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.

Michael responded that the two were not likely to be so far apart in practice: “You can hardly develop a credible problematique without knowing some details.” Thill responded that this depth of interpretation necessarily “involves also an explanation of Kant’s argument for his views or claims!!!… What else could ‘why he said it’ mean or refer to?”

Thill’s question appears to be intended as rhetorical (especially given the laughs that precede and follow it in his comment). But it shouldn’t be. There is always much more to the reasons a philosopher says anything than the arguments that she makes for it. Certainly the arguments matter. They always do. But they are not the only thing that matters. Michael is right that depth of interpretation requires a serious attention to detail – but arguments are not the only details.

So what else could we be speaking of here, other than arguments? I don’t think it’s too hard to imagine what that could be. An argument consists of premises leading to a conclusion. But where do those premises come from? Sometimes from other arguments – but not always. We can follow a chain of reasoning back from one argument to another argument to another, but eventually it’s going to stop somewhere. There will be a premise that is simply asserted – or at least as often, and this is particularly important, a premise that is not even stated but merely assumed. And if one merely understands the structure of a thinker’s arguments but not the assumptions that underlie them, one will not have understood that thinker.

I should note that there’s nothing inherently wrong with an assumed premise, or one asserted without argument. Indeed, one has to do it at some point; one cannot say everything, or one would run out of space. It’s just that if one is going to assume or assert a premise successfully, it must be an assumption that is shared by one’s intended audience. That’s the point that is typically missed by overeager campus missionaries: you are not going to get anywhere by telling me that Jesus is God’s only son because the Bible says so, since I don’t accept your assumption that the Bible as an authority on that matter. If I did, your argument would be sound; but I don’t, so it isn’t.

Within analytic philosophy, when these shared assumptions are highlighted it is usually with the term intuition. I find that term highly inappropriate, because it suggests that these “intuitions” are something more than mere shared assumptions. But it’s not wrong to ground one’s arguments in those shared assumptions that get called “intuitions” – simply because, again, one has to start somewhere. On the “continental” side this point was one of Gadamer‘s key insights: new knowledge is always measured against the “prejudices” (Vorurteilen) we already have. (I find Gadamer’s “prejudices”, or Martha Nussbaum’s “prevalent ordinary beliefs” – a term derived with reference to Aristotle’s phainomena – all much more appropriate terms than “intuitions”. For the purposes of this discussion, I think it’s fine to call them “assumptions”.)

Now where all of this gets us into trouble is when we start dealing with thinkers who don’t share our assumptions (and we don’t share theirs). Such thinkers exist even within our own time and place (as with the overeager campus missionaries). But the greater the distance in time and space, the greater the disconnect of assumptions is likely to be – and the more crucial it is to consider not merely the explicit arguments but also the assumptions of the thinkers we hope to learn from.

Figuring all this out was crucial to my own dissertation work. Śāntideva, I noted there, believes that material goods are harmful and still urges one to give them to others for their benefit. If I’d merely considered his explicit arguments and nothing more, I would have had to have stopped there: Śāntideva is a fool who contradicts himself, and there’s an end on’t – and in that case, why bother studying him any further?

But I didn’t do that. Instead, I followed the method of looking for coherent authorship, as stated by Thomas Kuhn: I tried to ask myself how an intelligent person could have written such an apparent absurdity. And that required looking deeper into Śāntideva’s assumptions: the things he believes but doesn’t say. Key among these was the idea that gifts benefit the recipient through the gift encounter and not the gift object. I argue in the dissertation that if you look at the things Śāntideva does say, you can infer that Śāntideva believes this, and it makes sense out of his explicit arguments in a way that you can’t get from looking at the arguments alone. Such an approach, I think, is crucial to making sense of any philosopher outside of one’s own immediate cultural milieu. If all you’re going to consider is the arguments, you might as well not bother. And indeed, most analytic philosophers don’t bother much with thinkers from distant times and places, which, considering their method, is just as well.

But that is not to say analytic philosophy is worthless. Not at all! It just doesn’t prepare you very well for studying the history of philosophy (which is why that history tends to be relegated to the sidelines of analytic departments). What it does very well is attempt to get to truth within a given context, namely ours – to take the incoherent mess of “intuitions” or prejudices, with which we must always begin our philosophical reflection, and start to hammer them into something that actually makes sense. For that reason I often refer to analytic philosophy as the scholasticism of the liberal tradition. Like medieval Christian scholasticism, analytic thought provides an extraordinary level of detailed reflection within one given context, which is necessary if those within that context are going to seriously strive to reach a truth about their lives. But it also makes that thought look parochial from a foreign context; I strongly suspect that the majority of analytical reflection will look as bizarre to people 500 years from now as Christian scholasticism looks to us today. Those people of the future may well be able to benefit from the argumentative details of 20th-century analytic philosophy; but it will require someone with the interpretive approach of a continental philosopher to figure out just what it was the analytic philosophers were going on about.

Rosen argues that we need to see a much closer association between two fields of study often thought separate: logic and psychology. At first glance, the two might seem to have little in particular to do with one another. Logic concerns itself with the proper formal relationships between statements in arguments; psychology, with the empirical investigation of mind and behaviour.

But more basically, what are logic and psychology? Both, really, are the study of thought. One might narrow logic down a bit and say it is the study of reasoning; but reasoning is very much a part of psychology’s subject matter as well. Their differences are not in their subject matter. There is certainly a difference in method; but that difference flows from a more fundamental difference between the two.

Namely: psychology (or at least certain branches of it) tells us how we do in fact reason. Logic tells us how we should reason. Psychology tells us about the circumstances under which we do or do not follow the rules of reasoning that logic sets down as proper. Which is to say: logic is a normative discipline. That is, logic, like ethics and aesthetics, is concerned with goodness and value – with what should and should not be the case, not merely with what is and is not the case. The idea of a truth that is better than falsehood, and of the methods to discover that truth, is part of what makes logic possible.

The relationship between logic and psychology, taken in this way, is more or less the relationship between ethics and ethics studies, between the philosophy of science and science studies, or between theology and religious studies as religious studies is very often conceived. The latter member of each pair tells us how we do reason (or act); the former tells us how we should. But where the ideals of science, ethics and theology tell us how to reason within their particular fields of inquiry, logic tells us how to reason in the general case, including all the others.

Logic is a normative discipline – a discipline concerned with value – because it is fundamentally concerned with truth. And it is part of the nature of truth to be a value, to be better than falsehood. To deny the intrinsic value or goodness of truth makes no sense, as I argued before in claiming that truth has a value independent of pleasure.

The normative nature of truth holds true whatever one might understand truth to be. Analytic philosophers most commonly identify three theories of the truth of statements (or more generally propositions): correspondence, coherence and pragmatic. Speaking broadly, on the correspondence theory, propositions are true if they correspond to reality; on the coherence theory, propositions are true if they cohere with other propositions we hold; on the pragmatic theory, propositions are true if they are effective. But what is presumed by all three theories is that truth is a good thing: other things being equal, propositions that correspond to reality or that cohere with other propositions or that are effective are better than propositions that do not do these things. And when this is true of the more limited analytical theories of truth, how much more so of more expansive theories of truth that do not limit themselves to propositions, like those of Augustine or Gandhi. Augustine probably goes the furthest on this point: truth is goodness – which is God.

The fact that truth and logic are normative and value-laden has important consequences. For one thing, it gives the lie to simplistic claims of “value-free” science or social science (including psychology itself). All intellectual inquiry is predicated on at least one value, namely truth itself. More sophisticated defenders of “value neutrality,” like Max Weber, will argue that the scholar of a scientific field needs to put truth above other values – but we must recognize that this argument is itself a value argument, an ethical argument for the importance of truth relative to other values, at least within certain areas of inquiry. The argument that one should place truth above other values is a normative and value-based argument.

Now the discussion above should not imply that all true statements are good statements, or all true things are good things. It is true that outlying areas of Bangkok were recently hit by disastrous floods; it is not good that this happened. The relation between truth and goodness is and must be more complex than that.

The fact that not all true things are good probably seems obvious to anyone who isn’t a philosopher; but it nevertheless poses some problems. For someone like Augustine who identifies truth with goodness, it would seem to be at the very heart of the problem of bad. If truth is goodness, how can there be things that truly exist but are nevertheless bad? Augustine ingeniously deals with this problem (or at least this aspect of the problem) by identifying badness as a lack of the existence of good – in the same way a modern physicist identifies cold as simply a lack of heat. Absolute evil, on his account, looks very much like absolute zero.

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.

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.

This problem is not quite the opposite of the problem of suffering. Those who don’t believe in an ultimate value of this sort – I am here going to call them “atheists” as a shorthand, though I think that runs the risk of oversimplifying the matter – have no problem explaining the existence of particular good things, the way that theists have a problem explaining the existence of hurricanes or ALS. The problem they face, rather, is in the basic question of how things can be good (or bad) at all, of how the very ideas of goodness or badness can mean anything.

The analytical movement in early twentieth-century philosophy rejected not only “religion” but most forms of metaphysics, looking with deep suspicion on any claims about the universe that could not be demonstrated empirically. As a result, they came up with (highly implausible) theories about ethics and value that often dismissed them entirely. For A.J. Ayer, value claims are entirely meaningless; C.L. Stevenson argued that they mean nothing more than the expressions “boo” and “hurrah,” with no rational content. G.E. Moore wasn’t quite as dismissive – the word “good” did mean something real – but it was also something undefinable, like “yellow” (referring to the subjective perception of yellowness as a colour, not the way in which yellow objects happen to refract light). What this effectively meant was that it was impossible to argue rationally about what was good; you just knew. The economist John Maynard Keynes, who knew Moore well, witnessed firsthand the anti-intellectual bullying that resulted from such an approach in Moore’s social circle:

How did we know what states of mind were good? This was a matter of direct inspection, of direct unanalyzable intuition about which it was useless and impossible to argue…. In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore at this time was a master of this method — greeting one’s remarks with a gasp of incredulity — Do you really mean that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility … Oh! he would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible. (Keynes, “My Early Beliefs”)

These various analytical attempts to analyze value judgements are all pretty clear failures, to my mind; in many cases they explain away value judgements rather than actually explaining them. But they all come within a shared context of rejecting metaphysics – and thereby rejecting any metaphysical status for goodness in the universe. It seems to me that the rejection of a metaphysics of goodness leaves them bereft of any ability to speak reasonably about what goodness actually is. Alasdair MacIntyre, with the Nietzschean wit that characterizes his early work, compares the analytic philosophers to Hawai’ian natives who would explain prohibitions by saying that they are taboo, but not be able to explain what taboo means – so that soon enough King Kamehameha II could abolish the taboos without any serious objections arising:

Deprive the taboo rules of their original context and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions, as indeed they characteristically do appear when the initial context is lost, when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten…. But had the Polynesian culture enjoyed the blessings of analytical philosophy it is all too clear that the question of the meaning of taboo could have been resolved in a number of ways. Taboo, it would have been said by one party, is clearly the name of a non-natural property; and precisely the same reasoning which led Moore to see good as the name of such a property and Prichard and Ross to see obligatory and right as the names of such properties would have been available to show that taboo is the name of such a property.

MacIntyre then compares Nietzsche to Kamehameha II, shattering the pretensions of those who claim “good” still means something in the absence of the “background beliefs” that make that meaning possible. It is not that Nietzsche wins the debate, that good means nothing; but that for us to see the meaning of good we must have the kind of underlying beliefs that the twentieth-century analytic philosophers did not.

What are those underlying beliefs? It seems to me that, at base, they require goodness to have a real, objective existence, beyond that which people happen to value at any particular place and time. Reality, the larger stage in which our lives take place, what Ken Wilber calls the Kosmos – what is most often called “the universe” or “the world” except that these terms usually limit themselves to the physical – it must somehow have value and goodness as a part of its nature, at least insofar as human beings exist within it. Seeing that goodness at the heart of the world is a lot easier if you take the next step and view that world as the creation of an omnibenevolent God. But then, of course, it winds up being a lot harder to explain the world’s observed badness.

And so with the perennial questions, to which I regularly return on this blog. Central to the idea of a perennial question, as I have expressed it, is that the answers have never come easily. People across cultures, in different places and times, have asked the question – but in each place, people have come up with opposing answers.

To observe this diversity of opinion is humbling. Here are some of the greatest minds in human history, people smarter than I will ever be, reading each other’s work and still coming to opposite conclusions. Can an answer then ever be found?

The quickest, easiest and most tempting response is to throw up one’s hands and say no, or effectively say no: there’s no way to decide between these different answers. This is the postmodern or relativist response, and it’s one to which undergraduates gravitate very quickly – and understandably – when faced with the big questions. But this answer very quickly reveals itself to be both incorrect and unsatisfying – for reasons beyond the performatives I have previously discussed.

For to say “there is no answer” is itself an answer, and an answer that is itself in disagreement with those very great minds. Plato and Aristotle might disagree significantly on the answer to the question of Ascent and Descent, but they will certainly agree that there is an answer to be found. Take the Descent and you will reject Plato; take the Ascent and you will reject Aristotle; say there can be no answer and you will reject both. There’s no way around fundamental disagreement with at least one of the great thinkers on any perennial question.

Or is there? There is another way to address such questions, but it is more complicated than any of the options discussed so far: taking one side over the other; adopting one thinker’s solution as truth; rejecting attempts to find an answer. Skholiast nailed it in his response to my first post on perennial questions. On perennial questions like that of Ascent and Descent, there is in the great thinkers always a dialectic: an attempt not merely to refute the opponent’s position but in some way to incorporate it. Skholiast describes the dialectical process using Hegel‘s complex but key German term Aufhebung (which is the noun form; the verb is aufheben in the present tense, aufgehoben in the past). Aufheben is often translated ineffectively with the word “sublate,” a word which has no real English meaning other than as a translation of aufheben. Ken Wilber renders it as “transcend and include,” which provides a much more helpful understanding of what the German term gets at, but is wordy enough to be awkward. I prefer “supersede,” which covers a lot of the sense of the German word. The new edition of a book (ideally) supersedes, aufhebs, the old. It cancels the old in a sense, moves beyond it and makes it unnecessary, but does so by preserving what is most important in the old while adding things that are new and better.

In the case of Plato and Aristotle, it’s easy to fall into the temptation of portraying them roughly as Martha Nussbaum does in The Fragility of Goodness, or as Raphael does in The School of Athens: as polar and mutually exclusive opposites, Plato seeking only to escape the fortunes of the world and Aristotle to embrace them. But as Skholiast notes and as I have tried to emphasize in my own posts, there is always a Platonic element to Aristotle, an attempt to embrace and incorporate Plato’s transcendence within a philosophy whose overall tendency is more worldly. This Platonic Aristotle comes out above all in sections X.6-8 of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle says that the contemplative life is the highest and best because it is the most godlike. This is a passage that Nussbaum has a hard time dealing with; she says effectively that Aristotle is contradicting the rest of his work (Fragility 375-7). But she agrees that he feels the power of Plato’s Ascent ideal, and is trying to consider it. It strikes me that his goal was very likely to supersede Plato, to transcend and include him, to be not merely a Descender but a Descender who includes Ascent within his thought. If Nussbaum’s interpretation is right, it may mean primarily that he failed at that task.

The point I’m trying to make is that the perennial questions are best addressed through a dialectical synthesis. What the greatest thinkers do when they address a perennial question is not merely to take a side, Ascent or Descent, ātmanism or encounter. If they do take a side, they will attempt to incorporate the best of the opposing side in their view.

There are two critical elements to the process of dialectical synthesis. First, it is an attempt to find synthesis, not compromise; it is not about finding a middle ground. The middle ground can turn out to be a vicious mean and not a virtuous one. (Compromise, I have argued, has its role in political practice but not in philosophy.) More important is to take seriously the underlying concerns that animate each side and bring them to where they are, and answer those concerns in a way that could be genuinely satisfying to those who have them.

And second, this process of “taking seriously” is a dialectical one: one starts from the positions one tries to supersede, and shows their inadequacies from within, making the opposing positions part of the process of reaching one’s own. It is in this sense that Nussbaum’s and Wilber’s major works are not themselves dialectical, though I think they may aspire to be; the endpoint of the inquiry has already been reached at its beginning. In their works, opposing positions are discussed only to be refuted. Nussbaum tries to make a movement from Plato through various other thinkers and ending in James Joyce; but by the time she gets to Joyce, there isn’t any Plato left.

Not much of what I’ve said here today is new; I’ve made most of these points in the various posts I have linked to above. But I’m trying to bring them together just because I do see my project as one of trying to work out some answers, however tentative they must be, to perennial questions – and I do not believe I’ve found those answers yet. In some respects this post is an attempt to remind myself, and hopefully others with me, of the best ways to think about the great questions – just because dialectical synthesis is such a difficult path to follow, and I think I’ve typically fallen short of it so far myself.

I’ve briefly discussed this question before, with a focus on ethics. Afterwards, following James Doull, I examined how it gets works out in the history of Western philosophy after the Sophists – in ethics. But as Doull knew, there is an epistemological story that parallels the ethical. God in the Hebrew Bible is the arbiter of truth as well as ethics; the Sophists reduce not merely justice and goodness, but truth, to the subject that knows them. (In a similar way, for Doull, Plato’s Sophist dialogue makes essentially the same point as the Statesman, even though it would appear that one is entirely about metaphysics and the other about politics; both are asking how ideals can relate to physical reality.)

In ethics, as I noted in the earlier post, analytic philosophers tend to use the terms internalism and externalism to describe the opposing positions on this question. In ethics, internalists say that genuine reasons for action must come from our own motivations or desires; externalists say there can be reasons that come from outside us. To use Doull’s examples, the Sophists are the ultimate ethical internalists, the Hebrew Bible the ultimate ethical externalist text. (Consider Ecclesiastes, which repeatedly advises us to fear God and follow his commandments even though it repeatedly denies the possibility of our attaining any benefit for doing so, in this life or the next.)

Now, as well as in ethics, analytic philosophers also use the terms “internalism” and “externalism” to describe positions in epistemology (the theory of knowledge). Ethan Mills discussed this other form of the distinction in comments on a recent post, and I’ve been trying to learn some more about it. What follows is some preliminary attempts of mine to think through the distinction between internalism and externalism in epistemology, and relate it to the distinction in ethics. Apologies if the results are somewhat unclear, as I’m still thinking it through.

Before reading this analytical literature, I had already saw an important internal/external distinction of sorts in epistemology, parallel to the one in ethics. (Doull influenced my thinking here too.) In ethics, we may ask whether we acting subjects are the measure of goodness; just so, in epistemology, we may ask whether we knowing subjects are the measure of knowledge. Ethical internalists say our reasons for action must all come from within us, from our motivations; ethical externalists say we can have reasons to act independent of our motivations. There seems to be a parallel set of questions in epistemology: can the reasons for our beliefs be independent of the ways we come to know them? For example, can we logically speak of a truth that no subject is capable of knowing? Or as the Sophists would put it: is man the measure of truth?

It is not quite clear to me, though, that these questions are what analytic philosophers mean when they speak of “internalist” and “externalist” epistemologies. In Ethan’s comment, the key question dividing internalism and externalism is: Can we really be said to know something if we don’t or can’t know why we know it? Externalists say we can, internalists say we can’t. In online introductory works on internalism and externalism, the problem is phrased in terms of justification rather than knowledge: can our beliefs be justified even in cases where we don’t or can’t know why we hold them?

Now, when the distinction was put in this way, it was not immediately clear to me why these positions were even called “internalism” and “externalism.” In ethics the terminology seems clear enough to me: internalists say that any reasons for action must come from our motivations, which are inside us. But what is “inside us” about knowing how we know or knowing why we hold our beliefs, the hallmark of epistemological “internalism” in the analytic sense? Another article, by Joe Cruz and John Pollock, helped clarify. Internalism on Cruz and Pollock’s view “is the view that all the factors relevant to the justification of a belief are importantly internal to the believer”; our knowing how we know or why we hold our beliefs is itself internal to us. An example of the contrasting, externalist view would be “reliabilism”: the view that a belief is justified if it comes from a source that is in its nature likely to be correct, even if we don’t know that it comes from that source. (So in recent debates “common sense” was defended on the grounds that it is
“reliable.”) The distinction might be illustrated with an example from Laurence BonJour:

Norman, under certain conditions that usually obtain, is a completely reliable clairvoyant with respect to certain kinds of subject matter. He possesses no evidence or reasons of any kind for or against the general possibility of such a cognitive power, or for or against the thesis that he possesses it. One day Norman comes to believe that the President is in New York City, though he has no evidence either for or against his belief. In fact the belief is true and results from his clairvoyant power, under circumstances in which it is completely reliable.

A reliabilist would need to say that Norman’s belief that the President is in New York City is justified, because his clairvoyant power is reliable – even though Norman doesn’t know it’s reliable. (Perhaps it’s one of the first few times the power has manifested.) By contrast, an internalist, like BonJour, says that in such a case Norman’s belief is not justified – even though it’s true. Which is to say, I think, that Norman has no reason to believe the President is in New York.

It’s on this matter of “reasons to believe” that I suspect the two analytical internalism/externalism distinctions dovetail the most. The internalism/externalism question in epistemological justification asks: what counts as a good reason to believe something? In ethics, it asks: what counts as a good reason to do something? In both cases, the internalist says that the good reason must be within us.

Ethan notes in his comments that the South Asian Nyāya school is similar to the reliabilists: what matters is that knowledge is formed by the right kind of process, not anything within us. We can know without knowing how we know. So they are effectively externalists in the analytical sense at issue here. Yet at the same time, the Nyāya have a slogan that “whatever exists is nameable and knowable” – for something to exist objectively, it must be available to subjective knowledge. To speak of something which exists but we couldn’t know – that is meaningless. Here, man (or other subjective knowers) is in some sense the measure of truth, as the Sophists would have wanted to have it. On this score, the Nyāya view seems more comparable to ethical internalism, the view that good reasons must come from within us – truth is in some sense within us knowers as well. Perhaps one could describe the Nyāya as externalists epistemologically, but internalists metaphysically or ontologically?

So far I’ve explored two major perennial questions: ascent versus descent and intimacy versus integrity. I have taken these as two different axes along which philosophies can be classified – in their ethics and soteriology as well as their metaphysics and epistemology.

But why should we treat these as exhausting the perennial questions? I think there’s value in limiting the number of questions we treat as perennial – in being prepared to say “those are different aspects of the same question” or “those are different ways of asking the same question” rather than allowing the questions to proliferate randomly. But that’s not to say the number of questions should be limited to merely two – though it’s certainly interesting to consider the two as axes on a single graph.

For there are other questions which are similarly widespread and have similar ramifications. A little while ago I pointed to Mou Zongsan’s distinction between “perfect” and “separation” theories; these map onto the distinction I discussed earlier between ātmanism and encounter, but Mou effectively tries to show that ātmanism-encounter is its own perennial question, distinct from the integrity-ascent and intimacy-descent positions they might seem to map onto.

Other perennial questions are significantly better known than the debates I have discussed above. One of these is human nature: the question that finds its most classic expression in the ancient Confucian debates between Mencius and Xunzi, but is also well expressed in the West in Rousseau and Augustine, among others. So too, I suspect it is at the heart of the changes in Buddhism as it moved from India to Mencian China. At its heart, this is a metaphysical question about what human beings are and what makes them so – a question which is also open to at least some empirical verification or falsification. But it is also an ethical question. If human beings are naturally good, they need far less ethical correction, need to watch themselves or be watched far less, than if they are systematically prone to error and wrongness. It extends into soteriology: a good human nature makes sudden liberation more plausible. And at several points the recent debates over “common sense” extended this question into epistemology. To what extent are human reasoning processes naturally good enough to lead us to the truth, and to what extent are they so prone to error that they need regular and systematic correction?

Then there is the similarly metaphysical question of free will – much less subject to empirical verification. The empirical methods of natural science assume that the world is made of causal processes whose workings can be ascertained; this very assumption begs the metaphysical question at issue. But it too has significant ramifications in ethics and politics. Free will is a fundamental assumption behind the characteristic organizing concepts of modern liberalism: rights, respect, autonomy. The idea that individual choices are to be respected qua choices – as opposed to their being instrumental to other goods like happiness – implies that something about these choices gives them a different status from other phenomena in the universe. So you can’t get even close to a Kantian ethics without free will – but consequentialist ethics can do fine without it. I’m told that Fyodor Dostoevsky even saw this point as the fundamental difference between the worldviews of Protestantism and Catholicism: Protestants sacralize individual autonomous choice even if it leads to overall misery; Catholics want an order that produces general happiness even if it leads to tyranny over individual choice. (Whether his characterization was accurate, let alone whether Eastern Orthodox churches provide the appropriate synthesis he thinks they do, is a separate topic.)

The idea of free will has been particularly important in the West, but it has not been limited to that context. It is important enough to Śāntideva that he spends several difficult verses refuting it. Very much like Nietzsche, Śāntideva believes that the idea of free will is harmful and dangerous because it leads us to blame others: their actions have causes just like a stomach upset does, so we should not get angry at them any more than we get angry at our stomach bile. And I think points of view like Śāntideva’s tend to frame the left-right axis in Canadian politics, and in other countries where God is not a serious political issue. The right believes criminals make free choices, and so deserve their punishment, while the left seeks to reduce the causes of crime; and if people’s fates in society largely come down to their free choices, then the government has less of a duty to help those whose fates turned out poorly.

The questions I’ve listed – ascent/descent, intimacy/integrity, ātmanism/encounter, free will, human nature – hardly exhaust the list of perennial questions either. In future weeks I’m hoping to examine others. But I’m returning to the idea of perennial questions now because I suspect that it may form part of a highly fruitful method in cross-cultural philosophy. Too much cross-cultural philosophy so far has been dominated by the idea of a philosophia perennis, a single universal philosophy shared across cultures. That idea is usually taken to refer to some sort of Advaitic mystical monism, a single cosmic truth that can be known through mystical experience. And while ideas of that sort are indeed present in many cultures, they’re rarely all that widespread. Most people do not believe this so-called perennial philosophy. Moreover, there’s an odd parallel between that sort of perennialism and the view of “common sense” recently advocated on this blog by Thill Raghunath and others. Though Thill describes “common sense” as excluding “religious” ideas (which I suspect includes the “perennial” mystical monism), he shares with the perennialists a common view of human access to truth: all humans, across cultures, share an innate faculty which allows them access to truth, but most humans access this faculty so little that they are enmeshed in delusion. (As I noted above, epistemologically this seems to put both Thill and the perennialists on the side of the human nature debate that stresses our natural goodness.)

What is truly universal to me in philosophy, it seems, are not the answers but the questions; and that is why I think the cross-cultural study of philosophy should devote more time to these questions. To the extent that the answers are universal as well, it seems to me that multiple and contradictory answers are universal: both mystical Ascent and a “common sense” Descent are found across cultures. The student of cross-cultural philosophy should pay attention to both sides.

In August I will be taking some vacation time with my wife and my friends. So there will be no blog post next week; posts may be sporadic for the rest of the month as well.