Over the past 35 years I’ve sat in countless church services in which the pastor (often a youth pastor) has held up his Bible and referred to it as “the owner’s manual” for operating God’s creation. A little over five years ago, I was sitting in a lecture hall at the University of Santa Clara with more than 500 people. The occasion was the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. Rawls himself was present for the celebration, as were five other world-class political philosophers.
During his public address, Michael Sandel, himself from Harvard University, compared current abortion practices in the United States to our treatment of slaves in the 19th century—neither, he suggested, was sustainable over the long haul. Last year, another Harvard professor of philosophy, Hilary Putnam, published The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy. Though the pastors I listened to all these years might be surprised, it appears that leading philosophers are now endorsing their contention that the care of humans involves rules that are just as “factual” as the proper grade of motor oil to put in one’s car or the amount of fertilizer to put on one’s lawn.
In Putnam’s account, the difficulty for the objective, factual nature of morality began in the 18th century with David Hume. Hume famously argued that it is impossible to derive an “ought” from an “is.” Statements of fact tell us what is the case. Statements of value tell us what we ought to do, say, or approve. According to Hume, “facts” and “values” are related in the same way as apples and architects. No matter how long people study apples, they will never learn anything about architects. Thus, “fact is fact and value is value and never the twain shall meet.”
But wait a minute. While it’s true that “silver melts at 533.6 degrees Celsius” and “Thou shall not commit adultery” are different kinds of statements, that doesn’t mean that facts and values constitute a hard-and-fast dichotomy. Hume tried to justify the dichotomy by arguing that factual statements are always based on a corresponding mental picture or “idea,” whereas value statements are only based on “sentiments” according to “the particular structure and fabric” of our minds. But Hume’s “pictorial semantics” is universally rejected by contemporary philosophers.
Beginning in the 1920s, logical positivists made another attempt to draw a hard-and-fast dichotomy between facts and values. They reverted to Kant’s distinction between analytic statements, which are true by definition—”All bachelors are unmarried”—and synthetic statements of fact—”Some bachelors are celibate.” Analytic statements, it was said, were tautological and did nothing to increase our understanding of the world. The truthfulness of synthetic statements, on the other hand, could only be established by some sort of observation (the more “scientific” the better).
Once again, values got the short stick. Having sexual relations outside marriage is not wrong by definition (and even if it were, definitions are social constructs and these are always changing). Nor is their “wrongness” scientifically observable. Therefore, the claim that adultery is wrong can be nothing more than a disguised statement of taste or preference, perhaps with an implicit imperative attached—”we wish you wouldn’t do that sort of thing.”
Today, no professional philosopher openly acknowledges allegiance to logical positivism. Yet, the fact/value dichotomy doesn’t lack apostles; they’ve only changed their terminology yet again. For example, most economists insist that policy recommendations must be “value neutral” because “intersubjective comparison of utilities” is impossible. Philosophers like Bernard Williams argue that attempts to evaluate people’s “motivational sets” are always “false or incoherent.” Political theorists like Jürgen Habermas distinguish between “norms,” which are universal but few and far between, and “values,” which are everywhere but only of local and limited application. Whatever the jargon, on the street these all translate as the discussion stopper—”that’s just your opinion!”
This “is no ivory-tower issue,” Putnam insists. “Matters of—literally—life and death may well be at stake.” He explicitly mentions growing inequality of income as a case where alleged “value neutrality” is morally pernicious, though by extension questions about abortion, capital punishment, and war could certainly be added to the list. So how does Putnam defend the objectivity of values?
First, he argues that ethical judgments and scientific theories are both irreducibly normative. The proverbial moral skeptic who will not countenance any argument that cannot be logically or scientifically proven, says Putnam, understands neither logic nor science. Of course moral reasoning involves more than formal logic, but so does all inductive reasoning, including the mythical “scientific method” we were taught in the fifth grade. The most serious attempt to formalize inductive reason was undertaken by one of Putnam’s former teachers and colleagues, Rudolf Carnap. Though Putnam describes him as the kindest and least pretentious person one could wish to know, his criticism of Carnap’s philosophy is unequivocal. “To put it very briefly, Carnap wanted to reduce [scientific] theory choice to an algorithm. … Today no one holds out any hope for Carnap’s project.”
More careful attention to how scientists actually reason, instead of how they are supposed to reason, reveals the same point. The first “really solid experimental confirmation of general relativity came only in the 1960s,” but the coherence and simplicity of Einstein’s arguments had long since placed his theory beyond doubt. “Yet coherence, simplicity, and the like are values. … Indeed, each and every one of the familiar arguments for relativism in ethics could be repeated in connection with these epistemic values. The argument that ethical values are metaphysically ‘queer’ because (among other things) we do not have a sense organ for detecting ‘goodness’ could be modified to read ‘epistemic values are ontologically queer because we do not have a sense organ for detecting simplicity and coherence.'”
Second, Putnam argues that words like “cruel,” “brave,” “temperate,” “generous,” “vulgar,” “gauche,” etc.—what he calls “thick ethical descriptions”—both describe and evaluate at the same time. Furthermore, it is impossible to “factor out” the purely descriptive element “without using the word ‘cruel’ or a synonym.” For example, “causing great suffering” is not a necessary element: “Imagine that a person debauches a young person with the deliberate aim of keeping him or her from fulfilling some great talent!” Nor is it sufficient. Prior to anesthesia any medical operation caused great suffering.
Putnam is the first to admit that his present position has changed considerably from his youthful materialism and his commitment to “analytic philosophy.” Nonetheless, he still exhibits a fear of metaphysics. Some of that fear is certainly justifiable. Plato’s ontologically cluttered universe with metaphysical Forms for everything from bravery to beds is hard to defend. Yet, valid criticisms of bad metaphysics do not mean that we can dispense with all metaphysics, especially when the objectivity of values is at issue. 1
For example, no one seriously doubts that dogs and cats have different natures. Furthermore, no philosopher accuses veterinarians of being “metaphysical” when they tell us that these different “natures” require different kinds of food. But just as the nature of dogs and cats differs, so too, human nature differs from the nature of dogs and cats. It is this final difference, argues Henry Veatch in Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics, that sustains objective, moral truth.
Once the existence of distinct natures is granted, “nothing is quite so much a fact of nature … as goal-directed behavior or activity that aims at some end.” Yet science strictly forbids talk of nature’s ends or goal. It is the “most ingrained of modern prejudices” to identify nature with what is studied by modern science, so “the very notion of human nature, and of nature generally, has apparently turned sour for most modern ethical thinkers.” We will not spend much time considering Veatch’s refutation of this common, but mistaken, understanding of science’s hegemony—Putnam’s critique is more than sufficient.
What is most important to Veatch is the fundamental difference between human nature and the nature of all other biological species—namely, the fact that humans choose their ends whereas for all other species nature itself assigns the ends. Acorns by nature become oaks and Golden Retrievers by nature retrieve sticks. These behaviors are neither taught nor chosen. And while humans aren’t taught to seek happiness, nothing is more obvious than the diversity of plans by which we seek to make ourselves happy. Many seek happiness through pleasure; some seek it through success and fame; and a few even seek it through the intellectual contemplation of the true, good, and beautiful. Which plan any particular person adopts is a matter of choice. The only reason we study ethics, according to Aristotelians, is to make this choice wisely.
But isn’t it silly to speak of studying how to become happy? No one studies her choice of ice cream flavors. A person either likes Mocha Almond Fudge or she doesn’t! The same is true of a person’s choice of “lifestyles.”
Veatch disagrees. The Socratic dictum—Know thyself—is indispensable. In fact, Veatch argues that “Know thyself” pretty much sums up the study of ethics. Nothing is more common than self-deception. When we engage in self-evaluation, too often we do so by considering our feelings, emotions, and passions. Is passionate anger a sign of envy or of righteous indignation? Are feelings of boredom while reading a sign of tiredness or of good judgment concerning a dull book? “Feelings” are not self-interpreting. We need trained doctors to properly evaluate our physical health. So too, we need good men and women to properly evaluate the health of our soul.
Objections will come from both the Right and the Left. Those on the Left will say that Aristotle simply begs the question, since what constitutes a good man or woman is itself a matter of opinion, and hence, cannot be used to prove that the choice of lifestyles is any different than the choice of ice cream.
Veatch skillfully parries this objection by distinguishing between standards of human excellence that are primary (and invariable) and those that are secondary (and variable). “An English gentleman of the nineteenth century was expected to observe a haughtiness and reserve which would have been scarcely appropriate, and even ridiculous, in an Italian fruit peddler of the same period; a trust officer in a bank is expected to display a caution that would hardly be fitting in a wildcat oil operator.” Yet this hardly means that there are no objective standards for being a good English gentleman, Italian fruit peddler, trust officer, or wildcat oil operator. “It is true that as the conditions of life vary from age to age, from region to region, or from one culture to another, the criteria of bravery, say, or of honesty, or of stupidity, will vary considerably. But the distinction between bravery and cowardice, honesty and dishonesty, wisdom and folly, will nonetheless be recognized and maintained almost universally.”
Those on the Right will now say this is but the thin edge of a wedge leading to rank relativism. Without objective standards of right and wrong, morality becomes wholly subjective. Ethics must be based on law, not judgment.
But just as there is no algorithm for doing science, neither is there an algorithm for being good. Doing science well and living well are both crafts. No painter, chef, or surgeon can reduce his or her craft to a checklist of do’s and don’ts. As Veatch puts it, “the particular concrete situations which are the actual points of application of any art or skill are always so complex and intricate that no set of general rules and principles ever suffices to cover them completely.”
The desire to reduce morality to a list of rules stems from the modern notion that ethics is primarily about how to treat others, not how we treat ourselves. Ancient moralists knew better—”For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.” Or as Aristotle would say, when the habits of both mind and will are sound, right action follows immediately. “Only when it can be said of a person interchangeably, ‘He is doing what he ought to do’ and ‘He is doing what he wants to do,’ ” have our desires become rational. Doing the right thing out of a sense of duty is good, but it is not—contrary to what Kant says—the best. Doing the right thing out of delight is better still.
But how is such a lofty calling possible? “However it may have been with a philosopher like Aristotle,” say Veatch, “most of us ordinary mortals cannot even know the good life, much less practice it, without some aid from a source outside ourselves. Such an association of ethics with religion is, I believe, entirely compatible with the sort of Aristotelian ethics presented here.” Veatch’s other philosophical hero, Thomas Aquinas, put it like this: “Grace does not destroy nature, but completes it.”
Rational Man was originally published in 1962, thirty years before “virtue-ethics” became philosophically fashionable. The Liberty Fund is to be commended for republishing Veatch’s prescient book. Those who read it along with Putnam’s work will understand just how defensible the metaphor of “God’s owner’s manual” is, even in the secular university.
Ric Machuga is professor of philosophy at Butte College in California. He is the author of In Defense of the Soul: What It Means to Be Human (Brazos Press).
1.Though there are copious footnotes for everything else, there isn’t a single reference to the metaphysicians Putnam rejects. John Haldane writes, “Such a metaphysical realism is not excluded by Putnam’s current thinking and it may be required for it.” See “On Coming Home to (Metaphysical) Realism,” Philosophy, Vol. 71 (1996), pp. 287-96).
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