fails: the account of how particular injunctions acquire justification on the formal foundationalist model still stands, in the form of argument G: Argument G (1g) The rule, ‘Always do X in circumstances C,’ is morally justified iff the rule, ‘Always do X in circumstances C,’ promotes societal thriving. (2g) I stipulate that by ‘societal thriving’ I mean T. (3g) The rule, ‘Always do X in circumstances C,’ is morally justified iff the rule, ‘Always do X in circumstances C,’ promotes T. (substitution by stipulation) (4g) The rule, ‘Always do X in circumstances C,’ promotes T. 20 I anticipate the following objection: ‘A correct definition, “A = df B” is always symmetrical—one can replace the left side by the right, but also the right side by the left. So, in the present case, we simply replace f* by f, thus re-introducing the required injunction-justification premise.’ I reply that this holds only for reportive definitions, not stipulative definitions. The former are, if successful, true necessary bi-conditionals; the latter are not true statements at all, hence are not necessarily true biconditionals. They are, rather, commitments to act in certain ways—and the ways are asymmetrical.
12.7. AN ALTERNATIVE BRIEFLY CONSIDERED
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(5g) The rule, ‘Always do X in circumstances C,’ is morally justified. (3g, 4g) (6g) I now say: ‘You, do X now’; and circumstances C obtain. (7g) The injunction, ‘You, do X now’ is morally justified (5g, 6g, and a suitable transmission rule). However, this benefit is achieved at a cost—as mentioned in section 2, we no longer have as an answer to the question, ‘What justification can you offer for (1g)?’, that it is true by stipulation. The challenge, arising within meta-ethics (third conception) is, With what are we to replace it?
12.7 An Alternative Briefly Considered I wish to pursue, very briefly, an alternative formulation of the theory of warrant being pressed by Braybrooke that avoids this problem. This formulation takes note of the fact that we often attribute instrumentally evaluative predicates to individuals in relation to certain sub-categories within a general category that they exemplify. Thus we can speak of a ‘good sports car,’ meaning that it is good as a sports car (though not, perhaps, as a touring car.) The notion of ‘good car’ simpliciter is undefined. In the spirit of this we might think of defining what it is for a given general injunction to be a good moral injunction. On the present suggestion this means that the injunction would be good as a moral injunction, good for the purposes which such injunctions serve. At this point one might plausibly have recourse to the conception of natural law underlying Braybrooke’s program in the present paper, namely, that moral injunctions, when followed, serve to promote societal thriving. An injunction, ‘Always keep promises,’ for example, might plausibly be thought to serve such purposes, and thus be good as a moral injunction. This could be phrased alternatively by saying that the rule, ‘Always keep promises,’ understood as a moral injunction (as opposed to some other kind—prudential, authoritarian, etc.) is justified. Unfortunately, relative instrumental justification of this sort does not seem to be transmissible to particular injunctions, for it does not follow that because a general
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rule, when followed, will promote societal thriving, so will a particular injunction when it is followed. I conclude that the task of providing a theory of moral warrant within the protocol of formal foundationalism, based on the EI theory of ethics and adequate to dispelling Moore’s allegation of a naturalistic fallacy, remains still prospective.
Chapter 13
David Braybrooke On the Track of PPE P ETER K. S CHOTCH
Abstract David Braybrooke has long been interested in the project of applying moral philosophy to social science. In this essay I attempt to show how various bits and pieces of his life’s work actually might be seen as accomplishing that far-reaching aim. Part of the difficulty which others have encountered with such central pieces as the theory of rules presented in Logic on the Track of Social Change, has more to do with the formality of the presentation of that material (which the authors admit demands at least some technical facility on the part of the reader and a considerable store of good-will besides). In order that these same difficulties not reappear, the Track theory is presented in a (new) graphic format which simplifies the concepts but not to the point of triviality. Within this newly minted approach, various issues are raised including a novel presentation of some well-trodden moral theory and the place of political economy in a rule-based picture of morals.
13.1
Introduction
When I came to Dalhousie in 1972, my relationship with David Braybrooke went through a shake-down period during which we were both wondering what to make of each other. I was a brash young man and 323
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David was the established major figure—the power of the department even though he wasn’t then (nor was he ever) the administrative leader. We each had misgivings about the other, although perhaps misgivings is too strong a word since it implies a lack of openness, or perhaps even of goodwill and neither of those obtained. For his part, David had been dismayed by certain trends in the technical end of philosophy— trends away from applications and toward the philosophical equivalent of so-called pure mathematics. For my part, I had been similarly dismayed by the eagerness of some moral and other philosophers to dismiss my work as not being ‘real philosophy.’ So the stage was set for us to start off on the wrong foot. Instead, I discovered that David was glad to have my counsel on certain matters that involved deploying formal methods in some of his projects, and David discovered that I was delighted to make whatever mutations seemed necessary in order that some existing formalism actually have a useful application. Both experiences were novel to each of us. At a later stage in our cooperation, we moved into an entirely new mode in which the formal work did not consist of applying (perhaps with some modifications) an off-the-shelf theory, but the construction of a new theory virtually from scratch, the shape of which was dictated by the application, or series of applications. In a project like Logic on the Track of Social Change (referred to as Track in the sequel) some formalism would be proposed to fit initial requirements and then might change substantially as the requirements were refined over time. What I intend to do in this essay harks back to the very first time I heard David Braybrooke speak publicly about his philosophical aims. On that occasion he said that he was interested in the possibility of applying moral philosophy to social science. I was struck then by the scope of this project and remain stricken to this very day. In what follows I shall revisit this ambition to apply philosophy. In the version I preach, it will be the philosophy mainly expanded in Track and some of its successor pieces. It might be a stretch for some to accept that this philosophy is in fact moral philosophy though there is this to be said for it: For the most part it will be philosophy in which David
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Braybrooke had a hand or at least an interest. Though much of what I say will bend in the direction of the technical, I will present the latter in graphical, rather than the more forbidding algebraic, form. In the interest of readability, if not comprehensibility I will content myself with a gloss whenever that is possible without producing a mere caricature.
13.2 How Track Came About It’s all very well to give an account of how the various bits of Track and some of its later exfoliations connect with David Braybrooke’s work in the larger sense, but what sort of position should we grant Track itself? Is it a project to which Braybrooke committed himself at a fairly late stage in his career—a project, moreover, that can (arguably) be detached (at least very largely) from the projects (in moral, social, and political philosophy) which preoccupied him in earlier periods. No it isn’t. In fact this view of things, though representative of a body of opinion against which Track labored in vain, is remarkably out of touch with Braybrooke’s work. We knew on the day that Track would challenge a number of accepted ways of doing things but we hoped that with enough of what we called ‘ good will,’ people could be brought to see that the struggle with the formalism was worth-while in the end. Unfortunately, it must be admitted, we seriously over-estimated the amount of good will upon which we might draw. The Track project grew out of Braybrooke’s long time interest in the notion of a rule in general, and of a social rule in particular. Anybody who thinks this interest may be detached from the rest of Braybrooke’s thought without any great violence to the whole, hasn’t done his homework. But let us do ours. That David Braybrooke’s interest in rules dates from his earliest work, needs no further documentation. Instead we need to show that a willingness to employ formal methods in pursuing an account of rules
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is not something which belongs only to some hypothetical ‘later period.’ Providing one is not prepared to date such a period to include 1969—a very brave exegetical hypothesis that would be, we need only notice the use that Braybrooke makes of the formalism of G.H. von Wright1 in his paper Braybrooke (1969), and in his Braybrooke (1970). In a nutshell, the program of Track is to bolster these earlier attempts at showing how the notion of a rule can figure in certain kinds of historical explanation. In fact the various case studies that form the core of Track are very much to that point. But there is another reason for Braybrooke to look for aid and comfort among the formal philosophers: Though many and various are those who seek to call upon the concept of a rule to do this or that theoretical work, fewer by far are those who are prepared to offer a definition. Now of course there are bound to be those who say that we know perfectly well what a rule is and don’t require a definition, especially a formal one, but Braybrooke is not among their number. The first attempts to define a rule, as for instance ‘a pattern of norms’ or ‘a context dependent family of imperatives’ would seem, on no very deep appreciation of the concepts involved, to be circular. So rule talk looks to be all of a piece with norm talk and imperative talk, which makes things messy, to say the least. It also explains why so few philosophers attempt a definition. It is at exactly this point, the point where things are messy, that a formal approach can be helpful. It is quite true that rigor is sometimes the enemy of clarity, but when there is no clarity to begin with, it is sometimes wise to fall back on rigor. And clarity may appear in the end after the rigorous approach has been pursued far enough. In fact, we contend that this is precisely what happened in the case of rules. It is not so easy for the casual reader to detect this since in Track the ‘order of reasons’ gets scrambled, as it nearly always does once we go from the research to the write-up. The chapter, largely informal, which introduces our (non-circular) account of rules comes before the formal chapters which introduce the logic of rules. Historically it was the other way about, and it is no exaggeration to say that we wouldn’t 1 As
developed in his ?
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The Set of Alternative Social States
You are here
Figure 13.1: The Space of Alternative Social States
have hit on the former were it not for our struggles to get the latter correct, or at least not obviously incorrect.
13.3
The Basic Set-up
So let’s do some social science. We shall conceive of our subject as widely as possible in terms of a certain set of objects—the objects studied by social scientists. Now of course this is a considerable idealization, that all of the social sciences are really concerned with one sort of object, but perhaps the stretch isn’t quite as broad as one might first expect. These objects we shall call, following K. J. Arrow, the set of alternative social states understood as the objects with respect to which the state-variables, however we conceive these, receive a value.2 2 There
is an analogy to be made here with the phase space approach to physical science.
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13.4
How to Apply Moral Philosophy
Morality, at bottom, is an account of what we ought to do. Obviously it is situational—it would be a bizarre moral code which, in every set of circumstances demanded precisely the same action on our part. Somebody might say that morality does exactly that, by demanding that we always do the right thing, but this is disingenuous in the extreme. Half, or more of the battle is the determination of which thing (or things) are right—in this or that circumstance. There are different kinds of morality and hence moral philosophy springs into being. It might be better to say that there are many apparently different moral codes. Or perhaps “decodes” would be better still. One single moral principle ”The greatest good for the greatest number”, or ”Harmony with nature” etc. might be understood, at the level of ordinary life, in dozens of ways which at least seem distinct. These unpackings of over-arching principles are what we typically mean when we talk of moral codes.3 Now we get an inkling of how moral philosophy can be applied to social science: The latter describes the ‘phase space’ of alternative social states, while the former tells us what we ought to do in this or that circumstance. This is to prescribe an action (or series of actions) given that we find ourselves in an alternative social state which satisfies some specified condition or set of conditions.
13.5
Actions
But doing things, either what we ought to do or some other thing, results in moving from one alternative social state to another. So knowing what to do (or at least what we ought to do) is tantamount to knowing which alternative social state is to be (or at least ought to be) selected as our new home, given that we find ourselves in such-and-such a present alternative social state. 3 And it might be no exaggeration to say that how exactly a principle is to be unpacked is the fundamental problem of practical ethics.
13.5. ACTIONS
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termination set
Intermediate States
x
Starting State
Figure 13.2: The Ice-Cream Cone Semantics of Action
The picture just presented demands clarification and qualification, much of which will require another occasion, but this we can say right away: It is not, in general, possible to specify in advance with precision just what the consequences of (a given agent) performing a certain action (action type) will be. The best we can do in ordinary circumstances is to specify some range of states within which the result of performing the action type in question will lie. The semantics of action is thus a complicated business and not, perhaps, for the faint of heart or the impatient. But in keeping with our present graphical slant on things, one picture will answer all but the most determinedly technical questions. Indeed this picture explains why the approach is often described as the ice cream cone semantics. The apex of the cone, it’s originating point, is what we call the starting state of the action. The cone proper contains the only states which (if any can) can be active while the action is being performed. We some-
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times say that these are the only states in which the action might be running once it has been started (if it starts at all) in its starting state. This should not be taken to mean that each of the cone states will in fact be visited, only that no other state will be. Similarly, the ice-cream part contains the only states which can result (if any do) after the action is performed. We might think of the ice-cream states as the ones that can be reached (if any can) by performing the action beginning in the starting state. Similarly the cone states are those through which we might pass as a result of performing the action beginning in the starting state (if indeed the action can begin there). This picture of the action is decidedly non-deterministic but that can be taken to reflect only our lack of knowledge about what the other actors will do in the circumstances contemplated by the picture we here present.4 Compared to the literature (on the formal theory of actions), this account is new in adding the cone. In other words, previous accounts characterize actions entirely in terms of which states result once the action had been performed (providing that it can be performed—there is no guarantee of this in general). So for these theories, actions are essentially and only what we might term bringings about. We, on the other hand, characterize actions not simply in terms of what they bring about, but also in terms of how they bring about whatever it is, if anything, that they do. Our view is perhaps closer to common sense, even though such a remark is sometimes thought pejorative in connection with formal work. For us, two distinct actions might bring about precisely the same result. This would also seem to be the burden of a number of old sayings many of which involve violence to cats. Just what happens when we string a series of actions together (by concatenation as we say—with the resulting object often referred to as a concatenate) is nearly but not exactly what you think will happen. Another picture will help. In this we see that the cones (intermediate states to give them their technical title) get aggregated into a kind of super-cone for the concatenate. In addition, all the ice cream of the last actions in the se4 This leaves open the question of whether or not the non-determinism runs deeper than the epistemic—an important question no doubt but one that we have been glad to dodge.
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INTermediate set for concatenation TERMination set for concatenation not part of the concatenation
... ... ...
Figure 13.3: Concatenating Actions
quence (termination states in the parlance of Track) gets lumped into one object—a sundae perhaps? This leaves open only the fate of the intermediate bits of ice-cream, the ones that are not shaded in the picture. They, it might seem a trifle odd to say, are not part of the concatenate at all. There is a technical reason to prefer things this way5 but we shall appeal instead to the intuitive principle that a concatenation can only be said to be running when at least one of its ‘factors’ is running. But at the states in question one action is terminating and its successor is starting. Since the concatenate is not running then, these states shouldn’t be counted as intermediate for the concatenation. The entire semantic account of an action type, say r, is the specification of its ice-cream cone given the selection of any alternative social 5 The technical reason is that only by casting out these states will the virtual action skip, mentioned in the next section, serve as what the algebraists term an identity. This identity, along with the fact that the operation of concatenation is associative, endows the set of actions with an interesting algebraic structure.
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Figure 13.4: An Non-Terminating Action
state as a starting state. “But why” you will want to know ‘should an action type even have a cone for every social state?’ Indeed that would make action types rather more abstract than we would like. We must thus allow cases in which a given starting point does not have a cone, or at least one of the usual sort. 13.5.1
When good actions go badly
The standard pathology of actions is confined to those which do not terminate. These are actions with no ice-cream so-to-speak and that’s their graphic representation. And if actions are conceived as the bringings about (of the truth or falsehood of propositions for instance), then these are the only actions which fail. But in our account of action types there is the cone to consider as well. In this case there is clearly the possibility of another form of ‘misfire.’. It might be that the action in question cannot even be started.
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Figure 13.5: A Non-Starting Action
Such an action has no cone at all, and is represented graphically by a backwards facing cone.6 An important property of actions which is studied in Track but not elsewhere in the literature (at least in the literature on formal accounts of action) is that one action may block another.7 The basic idea is simple enough: the action r1 might BLOCK the action r2 in one of two ways. In the first way, attempting to perform r2 after performing r1 (which is to say graphically at any point in the ice-cream portion of r1 ) either will not terminate or will not start. In the second way, attempting to perform 6 This raises the issue of whether or not an action with no cone might nevertheless have some ice-cream. Such a thing sounds bizarre and in Track such actions are called virtual. In point of fact the literature contains at least one such action called (in Track and elsewhere) skip. This action always terminates in the unit set of the state in which it was started and traverses no intermediate states in its journey. To put the matter whimsically, skip has always and everywhere just finished being performed although nowhere is the performance of it actually taking place. 7 This idea appeared in the early stages of research which was later reported in Track, and at first seemed nothing more than a minor curiosity. As we began to exercise the Track account of rules however, it soon became clear that blocking is a central and crucial notion.
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r2 while at the same time performing r1 , which is to say graphically in the cone portion of r1 , does not terminate or does not start.8
13.6
Rules
Which brings us to the center of Track and to the notion that must bear a great deal of the weight when morals meet science—the theory of rules. The theory as presented in Track might be termed ‘forbidding’ in more than one sense, alas. In the first sense, the introduction of the idea of actions blocking one another allowed a simplification of the theory in that all rules can be cast into the form of rules of forbidding. An earlier effort9 had already reduced all rules to those in the top row of the square of opposition—forbidding and permitting. But with blocking in our arsenal, we can parse rules which permit the action r as rules which forbid all those actions r∗ which block r. Unhappily the theory also seems have been forbidding in that it presumed too much in the way of formal science to be easily digestible by its target audience. Given our current graphical turn however, we can see what a rule is, at a glance. Consider figure 13.6. Here we see the universe of alternative social states from the perspective of a particular subset of them, those which satisfy the condition C, of a certain collection of rules Fi . These are the states, the C-states, where the rules apply. We refer to actions that start in C as C-state actions. What each Fi does, in simplest terms, is to forbid certain C-state actions (to a certain class of agents, those within the so-called demographic scope of Fi . To avoid complicating the exposition, we typically suppress mention of these agents). 8 The illustration of these two in Track is in terms of tying shoe laces. You can block my tying my shoe laces by untying whichever lace I have just tied. So long as you perform your untying action, my tying action cannot terminate. This is an example of the second way of blocking. Alternatively you might make away with my shoes while I take a reckless nap, which will ensure that my tying action cannot start. 9 By Charles Hamblin, see ?
13.6. RULES
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The set of states which satisfy the condition C
Figure 13.6: Instantaneous Picture of a Rule
The darkened areas of the social universe, represent the forbidden actions according to the collection Fi in that the only way to reach any darkened state is by means of an action which some Fi rule forbids. ‘Ah’ you say, ‘but what if the actual social state, our current state lies in one of the dark zones?’ (see figure 13.7) Well, that would be a bad thing— so bad indeed, that we have a name for it—a quandary. Quandaries are to rules what contradictions are to propositions.10 It must be emphasized here that figure 13.6 is not a picture or diagram of the effect of a set of rules—it is instead a snapshot of the actions forbidden by the rules relative to a certain condition and a certain collection of agents. One might postulate the existence of certain rules that hold for all agents under all conditions—but this is no part of the Track doctrine. 10 In practical terms, one would be as bad off as somebody in a quandary if one’s social state were entirely surrounded by a dark zone as a single candle burning in the darkness. In such a situation there is only one action not forbidden, but it is the virtual one skip.
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Current Social State
Figure 13.7: A Quandary Situation
As we trace out a certain trajectory in the social space which is to say, move from one social alternative to another, we also pass from one condition to another. As this happen the class of forbidden actions and, it goes without saying, the class of agents bound by the rules, change. So a picture like figure 13.6 is really only one frame in a movie—and it is the movie which is the true representation of the rule.
13.7
Utilitarianism
For much of his philosophical career David Braybrooke has been interested in utilitarianism. Given his interest in rules, we can see at least one reason for such an interest. To put the matter in the whimsical idiom of the previous section, one wants to know whether or not the movie has a happy ending. The thing is, a given society of individual agents who are bound by a sequence of rules (which come into effect as they progress from one
13.7. UTILITARIANISM
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alternative state to another) will, since portions of the state space are forbidden by the rules, tend to move to the other states, the ones which are not forbidden. At least this will happen if sufficiently many people who are bound by the rules, actually comply with them. Waiving that (interesting) consideration for a moment, suppose that the society in question follows the rules as they evolve from one frame of the movie to the next. The question is: what should happen? Or better: If the rules are properly constructed, what should happen? To put a moral slant on things: what would be a good outcome to following the rules? This is a bit tricky but only only a bit and only because we aren’t yet equipped with the concepts we require in order to adjudicate the matter. The first thing we need is the notion of a goal . In this context a goal is a subset of the space of social alternatives. Which subset? Evidently, one in which we would like to live, one in which we want the actual social state to be. We shall shortly take up the issue of how we decide on our goal, but first we may need to be convinced that such a notion actually has a role to play. It should be clear that the function of rules is to restrict which alternative social states are ‘accessible,’ which is to say that following the rules amounts to staying within a certain corridor. But what if that corridor doesn’t lead anywhere? What if following a certain set of rules meant only that any alternative social state was as likely as any other as our destination (subject only to the laws of nature)? To put the question more bluntly, what incentive would we have to actually bind ourselves to following such rules? There has been and remains an intuition on which it may turn out that following a rule is less advantageous in the short-run than not following it, but even so, following is the right thing to do. An extreme version of this view has it that some rules are just correct, pure and simple. Following them is always the right thing to do and not following them never is. It would seem then such folk as these would answer the blunt question that our incentive for following rules can never be more or less than the rightness of doing so. At this point we might ask for a list of the right-making properties
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and a great controversy will ensue. Instead, we shall take the position that even if the journey be worth more than the destination, the latter has to count for something. In particular, there must actually be a destination as opposed to a random walk through social space. This separates us from the extremists just canvassed. We may think of the region into which a set or rules ’leads’ us, as the goal of, or relative to, that set of rules. It also brings us closer to something resembling utilitarianism. Once we restrict our attention to those collections of rules which have what we called a goal,11 there remains the question of how to adjudicate between rival collections. Evidently we can raise the question of whether one goal is preferable to another and as soon as we do that, we have become some flavor of utilitarian. Strictly speaking there is a whole range of alternatives here only some of which are ‘really’ utilitarian. What we require is some evaluation of the alternative social states which is to say a preference ordering.12 How utilitarian we are depends upon how this preference ordering is used. I think David Braybrooke’s contributions to this part of the account are numerous. One which we might highlight first is the notion that the goal, whatever subset it eventually turns out to be, has a kind of core. In other words in order to belong to the goal set of social alternatives, there is some list of minimal conditions which, while it may not, indeed probably doesn’t, fully characterize the goal, yet gives us a starting point for calculating which states are likely candidates. Perhaps we can say that although we may not be in a position to identify the goal with much precision, we are prepared to say immediately that social states of suchand-such a kind will definitely not belong. I look at Braybrooke’s work on needs as being of this sort. Whatever other properties a state satisfying a (social) goal might turn out to have, within the goal the needs of the individual members of society will be met according to some well-defined standard of provision. In 11 There is another technical matter concerning goals. A goal should be not only a subset of the state space which we eventually reach, but a subset which once entered, we do not subsequently leave—at least not without a change in the rules. 12 Utilitarians, of the later generations at least, came to regard preference which a jaundiced eye. They it were who coined ‘Better Socrates unsatisfied than a pig satisfied.’
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339
fact the book on needs makes a useful beginning as a specification of such standards and indeed spelling out just what sort of thing is a need, and telling us why the concept of needs and paying attention to them can be seen as central to what we (but not Braybrooke) have been calling a social goal.
13.8 Where’s the politics? Even if we can agree on the core properties of the goal states, it might well be necessary to go beyond those properties to specify an additional collection of features. In particular, there may be political-economic reasons for such a thing. Think of it this way: We describe a subset of the space of social alternatives in which we shall (eventually) arrive provided enough members of society act in accord with the rules in a certain collection. We can see, in the abstract perhaps that the rules should be such as to secure the provision of needs, but will that be enough? Enough, that is, to ensure the amount of compliance required to reach the destination subset. It might fail—human nature being what it is. In order to ensure a sufficient level of compliance we must then take further measures. Moral education of a more or less strenuous sort has been popular in this regard (one might think of the so-called cultural revolution in China as an example) though not always efficient. Beyond the softer measures are rank upon rank of harsher, and more expensive methods. After a certain point, the game is no longer worth the candle— once the Gulags and the Dzerzhinsky squares appear, for instance. In such a case we must find another way to convince (sufficiently many) members of society to follow the rules. And what other way is there, when coercive measures have been put aside13 , but to appeal to the preferences of sufficiently many? Evidently what has to be done is to further shape the goal (which will also require tuning up the collection of rules). But havent we now set ourselves an impossible task? After all K.J. Arrow has shown that blah blah blah and we all know what that means. 13 not
that they are ever entirely put aside
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Individual preference orderings cannot be aggregated in any convincing way. Or does it? I am inclined to think that we have been coming at the problem the wrong way around. In the first place we cannot (or at least should not) prove that social choice is impossible since it happens all the time. Instead of first trying to define the social preference ordering , and then choosing alternative states on the basis of that ordering, we should ask how we might go about choosing the states. We can then see what social preference ordering (if any) is implied by this choice, and let the chips fall where they may. So how do we actually decide on social policy? How do we decide which kinds of alternative social states to aim for? It is a complicated, but not entirely impenetrable matter. Let us idealize it a bit but not to an absurd degree. And once more we can call upon the vision of David Braybrooke who has emphasized issues and made interesting conjectures concerning how issues are processed in a social setting. The basic idea in our idealization, is that of an agenda which is a collection of issues, each of which is represented by a proposition (which is part of the idealization). The propositions are considered in turn by a number of parties either all the individuals in the society or, more usually, their representatives. These representatives consult their own preferences in order to judge whether or not any given proposition in the agenda is preferred to its negation. This is another tricky technical matter since we have hypothesized only the preference orderings defined over states and we have now to parlay that into an ordering defined for sets of states (which is what, semantically speaking, propositions are). Suffice it to say that such a “ type-raising” is indeed possible.14 So each member can decide for herself whether she would prefer that the proposition P , for instance, be true rather than false or vice versa or finally whether she is indifferent between the two.15 14 this
matter is treated in more detail in ?.
15 An advantage to considering propositions—sets of states as opposed to individual alternative
social states is that a number of different individuals can have wildly varying preference orderings on the states and yet have wide agreement on the orderings of sets. This fact makes it more plausible that a relatively small number of representatives can accurately reflect the preferences of
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If we were to presume, which we assuredly do not, that all the decision makers have perfect information, then we could allow an agenda to contain every proposition. But that would be an idealization extending into what we called the absurd. In our picture, a group of adjudicators, decision makers, or the representatives of the interested parties (who are themselves, we presume also interested parties) confront the list of propositions (issues) on a given agenda. Some of the propositions might well be agreed to by everyone (or their negations agreed to) and those will go on to form part of the goal, pending agreement on the package. Many, it may be presumed will be preferred by some but not by others. Here there is the possibility of so-called log-rolling. You care nothing for P one way or the other but are committed to Q while for me the two attitudes are reversed. There is the material for a bargain here. Further bargains might result from my weak preference for P retiring in the face of your strong preference for not-P , so long as my strong preference for Q similarly trumps your relatively weaker preference for its negation. Eventually we get as far as we can go. What are left are the issues concerning which we can not secure agreement. Some of us prefer P as a matter of deeply held principles while the others prefer not-P on a similar basis. Various means have evolved to produce a decision in these cases too but we shouldn’t ignore the possibility of simply dropping the more contentious issues from the agenda. If the value of the bargain consisting of the package of issues already agreed to is sufficiently high, then there is that much incentive to find a way to complete the bargain. When strongly held principles stand in the way of a valuable bargain, we don’t discard the principles (for the most part) but that need not prevent us from discarding the occasion on which the principles become inconvenient. An added incentive to pull back from a game of ‘duelling principles’ is that this whole procedure, from agenda formation to final decision, is one that is going to take place again and again. If our principles clash today, who’s to say that tomorrow you won’t be converted to my point of quite a large constituency.
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view, or I to yours. This highlights another of David Braybrooke’s key insights—the value of an incremental approach to policy formation. If we allow the goal to be formed by a sequence of processes like the one just described, then it will be a moving target, although there must be some limit on the velocity of its movement or the process won’t work. If all of our preference orderings changed wildly every day, then given the cost of computing (a stage of) the goal and of setting up a set of rules which conduce to that goal, it would be too expensive to attempt. But, in real life, our preferences do not change wildly and the idea of forming a goal in these stages while at the same time reconstructing the collection of rules so that its goal matches the one we are computing, seems if not a clear match to some actual procedure, then at least an interesting idealization. It seems that in the new science of issue processing coupled with this new account of rules, we have come at last to something like the foundations of policy analysis.
Chapter 14
Bootstrapping Norms: From Cause to Intention B RYSON B ROWN
Abstract In Logic on the Track of Social Change, David Braybrooke, Peter Schotch, and I developed a theory of rules, including both a definition of rules and a logic explicitly designed to enable us to express their contents in an illuminating way. This paper sketches an account of the relation between the normative and the descriptive elements of that theory. The account draws on a bootstrap argument due to Sellars, who used it to ground an account of how an agent can come to be aware, and justified in asserting, that she is a reliable observer. Sellars’s argument relies on a distinction between descriptive assertions about episodes and their normative interpretation. This paper relies on the same distinction to explain how an agent can come to be aware, and justified in asserting, that she is normatively engaged with a system of rules.
14.1 Introduction In Logic on the Track of Social Change (1995; hereafter Track), Braybrooke, Brown, and Schotch present a definition of rules that includes both causal and intentional elements. Our definition appeals to a technical notion of imperatives, which we identify as blocking operations. Blocking operations must be causally efficacious—that is, they must 343
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actually (in some relevant and substantial range of cases) prevent actions of a certain type on the part of some agent(s). But they must also be intended to have this effect. A rule is identified with the class of imperatives (whether actual or merely possible) targeting the actions forbidden by the rule. How this blocking is accomplished varies with the blocking operation employed—with young children, direct physical intervention (for instance, holding on to a child to prevent her running out into the street) is fairly common. Even with adults, this form of blocking may be used, for instance, when trying to correct a flaw in how an athlete performs a swimming stroke, a dance step, or a gymnastic move. But saying ‘don’t’ or ‘no’ or ‘stop’ can also be blocking actions, since some agents in some circumstances respond to these utterances (on the part of certain other agents) by not doing something they would otherwise have done. And of course there are many more examples. In all these cases, however, the action qualifies as a blocking action if and only if it is both of a kind which, with a fair degree of regularity, causally prevents agents from doing actions of the targeted type, and is intended to have that effect. Our principal aim in Track was to develop and apply a rich, formally structured account of rules. The resulting account, linking rules and causal relations without reducing the first to the second, links two distinctive approaches to the social sciences. An emphasis on the importance of rules is characteristic of what Braybrooke calls interpretive social science.1 But a focus on regular correlations and causal hypotheses invoked to explain them is characteristic of what he calls the naturalistic approach. Drawing on both, we proposed an approach to rules that integrates the descriptive evidence of regular correlation and causal analysis while allowing an important role for intentions as well. However, in Track we left the relation between these causal and intentional elements unexplored. In this paper, I examine both sides of our proposed definition and sketch a bootstrap argument that tries to 1 For more on these two approaches to social science, as well as a third (the ‘critical’), see Braybrooke (1987b), chap. 1). Braybrooke’s case for a more ecumenical view of these approaches to social science (as contrasted with the widespread view that they are mutually exclusive) is an important inspiration for this paper’s efforts to understand the relations between the natural and the normative.
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account for how causal interactions underlie but do not constitute the intentional/normative component of rules. A striking epistemological argument due to Wilfrid Sellars is the main inspiration for both the account I will give of the distinction between these elements and the account I offer of how the intentional, normative dimension arises from the natural causal order.2 For reasons of space and time, I will not attempt a detailed reading of Sellars’s argument. My aim at this stage of the work is only to indicate how some aspects of Sellars’s views, especially the possibility of retroactively assigning a normative status to past events,3 contribute to a promising understanding of the roots of normativity. I believe the resulting account, though only an outline at this point, has a virtue characteristic of Sellars’s approach to many issues: It is conceptually rich, but also metaphysically economical (even austere). There are two entangled but distinct purposes for which we might use an account of social rules. They correspond to two very different sorts of explanations that we can give of human behaviours. For the purposes of naturalistic explanation, human behaviour is just part of the natural goings-on in the world around us. Like other cases of related phenomena that constitute what Dudley Shapere (Shapere (1982)) has called domains, behaviour is distinguished from other phenomena by a commitment we have made to treat it as calling for an explanation in terms of a common set of principles.4 Broadly, behaviour is distinguished from other kinds of goings-on by the different regularities and principles we invoke to predict and explain it. But the regularities and principles at work in such behavioural studies are not different in kind 2 For Sellars’s distinction between the natural and the logical order see, e.g., ‘Being and Being Known’ and ‘Some Reflections on Language Games.’ Sellars (1960, 1954) The bootstrap argument presented here is modelled on Sellars’s well-known bootstrap defence of an empiricist/inductivist account of perceptual knowledge in ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.’ 3 Something that is only possible because such assignments are interpretive rather than descriptive. 4 See Sellars’s remarks on behaviourism in ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,’(Sellars (1962)) and in Science, Perception and Reality (Sellars (1963)) (hereafter Science), 23ff., where behaviour is distinguished from other phenomena involving living things. Sellars’s discussion of worm behaviouristics, together with the distinction between nature and character in the prediction/explanation of human behaviour (see Science, 13ff.), reflects an interesting perspective on the contextual constraints that circumscribe our use of certain explanatory principles.
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from the regularities and principles applying to (for instance) what water does when cooled to 0◦ Celsius, or once heated (at standard pressure) to 100◦ Celsius as net heat is removed or supplied, respectively. They are commitments regarding how we shall project from what we observe of people and their doings to a fuller, but still purely descriptive, story of people in the world. It’s worth noting that these behavioural principles are limited to contexts in which something like standard conditions hold for the organisms involved; further, not just anything that humans or other organisms do is grist for the mill of behavioural science. We learn to draw distinctions at mother’s knee, recognizing circumstances and kinds of goings-on that are part of behaviour as separate from other aspects of the nature of things. It’s worth noting that these distinctions are rich and complex in ways we don’t often notice.5 But the point I want to make here is just that social science in this vein is an entirely naturalistic affair. It treats us as part and parcel of the natural world, subject to the same kind of scientific description and explanation as any other aspect of that world. This explicitly monist approach has a substantial prima facie edge over dualism, both of conceptual economy and coherence: Dualism (at least when taken at its metaphysical face value) posits mysterious, non-physical aspects of reality that are declared to be importantly connected both to the natural world and to a separate realm of norms. Deep and troubling puzzles have arisen in philosophers’ efforts to explain how a mere addition (however exotic) to descriptive reality can bridge the gap between descriptions and norms. But however these questions are to be resolved, they are no concern of naturalistic social science. The aim of that endeavour is to capture and explain behavioural regularities. The normative interpretation of behaviour plays no role there. 5 For our purposes, not much hangs on exactly where we draw the line between what is and is not behaviour. What we would normally describe as deliberate actions certainly count as behaviour; so are typical responses to sensory stimuli (shutting or covering the eyes when suddenly exposed to a very bright light, pulling one’s hand off after touching a hot surface, etc.). But falling to the ground when thrown out a window does not (though a lot of behaviour would probably occur along the way): this is something that happens because of features we share with all heavier-thanair physical objects, while behaviour turns on certain kinds of features that we share (broadly) with living things.
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On the other hand, when our aim is interpretive, we want to embed what people are and do in a normative framework. Interpretive social science takes behaviour to be goal-directed and norm-guided. Such efforts, I will suggest, are analogous to translation: they connect our own understanding of norms in general and of familiar systems of norms in particular with the doings we have observed, ‘regularizing’ them in the rich sense of fitting them into a normative framework.6 The result, if we are successful, is an understanding of their behaviour cast in the kinds of terms we use to explain and justify our own behaviour: meaningful, purposive, and at least sometimes rule-guided. Success in these efforts allows us to say, ‘Yes, we see why they do these things; they do things that, were we situated as they are, with their beliefs and commitments, we ourselves would (or should) do.’ Sellars’s views on meaning are in the background here. For Sellars, ‘ “. . . ” means “—” ’ expresses a translation-relation, in which (normally) ‘—’ is expressed in a language the speaker and audience share (and at the very least, in a language the audience understands) and the role of ‘. . . ,’ in the language being translated, is identified with the role of ‘—’ in the familiar language (1956, 163) These roles, in turn, are specified in terms of the norms of use for ‘. . . ’ and ‘—’ in their respective languages, including norms of inference in the language (and the difference that ‘. . . ’ makes to the inferences that are endorsed by them) and the links between language use and circumstance that are involved in observation (what Sellars called language entry) and deliberate action (language exit). So what I’m suggesting is that a similar, translational effort to map behaviour into normative systems (whether normative systems we are actually committed to or systems described with the help of a meta-language of norms) underlies interpretive social science.
6 Here Davidsonian remarks regarding charity and the presupposition of rationality come in— although in our presentation, they arise explicitly as part of the methodological task of connecting hypotheses about rules in force with observations of behaviour, rather than as presuppositions of interpretation.
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14.2
Rules in Logic on the Track of Social Change
In Track we specified the content of a rule in terms of three components: volk is the set of agents to whom the rule applies, wenn is the set of circumstances in which the rule applies, and nono is the set of actions forbidden (to those agents in those circumstances) by the rule. But our definition of rules begins with a technical notion labelled (for obvious reasons) imperatives. An imperative, in our sense, is a blocking operation, verbal or otherwise. A blocking operation, in turn, is an action kind whose instances characteristically (in some important range of circumstances) prevent some agent(s) from performing an action(s) of a certain kind, and which is performed with that intent(34). Blocking operations need not always succeed; a blocking operation ‘qualifies for the title if it works sometimes for some people . . . when conditions are suited to its succeeding’ (34; emphasis added). A rule, in the abstract, is a set of such imperatives—that is, a set of blocking actions, directed at the volk, under the wenn, and against the nono. Finally, a rule in force is a rule sufficiently many7 of whose imperatives actually occur. This definition appeals to natural facts, but it combines them with normative/intentional facts. The range of possible blocking operations is determined by the natural causal influences that some available action types have, in various circumstances, on the actions of certain agents. But they are not blocking operations just in virtue of these natural causal powers. To be a blocking operation, what someone does must be done with the intention or purpose of preventing someone from doing something. This picture of rules leads us to the final image of a triptych, three panels representing different stages in the application of a rule for a given subject: In the first panel, the subject is exposed to a range of imperatives aimed at ensuring that her behaviour accords with the rule. In the second panel, subjects in whom the rule has been successfully inculcated govern themselves: They now possess an internal system that (often enough, under what we might call normal psychological oper7
Sufficiently many, that is, for the purposes of instruction and enforcement.
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ating conditions)8 prevents them from violating the rule. It may do so by producing internal imperatives blocking such actions when the wenn condition of the rule is met,9 or by replacing or altering the original system for generating actions in some way that has the effect of ensuring general compliance with the rule. These mechanisms either involve conscious obedience to the rule or lie in a middle ground10 between consciously obeying a rule and merely conforming to it.11 In the third and final panel, rules that early training does not suffice to inculcate (to a sufficient degree, in a sufficient number of subjects) are enforced by (a wide range of) penalties directed against violations. There is obviously a lot more to be said here. To forestall one misunderstanding (arising from the assumption that our account of imperative aims to be an account of the familiar grammatical notion), I will point out that our use of the word ‘imperative’ is technical: Its application to these action kinds is inspired by the ordinary understanding of the imperative voice as directing or giving orders—but some uses of that voice are not imperatives in our sense (consider ironic and other nonstandard uses of the imperative voice) and many other things (gestures, expletives, merely declarative sentences uttered in certain ways and in certain circumstances, and a broad range of actions like closing a door or turning away from someone) are imperatives in our sense. A second concern is the problem of deciding which, and how many, imperatives must occur for a rule to be in force. It depends on the kind of imperatives that occur, on the range of relevant rule alternatives that the imperatives must bring us to distinguish between, and the kinds of cues that enable those subject to the rules to learn them. Here we rely on a rich background of natural facts about developmental and behavioural 8
It is clear that there is a normative side to this notion—but we will not try to untangle it from its descriptive aspects yet. 9 This is reminiscent of Hume’s remarks on abstract ideas, according to which the idea of the counterexample to a mistaken generalization is called to mind automatically when we contemplate the generalization; the result is that acceptance of the generalization is blocked by our awareness of the counterexample. 10 Sellars identifies this middle ground in ‘Some Reflections,’ in Science, 321-58. 11 In this middle ground, though it is false that we are consciously following the rules, the subject’s behaviour is still correctly interpreted in terms of the rule: The subject does as she does because the rule is in place, even though she does not explicitly represent the rule to herself in a meta-language and constrain her behaviour by means of that representation.
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psychology. Given that background, it may turn out that certain types of imperatives are particularly effective in driving the transition from panel 1 in our triptych view of rules in force, where imperatives arise in the course of training, to panel 2, in which the rules have been successfully inculcated in someone subject to them. Further, some rules are so naturally and thoroughly inculcated (and any violations that persist of little enough concern) that panel 3 plays almost no role in keeping violations down. On the other hand, others obviously require systematic and expensive enforcement efforts.
14.3
Some Worries
Epistemically this is tricky business. After all, a settled or established matter-of-fact violation of a principle of descriptive science is a refutation of that principle: Although a refuted principle might still apply usefully in a special subset of cases, it can no longer be defended as a fundamental principle. But an established, matter-of-fact violation of a norm does not show that the norm itself isn’t in force or didn’t apply to the action violating it. Further, the fact that establishing that there has been a violation of a (proposed) natural principle falsifies that principle is widely, and rightly, viewed as a critically important source of the epistemic standing our commitments to such principles do have: A principle that cannot be tested in this way cannot be confirmed or vindicated by passing such tests either. Even with such tests in hand, the epistemology of natural laws is challenging enough. They reach far beyond the goings-on that we have actually observed; their acceptance commits us to claims about events we did not and may never observe. Further, such commitments are usually thought to commit us to counterfactuals, constraining things or circumstances that never actually occur. But, at least for an empiricist, the evidence we draw on to justify such commitments is limited to the observations we have actually made. Hume’s concerns about induction loom large here. Our evidence often seems far too thin to justify a serious cognitive commitment to general principles of nature. These considerations raise even deeper doubts about the epistemology of rules
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and norms, which seem to be more tenuously linked to actual observation. Suppose for now that we know what we are claiming when we assert that a certain rule is in force, and invoke that rule’s being in force to explain some actions performed by certain agents. (Recall that our account in Track emphasizes the regular appearance of imperatives aimed at inculcating and enforcing compliance.) Two questions come immediately to mind: 1. How can we justify the choice of which rules to invoke, when social scientists pursue interpretive social science? (The problem is that there is always a wide range of alternative rules that would ‘fit’ the observed behaviour equally well, i.e. which the behaviour conforms to.) 2. How does a rule’s being in force explain features of the actions the rule applies to? In Track, we are fairly lax about these concerns. Our position there is that ‘it suffices for holding that people know what the rules are to find them distinguishing behaviour that accords with the rules from behaviour that does not. It suffices for holding that they are following the rules to find them either acting so as to avoid blocking, physical or verbal, or modifying their course of action suitably when a form of blocking is produced (or begun) by way of caution’ (39). And for the purposes in view there, this is reasonably satisfying. We clearly have a successful practice in which we both identify certain rules that some people are following, and interpret behaviour, our own and others, by appeal to various goals and rules. Appealing to that practice is fair ball. But it does not illuminate what justifies our applying such concepts at all. Neither does it help to explain how we acquire them. As an account of our grounds for distinguishing merely natural description and explanation from the normative, and choosing, as we do, to apply the normative to a wide range of human (and perhaps some non-human) behaviour, it doesn’t go far enough. So here we will spend a little more time dwelling on the difficulties.
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A convincing general answer to question 1 will be difficult to come by. As Goodman showed long ago (Goodman (1965)), different ways of reporting our evidence to date regarding the colour of emeralds seem to be equally correct as descriptions of the evidence, while suggesting very different inductive conclusions regarding the colour of emeralds observed in the future. But this problem is clearly a problem for both natural laws and norms, and so not specifically a problem for norms.12 The first step towards an answer to question 2 is to say that it is not by the same means as natural principles explain regularities in our observations. In the case of natural laws, we have a direct inference from their holding to the regularities that the laws logically impose on the phenomena (this is just the converse of the falsificationist’s inference). In standard cases a rule’s being in force ‘explains’ why some actions comply with it, but not by appeal to a direct inference from the rule’s being in force to the action’s complying with it. Natural things obey the laws of gravity—whatever these actually are—with no need of thought or calculation. But (in the central cases that extended or even metaphorical cases are modelled on) agents obey rules in virtue of consciously recognizing that those rules apply to their action(s), and deliberately conforming their actions to the requirements of the rules. Full-fledged obedience to a rule combines awareness of the rule’s demands, a conscious commitment to respect them, and the ability to fulfill that commitment. Accidentally conforming to a rule’s demands lies at the other extreme—here the rule plays no explanatory role at all. In between, we find pattern-governed behaviour, which accords with the rule not merely by accident, but for reasons that link the volk, wenn, and nono components together in a reliable way, ensuring that the subject will generally respond to circumstances in which he falls within volk and wenn of the 12 I do not mean this as the counsel of despair. Goodman’s puzzle passes over the role that material inference rules (‘Some Reflections,’ in Science, 352ff.) play in making the predicates of our language the predicates that they are. This approach makes induction a fundamental part of what we are committed to in speaking a language. Of course this does not show that the world must behave as induction leads us to expect. But it does undermine the simple equivalence Goodman’s argument assumes between ‘grue’ and ‘observed before t and green or observed after t and blue.’ The inductive practice Goodman envisages as associated with ‘grue’ is clearly distinct from that associated with the language of this proposed definition.
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rule by avoiding actions in the nono.13 There are slips between the inferential cup and lip for rule explanations, unlike explanations in terms of natural principles. Failures to obey a rule in force can be due to ignorance (whether culpable or not), to calculational errors and limits (especially in complex cases),14 and even to willful disobedience: a rule’s being in force may even explain, by means of awareness of the rule’s being in force combined with a deliberate response to that fact, actions that don’t comply with it (we often call such actions defiant or rebellious). These aspects are part of what makes rule explanations normative—and their impact weakens the epistemic ties between observed regularities and tests of rule hypotheses. But there is a positive side to these differences as well, picked up in both panels 1 and 3 of our triptych: justifying rule hypotheses also requires evidence of background conditions eliciting and enforcing obedience to the rules. That is, rules are accompanied by efforts to instruct and enforce rules—which appear at the descriptive level as blocking actions (in the causal sense), and characteristic patterns of response to violations of the rules.
14.4
The Bootstrap Argument
Thus far this discussion has focused on the relation between hypotheses regarding rules in force and descriptive facts about the behaviour of those subject to them. But the specifically normative aspects of such hypotheses about rules relate not just to direct behavioural evidence and how it fits the hypothesized rules, but to interpretive commitments regarding how we will construe (some aspects of some people’s) behaviour. These commitments can be vindicated by successful application, which involves not merely examples of behaviour conforming 13 See ‘Some Reflections’ for more details. Crucial to Sellars’s account of rule-governed behaviour is the identification of a middle ground between this strong sense of obedience and ‘mere’ conformity to a rule’s demands. According to Sellars, behaviour can be guided by a rule without the subject’s having to represent the rule in some meta-language. This middle ground allows Sellars to escape a regress that threatens the thesis that learning a language is learning to obey the rules of that language. 14 Closely related to this is the injunction to legislators that laws must be such that it is clear to anyone aware of a law’s provisions whether what they are doing violates it.
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to the rule, but also giving an account of how conformity to the rule is elicited and enforced. The evidence in hand goes beyond whether or not certain behaviour violates the rules to include an examination of the behaviour in its social context, including efforts at teaching, inculcation, and enforcement of the rules. We will not begin with rules explicitly formulated in words. Focusing on this admittedly central case seems to produce an irresolvable regress: we cannot communicate the contents of such rules to each other without presupposing a shared system of rules. This leads to an obvious question: How could we communicate the contents of these rules, so that communication can get underway? Assuming the existence of a built-in system that we all share ab initio might provide an escape from this worry, but empiricists will want to avoid simply cutting the Gordian knot.15 Instead, we will begin with development. The key question will be: How do individuals make the shift from merely behaving to acting deliberately, in recognition of rules that apply to them and to others? Our answer must account for how we acquire concepts including the concepts of a rule, of authority, and of commitment, and how we come to be justified in applying these concepts to ourselves. Along the way I will draw explicitly on Sellars’s work to illuminate these difficulties and point towards a strategy for dealing with them. Sellars aims to take empiricist scruples about evidence seriously, while finding room for rationalist ideas about the fundamental importance of rules and concepts to our understanding of the world and of each other. This aim is apparent in Sellars’s careful examination of the descriptive, naturalistic underpinnings of his account of how someone can come to be an observer. In his epistemic bootstrap argument, Sellars explores how an individual knower can appeal to a kind of induction to justify her claim to be an authority on certain perceptible aspects of her surroundings. In doing so, she enters into the normative game by meeting its demands. We begin with an account of Sellars’s view of sensations 15 Note that this does not rule out sharing certain matter-of-fact dispositions that make it easier to train individuals to obey rules of a particular kind. See ‘Some Reflections’ for a very careful approach to escaping this regress.
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and their relation to the philosophical notion of ‘sense data’: It certainly begins to look as though the classical concept of a sense datum were a mongrel resulting from a crossbreeding of two ideas: (1) The idea that there are certain inner episodes—e.g. sensations of red or C] which can occur to human beings (and brutes) without any prior process of learning or concept formation; and without which it would be impossible to see, for example, that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular, or hear that a certain physical sound is C]. (2) The idea that there are certain inner episodes which are the non-inferential knowings that certain items are, for example, red or C]; and that these episodes are the necessary conditions of empirical knowledge as providing the evidence for all other empirical propositions. (Science, 132) The division Sellars makes here is between mere sensations as episodes in the natural order and the non-inferential knowings he holds some have confused them with. For Sellars, knowings are episodes in the normative order, playing a certain role in the give and take of justification. These episodes presuppose, but are not reducible to, certain facts about the natural order. In particular, facts we are able to report must cause (in certain conditions) states in observers that are behaviourally discriminable, that is, states that (once the observers are trained) can cause the observers to make certain noises or write certain inscriptions, noises and inscriptions that they will not make or write when not in those states.16 These behaviourally discriminable states are what Sellars calls sensations: they are posited natural states of observers that are 16 This condition clearly failed for Ren´ e Blondlot’s N-rays when a visiting scientist put the ‘N-ray’ source in his pocket and the unknowing observers went merrily along making more ‘observations’ of N-ray phenomena. This clever little jape put an end to the study of N-rays. Note that meeting this condition alone is not enough to constitute a knowing, though it does make the ‘observer’ a reliable source of information; an observer trained in this merely stimulus-response way, no matter how reliable, does not properly know or report anything. On Sellars’s account, to know or report, the observer must not merely be a reliable reporter—she must know that she is reliable. This reflexive, normative condition leads to a regress that Sellars avoids by appeal to the bootstrap argument we are about to consider.
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normally triggered by sensory exposure to a particular kind of stimulus. But they can also be triggered by other circumstances as well (thus explaining, in outline, how perceptual illusions occur). On Sellars’s account, the ability to have sensations is not acquired.17 It constitutes the natural basis that allows us to learn to make perceptual reports. But the ability to perceive—that is, to know certain facts about our surroundings by means of a non-inferential response to our sensations—is acquired. Knowing requires more than just reliable noisemaking. Knowledge requires also an awareness of one’s own authority as knower. This in turn requires developing not just the ability to respond reliably to different sensations, but also the concepts and skills required to produce justifications of the claims we make. The transition from mere ‘thermometer’ reliability to having epistemic status as an observer in one’s own right requires that one learn to defend a claim to the authority to make such assertions in such circumstances.18 Suppose that our ability to come to know facts about our environment by means of our senses is something that we learn. Empiricism requires that the recognition of this ability in oneself be grounded in a kind of induction: what grounds our claim to authority in a present report is our demonstrated past reliability as reporters of certain facts (the redness or triangularity of an object, or that a certain note is C]). Now consider the first occasion on which one can correctly claim such authority. It seems that the past episodes we need to draw on for this induction couldn’t be cases of knowledge themselves: Ex hypothesi they occurred before we had the conceptual sophistication and/or a sufficient body of past experience of our reliability as knowers of such facts in such circumstances to give an inductive justification of our claim to authority.19 But without past cases of perceptual knowledge to appeal to, 17 Though it arises in the course of normal neuronal/sensory development, and so might reasonably be said to be acquired in a broader sense. 18 My concern here is with the second hurdle of the two Sellars considers. Passing the first hurdle requires only that others be in a position to treat the observer as an authority; being a ‘reliable thermometer’—that is, being disposed to make correct reports under a range of circumstances—is enough. But the second hurdle requires that the observer be in a position to recognize her own authority. 19 A theme I am short-changing here is Sellars’s holism, according to which having a single concept (redness, for instance) requires having a more-or-less complete set of concepts including
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we seem to be stuck: until we have the inductive base in hand, we cannot use induction to justify our claim to authority, and we cannot build an inductive base of past justified knowledge claims to generalize on unless we have a justified claim to authority already in hand. Sellars’s solution to this regress is to claim that the status of such an episode as a knowing is not an occurrent, natural fact about the episode. Instead, it results from locating it, conceptually, in a normative, evaluative context. And we can do this after the fact. That is, we can retroactively recognize a past report as a case of justified perceptual knowledge even though at the time that the report was made, we lacked either (or both) a sufficient grasp of the normative business of justifying our claims or a sufficient inductive base of similar cases in which our reports proved correct. Thus Sellars’s account of our status as perceptual knowers holds that at a certain point in our development we come to have both the conceptual sophistication to justify our knowledge claims (in certain kinds of circumstance) by appeal to inductive evidence of their reliability, and sufficient experience of our past success, derived from a retrospective application of these inductive standards, to provide the inductive evidence required. Then and only then do we meet the normative standards applying to knowers—but the cases in which we then recognize ourselves as meeting the standards extend back into the past, as well as forward into the future.20 What I want to do here is to apply this kind of argument more broadly, to sketch the origin of normative concepts including standards of evidence, commitments, and contents. There will be an evolutionary element in the series of steps I will describe, as well as a prospective, commitment-based view of the openness of norms to interpretation. Finally, there will be a meta-linguistic element in the account of our talk of norms (rather than a metaphysical one). The key element that I will borrow from Sellars’s bootstrap argument is the possibility of retrospective concepts of the conditions of observation, and related concepts (of coloured items and of other colours, for instance). The bootstrap argument may well also be aimed against the broader regress puzzle that this view of concept acquisition suggests. 20 If this were claimed to be a descriptive change in the facts about these earlier episodes (as a reductive account would demand), it would require a bizarre and implausible kind of retro-causal influence by means of which a subsequent state or activity of the knower could causally alter the facts about his own epistemic past.
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interpretation: As in Sellars’s epistemic bootstrap, we need to pass two hurdles here—the first demands a justification for interpreting someone’s behaviour as a case of rule-following. Here I will assume that evidence of a sufficiently reliable tendency to avoid actions breaking the rule, grounded in the effective training and enforcement that occupy panels 1 and 3 of our triptych, is enough. But the second requires that the rule-follower be capable of justifiably interpreting her behaviour as rule-guided. This means that she must have acquired both the conceptual sophistication required and good inductive grounds for regarding herself as meeting the conditions those concepts impose. Here a regress arises which I take to be parallel to the regress Sellars addresses in his bootstrap argument, and resolvable by invoking the same contrast between description and interpretation. Unlike description, interpretation can be retrospective, ascribing after the fact a normative status to an episode that the episode did not have at the time that it occurred.
14.5
The Roots of Normativity
The proposal I offer here is tentative and sketchy, but I believe that it is suggestive. I believe that its components make crucial contributions to a correct understanding of norms. As I present it here, the proposal has five components, forming a series of steps beginning on the naturalistic side, but arriving finally at an account of the normative. The key normative concept that I will focus on is the notion of a commitment . I believe that the other normative concepts we have been considering can be subsumed under this notion and, more narrowly, under the notion of a negative commitment, a commitment not to do something meeting a certain description. In particular, I assume here that paradigmatic rule-governed behaviour is just behaviour that is constrained by a fullfledged, conscious commitment not to do anything forbidden by the rule. But our story begins with a much weaker, merely behaviour-predicting, form of ‘commitment.’
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Evolutionary Advantage
Being able to signal willingness to make and engagement in a commitment has substantial evolutionary advantages. For example, we can deal with coordination problems including some forms of prisoners’ dilemmas by signalling willingness to cooperate with anyone willing to reciprocate—the signal could of course be such that it only takes effect—that is, is only to be relied on—if a signal indicating reciprocation is received. At its simplest, this kind of signal could simply be a ‘flag’ flown at all times, indicating an inclination to cooperate with anyone else flying a suitable ‘response’ flag. Suppose we have a subject who begins the process here by making a friendly nod towards someone whose cooperation she needs to enlist in food gathering. By working together, the two can gather more than twice what each could gather individually. But each will have an opportunity to make off with all the food as the end of the day approaches. The nod is returned, and the two go off to gather food. If these nods are sufficiently reliable indicators of cooperative behaviour, the benefits of relying on them to establish trust will outweigh the risk of losing all the food to a sneak. Evidently, when ‘commitment’- signals, linguistic and otherwise, are reliable symptoms of reasonably durable behavioural dispositions, they can be of considerable value to social organisms. Although the effectiveness of such signals creates opportunities for cheaters to prosper by manipulating or faking them, enforcement efforts can make cheating risky enough that the value (and so the use) of the signals can be sustained.
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Naturalism
The signals involved here are to be thought of as natural-linguistic signals of ‘commitment’; they need only predict behaviour with sufficient reliability. The reliability of this prediction can in turn be grounded in the sort of behaviour the naturalistic side of our account of rules involves—the inculcation of ‘rules’ (in the sense of behavioural regularities) by interaction between trainees and teachers using natural blocking operations, together with enforcement if needed.
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14.5.3
Metalanguage.
Having developed a simple language in which we can give and acknowledge a variety of such ‘commitments,’ we can go on to develop language in which we talk about this practice. Words like ‘commitment,’ ‘rule,’ ‘enforcement,’ and so forth, come into use here, as part of a complex linguistic response to the various behaviours involving such signals, others’ responses to them, and the broader responses (of teachers and enforcers, in particular) to behaviours that accord with or violate the signals’ regular accompaniments. In our example, we may hear our subject and her partner saying that they have ‘an agreement’ to work together and share the proceeds; others may be disposed to comment in various negative ways should our subject abscond with the day’s proceeds. 14.5.4
The bootstrap
Here we finally begin to approach the realm of norms. The retrospective element of the bootstrap considers past behaviour and interprets it in terms of newly acquired normative concepts. Normative concepts themselves originate in meta-linguistic reflection on the language in which we undertake and acknowledge commitments. Like other aspects of language use, there are complex natural regularities connecting the use of these words with other aspects of our behaviour.21 Normative words are regularly connected to a number of other aspects of language use, including the language of psychological explanation, allowing forgetfulness or inattention to serve as explanations of failures to act on commitments made. These also include the language of excuses, connected in turn to various conditions which (when brought to the attention of concerned parties) have the effect of reducing various social signals, linguistic and otherwise, that serve to enforce the natural practice of ‘commitment’ indication and acknowledgment. At this point, reflection on patterns of behaviour in our object-level use of descriptive language may also lead us to apply this metalanguage of rules, commitments, and 21 See Sellars, Sellars (1960), especially 50ff. on the relation between such descriptive regularities (linking language use to other features of the world) and the normative ‘order of signification.’
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so on, to it as well—that is, we may come to conceive language itself in terms of this proto-normative vocabulary. It is very difficult, at this point, not to just slide over the edge into surreptitiously and then explicitly normative accounts of these phenomena. I ask the reader to cling tightly to a purely descriptive, naturalistic view of what I’ve said to this point. What is being described above are, broadly, systematic links between behaviour and various signals that the parties involved display and respond to. By carefully insisting on the distinction between the normative and the descriptive until the last turn, we can hope to shed some real light on the roots of the normative. What I suggest is that our cooperative hunter-gatherer crosses over the edge to full-fledged use of normative concepts when she learns to apply this meta-language of commitment to herself, justifiably conceiving herself as making commitments and keeping commitments she has made.22 As in Sellars’s epistemic bootstrap argument, she must have in hand inductive evidence justifying this application of commitmenttalk to herself, that is, evidence of her ability to make and act on commitments in a reliable way, as well as evidence that she can reason about both her own commitments and those of others reliably.23 Just as in the epistemic case, this inductive requirement seems to produce a regress: The past cases she appeals to in her first application of this meta-language to herself must by definition predate the time at which she first applies these concepts to herself. But she can apply them retroactively, recognizing past ‘commitments,’ and interpreting them, using her new vocabulary, as commitments. Recognizing subsequent past behaviour as having regularly fulfilled her (now recognized) commitments’ demands, and carrying this interpretation through to completion, she applies her use of this vocabulary for rules, commitments, and 22 Without evidence of commitments kept, seeing oneself as making commitments is (at best) unjustified. 23 In fact this needs some care, since mere reliability is not enough. I will reliably meet the conditions of a promise to fall to the ground if thrown out a window. But this is evidence that I am subject to a certain natural principle, not that I can make and meet commitments. Broadly, what shows that I can make and meet commitments is evidence that, if I have made a commitment, I will reliably (where this is qualified by considerations about my being aware that the commitment is in play and that the circumstances are such that it now demands something of me) act in certain ways that I could not be predicted to act if I had not undertaken the commitment.
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so forth, reflexively to itself as well as to object-level linguistic practice. From a purely naturalistic, descriptive point of view, all that she has done is to extend her natural-linguistic practice. But as a user of this extended language, she now conceives herself as making commitments, as distinguishing actions in accord with those commitments from actions violating them, as teaching and enforcing rules, and as pursuing various goals. By conceiving herself in these ways, employing these terms, and reasoning about them in the interpretation and evaluation of her behaviour (and that of others), she demonstrates a grasp of normative concepts grounded in, but not reducible to, natural facts about agents and communities. The contents of these concepts extend beyond the merely descriptive natural facts about our subject and her fellows by virtue of the rich embedding of the associated inferences with the practical goals and activities of her life, goals that extend beyond the very narrow goals governing the business of description. And in the light of her and their success vis-`a-vis these goals, together with the bootstrap considerations brought to bear above, she justifiably interprets herself (and others) in these terms. This broader self-interpretation in terms of the language of commitments reflects something that I think is implicit in Sellars’s original, epistemic bootstrap argument: a view of oneself, as an observer, making commitments to the reports one makes, commitments that include an undertaking of the justificatory burden Sellars’s bootstrap induction aims to meet. 14.5.5
Interpretation of self and others
The account of norms proposed here applies to us because we view ourselves (as our use of this kind of language demonstrates) as subject to the norms (and to the explicit linguistic expressions of norms) that emerge from our reflective engagement with each other and with actual language use. It is tempting to say, echoing some versions of relativism, that we make ourselves subject to norms solely by agreeing to speak of ourselves in normative terms, and that what those norms demand of us is simply a matter of what our community decides they demand. But to say this is to ignore the naturalistic, descriptive facts out of which our
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meta-linguistic talk of norms arises. We cannot state, in advance, what limits this background imposes on the range of successful practices— there is no conceptual reduction of the normative to the descriptive to be had. But the stability of our commonsense world-view, and the continuity of its standards of evidence (including, as I argued in Brown (2003, 2004), a central role for explanatory coherence), give us robust assurance that we do not, and cannot, simply make things up ‘at will.’ Still, the contents of our commitments to such norms are openended. I cannot demonstrate here and now a full grasp of what the various norms I am committed to demand of me; part and parcel of the notion of a norm is that its demands vary with circumstance and are judged not just by me, but by others to whom I make and (at least in principle) can express my commitments. When I make commitments to such norms, what I am implicitly committed to includes all the consequences of those commitments. But I cannot, even in principle, work these consequences through entirely on my own. Others’ responses to the commitments I undertake are part of what determines the demands a norm imposes on me. Ultimately, these implicit commitments are conceived normatively, in terms of what an ideal agent or community would take them to be: There is no non-normative ground in which we can anchor the contents of norms. One striking example of this arises in science, where our interpretation of what is reported in previous observations (i.e., the inferences we are prepared to draw from such reports) shifts as our theories change. Reliable observations of masses, relative velocities, and so on, provided by classical physicists now sustain (given our present conceptual resources) inferences those physicists would have rejected. Our commitment to these norms and to our fellows demands openness to this kind of development of the content of our present commitments over time. The implications of this openness are of great philosophical interest, but we will not pursue them further here.
Appendix A Another—Literary—Side of David Braybrooke:The Comic Dialectician Abstract In the following little-known but much appreciated piece, David Braybrooke demonstrates his skill as a wit, in a way which his more serious writing would never allow.∗
People will not be especially surprised to learn that professors in chemistry and physics spend the summer working on experiments in their laboratories. In geology, oceanography, and biology, many of them are away from the campus doing research in the field. So are many professors in the social sciences and the humanities. Professors of French, for example, try to spend recess time in France, which would be a useful thing for them and their students if they just practiced speaking French there. In fact, they have reading, writing, and research in French libraries to do as well. Summers are the time to do reading of scholarly material that isn’t tied to their classes, the time, too, to get ahead with the projects—the books and articles that they cannot concentrate upon writing under the distracting pressures of term-time. Many professors take their stipulated month’s vacation during the four-month recess, spending the other three months on research—in many cases, on teaching ∗ These excerpts originally appeared in the Dalhousie Review 65, no. 3 (Fall 1985), under the title, ‘Appendix B, or A (Summer’s) Day in the Life of a Professor of Philosophy.’ They appear here at the request of the author and by permission of the Dalhousie Review.
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as well, because even during the recess, teaching goes on with graduate students and in two consecutive summer sessions for undergraduates. When their research consists of reading and writing, however, their working time tends to spread out over the whole recess. Whatever vacation is taken is taken little by little, in an afternoon here, a day off there. Among the professors for whom this is true we find a certain professor of philosophy. Let’s call him Green. Green is perhaps an exception in keeping up his writing all through the year, in term-time and out; and an exception, too, in doing his writing entirely in his office, to which he repairs every morning, seven days a week, holidays included. Many other professors, however, put in the same amount of work year by year, though they work on different patterns. They may, for instance, do their reading during term-time; when the term has ended, they put in days at a time at their typewriters. Green does his intensive reading of scholarly material, except for the reading (rereading) tied to his classes and the minimum necessary to keep on with his writing, in the summer. A typical summer day for Green begins at 7:30, after exercises, a shower and breakfast. Until about 9 o’clock, with some short breaks for household chores, he reads some philosophical work—chapters in a book; an article in a journal—related in at least a general way to the topic that he is writing about. If the topic is the relation between mind and body, he will be reading an intricate discussion in the Journal of Philosophy of the extent to which computers can perform mental functions that in human beings can be performed only consciously. At 9 o’clock or thereabouts, Green goes to his office, sits down at his typewriter and writes or rewrites 3 or 4 pages of a projected book or article. Now and then, a student will drop in to ask for a bit of advice; in the summer, he or she is likely to be a graduate student, working on a thesis. Or maybe a colleague, maybe a secretary, will come in to do some business, about a calendar entry, or a regulation to be reformulated. By and large, however, Green sticks with his project until he has finished his daily stint, and the ideas no longer flow freely—until sometime between 11:30 and 12.
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He will then spend half an hour or an hour on his correspondence, which might on a given day include writing recommendations for colleagues elsewhere or for former students, ordering some books, exchanging comments on current work with a colleague at another university. At 12:30 or thereabouts, Green walks home to have lunch. He does a little light reading afterwards, then goes back to the department of philosophy to look through the day’s mail. Several items may require immediate attention: A prospective participant in a week-long conference on philosophy and psychology that he is organizing for later in the summer writes to ask whether room in the program can be found for him to read two papers; a publisher writes to ask whether he will assess a manuscript; Green drafts replies to both and leaves them with a secretary for typing. Then, just before 2 o’clock, he goes off again to spend an hour in the library, first looking up some books in the card catalogue, then tracking them down in the stacks, picking out some to check out at the circulation desk. Others he puts back after a glance, as not relevant to his work; still others, missing from the shelves, he will have to ask the library to recall from other borrowers. Leaving the library at 3 o’clock, he might, some days, have a committee meeting to go to, perhaps one dealing with revisions to the rules of admitting mature students, perhaps one occupied with measures to encourage more faculty members to apply for research grants from Federal agencies. A committee meeting might in fact have taken up all the time that has elapsed since lunch. Today, however, Green has no committee meetings. So he goes back, to the department to see whether the secretary has finished his letters for signature and to proofread the half-dozen pages that she has typed since yesterday of an article that he finished last week. At quarter to 4, he walks home again and settles down for an hour with a philosophical work on a priori knowledge. He goes for a swim at Sand then is occupied until 7 or 7:30 with preparing dinner, eating it, and washing up afterwards. Some evenings he will not be doing any work at all, not even any serious reading. But typically he will be reading one or another book from the pile beside his living-room chair; tonight it is Fernand Braudel’s The Wheels of Commerce, a history of everyday practices during the development of capitalism, that occupies him. (He
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will have a chance to draw upon some of the information in this book next week, in a debate with other philosophers about the power that private property gives some people over others.) An interruption occurs at 8:20: another member of the team with which he is collaborating on a picture book about 19th Century architecture in Halifax calls to discuss the current stage of this project. At 9:30, he turns to lighter reading, though even this may have a bearing on his work. He is currently reading Edmund Wilson’s diary for the 1940’s, and he takes that up again, putting it down after a while to look through a book of 20th Century watercolors. At 10:30 Green is ready for bed; and to bed he goes.
Excerpt from Faculty Council Minutes, 29 September 1983 Professor Y. said that he thought Appendix B, A (Summer’s) Day in the Life of a Professor of Philosophy, was undesirable. Its formulation was objectionable if indeed this was intended as a strategic document. People had read this and thought it ridiculous as a portrayal of a serious person’s existence. It was a mistake, which worked against the general impact of the brief. Professor B. said that members of Council would recall that this passage had originally been included in the brief. It was now presented as an appendix so that it could easily be dropped. The Dean called for a straw vote. Professor W. said that he thought it was important to indicate that work did go on in the summer. Professor D. said she was in favour of removal. Aside from the frivolity, the appendix suggested that Professors had no family or domestic concerns. Professor F. said that he remembered saying at an earlier meeting that this section was the part that he had enjoyed most. If it were removed, he hoped that a suitable footnote might yet take its place. The Dean called for a motion to deal with the matter. It was moved by Professor L., seconded by Professor T., that Faculty Council recommend to Faculty that Appendices B and C be omitted from the Faculty Brief to the Royal Commission on Post Secondary Education. Professor W. asked what was the objection to having something about what Professors do in the summer. He did not see the harm in
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addressing these questions seriously. The Dean said that was the committee’s view. Professor B. said there were no paragraphs in the brief itself which bore on this question. The motion was carried with one dissenting vote and three abstentions.
Excerpt from Faculty Minutes, 11 October 1983 The Secretary said that the report had been discussed on two occasions by Faculty Council and as a result there was a recommendation from Faculty Council to Faculty which he would move. The Secretary moved, seconded by Professor D., that Appendices B and C be deleted from the document. The Secretary said that Faculty Council had felt that these appendices did not achieve their objective. It was recognized that what the committee had tried to do was to represent the fact that Professors work during the summer and while on sabbatical leave; however, the form of these appendices it was felt by Council would be counterproductive in achieving this objective. Professor B. said that he felt it was necessary to defend Professors against assumptions of idleness. It was a natural reaction to want to explain what we do during the summer. He said that one member of Council had said that this was the only part of the brief he had enjoyed. Professor B. said that the appendices were anecdotal and personal and might achieve some sympathy for professors. Professor 0. said that if it came to revisions, was it a question of dropping the appendices or keeping them. He thought they could be moderated somewhat. If this were not possible, he would support the motion. Upon being put to the vote, the motion was carried by fourteen votes to eleven.
An Open Letter from David Braybrooke Faculty Council Arts & Science Friends: I showed the minutes of your meeting of 29 September to Professor Green and held a conversation of sorts with him. He told me that
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in general he had felt, turn by turn, amazed, mortified, and amused by the reception of the literal (though selective) account of one of his typical days. ‘Amazed,’ he said, ‘at the variety of reactions. Some enjoyed it, but thought it gave a picture too enviably agreeable. Others thought it unbearably grim.’ He went on, ‘I was mortified to find so extensive a mismatch between my colleagues’ sense of humor and my own. Not only, it appears, do we differ in the number and kinds of things we find funny. We evidently strongly disagree on whether the least bit of life and humour has a place in a public document.’ ‘Really,’ I said; ‘I suspect you’re ready to put in a joke anywhere.’ ‘Whenever I think of one,’ he replied, without, it seemed to me, a trace of penitence. ‘But what,’ I asked, ‘amused you about the reactions?’ ‘Why,’ he said, ‘they were at such cross purposes. Some said the account was ridiculously far from giving an accurate picture of a serious person’s existence. Others evidently thought the degree of industry that it described was wildly improbable. Where was the time needed for family and household concerns, not to speak of relaxation? Some specially gifted people managed at one and at the same time to think it too frivolous and too serious besides.’ ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘maybe that’s because you yourself make a mixed impression. Come clean: Which is the real you, too frivolous, or too serious?’ He rejoined, emphatically, though rather unhelpfully, ‘Both. But the frivolous side hardly showed up in this account. Like G.E. Moore I’d rather give close study to The National Lampoon any day than write philosophy, and there was nothing about that.’ I protested, ‘Didn’t Moore speak of reading novels? The National Lampoon wasn’t even around in his day, for goodness’ sake.’ Green said, ‘I read novels, too; besides, I’m much more frivolous than Moore was. I thought whoever wrote the account was a bit heavyhanded. In fact, it looks to me as though he himself had an overdose of public solemnity. I understand he left out a lot of colorful data as not being to the point. Even so he didn’t succeed in being solemn enough, did he? Nothing about romance, kisses, fond embraces, making music, sharing an apple with Cherubino (the canary), playing fetch and tug with the Corgi—though he did get something in about dishwashing.’ I
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pointed out, ‘If any of that stuff had been in the account, it would have struck even more people as completely frivolous.’ ‘Exactly,’ he said; ‘yet it would have been truer to life.’ I put it to him: ‘Do you mean to say that the picture as it stands is more serious than frivolous?’ ‘I do,’ he said. ‘But,’ I asked, ‘don’t you realize that either way it has jeopardized your chances of exercising any influence in faculty affairs? What chance, for example, do you now have of being elected to the tenure committee, or the promotions committee, or Faculty Council?’ He grinned; but it was not merely a grin; it was a gleeful, even exultant expression. It was as if, to everybody’s surprise, including his own, he had just pulled off a minor coup. ‘It may be worse for you,’ I said, ‘if you’re seriously taken to be living by such a standard of industry.’ A look of concern crossed Green’s face. ‘I wouldn’t want to be taken,’ he said, ‘to be leaving no room for joie de vivre. Shouldn’t any serious academic find joy in his work, research as well as teaching? ‘We work,’ declares Delacroix, ‘not only to produce but to give value to time.’ If enjoying work at least as much as I do is uncommon at Dalhousie, then I must say it will be a better university when the enjoyment is more common. I hope some people who feel the same way will continue to creep into those committees, if only by accident.’ I asked, ‘Where did you get that nugget from Delacroix?’ He answered, ‘From my frivolous side; I was reading a book of aphorisms, when I should have been doing something more ambitious.’ ‘Joking again,’ I commented; ‘what are you going to do now, spared for the rest of your career the prospect of serving on any of those committees?’ This time he smiled, just like Moore, seraphically. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I’ll never want for something to do.’
Appendix B David Braybrooke’s Publications 1955-2005 Books With C. E. Lindblom. A Strategy of Decision: Policy Evaluation as a Social Process. New York: The Free Press, 1963. Paperback edition, 1970. Translated into Portuguese as Una Estrategia de Deciso Social. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores, 1972. Philosophical Problems of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Edited, contributing an introduction and an integrating running commentary. Three Tests for Democracy: Personal Rights; Human Welfare; Collective Preference. New York: Random House, 1968. Traffic Congestion Goes through the Issue Machine (in the United Kingdom, 1963 1968): A Case Study In Issue Processing, Illustrating a New Approach. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. Ethics in the World of Business. Philosophy and Society Series. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983. Edited, contributing several chapters (see below, under “Chapters in Books”) and an integrating running commentary. Philosophy of Social Science. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1987. [Foundations of Philosophy Series]. Meeting Needs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. With B. Brown and P. K. Schotch. Logic on the Track of Social Change. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. [Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy]. 373
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Social Rules: Origin; Character; Logic; Change. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press (HarperCollins), 1996. Edited, contributing several chapters (see below, under Chapters in Books) and an integrating running commentary. Moral Objectives, Rules, and the Forms of Social Change. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Natural Law Modernized. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Utilitarianism: Restorations; Repairs; Renovations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2004. Analytical Political Philosophy: From Discourse, Edification. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
Journal Articles “Farewell to the New Welfare Economics.” Review of Economic Studies 22 (June 1955): 180 193. “Berkeley on the Numerical Identity of Ideas.” Philosophical Review 64 (October 1955): 631 636. “Professor Stevenson, Voltaire, and the Case of Admiral Byng.” Journal of Philosophy 53 (November 1956): 787 796. “Vincula Vindicata.” Mind 66 (April 1957): 222 227. “The Expanding Universe of Political Philosophy.” Review of Metaphysics 11 (June 1958): 648 672. “Diagnosis and Remedy in Marx’s Doctrine of Alienation.” Social Research 25 (Autumn 1958): 325 345. “The Relevance of Norms to Political Description.” American Political Science Review 52 (December 1958): 989 1006. “Authority as a Subject of Social Science and Philosophy.” Review of Metaphysics 13 (March 1960): 469 485. “The Ethical Control of Politics.” Ethics 70 (July 1960): 316 321. With Others. “Some Questions for Miss Anscombe about Intention.” Analysis 22 (January 1962): 49 54. “Collective and Distributive Generalization in Ethics.” Analysis 23 (December 1962): 45 48.
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“Personal Beliefs without Private Languages.” Review of Metaphysics 16 (June 1963): 672 686. “The Mystery of Executive Success Re-examined.” Administrative Science Quarterly 8 (March 1964): 533 560. “How Are Moral Judgments Connected with Displays of Emotion?” Dialogue 4 (September 1965): 206 223. “The Choice Between Utilitarianisms.” American Philosophical Quarterly 4 (January 1967): 28 38. “Un Esempio Americano di Gestione Operaia.” Biblioteca della Libert (Gennaio Febbraio 1968): 23 38. “Taking Liberties with the Concept of Rules.” The Monist 52 (July 1968): 329 358. “Refinements of Culture in Large Scale History.” History and Theory, Beiheft 9 (1969): 39 63. “Three Separable Tests” (Reply to review essays by Robert Ginsberg and Joseph Margolis on Three Tests for Democracy), Philosophy Forum 9 (March 1971): 140-147. “Dialectic in History: Rejoinder to Professor Mulholland’s Comments.” Dialogue 10 (March 1971): 103 108. “The Firm but Untidy Correlativity of Rights and Obligations.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 1 (March 1972): 351 363. With Alexander Rosenberg. “Getting the War News Straight: the Actual Situation in the Philosophy of Science.” American Political Science Review 66 (September 1972): 818-826. With Alexander Rosenberg. “Anti-Behaviourism in the Hour of Its Disintegration.” (A review essay on Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences, ed. Robert Borger & Frank Cioffi.) Philosophy of the Social Sciences, (December 1972), 355-63. “The Logical Character of Verdicts: A Case Study.” University of Toronto Law Journal (Autumn 1972): 221 236. “Two Blown Fuses in Goldman’s Analysis of Power.” Philosophical Studies 24 (November 1973): 369 377. “Utilitarianism with a Difference: Rawls’s Position in Ethics.” (A critical notice of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice). Canadian Journal of Philosophy 3 (December 1973): 303 331.
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“The Philosophical Scene in Canada.” Canadian Forum 53 (January 1974): 29 34. “From Economics to Aesthetics: The Rectification of Preferences.” Nos 8 (March 1974): 13 24. “Comment mettre a` l’epreuvre le soupc¸on selon lequel une croyance est id´eologique?” Bulletin de la Soci´et´e de Philosophie du Quebec (aout 1975): 47 49. “The Insoluble Problem of the Social Contract.” Dialogue 15 (March 1976): 3 37. “A la recherche d’une justice de structure au Nouveau Brunswick.” Philosophiques 3 (avril 1976): 123-129. “Still at the Fuse Box, Arguing with Goldman about the Power Supply.” Philosophical Studies 30 (October 1976): 269 272. Critical notice of Peter D. McClelland, Causal Explanation and Model Building in History, Economics And the New Economic History. In History and Theory (1977): 337 354. “Our Natural Bodies, Our Social Rights.” (A comment on a paper by Samuel C. Wheeler III), Nos 14 (May 1980): 195 202. “The Maximum Claims of Gauthier’s Bargainers: Are the Fixed Social Inequalities Acceptable?” Dialogue 21 (September 1982): 411 429. Rejoinder to Gauthier’s reply: 445 448. “The Possibilities of Compromise.” (A review essay on Compromise in Ethics, Law, and Politics (Nomos XXI), edited by J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman.) Ethics 93 (October 1982): 139 150. “Preferences Opposed to the Market: Grasshoppers vs. Ants on Security, Inequality, and Justice.” Social Philosophy and Policy 2 (Autumn 1984): 101 114. “Work Related Ethical Attitudes: Commentary.” Business & Professional Ethics 3 (Winter 1984): 41 42. “Scale, Combination, and Opposition: A Rethinking of Incrementalism.” (A review essay on Jennifer Hochschild, The New American Dilemma.) Ethics 95 (July 1985): 920 933. “Marxism and Technical Change: Nicely Told, But Not the Full Contradictory Story.” (Critical notice of two books relating to Marx-
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ism by Jon Elster.) Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16 (March 1986): 123 136. “La cicala e la formica: una parabola sul mercato.” Biblioteca della Libert´a 93 (Aprile Giugno 1986): 5 22. (Italian translation of ”Preferences Opposed to the Market: Grasshoppers vs. Ants on Security, Inequality, and Justice”.) “Economic Thinking in Political Science: Maximizing on the Way to Tautology.” Manuscrito 10 (1987), 19-42. “Social Contract Theory’s Fanciest Flight.” Ethics 97 (July, 1987): 750-764. “Thoughtful Happiness.” (A review essay on James Griffin, Well Being, and Richard Warner, Freedom, Environment, and Happiness.) Ethics 99 (April 1989): 625 636. Review essay on A. Sen et al., The Standard of Living. In Economics and Philosophy 6 (Fall 1990): 339-350. “Exaugural Lecture: Conceptual Tunnelling B A Mole’s Eye View of Philosophy.” Dalhousie Review 70 (Fall 1990): 288-306. “The Natural Law of Moral Education.” The Vital Nexus 1 (May 1991): 26-32. “No Virtues Without Rules; No Rules Without Virtues.” Social Theory and Practice 17 (Summer 1991): 139-156. “Liberalism’s Claim to Culture.” (Critical notice of Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture.) Dialogue 30 (Spring 1991): 117121. Preface to “The Future of Post-Modernism.” In Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 6th series, 3 (1992): 99-106. “Inward and Outward with the Modern Self.” (A critical notice of Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self.) Dialogue 33 (Winter 1994): 101108. “Economic Theory Stalled: Model Theoretic Institutionalism as a Way Forward.” (A critical notice of books by A. Rosenberg and D. Hausman.) Dialogue 34 (Summer 1995): 623-631. With Herbert A. Simon. “In Memoriam: Lewis Anthony Dexter.” PS: Political Science and Politics 28 (September 1995): 545-546.
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“Justice in Jeopardy If Needs Not Met: A Reply to Gillian Brock.” Dialogue 37 (Fall 1998): 799-804. “The General Theory of Absurdities in Daily Life and Politics.” Dalhousie Review 80 (Spring 2000): 45-63. “Moral Rigidity Inside and Outside the Law.” Public Affairs Quarterly 16 (April 2002): 173-188. “A Progressive Approach to Personal Responsibility for Global Beneficence.” The Monist 86 (April 2003): 301-322 With Michael Bailey. “R. A. Dahl’s Philosophy of Democracy, Exhibited in His Essays.” Annual Review of Political Science 6 (2003): 99-118. “Toward an Alliance Between the Issue-Processing Approach and Pragma-Dialectical Analysis.” Argumentation 17 (2003): 513-35. (DB served as honorary editor of the special issue on “Conversation, Argumentation, and the Resolution of Issues,” in which this article appeared and also wrote a brief introduction to the issue.) “What Truth Does the Emotive-Imperative Answer to the OpenQuestion Argument Leave to Moral Judgments?” Journal of Value Inquiry 37 (2003): 341-52. “The Relation of Utilitarianism to Natural Law Theory.” The Good Society to appear 2004 or 2005. “Where Does the Moral Force of the Concept of Needs Reside and When?” Philosophy to appear 2004 or 2005.
Chapters in Books “The Public Interest: The Present and Future of the Concept.” In Carl J. Friedrich, ed., The Public Interest (Nomos V). New York: Atherton Press, 1962, 129-154. “An Illustrative Miniature Axiomatic System.” In Nelson W. Polsby, Robert A. Dentler, and Paul A. Smith, eds., Politics and Social Life. Houghton Mifflin, 1963, 119-130. “Marx on Revolutionizing the Mode of Production.” In Carl J. Friedrich, ed., Revolution (Nomos VIII). New York: Atherton Press, 1966, 240246.
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“Economics and Rational Choice.” In Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. II. New York: Macmillan & Free Press, 1967, 454-458. “Ideology.” In Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. IV. New York: Macmillan & Free Press, 1967, 124-127. “The Duality of Politics and Ethics.” In The Seventh Inter American Congress of Philosophy: Proceedings of the Congress. Quebec: Les Presses de l’Universit´e Laval, 1967, 150-161. “Skepticism of Wants, and Certain Subversive Effects of Corporations on American Values.” In Human Values and Economic Policy (N.Y.U. Institute of Philosophy for l966), edited by Sidney Hook. New York: New York University Press, 1967, 224-239. “Let Needs Diminish that Preferences May Prosper.” In Studies in Moral Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly Monograph Series, no. 1. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968, 86-107. “Values and Managers: Private Production of Public Goods.” In Kurt Baier and Nicholas Rescher, eds., Values and the Future. New York: Free Press, 1969, 368-388. “The Logic of the Succession of Cultures.” In Howard E. Kiefer and Milton K. Munitz, eds., Mind, Science, and History, Vol.II of Contemporary Philosophic Thought: The International Philosophy Year Conferences at Brockport. Albany: State University of New York Press, 197O, 270-283. “Revolution Intelligible or Unintelligible.” In Robert H. Grimm and Alfred F. Mackay, eds., Society: Revolution and Reform, Proceedings of the 1969 Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971, 93-118. Reply to comment by Marshall Cohen, 129-134. Comment on re apportionment and political democracy. In Nelson W.Polsby, ed., Re apportionment in the 70’s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, 112-118. With Alexander Rosenberg. “Vincula Revindicata.”, In Tom Beauchamp, ed., Philosophical Problems of Causation. Encino & Belmont:CA Dickenson, 1974, 217-222. “The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It.” In J. R. Pen-
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nock and J.W. Chapman, Participation in Politics (Nomos XVI). New York: Lieber Atherton, 1975, 54-88. “Variety among Hierarchies of Preference.” In C. A. Hooker, J. J. Leach, and E. F. McClennen, eds., Foundations and Applications of Decision Theory, vol. I.. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978, 55-65. “Policy Formation with Issue Processing and Transformation of Issues.” In C. A. Hooker, J. J. Leach, and E. F. McClennen, eds., Foundations and Applications of Decision Theory, vol. II. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978, 1-16. “Self Interest in Times of Revolution and Repression: Comment on Professor Tullock’s Analysis.” In H. J. Johnson, J. J. Leach, and R. G. Muehlmann, eds., Revolutions, Systems and Theories. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1979, 61-74. “Through Epistemology to the Depths of Political Illusion.” In Maria J. Falco, ed., Through the Looking Glass: Epistemology and the Conduct of Political Inquiry. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1979, 59-82. With Peter K. Schotch. “Cost Benefit Analysis Under the Constraint of Meeting Needs.” In Norman E. Bowie, ed., Ethical Issues and Government. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981, 176-197. “Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy.” In P. A. French, T. E. Uehling, Jr, and H. K. Wettstein, eds., Social and Political Philosophy: Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 7. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, 321-341. “Making Justice Practical.” In D. Braybrooke and M. Bradie, eds., Social Justice. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Studies in Applied Philosophy, 1982, 1-14. Rejoinder to comment by James P. Sterba, 20 23. “Can Democracy Be Combined with Federalism or with Liberalism?” In J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman, eds., Liberal Democracy (Nomos XXV). New York: New York University Press, 1983, 109-118. “Justice and Injustice in Business.” In Tom Regan, ed., Just Business: New Introductory Essays in Business Ethics, edited by Tom Regan. New York: Random House, 1983, 167-201. “Putting Things Together: Three Leading Subjects of Moral Con-
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cern in the World of Business,” in D. Braybrooke, ed., Ethics in the World of Business. Totowa, N. J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983, 461470. “Moral Questions About the Business System as a Whole.” In D. Braybrooke, ed., Ethics in the World of Business. Totowa, N. J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983, 471-477. “La science et la technologie nous permettront elles de continuer travailler? Question que l’id´eologie engendre dans la pens´ee bourgeoise et aussi dans celle de Marx.” In C. Savary et C. Panaccio, eds., L’idologie et les strategies de la raison. La Salle, QC: Hurtubuise, 1984, 171-200. “Contemporary Marxism on the Autonomy, Efficacy, and Legitimacy of the Capitalist State.” In Roger Benjamin and Stephen L. Elkin, eds. The Democratic State. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985, 59-86. “A Public Goods Approach to the Theory of the General Will.” In J. Porter, and R. Vernon, eds.,Unity and Plurality in Politics: Festschrift for Frederick Barnard. London: Croom Helm, 1986, 75-92.. “The Sorites: Logic Astray for Want of Observation.” In The Fact of the Matter: Essays in Honour of Lawrence Resnick. Burnaby, B.C.: Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University, 1988, 1-4. “The Conditions on Which Rules Exist.” In P. A. Schlipp and L. E. Hahn, The Philosophy of Georg Henrik von Wright, The Library of Living Philosophers La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989, 187-209. “Campaigning for Increased Measures of Safety: Paradox, The Shadow of a Paradox, and a Conceptual Way Out.” In J. P. Rothe, ed., Challenging the Old Order: Towards New Directions in Traffic Safety Theory, edited by J. P. Rothe. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1990, 169-182. “How Do I Presuppose Thee? Let Me Count The Ways: The Relation of Regularities to Rules in Social Science.” In P. A. French, T. E. Uehling, Jr, and H. K. Wettstein, eds., The Philosophy of the Human Sciences: Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. XV. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990, 80-93. “Gauthier’s Foundation for Ethics Under the Test of Application.” In Peter Vallentyne, ed., Contractarianism and Rational Choice. New
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York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 56-70. “Meeting Needs: Towards a New Needs-Based Ethics.” In K. Aman, ed., Ethical Principles for Development. Montclair, N.J.: Institute for Critical Thinking, 1991, 80-90. With Arthur P. Monahan. “Common Good.” In L. Becker and C. Becker, Encyclopedia of Ethics. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992, Vol. I, 175-178. With L. A. Dexter. “Corruption.” In L. Becker and C. Becker, eds., Encyclopedia of Ethics. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992, Vol. II, 218-220. “Needs and Interests.” In L. Becker and C. Becker, eds., Encyclopedia of Ethics. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992, Vol. II, 894-897. “Two Conceptions of Needs in Marx’s Writings.” In R. Beehler et al., eds., On he Track of Reason: Essays in Honor of Kai Nielsen. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1992, 119-133. “The Social Contract and Property Rights Across the Generations.” In Peter Laslett and James S. Fishkin, eds., Justice Between Age Groups and Generations [Philosophy, Politics, and Society, 6th Series]. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, 107-126. ”“Y-a-t-il une connaissance philosophique de la soci´et´e?” In J. Proust and E. Schwartz, eds., La connaissance philosophique: essais sur l’oeuvre de Gilles-Gaston Granger. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995, 81-90. “Interests and Needs.” In P. H. Werhane and R. E. Freeman, eds., Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Business Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, 341-3. A“The Representation of Rules in Logic and Their Definition.” In David Braybrooke, ed., Social Rules: Origin; Character; Logic; Change. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press/HarperCollins, 1996, 3-19. “Changes of Rules, Issue-Circumscription, and Issue-Processing.” In David Braybrooke, ed., Social Rules: Origin; Character; Logic; Change. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press/HarperCollins, 1996, 75-83. “Logic and Historical Enquiry.” In D. Woolf, ed., A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing. New York: Garland, 1998, Vol. II, 570-1.
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“Philosophy of Social Science, Contemporary Theories (Schools).” In E. Craig, ed., The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1998, Vol. VIII, 838-47. “The Concept of Needs, with a Heart-Warming Offer of Aid to Utilitarianism.” In G. Brock, ed., Necessary Goods: Our Responsibilities to Meet Others’ Needs. Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. “Common Good.” In C.B. Gray, ed., The Philosophy of Law: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1999, 125-7. With Arthur P. Monahan. “Common Good.” In L. Becker and C. Becker, eds, Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2d ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2000, Vol. I, 262-66. (A revision of the article on the same topic in the first edition, 1992.) “Interests.” In L. Becker and C. Becker, eds.,Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2d ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2000, Vol. II, 868-71. “Needs.” In L. Becker and C. Becker, eds., Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2d ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2000, Vol. II, 1220-24. (This article and the one just mentioned give separate, revised treatments of two topics that the first edition combined in one article.) (The second edition of Encyclopedia of Ethics carried forward unchanged, except for an addition to the bibliography, an article on “Corruption” written together with the late Lewis Anthony Dexter.) “Decision Making Systems: Personal and Collective.” In N.J. Smelser and P. B. Baltes (eds.)The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioural Sciences. Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier, 2000, Vol. V, 3315-18. “Sidgwick’s Critique of Nozick.” On line in a web site on utilitarianism established by Paul Lyon.
Book Reviews Of W.D. Lamont, The Value Judgment. In Philosophical Review (April 1957): 255 8. Of Peter Laslett, ed., Philosophy, Politics, and Society. In Philosophical Review (July 1958): 418 421.
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Of Richard W. Sterling, Ethics in a World of Power: the Political Ideas of Friedrich Meinecke. In Ethics (July 1959): 292 294. Of Elting E. Morison, ed., The American Style: Essays in Value and Performance. In Ethics (October 1959): 73 75. Of Felix E. Oppenheim, Dimensions of Freedom; An Analysis. In Philosophical Review (October 1963): 524 528. Of Arthur S. Banks and Robert B. Textor, A Cross Polity Survey. In Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science (February 1965): 142-144. Of Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law. In Dialogue (March 1965): 441 444. Of Samuel I. Shuman, Legal Positivism: Its Scope and Limitations. In University of Toronto Law Journal (1965): 190 194. Of Neil A. McDonald, Politics: A Study of Control Behavior. In Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science (February 1966): 108 109. Of R. S. Downie, Government Action and Morality. In Journal of Philosophy (June 1966): 363 367. Of Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History. In Philosophy of Science (December 1967): 388 392. Of Herbert Marcuse, Negotiations and An Essay on Liberation. In Trans action (October 1969): 51 54. Of Gordon Leff, History and Social Theory. In History and Theory 10 (1971): 122-134. Of Virginia Held, The Public Interest and Individual Interests. In Journal Of Philosophy (April 1972): 192 202. With Alexander Rosenberg. “Anti Behaviourism in the Hour of its Disintegration.” (A review essay on Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences, edited by Robert Borger and Frank Cioffi.) In Philosophy of the Social Sciences (December 1972): 355 363. Of Leon Dion, Soci´et´e et politique la vie des groupes. In Canadian Journal of Political Science (September 1973): 522 523. Of J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against. In International Studies in Philosophy (Fall 1975): 522-523.
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Of Alan Montefiore, ed., Philosophie et relations interpersonnelles, jointly with a compte rendu by G. G. Granger of the companion volume of essays by anglophone philosophers, Philosophy and Personal Relations, edited by Alan Montefiore. In Dialogue (March 1975): 159 167. Of S. Korner, ed., Explanation. In Philosophical Quarterly (January 1977): 74 78. Of J. Manninen and R. Tuomela, eds., Essays on Explanation and Understanding. In Philosophical Review (July 1978): 485 489. Of S. I. Benn and G. W. Mortimore, eds., Rationality and the Social Sciences. In Australian Journal of Philosophy (December 1978): 256 261. Of Dennis H. Wrong, Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses. In Canadian Journal of Political Science 14 (June 1981): 437 438. Of Stanley A. Hoffman, Ethics in International Relations. In Canadian Philosophical Reviews (April/June 1982): 107 110. Of Jane J. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy. In Ethics (October 1982): 153-155. Of William Dray, Perspectives on History. In Dialogue (December 1982): 782 783. Of L. Armour and E. Trott, The Faces of Reason. In Queen’s Quarterly (Autumn 1983): 688 692. Of Allan Moscovitch and Glenn Drove, eds., Inequality: Essays on the Political Economy of Social Welfare. In Labour/Le Travailleur (Autumn 1983): 290 291. Of Richard W. Miller, Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power, and History. In Dalhousie Review (Spring 1984): 190 193. Of W. L. Robison et al., eds., Profits and Professions: Essays in Business and Professional Ethics. In Ethics (October 1984): 193 194. Of Frederick Schick, Having Reasons: An Essay on Rationality and Sociality. In Dalhousie Review (Fall 1984): 626-629. With J. Fingard, of A. W. B. Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law. In Ethics (April 1985): 745 747. Of Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. In Dalhousie Review 66 (Fall 1986): 382-385.
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Of Gregory Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory and Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition. In The Dalhousie Review 66 (Winter 1986/87): 540-545. Of Amartya Sen et al., The Standard of Living, In Economics and Philosophy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Of Arthur P. Monahan, Consent, Coercion and Limit. In Dalhousie Review 67 (Summer/Fall 1987): 367-369. Of Alan Irwin, Risk and the Control of Technology. In Risk Abstracts (July 1988): 118 119. Of David R. Shumway, Michel Foucault. In Dalhousie Review 69 (Summer 1989): 292-293. Of Ian Shapiro, Political Criticism. In Canadian Journal of Political Science 24 (September 1991): 670-671. Of Maurice Cranston, The Noble Savage: Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1754-1762. In American Political Science Review 86 (September 1992): 778. Of L. W. Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, in Philosophy in Review, 17, 2(April 1997), 141-4. Of Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, in Globe & Mail (Toronto), 4 April 1998, D10.
Notes on Contributors Nathan Brett is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He teaches philosophy of law and politics and the history of modern philosophy. Publications include many papers on Hume’s views and discussions of political and legal issues relating to consent, discrimination, punishment, collective rights, property rights and justice, and patents on living organisms. (
[email protected]) Bryson Brown is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Lethbridge. His philosophical interests center on logic, especially paraconsistent logic, and philosophy of science. He is co-author, with David Braybrooke and Peter Schotch, of Logic on the Track of Social Change (1995). Recent articles include ’Chunk and Permeate’ (with Graham Priest) in the Journal of Philosophical Logic, and ’The Pragmatics of Empirical Adequacy’ in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. (
[email protected]) Steven Burns is Professor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University and Professor of Contemporary Studies at the University of King’s College, and has served as Chair of both programmes. He has recently published investigations of Otto Weininger’s influence on Wittgenstein (see, e.g., Wittgenstein Reads Weininger, eds. D. Stern and B. Szabados, CUP, 2004), and is currently working on some studies of moral philosophy in literature. He has been a colleague of David Braybrooke since the 1960s. (
[email protected]) Richmond Campbell is George Munro Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Illusions of Paradox: A Feminist Epistemology Naturalized and Self-Love and Self-Respect and co-editor of Naturalized Moral Epistemology and Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation. His publications include articles in moral theory, epistemology, feminist theory, logic, philosophy of biology, and philosophy 387
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of mind. He is currently preparing a book on moral judgment. (
[email protected]) Sue Campbell is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of Women’s Studies at Dalhousie University. She is the author of Interpreting the Personal: Expression and the Formation of Feeling (1997), and Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars (2003). (
[email protected]) Michael Hymers is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University. He received his PhD from the University of Alberta in 1993 and held Postdoctoral Fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Calgary Institute for the Humanities. He has published numerous articles on questions concerning epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics, Kant, Wittgenstein, and neopragmatism. His book Philosophy and Its Epistemic Neuroses (Westview Press) appeared in 2000. (
[email protected]) Edna Keeble is an associate professor of political science at Saint Mary’s University and holds a Ph.D. from Dalhousie University (1994). As one of Braybrooke’s many graduate students who has been influenced not only by the weight of his ideas but also by the strength of his character, she regards both his scholarly work and his life well-lived as a continuing inspiration to be generous to others in time, monies and friendship. (
[email protected]) Meredith Ralston is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Women’s Studies and Political Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. She is also a documentary filmmaker and has directed two films on women and politics for the National Film Board of Canada. Kiefer Sutherland narrates her latest film, on Filipino bar girls and sex tourism. She has just been included in the 2005 edition of Canadian Who’s Who. (
[email protected]) Peter Schotch is a Professor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University. He received his university education at the University of Waterloo. By training, he is a formal logician with an interest in modal and manyvalued logics (which were then not very respectable areas of research— a fact which may go some way to explaining his interest). Over the years
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Schotch has become much more interested in applications of formal science which explains his interest in collaborating with David Braybrooke and Bryson Brown on the book Logic on the Track of Social Change. (
[email protected]) Susan Sherwin, FRSC, is a University Research Professor at Dalhousie University. She is a Professor of Philosophy, Bioethics, and Women’s Studies. Her principal research interests are in feminist approaches to health care ethics. Her publications include No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics and Health Care(1992), and The Politics of Women’s Health: Exploring Agency and Autonomy, with the Canadian Feminist Health Care Ethics Research Network (1998). (
[email protected]) S. L. (Sharon) Sutherland, FRSC, is Visiting Professor at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, working closely with the Public Administration Program of the School. She is also adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie, where she benefited from David Braybrooke’s collegiality in the 1970s, and a consultant to government. Beginning her career in attitude theory in political and social psychology (for example, Patterns of Belief and Action, University of Toronto Press, 1981), she later switched to study of the representative institutions and bureaucracy (Bureaucracy in Canada, Control and Reform, University of Toronto Press, 1985), ministerial responsibility, machinery of government (the politics of institutional design), and management policies and their political implications. She has published a number of journal articles in these areas, as well as in the ethics of office holding. Tom Vinci is Professor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University in Halifax, arriving there upon completion of his Ph.D in Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in 1977. He has been a colleague and friend of David Braybrooke since then. Professor Vinci’s publications include a book on Descartes, Cartesian Truth (Oxford, 1998), and articles in Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Decision Theory and the History of Modern Philosophy. He lives in Halifax with his wife and three children. (
[email protected])
References Acharya, A. (2001, Summer). Human security: East vs west. International Journal 56(3), 442–60. Aiken (1948). Hume’s Moral and Political Philosophy. New York: Hafner. Alberta, A. G. (2004, July 27). Report of the Auditor General on the Alberta government’s BSE-related assistance programs. Government of Alberta. Anscombe, G. (1963). Intention (2nd ed.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Audi, R. (1999). Moral knowledge and ethical pluralism. In J. Greco and E. Sosa (Eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology. Oxford: Blackwell. Axtell, G. (1997). Recent work on virtue epistemology. American Philosophical Quarterly 34, 1–26. Axworthy, L. (2001). Introduction. In McRae and Huber (Eds.), Human Security and the New Diplomacy: Protecting People, Promoting Peace. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Axworthy, L. (2003). Navigating a New World. Toronto: Knopf Canada. Ayer, A. (1936). Language Truth and Logic. 2nd(1946). London: Victor Gollancz. Ayoob, M. (2004). Third world perspectives on humanitarian intervention and international administration. Global Governance 10, 99– 118. 391
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Braybrooke, D. (1998a). Moral Objectives, Rules, and the Forms of Social Change. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Braybrooke, D. (1998b). Philosophy of social science, contemporary theories (schools). In E. Craig (Ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Volume VIII, pp. 838–847. London: Routledge. Braybrooke, D. (2000). Decision making systems: Personal and collective. In The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Volume V, pp. 3315–3318. Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier. Braybrooke, D. (2001). Natural Law Modernized. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Braybrooke, D. (2003a, April). A progressive approach to personal responsibility for global beneficence. The Monist 86, 301–322. Braybrooke, D. (2003b). Toward an alliance between the issueprocessing approach and pragma-dialectical analysis. Argumentation 17, 513–535. Braybrooke, D. (2003c). What truth does the emotive-imperative answer to the open-question argument leave to moral judgments? Journal of Value Inquiry 37, 341–352. Braybrooke, D. (2004). Utilitarianism: Restorations; Repairs; Renovations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Braybrooke, D. (2005). Analytical Political Philosophy: From Discourse, Edification. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Braybrooke, D. and M. Bailey (2003). R. A. Dahls philosophy of democracy, exhibited in his essays. Annual Review of Political Science 6, 99–118. Braybrooke, D. and J. Fingard (1985, April). Review of A. W. B. Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law. Ethics, 745–747. Braybrooke, D. and C. E. Lindbloom (1963). A Strategy of Decision: Policy Evaluation as a Social Process. New York: The Free Press.
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Index Meeting Needs, 53 ‘flexible’ categories of work, 24 ‘impaired’ thinking, 143 ‘open question’ argument, 273 ‘open-question’ argument, 301 ‘partisan mutual adjustment’, 143 ‘scientific’ political science, 127 ‘single-pass’ solution, 133
air pollution, 129 al-Qaeda, 111 alternative social states, 327 altruism, 223, 226, 227, 233, 241 Amartya Sen, 105 ameliorative activity, 147 Amnesty International, 117 analysing means, 134 Anscombe, E., 263 abject cosmopolitanism, 104 anti-personnel landmines, 103, 113, accepted ways of doing things, 325 114 action anti-personnel landmines treaty, 105 blocking, 333 apartheid, 289 virtual, 333 approved projects, 94 action type Arthur Wellesley, 285 semantics of, 331 artists, 95 actions, 328 aspiration adaptation, 135 concatenation, 330 aspiration level, 137 more than bringing about propo- authority, 356 sitions, 330 autonomy, 67 active community practices, 121 axioms actual moral situations, 297 for constraining possible needs, Adam Smith, 226, 231, 234 77 aesthetic judgments, 277 Ayer, A., 261 agenda, 340 Ayer., 302 agenda policy, 159 Agrippan sceptic, 280 B.R. Berelson, 128 Aiken, H, 268 background beliefs, 285 410
411
basic beliefs, 280 is dynamic, 127 BRCAnalysis, 55 basic moral principles, 272 Brian Fry, 131 basic needs, 42 Brink, D., 254 basic social roles, 59 Brown, 343 Bayesian models of rational decision, 256 Campbell, 218 behaviour, 345, 347 on naturalized epistemology, 218 behavioural principles, 346 Canada’s human security agenda, behavioural psychology, 349 115 behaviourally discriminable states, Canadian foreign aid policy, 116 355 Canadian foreign policy, 102, 122 belief-desire, 265 Carl Hempel, 196 theory of action, 251 Carl Rogers, 232 theory of moral judgement, 259, Cartesian sceptic, 291 265 Cartesian sceptical argument, 296 Bernard Weiner, 102 Cartesian scepticism, 283 Blackburn, S., 261 causal and intentional elements, 344 blocking, 344 census notion, 13 blocking operation, 348 certainty of moral propositions, 18 blocking operations, 343 certification of moral judgments, 276 bootstrap argument, 353 Charles Hamblin, 334 bootstrapping norms, 360 Chester Barnard, 139 Bosnia, 107 Chicago’s Old First Ward, 129 bounded rationality, 131, 135, 136 civil society engagement, 114 bovine spongiform encephalopathy, cognitive limitations, 143 158 cognitivism Brandom, 277, 278 vs non cognitivism, 259 Brandt, R., 259 vs non-cognitivism, 249 Braybrooke, 42, 48, 77 coherentism, 280, 313 as a theorist of participation, coherentist, 283 127 Cold War, 107, 110 Braybrooke and Lindblom, 132 collective discussion, 127 Braybrooke’s Cautions, 152 collectivities, 127 Braybrooke’s problem, 83 Commission on Human Security, Braybrooke’s strategy 118
INDEX
412
commitment central position of, 358 commitments interpretive, 353 commodity value, 30 communal discussion, 151 community medicine, 87 community-approved projects, 92 complex problems, 148 comprehensively rational method, 131 comprehensively rational prescriptions, 133 computational routines, 132 concept of national responsibility, 105 conflict prevention, 113, 116 consequences of action, 329 constraints, 77 constraints on epistemic contexts, 285 constructive competitiveness, 151 contemporary feminist epistemology, 17 context of debate, 283 contextual constraints on justification, 292 Contextualism rejects epistemological realism, 284 contextualism, 279, 287 of use to Braybrooke, 289 Williams’ definition, 280 conventional policy goals, 148
conventionalism about mathematics, 288 conventions, 273 cooperatives, 162 Copp, D., 252 core social roles relation to needs, 65 correctness of cultural decisions, 91 correspondence theory of truth and moral claims, 277 cosmopolitan, 223, 231 cosmopolitan ethical considerations, 116 cosmopolitan ethics, 16, 103, 106, 225 cosmopolitanism, 104, 123 different versions share a common root, 104 distinguished from other approaches, 104 extreme, 104 moderate, 104 Cranford Pratt, 116 critical theorists, 201, 204 critical theory, 195, 200–202, 204, 213 crude utilitarianism, 133 cultural evolution, 90 cultural parochialism, 227, 229, 233 culture evolves without self-direction, 91 culture-independent standards, 91 Dancy, J., 257 David Annis, 279
413
David Braybrooke direct inference, 352 directions of fit, 263 critic of privatization, 23 disabled David Cohen, 143 many easily helped, 81 David Haekwon Kim, 245 discounting factor, 80 David Hollinger, 104 disinterested perspective, 235 David Lewis, 279 disjointed incrementalism, 147 David Miller, 104 dispositional genetic tests, 56 David Sloan Wilson, 240 distinction between ethics and metadecision environment, 139, 140 ethics, 272 decision-making in policy literature, distribution of resources, 80, 93 126 Default and Challenge Model, 285 doctrine of equal regar, 108 default and challenge model, 290 dominance of terrorism, 105 Dudley Shapere, 345 default egoism, 223 as an account of moral moti- Dworkin, 40, 48 dynamic problems, 144 vation, 228 as misleading, 229 economic justice, 114 difficulty of avoiding, 228 in Sherman’s account of moti- education, 24 as a commodity, 29 vation, 230 not compatible with re-imagining, public vs private, 31 241 education as a human need, 42 definition efficiency calculus, 137 persuasive, 306 efficient needs monsters, 87 definitions, 312 efficient utility monster, 90 deflationism, 278 egoism Feinberg and Shaver’s work, democracy 224 western industrialized, 12 Elliot Sober, 240 democratic deliberation, 128 Department of Public Safety and Elshtain, 110 Emergency Preparedness, eminist relational accounts 115 of social justice, 68 Descartes, 281 emotions and imperative, 273 development assistance, 112 emotive-imperative, 302 dialectical constraints, 285 emotivism, 274
414
empirical analysis, 133 empiricism, 356 endorsement, 274 enforcement, 359 entitlement, 79 entitlements grounded in needs, 78 entitlements to resources, 77 environmental degradation, 113 environmental heuristic, 138 environmental heuristics, 134 epistemic bootstrap argument, 354 epistemic contextualism, 273 epistemic function of empathy, 228 epistemic justification, 19, 277, 310 epistemic priority, 287 and coherentism, 284 epistemically responsible, 287 Epistemological Realism, 281 epistemological realism, 272, 284, 287, 292, 293 epistemology, 302 epistemology of natural laws, 350 Epstein’s example, 206 equal opportunity, 36, 37, 44, 46 equality in meeting needs, 42 error theory, 253, 260, 264 ethical justification, 18 ethical theory, 302 ethics and meta-ethics, 276 ethics of consequentialism, 146 ethics of individual responsibility, 117 ethics of state responsibility, 106 ethnic cleansing, 108
INDEX
evolutionary advantage, 359 exegetical hypothesis very brave, 326 expensive technology, 86 expensive technology and research, 87 expressivist, 273 externalist moral realism, 254, 260, 262 fact-value, 205 fact-value dichotomy, 220 fact-value distinction, 200, 211 fact/value dichotomy, 219 feasible policy designs, 137 felicific calculus, 80 feminism commitments of, 67 feminist concern with autonomy, 68 relational account of persons, 65 feminist accounts of the self, 237 feminist empiricism, 214, 217 Feminist relational accounts, 67 feminist relational theory, 69 feminist standpoint, 211, 215 feminist theorists, 240 feminists can build on Braybrooke’s theory, 67 Feuerbach, 295 first-order discourse, 312 first-order knowledge, 311 fixing jurisdictions, 151 folk psychological theory, 256
415
following a rule deontological view, 337 foreign policy, 105 formal foundationalism, 302, 306 formal philosophers, 326 foundationalism, 280, 313 foundationalist, 283 foundations of policy analysis, 342 Fragmentation, 151 free market, 43 free-market, 38 freedom from fear, 111, 116 freedom from want, 111, 116 full rationality, 135 functionings Sen’s concept of, 106 fundamental principle of science, 350
global beneficence, 121 global community, 52 global economic injustices, 112 global poverty, 123 goal, 337 goal formation, 342 goal revision, 150 goal states more than needs required, 339 goals and rules used to interpret behavior, 351 good life, 89 good will, 325 Goodman, 352 governance and accountability, 113 grant and scholarship competitions, 95 grue, 352
gap between rich and poor, 24 gap in decision-making theory, 145 Gareth Evans, 109 gender equality, 114 general moral principles, 292 genetic ‘corrections’, 55 genetic disposition, 54 genetic disposition tests, 55 genetic dispositional testing, 69 genetic knowledge, 55 genetic susceptibility, 55 genetic susceptibility tests, 71 genetic testing, 54 Genevieve Lloyd, 224, 241 genocide, 108 Gibbard, A., 261
happiness, 80 Harding, 215, 217 Hare, R., 261 Harold Lasswell, 129 hedge-clipping models, 144 Hegel, 215 Herbert McClosky, 128 Herbert Simon, 130 Herman van Gunsteren, 130 heuristics, 140 hidden optimization, 138 hierarchical programs, 130 historical inquiry, 285 human beings as relational entities, 54 human development, 105, 146
416
INDEX
human happiness, 147 incrementalism, 16, 131, 133, 138, human needs 142, 143, 145 concept of restored, 52 conditions of failure, 152 human rights, 114 with utilitarianism, 146 human rights violations, 113 incrementalist experimentation, 154 human security, 102, 106, 111, 113, incrementalist thinkers, 144 115 incrementalist-utilitarian policy, 126 and Canadian foreign policy, individual analysts, 127 113 individual capacity for deliberation, and charitable organizations, 123 127 and cosmopolitan ethics, 103 inductive standards, 357 defined broadly, 112 inefficient needs monsters, 87 in Canadian foreign policy, 117 inefficient utility monster, 90 its empirical application, 103 infinite regress of reasons, 282 human security thinking, 106 humanitarian intervention, 111, 113 injunction, 308 Hume, 234, 235, 251, 255, 264, injustice, 66 that warrants use of force, 108 269 institutional blindness, 160 Hume’s concerns about induction, institutional insurance, 149, 150 350 institutionalized interests, 152 Humean moral sentiment, 224 instrumental ice cream cone semantics, 329 good, 321 identity, 85 insurgency within states, 105 imagination, 226 intelligibility of problems, 146 imagining interest groups, 94 of the self, 234 interests impartiality, 33 become shared, 243 imperative voice orfdinary understanding of, 349 intermediate principles, 132 increase participation in delibera- internal opposition, 145 internalism tion, 126 about justification, 281 incremental alternatives, 149, 150 Internalist moral realism, 258 incremental change, 148 incremental changes, 41 internalist moral realism, 256, 260, incremental policies, 131, 158 262, 263
417
International Campaign to Ban Land-John Pollock, 286 mines, 113 just warriors, 109 International Commission on Inter- justice, 67, 73 vention and State Sovereignty, global, 16 102, 109 privatization a threat, 15 International Committee of the Red justification, 302 Cross, 114 holistic, 281 International Criminal Court, 103, K. J. Arrow, 327 105 K.J. Arrow, 339 international relations, 16 Kaldor, 111 international security issues, 115 Kant, 48 interpretation Keith DeRose, 279 of self and others, 362 Khadija Coxon, 225 interpretive, 195 with naturalist tendencies, 207 knowing as a normative notion, 357 interpretive and naturalist questions knowledge of cause and effect, 292 in postmodernism, 209 Kofi Annan, 113, 118 interpretive methods, 213 Kosovo, 108 interpretive social scientists, 208 interpretive theorists, 197, 198 interpretive theory, 201, 203, 204, 214, 220 interpretive view, 216 intrinsic desirability, 296 intrinsic epistemic priority, 284 Iraq, 107 issues, 340 Jacobsen, R., 249 Jane Duran, 279 Jean Bethke Elshtain, 108 Jenna Woodrow, 272 Jill Sinclair, 114 Joan Tronto, 236 Jody Williams, 114 Joel Feinberg, 230
legacy policy, 159 liberal, 41, 67 liberal conception of personhood, 69 liberal conceptions of persons, 65 liberal individualist theories, 68 libertarian, 38 libertarianism, 39 Liebow, 207, 211 life-prolongation, 96 life-prolongation projects need not be legitimate, 77 life-prolongation technology, 92 life-sustaining technologies, 82, 83 Lillian Smith, 245 Lindblom, 129
418
INDEX
Lloyd Axworthy, 114 meta-ethical principle, 290 logical positivists, 293 meta-ethics longevity of older people, 86 various forms, 310 longevity-prolonging technology, 82 meta-language, 310 Longino, 217 metalanguage, 360 metaphor, 226 M´edecins sans Fronti´eres, 117 of distance in Hume, 236 MacIntosh, D., 249 of leaving oneself, 232 Mackie, 291, 294, 298 metaphor of overcoming distance, 237 Mackie’s error theory, 296 metaphorical structures, 224 Mackie, J., 253, 259 metaphors Margaret Urban Walker, 245 conceretizing empathy, 231 Mark Gwozdecky, 114 for empathy, 234 Marshall Dimock, 132 methodological necessities, 285 Martha Nussbaum, 104 Michael Moran, 159 Marx, 37, 205, 215 Marxist critique of ideology, 200, Michael Williams, 272, 279 215 Millikan, R., 264 Mary Douglas, 139 minority rights, 149 Mason Cash, 272 modern natural law theory, 43 mathematical judgments, 298 Mohamed Sahnoun, 109 maximizing, 138 Mohammed Ayoob, 108 McNaughton, D., 256, 258 Moore, 273, 301 means-end analysis, 134 moral belief, 253, 255, 262, 264, medical services, 53 265, 269, 295 medical technology, 78, 84, 89 moral claims, 272 can extend life, 81 judged true, 274 drains resources, 77 pragmatic force of, 278 medical technology problem, 92 presuppositions must be true, 292 medicare, 46 meeting needs and taking personal moral content, 296 responsibility, 117 moral conventions, 298 meta-epistemology, 311 moral cosmopolitanism, 229, 231, 233 meta-ethical dimension, 310 meta-ethical justification, 18 moral discourse, 272
419
moral education, 224, 225, 237, 242, basis for motivation, 18 243 Hume’s theory, 244 consequences of Braybrooke’s moral sentiment theories, 223, 234 account, 244 moral sentiment theory, 224, 236 Hume’s account, 234 role of imagination, 236 moral entitlements, 78, 94 moral subject, 65 moral epistemology, 302 moral theory, 274 moral experience, 295 moral truth moral facts, 79, 292, 293 has no nature, 279 moral force morality argument for, 119 can it be factual, 79 moral goodness, 290 different kinds, 328 moral judgment, 18, 305 situational, 328 moral judgments, 272 morally evaluative terms, 274 just expressions of emotion, 273 morally permissible community enmust motivate, 273 dorsements, 97 necessary conditions for, 287 morally permissible preferences, 98 motivation moral justification, 18, 301, 305 alternative model, 243 moral knowledge, 249, 251–253, 267, 269, 294 motivational force, 273, 299 moral language, 273 multi-layered citizenship, 104 moral motivation, 222, 227, 255, multiplication of personal activity, 262 121 naturalized account, 234 mutual assured destruction, 107 options for, 234 moral philosophy, 324 Nancy Sherman, 223 applied to social science, 328 Nathan Brett, 272 moral practices, 297 natural facts, 348 moral properties, 290, 295, 296 natural law, 302 moral realism, 252, 253, 257, 272 natural law theory, 12 moral realists, 276, 298 natural laws, 352 moral relativism, 307 natural order moral rules, 290 and justification, 355 moral scepticism, 291 natural regularities, 360 moral sentiment naturalism, 195, 201, 204, 213, 359
420
naturalism and interpretive theory, 201 naturalist, 208 naturalistic, 203 naturalistic explanation, 345 naturalistic fallacy, 306 naturalistic social science, 203 naturalists, 195, 196, 198, 200 naturalized accounts of human motivation, 224 naturalized approach to moral motivation, 225 naturalized epistemology, 218 need for a person to be alive, 82 for food, 43 needs, 11 meeting requires rules, 12 adventitious, 13, 52, 78 are a form of preferences, 70 as preferences, 66 very diverse, 13 and relationally defined persons, 86 and social goals, 338 as the basis of moral entitlements, 78 axiomatized, 92 axioms solve a problem, 94 basic, 89 bilogically given, 97 Braybrooke and Sen on, 105 co-tenability constraint, 98 confilict of, 86
INDEX
core concepts, 12 course-of-life, 13, 52, 58–61, 78 and scientific discoveries, 67 as relational, 65 attached to disease, 72 BRCA testing, 61, 69, 70 difficulty of BRCA testing as, 64 genetic test as, 72 health and life, 75 limit access to genetic testing, 74 priority of, 66 some universal, 13 take precedence, 70 technology as, 64 threatened by geneticization, 73 tied to social roles, 65 tracking, 13 created by projects, 77 criterion for inclusion, 59 defeasible, 84 effectiveness of different policies, 13 feminist consideration on, 15 for life extension not more pressing than other needs, 88 for life-extension technology, 83 for life-prolongation, 90, 95 have moral force, 117 individualist analysis, 85 legitimate classification as, 52
421
less empirical, 91 their role in evaluating public policy, 13 location of, 84 needs and capabilities, 118 locus in groups, 86 making public policy respon- needs ethics, 94 needs monster sive, 16 two kinds, 80 medical, 54, 55 medical demands for services, needs monsters, 96 15 needs-based ethics medical technology for life expressing problem for, 82 tension, 15 needs:for indefinitely long life, 87 meeting them as a goal of so- needs:for life-prolonging medical cial policy, 77 care, 54 minimum standard of provision, Nelson, 217 13 New Public Management, 130 no reliable distinction, 16 Nicholas Wheeler, 108 not grounding entitlements, 92 non-basic beliefs, 280 of a population, 87 non-governmental organizations, 105, of citizens, 11 122 of older people, 85 normal decision-making, 147 of others as a limit, 93 normalization of prenatal testing, 68 ordered by importance, 82 normative plasticity of, 97 facts, 348 policy should meet them, 127 no reduction to descriptive, 363 possibly determined by some normative concepts preferences, 99 grounded in natural facts, 362 potetial for conflict, 86 provide guidance for social pol- normative developments, 113 icy, 52 normative discourse, 306 purpose of public policy, 12 normative ethics, 311 quality of life, 86 normative status relational understanding of, 65 of beliefs, 282 relative to projects, 90 normativity, 19 require public debate, 13 norms the rejection of philosophical explicit linguistic expressions, egoism, 17 362
422
INDEX
metalinguistic elements of, 357 perfect information, 341 Nozick, 79 performance-enhancing drugs, 97 personal security, 105 objective grounds of value, 272 persons objective moral properties, 294 as embodied beings, 67 objective scientific procedures, 214 as locus of needs, 66 objectivism, 214 Peter Schotch, 343 objectivists, 272, 276 phase space, 327 objectivity, 212, 219 photo radar, 157 objectivity and universality, 214 Platonism, 298 observer, 356 Platonists, 272 obsolescence, 30 Platts, M., 257 official development assistance, 116 policy one-off decisions, 137 for resource distribution, 79 one-step remedies, 149 policy formation operationalizing pragmatism, 139 value of incremental approach, oppression, 44 342 oppressive conditions policymakers, 94 interference with autonomy, 68 political efficacy ordinary moral discourse, 274 tests for, 128 organizational loyalties, 137 political identities, 114 otherwise deployable resources, 82 political negotiation, 94 Ottawa convention, 103 political parties, 162 ought populations from is, 79 vs individuals, 85 postcolonial states, 108 Partiality, 32 postmodern, 216 partiality, 33 postmodern challenge among persons, 32 to philosophy of social science, participation, 128, 145 209 partisanship, 151 postmodernism, 202 Pat Barker, 241 preferences, 13, 52, 69, 339 patient autonomy, 69, 71 prescriptivism, 274 peace activists, 114 preventive medicine, 85 peace support operations, 113 peremptory values, 149 low-tech, 85
423
principles of thriving, 276 Prior Grounding Requirement, 281, 287 priority of justice, 40 priority principle, 44 prisoners’ dilemma, 359 private charitable organizations, 122 private education, 15 private schooling negative impact on equality, 15 private schools, 25 privatization, 26, 41 problem of global disparities, 120 problem of needs solved by illegitimate fiat, 91 procedural justice, 92, 94, 96 professional policy analysts, 134 program of Track, 326 progressive intellectuals, 163 projective, 233 projective empathy, 227 projects co-feasible given resources, 95 selected by individuals, 94 protection of civilians, 113 prudential considerations, 151 psychological egoism, 222, 230 public and private, 35 public goods, 121, 146 public policy, 126, 130 democratic planning for, 147 evaluation, 13 public policy successes, 153 public safety, 113
public transport, 155 Public-Private, 34 qualitative, 213 quandaries, 335 quantitative methods, 220 Quine, 218, 283, 293 Ralph Klein, 160 ranking possible policies, 132 rational egoism, 222 rational-deductive ideal, 133 of political science, 129 rational-deductive method, 132 Rawls, 37, 48 re-imagining the self, 241 reasoned decision, 144 redesigning, 150 redesigning and supersession, 150 redistributions of resources, 81 redressing human rights violations, 121 redundancy theory of truth, 304 redundant programming, 130 reference groups, 133 regularities, 346 Reinhard Selten, 135 relational autonomy, 75 relational interest, 237 relational persons, 67 relational understanding of persons, autonomy, justice, 70 reliabilism, 286 reliability, 356
424
reliable prescriptive heuristics, 139 remedial orientation, 149 remedy the consequences, 150 representation of needs, 145 resource cost, 81, 90 resources, 94 responsibility to protect, 102, 108, 109 results-oriented style of evaluation, 130 rethinking human security, 122 revisionary process, 148, 151 Richmond Campbell, 272 right to intervene, 109 rights, 77 grounded in needs, 78 rights of individuals, 108 road deaths reduction in France, 156 road offences, 156 Robert Audi, 302 Robert Brandom, 282 Rockney Jacobsen, 275 Roderick Chisholm, 302 role of ethics in public policy, 52 Rome statute, 113 root method, 133 roots of normativity, 358 Rorty, 278 rule, 308 nono component, 348 volk component, 348 wenn component, 348 and imperatives, 349 being in force, 351
INDEX
condition, 336 contents, 354 demographic scope, 334 development, 354 difficulty of defining, 326 in general, 325 rule explanations vs explanation by natural principles, 353 rule-utilitarian, 305 rules, 344 a definition, 343 function of, 337 normative dimension, 345 not constituted by causal relations, 345 triptych representation, 348 Rwanda, 108, 109 Sadako Ogata, 118 Saddam Hussein, 111 Samuel Scheffler, 104 Sandra Harding, 212, 214 satisficing, 131, 134, 135, 138, 149 no guarantee of success, 136 Sayre-McCord, G., 259 scepticism, 280 Schechtman, 243 Schlick, 281, 289 scientific method, 195, 196, 199, 212, 214 second-order discourse, 312 Sellars, 347, 349, 354 semantic atomism, 281 semantics of action, 329 semi-autonomous agencies, 122
425
Sen’s capabilities approach, 119 seniors’ political activism, 88 sensations, 356 sentiment of humanity, 235 Serbia, 108 shared interest, 242 shared interests, 238 Braybrooke’s focus, 240 Sherman, 237, 244 Sherwin, S., 249 Siegfried Sassoon, 241 signals of commitment, 359 Simon, 129 Simon’s bounded rationality, 144 small arms proliferation, 113 Smith, M., 251 smokescreen of humanitarianism, 122 social choice, 340 social group membership, 67 social groups, 65, 67 social inequality, 24 Social justice, 74 social justice, 75, 112 practical approach, 11 social justice activists, 114 social organizations, 117, 119 social policies vs individual autonomy, 73 Social policy, 78 social policy, 75, 340 social preference ordering, 340 social rule, 325 social science, 327, 346
interpretive, 344, 347 philosophy of, 4 three schools, 17 social sciences unity of, 202 unity within, 206 social welfare responsibilities, 116 Somalia, 107 Sosa, 302 Soviet Union, 103 speculative work in social indicators theory, 130 standpoint theorists, 220 state-variables, 327 Stella Gaon, 111 Stevenson, 302 Stewart Cohen, 279 stipulative definition, 316 strategic incompleteness, 138 strong objectivity, 216 strongly held principles, 341 subjectivists, 272 successful policy reforms, 153 successive limited comparisons, 133 supersession, 150 sustainable human development, 112, 118 symmetry-breaking, 93, 94, 96 synoptically rational in decision making, 130 Taliban, 111 Tally’s Corner, 211 terrorism, 103 Terry Connolly, 144
426
INDEX
the viewpoint of quality, 24 underdetermination argument, 295 Theodore Lowi, 137 United Nations Children’s Fund, 118 theory of motivation United Nations Development ProBraybrooke’s naturalized, 237 gramme, 112 theory of rules, 334 United Nations Security Council, theory of warranting judgments, 275 109 third kind of utilitarianism, 80 unity of method, 210, 220 Thomas Pogge, 112 utilitarianism, 12, 90, 138, 273, 336, Thomas Seeley, 140 338 thriving, 272, 274, 276, 299 utility monster, 80 compelling criteria for, 276 analogous problem for needs, societal, 305 82 Titchener, 231 value clarification, 133 Tom Vinc, 292 value-‘neutral, 134 Tom Vinci, 272 values leadership, 139 tradition of philanthropy, 120 virtue epistemology, 302 traditional utilitarianism, 150 von Wright, 326 traffic congestion, 16, 131, 153 traffic congestion charge in central London, 154 traffic management, 129 transformative empathy, 227, 232 transmission principle, 312 transnational crime, 113 truth, 302, 305 deflationary accounts, 277 pragmatic use, 278 semantic role, 278 theories of, 304 truth of moral claims, 276 truth-evaluability, 274 truth-predicate, 277 truth-value candidates, 275 type-raising, 340 underdetermination, 283
Waismann, 289 Walker, 243 war on terrorism, 110 warlordism, 108 warrant principles, 312 warranting judgments, 279 warranting moral judgments, 277 Wilfrid Sellars, 19, 345 Will Kymlicka, 104 William Pace, 114 Williams, 283, 284 Williams, M., 287 Wittgenstein, 18, 277, 279, 285, 288, 298, 307 women’s groups, 114 world citizenship problem og, 104
427
world community, 118, 120, 123 world conflict, 112 World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy, 114 world poverty, 112
