Fb2 Beyond Morality (Ethics And Action) ePub

I liked the book. However, it was much longer than it needed to be and in parts it lost its focus. I thought his comments on biology and history were... problematic. For information about origins of morality, Patricia Churchland had some better ideas in her book Braintrust. Also, most importantly, he argues that morality ONLY means rules that one considers objective and that one MUST follow. I do think that there may be reason to believe that humans may have evolved to see morality that way, but there are people who don't see it that way. Churchland makes the point that some people define morality so narrowly that her version of morality wouldn't count as morality. She argues such people are playing a word game. I kind of agree. I mean, in this book, Garner distinguishes between ethics and morals. Yes... you could distinguish them if you define morality narrowly as he does. However, if you don't define morality so narrowly, then morals and ethics are basically synonyms. You might be better off reading his short article in the magazine Philosophy Now on the same topic. It covers his basic ideas. What I liked about the book is that he makes some good points about how, even if there is no objective morality, many people's fears about this are not necessarily warranted.

Interesting book well worth reading. It discusses and questions morality of course. Especially worth noting is that it contains a survey of non western religious and philosophical views on morality. Many people take morality for granted, after reading this book maybe not so many.

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It's good to have this book back in print twenty years after its original publication. It is a classic among contemporary books advocating amoralism, and it remains the most comprehensive, cogent, and clear. Amoralism is the philosophical position that morality, strictly speaking, does not exist but is an illusion or a myth. Morality in this strict sense implies some absolute source of objective, categorical, and inherent values in the universe, and in particular moral values, such as right and wrong and good and bad. Also implicated are a host of other moralist notions, such as desert, responsibility, duty and obligation, guilt, and so on. All of these belong in the trash bin, according to philosophical amoralism.

But the brand of amoralism Garner defends goes even further to advocate the elimination of even the pretense of morality in human life. For there are other amoralists, in the narrow sense of denying the reality of morality, who nevertheless argue that some kind of moral influence on our lives remains useful for human welfare and the smooth functioning of society. Since morality does not really exist, it would therefore seem necessary to maintain some kind of pretense that it does - if not outright self- and/or other-deception then a shared "suspension of disbelief" in morality. Most prominent among contemporary advocates of such a position, now known as moral fictionalism, is Richard Joyce, whose books on the subject I would also recommend.

Since Garner's original edition there have been new books by Hans-Georg Moeller and Joel Marks (full disclosure: That's me) making the same radical recommendation as his. Also, prior to Garner's book there were essential books by Ian Hinckfuss and, above all, J. L. Mackie. All of them of course owe debts to Hume and Nietzsche as well. But for a straightforward defense of amoralism and a sane roadmap to the way forward, nothing beats Garner's book. It does seem to me that ethical philosophy would be well served if from now on it were nothing but (to paraphrase Whitehead on Plato) "a series of footnotes to Garner."

By the way, Garner also offers a kind of revision of Beyond Morality, mischievously titled "Beyond Beyond Morality," at his Website. It is well worth reading, but is not a complete replacement of the print version.

In a nutshell, this book rejects morality as such, based on the author's embrace of the Humean picture of moral judgment being grounded solely in sentiment. But unlike others influenced by the Humean account, such as the non-cognitivists (emotivists like Stevenson or prescriptivists like Hare) or the subjectivists (those who ground moral discourse in individual preference and those who ground it in consensus preference within particular groups), and, of course, unlike intuitionists like Michael Huemer (who argue that moral claims are cognitively respectable because they address rationally knowable facts derived from our concepts, themselves), Garner (like J. L. Mackie before him) rejects the idea that moral claims state any facts at all. There is no moral knowledge, he argues, and that's a good thing.

He maintains that moral disputes are always unresolvable because they stand on our capacity to argue which, he thinks, is evidence of one's rhetorical skill, not evidence of the arguer's greater knowledge of facts or logic. Framing any claim in terms of moral beliefs, he says, must fail because it's bound to produce more disagreement than agreement. And, he argues, more confusion. Further, he maintains, moral belief systems have had an historically pernicious effect on human history, leading to fanatical excesses, wars and other interminable disputes. But that doesn't mean he rejects any capacity to differentiate our choices and to choose what we do more or less wisely. His position is that we need to look elsewhere for a satisfactory account of how to guide our behavior, i.e., to the ancient thinkers, particularly some of the Greek and Roman philosophers (he likes Marcus Aurelius quite a bit) and to the sages of the ancient East (he's especially taken with Lao Tzu and the Buddha, the latter of whom he describes as more practical psychologist than religious teacher -- though he acknowledges that many of the Buddha's followers gave his teachings a distinctly religious cast).

After dispatching the moral claims of thinkers like Kant and many later ethicists, including John Stuart Mill (of utilitarian fame), he proceeds to examine the alternatives available to us if we reject morality as such. He makes a distinction, by the way, between ethics and morals, suggesting that the former is related to one's profession or place in society and life (business ethics, medical ethics, etc.) while the latter is taken to be absolute, overriding more particular ethical concerns and issues. It's this sense of absoluteness, that moral claims consist of knowable true statements, that he is rejecting. In particular he criticizes the claims of intuitionists, whether explicit like Huemer or implicit, which is what he takes the average moralizing person to be. He argues that there is simply no basis for claiming that anything is intrinsically good or bad or that thinking it is represents a claim of fact. There is, he asserts, simply no moral there there.

His antidote to the moral motivations we feel and, he insists, need to replace, is to redirect our attention to the project of attaining a deeper understanding of our own mental lives (he favors the Zen Buddhist approach to meditation, which he believes can help us better understand our own motivations and deciding dynamics). He suggests that achieving this kind of insightful knowledge about ourselves can lead to a more settled, more balanced life without the intellectual and emotional agitations which moralizing causes in its exponents. Importantly, he argues that achieving this sort of state (which he also takes to be akin to the Taoist strategy of going with the flow) can show us how to behave in more productive and less harmful ways.

Of course, his emphasis on there being ways to behave suggests that he hasn't abandoned the moral side of things quite as radically as he wants to claim. As long as there are questions before us concerning what we should do in any given situation, even if we are urged to answer them by developing insight into our own motivations and thinking, and acting in accord with such insights, there are value questions about our actions to be answered. To the extent we understand "moral" valuing to be about assessing and choosing our actions, and not in the narrower sense of subscribing to and implementing formal belief systems with claims to objectivity via access to special kinds of facts, there is an apparent moral dimension to this, for even the idea of seeking increased personal awareness of ourselves has that sort of implication. Garner's target, in rejecting the idea of the moral, is morality as belief systems with supposed underlying knowledge sources, whether handed to humans from a divine "lawgiver," or believed to be intrinsic to human understanding (intuitionism), or equivalent to particular human states or conditions (naturalism). But one needn't take "moral" to refer only to such systemic thinking as long as one understands the term "moral" to refer to evaluating behavior in terms of agential deliberation and decision-making.

Morals and ethics are usually taken to be equivalent terms though, admittedly, we do make some distinctions in the sense that we often differentiate ethics from morals by supposing that the former are specific to particular social contexts whereas the latter have a kind of universal status that everyone ought to abide by. It's the latter universal "ought" that he most clearly objects to, claiming there is nothing universal about moral knowledge, that it is always personal and about finding the best ways to live in a world consisting of other persons like ourselves. When we suppose such decision making is governed by claims of objective fact, however, we fall into error. Garner's account, which argues for applying introspective psychological insight to one's life, in order to find the best way to live and the best things to do, is certainly "moral" in a larger sense though. To the extent "moral" is just taken to mean that kind of valuing we do with regard to our actions, there may be any number of reasons to act one way instead of another and all of these, including acting in ways consistent with our societal norms at times, can have a moral flavor. Although his account rejects the impetus to universalize such judgments (the moral move which he believes leads us to imagine moral facts as our basis for such a claim), a broader notion of "moral valuing" that does not necessarily preclude universalizing without also supposing moral facts, is not ruled out. There may, indeed, be some aspects of moral valuing which are universal in the sense of their being applicable to others as well as ourselves which admit of a different sort of justification.

Of course it's the universal aspect that thinkers like Kant aimed to get at -- and, more recently, Michael Huemer, a latter day intuitionist who attempts to resuscitate G. E. Moores's intuitionist account of ethics by wedding it to a Kantian model of a priori knowledge. But even Garner can't help introducing something universal in mind to the extent that he argues that we are all best served by rejecting formal moral systems in favor of learning about our own feelings, motives and beliefs through introspective insight and meditative practice. Such advice is meant for people in general and is not personal only, as even the Buddha's example shows. Even advice to find an inner peace by giving up the belief in moral polarities (good vs. evil) found in certain kinds of moral belief systems, and turning, instead, to a search for harmonious existence in a diverse universe has a universalist implication. To the extent it's about recommending certain ways to behave, to ourselves and others, it's moral, too.

On balance, Garner's argument is strong against the idea of adherence to rigid moral belief systems which can demonstrate no grounding to justify their claimed or presumed objective status. However, it doesn't really imply that all uses of the term "moral," when applied to value judgments related to our actions, choices and objectives in life, are illicit. Rejecting moral belief systems is not the same as rejecting the moral dimension in valuing itself.