The Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 39 No, 154 ISSN G031-8094 $2.00 CRITICAL STUDY MACKIE AND THE MORAL ORDER By SrepHen R. L. Ciark TED HONDERICH (ed.), Morality and Objectivity: A Tribute to J. L. Mackie (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. Pp. viii + 232. Price £14.95.) 1 John Mackie was an inspiring teacher, a splendid dialectician and a clear-headed empiricist of the non-idealist school. His relatively early death deprived us all of a good philosopher, and his friends and colleagues of a kind and witty man. He obviously merited a tribute, and Morality and Objectivity at least demonstrates that some serious moral philosophers were ready to provide essays for such a memorial volume that themselves merit discussion. Those essays, and the bibliography of Mackie’s writings that concludes this volume, are a better memorial than the laudatory addresses by Blackburn and Cawkweli, of Mackie as Philosopher and as College Man, which are as unconvincing, as unreal as most such valedictories. Perhaps they served well enough in their original context, but 7 am sure that Mackie himself would have preferred McDowell's honest declaration that he chose to pay tribute ‘to a sadly missed colleague by continuing a strenuous disagreement with him’ (p. 123). ‘There is, none the less, something very strange about honouring John Mackie’s memory in quite this way. Ali the essays printed here are, of set purpose, to do with moral philosophy, and some at least seek to respond, if only notionally, to Ethics: Inventing the Difference Between Right and Wrong (Mackie 1976). 1 may as well admit that this seems to me to be Mackie’s worst book. Anyone who wanted a brief and genuinely lively introduction to secular, non-objectivist morality would do far better with Harman 1977. Anyone who wanted some account of ‘the’ theory of morality, the theory thar actually has influenced many generations of moral casuists, would do better with Donagan 1977: the theory, that is, that ‘there is a set of rules or precepts of conduct, constituting a divine law, which is binding on ail rational creatures as such, and which can in principle be ascertained by human reason’ (Donagan 1977, p. 6). Mackie’s chief contributions to the discussion were (i) that people in general thought (or their language suggested) that moral values were objective realities, but that they were wrong, and (ii) that morality in the narrow sense, as a system of a particular sort of constraints on conduct (1976, p. 106), was adopted to facilitate co-operative action. Pace Hare (p. 53) it was not Mackie’s ‘great contribution to ethics to display clearly the absurdity of realism’, partly because, as Hare himself shows, the term ‘realism’ is obscure, and partly becauseMACKIE AND THE MORAL ORDER 99 nothing that Mackie says on this score proves that anything is absurd — on the contrary, he simply assumes that he has shown the absurdity of moral realism by equating it with the combination of Platonic Idealism (Mackie 1976, p. 40) and Divine Command Theory (Mackie 1976, pp. 48, 230ff.) thar actually served pious philosophers well for nearly two thousand years. He does not even try to disprove that theory as a systematic rival to moral scepticism, but merely ‘states his conviction’ that it is false (1976, p. 232). The contributors to this volume seem to have a similarly low opinion of the book. At any rate, despite the occasional hagiographical claim that Ethic: was ‘splendidly invigorating’ (Hare, p. 39) or ‘lucid and influential’ (Hurley, p. 54), it is clear that Blackburn, Hare, Hurley and McDowell think Mackie was completely mistaken in his analysis of ‘ordinary belief or language’; that Lukes and Sen entirely disagree with his notion of what moral rules are to be taken as central; that Wiggins and Foot simply ignore his work; and that Williams, though claiming that his ‘disagreements are rooted in a deeper agreement’ (p. 213) actuaily, and importantly, sees a far more deeply corrosive effect in the subjectivist theory than Mackie (or Blackburn and Hurley) imagine. It’s all very well honouring a sadiy missed colleague by continuing an argument, but that presupposes that there are really things to be said on both sides. On the evidence before us there is precious little to be said for Mackie’s Invention of Right and Wrong. But Williams’ point is worth re-examining. Williams and Mackie do indeed agree ‘deep down’ — and so does every other contributor to this volume, though some of the not-so-deep disagreements are very important ones. They agree deep down, and they share a common background of ‘Oxford philosophizing’ (which cannot historically be equated with ‘the Oxford tradition’ - the unhistorically minded always imagine that their particular milieu and code of manners have existed without change for centuries). No contributor has anything to say from within, say, a Bradleian framework, or a Thomist, or a Neo-Platonic, or even (despite McDowell's verbal avowals) an Aristotelian. No one for that matter takes any acceunt of more recent worries about the grounds of our decision-making, or notions of identity or practical reason, or the biology of value, Only Lukes, Sen and (occasionally) Wiggins give any sense of being on top of work outside the magic circle of determined Oxford conversationalists. Are these really all ‘among the most distinguished figures in moral philosophy today’, having - by implication — the most important and interesting things to say about how we should act and how we should understand our acts and obligations? Whatever happened te Anscombe, Baier, Cavell, Cooper, Donagan, Dworkin, Elster, Frankena, Gauthier, Geach, Gewirth, Glover, Griffin, Hampshire, Harman, Kenny, King-Farlow, Leslie, Lewis, Lyons, McIntyre, Midgley, Nagel, O’Neill, Parfit, Passmore, Rachels, Raz, Rorty, Singer, Smart, Strawson, Taylor, Vendler, Von Wright? Is it really believable that a man who taught and argued for over forty years in Otago, Sydney, York and Oxford, and who published five books and over ninety articles and reviews in his lifetime could only have found nine sometime fellows of Oxford colleges who had anything of interest to say in response to his ideas and arguments? Js it believable that these nine have the most of interest to say, or the most reason to say it in response to100 STEPHEN R. L. CLARK Mackie? Are the only interesting issues the strictly scholastic ones raised by most of the contributors? Allow me to be ruder still: who exactly is honoured by this sort of volume, which provides a mysteriously selected few {selected from within a magic circle) with a platform for their current preoccupations (which could all have appeared in the professional journals) and offers only lukewarm enthusiasm for discussing anything important that the declared honorand has said? ‘Only John Mackie’, so Blackburn says (p. 216), ‘being given The Selfish Gene as a Christmas present would shortly publish a paper on it, and one which has been described by the author of that bock as making a contribution to biology’: the claim is exaggerated, but granted that the topic was an important one that exercised Mackie’s talents, why did no essayist discuss the ‘sociobiological’ approach to ethics? Why is there so little on any substantive moral issue? Why did no one discuss in detail how Hume’s views, or Anderson's, or Epicurus’, differed from Mackie’s? Granted that Mackie claimed that such matters as concern for the mentally disabled or the non-human lay outside the ‘core of morality’ but were none the less important (1976, p. 194), why did no one seek to explore that area? Why did no one ask whether it was rational, on Mackie’s terms, to treat ‘like cases alike’ even when this amounted to an extravagant extension of those rules that are maybe needed for our immediate civil peace: what are Amazonian Indians to us, or they to Hecuba? Granted that Mackie himself noticed that a Divine Command morality would avoid the particular problems for ‘objective value’ that he pointed to, why did no one discuss the matter further, perhaps in the light of his posthumously published Miracle of Theism (Mackie 1982: held by Blackburn, hagiographically, to demonstrate ‘a rare and awesome appetite” for argument)? All contributors assume, to put it crudely, that ‘we are on our own’, that God is so long dead that there is no further point in wriung his obituary. Those essayists who wish to say that moral values are objectively real, but only as elements of ‘our’ self-enclosed universe of discourse, ought to admit that gods, demons and fairies are real on just the same terms, but neither constructivist nor sceptic takes such authority-figures seriously. Mackie, though his grasp of theism was less sure than Blackburn supposes (see Leslie 1987), was at least clear about what it was he was dismissing, namely the doctrine that what we perceive as ‘moral value’ has had a real and continuing effect upon the way things are. The Witgensteinian mistiness that Blackburn remarks upon as a grave danger (p. 218) has unfortunately infected more than one of the essayists - though it should in fairness be said that most of them at least have some of Mackie’s literary virtue, and that only McDowell and Wiggins perpetrate such sentences (I select at random) as the following: McDowell, p. 120: ‘The critical dimension of the explanations that we want means that there is no question of just any actual response pulling itself up by its own bootstraps into counting as an undistorted perception of the relevant special aspect of reality.” Wiggins, p. 185: ‘If the idea of living with this conflict (defined over the previous three pages] and tolerating the essential contestability of the frontier that contains it seems unbearable, then, having deciphered the palimpsest I spoke of, we could, I suppose try to retrace the marks we have made and contemplate the restoration (byMACKIE AND THE MORAL ORDER 101 deletion of the most recent) of the simpler moral universe in which there is scarcely any public largesse and in which rights and counter-claims make up the whole of justice.’ No author should be so clumsy, and no editor should let such self-indulgence pass. I It must by now be clear that I do not think highly of this volume as a Memento Mackie. It does littie honour, except verbally, ta its honorand; every essay in it could more profitably have found a home in the journals. It does not constitute, nor (to be blunt) do we need, a commentary on Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Its publication raises the gravest doubts about the whole concept of memorial volume and Fesischnft. Such volumes are useful when they genuinely develop and explore the honorand’s ideas in ways that make it clear that those ideas, even if occasionally or even entirely wrong, are worth exploring. They are better still when the contributors, or the editor, have tried to ensure that most significant areas of the honorand’s thought are covered, and when contributors have been solicited from a broad spectrum of school and opinion. At the present time far too many such memorials and Festschrifis prompt only the unworthy thought, ‘Now why was Branestorm not asked to contribute? And why did no one mention Jigajig’s Theory of Postglobular Mutability .. .?, and thereafter rest unread upon the library sheif. But though I think that this and other similar volumes do no real honour to anyone, every essay in it, as I said, could have found a home elsewhere, and there been answered, or ignored. Five of the essays deal with the meta-ethical issue of moral realism. john Mackie thought that our ordinary moral language embodied an error to which we were unthinkingly prone, namely that being right or being wrong were properties of things, acts or persons independently of our judgement or sentiment, that we could recognize (and of course fail 10 recognize) what would still be true even if we had never noticed, or never had a moral thought at all. He also believed that once we had recognized our error we could continue to moralize (or as Blackburn suggests, ‘shmoralize’), knowing that what we were doing was not discovering or reporting upon facts but drawing out the implications of the rules we must devise {or at any rate, have devised) for social harmony in a world of limited resources and parochial affections. Blackburn and Hare both argue that ordinary moral language and practice (by which they both mean those practices familiar to secular Westerners) embodies no such realism: wrongness really exists just in the sense that some things are wrong; some things are wrong just in the sense that ‘we’ rule them out of consideration. Shmoralizing differs not at all from moralizing, even if someone who was once persuaded of moral realism and then abandoned the belief might (mistakenly) suppose that something important and compelling had been lost. Both Blackburn and Hare insist that all the work of choosing and justifying action is carried out by rational sentiments and projected rules: its being ‘really right’ to do something other than what ‘we’ had seriously preferred and settled on could not influence us at all. Such a ‘real rightness’ would be a cog that turned nothing.102 STEPHEN R. L. CLARK The causal connection seems to be mainly ... that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy. (Mackie 1976, p. 36) Mackie offers no evidence for this particular claim, which rests in the end upon the a priori (Humean) judgement that reason cannot cause action. Why should we not retort that ‘the world gua moral — that world which is the totality of moral facts — is a world “compulsively present to the will” ’ (Lovibond 1983, p. 13, after Murdoch 1970, p. 39)? Even if reason could not cause action, of course, it would not follow that those things which we recognize as values could not themselves, under some other description, be the causes of our being the sort of things we are. That, after all, is exactly what traditional moralists have supposed: namely that the Ideal we glimpse is itself the real cause of existence. Hurley and McDowell profess a large disagreement with the projectivist account, but it turns out that they only mean to deny that we are in any better situation about anything at ail. That something was ‘really true’ although such as to be forever inaccessible to any human endeaveur, is as vacuous a notion. Blackburn holds that there ‘really’ are things in the world onto which we ‘project’ our quasi-realist valuations, McDowell denies that we can ever go beyond ‘our’ human world to locate such ‘real things’. Moral value is as real as secondary quality, having no existence outside the human framework, but no less ideally real for that. Mackie had acknowledged the possible parallel, but insisted that there was an account to be given of how we came to know about essence, number, identity, diversity, solidity and so forth, as realities that transcend our human schemata (1976, p. 39). ] am not clear that he was correct: it is obvious enough that people say the ordinarily factual things they do, not simply because they are true-in-fact, but because they are themselves inclined to believe them. We believe scientific realism to be correct because we participate in ‘scientific practices’, not vice versa (contra Mackie 1976, p. 228). Nor do we need to suppose that there is a magical form of moral intuition that guarantees us direct access to the morai realities, any more than we need to suppose that perception gives us a direct access to material realities: in both cases, perception and moral judgement, we form hypotheses on the basis of our internal and social data. Intuition, or nous, is, in one sense, simply a rational grasp of the ‘meaning of a situation’ in which we find ourselves (see, most helpfully, Wallis 1976, pp. 126f.), and in another, a rational conviction that certain claims (in mathematics and in morals) would be self-evident to a pure and attentive mind, even if not to ourselves (who are neither pure nor very attentive: see Donagan 1977, pp. 24f,). McDowell's abandonment of realism for fear of the sceptical possibilities it involves amounts to just the same thing as scepticism, a determination to be led by social rule and immediate perception without ever claiming that these give us truth- in-fact: Adhering to appearances we live in accordance with the normai rules of life, undogmatically . .. And it would seem that this regulation of life isMACKIE AND THE MORAL ORDER 103 fourfold, and that one part of it lies in the guidance of nature, another in the constraint of the passions, another in the tradition of laws and customs, another in the instruction of the arts. Nature’s guidance is that by which we are naturally capable of sensation and thought; passion is that whereby hunger drives us to food, and thirst to drink; tradition of customs and laws that whereby we regard piety in the conduct of life as good, but impiety as evil; instruction of the arts that whereby we are not inactive in such arts as we adopt. But we make all these statements undogmatically. (Sextus 1933, p. 17 (1.23) Williams, by contrast with the other four, actually considers Mackie’s arguments for his claim that there could be no moral facts of an objective kind (having an existence independent of our judgements of the case). In daing so he reveals just how weak they were, consisting of the argument from ‘queerness’ (that such moral facts would be different, by hypothesis, from non-moral ones), the argument from ‘social relativity’ (that there would be greater agreement about moral matters if there were independent moral facts to recognize), and the argument from moral epistemology (that we could only know of such values if they had a direct effect upon us such that they explained some of our judgements better than any other hypothesis would do). Hurley casts considerable doubt upon the argument from. social relativity by pointing out that we could not recognize disagreements without a large-scale underlying agreement. But even if we did disagree ‘radically’, so what? Have people never disagreed, even to the death, about quite ordinary facts? The best argument of the three is that any objective values (such as to be action- directing irrespective of the agent’s own desires or plans: but what exactly does that mean?) could only be recognized and found to be motivating as things that satisfied the subjective demands of the agent. Their Platonic, or Divine, or Kantian, or Perfectibilist objectivity does no work. Discovering that moral duties are not ‘given’ in the way that objectivists have thought, must we (and who is ‘we’?) begin to make our own rules up afresh? And how, and for what purpose? Williams professes himself uncertain, hoping no doubt — like others — that people will go on thinking much the same things should be done, but perhaps with less moral fanaticism or insistence upon blame. All five of these essayists deny (and McDowell and Hurley profess not even to understand) that there is any extra-systemic sense in which one moral judgement is correct, or more correct than others. The sense ef givenness that moral judgements often have, and perhaps must have if they are to be really effective, is either a projected fancy or a recognition of the human social reality in which we live and cannot imagine ourselves not living (being devoid of any interesting imagination). All acknowledge as one criterion of reality (though the transcendental idealists present deny it ever applies) that a thing is real if it has effects whether or not anyone supposes that it does, or recognizes its existence. All play with the possibility of comparing moral value to such secondary qualities as colour. Colours (as phenomena) do not exist apart from our recognition and codification of them: are they less real for that? Is there no available criterion to say that one imaginable cotour-coding is more accurate or more to be preferred than others?104 STEPHEN R. L. CLARK A kind of objectivity can be constructed even for non-realists: intersubjectivity, contra Mackie 1976, p. 22, ES objectivity. But we could go further: is it really absurd fo suggest that what we experience in experiencing colours are indeed real features of the world, which do not exist as colours irrespective of our coding, but do exist as, say, wave-lengths? When we perceive beauty, what we are perceiving (al] being well) is something that has certain definite attributes communicated to us in the phenomenal guise of affective beauty: the structure that beauty ‘is’ has many real effects, ranging from the stability of bridges to the health and fertility of the living thing or ecosystem. ‘Beauty’ in one sense is the phenomenal cue; in another, ‘real beauty’, it is the thing that phenomenal beauty mostly goes along with, that it ‘shadows’. Similarly with moral value: an act or an individual which appears to us {we being in good health and manners) as despicable or laudable is a clue to an underlying something that has real effects within the world whether or not we notice it. Sociobiologists identify that as the predicted inclusive fitness of the thing, Divine Command moralists as the presence of God. Since what we value at first is the aesthetically pleasing we can be tricked: cosmetics and hair-sprays can give us the impression of ‘natural beauty’ which is a symptom of good health (pace Foot, p. 29, not everything that looks beautiful is beautiful, and ‘anything which is visually beautiful is [NOT] so because it looks beautiful’); physical gracefulness can give us the impression of ‘natural nobility’, which is a symptom of what is fittest in mate or co-parent ~ a good deal of animal sexual display is bluff. The beauty that is more than skin-deep, the value, say, that rests in being an honest and a loyal friend, may in turn be a reflection, intimation or shadowing of some yet more real, more really effective, nature. Courage, courtesy, chastity, temperance, prudence, generosity, proper pride, loyalty and justice are all sound Aristotelian virtues over all the world (although they may be manifested in widely differing circumstances) because those qualities really do have effects whether we notice them or not. Even the continued existence of vice Tests upon the manifest advantages of virtue, just as sicklecell anaemia persists in certain populations because the heterozygotic form of that genetic condition provides immunity to malaria. We cannot rationally suppose that just any quality we arbitrarily decide will thereby be genuinely virtuous: what character carries such manifest advantages is not for us to decree. What those characters which genuinely are virtuous have in common, and the character that our evolutionary heritage has created us to detect, is a dynamic harmony that can then be seen to be present elsewhere in the world. As it is not for those to speak of the graceful forms of the material world who have never seen them or known their grace - men born blind, let us suppose — in the same way those must be silent upon the beauty of noble conduct and of learning and all that order who have never cared for such things, nor may those tel] of the splendour of virtue who have never known the face of Justice and of Moral Wisdom beautiful beyond the beauty of Evening and Dawn. Such vision is for those only who see with the Soul’s sight, and at the vision they will rejoice, and awe will fall upon them and a trouble deeper than all the rest could ever stir for now theyMACKIE AND THE MORAL ORDER 105 are moving in the realm of Truth. This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and Jove and a trembling that is all delight. (Plotinus, 1.6.4: 1956, p. 59) That Blackburn (and Hare) could suppose that such a vision could survive the conviction that beauty was only the fanciful projection of libidinal affection tells us something about the deracination of our intellectual classes! Blackburn declares, in effect, that Dante will feel just the same about Beatrice when he realizes that what had seemed to be her beauty was only his projected lustfulness, that what lay behind the experience was not the recognition of a divine presence but chemical activity in his gonads which caused him (strictly) to misperceive the case, and which could be as well served by any other suitable love-object. Perhaps, so Blackburn says (pp. 9f.), ‘a projective explanation of morality may diminish the attention he is prepared to pay to it’, but only because we suppose that ‘only commitments which describe the constitution of the real world have any importance’. He thence concludes that his projectivism will not corrode moral endeavour unless people insist upon that latter supposition, apparently content to dismiss i without any attempt at understanding or reasoned apposition. ‘Plato’s connection of the good with the real is the centre of his thought and one of the most fruitful ideas in philosophy’ (Murdoch 1976, p. 45; see Lovibond 1983, p. 60). So why not discuss it? At this point Blackburn's disagreement with McDoweil becomes vacuous: both insist on ‘taking seriously’ features of our experienced world that are not caused simply by objective realities (as these are ordinarily understood), but by our emotional and historical characters. Moralizing, and the recognition of moral beauty, is for both of them a human enterprise which requires no magical correspondence with real value for it to have subjective value. What neither of them, nor any other contributor except (very briefly) Williams, troubles to do (any more than Mackie did) is outline any of the metamoral, metaphysical systems that actually do insist upon objective value. ‘The overall effect is like reading an attack on the doctrine that God made the world by someone who has never done more than guess at what a few American creationists might say against Darwin, and who genuinely does not know what great philosophers have said upon the point — or else like reading the works of a creationist who has never noticed what current evolutionary theory is actually like. Contributors repeatedly use Mackie’s argument that moral values as realistically conceived could have no causal effect on us apart from our belief in them, and that we could not therefore have any rationally grounded knowledge of them. At no point do they enquire whether there might perhaps be published answers to this conundrum: it is taken for granted that it is up to ‘Oxford philosophers’ to dissect the sayings and presumed beliefs of a naive multitude (whose opinion of course has not actually been asked). It is worth adding at this point that there is more evidence available than Mackie used, or was perhaps aware of, to suggest that ‘causal objectivism’ is embedded in our social psychologies. Maybe we do not now find it easy, as Aristotle did at least occasionally, to explain what happens as something that is required by the moral order (males, for example, have deeper voices because they are the nobler sex: De106 STEPHEN R. L. CLARK Generatione Animatium 5.787aLff.!), though teleological explanation is nat as absent from modern biological and cosmological theory as is sometimes supposed. But we do seem inclined to blame victims of disaster, or to think that, for example, a drunken driver who happens to kill someone is likelier, than a drunken driver who luckily does not, to be a wife-beater, cheat and liar. We believe, in the social psychologists’ phrase, in the ‘just world hypothesis’: that what happens is what, in some sense, ought to happen, and that it happens because it ought. In its most detailed form this hypothesis is indeed heretical as far as the Judaeo-Christian tradition goes (and probably mistaken): it is at any rate not up to us to decide so simple-mindedly who merits a catastrophe, and better to remember that ‘the world man inhabits is a system of nature, in which events occur according to morally neutral laws [and not, for example, the law of karma]’ (Donagan 1977, p. 35). Not all AIDS-sufferers, or even any, are wicked fools who merit their reward, or suffer ‘because’ the moral value of their acts was poor. But Blackburn is wrong to think that there is nothing in our ordinary practice to suggest that we are indeed as Mackie supposed, habitual objectivists. And Mackie is wrong to think that the doctrine is intrinsically absurd (see Leslie 1979, 1987). That our morality is founded on our biology and historical experience is obvious. So is our science: creatures of another imaginable biological nature would have very different ways of perceiving the world, and for all we know quite different ways of explaining it. Ef scientific realism has anything going for it (as 1 believe), such creatures and ourselves could come to some agreement about what was the true account of how things happen. If moral realism is correct we could also come to some agreement about what would be objectively beautiful. If the contrary hypothesis is preferred (that we could not ever expect agreement on what ought to be), it is difficult to see how we could expect agreement on what was. By hypothesis, after all, such aliens would not care whether what they said was appropriate or mathematically elegant or designed to help. No moral realism means no scientific realism either (on which McDowell and Hurley at any rate are perhaps agreed). Ul The remaining four papers deal with ethical rather than meia-ethical questions. | have remarked before that Foot and Wiggins simply ignore Mackie’s work, but it is possible to discern an underlying agreement with Mackie’s position. Foot argues first that utilitarianism, and similarly consequentialist theories, cannot accommodate our ordinary moral distinctions between act and omission, intention and foresight (discussed by Mackie 1976, pp. 160ff.), and second that the compellingly ‘rational’ appearance of utilitarian principle is an illusion. We can have no non-moral conception of a ‘good state of affairs’ from which to calculate the best available action, Benevolence is a virtue, to be sure, but ‘benevolence gives us no reason to say, for instance, that it would be a “good state of affairs” or “good total outcome” if the sacrificing of a few experimental subjects allowed us to get cancer under control. The operation of benevolence is circumscribed by justice’ (p. 32). There isMACKIE AND THE MORAL ORDER 107 no one universal end of moral action, but only a set of rules and virtues that the moral agent lives by. These are tested not by the seemingly rational, but actually (as Mackie said, wholly impracticable: 1976, pp. 129f.) goal of whether action by such rules results in the ‘best available state of affairs’ (a judgement that cannot be made independently of our judgement of the actions involved in bringing it about), but by whether anyone at all could live by these rules ‘and still live well, in the ordinary non-moral sense {whatever that is]’ (Foot, p. 36). Mackie added more explicitly that there is no reason to think that the various fragments of our present moral system, the rules by which we act in different settings and with different people, are all the same, or such as to be ‘rationalized’ into agreement. To act by those rules that one thinks would in the abstract be the best rules for everyone to act upon, even though no one else will in fact act on them, is (as Mackie said: 1976, p. 148) a recipe for disaster. Wiggins writes about the claims of need, taking his notional beginning from some late papers by Mackie, but without discussing them. One merit of his argument is that he recognizes the absurdity of judging our moral code from any Archimedean, Pre-contractual point: ‘a social morality as conceived here is not even something which it is as if we have opted or contracted into’ (Wiggins, p. 172). His conclusion, so far as I can unravel it, is that some recognition of the vital needs of individuals, as limitations on what may rightfully be done by state action to satisfy the supposed needs of its citizens, is necessary for the maintenance of such civil virtue and prosperous living as we now enjoy. There are good ideas struggling to the surface of Wiggins’ prose, but he would have done better to start work on a fresh piece of parchment than to rewrite, adapt and update a succession of drafts dating ‘from the early and middle 1970s’ (Wiggins, p. 187). Both Wiggins and Foot seem to agree that there are many goals of moral and political action, and that justice itself is a complex and many rooted idea (Wiggins, p. 187). Biackburn too (p. 20) lays it down that ‘the features of human life which we value and which would be drawn into any remotely plausible sketch of human flourishing very probably represent a bundle of ultimately incommensurable goods, among which there is no systematic way of making choices’. Sen’s more systematic account at least rejects any aggregative assessment of utility: what counts is the sort of deal that people are getting to empower them to achieve the positive freedoms that we value. Utilitarian assessment fails precisely because ‘the most blatant forms of inequalities and exploitations survive by making allies out of the deprived and exploited . .. As people learn to adjust to the existing horrors by the sheer necessity of uneventful survival the horrors look less terrible in the metric of utilities’ (p. 131). What we need to know is what people can do of the things that people in general might be glad to do, not how happy they are with what they are currently permitted. Oppression is not vindicated by the victims’ resilient acceptance of their state. It is that very diversity of human goals, so Lukes points out (pp. 104f.), that makes it necessary to devise ways of settling disputes and assigning responsibilities if a community is to survive, not simply the Limited resources and parochial affections on which Mackie and Hume place so much stress. Even a society of post- revolutionary angels would need ways of sorting out their different duties and108 STEPHEN R. L. CLARK interests, and resolving even amicable disputes about what is best to be done. The idea that justice might wither away if only we were benevolent or rich enough is ‘a deep and dangerous mistake’ that Mackie’s view encourages (Lukes, p. 109). The two important principles that can be seen at work in many, if not quite all, of the contributors are these: (i) the goals of individuals and of societies are diverse, and not such as to be weighed systematically against each other; (ii) those goals, or the currently most ‘important’ of those goals, cannot simply be equated with what imagined abstract intelligences would have chosen before they were endowed with particular natures, histories and culturally constrained preferences. If it is only as a member of some community that ] exist as a moral being (see Lovibond 1983, p. 85) there is no sense at all in asking what an imagined ‘I’ that was not so situated would have ‘chosen’. I can perhaps ‘opt out’: I have never been asked (nor could I be) whether I wanted to opt in. It follows that we are not entitled to suppose that any particular rules of justice, ‘morality in the narrow sense’, must rationally be preferred whatever other beliefs we have. It is wildly optimistic to suppose that there are really any rules ‘that can be endorsed from all points of view — not only no matter what one’s actual condition is, but also no matter what one’s actual ideals and values are’ (Mackie 1976, p. 154). This must be especially obvious when it is realized that ideas of identity, and especially ‘personal identity’, are as empirically ungrounded as moral value itself: ‘imagine a world in which ... the Buddhist notion of the self was widely shared’ (Lukes, p. 103). Or consider a world where the really significant entities are family lines, and it is axiomatic that the creatures we call children are justly to be executed for their father’s crime. What empirical and value-free evidence is there against such a code, or in favour of ‘our’ ideological belief in separately responsible individuals? Mackie recognizes that there is a question ‘what is to count over time as the same nation’ (1976, p. 179), but does not grapple with the problem (recognized at 1976, p. 19%) that just the same question can be raised about individual people, and that no merely empirical answer is available. ‘What is being asserted in personal identity is [a] special unity of responsibility and interest’ (Mackie 1985, p.9: in a paper dating from 1958) — which is to say that it is already a ‘moral’ notion, and one that cannot, on Mackie’s terms, be ‘objectively real’ (see Clark 1975, Ch. 3.3). It is therefore vacuous to suggest that alJ moral systems must include some egoistic principle to the effect that one takes care of oneself or consider ‘one’s own well-being” (as Mackie 1976, p- 173). Under the circumstances Mackie’s complaint that Aristotle’s doctrine of moral virtue is too unspecific to be helpful (1976, p. 186) is disingenuous. The multiplicity, even the incommensurability, of values may seem to lend weight to the doctrine that they lack objective reality. Those who adopt a purely instrumentalist or constructivist attitude to scientific or mathematical ‘truth’, after all, have no need to require that their instrumentally useful notions be consistent with each other or apply across the board. It is enough that they are useful where and when they are. Scientific realists have that much more reason to suppose that there is one truth only, and that contradictory theories cannot all be true. So if we find that our values are radically incommensurable, and that there is no one way of life, however sketchily described, which would be recognizably ideal for ail agents, that is at least compatible with a non-objectivist account. On the other hand,MACKIE AND THE MORAL ORDER 109 realists have no need to suppose that any of our actual theories contain al] the truths we shall ever need. Faced by two or more opposing theories they may retain both, without knowing which (if either) is really true, and which merely useful. It is the rational constructivist (who does after ail have one good reason for seeking to have a consistent theory — namely that she may otherwise be faced “by incompatible predictions or demands) who is likely to want there to be an available compromise version. The realist may refuse 10 compromise precisely because she has more reason to believe any one of her theories on its own than she has for a putative non- contradictory compromise. Similar twists and turns are available in the moral sphere: maybe we cannot fully envisage the one true moral system that gives each value its appropriate place, and must therefore have the grace to be torn between what seem to us to be incompatible ideals. It is the rational constructivist who most disitkes this, and has less reason than the realist does to hang on to each of her ‘known duties’. There is not always one right thing to do, or one thing that just anyone should do. Nor is it always possible to do right without at the same time doing dreadful wrong, for ‘it is a logical consequence of some sins that they entangle the sinner in situations in which he cannot but commit others’ (Donagan 1977, p. 145: whether there are also cases of ‘perplexity simpliater, without any prior wrong-doing, is moot). These are truisms, and aspects of the moral life that utilitarians (and other systematizers) always find difficult to face. What is striking about most, if not all, of the contributors to this volume, and about the mass of smugly secular moralists in the present day, is that they have become polytheists without realizing it, and without any acquaintance with the way in which ancient philosophers transcended polytheism (see Kenney 1986). Polytheism is the acceptance of multiple and often contradictory ideals, the awareness that the choices we make are never without their costs. The gods of our pagan ancestors took their shape within the universe of poetic and ceremonial discourse (see Clark 1986, pp. 88ff.), as real or as seriously motivating as secular projectivists and anti-realists now think their subjective values. Even those who groped toward a conception of the single system of justice and good order within which lesser gods were tamed, the rule of Zeus and Themis, could conceive that ruling deity simply as the idealized human intellect. To serve Zeus was to understand the place of each subordinate real value, and to be glad of the fact that there were those dedicated to the service of those lesser gods. So long as the civil and ceremonial and natural order was maintained lesser deities could have their devotees. It was when those lesser deities claimed more than their due, claimed to be the one true way to perfection, and sought to overthrow Themis that they became demons. The unity of the divine cosmos consists in a harmony between contrary powers. Although these divine powers may come into conflict and fight each other, man has no right to scorn any one of them for each represents an authentic aspect of being, expresses one part of reality, stands for a particular type of value without which the universe would, as it were, be mutilated. (Vernant 1982, p. 103)110 STEPHEN R. L. CLARK The vacation of the true human, as Spinoza saw (Ethics 4p68s: 1982, p. 193), was to embody ‘the spirit of Christ, that is the idea of God’ ~ which was simply to say, the comprehending intellect that gave each power its due. The collapse of civil and ceremonial order (or of that order in which we had lived before) is all that could ever be meant by the ‘death of God’. That death is better described by Yeats than by Nietzsche: ‘we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a corner’ (Yeats 1959, p. 104). The new age coming, so he said, would be one that would worship many gods (Yeats 1962, p.393), unconstrained by any conception of the unity or of due order. Pluralism of value, where it is only force that decides what ideal, what god will have its way in any particular area of the world or of our lives, is the natural consequence of the collapse of a social order that rules by acknowledged right. And though it is not logically inevitable that projectivists and the like should fail to sustain such an overarching order, it is natural that they should not. The ancients would hardly have comprehended the ciaim that the gods had no extra-linguistic reality. The universe in which we live is permeated by our codes and expectations. Perhaps ‘we’ (who?) invented ‘the language of religion’, but not because we ‘first’ saw the world in purely secular and instrumental ways and ‘then’ projected values onto it. It is the world itself that speaks this language. The universe appears to {man] as the expression of sacred powers which, in their own particular different forms, constitute the true texture of reality, the being behind appearances, the meaning that lies behind the symbols that manifest it. (Vernant 1982, p. 95) Anti-realists are surely right to this extent, that it is the image of an inherently valueless and ‘merely material’ world that requires special socio-historical explanation. We do not ‘first’ see the natural and material world and then project values on it: on the contrary, we first (and here ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) inhabit a meaningful cosmos and only later invent the merely material world as the true ‘explanation’ of our everyday reality. “The idea of the objective world ~ that of which human knowledge aspires to be an adequate representation — as something morally or spiritually dead (or “motivationally inert”) is widely accepted as the central achievement of the European Enlightenment’ (Lovibond 1983, p. 23) — or its catastrophic error. But in the absence of any coherent explanation that is more than magical of just how and why a merely ‘material’ world could ever have produced the manifold worlds of conscious meaning, or could ever be expected to have produced creatures with an innate capacity to discover underlying truths, we are entitled to ask why we Should concede the title of ‘underlying reality’ to the imagined world of merely material events. If it were a good explanation I would concede, against the anti- realists, that it was likely to be a reliable picture of the way things ‘really were’, and would have been even if we had never noticed. As it is not an explanation at all, I reserve the right to ask whether perhaps a Platonic picture might not have theMACKIE AND THE MORAL ORDER 111 greater truth. After all, even scientists whose professed metaphysic is materialistic and whose professed epistemology is empiricist (a combination that Mackie at least thought possible, though I myself doubt that it is), do in practice rely upon the postulate that it is the more elegant, more beautiful theory that is likelier to be true. This is no mere convenience: modern science began in the Copernican and Galilean insistence that we could trust our sense of mathematical beauty to reveal the truth to us, precisely because the intellect in each of us was formally identical (when purified) with the intellect from which the world of apparently material objects grew. The pattern that we could uncover in our souls, and the pattern by which the world was governed were in the last analysis the same, though we would be rash to assume too quickly that our currently favoured theories were ali that the universe had to offer. And that is why the end may be defined as life in accordance with nature (that is, according to one’s own nature as well as that of the whole), a life in which we refrain from everything that the common law forbids, which is the right reason that pervades all things, which is this Zeus, who is the lord and ruler of all that is. And this very thing is the virtue of the eudaimon and the smooth current of life, when everything is done so that the daimon in each man agrees with the will of the ruler of the whole. (Diogenes Laertius 7.88) I do not deny that this moral and cosmological doctrine needs further analysis and defence: my complaint is that ‘modern moral philosophers’ too often seem entirely unaware that it was the dominant philosophical theory (in the East, allowing for a different vocabulary, as well as in the West) fer two millennia, that many of their own philosophical heroes, even in the empiricist tradition, endorsed it, and that it is ~ as far as 1 can see — quite untouched by standard anti-naturalist or anti- descriptivist arguments. Because the real nature of historical anti-subjectivism has been forgotten, such modern moralists regularly misrepresent past philosophers. Mackie, for example, calls on Richard Price as an ally against Divine Command Morality (1976, p. 46; 1980, pp. 133ff.) without registering that Price’s point was to derive moral law not from God’s will, but from His nature: When morality is represented as eternal and immutable ... it is only saying that God Himself is eternal and immutable, and making His nature the high and sacred original of virtue, and the sole fountain of all that is true and good and perfect. (1974, p. 89: see Clark 1987a) Because this is forgotten, Mackie himself is misrepresented. I do not myself believe that Mackie fully grasped the nature of the theory he was rejecting, but he did at Jeast know that it was there. Contributors to the present volume hardly seem to know what it was that he was attacking, precisely because they have never themselves given the older theory any serious attention. Because Mackie’s main point is simply a description of the world in which they live, where no one and112 STEPHEN R. L. CLARK nothing has any acknowledged right to tell them what to do, they are reduced to scholastic appraisal of lesser issues whose real significance they do not see. wv Intersubjectivity is objectivity — or at any rate, the eventual agreement of all those who have sought to incorporate the experience and rational insight of their companions on the way defines the ideal limit of our enquiries. That eventual agreement, that never-to-be-surpassed coherent theory, is what C. S. Peirce looked toward (1931, pp. 5.407f.). What Peirce sometimes (though not always) seemed to imply, and | would myself insist upon in opposition to the anti-realists in science or ethical enquiry, is that such agreement can rationally be expected only if it already exists. We may hope to find some acceptable synthesis of our assorted goals and readings of the universe, even if there is not yet one real world, one fully explanatory reading, to which we approximate. We may hope to identify certain virtues and techniques that will continue to be of service. But why on earth should we expect that our hope will be fulfilled unless there is indeed ONE world, teleologically ordered to allow our understanding and moral action? As an abstract ideal, the final community of scholars and saints sounds fine: but why believe that it will ever come? Only concrete idealism, that posits the present and eternal existence of that noetic community which is shadowed in the phenomenal world and in our intellectual imaginings, can give us rational ground for hope. If that belief itself were irrational or absurd then there could, by hypothesis, be no objective reason to dismiss it, over and above the parochial ‘objectivity’ provided by the rules of a given community. Membership of the community of ‘Enlightenment philosophers’, as that is lived in Oxford colleges, precludes belief in any real authority, or any demanding summons to do more than ‘we’ would genially require of each other and our future selves. But by that very argument there is nothing in ‘the fabric of the real world’ apart from the social worlds we inhabit, to require us to live as Enlightenment philosophers. Most people in the world do not. Mackie identified, though without much sympathy, the older conviction that there were real demands and that they had real effects, and realized that what this conviction led to was the ‘perennial philosophy’, His arguments against that philosophy amounted simply to the observation that it was inconsistent with certain tacit or explicit assumptions of the Enlightenment (which had after all been formulated in conscious opposition to that very thing). If there are no real duties that ‘we’ have not made up for ourselves, we can have no duty to become Enlightenment philosophers or believe a word that Mackie says. If (as I believe) there are {including the duty to respect rational argument), the Enlightenment project is doomed to self-destruct. Mackie claimed (1976, p. 10) that ‘the truest teachers of moral philosophy are the outlaws and thieves who keep faith and rules of justice with one another . . . as rules of convenience without which they cannot hold together’. But as Donagan. (1977, pp. 91f.) has pointed out, such rules of convenience, as between desperate ruffians, have no moral force at all: ‘it would be absurd to suppose that byMACKIE AND THE MORAL ORDER 113 promising to commit a murder for to conceal a colleague from justice] a member of a criminal gang can place himself under a moral obligation to commit it, or even to give himself a prima facie reason to commit it’. Even Satan’s kingdom, we have more eminent authority to believe, cannot stand when it is divided against itself: but then, who ever said it did? And is it only ‘paradoxical’ to suggest that Heil (which is to say, living godlessly) is our best model of the moral life? Mackie himself realized what he was denying, and it is no coincidence that his last book (Mackie 1982) was an attempt to ground his rejection of theism. It is a pity that the essayists who thought to do him honour apparently do not. University of Liverpool REFERENCES Clark, S. R. L. (1975) Aristotle’s Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press). —— (1986) The Mysteries of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell). —— (1987a) ‘God’s Law and Chandler’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 37, pp. 200-6. —— (1987b) ‘How to Believe in Fairies’, Inguiry, 30, pp. 337-55. Diogenes Laertius (1925) Lives of the Philosophers, u. R. D. Hicks (London: Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann). Donagan, A. (1977) The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Harman, G. (1977) The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press). Kenney, J.P. (1986) ‘Monotheistic and Polytheistic Elements in Classical Mediterranean Spirituality’ in A. H. Armstrong (ed.), Classical Mediterranean Spirituality (New York: Crossroad), pp. 269-92. Leslie, J. (1979) Value and Existence (Oxford: Blackwell). ~— (1987) ‘Mackie on Neo-Platonism’s Replacement for God’, Religious Studies, 22, pp. 325-44. Lovibond, S. (1983) Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell). Mackie, J. L. (1976) Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Pelican). —— (1980) Hume's Moral Theory (London: Routiedge and Kegan Paul). —— (1982) The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press). — (1985) Persons and Values, ed. Joan and Penelope Mackie (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Murdoch, 1. (1970) The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). —— (1976) The Fire and the Sun (Oxford: Oxford University Press}. Peirce, C. S. (1934) Collected Papers, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Plotinus (1956) The Enneads, tr. S. Mackenna (Londen: Faber). Price, R. (1974) Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, ed. D.D. Raphael (London: Clarendon Press). Sextus Empiricus (1933) Outlines of Pyrrhonism, tr. R.G. Bury (London: Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann). Spinoza, B. (1982) The Ethics and Selected Letters, wr. S. Shirley, ed. S. Feldman (ndianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.).4¢ STEPHEN R. L, CLARK Vernant, J.P. (1982) Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, wr. J. Lloyd (London: Methuen). Wallis, R. T. (1976) ‘Nous as Experience’, in R. Baine Harris (ed.), The Significance of Neo-Platonism (Norfolk, Virginia: International Society for Neo-Platonic Studies), pp. 121-54. Yeats, W. B. (1959) Myzhologies (London: Macmillan). —— (1962) Explorations (London: Macmillan).Copyright of Philosophical Quarterly is the property of Blackwell Publishing Limited and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.