Welcome to another post in the ever popular series - I read a difficult book that wasn’t that interesting and now you have to hear about it. Dirda put it well:
I’ve also come to feel that if I don’t write about a book—in a review or essay—then I haven’t actually read it. Gathering my thoughts, outlining an author’s argument, framing a few apt quotations, trying to make inchoate impressions coherent—all these activities give substance to my experience of a work, make it real in a way that simply “reading” alone doesn’t.1
Today Sellars and his somewhat Kantian morality2.
Why should we do the right thing? Many ‘should’ statements are conditional - you should eat, if you’re hungry. These conditional ‘should’ statements are valid if the intention follows from the condition - ‘you should eat, if you’re tired’ would obviously be invalid. However, the logic might be valid, even if the condition is false - if you’re not hungry, that ‘should eat’ claim is valid but inapplicable [p209].
Can we find a way to say you should be moral that is both valid and with a true condition? If we can, we’d be justified it claiming that there is a moral ‘should’ that applies to all rational beings.
A true proposition is one which has a certain claim to be assented to by a rational being [p210]
Sellars considers and rejects a Platonic ‘I should be moral, if I want to lead a satisfying life’. Intuitively, it does not validly describe all moral obligations, since there are times when being moral would make your life less satisfying. The truth of the premise is also doubtful, since we sometimes choose to do things that are not conducive to a satisfying life [p204].
Sellars similarly rejects benevolence - ‘I should act moral, if I want to maximize the general welfare’ - since it seems possible for a person to deny the condition [p205]. Sellars argues we need a stronger premise in order to get to a ‘should’ statement that applies to everyone. The premise we need is “categorically reasonable” or the “practical counterpart of truth”. Even further, we want a premise that is “intrinsically” reasonable or reasonable on its own without any further condition [p213]. Closer to the “ground-floor” [p200].
Sellars is shifting the meaning of some Kantian jargon. When Kant distinguishes hypothetical and categorical imperatives, it corresponds to conditioned vs unconditioned. Kant argues that morality is in this sense categorical - it’s an obligation without regard to any conditional desire or intent. Some Kantian commentators regard it as an absurdity to even ask why we should do the unconditioned (see Paton, Beck). In contrast, Sellars formulates exclusively conditioned statements [p202]. In Sellars usage, hypothetical and categorical are distinguished based on something like their truth content, with hypothetical closer to its more common usage (‘on hypothesis’).
Sellars proposed formulation of morality is ‘We should act moral, if we want to maximize the general welfare’ [p218]. This sounds a lot like benevolence, but with ‘we’ substituted for ‘I’. Is it categorically, intrinsically true that ‘we want to maximize the general welfare’? Here’s Sellars defense (italics in original):
[it] does seem to have an authority which is more than a mere matter of its being generally accepted. It is a conceptual fact that people constitute a community, a we, by virtue of thinking of each other as one of us, and by willing the common good not under the species of benevolence - but by willing it as one of us, or from a moral point of view. [p222]
Sellars goes on to say that what makes a group of people a community, is just this shared intention that they all desire the good of all the members of the community [p225].
Sellars goes on to discuss how far this morality takes us [p214]. It depends on who we view as in our community. It is possible that it is broad or narrow. Sellars admits it does not lead to the claim that we have moral obligations to all rational beings, let alone animals. It also doesn’t clarify what we might mean by ‘general welfare’ or how to navigate disagreements [p225], though Sellars gestures towards a “rational inquiry” that will resolve “differences of opinion” [p223], and a hope that the argument can be extended to justify moral concern for all rational beings [p226].
I think Sellars works very hard to get not very far. I would summarize Sellars’ view as - If it’s fundamentally true that people form communities, then obligation validly follows. And I think Sellars formulation might be valid. But the categorical truth of the premise and that this is actually morality, are more doubtful.
Is it a categorical truth “conceptual fact” that we form communities with a shared intention to promote the “general welfare”? Well, most actual historic societies were hierarchical or authoritarian, and their version of ‘general welfare’ wouldn’t sound to us much like morality. Perhaps Sellars would say there have always been true communities, but they may have viewed themselves narrowly. Or that these communities had a shared desire for the ‘general welfare’, but we would view their conception as flawed.
But then, of course, this isn’t what we mean by morality. We think cruelty to any person is immoral. To say it’s outside the bounds of morality because that person isn’t in our community or our action is not prohibited by our conception of “general welfare”, is no defense. When Sellars describes morality as arising from “thinking of each other as one of us” - he sounds to me like a mobster. Sellars formulation can not say there’s a obligation to extend our community or give any guide to improving our conception of what we owe each other.
Sellars’ view is based on intersubjectivity, and perhaps it is the best a subjectivist can say. It’s an interesting comparison to Nagel (who I discussed last post). Nagel’s formulation of morality is also conditional in Sellars’ sense. Both sound similar when discussing how we go from the intrinsically true broad statement to the derivatively true ‘I should’ [Sellars, p219]. The difference is that Nagel assumes a bit more about how reasonable we are and claims a morality that’s closer to objective. A little bit more premise seems to go a long way.3
Sellars’ claim may be valid as far as it goes, though it doesn’t take me anywhere I’d want to stay.
https://theamericanscholar.org/out-of-print/
Sellars, Wilfrid. Science and metaphysics: variations on Kantian themes. Kiribati, Routledge & K. Paul, 1968.
Would Sellars view Nagel’s work as extending his argument as hoped (p225)? I had originally thought their starting points very different, but Sellars’ proposal on p225 doesn’t sound very different than what Nagel tries to accomplish. Maybe something to think about.