Sorting Rules and Acts in Climate Policy

In 1959 Richard Brandt (1910-1997) clearly distinguished rule and act utilitarianism in his book Ethical Theory.  In the sixties he further developed the distinction and responded to his critics in a series of essays which were later collected and published in his 1992, Morality, Utilitarianism and Rights. What is the distinction between the two types of utilitarianism and why should it matter in thinking about contemporary climate policy? 

One might put the distinction as follows: 

• Act Utilitarianism:  Do act A if and only if doing A will conduce to the greatest happiness.
• Rule Utilitarianism:  Do act A if and only if A is an instance of rule R which, were it universally followed, would conduce to the greatest happiness.

Sharp eyes see that much is still vague in the distinction.  For instance, what does "greatest happiness" mean?  We can for both act and rule utilitarianism distinguish hedonistic pleasure from total human flourishing conceived as the development of our intellectual and moral virtues.   

• Hedonistic Act Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if doing A will conduce to the greatest pleasure.
• Hedonistic Rule Utilitarianism:  Do act A if and only if A is an instance of rule R which, were it universally followed, would conduce to the greatest pleasure.
• Flourishing Act Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if doing A will conduce to human flourishing.
• Flourishing Rule Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if A is an instance of rule R which, were it universally followed, would conduce to human flourishing.

But too much ambiguity remains. One must specify the extension of the set of individuals to which the properties of pleasure of human flourishing might apply. Are we concerned with global or merely regional happiness?  We are left with these distinctions: 

• Global Hedonistic Act Utilitarianism:  Do act A if and only if doing A will conduce to the greatest pleasure for the greatest number. 
• Global Hedonistic Rule Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if A is an instance of rule R which, were it universally followed, would conduce to the greatest pleasure for the greatest number. 
• Global Flourishing Act Utilitarianism:  Do act A if and only if doing A will conduce to human flourishing for the greatest number.
• Global Flourishing Rule Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if A is an instance of rule R which, were it universally followed would conduce to human flourishing for  the greatest number. 
• Regional Hedonistic Act Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if doing A will conduce to the greatest pleasure for the set of people in which one has interest.
• Regional Hedonistic Rule Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if A is an instance of rule R which, were it universally followed, would conduce to the greatest pleasure for the set of people in which one has interest. 
• Regional Flourishing Act Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if doing A will conduce to human flourishing for the set of people in which one has interest. 
• Regional Flourishing Rule Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if A is an instance of rule R which, were it universally followed, would conduce to human flourishing for the set of people in which one has interest. 

Now let us consider contemporary climate policy and the current demand upon the developed countries to limit carbon emissions to slow the greenhouse effect even though developing countries, and India and China, likely will not limit such emissions for several decades and maybe not until the end of the century.  On what ethical basis is this made? 

While currently the heating of the earth seems to remain much slower the many climate change models have projected, I will not deal with this factual question in this short reflection. I will simply assume that there is some global warming, and that carbon emissions are the main culprit in this warming.  (Although I am not a climate scientist, I don't there is universal consensus that climate science has conclusively shown that high CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere actually cause global warming. There is, in fact, data suggesting that there has not been a consistent correlation in earth history between elevated CO2 levels and high temperatures.)

So let us consider Germany's cultural and governmental penchant toward deeply reducing carbon emissions.  On what ethical ground might a judgment deeply to reduce CO2 levels stand?  

Since we know that draconian cuts in CO2 levels will have virtually no effect on global climate -- perhaps .02% of one degree -- over the next century, justification for such cuts cannot rest on an act utilitarianism of any kind.  The Germans can either deeply cut use of fossil fuel, or not deeply cut the use.  Since there will be little effect on global climate whether they cut or not cut, the decision to cut cannot be due to application of an act utilitarian yardstick.  

So if we are interested in consequences at all in climate policy, we must point to a rule utilitarian basis.  But what kind of basis is this?  

Since most advocates of draconian carbon cuts talk about saving the planet, appeal is being made to a global rule utilitarianism: We must move to cut emissions in such-and-such a way, because were all people to cut emissions in such-and-such a way, the greatest happiness for the greatest number would eventuate.  

But is the rule utilitarianism to which appeal is made of the hedonistic or flourishing variety?

While one could argue this either way, I think it most natural to think that the ability of human beings to flourish by cultivating their intellectual and moral virtues would be inescapably negatively impacted were temperatures to rise significantly.  After all, temperature increases will eventuate in the melting of polar ice and the rise of sea levels, a situation which will damage or destroy coastal cities. The concomitant cultural loss of these cities being destroyed would clearly impact total human flourishing even if governments were somehow successful in evacuating people from areas of flood.  While I can even imagine a scenario where governments might somehow make it pleasant for their populations to migrate away from the coast, I can't imagine a scenario where the destruction of these cities is a artistic-cultural good.   

So Germany ought to reduce CO2 levels because acting to reduce such levels is in accordance with a general rule so to act that, were this rule universally followed, would conduce to the greatest flourishing for the greatest number of people. Notice that since the reduction of CO2 levels by Germany will have virtually no effect on global warming, the decision to reduce such  levels is quite abstract.  One must have a philosophical bent, I think, to be convinced by this abstraction.  I suspect, however, that the fact that most Germans are so convinced does not mean that most Germans are philosophical, but simply that most Germans have only thought about the benefits of such reduction were all countries to reduce as the Germans are, and have not thought about the concrete downsides of their own reduction.  

What happens when act and rule utilitarianism come into conflict? Will the German population opt for the abstract benefits over concrete losses? 

Imagine, as seems quite likely, that the German desire to end fossil fuel consumption, and their continuing commitment to eschew atomic energy solutions, eventuates in much higher energy costs and an increased reliance on other countries in the importing of their energy needs. This seems actually quite likely because Germany does not get much sunlight and it is in general not very windy.  Clearly, it is likely that the renewable energy to fuel the German economy will likely have somehow to be imported. Under these conditions, it is quite probable that people in Germany will have radically to cut their consumption of energy. They can do this by not heating or cooling their buildings to previous levels, living in buildings that more efficiently heat and cool -- big apartment complexes rather than individual homes -- and not consuming processed food or manufactured goods to previous levels.  

If this happens, the German population will likely grasp that from a regional hedonist or regional flourishing act utilitarian perspective, one ought not to have acted to lessen CO2 emissions. Why would one do that which lessens their own pleasure or human flourishing? From an abstract global flourishing rule utilitarian perspective one must cut CO2 emissions but from a concrete regional hedonistic or flourishing act utilitarian perspective one must not cut CO2 emissions.  So what to do? 

Jeremy Bentham famously argued that the principle of utility was not finally an abstraction at all, but that it is simply part of our nature.  Since we do act so as to bring about our pleasure, we are allowed to claim that we ought to act to bring about that pleasure.  (I have never found this part of his argument convincing.)  However, I do believe that Bentham has his finger on something important.  When human beings are confronted with a choice between an abstraction potentially benefitting many and a concrete course of action that actually benefits themselves, they will likely take the latter.  What else would the sinner do, the sinner in which concupiscence runs deep?  

Speaking theologically -- I must do this sometimes because I am a theologian -- I would point out the spiritual pride and hubris of well-sated populations holding abstract positions that they believe will never be put to the test.  It is quite easy to dream about CO2 reductions when such reductions do not have concrete effects on the dreamer.  But the minute the dreamer is profoundly affected all bets are off. 

Spiritual pride comes when we think we can divorce our "higher part" (reason, sound judgment, empathy, altruism, etc.) from our "lower part" (body, feelings, needs, self-preservation, etc.).  I am not saying that thinking as a rule utilitarian is not a good way to think, but only that such thinking, when unbuckled from life itself, can tend to make one quite arrogant an unwieldy in one's judgments.  

Thinking philosophically is hard work; one must look at all sides of things.  Unfortunately, in the current politically charged arena of public opinion, looking at all sides appears to be a moral failing.  

Climate Policy and the Generalization Argument

In July of 1955, Marcus Singer discussed in Mind (Vol. 64, No. 255: 361-375) the so-called "generalization argument in ethics."  The argument's general form is this: "If everyone were to do that, the consequences would be disastrous (or undesirable); therefore no one ought to do that" (361).  An instance of the argument is this: "The consequences of no one doing x would be undesirable; therefore everyone ought to do x. The question for Singer is this: What are "the conditions under which the fact that the consequences of doing x would be undesirable provides a good reason for concluding that it is wrong for anyone to do x" (361)?

Singer believes that determining these conditions links to the basic principle underlying generalization arguments.  The generalization principle states that what is right or wrong for one person must be right or wrong for any similar person in similar circumstances" (362).  In the Mind article Singer defends the validity of the generalization argument, leaving open the question of its soundness, that is to say, there is nothing in the form of the generalization argument that determines whether or not the consequences of everyone acting in a certain way are, in fact, undesirable.  He is not concerned with the "desirability or undesirability of a certain set of consequences" (375),  but only with the hypothetical 'were the consequences of x undesirable were all to do x', then no one ought to do it.  

Because he is not concerned with the truth of the assertion, 'were everyone to do x, the consequences would be undesirable', he does not take seriously the popular objection to the generalization argument: "Not everyone will do x."  Singer claims that the objection "is irrelevant because the argument does not imply that everyone will" do x.  What it implies is that "if A has the right to do something, then everyone else (or everyone similar to A in certain respects) has the same right in a similar situation," or alternately, "if it is undesirable for everyone to have this right, it is undesirable for A to have it" (374-75).  Singer believes that while it might be undesirable for A to have a certain right, this does not entail that the consequences of A acting in a particular way are themselves undesirable (375).  

While Singer does not find the objection 'not everyone will do x' relevant to evaluating the validity of 'if the consequences of everyone doing x are undesirable, no one ought to do x,' in the actual application of generalization arguments it nonetheless seems quite important.  

Take a standard example, 'If everyone were to engage only in homoerotic activity then there would be no children and the human race would end, then no one ought engage only in homoerotic behavior'.  Is this valid?  

One might say that it is formally valid, but point out that the antecedent simply does not in fact obtain.  It is simply not the case that everyone will engage only in homoerotic behavior. Clearly, if it is false that the antecedent in fact holds, then the first conditional is vacuously true.  

But it must be admitted that if the disaster conceived on the supposition of exclusive homoerotic behavior will not in fact obtain, then the very motivation to cast the homoerotic behavior argument as a generalization argument resting on the generalization principle disappears.  If, as a matter of fact, only 5% or less of the population engages in exclusive homosexual activity, then correct application of the generalization principle must take this fact into consideration in determining what is to count as "similar circumstances."  

Imagine Molly is deciding how to apply the generalization principle when determining whether or not to initiate sexual activity with Myrna.  She thinks, "what is right or wrong for me must be right or wrong for similar people in similar circumstances."  Thus it is, thinks Molly, that my desire to engage with Mryna must be judged acceptable if people having the particular psychological orientation I have are deemed acceptable in pursuing homoerotic relationships with others who, like Myrna, are open to them.  

Clearly, Molly's thinking has drifted far away from an application such as this: Molly is similar to every other woman in being a woman, and since if all women were to have only homosexual relationships is disastrous for the human race, then Molly having only homosexual relationships is disastrous for the human race.  Obviously, everything depends on what one understands "similar" to mean. How does one rightfully apply similarity here?  

How does generalization in ethics affect contemporary thinking on climate policy?  Is such policy committed to a generalization principle that is, in fact, misapplied? 

The default position of many of the North Atlantic countries on climate policy seems to be this:  If the situation of no countries doing anything to limit greenhouse emissions is undesirable, then all countries should limit greenhouse emissions.  Or alternately, if every country ignoring greenhouse emissions has disastrous consequences, then no country ought to ignore such emissions.  Again, one might grasp that the generalization argument rests on this principle: what is right or wrong for one country with regard to greenhouse emissions must be right or wrong for any similar country in similar circumstances.  

Those convinced of the general validity of this principle are obviously convinced that the fact that not every country will limit greenhouse emissions is irrelevant to what ought to be done, for clearly, if every country were so to limit emissions then disaster might be averted.  

But does this situation not call for an investigation of what motivates the application of the argument in this context?  Clearly, the presupposition is that it is in the power of every country to limit greenhouse emissions.  

Compare this to the situation of Molly.  Can it be said that it is fully within the power of Molly simply not to be predisposed to homoerotic activity?  In one sense, of course, Molly might reasonably be said to have the power to do other than what she might otherwise want to do with Mryna, but does this mean that she has the power not to have the general psychological orientation she has?  Given her psychological orientation, and given the psychological orientation of others similar to her, and given the relative infrequency of her psychological orientation among the general population, could it be said that acting in accordance with her psychological proclivities actually lead to disastrous consequences?  

It might be similarly argued, that while every nation may have the abstract power to limit greenhouse emissions, many would not find it in their best immediate interest so to, and might even find it almost impossible to limit such emissions given the current socio-economic conditions obtaining in their country, and the happiness of the actual populations of that country! What I am suggesting is simply this: Just as it seems that 'not everybody will do so' is ethically relevant to the application of the generalization argument to homoerotic behavior, so is it relevant to that argument's application with respect to greenhouse emissions. 

Take, for example, the country of Germany having the fourth largest GDP in all the world. Many in Germany are convinced by the generalization argument.  Since every country ignoring greenhouse emissions would lead to disastrous consequences for the future of humanity, it is not morally permissible for Germany to ignore such emissions.  Presumably, German citizens hold this even knowing that were they completely to eliminate fossil fuel consumption, such elimination by itself has virtually no effect on global temperatures over the next 100 years.  The actual consequences of Germany eliminating fossil fuels is irrelevant, we are told, from their ethical mandate so to eliminate these fuels, for "if everybody continuing to burn fossil fuels has disastrous consequences for the earth, then it is not allowable that Germany should continue to burn such fuels."

But why exactly?  Why should Germany and the North Atlantic countries limit emissions over the next century when, as a matter of fact, most of the developing countries will increase emissions dramatically?  Why must Molly act like the rest of the women who are unlike her?  What makes Germany unlike countries like India and China that will likely raise carbon emission levels through the end of the century?  How should we apply the criterion of similarity here?  

I would argue that while Molly is unlike 19 out of 20 women, (but like 1 out of 20), Germany is more like China and India than it likely believes.  Undeveloped, developing and developed countries share overarching similarities.  They are all comprised of people who want to have enough food to eat, clean water to drink and air to breath, and energy to heat and cool their days and get them from one place to another.  

Right now there is general acceptance that undeveloped and developing countries do not have the requisite socio-economic structures that would allow them to eschew consumption of all fossil fuels.  Prohibiting such consumption would wreak havoc within their societies with concomitant suffering of their populations.  It would lead to the profound unhappiness of their populations.  Is Germany ultimately more similar or dissimilar to these countries? Does Germany find herself in similar or dissimilar circumstances with respect to these other countries?  How does the generalization principle rightfully get applied?

I believe that the fact that not all countries will limit emissions is ethically relevant to the generalization argument with regard to climate policy.  Given that Germany has a population that wants many of the same things that the folks of India and China want,  how does the requirement that Germany's population suffers by deeply limiting their carbon footprint find ethical justification when the other populations will not in fact limit fossil fuel emissions, and that Germany's reductions will likely have no discernible effect on temperature and sea-level measurements world-wide?  

The answer might be more surprising than we originally imagine.  Perhaps it is because the plausibility of using the generalization argument in climate policy is based on a presumed dissimilarity between Germany and the developing countries.  Just as Molly might get a pass from the ethical requirement of exclusive heterosexual behavior based upon her dissimilarity from the rest of the women, so does the requirement that Germany achieve all fossil fuels emissions ultimately rest on its dissimilarity from the populations of the undeveloped and developing countries. While China and India are exempt from the requirement to limit fossil fuel use based upon the sufferings of their populations were such fuels not used, so is Germany not exempt from this requirement.  After all, the German population has already developed and has no right to claim an exclusion from general requirements of the generalization argument.  Thus, the suffering that eschewing carbon emissions will bring to German life are simply not ethically relevant the German situation.  

This is a rather startling conclusion, I think, and I shall end this reflection purposefully in ambiguity because the ethical situation underlying it is not clear.  I have claimed that the generalization argument seems to support current climate policy. The argument is this: If the effect of all nations not dropping carbon emissions is disastrous, then it is not allowable that one nation not drop carbon emissions.  This is so because what is right or wrong with respect to this issue for one country, is right or wrong with respect to this issue for all similar countries in similar situations. Thus, Germany must drop their carbon emissions even though dropping such emissions will have little to no effect on world-wide temperatures and sea-levels.  

All of this is clear enough, bur remember that that not all countries will drop their carbon emissions.  So what is Germany's responsibility in lowering carbon emissions given that lowering such emissions themselves have little effect on the climate?  Here we must look to the generalization principle itself.  What makes a country similar to another?  I have suggested that through a strange inversion of its use, the chief perpetrators of high carbon emissions are protected from moral censure on the grounds that adopting strict carbon emission policies would lead to untoward suffering to their populations.  Germany, however, (and by extension other North Atlantic countries) are dissimilar from these populations in ways that do not allow escape from moral censure.  Because of this dissimilarity, Germany is  condemned.  The fact that many countries will not lower emissions is somehow not ethically relevant to the proscription and the guilt under which Germany labors.  

I do not believe that that such moral censor ought be the case, and I would argue that populations are comprised of concrete individuals whose sufferings are morally relevant to climate policy no matter what countries they inhabit. Further, I would argue that the Rule Utilitarian yardstick simply does not work in climate policy.  Here we must be Act Utilitarians.  But this argument awaits another post.  

Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze: An Introduction

Every so often a book is published that demands serious and sustained engagement. Adkins and Hinlicky's 2013 Rehinking Philosopher and Theology with Deleuze raises a number of important issues that I shall address in a series of posts.  

A major question of the book concerns the relationship between the exploration of being as such versus the investigation of the highest being.  Philosophy has traditionally dealt with the first and theology with the second. But what is the relationship between these two explorations?  The tradition has assumed a discontinuity between philosophy's reasoned exploration of being as such, and theology's religious response to that which reveals itself as highest.  However, must this be the case?  What ought this relationship be, given the contemporary intellectual and cultural context in which we find ourselves?

Adkins and Hinlicky ask us to reconsider regnant discontinuity assumptions about theology and Philosophy. Instead of the disciplines being concerned with different types of things, might one better understand them as poles on a continuum?  Adkins and Hinlicky suggest that we might better regard them as assemblages, as constructions out of heterogeneous components.  Were we to regard them so, might we make progress on a set of vexing questions that appear to us now as insolvable?  

But what is an assemblage?  The authors write: "An assemblage is a singular and temporary coagulation of heterogeneous forces that achieves consistency"(2).  Importantly, 'consistency' here does mean either unity or identity. An assemblage is assembled out of disparate components, and that these disparate components are assembled out of disparate components. It was Deleuze and Guattari who introduced the metaphysics of assemblage in their books, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?.   

The properties of assemblages are dependent on the properties of their component parts as they sustain relations with each other.  Assemblages generate limits -- one towards dissolution and the other towards constriction. The first limit functions as the boundary of the assemblage beyond which the assemblage transitions into another.  Deleuze and Guattari use terms like 'immanence', 'deterritorialization', 'molecular', 'smooth space', and 'chaos' in naming the dissolution limit.  Alternately, 'transcendence', 'territorialization', 'molar', 'striated space', and 'opinion' apply to the constriction limit.   

In the history of philosophy, say Delueze and Guittari, the notion of a thing gets confused with the assemblage reaching its limit of constriction. When one asks what something is, one is treating the assemblage as a thing. The very question lifts that which looks stable and eternal out of the context of its ever-changing existence.  

However, this question of the what is, for Deleuze and Guattari, clearly secondary to the question of "which one?"  This latter question concerns singular, concrete sets of capabilities within the process of being, the behavior of concrete assemblages (3).  

The book aims to explore theology as an assemblage, particularly in its relationship to the assemblages of both religion and philosophy. Unfortunately, according to Adkins and Hinlicky, "assemblages that have been created have impoverished rather than enriched our lives" (3). But why have the assemblages of philosophy, religion and theology impoverished our lives? 

Our authors tell us that the problem has been that we continually opt for discontinuity over continuity.  It is Kant who bequeathed to modernity the current form of the discontinuity thesis. It was he who sharply distinguished concepts from intuitions (percepts) and the supersensible from the sensible. It was he who pointed out and corrected Leibniz's confusion that "perception is just confused conception." 

Adkins and Hinlicky discuss the ontological dualisms to which Kant and much of western philosophy is committed. Such dualisms exist alongside the  basic grammatical distinction between subject and verb.  Accordingly, we traditionally have distinguished being and doing, cause and effect, and the conditioned and the conditions. These dualistic differences are difference in kinds, not degrees. Moreover, these kind differences presuppose hylomorphism's form/content schema and the analogy of being. 

Adkins and Hinlicky muse about what philosophy and theology might look like if we were to consider lightning as inseparable from its flash, being from inseparable from doing, and the doer inseparable from the deed (5).  Maybe hylomorphism could be replaced by hylozoism, by the notion of the self-organization of matter.  Accordingly, we might replace the analogy of being with the univocity of being. 

The authors are bold, for prima facie it seems that God/universe presents an ontological dualism if ever there were one. Traditionally, God has so far exceeded the perfection of His creation that one might speak of God only analogously. While the infinite God is literally not good in the way that finite being Mother Threasa is good, nonetheless God is more like Mother Threasa than He is like Joseph Stalin. God is that which none greater can be thought; God is the one activity of being in and throughout all activities of being. Clearly, the tradition has tended to blend the onto with the theo, in forming and committing itself to onto-the-logy.  But must Christian theology be committed to a rejection of ontological continuity between God and His creation?   

Thinking beyond discontinuities in theology means to think beyond immanence and transcendence. Every assemblage is a continuum from which we might abstract two poles. Philosophy tends toward the immanent and religion towards the transcendent. Now we reach the important point: transcendence need not entail a transcendent entity. All that is required for transcendence is "the organization of a field by something that is discontinuous with the field" (5).  Because Kant's transcendental categories are discontinuous with the manifold of sensation, they are discontinuous with that manifold.  But must this transcendence entail a difference in ontological kind? 

Christian theology, we are told, differs from both religion and philosophy because it attempts to think immanence and transcendence within a single assemblage. Accordingly, theology is a "fragile, paradoxical assemblage," and can easily become bad religion or bad philosophy (6).  Christian theology must eschew simile in favor of metaphor, apophatic theology in favor of kataphatic theology, and negative dialectic in favor of positive dialectic. Were we to assume a basic continuity between God and other beings, we might be able to conceive God as a "fully giving self-relation . . .  commonly referred to as the Trinity" (7). 

The continuity thesis shall require a rich cartography because maps must be continually drawn and redrawn since assemblages are always in the process of becoming. Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze explores how theology, philosophy and religion might map on the assumption of the continuity thesis.  

Kant has been most influential in the drawing of boundaries over the last 250 years. These boundaries have had real staying power.  Much of the tradition has simply followed Kant's lead in establishing boundaries for what things (and their disciplines) are and what they are not. Thus it is that phenomenology, the new ontology, existentialism and even deconstruction remain wedded to the drawing of boundaries on the assumption of discontinuity. Adkins and Hinlicky ask what the rejection of discontinuity might mean to the refiguring of philosophy, theology and religion generally. 

Clearly, Adkins and Hinlicky are asking an interesting question, and this is why I shall spend some time unpacking their text.  Ultimately, the success of their argument rests not in the broad strokes in which it can be stated, but in the answers they can provide to the many related mostly philosophical questions that arise on the assumption of these broad strokes.  

In reading the Adkins and Hinlicky's text, I was reminded of the process metaphysics that process theology appropriated from Whitehead's Process and Reality.  Prima facie for Whitehead and followers, neither the antecedent and consequent natures of God nor God and the universe are ontologically discontinuous from each other.  Accordingly, in discussing later chapters of the book I shall be interested in whether dialogue with the promise and perils of process thought is at all fruitful in understanding the authors own move from hylomorphism to hylozoism. My questions throughout are explorations shall be these: Is is true that transcendence need not entail a transcendent entity, and is Christian theology conceptually possible without a transcendent entity?  

The Paradox of Transcendental Reflection

I first read the Critique of Pure Reason seriously over four decades ago. Like many novices reading Kant, I was impressed by the epistemological distinction between the a priori and a posteriori and the semantic distinction between synthetic and analytic judgments. Kant’s question intrigued me: By what right do we claim truth in synthetic a priori judgments? What justifies the assertion that deep reflection allows for an advancement of knowledge about the ultimate features of reality?

Kant claimed that a true analytical judgment is one where the meaning of the predicate is included in the meaning of the subject, while a true synthetic judgment is one wherein the meaning of the predicate is not so included. A synthetic judgment is thus “ampliative,” that is, to say that “all bachelors are happy” is to make an assertion that cannot be known to be true simply by thinking deeply about what the word ‘batchelor’ means.

As is well-known, Kant criticized traditional metaphysics by showing that its claim to extend knowledge “beyond the realm of possible experience” was chimerical. In the absence of intuition – that which is “given” through sensation – concepts simply relate to other concepts analytically or semantically. Since no intuitions “fall under” the concept ‘God’, we cannot know that ‘God loves human beings’, unless, of course, we are able to claim this to be merely an analytical truth, that is, that the concept of ‘God’ includes as part of its very meaning ‘loving human beings’. Putative metaphysical judgments that turn out to be analytical in this way are, for Kant, “regulative judgments.” While incapable of miming the ontological contour of the supersensible world, they are useful in ordering our supersensible concepts, and thus our thinking about the supersensible world. Kant thought his analytic/synthetic distinction exhaustive. Either judgments are analytic or synthetic; tertium non datur.

In reading the metaphysical and transcendental deductions of the Critique, I was struck by the oddity of what Kant was writing and what I was doing in reading. Kant was offering arguments about how it is that knowledge consists in the application of concepts to intuitions such that there is a “synthesis of the manifold of sensation.” I thought that what he wrote was plausible and was even able to grant that what he said was likely true. But with this an uncomfortable argument seems to emerge.

Let us regard as true the Kantian statement, ‘an object is that by concept of which the manifold of sensation is united’. If this statement is true, it must be true either analytically or synthetically. But clearly it is not an analytic truth for no amount of simple reflection upon ‘object’ allows one to conclude by meaning alone the concept ‘that by concept of which the manifold of sensation is united’. Therefore, it must be true synthetically.

But now the discomfort becomes acute because it is unclear what sensible intuitions must be united to make true the judgment ‘an object is that by concept of which the manifold of sensation is united’. Synthetic judgments for Kant are true a posteriori except for arithmetic and geometry which make direct appeal to the pure forms of sensibility. But neither sensibility nor its pure forms are synthesized in judging true the proposition, ‘an object is that by concept of which the manifold of sensation is united’. Accordingly, the sentence seems to be left without justification, and with it a great many of the statements Kant employs in his discussion of the transcendental unity of apperception.

Clearly, I had stumbled upon the paradox of transcendental reflection. Kant asks his readers in the Critique of Pure Reason, “What are the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such?” After claiming that all propositions are either analytic or synthetic and that synthetic a priori metaphysical judgments are problematic in extending knowledge beyond the realm of possible experience, he writes hundreds of pages in which he is seemingly using synthetic a priori judgments justifying these claims. Kant’s transcendental reflection apparently did not have to follow the same justificatory practices with respect to knowledge and truth that our reflections on the nature of things must follow. When reflecting upon the conditions of our knowledge of the nature of things, we no longer need to play by the same rules as we do when reflecting simply upon the nature of things.

Transcendental reflection, our thinking about how we think things, is exempt from the rules it prescribes to our thinking of things. Kant had perhaps “done away with knowledge of God to make room for faith,” but in doing so he created a cottage industry for philosophers. They who could not with justification lay out the truth conditions of ‘God created the universe’ -- there are no intuitions united either under the concept ‘God’ or the concept ‘created the universe -- could now claim truly this statement: ‘The judgment that ‘God created the universe’ cannot be regarded as true because there are no sensations falling under ‘God’ and ‘creating of the universe’. While clearly this proposition is a priori, we need no longer worry if it is synthetic or analytic. It is a statement within the field of transcendental reflection after all, and while such reflection sets the rules for meaning and truth for other provinces, like the Politburo of the old Soviet Union, it is wholly exempt from the rules that it prescribes for others.

The problem of transcendental reflection is a problem of grounds: What legitimates claims of transcendental truth? Why can we not ask with sense whether the statement ‘truths divide exhaustively between the analytic and synthetic’ is itself an analytic or synthetic statement? After noticing that true judgments are both “clear and distinct,” Descartes argued that clarity and distinctness form the very criteria of truth. Analogously, we might argue that reflections that philosophers regard as true that do not meet the truth criteria of what they prescribe are transcendental. Accordingly, the claim that we can say truly that there are conditions that do not apply to what is said truly actually constitutes the very criteria of the transcendental.

The problem of the transcendental standpoint and the truths discerned in occupying it has often been overlooked or ignored. The verificationist criterion of meaning asserted that only those propositions are meaningful that are comprised of tautologies or can be checked up upon in experience. But clearly, the statement that ‘only those propositions are meaningful that are comprised of tautologies or can be checked up upon in experience’ is neither a tautology nor can it be checked up upon in experience. Faced with the inability to say with truth the material conclusion of their argument, some retreated to regarding the statement as neither true nor false, but merely a proposal. Of course, this begs the questions of why one would be motivated to adopt the proposal in the first place.

The twentieth century, though often increasingly wary of transcendental reflection, has nonetheless had difficulty avoiding it. After laying out the conditions making possible propositions of sense, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus points out that none of the propositions he has written can be regarded as either true or false. They are like a ladder one climbs that can be thrown away upon reaching the summit. Such propositions might be elucidations, but they themselves have no truth conditions. Wittgenstein famously says that while saying what cannot be said, he nonetheless hopes in this saying that something might be shown. While one cannot state the conditions for the meaningfulness of propositions meaningfully, one can nonetheless show in one’s saying how to use propositions meaningfully. Wittgenstein notes sadly that the most important things of life cannot be said.

Wittgenstein knew that Russell’s paradox had spelled doom to Frege’s logicist program. That program depended upon the unrestricted use of the axiom of comprehension within set theory, the notion that any set of conditions clearly demarcate and distinguish sets from one another. Set theorists make extensive use of sets that have sets as their own members. Given the axiom of comprehension, this condition should uniquely determine sets, that is, for all sets, either they have sets as members of themselves or they don’t have sets as members of themselves: tertium non datur.

Russell then asked us to consider those everyday sets that don’t have sets as members of themselves, e.g., the set of elephants has as its members elephants, not sets of elephants. He directs us to consider the collection or set of all of sets that are not members of themselves. Now since we can ask with sense whether a set is a member of itself or not a member of itself, and tertium non datur, we can ask with sense whether the set of sets that are not members of themselves is itself a member of itself or is itself not a member of itself. A little reflection shows that if the set of all sets is a member of itself, that is, is a member of the set of all sets that is not a member of itself, then it itself must not be a member of itself. Conversely, if the set of all sets that are not a member of themselves is not a member of itself, then it must be a member of itself. That this paradox was not allowed in logic shows that somehow logic was not going to be regarded as a case of transcendental reflection, for it itself must obey its own rules!

That logic must obey its own rules is assumed in the celebrated Incompleteness proof of Gödel. He showed that paradox arises on the assertion that all known mathematical truths (tautologies) can be derived from a finite set of axioms. By ingeniously semantically encoding information into the syntax of arithmetic, it can be proven that there will always be a provable true proposition G from some axiom set that states that it itself cannot be proven on the basis of that axiom set. Adding a new axiom will not solve this problem because a statement can be proved stating that it cannot be proved on the basis of the new axiom set. While logicians carefully distinguish their metalanguage from the object languages about which the metalanguage speaks, they do not countenance theorems in the metalanguage contradicting those of their object languages.

Paradox dooms logic, but not transcendental reflection! How else can we explain the rise of phenomenology with all its fanfare and hopes? Reading the texts of Husserl, Heidegger and others brings us again into the orbit of the transcendentality that Kant had birthed, and Fichte, Shelling, Hegel and others so effectively exploited.

The phenomenological tradition of such reflection differs from the Neo-Kantian tradition in that while the latter is engaged with the principles by which knowledge is legitimately had, the former utilizes evidence.  Husserl realized that truth is itself not something that can be accounted for on naturalistic assumptions, and thus argued that so-called natural truths must rest upon non-natural grounds. Accordingly, the very grounds of the truth of metaphysical truths must be non-metaphysically investigated. One must go zu den Sachen selbst and bracket questions of metaphysics and the natural world in order to apprehend those grounds upon which the natural world and metaphysics rests. These grounds, thought Husserl, were to be found in the direct apperception of that which is immediately given to consciousness.

But phenomenological reflection proved to be no easy task, and reflection on “the things themselves” was soon seen to involve reflecting upon many other things, some of which were not so unambiguously evidence. In fact, the criterion by which to evaluate the nature and strength of evidence was not clearly something one could simply “see” evidentially. Marshaling evidence and relating that evidence to philosophical problems seems to involve principled transcendental reflection. Husserl knew this, and by the publication of Ideas in 1913 adopted the position of transcendental idealism that he once wished to bracket. Transcendental reflection demonstrated the necessity of a transcendental ego related noetically to the Sinn-world of noematic content. This transcendental ego could not be examined phenomenologically without presupposing that very ego under investigation. The problem was that transcendental reflection seemed to require a transcendental ego that was, by definition, not amenable to phenomenological investigation.

It is at this stage that Heidegger enters our story, penning Sein und Zeit and striving mightily therein to avoid the paradoxes to which Husserl’s hidden transcendental ego fell prey. By re- thinking what a transcendental ego really is, Heidegger was able to avert the problem of how the transcendental ego can direct itself upon its world. For Heidegger, the occult ego of Husserl became Being-in-the-world, Dasein. The ego is already embedded in its world and it is this embeddedness. With this step Heidegger would try to do something nobody had yet succeeded in accomplishing. Heidegger wanted phenomenologically not only to access those beings in the world that constitutes the basic experience and structure of Dasein, but he wanted to examine the conditions for the intelligibility of phenomenologically accessible beings in the world; he wanted to coax out of hiding those worldly conditions making possible beings in the world. His interest was in the be-ing (“to-beness”) resident within the horizon of the world itself. He claimed that his investigation was ontological, that it had to do with be-ing, that is, it concerned not primarily beings, but those conditions of intelligibility that made possible the intelligibility of beings as such. 

But Heidegger’s work in Sein und Zeit was beset by transcendental paradox as well. His pointing out of different ways of being seems at times to leave out the very possibility of a way of being doing the pointing. Take, for instance, his distinction between Vorhandensein (present-at-hand be-ing) and Zuhandensein (ready-to-hand be-ing). This distinction is fundamental for Heidegger. Objects appear to us either as “present-at-hand” or “ready-to-hand”, either as objects having properties or as equipment to be used in our everyday pragmatic concerns. But what is the being of the one who distinguishes be-ing-present-at-hand from be-ing-ready-to-hand? Is the distinction between the objective and pragmatic an objective or pragmatic distinction? If neither, then should Heidegger not have distinguished some other category beyond the objective and pragmatic?

Heidegger’s detailed analysis of the be-ing of Dasein in Sein und Zeit seems to push towards theoretical comprehension, a present-at-hand description of those fundamental structures that are not in themselves present-at-hand. But this is exactly what transcendental reflection does: It attempts a theoretical description of a province of being that cannot be theoretically described.  Transcendental phenomenology perhaps has made the most valiant attempt to grant explicit truth conditions for statements of the transcendental. Clearly, Husserl was attempting in his formal ontology to escape the paradox of transcendental reflection.  But as mentioned before, the hope that there could be a stable province of being impassible to its own investigation was quickly extinguished by Heidegger's insight that knowing being is itself an activity of being, that at the foundation of being, there is be-ing, and that there is be-ing all the way down, as it were.  

The paradox of transcendental reflection are encountered by a being, who in its be-ing, has be-ing at issue for it. Such reflection and paradox can sometimes be brought to the surface by the Geisteswissenschaften, who realize profoundly that the Naturwissenschaften proceed so successfully because they exclude what to the human spirit is central: We are not who we are and can never not be who we are.  Difference rules the first set of disciplines and identity the second. 

So what is deeper in human experience, the geistliche paradoci of transcendental reflection, or the tidy coherency of  natural science? 

Theology and Metaphysics

Theology and philosophy have always been deeply related, though each has often tried to disown the other.  The ways in which they have related to each other are often overlooked by those believing they already know what the relationship is or ought to be.  

We hear much these days about the destruction of the history of onto-theology.  Theology, we are told, must move forward without the help of metaphysics.  The story is that metaphysics is bad, that metaphyscis is, in the words of one Christian theologian, "death dealing."  But why the rancor against metaphysics?  

The story of the exclusion of metaphysics from theology is a long and complicated one, a story whose tellers carry presuppositions about which they are often unaware.  I tell the story in the following paragraphs.   

Once upon a time 2,400 years ago, Greek philosophers, thinking deeply about things, recognized that there were certain problems connected with knowing the world and our way around in that world.  If everything that is, is in process (Heraclitus), then how could it be that there is anything stable in the world to know.  If one can never step into the same river twice -- that is, if the matter of the river is alway changing -- then how can one speak meaningfully about a river at all? But we do speak meaningfully about rivers.  Thus, there must be something stable about which we speak when we talk about things in the world, especially when we talk about how things in the world change.  It seems that the condition for the possibility of change is that there is something stable and enduring to which change might be attributed.  After all, it is the same sheep in the field, though this ewe no longer has wool.  

I marvel at the work of Plato and Aristotle in their attempt to give an account of how knowledge is possible and how change is possible.  Plato, of course, advocated that there must be some stable and enduring forms which we know and about which our talk is about.  The form sheep, instantiated in this object before me, allows me to speak truly the statement, 'this sheep has lost its wool.'  

Aristotle gave us a metaphysics of primary substances, accidents and secondary substances that allowed us to make sense of our world.  There are basic unities called substances, of which certain can be "said of", and of which certain things are "present in."  The primary substance is this sheep, and the whiteness of its wool is "present in" this sheep.  However, 'sheep' can be 'said of' this sheep, and so can 'mammal' and 'animal'.  

Plato and Aristotle knew that before we can go about clearly investigating the natural world around us, and the complexity of ourselves, we needed language to do that investigating, language presupposing categories by which anything as such is know, and through which anything as such is.  A world in which there is only becoming would be a world unknown to us.  What was needed is the logos, the permanent possibilities by and through which things become.  

Christian theology found the work of Plato and Aristotle very handy when it came to talk about the divine.  Just as becoming needed forms by which the becoming my be and be known, it seemedthat God  was in need of such forms as well.  Without such forms, it would seem we could no more utter a word about God as we might utter a word about ceaseless becoming.   

But talk about God appears quite different than talk about the world of becoming all around us.  After all, we can see, hear, touch, smell and taste the world around us, but this seems not to be true of the divine.  God is supersensible; the divine is beyond all sensible finite being.  Categories by which we might know the world are categories we use when talking about God.  Metaphysics is born again in its attempt to take the categories that apply to the temporal and finite and use them to speak of the eternal and infinite. This seems quite reasonable because the categories themselves in their universal applicability seem to suggest the eternal, immutable and infinite.  The categories are not themselves comprised of the material becomings to which they apply.  If they were so comprised, they would not be categories, and the problem of stability and change would come back upon us again in full force.  

Medieval thinkers knew their metaphysics, and realized that reason itself dictates the use of metaphysical categories if there was to be anything stable about God and his mighty deeds that they human mind might know and that human language might speak.  Seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers often divided on where to put their attention, with Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz arguing passionately that rationality itself connects to the forms by which reality is grasped, a connecting that concerns the supersensible.  These great "continental rationalists" thought that proper application of reason could eventuate in knowledge of the supersensible, and ultimately through this, knowledge of the sensible itself could occur.  

Christian theology from the fourth century onward had linked itself arm and arm with the metaphysical.  And why not?  God as the eternal, immutable, impassible, infinite being is a denizen -- one might say the paradigmatic denizen -- of the realm of the supersensible itself.  No matter how large the field of the supersensible, God fills it, and even, at times, seems to strain against the borders.  After all, God as "that which none greater can be thought" must occupy the highest region of Being, though one must allow that God could at any time go to live in another realm entirely. 

God as the highest being quite naturally assumed the Grund (ground) role within all of being. While all beings in the supersensible have some reason to be that appeals to something outside themselves, God's raison d'etre must be included within Himself alone.  God is the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover, the necessary being grounding all contingency, the perfection of the medieval transcendentals of goodness, beauty and truth, and that by virtue of which the world has a consistency and stability allowing for human life.  

God as the ineffable, impassible, uncaused causer is the condition for His own actuality as well as the actuality of the world as such.  Why is there being and not nothing?  There is being because there is God and God is the one activity of being in all activities of being and the highest being.  Because there is God, there is metaphysical and physical order.  God has more being than His angels, who have more being than human beings, who themselves have more being than the animals, plants and minerals.  The "Great Chain of Being" determines the hierarchy of being, and every being on that hierarchy.  

The metaphysical realm of the supersensible is closed to all human sensing, but not to human thinking.  One can know something about supersensible hierarchies through reason, and through the reason-transcending showings of the supersensibe to human beings.  In the tradition, revelation stands on the side of reason and not on the side of the empirical.  Revelation and reason deal with the eternal verities, while the senses concern the temporal.  The first deal with Plato's realm of Being, the second with his realm of Becoming.  

Kant famously argued that the traditional province of human thinking, the realm of metaphysics itself, was epistemically inaccessible to human thinking. What can be known are those determinate perceptions (intuitions) that have been synthesized by our concepts into determinate objects of experience.  Human thinking as such could proceed in orders of conditioned and that which conditions, but such thinking does not access the supersensible it itself.  It does not carve the beast of reality at its joints. Such thinking is regulative; it is how human beings must think something, but there is no justified reason to think that how we must think something is the way that the supersensible thing to be thought is.  The transcendental subreption occurs when we confuse the necessity of our thinking with any necessity that the thing thought might have. 

With one fell swoop, Kant seemingly broke up the 14 century long marriage between theology and metaphysics.  "Doing away with knowledge to make room for faith" sounded good to many people in the day, but the pesky problem since the time of Kant has concerned what exactly does one have faith in?  

Fichte, Shelling, Coleridge, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and many others scavenged about for ways to think God beyond traditional supersensible formulations.  Perhaps one might think God as the whence of the human feeling of absolute dependence.  Perhaps God is found in the dynamism of the ego as it creates and surpasses the forms by which the world is known.  Perhaps God can be identified as the human effort to know the world through history, a knowing that is absolute when all that has been and can be known is known, a knowing that is simultaneously God reaching complete self-consciousness. 

But metaphysical ways die hard, and the post-metaphysical ways to think God suddenly seemed to be thinking God all over again through a new type of metaphysics. To think God as the transcendental field allowing knowledge to happen as a "laying out" or interpretation of God simply moves that which ultimately is from the prohibited traditional metaphysical transcendent to the newly permitted transcendentally unconditioned.  As that which ultimately conditions all knowledge, God is now thought as unconditioned conditioned, a step away from the uncaused causer, as it were, but a step that appeared to many to be not far enough.  

So it was the young Heidegger, reading the young Luther, who came to the conclusion that all of metaphysics, transcendent or transcendental, merely occludes that be-ing which is closest to us and in which we unavoidably dwell.  Heidegger declared that metaphysics is a practice in the "forgetfulness" of being because metaphysics simply lays out ultimate things with putative objectivity (present-at-hand being) while occluding the (ready-to-hand) practical fields of being in which human ultimately dwell.  Later Heidegger develops a radical critique of the "onto-theological tradition" of thinking God through derivative categories that ignore the factic life of Christians living always already ahead of themselves in anticipating the Second Coming of Christ.  One might say that onto-theology is the problem that has beset Christianity from its beginning and continually derails theology, which itself must ultimately concern human existence as they are "placed" or as the "find themselves" before God.  

This is the story of the great divorce between theology and metaphysics, a story that leaves Christian theology in the uncomfortable position of having to say something about God without using metaphysical categories.  But what can we say about God without metaphysical categories?  Although many books deal with this topic, It is actually quite difficult to answer this question.  If we don't talk about God then don't we fall into the black hole of apophatic theology?  This will be my topic in a later post.

Grounding Ethical Vision and Mission Statements

Some of us at the Institute of Lutheran Theology will soon be engaged in consulting work to institutions and businesses to aid them in casting their own ethical mission and vision statements. The increasing use of sophisticated algorithms by companies and institutions have created new situations in which the institution or business ends up treating managers, employees and customers in new ways, yet ways that are not the result of individual people making decisions to treat these managers, employees and customers in new ways. 

People who write computer code construct algorithms that function as decision procedures. For instance, in writing an algorithm for a self-steering car, the coder has to program the car to do certain things given certain inputs. The idea is that the program will give an output as a function of the present state of the machine and relevant inputs it has while in this state. The car would not presumably move to crash into the motorcycle to its left, if it had not already been in states of danger for some time, and if this option had not been coded in as the best response to a certain sequence of danger states given some new driving inputs.   

It is very clear to me that thinking about helping businesses and institutions do ethics on the ground is a different activity than teaching ethics to students at the university. In some ways, it is much more challenging because we deal here not with hypothetical scenarios, but with real flesh and blood human beings. 

When teaching ethics at the university, I always tried to deal with the standard normative ethical theories and the meta-ethical challenges to those theories. This meant that I always dealt with Aristotelian-inspired virtue theory, utilitarianism, Kantian-inspired deontological theory, and divine command or divine will theory.  

Standardly, I treated as well the meta-ethical challenges to normative ethics: ethical subjectivism, ethical emotivism, psychological egoism, and ethical relativism. I introduced ethical intuitionism in light of the Open Question argument proffered by G.E. Moore, and discussed the non-natural intuition of the good in Moore and the non-natural intuition of the right in Ross. There is not much time in one ethics course to do all of this, however, so I made sure to cover the standard four normative ethical approaches.   

Aristotelian-inspired virtue theory is an ethics of self-actualization or realization which attempts to understand the excellence of human beings in terms of human dispositions to behave, that is human habits. In a society like ancient Athens where there was deep agreement on what the good is, there was agreement on what traits or characteristics human beings ought to have to be good. If the telos of human beings is their happiness, that is their "total human flourishing," then one should seek to cultivate those intellectual and moral virtues, that is, those "powers of the soul" whereby human beings together can profoundly flourish. To grow the intellectual and moral virtues is to increase in human excellence and to realize the good.   

Utilitarianism espouses a consequentialism; it claims that the goodness or badness of an act is a function of its likely consequences. There are many kinds of utilitarians. One can be a hedonistic utilitarian who understands the good in terms of crude pleasure, or perhaps a eudaimonian utilitarian identification ing the good with higher human values.  Accordingly, the good is not simply pleasure, but the happiness of human flourishing in general. One can be a global or universal utilitarian claiming that the act should bring about the greatest happiness for everyone in general, or could be a regional or local utilitarian claiming that the utilitarian calculation should privilege some particular group or community. One must also distinguish between an act and a rule utilitarian in that while the first holds that the direct consequences of the particular concrete act are what is ethically relevant, the second argues that it is the rule that the particular act falls under that ultimately determines its goodness or badness.  

The deontological perspective claims that acts or good and bad of themselves apart from their consequences. Kant most famously argued for the categorical imperative, a formal principle by which an act's moral properties obtain apart from any hypothetical antecedents. Kant claimed two subjective maxims of this categorical imperative: 1) so act such that your act could in principle be universalized, and 2) so act such that you always treat the other as an end-in-themselves and not as a means to your end.  

Finally, divine command or divine will ethics claims divine primal intentionality determines the rectitude of an act. It is incumbent on S to do P if and only if God wills P (to be done be S). Divine will ethical theories must then give an account both of the nature of the divine will itself and of our epistemic access to it.  

But none of these normative theories work very well in our present context actually to inform ethical decision-making. The problem is that people disagree rather profoundly on the presuppositions upon which such theories are based. 

For instance, the plausibility of virtue ethics famously depends upon a basic agreement in the community about what the good life is.  Aristotle said that a good person is one that does the good and that the good is that which good people do. This makes sense if there are not competing moral visions within a society. Notice, however, that even if their is near unanimity about what the good is, the theory does seem prone always to the critique launched by Luther and others. Focussing on virtue-building places the action on the self. Cultivating our moral virtues as part of self-realization towards maximal human excellence puts the action on the side of the subject. She or he must train themselves to evince the suitable dispositions to behave, and such training is ultimately the result of what James once called "the dull heave of the will." 

But part of what it is to live morally, it seems, is to be not reflecting upon oneself all of the time.  Yet the ethic of self-realization places the focus of the self on the self as that self endeavors to cultivate the proper dispositions that constitute character,  those general habitualizations that constitute our moral excellence.  

There are deep problems with utilitarianism as well. As it turns out, calculating likely consequences from an act or rule utilitarian perspective makes many positions questionable because we really don't know what the real consequences of our actions are. Claiming that it is probable that act X issues in consequences P is not granular enough it seems.  Would we not need to know precisely what that probability is in order to do the utilitarian calculus rightly?  Moreover, discriminating what the good is, e.g., pleasure, cultivation of virtue, human flourishing, is itself not amenable to utilitarian calculation.

Recall that Bentham claimed that the Principle of Utility need not be argued for because, as it turns out, the principle objectively obtains, and that we humans simply do act in accordance with it. While this is plausible if one is a universal hedonistic act utilitarian perhaps, it is not the case if one is a regional eudaemonistic act or rule utilitarian.  We need some independent philosophical argument, it seems, to say with Mill against Bentham that it is better to be a dissatisfied human being than a sated pig.  Moreover, while the move to rule utilitarianism seems to protect utilitarianism in general from crude counterexamples, it might be asked whether rule utilitarianism does not abandon utilitarianism altogether.  Clearly, the claim that S ought to do act X if and only if X were in accordance with rule R that, if it itself were universally instantiated, would conduce to the maximum distribution of happiness is itself consistent with act X itself causing great pain or unhappiness to S. But this seems like an abandonment of utilitarianism entirely.  

Notice as well that utilitarian calculations place the moral action in our own reasoning. We must calculate the likely consequences of an act or rule, and only after such calculation can we determine how to treat the person standing in front of us. Again, it seems like this kind of moral reflection places the action within the echo chamber of our subjectivity. We do X because we have done the suitable calculus and, on the basis of the kind of utilitarian we are, we can determine that it is rational to do X.  How my doing X impacts Bob who stands before me, is relevant only insofar as I can describe the doing of X in ways that take into consideration the consequences for Bob of my doing of X. 

Our friend Kant gets us to consider the noumenality of duty, and asks us if we can conceive that one ought to do X in the absence of one's freedom to do other than X. We are then told that we should treat others as ends in themselves and not as means because others are denizens of the same kingdom of ends we ourselves occupy. He argues that we must not act in ways that end in moral contradiction. For instance, if I were knowingly to lie, then I must accede that it might be a general moral law that people could lie. But if this were a general moral law, then dissimulation itself could not be specified, because there would be no institution of truth-telling from which lying diverges. This is all pretty heavy stuff, but it is what pure reason does when it is concerned with the practical.  Pure practical reason is human reason set free to investigate what we ought to do mostly unimpeded by historical and cultural conditions.  

Finally, there is divine will theory of either the static or dynamic variety.  Since the latter is demonstrably incoherent, this leaves the former, and clearly it is a matter of reason to discern what the divine command is, and whether we have a duty to do it. One cannot in our post-Christian context simply assume that there is a divine being whose primal intentionality on creation is objectively the case, and whose intentional objectivity is epistemically accessible to human beings.  

In other words, if we want to cast ethical mission and vision statements in the business world by getting people to affirm the objective reality of the ethical and getting them to see that it is rational to accept that they have epistemic access to it, then we shall have a very steep hill to climb in accomplishing our ethical work. 

In Lutheran fashion, one might think that ethical theory provides the light by which the law confronts us as a curb on what we would otherwise want to do, a mirror by which to apprehend our own moral inadequacies, and a guide as to how we should comport ourselves. The light clearly is where the action is. In classical theology it is the primordial divine intentionality manifesting itself in the eternal law, the light of the universe itself. One can connect this light to Wisdom as it was prior to the creation of the world and ultimately to the logos.  

When I was a graduate student, I studied meta-ethics because I already did not believe one could do normative ethics without first getting clear on the sources, grounds, and methods of ethical adjudication.  My meta-ethics class one summer was with an excellent professor whose constructive contribution to the course was to point out that the only motive one could possibly have to do X from a meta-ethical standpoint was that the doing of X was conceptually tied to the desire to do X. From the standpoint of analytical ethics, he might be right. In other words, we are left with a psychological egoism functioning underneath meta-ethical reflection.  

I think I was a pretty good ethics teacher for undergraduate students because I could generate scenarios quite easily on the spot and I was able to keep their attention. The problem, of course, was that normative ethics is unfortunately today in many respects a fool's game. I don't mean that the theories are necessarily wrong, but rather they are all inadequate either when confronting complicated ethical situations we presently face or when they are placed against our moral intuitions. The longer I taught ethics, I found myself actually asking students to consult their moral intuitions as a way to test the normative theories we introduced. I straightforwardly suggested to them that their moral intuitions should function as data for ethical theory-making.  

But I knew that this gets it all wrong. Isn't normative ethics supposed to tell us what is the case? Ought it not trump moral intuitions altogether? Should it not function pedagogically to teach us what moral intuitions are worth having?  We don't form ethical theories in order to be applicable and adequate to ethical data, but rather to give us the principles by which we might act and value.  

Towards the end of my teaching of ethics I developed a rather elaborate way to think about normative ethics, replete with suitable defeaters. Additionally, I would argue that when there was a conflict between utilitarian and deontological perspectives, one had to go outside theory and evaluate the situation from a standpoint external to either theory.  Of course, here one could not help but privilege one's own moral intuitions again. If such a view from above the normative ethical conflicts is not to be a view from nowhere, then that view must be informed by something concrete.  But what could this be if not our moral intuitions? 

Often in teaching ethics, I would discuss G.E. Moore's famous Open Question argument that purports to show that any analysis of the good in terms of natural properties -- actually any properties -- leaves us in the situation of asking with sense if it is good that the good is so analyzed.  G. E. Moore was an ethical intuitionist because of this argument, and I do confess to believing that his comparing the instrinsicality of yellow with the the intrinsicality of the good a first-rate philosophical move. Just as we can identify yellow without conceptually stating its necessary and sufficient conditions, so we might identify the good without being able to give an analysis of it in terms of something more basic.  

It strikes me today that a new approach is needed if we are ever going to get outside of the philosophy classroom when contemplating the ultimate grounds for corporate ethical vision and mission statements. Emmanuel Levinas' notion of the immediacy (and transcendence) of the Other, despite its philosophical complexity, might actually be able to be explained simply to people today-- people within institutions and corporations alike -- who have lost their way among the endeavor to justify what it is that is good and right.  Most of the people we shall speak with in framing corporate ethical vision and mission statements will not seriously ask for the philosophical grounds why the torturing of children is wrong. They will already know it wrong.

Levinas' notion of the exteriority of the ethical, the demand of the Other upon us through the immediacy of the face can provide a way to adjudicate simple ethical questions like the torture of innocent children. Looking into the face of a child and torturing him or her is for most people simply unthinkable. One does not need to plunge into one's own subjectivity -- Levinas called the self and its ontology the realm of the same, the realm of totality -- to ground a demand not to torture. The demand needs no grounding in ethical principles that themselves presuppose ontology, rather the demand is simply given in the face and eyes of the Other.  

Maybe the light we seek in the doing of ethics can be found in the face of the Other, the face which places a demand upon all of us, including managers of algorithms and writers of code. Maybe we don't have to get much deeper than that with people with whom we work. If pushed we can say we are committed to the view that the social situation with its concomitant primacy of ethical demand needs no further justification.  Wittgenstein said, of course, that the spade must stop somewhere.

We can use Levinas' starting point and build defendable, albeit somewhat superficial, but ultimately communicable ethical positions for institutions and businesses. In certain contexts we can do what Levinas does: connect the face of the Other with God through the notion of a trace.  We can always say we could go deeper if we have to. By emphasizing the exteriority of ethics we guard ourselves from falling into some totalizing project of justifying the very nature of ethics to ourselves or whoever might listen before we can deal with the concrete person standing before us. This will get us to the practical much more quickly, and give our audiences a sense that we know what we are doing as consultants without taking them through a 300 level class in philosophical ethics.  

At the end of the day in phenomenology generally one either sees the phenomena described or one does not. If the face of the child before us does not move us out of our own freedom to a position of responsibility for that child, then it is doubtful that an appeal to normative ethical theory will do so. At the end of the day, it seems, the demand of the Other upon us cannot be given an analysis in terms of some set of necessary and sufficient conditions.  While the word 'Infinite' would not have been used by Moore to characterize this non-natural intuition of the good, his claim of the irreducibility of the Good is of the same spirit as Levinas.  Both were, after all, inspired by Plato, whose Good was the presupposition both of the forms and our access to them.  

Plato's Good constitutes, with Levinas, the priority of metaphysics over ontology. The latter is ultimately an affair of the self, but the former points away from the self and towards the divine.  Levinas and Plato document that "invisible desire" towards that which is other than the self, a desire not born of a need or lack within the self, but an ecstatic desire to transcend entirely the self and its machinations. Ultimately, both knew that salvation consists not in a being otherwise, but rather in that which is otherwise than being.