Who Is more likely to be a psychopath: the rational moralist or the emotional amoralist?
In the Afterword to the 2011 Edition of his book The Expanding Circle (Princeton University Press), Peter Singer makes the extraordinary admission that he has seen the light about the problematic nature of objective morality. Nevertheless he ends by cleaving to it, after providing an extremely weak argument, namely that even though a moral reason is not inherently motivating, we will nevertheless, at least in certain circumstance\s, find a moral reason to be compelling, that is, rational. To me this argument sounds almost (?) circular.
But what is even more salient for me is Singer’s conception of the rational as something that is quite distinct from what he calls the “emotional.” “[W]hether a belief gives us reasons to do something is a normative question, and whether it motivates us to do it is a psychological question.” “[I]f we can accept the idea of objective moral truths, we do have an alternative to reliance on everyday moral intuitions that, according to the best scientific understanding, are emotionally based responses that proved adaptive at some time in our evolutionary history.” The subtext here is that this understanding undermines “emotionally based intuitions,” presumably because the conditions of contemporary life are so different from “some time” in our past when these responses were adaptive.
I would say that the natural conclusion to draw would therefore be that there are no objective moral truths. But this is so distasteful to Singer (and Parfit), if not simply absurd (as it once was to me), that he pins his hopes on the “rational,” which will yield “the reasons for action that all rational sentient beings would have, even rational sentient beings who had evolved in circumstances very different from our own.” And the example he gives to make this point is that even if someone cares more about the present than the future, the fact that they know that their not attending to a toothache today would lead to a month of agony thereafter establishes that it would nevertheless be irrational for them not to go to the dentist today.
As I say, an incredibly weak argument. And even Singer acknowledges that its normative force derives from a substantive moral (or, actually, prudential) principle. But however widely accepted that prudential principle may be, why say that it is objective? And Singer is hardly one to talk: Is not his moral principle of anti-speciesism something that most people would reject? Yet we can be sure that this will not influence Singer in the slightest to alter his moral commitment to it (nor mine to veganism, even though the vast majority of people couldn’t care less about the animals and in fact think I’m some kind of weirdo in this respect, while I, when in moralist mode, think they are morally deficient).
Which brings me to the more general point I want to make in this essay, to wit: While the typical moralist will get all frantic about the moral anarchy that would result from the adoption of amoralism, I would say (when in moralist mode) that it is in fact the moralists who perpetrate the greatest moral crimes. For example, Singer tells us that it would be irrational not to push the fat man in the path of the runaway trolley, because the horror one might feel at the prospect is emotional at base and ignores the clearly rational consideration that five people will die if the trolley is not stopped.
Yes, I am horrified … but not only about pushing the fat man
off the overpass but even more so that the unemotional rational moralist is so
sure that the right thing to do is to push him. It is a short step from this
conception of reason and morality to Auschwitz.
Part 2
It’s actually sad to read Singer acknowledging about normative ethics that “There have been many attempts over the centuries to find proofs of first principles in ethics, but most philosophers consider that they have all failed.” This from someone who has been known as an uncompromising utilitarian. My empathy was elicited, analogous to when a colleague visiting from Russia lamented the loss of the Soviet Union she had grown up in. It simply was no more.
But people do not give up on their familiar truths. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is clear testimony to that. And Singer’s blithely proceeding in his usual ways after his acknowledgment is as well. The wackiness this can lead to is evidenced by the truly desperate suggestion, which Singer adopts from Sidgwick, that praise and blame be detached from moral judgment, so that, in Singer’s telling, we might still blame someone for pushing the fat man off the bridge whilst yet insisting it was the right thing to do.
This is the kind of nonsense one falls into as one attempts at all costs to save a theory despite all the evidence against it. The various theological attempts to save the God theory in the face of the Problem of Evil are perhaps the most notorious case of this sort of thing. Singer’s almost half-hearted attempt to save the morality theory (that is, the theory that there are objective values) is of the same ilk. The suggestion about blame is just the first epicycle being introduced to complicate the theory on the road to incoherence.
But what exactly is it that Singer is defending? I don’t really want to trash utilitarianism as a useful part of ethics. It is, as I say, the morality, or, maybe better put, moralism, which is the culprit.[1] What is the problem? Moralism insists on objective truth. This has tended to put the various proposed “first principles in ethics” at odds with one another, since presumably insofar as they can lead to contradictory imperatives, they cannot all be true; and so the moral theorist seeks “to find proofs” of the one that is true. I call this monotheorism. But this enterprise has “failed,” Singer laments.
Why not instead, then, I submit, turn this around and consider this via negativa to have led to a helpful recognition that the moral project is not helpful for ethics? Instead let us explore the various riches of utilitarianism … and Kantianism and egoism and virtue theory and so on for guidance in living They are all potentially beneficial rules of thumb in various situations without any of them needing to be true or issuing in absolute imperatives that uphold objective values.
Thus, I think in the end Singer’s problem arises mainly from his personality as a rationalist. His ideal must be an ethics that begins with an axiom from which all other moral judgments can be derived, on the model of a physics that would derive the whole of the universe from a single formula.[2] One interesting implication is that morality may be more suited to robots than to humans. I would therefore advise Singer and other rational moralists just to learn to “let go” and smell the 100 flowers blooming.
[1] Cf. Richard A. Posner: “Although you are correct that the efficacy and the soundness of moral arguments are analytically distinct issues, they are related. One reason moral arguments are ineffective in changing behavior is their lack of cogency—their radical inconclusiveness—in a morally diverse society such as ours, where people can and do argue from incompatible premises. But there is something deeper. Moral argument often appears plausible when it is not well reasoned or logically complete, but it is almost always implausible when it is logical. An illogical utilitarian (a "soft" utilitarian, we might call him or her) is content to say that pain is bad, that animals experience pain, so that, other things being equal, we should try to alleviate animal suffering if we can do so at a modest cost. You, a powerfully logical utilitarian, a "hard" utilitarian, are not content with such pablum. You want to pursue to its logical extreme the proposition that pain is a bad by whomever experienced. And so you don't flinch from the logical implication of your philosophy that if a stuck pig experiences more pain than a stuck human, the pig has the superior claim to our solicitude; or that a chimpanzee is entitled to more consideration than a profoundly retarded human being.” (from a debate between Posner and Singer in Slate, June 2001)
[2] Nancy Cartwright questions this even in physics.