In a work that aims to consider and ascertain how human beings ought to carry on in their personal lives, social affairs, and public policies, the question of whether it is possible to be objective about such matters is vital. This is why the introduction to this book addresses whether we can make objective -- including ethical, moral, and political -- value judgments.
Are we able to make objective moral judgments? By "objective," I mean "supportable by reference to facts about the world in contrast to what we may feel, desire, wish, or hope for, vis-a-vis those facts." By "moral judgments," I mean, broadly, "judgments pertaining to how human beings ought to conduct themselves, how their institutions should be set up, and so forth."
This perennial philosophical -- yet popular -- topic needs to be revisited often because it is central to human life. Judgments about how people conduct themselves, about the institutions they devise -- in short, about whether they are doing what is right or what is wrong -- are ubiquitous. Even if one complains that people are judgmental or that they mistakenly think they can make true moral judgments or assessments (when in fact that is supposedly unjustified), one is making judgments that one intends to have taken seriously, to be correct, even as one is rejecting the wisdom of doing so. "You shouldn't think moral judgments are objective" is itself a moral judgment, albeit one pertaining to a special undertaking, one of restricted scope. Nevertheless, those making it seem to treat it as objectively true.
In short, moral skeptics or relativists, too, criticize those who disagree with them, making note of their opponents' supposedly misguided thinking about this metaethical issue. And they expect that they are correct when they do so -- objectively right, that is.
Some may hold that such judgments are no more than expressions of what is desirable -- that is to say, they express what some desire. But that is not what is meant by making such judgments; these judgments are taken to be true and, thus, objective. The mere expression of a desire does not amount to a criticism.
Yet such dialectical points are not sufficient for making a case for the objectivity of moral judgments -- that is, to defend the position that it is possible to gain knowledge of (and demonstrate the truth or falsity of) moral judgments as we do with other judgments (for example, those in physics, biology, engineering, or drivers' education). All that these dialectical points make evident is that denying the objectivity of moral and other evaluations leads to self-referential inconsistency; if this is so, then perhaps what follows is only that we ought to remain silent on the topic (as Wittgenstein appears to have believed).
One promising approach in defense of objectivity in ethics is to work out a sound, naturalistic idea of what constitutes the human good, and then to demonstrate that certain ways of acting will advance this good, while others will thwart it. If one can show that there are such ways of acting, this would satisfy the requirement of objectivity, since whether certain ways of acting advance the good or not is a matter capable of being established, shown to be true based on evidence and argument. In this introduction I plan to deploy a neo-Aristotelian naturalism in order to keep the "is-ought" gap at bay and place morality on an objective footing. I will do this with the aid of the ideas of Ayn Rand, as well as (but only by implication and association) those of
Martha Nussbaum and Philippa Foot.
It is important to mention at the outset that, in defending the objectivity of moral judgments, one is not defending the universal applicability of all of them, except where identical circumstances obtain. Thus, if in fact Mrs. George ought to send her child to take piano lessons, it does not follow that everyone should. It is irrelevant that the truth of such a claim is universally ascertainable; the point is that it does not have to apply universally, to all moral agents, although there may be some very basic moral judgments that are universally applicable in this sense.
As we have already seen, this debate ultimately takes us back to a discussion of human nature. As things stand, most of the officials involved in working to abate poverty embrace some combination of views, seeing people as both casualties of their harsh circumstances and individuals capable of overcoming such circumstances if political and legal infrastructures do not hamper them.
Perhaps the most novel approach in political theory is that of the communitarians, such as Charles Taylor, whose analysis makes it difficult to involve any strong conception of human rights. Taylor insists that we belong to our communities and thus that the lives we have are not actually ours -- we do not, thus, have the right to life, let alone to liberty and property. He speaks approvingly of "a principle which states our obligation as men to belong to or sustain society, or a society of a certain type, or to obey authority or an authority of a certain type."
According to this view, there is more than just a moral responsibility to be generous and charitable toward those who are poor. There is an actually enforceable legal obligation to contribute to the community of which the poor are members, thus alleviating their poverty not only within one's own region of the world but also in the human community as such, globally, as per the remark quoted above from Peter Unger.
The classical liberal or libertarian tradition of human rights theorizing, especially that which emerges from John Locke and, more recently, Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, and some neo-Aristotelians (such as Eric Mack, Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl), would take issue with this approach and reaffirm, based on various philosophical arguments, the vital importance of negative individual human rights. It would hold that respecting and protecting these would serve most effectively to counter poverty (although never guaranteed against all of it, since individuals can, even when they have the right to work, neglect to exercise this right wisely and prudently, and because nature is often simply merciless). In the last part of this chapter, these points are elaborated.
For the past two hundred years, a debate has flourished in political philosophy regarding what kinds of rights human beings possess. This is not the debate about whether we have any rights at all. Instead, the rights versus socalled-rights debate is about whether human beings have rights other than the negative rights not to be killed, assaulted, robbed, or silenced. Locke, the major seventeenth-century individual-rights theorist, argued that we all possess the natural negative right not to be intruded upon. Because of the kind of beings we are, we require certain social conditions, including respect for our negative rights, when we form communities.
Locke's critics argued that the negative rights he identified are only some of the rights that we possess. Such critics maintain that we also have so-called positive rights whereby others must not only refrain from intruding upon us but also owe us positive services such as welfare, health care, and education.
Positive-rights theorists do not simply argue that it is decent and morally proper for others to voluntarily help us when we are in need. Rather, they argue that, just as others may be forced to desist from murdering or assaulting us, they can also be forced to give us whatever help they can -- including their work, their earnings, and the fruits of their talents.
Since Marx, other people have softened his hard-line collectivist position into a so-called kinder and gentler theory of positive rights. As a result, some people misunderstand the nature of positive rights, thinking that they simply arise from an elaboration of negative rights. When newspaper columnist George Will noted that one government official leaned toward authoritarianism by inventing positive rights not listed in the Constitution, someone criticized Mr. Will thus: "The Constitution has been amended in the past to include the 'right' to vote for African-Americans, women, and eighteen-year-olds, as well as the right to be free from slavery and involuntary servitude." The idea is that, since such so-called positive rights have been added to the United States Constitution, others may also be added.
However, such amendments are drastically different from the amendments advocated by many big-government theorists. Many of the amendments are simple elaborations for more specialized cases of the basic negative rights everyone possesses by nature. The right to vote is an application of the right to liberty in the arena of political action: government may not prevent any adult citizen from fully participating in the political system. The right to be free from slavery is a simple corollary of the negative right to liberty, as is the right to be free from involuntary servitude.
It is, however, difficult to disguise the open, unabashed "selfishness" of a profession that aims to produce wealth for those for whom it is conducted, the clients, as it were, of those who hire managers of corporations, the small entrepreneurs, and so forth. At even the simplest level -- say, when one shops at the grocery store, the farmer's market, or the mall, commerce is directed, unapologetically, toward making a good deal for the various parties involved.
Moreover, because of its focus on worldly, mundane goods, commerce and business have always been found to be something of a distraction from what is deemed to be more important, namely, preparing for the afterlife, readying one's soul for everlasting salvation.
Of course, this view of commerce and business as being exclusively concerned with one's own welfare and advantage is itself problematic since, for millions of people, obtaining wealth for themselves amounts to but a first step in the allocation and distribution of that wealth. One need but consider such highly visible wealthy individuals as Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet, to start with, and then nearly anyone who is prosperous, to realize that personal wealth is very often spread out to support a large "stakeholder" community, directly or indirectly -- family and friends, organizations being chosen for philanthropic benefit, causes involving artistic, cultural, and/or scientific projects, and, of course, employees, subcontractors, and their families and associates who benefit from the distribution of personal wealth.
But the idea tends to be seen as rank absurdity by most Westerners because their traditions -- based on elaborate philosophical and related argumentation -- tend to be individualistic. Most don't accept the collectivist notion that has treated entire societies as if all members were guilty for the deeds of a few among them. In short, they reject the idea of collective guilt and tend to eschew class analysis and ethnic and racial condemnation.
In conclusion, the fundamental difference between at least those in the East on whom the world in the early twenty-first century is very much focused and those in the Western tradition of ethics and morals is that the latter tend -- in the main though by no means universally -- to view individuals as responsible for their conduct and capable of choosing between right and wrong, and their moral life would be demolished if we forced them to do what is really, actually morality right (apart from what is required for the preservation of the right of individuals to make their own choices regarding their own peaceful conduct). Once one is an adult, one's moral or immoral conduct is one's responsibility, not anyone else's. And this assumes that every intact human being must be free to choose.
Other societies, especially the ones that I've focused upon, don't have this conviction widely enough embraced throughout their culture and through their legal and political tradition. That in part explains our major differences between the dominant ethical outlook in the West and much of the Middle East.