The question of ‘what is right (or wrong)’ or ‘what one ought to do’ is possibly the earliest and the most pervasive philosophical problem. Countless arguments and methods of justification of ethical, moral and, more generally, normative claims have been developed over the millennia, but no argument has fully satisfied the desiderata of objective truth. An authoritative answer to the normative question requires grounding of the alleged truth in objective facts or some self-evident principle.

Ethical convictions that are not well grounded in objective facts but only in the belief that something just is right have the logical consequence of validating their opposite as also right, that is, such convictions are immanently self-defeating. Were I to validate an ethical claim as objectively and universally right on the basis of my subjective belief, I would have also validated subjective belief as a sufficient basis of ethical judgement in general, and thus implicitly justify your acting according to your subjective belief in what is right, irrespective of whether our beliefs were in agreement or opposed to one another. This would amount to ethical pluralism, but an affirmation of a plurality of possibly incompatible ethical judgements as independently right implies a negation of a universally binding, objective criterion of being right. If no one can be universally right then the conflict of rights is reduced to the conflict of might, and resolution can only be achieved through violent repression or destruction of one’s ethical adversary. The only universal principle affirmed by ethical pluralism is therefore violence, but an affirmation of violence by everyone against anyone is not ethically normative at all: it is a radical rejection of the possibility of being objectively right or wrong in any conflict.

But perhaps your position is not that of an ethical-pluralist; perhaps you just know that you are right and that I am wrong, and you do not claim that two conflicting views can both be right at the same time. Let us call this attitude ethical elitism. But ethical elitism leads to the same impasse as ethical pluralism. If you just know that you are right and I am wrong, and I just know that you are wrong and I am right, then violence is still the only means of resolving conflict, irrespective of who is objectively wrong and who is right. Both attitudes preclude peaceful resolution of conflict via public deliberation.

Successful deliberation (that is, deliberation per se) requires meaning: a commonly accepted normative structure for discerning sense from nonsense, logically valid from logically false. Rejection of a common structure has the same effect as ethical pluralism or elitism, that is, it also necessitates violence in situations of conflict. The most fundamental normative structure, without which meaning could not exist even on the subjective level, are the laws of classical logic: the law of non-contradiction (no statement can be both true and false at the same time and in the same context), identity (at any given time, everything is absolutely identical only to itself) and excluded middle (every statement must be either true or false, or be composed of parts that are either true or false). But ‘so what’, one might say, ‘I might be contradicting myself but I don’t care as long as I get what I want’. The problem with this position is that by even thinking about what I want I already apply the law of identity, and by acting with the intention to get what I want out of action I must act consistently and unambiguously towards a goal, otherwise my actions would contradict one another and could not reliably achieve the desired result. We all affirm the fundamental laws of logic simply by acting intentionally, and this affirmation is presupposed in every instance of intersubjective conflict. (See also Lord, Errol. What You’re Rationally Required to Do and What You Ought to Do (Are the Same Thing!). Mind, 2017)

We can now turn our attention to the kind of ethical convictions that claim to be grounded in objective, universal facts. Throughout the history of philosophy, no one has succeeded in demonstrating existence of objective ethical facts. Many have tried but their arguments have always amounted to kicking the proverbial can further down the road. If, according to G.E. Moore for example, to be morally right is just to do good, then this begs the question about what is objectively and universally good. If the good is to be judged according to its social consequences, this again begs a question: what social consequences are objectively indicative of goodness, and so on… The question of ‘what is good’ is, according to G.E.Moore, a genuinely open one: it can never yield a fundamental or final answer.

The question of ‘what is right’, on the other hand, does not neatly map onto ‘what is good’, ‘…useful’, ‘…virtuous’, ‘…beautiful’ or ‘…pleasurable’, but there are other ways of establishing normative facts (what one ought to do) without relying on the idea of irreducible goodness, virtue or utility. Several approaches of this kind have been developed and applied with various degrees of success. Normative constitutivism, for example, maintains that certain rules of behaviour are hard coded in our capacity for rational action. That is, to act in breach of the constitutive rules or conditions of rational agency it to cease being a person capable of acting rationally. This approach faces major conceptual hurdles and is still considered incomplete (Enoch, David., Agency, Shmagency: Why Normativity Won’t Come from What Is Constitutive of Action. The Philosophical Review, 2006).

The most successful metaethical approach is, in my view, constructivism. “Metaethical constructivism is the view that insofar as there are normative truths, they are not fixed by normative facts that are independent of what rational agents would agree to under some specified conditions of choice.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

While a variety of (transcendental) constructivist strategies have been development since its original formulation by Immanuel Kant, the most promising development can be attributed to Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas and goes by the name of transcendental-pragmatic justification of universal ethics (or simply, Discourse Ethics). Unlike constitutivism, Discourse Ethics is not explicitly motivated by the constitutive conditions of agency but by the normative commitments presupposed by participation in public discourse: “Humanity is in essence linguistic, and therefore depends always already for its thinking on consensual communication.” (Apel, Karl-Otto. Selected Essays: Ethics and the Theory of Rationality. Humanities Press International, 1996. p211) All meaning is developed through communication and presupposes recognition of our interlocutors as co-participants in the process of creating common meaning. Also, by verbalising any claim we are implicitly recognising another as a being capable of responding to our claim and inviting them to do so. “The logical justification for our thought” therefore commits us to “understand arguments critically” and to “mutually recognize each other as participants with equal rights in the discussion.” (Ibid. Apel p29) By acting in a way that would aim to silence the interlocutor or compel a particular response, the person making the original claim would be committing a performative contradiction.

Habermas makes a distinction between communicative action, which generates meaning and is (according to Apel) a condition of our capacity to think, and strategic action, which diminishes our capacity to generate meaning. Strategic action harms our fundamental interest: our capacity to be rational agents. “Whereas in strategic action one actor seeks to influence the behavior of another by means of the threat of sanctions or the prospect of gratification in order to cause the interaction to continue as the first actor desires, in communicative action one actor seeks rationally to motivate another by relying on the illocutionary binding/bonding effect of the offer contained in his speech act.” (Habermas, Jürgen. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. p85) Since all meaning, and therefore our own capacity for thinking, can only be developed and sustained through public deliberation, it is in everyone’s self-interest to practice public deliberation instead of violence, deception or coercion. To do otherwise would be irrational, and we have normative reasons to be rational in order to reliably get what we want out of action. Another way, strategic action diminishes our capacity to think and to be agents and therefore also diminishes our capacity to formulate and achieve goals. Resorting to public deliberation instead of violence or deception in response to conflict is also likely to have a second-order effect of improving our existential conditions and prosperity by supporting a social environment conducive to cultural development and creative cooperation.

The normative force of public deliberation as a necessary condition of meaningful existence precludes any finality about ethical or moral truths and is therefore radically opposed to ethical dogmatism and ideological violence. Instead, it motivates content-responsive, all-things-considered rational agreement that is consistent with stages of conceptual development.

“The means of reaching agreement are repeatedly thrust aside by the instruments of force.” (Ibid. Habermas p106)

Update: See my latest article on formal ethics here.

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