Ethical Socialism

I posed the problem of the indispensability of ethics, remarking that no ethical theory I know of has a solution to it.[1] It seems that we prize ethics above even prudence, logic, and sanity; we can’t live without it. This is puzzling—surely, you don’t have to be good to be happy! Acting ethically doesn’t always feel that great (see I. Kant, as in “I can’t help it”). I now think I have a solution to the puzzle, and it puts a particular twist on the basic rationale of ethics. I call it “ethical socialism”. The basic idea is simple and not unfamiliar: ethics is a precondition of society. Without ethics there is no such thing as society. By society I mean any social grouping: from towns and countries to families, friendships, and fleeting encounters. Any form of human association. For without ethics such collectives are impossible, since they need ethical rules in order to exist. You can’t treat someone without regard for right and wrong and expect to stay friends with them. You have to treat them right—no stealing, lying, promise-breaking, betraying, violence, and murder. Such things are not conducive to a functioning society (even of two people). This is self-evident and hardly needs arguing. What is less obvious is the alternative to a life lived with others in harmony: loneliness, isolation, misery, fear, self-sufficiency, humorlessness, poverty, early death. Nasty, brutish, short, and all alone. It sounds like hell—there is no social life in hell. The OED gives for “society”: “the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community” (I love that “more or less”). No community, no communing—no chatting, sharing, amusing, informing. No one to talk to, no one to see, no one to interact with. No friend, no spouse, no partner, no helper. This is brutal stuff—the stuff of nightmares. But that’s what you get if you spurn morality. This is why the professional criminal (wrong-doer) is never completely amoral or immoral: because if he is, he has nobody, nothing. His life is barren and empty. Thus, he treats his gang and family well. He isn’t a shit to everybody. So, on pain of total isolation, he maintains a local morality, perhaps even accentuates it. You begin to see why morality matters more than prudence, logic, and sanity—at least you have some company if you lack those qualities. Abandoning morality altogether is choosing to live alone, and human life is a very meagre thing under such conditions; really, not worth living. We are social creatures and our happiness is largely social, perhaps entirely when you take it to the logical extreme. Life without society would be unbearable; no one ever chooses it. We find it difficult to imagine how a totally solitary animal can ever be happy; it merely survives.  Not that any animal is ever truly alone, what with mates and family. Total isolation isn’t biological. Ethics is written into our souls because social existence is; it is as deeply ingrained as our social nature. We implicitly understand from a young age that morality is necessary for social bonds; it is the glue that holds individuals together. It is what makes living together possible. We might thus announce that what is good and right is what enables and preserves society (in the broadest sense). It even includes human-animal societies: these can exist only because we treat animals with a degree of moral respect—they would run away if we didn’t. Animal ethics stems from human-animal societies. You can’t even own a dog unless you stick to moral principles. The very concept of right and wrong is bound up with the need for society. In a sense, it is tribal (but not in the narrow sense). We would all die early and live horribly if society was not possible, and morality is what makes it possible.[2]

A good ethical theory should register the connection between morality and society—and not by supposing that morality is “socially constructed”. It isn’t. But its profound hold on us is bound up with its role in creating social groups. This conception is socialist not individualist: it is a group phenomenon not an individual one. At the level of the individual morality does not exist. If we deny the existence of society, we undermine morality; we rob it of its point. We rob it of its content. The atomistic individual cannot be a moral agent; he can at best be a member of an aggregate. Ethics and community go together, but not ethics and the isolated individual. Thus, we might label the theory under consideration “communist ethics” or “ethical communism”. It is the ethical basis of political socialism and communism (no matter how perverted such ideas have become historically). Ethics must be directed at communities not individuals (here there is only prudence). I think this is why there has always been some disquiet over utilitarian ethics: society is not visible in it. All we get is maximizing the happiness of the greatest number, whether or not this number comprises a society (people “living together”). The beneficiaries of the utilitarian calculation could be isolated individuals. There doesn’t seem to be anything essentially social in this ethical theory. By contrast, deontological theories explicitly record interpersonal relations—don’t lie, don’t break your promises, don’t steal, don’t be ungrateful, don’t kill, clean up after yourself. It is about one’s duties to others not just making everyone feel good. Where is the interpersonal element—the I and thou? Nor should we neglect the spiritual aspect: the meeting of minds, the empathy, the spiritual communing. All this is immensely valuable to us—and it goes beyond supplying goods and services and simply getting along with each other. Our greatest happiness lies here. So, morality exists in the human species because we have interpersonal spiritual needs. In short, we need love—to give it and receive it. We don’t just want to go about our business, lovelessly. We sense that without morality this good would be unavailable to us (we might just get stabbed in the back, betrayed, enslaved). There has to be trust, or else everyone suspects everyone and bonds are never formed. We would hardly exist as human beings unless we had a developed social life, and morality is what makes this possible. Ethics is existential. Human life has no meaning lived alone. Aloneness can lead to suicide in extreme cases. So, ethics is what gives life meaning, because it enables the social dimension. It prevents life being unpleasant, isolated, and brief (what with suicide and everything). Even street-gang life is preferable to that.

We should really divide philosophy into two parts: philosophy of the individual and philosophy of the group. In the first part we deal with such problems as the mind-body problem, the problem of free will, the classical problems of epistemology, etc. In the second part we deal with ethics, political philosophy, the analysis of social facts, and some of the philosophy of language. A theorem of this branch of philosophy might be that there can be no social facts without ethical facts: societies can’t exist without firm ethical foundations (ethical subjectivism won’t cut it). Ethical nihilism produces rampant individualism and the collapse of organized society (just roving gangs and lone assassins). We have the individual-community problem as we have the mind-body problem. Some philosophers specialize in individual philosophy and some specialize in group philosophy (same in psychology). Some suggest that what looks like an individual problem is really a group problem—as with community theories of meaning or mental content. Some maintain that the concept of freedom is individualistic (a matter of causal determination) while others argue that it is a social concept (not being coerced by others). I think this is a useful division, and I place ethics on the group side. It turns out that the reason we are so firmly committed to ethics is that we are essentially and unavoidably social—but not necessarily prudent or logical or sane. We can live without the latter three, but we can’t live without society. Other people may be hell, as Sartre suggested, but it is a hell we would prefer to the heaven of total aloneness.[3]

[1] See my “Ethical Life”. I posed the problem one day and arrived at the present view overnight. Perhaps the solution will help to see what the problem is.

[2] The function of the law is likewise to codify the rules of interpersonal engagement; to regulate societal interactions. This is why it is connected to ethics. We have laws because without them society would disintegrate into amoral individualism—or so it is believed at this stage of human history. If ethics is the social glue, the law is the social hammer (it knocks in the nails). This is the importance of the law, for what it’s worth. The law is what enables to sleep easy at night and speak freely. It is society’s enforcer. A large amount of human effort is devoted to keeping society together, because without it, life becomes meaningless and unbearable. Family law is particularly important.

[3] I can’t refrain from mentioning the song, by Celine Dion and others, entitled “Alone”. The theme is the isolated individual versus the connected lover. The hysterical chorus has the lyrics, “Till now I always got by on my own, I never really cared until I met you”, and the song ends with two long shrieks of “Alone!”. The importance of morality is its capacity to prevent such shrieks.

Philosophy of Objective and Subjective

If concepts divide into the objective and the subjective, it should be possible to conduct a survey of them and assign them accordingly. We should be able to group and rank them according to their objective or subjective character. This would be an exercise in conceptual analysis—not analysis into components but into general categories. It should be philosophically illuminating. Think of it as a philosophical project or program: discovering which concepts qualify as subjective and which objective (or possess these attributes to different degrees). How do we think of the phenomenon under consideration, objectively or subjectively? For example, how do we think of color and shape–do we think of shape objectively and color subjectively, or vice versa? What about identity and existence? Or the self. Or truth and knowledge. Do we think of these things from a specific point of view, or do we abstract away from this to obtain a more impersonal conception? Do the relevant concepts have a subjective structure or an objective structure? What kind of structures might these be? The obvious idea is that subjective concepts reflect our perceptual point of view, while objective concepts (if there are any) reflect more universal faculties (e.g., reason). Do we think of color perceptually, possibly by means of mental images, and shape by means of abstract geometry grasped by pure reason? Do we think of existence subjectively as what we perceive with our senses, or do we have a more abstract objective concept of existence that takes in numbers? Do we employ ourselves in our concepts or do we set ourselves aside and focus on the object? What is the architecture of our conceptual scheme—is it based on a foundation of subjective viewpoints or something more universal and absolute? Are we representational subjectivists or representational objectivists? And what about other animals and aliens from outer space?

We need some guidelines. I think we do well to begin with a subjectivist hypothesis: all concepts have a subjective ingredient or origin or history, even if they also possess a measure of objectivity. Concepts begin with the self and probably the perceiving self. They come from innate constitution plus experiential history. They are relative to the creature that has them. The simplest theory is that all concepts of the external world derive from sensory experience (empiricism) and hence embody a subjective perspective; look closely and you will always see perception lurking in the background. Let’s formulate this as the Special Theory of Subjective Relativity: all our concepts of empirical reality are based on perceptual subjectivity. Then we can say that all such concepts incorporate perceptual subjectivity (they are all relative to the subject’s specific mode of sensory experience). In the obvious case, they are visually based: seeing is the subjective mode under which we conceptualize things. We thus need to understand the subjectivity of seeing—how it works in the representation of objects. In what does the subjective character of seeing consist? The answer is not far to seek: vision involves fleeting and variable stimulations of the retina that are processed to produce a stable world of constant objects. It is the correction of the idiosyncrasies of the ceaselessly changing retinal image. It manufactures constancy from variability.[1] Thus, concepts incorporate this kind of corrective operation; they result from acts of proximal stimulus regulation in the direction of constancy. The variation of retinal stimulation has a phenomenological counterpart: an area of the retina corresponds to what is called “apparent size”. We need not go into the details; the essential point is that correction plays a central role in producing a picture of reality—correction of the proximal stimulus. What we can say, then, is that all concepts result from this kind of operation: subjective states that have been processed to produce something endowed with (a degree of) objectivity—as it might be, seeing a ball coming towards you and not changing in size. In the case of the concept of existence, then, the subjective dimension consists in perceptions of objects that result from operations on proximal stimulations or apparent qualities. In short, our concept of existence incorporates a perceptual process: for something to exist (for us) is for it to emerge from the chaos of sensory bombardment. This is what the Special Theory of Subjective Relativity (STSR) is telling us: it is offering a theory of the subjective make-up of the concept in question. This would be the beginning of an investigation into the subjective character of human concepts. Concepts are imbued with the kind of subjectivity characteristic of visual perception.

Methodologically, the program is like Chomsky’s program in linguistics, but where he sought to identify underlying syntactic structures, this program looks for underlying subjective structures (you could write a book called Subjective Structures). Concepts evidently have a subjective composition and we want to know precisely what that composition looks like. The current proposal is that it is perceptual in character, with the kind of structure present in visual perception (proximal stimulus, correction, constancy). The subjectivity is of a familiar pattern. But we must remember that there is also objectivity of a sort—the world does get represented more or less as it is, subject-independently. Concepts do apply to things outside the subject’s head. So, concepts have both a subjective dimension and an objective dimension; they are a mixture of the two, like a visual percept. The objective aspect is harder to analyze and I doubt that we know much about it at present (how does the mind manage to latch onto things outside of itself?). Still, we can recognize its existence, if not delineate its nature; concepts are hybrid entities, combining the subjective and the objective (like percepts). The program, then, has a dual goal: investigate the subjective and objective aspects of concepts—what they are, where they come from, how they evolved, etc. That is the basic structure of the inquiry; the details need to be filled in by future research.

It is beginning to look as if we don’t have a single concept corresponding to a given word but a duality of concepts: we conceive the same thing both subjectively and objectively. We can’t ask what is the concept of knowledge, say, because there are two concepts (possibly more): we have both a subjective concept and a (more) objective concept. One concept derives from our perceptual faculties, the other from somewhere else (language, reason?). We have experienced knowledge in ourselves and others and formed a conception of it based on that, but we also seem to have a concept of knowledge that extends beyond such episodes of acquaintance and whose origin is obscure. These paired concepts can pull in different directions, creating conceptual perplexity; they need not cohere. We have subjective conceptual analysis and objective conceptual analysis (consider space and time). The structure of our thinking is thus more complex than we supposed; our concepts are multi-leveled. It won’t be easy to excavate them, perhaps next to impossible. Maybe we can only scratch the surface. What methods can we use?  The standard approaches of cognitive science seem inadequate to the task; the computational model seems inappropriate. The idea of a language of thought is unhelpful. The cognitive mind seems intolerably complex when viewed through the subjective-objective lens. But the project looks well-defined.[2]

[1] Tyler Burge’s Origins of Objectivity contains a nice discussion of constancy directed towards philosophers, but any introductory textbook on perceptual psychology will fill you in.

[2] Part of the problem in this area is that the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity, though frequently used by philosophers, are commonly left at an intuitive level; we need to do some conceptual analysis on them.

Objective and Subjective Knowledge

We must first make a firm distinction between objective and subjective facts, on the one hand, and objective and subjective conceptions of facts, on the other.[1] That is, we must distinguish the application of these terms to the world (objects, properties) from their application to mental representations of the world (perceptions, thoughts, knowledge). A subjective fact would be something like a belief or state of consciousness; a subjective conception would be a subjective representation of a fact. Thus, there can be subjective and objective conceptions of subjective facts, and similarly for objective facts. For example, there might be subjective and objective conceptions of shape, this being a type of objective fact; and there might be subjective and objective conceptions of pain, this being a type of subjective fact. I will not here be much concerned with subjective and objective facts, but rather with subjective and objective conceptions. What, then, is that distinction? Roughly, it is the distinction between representations from a particular point of view and representations that prescind from any particular point of view—that are independent of point of view. Just to fix initial intuitions, we can distinguish the point of view of a dog from that of a human, given the sensory and cognitive differences between them (smell, hearing, etc.). Each species has its own distinctive point of view—there are many types of subjective perspective—while the universe itself has only one inherent reality. Subjective conceptions are subject-relative, multiple, and idiosyncratic. By contrast, objective conceptions (if such there be) are absolute, singular, and universal. There are many subjective points of view on the same objective reality, but objective points of view converge on reality itself. We will have more to say about this distinction later; for now, I am just trying to mobilize intuitions along familiar lines. The subjective reflects the nature of the subject; the objective reflects the nature of the object. We can think of the world subjectively or we can think of it objectively (or so it seems). I want to ask which domains of knowledge fall into which category: what do we know objectively and what do we know subjectively?

We already know that we can’t read conception off from fact: an objective fact can be known objectively or subjectively, and a subjective fact can be known subjectively or objectively. It depends on the manner of knowing not on the nature of the object known. Thus, we can’t infer that physics is (conceptually) objective because it deals with (ontologically) objective facts; and we can’t infer that psychology is (conceptually) subjective because it deals with (ontologically) subjective facts. In fact, I think it is the other way about: physics is subjective and psychology is objective—or the latter is more objective than the former. The reason is that our knowledge of physics reflects our subjective modes of apprehension more than our knowledge of psychology does. The latter is less subjectively mediated than the former. This is simply because physics is known via perception, but psychology isn’t; that is, we know the nature of the subject matter of physics on the basis of our sensory evidence, whereas we know the nature of the subject matter of psychology non-perceptually. Mainly we know physics via vision, but we don’t know the natural kinds of psychology by seeing them; we know it introspectively or “intuitively”. Our conception of the mental is thus closer to its intrinsic nature, and hence more objective (object-centered). This is implicit in traditional epistemology, particularly empiricism, because of the doctrine that knowledge is derived from sense experience. The content of physical theories is supposed to derive from the character of sensory experience, especially visual experience. But vision is par excellence subjective, i.e., relative to the perceiver; it is the original home of perspective. How the world is seen and perceived generally is relative to the species in question. So, the physical world will be apprehended via sensory experience, which is to say subjectively (“the cause of these experiences”). At the least our grasp of physics will be subjectively infused, from the very large to the very small. This is a familiar observation, which need not be labored. The interesting point is that the same thing is not true of our knowledge of psychology: our grasp of the nature of mind is not visually mediated; it is more an example of direct objective knowledge. We know just what pain is, objectively, not merely how it sensorily seems to us. We immediately apprehend its essence, to put it in old-fashioned language. Consequently, psychology contains more objective content than physics; it is less subjective. Its conceptions are less subject-dependent, idiosyncratic, species-relative (consider what an intelligent dog’s physics would be like). Aliens with radically different senses from ours would conceive the physical world differently from us, but they would have much the same conception of the contents of minds (assuming objective psychological constancy). Pain seems the same to anyone who has it, but motion seems different according to one’s mode of perception of it (consider a blind animal).

I now want to put forward a bold conjecture: a priori knowledge in general is more objective than a posteriori knowledge. The reason is clear: a posteriori knowledge is sense-dependent while a priori knowledge is not. The former is “based on experience”, but experience varies from subject to subject; while the latter is not so based and hence not so variable. I mean to include logic, mathematics, and ethics: these are characterized by an absence of sensory foundation, and therefore do not partake of the subjectivity of the sensory. In a sense, our knowledge of them is more direct, less mediated by perception, and hence less beholden to the varieties of sense experience. Our conceptions of the a priori will have more in common with those of alien subjects precisely because they are not based on perceptual experience. You can vary the senses but leave the a priori intact conceptually. Thus, ethics is more objective than physics in the sense explained (there may be other senses in which it is less objective). Logic, for its part, is manifestly more objective than physics (or chemistry, geology, astronomy, etc.), precisely because its epistemology is not dependent on the senses; we don’t think of entailment visually. Of course, physics and astronomy were once highly subjective in that motion was taken as relative to the stationary earth, because of our naive perception of it; but it is also hard to deny that our picture of the physical world is determined by our perception of it. This is not true of logic or mathematics or ethics. The a priori stands above the senses, or apart from them; the a posteriori, by contrast, is up to its neck in perceptual subjectivity. Accordingly, the objective facts of physics are conceived subjectively, at least in part, while the a priori sciences are proudly objective in their mode of conception. The concept of gravity, as we have it, is more subjective than the concept of logical entailment, say. Folk physics is more subjective than folk logic (or folk ethics); and the same may be said of more professional brands of physics, these being rooted in folk conceptions. Phenomenology too is more objective than physics in the intended sense, because of its freedom from the tyranny of the visual. Physics is skewed in a way the a priori sciences are not (including phenomenology).[2]

[1] For background the reader should consult Thomas Nagel’s discussion of objective and subjective in The View from Nowhere, chapter 1.

[2] I take this point to belong to that peculiar philosophical genus, the shocking truism. Physics is perhaps the most subjective of all subjects!