The End of Faith (22 page)

New problems arise once we commit ourselves to finding a ratio- nal foundation for our
ethics. Indeed, we find that it is difficult to draw the boundaries of our moral concern
in a principled way. It is clear, for instance, that susceptibility to pain cannot be our
only cri- teria. As Richard Rorty observes, “If pain were all that mattered, it would be
as important to protect the rabbits from the foxes as to protect the Jews from the Nazis.”16 In virtue of what have we con- vinced ourselves that we need not intercede on behalf of
all rabbits? Most of us suspect rabbits are not capable of experiencing happiness or
suffering on a human scale. Admittedly we could be wrong about this. And if it ever seems
that we have underestimated the subjec- tivity of rabbits, our ethical stance toward them
would no doubt change. Incidentally, here is where a rational answer to the abortion
debate is lurking. Many of us consider human fetuses in the first trimester to be more or
less like rabbits: having imputed to them a range of happiness and suffering that does not
grant them full sta- tus in our moral community. At present, this seems rather reason-
able. Only future scientific insights could refute this intuition.

The problem of specifying the criteria for inclusion in our moral community is one for
which I do not have a detailed answerother than to say that whatever answer we give should
reflect our sense of the possible subjectivity of the creatures in question. Some answers
are clearly wrong. We cannot merely say, for instance, that all human beings are in, and
all animals are out. What will be our cri- terion for humanness? DNA? Shall a single human
cell take prece- dence over a herd of elephants? The problem is that whatever

attribute we use to differentiate between humans and animals intelligence, language use,
moral sentiments, and so onwill equally differentiate between human beings themselves. If
people are more important to us than orangutans because they can articu- late their
interests, why aren't more articulate people more impor- tant still? And what about those
poor men and woman with aphasia? It would seem that we have just excluded them from our
moral com- munity. Find an orangutan that can complain about his family in Borneo, and he
may well displace a person or two from our lifeboat.

The Demon of Relativism

We saw in chapter 2 that for our beliefs to function logically indeed, for them to be beliefs at allwe must also believe that they faithfully represent states of the world. This
suggests that some sys- tems of belief will appear more faithful than others, in that they
will account for more of the data of experience and make better predic- tions about future
events. And yet, many intellectuals tend to speak as though something in the last century
of ratiocination in the West has placed all worldviews more or less on an equal footing.
No one is ever really right about what he believes; he can only point to a community of peers who believe likewise.
Suicide bombing isn't really wrong, in any absolute sense; it just seems so from the parochial perspective of Western culture.
Throw a dash of Thomas Kuhn into this pot, and everyone can agree that we never really
know how the world is, because each new generation of scientists reinvents the laws of
nature to suit its taste. Convictions of this sort generally go by the name of
“relativism,” and they seem to offer a rationale for not saying anything too critical
about the beliefs of others. But most forms of relativismincluding moral relativism, which
seems especially well subscribedare nonsensical. And dan- gerously so. Some may think that
it is immaterial whether we think the Nazis were really wrong in ethical terms, or whether we just

don't like their style of life. It seems to me, however, that the belief that some
worldviews really are better than others taps a different set of intellectual and moral
resources. These are resources we will desperately need if we are to oppose, and
ultimately unseat, the reg- nant ignorance and tribalism of our world.

The general retort to relativism is simple, because most relativists contradict their
thesis in the very act of stating it. Take the case of relativism with respect to
morality: moral relativists generally believe that all cultural practices should be
respected on their own terms, that the practitioners of the various barbarisms that
persist around the globe cannot be judged by the standards of the West, nor can the people
of the past be judged by the standards of the present. And yet, implicit in this approach
to morality lurks a claim that is not relative but absolute. Most moral relativists
believe that toler- ance of cultural diversity is better, in some important sense, than
outright bigotry. This may be perfectly reasonable, of course, but it amounts to an
overarching claim about how all human beings should live. Moral relativism, when used as a
rationale for tolerance of diversity, is self-contradictory.

There is, however, a more sophisticated version of this line of thinking that is not so
easily dispatched. It generally goes by the name of “pragmatism,” and its most articulate
spokesmen is undoubtedly Richard Rorty.17 While Rorty is not a household name, his work has had a great influence on our discourse,
and it offers considerable shelter to the shades of relativism. If we ever hope to reach a
global consensus on matters of ethicsif we would say, for instance, that stoning women for
adultery is really wrong, in some absolute sensewe must find deep reasons to reject pragmatism. Doing so, we
will discover that we are in a position to make strong cross-cultural claims about the
reasonableness of various systems of belief and about good and evil.

The pragmatist's basic premise is that, try as we might, the currency of our ideas cannot
be placed on the gold standard of cor- respondence with reality as it is. To call a
statement “true” is merely

to praise it for how it functions in some area of discourse; it is not to say anything
about how it relates to the universe at large. From the point of view of pragmatism, the
notion that our beliefs might “cor- respond with reality” is absurd. Beliefs are simply
tools for making one's way in the world. Does a hammer correspond with reality? No. It has
merely proven its usefulness for certain tasks. So it is, we are told, with the “truths”
of biology, history, or any other field. For the pragmatist, the utility of a belief trumps all other concerns, even the concern for coherence.18 If a literalist reading of the Bible works for you on Sundays, while agnosticism about God
is better suited to Mondays at the office, there is no reason to worry about the result-
ing contradictions in your worldview. These are not so much incom- patible claims about
the way the world is as different styles of talking, each suited to a particular occasion.

If all of this seems rather academic, it might be interesting to note that Sayyid Qutb,
Osama bin Laden's favorite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of
American civilization. He thought that it would, in Berman's phrase, “undermine America's
ability to fend off its enemies.”19 There may be some truth to this assertion. Pragmatism, when civilizations come clashing,
does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually
be rightabout anythingseems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when “the best lack all
convic- tion, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I believe that relativism
and pragmatism have already done much to muddle our thinking on a variety of subjects,
many of which have more than a passing relevance to the survival of civilization.

In philosophical terms, pragmatism can be directly opposed to realism. For the realist, our statements about the world will be “true” or “false” not merely in
virtue of how they function amid the welter of our other beliefs, or with reference to any
culture-bound criteria, but because reality simply is a certain way, independent of our
thoughts.20 Realists believe that there are truths about the world that may exceed our capacity to
know them; there are facts of the

A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL l8l

matter whether or not we can bring such facts into view. To be an ethical realist is to
believe that in ethics, as in physics, there are truths waiting to be discoveredand thus we can be right or wrong in our beliefs about them.21

According to pragmatists like Rorty, realism is doomed because there is no way to compare
our description of reality with a piece of undescribed reality. As JŸrgen Habermas says, “since the truth of beliefs or sentences can in turn be
justified only with the help of other beliefs and sentences, we cannot break free from the
magic circle of our language.”22 This is a clever thesis. But is it true? The fact that language is the medium in which our
knowledge is repre- sented and communicated says nothing at all about the possibilities of
unmediated knowledge per se. The fact that no experience when talked about escapes being mediated by language (this is a tautol- ogy) does not mean that all
cognition, and hence all knowing, is interpretative. If it were possible for any facet of
reality to be known perfectlyif certain mystics, for instance, were right to think that
they had enjoyed unmediated knowledge of transcendental truths then pragmatism would be
just plain wrong, realistically. The prob- lem for the pragmatist is not that such a mystic stands a good chance of being
right. The problem is that, whether the mystic is right or wrong, he must be right or
wrong realistically. In opposing the idea that we can know reality directly, the
pragmatist has made a covert, realistic claim about the limits of human knowledge. Pragmatism amounts to a realistic denial of the possibility of realism. And so, like the relativist, the pragmatist appears
to reach a contradiction before he has even laced his shoes. A more thorough argument
along these lines has been relegated to a long endnote, so as not to kill the gen- eral
reader with boredom.23

Relativists and pragmatists believe that truth is just a matter of consensus. I think it
is clear, however, that while consensus among like minds may be the final arbiter of
truth, it cannot constitute it. It is quite conceivable that everyone might agree and yet be wrong about the way the
world is. It is also conceivable that a single person

might be right in the face of unanimous opposition. From a realist point of view, it is
possible (though unlikely) for a single person, or culture, to have a monopoly on the
truth.

It would seem, therefore, that nothing stands in the way of our presuming that our beliefs
about the world can correspond, to a greater or lesser degree, to the way the world
iswhether or not we will ever be in a position to finally authenticate such correspon-
dence. Given that there are likely to be truths to be known about how members of our
species can be made as happy as possible, there are almost certainly truths to be known
about ethics. To say that we will never agree on every question of ethics is the same as
saying that we will never agree on every question of physics. In neither case does the
open-endedness of our inquiry suggest that there are no real facts to be known, or that
some of the answers we have in hand are not really better than some others. Respect for diversity in our ethical views is, at best, an intellectual holding pattern until more of the facts
are in.

Intuition

One cannot walk far in the company of moral theorists without hearing our faculty of
“moral intuition” either exalted or scorned. The reason for the latter attitude is that
the term “intuition” has always carried the scent of impropriety in philosophical and
scien- tific discourse. Having been regularly disgraced by its appearance in
colloquialisms like “woman's intuition” (meaning “psychic”), or otherwise directly
contrasted with “reason,” the word now seems to conjure up all that is cloying and
irrational outside the university gates. The only striking exception to this rule is to be
found among mathematicians, who apparently speak of their intuitions without the least
embarrassmentrather like travelers to exotic places in the developing world who can often
be heard discussing the misadven- tures of their colon over breakfast. But, as we know,
mathematicians

travel to very exotic places indeed. We might also note that many of them admit to being
philosophical Platonists, without feeling any apparent need to consult a trained
philosopher for an exorcism.

Whatever its stigma, “intuition” is a term that we simply cannot do without, because it
denotes the most basic constituent of our fac- ulty of understanding. While this is true
in matters of ethics, it is no less true in science. When we can break our knowledge of a
thing down no further, the irreducible leap that remains is intuitively taken. Thus, the
traditional opposition between reason and intuition is a false one: reason is itself
intuitive to the core, as any judgment that a proposition is “reasonable” or “logical”
relies on intuition to find its feet. One often hears scientists and philosophers concede
that something or other is a “brute fact”that is, one that admits of no reduction. The
question of why physical events have causes, say, is not one that scientists feel the slightest temptation to ponder. It is just so. To
demand an accounting of so basic a fact is like asking how we know that two plus two
equals four. Scientists presuppose the validity of such brutishnessas, indeed, they must.

The point, I trust, is obvious: we cannot step out of the darkness without taking a first step. And reason, without knowing how, understands this axiom if it would understand
anything at all. The reliance on intuition, therefore, should be no more discomfiting for
the ethicist than it has been for the physicist. We are all tugging at the same bootstraps.

It is also true that our intuitions have been known to fail. Indeed, many of the
deliverances of reason do not seem reasonable at first glance. When asked how thick a
piece of newspaper would be if one could fold it upon itself one hundred times in
succession, most of us imagine something about the size of a brick. A little arithmetic
reveals, however, that such an object would be as thick as the known universe. If we've
learned anything in the last two thousand years, it is that a person's sense of what is
reasonable sometimes needs a little help finding its feet.