History and Mystery

How does the history of philosophy look to a mysterian? As follows: the history of philosophy is the history of our consciousness of mystery. Philosophy consists of a set of mysteries, possibly open-ended, and philosophers, as conscious beings, are aware of these mysteries—and aware of them as mysteries (no matter what they might say in professional moments). The philosophical state of mind is a confrontation with mystery felt as such. But this set may not be static; it may be that different mysteries are salient at different times. Given that philosophical preoccupations vary over time, the mysterian will expect to find a different set of mysteries dominating during particular periods. What is distinctive of the mysterian point of view is that it characterizes philosophical perplexity as an encounter with the mysterious—the baffling, incomprehensible, confusing, and elusive.[1] That is, philosophy is not just grappling with problems that are experienced as solvable and open to available methods, but as peculiarly taxing and prone to rational disagreement. I won’t attempt to say more here about what this mystery consists in; my aim is rather to sketch the overall shape of (Western) philosophy as seen from this perspective. What were the mysteries that occupied thinkers at different periods of history, and is there any pattern to the succession of philosophical mysteries that gripped people over time? I am not attempting to defend the mysterian position, nor even to articulate it further, merely to describe (sketchily) the history of philosophy as seen from its perspective. I think this provides an illuminating way to think about philosophical history.

The pre-Socratics were concerned largely with mysteries of the physical world: what things are made of, whether reality is one or many, do things change or remain the same. The empirical sciences didn’t exist at that time, so their suggestions were highly speculative (e.g. Greek atomism). To these thinkers the physical world presented many mysteries that could not be resolved by common sense or by any generally accepted method—the model of Euclidian geometry could not be applied. No doubt their intellectual attitude toward these questions resembled the attitude of later generations towards questions about the mind: physical nature will have seemed to them like a vast enigma. Their questions don’t strike us now as part of philosophy proper, though to them they may have seemed the way the mysteries of philosophy seem to us today. In any case the mysteries that concerned them pertained mainly to physical nature—to what they could see and touch. They wrestled with these questions as best they could, aware of their intractability.

Plato’s concerns were rather different: he was interested principally in mysteries of definition. What is knowledge? What is virtue? What is the just state? He was also concerned with reality and appearance, including the distinction between particulars and universals. His interests were centered on the human: human knowledge, human virtue, human nature, and human concepts. He found these questions exceptionally difficult to answer (or Socrates did), not part of existing human understanding. Socrates is forever asking people to define some concept or other and finding them irrationally overconfident; famously, he knows only that he does not know. Ignorance is standard; human knowledge is limited; real knowledge (of the forms) is difficult to acquire. There is mystery lurking in the most familiar of things. It isn’t just the world outside us that is mysterious; our own thoughts are mysterious—we are mysterious. Everyone could see that we know little about the external natural world, but it takes a philosopher like Plato to see that we know little about our own internal world. Plato’s pupil Aristotle is also concerned with matters of definition, though he prefers to speak of essence—the essence of existing things. Thus his concern with the essential nature of substances, causation, biological forms, and human virtue: he looks outward to the world not inward to our modes of representing it. He thus combines Plato and the pre-Socratics, simply put. His mysteries belong to external reality, though they emerge through the search for essences (hence “Aristotelian essentialism”). They belong to nature, but nature as viewed through Aristotelian categories. In Plato the mysteries come with a dose of mysticism, while in Aristotle no trace of mysticism can be detected—though he is still grappling with the most recalcitrant of problems.

The medieval period undergoes a shift of interest, despite its debt to Plato and Aristotle: God and the supernatural now become the field for the contemplation of mystery. No doubt this is mainly the result of the rise of Christianity: theological questions become paramount. The problem of evil, divine foreknowledge, the Holy Trinity, arguments for the existence of God, angels dancing on pinheads—all these become the mysteries of the moment. And they were apt to be characterized in just those terms, God being the ultimate mystery—thus the lucubration of Augustine, Aquinas, and sundry others. Now the mysteries exist in the supernatural realm not so much here on earth, in nature or human nature. Philosophers had to look upward not outward or inward. What is constant is the sense that philosophy deals with deep mysteries not merely problems solvable by the application of recognized methods. Whether these were pseudo-mysteries, born of misguided religion, is not to the point; they were conceived as grist for philosophy precisely because they were seen as genuine mysteries. Philosophy goes wherever the mysteries are perceived to be.

The modern period, in which philosophy as we now know it was largely formed, is characterized by two main problems, along with subsidiary problems: the problem of human knowledge and the problem of motion. The latter problem has now shifted to what we call “physics”, but at the time no sharp distinction was made by practitioners. Natural philosophers from Galileo to Newton tried to understand the nature and origin of motion; the problem was seen as presenting deep mysteries to the human mind in its effort to understand nature (the equivalent to today’s mind-body problem). Newton’s eventual triumph was not total, since gravity as a source of motion was agreed not to be intelligible by mechanistic standards (“occult” in Newton’s word). The mystery of motion was not fully resolved (and arguably still is not). In the case of knowledge the main question concerned the acquisition of knowledge (the “origin of ideas”) and two theories were formulated, rationalism and empiricism. Thus we have the efforts of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and Hume (among others). Solving this problem was not understood as routine empirical inquiry but as steeped in imponderables and controversy. Human knowledge was seen as a mystery, a puzzle, something calling for distinctively philosophical work. And it is indeed still a mystery how human knowledge is possible, despite the efforts of “learning theory”. How we come to know mathematics, for example, is still not understood at a fundamental level. The mind-body problem was also much discussed during this period—also still a mystery today. It isn’t that the dawn of science saw the conversion of philosophical mysteries into tractable scientific problems; rather, natural philosophers began to appreciate more fully the mysteries inherent in knowledge and motion. New mysteries were added to old.

Not much later the mysteries of metaphysics began to assert themselves, particularly in the writings of Kant, and later Hegel and others (e.g. Schopenhauer). Reality and appearance, space and time, necessity and contingency, the self, idealism versus realism, monism versus pluralism—all the problems of traditional metaphysics are extensively debated. Again, this was not a matter of routine science, still less common sense, but was understood as a confrontation with profound mysteries that stretch or exceed the powers of the human intellect. Philosophy changed its focus with Kant, but it did not change its preoccupation with mystery; it did not perceive itself as moving to a new phase in which mysteries gave way to mere problems. The torment of philosophy never went away. The mysterian sees in this the essential connection between philosophy and mystery. Mystery is not associated only with the earlier immature phases of the subject, nor with the medieval emphasis on religion and the supernatural, but is part of the very texture of the subject–the impenetrable, the obscure, the maddening.  Anti-metaphysical positivism was the welcomed antidote to this sense of oppressive mystery—the promise that all confounding mystery could be banished by appeal to the principle of verifiability. Mysteries consist of unanswerable questions, but there are no such questions because every meaningful question must be answerable. It was not so much a priori metaphysics that the positivists objected to; it was mysterious metaphysics, the kind that resists resolution. If metaphysicians had been able to reach consensus on their questions it wouldn’t matter that they eschewed methods of empirical verification; the real problem was that the questions of metaphysics presented insoluble mysteries. Why labor at questions you can never resolve? Kant’s entire system is really a rebuke to the human intellect (the noumenal world is completely impenetrable to the human mind); positivism promised to do away with all such metaphysical mystery by adopting an exclusionary theory of meaning. That was its main motivation and appeal.

Twentieth century philosophy then dedicates itself to pondering the general nature of meaning, making the “linguistic turn”; but here too mysteries abound, controversies rage, frustration descends. Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine, Austin, Kripke, Davidson, Grice, and others: they all tried to lay the mysteries of meaning to rest, but those mysteries persisted. The state of philosophy as mystery management did not fundamentally change, just the nature of the mysteries being studied. Theory of meaning never turned into a branch of science; it remained as philosophy with its characteristic sense of puzzlement. Anti-metaphysical philosophy of this type is not mystery-free philosophy; indeed, the focus on meaning only accentuated the sense that philosophical questions resist resolution. Wittgenstein exemplifies it best: the Tractatus is a deeply mysterious (and mystical) work, but the Investigations also raises profound puzzles about meaning, despite its ostensible complacency. Philosophy of language is just philosophy as usual, complete with its own roster of puzzles and paradoxes (Chomsky has always been willing to accept that language presents genuine mysteries).

In the present day we have the mystery of consciousness, but also mysteries of free choice, imagination, creativity, dreams, and thought. The currently accepted mysteries cluster around the mind, human and animal. To some extent these are new mysteries, or new versions of old mysteries. Calling them mysteries is perhaps new, at least within the last hundred years (Hume had spoken of “mysteries of nature” in the eighteenth century). Chomsky has been using this language for many years and the term “mysterian” was introduced to describe my position on consciousness thirty years ago. Whether the existence of these mysteries shows anything about the limitations of the human mind is a separate question; for all I have said here the mysteries might stem from objective reality (we live in an inherently mysterious universe). I have only suggested that the history of philosophy can be described as an engagement with mysteries whatever their provenance may be. The point of this exercise is to draw a distinction between philosophy and other disciplines: philosophy is characteristically concerned with mysteries, while other disciplines traffic in them only incidentally. You can write a book called The Problems of Philosophy and be expected to deal with the kind of mysteries I have enumerated; a book called The Problems of Physics will not deal with the mysteries of physics but with the achievements of that field. Even psychology, an undeveloped science, does not deal in mysteries in the way philosophy does (though philosophical problems certainly arise within psychology): its problems arise from lack of data and lack of theory, not from recalcitrant conundrums or conceptual roadblocks.

So philosophy has a distinctive kind of history—a distinctive kind of psychological history. The psychology of the philosopher differs from the psychology of other seekers after truth: it might be described as ecstatic despair(if I may be allowed a degree of hyperbole). Ecstatic, because of the grandeur of its questions; despair, because of the difficulty of answering them (sometimes even formulating them). It is like being in contact with an elusive god: the object is radiant, but the access is limited. Philosophy thus produces a curious mixture of optimism and pessimism: optimism born of being able to think about these questions at all, but pessimism born of constant failure to answer them. Oh how wonderful it would be to solve these problems! But oh how lowering it is to come up with nothing! Doing philosophy is an exercise in hubris and humility: hence the pained expression on the face of philosophers (true philosophers), but also the wild glint in the eye. The philosopher longs to discover things, to write up his or her results and announce them to the world; but alas it is all controversy and rejection, doubt and neurosis. We want to see into the nature of things and take their measure, but they remain maddeningly elusive. Still, we cannot quench the feeling that this time we have it right… Thus the life of the philosopher is apt to be veering and halting, or else digging dogmatically in; the serenity of certain knowledge is not ours to be had (except in very limited ways). We live with the consciousness of mystery, while committed to unraveling it. We are like babies learning to walk—we get up on those rubbery legs and totter a few paces before collapsing on the floor (but we gamely get up again to totter a few more wobbly paces). We don’t feel merely ignorant, remediably so; we feel stupefied, nonplussed. No amount of further study can remove our bafflement. No grant is large enough to resolve our perplexities. The mystery bears down on us.[2]

Of course, there have been attempts to deny mystery: it’s all pseudo- questions, nonsense, confusion; or it will all eventually turn into regular science; or it has already been taken care of by the latest theory from Professor X. There are no real mysteries, just ordinary problems or conceptual snarl-ups. That too is part of the history of philosophy from the mysterian standpoint—the need to deny that philosophy deals with mysteries. Meta-philosophy is part of the history of philosophy and it often takes the form of denying the mysterious character of philosophical problems. For the mysterian, however, this is predictable, since the human mind is impatient with mystery and would like to be rid of it. So the history of philosophy will be marked by attempts to deny the truth about the nature of philosophy. For philosophical perplexity is irritating—it disturbs the mind, won’t let it rest. The mind wants badly to solve mysteries (hence the appeal of detective stories) and it grows peevish when denied that satisfaction. Thus the philosopher is forever irritated and exhilarated at the same time. Acceptance of mystery is difficult, and there is always the possibility of total triumph! So it has gone in the past, and so it will continue to go in the future. I don’t expect the future of philosophy to be any different from its past, though new mysteries may rear their heads as time goes by.[3]

Colin

[1] See my Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry (1993).

[2] I don’t mean to say there are no lighter moments when dawn breaks and clouds part—and there is always the thrill of refutation. But the experience of solving problems to one’s own and others’ satisfaction, central hard problems, is not one that we can hope to enjoy. At best we can argue for positions, not announce results. (I used to be an experimental psychologist where at least one can tabulate data and perform statistical tests on them. And think what a field biologist can hope to discover!)

[3] My guess is that the brain will come to seem the mystery par excellence, much more so than today; also the mysteries of physics will become more widely acknowledged.

Experience and Fact

We normally suppose that experience and fact are separate entities. Suppose I observe my cat chasing a lizard: on the one hand, there is the fact of my cat chasing a lizard; on the other, there is my experience of my cat chasing a lizard. These could exist separately—there is a dualism of experience and fact. I might report the fact in question by saying, “My cat chased a lizard”, and I might report the experience by saying, “I had a visual experience of my cat chasing a lizard”. But these sentences mix up fact and experience, because the first refers to me in stating the fact in question, while the second refers to my cat in stating what I experienced. Shouldn’t we be able to describe fact and experience in their own terms? So let’s try again: suppose I say, “This cat chased a lizard” in an effort to keep myself out of the picture, sticking only to the fact itself. That looks better, but what does “This cat” mean? Doesn’t it mean, “The cat I am experiencing”? I am experiencing a cat and I use this fact to refer to the cat by employing a demonstrative: the demonstrative refers back to my experience in using it.[1] So I have not succeeded in keeping myself out of the picture; the picture still contains a reference to myself in the corner. Worse, I have referred to my experience in trying to report a fact about the cat and the lizard. On the other hand, I scarcely remove the reference to the world in describing my experience by substituting “this cat” for “my cat”: now I am saying that I had an experience of this cat chasing a lizard not my cat—still a living breathing cat. I refer to experience in reporting the fact and to the fact (or a component of it) in reporting the experience. But if there is an ontological dualism here, why am I mixing up the two categories? Can’t I report the fact as it objectively is and the experience as it subjectively is?

It might be thought easy to achieve that ideal: I just substitute a name for the cat in the former case and an indefinite description in the latter case. Thus “Blackie chased a lizard” and “I had an experience of a cat chasing a lizard”: in the former there is no reference to my experience, and in the latter there is no reference to a particular cat. But matters are not so simple. How does “Blackie” refer to its feline bearer? Plausibly by trading on a prior demonstrative reference–either at an initial baptism or maybe as an ongoing prop. A perfectly general description is seldom if ever available and is certainly not the typical case; we generally rely on a bedrock of demonstrative reference to secure the reference of names. At root, then, our names refer back to our experiences—as in “the object I am seeing”. So we are still not succeeding in describing the facts purely, as they objectively exist. In the case of descriptions of experience we have a different problem: I am not experiencing any old cat as chasing a lizard—some cat or other—but a specific cat, viz. Blackie, my cat, this cat. There is a particularity to the experience that is not captured by the indefinite description “a cat”; so we need a singular term to do justice to this aspect of the experience. The natural choice is a name (if you know it) or a demonstrative (if you don’t): “I had an experience of Blackie chasing a lizard” or “I had an experience of this cat chasing a lizard”. But then we are back to referring to an actual singular cat. We can’t keep the world out of descriptions of the experience, as we couldn’t keep experience out of descriptions of the world. Yet aren’t these separate domains?

One response is to accept that they are not separate domains. Idealism says that facts are experiences, so it isn’t surprising that we can’t describe the one except by reference to the other: the fact of a cat chasing a lizard is just the occurrence of an experience of a cat chasing a lizard. On the other hand, externalism maintains that experiences are constituted by relations to worldly objects, so that my experience just was composed of a particular cat (inter alia): I wouldn’t have that experience unless it was directed at a particular individual cat. The reference to a specific cat simply reflects the actual nature of the experience, according to externalism. Thus there is no dualism of the sort described earlier: facts and experiences are inextricable. I won’t try to adjudicate this issue now; I have merely indicated a possible route to the doctrines in question. Our habitual modes of description can encourage the rejection of a strict dichotomy between facts and experiences. What I want to suggest is that there is room for an alternative view: granted we can’t find a way to exclude reference to experience from descriptions of fact, and reference to fact from descriptions of experience, but that is really a point about us not about reality. From the fact that we can’t describe facts and experiences without importing alien elements from the other side, it doesn’t follow that these things can’t exist without each other or that they have dependent natures. Ontological dependence doesn’t even follow from the fact that no one could describe the two independently. For it may be that we are limited by our language and cognitive resources to describing things in ways that don’t reflect their real nature. A cat could be chasing a lizard even if no one ever experienced that fact, though reports of the fact inevitably introduce reference to the reporter’s experience (even if only implicitly). And it could be that someone has an experience just like mine when I see my cat chasing a lizard, even though there is no cat there and hence there is no reference for “this cat”. Maybe I can’t capture the singularity of the experience without employing an existentially committal singular term, though the experience itself has a nature that is not dependent on the reference of such terms. So the dualism of fact and experience is not compromised by constraints on description, assuming such constraints to exist. Language is designed to fulfill certain practical purposes and these may not include capturing the objective nature of things (completely, purely). We talk about facts by relating them to our experiences, and we talk about experiences by relating them to facts (objects, properties), but that need not imply that reality itself is similarly structured. Perhaps we could invent new ways of talking that capture things more accurately (objectively, intrinsically), but as things stand we are apt to describe the world in something short of a logically perfect language.[2]

Co

[1] There is much to be said about the relation between demonstratives and perception, but it is clear that in standard cases one refers to the object that one is perceptually attending to, as if with an act of inner pointing. Without sense perception demonstratives would have little use—the audience needs to perceive what the speaker is referring to in order to understand the utterance. The mode of presentation associated with a demonstrative is perceptual, i.e. involves an experience of a certain object. But then demonstratives embed in their meaning acts of perceptual acquaintance—while the fact being reported is not itself a fact of perception.

[2] Physics might be regarded as the right kind of language to use to describe physical reality as it is in itself, using no indexical language to do so; but there doesn’t appear to be anything comparable that rids psychology of all reference to things outside the mind. It is hard to reconstruct commonsense psychology in purely non-externalist terms. Could there be a pure phenomenology that described experience without employing any terms applicable to physical objects? This would include even general terms for types of physical object such as “cat” or “square”.

Comparative Morality

It is plausible to suggest that our attributions of beauty are essentially comparative. To say that x is beautiful is to say that x is more beautiful than most things (or some such). More exactly, to say that x is a beautiful F (painting, person, motorcycle) is to say that x is more beautiful than most F’s. Objects are not said to be beautiful in isolation but only in relation to other objects; we certainly have the locution “x is more beautiful than y” and this locution is what underlies our use of the adjective “beautiful” used as a one-place predicate. It is the same with other adjectives: to say that x is large is to say that x is larger than most things of a certain class. Thus an ant can be said to be large because it is larger than most ants, though it is certainly not large in relation to other animals—it is large for an ant. Does the same hold for “beautiful”? Can something be a beautiful doorknob because it is more beautiful than other doorknobs but not beautiful tout court? It may not be a beautiful work of art compared to other works of art, suitable for exhibition in an art gallery. In any case, the word “beautiful” is best understood as a comparative: to be beautiful is to be more beautiful than other things of some class or other. This implies that an object can be beautiful in one world but not in another without changing its intrinsic character, since the comparison classes can vary between worlds: what is more beautiful than the majority of things in one world may not be more beautiful than the majority of things in another world. For example, a given bird may be more beautiful than most birds of its species in one world but not in another world in which avian pulchritude is of a higher order. Beauty is not then an intrinsic feature of objects that have it but a relative feature—a matter of how one thing compares to another. In a world of gods even Dorian Grey may seem plain—while what counts as ugly in one setting may be deemed handsome in another. Beauty comes on a scale and position on it is what matters. Accordingly, it makes little sense to entertain the idea that everyone might be beautiful, since that would imply that no one is more beautiful than anyone else: given that some people are more beautiful than others, some will count as beautiful and some will not (the same applies to doorknobs). The point of talk of beauty is to signal differences, so that to be less beautiful than others is to edge towards not being beautiful—someone has to lack this property in order than others may have it. The lowest ranked members of the relevant class will have to lack what the highest ranked members possess, on pain of rendering the concept of beauty nugatory. There can only be large ants because there are also small ants, and the same for beautiful people and doorknobs. In the land of the ugly some may yet be blessed with relative beauty, while in the land of the beautiful even Adonis may cringe and hide.

But I am not concerned here with aesthetics: I want to ask whether a similar story applies to morality. I take it that what I just said about beauty is pretty uncontroversial (if upsetting to the vain), but can something similar be true of goodness? Is it plausible to suggest that for a state of affairs or an action to be good or right is for it to be better than some chosen class of states of affairs or actions? Is moral goodness analyzable as a comparative concept, to the effect that it applies just when one thing is morally better than another? This would imply that moral goodness is not a fixed quality but something that varies with the comparison class: being good is a matter of a relation between the object in question and other objects. To put it simply, an action can be said to be good if and only if it is morally better than most actions. That will need some refinement, but the intent should be clear—goodness is a comparative concept. We can rank actions according to their degree of moral goodness and the property of being morally good is analyzable in terms of the relation of moral superiority. And the same for moral badness: some actions are worse than others and moral badness can be defined as being worse than other actions (of a certain class). The basic moral concept is thus a comparative concept, i.e. being morally better-than. Something like this conception is at work in classical utilitarianism: an action is said to be right just when it produces more utility than other actions that could be performed in the circumstances. Moral rightness is defined as being better than other actions, as judged by the utilitarian measure. If another action would produce more utility than the one actually performed, the latter action is not deemed right. A morally good action is one that produces more utility than other actions that belong to the class of actions that could have been performed. The same action that is deemed not right in the actual circumstances could be right in other circumstances—those in which it is the best of the available actions there. Actions are right only in relation to other actions not tout court. Utilitarianism doesn’t say that an action is right if it produces a lot of utility, which would be a non-comparative condition; it says that an action is right if it produces more utility than other actions. Since utility is the measure of goodness, this implies that actions are morally right according to whether they are better than other actions. And notice that the next-ranked action possible in the circumstances cannot be reasonably deemed wrong without qualification, since it would have been right if the first-ranked action were not available. It is not intrinsically wrong to give someone a hundred dollars—that is only deemed wrong when you could have given a hundred and one dollars. According to utilitarianism, actions are ranked on a scale of moral quality, with some better than others; it is not an all-or-nothing matter. The underlying notion is that of one action being better than others according to its ability to produce utility. In extreme cases an action could be very wrong in one set of circumstances and very right in another, depending on the other actions available (e.g. how much money you have to give).

There is a question how far the comparative account can apply under deontological theories. Isn’t it an absolute all-or-nothing matter whether keeping a promise is right and breaking one is wrong? But even here comparative considerations come into the picture, for two reasons. First, breaking a promise can be more or less wrong depending on the importance of the promise—promising to bring life-saving medicine to a sick person versus promising to sing “My Sharona” to a friend, for example. Clearly, it is worse to break an important promise than a trivial one, so promises can be ranked according to how immoral it is to break them. And it is not implausible to suggest that the scale might be differently set in a world in which promise breaking is more prevalent and serious than in ours: if people are continually breaking important promises, it will seem less immoral to break trivial ones. Or if people are extremely punctilious, what we would count as trivial promise breaking will incur strong condemnation from them. Similarly for lying, ingratitude, etc. It may even be supposed that in the land of routine genocide regular murder will not earn such powerful censure as in our world. After all, not all murders are equally bad, some being worse than others; thus we speak of particularly heinous murders and distinguish them from less grievous cases. The second point is that duties may conflict in a given actual case: telling the truth might involve breaking a promise, for example. Here it is natural to speak of one action as exemplifying more duties than another, thus ranking actions according to the amount of duty following they contain.[1]Comparative thinking is common even in a deontological framework, not just the simple statements “This is right” and “That is wrong”. We can always ask, “Yes, but which action is more right or wrong?” Much the same holds within a virtue ethics perspective, but I won’t go further into this, since the point is clear enough (some people are more virtuous than others, and some virtues more important than others). To be virtuous is to be more virtuous than the average or typical or some such.

The interesting question that arises from this is whether a certain kind of moral relativity follows. Is it relative to a given society how wrong an action is? Suppose that in one country immorality of every kind is rife with the murder rate sky high, while in another country bad behavior is rare and minimal with no murder at all. Won’t the people in these societies calibrate their moral scale according to the prevailing facts? Both will employ a scale ranging from “mildly objectionable” to “absolutely horrific”, but the same actions will be categorized under different moral descriptions—armed robbery deemed only “pretty bad” in the first society while excoriated as “the epitome of evil” in the second society. The prevailing and varying facts will fix how the scale is applied, just as in the beauty case. Our moral language is used to make distinctions, mark contrasts, and these distinctions will exist even when the actions described are different. Thus how bad an action is will depend on the nature of the society that we are dealing with: in a land of villains actions might be only mildly reproved that in a land of saints would be regarded as deserving severe sanction. Societies become more morally lax according to the amount of immorality within them.

But this relativist position encounters resistance from another aspect of our moral thinking, namely that we are wedded to the idea that some actions are intrinsically wicked (or good) irrespective of what other actions may occur. Can it really be that murder is less wicked in a society in which murder is common, as opposed to being described as less wicked by (numbed) members of that society? The intuition to the contrary is certainly strong, and relaxing it likely to lead to nasty consequences, but it appears to conflict with the comparative view of moral discourse. People might rate actions according to their comparative status given the general function of moral discourse, but it doesn’t follow that actions themselves vary in their moral standing as these ratings vary. I think this is a real tension in our moral thinking, since we are committed to both things; and it leads to an uncomfortable form of moral skepticism, to the effect that we might be wrong about how bad various actions actually are. Maybe we are rating actions comparatively so as to preserve the full spectrum of moral language but the underlying moral facts are not varying with our ratings. For example, we rate armed robbery as less immoral than murder, and no doubt it is, but it might be a lot worse than we normally suppose: it might be really bad, just not as bad as murder, which is really really bad. Or it may be that promise breaking is a lot worse than we think, even though it compares favorably to others types of immorality. We apply a fixed set of moral categories but that may not be adequate to the moral facts. Surely a society in which child murder is common is missing something if they regard adult murder as only moderately wrong (comparatively speaking)! So we could be in error about how bad (or good) things are because we deploy a comparative scheme that glosses over questions of absolute rightness. But what are we to do—should we start declaring that certain actions are extremely bad (e.g. promise breaking) and other actions superlatively bad (e.g. murder), phasing out such pallid locutions as “pretty bad” or “not OK”? That seems pointless, so we seem committed to a comparative conception of morality, notwithstanding contrary intuitions. I think that in the course of history our sliding scale has moved around a good deal, though from a wider perspective the moral facts have not changed—murder was always as bad as it is now (and it may be a lot worse than even we recognize). It is clearly important to our moral thinking that we retain a comparative point of view—we need to count some actions are worse than others not just as good or bad simpliciter—but we don’t want to devolve into a kind of relativism that makes the moral status of an action dependent on people’s comparative judgments. Thus there is a tension at work here as we try to do justice to both ways of thinking. This tension does not appear to exist in the beauty case, since there we have less trouble with the idea of relative beauty: a given person might really be less beautiful in a world in which everyone is at the Cleopatra level (though that person is equally beautiful relative to our world). A large ant in our world might be a small ant in another world in which ants are twice as large, but it is less easy to accept that a person who is fairly wicked in our world is quite virtuous in another world in which wickedness is doubled. But then isn’t “fairly wicked” clearly a comparative term, inviting the question “Compared to whom?” We seem to operate uneasily with a moral system that is largely comparative but also contains hints of the absolute.[2]

Colin McGinn

[1] W.D. Ross formulates the point this way in The Right and the Good (1930): “right acts can be distinguished from wrong acts only as being those which, of all those possible for the agent in the circumstances, have the greatest balance of prima facie rightness, in those respects in which they are prima facie right, over their prima faciewrongness, in those respects in which they are prima facie wrong”. Note the comparative form of this definition of rightness.

[2] I can find no analogy for this situation drawn form elsewhere: nothing else has this kind of dual structure. Pragmatically, our moral discourse operates comparatively, at least most of the time, but metaphysically we are also drawn to a conception of moral facts that transcends such comparative truths. If we compare non-moral uses of “good”, as in “good knife”, we find a comparative account compelling, but there is no countervailing tendency towards absolute judgments: to be a good knife is just to be better than the majority of knives (in a given possible world), and no knife is deemed non-relationally good. We would expect on semantic grounds for the moral “good” to follow the pattern of the non-moral “good”, but it seems also to connote an absolute trait of actions that doesn’t vary between possible comparison classes– hence the tension.