Faculty Research
Presentation
March 2, 2016
“The fox knows many
things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
---- Archilochus -- Greek Poet ca.
690-645 BC
The Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay in 1953 in which he used “fox” and “hedgehog” to characterize two contrasting intellectual styles. Berlin characterized some thinkers, such as Plato and Nietzsche, as hedgehogs because their philosophies were unified by a single great idea, Forms for Plato, and the Will to Power for Nietzsche. While he said that other thinkers, e.g. Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Goethe, were foxes whose intellects ranged widely over many subjects, and whose thought could not be characterized by means of a single powerful idea. (As an aside, I remember attending a lecture by Sir Isaiah while I was a philosophy graduate student at the University of Illinois in the 1970s. I do not recall the topic of his lecture, but I do remember that he stared at the ceiling, rather like this, for nearly the entire time he was speaking). I think of myself as a fox, but one who is interested in collecting great ideas. Over my career my interests have ranged widely over many topics and disciplines including philosophy of science and technology, linguistics, cognitive science, bioethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, international relations, human rights, evolutionary biology, economics, and environmental ethics. Unlike hedgehogs who focus their research in a small subfield of their own academic discipline, I have crossed disciplinary boundaries in search of insights and tried to see the larger patterns of history in their entirety.
I am a progressive, secular humanist who believes that humans can acquire moral knowledge through experience and systematic inquiry and that moral knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient basis for moral progress. I assume that many of you also share my belief in moral progress whether or not you regard yourselves as secular humanists. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. often expressed his belief in moral progress by quoting Theodore Parker, a nineteenth century Unitarian minister and abolitionist from Massachusetts: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. If we take a long view of history there seems to be evidence for the truth of this claim based upon the progress over the past several centuries made towards greater human freedom and equality, for example, by the abolition of human slavery, the women’s suffrage movement gaining equal voting rights through the Nineteenth amendment, and, most recently, the ending of legal discrimination against homosexuals as evidenced by the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in
Windsor v. United States and
Obergefell v. Hodges that extended the rights to inherit and to marry to same sex couples.
However, when we take a clear-eyed look at history we can also find ample evidence of moral regress. The twentieth century witnessed mass murder on an unprecedented scale, not only two disastrous world wars, but major genocides in Ottoman Turkey, the Ukraine, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Rwanda as well as the Holocaust, in which more than 100 million people perished. These moral catastrophes should remind us of the potential for human societies to regress morally and to rapidly descend into a moral abyss of cruelty and barbarism. We are witnessing yet another catastrophic moral slide right now in Syria and Northern Iraq where Daesh has engaged in public beheadings, institutionalized rape and sexual slavery, throwing gay men off rooftops, deliberate destruction of antiquities, and genocide against religious minorities. Those of us who here today are engaged in a privileged conversation; when millions of our fellow human beings are desperately struggling to escape from extreme poverty, political repression, and violent extremism, we must not be too quick to assert that the arc of the moral universe is in fact bending the right direction.
However, we must remember to distinguish between revolutions in the “real world” and revolutions in the world of ideas. In this respect moral revolutions are very different from scientific ones. We tend to think of science as progressive because we implicitly assume that there are certain consensus values that are normatively stable for epistemic communities of scientists. In the case of science, the stable consensus values are things such as predictive power and explanatory adequacy. Einsteinian general relativity was seen as progressive over Newtonian mechanics because it could both predict and explain the curvature of light around massive objects, and (as has been recently confirmed) the existence of gravitational waves. But in science one does not need to convince the entire population of the planet of the truth of General Relativity; one need only convince members of theoretical physics community. But as concerns moral revolutions, it is not sufficient that a few philosophers become convinced of some moral truth; there must be a change in moral sentiments that becomes widely diffused within society, accepted as part of moral commonsense, and incorporated into law. So we must distinguish between two different questions about moral progress: The first is whether we have gained important moral knowledge, and the second is whether this knowledge has been widely diffused and implemented within society. The first question is philosophically prior since unless we know which of our moral ideas are progressive we cannot determine whether we are getting to where we want to go.
Progress may be understood as change for the better. We make progress when there is a change that brings one closer to a goal or ideal. Let me narrow my focus to the ideal of human equality. The examples of moral progress I mentioned earlier are milestones in the development of one of the great moral innovations of modernity: the notion that all human beings are equal in dignity and rights. In the examples of moral progress mentioned earlier, unchosen personal characteristics that were once regarded as providing a legitimate basis for discriminating among persons, one’s race, sex, and more recently, sexual orientation, gradually came to be seen as illegitimate bases for denying people equal respect and rights. Another way of describing these transformations of our moral thinking is to say the idea of equality moved us away from a stratified, and hierarchical idea of moral status in which people were assigned different statuses based unchosen personal characteristics, and towards the ideal of a single status moral community in which all persons are respected as having equal dignity and rights at birth. This revolutionary shift from a stratified hierarchical system of moral status to a flat one is the core of the human rights revolution. Although I do believe that there has been progress towards realizing this ideal in the real world – it is now widely diffused and regarded by many people as moral commonsense, this empirical claim is not the question I wish to address here today. Instead my focus will be on the prior philosophical question: Why is change towards greater equality evidence for moral progress?
One way of answering this kind of question is just to say “Well, it just is!” This may sound like question-begging, but in the realm of values, there must be some that are regarded as ultimate or axiomatic. Different moral philosophers have built their systems of ethics on different ultimate moral values, for examples, Aristotle chose eudaimonia, Kant chose dignity, and Mill and his utilitarian followers chose happiness or welfare. The particular idea of equality that I am interested in is political equality, (sometimes called democratic equality), and is to be distinguished from economic and other forms of equality. Democratic equality is aptly described by the political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson when she says, “The proper negative aim of egalitarian justice is not to eliminate the impact of brute luck from human affairs, but to end oppression, which by definition is socially imposed” (Anderson, 1999). This view of the value of equality differs from the view known as “luck egalitarianism” which holds that “people should be compensated for undeserved misfortunes and that the compensation should come from only that part of others’ good fortune that is undeserved” (ibid.). There is a vast literature on these different understanding of equality which I will not attempt to review here. My focus will be on political equality as a moral ideal as understood in relation to systematic and institutionalized forms of oppression based upon differences of race, sex, class, caste, sexual orientation, and citizenship. Over the past two centuries or so, political distinctions based upon these sorts of personal characteristics have come to be seen as illegitimate and unjust.
It is at this point that I want to talk about my own modest contributions to this discussion. Over many years I have been developing a theory of human rights that attempts to explain how human rights arose and why they are justified as authoritative and globally applicable system of moral and legal norms. My theory of human rights is set forth in several of my publications, but most fully in a journal article from 2007 titled “Human Rights as Moral Rebellion and Social Construction,” which is currently one of my most cited publications. In this essay I develop and defend the thesis that human rights norms have arisen as normative responses to historical experiences of oppression. Taken as a whole, the system of human rights norms embodied in the contemporary human rights canon is designed to thwart known systems of domination and oppression by providing guarantees of social protection to members of society who are or may become vulnerable to specific forms or techniques of oppression. A key feature of my account is that specific human rights norms and values are viewed as having been created from the “bottom up” by means of an inductive reasoning process akin to hypothesis formation in science. Top- down theories of human rights generally begin with some abstract positive value such as freedom, equality, or dignity and attempt to derive specific rights from these values.
In contrast, bottom-up theories begin with the experience of specific forms of oppression and abuse that ”shock the conscience” or violate our sense of justice and proceeds to create norms that, if followed, would function effectively to prevent them. The initial step in the bottom-up process of norm creation is the act of moral rebellion. But the second, critical step, is the formulation of a moral norm (or norms) that if adopted would tend to prevent similar forms of abuse. Following the 19th American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, I call the form of reasoning that creates moral and legal norms, moral abduction.
The idea of moral status equality is the master value of the entire human rights paradigm. It is the idea found in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” The drafters of the UDHR expressed this fundamental moral principle in Article 1 in order to emphasize its status as a systemic “master value” that undergirds the entire system of human rights. The idea of moral status equality, although widely regarded as radical in earlier times, has become for many of us a tenet of moral commonsense. Even among philosophers, George Sher, a contemporary moral philosopher, notes that “One of the rare points of agreement among moral and political philosophers is that, despite their innumerable physical and mental differences, all persons have equal moral standing,” (Sher, 2014, p.74). But exactly how did this shift take place? What were the conditions under which social distinctions that were once perceived as legitimate grounds for discrimination came to be seen as immoral and unjust?
This is the question that Kwame Anthony Appiah addressed in his 2010 book
The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. Appiah says that “fundamental equality, in the eyes of morality, of all human beings “is the great modern discovery. In his view, this moral discovery came about largely by means of a recasting of the idea of “honor.” Having honor means “being entitled to respect,” but there are at least two senses in which we use this term: there is what Stephen Darwall terms “appraisal respect” in which we judge a person’s qualities or achievements relative to some standard, for instance, when we say that Roger Federer deserves honor and respect for his skill at tennis. But there is also, “recognition respect” that involves giving appropriate weight to some fact about a person, for instance, in light of an office that they hold, e.g. judge, or because of their personal identities or characteristics. Under the older honor codes that the modern idea of democratic equality displaced, persons who were recognized as female, black, or gay were accorded less recognition respect than straight, white, men.
The core of the 18th century’s human rights revolution was a rejection of this honor code, and in particular the notion that “people deserve better (or worse) treatment on account of identities that they did not choose” (185). The philosophers and revolutionaries of the European Enlightenment, both in France and in America, who championed the idea of equality did not have a clear idea of the respects in which all humans are equal, rather, they arrived at their idea of equality by means of the negative route: they were united in their opposition to inherited privilege, in particular, to the institution of the aristocracy, and to the manner in which people were treated badly “merely because they were not born into the nobility” (Appiah 127). We may tend to forget the fact that a rejection of “titles of nobility” was one of the beliefs that united the Founding Fathers. Benjamin Franklin expressed their shared belief that inherited titles of nobility were not only, “groundless and absurd, but often hurtful to that Posterity, since it is apt to make them proud, disdaining to be employ'd in useful Arts, and thence falling into Poverty, and all the Meannesses, Servility, and Wretchedness attending it; which is the present case with much of what is called the Noblesse in Europe” The Founders felt so strongly about this matter that they wrote it directly into the U.S. Constitution: “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state” (Article I, Section 9, Clause 8).
Opposition to discrimination based upon inherited personal characteristics was not originally understood to apply to all such forms of discrimination: the propertied white men who fought the War of Independence and created the American republic could not accept being looked down upon by the “noble men” of Europe, but were at the same time pleased to elevate their own status above that of women, slaves, and men without property. But equal rights are not won by means of philosophical argument: they are only secured by means of social movements which engage in protracted political struggle. In my theory of human rights, there is a process in which rights are socially constructed by means of a series of stages. Different categories of human rights are generally found at different stages in this process, and in most cases, many rights have not yet reached the final stage of operability.
But the logic of the argument that inherited characteristics are not proper grounds for discrimination, was very useful to other oppressed groups seeking to press their case for equal respect: for women (Mary Wollstonecraft), and for blacks (Frederick Douglas, Willian Wilberforce, Harriet Tubman), more recently for gays and lesbians (the Human Rights Campaign). In each of these cases an unchosen personal characteristic came to be seen as an inappropriate ground for differential recognition respect. The 18th century’s moral rebellion against aristocratic privilege started a “justice cascade” that eventually came to include many other forms of undeserved social status privilege based upon unchosen personal characteristics such as gender, race, ethnic background, physical appearance, nationality, disability, or sexual orientation. The more general moral insight that is the core of the human rights revolution is the idea that unchosen personal characteristics ought not to be used as a basis for differential recognition respect.
We are now in a position to return to our main question “Why does the recognition that all persons have equal moral standing count as moral progress?” I believe that there are at least four good answers to this question: first, it contributes to ending systematic or institutionalized forms of oppression based upon unchosen personal characteristics, second it makes competition for social and economic goods within societies more just and fair; third, it allows for a greater number of diverse individuals to achieve the full development of their human potentials; and fourth, it promotes greater social cohesion and voluntary social cooperation within society.
Moral status inequalities are not only oppressive, unfair, and limiting, they also undermine social cooperation, because people who are stigmatized by forms of unjust discrimination are oppressed and thus become less willing to participate in cooperative social enterprises in which they have no realistic hope of benefiting. In the remainder of this talk I would like to focus on the claim that moral status equality promotes social cooperation.
In his
Theory of Justice, John Rawls defines a scheme of social cooperation as stable when it is “more or less regularly complied with and its basic rules willingly acted upon” (TJ6/6). In his version of social contract theory, members of society can be induced to develop and deploy a sense of justice that will enable them to reliably and willingly accept the basic rules of justice, if and only if they regard these rules as fair in the sense that they do not provide some individuals with social and economic advantages based upon characteristics over which they have no choice. For Rawls, the observance of basic human rights is the primary condition for social cooperation. Human rights are, for Rawls, a special class of rights that provide minimum standards for decent social institutions. For all of the philosophers in the social contract tradition, facts about human nature and about the political conditions necessary for extensive schemes of cooperation within human societies, are relevant to justifying basic principles of justice, such as moral status equality.
Morals norms and laws are basically social techniques that we have developed over many centuries of living together that enable us to get along with one another in very large complex societies whose effective functioning require high degrees of sustained social cooperation. My conception of social morality is very close to one proposed recently by the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who says, “Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible” (Haidt 2012, 314). While I think is a pretty good definition of social morality, I also think that social morality, or intragroup ethics, is only one branch of ethics.2 Nevertheless, Haidt’s claim that the essential function of social morality is to regulate intragroup competition, comports very well with our current understanding of human evolution and the place that our species occupies within the biological world. There is now good reason to believe that humans evolved to be both “selfish” and “groupish” -- “Our minds were designed not only to help us win the competition within our own groups, but also to help us unite with those in our group to win competitions across groups” (283).
The great biologist Edward O. Wilson, in a recent book with the immodest title
The Meaning of Human Existence, argues that
homo sapiens sapiens are one of the few eusocial species. Wilson defines eusocial species as those which “cooperatively rear the young across multiple generations. They divide labor through the surrender by some members of at least part of their personal reproduction in a way that increases the “reproductive success (lifetime reproduction) of other members” (105). Eusociality allows animal species, including ours, to excel at multilevel selection: “individual selection based on competition and cooperation among members of the same group, and group selection, which arise from competition and cooperation between groups” (154). Wilson is following in a long tradition of natural philosophers, running from Aristotle through Darwin to Aldo Leopold, all of whom viewed human morality in a biological perspective, and saw it as
embodying limitations on our freedom to pursue self- interest in the struggle for survival. Wilson believes that there was a stage in human evolution, in which intensified competition among human groups favored societies that excelled at group level selection, and this “promoted altruism and cooperation among all members of the group” which in turn led to the creation of “innate group wide morality and a sense of conscience and honor” (239). Summarizing his theory Wilson says, “The competition between two forces can be succinctly expressed as follows: Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals.” (239).
The idea that humans are innately predisposed to both compete with others in their own societies and to cooperate with them when confronted by external threats, while important, is not really that new an insight into the human condition. Every demagogue and tyrant knows that they can gain a following by telling people that they are threatened by an “other.” Nor is their idea that the core function of morality is to produce stable conditions for social cooperation a new one; moral philosophers have been saying this for a long time. But what is new and interesting is the connection between honor, equality, and social cooperation. In Appiah’s view, it was the insult to honor produced by discrimination based on unchosen personal characteristics that provided the stimulus for moral progress towards greater social equality. Honor and conscience are bio-psycho-social adaptations that enable individual members of human societies to cooperate in competition with other human groups. The appeal to honor and respect relies on the evolved human desire for reputational status within one’s own identity group. The offense of feeling dishonored due to personal characteristics over which one had no control is one of the spurs to the moral rebellions that moved us towards greater status equality. But by following this idea we have discovered an important moral truth: that those human societies that embrace the value of social status equality are superior at both individual and group level selection. Because they afford every member of society equal recognition respect, they have fairer forms of individual competition within the society; and they also have better social cohesion enabling them to cooperate more effectively in competition with other societies. In others, words, given our eusocial nature, greater social equality is beneficial for humans at both the individual and group levels.
If providing the basis for a stable system of social cooperation is, as I have suggested, an enduring value against which we can measure moral progress, then we can then assert that the human rights revolution that has produced change towards greater social equality has been progressive, at least in those liberal societies that have embraced democratic equality as a normative ideal. However, the human rights revolution remains an unfinished project. it is obviously unfinished as long as the majority of the world’s people still live in traditional societies in which status discrimination based on sex or race or other unchosen personal characteristics remains the norm. But it is also unfinished because the human rights movement has not yet successfully addressed all of the norms and institutions that undermine trust and social cooperation both within and between human societies. If we wish to make further moral progress in the 21st century the question we must ask is: “Which of our current social norms, values, and institutions are not conducive to our maintaining a stable system of global social cooperation?”
There are several good candidates, but I want to focus attention on one unchosen personal characteristic on which we continue to discriminate, the country in which one happens to be born. The migrant crisis in Europe, South Asia, and elsewhere reveals a fundamental form of injustice in our current institutional arrangements based upon sovereign territorial nation states: in our globalized world capital and goods can more freely across national borders than people can. In fact, the current exclusionary system based on birth or inherited citizenship is a form of global apartheid in which millions of persons are prevented from moving freely around the planet in search of political asylum, refuge, economic opportunity, and a better life for themselves and their families. If it is wrong to discriminate against individuals because of unchosen personal characteristics such as their race or sex, why is it not also illegitimate to discriminate against people because of their parent’s citizenship or the place of their birth?
For a cosmopolitan progressive like me, the struggle for human equality must now confront issues that limit the full development of human potentials and undermine the bases of social cooperation globally. This is a very daunting challenge because the moral and legal norms that support the current system of sovereign nation states and a capitalist political economy are deeply entrenched in the popular moral conscience, and there are powerful interests which are fighting vigorously, and often unfairly, to protect their power and privilege. But this should not stop us from trying. Our current form of civilization, based upon industrial mass production driven by the unrestricted burning of fossil fuels for energy, has powered rapid economic development, but has also destroyed ecosystems, driven other species to extinction, and is disrupting the global atmosphere and hydrosphere in potentially disastrous ways. More than ever before in human history, we need to cooperate as a species in order to voluntarily limit our competition with other species and our unsustainable exploitation of the ecosystems upon which all life depends. We also need to promote greater international cooperation to address other threats to our own well-being and that of other species, such as preventing war and terrorism, rescuing people fleeing from conflict or famine or political repression, and more equitably sharing the benefits of economic cooperation among people and the nations of the world.
Human survival and flourishing requires now that we forge a set of moral norms and values, and an accompanying legal framework, that enables us to cooperate not only the group level, nor only at the society level, but internationally, and globally – also at the interspecies level -- in order to solve the problems of living that we face in Anthropocene Epoch. We are on a difficult and perilous part of our journey, one in which we face many threats and challenges.
Humans have been able to progress morally in large part because of our ability to create knowledge, an in particular, to fulfill the Socratic dictum “Know Thyself” and this ability gives me some hope that we can overcome these challenges and survive and continue to flourish as a species among others on this planet.
March 2, 2016
Works Cited
Anderson, Elizabeth. “What is the Point of Equality?” Ethics, Vol. 109, No. 2 (1999): 287- 337.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony.
The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. New York:
W. W. Norton, 2010.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics. New York: Vintage, 2012.
