Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (39 page)

But something more rigid comes into view if we take the question of what we can expect from each other a different way. On this
interpretation, it is asking for the right boundaries on conduct.
This is the sense in which if we fail to live up to expectations, we
have done something wrong. We have fallen short, and become targets for various kinds of possible reproach. People expect of each
other that they should be honest, cooperative, sensitive to people's
needs, fair, well-meaning, and so on, and if we fail in one of these
then we have fallen short and may receive censure. Other people have a complaint against us; they are concerned that we should not
be like that.

Someone might chafe against that. One might try to shrug off
the ill opinion of others. Why should it concern one? Why not be a
free spirit, blithely unconcerned with what the world may think? In
some cases there is something admirable about this: the visionary
or the saint or hero might have to be unconcerned with the world's
opinion while they seek to change it, perhaps for the better. But the
question will he why we are attracting the world's bad opinion. If
we attract it because, for instance, we don't care a jot about keeping
our promises, or don't care about keeping our hands off other
people's money, then it may be harder to shrug off the censure of
others. Doing so-being able to look them in the eye and say that
you don't see what they have to complain about-requires not
only no concern for promises or honesty, but also no recognition
of the concerns of others about these things. And in normal people
that degree of insensitivity is rarely found. It is one thing to be the
common-or-garden villain who says,'I don't care if I have wronged
you by breaking my word or stealing your goods. But it is another
to achieve the rather extraordinary pitch of villainy which says,'!
don't even recognize that you have a complaint.' It is usually easier
to take that up as a defiant posture than to be comfortable in it, although sexual morality provides areas where people who have behaved badly sometimes cannot see what the other has to complain
about-thereby making things worse. A society in which people
were all incapable of recognizing the others as having a complaint,
whatever they do, would he one without an ethic-but for that
very reason it would be hard to recognize it as a society at all.

There are various ways in which thinkers have tried to articulate
these ideas.'Internalizing' a set of values is very close to internalizing the gaze or voice of others. Recognizing that they have a complaint against you is regarding yourself as having fallen short in
their eyes, and to have internalized their voice means finding that
itself weighing with you. The discomfort comes out in selfreproach, or emotions such as shame and guilt. Most systems of
ethics have some version of the Golden Rule near their core: 'Do
unto others as you would have them do unto you: Some thinkers
stress the emergence of a'common point of view'; others stress the
sympathy or empathy whereby our view of ourselves resonates
with what we can take the view of others to be. To show how easily
and naturally we incorporate the views of others into our concerns, Hume gives the splendid example:'A man will be mortified
if you tell him he has a stinking breath; though it is evidently no annoyance to himself.' We see ourselves from the point of view of others, and may be comfortable or uncomfortable as a result.

We can describe this aspect of our psychologies in terms of taking up one another's reasons. If there is a piano on your foot, one of
your concerns is to move it quickly. If I am aware of this then I will
naturally share that concern-and I would be falling short if I did
not. I do not have the same place in this situation, for after all the
piano is hurting you, not me. But I am expected to sympathize, to
take up your concern, to help, and to treat your problem as mine
also. What is a reason for you to act, becomes a reason for me to
help. Some moral philosophers like to think that there is a kind of
imperative of reason itself here. They think that there would be
something defective about my rationality, or my understanding, if I did not take up your concern and make it my own. I do not counsel this way of looking at it. The person who is indifferent in this situation is bad, certainly. And there may be things wrong with his
reasonings, or his ways of understanding the world. He may be a
psychopath, unable to comprehend the reality of others. Or he may
make some deficient calculation, about whether it is good for you
in the long run to suffer. But in the more common case where he
averts his gaze, or passes by on the other side, there need be nothing wrong with his understanding of the world, nor his reasonings
about it. He is cold-hearted, not wrong-headed. That is just as had,
or worse. But placing the defect in the right place shows that what
is needed to improve him is a kind of education of the sentiments,
rather than some kind of extra insight into the structure of reasons.

TRUTH AND GOODNESS

However, there is an issue here that divides thinkers into two
camps.

Consider this equation:

One of X's concerns is to aim for/promote/endorse _
X thinks ~ is good/thinks ~ is a reason for action.

The division lies between thinkers who read this equation `left to
right', and those who read Wright to left'.'l'hat is, there are thinkers
who suppose that the right direction of explanation is from concerns, taken as understood, to'seeing something as a reason, which is thereby explained. And there are those who think the right direction of explanation is from thinking that something is a reason,
considered as a pure belief about the case, to concerns, which are
thereby explained.

The difference is sometimes called that between `non-
cognitivism' and `cognitivism' in the theory of ethics. The idea is
that if the equation is read left to right, then talk of something
being good, or something being a reason for action, is a kind of reflection of a motivational state of mind: the fact of something
weighing with you. This motivational state of mind is not a simple
belief. It is not a representation of some aspect of the world. It is a
reaction to representations of the facts of the matter. It does not itself pick out some fact of the matter. Hence it is not strictly speaking a state of mind that is either true or false, any more than a desire
for coffee is either true or false. The non-cognitivist direction is
beautifully expressed by St Augustine:

[T]here is the pull of the will and of love, wherein appears the
worth of everything to be sought, or to be avoided, to be esteemed of greater or less value.

If the equation is read the other way, from right to left, then there is
at the foundation a belief: the belief that 4 is a reason for action. It
is a special kind of belief, because it picks out or represents reasons.
But it is a belief that carries concern with it. It is often said that Aristotle believed in this direction of explanation: its slogan is that to
desire something is to see it as good. It is as if desire answers to a
perceived truth.

The issue here is important to many thinkers, especially on the cognitivist side. They fear that without the backbone injected by
cognitivism, all we have in practical reasoning are 'mere' concerns,
desires, and attitudes. Whereas if we can somehow bring the whole
thing under the control of Truth, we have some kind of basis for the
claims of ethics. Concerns that correspond in the right way to these
truths are the right ones; they deserve authority over the others.

Myself, I believe this is one of these areas where the advantage is
definitely on one side: the non-cognitivist side.

The principal reason for this is that there is hound to be something other than beliefs or cognitions-representations of aspects
of things-in the mix. There is also the'pull of the will and of love.
The person with a concern is someone for whom some feature of a
situation matters in practical reasonings. The weight attached to it
is measured in motivational strength: in its disposition to cause her
to change her actions and attitudes. Can `seeing that ~ is a reason
for action' have that weight?

There are various suggestions possible about what it is that is
seen or cognized. One would be that it is some purely natural fact.
For instance'seeing that the piano is on your foot is a reason to take
it off' might he construed as `seeing that the piano is on your foot is
causing you pain'. But the trouble here is that it is obviously contingent whether this weighs with the agent. If she is cold-hearted or an
enemy or has too robust a sense of humour it may not weigh at all.
So it is not equivalent to having the motivation nor with having the
concern, which weighs by definition. G. E. Moore summed this up
by saying that whatever natural features of things we discern, it is
always an'open question' in what way we think that they form rea sons for action. Taking them to do so is taking a step-the very step
that leads us into the domain of practice in the first place.

Another tack would suggest that what is cognized is a peculiar,
non-natural, `normative' fact. This was Moore's own view, and it
might have been that of Plato. It is as if we get a glimpse of something other than ordinary empirical or scientific features of things.
We get a glimpse of the normative order.

This sounds very mysterious. The equation read right to left, if
this is what is on the right-hand side, is altogether a strange thing.
Suppose the normative order talked of is conceived of on the
model of human laws. So it is as if you had come upon a law saying
that pianos are to be taken off people's feet. The trouble is that it is
always up to us what to feel about a law, just as much as anything
else. I could, in principle ignore the law. I could reject it outright.
There is no necessary connection between coming upon a law, and
having it weigh with me. So it is not clear that moving in this direction gives us any explanatory story at all. The same, incidentally, is
true even if the law had `God's law' written on it. I might not care
about that. If I do not, the traditional weapon to beat me with is the
Fear of God's Wrath. But the cognitivist does not want to appeal to
a contingent emotional state like this, for that is taking the issue
outside the domain of reason. She wants what is discerned to be
necessarily motivating, necessarily magnetic.

Faced with this a cognitivist might panic. She might respond by
denying the equation with which we started. She would say: `All
right, I concede that there is a gap between truly perceiving the
normative order, and being motivated. But that is fine: it takes a
good will or a good heart to be motivated to do what you see you have reason to do: The reason I call this a panic is that it allows the
cognitivist to protect her cherished involvement with the idea of
Truth-but only at the cost of taking its motivational force outside
the domain of truth. For on this line, whatever it is that is wrong
with people without good will or good hearts, it is not that they see
the wrong truths. But the whole point of cognitivism was to bring
practical reasoning within the purview of truth, enabling us to say
that the person with the wrong concerns or had concerns is flying
in the face of reason, getting the world wrong. If the cognitivist
cannot say this at the end of the day, there is no point in winning
individual battles by conceding it.

My own view is that all these problems disappear if we read the
equation the other way. When people have concerns, they express
themselves by talking of reasons, and seeing the features that weigh
with them as desirable or good. They do this in the `pull of the will
and of love'. I believe we invent the normative propositions ('This
is good'; `That is a reason for action'; `You ought to do this') in
order to think about the concerns to demand of ourselves and others. We talk in these terms in order to clarify our motivational
states, to lay them out for admiration or criticism and improvement. There is no mysterious normative order into which we are
plugged.

So is no set of concerns better than any other? Certainly they are.
But their superiority does not lie in conformity to an independent
normative order. Their superiority lies in the ways of life embodying them. A set of concerns that leads to lives that are loyal, friendly,
grateful, prudent, sympathetic, fair is indeed superior to one that
leads to lives that are treacherous, suspicious, malicious, careless, hard-hearted, unjust. Our lives go better when we can be described
the first way, than when we are described the second way. And we
should be concerned that lives go better.

GOOD BAD FEELINGS