The task of this chapter is to defend the concept of the morally impossible. The logical problem of morally-impossible evil depends on our judgement that the morally impossible happens. There are two ways to reject this judgement: the first is what we see with theodicy and sceptical theism, which is to accept the concept, even if only for the sake of argument, but deny that the morally impossible happens or has ever happened. The concept is meaningful, but empty. I have argued that this denial only comes at great moral cost: it reveals a lack of moral sensitivity, coming from a perspective that is too deliberately detached, utilising a consequentialism too unrestricted and an instrumentalism too ruthless. It also violates the ‘Humanity Formulation’ of the Categorical Imperative, which is a big no-no if you think there’s anything at all to what Kant says. Denying the morally impossible is itself morally impossible and we cannot do the morally impossible without incurring the cost in terms of guilt and shame. Consistent positions are available for the theist here, but they will appear morally reprehensible to anyone who recognises instances of the morally impossible in the world.
There is another option, however, which is to reject the concept of the morally impossible per se. This response does not argue against the truth of the claim that the morally impossible has happened but rejects the concept as meaningless trumped-up nonsense. Analogous with a disagreement about whether or not a cloud is angry, the proper response is not to argue ‘yes it is’ or ‘no it isn’t’ but rather to point out the meaninglessness of the question. The thought that a cloud might be angry is no more than a philosophical confusion to be dissolved by rigorous analysis. Perhaps ideas about the morally impossible are also no more than a confusion, a fantasy, a myth, a philosophical hobgoblin. My logical formulation of the problem of evil collapses, like any imagined danger, as soon as it is faced. The curtain is drawn back and the problem is exposed as a spurious and pseudo problem that achieves its sense of moral challenge only by making up outrageous claims about moral necessity. These outrageous claims are dismissed as unsupportable, incoherent nonsense on stilts, and with that the theist can rest easy, safe in the knowledge that there is no hobgoblin to defeat.
I think the morally impossible is more than just a hobgoblin, however. I think it is not a myth, but real, and as real as any moral reality can be. The purpose of this chapter is to defend the meaningfulness of the concept. I know I am in controversial territory here. I do not expect many philosophers to agree with me, and certainly not all. Whilst few would (or could, if they are honest with themselves) deny the intuitive power of morality, many philosophers are sceptical about moral meaning even in its contingent form, let alone any claims about necessity. I want to dispel some of these doubts if I can.
My approach is straightforward: to firm up the intuitive power of moral necessity and offer some defence of it. I want to reassure you, and me, that our intuitions about moral necessity are sound. They are not a philosophical hobgoblin. It is not the case that they ought to be dismissed, and it is the case that they ought not be dismissed. They should be taken seriously. We can, do, and should hold fast to our understanding of the morally impossible.
I’ll start by clarifying what I understand by the morally impossible. I think this is a distinct kind of moral judgement that is identifiable by two features: a) that something is recognised as being wrong in a way that is inexcusable or unjustifiable, and b) that even though we might sometimes disagree about which things are so, a capacity to recognise that some things are inexcusable or unjustifiable is a condition for the possibility of sound moral judgement. Over the course of this clarification, I expect to show you that you already recognise this concept, both practically and theoretically. Practically, you live and operate with this concept and apply it in your quotidian moral reasoning. Theoretically, you have no compelling reason to dismiss this concept, and it is essential to your understanding of the limits of moral meaning. Because of this you cannot deny the meaningfulness of the concept without contradicting yourself practically, such as when a man denies he has feet whilst walking about on them, or contradicting yourself theoretically by cutting off the branch on which your moral reasoning sits.
Two Examples of the Morally Impossible
It will be clearer if I work with some examples. But it’s important to remember that they are just some examples that are taken to be indicative of a much wider-reaching concept. It is the nature or quality or type of moral judgement that is represented in the example that matters, not the specifics of the example or even the specific moral judgement in its case. I will trust that you will probably (surely) share in the moral judgement in the first example; I am less confident in the others. Other instances of the morally impossible will be analogous to these cases only if they share the general features that I am pointing out; other more specific features would not be relevant to any analogy.
The first example I will use is Jimmy Savile. This is an example that will be more familiar to British readers of various generations, but has been subject to internationally-aired documentaries since the ‘revelations’ came out and has become a fairly well-known story, and so I think it’s safe to assume it’s a fairly widely-known example. I’ll summarise it in brief:
Jimmy Savile was a popular British television presenter and personality for much of the latter part of the 20th century. He presented ‘Top of the Pops’, a very important popular music show of that era, amongst other things, and he used his celebrity and profile to do an awful lot of very notable charity work. He was best known for his children’s show ‘Jim’ll Fix It’, the basic premise of which was that children would write in to Jim with various wishes and Jim would then ‘fix it’ to make those dreams reality. It was all very heart-warming and entertaining stuff, carried along by Savile’s accessible and easy-going, if a little odd, manner. I remember watching this show growing up. I remember feeling that Jimmy Savile was a bit of an old weirdo, as I think most people did, but that this was more in the category of ‘harmless eccentric’ – of which there is a long-standing British tradition – than anything particularly sinister. It turns out his eccentricity was extremely sinister and anything but harmless.
After his death, it emerged that Jimmy Savile was an abuser and a paedophile. He had spent a lifetime exploiting his celebrity to gain access to children, particularly vulnerable children, in order to sexually abuse them. These opportunities were often linked to his charitable activities. He would raise a great deal of money for a hospital, for example, becoming such a well-liked and respected figure in that hospital that he would be given free access to it and within it; he then used this unfettered access to abuse patients in that hospital. When these revelations emerged, it was shocking to discover that this was not an occasional arrangement: he did it all the time, over many decades, for his whole life. Savile had various residences in these institutions, as well as a motorhome, and he would freely flit from one to the other taking children wherever he went. His overt charitable work and persona as a beloved children’s TV personality somehow blinded everyone to what he was doing, or else overpowered any serious inclination to look too closely.
I have already cited child abuse as an example of the morally impossible, so this example is a natural fit for my discussion. But there are more features that are relevant in this case. It’s not just that Savile abused children, it’s that he used, in part, his good works and reputation in order to do so. It’s that these good works somehow enabled him to be granted free access to the vulnerable. It’s that he died before any serious evidence emerged; he died before facing any serious repercussions; he got away with it. It’s that he seemed to think his ‘good works’ could somehow outweigh the bad that he knew he had done. For Savile, it was clearly morally possible to do what he did. It was a fair trade. This is clear because it was not only morally possible for him, but morally actual, because he did it, and he showed no remorse for doing so, and seemed to believe that his good works got him off the hook. Whereas for the rest of the shocked British public, when the revelations emerged, we reacted with one voice: that Savile had done the morally impossible – and not just once or twice, but for a lifetime, a catalogue of the morally impossible – and we couldn’t believe such a thing could have been allowed to happen. We couldn’t believe that no one knew, but we equally couldn’t believe that if anyone knew then they could have stayed silent and allowed it to happen. We remain incredulous.
Let me extract what is relevant for my purposes as part of a philosophical argument about the problem of evil. That it is wrong for old men to sexually abuse children would seem to go without saying. So this is clearly a case of ‘wrongness’ or ‘evil’: it is something that we judge ‘ought not to be’. I don’t think I need to explain why that is the case.
Is it a case of ‘evil’ that can be justified by greater goods or the avoidance of worse evils? Clearly not, I would say. Imagine Savile defended himself: ‘Now then now then, if I hadn’t been free and able to abuse these children, I wouldn’t have done all that charity work to make up for it. This charity work did an awful lot of good, so much good that it clearly washes away the bad I might have done. A few children might have suffered, but many more people benefited. When all’s said and done, on balance, I think my behaviour is excusable and justified. The suffering of those children was a small price to pay for all the good I gave in return. I earned it. Children’s television and charity work; who can ask more than that?’ Would we seriously countenance this argument? Could we bring ourselves to condone, on this basis, and not condemn?
Of course not. No one disputes the good works that he did or the good consequences that followed from them, but no one in their right mind would think this excuses what he did to those children. That’s not something Jim can fix.
Could he have, if he had done more good works? Is it a matter of quantity? Would it be different if he had done more charitable work and less child abuse? How much more would be required, or how much less? At what point would his behaviour become justified by appeal to greater goods? What is the going rate for sexually abusing a vulnerable child these days? Has this price been subject to inflation like the rest of the economy? Is that why we notice the wrongness of Savile’s conduct now when we didn’t before?
This is all absurd, obviously, because the sexual exploitation of children is not something that’s up for sale. There is no ‘market value’ for that. It is not an economic transaction, like wages for labour, or tax-deductible charitable contributions. To speak of it as if were is to mutilate the concept. But this is what would be done if we were to take Savile’s hypothetical defence seriously. We would be asking: is that a reasonable price to pay for the abuse of children?
Asking the question shows that you don’t understand what you’re asking about. No one who understands the moral reality of child abuse could ask at what price it becomes morally acceptable. (The connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear.)
Some things we judge to be excusable and justifiable by compensation or other ways of ‘making good’. Some things we judge not to be so. An ability to discern the difference between the two is essential to sound moral judgement. But we need not always agree on where to draw the line.
Consider my second example: the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945. Many people consider this, together with Hiroshima, to be morally justified for various reasons: principally that it ended the war and saved many lives, but also that it ended the war swiftly and saved many American lives. (Few could doubt that the war would have ended at some point, after all, and most would accept that there were alternative war-ending options available.) I happen to disagree that dropping the bomb on Nagasaki (or Hiroshima) was morally justified. In fact, I’d go further and say that the dropping of atomic bombs over civilian populations is a case of the morally impossible, that it is not just contingently unjustified but necessarily unjustifiable, but it’s clear that some people would disagree with my judgement in this case and I accept that people disagree about such things. But you don’t need to agree with my judgement to accept the point of this example.
Some bad things we consider to be justified by sufficient reason, others we do not. Often we have to draw a line and make a judgement to discern between the two. Recognising some things as unjustifiable is necessary to be able to make this kind of discrimination.
Imagine it were to come out that the Japanese had actually surrendered just before the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and that that bomb had been dropped only as a weapons test or just to make a point to the Russians. Presumably we would say with one voice that those are not acceptable reasons to justify dropping an atomic bomb on a civilian population. Such a thing would be inexcusable. But it is only because of this that we are able to contrast that counterfactual with what actually happened and make some attempt at justifying the circumstances under which it is permissible to drop an atomic bomb on civilian populations. You can only sensibly say ‘under these conditions, yes’ if you acknowledge that ‘if those conditions do not hold, then no’. Otherwise what is the meaning of specifying any conditions at all?
The attempt to justify the dropping of atomic bombs over civilian populations is made by offering reasons. ‘Dropping the bomb was justified because…’ If those reasons are not true, then the justification does not follow. For example: ‘Dropping the bomb was justified because it caused the Japanese to surrender, ending the war.’ Under those circumstances, dropping the bomb becomes justified (or so it is argued). But if the Japanese surrendered before the bomb was dropped, then those reasons would no longer hold. It would then become ‘unjustified’ because there would be no justification.
But what is the assumption here? That dropping an atomic bomb over civilian populations should not be done without (very) good reason. You cannot drop the bomb without (very) good reason. That is why we need those justificatory reasons. But this ‘need’ is just a form of the morally impossible: ‘It would be morally impossible to drop an atomic bomb over civilian populations without (very) good reason.’ Everyone recognises the morally impossible, in some form, or else we cannot make any sense of the reasons we offer to justify the bad things that we do.
And not just any reasons, because only some reasons count. It wouldn’t be enough to say: ‘Dropping the bomb was justified because I really enjoyed the flight, and I’d have had no reason to fly over Nagasaki if I hadn’t been there to drop a bomb. It was a nice day and I really enjoyed the view.’ That is an admittedly silly example. Closer to reality would be the unspoken assumption that if the USA had dropped the bomb primarily for the purposes of conducting a weapons test and making a point to the Russians, the action would lose any claim to the moral high ground. Those are not offered as alternative morally-sufficient reasons, but as potentially corrupting reasons that we hope weren’t amongst the main reasons for choosing that course of action. It would be morally impossible to drop the bomb on the basis of those reasons.
We discriminate between these reasons and weigh up their justificatory power always on the basis of the underlying assumption that at some point we encounter a limit: we define something that cannot be justified and define what can in relation to that limit. This limit is the morally impossible. People differ widely about when or where they hit this limit, but that limit must always be there if there is to be any sensible distinction between what is and is not justified.
A condition for the possibility of sound moral judgement is a capacity to distinguish between what can and cannot be justified or excused. You need to recognise when reasons run out; you need to know when to stop. But to do this requires that some things are held to be inexcusable or unjustifiable. When all excuses and reasons run out, then we say that is beyond justification. We hit our moral limits. If you cannot hit that limit, then you show that you cannot distinguish between what can and cannot be justified or excused, and therefore that you lack an important element of moral judgement. You cannot recognise when you ought to stop.
Dropping the bomb ended the war and saved lives. But if the war was ending within a few weeks anyway, or if dropping the bomb cost more lives than it saved, or if the real reason for dropping the bomb was to test a new toy and make a point to the Russians, then dropping the bomb would have been inexcusable and unjustifiable. If you then say, finding that you cannot stop, that perhaps testing the weapon and making a point to the Russians might be a good reason to drop an atomic bomb over civilian populations, then the error moves beyond being an error in moral judgement and becomes an error of moral judgement – strictly, a lack of moral judgement –indicative of something more fundamental: that you have moved beyond the limits of reasonable moral thinking. Like the difference between making a bad move in chess and an illegal move in chess. Some mistakes show that you lack a capacity for the proper exercise of judgement on these matters; some mistakes prompt the response ‘I see you are doing something altogether different’.
Certain judgements are like cornerstones of our moral judgement, hinges around which our moral judgement swings, and these form the limits of our moral thinking. They are the limits we hit when we encounter something that we consider to be inexcusable or unjustifiable. Though we might disagree about what those things are, that there are some things that are beyond justification or excuse is something that must be a part of any meaningful moral picture of the world.
Epistemic Ambiguity
Though both of my examples are meant to express something about the morally impossible, there is a clear difference between the two, at least if my reaction is anything to go by: If someone comes to me and defends the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I am inclined to question their moral judgement; and in questioning their moral judgement I investigate my own and subject both to examination, as a good student of Socrates. If someone comes to me and defends Jimmy Savile’s abuse of children, I am inclined to throw their moral judgement out altogether: they show themselves to be someone who has nothing to say. These are expressions of my moral limits in both cases, but only one is exclusionary, at least for me. Anyone who defends Savile’s behaviour shows themselves to lack a capacity for sound moral judgement: they defend the indefensible. For me, anyone who defends the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki also defends the indefensible, but I am not as quick to dismiss their capacity for sound moral judgement. But if they are both cases of the morally impossible, for me, then what is the difference here?
I think the difference between the two examples can be accounted for epistemically. It’s easier to see that there could be no good justification for Savile’s behaviour than it is to see that there could be no good justification for dropping the bomb on Nagasaki. The latter is morally ambiguous in a way that the former is not. But after investigation, we might come to see more clearly and resolve the ambiguity. Once resolved, we might find ourselves clearer about our moral limits. This is a useful exercise. (The connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear.)
I think progress in moral understanding can be made by trying to get a clearer understanding of these moral limits. Finding these limits, these cornerstones and hinges, helps to firm up your understanding of your own moral understanding. I used to be unclear about where I stood on the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Perhaps I naively thought that it was probably justified by the reasons offered, that it ended a war that would not have ended in any other less-costly way. Then I engaged with the philosophical literature, and reflected on it, and attended some exhibits of various kinds (a photographic exhibition ‘Camera Atomica’, for example, or a visit to the ‘National WWII Museum’ in New Orleans), and my view slowly clarified.
As trivial as it might sound – and I am slightly ashamed of how trivial this will sound – a small photographic negative of the first atomic test had a powerful and lasting impact on me. This makes more sense for me than it would for others. I am a sort of amateur photographer and I like to work with photographic film when I can. I have a philosophical argument that I like to bore people with every now and then, about how photography captures ‘a moment in time’, but that digital photography offers only copies of copies but never anything that can be properly identified as an ‘original’: it is just data, metaphysically indistinguishable from other data. In that, something of the original ‘moment in time’ is lost, at least in contrast to analogue film. If you were to craft a copy of a digital photograph, pixel by pixel, and then save that copy as data, that data would be exactly identical with the ‘original’ image. Whereas a film negative is the original, in the camera at the time and place, exposed to the light of that day. When you look at the negative, or the reflected image whilst developing that negative, you see something of the light of that day reflected back at you. You are connected to something that was there; it is as unique as the moment captured; something lacking in its digital data equivalent. In any case, for me, seeing a small photographic negative of the first atomic test allowed me to feel connected to something that had been hit by the light of the first atomic bomb. It felt the world change and that change was captured in it. Decades later, I can look at that moment of change in a museum. I can connect myself with the place where that photographic negative was and dare to imagine that same impact. That connection forces me to place myself in the perspective of being underneath the bomb as it dropped. That perspective gives me moral insight.
A detached (and largely ignorant) perspective makes it easier to sign off on some purported moral justifications. As your perspective becomes more engaged (and less ignorant), that becomes harder to do. You see pictures of children, of victims, of the immediate and lasting damage of such an action and you find yourself incapable of imagining the turn of events that would make you choose to do such a thing. It is unimaginable, unthinkable. I do not say I could or would not do such a thing, in reality, because who knows how we would react in such extreme circumstances, conditioned by the brutality (and banality, so they say) of that world war. But I imagine that if I were brought to the point of choosing to do such a thing, I could not do so without acknowledging the evil of it – even if not at the time, inevitably later. I would curse my fate and lament being put in a such a morally tragic position. And then I would be mortally ashamed of my selfishness for cursing my fate, as if I were the victim.
These are abstract and indulgent philosophical investigations. Sometimes the discovery of moral limits is more concrete: experience can be the best teacher. Sometimes we only find a limit when we have transgressed it. But those concrete regrets are surely best avoided and you can find your moral limits in abstract philosophical investigations. And in finding those limits, you find your boundaries and your shape, and in that shape you find your moral picture of the world. The picture can be changed, modified over time, but it cannot be thrown out entirely. After these abstract philosophical investigations on the dropping of atomic bombs over civilian populations, I find that part of my moral picture of the world is that we should not incinerate the children of our enemies in order to preserve the lives of our soldiers; we should not obliterate children as an intimidation tactic. ‘Look how big and strong and fearsome I am: I have killed all your children in a rain of ruin the like of which has never been seen on this earth! You’d better give up now, or I’ll do it again!’ We cannot bypass that moral duty to serve our purposes, even if they were worthy purposes. (Just as Jimmy Savile cannot justify his bad behaviour by the good of charity work.) This, in turn, reinforces something important about the nature of ethics, for me: that it is a judge of our purposes and not a servant of them. It is not something that can be put to use; it is something that holds us to account. I have heard this cliché and broadly accepted it, but it takes a philosophical working out and concrete examples to make it clear. I accept that people will see things differently and will disagree, but I am content to have a clearer picture of my moral world. My ethical life is my responsibility, after all, and only mine, and their ethical life is theirs and only theirs. It’s not my job to make their moral decisions for them, only to make my own. To make those decisions (in any way other than unthinkingly) I need a clear picture of my moral world. To that extent, my abstract and indulgent philosophical reflection has served its purpose. (The connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear.)
A clear picture of your moral world can help you live your life in a way that is consistent with yourself. In simple terms, it can help you avoid doing things that you will regret. I don’t expect ever to be put in the position of choosing whether or not to drop an atomic bomb over civilian populations, but this is obviously an extreme example that is chosen for the sake of its clarity and philosophical renown. There are other examples that are closer to home.
Consider child abuse, for example. Clearly, ‘doing a Jimmy Savile’ is not something that’s up for consideration. But what about hitting a child, for the purposes of discipline? As I write this, at this moment in time in the UK the government in Westminster is debating laws about banning the ‘smacking’ of children in any form. Currently this is the case in Wales and Scotland, so the question is whether Westminster will align with these laws. As it stands in England, ‘smacking’ a child is legal so long as it doesn’t leave a visible mark. The issue is debated and people have their views. Is the physical disciplining of a child always, sometimes, or never justifiable? Like a good student of Socrates, I ask myself where I stand. As I write this, my wife is pregnant with our first child, and I am surrounded by a diverse range of views couched under the name of ‘advice’, so it’s a pressing question for me.
Under what circumstances would I think it is right to hit a child? Not for personal enjoyment or satisfaction, obviously. Nor either for the entertainment of others. I cast these into the realm of the morally impossible. To do such things would show yourself to lack any contact with moral reality.
For discipline, then? As a punishment? I hit the child because it deserves it? But I know a child has limited moral accountability. I’m not quite clear where the line is drawn, and at what ages and stages moral accountability progresses with the child, but I know that a child is not as morally culpable as an adult. Would I hit an adult, as punishment? Presumably not. Why not? Because I am afraid they would hit me back? What if I were significantly stronger than them, would that make it right? If the world heavyweight boxing champion (or perhaps an actor who played one) went around smacking people in the face because they’d stepped out of line, would we celebrate them? I think not. Would you think it right to hit your adult spouse if they stepped out of line? All clearly absurd. But if I wouldn’t think it right to hit an adult, who is fully morally culpable, then why would I think it right to hit a child, who is less?
For education, then? I have a duty to raise the child right, to teach it lessons, and so I hit the child because it’s the only way they will learn. They are not sufficiently cognitively advanced to understand my reasoning, so I must resort to the only language they understand: physical threat. But is the language of physical threat the only language a child understands? Surely not: they learn all sorts of things without me hitting them about it. Is there really no other way they will learn, no alternative to violence? Asked like this, I think it’s clear that there is always going to be an alternative to physical threat, isn’t there?
I think most people who hit their children do so because they get irritated and angry. They lose patience. For whatever reason, they have given themselves permission to stop looking for alternatives to physical violence. Hitting their children is within the realm of the morally possible: it’s an option, and so sometimes they take that option. I think they justify it to themselves because they were hit as children (‘it did me no harm’) or otherwise see it as normal. They do this so much that they stop calling it violence and hide its reality under other euphemisms. ‘Are you violent to your children?’ Surely not! ‘Do you discipline them?’ Spare the rod, spoil the child…
It’s remarkable how often people defend their attitude to the physical punishment of children by parroting the cliches and platitudes of their parents (and grandparents), sometimes in a way that is strikingly out of character. I have seen otherwise bleeding-heart liberals defend the physical punishment of children on the basis that ‘otherwise you just make a rod for your own back’; but that’s not them talking. I should hit my child because it makes my life easier in the long run?! What a reason! I suspect if we lived for two generations without any physical punishment of children it would swiftly become unthinkable to do so.
Considered from the perspective of the child, the situation becomes clearer, I think. A child cannot always understand what is going on: that is an essential part of the question. All they see is a giant, on whose good opinion their life depends, angrily displaying physical dominance. ‘I could kill you if I wanted’, the child hears, ‘so you’d better comply’. Perhaps it does teach them a lesson, but is it a lesson we want them to learn? Are we glad to think of our children being so mortally afraid of us? Are we glad to be an object of fear, for them? I think it’s a parent’s job to do what they can to protect the child from violence and the cruelty of the world, not be the source of it. Can we not earn their respect any other way? And is it not basically shameful to resort to violence against something you stand in such unequal physical and mental and emotional power towards? Can’t you be better than that? (The connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear.)
You can decide where you stand, but these reflections make my thinking clearer. I’d like for my children to not be afraid of me. I’d like for them not to carry that fear out into the world, where they will soon enough find enough things to fear. I’d like for them to feel like I have their back, no matter what. I’d like to be a source of safety and security for them, not fear and threat. I’d like to find a way to teach them lessons in ways other than violent ways, not least because I understand that moral understanding is something you have to come to see for yourself: you can be led to see something morally important but you cannot be made to see something morally important; you cannot be beaten into anything other than submission. Perhaps I am hopelessly naive. Perhaps I’ll learn as much in time.
Nevertheless, I come to my decision: I categorically ought not use violence against my child. For me, it is a moral impossibility. There can be no sufficient justification for it. I could not do it without incurring guilt and shame. I understand this because I probe my moral limits. And I probe those limits because there are limits, established by the cornerstones or hinges of what is inexcusable or unjustifiable. Jimmy Savile’s behaviour, for example, is inexcusable and unjustifiable. Beating a child for fun would fall into the same category. I investigate the ‘justified’ instances of violence towards children and see if they too fit into that category. I can only do this because there is such a category. If I could not bring myself to say that Jimmy Savile’s behaviour was inexcusable, how on earth would I make sense of the question about whether it was right or wrong to hit my child?
You can only discriminate between what is and is not justified by specifying circumstances under which it would not be justified. And those circumstances can only be understood in light of what is judged to be ‘unjustifiable’. When a judgement of what is ‘unjustifiable’ is clear enough to be a cornerstone of moral judgement, such that denying it undermines the practice of moral judgement as such, then that is properly called ‘morally impossible’. It is these characteristic judgements that I have in mind when presenting my version of the problem of evil.
Relative Certainty
Many judgements about the morally impossible will remain epistemically ambiguous and subject to change over time. Many philosophers who do not share my metaethical perspective will think this is a problem for any claims about moral necessity. But I think the issue of epistemic ambiguity actually reinforces my point, rather than weakening it, because this epistemic ambiguity is always relative to something more certain. The question ‘does 2547 + 2376 = 4943?’ is relatively epistemically ambiguous compared to simpler questions like ‘does 1 + 1 = 2?’. But answering the relatively ambiguous question only makes sense if you are happy to accept the answer to the simpler question. Some of these questions and answers are so epistemically simple that they become paradigmatic. They express the limits of meaningful thinking in that case. They in part determine what we mean when we say that someone has a capacity for judgement on such matters. If you cannot answer, off the top of your head, whether 2547 + 2376 = 4943, I won’t hold it against you. But if you cannot answer, off the top of your head, whether 1 + 1 = 2, then I doubt your capacity for mathematical judgement.
Mathematics is a confusing case because it is so clear. Take a muddier and more realistic example like empirical evidence. ‘Does x count as good evidence for y?’ This can be asked of many different things and the answers can sometimes be very difficult to discern. Unlike mathematics, we must talk in terms of the weight of evidence rather than categorical proof. But still, if someone were to defend the efficacy of a certain medical intervention on the basis of one inconclusive study that suggested there might be something in it, ignoring the ten studies that told against, I might dispute the truth of their claim and question their empirical judgement in this case, but I would not necessarily doubt their capacity for empirical judgement. They are playing the right game, just doing it badly, perhaps. Likewise if a fellow juror were to deny that DNA evidence placing the suspect at the scene constituted good reason to convict, I might question their judgement, but not necessarily their capacity for judgement. Perhaps they are just keen to uphold the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and are exercising due diligence. But if someone were to tell me that the Holocaust was a Zionist fabrication, or that the Earth is flat, and refused to acknowledge all evidence to the contrary, I wouldn’t just dispute the truth of the claim and question their judgement, I would doubt their capacity for judgement on these matters. Their errors show that they are not just playing the ‘history’ game or the ‘cosmology’ game badly, they are doing something altogether different. Likewise when people defend absurdly pseudo-scientific claims: they might think they are citing evidence, but in truth they are not talking in terms of evidence at all, because they clearly don’t understand how evidence works, because no one who did would defend those ridiculous claims.
Empirical claims – whether medical, historical, criminal, or cosmological – are always going to be more ambiguous than mathematical claims. They will never be necessarily true, as any good Humean knows. But that doesn’t change the structure of the limits of meaningful thinking on these matters. There will always be paradigmatic cases of ‘certainty’ that must be held as such in order for the rest of the way of thinking to make any sense. We take these paradigmatic cases to be clear indicators and even determinations of someone’s capacity for judgement on these matters. Don’t know whether 1 + 1 = 2? Then you can’t have a capacity for mathematical judgement. Don’t know whether the Earth is flat? Then you can’t have a capacity for cosmological judgement. Don’t know whether what Jimmy Savile did was wrong? Then you can’t have a capacity for moral judgement.
It is controversial to say so, because people disagree wildly about moral matters in a way that they do not (so much) about mathematical and empirical matters, but is the structure any different with moral judgement? If someone says there is nothing wrong with amassing great personal wealth, avoiding tax where you can, and remaining indifferent to the poor, I dispute the truth of the claim and question the moral judgement, but I do not necessarily question the capacity for moral judgement. I suppose they are just different to me; I shrug and move on. If someone were to say that there’s nothing wrong with physically disciplining a child, when it is warranted, then I might dispute the truth of the claim and doubt this moral judgement, but I wouldn’t necessarily doubt the capacity for moral judgement. It seems they are trying to to the right thing as a parent, as they see it; perhaps their experience of growing up was different from mine. But if someone were to say that Jimmy Savile was, on balance, a good bloke, my reaction is different. I don’t just dispute the truth of the claim, I consider it beyond the conceptual space of reasonable moral judgement. I would be incredulous. I would assume they haven’t heard about the revelations of child abuse. If I found that they were fully aware, and simply thought that the charity work he had done was enough to make-good his behaviour, then I would not be able to believe that anyone could make that moral judgement with such an awareness. They cannot think such a thing. No one in their right moral mind would make such a judgement. The judgement is so wrong that it is no longer a ‘moral’ judgement at all, simply a lack of it. To agree with them would require me to not only modify the picture of my moral world but throw it out entirely.
There will be paradigmatic cases in any sphere of thinking. In all cases, one function that these paradigmatic cases perform is to establish the limits of reasonable thought. They are like the rules of the game, rules that you cannot reject without rejecting the game as such. You cannot reject a rule in chess and remain playing chess, for example, because the game is defined by its rules. Similarly, you cannot reject that 1 + 1 = 2 and remain doing ordinary arithmetic. You cannot say the Earth is flat and remain doing cosmology. You cannot say the Holocaust didn’t happen and remain doing history. And you cannot say that Jimmy Savile was a good bloke and remain doing morality. You can do different things and operate in different spheres of thinking, obviously, but you cannot make those kinds of judgements, judgements that transgress the limits of reasonable thinking, and remain in that sphere of thought. And so if you do then we say ‘now you are doing something altogether different’.
My favourite teaching example was a contrast between rugby and football. (For the benefit of Americans I will say ‘soccer’ for football.) Imagine you are playing football (soccer), and a defender is standing on the goal line defending a corner kick. The ball comes in and is hit goalwards by an attacker, and in an instinctive reaction the defender throws their hand up to block the ball. It is a penalty, because you are not allowed to handle the ball in soccer unless you are the goalkeeper, and because it prevented a goal it would certainly be a red card for the defender, meaning they would be sent off. It is a very clear violation of the rules. They have played soccer badly.
Contrast this with another game of soccer where, in open play in the middle of the pitch, an attacker picks up the ball with their hands, charges towards the opposing goal line, smashing into defenders along the way, before placing the ball down behind the goal line and throwing their arms up in celebration. Everyone is confused. The infringement is the same in both cases – it is a hand ball – but it is clearly more than just a violation of the rules. It is a ‘blunder’ so big that it shows they are doing something altogether different. Their ‘mistake’ shows that they are playing a different game entirely. They think they are playing rugby (or American Football). They are not just playing soccer badly. Their behaviour shows that they have stopped playing soccer altogether.
Though it is against the rules of soccer for a defender to use their hands to stop a ball crossing the goal line, it’s within the bounds of sense that someone might do so and still be playing soccer. It’s the kind of mistake that shows only that they are not very good at sticking to the rules, but it doesn’t show that they lack a fundamental understanding of the rules. But if an attacker does what to all intents and purposes is play rugby when they are in the middle of a soccer game, then this is not just a mistake, this makes no sense: it is not properly called a ‘mistake’ at all but a radical separation from reality. It shows that they are doing something altogether different. It causes us to question whether they understand the game they are playing.
If they were playing rugby it would be different. But that alone doesn’t make it any less absurd in the context of soccer. Some judgements show that you are playing the game badly; some judgements show that you are not playing it at all. Like mounting an economic defence of Jimmy Savile, arguing that his professional and charitable work made more money than was lost by the loss of earnings suffered as a result of the damaging effects inflicted on his victims. Whilst this might be true, no morality worth its name could consider it a legitimate moral reason. In defending Savile on economic terms, you would be doing something altogether different from moral reasoning. Within soccer, you cannot sensibly speculate about the virtues of mauling over the line; within morality, you cannot sensibly speculate about the economic advantages of Jimmy Savile’s behaviour (or slavery, genocide, or dropping an atomic bomb over civilian populations). Anyone who did so would show themselves to have lost contact with soccerring/moral reality.
Similarly, I’m sure there were perfectly sound military reasons for the course of action taken at Nagasaki, but good military reasons do not always fall within the sphere of moral reasoning. Likewise, there might even be sound pedagogical reasons to beat children: it teaches them a lesson like no other. And if you get hung up on your moral duty to teach your children, you might get led down a certain path. But the power of moral necessity is such that it reaches over into all our morally-relevant decisions and stands in judgement over them. It specifies what we are allowed to do in pursuit of our (military, economic, hedonistic, pedagogical) purposes. It acts as a limit on our will. (The connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear.)
This is what I mean by the morally impossible. They are the paradigmatic cases of the inexcusable or unjustifiable. Everyone who reasons morally has these at the limits of their moral thinking, even if those limits might differ. They are the points at which we stop looking for reasons. They are the points where we start ruling certain things out of consideration. If you cannot do this, then you are like a chess-player who cannot stop considering illegal moves, or a mathematician who cannot sum 2547 + 2376 because they cannot decide whether 1 + 1 = 2, or a cosmologist who keeps looking for more evidence that the Earth is round, or a historian still trying to convince themselves that the Holocaust really happened. These are not pictures of the sound exercise of judgement but of a distinct lack of it. In extreme cases, they are pictures of madness, like a man walking around seriously convinced he doesn’t have feet. In less extreme cases, they are at least pictures of inconsistency, such as a philosopher putting down their sceptical argument about the sun rising tomorrow, thinking ‘I’ll try again in the morning’. (The connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear.)
An understanding – we might say ‘mastery’, though I don’t think that’s necessary because it connotes too much – of a particular domain of reasoning is marked by an ability to discern what does and doesn’t make sense in that domain. For someone who understands, it makes no sense to ask certain questions. For Socrates, anyone who asks at what price you ought to stop being virtuous shows themselves to not understand what virtue is: anyone who understands virtue, as he understands it, would not ask that question. For me, anyone who asks at what price child abuse (or slavery, genocide, etc.) becomes acceptable shows themselves to not understand something important about morality. Not everything is rightly thought of as being for sale. The connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear. It’s not that as a matter of fact Jimmy Savile’s child abuse was categorically wrong, but that it makes no sense to say that it might not have been categorically wrong. It is rightly thought of as inexcusable and unjustifiable, it is a paradigmatic case: it is morally impossible. If Jimmy Savile’s child abuse was not categorically wrong, then I no longer know what ‘wrong’ means.
Recognising Moral Necessity
Do you recognise anything to be morally necessary? I can easily imagine that many of you don’t. Scepticism is easy, and in any case easier than holding yourself to account. It’s easy to overlook or dismiss the morally necessary because most of the time we live in a murky world of moral contingency and epistemic uncertainty. But every now and then we hit upon a clear moral limit. I have sometimes found these limits in my own life; remorse is educational; life has shown me what I believe. I imagine some of you have experienced the same. It’s difficult to think what would show the same to someone who has never found these limits in their own moral experience. Classically, we appeal to stories and literature. We look to cautionary tales. We turn to Dostoevsky and Raskolnikov, Shakespeare and Macbeth, Dickens and Scrooge.
Or we look to examples from real life, like Jimmy Savile or Hiroshima. War is as good a source of examples here as any because it shows people mostly at their very worst, but the extremity of the situation occasionally shows them at their truest. (I won’t say best.) I have in mind here a well-known example of George Orwell finding himself unwilling to shoot a man who is holding up his trousers:
I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.
Orwell says – in what seems to me to be an exercise in English understatement – that this doesn’t reveal anything particularly morally relevant. I’m inclined to disagree. He recognised a difference, and recognising a difference requires that you have a capacity to recognise that difference. Perhaps he thinks that goes without saying. But I don’t think we should gloss over the power that the capacity to recognise someone as a ‘fellow-creature’, and not only a ‘thing’ like a ‘Fascist’ or an ‘enemy’, has over us. I’m not sure we can make sense of that power without acknowledging a categorical moral limit of some kind, even if we might disagree about where and when and how that limit will be hit. We shoot at ‘things’ without a second thought, but we do not shoot at ‘fellow-creatures’ without hesitation.
Modern military training is often a matter of training soldiers to forget this distinction in order to eliminate the hesitation. I have no near experience of this reality, so I will outsource to Major Dr Peter Kilner, Instructor at the US Military Academy, who reports:
Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli – such as fire commands, enemy contact, or the sudden appearance of a ‘target’ – and this maximizes soldiers’ lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy. Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so.
Perhaps we might all agree that this isn’t a good thing, but we might disagree about why. He continues:
In and of itself, such training is appropriate and morally permissible. [sic] Battles are won by killing the enemy, so military leaders should strive to produce the most efficient killers. The problem, however, is that soldiers who kill reflexively in combat will likely one day reconsider their actions reflectively. If they are unable to justify to themselves the fact that they killed another human being, they will likely – and understandably – suffer enormous guilt. This guilt manifests itself as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it has damaged the lives of thousands of men who performed their duty in combat.
He cites some examples of modern soldiers who later struggled to come to terms with what they had done in combat. Of course these soldiers had all the justifications or excuses or ‘morally-sufficient reasons’ necessary to exonerate them from any real wrongdoing. They did what they had to do; they are blameless. But that’s not really the point, is it? Here is only one representative example: ‘[I just] reali[zed] that he was another human being, just like I am. And so that’s hard to deal with, but that day it was too easy. That upsets me more than anything else, how easy it was to pull the trigger over and over again…’
I’m reminded of a sequence in the documentary film Restrepo (2010), where young American soldiers are shown engaged in a heated firefight. They are seen a’whoopin and a’hollerin and celebrating at the destruction of the enemy at their hands, as if they were playing a computer game or scoring touchdowns. Of course it’s meant to be shocking, even if no judgement is offered for or against the morality of their action. We can sit back and wring our hands and clutch our pearls at the sad reality of young people going to war and what necessarily comes with that. There is moral tragedy in what they do, and perhaps more tragedy in becoming (in needing to become) the kind of people that do what they do: it is better to suffer evil than do it, after all. But I would ask what we could expect when we send young people out to fight. Having been put in a situation where they have to do what they know ought not be done, do we expect them to do it with moral sensitivity? And as they are shooting and blowing people up they shout: ‘Sorry! I hope that didn’t hurt too much! I really find this all terribly difficult!’ Such inconsistency is not sustainable and must be resolved one way or another.
Orwell follows his well-known example with what seems to me a lesser-known example which he takes to be more morally revealing. He tells a story of a recruit who was an ethnic minority from a poor background. This recruit is unfairly suspected of a theft and is summarily accused and humiliatingly strip searched. He is not guilty, of course, but Orwell says:
What was most painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed after his innocence had been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave him brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible – I mean the attempt to wipe out an injury with money. For a few minutes I had half believed him to be a thief, and that could not be wiped out.
Is this not a sober recognition of a violation of moral necessity, a failure to see and respect this recruit in their full humanity, because he was poor and dark skinned, and that this wrong cannot be made right by compensation? The same recruit later defends Orwell. This is what strikes Orwell as most revealing of the characteristic ‘moral atmosphere’ of that time and place:
Could you feel friendly towards somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you had been ignominiously searched in his presence for property you were supposed to have stolen from him? No, you couldn’t; but you might if you had both been through some emotionally widening experience.
War is a time when the morally impossible becomes possible. Most of the time this is a terrible thing. Very occasionally it goes in the opposite direction, such as when one man is naturally forgiven by another, even though he might not deserve it, for the simple reason that they have fought alongside one another.
I can keep citing example after example, battering you over the head with examples of moral necessity in an attempt to get you to see what I am talking about. But these examples will only work as examples of moral necessity if you are receptive to their recognition. If you stubbornly refuse to accept the concept then you will be eager to keep coming back with justificatory responses that entirely miss the point: ‘So Orwell felt guilty about falsely accusing the recruit; it’s natural, but he did what he could to make amends: he gave him brandy and chocolate.’ But could he dismiss his own moral response so easily, and retain his understanding of the ‘moral atmosphere’ of that time and place? Could he come to understand that he did make good with brandy and chocolate? And if he could, then what would be remarkable about the recruit coming to his defence? And in turn, what would this incident say (of any ‘morally revealing’ interest) about war? That sometimes mistakes are made but you can make people feel better with brandy and chocolate? What a lesson!
Wouldn’t dismissing a response so revealing of the moral character of that time, for him, force him to reassess his moral understanding of that time? And if he throws out his moral understanding of that time, would he lose a vital part, a corner or an edge, of the shape of his moral world? It seems to me that those moral responses, captured as important in his recollections, are definitively expressive of his moral understanding as such. That is why he recollects those incidents, in their way, and not others. He comes to understand that the wrong he has done to the recruit cannot be made good with brandy and chocolate, and that tells him something important about ethics. These are paradigmatic cases, the cornerstones and hinges of his moral understanding. They are a realisation of moral limits. How else could they have the meaning that they do?
What are these stories without their recognition of the morally impossible? Is the lesson of Raskolnikov that we should be wary of our natural human psychological tendency to beat ourselves up? Is the lesson of Macbeth that we should be careful not to murder one-too-many, on our way to the top? Is the lesson of Scrooge that children and family are bad for business? These are not conclusions that you can seriously conclude.
I say that you do recognise the morally necessary – of which the morally impossible is an instance – in your quotidian moral reasoning. I say this because you are not stupid and when you are not being deliberately obtuse you do recognise the meaning in these stories. What you are, if you are sceptical, is hesitant to endorse that recognition. You are hesitant to rationally commit to that recognition because you think it has insufficient rational foundation, and you think having insufficient rational foundation is a sufficient reason to doubt, or even throw the judgement out entirely. We do recognise moral necessity, you might agree, but there is nothing that conclusively establishes that we are right to recognise it.
To that I say this: Whilst there might not be any evidence or argument that conclusively establishes that we are right in our recognition of moral necessity, still we have every right to recognise it.
Properly Basic Moral Belief
The suggestion that we have every right to hold something to be true, even though we might have no evidence or argument that makes it true, will ring familiar with anyone schooled in the philosophy of religion. Certainly this will be familiar to anyone involved in the discussion of the problem of evil. Alvin Plantinga’s discipline-defining contributions to the philosophy of religion are not limited to the free-will defence:
The believer is entirely within his intellectual rights in believing as he does even if he doesn’t know of any good theistic argument (deductive or inductive), even if he doesn’t believe that there is any such argument, and even if in fact no such argument exists.
Any sympathies to Plantinga’s claim that religious belief can be a properly basic belief can be co-opted for my purposes. According to Plantinga, religious belief is properly basic because it is involuntary and it arises from a properly functioning natural faculty that, if its origin story is true, grants the belief epistemological warrant. Is there any reason to suppose moral belief, especially at its limits, is any different from a properly basic religious belief?
Perhaps you will say that there is no secular moral equivalent of the ‘sensus divinitatis’ that provides the externalist epistemological justification for properly basic religious belief. God plants this divine sense in believers, but if there is no God, who or what plants a moral sense in moral believers?
I think this question is easy to answer, at least superficially. Moral naturalists answer it all the time, with varying degrees of success. Isn’t it enough to say that we have evolved an innate disposition? Isn’t it enough to say we learn and develop this moral sense by interacting with our fellow creatures? Certainly these are sufficient causal explanations. They do not seem to be very different from the causal explanations considered sufficient to account for other basic beliefs, like seeing a tree or being in pain. Moral beliefs are ‘produced by cognitive faculties whose purpose it is to produce true belief’, in this case true beliefs about how to interact with our fellow creatures. Do we need anything more to account for our properly basic moral beliefs?
Of course there is the possibility of this cognitive faculty misfiring or going wrong, and there are questions to answer about what counts as ‘proper function’ of this faculty and what holds it to account. But the unsettled nature of these questions does not, in itself, give us sufficient reason to dismiss our moral beliefs. Plantinga would argue the same for religious belief, at least. That we cannot know (de facto) whether or not God exists and has given us the sensus divinitatis does not in itself mean that any believer lacks warrant for their theistic belief. They would not be blameworthy for holding those beliefs, despite their de facto ignorance. It would be different if those beliefs were shown to be inconsistent or contradictory: that would defeat the warrant, as Plantinga is all-too-aware, and so much of his work on the ‘warrant’ of Christian belief has defended against any accusation of contradiction. But it seems to me that no one is seriously suggesting that all our beliefs about the morally impossible are contradictory or inconsistent; the suggestion is only that they lack conclusive ground.
In light of this, can we not talk of warranted moral belief? These are the morally basic beliefs that are not shown to be obviously contradictory. They are involuntary, just like religious beliefs, and they arise from a natural faculty whose origin story, if true, grants them warrant. These can be causally accounted for naturalistically, if you like, with evolution and social interaction. Of course, we do not know them to be true (de facto) but we have no good reasonto reject them as false (de jure). Plantinga’s description of a properly basic religious belief seems to me to be closely aligned with a necessitated moral responsiveness: ‘I don’t choose between believing this and not believing it: I just find myself believing. In the typical case, what I believe is not under my control; it really isn’t up to me.’
Perhaps you will say that it isn’t just that our natural moral sense can sometimes misfire, it’s that there is nothing in the naturalistic origins of our moral sense that can grant any kind of epistemological warrant to our morally basic beliefs.Unlike the sensus divinitatis which, if true, would grant total epistemological warrant to properly basic religious belief, the naturalistic origins of our moral sense could never, even if true, grant any epistemological warrantto our morally basic beliefs. Moral naturalism is false, and there are no moral facts to form true beliefs about. How, then, can we talk about a natural faculty whose purpose is to produce true beliefs, when there are no true beliefs to be had?
Whilst it is easy to dismiss strongly naturalistic accounts of ethics (and I do), the idea that our evolved natures might play a role in determining our moral natures is not so easy to dismiss. Or at least it’s harder for a non-believer to dismiss this than it would be for a non-believer to dismiss the sensus divinitatis.There are some things that we, as human beings, cannot do. If you dispute these limits then I encourage you to follow Diogenes and try to eat raw meat (like a dog) and you will quickly discover your human limitations, as he did. Just as our evolved natures shape our physical limits (we cannot breathe underwater, photosynthesise, lay eggs, etc.), it’s possible that our evolved nature shapes our moral limits, at least in part. And if this is the case then, whilst you would be free to transgress these limits, you would not be free to do so without consequences. (Just as Diogenes is free to eat raw meat but cannot do so without consequences.) These limits would be as ‘true’ as anything can be for you. A human being cannot eat raw meat without risking the digestive consequences, and a human being cannot do the morally impossible without risking the consequences of guilt and shame. Can you, as a human being, love a fellow human being, form a bond of trust with them, make oaths and promises with them, have a family with them, become part of a community with them, entwine your lives and identities over time (activating all the evolved dispositions along the way) to such an extent that your life feels empty when they are not around, and then turn around and shamelessly betray them brutally? You can do the deed, of course, but can you do it shamelessly? Can you do this without facing any judgement, and can you be sincerely indifferent to that judgement when it comes? I think you would discover that doing this guilt-free would be no more possible for you than eating raw meat indigestion-free. Diogenes would say it is wise to align your will with nature, your nature.
We can call these empirical facts, if you like, though I would hesitate to say so because that description would always fall short and suggests it to be less than it is. You can call them ‘natural’ if you like. I would prefer to call them an essential part of what it means to be a human being. I would say they are ‘true’, even if not a ‘fact’, and that it is obvious that part of what makes them true is my evolved human nature. It would be different if I were a lizard.
Should we try to transcend these natural limits? Are these limits limitations to our potential? Should we use technology to overcome this human moral frailty, just as we learn to cook our food, or use scuba gear to breathe underwater?
A wholly naturalistic account that sees ethics as only a helpful tool that has evolved to serve our purposes would seem to recommend ditching that tool when it is no longer useful. That kind of thinking reveals a misunderstanding, I think. For this reason, I would say that these kinds of naturalistic accounts can be only partially and never wholly true for ethics. They can show us our limits, but they cannot of themselves determine those limits.Ancient philosophers seemed to understand this; we seem to have forgotten. You can begin by being motivated by a natural tendency to ‘self-interest’, but as soon as you reflect and philosophise on it you realise that ethics is self-supporting or sui generis: it stands alone. The good is good for goodness’ sake, and virtue is its own reward. It is in your self-interest, but it is not done for the sake of self-interest.
Once you understand what virtue is, you understand that nothing is more important, not even your own ‘wellbeing’, because understanding virtue changes your understanding of what it is to be well. A healthy soul is a virtuous soul. That is why those old philosophers can say, straight-faced and with absolute seriousness, that ‘virtue is sufficient for happiness’. These virtues are not mere instructions about how to achieve a particular purpose, they are recognitions of what our purposes ought to be. They are a recognition that ethics does not serve our purposes but judges them; a recognition that there is goodness beyond wellbeing. That is why they can say with sincerity that ‘a good man cannot be harmed in life or after death’, and this would remain true even in a virtual or post-human life where all harm is artificially removed. It would be shameful to take a pill that allowed one to be a glutton without consequence, rather than exert some self-restraint, even though it seems to go against motivations of self-interest. With philosophical and moral understanding, you learn that those self-interested reasons are the wrong kind of reasons to be motivated by.
This idea of ‘goodness beyond wellbeing’ would make no sense on a purely naturalistic account that sees ethics as an evolved disposition that serves our adaptive purposes, that ethics just is the way to achieve our purposes. Such an account suggests that if we can rid ourselves of the need for ethics then we can and should do so. At the point when we can achieve our purposes without ethics, ethics will become something that used to be useful at some point in our distant evolutionary past; like an appendix. We can cut it away and suffer no loss. Keeping it on beyond its purpose only offers us an ever-present risk of infection. But I suppose the post-human world of the future will have an easy cure for that too, just as soldiers can be (first) trained to kill reflexively, and then (later, once we have realised our ‘mistake’) trained to do away with the guilt that follows.
(Is the connection with the problem of evil clear, in this instance, or do I have to make it clear? I said philosophy has become like trench warfare. I say soldiers are trained to dismiss their capacity for moral discriminations about the morally impossible. I say this leads to an intolerable inconsistency that must be resolved one way or another. Is dismissing our understanding of the morally impossible the correct way to resolve this inconsistency? If we recognise the morally impossible, then we understand that we are not permitted to dismiss it in pursuit of some purpose. And that shows us something important about ethics: that it does not serve our purposes; that it cannot be made to serve our purposes. The connection with theodicy ought to be clear.)
In any case, the lesson of Socrates is that ethics is sui generis; it stands on its own two feet. Even if it might have its origins and some of its limits accounted for by our evolutionary past, its meaning is not entirely determined by that naturalistic account. That we can offer some naturalistic account for our moral beliefs helps to support the notion that those beliefs can be considered properly basic, but it is not necessary for it. Properly basic moral beliefs can stand alone. It can be its own warrant, just as belief in God can be its own warrant. It can me made true by the fact that it is true, even if we cannot know with certainty whether it is (in fact) true.
Properly basic moral belief stands alone, but it does not stand on a lone individual’s judgement. As with Plantinga’s argument about properly basic religious belief, it’s relevant that there is a ‘community of believers’. This community of moral belief extends far wider than Christianity. As I’ve said, whilst we might disagree wildly about where or what the moral limits are, that there are limits would seem to be a common ground. So common, in fact, that it acts as a condition for the possibility of moral reasoning as such. There are denominational differences, but moral limits would seem to be an ecumenical matter. There is no meaningful morality without moral limits.
Plantinga’s analogy with our belief in other minds is relevant here too. All the more so, in fact, because our belief in other minds is more intimately connected with moral belief than religious belief. We would seem to have no more (or less) reason to believe in the existence of other people’s minds as we do to believe in our moral responsiveness to those people, in part because in recognising them as people with minds, we ordinarily recognise them as being something of moral importance. It would be difficult to separate those two things. Could you recognise someone as a person who has a mind but not see anything morally important in that? But perhaps we shouldn’t beg these questions.
‘My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.’ There is more that should be said in defence of this idea, but if you are not already on board with Wittgenstein’s approach to this issue then it is unlikely that any discussion of mine will bring you aboard. It is sufficient to say that we do believe in the existence of other people’s minds and we are morally responsive to those people. We happily believe in the existence of other people’s minds even though we have no conclusive reason to believe in the existence of other people’s minds. We don’t ordinarily think there is anything wrong with this. In fact, we would question the sound mind of anyone seriously committed to solipsism. By analogy, why shouldn’t we be just as happy to believe in our necessary moral responsiveness to those people, even though we lack conclusive reason to believe in that responsiveness?
Conclusion
I recognise moral necessity; I suspect you do too. There is no reason to reject that recognition, and there is reason not to reject it, because a recognition of moral limits is a condition for the possibility of sound moral judgement. But if I recognise moral limits, then I recognise that there are certain things I cannot do, things like dismissing my moral limits when they are not convenient. That is the nature of moral necessity.
What emerges is an accusation of a peculiar kind of inconsistency on the part of theodicy; or at least an inconsistency within myself were I to endorse a theodicy. To dismiss these moral limits by, say, speculating about whether or not Jimmy Savile’s behaviour can be fit into a network of divine purposes, to ask whether it might be worth it, would be inconsistent with myself. Those speculations fall beyond the reasonable limits of moral thinking. All I can say in such a case is that I cannot (morally) do such a thing. It makes no moral sense. It is like the man walking around proclaiming that he doesn’t have feet. It’s not just a confusion; it’s not a matter of evidence or a lack of understanding. It’s not as if he believes his shoelaces are tied when they are not (because he hasn’t looked), or that he believes he is wearing brogues when he is not (because he doesn’t understand what ‘brogues’ are). You can believe these things and be wrong. You can be shown your mistake. Even if he were walking around on prosthetics, and comes to learn as much, what he learns concerns the nature of his feet: ‘I am walking on prosthetic feet.’ These are confusions that can be responded to with better evidence or greater understanding. But who can show a man that he doesn’t have feet, the things he understands to be walking around on, when he is walking around on them? Would that be a conclusion that he can really conclude? Without, perhaps, jumping into a chair in fright and alarm.
Having feet is a condition for the possibility of walking around on them; and I am walking around on my feet; so if you ask me to dismiss the belief that I have feet then I’m not sure what you are asking me to do. Should I stop walking around? If I am to continue walking, what do I walk on?! Having moral limits is a condition for the possibility of sound moral judgement; and I do (and ought to) exercise my moral judgement; so if you ask me to dismiss my moral limits then I’m not sure what you are asking me to do. Like walking around on my feet, my understanding of moral limits stands on itself. Dismiss it and I lose my footing.
So when it comes to the problem of evil, you might be able to argue that some, or many, or even most of the bad things in the world are justifiable by appeal to a morally-sufficient reason. But not all. There are limits, and a recognition of the morally impossible is a recognition of those limits. If you recognise those limits (as I think you must) then you cannot dismiss, doubt, or deny them without falling into inconsistency with yourself.
In conclusion, I say that we do recognise the morally impossible, that these are expressive of our moral limits, that these limits determine the shape of our moral world, and we cannot dismiss all our moral limits without also throwing away our entire moral world. As such, I must, morally and rationally, recognise some moral limits; and so I ought not and I cannot dismiss the morally impossible, even if I am not right.
tobybetenson.com 