One cannot walk far in the company of moral theorists without hearing our faculty of "moral intuition" either exalted or scorned. The reason for the latter attitude is that the term "intuition" has always carried the scent of impropriety in philosophical and scientific discourse. Having been regularly disgraced by its appearance in colloquialisms like "woman's intuition" (meaning "psychic"), or otherwise directly contrasted with "reason," the word now seems to conjure up all that is cloying and irrational outside the university gates. The only striking exception to this rule is to be found among mathematicians, who apparently speak of their intuitions without the least embarrassment-rather like travelers to exotic places in the developing world who can often be heard discussing the misadventures of their colon over breakfast. But, as we know, mathematicians travel to very exotic places indeed. We might also note that many of them admit to being philosophical Platonists, without feeling any apparent need to consult a trained philosopher for an exorcism.
Whatever its stigma, "intuition" is a term that we simply cannot do without, because it denotes the most basic constituent of our faculty of understanding. While this is true in matters of ethics, it is no less true in science. When we can break our knowledge of a thing down no further, the irreducible leap that remains is intuitively taken. Thus, the traditional opposition between reason and intuition is a false one: reason is itself intuitive to the core, as any judgment that a proposition is "reasonable" or "logical" relies on intuition to find its feet. One often hears scientists and philosophers concede that something or other is a "brute fact"-that is, one that admits of no reduction. The question of why physical events have causes, say, is not one that scientists feel the slightest temptation to ponder. It is just so. To demand an accounting of so basic a fact is like asking how we know that two plus two equals four. Scientists presuppose the validity of such brutishness-as, indeed, they must.
The point, I trust, is obvious: we cannot step out of the darkness without taking a first step. And reason, without knowing how, understands this axiom if it would understand anything at all. The reliance on intuition, therefore, should be no more discomfiting for the ethicist than it has been for the physicist. We are all tugging at the same bootstraps.
It is also true that our intuitions have been known to fail. Indeed, many of the deliverances of reason do not seem reasonable at first glance. When asked how thick a piece of newspaper would be if one could fold it upon itself one hundred times in succession, most of us imagine something about the size of a brick. A little arithmetic reveals, however, that such an object would be as thick as the known universe. If we've learned anything in the last two thousand years, it is that a person's sense of what is reasonable sometimes needs a little help finding its feet.
Or consider the unreliable species of intuition that might be summed up in the statement "Like breeds like"-yielding sympathetic magic and other obvious affronts to reason. Is it reasonable to believe, as many Chinese apparently do, that tiger-bone wine leads to virility? No, it is not. Could it become reasonable? Indeed it could. We need only be confronted with a well-run, controlled study yielding a significant correlation between tiger bones and human prowess. Would a reasonable person expect to find such a correlation? It does not seem very likely. But if it came, reason would be forced to yield its present position, which is that the Chinese are destroying a wondrous species of animal for no reason at all.
But notice that the only manner in which we can criticize the intuitive content of magical thinking is by resort to the intuitive content of rational thinking. "Controlled study"? "Correlation"? Why do these criteria persuade us at all? Isn't it just "obvious" that if one doesn't exclude other possible causes of increased potency-the placebo effect, delusion, environmental factors, differences in health among the subjects, etc.-one will have failed to isolate the variable of tiger bone's effects on the human body? Yes, it's just as obvious as a poke in the eye. Why is it obvious ? Once again, we hit bedrock. As Wittgenstein said, "Our spade is turned."
The fact that we must rely on certain intuitions to answer ethical questions does not in the least suggest that there is anything insubstantial, ambiguous, or culturally contingent about ethical truth. As in any other field, there will be room for intelligent dissent on questions of right and wrong, but intelligent dissent has its limits. People who believe that the earth is flat are not dissenting geographers; people who deny that the Holocaust ever occurred are not dissenting historians; people who think that God created the universe in 4004 BC are not dissenting cosmologists; and we will see that people who practice barbarisms like "honor killing" are not dissenting ethicists. The fact that good ideas are intuitively cashed does not make bad ideas any more respectable.
Ethics, Moral Identity, and Self-interest
While our ethical concerns are necessarily bound up with the understanding that others experience happiness and suffering, there is more to ethics than the mere knowledge that we are not alone in the world. For ethics to matter to us, the happiness and suffering of others must matter to us. It does matter to us, but why?
Strict reductionism does not seem to offer us much hope of insight into ethics. The same, of course, can be said of most higher-level phenomena. Economic behavior necessarily supervenes upon the behavior of atoms, but we will not approach an understanding of economics through particle physics. Fields like game theory and evolutionary biology, for instance, have some plausible stories to tell about the roots of what is generally called "altruistic behavior" in the scientific literature, but we should not make too much of these stories. The finding that nature seems to have selected for our ethical intuitions is relevant only insofar as it gives the lie to the ubiquitous fallacy that these intuitions are somehow the product of religion. But nature has selected for many things that we would have done well to leave behind us in the jungles of Africa. The practice of rape may have once conferred an adaptive advantage on our species-and rapists of all shapes and sizes can indeed be found in the natural world (dolphins, orangutans, chimpanzees, etc.). Does this mean that rape is any less objectionable in human society? Even if we concede that some number of rapes are inevitable, given how human beings are wired, how is this different from saying that some number of cancers are inevitable? We will strive to cure cancer in any case.
To say that something is "natural," or that it has conferred an adaptive advantage upon our species, is not to say that it is "good" in the required sense of contributing to human happiness in the present.24 Admittedly, the problem of adjudicating what counts as happiness, and which forms of happiness should supersede others, is difficult-but so is every other problem worth thinking about. We l86 need only admit that the happiness and suffering of sentient beings (including ourselves) concerns us, and the domain of such concerns is the domain of ethics, to see the possibility that much that is "natural" in human nature will be at odds with what is "good." Appeals to genetics and natural selection can take us only so far, because nature has not adapted us to do anything more than breed. From the point of view of evolution, the best thing a person can do with his life is have as many children as possible. As Stephen Pinker observes, if we really took a gene's eye view of the world "men would line up outside sperm banks and women would pray to have their eggs harvested and given away to infertile couples."25 After all, from my genome's point of view, nothing could be more gratifying than the knowledge that I have fathered thousands of children for whom I now bear no financial responsibility. This, needless to say, is not how most of us seek happiness in this world.
Nor are most of us resolutely selfish, in the narrowest sense of the term. Our selfishness extends to those with whom we are morally identified: to friends and family, to coworkers and teammates, and-if we are in an expansive mood-to humans and animals in general. As Jonathan Glover writes: "Our entanglements with people close to us erode simple self-interest. Husbands, wives, lovers, parents, children and friends all blur the boundaries of selfish concern. Francis Bacon rightly said that people with children h
ave given hostages to fortune. Inescapably, other forms of friendship and love hold us hostage too.... Narrow self-interest is destabilized."26
To treat others ethically is to act out of concern for their happiness and suffering. It is, as Kant observed, to treat them as ends in themselves rather than as a means to some further end. Many ethical injunctions converge here-Kant's categorical imperative, Jesus' golden rule-but the basic facts are these: we experience happiness and suffering ourselves; we encounter others in the world and recognize that they experience happiness and suffering as well; we soon discover that "love" is largely a matter of wishing that others experience happiness rather than suffering; and most of us come to feel that love is more conducive to happiness, both our own and that of others, than hate. There is a circle here that links us to one another: we each want to be happy; the social feeling of love is one of our greatest sources of happiness; and love entails that we be concerned for the happiness of others. We discover that we can be selfish together.
This is just a sketch, but it suggests a clear link between ethics and positive human emotions. The fact that we want the people we love to be happy, and are made happy by love in turn, is an empirical observation. But such observations are the stuff of nascent science. What about people who do not love others, who see no value in it, and yet claim to be perfectly happy? Do such people even exist? Perhaps they do. Does this play havoc with a realistic account of ethics? No more so than an inability to understand the special theory of relativity would cast doubt upon modern physics. Some people can't make heads or tails of the assertion that the passage of time might be relative to one's frame of reference. This prevents them from taking part in any serious discussion of physics. People who can see no link between love and happiness may find themselves in the same position with respect to ethics. Differences of opinion do not pose a problem for ethical realism.
Consider the practice of "honor killing" that persists throughout much of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. We live in a world in which women and girls are regularly murdered by their male relatives for perceived sexual indiscretions-ranging from merely speaking to a man without permission to falling victim of rape. Coverage of these atrocities in the Western media generally refers to them as a "tribal" practice, although they almost invariably occur in a Muslim context. Whether we call the beliefs that inspire this behavior "tribal" or "religious" is immaterial; the problem is clearly a product of what men in these societies believe about shame and honor, about the role of women, and about female sexuality.
One consequence of these beliefs has been to promote rape as a weapon of war. No doubt there are more creaturely and less calculating, motives for soldiers to commit rape on a massive scale, but it cannot be denied that male beliefs about "honor" have made it a brilliant instrument of psychological and cultural oppression. Rape has become a means through which the taboos of a community can be used to rend it from within. Consider the Bosnian women systematically raped by Serbs: one might have thought that since many of their male relatives could not escape getting killed, it would be only reasonable to concede that the women themselves could not escape getting raped. But such flights of ethical intelligence cannot be made with a sufficient payload of unjustified belief-in this case, belief in the intrinsic sinfulness of women, in the importance of virginity prior to marriage, and in the shamefulness of being raped. Needless to say, similar failures of compassion have a venerable pedigree in the Christian West. Augustine, for instance, when considering the moral stature of virgins who had been raped by the Goths, wondered whether they had not been "unduly puffed up by [their] integrity, continence and chastity." Perhaps they suffered "some lurking infirmity which might have betrayed them into proud and contemptuous bearing, had they not been subjected to the humiliation that befell them."27 Perhaps, in other words, they deserved it.28
Given the requisite beliefs about "honor," a man will be desperate to kill his daughter upon learning that she was raped. The same angel of compassion can be expected to visit her brothers as well. Such killings are not at all uncommon in places like Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank.29 In these parts of the world, a girl of any age who gets raped has brought shame upon her family. Luckily, this shame is not indelible and can be readily expunged with her blood. The subsequent ritual is inevitably a low-tech affair, as none of these societies have devised a system for administering lethal injections for the crime of bringing shame upon one's family. The girl either has her throat cut, or she is dowsed with gasoline and set on fire, or she is shot. The jail sentences for these men, if they are prosecuted at all, are invariably short. Many are considered heroes in their communities.
What can we say about this behavior? Can we say that Middle Eastern men who are murderously obsessed with female sexual purity actually love their wives, daughters, and sisters less than American or European men do? Of course, we can. And what is truly incredible about the state of our discourse is that such a claim is not only controversial but actually unutterable in most contexts.
Where's the proof that these men are less capable of love than the rest of us? Well, where would the proof be if a person behaved this way in our own society? Where's the proof that the person who shot JFK didn't really love him ? All the proof we need came from the book depository. We know how the word "love" functions in our discourse. We have all felt love, have failed to feel it, and have occasionally felt its antithesis. Even if we don't harbor the slightest sympathy for their notion of "honor," we know what these honor killers are up to-and it is not a matter of expressing their love for the women in their lives. Of course, honor killing is merely one facet in that terrible kaleidoscope that is the untutored, male imagination: dowry deaths and bride burnings, female infanticide, acid attacks, female genital mutilation, sexual slavery-these and other joys await unlucky women throughout much of the world. There is no doubt that certain beliefs are incompatible with love, and this notion of "honor" is among them.
What is love? Few of us will be tempted to consult a dictionary on the subject. We know that we want those we love to be happy. We feel compassion for their suffering. When love is really effective-that is, really felt, rather than merely imagined-we cannot help sharing in the joy of those we love, and in their anguish as well. The disposition of love entails the loss, at least to some degree, of our utter self-absorption-and this is surely one of the clues as to why this state of mind is so pleasurable. Mo$t of us will find that cutting a little girl's head off after she has been raped just doesn't capture these sentiments very well.
At this point, many anthropologists will want to argue for the importance of cultural context. These murderers are not murderers in the usual sense. They are ordinary, even loving gentlemen who have become the pawns of tribal custom. Taken to its logical conclusion, this view suggests that any behavior is compatible with any mental state. Perhaps there is a culture in which you are expected to flay your firstborn child alive as an expression of "love." But unless everyone in such a culture wants to be flayed alive, this behavior is simply incompatible with love as we know it. The Golden Rule really does capture many of our intuitions here. We treat those we love more or less the way we would like to be treated ourselves. Honor killers do not seem to be in the habit of asking others to drench them in gasoline and immolate them in turn.
Any culture that raises men and boys to kill unlucky girls, rather than comfort them, is a culture that has managed to retard the growth of love. Such societies, of course, regularly fail to teach their inhabitants many other things-like how to read. Not learning how to read is not another style of literacy, and not learning to see others as ends in themselves is not another style of ethics. It is a failure of ethics.
How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to be mere human beings, shorn of any more compelling national, ethnic, or religious identity? We can be reasonable. It is in the very nature of reason to
fuse cognitive and moral horizons. Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.
Morality and Happiness
The link between morality and happiness appears straightforward, though there is clearly more to being happy than merely being moral. There is no reason to think that a person who never lies, cheats, or steals is guaranteed to be happier than a person who commits each of these sins with abandon. As we all know, a kind and compassionate person can still be horribly unlucky, and many a brute appears to have seized Fortune herself by the skirts. Children born without a functioning copy of the gene that produces the enzyme hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase will have a constellation of ailments and incapacities known as Lesch-Nyhan syndrome. They will also compulsively mutilate themselves, possibly as a result of the build-up of uric acid in their tissues. If left unrestrained, such children helplessly gnaw their lips and fingers and even thrust pointed objects into their eyes. It is difficult to see how instruction in morality will contribute meaningfully to their happiness. What these children need is not better moral instruction, or even more parental love. They need hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase.
Without denying that happiness has many requisites-good genes, a nervous system that does not entirely misbehave, etc.-we can hypothesize that whatever a person's current level of happiness is, his condition will be generally improved by his becoming yet more loving and compassionate, and hence more ethical. This is a strictly empirical claim-one that has been tested for millennia by contemplatives in a variety of spiritual traditions, especially within Buddhism. We might wonder whether, in the limit, the unchecked growth of love and compassion might lead to the diminution of a person's sense of well-being, as the suffering of others becomes increasingly his own. Only people who have cultivated these states of mind to an extraordinary degree will be in a position to decide this question, but in the general case there seems to be no doubt that love and compassion are good, in that they connect us more deeply to others.30