‘Against the pervasive self-interest of our market culture, the inescapable cynicism of our political culture, and the extensive vacuity of our entertainment culture,” sociologist James Davison Hunter and philosopher Paul Nedelisky write, “we want to believe that there is some foundation upon which we as a nation or world can make strong moral claims; claims that will inspire us, guide us, and unify us.” But on what basis can we do so?
Is there a moral structure to reality itself, rendering some motivations and actions good and others evil, or is life just one damn thing after another and morality simply our attempt (as individuals or as societies) to come up with a set of workable rules to live by? Is it possible, with Aristotle and with Christian and other religious traditions, to discern fundamentally unchangeable requirements for human flourishing, or is each individual free — indeed, obligated, in order to be “authentic” — to invent these for him- or herself, untrammeled by family, tradition, or (lately) even gender at birth?
In the latter case, as Robert Bellah and his co-authors argued in Habits of the Heart (1985), the actions and attitudes chosen are arbitrary, and “each self constitutes its own moral universe, and there is finally no way to reconcile conflicting claims about what is good in itself.” Hunter and Nedelisky recount the earlier philosophical and more-recent scientific efforts to define or discover a basis for morality, for life direction, and for social norms that is rooted neither in individual willfulness nor in unverifiable religious claims.
For this reader, untutored in the formal study of ethics, this brief and very readable book has been a useful introduction both to the theoretical discussion of these issues since the Renaissance and to the widely publicized current efforts to find the basis for morality in neuroscience, primatology, and social psychology, among other academic disciplines.
The historical discussion, 50-odd pages, provides an accessible overview of four centuries of efforts to define a basis for ethics and for the requirements of a flourishing human life without invoking divine authority. These are presented briefly in a manner that historians of philosophy might wish to complicate but that I found helpful. Descartes, we are told, “argued that the material world was inert, inanimate, lacking mental or experiential qualities, and devoid of inherent purpose,” while in 1913, psychologist John Watson “argued that if psychology would be a legitimate science in the tradition of Newton's physics, it must jettison all talk and concern for the alleged constituents of inner mental life — thoughts, feelings, will, consciousness — and focus strictly on external behavior.” Through the four intervening centuries a variety of thinkers such as Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Darwin, and James, whose names are familiar but whose discussion of ethics may be less so, wrestled with whether a basis for morality could be found within the limitations of the natural world. Was ethical language simply “a way of expressing sentiment about various states of affairs, not an assertion of propositions” with authoritative content for human life?
This discussion came close to home for me when it turned to the question of human rights, the focus of my work for 50 years:
Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, or do they feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture and then invent a story about universal human rights to justify their feelings? The Humean view is the latter: that what moral philosophers are really doing is “consulting the emotive centers” of their brains and then fabricating justifications for their feelings.
I remember arguing with ethicist Max Stackhouse, after he gave a talk about internationally recognized human rights. My state-government job then was to enforce civil rights, those defined by law, but I questioned how other rights could be said to exist when they lacked the authority of law. How could they be considered universal, since there was no universal legal authority? Wasn't that just so much hot air and wishful thinking?
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