So what happens when we try to take our reasons all the way down? When we continue asking why we should do anything? We begin to get to a complex meta-ethical question: what constitutes a reason for action? What is it to have a reason to do something? (Warning: this will be an abstract and theoretical post, but it is important to fundamental questions like why we should do anything at all.)

There are at least three things that this last question could mean, three things we could be saying when we speak of having reasons. I like to distinguish the different kinds of reasons in terms of grammar: it’s so far the most precise way I’ve found of spelling them out. There is on one hand a difference of case, between ablative and dative reasons; and on the other a difference of person, between third-person and first-person reasons. English has the second of these distinctions but not the first.

I know the distinction between ablative and dative from my study of Sanskrit and Pali (and to a lesser extent Latin) grammar; the same distinction, I believe, is there in Greek. (It’s not there in German, which has only a dative and no ablative.) In Sanskrit, ablative and dative case endings can both be used to express what we would normally call reasons; but they are very different kinds of reasons. The ablative case describes a cause; it describes the reason why we did something (or why we’re doing it or will do it). The dative case describes a purpose; it describes our reason to do something. The ablative in this sense is translated with “because”; the dative, with “in order to.”

So when we speak of reasons, it can be helpful to specify whether we’re speaking of reasons in the sense expressed by the dative, or only by the ablative. Ablative reasons are the reasons that natural scientists are best at expressing; they’re the only kinds of reasons discovered by chemistry or physics. Everything in the universe acts according to ablative reasons: the rock fell because it had been dropped (and because of gravity). Essentially, they are causes; the “why” in an ablative reason can be replaced with a “how.” In Aristotle’s scheme of four explanations, they are efficient explanations.

Dative reasons, by contrast, are final explanations; they have to do with purpose, aims, teleology. On Aristotle’s understanding, everything had a dative reason; for a modern scientific understanding, this is not the case. There is no purpose to rocks falling or the sun shining. There is, however, some sort of purpose in the biological action of lifeforms, even on a purely scientific explanation. We cannot explain the movements of, say, blood clotting in a wound entirely on the basis of chemical and physical movement; we explain the blood clotting much more effectively if we can talk about what it’s for, namely to protect the wound and stop bleeding. Purpose is such a central part of biological explanation that, until Darwin, it was the most obvious and preferred proof for the existence of God. Everything biological, from the cell to the ecosystem, acts with some purpose to the preservation and reproduction of life; how could this have happened without the action of a God? Nobody had a good answer to that question until Darwin; ever since then, evolution replaced God in explanations, and people have made attempts to base ethics on evolution (usually failing miserably).

It’s dative and not ablative reasons that are of interest to me here. Ablative reasons help us explain the action of the universe; but they tell us less of interest for ethics. To ask “why should we do something?” we need to ask about purpose.

Some – especially Kant – would step in and require a further distinction among dative reasons. The best way I’ve found of putting this distinction is also grammatical: third-person versus first-person reasons. (My grad-school colleague Drew Schroeder used this distinction to help explain Kant to me, though I don’t think Kant himself puts it in those terms.) When a biologist explains blood clotting in terms of its purpose, Kant would say, that explanation too has nothing to do with what actions we should actually take. The purpose of our action has to come from within us.

Sociologists and psychologists can easily explain actions in dative terms. This is clearest in the case of functionalists like Talcott Parsons, for whom basically every social phenomenon can be explained in terms of its purpose for society at large, but pretty much every social scientist will explain actions in terms of some sort of purpose, including individual self-interest or evolutionary fitness. But they’re still explaining action causally, looking at the social or biological variables that cause one course of action to be taken rather than not taken. In the end these third-person dative reasons still turn out to be efficient explanations: we ask what something is for only in order to explain what caused it. First-person reasons are different: they’re the reasons that we use for choice and deliberation in an action.

On the internalist view, I think, these distinctions look a bit less important. If our reasons for action come down to our existing desires or other motivations, then it may well be sufficient to say that we want X because it gives us pleasure, and it gives us pleasure because our upbringing predisposes us that way. But I think it’s that very way of phrasing the question that looks suspicious to the externalist. Should we really take a view that’s that conservative – that just leaves the preferences formed by genes and upbringing as they are? Don’t we want to have better reasons than just being slaves of our pasts? It’s the sorts of judgements implied in those questions – the idea that it is better to make a free and rational choice – that Kant appeals to, and I don’t think it’s too hard to see the appeal in his view.

Christmas appears to have a dual message in our culture. ‘Rampant consumerism’ is one half, and ‘The True Meaning Of Christmas ™’ is the second. While there are exceptions that focus more on family and loved ones and generosity, references to TTMOC largely also include references to the birth of Jesus.

I think Ben is on to something important: an unreflective understanding of Christmas can turn into a simple consumerism. So, many who do reflect on Christmas either refuse to celebrate it at all or try to make it entirely about Jesus. I think both reactions, but especially the latter, are examples of single-mindedness as a problem: an attempt to pick out one single meaning that’s most important and ignore the details. But for those of us who genuinely enjoy Christmas, the details can be the most important part.

In my reply to Ben’s first comment I pointed to trees, wreaths, “Deck the Halls” – trappings of North American and at least some European Christmas that have no clear connection to Jesus but also don’t require any consumerism. Ben replied that those elements of Christmas scarcely have any meaning left if one takes out the two alternatives of consumerism and the Christian “true meaning”: people do them only because their family did when they were young and it leaves them with happy associations.

In my reply at the time, I focused on the performative implications of the rituals, on what they do: nobody really agrees on what Diwali “means,” but it never really seems to matter. They bring us together as families and as a larger cultural community – which is why some non-Christian Indians celebrate Christmas when they come to North America, and why my immediate family (who do not identify as Hindu) celebrated Diwali in India. Along with weddings and funerals, Christmas seems to me the closest North American analogue to the traditional familial rituals that Confucius viewed as crucial to a good life. In this light I also pointed a while ago to Frits Staal‘s conception of ritual as “rules without meaning.” While I had previously disparaged performance theory – the idea that the important thing about a traditional action is not what it means but what it does – I did come to realize that sometimes that can indeed be true, and thought about the point especially with regard to Christmas.

So far this has been a summing up of things I’ve said before, in one manner or another. But more recently I’ve been thinking in a different direction about Christmas rituals. I’ve come to think their meaning does matter, even for us non-Christians – but in a way that doesn’t have to do with Jesus. Christmas, as a traditional ritual passed down through history, has multiple meanings of which the significance of Jesus of Nazareth is only one.

On another post about Christmas, my wife Caitlin referred to the origins of Christmas in pre-Christian ritual. And I’ve lately been thinking about Christmas differently because of her, as well. She loves Christmas, but dislikes the rest of the winter season, because she loves being out in sunlight.

And only after being with her did it occur to me that Christmas is in many respects a ritual about darkness. Like (the Western) New Year’s Day, its timing is linked to the winter solstice – the shortest day of the year. In the northern hemisphere, 25 December is far from the coldest time of year, but give or take a week, it is the darkest. And a great deal of its rituals focus on lights shining against that darkness – often lighting candles, but nowadays especially the small coloured lights on strings that, in North America, are known as “Christmas lights” whatever time of year they appear. So too, the English-language Christmas carols about Jesus’s birth repeatedly return to the theme of darkness and night, whether in their titles (“Silent Night,” “O Holy Night”) or in their content (when “O Little Town of Bethlehem” proclaims “But in thy dark street shineth the everlasting light”).

The emphasis on darkness and night doesn’t come from the Bible. As far as I can tell, the biblical accounts of Jesus’s birth mention only once that it took place at night, and that in passing: “In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.” (Luke 2:8) Moreover, the biblical authors did not deem it important to fix a date for Jesus’s birth; it is generally agreed that the date of Christmas was chosen to coincide with a preexisting festival occurring near the winter solstice, though there is some debate as to which one.

I don’t know enough about the history of Christmas to say when and how the various night- and darkness-related aspects of its mythology emerged. But it seems likely to me that these have less to do with the birth of Jesus itself than with the timing of the festival at the winter solstice. The idea of light in the darkness makes some sense as a Christian metaphor for the presence of Jesus in a non-Christian world, but that doesn’t seem enough to explain the ubiquity of light and darkness language in the tradition, especially given the seasonal timing. (In this respect the celebration of Christmas by non-Christians feels less odd to me than its celebration by Australians.)

Here the meaning of Christmas seems to be: our year is now at its very darkest, but the light is coming, and even at the darkness we will hold back that darkness with lights of our own. One can read this as an allegory for Jesus, but one doesn’t have to. No wonder the Puritans, zealous exemplars of Protestant single-mindedness, sought to ban Christmas as a form of “popery” – there is so much in it that is not primarily about Jesus or his role in saving human beings. And those are the things I love about it.

No posts for the next two weeks, as I’ll be taking a break for Christmas – and for the New Year.

The appeal of such literal conservatism is certainly not limited to aesthetics, but one may perhaps see it most clearly in the aesthetic realm. (Some modernists, like the Marxist geographer David Harvey, see an aesthetic conservatism as opposed to a more ethical modernism.) For it’s hard to imagine elevating a single most important principle, as modernists typically do, as the principle behind beauty: could one ever say “Everything constructed according to principle X will be beautiful,” without making principle X entirely vacuous and devoid of content? Aesthetics seem to require a focus on the details and not merely the big picture.

Now of the various single-minded thinkers I’ve mentioned so far – modernists, evangelicals, Salafis and Augustine – one might note that they all have their historical roots in Western traditions. And one might well trace much of this single-mindedness in the West back to Plato, with his focus on the good as one and single. Most notably, the single-minded Plato banished the poets from his ideal city. He did this for a variety of reasons, but all of these had to do with the poets’ leading us away from the single true good: their works portrayed the false idea that external goods matter to a good life as much as virtue; they imitate the bad as well as the good; and their very practice of imitation leads one to mistake falsity for truth.

Marxism – about as modern a political philosophy as one can get – has paralleled Plato (and the Salafis) in a political single-mindedness. Plato’s ideal state seems totalitarian in theory; implementing Marx’s vision turned totalitarian in practice, even if that was not his intent. Self-proclaimed Marxists pursued the vision of a classless society with a zeal that overrode any and every other possible goal. Pol Pot justified some of his atrocities – the evacuation of the cities, the mass murder of intellectuals – with the chilling words: “If the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?”

Now in saying this I am not agreeing with the distorted account of Karl Popper. While I would dispute Popper’s interpretation of Plato and Marx to some extent, more important in this context is his unfortunate lumping of G.W.F. Hegel in with these two; for Hegel’s vision strives directly to encompass the particulars of everyday life without sacrificing them to a higher ideal. Yes, the state is necessary to human fulfillment, and Hegel’s state is less liberal than those we are accustomed to, but it does not dictate the details of life in the pursuit of a single ideal, in the way of the Platonic state or of existing Communist states.

Indeed, I find the unabashedly Hegelian thought of James Doull perhaps the most helpful way to theorize and think about philosophical single-mindedness. For Doull, the most abiding philosophical issue is a conflict between the universal and the particular – between the one singular truth or good that Plato picks out, and the manifold reality that surrounds us. Single-mindedness is then a dogged focus on the universal that disparages the particular.

And if we understand single-mindedness in this way, with Doull, then we can start to note its appearance in South Asian traditions as well — most clearly in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta. For Śaṅkara as for Plato and Mao, everything of significance reduces ultimately to one driving universal thing that’s most important, and nothing else compares. One may contrast particularist thinkers like the Sophists or postmodernists for whom there is no universal, and the details are all that matter. The project of Aristotle, and his followers Hegel and Doull in turn, is to harmonize these viewpoints and acknowledge both the one and the many, the universal and the particular, as having great significance – a significance found perhaps especially in the relationship of the one and the many to each other.

Personally, I find Doull’s reflections particularly helpful because I am very much a big-picture thinker. It’s probably one of the big reasons I was so impatient with the philological questions that preoccupy so many scholars of religion; I was always asking “but what’s the point?” On the Myers-Briggs personality test I scored near the middle on three of the four dimensions, but off the charts for “iNtuiting” over “Sensing” – which is to say that I gravitate toward abstract concepts, theories, larger significance, and away from details and particulars. In many respects philosophy appeals to me precisely because it deals with the biggest questions of all — the most important things, the universals. But the problems of modernism — to say nothing of Salafism and Communism — are a good cautionary reminder of why the details really do matter. One may well find a universal ultimate that is most important; but that does not make everything else unimportant.

One of the more interesting elements of teaching at Stonehill was explaining Protestantism to a student body composed largely of ethnic Catholics. I remember giving a lecture on the history of Protestantism and having a student ask, “But what do Protestants believe?” It was a great question, for in my focus on history I’d neglected to say much about, say, the relative emphasis on the Bible or on Mary. The fault was mine for naïvely assuming it would be something students already knew. And so in later versions of the course, I gave students a much more detailed account of the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, and in turn these differences became much clearer to me myself.

I particularly came to realize how evangelical Protestantism – the growing Protestant wing of which fundamentalist Protestantism is basically a subset – is basically a more extreme form of Protestantism itself, “more extreme” in the sense of being much more characteristically Protestant and less Catholic. And what I found central in evangelicalism specifically but to some extent in Protestantism generally is something analogous, and perhaps even homologous, to modernism.

This central thing might be called single-mindedness: the tendency to focus on “what’s really important,” at the expense of the ancillary details. That’s the attitude behind all the ugly modernist architecture: the most important thing is to give people a comfortable, hygienic, convenient place to live. You can do without all those frivolous aesthetic details; focus on the big stuff, and people will learn to like it, as they should.

This same tendency seems to me to underlie evangelical Protestantism. The really important thing is the saving power of Jesus Christ; the rest, one might say, is gravy. And so evangelicals typically congregate in highly modern buildings, most notoriously the “megachurches” like Lakewood Church in Houston, a former sports arena, and often play rock music in their services. You don’t need the beauty and mystery of a centuries-old cathedral and its incense and pipe organ; you need Jesus.

The older, non-evangelical streams of Protestantism, such as Anglicanism and Lutheranism – usually referred to in the US as “mainline” – do not take this extreme approach. They still meet in the old churches, pray in an older style. And yet I think their founders, too, had something of the modernist tendency to privilege the big picture over the details. For Luther as I understand him, Christian tradition had become needlessly packed with irrelevant accretions. History still mattered to him – but the history that mattered was the history recounted in the Bible, not anything that had happened since then. All those sacraments and rituals were of a piece with selling indulgences. One may note that Luther derives a great deal of his thought from Augustine, and Augustine shares some of this same single-mindedness of focus. Augustine in his work expresses a worried ambivalence about liturgical music – he’s all for it if the lyrics bring people into Christian tradition, but he’s worried that it will be counterproductive if people start enjoying the music for its own sake. (And while many of Augustine’s views did become part of official Catholic tradition, they were typically tempered by the more worldly Aristotelian views of Thomas Aquinas.)

This kind of single-mindedness is not confined to Christianity or secularism, either. This single-mindedness is also the most prominent feature of the Salafi or Wahhabi strain of contemporary Islam. At first glance, Salafi tradition is as opposed to modernism as can be, for it claims that Islamic tradition was perfected in its first few centuries and every following innovation is worthless or worse. But the Salafis share with the modernists a single-minded disdain for the details of established tradition. And aesthetically the two come to look very similar. In recent years the Saudi Arabian state, which officially endorses Salafi Islam, has deliberately destroyed most of the historic sites of old Mecca and Medina, partially to make room for more infrastructure for pilgrims, but just as much because of Salafi ideology. People offered veneration and prayer at many of those sites, such as the grave of Muhammad’s mother. But to a Salafi, such activity is idolatrous, associating partners with God and compromising his unity. Better not to have them around. (Evangelicals, I might note, often take a similar attitude to many Catholic traditions, especially the reverence for Mary.)

Further musings on philosophical single-mindedness next week.

It seems to me that the term “sensitivity,” as popularly used, implies at least two different concepts. They are related; in both cases, if one is asked “what is one sensitive to?”, the answer would likely be: emotion. But they are not the same; for one is generally good, the other generally bad.

Sensitivity in the good sense, it seems to me, involves being aware of emotion, being able to sense it. One can witness that slight tremble in a lower lip and know that it means unhappiness, see that those slightly narrowed eyes indicate disapproval, recognize that that particular turn of phrase indicates annoyance. This sort of sensitivity strikes me as a valuable skill. It allows one to be attentive to others, know the needs that they often fear expressing. One can be similarly sensitive to one’s own emotions – be attuned to them, aware of them as they arise. I think that something like this sort of sensitivity to oneself is expressed in the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness (smṛti), awareness of the currents of one’s thoughts and feelings. Such awareness can mean the difference between repressing and reducing anger, or other negative emotions – between leaving anger untouched in a way that leads to passive aggression, and dealing with it actively and openly in a way that actively minimizes it.

But the term “sensitivity” also typically implies something else. A “sensitive guy” is often easily affected by another’s emotion, takes it personally. This is, I would admit, a flaw of mine; I don’t react particularly well to others’ disapproval. And “sensitivity” in this second sense can be exacerbated by sensitivity in the first sense – for it’s much easier to react negatively to disapproval when you’re acutely aware that that disapproval is happening. This is why I find it very easy to get annoyed by subtle changes in tone of voice when they come from my wife or a close friend – when those same changes from a stranger would not affect me. It’s a source for the kinds of arguments within married couples that seem so bewildering to those outside the relationship (“Don’t give me that look! You always do this!”)

A traditionally masculine man is likely sensitive in neither of these ways. The second makes him easier to get along with because less easily offended; the first is a source of frustration to those who try to send him subtle signals. A nice person, on the other hand, is likely sensitive in both ways – considerate of emotion but solicitous of approval.

A significant part of classical Buddhism’s appeal to me is that it seems to get this distinction. Mindfulness toward emotion, at least one’s own, is a key Buddhist virtue; but saukumārya, “softness” or “fragility,” is disdained. Śāntideva insists that being soft in the face of suffering only allows that suffering to increase.

The larger passage in which Śāntideva’s claim appairs, within the Bodhicaryāvatāra chapter on patient endurance, is rhetorically striking: “A wise one should not disturb purity of mind even in suffering, for [the wise one is in] combat with the mental afflictions, and pain is easily obtained in war.” One might not expect military metaphors from an advocate of non-harming. But for Śāntideva our mental afflictions (kleśas) are so destructive that we must stamp them out, fight a battle against them in a way we would never do against a sentient being.

The metaphor takes me back to my earlier discussion of niceness (the SNAG looks almost identical to the nice guy). André Comte-Sponville addresses the importance of gentleness as a virtue, beginning his discussion thus: “Gentleness is a feminine virtue. That is why it is particularly pleasing in men.” And he urges us to “think of trains packed with soldiers” as an example of the ugly, and traditionally masculine, world that follows from a lack of gentleness. Now Śāntideva does not wish us to be gentle toward the mental afflictions, rather to root them out and fight them, be tough against them. We must not act like sensitive guys toward our craving and ignorance and even anger. But to fight them we must nevertheless be sensitive to their existence.

There is a fine line between gentleness and niceness; the latter too easily becomes a vice. Similarly, there is a fine line between the two concepts of sensitivity: In subtly discerning others’ emotions, one runs a risk of being too easily affected by those subtleties. It is in being affected by them that we most easily notice them. But to notice others’ subtle emotional shifts while remaining undisturbed by them – this is an ideal worth striving for.

It is also not surprising that ancient ethics, with one marginal exception, never develops anything like the related consequentialist idea of a maximizing model of rationality. If my ethical aim is to produce a good, or the best, state of affairs, then it is only rational to produce as much as possible of it. But ancient ethics does not aim at the production of good states of affairs, and so is not tempted to think that rationality should take the form of maximizing them. Rather, what I aim at is my living in a certain way, my making the best use of goods, and acting in some ways rather than others. None of these things can sensibly be maximized by the agent. Why would I want to maximize my acting courageously, for example? I aim at acting courageously when it is required. I have no need, normally, to produce as many dangerous situations as possible, in order to act bravely in them.

Why is this passage particularly striking in New York? Because as I discussed before, New York life is all about maximizing. You go to New York because you want the best of everything – for indeed, in New York you get the best of everything, at least if you can afford it. I like to talk about the great Thai food at a couple of restaurants back home in Boston, being as good as it is in Thailand, but these were blown away by a truly stunning Northeastern Thai restaurant that recently opened up in the East Village neighbourhood – the sauce on their laap was pure perfection. The Boston places are very good, but they can’t keep up. Nor is the Boston subway nearly as fast or as extensive; nor does a brand-new store selling cheap, quality, high-tech Japanese clothing open up all around the city. Nor are there browseable bookstores four storeys tall – one of which was the place where I purchased Annas’s book. And these are just examples I experienced on a four-day trip, with relatively limited funds – no attempt to, say, see Jon Stewart live.

But as I noted before, all this is just the problem. You go to New York because you want to have the best of everything – and that means you will always be wanting more. I remember, on one of my first trips to New York years ago, speaking to the New Yorker closest to me, who was already making an income likely higher than anything I’ll ever make – but spoke of his frustration that this was less than his MBA classmates. You don’t go to the place that has the best of everything if you’re the kind of person who is likely to be satisfied with the life you have. In the terms of Herbert Simon and Barry Schwartz, New Yorkers are maximizers rather than satisficers. And this, in turn, is probably why the people in this wonderland are the unhappiest in the United States.

Which brings me back to Julia Annas’s quote. Like Simon and Schwartz, she uses the language of “maximizing” – in her case, to describe what it is that “ancient philosophy” does not advocate. You can maximize your variety of food choices, but you can’t maximize courage. John Rawls popularized the highly unfortunate term perfectionism to describe virtue-focused ethical theories; it is an awful term, since virtue theories are in this respect the opposite of perfectionism in the usual sense of that word. Perfectionists, as we normally understand the term, are the consummate maximizers, never satisfied because they strive to make everything perfect, including themselves. But Annas is pointing out that the ancient Greeks and Romans from Aristotle onwards are very different from this: their philosophy cannot be put in terms of maximizing, not even the maximizing of virtue. Rather, try to live a flourishing life – a life with which you can be satisfied.

I think it’s important to stress and illustrate Annas’s point because it helps illustrate an alternative to consequentialism, the widespread view according to which the best actions can be defined in terms of bringing about the best total consequences. Consequentialism is the philosophy of maximizing, the worldview that built New York. (Philosophical utilitarianism, the most common variant of consequentialism, is a direct ancestor of modern economics.) The “ancient” view offers us something quite different, in a way that Rawls’s “perfectionism” concept obscures.

It’s important to have this alternative because consequentialism is so filled with problems. I think Schwartz and Simon point us to a paradox at the heart of consequentialism – at least of hedonistic forms of consequentialism, which is most of them. I’ve attempted to note this before: trying to maximize our own happiness is like trying to get to sleep; thinking about it gets in the way. But the same is true about maximizing others’ happiness. Happiness is there in the moment. At some point, you have to be happy with what you have now, and even with what others have now. Eventually, you are going to die; and if you keep trying to maximize, you are going to die unsatisfied. This was the point behind my rejection of utilitarianism: there’s a fundamental problem behind a life devoted to making others happy as possible, when doing so makes you unhappy yourself. If everybody lived the way you did, they would all fail at their goal.

It is true, as commenter Ethan C-F pointed out before, that we can realize a good for others that will come about after we’re gone, even if it too will eventually perish in the cosmos. But it seems to me that if we’re going to strive to benefit others, we need to see a good in the striving itself, in the doing of good works for others, and not in their consequences – successful or not. It is that attitude that allows us to be happy satisficers rather than miserable maximizers. I think that this point is what underlies the enduring popularity of the Bhagavad Gītā, the reason the pacifist Gandhi drew his inspiration from a text that advocates war: if you tie your happiness to the consequences of your actions, you will not be happy, and neither will anyone else who does so. I suspect that Jack Layton had figured out this lesson, which is why he was as inspiring as he was.

The Gītā’s worldview, to be sure, is quite different from Aristotle’s – all about adherence to an externally defined duty rather than the cultivation of flourishing. But they share the rejection of consequentialist maximizing; they are willing to let virtue be its own reward.

Probably the most widespread argument for the existence of God today is the cosmological argument. (I discount the “Reformed epistemology” argument, which is not actually an argument that God exists but only that those who already believe in him should continue to do so.) According to the cosmological argument, we need explanations for everything, and then explanations for those explanations, which ultimately must come back to a First Explanation. In the more simplistic and less satisfying versions of this argument, the First Explanation is simply a first cause, a temporal beginning that sets the universe in motion. Such a first cause has little to do with the claims I’ve been making about value. But as I’ve noted a couple of times, the First Cause is hardly a proof of anything Godlike. After that first act of creation, the First Cause can just go home and ignore us and be ignored.

But things look rather different through if we view explanation more broadly, as Aristotle did. For among Aristotle’s four aitia, the so-called “four causes” that are really four explanations, is the “final” explanation: one explains a thing through its purpose, its telos, what it is for. And on the more sophisticated cosmological argument, not merely causes but purposes must go back to something: there must be a First Purpose of sorts, the telos of every other telos, an end to end all ends. The First Purpose, as opposed to the First Cause, is exactly an explanation of value; questions of “why should I do X?” will ultimately lead back to it. And if such an ultimate purpose exists, it takes the kind of guiding role in our lives that God would be expected to take.

C.S. Lewis’s moral argument for God’s existence claims that there is a basic universal human set of moral rules, and that this could not exist without a creator having put it there. I don’t think this argument works; differences in historically observed moral codes are far greater than Lewis takes them to be, and Lewis too readily conflates explanation at the level of value with the kind of causal explanation that evolution at least theoretically could provide. However, it seems to me that in his own confused way, Lewis is trying to get at something like the argument of the earlier weeks: to posit God as the explanation for real value. In that sense, it seems to me that Lewis’s argument, like the First Cause argument, turns out to be a confused version of the more sophisticated First Purpose argument.

Even Anselm’s ontological argument can be viewed in a somewhat similar light. Unlike the First Purpose and moral arguments, it is not exactly an attempt to explain the existence of value. But it does something parallel. It starts with an idea of value and goodness of a certain kind, observed by the mind, in the concept of a perfect being. This concept doesn’t make sense – so the argument goes – unless it exists in reality. The evaluative concept of a highest perfection, here, cannot be understood unless it turns out to really exist.

Whether the argument from design also follows a similar line of reasoning is more debatable. In a sense it works by conflating cause and purpose – by examining the purposes apparent in living beings and assuming those must be caused by an intelligent designer. But then it doesn’t really matter, because that is the one argument that – notwithstanding the arguments of intelligent design proponents – has been decisively refuted by empirical evidence. With the idea of evolution to explain the complexity of life on earth, we do not need an idea of God; of course there are gaps in evolutionary theory, as there are in any scientific theory, but they are much smaller than the gaps in any theory of divine design. Before Darwin, the design argument was by far the most compelling argument for God’s existence; now it is the least, and not because the others have gotten any stronger.

I tie together the proofs of God in this way because I want to get at the heart of the God question in philosophy – and I think that question ultimately comes down to the problem of bad and the problem of good. It is not that I necessarily buy any of the arguments discussed here, even the more sophisticated ones. The problem of suffering is too intractable – it’s at least as big a problem for those who believe in God as the problem of value is for those who don’t. But perhaps there is some sort of dialectical synthesis to be found in between?

I’m going to begin this week not with God, but with Buddhism. Because I think one of the most deep and important elements of Buddhist tradition is precisely its atheism. That atheism is, indeed, a great part of what brought me to Buddhism in the first place. The teaching on suffering was what really got me hooked on Buddhism, but it wasn’t what had got me interested in the first place; indeed, it had initially repelled me. Even despite my repulsion, I’d done a lot of reading on Buddhism during my time in Thailand; that was what made it possible for me to see how Buddhism applied directly to my life, when the time came for me to make that grand discovery. And why? Well, part of it, as I’ve said in telling the story here, was that the temples were so gorgeous and I was drawn into the worldview behind them. But there was also something that had drawn me to Buddhism well before I ever saw a Thai temple, and that was its atheism. In a journal that I wrote while travelling around India at age 19, I had noted that “in my Indian travels it was Buddhism, more than Hinduism or Islam, which seemed the most profound and interesting of the Indian religions — probably because it’s not technically a religion at all. You can be an agnostic or even an atheist and still be a Buddhist, because God or Gods don’t figure.”

I still think this is something remarkable about Buddhism, at least in its Theravāda variant. Unlike Epicureanism, a similarly atheistic tradition which died out within a century or two, Buddhist tradition survived for thousands of years while denying that there were gods out there. And I don’t think it’s just me for whom this is an appealing point: in an atheistic age where we are more aware than ever of the hideous sufferings that befall our fellow human beings, and where Darwin managed to dispense with God as the explanation for life’s diversity, Buddhism provides the kind of wise and enduring tradition that the various theisms provide, without having that God at the core. It is significant in this respect that an outspoken atheist like Sam Harris has spoken highly of “Buddhist wisdom,” even as he wishes to divorce it from “religion.”

But just as Buddhism has some of the advantages of atheism, it can also face its disadvantages – and especially, the one I first spoke of three weeks ago. I discussed the ways that the atheistic thinkers of early twentieth-century analytic philosophy, like Ayer and Moore, struggle to make sense of ideas of value and goodness, often giving highly implausible responses. But I am increasingly thinking that Buddhists face the same difficulty.

Damien Keown, widely regarded as one of the most prominent experts on Buddhist ethics, has increasingly begun putting forth the view that there is no such thing: that Buddhism is “morality without ethics,” in that Buddhists do little to justify the claims they make about what we should and shouldn’t do. I have disputed this claim in my dissertation; in Śāntideva I have found many arguments why certain actions are good and others are bad. I think such arguments are found in other Buddhist thinkers as well. But I also think there is a certain way in which Keown is on to something. The most persuasive of Śāntideva’s ethical arguments appeal to values Śāntideva expects us to already have. They have a means-end approach: since we all wish to end suffering, we should therefore take whatever action is being recommended (avoid anger, avoid lust, and so on.)

But why should we wish to end suffering? What makes suffering bad? Śāntideva responds to this question directly, in a way that no other Buddhist (that I am aware of) does. But I do not find his very brief answer satisfactory. It occurs in Bodhicaryāvatāra verse VIII.103, within his famous equalization of self and other, in which he argues that since the self is unreal, one should prevent everyone’s suffering and not only one’s own. Having said this, he entertains an objection (pūrvapakṣa) to the effect of “Why is suffering to be prevented?” (kasmān nivāryaṃ cet) and responds with sarveṣām avivādataḥ: literally “Because of the non-dispute of everyone.” Or in Crosby and Skilton’s simpler and crisper translation: “No one disputes that!”

But this won’t do. It is not just that his imagined objector does indeed seem to be disputing that suffering should be prevented. What Śāntideva is doing here is very similar to Mill’s argument in Utilitarianism that the only reason one can give for finding happiness or pleasure (or anything else) desirable is “that people do actually desire it.” G.E. Moore thought this the classic example of a “naturalistic fallacy,” of illegitimately deriving a “should” from an “is,” in that “desirable” means what should be desired rather than what is; it does not mean “able to be desired” in the way that “visible” means “able to be seen.” But as Alasdair MacIntyre points out in A Short History of Ethics, there is a way to read Mill which does not rest on linguistic equivocation, and I think the same applies to Śāntideva (changing “pleasure” to “the absence of suffering”):

He treats the thesis that all men desire pleasure as a factual assertion which guarantees the success of an ad hominem appeal to anyone who denies his conclusion. If anyone denies that pleasure is desirable, then we can ask him, But don’t you desire it? and we know in advance that he must answer yes, and consequently must admit that pleasure is desirable.

I think Śāntideva’s argument is most persuasively read as just this sort of “ad hominem appeal.” But this is still insufficient. For one thing, many would indeed argue against ending suffering – most notably Nietzsche, who believed that suffering can ennoble us and make us better people. Or even Penelope Trunk, who, after considerable reflection, decided she would rather suffer because happiness is boring. One could, I suppose, bite the bullet and say “fine, then, those people don’t need Buddhism and their life will be perfectly good without it,” but this is not a response that would be acceptable to the vast majority of Buddhist tradition to date – certainly not to Śāntideva himself.

Moreover, Śāntideva’s very argument rests on denying one of our most deeply felt beliefs – the existence of a self. If even our basic selfhood – the one sole thing that Descartes thought completely indubitable – is available for dispute, then surely the prevention of suffering is as well. One might well reply to the ad hominem: “Well, yes, I believe my suffering should be prevented. But I also believe that there’s a self, and that that’s the whole reason it makes sense to prevent any suffering at all. If you really knock down the self, you knock down the prevention of suffering – and maybe the existence of suffering – with it.” (This point is roughly similar to Paul Williams’s objection.)

In short, Śāntideva – possibly the most sophisticated ethical theorist in Buddhist tradition – fails, like the twentieth-century analytic philosophers, to provide a satisfactory account of why we should value the things we do value. And I suspect that this is not a coincidence: that Buddhists, like empiricists, have a hard time justifying their value system because they do not assign value a place underlying the metaphysics of reality. The obvious objection to the claim is karma; but karma is held to be a potentially observable causal law of the universe, comparable in theory to the laws discovered by scientists. Karma does not make things valuable, and so it does not suffice as an explanation of the nature of value.

I speak, of course, of Steve Jobs, the co-founder and former CEO of Apple Computer. Jobs’s figure loomed large over my life a decade ago. My first wife had convinced me to switch to a Mac in 2000, and I embraced everything Mac and Apple with all the zeal of the newly converted. She and I regularly went together to the Apple retail store in Cambridge for Jobs’s keynotes, just to watch him announce new products with his famous showmanship. I have been far less enthused about Apple recently, especially the arbitrary restrictions the company places on iPhone apps – the exact kind of controlling monopolistic behaviour that Apple was once best known for fighting against. I still happily use Macs and iPods, though. And more importantly for today, I learned important lessons from following Apple and Jobs so devotedly in the 2000s – above all about leadership.

I’ve never been much of a leader. I’d much rather let people do their own thing, and stay out of their way. But there are plenty of circumstances when such an attitude is not appropriate. Sometimes, we need to make decisions for other people, and it’s not easy to figure out how to do that well. “Leadership” does not figure prominently in premodern lists of virtues (like Aristotle’s), but I wonder if that’s because of different social circumstances. The idea of leadership as a virtue seems to me to come to the fore in organizations that are supposed (in theory) to be meritocratic, and where the input of subordinates is supposed (again in theory) to be valuable. This is the regular situation of a modern business, but seems to me to have been less common in earlier days. Confucius’s “rectification of names” tells us that “a king kings” (that is, a king should act in the manner proper to a king and “a father fathers”; it doesn’t tell us that “a leader leads,” and I wonder if this wasn’t because most hierarchies were specific enough that the more general idea of leadership was unnecessary.

I’m not enough of a social historian to say any of that with confidence. The point is: however that history may be, today we – at least we in the white-collar middle classes – are frequently thrown into situations where we are expected to lead people who are in other respects considered our equals. And this is a situation that requires decisiveness, requires that those decisions be made even when there are others who actively disagree. And Steve Jobs was the best model of this kind of leadership that I knew.

I remember how back in 2001, not long after I’d first obtained my beautiful Ruby iMac, Apple announced one of its famously secretive press conferences for a mysterious new product. Online Apple forums lit up with underwhelmed disappointment after the conference, saying “you mean it’s just an MP3 player?” But that disappointing MP3 player, of course, turned out to be the iPod – a product that wound up being more successful for Apple than any of the computers it had previously sold, and one which probably eventually wound up in the hands of nearly all the people who had previously posted their disappointment. Similarly, the new computer designs that Apple released under Jobs were often notable for what they lacked. It was unthinkable in 1998 for a computer to be sold without a floppy disk drive – but that’s exactly what the iMac was, and it was the computer that saved Apple. If Jobs had listened too attentively to those around him, he could not have made the bold decisions that he did.

In this respect, leadership is in many respects the inverse of humility, a virtue I’ve spoken of quite frequently on this blog. One must listen to others enough to be aware when one might be wrong – but one must nevertheless still make the decision even though it might be wrong.

Indeed, while Jobs’s decisiveness made him a good leader, it may well be the occasional dose of humility that helped make him a great leader. Just before the iPod, Jobs had gushed about a computer called the G4 Cube, saying in interviews “Isn’t it beautiful?” The G4 Cube, as it turned out, was a very expensive computer that was only as powerful as a laptop but had none of the portability. Few people wanted one; I can’t recall meeting anybody who owned one. It was a flop. But soon enough, Jobs admitted “we goofed.” The humility to admit a mistake is essential to a good leader – one must have the courage to make mistakes, but then be willing to accept their consequences. Jobs did, and he didn’t look back – he continued to make the bizarre but prescient decisions that would build his company from a struggling niche player to the most valuable company on earth.

Now as part of an integrated human life, leadership extends beyond just your own organization; it’s one thing to be a good leader for your company’s bottom line, and another to be a leader who benefits humanity as a whole. On this score, Jobs’s later monopolistic tendencies leave me unable to give him the unequivocal praise I would have liked to give; excluding competitors arbitrarily from the iPhone’s store has probably been great leadership for the bottom line, but it diminishes the broader human good in a way that Jobs’s earlier innovations never did. But then power corrupts, and Jobs is no exception to that. I doubt I could have been as effusive about Jack Layton had he actually become prime minister for a significant length of time. For many years, at least, Jobs gave us a model of what it’s like to be a great leader. That model is worth celebrating – and emulating.

Several comments from Jesse took this approach. “Morality,” he claims, “has existed in some form or other since the first self-replicating proteins formed in the primordial ocean.” Citing game theory, he notes that organisms which helped each other out would have been far more likely to survive and thrive. Ethan Mills, while somewhat skeptical of the game-theoretic explanation, still cites James Rachels for another kind of evolutionary explanation: at the social rather than individual level, societies wouldn’t have lasted long without morality.

Now I am not and was not speaking only of “morality” in the sense of aiding (or refusing to harm) others. (There was a reason the word “morality” didn’t appear in that post.) As I noted in my comment, I was also speaking of other kinds of value – including virtues like self-discipline and patient endurance that would be valuable whether or not anyone else is around, and for that matter of aesthetic value, the value in good art or the beauty of nature.

But that’s not the big issue here, for it’s not so hard to come up with evolutionary explanations for these other kinds of value either. Self-disciplined creatures would very likely have adapted better to their environments. There are plenty of people, perhaps most notably Denis Dutton, who have even tried to find evolutionary explanations for aesthetics.

I am not going to pass judgement here on whether evolution is a correct or adequate causal explanation for the origins of human value judgements. For the sake of argument, in this post, I am going to assume that such accounts get the causal origin of value judgements basically correct. Because far more important is a deeper criticism: they miss the point.

The error being made here is parallel to the one that tries to prove God’s existence merely as a First Cause of the universe, not as a First Explanation. In this bastardized version of the cosmological argument, the causal processes of the universe must have a starting point, identified with God – a rather useless God, one that doesn’t mean anything more than the Big Bang. But the intellectually respectable form of the cosmological argument isn’t just about causes, but about other kinds of explanation: not just where the world comes from, but what its essence is and what it’s for.

Return more directly to the present topic: to explain the causes of value judgements, to identify where they have their origin, is not actually to explain value. What this kind of explanation explains is the bare fact that people happen to make judgements of value. What it doesn’t and can’t explain is the truth or falsity of those judgements. To have an adequate account of ethics and values, we need to know not merely why people happen to think some things good and some things bad (or why they act accordingly). We need to know why things actually are good and bad. (Our mode of explanation needs to be ethics, not ethics studies.)

Few are seriously prepared to jettison this distinction, between what actually is good or bad and what people merely believe to be so. We want to say that Pol Pot was wrong when he thought it was a good thing to commit genocide on his own people. To consistently say such a thing requires that we believe value judgements can be correct or incorrect; they need to have a referent, to refer to the action having a real goodness or badness independent of whether the agent takes the action or believes in its goodness. (Some do try and advocate a thoroughgoing value relativism, of course; I have responded to some such arguments here, here and here.)

I think the early analytic philosophers, more than those who find evolutionary explanations sufficient, at least grappled with this problem – they just failed to solve it. They asked: what do we mean when we call something good or bad? Those who try to reduce judgements of good or bad to a simple descriptive property – good is what fosters the species, produces pleasure, etc. – run into trouble pretty quickly, for it’s pretty clear that a great many usages of “good” do not simply mean any of these things. One could try and argue that those who use “good” to mean anything other than species preservation or the production of pleasure are mistaken, but they’ll have a pretty hard time making the case. Neil Sinhababu made a valiant effort, but I have argued that he failed, with some additional thoughts.

I have many problems with G.E. Moore’s concept of the naturalistic fallacy, and especially with the inadequate alternative he provided (as I discussed last week) – but I suspect that this important point is where he was coming from when he came up with it. Moore took the idea of the naturalistic fallacy much too far; I think one can legitimately make inferences from “is” to “ought” statements, but one should still be careful about doing so, especially when one puts a particular kind of descriptive claim at the heart of one’s ethics. The problem is nicely illustrated by Ayn Rand in this deeply problematic passage:

the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between “is” and “ought.” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p.17)

What Rand doesn’t seem to have thought of is that such a view can have absolutely nothing to say to the person who chooses to kill herself – in suicide, in war, in civil disobedience. If your system of values comes out of the desire to live, it is irrelevant to anyone who takes that desire as unimportant. I think there’s a similar problem with the point Ethan makes in his comment that Buddhism is ultimately based on our desire to end suffering; not everybody treats that desire as decisively important, and I think Buddhists have a problem addressing those who don’t. (I intend to take up this point more next week.)

How to get around this problem? I note that Ethan lists Aristotle as having a “naturalist” theory of ethics comparable to Rand’s or Sinhababu’s. But Aristotle’s theory is a bit different from theirs, in that he sees value as an inextricable part of the natural world. The idea of God as First Explanation ultimately derives from his thought, because for him explanation needs to be teleological as well as causal: you need to explain things in terms of their purposes, what they’re for, as well as their (efficient) causes, what put them there. Aristotle’s views of nature are of course tied up with beliefs about causes that we cannot share in a scientific age. But it seems to me that we may still need something like them in order to make sense of value.