Horsing Around

In defense of moral reflexes.

“There is often in the language of ordinary people a logic which, for want of philosophy, they cannot interpret.”

—Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

Peter Singer, winsome advocate of mercy killing for infants, has graced the internet yet again with his provocations. In one of those tweets that surfs across the timeline on a tsunami of hate-quotes, Singer shared a pseudonymous essay from the Journal of Controversial Ideas. Its argument was not only that having sex with animals should be grudgingly accepted, but that endorsing bestiality should be “the default position within many philosophical quarters.”

I don’t propose to waste your time or mine by engaging with the merits of this proposal, or by rehearsing the failures of Singer’s consequentialist ethics. To me the deformity of his outlook is evident in the conclusions he draws, which are ghastly enough on their face to discredit his premises, even if there weren’t other good reasons to reject them on principle.

Marshaled in service of such obviously ghoulish positions, erudition makes a man more ridiculous, not less—like a lecturer strutting solemnly before a chalkboard in a dunce cap and clown makeup. The correct response to pages of dense argument to the effect that we should kill babies or shtup pigs is not a point-for-point refutation: it’s “no we shouldn’t, lol, lmao.”

But I do want to say something about the legitimacy of that response, which people like Singer devote their entire careers to undermining. Advocates of incendiary views benefit from a vague perception in the public mind that wisdom and learning serve exclusively to explode the assumptions of decent workaday people.

The more offensive an idea is to our moral sensibilities, the more insightful and penetrating we assume it must be. The person defending it, we suppose, must have had to fight valiantly past a thicket of prior assumptions and public prejudice in order to arrive at his coveted forbidden truth. This is evidence of his dispassion, his intellectual fearlessness, his uncompromising resolve in the face of bourgeois outrage. Philosophy, we imagine, becomes more rigorous the more brazenly it contradicts received opinion.

This is altogether wrong. It depends on a kind of cheap and half-understood perversion of what’s known as the “endoxic” method, an ancient mode of reasoning. The endoxic method is so called because it begins with endoxa, generally approved or noteworthy opinions, and subjects them to a kind of stress test, weighing them against one another and examining where they fall short or contradict themselves.

The popular image of this procedure is the legend of Socrates that many of us received at some point in grade school. Through gentle prodding and acrobatic leaps of reasoning, the so-called “Socratic method” supposedly forced the young men of Athens to concede that everything their mothers taught them was grievously wrong.

No one could deny that Plato’s Socrates takes a certain impish pleasure in tying the confident scions of the upper crust into argumentative pretzels. But listen to Plato’s student Aristotle describe the endoxic method, specifically as it applies to ethical reasoning (Nicomachean Ethics 1145b):

As in other cases, what is necessary is to set out how things seem and, after first discussing the problems, go on to demonstrate the truth of all reputable opinions on the subject of the affections—if possible, or, if not, the majority of them and the most secure ones. For if we can resolve the difficulties and leave the reputable opinions in place, that will be proof enough.

Aristotle’s aim here is to arrive at the truth with minimal damage to received opinion. That’s enough to satisfy him—it’s “proof enough.” He knows not everyone can be right, and not everyone can fully articulate the reasoning behind his ideas: most people aren’t philosophers. But they aren’t idiots either, and Aristotle’s job is to hunt out the basic truths that people are sensing or groping toward when they express their moral instincts.

When Francis Bacon undertook to replace Aristotle’s system with his Novum Organum, he flattered himself that his empirical methods could pierce through basic instinct altogether and arrive at pure reality, unadulterated by arbitrary prior assumptions (see Book I.xxiii ff).

Technically speaking this doesn’t guarantee that all morality will be overturned: it might be that once you clear away the “idols of the mind,” you arrive at something that happens to look very much like what you initially thought. But Bacon’s assumption is plainly that you will not, and so at this point philosophy’s merit began to be measured by the damage it did to conventional beliefs. Which is how you end up with our friends in their dunce caps and clown makeup.

Because it turns out there’s nothing more boring and conventional than the reflexive impulse to contradict all maxims and shatter all taboos. No doubt good philosophers, if they follow the argument where it leads, will end up at some surprising results. But the identification of philosophy with subversion is its own kind of faddish instinct, all the more tiresome because it doesn’t recognize itself as such.

It’s been more than 50 years since there’s been anything approaching novelty or interest in the kind of academic shock jockery that serves as the modern sophist’s stock-in-trade. It’s a tired trick at this point, and since yesterday’s outrage is tomorrow’s commonplace, sensationalism comes with diminishing marginal returns.

When people get stuck in this kind of rut, they end up publishing in journals whose literal reason for existing is simply to publish Controversial Ideas, of which there are increasingly few to be had. So they cast lamely about on Twitter for something disgusting they haven’t said yet, like, “hey guys maybe we should shtup pigs.” No, we shouldn’t. Lol. Lmao.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

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