Error and Ignorance in Ethics - J. L. Mackie on courage.

1 Error and Ignorance in Ethics: J. L. Mackie on Courage. In his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, J. L. Mackie writes of courage that it is a kind of strength. It makes its possessor more likely to achieve whatever he sets out to do, whereas the foolhardy man is likely to destroy himself or his enterprise or both, and the timid man is too easily turned aside. Besides, most worthwhile enterprises involve risks of some kind, and the courageous man can enjoy the activity, risks and all, whereas the coward cannot. Again, both vice and virtue in this area are hard to conceal, and the brave man will be a more acceptable partner for others than either the foolhardy man or the coward. There can be no doubt that such courage is in general advantageous to its possessor – more advantageous than a tendency to calculate advantage too nicely. In so far as one can choose one’s dispositions – say by cultivating them – this is one which it would be rational, even on purely egoistic grounds, to choose. Admittedly there will be particular occasions when rashness would be rewarded, and others when only the coward would survive. But it is hard to calculate which these are, and almost impossible to switch the dispositions on and off accordingly. To be a coward on the one occasion when courage is fatal one would have had to be a coward on many other occasions when it was much better to be courageous. The real alternatives are the various persisting dispositions, courage and those that contrast with it, and it is clear which of these the rational egoist would prefer. A far from negligible part of discretion is valour.1 I want to ask two questions. First, is what Mackie says here consistent with his general position on value? Second, how good are his arguments in this paragraph, considered in themselves? As regards the first question, it is pretty clear that what he is claiming here is not consistent with his ‘error theory’ of value. He seems to be inviting us to accept a certain evaluative claim as a matter of fact, as something that is simply true, true in the very nature of things. As will soon emerge, his claim has a certain internal complexity, since it involves conflicting reasons; but that does not make it any less evaluative. He is talking about what are in general the better reasons to act upon and what are the worse. Now, as the subtitle of his book makes clear, Mackie wants us to think of morality as something invented. But in the paragraph above he is saying that there are constraints on the sort of morality that could be rationally invented. And these constraints are themselves evaluative, as distinct from being merely logical, i.e. concerned with consistency. There will be a place for courage in any rational morality. Some of what he says could perhaps be reworded so as to express an avowedly subjective preference for a certain kind of life-style but most of it could not. When I first read the book soon after it came out I was taken aback by this paragraph. I wondered whether I had completely misunderstood what his ‘error theory’ was about. Did it concern only moral values, where ‘moral’ was understood in some fairly narrow sense, perhaps as limited to altruistic concerns? But rereading Chapter One, particularly its opening page, convinced me that I had not misunderstood: There are no objective values … The claim that values are not objective, are not part of the fabric of the world, is meant to include not only moral goodness, which might be most naturally equated with moral value, but also other things could be more loosely called 2 moral values or disvalues – rightness and wrongness, duty, obligation, an action’s being rotten and contemptible, and so on. It also includes non-moral values, notably aesthetic ones, beauty and various kinds of artistic merit. I shall not discuss these explicitly, but clearly much the same considerations apply to aesthetic and to moral values, and there would be at least some initial implausibility in a view that gave the one a different status from the other.2 It should be noted that Mackie believes that most people think there are, and talk as if there are, objective values. This is why he calls his view an ‘error theory’.3 But it will be with my second question – how good are Mackie’s arguments concerning courage? – that this paper is chiefly concerned. Some Peculiarities of Mackie’s Approach. The sort of thing that Mackie is saying about courage is said by many virtue ethicists who make no bones about presenting their claims as objective truths.4 So his arguments do demand to be considered. Let me begin by mentioning certain dubious features of his reasoning that I have not noticed in other writers. a) He speaks of the courageous man as being able to enjoy dangerous activities, ‘risks and all’. Surely this is not built into the notion of courage. Although there is certainly such a thing as getting a buzz out of danger, even those who set great store by courage do not in general insist that one is only courageous if one enjoys risky activities. b) I do not understand his claim that courage is ‘more advantageous than a tendency to calculate advantage too nicely’. He says that it can be difficult to calculate advantage; and on the previous page, speaking of dispositions generally, he writes, ‘though dispositions can be discriminating, there are practical limits to the fineness of the discriminations they can make’.5 This is surely a completely different point. The best I can think of is that his idea is that one might waste valuable time trying to calculate the incalculable and so it is advantageous not to be someone who has a tendency to do this. c) His final argument seems to assume that a kindly fate will allow the courageous person to take lots of risks with impunity before the fatal blow finally falls. This is obviously false. Let me also mention one merit in Mackie’s treatment of the issue. With one exception, he talks in terms of being ‘foolhardy’ rather than of being ‘rash’. The latter word carries a strong implication of a failure to deliberate. It would be wrong to imply that those who take risks, even extreme ones, always do so without pausing to think. But the deep problem with Mackie’s view is one that confronts all who make the sorts of claim about courage (and indeed about other supposed virtues) that Mackie does. We are dealing with conflicts between motives and so need to consider the weighing of competing reasons. 3 Courage and Self-Interest. Like Philippa Foot6, Mackie thinks that courage generally benefits its possessor. There is at least a grain of truth in this. One can knowingly take a risk, face a danger, for purely self-interested reasons. But to inflate this into the claim that courage generally benefits its possessor is, to say the least, misleading. For refusing to take the risk would typically also be to act out of self-interest.7 Let us try to spell this out carefully. First, there is the question of what counts as self-interest. It seems possible to take the notion broadly or narrowly. If taken broadly, it would include concern for one’s family and friends, one’s nearest and dearest. Certainly, it would seem odd to file the concern of two lovers for each other’s welfare under the heading: altruism. The point I am making applies if one takes self-interest in this broad sense but it applies too if one takes it in the narrowest possible sense – if we imagine someone who is prepared to disregard completely the interests of all others. Now, one can have a self-interested reason for doing something and also have a selfinterested reason for not doing it. And of course one of the self-interested reasons could be a fear of danger. What could be more self-interested than a concern to preserve oneself from injury or death? So, if the only reasons that weigh with one in a given situation, the only one that enter into one’s deliberations, are self-interested ones, then there is a clear sense in which, whatever one does, it will be motivated by self-interest. The claim that courage tends to benefit its possessor seems to have degenerated into the platitude that self-interested reasons can conflict and that among the competing self-interested reasons there may be concerns for one’s safety.8 (This could equally well – or badly – be embodied in the claim that cowardice tends to benefit its possessor.) Can anything more be got out of it? As far as I can see, only if it could be established that some self-interested reasons are as a matter of fact more important than others – if, for example, if could be shown that someone was objectively too concerned about his own safety as against his own pleasure, say, or his ambitions or his social standing. What are the prospects for this? Reasons For Taking Risks. As we have seen, Mackie gives several reasons against always playing safe and I have suggested that they are unconvincing, at least insofar as they are supposed to show that it is not in one’s own interests to adopt such a policy. What other reasons might there be? I can think of three. a) Some supposed dangers are in fact illusory and someone who is prepared to face them is more likely to discover this. Imagine a community living in fear of vampires. Assuming that vampires do not exist, the weakness of the evidence for their existence is more likely to become apparent to someone who boldly confronts the imagined dangers from them than to someone who does not. Mackie is especially concerned with self-interested reasons but these can readily be imagined in the present case. Someone who becomes privy to information that is not widely shared can often find ways of exploiting this to his own advantage. 4 b) There are involuntary symptoms of fear, felt sensations and observable bodily reactions. It is hard to see any advantage in these and some, such as trembling and fainting, are decidedly disadvantageous.9 Here we seem to have a good reason for wanting to be in a certain sense fearless. But care is needed. Someone who, perhaps from some hormonal abnormality, did not experience the subjective sensations of fear and concomitant bodily reactions might still be risk-averse, perhaps exceptionally so. To put the point another way, a drug that suppressed the symptoms of fear but had no effect on people’s willingness to face danger might well be valued but not as productive of courage, even of a form of so-called ‘Dutch courage’.10 Nevertheless, we can concede this much to Mackie. He suggests that ‘[i]n so far as one can choose one’s dispositions – say by cultivating them’, it would be rational to choose courage. It may be that, as one ‘cultivates’ courage, the bodily and experiential symptoms of fear will diminish11; and this can be considered a gain. c) This talk of ‘cultivating’ dispositions might suggest a further reason. Those who look to Aristotle for inspiration on the subject of the virtues stress the importance of habit formation: the more one acts in a certain way, the easier one finds it to do so and the more difficult one will find it to change. Hence the thesis that one becomes courageous by performing courageous actions. Maybe so; but suppose this were given as a reason for making courageous choices, the idea being that one has two reasons for performing a given courageous action: whatever one hopes to achieve by it in the particular case and the possibility of strengthening one’s disposition to be courageous. Well, if one did see this notion of habit as giving one a reason for being courageous, one would have to admit that it could equally well be seen as giving one a reason against. Someone might argue that every time one knowingly does something dangerous this creates the secondary danger that one will be more likely to take risks in the future and eventually come a cropper. But the problem is of course that, even if one can construct a long list of reasons for living dangerously, these will still have to be weighed against the obvious reasons for playing safe: the threat of death, injury or pain.12 The number of reasons one can come up with on either side is not decisive. Reasons on either side are just reasons among others. How do they add up? Weighing Reasons. Although there is certainly such a thing as being paralysed by indecision, we are normally able to decide whether a given risk is worth taking for the sake of a given end and to act accordingly.13 But can such decisions have anything of objectivity about them? Could one be mistaken about whether such-and-such is worth risking for the sake of so-and-so? One would have thought this was an obvious question, indeed the obvious question, to ask about claims concerning the supposed benefits of courage (whether or not we are considering only with benefits to its possessor). Can there be a right answer when the dangers of a course of action are weighed against the benefits it might bring? Two preliminary questions about this notion of weighing need to be raised: 5 a) No doubt the notion is metaphorical but it clearly suggests something quantitative. This might worry the moral absolutist. It is characteristic of the absolutist to say that deciding what to do should not be, or should not always be, a matter of calculating possible costs and benefits. There are some things, he will say, that should not be done, whatever the expected consequences of doing or not doing them. He might say that some risks should not be taken in any circumstances or that some things should not be done, whatever the risks attendant upon not doing them; or he might say both. The important thing is that the absolutist should not be made to feel excluded from the discussion by the very terms in which the problem is formulated. So let us be clear that when we ask whether reasons for and against actions can have objective weights, we want this question to cover that of whether the exceptionless prohibitions of the absolutist can have objective validity.14 b) There is a complication introduced by the notion of supererogation. An action can be thought of as being meritorious to the point of being ‘beyond the call of duty’. One would not have done wrong by omitting it, but one is especially praiseworthy for performing it. Of the qualities that are popularly regarded as virtues, courage – in contrast with, say, temperance – is the one that is most often thought of as allowing for the possibility of supererogation. The soldier who is awarded a medal for conspicuous gallantry has done something it would not be considered cowardly not to do.15 This will cause difficulties for anyone trying to work out an objective way of weighing dangers against other considerations. If refusing to run a certain risk would not be considered cowardly, when would running it be heroic and when foolhardy? I suggest that this is very much a bridge to be crossed when it is reached: when there is some real prospect of objectively weighing risks against other considerations. In any case, the problem is of limited relevance to Mackie’s claim that it would be rational, even on purely egoistic grounds, to choose to be courageous. My Own View As Compared With Mackie’s. I now wish to summarise the position I take on the question of fact, value and reasons for action in certain earlier papers.16 a) I accept Philippa Foot’s claim that there are some concepts, such as danger, injury and health, that straddle the supposed fact/value divide. Take injury. A rational agent must care about injury because injury makes one less able to get what one wants and to avoid what one wants to avoid BUT this is only to say that a rational agent has some reason for avoiding injury, not necessarily overriding reason.17 If this is right, then Mackie’s ‘error theory’ of value cannot be wholly correct. Nevertheless, it might be correct for most values, since the number of things that can be shown to have objective value or disvalue using Footean arguments might be very limited. b) I maintain that Foot’s attempt to extend the argument just considered to show that a rational agent must desire to possess the qualities of courage and temperance fails, and fails for reasons that she herself implicitly provides. To show that it is better to be courageous than cowardly or foolhardy in a certain situation, or in general, one would have to show that certain reasons overrode others and Foot’s argument summarised in (a) only works because it does not try to show that one has overriding reasons to do something, just that one has some reason. 6 c) I have no idea how one could show that certain reasons objectively overrode others, for example that someone was wrong to care more about his safety than about his ambitions (or vice versa). I do not think anyone else has either. This is an ‘ignorance theory’, rather than an ‘error theory’, or, if one objects that a confession of ignorance is hardly a theory, then an ‘ignorance thesis’. I have no proof that reasons cannot be objectively weighed or ranked, but it is pretty clear that no ethical theory currently on offer is able to demonstrate any such objectivity (though many claim it). I should add, by the way, that ‘error theories’ and ‘ignorance theses’ are not as far apart as it might seem, since, if one thinks one knows something that one doesn’t, one is in error as well as ignorant. It might help to clarify how my own views stand in relation to Mackie’s and those of ordinary virtue ethicists (who present their claims as objectively valid), if I discuss the following hypothetical situation. Suppose that I myself had written the paragraph of Mackie’s to which I have taken such exception. I have argued that it is straightforwardly inconsistent with Mackie’s ‘error theory’. How would it relate to my own ‘ignorance thesis’? There certainly would be some kind of tension between it and what I have been saying. I suggest that it would be akin to that found in Moore’s Paradox. Moore draws attention to the oddity of saying, ‘It’s raining, yet I do not believe that it is raining’.18 There would be a similar oddity in saying, ‘It’s raining, yet I have no grounds whatsoever for asserting that it is raining’.19 Now, if I had written Mackie’s paragraph and conjoined it with a statement of my ‘ignorance thesis’, would I not be conjoining what seemed to be assertions about the objective superiority of courage over cowardice and foolhardiness with an admission that I had no warrant whatsoever for making any such assertions? Speech Acts. If I had been writing this paper a few decades ago, I would have been expected to devote most of it to a discussion of what one is doing when one describes an action as courageous, cowardly or foolhardy. Is one perhaps merely expressing one’s own attitude to it? And indeed the reader may well have wanted to interject at various points, ‘But one would not call an action “cowardly” unless one disapproved of it’ or, ‘But one would not call a person “courageous” unless one approved of at least some of his actions’.20 I am well aware of this, but it seems to me to make very little difference.21 Would not the question about weighing reasons just reappear as a question about justifying attitudes of approval and disapproval? If someone thinks an action cowardly, he probably thinks that the reasons against it outweigh the reasons for it, which will in this case include the fear of danger.22 Could he be right about this? Or is it merely a preference for which no reason can be given? I have wondered whether someone who accepts the ‘ignorance thesis’ that I have outlined could go on using words like ‘courage’, ‘cowardice’ and ‘foolhardiness’ in daily life (as distinct from using/mentioning them in the way one does in a philosophical paper such as this one). Or would he be involved in the sort of paradox discussed in the last section? Let us suppose that someone thinks it worth risking X for the sake of Y though not for the sake of Z; but he admits that these are purely personal preferences and not something he would know how to justify. Would there be anything odd in his calling someone who risks X for the sake of Y ‘courageous’ or someone who refuses to do so ‘cowardly’ or someone who risks X for the sake of Z 7 ‘foolhardy’? I am not sure that there would, though in practice, unless he made it very clear that he was only expressing his own purely subjective opinion, he would almost certainly be taken to be attempting to state some kind of fact. (On this, I am sure, Mackie would not disagree.) One Final Problem. What is it about the notion of courage that tempts philosophers into committing the most glaring fallacies and into saying things that are totally at odds with other things they say? We have seen how this happens with Mackie. Now look again at Foot. She argues persuasively that rational agents must acknowledge that they have some reason to avoid injury and danger, though not necessarily overriding reason. Very well; it is not necessarily irrational then to risk injury for the sake of some good. Somehow this gets transformed into the claim that a rational agent will desire to be courageous, which of course involves being actively prepared to risk injury for the sake of certain goods. If anyone feels that this just has to be an unfair description of the course of her argument, I can only ask them to look up the original and compare it with my discussion of it. Having spent several paragraphs emphasising that everyone has reason to avoid injury (even though this is not necessarily an overriding reason), Foot ought to be the first to realise that if one is going to say that there are cases where one ought to risk injury for the sake of some good (because that good is sufficient to override the danger of injury), one is going to have to produce some argument for this. To call Foot’s failure to realise this ironic seems correct but somehow inadequate. But perhaps the fault lies with me and I am missing something staring me in the face. Notes. 1. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1977, p. 189. 2. Op. cit., p. 15. 3. When they make moral and other value judgments, people do not on Mackie’s view (and mine) think of themselves as merely expressing or trying to evoke feelings, nor as just issuing imperatives (op. cit., Chapter Two). 4. For example, by Philippa Foot, whose views will be considered later. I get a strong impression that most virtue ethicists regard courage as their prize exhibit. It invariably appears on the list of character traits they regard as virtues and Philippa Foot for one often seems to be trying – sometimes desperately – to present other traits she regards as virtues, such as justice, as in crucial ways analogous to courage. 5. Op. cit., p. 188. 6. Philippa Foot, ‘Moral Beliefs’ in Foot, Virtues and Vices, Oxford: Blackwell, 1978, pp. pp. 124-25. 7. It will perhaps happen occasionally that someone refuses to take a risk, not out of self-interest, but entirely because he is worried about his dependants – how they will fare without him or if he is incapacitated. 8. There are occasions when fear contends with fear, danger is weighed against danger. In this sort of situation it would be difficult for anyone to talk confidently of courage or cowardice, unless he were merely concerned with demeanour – whether a person manifested observable symptoms of fear. Or conceivably someone might take 8 the notion of facing danger with a certain literalness and say that choosing to confront the danger that was nearest in time was the more courageous option. 9. The best exposition I know of this problem – What’s the use of feeling afraid? – is by Sigmund Freud. I do not understand his answer though; or rather, I only understand it as an answer to a different and much more restricted problem. See Chapter Twenty-Five, ‘Anxiety’, of The Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. His statement of the problem is on pp. 442-43 of the 1973 Pelican edition. 10. This point can be seen as a counterpart to the frequently expressed view that it can be courageous to do what one is very afraid of doing (whether or not others are equally afraid). 11. This is clearly an empirical question. I do not know whether there is much information available on it. 12. Foot emphasises that everyone has reason to be concerned about danger and injury (op. cit., pp. 121-23). 13. Or to fail to act accordingly, if there is such a thing as weakness of will. 14. If someone were to protest that bringing in absolutism is not really relevant to Mackie’s claim that it is in general in one’s own interest to be courageous, I would cite this from the absolutist, G. E. M. Anscombe: ‘It can’t do me any good to go against his [God’s] law’ (‘Modern moral philosophy’ in W. D. Hudson (ed.), The Is/Ought Question, London: Macmillan, 1969, p. 194). 15. Peter Geach expresses the worry that a tendency to see courageous deeds as beyond the call of duty might be harmful. He thinks that people might be content just to admire courage and not expect it of themselves See his The Virtues, Cambridge: C.U.P., 1977, pp. 153-54. 16. In particular, ‘Facts, values and priorities: Philippa Foot on objectivity in ethics’ and ‘Knowing what to do: Are there objectively correct decisions?’, both on academia.edu. The former contains the more detailed discussion of the matters I summarise here. 17. Of course, this will only be a relevant criticism of Mackie’s ‘error theory’ if the concept of rationality in play here is an objective rather than a subjective one. I discuss this point in ‘Facts, values and priorities: Philippa Foot on objectivity in ethics’, pp. 5, 11-12. 18. See Thomas Baldwin (ed.), G. E. Moore: Selected Writings, London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 207-12. 19. It is noteworthy that the appearance of paradox disappears if I give some sort of reason, however feeble or suspect: ‘I intuit that it is raining’; ‘I just know somehow’; ‘I feel it in my bones’; ‘I’m psychic’; ‘I am the recipient of a divine revelation’; ‘I have consulted the Tarot and the I Ching’. Any remaining problem is epistemological, rather than logical. 20. There is a complication in the latter case, in that some writers make an issue of whether an evil deed can be courageous. Some would agree with G. J. Warnock: ‘Courage, asceticism, iron self-control, resolution in the face of hardship or difficulty – these are almost the standard equipment for the really major destroyers, whether military, political, criminal, or all three at once’ (The Object of Morality, London: Methuen, 1971, p. 79). Others disagree; an example is Geach (op. cit., p. 160), although he seems half-inclined to dismiss the issue as merely verbal. And then there is Foot’s compromise view that, although courage is a virtue, it does not function as a virtue when it is manifested in the performance of an evil deed (see the introductory essay of Foot, op. cit., pp. 14-18). I do not think there is much pointing in expending time and effort on this question until more basic issues have been explored. In fact I 9 would say that it is an indication of the general failure to grasp what is at stake here that it should be discussed when the problem of whether reasons for action can be objectively weighed against each other is largely ignored. 21. I have to admit though that when I first came across emotivism it seemed to me to put into words what I had always dimly suspected, at least about some evaluative terms. I don’t remember where I met it – whether in Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic or in some secondary source – but I do clearly remember thinking: Disagreements about whether an action is foolhardy or courageous or whether a person is cowardly or prudent are just like that, mere hot air, mere sounding off! The question I would now press is whether they are condemned always to be like that or whether it is just that we have not yet found a way of resolving such disputes. 22. I suppose there will be the occasional case where someone condemns an action as cowardly because he thinks the one performing it was motivated mainly or wholly by fear, and yet thinks that that very action could be justified on other grounds.