Modernity and the Substance of Ethical Life
WE ARE MET to discuss the relations of ethics to modern life. When such a subject is proposed, the discussion almost always turns to ethical discontent with modern life, to the feeling that the modern world is, from an ethical point of view, peculiarly problematical or unsatisfactory. That feeling may not be altogether wrong. But it makes a great deal of difference how such feelings are brought to bear on the discussion, and how we understand ethical discontent itself. I should like first to say something about this.
There have been complaints about the ethical state of the modern world as long as there has been a modern world. Indeed, there have been such complaints as long as there has been a world conscious that it was later than, and different from, some other world; that is to say, as long as there has been social life self-consciously placed in time. One of the very earliest documents of Western literature, Hesiod’s Works and Days, already richly displays many of the materials of cultural and ethical nostalgia that in one form or another have been current ever since.
As that example shows, the nostalgic consciousness does not have to locate itself determinately in what we would regard as metric historical time. As is well known, the Golden Age, for Hesiod, was earlier than his own time, but no determinate number of years earlier; even though, so far as his own time itself was concerned, he thought (as surely all human beings have thought) that if something really happened earlier than today for instance, if we can remember its happening then it happened some number of days ago. The consciousness of metric historical time involves the application of that local thought to a generalized, recursive, “earlier,” and that application is inescapable once a group of people have the idea that they are the successors of temporally overlapping groups of people, each of whom thought of their own time in terms of successive days. But once people think of themselves and their predecessors in those terms, the character of ethical nostalgia must change. To think of past people in these terms implies that it is merely a matter of temporal perspective whether they are “they” or earlier members of “us.”1 This by no means excludes ethical nostalgia, but it does rule out the archaic kind of nostalgia under which earlier times were, in their superiority to the present, insuperably other. (Although the idea of metric historical time emerged two millennia earlier, there is an analogy here to the Galilean revolution of thought by which the heavenly bodies came to be seen at once as at various determinate distances from the earth, and as composed of the same kind of matter.)
The nostalgia that succeeds the more deeply mythological version must have more negotiations with history; it must, for instance, be prepared to consider the question of whether the earlier should have been better than the later. If the thought is that the later is always worse than the earlier, a special kind of explanation is needed—one, obviously enough, that explains why things continuously get worse. Such an explanation would provide the inverse of what is needed by a doctrine of progress. However, it is not typical of ethical nostalgia to take the stance of explicitly claiming that the later is always worse than the earlier, and there is an asymmetry here between characteristic forms of ethical nostalgia and doctrines of progress. Theories of progress necessarily take the general view, and their explanations, such as they may be, correspond to the general view: they invoke models of learning, or climbing, or accumulation. Such theories and the explanations that go with them may be worthless, but they have no problem, as such, with locating themselves in metric historical time.
Ethical nostalgia, on the other hand, even when it has given up the deeply archaic outlook, is still resistant to the general view. It is more tied to “now” and “then” than to “later” and “earlier,” and it is grounded in an experience that resists recursive generalization, the familiar experience of simply finding something inferior to something else. This experience does not inevitably, or even naturally, lead to the general thought “every present is worse than each earlier past.” On the contrary, the discovery that people have always, or very often, had such experiences, tends to undermine the authority of the experience, and hence the nostalgia itself. For theories of progress, on the other hand, it would even be encouraging to discover that people had always believed in it. It is not essential that this should have been so, but the theories do have to find explanations of why it has not been so. Those explanations will, once again, no doubt be fanciful, but they operate within the structure of metric historical time, while ethical nostalgia, even when it has detached itself from the deep mythology of archaic times, retains a mythological aspect; it is naturally resistant to thinking of itself in terms of the structure of metric historical time.
This feature of ethical nostalgia, which shows up in its structural asymmetry from the ideas of progress, is significant when one considers the most important current version of it. This is the version in which complaints about “the modern” relate, not just to what happens to be more recent rather than less recent, but to a specific and unique historical epoch in which we live, that of modernity. “Modernity” in this sense claims to be a genuinely historical category, which organizes both explanations and phenomena to be explained; the idea that the modern world is immensely different from any previous historical formation is often said to be the founding thought of sociology. In relation to the category of modernity, ethical nostalgia takes a special, and superficially less mythological, form. Its characteristic disposition simply to treat the present as unique is transformed into an historical claim, that modernity is unique; its typical resistance to thinking about its own relation to history is replaced by a specific claim about history.
Just because of this transformation, however, it acquires a new vulnerability to reminders that it is indeed a recurrent phenomenon: its increased engagement with historical time means that it has to take those reminders seriously. Its complaints about the ethical condition of modernity and its explanations of the phenomena about which it complains are weakened if what it says about the supposedly unique situation of modernity is just a version of what it has been saying about each contemporary situation throughout its long life.
Its complaints will be weakened even if the phenomena of which it complains really are characteristic of modernity. It is generally agreed that modernity is marked by the decline of traditional patterns of authority, and by secularization. (I mean this merely in the sense of the substitution of secular for religious conceptions and institutions, not in the sense of the “secularization thesis,” criticized by Blumenberg, to the effect that the leading ideas of modernity are secular versions of religious ideas.)2 Ethical nostalgia, particularly in its most immediately conservative forms, will seize on these phenomena as part or cause of what is bad in the modern world. But, at the same time, those complaints are the most familiar expressions of traditional ethical nostalgia; already in antiquity the decline of parental and other authority, and the neglect of the gods, have been central to the repertoire of those who praise times past at the expense of the present.
Those people are not necessarily wrong. But if their repertoire is notably the same as the traditional repertoire, we have no particular reason to think that they are right; in particular, we have no reason to think that they are right because we share, if only in certain moods, their experience of nostalgia.
Moreover, we should be distrustful of their accounts of the past. One important example concerns the supposed ethical effects of religious belief. Here it is important, in my view, to make two distinctions. One is a distinction between a religious outlook, on the one hand, and simply an acceptance of the divine on the other. The scholar who interestingly said that there is no less religious poem than the Iliad is not refuted by our pointing out that the Iliad is full of gods. The second distinction, more immediately important here, is to be drawn between the social facts of secularization and a supposed consequence about motivation. It can scarcely be denied that the modern view of the world is more secular than that of, say, seventeenth-century Europe. (It is another question whether that change is as permanent and irreversible as has often been believed.)One consequence of this is that in describing, or trying to arouse, approved motivations, people make fewer appeals to religious authority, sanctions, or institutions. In one sense, then, it follows that people rarely now have a kind of motivation that they used to have, a motivation characterized in religious terms. But it does not follow that just in virtue of that, they are less motivated to act in the approved ways. There seems in fact a good deal of evidence that the efficacy of ethical motivations has not much to do with the religious or non-religious character of their expression. In this respect, as in many others, the picture of the past as better-ordered, more disciplined, more homogeneous than the present, may well be a fantasy; and in this case, as in all others, there is no substitute for a truthful recovery of the past. (It is an ironical reflection that some contemporary movements of thought, concerned to expose ethical nostalgia and similar outlooks as ideological, at the same time disempower themselves by denying that there can be such a thing as a truthful recovery of the past.)
In any case, the most important points here go beyond questions of whether the complaints and explanations of ethical nostalgia are true or not. It is rather that ethical nostalgia and its formative experiences have to be abandoned before one can even properly formulate the questions.
At best, ethical nostalgia mistakes a problem for a solution. I say “at best,” because there may be no problem, beyond its own problem of accepting the unfamiliar. But even when there is a problem, even if there is something in the thought that there is now a new level of ethical disorder or uncertainty, no solution could be conjured merely from the sense that things are not as they used to be. All that ethical nostalgia can generate from its own resources is, literally, reaction. Reactionary aspirations necessarily share the mythological aspects of the nostalgia; just as nostalgia looks back to an indeterminate or fictional place, so what it yearns for is an impossible journey. Unfortunately, this does not mean that there is no such thing as reactionary politics, or that reactionary thoughts leave everybody as stationary as they would be if they were sitting in something they imagined to be a time machine. What it does mean is that reactionary politics cannot be what it pretends to be, namely a practice which may indeed need to deploy coercive force, but only in order to turn the ship around. It proposes, rather, an ongoing ship the direction of which is concealed by a regime of coercive force.
If ethical nostalgia reached no further than everyday discussion or the commonplaces of conservative columnists, it might not be so important. But it reaches further than that. It has affected some important political philosophy of this century, including, interestingly, some that has purported to be among the most radical. The results are literally pathetic, and doubly so when to the emptiness of the nostalgia is added the self-importance of philosophy. The proper role of philosophy in these matters is something I shall touch on later, but we should bear in mind from the beginning how extraordinary the presuppositions are of the sage who claims on philosophical grounds insight into our ethical plight, and pretends on the basis of reflections on Being, for instance (to take one notably indecent example), to tell busy or impoverished people what is wrong with the modern world.
Granted ethical nostalgia reaches a long way, one needs to go some way to get away from it. A useful rule seems to me to be this: when thinking about the relation of ethical thought to the modern world, start with concepts that in themselves involve the minimum of ethical commitment. To many people, this will immediately seem a positivist proposal, relying on some spurious distinction of fact and value. In fact, I reject that distinction in anything like the form that it takes in positivism, and it is not needed here; all that is needed is the much more modest idea that it will be useful to start, if we can, with characterizations of the modern world couched in terms that are acceptable to a range of people with differing ethical outlooks on it. This may encourage us to try to understand the modern world before we address the question of the relations to it of ethical thought. One important consequence of this is that it helps to leave open the relation of philosophy itself to such inquiries, something that is merely ignored or taken for granted by many philosophical theories on these matters. In case anyone still thinks that the motivations of this approach are positivist, and that it aims at a “scientific” account that leaves out all evaluations, it is worth recalling the point I have already touched on, that values are already deeply involved in the ways in which we should understand critiques of the modern world. These critiques run the risk of being not merely intellectually empty and unrealistic, but pathetic, pretentious, evasive, or deceitful as well.
Two concepts very relevant to describing the present state of things in relation to ethics are those of the “public” and the “private.” At this present moment—that is to say, in the 1980s, a very brief period relative to the modern world as identified by the theory of modernity—it is notable that, in one sense, the boundaries of the public have been retreating in favour of the private, for instance by the “privatization” of hitherto public industries or institutions; the growth of insurance-funded health schemes as opposed to a national tax-based system; the encouragement of entrepreneurs, and so forth. Some such developments appear to be affecting the Eastern bloc as well as the West. Their future, and indeed their correct description, seem to me still very unclear, and that extends to the sense in which privatization really involves the private; in Britain, for instance, when the government sells off a nationalized industry, some private persons indeed buy shares in the resultant company, but no one even pretends that they acquire much control over it. But in any case, I mention this area only to contrast it with what I principally have in mind, which is the question of the extent to which events and actions of considerable ethical significance are governed by regulations which are publicly declared and debated. In this sense, the extent of the public is growing, and this is so even if the institutions in question—hospitals, for instance—are, in terms of the first contrast, private institutions.
When I say that the extent of the public is growing, one thing I mean is that decisions that used to be made in private on the grounds of individual ethical belief are now made by public institutions on the grounds of promulgated regulations. But it is not simply a question of the same decisions being made now in different places by different people. In many cases, public institutions enter the question because they, and they alone, offer possibilities that did not exist before, possibilities which generate new decisions. This is overwhelmingly true in medicine. Death used to be something that happened, more or less, at whatever time it happened; doctors tried to postpone it and were forbidden to cause it. They always had to make accommodations with those simple rules, in the light of their own outlook and those of their patients and their patients’ relatives. If people are dying at home, and a physician is coming to see them, and the physician has any human contact with the patient and his or her relatives, then that may be to some extent how it still goes; but that is an increasingly rare conjunction of circumstances these days. Because of technological advance, possibilities exist and decisions are required that did not present themselves before. Moreover, they present themselves in public institutions, hospitals and clinics, and what happens in those is properly a matter of public concern. This means, in turn, that these practices have to be regulated by principles that can be publicly stated; and that means that they cannot be very indefinite, or too heavily dependent on the individual’s sense of what is individually appropriate.
This importantly alters the nature of the ethical judgement involved in such matters. What has happened in some places is that the presence of ethical argument in these decisions has itself been institutionalized, in the form of supposed experts in medical ethics who are appointed to take part in discussions of the rules and of decisions about particular cases. This performs a number of functions: it enables ethical considerations to be presented in an institutionally recognizable form, parallel to a consultant’s expertise, and as a secular alternative, or addition, to religious opinions (which themselves are now typically expressed in more secular terms). The presence of authorities on medical ethics also helps to guard against lawsuits. To some philosophers, it will seem that it is the fulfilment of an Enlightenment dream, the regulation of ultimate questions by the institutional embodiment of systematic ethical reason. To others, however, including myself, that view seems a clear example of what Nietzsche called the reversal of effects and causes: these procedures represent, rather, a conception of ethical reason that it itself formed by the requirements of bureaucratic organizations.
You need to accept some startlingly strong presuppositions if you are to believe in these practices on their own terms. The supposed experts receive their qualifications by taking certain courses in philosophy, in particular in ethical theory and associated devices of casuistry. It is obvious that someone may acquire an excellent Ph. D. in such topics and yet be someone whose judgement you would not trust on anything. To believe in these practices on their own terms, you have to believe that what matters most to regulating issues of life and death, beyond medical expertise, is skill in manipulating theories, rather than any other human characteristic; and it is hard to see why anyone should believe that. People are forced to believe it—or rather, forced to forget that they need to believe it—by the demands made by a publicly answerable institution that has to make decisions about the most intimately significant human issues.
It is natural to translate the extension of the public, in these senses, into an extension of the “political”; if certain subjects become increasingly a matter of public, explicit, regulation, then they are seemingly the proper concern of politics. But if the relations are changing between the public and the private, it is equally true that there are changes in the conception of the political and of its importance. The matters in question here, if they are going to be regulated by law, are going to be regulated, as things now are, at a national level, and it is the politics of the nation-state that remain primarily important. Yet many very important matters obviously transcend the nation-state, and the most that the politics of individual states can achieve is to encourage or discourage the possibility of international solutions, solutions which have to be reached on the basis either of widely shared values and objectives, or else at the level of bargaining. At the same time, some agencies, such as multinational corporations, have greater international power, in certain fields, than any nation-state has; and while those fields may be limited, they are probably of greater relevance to the development of human life than the power, which still largely rests with nation-states, to coerce or annihilate other states.
The sense that technical or commercial considerations often have more determinative power than the policies of states applies within states as well. The current contraction of state functions in favour of “private”entrepreneurs, to which I have already referred, cannot go on indefinitely, and may reverse itself, but there is a more general tendency, to distrust the capacity of states to bring about ethical transformations of society, and this may prove more enduring. Scepticism about the practical and ethical consequences of les grands re´cits that have been enacted in the past century here meets the sense of the declining effectiveness of the nation-state. Whether states seem to have the power to shape society ethically or whether they do not, it seems that they will not succeed in doing so, and so it is better that they should not try.
If these extremely schematic thoughts are at all correct, then it is a significant characteristic of the modern world, a direct product of its distinctive modernity, that many ethical issues become matters for public regulation and institutional discussion, while at the same time a traditional place for the principled discussion of public matters, the politics of the nation-state, seems to be declining in importance, or at least in its credibility as a vehicle of ethical discussion. This may appear to present a conflict, or double difficulty; but I shall suggest at the end of these remarks that the second phenomenon may in fact conceivably help us in overcoming some consequences of the first.
As we explore some consequences of these phenomena for ethical thought, it will be helpful to consider first how they bear on something that is not identical with ethical thought, and indeed is not always even an example of it, namely ethical theory (the sort of thing in which the experts in medical ethics are typically trained). I take ethical theory to be an intellectual structure such as Kantianism or various versions of Utilitarianism, which has characteristically sought to achieve three ends. (1) It has sought to systematize ethical thought and to reduce it to some basic principles and concepts. One particular path that this process takes is that theory regards as basic very general or abstract ethical concepts such as “deceit”—what may be called “thin” ethical concepts—and uses these to explain or, more significantly, to replace “thick” concepts with a relatively high descriptive content, such as “brutality” or “treachery.” (2) Theory seeks to provide a personal morality. Various ethical theories have differing ambitions in this respect, as in others; the differences show up both in how much they seek to control, and in how direct their control is meant to be. Thus some ethical theories may try to lay down only restrictive principles of right, while others, such as Utilitarianism, have ambitions to dictate an entire system of value. These are differences of ethical scope. But some well-known manifestations of Utilitarianism, in particular, do not intend each agent all of the time to conduct his or her life by Utilitarian reasoning, which is intended rather to justify other, perhaps more traditional, patterns of reasoning for private use. In such a case, the control of the theory is indirect, but it is still intended, by these indirect means, to control everything. (3) Differences in ambition apply also to the third aim of ethical theory, which is to produce a public or political morality. In this area, however, it is more typically the extent of the control, rather than the degree of its directness, that gives rise to the differences between different theories. Though theorists are not always very open on the subject, the idea of indirect control seems less commonly employed at this level.
I have elsewhere criticized these various pretensions of ethical theory. In particular, I have argued that the underlying idea of objective (1), that rationality itself requires ethical thought to be systematized in this way, is baseless; so far from trying to eliminate or reduce all “thick” concepts in the name of rationality, we should try to hold on to as many as we can. This relates also to objective (2), the aim of ethical theory to provide a private morality. The familiar (originally Hegelian) criticism of modern ethical reflection that it is too abstract and theoretical to provide any substance to ethical life is well taken, and it is precisely the use of “thick” ethical concepts, among other things, that contributes to a more substantive type of personal ethical experience than theory is likely to produce.
This insistence of theory on reducing ethical thought to “thin” concepts is, I believe, itself an example of something that I have already mentioned, the disposition to construe the requirements of certain kinds of public justification as themselves the criteria of ethical rationality. Public justification does not in itself inevitably imply the use of “thin” concepts; in a very homogeneous traditional society—assuming that it does allow some relevant contrast between public and private—public justification may deploy “thick” ethical concepts that figure equally in private practice. Modern societies, however, are characteristically more pluralistic. Moreover, their conception of public legitimacy is one that encourages institutions to behave as though society were pluralistic, and to adopt styles of justification that are more procedural, or appeal to notions of welfare or consensus that are less committal and less ethically distinctive than “thick” concepts. There is a political argument for public justifications to take these forms, and to deploy, correspondingly, “thin” concepts. So if public justification does make the increasing demands that I have already suggested, then there are forces (though they are not well understood by ethical theory itself) that work in favour of what ethical theory wants, the replacement of the “thick” by the “thin” at the public level.
If, further, these categories are inadequate to provide any great substance to personal ethical experience, as I have also suggested, then there is a divergence between the requirements of a personal ethic and a public morality, in the sense of the discourse in which it is most natural to discuss the public regulation of ethically sensitive matters. I take this to be a genuine problem of ethical thought in the modern world, one that transcends mere ethical nostalgia for an imagined homogeneous past world. Ethical theory has tried to bypass this problem; by combining ambitions (2) and (3), it has sought to bring private and public moralities together. But ignoring the problem has not solved it, and these attempts have manifestly not succeeded: and to the extent that Utilitarianism, in particular, has resorted to indirect methods of control in the private and not in the public sphere, and thus attempted to get the best of both worlds, its attempts have been either unintelligible or politically extremely suspect, implying the presence of a manipulative Utilitarian elite.
We can hope to make sense of ethical thought in relation to the modern world only if we give up, along with other ambitions of ethical theory, the attempt to find one set of ideas that will represent the demands of ethics in all the spheres to which ethical experience applies. We must then try to find some better ways in which we can have the best of both worlds. In some way, we must aim to cherish as best we can a range of ethical concepts of the more substantive kind; these will differ, no doubt, to some extent, from place to place and group to group. At the same time we may recognize, possibly in virtue of some of these ideas themselves, such as certain conceptions of justice, the need that decisions taken by public bodies may have to be argued about and justified in more abstract, procedural terms, with a “thinner” ethical content.
Simply to embrace some such formula, however, cannot take us far. In itself, it may lead merely to a distinction between public and private as paralleling a distinction between “thin” and “thick,” and that is a place that modern reflection has visited only too often before. To get further, we would have to go beyond any absolute distinction between public and private, and think in terms of a structure in which (notably in contrast to the aims of traditional ethical theory) public justification did not try to justify what it was doing to everybody, or every possible person; it would justify it, so far as possible, within its own ethical constituency. This would mean that while its arguments would necessarily have procedural features, the basis of the considerations it took into account could borrow more from the distinctive ethical experience of its constituency, and not fall back merely on the most general and “thin” considerations. The more general and purely regulatory the functions, the larger the appropriate constituency, but also the discourse of “right” and the appeal to thin notions of the good would to that extent be more appropriate.
Such a speculation would lead us to the idea of a kind of ethical federation, with denser ethical considerations being deployed at more local levels, and “thinner,” more procedural, notions applying at higher levels: though it is very important, as I shall suggest below, that “local” here should not be taken in a purely geographical sense. I do not know whether such an entirely schematic picture could be given social substance. One arrives at such a picture from the need to meet the characteristic problem that I have described as presented to ethical thought by the modern world: that one kind of ethical concept and thought seems necessary to a substantive ethical experience, but many ethically important issues must be discussed in a public discourse that typically, particularly in a pluralistic society, uses other and “thinner” concepts. There exist various schemata that embody respectively the “thick” and the “thin”: the virtuous republic model, on the one hand, and on the other the Kantian and the Utilitarian constructs, the association of individual right, and the welfare machine. All, for different reasons, have been found inadequate to the modern world. The present speculation marks the spot for a further possibility, which in some form or other is certainly required.
These ideas themselves, and the scepticism I mentioned earlier about the powers of the state ethically to transform society, imply that it is unlikely that a theoretical or prophetic blueprint for such ethical institutions will be forthcoming; they are more likely to be generated, historically, by the need for them. However, it is relevant to recall here the other phenomenon I mentioned as characteristic of present developments, the decline in ethical importance of the nation-state. The power and significance of this institution have encouraged theorists, as the ideal of the good encouraged Aristotle, to seek for a theory that would serve both aims (2) and (3), those of an individual and a political morality. The idea has been that the territory of legal control, and the sphere of significant ethical life, should be the same. The consequences drawn from this have been different for different theories, as I have already suggested: very roughly, for Hegelians and theorists of the virtuous republic, the aim has been to give the state a substance comparable to that of individual life, while with Utilitarians (at least of the more direct persuasion) it has been the other way around. The present suggestion is that we should give up this assumption and concentrate on unities of ethical experience between groups of people who are less than the population of a state—the more familiar pluralist picture—but also on groups that cross its boundaries. Particularly with modern forms of communication, a “constituency” of persons need not live contiguously to one another.
This is only a gesture to the direction in which one might think. But if it is true, as I have suggested, that there is more than one genuine feature of the modern world that does give rise to novel difficulties for ethical thought, transcending the familiar reactions of ethical nostalgia, it may also be true that the difficulties do not merely sum to a greater difficulty but may turn out to help in solving one other.
1 Williams considers further implications of this change in “What Was Wrong with Minos?,” in Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 149–71.
2 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M.Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983).