Richardson on the construction of moral norms

Henry Richardson's Articulating the Moral Community provides us with a rich pragmatist account of how we might settle a set of tensions at the heart of our conception of morality. On the one hand, we feel moral norms are objectively binding—it's not merely an individual's values or a culture's conventions that makes it wrong, for instance, to torture an animal. On the other hand, it's clear that we human beings, with our contingent histories, capacities, and limitations bring moral norms into being and then go on to shape them. How can these two things both be right? If we make morality, does that not entail a relativist ‘anything goes’ position—one that seems alien to our actual moral practices? In order to resolve these tensions, we need a theory of objectivity that makes sense of our thinking that there are rights, wrongs, and duties, which human morality-makers have the authority to specify. That theory must tell us how moral progress (and moral regress) is possible. It must give us some indication of what those objective norms might look like, how they're introduced, how they might legitimately change and evolve, and how they become authoritative. This is a tall order, and one the pragmatist has tried to fill. For an insight at the heart of the tradition is that any domain of inquiry and belief—science, mathematics, ethics—is human inquiry and belief. Our philosophical concepts of truth, knowledge, justice, and moral authority must start with that insight, not with the fruitless quest for high metaphysics, a supernatural God, an all-powerful sovereign, or some other absolute ideal. Richardson's book is the most recent and most ambitious pragmatist attempt to address these pressing issues. In order to assess it, I will need to quickly canvass his predecessors.1 One kind of pragmatist answer is quietist and is focused on the apparent radical plurality of moral contexts. On this version of pragmatism, prominently manifested in the work of Richard Rorty, the absence of infallible foundations leads directly to the idea that we cannot aim at getting things right, but only at temporary agreement with our peers, or within a community or form of life. This brand of pragmatism, I think, can only end in a ‘might is right’ view, leaving us with nothing to say to those who disagree with us. The other kind of pragmatist answer is epistemic or focused on human inquiry's quest to reach a right or true moral belief or policy. These pragmatists argue that there is a distinction between acceptance of a norm, on the one hand, and the validity or justification of that acceptance, on the other. That distinction is going to have to be subtly drawn, for it might seem like magical thinking that we can get justification out of human inquiry. The key, for most of the epistemic pragmatists, is that the best that human beings could do in a reflective and experience-based process is what truth amounts to, and with that view of truth in hand, we can justify norms. The best-known epistemic argument is Dewey's. When a problematic situation or a doubt arises, we inquire in order reach a new settled belief that provides “a decisive directive of future activities.”2 Since inquiry of any kind requires the unimpeded flow of information and the freedom to offer and to criticize hypotheses, broadly democratic norms are justified and the results of our moral inquiries have authority when the moral norms are established in a true democracy (a democracy that includes equality of education and opportunity). A second classical epistemic argument is that of the Supreme Court justice and co-founder of pragmatism, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. His theory of moral authority starts with a major contributor to the norms of society—the law. In good pragmatist form, Holmes argues that law is not abstract, doctrinal, and formal: “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience,” or, “the felt necessities of the time.”3 Law is a growing, ongoing enterprise of inquiry, which works from precedent, or our settled body of background belief; is driven by experience, conflict, and unanticipated problems; and reaches answers that are authoritative. A third pragmatist epistemic account of moral authority is that of C. I. Lewis. He argued that the whole body of our beliefs forms a pyramid, with the most comprehensive beliefs, such as those of logic, at the top, and the least general, such as ‘all swans are birds,’ at the bottom. Ethical judgments are also under our cognitive scope, “as obdurate and compelling” as “any other kind of knowledge.”4 When we have a new experience, we attempt to fit it into our human, preformed, patterns. Persistent failure leads to readjustment in the pyramid, but the higher up a concept stands, the more reluctant we are to disturb it, because the required revisions will be radical and far-reaching. That is, the beliefs and principles at the top of the pyramid are fallible and revisable, but were we to revise them, those revisions would reverberate throughout our body of knowledge. To switch to a more well-known metaphor, we have experience informing the periphery of our web of belief and at the core, we find norms against torturing children and genocide. We would find it immensely disturbing if such principles were thrown into doubt and they are justified, at least for the time being. But ‘I should support Oxfam over giving money to my struggling brother’ is closer to the periphery, something I might more easily abandon in the face of counterargument or experience. Into this pragmatist space comes Richardson's impressively hard-working theory. His project is to show how the moral community constructs and establishes genuine norms. Like all pragmatists, he argues that our ordinary moral practices and beliefs provide the basis for objectivity, normativity, and authority. Morality is something we work out together, using “inherited materials”, rather than first principles (21). We have some core “global” moral principles, such as the fundamental moral equality of all people, duties to keep one's promises, to not kill, assault, or torture, as well as more pedestrian duties such as not to drink and drive (256, 139). We won't, in the process he sets out, overturn elements in the core, unless it is “deeply riven with internal … conflicts” (24). When it is not in conflict, we hold the core stable and that “empowers” people to articulate new norms on the “periphery” (23). Those norms are germinated in individual problematic situations, in which there is some indeterminacy—some gap in morality—that requires resolution. Our aim when we are engaged in an ethical dilemma is not to come up with a pristine principle, but to improve the overall practical coherence of our set of norms, sometimes by introducing novel norms that will guide us out of the particular dilemma we face—hopefully an improvement on our existing moral understanding. Imperfect as they may be, our practices provide “an adequate basis” for working out the best course of action and making “objective progress” (3). The “adequate”, I suspect, was carefully chosen for capturing just the right measure of modesty and ambition. We live in a world in which “past injustices go uncorrected … discrimination and disrespect are woefully common, dire needs get neglected, and venality and self-dealing thrive” (256). We start from where we find ourselves, trying to make piecemeal reforms. Inquirers don't begin with a foundation of already existing truths and build up more truths, nor by setting out an abstract and idealized account of moral reasoning. As Richardson puts this pragmatist idea: we shouldn't seek an ethical theory that's a “beautiful achievement even if no ordinary people care about it,” nor should we try to identify the “ultimate (and perhaps timeless) truth-conditions or truth-makers of moral statements” (45, 6). There is no unifying conception of the good, such as maximizing utility, that grounds right action. Moral progress arises with respect to “this or that issue” and may be “episodic” (8). It tends to occur when we reform principles that clash with the “fundamental axiom of moral equality” or core beliefs such as “it is wrong to support or implement changes in social practice that perpetuate or exacerbate … injustice” (261, 257). Richardson does not side with the quietist pragmatist who thinks that moral norms are the norms of this or that community, or this or that individual. He thinks we can identify norms that are really binding on everyone. Richardson is the kind of pragmatist who argues that we assess our beliefs in terms of whether they are successful, not in the crude sense of working in someone's self-interest, but in terms of whether they make better sense of the tapestry of moral rights and duties, and make that tapestry itself better. He must thus meet the challenge that greets all epistemic pragmatists. Surely, some people should be kept out of the deliberative process. There will be flat-earthers in every domain of inquiry. In morality, they are the extreme alt-right, the opportunistic child molester, and so on. Surely their voices cannot count in an inquiry designed to find objectively right norms. The founder of pragmatism, C.S. Peirce, disqualified flat-earthers by arguing that they fail to engage in genuine inquiry and hold genuine beliefs. Their attitudes are not responsive to evidence and that responsiveness is a constitutive norm of what it is to hold a belief aimed at truth. Jurgen Habermas disqualified flat-earthers in ethics as failing to abide by the requirements of genuine communication. Richardson too makes such a move. He rules out the dissents of racists, sociopaths, pirates, etc., by arguing that their “points of view” are “inherently and wholly inimical to morality” (180). Acceptance of a norm must be “broad and inclusive,” but not inclusive of everyone—only “existing competent moral persons” (183). As well as being incompetent, the flat-earther in morality refuses to work things out sincerely and jointly with “moral freedom”—freedom from “broader social necessities, mindless peer pressure,” (137) and from violence and epistemic injustices (172). These are conditions on the legitimacy of Richardson's process of inquiry (157). To varying degrees, all of these attempts to define belief, communication, or morality such that flat-earthers are disqualified, have a whiff of question-beggingness about them. One of the great challenges for the pragmatist is to say what binds people into a community. Who is the ‘we’ in question? One might argue the voices of the marginalized won't get heard in such the system of belief which is ‘our’ inheritance. Richardson employs Davidson's idea that if we can communicate and translate, we are a community. One wonders, though, if this really disqualifies the racist and the pirate, although it might disqualify the sociopath. Another problem I want to raise for Richardson is that, despite his arguing for a pragmatist, human, account objectivity in ethics, he asserts that his position is compatible with another kind of objectivity, something that goes beyond the human. He distinguishes between morality and, “the ultimate truth-conditions or truth-makers of morality, whatever these may be,” and says that his position “is compatible with the rationalist realist's view that morality's ultimate grounds are timeless” (13, 238). One of the fundamental premises of pragmatism is that this contrast between real and human objectivity is something we must abandon. Richardson stays away from the project of trying to actually find ultimate truth-makers of morality, so in some sense he rejects the contrast. He says: “I have simply pointed out the possibility of such ultimate truth conditions, so as to explain how my view can be reconciled with rationalist moral realism—I have not argued for them” (247). But in setting up the contrast, he encourages the idea that he's talking about something other than morality—something like whatever we find workable. This is unfortunate. If there is a possibility that there are ultimate, non-human underpinnings of morality, then a bevy of unmeetable challenges arise for Richardson. What if they pull against the norms arrived at by the deliberative process? Why not try to discover what is really right, rather than mess around with human construction? Richardson says that his own views about the metaphysics of moral indeterminacy are “unsettled” (16). I suggest we settle them and read “whatever these may be” to express a scepticism that there are such objective underpinnings. Otherwise, I see little point to proceeding with Richardson's fine analysis, to which I now turn. Richardson is one of the few pragmatists who actually does the spadework to show how moral progress might operate, offering us a mechanics of how we resolve moral indeterminacy. He asks how local agreement, or a local way of working through a problem, can be authorized or articulated by the moral community. How can it can become binding on everyone? His answer is a three-step process. The input stage consists of “pairs (dyads) of individuals” who exercise moral discretion and provide the inputs into moral inquiry (85). In the second stage, people, in a variety of ways, choose one norm over others to form a social convergence. Third, we have the moral community coming to “socially embodied forms of reflection” (176). This is the articulation stage, in which the moral community ratifies the norm. It is the truly normative point, despite there being no authoritative body that can announce it. It is a reflective acceptance on part of the moral community. Here I come to my final worry about Richardson's position. He gives us examples of this process, which seem to me to not perfectly jive with how moral inquiry goes. In his Dr. Jones case, for instance, the third stage is not met—it hard to imagine uptake of norms about placebos in developing countries in the general community, as the knowledge base and the opportunity to employ such norms is limited to a specialised community. And when we turn to medical norm introduction with relevancy for a broader range of people, such as physicians responding to requests by patients and their families for treatment that is deemed medically futile or inappropriate, both the first and third stages are not met. The norms don't arise with a pair of people trying to work out a particular problem—they circulate in the specialised medical community before they gel. And uptake is again not general. Disagreement and unclarity remain thick on the ground. Should a family's religious beliefs require physicians to provide treatment they believe is futile and will cause the patient further pain and suffering? Should a physician's own religious beliefs (or a hospital's religious principles) be allowed to drive their decisions about whether to keep a patient alive when that patient and her loved ones want the end to come? Should a patient who is highly unlikely to come out of a coma be allocated full life support when many other lives could be saved by that bed and equipment? Indeed, with respect to pretty much all norms, it looks like ratification never occurs. Inquiry is, as Richardson himself holds, an ongoing nature. Surely there are other ways of initiating a norm, of recognizing and making a bid for it in the hope that others will take it up. That is, Richardson's three stages seem unduly restrictive. I suggest that we think of the matter in Lewis's terms. He argued that one way new moral norms come into our system of belief is by being disclosed in experience, which can include imagining oneself in another's shoes; hearing the stories of others; or finding ourselves in a changed circumstance. While Richardson does envision a large role for “individual experimentation” (141), it seems to be in the service of finding the “novel” solution once two people are in the dyadic duty/rights situation. But surely one site of the friction—one of the where ethical can get a when we experience something as when we it or think about it at That is, we be trying to out a with Indeed, a and can communicate their experience not to the but within their in order to get clear on their experience, as in or through before they into a In to Lewis's idea of experience Holmes and us with two ways of how new moral norms are democracy and the law. Richardson is set against these moral authority arise in the is, that it does within democratic and (21). Moral authority cannot be the of the of and One of his is the of morality as a whole as being on the basis of such as a But I would say that thinking that moral norms can arise within democratic and us to the idea that this is the of morality—that such as a Another Richardson gives for the between morality and democracy “The moral community does not express will in any way in democratic That would require an situation in which of moral persons” This again the that in on any does the community of of or can more local It seems like the community of is is or no matter what this or that community may Richardson seems to this idea to morality. His theory of rights “is of of But he also that as a matter of might have it not be the that there is some indeterminacy in moral an indeterminacy only if in and that those can be the democratic process? For instance, might justified in but be to justify in with of genocide. norms might well come into being and be in the democratic process. Richardson's third for the is that might easily be set up to their as the or in a few But that from religious or that all the in the or the of And point was that democracy has a voices of all are at least at the which includes equality of education and has equality it does seem that, as a matter of local democratic can new moral norms. of those in recent in which in particular on a moral or the of When we say that an is a on a moral we don't that it is a We that the people, the moral community, take the to be are hard to what the are about it, and the has a kind of moral authority. a seems to be one of those social that can a moral norm. The for when a a norm, as it in under some of and argument on the part of the norm in a process. It seems that democratic and are for about rights and duties, as well as for their Richardson this worry on the not be of novel input from whatever His answer is that two people coming to work out their duties and rights is “the But I hope to suggest that even in Richardson's it's not so clear that the is In to my Richardson that the I suggest do not new moral norms that are binding on the community of all and that his view is to that In I say that there is then more work to be by other pragmatists, to articulate with an aim to coming to a more of how moral progress Indeed, that is a project I to by the major by Articulating the Moral

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