BERNSTEIN

Moral Certainty and Passionate Commitment

In the previous chapters I described the mentality of pragmatic fallibility and contrasted it with the appeal to absolutes, moral certainties, and a black-and-white world of good and evil. But the objection might well be raised that I have ignored some tough issues. A critic might object that I am guilty of presenting a new misleading Either/Or: either pragmatic fallibility or the appeal to absolutes. But such an Either/Or masks the real situation that we confront today. Fallibilism may well be the preferred ethos in those situations in which we can expect deliberation – where we are dealing with reasonable persons who are open and willing to engage in critical dialogue. But this is not our situation today. It is a world in which terrorism, which has become increasingly sophisticated, poses radically new threats. We have to face the realistic possibility that terrorists may soon have the chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons to carry out mass murder. It may well be that there is no single essence or deﬁnition of what we take to be evil, but the deliberate murder of innocent victims has always been an exemplar of evil. The critic might point out that I have already conceded that new forms of evil have burst forth in the twentieth century. Why not recognize that we are now facing a new form of evil? The trouble with the pragmatists is that they have always felt uncomfortable with facing up to evil. “Evil” is not really a part of their vocabulary. They speak of contingencies and dangers, but they are unrealistic about the real dangers that now exist. Deliberation, diplomacy, and persuasion are, of course, desirable. But we have to realize that – to use a pragmatic turn of phrase – they do not work in the extreme circumstances that exist today in the “War on Terror.” We are dealing with ruthless fanatical murderers. We have to be decisive, forceful, steadfast, and fully committed to ﬁghting this new evil. The real weakness with pragmatism is that it lacks the resources to justify decisiveness and passionate commitment. Such a commitment depends on a ﬁrm conviction – the moral and political certainty that one’s cause is just. Otherwise we will lack the will and persistence to make the sacriﬁces required for ﬁghting the enemy. The primary issue is the eminently practical one of doing what is required to ﬁght this new evil. Pragmatists are always telling us that we should judge ideas by their consequences. Despite the well-intentioned claims of the pragmatists, the real consequences of this mentality are indecisiveness and a ﬂuctuating equivocation that undermines principled commitment and clear decisive action.

The objection is a serious one, and it needs to be confronted squarely. It is a variation of the familiar charge that pragmatism is naively optimistic and does not fully appreciate the tragic dark side of human life, the sinfulness of human beings, and the intransigence of evil. During Dewey’s lifetime, Reinhold Niebuhr pressed this criticism against him. More recently, it has been reiterated by Jack Diggins. Even Cornel West, who thinks of himself as working in the pragmatic tradition, worries about whether pragmatists really have the resources to deal with evil.¹

Sidney Hook has given one of the sharpest and best responses to the caricature of pragmatism as being naively optimistic and lacking the resources to deal with tragedy and evil. Hook was a student and a close associate of John Dewey. As a young man, before his pragmatic turn, he identiﬁed himself with a Hegelian –Marxist tradition, but he became one of the most penetrating and forceful critics of communism at a time when many American liberals were still fellow travelers. He was known as the “bulldog” of the pragmatists. His 1974 book, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life, provides a strong critical response to the recurring objection that pragmatism is superﬁcial and naive. The essays collected in that volume exhibit a vitality and a freshness that make them highly relevant to our contemporary situation.² Hook succinctly summarizes the familiar caricature of pragmatism “as a superﬁcial philosophy of optimism, of uncritical adjustment and conformity, of worship of the goddess of success.” This distortion, based on a tendentious reading of Peirce, James, and Dewey, misses what is most central to the pragmatic temper.

Pragmatism was not only a method of clarifying ideas by exploring their consequences in behavioral use. It was also a temper of mind towards the vital options which men confront when they become aware of what alternative proposals commit them to. It stressed the efﬁcacy of ideals and actions and at the same time their inescapable limitations. It foreswore the promise of total solutions and wholesale salvation for piecemeal gains. Yet far from embracing easy formulae of the ultimate reconciliation of conﬂicting interests and values, it acknowledged the reality of piecemeal losses even when we risk our lives to achieve the gains. (Hook 1974: 4–5)

We are frequently faced with hard choices and conﬂicting options where there is no possibility – even after careful deliberation – of reconciling “conﬂicting interests and values.” And in making these choices we need to be acutely aware of our limitations.

No matter how intelligent and humane our choices, there are, as William James insists, “real losses and real losers.” We live in a dangerous and adventurous and serious world and “the very ‘seriousness’,” James goes on to say, “we attribute to life means that the ineluctable noes and losses form part of it, that there are genuine sacriﬁces, and that something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of the cup.” (Hook 1974: 5)

This is the aspect of pragmatism that has been ignored by its critics, but it is stands at the heart of pragmatism. Pragmatism, Hook claims, is grounded in a recognition of “the tragic sense of life,” an expression that he appropriated from the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. What, precisely, does Hook mean by the tragic sense of life?

Every genuine experience of moral doubt and perplexity in which we ask “What should I do?” takes place in a situation where good conﬂicts with good. If we already know what is evil, the moral inquiry is over, or it never really begins. “The worse or evil,” Dewey says, “is the rejected good,” but until we reject it, the situation is one in which apparent good opposes apparent good. “All the serious perplexities of life come back to the genuine difﬁculty of forming a judgment as to the values of a situation; they come back to a conﬂict of goods.” No matter how we resolve the situation, some good will be sacriﬁced, some interest, whose immediate craving for satisfaction may be every whit as intense and authentic as its fellows, will be modiﬁed, frustrated or even suppressed. (Hook 1974: 13)

There are “small tragedies” in life, but the tragic quality of moral dilemmas emerges most dramatically when the conﬂicts and choices we face are – to use William James’s expressions – momentous and forced. As Dewey tells us, “only the conventional and the fanatical are always immediately sure of right and wrong [or good and evil] in conduct.”

We not only have to make difﬁcult choices, but, as Hook emphasizes, we are frequently faced with moral and political dilemmas where there are incompatible and irreconcilable values. This is precisely why pragmatists place so much emphasis on deliberation, inquiry, and the careful evaluation of consequences of our decisions and actions. The pragmatists do not underestimate the role of conﬂict in human life – even irreconcilable conﬂicts. Dewey makes the perceptive observation that if we already know what is evil, then moral inquiry is over, or it never really begins. Simply labeling something or some person as evil is not moral inquiry. For all the emotional appeal of this labeling, it obscures and distorts our choices. The pragmatists stress the agent’s perspective – the perspective of those who have to make choices and decisions. The primary question is always how to respond to what we take to be dangerous, threatening, or unjust situations. And when we conclude that someone or something is evil, we should be prepared to explain and justify what we mean, because we still have to decide how we will respond to this concrete evil. In making moral or political choices there is always the need for deliberation and questioning, and there is also always the possibility of disagreement. Reasonable persons can and do disagree about what is to be done. Furthermore, we frequently have to act without the opportunity to engage in full deliberative inquiry. This is why the pragmatists stress the need to cultivate those habits, dispositions, and practices that will enable us to act decisively. It is a misleading caricature of the pragmatic mentality to suggest that it calls for endless debate. It is difﬁcult to think of another philosophical orientation that has placed so much emphasis on conduct, practice, and action. There is no incompatibility between being decisive and recognizing the fallibility and limitations of our choices and decisions. On the contrary, this is what is required for responsible action. We must recognize that whatever we do, there will always be unintended and unpredictable consequences. Acknowledging and intelligently assessing these consequences may require altering our conduct. Fallibilism takes seriously the commonsense realization that we learn – or ought to learn – from our mistakes. And because of human ﬁnitude and limitation, we cannot avoid making mistakes. It takes imagination and courage to acknowledge our mistakes. “Steadfastness” and “staying the course” are not virtues but vices when they involve ignoring the undesirable consequences of our choices and actions. “Aside ... from the cruelty of those who glory in the personal harm they can inﬂict, the possibility of cruelty is the ever-present converse fact of human limitation. We are all crueler than we know, not because we are evil, but because our senses and imagination have such a limited range” (Hook 1974: 29).

One must not confuse ﬂexibility and reﬂective intelligence with indecisiveness. The appeal to evil is being used today to “justify” deeply problematic and questionable courses of action. In the abuse of evil there is a manipulative – and sometimes cynical – fusing together of widely disparate phenomena into a single, reiﬁed evil enemy. Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Palestinian suicide bombers, and Chechnyan rebels are lumped together as if they were a single evil enemy – or part of a single global conspiracy.³ And the factual evidence making it clear that this is just not so-and that it is politically disastrous to think that there is a single “evil force” threatening our security – is ignored or deliberately suppressed. The very expression “War on Terror” is deeply misleading. Terror is not an enemy; terror is a complex of tactics and strategies used by different groups for different purposes. But those who are all too eager to label the enemy as evil or as part of the “Axis of Evil” are impatient with this obvious fact. The abuse of evil – the reiﬁcation of evil – also blocks serious inquiry into why so many people throughout the world sympathize with terrorists. It blocks inquiry into a phenomenon that is taking on global signiﬁcance – the rage expressed by those who believe that they are constantly and systematically being humiliated. Humiliation is one of the primary social and political forces in this global world – and there is still little real understanding of its power to motivate people. There are not only the evils of fanatical terrorists, but also the evils of those whose actions inﬂict humiliation. There are “great ranges of cruelty in modern history, involving the fate of millions, that ﬂow from the limitations of human imagination and sensitivity, of cruelty men do because it is easy to stand what is out of sight, and still easier to stand what is out of mind” (Hook 1974: 29). There is also a failure to raise questions about whether the tactics and strategies employed in combating our “evil enemies” may have the unintended consequence of creating an environment in which terrorists will continue to ﬂourish. Like Proteus, terrorism takes on ever new forms. And if we are honest, there is good reason to believe that we can never completely eliminate terrorist initiatives. What we can do is try to eliminate known terrorists, and, as Samantha Power reminds us, “undertake the complex and elaborate effort to distinguish sympathizers from militants and keep its converts to a minimum. Terrorism also requires understanding how our past policies helped to give to such venomous grievances” (2004: 37). But today those who seek to raise and debate such issues are frequently accused of being unpatriotic.

“Realization of the evil men can do and have done to men is integral to any intelligent appraisal of human history” (Hook 1974: 30). We must recognize the variety of sources of concrete evils. They can ﬂow from “ignorance, insensitiveness and imaginative dullness of even conventionally good men.” The post-9/11 discourse about evil is regressive because it is based on one of the most primitive conceptions of evil. We demonize the enemy, think of the enemy as possessed by Satan – as someone who does evil for evil’s sake. But the lesson that we should have learned from the twentieth century, from the writings of Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, and many others is that the worst evils we experience cannot be adequately understood if we think of them as exclusively the actions of vicious demonized individuals.

There is intelligent and unintelligent fear . . . Intelligent fear arms us against real dangers and enables us, by modifying the environment or altering our behavior, to reduce the incidence of terror and pain. Intelligent fear must be proportionate to the dangers. It is the absence of any proportion between the danger and the fear which marks the panicky and hysterical response. Political thinking is often distorted by a failure to distinguish between fears that are ill-grounded or well-grounded. (Hook 1974: 58)

“The grim fact, however, is that there is sometimes no desire to reason, no wish to negotiate except as a holding action to accumulate strategic power, nothing but the reliance of one party or the other upon brute force even when other alternatives may exist” (Hook 1974: 23). The pragmatist mentality recognizes that there are limits to tolerance. We cannot tolerate those who are actively intolerant – those who seek to undermine the very possibility of discourse, dialogue, and rational persuasion. But how are we to decide when these limits have been reached? What is the criterion for deciding when there is a legitimate use of force? From a pragmatic perspective, these questions cannot be answered in an abstract manner. They demand speciﬁcity, inquiry into the historical circumstances, and risky choices. But if the virtues and practices of robust pragmatic fallibilism prevail, there will be a willingness to listen to dissenting voices and an openness to modifying our conduct in light of the intelligent evaluation of the consequences of our choices and actions. There will also be a strong resistance to the curtailment of civil liberties.

Still, it may be objected that however noble the pragmatic appeal to discussion, dialogue, and persuasion, it fails to grasp the character of fanaticism that is motivated by irrational passions. This is also an objection that Reinhold Niebuhr pressed against John Dewey. Niebuhr accused Dewey of being a rationalist who rested his hopes on self-sufﬁcient reason. But Dewey rightly responded that this was a caricature of the pragmatic conception of social intelligence. Dewey preferred to speak of intelligence rather than reason because he objected to the way in which many traditional philosophers had characterized reason – as if it were a special faculty that had intrinsic power. Intelligence is not an autonomous faculty, but consists of a set of habits, dispositions, and virtues that are not innate but need to be cultivated. In response to Niebuhr, Dewey afﬁrmed that “intelligence has no power per se.” It becomes powerful “only as it is integrated into some system of wants, of effective demands.” Pragmatism does not deny the strength of human emotions and passions. The point is to inform these passions with intelligence, to make them more humane.

The critics of a pragmatic temper frequently present themselves as “tough-minded realists,” who mock their opponents as “tender-minded sentimentalists.”⁴ But Hook gives a piercing rejoinder to this charge. What he wrote in 1947 might well have been written in 2005.

This “tough-mindedness” is another expression of the abdication of intelligence. It refuses to discuss the speciﬁc problems and the speciﬁc ways of handling them, smothering all problems under a blanket allegiance to some vaguely deﬁned goal. It wraps itself up in the blind faith, essentially religious, that no matter what is done, things will come right in the end. It is impatient with any attempt to judge verbal professions by consequences in fact. It is really not an attitude of tough-mindedness at all, for it cannot face or live with the truth. It cannot bear to see its assumptions put into the crucible of doubt. Rather it is a tender-minded sentimentalism that reads its pious wishes into the mysterious “workings” of history. (Hook 1974: 35)

We come here to the heart of the matter – to what is implicitly presupposed in the objection that I rehearsed at the beginning of this chapter. It is the unspoken assumption that “tough-minded realism,” strength, forcefulness, decisiveness, and persistence are based upon unwavering moral certainty. For without a ﬁrm, absolute, moral conviction, we will lack the determination to do what is required to ﬁght evil. But here is where we detect the gross fallacious slide from subjective moral certitude to alleged objective moral certainty. The strength of one’s personal conviction is never sufﬁcient to justify the truth or correctness of one’s claims. This is the primary lesson of pragmatic fallibilism. Furthermore, we need to expose the vulgar form of the Cartesian Anxiety that corrupts so much of current political rhetoric. We are presented with the alternatives of either steadfast moral certainty or a wishy-washy vacillating relativism. And the not-so-hidden implication is that pragmatic fallibility is effeminate and tender-minded; it lacks the guts to cope with the evil of terror. Over and over again, so-called tough-minded realists afﬁrm this in conscious and subliminal ways. We need to bring this attitude out into the open and expose it. It is based on confusion between subjective certitude and objective certainty. Ideologists, fanatics, and fundamentalists are always claiming certainty. History is full of instances of discarded certainties. As Peirce noted long ago, we are confronted with conﬂicting, contradictory claims about certainty. The fervor with which one asserts the possession of moral certainties is no evidence whatsoever for the truth or validity of one’s claims. One of the original motivations for the development of pragmatism was the realization that tenacious professions of certitude are never sufﬁcient to justify the truth of our beliefs. Peirce called this the method of tenacity for ﬁxing belief. And what he wrote in 1877 is still – perhaps even more – relevant for us today.

The instinctive dislike of an undecided state of mind, exaggerated into a vague dread of doubt, makes men cling spasmodically to the views they already take. The man feels that, if he only holds his belief without wavering, it will be entirely satisfactory. Nor can it be denied that a steady and immovable faith yields great peace of mind ... And in many cases it may well be that the pleasure he derives from his calm faith overbalances any inconveniences resulting from its deceptive character. (Peirce 1992: 116)

Earlier I mentioned the rather innocuous situation in which I declare that I am absolutely certain that I saw someone only to discover that I was mistaken. But there are horrendous situations where professions of absolute certainty are extremely dangerous and systematically misleading – if not deceitful. In justifying the “preventive war,” the US administration bombarded us with their absolutely certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.⁵

The supposition that the Bush people truly believed in their WMD nightmare was indicated by the unconditional quality of their prose. Phrases like “we do know, with absolute certainty,” uttered with majestic authority, abounded in Vice President Cheney’s speeches. He was also a “no doubt” man in, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” The president was another “no doubt” man: “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” Asked about the location of the WMDs, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said conﬁdently: “We know where they are.” (Schlesinger 2004: 29)

But we now know that all these “no doubt” statements and “absolute certainty” claims were false. Moreover, we also know that doubts about the reliability of this intelligence information were systematically discounted. There has been extensive discussion of whether Bush and his administration genuinely and sincerely believed what they claimed to know with absolute certainty or whether they were deliberately lying. Defenders of the administration claim that our leaders genuinely believed that there were weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein did pose on “imminent threat.” But the question must be asked: why were our leaders so ready and eager to believe that Hussein possessed these weapons? One cannot underestimate the power of the mentality that gripped the administration – especially the president’s tendency to see the world in the stark terms of good and evil. Greg Thielmann, a member of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, claims that the Bush administration had a “faith-based intelligence attitude: ‘We know the answers, give us the intelligence to support these answers.’“ Peter Singer adds:

It seems probable that it was not faith in general that gave Bush and his aides a misplaced conﬁdence that they knew the answers. It was the idea that Saddam was evil. Writing in Newsweek on how Bush justiﬁed going to war with Iraq, Howard Fineman observed, “He decided that Saddam was evil, and everything follows from that.” That alone made it intuitively obvious that Saddam must be building weapons of mass destruction. But it is a mistake to divide the world neatly into good and evil, black and white without shades of gray, in a manner that eliminates the need to learn more about those with whom one is dealing. For an unreﬂective person, having a sense of “moral clarity” that disregards the shadings in human motivation and conduct can be a vice, not a virtue. (Singer 2004: 211–12)

But why is the appeal to certainty so seductive when it comes to issues of choice, decision, and action? It is because of the belief that unless we do possess this certainty, we will not have any basis for justifying our choices, decisions, and actions. This is the faulty inference that must be exposed and rejected. When we are acting intelligently, we appeal to reasons to justify our actions – or we should be prepared to do so if challenged. But when we appeal to reasons, we are operating in a space where there can be better and worse arguments based upon concrete evidence. If we give reasons to justify our actions, then we must admit that however plausible and convincing we ﬁnd these arguments, they are always open to further inquiry and critique. There is no escape from fallibility. But does acknowledging the fallibility of our reasons and justiﬁcations mean that we will lack the conviction and passionate commitment to choose and act decisively? The answer is clearly No! We should act on what we take to be our best reasons and strongest convictions. We should be prepared to die for what we ultimately cherish. None of this requires any compromise or weakening of fallibilism – the belief that no matter how ﬁrmly we hold some fundamental beliefs, they are in principle open to criticism and self-correction. To use a different idiom, to acknowledge our fallibility is to recognize our human ﬁnitude. In his famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Isaiah Berlin quotes a wise saying by Joseph Schumpeter, who wrote: “To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unﬂinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.” And Berlin comments: “To demand more than this is perhaps a deep incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity” (Berlin 1969: 172).⁶

There is a residual belief that, ideally, it would be most desirable to achieve the type of indubitable certainty that could provide the foundation for our epistemological and moral judgments; but, as fallible human beings, we can never achieve such certainty. We have to settle for what is second best – fallible knowledge. But this really misses the central point of the pragmatists’ insight. They are making a much stronger and more important claim. The very idea of epistemological or moral certainty is incoherent. In everyday life, we are practically certain about all sorts of things – even though we may discover that we are mistaken in our beliefs. But if we mean by “certainty” something that is incorrigible – something that can never be questioned, modiﬁed, or corrected, then the pragmatists are telling us that there is no such thing! That is why we have good reason to be skeptical with regard to anyone who tells us that they are absolutely certain that they know what is truly evil. Once we give up the specious idea of absolute moral certainty, then we have to think of our convictions and commitments in a different way. They ought to be based on our best and strongest reasons for acting. And the most effective way of testing these is by opening them to public discussion, debate, and criticism.

In short, we need to be critical of those who claim to know with absolute certainty what is good and evil, and who think that such moral certainty is the basis for decisiveness and passionate commitment to ﬁght injustices and concrete evils. Our commitments and convictions will be stronger if they are informed by intelligent deliberation and tested by public discussion. Contrary to those who think that unless we achieve objective moral certainty, we will lack decisiveness and ﬁrm commitment to ﬁght for what we believe is right and just, the reverse is true. Our passionate commitment to just causes is strengthened and deepened when we are prepared to justify them by an appeal to reasons and evidence that are subject to open, public, critical discussion. This is essential for a democracy that truly cherishes freedom.