Much intellectual ink and effort has been spilled upon the concept of morality and what is right and wrong in human conduct. We may go so far as to say that the central concerns of human life all fall under this category, especially if morality is taken to be that general conception that suggests what we should and should not do. Morality, then, is a reality that is always with us, and it is unsurprising that many thinkers have felt compelled to think about our moral concerns so thoroughly. I believe, however, that this might cause a common confusion that those endowed with intellectual gifts are frequently drawn in by: we believe we will theorize our way through moral quandaries and come to a rational, positive description of what should and should not be done. In my view, this is a deeply confused position that often causes us to have unrealistic expectations of what a moral theory should provide, and it may even confuse our moral reasoning insofar as moral decisions are put under the scrutiny of unhelpful moral theorems. This obviously requires that I provide something of a distinction between doing and theorizing, how this interplays with the human predicament, and perhaps grounding this in a specific example – all of which I sketch below (with Immanuel Kant being the specific recipient of my criticism here).
To do is something that we hardly need explained. Doing is what is suggested by nearly all human affairs; we choose to do this rather than that, say putting together a puzzle instead of watching T. V., and the object of our activity is not necessarily to understand but to instantiate some new circumstance in the world. This is not to say that doing is devoid of understanding, but the understanding in question serves some end as opposed to being the end itself. Conversely, inverting this logic gives us insight into the nature of theorizing: per its Greek origins and roots, theorizing refers to a different kind of seeing, a way of looking that reveals something alternative to what strikes us when observing a given ‘going-on’ in the practical sense of doing. When looking at a tree, I may wish to understand its history and development, I could want to analyse the sorts of materials and cells out of which it is composed, or I might seek to cut it down and make a chair of it. The first two options are of a more theoretical flavour insofar as they merely seek to think about the tree in a new light, whereas the latter evidently desires some new state of affairs. Per this view, then, theory can take on many forms – historical, scientific, philosophical – but they share in common that they seek to interrogate and understand a given phenomenon in a different manner than usual. If we consider the difference between, on the one hand, the physicist or mathematician and, on the other, the engineer or construction worker, these same distinctions become salient. In many instances, there may be overlap in the ‘objects,’ so-to-speak, with which we are interacting, but the intentions of the observers are radically divergent. No doubt, given this description, all human activities involve some doing and some understanding, but we can ideally distinguish which is being emphasized in specific instances.
For my present purposes, the sense of theorizing that I am using in relationship to morality is likely best understood as philosophical, though we might wish to save ‘philosophy’ for that most profound form of thought that is ‘thinking about thinking’ in itself. Such fine distinctions aside, however, when theorizing morality as I am intending, we are instead focused on ‘thinking about the thoughts involved in doing.’ My intention therein is not to involve myself in the transformative kind of thinking and acting that is characterized as doing with a great moral sense; rather, my intention is to understand what it means to do, to be moral. This entails unpacking what is postulated in that form of thinking. I look at morality, at human conduct, at doing, and I am intending to understand what holds together this form of thought and action. In my view, this is not meant in a ‘normative’ sense – though it may incidentally entail such if someone thinks he can derive practical injunctions from the theory in some interpretive manner. What I am describing as theory is a manner of articulating what is perceived to be the case in human conduct as encountered. Thus, to refer to morality as postulating a self-conscious and deliberative agent, I am not making a moralizing claim; I am merely trying to describe what is already involved in all moral endeavours. In this sense, theory is always existentially antecedent to doing in at least a limited sense; if I have not thought the kinds of thoughts I am trying to understand, it becomes difficult to lay claim to theorizing their postulates – no different than how the chemist cannot derive a chemical formula for a substance he has never encountered.
What should be clear from this description of theorizing morality is that it cannot tell us what ought to be done. No doubt, to know that morality would entail a self-conscious and deliberative agent does imply that there are some decisions that agents can make which could be deleterious to morality (such as being entirely unreflective in one’s choices), but what the right choice in particular must be is always to extend into a realm foreign to that of theorizing the postulates of human conduct and morality. This is not to say that one cannot generate something akin to ‘rules-of-thumb’ to better approximate what is the right thing to do would (and we most certainly do such things all the time), but they are rife with exceptions and are hardly universally instructive. Moreover, such determinations are simply doing something other than theorizing the moral endeavour; they are not describing the nature of the thinking involved in moral affairs but instead trying to generate an abstract maxim by which morality can and ought to be judged. This is problematic on two fronts: firstly, it hides the necessary prudential judgement made in all moral decisions, and it makes our moral decisions subject to frequently indeterminate criteria that prevent us from thinking clearly about what should or should not be done.
An example of moral theorizing that exhibits the problems I am suggesting is that of Immanuel Kant in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten). Kant’s aim in the work is to find a supposedly a priori (or non-observationally-grounded) source for morality; in his view, this would provide an acontextual foundation that is, therefore, universally instructive for moral concerns. Kant arrives at the ‘Categorical Imperative,’ which he describes several times with slightly different emphases. The gist of all the formulations is actually somewhat circular: his universal instruction is that we should formulate only those moral rules that we believe could be genuinely universalized. Importantly, Kant also emphasizes in certain formulations that all human beings must always be treated as ends in themselves and never as a means to another end – though this arguably develops out of the claim that any moral rule ought to be universal, because a given agent always supposes himself never to be a means to some end and must therefore assume this for all others as well. Kant believes that this articulation of the Categorical Imperative results in certain key rules: lying is always prohibited; promises must always be kept; theft is always wrong; etc.
What we note almost immediately is that these specific rules that Kant formulates all have obvious counterexamples. For instance, it might be legitimate to lie to someone about whether you are bringing them to their own surprise party; someone who was forced to make a promise at gunpoint can hardly be expected to fulfill it; and theft is perhaps permissible for a man whose family is on the brink of starvation. Of course, all these objections seem to offer specifications that could be accommodated in the rules: lying may be permissible if it be done for the good or pleasure of the deceived individual; only those promises made freely should be binding; and theft due to necessity may be a fine exception to the general rule. Nevertheless, these further specifications could have further objections, but I am not going to pursue this for the sake of expediency; once more, further specifications may be made, and it is likely that this dialectical process could go on (theoretically) ad inifinitum. (My discussion thus far has not – and will not below – get into the issue of definitions: what constitutes a lie, a promise, or theft? This is not self-evident, and this itself requires contingent judgements.) As these instances are further and further specified, what they will begin to look like are actually a variety of highly specific instances in which prudence is exercised, but prudence is hardly the mere application of a moral rule – it is more like the proper decision in a given instance that may be informed but not entirely instructed by a multitude of rules.
If this is the case, rules cannot be considered clear instructions to navigate moral quandaries but are better understood as abridgements of the deeply contingent and specific instances in which we perpetually find ourselves. They may make moral deliberation easier, but they do not simply provide an answer; at best, they speed up our process of making decisions that in actuality refuse mere rule-following. I believe that this provides us with an intimation of how theorizing about morality and moralizing proper are two deeply distinct forms of thought. Moralizing requires that I criticize a specific decision within the confines that a given person is operating; my judgement will be made up of a number (perhaps dozens) of different ‘rules’ that are being played off of one another in a complex manner. To know that a man is filing for divorce and to criticize such a decision will require a great deal of context; how I respond to his decision will be predicated on things like the faithfulness of him and his wife, their common understanding of marriage from the outset of their union, the presence of children or lack thereof, etc. Moreover, even if a person were to hold as a general rule that divorce is always immoral, the moral response to a specific divorce will nonetheless be contingently mediated by the many factors (and more) that I just mentioned.
I think, therefore, that Kant simply has not provided a proper theoretical account of morality – despite that he, and many of his disciples, claim that he has provided such a theory that even tells us what we ought to do. This is not to say that I think that Kant’s various rules that he believes he has determined from the Categorical Imperative are wrong – in fact, I think almost all of them are good rules-of-thumb to have on hand when morally deliberating. But this is not the same as saying that he has provided a good moral theory for any of these things; at best, the Categorical Imperative is an attempt to abstract from various moral realities what unites them as being ‘good rules’ – yet this offers us no way to return from the abstraction to the concrete realities of daily decision making. Kant has both insufficiently theorized the nature of human conduct to give us an understanding of what it is, and he has also provided us with a distracting criterion that offers little guidance to someone attempting to solve problems in their daily lives.
In brief, then, we should not fall for the allure of a catch-all abstraction that purports to provide moral rules that are universally valid. Theorizing morality is not determining a standard by which all conduct can be judged but instead recognizing what is postulated in all moral conduct – to ask what is meant by ‘good’ within that world is to ask a different question that already presupposes an understand of the postulates of conduct. Theorizing morality can, therefore, not provide us with the equipment necessary to live morally; though it may modestly clarify aspects of our moral life, it does not deal with the contingent, fragmentary, and complex dynamics that persist for individuals such as ourselves. Moral theories can only, at best, seek to inform us, but to seek instruction in them is to misunderstand ourselves as moral beings. And, of course, to be consistent, I must maintain that my writing of these words and your reading of them provides almost nothing for our moral rectitude.
Hoping for Clarity 