Moral Theories (a Response to Nye)
An article by Connor.
Recently my friend and fellow podcaster Nye wrote an article in response to the Series III opener episode entitled "Do Moral Theories Work" (The first 8 minutes anyway). You can read it here. It aimed to illuminate some misconceptions and mistakes we made.
My initial feeling is that the three of us shouldn't have to face so quite much criticism for many of these points. A variety of the issues raised felt largely unnecessary or tonally bereft, given our chatty format. Yet I think there's something to be said about the spirit of the piece. For a start it's very well written and, while a few of the points raised can be put down to semantics or debatable differences of opinion, some of them hit their mark. It ignited some general thoughts about dialogue and criticism which I'll expand on in the end of this article. For now I just wanted to respond to a few of the points the article made…
"Emmanuel Kant did not invent Deontological ethics"
The principle example of why I think some of this disapproval is misplaced can be found in Nye picking up on a flippant remark I made about Immanuel Kant. We made very little reference to Kant or deontological theories in general, choosing to talk about the issues facing early Utilitarianism and continental phenomenology. I'm aware that Kant didn’t literally invent deontology from scratch but Kantian ethics remains the first and most comprehensive, non-religious example of deontic ethics in the philosophical tradition. So much so that its by far the most famous and well-known. One could very easily argue the case for Kant being the deontologist and almost definitely the first modern one.
Therefore, I believed I could get away with an off-hand comment that Kantian ethics is representative of deontology. Nye somewhat rightly makes the point there were precursors to Kantian ethics that Kant himself drew from; deontic properties associated with Divine Command Theory for instance. For me, that's comparable to saying Aristotle and Maimonides were essentially scientists and that Plato was a fascist. These concepts were invented much later and referring to medieval theology with words that have a firm place in the secular philosophical tradition comes across as ahistorical. It almost feels like the exact same type of inaccuracy highlighted by the article. That said, I think Nye is correct in that it is always useful to show that ideas are not invented in a vacuum and that they always have precursors and grow organically.
But for a single sentence bracketing a concept during an informal conversation, I think it was sufficiently accurate. We were explicitly addressing human-centred actual moral theories, not "here's my list of religious commandments" or an intricate account of theology. This is actually something the article acknowledges - that we’re talking here in the context of "post-enlightenment" theories. I would even say that we begin to talk about something fundamentally different when we're talking about dark age morality like Divine Command Theory. Mentioning Kant in the same breath as extreme religious ethics is limited in its comparisons. The difference is not only at the applied level of how these theories operate but the meta-ethical dimension (what they value and why). Another marked difference is that religiosity is also heteronomous rather than autonomous, meaning that it is based in an external, extra-social authority rather than human reason, which is arguably immoral . DCT also has metaphysical assumptions built into the premise of its argument and it exists in a different social and historical context. Its classification as deontic is not quite the same thing as when we're talking about Kantian ethics. Modern deontic ethics is subsequently associated exclusively with Kant for very good reasons.
On the one hand I agree that its useful for listeners and myself to not slip into laziness. As Nye has said there are ways to be just as concise without compromising accuracy even if we are intentionally opting for generality and ease of access. This is very true. Plus, I don’t exactly let on a lot of this background information - that could well be down to laziness… but also it just isn’t the place for it. We can and will get into more detail on later episodes. This particular episode is the first real mention of ethics that we've ever done (unless you count our case studies with Levinas and Gaita which are very different in Series I). As an improvised introduction I think it largely serves its purpose.
My initial feeling is that the three of us shouldn't have to face so quite much criticism for many of these points. A variety of the issues raised felt largely unnecessary or tonally bereft, given our chatty format. Yet I think there's something to be said about the spirit of the piece. For a start it's very well written and, while a few of the points raised can be put down to semantics or debatable differences of opinion, some of them hit their mark. It ignited some general thoughts about dialogue and criticism which I'll expand on in the end of this article. For now I just wanted to respond to a few of the points the article made…
"Emmanuel Kant did not invent Deontological ethics"
The principle example of why I think some of this disapproval is misplaced can be found in Nye picking up on a flippant remark I made about Immanuel Kant. We made very little reference to Kant or deontological theories in general, choosing to talk about the issues facing early Utilitarianism and continental phenomenology. I'm aware that Kant didn’t literally invent deontology from scratch but Kantian ethics remains the first and most comprehensive, non-religious example of deontic ethics in the philosophical tradition. So much so that its by far the most famous and well-known. One could very easily argue the case for Kant being the deontologist and almost definitely the first modern one.
Therefore, I believed I could get away with an off-hand comment that Kantian ethics is representative of deontology. Nye somewhat rightly makes the point there were precursors to Kantian ethics that Kant himself drew from; deontic properties associated with Divine Command Theory for instance. For me, that's comparable to saying Aristotle and Maimonides were essentially scientists and that Plato was a fascist. These concepts were invented much later and referring to medieval theology with words that have a firm place in the secular philosophical tradition comes across as ahistorical. It almost feels like the exact same type of inaccuracy highlighted by the article. That said, I think Nye is correct in that it is always useful to show that ideas are not invented in a vacuum and that they always have precursors and grow organically.
But for a single sentence bracketing a concept during an informal conversation, I think it was sufficiently accurate. We were explicitly addressing human-centred actual moral theories, not "here's my list of religious commandments" or an intricate account of theology. This is actually something the article acknowledges - that we’re talking here in the context of "post-enlightenment" theories. I would even say that we begin to talk about something fundamentally different when we're talking about dark age morality like Divine Command Theory. Mentioning Kant in the same breath as extreme religious ethics is limited in its comparisons. The difference is not only at the applied level of how these theories operate but the meta-ethical dimension (what they value and why). Another marked difference is that religiosity is also heteronomous rather than autonomous, meaning that it is based in an external, extra-social authority rather than human reason, which is arguably immoral . DCT also has metaphysical assumptions built into the premise of its argument and it exists in a different social and historical context. Its classification as deontic is not quite the same thing as when we're talking about Kantian ethics. Modern deontic ethics is subsequently associated exclusively with Kant for very good reasons.
On the one hand I agree that its useful for listeners and myself to not slip into laziness. As Nye has said there are ways to be just as concise without compromising accuracy even if we are intentionally opting for generality and ease of access. This is very true. Plus, I don’t exactly let on a lot of this background information - that could well be down to laziness… but also it just isn’t the place for it. We can and will get into more detail on later episodes. This particular episode is the first real mention of ethics that we've ever done (unless you count our case studies with Levinas and Gaita which are very different in Series I). As an improvised introduction I think it largely serves its purpose.
"This is the first image that comes up when I googled ‘business ethics’: "
Nye also brings up a counter example to my lack of precision by… googling a picture. I'm not sure how helpful that is to discourse or what comprehensive impression of the substance of business ethics you can get from "the first image" that shows up when searched. I admit that my choice of words isn't always the best, a lot of that is to do with a staggering lack of ability and nervousness but other times its for the sake of simplicity. Having studied business ethics, I seem to remember the conclusion I reached from an old thesis. This isn’t just an arbitrary opinion I have, its actually a widely argued observation - Utilitarianism arguably characterises much of the pseudo-philosophy or indeed actual philosophy espoused by corporations. You can often find direct or indirect references to utilitarian ideas at conferences, in books and corporate ideology.
The reason I say that much of the time this doesn't qualify as philosophy is because I would agree with many people that much of the rhetoric is actually pragmatism and not morally motivated at all. You could argue it only really becomes utilitarian when you question the CEO and they'll tell you that healthy business, economic flourishing and competition are all staples of a wider healthy society and the flourishing of civilisation . So business practices like "cooperation" and "conscientiousness" aren’t, in these cases, virtues with inherent worth, they serve a utility function and end goal of maximising profits and the rhetoric really doesn't support sufficient goods, certainly not moral ones.
Much of this is a difference of opinion but I would argue if you read Adam Smith or examine the ideas that underpin the macro rationale of business frameworks you find ideas like corporate citizenship which begin to sound very much like late versions of utilitarian theory. You could argue that the meta-ethical part of the utilitarian thesis is revised or bracketed in this system of thinking but the applied part does, I believe, characterise the practices of business in appearance and practice. There's a very strong case to be made that concepts like work-life-balance, productivity, good work relationships and punctuality are of relational worth to yield or output, not morally worthy in their own right. I think that's what's observable on the systemic level. Testimony to this is that the ultimate raison d'être of a business is to be economically viable. Any personal qualities it advocates to its employees as moral agents that are not viable in this way or contradict this premise are hastily abandoned, or almost by definition, cannot exist. So I don’t think Nye is entirely justified to run me down on this point because this is more of a difference of opinion rather than a mistake or an oversight. That said, he's right in saying that this would be fun to talk about in the future.
There seems to be an assumption made here about utilitarianism that it is always about the means justifying the ends no matter what. As our guest Al points out, while this may have been true under act utilitarianism, this is simply not the case with modern revisions of the theory. This is probably the reason for Adam Smith's dislike of the theory when it was first formulated. This is why a utilitarian could argue against Thanos-esque ideas or even other utilitarians about justifiable means and desirable end goals. The Avengers don't despise Thanos because he's a model utilitarian, but actually quite the opposite. Thanos is only a utilitarian in the most strict and radical sense, probably a Malthusian or negative Act Utilitarian. Captain America might be Kantian but, as mentioned in the podcast, when stretched Rule Utilitarianism begins to look very deontic anyway.
These corporate "virtues", like "responsibility" are in the context of a business and valued as such. The worth of these "virtues" ends when they stop producing profit. The intended reductio ad-absurdum remark about overall net increase of a business improving thanks to hospitalising its employees is a strawman of how utilitarianism would actually operate. Its perfectly possible for a utilitarian to qualify "pleasure" as being intellectually grounded as Mill did, or based on justice (and not deception). The utilitarian tradition has been painstakingly addressing these issues for literally centuries.
Most of mine and Joe's criticism was more accurately in reference to extreme or act utilitarianism. We later claimed that we have no issue with modern moral theories, only that we reserve a different conceptual space for their deployment than some people might. Namely, that they are subsidiary to experience and revelation and that no one theory, in practice, can workably confront the full complexity of moral issues. Look at utilitarian cake-cutting if you want a real example of how abstract this can get. Not to mention the potential for abuse and morbidity. But I think I mentioned that even though Act utilitarianism could justify anything, its creator Bentham was at the forefront of gay rights, women's rights and generally was just a very stand up bloke to be honest. I doubt he would rig a coffee machine to explode to hospitalise an annoying employee.
One thing you have to remember is that I'm not an expert in podcasting and I'm not even great at philosophy, certainly not in the context of debate. This is a free-flowing, off the cuff conversation and for the sake of allowing the audience to hear a natural, organic dialogue. For better or worse, this is the end result. I knew there would be mistakes going into it, and this is why I said, before we even recorded it, that it would be disliked by those that prefer a rehearsed and polished product. Which is fair enough. None of us are experts and have never claimed to be. We have varying levels of experience and study and, for me and Joe at least, our forte is the philosophy of religion.
Moral theories aren't descriptive
The other point raised is that moral theories don’t describe the moral landscape in any capacity; that they are prescriptive rather than descriptive. This is a point I was introduced to at university and I understand why it was picked up on… again, maybe I didn’t flesh the point out enough. Moral theories have to work alongside the grain of reality. The first part of the classical utilitarian thesis makes a meta-ethical claim that pleasure is good and pain is bad. It doesn’t do this in the abstract. On some level it has to have an understand of how things are. Even Kant makes use of examples and has to refer to real world to do so. Even pure emotivism has to appeal to moral reality and say things like "don’t you see what happens if this is the case!?", "this is how people feel", etc. That was part of my point, that there's an overlap anyway.
But even then I think what my point was more… Virtue ethics describes what is true about ethics for me. Maybe that's a poor choice of words and feel free to disagree with them. It may be unhelpful but I would say in perhaps a similar way that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind speaks to me about romantic love. It describes or characterises the most appealing or resonating way of thinking about that theme. If that's confusing then fair enough I'll try and be more precise with my language but I don’t think it warranted an article or a follow up podcast.
At the very least the podcast and resulting exchange were nice conversations to have. My hope is, as it usually is with these podcasts that, with perhaps some accuracy and insight it scratched the surface. Hopefully it succeeded in entertaining and introducing people to some of the ideas and issues in ethics, giving people a taste for conversation and learning. Here's to many more and, thanks to Nye, some greater detail.
I get it though. I occasionally bite my tongue when I see disconnected or unjustified thought patterns in politics or pseudoscience… alternative (made-up) medicine like acupuncture being available on an already strained NHS or the belief that disliking Disney's Star Wars is anti-progressive… despite their own utter refusal to gay it up in 2020 (go for it already, screw the "Chinese market"!). But I didn’t really think it was all necessary here… though I do genuinely welcome the wake up call for clarifications to be added in future. I would rather have this critique than think that open conversation was barred in strong friendships… which is oxymoronic. You always have to open to criticism and conversation. A lot of people saw Nye's article and said "how can the three of us be wrong? its just opinions". No. Opinions can be wrong all the time, whether it’s a case of disagreeing with them, or they're just badly thought through (and that's not the same as saying people don’t have a right to hold them). But besides, its not just opinions - its following an argument from its premise to its logical conclusions without getting lost along the way, its misunderstanding ideas or definitions. The article was in no way harsh in principle. We have to pick up on each other's mistakes… its kind of a given in philosophy. But picking apart every stuttered comment in the first 8 minutes of an informal chat between friends may be slightly off the mark. In any case, I know all too well how difficult it can be to criticise friends and pull things apart so its ultimately a welcome and useful piece. Besides, we were genuinely inaccurate and misinformed on some points.
The reason I say that much of the time this doesn't qualify as philosophy is because I would agree with many people that much of the rhetoric is actually pragmatism and not morally motivated at all. You could argue it only really becomes utilitarian when you question the CEO and they'll tell you that healthy business, economic flourishing and competition are all staples of a wider healthy society and the flourishing of civilisation . So business practices like "cooperation" and "conscientiousness" aren’t, in these cases, virtues with inherent worth, they serve a utility function and end goal of maximising profits and the rhetoric really doesn't support sufficient goods, certainly not moral ones.
Much of this is a difference of opinion but I would argue if you read Adam Smith or examine the ideas that underpin the macro rationale of business frameworks you find ideas like corporate citizenship which begin to sound very much like late versions of utilitarian theory. You could argue that the meta-ethical part of the utilitarian thesis is revised or bracketed in this system of thinking but the applied part does, I believe, characterise the practices of business in appearance and practice. There's a very strong case to be made that concepts like work-life-balance, productivity, good work relationships and punctuality are of relational worth to yield or output, not morally worthy in their own right. I think that's what's observable on the systemic level. Testimony to this is that the ultimate raison d'être of a business is to be economically viable. Any personal qualities it advocates to its employees as moral agents that are not viable in this way or contradict this premise are hastily abandoned, or almost by definition, cannot exist. So I don’t think Nye is entirely justified to run me down on this point because this is more of a difference of opinion rather than a mistake or an oversight. That said, he's right in saying that this would be fun to talk about in the future.
There seems to be an assumption made here about utilitarianism that it is always about the means justifying the ends no matter what. As our guest Al points out, while this may have been true under act utilitarianism, this is simply not the case with modern revisions of the theory. This is probably the reason for Adam Smith's dislike of the theory when it was first formulated. This is why a utilitarian could argue against Thanos-esque ideas or even other utilitarians about justifiable means and desirable end goals. The Avengers don't despise Thanos because he's a model utilitarian, but actually quite the opposite. Thanos is only a utilitarian in the most strict and radical sense, probably a Malthusian or negative Act Utilitarian. Captain America might be Kantian but, as mentioned in the podcast, when stretched Rule Utilitarianism begins to look very deontic anyway.
These corporate "virtues", like "responsibility" are in the context of a business and valued as such. The worth of these "virtues" ends when they stop producing profit. The intended reductio ad-absurdum remark about overall net increase of a business improving thanks to hospitalising its employees is a strawman of how utilitarianism would actually operate. Its perfectly possible for a utilitarian to qualify "pleasure" as being intellectually grounded as Mill did, or based on justice (and not deception). The utilitarian tradition has been painstakingly addressing these issues for literally centuries.
Most of mine and Joe's criticism was more accurately in reference to extreme or act utilitarianism. We later claimed that we have no issue with modern moral theories, only that we reserve a different conceptual space for their deployment than some people might. Namely, that they are subsidiary to experience and revelation and that no one theory, in practice, can workably confront the full complexity of moral issues. Look at utilitarian cake-cutting if you want a real example of how abstract this can get. Not to mention the potential for abuse and morbidity. But I think I mentioned that even though Act utilitarianism could justify anything, its creator Bentham was at the forefront of gay rights, women's rights and generally was just a very stand up bloke to be honest. I doubt he would rig a coffee machine to explode to hospitalise an annoying employee.
One thing you have to remember is that I'm not an expert in podcasting and I'm not even great at philosophy, certainly not in the context of debate. This is a free-flowing, off the cuff conversation and for the sake of allowing the audience to hear a natural, organic dialogue. For better or worse, this is the end result. I knew there would be mistakes going into it, and this is why I said, before we even recorded it, that it would be disliked by those that prefer a rehearsed and polished product. Which is fair enough. None of us are experts and have never claimed to be. We have varying levels of experience and study and, for me and Joe at least, our forte is the philosophy of religion.
Moral theories aren't descriptive
The other point raised is that moral theories don’t describe the moral landscape in any capacity; that they are prescriptive rather than descriptive. This is a point I was introduced to at university and I understand why it was picked up on… again, maybe I didn’t flesh the point out enough. Moral theories have to work alongside the grain of reality. The first part of the classical utilitarian thesis makes a meta-ethical claim that pleasure is good and pain is bad. It doesn’t do this in the abstract. On some level it has to have an understand of how things are. Even Kant makes use of examples and has to refer to real world to do so. Even pure emotivism has to appeal to moral reality and say things like "don’t you see what happens if this is the case!?", "this is how people feel", etc. That was part of my point, that there's an overlap anyway.
But even then I think what my point was more… Virtue ethics describes what is true about ethics for me. Maybe that's a poor choice of words and feel free to disagree with them. It may be unhelpful but I would say in perhaps a similar way that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind speaks to me about romantic love. It describes or characterises the most appealing or resonating way of thinking about that theme. If that's confusing then fair enough I'll try and be more precise with my language but I don’t think it warranted an article or a follow up podcast.
At the very least the podcast and resulting exchange were nice conversations to have. My hope is, as it usually is with these podcasts that, with perhaps some accuracy and insight it scratched the surface. Hopefully it succeeded in entertaining and introducing people to some of the ideas and issues in ethics, giving people a taste for conversation and learning. Here's to many more and, thanks to Nye, some greater detail.
I get it though. I occasionally bite my tongue when I see disconnected or unjustified thought patterns in politics or pseudoscience… alternative (made-up) medicine like acupuncture being available on an already strained NHS or the belief that disliking Disney's Star Wars is anti-progressive… despite their own utter refusal to gay it up in 2020 (go for it already, screw the "Chinese market"!). But I didn’t really think it was all necessary here… though I do genuinely welcome the wake up call for clarifications to be added in future. I would rather have this critique than think that open conversation was barred in strong friendships… which is oxymoronic. You always have to open to criticism and conversation. A lot of people saw Nye's article and said "how can the three of us be wrong? its just opinions". No. Opinions can be wrong all the time, whether it’s a case of disagreeing with them, or they're just badly thought through (and that's not the same as saying people don’t have a right to hold them). But besides, its not just opinions - its following an argument from its premise to its logical conclusions without getting lost along the way, its misunderstanding ideas or definitions. The article was in no way harsh in principle. We have to pick up on each other's mistakes… its kind of a given in philosophy. But picking apart every stuttered comment in the first 8 minutes of an informal chat between friends may be slightly off the mark. In any case, I know all too well how difficult it can be to criticise friends and pull things apart so its ultimately a welcome and useful piece. Besides, we were genuinely inaccurate and misinformed on some points.