14 Adjudicating Moral Inquiry: Scientific Reason and/or Dialogical Encounters

Adjudicating Moral Inquiry: Scientific Reason and/or Dialogical Encounters

Professor Jean Porter wrestles with a key issue in our postmodern academy, which is how to make truth claims while recognizing the ways in which truth is framed and limited by traditions, cultures, historical contexts, practices, and languages. Because she focuses on moral inquiry, she turns to Alistair MacIntyre, whose Gifford lectures are published as Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Moral pluralism has undercut the Enlightenment epistemology, which promised to position the inquirer in a value-free, morally neutral position to judge truth claims. Science, the exemplar of this approach, has demonstrated the value of empiricism as well as the limits of claims to social transcendence. No longer can reason, even within rigorous empirical methodologies, claim to position the researcher as a judge freed from the values of a particular social context. Although reason offers justifications for a variety of actions, it can no longer, if it ever did, resolve dilemmas or create consensuses. The failure of reason as the arbiter for truth claims makes this not only an epistemological concern but a political one as well. If reason cannot determine the good, then how shall moral claims be substantiated sufficiently to be persuasive in sustaining social order? Even democracy, which relies on agreements, depends on deliberation shaped by truth claims. The problem of substantiating truth claims is particularly acute for the academy, whose primary work has been articulating notions of truth.

Porter begins by explaining that the problem is that we have “fragmented moral traditions” and so lack “broad agreement on reasons,” which leaves citizens with a choice in resolving moral debates between a fundamentalist Enlightenment model of truth, on the one hand, or, on the other, skepticism.[1] She finds in MacIntyre a scaled down version of reason, a “mode of rationality embedded in the development of a tradition.”[2] The issue here is twofold. First, the search for a broad-based consensus may itself be part of the problem. I wonder if MacIntyre in After Virtue is suggesting that part of the problem is our desire to seek broad-based solutions, because, in the last paragraph to this work, he suggests that the solution is to practice virtue in “local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained.”[3] Perhaps relying on reason to resolve broad-based disputes is part of the problem. Maybe reason is a feature limited to a local community and fails when attempts are made to apply it to broad-based situations. While in times of global strife, citizens yearn for a broad-based consensus so that reason can settle threatening disputes. Reliance on reason to end wars has not worked. It may be that an urge for consensus can lead to desires for domination and the suppression of rival views. Reasons have not yet been decisive in resolving value conflicts even within cultures because reasons offer differing solutions rather than a single resolution.

Second, in searching for examples of the resolution of rival positions within a tradition, Porter turns to science. It is here that Porter and MacIntyre most clearly disagree. Porter argues that scientific discourse, unlike moral discourse, offers ways to discover “superior” solutions, and she points to Aristotelian, Newtonian, and Einsteinian physics as three rival traditions that offer examples of progressively more “adequate” explanations. Porter explains that a tradition is reformed by finding a better version in its later stages as it learns from itself. For her, science illustrates how traditions can determine which rival view is the better or which solutions are “superior.”

MacIntyre, calling on the work of Thomas Kuhn, argues that scientific discourse is like moral discourse. He claims that scientific, theological, and moral inquiry rely on “some prior theoretical or doctrinal commitment.”[4] He argues that commitment to a theoretical position or standpoint is a “prerequisite” for inquiry rather than a “barrier” to it.[5] Thomas Kuhn and other philosophers of science argue that science is theory-dependent and that paradigms offer different explanations for different problems so that science, no less than moral enquiry, fails to offer a narrative of innocent progress. MacIntyre’s title “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?” articulates the principle that all knowledge claims rest on a set of values, which offer basic explanations of what counts as a just and rational world. Hence, rival positions even in science cannot be resolved without creating theoretical and doctrinal agreements. It is not so much a matter of progress toward a “superior” science as it is progress toward some situation where some groups find some solutions better than others for their immanent (not transcendent) purposes. The issue raised by MacIntyre asks “adequate” or “superior” for what purpose? It is the problem of the hermeneutical circle. MacIntyre asserts that one speaks from within a tradition in ways that “conflict with rival traditions.”[6] In Whose Justice, MacIntyre argues that his purpose in examining “tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive enquiry” is to examine how each understanding of justice has its own form of reason and that both depend on a worldview and a set of social political relationships.[7] Because reason cannot step out of that worldview, reason alone does not resolve debates. Issues like abortion, the “right” to die, and the death penalty illuminate how reason fails us even within shared traditions. But this does not mean that MacIntyre gives up hope on traditions learning from each other and even changing in response to what they learn.[8]

Both Porter and MacIntyre agree that the key to adjudicating rival disputes is a genuine encounter with the other tradition, point of view, or opposing claim. However, a genuine encounter might require the suspension of what counts as reason in one culture to follow the reasoned argument of a different culture. Such a suspension of the rules of reason in one tradition might enable a richer encounter with a very different tradition and a transformation of what counts as reason for either or both of the parties to the encounter. Traditions are dynamic, changed by both internal and external challenges. Some of those changes alter what counts as reason itself.

Porter points out that “every community needs to find some way to resolve its moral disputes.”[9] She warns that, without an authoritative moral consensus, life can become “intolerably contentious or oppressive.”[10] Of course, social orders have been and continue to be oppressive even when they appear to have a moral consensus. The political problem is how to tell the difference between a moral consensus and oppression. What liberates some might oppress others. The first 100 years of the history of the United States show the liberation of citizens who were fleeing to find religious freedom and yet at the same time oppressing African Americans and systematically attempting to destroy the religions and cultures of the Native Americans. Liberation for one group might well mean domination of other groups.

My reading of MacIntyre is that his case rests on his ability to incorporate science into his argument because science has been the one model that modernity has evoked to argue that reason can prevail and progress can be realized. In his concluding essay to the Gifford lectures, MacIntyre suggests that the academy itself requires reformulation from its Enlightenment beginnings. Not only is science implicated in the modern moral inquiry, but also it is both shaped by and shapes epistemological pluralism. So, rather than separate science from moral conflicts, MacIntyre wants to include scientific discourse in it so that moral inquiry can take account of a range of epistemologies including science and theology. For example, resolutions over issues such as abortion are matters not only for science, or religion, or theology. Such issues are public matters that concern the moral code of a people and their struggles over value conflicts. Modernity accorded science an epistemology outside of moral codes and located moral codes in the private realm. While Porter is less convinced that science is similar to moral inquiry, she does think that moral inquiry has a great problem finding the “superior” moral code among rivals. Both Porter and MacIntyre want to bring moral inquiry into the public realm for discussion.

MacIntyre’s Gifford lectures suggest that one way out of this problem is to note the level of contention. He argues that the academy can bring contentious issues into productive dialogues. But Porter is concerned about this because she worries that contentions can become intolerable. Perhaps the issues raised in her comments are asking her readers to think about what counts as an “intolerable” contention. This is especially important because in the Gifford lectures MacIntyre seems to be arguing that contention is a vital component to the resolution of rival views, and he argues that the university might well be reconceived in order to enhance rival exchanges.

This points to another difference between Porter and MacIntyre. Porter emphasizes how it is possible for someone to inhabit two positions and so “to see that the rival tradition offers”[11] solutions that the home tradition did not. This is especially attractive because she constructs different traditions not as rivals but as complements to one another. Sometimes differences can be understood this way and it would be a mistake to interpret cultural differences as necessarily oppositional. However, in seeking within the American culture, the resolution to such challenging political issues as abortion, just war, or euthanasia leads to a set of opposing moral traditions. What one group finds as a solution, another considers unacceptable and morally wrong. In this case, the problem of the clash of traditions can lead from the work of reflection to the work of putting the rival tradition out of business. Of course, an alternative to putting the others out of business is to alter one’s original position, to be converted by the other. Porter illuminates this point by explaining that some moral agreements would require changing mores but she explains that this does not mean “that moral traditions are a-rational.”[12] This is a good point, but again what might count as rationality in one tradition may be different in another, and even what counts as a conversion would vary among traditions. Traditions both patrol and fail to patrol their boundaries.

Porter raises questions about the role of authority in truth claims. From within a tradition, the question is who can speak for that tradition and what counts as orthodoxy and/or heresy within it? Because of the complexity of communities, the line between internal and external persons and/or principles is sometimes not easily drawn. What is simply an evolution into a new and better form of that tradition, and what is a corruption of it? The Reformation illustrates part of this problem, and so do the shifting boundaries of modern nations.

Porter explains that when it comes to moral decisions, the community acts in “imperceptible processes of shared deliberation and custom.”[13] While this is true, communities also suppress viewpoints and outlaw customs. She recognizes this point, however, by explaining that the real problem is to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate authorities. I take this to mean not simply keeping agreements or obedience to charters and constitutions but finding ways to seek the good over the ill, which includes deciding what good needs to be preserved within a tradition and what needs to be removed from it to make it good.

Porter has more faith in a progressive understanding of reason than does MacIntyre, and so she has more faith that a community of citizens can, through a mysterious process, “resolve most open moral questions.”[14] Such resolutions may take a very long time. In many cases, moral dilemmas are resolved, but such resolutions often take a toll on some members of that community. Who pays the cost of such resolutions and who suffers injustice while the resolutions are in process is the difficult political issue?

MacIntyre solves the mystery of such a process by offering a perceptible process in his Gifford lectures. He opens these lectures by explaining that the most he hopes for is to “render disagreements more constructive.”[15] In the last essay of the Gifford lectures, he invites his reader to reconsider the role of the university in the moral life of communities. He characterizes the preliberal university as one with “enforced and constrained agreements.”[16] which was the price it paid for unity. The liberal university abolished religious and moral tests to create "unconstrained debate," even though “unconstrained debate” was more of an ideal than a reality because reason itself is limited by a cultural context and pre-rational assumptions.

The failure of scientific inquiry provides his best example for why reason itself cannot resolve debates. He notes that universities fail to supply answers. Even moral philosophy, which, when asked for public answers, “have rarely done more than reproduce in new versions the unsettleable disputes.”[17] Such disputes are based on contradictory values that cannot be resolved through argument. Nevertheless, moral disputes are resolved “with or without rational justification.”[18] Reconceiving of the university means thinking about the university as more like a forum and less like a source for answers, less like a place for knowledge production and more as a place for reflection on the knowing process. He explains that the university cannot construct standards that can serve as a guardian for reason but can only provide the means for respectful and productive debates that take seriously rival positions. The modern/postmodern university needs to offer forums for “constrained disagreement” that “initiates students into conflict.”[19] The role of the faculty is not to offer neutral objective positions but to preserve the conflict in such a way as to enable opponents to “encounter” each other. He hopes that faculty can make the university an “arena of conflict in which the most fundamental type of moral and theological disagreement was accorded recognition.”[20] MacIntyre thinks such conflict can be productive because it allows conflicting views to test their positions against alternatives. He argues that students can be taught to make clear and precise judgments while understanding that it is only through particular standpoints that judgments can be made. He models such a dialogue by taking seriously the concerns raised by both Friedrich Nietzsche and genealogical approaches along with concerns raised by Thomas Aquinas and Thomistic approaches. He illustrates how reflecting on rival voices can be productive in the reformulation of an argument. At the same time, he alerts his reader to the danger of overlooking the ways in which opposing views may also share values and commitments. Engagement, that is the sharing of some aspect of a lived-experience, can take place only when there are some sorts of shared understandings and concerns.

Porter teaches us about this by emphasizing the importance of acknowledging both the “ineradicable contingency of moral traditions”[21] and the possibility of common elements. Simply hearing “both” sides of an argument is not enough. There needs to be a search for common elements. Those common elements might, as she suggests, be found in scientific discourse as “broad, species-specific patterns of behavior.”[22] However, common elements might also be found in narrow projects undertaken in the context of a focused problem. There need not be a broader human concern. I think what Porter is suggesting is that common elements can be found because we are, as humans, similar to one another. I am suggesting that faith in that similarity is important but that the process of finding common elements may also be found in smaller concerns that face only two or three traditions. However, as Porter suggests, it is in the encounter with another tradition that changes, even radical conversions, take place.

Thus, moral inquiry depends on genuinely dialogical deliberations in which views and traditions are reformulated rather than merely debated. The error of the modern university is simply to present debates or to try to offer singular views that will settle arguments. Porter emphasizes that communities do have common grounds. It is faith in this common ground, recognition of differences, and the willingness to explore the two that enables positions to be articulated and deliberations to become productive.

NOTES

1. Jean Porter, “Moral Traditions,” in Theology and Public Philosophy: Four Conversations, ed. Kenneth L. Grasso and Cecilia Rodriguez Castillo (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2012), 13.6.

2. Porter, “Moral Traditions,” [13.15].

3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 263.

4. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 17.

5. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 17

6. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 401.

7. MacIntyre, Whose Justice?, 387.

8. MacIntyre, Whose Justice?, 350.

9. Porter, “Moral Traditions,” 13.35.

10. Porter, “Moral Traditions,” 13.35.