Objective moral truth? Thoughts on Carrier’s take — Part II

Philippa Foot

In the first part of this essay I gave my reasons for rejecting philosopher Richard Carrier’s boastful claim to have provided a deductively valid proof of why science answers moral questions. What I wish to take up now is an interesting suggestion in the latter part of Carrier’s post, one that he manages to significantly mangle, but should nonetheless be seriously considered by anyone interested in meta-ethics (the study of how it is possible to ground ethical systems).

I am referring to Carrier’s homage to philosopher Philippa Foot. Let me start with what he says, and I will then clarify and correct it for a better appreciation of his main point. To begin with, I think Carrier seriously mischaracterizes Foot’s standing in contemporary philosophy. He says: “Most philosophers ignore Philippa Foot, or make no use of her work ... It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that she was (and pretty much still is) ignored because she was a woman.” This pious comment comes after this other one: “the late, great Philippa Foot, author of the book Natural Goodness and one of the most famous papers in moral philosophy, ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.’” If you don’t see the contradiction between claiming on the one hand that an author has largely been ignored and on the other hand that one of her papers is among the most famous in moral philosophy, well, you just don’t understand what a contradiction is.

In fact, Foot’s work is very well known, and highly appreciated, by moral philosophers. She is famous for having introduced the “trolley dilemma” class of thought experiments, as part of her incisive critique of utilitarianism. Moreover, she has been credited for the reintroduction in modern philosophy of Aristotelian-type virtue ethics (properly updated), a framework for ethics that nowadays is a major rival to the other two principal schools of thought, utilitarianism-consequentialism and Kantian-style deontology. So much for being ignored or underappreciated.

What’s important in Foot’s work, and which Carrier brings up, is her idea that moral reasoning is best understood as a system of hypothetical imperatives, even though she was at least ambiguous about this position later on in her career. The idea is not actually new to Foot, as it was introduced by none other than Immanuel Kant. [1] Regardless, the point is that there are some moral imperatives that are not “categorical” (to use Kant’s preferred term), but only hypothetical, meaning that they apply conditionally (as opposed to regardless of circumstances). You can think of hypothetical imperatives as the kind of reasoning you engage in if you wish to achieve a given goal. So, for instance, if you wish to become a lawyer then you need to go to Law School; if you want to be considered a good person then you need to work on your character; and so on.

In a multi-part series on ethics and ethical reasoning I also suggested that hypothetical imperatives are the essence of moral philosophy (I did not use the technical term, though), so I fully agree with Foot’s take on this. We both reject Kant’s position, by the way, because we don’t think that there is any such thing as a categorical imperative (i.e., a moral law that is valid regardless of circumstances or goals). Remember, Foot was a virtue ethicist (like myself), so for her morality does has a goal, namely the pursuit of a eudaimonic existence.

But Carrier, I think, pushes Foot well beyond where her thinking can reasonably be pushed. He says: “Philippa Foot developed the fourth way in moral philosophy, showing that morality is actually just a system of hypothetical imperatives ... Foot added a fourth and wholly separate category [to virtue ethics, deontology and utilitarianism], which actually is far more plausibly correct. ... Even Kant’s deontological ethics reduces to a special form of teleological ethics which reduces in turn to a special form of virtue ethics, which reduces in turn to a system of hypothetical imperatives. Thus, Mill, Kant, and Aristotle were all right, they just were missing pieces of the whole picture, and thus failed to see how the defects of their separate systems disappear when their systems are united rather than treated as incommensurable and in competition with each other. The means to unite them is the approach of Philippa Foot.”

These are stunning (and stunningly confused) claims. Kant’s deontology reduces to virtue ethics? What? The two approaches don’t even ask the same questions! Kant, like the utilitarians, was concerned with what is the right thing to do — the way we mostly think of morality today. The ancient Greeks, and especially Aristotle, conceived of the moral project in a very different fashion, and asked instead what sort of life we should live. Foot herself — again — was a virtue ethicist, so she certainly didn’t think that her talk of hypothetical imperatives transcended virtue ethics. And she mounted serious criticisms of the other approaches to moral philosophy, especially utilitarianism, so it is hard to argue that she conceived of her approach as somehow subsuming the other ones as special cases. (Incidentally, utilitarianism is logically contradictory with respect to deontology, which is one more reason to think that Carrier’s claim is incoherent.)

The reason all of this is relevant is because I agree with Carrier when he says — as part of his argument about why science answers moral questions — that “all imperatives (all ‘ought’ statements) are hypothetical imperatives.” But there are still differences between hypotheticals, so just because one can make a parallel between a moral imperative (if you want to maximize human flourishing then these actions are “right”) and an empirical imperative (if you want to grow your crops then you need this kind of soil) it doesn’t follow that ethics is a branch of science. To see that even more clearly, you may again want to recall my analogy with mathematics from part I: if you want to demonstrate Pythagoras' theorem then you need these axioms and those deductive moves. I hope it is clear that just because we can phrase the aims of a mathematician as hypothetical imperatives it doesn’t follow that mathematics is a science, or that the answer to mathematical questions are empirical.

So, once again, yes, empirical evidence broadly construed, as well as science more narrowly delimited, is most certainly relevant to ethical inquiry — and no serious philosopher should deny this. But moral reasoning remains a sufficiently distinct type of human activity so that it can safely remain within the purview of philosophy. Scientists have their hands full already with going after increasingly elusive theories of everything anyway...

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[1] Carrier is aware of Kant’s contribution, of course, but he comments on it in his inimitably insufferable way: “This concept was first articulated by Kant, who attempted to argue that some imperatives were not of this type but were ‘categorical’ imperatives, but in fact his categorical imperatives all reduce to hypothetical imperatives, so his attempt to prove there was a second kind of imperative failed. Not everyone is aware of this. But I have a demonstration of it.” Seriously? No Kant scholar or meta-ethicist has ever noticed this before Carrier deigned to “demonstrate” it to the world? And yet I was exposed to critiques of the logic behind Kant’s idea of a categorical imperative in Ethics 101...