Darwin's Dangerous Idea (95 page)

Perhaps we can get some clues about the status and prospects for ethical theory by reflecting on what we have seen to be the limitations of the great design process that has ethicists among its products to date. What follows, we may ask, from the fact that ethical decision-making, like all
actual
processes of exploration in Design Space, must be to some degree myopic and time-pressured?

Shortly after the publication of Darwin's
Origin of Species,
another eminent Victorian, John Stuart Mill, published his attempt at a universal ethical 1. CAN ETHICS BE NATURALIZED?

theory,
Utilitarianism
(1861). Darwin read it with interest, and responded to the "celebrated work" in his
Descent of Man
(1871). Darwin was puzzled by Thus
at last mm comes to feel, through acquired and perhaps inherited
Mill's stand on whether the moral sentiment was innate or acquired, and
habit, that it is best for him to obey his more persistent impulses. The
sought the help of his son William, who advised his father that Mill was
imperious word
ought
seems merely to imply the consciousness of the

"rather in a muddle on the whole subject" (R. Richards 1987, p. 209n.), but,
existence of a rule of conduct, however it may have originated.

aside from a few such points of disharmony, Darwin and Mill were (cor-

—CHARLES DARWIN,
Descent of Man
( 2nd ed,

rectly) seen as united in their naturalism—and duly excoriated together by 1874), p. 486

the defenders of skyhooks, most notably St. George Mivart, who declared: Human culture, religion in particular, is a repository of ethical precepts,

... men have a consciousness of an absolute and immutable rule
legiti-ranging from the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments, and the Greeks'

mately
claiming obedience with an authority necessarily supreme and

"Know Thyself" to all manner of specific commands and prohibitions, ta-absolute—in other words, intellectual judgments are formed which imply boos, and rituals. Philosophers since Plato have attempted to organize these the existence of an ethical ideal in the judging mind. [Mivart 1871, p. 79]

imperatives into a single rationally defensible and universal system of ethics, so far without achieving anything approaching consensus. Mathematics and To such bluster there is probably no better response than Darwin's, quoted physics are the same for everyone everywhere, but ethics has not yet settled at the head of this section. But there were more measured criticisms as well, into a similar reflective equilibrium.2 Why not? Is the goal illusory? Is mo-and one of the more frequent stuck in the craw of Mill: "Defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to reply to such objections as 1. Material in this chapter is drawn from Dennett 1988b, where the issues are developed of describing the world verbally rather than knowing it philosophically. In the recent in more detail.

past, religion had been driven from the campus because it lacked scientific credentials.

2. It is worth bearing in mind that mathematics and physics are the same throughout the But since that criterion has itself lost its own credentials, Mr. Marsden wonders why entire universe, discoverable in principle by aliens (if such there be) no matter what religion cannot reclaim its place on the campus. He is right to raise such questions.

their social class, political predilections, gender (if they have genders!), or peccadilloes.

[Diggins 1994]

I mention this to ward off the recent nonsense you may have heard emanating from some It is not "scientism" to concede the objectivity and precision of good science, any schools of thought—I speak loosely—in the sociology of science. It is dismaying to read more than it is history worship to concede that Napoleon did once rule in France and such a wise thinker as John Patrick Diggins falling under its spell: the Holocaust actually happened. Those who fear the facts will forever try to discredit the fact-finders.

But, as Mr. Marsden notes, in the past it was assumed that science would be the arbitrator of such disputes, whereas today science is dismissed as simply another way 496 REDESIGNING MORALITY

Can Ethics Be Naturalized?
497

this—that there is not time, previous to action, for calculating and weighing trated, not unwisely, on spelling out what that ideal theory is. The theoretical the effects of any line of conduct on the general happiness." His reaction was fruits of deliberate oversimplification through idealization are not to be quite fierce:

denied, in philosophy or in any scientific discipline. Reality in all its messy particularity is too complicated to theorize about, taken straight. The issue is, Men really ought to leave off talking a kind of nonsense on this subject, rather (since every idealization is a strategic choice), which idealizations which they would neither talk nor listen to on other matters of practical might really shed some light on the nature of morality, and which will just concernment. Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded on land us with diverting fairy tales.

astronomy because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical Almanac.

It is easy to forget just how impractical ethical theories actually are, but we Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready calculated; and all can make the truth vivid by reflecting on what is implicit in Mill's use of a rational creatures go out upon the sea of life with their minds made up on metaphor drawn from the technology of his own day. The
Nautical Almanac
the common questions of right and wrong, as well as on many of the far is an ephemeris of sorts, a book of tables, calculated and published annually, more difficult questions of wise and foolish. And this, as long as foresight from which one can easily and swiftly derive the exact position in the skies of is a human quality, it is to be presumed they will continue to do. [Mill the sun, the moon, the planets, and the major stars for
each second
of the 1861, p. 31.]

forthcoming year. The precision and certainty of this annual generator of expectations was, and still is, an inspiring instance of the powers of human This haughty retort has found favor with many—perhaps most—ethical foresight, properly disciplined by a scientific system
and directed upon a
theorists, but in fact it papers over a crack that has been gradually widening
sufficiently orderly topic.
Armed with the fruits of such a system of thought, under an onslaught of critical attention. The objectors were under the curious the rational sailor can indeed venture forth confident of his ability to make misapprehension that a system of ethical thinking
was supposed to work,
and properly informed real-time decisions about navigation. The practical noted that Mill's system was highly impractical—at best. This was no methods devised by the astronomers actually work.

objection, Mill insisted: utilitarianism is supposed to be practical, but not
that
Do the utilitarians have a similar product to offer to the general public?

practical. Its true role is as a background justifier of the foreground habits of Mill seems at first to be saying so. Today we are inured to the inflated claims thought of real moral reasoners. This background role for ethical theory ( and made on behalf of dozens of high-tech systems—of cost-benefit analysis, not only utilitarians have sought it) has proven, however, to be ill-defined computer-based expert systems, etc.—and from today's perspective we might and unstable. Just how practical is a system of ethical thinking supposed to suppose Mill to be engaging in an inspired bit of advertising: suggesting that be? What is an ethical theory for? Tacit differences of opinion about this utilitarianism can provide the moral agent with a foolproof Decisionmaking issue, and even a measure of false consciousness among the protagonists, Aid. ("We have done the difficult calculations for you! All you need do is have added to the inconclusiveness of the subsequent debate.

just fill in the blanks in the simple formulae provided.") For the most part, philosophers have been content to ignore the practical Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, certainly aspired to just problems of real-time decision-making, regarding the brute fact that we are such a "felicific calculus," complete with mnemonic jingles, just like the all finite and forgetful, and have to rush to judgment, as a real but irrelevant systems of practical celestial navigation that every sea captain memorized.

element of friction in the machinery whose blueprint they are describing. It is as if there might be two disciplines—ethics proper, which undertakes the task
Intense, long certain, speedy, fruitful, pure
—

of calculating the principles determining what the ideal agent ought to do Such marks in
pleasures
and in
pains
endure.

under all circumstances—and then the less interesting, "merely practical"

Such pleasures seek if
private
be thy end: If it discipline of Moral First Aid, or What to Do Until the Doctor of Philosophy be
public,
wide let them
extend.

Arrives, which tells, in rough and ready terms, how to make "online"

[Bentham 1789, ch. IV.]

decisions under time pressure.

In practice,
philosophers acknowledge, we overlook important consid-Bentham was a cheerfully greedy reductionist—the B. F. Skinner of his erations—considerations that we really shouldn't overlook—and we bias our day. you might say—and this myth of practicality has been part of the thinking in a hundred idiosyncratic—and morally indefensible—ways; but
in
rhetoric of utilitarianism from the beginning. But in Mill we see already the
principle,
what we ought to do is what the ideal theory (one ideal theory or beginning of the retreat up the ivory tower to ideality, to what is calculable another) says we ought to do. Philosophers have then concen-

'in principle" but not in practice.

498 REDESIGNING MORALITY

Can Ethics Be Naturalized?
499

Mill's idea, for instance, was that the best of the homilies and rules of thumb of minimize (but not definitively) the problem of misevaluating anticipated moves. Is everyday morality—the formulae people
actually considered
in the hectic course of the anticipated capture a strongly positive future to be aimed at, or the beginning of their deliberations— had received (or would receive in principle) official a brilliant sacrifice for your opponent? A
principle of quiescence
will help to resolve endorsement from the full, laborious, systematic utilitarian method. The faith placed that issue: always look a few moves beyond any flurry of exchanges to see what in these formulae by the average rational agent, based as it was on many lifetimes of the board looks like when it quiets down. But in real life, there is no counterpart experience accumulated in cultural memory, could be justified ("in principle") by principle that deserves reliance. Three Mile Island has been followed by more than being formally derived from the theory. But no such derivation has ever been a decade of consolidation and quiescence (it happened in 1980), but we
still
have achieved.3

no idea whether it is to be counted among the good things that have happened or The reason is not hard to see: it is unlikely in the extreme that there could be a the bad, all things considered.

feasible algorithm
for the sort of global cost-benefit analysis that utilitarianism (or The suspicion that there is no stable and persuasive resolution to such impasses any other "consequentialist" theory) requires. Why? Because of what we might call has long lain beneath the troubled surface of criticism to conse-quentialism, which the Three Mile Island Effect. Was the meltdown at the nuclear plant at Three Mile looks to many skeptics like a thinly veiled version of the vacuous stock-market advice

"Buy low and sell high"—a great idea in principle, but systematically useless as Island a good thing to have happened or a bad thing? If, in planning some course of advice to follow.5

action, you encountered the meltdown as a sequel of probability
p,
what should you So not only have utilitarians never made an actual practice of determining their assign to it as a weight? Is it a negative outcome that you should strive to avoid, or a specific moral choices by calculating the expected utilities of (all) the alternatives positive outcome to be carefully fostered?4 We can't yet say, and it is not clear that (there not being time, as our original objector noted), but they have never achieved
any
particular long run would give us the answer. (Notice that this is not a problem stable "off-line"
derivations
of partial results—"landmarks and direction posts," as of insufficiently
precise
measurement; we can't even determine the
sign,
positive or Mill puts it—to be exploited on the fly by those who must cope with "matters of negative, of the value to assign to the outcome.)

practical concernment."

Compare the problem facing us here with the problems confronting the designers What, then, of the utilitarians' chief rivals, the various sorts of Kantians? Their of computer chess programs. One might suppose that the way to respond to the rhetoric has likewise paid tribute to practicality—largely via their indictments of problem of real-time pressure for ethical decision-making techniques is the way the impracticality of the utilitarians.6 What, though, do the one responds to time pressure in chess: heuristic search-pruning techniques. But there is no checkmate in life, no point at which we get a definitive result, positive or negative, from which we can calculate, by retrograde analysis, the actual values of the alternatives that lay along the path taken. How deep should one look before settling on 5.

Judith Jarvis Thomson has objected (in a commentary on "The Moral First Aid a weight for a position? In chess, what looks positive from ply 5 may look disastrous Manual" in Ann Arbor, November 8, 1986) that neither "Buy low and sell high" nor its from ply 7. There are ways of tuning one's heuristic search procedures to consequentialist counterpart, "Do more good than harm" is strictly vacuous; both presuppose something about ultimate goals, since the former would be bad advice to one who sought to lose money, and the latter would not appeal to the ultimate interests of all morally minded folk. I agree. The latter competes, for instance, with the advice the Pirate King gives to Frederick, the self-styled "slave of duty" in
Pirates of Penzance:
3. Probably the closest anybody has come to a "result" in this field is Axelrod's ( 1984)