The Ethics of Life
Does Anything Matter?
Peter Singer
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OXFORD – Can moral judgments be true or false? Or is ethics, at bottom, a purely subjective matter, for individuals to choose, or perhaps relative to the culture of the society in which one lives? We might have just found out the answer.
Among philosophers, the view that moral judgments state objective truths has been out of fashion since the 1930’s, when logical positivists asserted that, because there seems to be no way of verifying the truth of moral judgments, they cannot be anything other than expressions of our feelings or attitudes. So, for example, when we say, “You ought not to hit that child,” all we are really doing is expressing our disapproval of your hitting the child, or encouraging you to stop hitting the child. There is no truth to the matter of whether or not it is wrong for you to hit the child.
Although this view of ethics has often been challenged, many of the objections have come from religious thinkers who appealed to God’s commands. Such arguments have limited appeal in the largely secular world of Western philosophy. Other defenses of objective truth in ethics made no appeal to religion, but could make little headway against the prevailing philosophical mood.
Last month, however, saw a major philosophical event: the publication of Derek Parfit’s long-awaited book On What Matters. Until now, Parfit, who is Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, had written only one book, Reasons and Persons, which appeared in 1984, to great acclaim. Parfit’s entirely secular arguments, and the comprehensive way in which he tackles alternative positions, have, for the first time in decades, put those who reject objectivism in ethics on the defensive.
On What Matters is a book of daunting length: two large volumes, totaling more than 1,400 pages, of densely argued text. But the core of the argument comes in the first 400 pages, which is not an insurmountable challenge for the intellectually curious – particularly given that Parfit, in the best tradition of English-language philosophy, always strives for lucidity, never using obscure words where simple ones will do. Each sentence is straightforward, the argument is clear, and Parfit often uses vivid examples to make his points. Thus, the book is an intellectual treat for anyone who wants to understand not so much “what matters” as whether anything really can matter, in an objective sense.
Many people assume that rationality is always instrumental: reason can tell us only how to get what we want, but our basic wants and desires are beyond the scope of reasoning. Not so, Parfit argues. Just as we can grasp the truth that 1 + 1 = 2, so we can see that I have a reason to avoid suffering agony at some future time, regardless of whether I now care about, or have desires about, whether I will suffer agony at that time. We can also have reasons (though not always conclusive reasons) to prevent others from suffering agony. Such self-evident normative truths provide the basis for Parfit’s defense of objectivity in ethics.
One major argument against objectivism in ethics is that people disagree deeply about right and wrong, and this disagreement extends to philosophers who cannot be accused of being ignorant or confused. If great thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham disagree about what we ought to do, can there really be an objectively true answer to that question?
Parfit’s response to this line of argument leads him to make a claim that is perhaps even bolder than his defense of objectivism in ethics. He considers three leading theories about what we ought to do – one deriving from Kant, one from the social-contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and the contemporary philosophers John Rawls and T.M. Scanlon, and one from Bentham’s utilitarianism – and argues that the Kantian and social-contract theories must be revised in order to be defensible.
Then he argues that these revised theories coincide with a particular form of consequentialism, which is a theory in the same broad family as utilitarianism. If Parfit is right, there is much less disagreement between apparently conflicting moral theories than we all thought. The defenders of each of these theories are, in Parfit’s vivid phrase, “climbing the same mountain on different sides.”
Readers who go to On What Matters seeking an answer to the question posed by its title might be disappointed. Parfit’s real interest is in combating subjectivism and nihilism. Unless he can show that objectivism is true, he believes, nothing matters.
When Parfit does come to the question of “what matters,” his answer might seem surprisingly obvious. He tells us, for example, that what matters most now is that “we rich people give up some of our luxuries, ceasing to overheat the Earth’s atmosphere, and taking care of this planet in other ways, so that it continues to support intelligent life.”
Many of us had already reached that conclusion. What we gain from Parfit’s work is the possibility of defending these and other moral claims as objective truths.
Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. Revised editions of his books Practical Ethics and The Expanding Circle have just been published.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
www.project-syndicate.org
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pf1 01:04 05 Jul 11
Well if Professor Derek Parfit believes that nothing matters unless he can show that objectivism is true, then nothing really matters. Because no matter what he can show there will always be someone to show the opposite and someone to accept his or the others view. Even his ecological obvious answer, which is obvious enough for me, is not so to many humans, at least when we look around.
Even a principle one would expect to be universally accepted, the basic priciple of the preservation of human life, is disputed since human organizations exist whose declared purpose is to kill as many x's or y's as possible (I'm triyng not to include direct religious references).
My greatest doubt is does it really matter triyng to place objectivism in ethics? Because the day we can say that ethics has become objective will be the brave new world and we won't be human any more.
Just an interesting remark: although professor Singer has many excellent articles about ethics published here, most of them get on average 2 to 3 comments by readers. Bu one of them has excelled and achieved the astonishing mark of 29 comments. It was the one about ethics in football (“is it ok to cheat in football?”). In my subjective view this goes to show that the main driver that motivates humans to act (or not) is passion. How can this be compatible with objectivity in ethics?
Paulo Fradique
Lisbon, Portugal
Misaki 09:23 09 Jul 11
The differences in moral philosophies are simply matters of priority. Does the individual's opinion take priority, does society's opinion take priority, or does an authoritarian source take priority? Politically, the first is represented as democracy, the second as roughly communism, the third as religious states.
The first is most difficult to be consistent in, due to variations of performance of individuals as locality changes that causes difficulty in predicting the optimal strategy for an individual and consequently what their optimal moral judgements should be. Eliminating some of the sources of this clustering of performance is one of the objectives of this text, but the choice of priorities for evaluation is always up to the individual even if the consequences of their actions will be influenced by the environment.
In other words: if one individual says a heap of 9800 grains of sand stops being a heap when it decreases to 2793 grains of sand, are you obliged to agree with that judgement or reach a consensus? What are the consequences of not doing so?
It has been said that the ability to handle complexity is the mark of an intelligent mind, even if the instinct is to attempt to simplify information being passed to other entities.
So everything matters, and yet nothing matters. I hope that answers the question.
NCoppedge 10:24 09 Jul 11
I didn't mean to be so cruel. More recently I've been excited by a book <<Counterfactuals>> by David K. Lewis, which is remarkable objectivity, even if it is addressed in a format of pure logic, or at least logical consequentialism.
Books like Counterfactuals are so rare somehow. Maybe <<On What Matters>> is for a different audience than me. Certainly the title sets a high bar, without being very specific.
Rainer 12:12 14 Jul 11
Why is it so difficult to renounce "objective truth" and building instead a civilization on the principle of respect for the different-minded (this includes animals), i.e. not imposing more laws and rules on each other than necessary? We will still have a lot of work to discuss, what rules are really necessary.
The problem with "objective truth" is, as history shows, there are always "elites", who claim the right to decide on what is objective truth and what not. If there is no "objective truth" no "elite" can claim this right. Instead there are only a lot of individuals with a lot of "subjective truths", who have to find compromises - where necessary and leave each other as much freedom as possible.
NCoppedge 10:48 16 Jul 11
Pure logic is not elitism unless it prefers certain individuals. I have always thought philosophers are a little mad. But presumably, some privileged are not. Granted the privilege, perhaps they rose through the ranks or simply had more to say.
NCoppedge 10:50 16 Jul 11
If having more to say is elitism, at least its based on an empirical standard
NCoppedge 09:49 17 Jun 11
The "excoriating" approach to criticism is well-deserved of the broad array of texts currently available to the public.
I thirst for a mote of time in which the piths of material are what concerns the publisher and authors---it is the philosophical "secrets of the earth" that really concern legitimate readers; and if these readers are rare, its like they own a special kind of politics
It is conceptualism which defines philosophical argument---I don't mean to assess textual matter like it is some Babelian derivative from God.
So when you say that arguments can be "lumped" together like digits, this reminds me of ordinalism, as a key to what you're saying about Mr. Parfit; however at that point it might be teleology, or semiotics, or pure deduction; so I begin to ask if the typical answer from such an author ("all of the above") is adequate; perhaps what I can derive is that there is a "compound interest" which argues for example, that two parts contingency equal one part exegency or something like that, which looks like the typical method of expounded vocabulary.
Is Mr. Parfit dimensional? How are so many questions so unresolved in such a text? And why am I so certain that I am to be disappointed?
Speaking seriously, couldn't some scholars be hired to write 1-page synopses of their most profound arguments? Is it possible that someone else would be more deserving than they?
What happens if someone ordinary suddenly has a profound idea of an argument for God that has not been proposed? Is it just insignificant, or insignificantly probable, or irrelevant to the discipline of philosophy? Are casual students or sons or daughters of philosophers so rare? Do we expect to be interpreted subjectively by a deity to be deemed worthy of publication? Is it too much of a morass to publish miniature works, internationally for example, or because of demand?
What about the connection to digital marketing devices? (Which haven't been in evidence in spite of LANs) Some philosophers might want to sell material that someone would read casually in an internet cafe setting. Maybe there aren't enough Starbucks afterall.