different from how our ancestors conceived these things. But we have our present array of recognized entities because they are the ones invoked in what we noW see as the most believable account of physical reality.
There is no reason to proceed differently in the domain of human affairs, by which I mean the domain where we deliberate about our future action, assess our own and others' character, feelings, reactions, comportments, and also attempt to understand and explain these. As a result of our discussions, reflections, arguments, challenges, and examinations, we will come to see a certain vocabulary as the most realistic and insightful for the things of this domain. What these terms pick out will be what to us is real here, and it cannot and should not be otherwise. If we cannot deliberate effectively, or understand and explain people's action illuminatingly, without such terms as 'courage' or 'generosity', then these are real features of our world.
Our tendency has been to be derailed by the thought that such features wouldn't figure in an absolute account of the universe. Both naturalism and the Platonic precedent combine to give this consideration great weight. But should it weigh with us? Only if we have reason to believe that an absolute account, one that prescinds from anthropocentric properties, in particular from the meanings that things have for us, offers the best explanation, not only of the extra-human universe (that much seems now fairly clear), but of human life as well. And this seems not only undersupported as an assertion but highly implausible in the light of what we know both about human beings and the resources of explanations in absolute-say, physical or chemical
terms.30 Unless we make a wild conjecture of this kind, we will be disposed to accept that the world of human affairs has to be described and explained in terms which take account of the meanings things have for us. And then we will naturally, and rightly, let our ontology be determined by the best account we can arrive at in these terms. We will follow what I called above the BA principle (section
3 . 1 ).
If naturalism and the Platonic precedent shouldn't deter us from following this principle to the point of allowing for courage and generosity, nor should they frighten us away from what I have been calling hypergoods, if these turn out to be really ineliminable from our best account. Hypergoods tend to be more epistemologically unsettling and to trigger off the reactions which naturalism and the Platonic precedent nourish in us, and that for two reasons.
. The first is that they present us with a good which challenges and displaces others. The picture of moral life in which a hypergood figures is one where we are capable of growth from a 'normal', or 'original', or 'primitive', Or 'average' condition, in which we acknowledge and orient ourselves by a certain range of goods, to a recognition of a good which has incomparably greater dignity than these. Our acceptance and love of this good makes us re-evaluate the goods of the original range. We judge them differently and
70 •
I D E N T I T Y A N D THE G O O D
perhaps experience them quite differently, to the point of possible indifference and, in some cases, rejection.
For Plato, once we see the Good, we cease to be fascinated by and absorbed in the search for honour and pleasure as we were before, and we will even altogether want to renounce certain facets of these. On a Christian view, sanctification involves our sharing to some degree God's love
(agape)
for the world, and this transforms how we see things and what else we long for and think important. Or again, the move from a prerational and parochial perspective to one in which we recognize the right of all humans to equal respect transforms our entire way of seeing historical cultures and their practices. What previously was endowed with the highest prestige may now seem narrow, tawdry, exploitative. We can no longer feel awe before it. On the contrary what now inspires this sentiment is the moral law itself and its universal demands. We feel ourselves lifted out of the ruck of unthinking custom, and becoming citizens of a wider republic, a kingdom of ends.
The fact that the perspective defined by a hypergood involves our changing, a change which is qualified as 'growth', or 'sanctification', or 'higher consciousness', and even involves our repudiating earlier goods, is what makes it so problematic. It is problematic right off because controver
sial, critical of where 'ordinary', or 'unregenerate', or 'primitive' moral understanding is. And this actual struggle and disagreement, the seemingly ineradicable absence of unanimity about these hypergoods, has always been a potent source of moral scepticism. This perennial worry understandably strengthens the naturalist reaction in this case. Who is to say that the critics, the protagonists of 'higher' morality, are right against 'ordinary' conscious
ness, or "I'homme moyen sensuel" ? This suspicion is all the stronger in the modern world because of what I described in section I .
3
as the affirmation of ordinary life. The rejection of the supposedly "higher" activities, contemplation or citizen participation, or of "higher" levels of dedication in the form of monastic asceticism, in favour of the ordinary life of marriage, children, work in a calling conferred a higher dignity on what had previously been relegated to a lower status. This unleashed a powerful tendency in our civilization, one which has taken ever new forms. Some of these involved turning against the very religious tradition which had inaugurated this tendency and defending
"natural" desire and fulfilment against the demands of sanctification, now seen as specious and destructive.
And then Nietzsche took this attack a stage further and tried to break out of the whole form of thought he defined as 'moral', i.e., all forms which involve the rejection of the supposedly "lower" in us, of our will to power, and to come to a more total self-affirmation, a yea-saying to what one is.
Enlightenment naturalism also frequently portrayed religious moralities of the "higher" not only as the source of self-repression but also as the
Ethics of Inarticulacy
• 7 I justification of social oppression, as the supposed carriers of the "higher", be they priests or aristocrats, exercise their natural right to rule the "lower"orders for the latter's own good. Neo-Nietzschean thinkers have extended this critique and tried to show how various forms of social exclusion and domination are built into the very definitions by which a hypergood perspective is constituted, as certain models of religious order excluded and dominated women,31 as ideals and disciplines of rational control excluded and dominated the lower classes (as well as women again),32 as definitions of health and fulfilment exclude and marginalize dissidents,33 as other notions of civilization exclude subject races,34 and so on.
Of course, the argument is complicated by the fact that all of these attacks, with the exception of Foucault's, are overtly (and, in fact, I believe Foucault's are as well, though unadmittedly) committed to their own rival hypergoods, generally in the range of our third example above, connected to the principle of universal and equal respect. But this doesn't reduce the perplexity and uncertainty we feel here. It seems that at least some of the hypergoods espoused so passionately must be illusory, the projection of less admirable interests or desires. Why then shouldn't all of them be so?
So indeed they might be. But it is wrong to think that we have stumbled on an a priori argument showing this to be so. The revelation that some hypergoods have been woven into relations of dominance, and this against the express pretensions made on their behalf, no more shows that all claims of this kind are irreceivable (and the more so in that the critical stance is often-or always-from the perspective of a rival hypergood) than does the success of the absolute standpoint in physics. There is still no substitute for the BA principle here as elsewhere. We can only look: perhaps we will find that we cannot make sense of our moral life without something like a hypergood perspective, some notion of a good to which we can grow, and which then makes us see others differently.
But, it will be objected, it is not just a matter of looking but also of arguing, of establishing that one view is better than another. And this raises the difficult question of practical reason. Is there any rational way for A to convince B that his hypergood perspective is superior? And if not, then how does A rationally convince himself? Or is it all just a matter of sub-rational hunches and feelings (as naturalists have been claiming all along) ?
Here again our understanding has been clouded by a naturalist episte
mology and its focus on the natural science model. Because following the argument in favour of a theory in natural science requires that we neutralize our own anthropocentric reactions, we too easily conclude that arguments in the domain of practical reason ought not to rely on our spontaneous moral reactions. We ought to be able to convince people who share absolutely none of our basic moral intuitions of the justice of our cause, or else practical
71. •
I D E N TI T Y A N D THE G O O D
reason is of no avail. Certain modern doctrines have tried to take up this challenge,3S but we perhaps don't need to examine their inadequacies in detail to see that the challenge cannot be met. The error is in thinking that it ought to be. Once we make this error, we cannot but despair of practical reason, and we are then readier to surrender to naturalist reduction.
But if our moral ontology springs from the best account of the human domain we can arrive at, and if this account must be in anthropocentric terms, terms which relate to the meanings things have for us, then the demand to start outside of all such meanings, not to rely on our moral intuitions or on what we find morally moving, is in fact a proposal to change the subject.
How then does practical reasoning proceed? How do we rationally convince each other or ourselves?
Practical reasoning, as I have argued elsewhere,36 is a reasoning in transitions. It aims to establish, not that some position is correct absolutely, but rather that some position is superior to some other. It is concerned, covertly or openly, implicitly or explicitly, with comparative propositions.
We show one of these comparative claims to be well founded when we can show that the move from A to B constitutes a gain epistemically. This is something we do when we show, for instance, that we get from A to B by identifying and resolving a contradiction in A or a confusion which A relied on, or by acknowledging the importance of some factor which A screened out, or something of the sort. The argument fixes on the nature of the transition from A to B. The nerve of the rational proof consists in showing that this transition is an error-reducing one. The argument turns on rival interpretations of possible transitions from A to B, or B to A.37
This form of argument has its source in biographical narrative. We are convinced that a certain view is superior because we have lived a transition which we understand as error-reducing and hence as epistemic gain. I see that I was confused about the relation of resentment and love, or I see that there is a depth to love conferred by time, which I was quite insensitive to before.
But this doesn't mean that we don't and can't argue. Our conviction that we have grown morally can be challenged by another. It may, after all, be illusion. And then we argue; and arguing here is contesting between interpretations of what I have been living.
If hypergoods arise through supersessions, the conviction they carry comes from our reading of the transitions to them, from a certain under
standing of moral growth. This is always open to challenge: the attacks on hypergoods as repressive and oppressive constitute only the most virulent of such challenges. When Nietzsche wants to launch his out-and-out attack on morality, he does this by offering an account of the transition to it, the rise of slave morality. 'Genealogy' is the name for this kind of probing. No one can fail to recognize that, if true, Nietzsche's genealogies are devastating. That is
Ethics of Inarticulacy
• 73 because genealogy goes to the heart of the logic of practical reasoning. A hypergood can only be defended through a certain reading of its genesis.The bad model of practical reasoning, rooted in the epistemological tradition, constantly nudges us towards a mistrust of transition arguments. It wants us to look for 'criteria' to decide the issue, i.e., some considerations which could be established even outside the perspectives in dispute and which would nevertheless be decisive. But there cannot be such considerations. My perspective is defined by the moral intuitions I have, by what I am morally moved by. If I abstract from this, I become incapable of understanding any moral argument at all. You will only convince me by changing my reading of my moral experience, and in particular my reading of my life story, of the transitions I have lived through-or perhaps refused to live through.
But then the force of this bad, external model is increased by something else, which is the second of the two main reasons which breed suspicions about hypergoods. These often make essentjaJ reference to bejngs or reaHtjes which transcend human life, as Plato does to the Idea of the Good, or theistic views do to God, and some Romantic-derived views do to Nature as a great source. These are problematic in themselves, and seen in the light of the Platonic precedent they seem doubly so: for these beings play no part in our natural science explanations today. If we are consistent in our adhesion to the BA principle, this f�ct shouldn't disturb us; but a worry arises from another quarter. It seems as though invoking these realities implies something about the order of argument. If you're a Platonist you must be saying: first realize that the world is ordered for the good, and then deduce from this fact that you ought to embrace certain moral reactions, internalize certain ' moral intuitions. And a theist must be saying: first realize that there is a God; he is good, creator, etc.; and
then
you will see that you ought to worship him, obey him, etc. And this was indeed a common way of conceiving argument in this domain in the days when the Platonic precedent was still unchallenged. Some philosophers thought you could prove the existence of God from facts about the world, accessible to all, regardless of moral perspective.But the acceptance of God or the Good has no necessary connection with this order of argument. And from our modern perspective, where the Platonic synthesis of scientific explanation and moral insight lies irrecoverably shat
tered by the rise of natural science, it seems more and more implausible. But nothing prevents a priori our coming to see God or the Good as essential to Our best account of the human moral world. There is no question here of our
�ver being able to come to recognize this by prescinding from our moral tntuitions. Rather our acceptance of any hypergood is connected in a complex way with our being
moved
by it. It is necessary to add 'in a complex way', because we never think of these things entirely on our own and monologically, however certain moral views may exhort us to do so. We may accept
74 .
I D E N TI T Y A N D T H E G O O D
something as a good although we are relatively unmoved by it, because at the lowest, we think very little about it and glide along in conformity with our milieu; or because we revere and look up to established authority; or perhaps best, because we choose certain figures as authoritative for us, sensing in them that they are moved by something authentic and great, even though we don't fully understand it or feel it ourselves. But through all these complex chains of intermediation, the connection between seeing the good and being moved by it cannot be broken. Our authorities, or the founders of our traditions, those who give these goods their energy and place in our lives,
they
felt them deeply.This intrinsic connection between seeing and feeling in this domain has, of course, been grist to reductionist mills. It is easy to rush in with the standard subjectivist model: the good's importance reposes just in its moving us so. But this model is false to the most salient features of our moral phenomenology.
We sense in the very experience of being moved by some higher good that we are moved by what is good in it rather than that it is valuable because of our reaction. We are moved by it seeing its point as something infinitely valuable.
We experience our love for it as a well-founded love. Nothing that couldn't move me in
this
way would count as a hypergood. Of course, I could be wrong. The whole thing could be just a projection of some quite ordinary desire which confers this seemingly exalted status on some object, surrounds it with a halo of the higher. Indeed, I could be. But I could also be right. The only way to decide is by raising and facing this or that particular critique. Is there a transition out of my present belief which turns on an error-reducing move? Do I have to recognize, for instance, that previously unavowed fears and desires of a descreditable kind have been lending lustre to this good, which it quite loses when these are factored out? What successfully resists all such critique is my (provisionally) best account. There is nothing betterI
could conceivably have to go on. Or my critics either for that matter. So says the BA principle.
Now the fact that, in applying this principle, I may come to a belief in God, a being who infinitely transcends my moral experience and understand
ing, doesn't mean that my rational confidence in this belief is grounded in considerations which take no account of this moral experience. It isn't, and with the demise of the Platonic synthesis, it couldn't any longer be.
The predicament of practical reason resembles the most primitive context in which I acquire factual knowledge, that of perception. My confidence in my awareness of my perceptual surroundings rests in large part on the quite inarticulate sense I have of enjoying a sure perceptual purchase on things,
a
sense which en frames all my particular perceivings. A typical response whenThe predicament of practical reason resembles the most primitive context in which I acquire factual knowledge, that of perception. My confidence in my awareness of my perceptual surroundings rests in large part on the quite inarticulate sense I have of enjoying a sure perceptual purchase on things,