Bad Patches

Fetal Philosophy

What kind of philosophy would an intelligent fetus develop? We ourselves don’t have much active intelligence in the womb, but what if we did? What if instead of nine months we had nine years? What if the brain was fully formed by the second year of life, but we were still unborn? Surely our philosophy would reflect our situation. Let’s suppose that we received some input from outside in the form of muffled noises, as well as sensations of touch, taste, smell, and even vision—just very limited. We don’t know we are fetuses or that we have a mother and father; we have no idea that we will one day be born. Then I think it is obvious that we would be rationalist mysterians: we would think that most knowledge is a priori and innate, and that many problems are insoluble by us (despite our excellent reasoning capacities). For we have precious little in the way of sense experience, but full access to our innate endowments. We would be accomplished logicians, mathematicians, and conceptual analysts; but we would know hardly anything of the world beyond the womb by sensory means. Empiricism would not seem like an attractive doctrine. As to mysterianism, we would clearly lack most of the concepts by which we now understand the world. True, we would be womb experts and know a bit about our own bodies and minds, but we would be ignorant of the vast world existing outside the womb. We would be like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, only worse. We would be scientific ignoramuses: no physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, etc. We would be rational beings, by hypothesis, so we would recognize our highly limited range of knowledge. The history of fetal philosophy would accordingly be very different from the history of our normal human philosophy. It would be a history of thwarted knowledge.

What would our ethics be like? It would not include other people, except imaginatively. I conjecture it would be egoistic, i.e., not really ethical. We would have no ethics worthy of the name, because there would be no need for it. The womb-world is a pre-ethical world, i.e., ethical bliss. Fetal consciousness is not troubled by ethical concerns. What would the meaning of life be for the fetus? Being warm, cozy, and well-fed, presumably, that being the limit of fetal experience—though some restless souls might yearn for escape. I suspect life’s meaning wouldn’t be much of an issue for them, especially if they had no idea of death, having never seen it happen. In general, their emotional life would be free of anxiety, since they experience nothing to be anxious about. The bad things of life would have no reality for them, assuming they suffered no illness or physical trauma. These are non-issues for them, though all-consuming for us. Life inside the womb is not the gauntlet it is outside of the womb.

What about the problem of other minds? It too would not really exist, except as a speculative hypothesis. For the fetus encounters no being for whom the question could arise; it is the only mind so far as it is concerned. It has no problem of other-fetus minds. We could consider the question of inter-fetus contact, but assuming this not to exist in our thought experiment, we can take it that the question does not cross the solitary fetus’s mind. It is doubtful that the fetus is aware that it has a mother in whose womb it passes its days (the question of its origin is a mystery to it). It might just think this is the whole of reality—a womb universe. The fetus is a natural solipsist.

What is its philosophy of action and free will? These too are nugatory or negligible: action is very limited and freedom just a word. Does the fetus ever feel imprisoned? Doubtful, because it has no conception of a prison. Does it yearn to run free, climb mountains, ride a horse? Surely not. It isn’t being held against its will; on the contrary. But it does have a philosophy of mental action, as in imagining and thinking; so, the concept of intention enters its thoughts. Its philosophy of action is largely a philosophy of mental not bodily action, though we can suppose it moves its body a bit. It has no inclination to believe in behaviorism. The fetus is more of a mental being than a born creature is. It is disembodied before it is born. What is its philosophy of the afterlife? It finds this mystifying, but I suspect inclines to something like a cosmic mind theory. It has no attraction to materialism. It has no concept of its brain.

Does the fetus have any objective conception of the world? Can it transcend its subjective viewpoint? It will have a view of its immediate environment—warm, moist, and soft—but will this view be detached from its own modes of awareness? It will not: it won’t have a bleached-out abstract physical-biological conception of the enveloping womb. Indeed, it won’t have any objective conception of physical reality at all, given its sensory and intellectual resources. It will be totally immersed in its own subjectivity. It will have nothing like an empirical science. No distinction between primary and secondary qualities, or anything like that. It will be unable to transcend its own subjective viewpoint.

How different is our post-natal situation from the situation of the fetus? Isn’t it really a matter of degree? After all, we were all once fetuses who were removed from the womb. And isn’t planet Earth just another version of the womb, but bigger and less hospitable? The womb was once our environment, and then the Earth took over. There is no sharp line; consider the marsupial pouch. The mother feeds and protects the infant when it is no longer inside her body (we can call this the extended womb). And it isn’t as if the womb is proof against fatal catastrophe.[1]

[1] General lesson: our philosophy is not the only kind that would be produced by any intelligent being (this is not to say that philosophical truth is relative). Just as a caterpillar might have a different philosophy from a butterfly, so a womb creature might have a different philosophy from an ambulatory creature.

Moral Knowledge and Moral Language

Moral knowledge is one thing; moral language is quite another. The two topics need to be treated separately. I am mainly concerned here with the language question, but I will make some prefatory remarks about moral knowledge. Moral knowledge comprises knowledge-that, knowledge-how, and knowledge-what: we know (say) that genocide is wrong, we know how to reason about moral questions, and we know what various moral categories are (the right, the good, the virtuous). This knowledge is a priori, largely innate, and arises spontaneously in the human mind (but not in the animal mind, except rudimentarily, if at all). We have a good grasp of various moral natural kinds—lying, stealing, promise-keeping, beneficence, etc.—as well as very general moral kinds such as good and bad acts. These are not like natural kinds whose real essence may be unknown to us. Importantly, moral knowledge is not subject to traditional skepticism: there are no brain-in-a-vat scenarios to contend with (the inhabitants of the Matrix are not morally deluded). Thus, we are justifiably certain of what we claim to know. Also, we are not tormented by the limits of our moral knowledge—it has comprehensive scope. We are not cognitively closed to certain identifiable moral questions as a matter of principle. All in all, our moral knowledge is in good shape; arguably, better than our knowledge of the external world (let alone the past and future). We get an A for moral knowledge—and we didn’t have to study for the test.[1] We might suppose, given our epistemic credentials, that our moral language would be similarly distinguished—that our linguistic moral competence would reflect our epistemic moral competence. We should be expert moral speakers.

But, alas, it isn’t true; indeed, our moral language has struggled to express our moral knowledge. We have trouble verbally articulating our moral understanding. Not to point too fine a point on it, our moral language is inadequate, dubious, slipshod, and metaphorical; it is easy to poke holes in it and lament its imperfections. Logically perfect it is not. The linguistic moral turn is a turn towards the dark, clumsy, and impoverished. First, the moral word “good” has to share its form with the non-moral “good” (and similarly for “right” and “ought”). Second, it is hard to find true moral generalizations: we can’t say lying is always wrong, or promise-breaking, or stealing, or killing. We can’t even say that maximizing happiness is always right (it can conflict with justice). Thus, we are treated to tortuous formulations like “Lying is prima facie wrong”, which even its author (W.D. Ross) feels the need to apologize for. Or we are urged to adopt the imperative mood to express our moral knowledge: “Do this, don’t do that!” But the imperative mood has nothing essentially to do with morality and is wheeled in in a vain attempt to capture the normative force of moral truth—truth, mark you, not obedience. Imperative sentences have nothing logically to do with moral principles or precepts. Moral truths need no commanding authority to give them force (even God). Moral knowledge is not commandment knowledge—that applies to the military not the moral. To act immorally is not to disobey orders (that is neither necessary not sufficient). Nor will categorical propositions do: “Generosity is good”, “Lying is bad” etc. For these are wide open to counterexample and much too strong; they breed skepticism about the force of morality. We all know that morality is not so simple, that such statements must be taken with a grain of salt; but how should they be amended so as to correspond with our moral thought? Should we insert a ceteris paribus qualifying clause? But then, we have to be able say when the generalization breaks down. We just don’t seem to be able verbally to hit the nail on the moral head, to find the moral mot just. The case is somewhat like aesthetics and laws of nature: here too the facts, and our knowledge of them, seem difficult to fit into linguistic form. Our aesthetic knowledge is extensive and sophisticated, but our aesthetic vocabulary is comparatively limited. The word “beauty” has to do a lot of heavy lifting. No doubt this is partly because aesthetics is an affair of the senses for the most part, and our sense experience is notoriously rich compared to our vocabulary. The beauty of a landscape is hard to put into words, as we all know. Likewise, laws of nature are real and known and yet their linguistic formulation is much disputed—how exactly should we frame them? Are they universal generalizations over particulars, or modalized versions of same, or statements about universals, or not statements at all but truth-less predictive devices, or summaries of observations? We find it difficult to put our knowledge of natural laws into words (some of it is knowledge-how). Morality is like this: our knowledge of morality pre-dates our language for it, and our language lags behind, or is inherently unsuitable for the task assigned to it. Morality verges on the ineffable. We can make individual judgments well enough, but we find it difficult to formulate general principles. We can’t even say what grammatical mood best expresses it. We are a bit like Tarzan in the jungle: “Jane, good, snake bad”.

I don’t see any cure for this linguistic lack, but I think I see an area of moral language that gets neglected, and which has some signal virtues. The approach is to privilege the comparative form, so I call it “comparativism”. Thus, “It is better to work than steal”, “It is better to tell the truth than lie”, “It is better to preserve life than destroy it”, etc. In this approach we mark a contrast; we situate the moral value we wish to praise and promote in the context of its opposite. It is better to do X than Y—that is the basic logical form. This doesn’t logically imply that X is good or the best; more modestly, it says that one thing is better than another. It doesn’t make an outright claim of moral goodness. We could paraphrase these formulas as “On the whole, it is better to do X than Y”, thus allowing for exceptions (stealing food in extremity, lying to save an innocent life). Such statements are calculated to ward off accusations of unreasonable absoluteness; they therefore accommodate the principled objector to more absolute formulations—they are easier to accept as true than their stronger counterparts. Note that our moral knowledge might be less qualified, because it can take in more complexity; the comparative theory applies only to moral language—to what we should say morally. In its most forthright form, the theory contends that the basic laws of morality have this comparative form: this is what we mean by saying something is good or bad; this the correct analysis of our moral talk (our thought might be different). It is a linguistic theory not an epistemological or ontological theory. Intuitively, we are saying that one thing is morally superior to another thing with which it might be in competition. It is better, for example, generally to tell the truth rather than to tell a lie. Why this should be is another question—maybe because it is more likely to generate long-term good consequences. It might also be taken to mean that truth-telling as an act of will is inherently more righteous than lying (Kant), though in certain circumstances this intrinsic superiority might be overridden (not Kant). The important point is that we use the comparative form in our verbal explications of the content of morality, i.e., our moral knowledge. They can, of course, be modified according to need and nuance, as in “It is far better to preserve life than to destroy it”. Instead of just saying, baldly, “It is (categorically) wrong to steal”, we can say “It is better on the whole to work for what you have than to steal it from someone else”. Then we allow ourselves wiggle room to append “though in certain circumstances what counts as theft legally need not be a decisive objection to stealing”. Notice there is nothing relativistic about this approach: in every society it is better to tell the truth than to lie, even if members of the society reject such a principle (say by being out-and-out ethical egoists). It is more the idea that moral concepts naturally come in pairs between which a comparison is being made. Russell once gave as an example of an a priori moral truth “Happiness is better than misery”: that seems both true and certain, and it is a comparative claim—not merely the claim that happiness is good, period. Compared to what, one wants to ask. It also allows us to say that happiness is not better than (warranted) grief on a particular occasion—it is just better on the whole. We know what is meant in the simple formulation, because our moral knowledge exceeds our linguistic resources, but the language is clumsy and potentially misleading. Our moral competence outstrips our linguistic competence, but the comparative speech act does better at conveying what morality is all about. It is better than imperatival prescriptivism or statements of prima facie duty or emotional ejaculation or universal quantification; it is truer to the heart of the matter. We might almost say it is less intellectually offensive than other formulations, especially to critically minded people looking for something they can in good conscience get behind. No one wants to put their life on the line for a false or clumsy verbal formula. Moral comparativism has the right combination of the confident and the qualified, the assertive and the modest. We don’t want to understate the strength and seriousness of morality or to overstate its strictness and universality. The language of morals has to steer a judicious line between these two extremes. Moral knowledge meanwhile can capably go its own way, resorting to verbal expression only when necessary.[2]

[1] I am quickly summarizing here, omitting many a caveat; I don’t attempt to defend these views, merely to set the stage for my discussion of moral language.

[2] Have you ever noticed how, when searching for words to express extreme moral outrage, the right moral language seems out of reach—nothing quite measures up? One resorts to animal metaphors or excremental ones. The language seems puny and inept. Our moral language is cognitively and emotionally under-powered. Attempts at general principles often fall flat. The language faculty is not properly hooked up to the moral faculty. Morality is not inherently linguistic (like laws of nature).

Art for Art’s Sake

I am fed up to the back teeth with this slogan. It may have once seemed brave and insightful, but now it reveals a complete failure of moral judgment (and intelligence). It is the opposite of the truth. First, let’s parse it, because it conceals a slyly tendentious ambiguity. It clearly means “The purpose of art is art” (art is autotelic, in the lingo). Equally clearly it is intended as a normative statement not a descriptive one: it doesn’t say that all art is actually done for itself, but rather that this is how art ought to be. There would be no point in saying it if artists already conformed to it. It is presupposing that many artists don’t proceed according to its prescription, but they should. And what is that they do so faultily? They treat art as a means to a moral end: they think the purpose of art is promoting the good—the moral good. So, the proponent of the autotelic view is saying that art is an end in itself not a means of making the world a better place. We can agree that the artist is doing art not morality—he is an artist, after all—but the slogan is urging artists to do only this: to have no moral intentions, to advance no moral cause. The artist is concerned solely and wholly with non-moral objectives—say, aesthetic experience or emotional response. Of course, the artist has artistic intentions, but we are being told that he should have no other intentions. So, the slogan becomes “The purpose of art is only art, not morality”. It is like saying “The purpose of art is only art, not brick laying”. Morality is extrinsic to the work of art. No novel, say, should concern itself with moral themes, with good and evil, on pain of not being art (or artistic). You disqualify yourself as an artist by building moral content into your work. Perhaps the reader can now see why I am fed up to the back teeth with this slogan; it is patent nonsense, pure rubbish. All art has, or should have, moral content, especially the written kind: it is concerned with good and evil, virtue and vice, right and wrong. It would have no human interest if it were not. Of course, it should not be inartistically concerned with such themes, but it is not a condition on being art that it not be concerned with them (pace Oscar Wilde and Vladimir Nabokov). Nor should it be concerned didactically to support received morality, conventional bourgeois morality; and in fact, art frequently makes a point of criticizing such morality. It would be absurd to announce that the purpose of art is only morality, but it clearly is a concern of the artist. Why would anyone want to deny this?

Compare science: “Science for science’s sake”. Suppose we paraphrase this as “The sole purpose of science is science—and certainly not the promotion of the good”. That is, we insist that science (the institution) is concerned only with scientific standards: truth, evidence, theoretical interest, and nothing else. This is obviously not so: we have pure science and applied science, and applied science is often concerned with human (and animal) welfare (medical science). Why would we want to preclude the scientist from having moral concerns, such as the desire to cure cancer—would this make him a bad scientist?  This is palpable rubbish, is it not? The scientist is quite capable of having several distinct aims at the same time: achieving scientific truth, improving the lot of mankind, earning a living, impressing his colleagues, etc. He presumably also believes that scientific truth is itself an intrinsic good, so to that extent is enmeshed in normative notions—as is also true of the value of artistic good (beauty is a good). The moral aims have to be the right ones, naturally, but assuming they are, there is no discredit to the scientist in pursuing them. He might well be criticized for not pursuing them. There is no incompatibility between science and morality, as there is no incompatibility between art and morality. Indeed, morally bad science should not be undertaken, as morally bad art should not be. We can make the same point with respect to many human activities: history, philosophy, psychology, economics, politics, mathematics, cookery, entertainment, education, etc. Try substituting these into the slogan and see if you like the result: for example, “Philosophy for philosophy’s sake, not for goodness’s sake”. Should philosophy never be concerned with morality—is ethics not part of its remit? It can be concerned with other things too, as art can also be. The right thing to say is that art is properly concerned with beauty, truth, and goodness; they are all part of its plural purpose. In this it is like many other human activities. It is quite wrong to maintain that art is only about aesthetic thrills (Nabokov) or pleasure (Wilde). A novel, say, is generally about all these things, with morality surely at the center; some novels are clearly intended to make a specific moral point, and are no less artistic for that (e.g., Black Beauty). Contrary to what its author insists, Lolita is in fact a deeply moral novel and gains much of its aesthetic impact from that fact. How could a novel not be occupied with morality, since it concerns human action, into which morality is woven. Drama is about good and evil, and drama is the point of a great deal of art.

It is hard not to see the autotelic view of art as reflecting a general cynicism about morality and wanting to protect art from the taint of the moral. If morality is subjective, relative, shapeless, and conventional, we won’t want it infecting the artistic work; but that sophomoric position is hardly compulsory (in fact, it is ridiculous). Sound morality elevates the novel (as in the work of Jane Austen, among many others). It is interesting that the form of our slogan is correct only for morality: “Morality for morality’s sake, not for money’s sake or power’s sake”. The only purpose of morality is to secure morally right conduct, however that may be defined—doesn’t that sound eminently reasonable? The novel should be proud to contain a large helping of morality; we expect nothing less. Morality isn’t the opposite of art but its backbone. It may well be true of music, painting, and dance that they have little or nothing to do with morality; but they are the exceptions that prove the rule, since they are not narrative forms. The ear and eye can be aesthetically stimulated by these art forms without any moral thoughts flowing through the mind of the observer, but the same is not true of narrative art—i.e., stories. If someone asserted “Stories for stories’ sake, only”, we would recoil in disbelief. The original slogan possesses what prima facie plausibility it does by suggesting non-narrative art, but narrative art is transparently morally imbued. And it is surely a wild exaggeration to try to assimilate narrative art to music, painting, and dance—as if we are responding to what our eyes present to us in reading a book. It is true that the written word can possess internal artistic features, but the novel is not about such features—and we surely don’t want to suggest that the novel is only artistic in virtue of such features. Sometimes the moral shape of a novel is the main part of its artistic appeal.[1]

[1] I rattle on about these themes in Ethics, Evil and Fiction and Shakespeare’s Philosophy. I know for a fact that I had covert moral intentions in writing my two novels, Bad Patches and The Space Trap, as well as narrowly artistic intentions. Wilde and Nabokov were stern moralists, if very funny and artistic ones.