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[Delivered
at Iowa State University, May 23, 1993 to agricultural scientists]
ETHICAL
THEORY AND MORAL DECISIONS
I arrive here at Iowa State University the day before my talk and you graciously show me around the campus. As we linger near the dairy barns, watching two Holsteins graze nearby, I try to think of something pithy and insightful to say. "Nice cows," I offer. "Look alike, don't they. You can hardly tell them apart." "Oh, on the contrary," you reply. "The one on the left is clearly superior to the one on the right. You'll notice that she's taller at the point of withers, longer and more nearly level from hooks to pins, and stands on a straighter set of rear legs. She has a big advantage in dairy character. She's longer and leaner in her neck and sharper over her withers, has a higher and wider rear udder attachment and a fore udder that blends more smoothly into the body wall. And she shows more bloom in her udder. "The cow on the right, on the other hand, as you see, is narrow through the thurl and pin region, has too much set in her rear legs, is close at the hocks, and her udder is tilted and slightly quartered. And she has several other defects: a wry tail setting, weak pasterns, and a parrot jaw."[1] "Well, yes, the weak pasterns bothered me, too," I mutter, and then remark on the good weather we're having. We end our tour near the library and after you depart I turn inside to seek out the reference librarian, who directs me to a booklet by the Purebred Dairy Cattle Association. So you weren't putting me on; there is more to the matter than "nice cow." The Dairy Cow Unified Score Card defines a goodly set of cow-parts and ideal forms. I realize that the various qualities you itemized in the good Holstein point to aspects of her body structure that indicate she is a reliable and copious supplier of milk. And I think to myself: just the sort of indications it would make sense to value in an animal whose primary purpose, after all, is to produce milk. As I close the booklet, I begin to philosophize about the dairy cow. Bovine beauty, I realize, is no simple matter. It has even more dimensions than those captured by the simple teleology of the Dairy Cow Unified Score Card. The cow is indeed a milk producing animal, but she is also an integral part of a larger system of meanings. I think of how the cow is culturally constructed. I reflect on the perfect harmony of the dairy cow with the forms, rhythms, and satisfactions of farm life as a whole. The farm day begins and ends with the dairy cow - she has to be milked morning and evening. To gain her milk, the farmer must feed and house her - thus is the cow the occasion for the growing and harvesting that occupies the farmer's day; - and thus is the cow the cause of that rural cathedral, the barn, around which the ecology of the farm takes root. Docile and uncomplaining, nurturing and imperturbable, the dairy cow brings a contentment to the daily round of farm activities. She is a force for calm among the bustle of the barnyard; a source of stability among the vagaries of weather and markets; truly, a very emblem of the "peaceable kingdom"[2] amidst the perishable, ephemeral projects of man. How serenely the cow fits into landscapes of meadow and hedgerow[3], into scenes of watering place and country lane![4] I realize my reveries picture a farm that once was but is no longer. Indeed, that larger system of meanings has so changed in the last three decades that "milk producing animal" is about all that remains to be said for the cow. I wonder what ideals will be reflected on the Dairy Cow Unified Score Card a century from now. I fantasize milk factories in which the cow is never released from its milking machine. It lies inert all day, fed through a gastric tube, its wastes piped directly from bowel and bladder to sewage tanks. Tricked into unceasing lactation by hormonally-induced false pregnancies, it supplies its constantly pulsing machine with a never-ending stream of milk. This is truly a postmodern cow, no longer cow-as-subject but cow-as-the-site-where-several-factors-of-production-intersect: Cow-As-Intersection-With-Udder. In this postmodern cow we would hardly look for straight and strong backs; long, lean necks; squarely placed legs; deep and refined flanks.[5] We would have no interest in the pasterns of an animal that never walks. I find myself disquieted by this picture of the late 21st century but I wonder by what metric I can compare the past, present, and future cow-wise, so to speak. If the dairy cow is what it is because of its place in a form of life, and the form of life changes, what reality, what standing have the old ideals? We're none of us Platonists or realists any more - good pragmatists, ironists, and relativists are we all now - so aren't radically different forms of life just other, incommensurable? Well, whatever the answer to this conundrum, the old ideals still obtain at present, encoded in the Dairy Cow Unified Score Card, and I can see what you were getting at earlier at the barn. Indeed, I begin to muse about how you would judge a pig and a goat, a horse, a rabbit. How are they culturally constructed I wonder. Could I develop a general theory of farm animals? Could I . . . . . ? But before I can dream on in search of a unifying account of the whole barnyard, the reference librarian prods me out of my reveries. The library is closing, she says. I leave still flush with my new knowledge. The next morning - this morning - I encounter you on my before-breakfast jog, and as we lope past the dairy barns, I gesture knowingly toward the two Holsteins there, and say, "I see what you meant: that cow on the left really is superior to the other." "Sorry," you reply, "those aren't the same cows." **** You have a critical capacity I don't. You can judge cows and I can't. I don't acquire your powers of discrimination and your command of reasons by sitting in the library philosophizing about the cow, no matter how profoundly and deeply I succeed. Had the librarian not broken my reveries and had I indeed worked out a complete unified theory of farm animals, I still wouldn't be able to tell one cow from the next. I can acquire your critical capacity only in the way you did - through experience and practice. There is no short cut. You began as a young 4-H-er. You learned some basic vocabulary about the cow, some basic rules about judging, and then you practiced over and over, under the guidance and correction of experienced judges. Thus you too became an experienced judge. Now, it isn't just that you have a perceptual capacity I don't; it isn't just that you can see differences where I can't: you have as well a critical capacity I don't. You can give reasons for your judgments; you can link up your discriminations to a web of justifying facts and purposes; you can say why one cow-feature is better than another. To put it simply: you know what you are talking about; I don't. When
it comes to judgments not just about cows but about moral and political
matters generally, how can we know what we're talking about? In particular,
do we have to rely on some "ethical theory" in order to know
what we are talking about? The theme for today's session is a variant
of that question: Can ethical theory resolve disagreements about agricultural
biotechnology? Well, the answer to that question is clearly - yes, no,
maybe, maybe not: who knows? It all depends on what you mean by an "ethical
theory," and that phrase can cover a multitude of activities. But
I'm going to suggest to you that the answer is definitely "no"
if what you have in mind are those "ethical theories" you find
in the philosophy books. Let's see if I can bring my answer into sharper
focus. I. Consider your cow judgments. You can give reasons for them that refer to a background of ideas and purposes. So we might say that you operate from a cow-theory. But in saying that, we are saying nothing more than that you operate within a distinct critical practice, with its vocabulary, ideals, and model arguments. Moral and political reflection likewise draw upon critical practices, with their distinctive vocabularies, ideals, and model arguments. They draw from New Testament parables and Old Testament psalms, from folktales and public rituals, from political campaigns and public crises, from lessons in school and conversations at home, from Supreme Court opinions and legal commentary. They draw from our covenants, contracts, offices, vocations, professions, competitions, and communions. They draw from the words of popes, poets, professors, proselytizers, playwrights, patriots, and pundits. When we argue morality or politics, we appeal to canonical texts (say, the text of the Constitution); we appeal to salient analogies (such as: "stopping Saddam Hussein in Kuwait is like stopping Hitler in Czechoslovakia"); we appeal to shared social knowledge (we know that looking a stranger directly in the face is not rude but that draping an arm around him is); we appeal to the nature and history of our institutions (e.g., the family, the military, the farm); and we appeal to widely professed ideals (of, say, equal justice before the law). We become experienced, thoughtful, and wise moral and political judges by mastering and exercising the vocabularies of our traditions. Becoming a good moral or political judge is in its essentials just like becoming a good cow judge. However, moral and political debate differ from cow judging in a crucial respect. All cow judgers learn in 4-H and afterwards the same vocabulary, ideals, and model arguments. In moral and political debate we use many different vocabularies. There isn't just one critical tradition from which our moral and political judgments draw but many competing and conflicting ones. Thus moral and political disagreement is endemic and recondite in a way that cow conflict is not. The practical task of reconciling different points of view, drawing out their respective implications, and recognizing their places of overlap is complicated - enormously so when the issues at stake affect people and institutions on a large scale. Add to the complication this fact: we are often not very articulate in our respective traditions; we often haven't mastered them very well. We go to church but don't read the Bible very thoroughly. We go to college but absorb very little of the imagination and experience contained in its library. We take an interest in politics but remain content with simple partisan clichés. Beyond the narrow circle of family, friends, and work, beyond the here and now, we don't give much thought. In short, our command of the traditions we inherit does not go very deeply. We know little of our history and we become easily tongue-tied about our ideals. The upshot is that when we are confronted with moral and political challenges, we often find ourselves at a loss for what to say. It all seems so messy and hopeless. Many of us would like to avoid the messiness by turning moral and political arguments into something else - into scientific or technical arguments, where we think there's greater power and objectivity, or at least where we feel more at ease. But such a strategy merely hides rather than resolves the problem. And the problem may be one you feel very acutely. It used to be so simple to teach your poultry science and herd management courses before the Age of Ethics arrived on campus. Now you have to say something about the cosmic significance of the practices, techniques, and skills you teach. You not only have to think about whether raising chickens in a certain way is cost-effective but whether it's decent and humane. You not only have to itemize the cow's milk capacity, you have to list her rights. How do you get a handle on those challenges! Where do you start? More and more you find yourself cast adrift on the Great Sea of Moral Judgment without a compass or paddle. "Isn't it all relative?" your gut urges you. "There aren't any right answers, are there? Good grief, do I really have to read the Bible, acquaint myself with Balzac's 'The Human Comedy,' study the Federalist Papers, get to know American folk tales, plumb the significance of Michelangelo ceilings, peruse the works of Ursula LeGuin, meditate on Martin Luther King's 'Letter from Birmingham Jail,' follow the detections of Sherlock Holmes, and learn to decompose rights into their constituent powers, liberties, immunities, and claims in order to say something sensible about animal experimentation or pesticide use or the introduction of new technologies? Why, it's hopeless!" And then you hear that over in the philosophy department they do ethical and political theory! Your prayers are answered! Off to the philosophy department you hasten, and away you come with a book list of moral and political theorists, classical and modern. Next stop: the library. Question: are you going to find relief for your troubles? Well, what are you looking for? One thing you might be looking for is a simple guide, a philosophical "Ten Commandments," as it were. Thus you might rejoice at thumbing through the very first book on your list, by Bernard Gert, called fittingly enough The Moral Rules.[6] Gert conveniently lists the ten basic rules of morality right on the title page:
There you've got it - the key to moral thinking! Just apply these rules to ethical dilemmas and you'll see your way through all the complications - or will you? It doesn't take you but a moment to get a queasy feeling about these rules. They all have exceptions without end. Indeed, they conflict with each other. Don't deceive? What if that causes pain? Don't deprive of freedom? What about in lawful punishment? Do your duty? What if your duty conflicts with a promise? Every application of these so-called rules mires you right back in the messiness you were trying to escape. Any successful application will draw on those stocks of traditional shared ideals, models, and examples you were trying to circumvent. A rule like "do your duty" is completely empty until you fill it up with all the duty-defining roles, institutions, conventions, and heritages of your place and time. A rule like "don't deceive" guides you nowhere until you start distinguishing between lies, ruses, disguises, dissimulations, feints, placebos, double-crosses, diplomatic indirections, political promises, and letters of recommendation; and until you set those descriptions within a web of purposes, expectations, and entitlements. But perhaps the situation is not so dire as I picture it. We may suppose that Gert, a canny philosopher, doesn't compose his list arbitrarily but for a reason. We would suppose correctly. There is a background idea or principle at work. These moral rules, Gert argues, are ones that all rational persons could and would publicly advocate. Rational persons must want for themselves and those they care about to avoid the evils of death, disablement, and the like. They must rationally desire, then, that a system of public rules protect against such evils.[7] So, if you can reduce those ten rules to a single principle, why can't you use it to guide your thinking about moral issues? Faced with issues about trust in science, or dissecting animals in undergraduate biology labs, or labeling genetically altered food, or distributing the benefits and costs of bGH, you can ask yourself, "What could rational persons publicly advocate?" Then it all becomes clear about dissecting those animals in the undergraduate labs, doesn't it? Well, not quite. Finding the single principle won't help you avoid the mushy cultural, religious, legal, and historical traditions you wanted to avoid - for it is only in terms of them that you will be able to put any flesh on the single principle. In fact, you most likely know this already from your own experience. For many of you, there's a familiar lesson on this very point. Recall those original Ten Commandments Moses brought down from the mountain, and recall the rest of the Hebrew law. In the New Testament, Paul tells the Galatians that the whole of that law is fulfilled in one word: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.[8] The commandments are reduced to a single principle. But what does "love thy neighbor" mean? How does the Christian guide herself by that single principle? Well, the Christian does not discover how to love her neighbor by looking at a variety of ordinary cases of love to abstract out a common criterion or defining property, then applying it generally. Rather, she learns to love her neighbor by learning to act in "imitation of Christ." She meditates on and conforms to the specific words and actions of Jesus in the Gospels. She harkens to the precepts and instructions of her church tradition. The principle of love has the meaning it has to the Christian in relation to determinate forms, practices, and stories. And so it is with any such principle. Substituting for the religious commandment of love the philosopher's stone of rational choice - or respect for persons, or utility - the philosophers, you see, can't even agree on what the philosopher's stone is - as I say, substituting a general philosophical principle leaves you in the same situation: those rather empty concepts of rationality, respect, or utility have to be filled up, get understood, and be interpreted by means of the specific practices of a community. There are too many ways respect or love can be expressed, too many ways utility can be understood, too many rational choices a person can make for any of these concepts in the abstract to guide us. A principle like "act only as rational persons can publicly advocate" does no real practical work for us. We have the illusion that it does only because we neglect to notice we've already poured our social knowledge into it. Sorry, Bernard Gert is not a relief to your troubles. You had better get started on your Balzac, Bible, and "Birmingham Jail!" But getting started on Balzac, the Bible, and "Letter from Birmingham Jail" only addresses the problem of inarticulateness. There still remains the problem of multiple traditions. Even if we can cite the Bible at will, what do we say to someone who cites the Koran in reply? What happens when disagreement issues from a conflict between our form of life and another? What happens when our own system of meanings itself begins to dissolve or transform - what happens in the transition to the postmodern cow when we find ourselves with a Dairy Cow Disunified Score Card? What happens when we can no longer agree how to construct the cow? Mustn't we reach for theory then? What else can get us out of our difficulty? But moral theory is no help here either. No list like Gert's will resolve our arguments, nor will asking ourselves what the rational person would want in a cow, or want a cow to be for. All moral and political thinking are acts of applied imagination, and Gert's rules and Gert's principle give the imagination no purchase. Faced with the scepter of the postmodern cow, our task is to imagine a new, attractive cow-future out of our past and present. Imagining that future requires our deepest immersion in our past and present, not our flight from it to some allegedly timeless, abstract principles. II. Now, when I say that Gert's ten commandments and their background principle of rational choice don't resolve our everyday questions about right or wrong, I'm not criticizing his rules. They weren't meant to answer our everyday questions: that's my point. Gert's enterprise is philosophical, not practical. It's a mistake, Gert himself tells us, to think the moral philosopher "should offer guides to conduct." The philosopher, rather, offers a "foundation" or "justification" of morality as a whole.[9] Philosophical books answer philosophical questions, and philosophical questions are very peculiar. Let me explain. The scientist asks, "This is possible, but is it actual?" The philosopher asks, "This is actual, but is it possible?" The doubt that motivates the scientist is practical doubt. "Will this drug stimulate the immune system to resist a human retrovirus?" "Does this atmospheric model predict long-run greenhouse effects?" And so on. Important implications for practice ride on such questions. The doubt that motivates the philosopher is pseudo-doubt. If the scientist concludes that a particular drug really is efficacious with the immune system, the philosopher doesn't dispute or doubt that conclusion. The philosopher wonders, rather, how we can have any scientific knowledge at all. Or even more radically: if it is conceivable that all of our sense perceptions are delusions - if it is conceivable, for example, that at this very moment an evil demon is making all of us dream that we are in this room discussing the postmodern cow - then how, wonders the philosopher, can we ever be certain we know anything at all! All of us right now are confident that we are awake and not dreaming - and we ought to be confident. But if we were required to justify that confidence, if we were asked to give it a foundation all the way down, we would find ourselves stumped. That's the philosophical challenge: to give what we already have confidence in a foundation all the way down, or to show why our confidence doesn't even require a foundation. And yet a further challenge: to restore our confidence should philosophical doubt actually unnerve us and make us lose confidence in all our judgments. And so it is with the moral philosopher: he is not concerned with this or that particular moral perplexity but with the coherence, the grounding, of morality as a whole. Consider Immanuel Kant, the great 18th century philosopher, who would have been on that list of moral and political theorists you took to the library. He set for himself this question: how is moral obligation possible? He did not doubt there was morality and moral obligation. Nor did he doubt morality was basically as people commonly understood it. But he saw in morality a deep puzzle. How could there be genuine moral obligation, not just the recommendations of prudence? How could we be bound by a law not conditioned on our particular ends or desires - as the moral law seems so to bind us? How could our rationality support self-regulation not tied to the content of our particular objectives? How could reason go beyond supplying the means to ends we already have to itself give us ends? The answer according to Kant was this: reason specifies no particular human ends, so it must find a standard not in the contents of rule-making but in the very activity itself. In making a rule for myself, whatever its content, could I agree that others make a similar rule for themselves? If I could not agree, that disqualifies my rule without even referring to its content, disqualifies it from giving moral permission for my conduct. Whatever its merits or weaknesses, Kant's answer was an answer to a philosophical perplexity, not a practical problem. Reading Kant will not help you with your policy disagreements about agricultural biotechnology. Knowing that you must act only from rules all others could adopt for themselves won't tell you whether to label genetically engineered food. It won't tell you who should bear the costs of environmental cleanup. Now, I do not mean to say you should never read Kant. If, in particular, you are unnerved and made disconsolate at the conceivability that morality as a whole is, in Samuel Butler's words, an "utter swindle,"[10] then you should read Kant. If you feel inhibited in taking up specific moral problems because you have doubts about the very enterprise of morality, then you ought to read Kant. You can't do better than to read Kant. Read Kant for the good of your soul; read Kant for deep philosophical insight; do not read Kant for his policy on milk price supports. Kant was perhaps the profoundest of all the moral theorists - but he couldn't tell one cow from another either.
NOTES [1] Paraphrased from a sample judging report in J. Lee Majeskie, The Basics of Dairy Cattle Judging (College Park, MD: University of Maryland Cooperative Extension Service, 1988), p. 16. [2] Edward Hicks, "The Peaceable Kingdom" (circa 1830). [3] John Constable, "Dedham Vale, Morning" (1811); "Wivenhoe Park" (1816). [4] Thomas Gainsborough, "The Watering Place" (circa 1777); "The Fallen Tree" (1748-50). [5] Majeskie, p. 2. [6] Bernard Gert, The Moral Rules: A New Rational Foundation for Morality (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). [7] Ibid, pp. 76-91. [8] Galatians 5:14. [9] Gert, p. 9. [10] Samuel Butler,
The Way of All Flesh (London: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 67. |