The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil (this is traditionally called the problem of theodicy) is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.7 Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.
Ethics and the Sciences of Mind
The connection between ethics and the scientific understanding of consciousness, while rarely made, is ineluctable, for other creatures become the objects of our ethical concern only insofar as we attribute consciousness (or perhaps potential consciousness) to them. That most of us feel no ethical obligations toward rocks-to treat them with kindness, to make sure they do not suffer unduly-can be derived from the fact that most of us do not believe that there is anything that it is like to be a rock.8 While a science of consciousness is still struggling to be born, it is sufficient for our purposes to note that the problem of ascertaining our ethical obligations to non-human animals (as well as to humans who have suffered neurological injury, to human fetuses, to blastocysts, etc.) requires that we better understand the relationship between mind and matter. Do crickets suffer? I take it as a given that this question is both coherently posed and has an answer, whether or not we will ever be in a position to answer it ourselves.
This is the point at which our notions about mind and matter directly influence our notions of right and wrong. We should recall that the practice of vivisection was given new life by certain missteps in the philosophy of mind-when Descartes, in thrall to both Christian dogma and mechanistic physics, declared that all nonhuman animals were mere automata, devoid of souls and therefore insensible to pain.9 One of his contemporaries observed the immediate consequences of this view:
The scientists administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They nailed the poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them to see the circulation of blood, which was a great subject of controversy.10
Cognitive chauvinism of this sort has not merely been a problem for animals. The doubt, on the part of Spanish explorers, about whether or not South American Indians had "souls" surely contributed to the callousness with which they treated them during their conquest of the New World. Admittedly, it is difficult to say just how far down the phylogenic tree our ethical responsibilities run. Our intuitions about the consciousness of other animals are driven by a variety of factors, many of which probably have no bearing upon whether or not they are conscious. For instance, creatures that lack facial expressiveness-or faces at all-are more difficult to include within the circle of our moral concern. It seems that until we more fully understand the relationship between brains and minds, our judgments about the possible scope of animal suffering will remain relatively blind and relatively dogmatic.11
There will probably come a time when we achieve a detailed understanding of human happiness, and of ethical judgments themselves, at the level of the brain.12 Just as defects in color vision can result from genetic and developmental disorders, problems can undoubtedly arise in our ethical and emotional circuitry as well. To say that a person is "color-blind" or "achromatopsic" is now a straightforward statement about the state of the visual pathways in his brain, while to say that he is "an evil sociopath" or "lacking in moral fiber" seems hopelessly unscientific. This will almost certainly change. If there are truths to be known about how human beings conspire to make one another happy or miserable, there are truths to be known about ethics.13 A scientific understanding of the link between intentions, human relationships, and states of happiness would have much to say about the nature of good and evil and about the proper response to the moral transgressions of others. There is every reason to believe that sustained inquiry in the moral sphere will force convergence of our various belief systems in the way that it has in every other science-that is, among those who are adequate to the task.14 That so little convergence has been achieved in ethics can be ascribed to the fact that so few of the facts are in (indeed, we have yet to agree about the most basic criteria for deeming an ethical fact,
a fact). So many conversations have not yet been had; so many intuitions have not yet been exercised; so many arguments have not yet been won. Our reliance upon religious dogma explains this. Most of our religions have been no more supportive of genuine moral inquiry than of scientific inquiry generally. This is a problem that only new rules of discourse can overcome. When was the last time that someone was criticized for not "respecting" another person's unfounded beliefs about physics or history? The same rules should apply to ethical, spiritual, and religious beliefs as well. Credit goes to Christopher Hitchens for distilling, in a single phrase, a principle of discourse that could well arrest our slide toward the abyss: "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."15 Let us pray that billions of us soon agree with him.
Moral Communities
The notion of a moral community resolves many paradoxes of human behavior. How is it, after all, that a Nazi guard could return each day from his labors at the crematoria and be a loving father to his children? The answer is surprisingly straightforward: the Jews he spent the day torturing and killing were not objects of his moral concern. Not only were they outside his moral community; they were antithetical to it. His beliefs about Jews inured him to the natural human sympathies that might have otherwise prevented such behavior.
Unfortunately, religion casts more shadows than light on this terrain. Rather than find real reasons for human solidarity, faith offers us a solidarity born of tribal and tribalizing fictions. As we have seen, religion is one of the great limiters of moral identity, since most believers differentiate themselves, in moral terms, from those who do not share their faith. No other ideology is so eloquent on the subject of what divides one moral community from another. Once a person accepts the premises upon which most religious identities are built, the withdrawal of his moral concern from those who do not share these premises follows quite naturally. Needless to say, the suffering of those who are destined for hell can never be as problematic as the suffering of the righteous. If certain people can't see the unique wisdom and sanctity of my religion, if their hearts are so beclouded by sin, what concern is it of mine if others mistreat them? They have been cursed by the very God who made the world and all things in it. Their search for happiness was simply doomed from the start.
New problems arise once we commit ourselves to finding a rational foundation for our ethics. Indeed, we find that it is difficult to draw the boundaries of our moral concern in a principled way. It is clear, for instance, that susceptibility to pain cannot be our only criteria. As Richard Rorty observes, "If pain were all that mattered, it would be as important to protect the rabbits from the foxes as to protect the Jews from the Nazis."16 In virtue of what have we convinced ourselves that we need not intercede on behalf of all rabbits ? Most of us suspect rabbits are not capable of experiencing happiness or suffering on a human scale. Admittedly we could be wrong about this. And if it ever seems that we have underestimated the subjectivity of rabbits, our ethical stance toward them would no doubt change. Incidentally, here is where a rational answer to the abortion debate is lurking. Many of us consider human fetuses in the first trimester to be more or less like rabbits: having imputed to them a range of happiness and suffering that does not grant them full status in our moral community. At present, this seems rather reasonable. Only future scientific insights could refute this intuition.
The problem of specifying the criteria for inclusion in our moral community is one for which I do not have a detailed answer-other than to say that whatever answer we give should reflect our se
nse of the possible subjectivity of the creatures in question. Some answers are clearly wrong. We cannot merely say, for instance, that all human beings are in, and all animals are out. What will be our criterion for humanness? DNA? Shall a single human cell take precedence over a herd of elephants? The problem is that whatever attribute we use to differentiate between humans and animals-intelligence, language use, moral sentiments, and so on-will equally differentiate between human beings themselves. If people are more important to us than orangutans because they can articulate their interests, why aren't more articulate people more important still? And what about those poor men and woman with aphasia? It would seem that we have just excluded them from our moral community. Find an orangutan that can complain about his family in Borneo, and he may well displace a person or two from our lifeboat.
The Demon of Relativism
We saw in chapter 2 that for our beliefs to function logically-indeed, for them to be beliefs at all-we must also believe that they faithfully represent states of the world. This suggests that some systems of belief will appear more faithful than others, in that they will account for more of the data of experience and make better predictions about future events. And yet, many intellectuals tend to speak as though something in the last century of ratiocination in the West has placed all worldviews more or less on an equal footing. No one is ever really right about what he believes; he can only point to a community of peers who believe likewise. Suicide bombing isn't really wrong, in any absolute sense; it just seems so from the parochial perspective of Western culture. Throw a dash of Thomas Kuhn into this pot, and everyone can agree that we never really know how the world is, because each new generation of scientists reinvents the laws of nature to suit its taste. Convictions of this sort generally go by the name of "relativism," and they seem to offer a rationale for not saying anything too critical about the beliefs of others. But most forms of relativism-including moral relativism, which seems especially well subscribed-are nonsensical. And dangerously so. Some may think that it is immaterial whether we think the Nazis were really wrong in ethical terms, or whether we just don't like their style of life. It seems to me, however, that the belief that some worldviews really are better than others taps a different set of intellectual and moral resources. These are resources we will desperately need if we are to oppose, and ultimately unseat, the regnant ignorance and tribalism of our world.
The general retort to relativism is simple, because most relativists contradict their thesis in the very act of stating it. Take the case of relativism with respect to morality: moral relativists generally believe that all cultural practices should be respected on their own terms, that the practitioners of the various barbarisms that persist around the globe cannot be judged by the standards of the West, nor can the people of the past be judged by the standards of the present. And yet, implicit in this approach to morality lurks a claim that is not relative but absolute. Most moral relativists believe that tolerance of cultural diversity is better, in some important sense, than outright bigotry. This may be perfectly reasonable, of course, but it amounts to an overarching claim about how all human beings should live. Moral relativism, when used as a rationale for tolerance of diversity, is self-contradictory.
There is, however, a more sophisticated version of this line of thinking that is not so easily dispatched. It generally goes by the name of "pragmatism," and its most articulate spokesmen is undoubtedly Richard Rorty.17 While Rorty is not a household name, his work has had a great influence on our discourse, and it offers considerable shelter to the shades of relativism. If we ever hope to reach a global consensus on matters of ethics-if we would say, for instance, that stoning women for adultery is really wrong, in some absolute sense-we must find deep reasons to reject pragmatism. Doing so, we will discover that we are in a position to make strong cross-cultural claims about the reasonableness of various systems of belief and about good and evil.
The pragmatist's basic premise is that, try as we might, the currency of our ideas cannot be placed on the gold standard of correspondence with reality as it is. To call a statement "true" is merely to praise it for how it functions in some area of discourse; it is not to say anything about how it relates to the universe at large. From the point of view of pragmatism, the notion that our beliefs might "correspond with reality" is absurd. Beliefs are simply tools for making one's way in the world. Does a hammer correspond with reality? No. It has merely proven its usefulness for certain tasks. So it is, we are told, with the "truths" of biology, history, or any other field. For the pragmatist, the utility of a belief trumps all other concerns, even the concern for coherence.18 If a literalist reading of the Bible works for you on Sundays, while agnosticism about God is better suited to Mondays at the office, there is no reason to worry about the resulting contradictions in your worldview. These are not so much incompatible claims about the way the world is as different styles of talking, each suited to a particular occasion.
If all of this seems rather academic, it might be interesting to note that Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden's favorite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of American civilization. He thought that it would, in Berman's phrase, "undermine America's ability to fend off its enemies."19 There may be some truth to this assertion. Pragmatism, when civilizations come clashing, does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually be right-about anything -seems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." I believe that relativism and pragmatism have already done much to muddle our thinking on a variety of subjects, many of which have more than a passing relevance to the survival of civilization.
In philosophical terms, pragmatism can be directly opposed to realism. For the realist, our statements about the world will be "true" or "false" not merely in virtue of how they function amid the welter of our other beliefs, or with reference to any culture-bound criteria, but because reality simply is a certain way, independent of our thoughts.20 Realists believe that there are truths about the world that may exceed our capacity to know them; there are facts of the
18l matter whether or not we can bring such facts into view. To be an ethical realist is to believe that in ethics, as in physics, there are truths waiting to be discovered -and thus we can be right or wrong in our beliefs about them.21
According to pragmatists like Rorty, realism is doomed because there is no way to compare our description of reality with a piece of undescribed reality. As Jurgen Habermas says, "since the truth of beliefs or sentences can in turn be justified only with the help of other beliefs and sentences, we cannot break free from the magic circle of our language."22 This is a clever thesis. But is it true? The fact that language is the medium in which our knowledge is represented and communicated says nothing at all about the possibilities of unmediated knowledge per se. The fact that no experience when talked about escapes being mediated by language (this is a tautology) does not mean that all cognition, and hence all knowing, is interpretative. If it were possible for any facet of reality to be known perfectly-if certain mystics, for instance, were right to think that they had enjoyed unmediated knowledge of transcendental truths-then pragmatism would be just plain wrong, realistically. The problem for the pragmatist is not that such a mystic stands a good chance of being right. The problem is that, whether the mystic is right or wrong, he must be right or wrong realistically. In opposing the idea that we can know reality directly, the pragmatist has made a covert, realistic claim about the limits of human knowledge. Pragmatism amounts to a realistic denial of the possibility of realism. And so, like the relativist, the pragmatist appears to reach a contradiction before he has even laced his shoes. A more thorough argument along these lines has been relegated to a long endnote, so as not to kill the general reader with boredom.23
Relativists and pragmatists believe that truth is just a matter of consensus. I think it is clear, however, that while consensu
s among like minds may be the final arbiter of truth, it cannot constitute it. It is quite conceivable that everyone might agree and yet be wrong about the way the world is. It is also conceivable that a single person might be right in the face of unanimous opposition. From a realist point of view, it is possible (though unlikely) for a single person, or culture, to have a monopoly on the truth.
It would seem, therefore, that nothing stands in the way of our presuming that our beliefs about the world can correspond, to a greater or lesser degree, to the way the world is-whether or not we will ever be in a position to finally authenticate such correspondence. Given that there are likely to be truths to be known about how members of our species can be made as happy as possible, there are almost certainly truths to be known about ethics. To say that we will never agree on every question of ethics is the same as saying that we will never agree on every question of physics. In neither case does the open-endedness of our inquiry suggest that there are no real facts to be known, or that some of the answers we have in hand are not really better than some others. Respect for diversity in our ethical views is, at best, an intellectual holding pattern until more of the facts are in.
Intuition