Why Should We Be Good?
Today we are witnessing an irrepressible and admirable pushback against the specters of ‘cultural relativism’ and moral ‘nihilism.’
by Matt McManus.
The issue I wish to explore is this: even if we know which values are universal, why should we feel compelled to adhere to them? Put more simply, even if we know what it is to be good, why should we bother to be good? This is one of the major questions addressed by what is often called meta-ethics.
https://quillette.com/2018/07/07/why-should-we-be-good/
debates between those who believe there are universal values, and those who believe that what is ethically correct is relative to either a culture or to the subjective preference of individuals.
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Indeed, relativism and the moral nihilism with which it is often affiliated, seems to be in retreat everywhere. For many observers and critics, this is a wholly positive development since both have the corrosive effect of undermining ethical certainty. I think there are two motivations behind this disdain for relativism and moral nihilism: one of which is negative and one of which is positive.
The negative motivation arises from moral dogmatism. There are those who wish to dogmatically assert their own values without worrying that they may not be as universal as one might suppose. For instance, this is often the case with religious fundamentalists who worry that secular society is increasingly unmoored from proper values and traditions. Ironically, the dark underside of this moral dogmatism is often a relativistic epistemology. Ethical dogmatists do not want to be confronted with the possibility that it is possible to challenge their values because they often cannot provide good reasons to back them up.
The positive motivation was best expressed by Allan Bloom in his 1987 classic The Closing of the American Mind. In this work, Bloom argues that American students during the 1980s increasingly bought into multiculturalism, relativism, and a certain cultural nihilism because they did not believe there were any universal values which should be propagated and defended. Bloom worried that if this trend towards a kind of hip cultural nihilism continued, it would eventually lead to a tremendous flattening of our ‘selves’ across society. Bloom wasn’t an ethical dogmatist who was unhappy that his students didn’t hold to his particular set of values. As he consistently observed, being critical and reflective about values which are presented as universal is part of the philosophical tradition dating back to Socrates. What made Bloom unhappy was that these students rejected the whole idea that there could be any universal values.
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To my mind, the first premonitions of the ‘profoundest problem’ can be found in the work of David Hume, who observed that we can never move readily from scientifically understanding facts about the world to determining what values people should hold to. This posed a serious problem for future scientifically minded ethicists, as it became clear that just knowing objective facts about human nature and desires couldn’t necessarily lead us to a clear set of ethical values. This problem was picked up and reformulated by Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher who was awoken from his “dogmatic” philosophical slumber upon reading Hume.
Kant argued, very powerfully, that a human being’s innate practical reason begets a universal set of “moral laws” which any rational person knows they must follow. This includes his famous imperative to “act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will it to be universal law.” But Kant also observed that there was a major problem. While we might know that these “moral laws” apply universally, why should we feel compelled to obey them?
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Kant’s answer was that we must postulate a belief in God and the immortality of the soul in order to get around this meta-ethical problem. This was problematic since, as Kant had already established in his Critique of Pure Reason, many of the traditional arguments for God’s existence didn’t seem tenable. So Kant argued that we simply must push the doubts of pure reason aside to make way for “faith.” This answer was obviously unsatisfactory to later secular or atheistic philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who outright rejected belief in God as a stabilizing force for our moral beliefs. For Nietzsche, the answer to “why should we be good” is negative.
Paul…..Your conscious is controlled by knowledge of how you are expected to behave….and is connected to the amygdla which sends out a feeling of fear…..if you are beginning to initiate…..or even thinking about initiating….a disallowed behavior.
I believe there is another position on this question which hails from the left, and is particularly evident in many syntheses of Freud and Marx. It is the notion that the disagreement between the public and private good can be overcome through universal consciousness. That is, the human subject can be so reconstituted (through the unleashing of the libido for example), as to no longer distinguish between ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. He would then spontaneously seek the happiness of the whole rather than the part. At least this was the revolutionary hope, it seems, that animated much of the ‘countercultural’ activity in the 60s in this country and elsewhere. But the achievement of cosmic consciousness through the unleashing of the passions has deep roots, I think, in the revolutionary movement in the West.
All ethics in my mind should be life boat ethics, as it is life boat ethics that in the final analysis that will dictate behavior. The rest is just polite hypocrisies which only stand so long as the Huns don’t succeed in sacking the city. Polite hypocrisies and status signalling is obviously important, but does not seem to express the essence of ethics.