Will Morrisey Reviews

Seth Benardete: The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: Plato’s Philebus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

An earlier version of this review appeared in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Spring 1997. Volume 24, Number 3.

 

In the Philebus “Socrates finally replaces the good with the beautiful in his summary of the goods.” In this, “Plato does not simply oppose philosophy to poetry and contrast reason with the indulgence of the passions; he has philosophy invade the territory of poetry and claim for itself what seems to be the indisputable domain of poetry.” Philosophy’s superiority to poetry “cannot lie in the neutral impersonality of its discourse” but in its ability “to tell a better story than poetry.” If “better” means, finally, more beautiful, then how does philosophy differ from poetry in kind?

Tragic poets evidently, and perhaps comic poets indirectly, tell stories “center[ing] around foundational crimes, crimes that reveal what must not be violated if either man is to be man or the city is to be possible”—as seen in Oedipus, as he wonders at the riddle of the Sphinx. “In light of what Oedipus has done, Oedipus has to cease to be what he is,” a king, a just judge of criminals. He is the criminal, and so must put an end to his own royalty. Benardete’s Plato answers that philosophy’s beauty is a beauty of the mind and its thoughts, not of the body and its actions, a beauty that reflects a “divide between man as man and man as political animal that poetry denies.” “Socrates caps the poets by telling a story about the impossible, since it is true that such radical abstraction from the body is impossible.” But that only makes it more beautiful, farther above the city, which “did not educate [the philosopher] either in its opinions or in philosophy.” [1] How then does the philosopher differ from the aesthete? He differs in that the most beautiful is also the truest: “there is a range of human experience that is incorrigibly false, and the recognition of this is known to the soul, which is always trying to divine where the true good for itself is,” and “hides from the enchantments of poetry.” Is, then, the beautiful the true good? In that case, Socrates has not exactly replaced the good with the beautiful.

This book consists of two main parts: a translation of the Philebus and Benardete’s commentary. Socrates recalls to Protarchus that Philebus, whose name means lover of youth, has claimed that happiness consists of enjoyment, pleasure, delight. He may be said to be a lover of a certain sort of beauty, but is it the bodily beauty of youth or the beauty or potential beauty of youthful souls? Or both? Socrates, whose name might playfully be said to mean ‘rule of wisdom,’ associates himself thoughtfulness, thinking, remembering. Who, then, is the true lover of youth?

Protarchus is taking over Philebus’ argument. His name means ‘first ruler’ or ‘foremost ruler,’ a name that may express the ambition of a sophist. Socrates says he initiated the dialogue in order to articulate and interpret what is the best of human possessions. His “way,” he says, is to throw his interlocutors into “perplexity.” When it comes to pleasures, Protarchus is a man who wants to have it all. Protarchus wants a life that combines pleasure and thought. Socrates argues that without knowledge one would not know one is being pleasured and that thought therefore outranks pleasure. Protarchus may be too optimistic about the ability to enjoy many intense pleasures, particularly sexual pleasures, while thinking (either at the same time or at many other times); as Yogi Berra said, “You can’t hit and think at the same time.” Pleasure, Socrates remarks, is “a complex thing,” as there are good and bad pleasures. One needs to select among them, which requires thinking prior to enjoying. The pleasure associated with falsehood differs from the pleasure associated with knowledge. But this leaves open the possibility that knowledge merely instrumental to pleasure.

He proceeds by ‘abstracting’ thought from pleasure and pleasure from thought, to see if either in its pure form is preferable. Without knowledge, one wouldn’t even know if one were being pleasured. There are pleasures of the soul as well as pleasures of the body, and the soul is the locus of desires, not the body. “Our soul at times resembles a kind of a book”; memories and sensations ‘write’ “as it were speeches on our souls,” while images are ‘painted’ on them. Souls with bad pictures painted on them love false pleasures, false because bad for the soul. Thus, the greatest pains and pleasures come to the wicked, who are ‘extremists.’ Powerful evils are hateful, weak evils ridiculous; hence “the entire tragedy and comedy of life.” 

An archē is a ruling cause and also a cause that begins what it effects, a genesis. Socrates effectively debunks the name of Protarchus by distinguishing being from genesis in the sense that genesis is for the sake of being. But if genesis aims at a purpose, a tēlos, then Protarchus’ sophistry may well be a false beginning resulting in false wisdom, in unwisdom. Protarchus may not be a hateful tyrant, but he is a ridiculous thinker. Socrates argues that one should choose the “kind of life” that is closest to being, the life “in which there was neither joy nor pain, but thoughtful thinking as pure as possible.”

What would such a life be? Socrates divides the “science of learning” into two parts, a demiurgic part and a part “concerned with education and upbringing.” Demiurgic learning, learning about artisanship, production, aims at understanding the precise and worthwhile elements of the arts, namely, the arts of number, of measurement, and of weighing. All other elements of the arts consist of guesswork and of experiential knowledge. This means that some knowledge is purer or clearer than other kinds of knowledge, even as some pleasures are pure than others. Is there, then, a truest understanding, “that which is by nature always the same way.” 

Protarchus easily grasps this point in the abstract but applies it in an unfortunate way. Asked if there is a truest understanding, an understanding that “is by nature always in the same way,” Protarchus mentions Gorgias’ opinion that rhetoric is the best art. He would like to combine demiurgic learning with right upbringing; that is, being a sophist, he wants saying something to make it so. While admitting that rhetoric is great in the sense of extensive, far-reaching in its effects, Socrates suggests that to be the best art an art must be pure, even if not great. Mind and thought are the most pure and beautiful things; “thought is a participant in the lot and portion of the good to a higher degree than pleasure.” Why? Let a man “speak rightly”: “Let him set down memory, thought, knowledge, and true opinion as belonging to the same species (idea), and then have him consider whether anyone would choose for himself to have or get anything whatsoever without them, let alone pleasure, regardless of whether the pleasure were the most extensive or the most extreme possible, which he neither truly opines that is enjoying nor altogether knows what experience he has undergone; and, in turn has no memory of the experience for any length of time whatsoever.”

Socrates does not say that thought is or brings about the most intense pleasure. While distinguishing thought and pleasure and subordinating the latter, he does not eliminate it. Pleasure is honey; thought is water. Mix them—otherwise, one will be ridiculously ‘pure’ (one might say ‘Kantian’), using the instruments of the divine science in the mundane world. The pleasures must be ‘filtered,’ so that none is admitted that will interfere with thought. But again, any blending requires numbering, measuring, and weighing, which means that mind be prior to pleasure. Measure is beautiful; there, Socrates says, “the power of the good has fled for us into the nature of the beautiful.” In that sense the beautiful “replaces” the good. The good consists of beauty, commensuration, and truth. Mind is more nearly akin to these than pleasure is. The philosopher’s way of life is therefore superior to the pleasure-loving sophist’s way of life.

Benardete comments that measure requires the ideas of the limited and the unlimited. The dialogue itself embodies these ideas. It begins, like many a narrative poem, in medias res and so has a ‘missing’ beginning. “We are forced to wonder…whether the unbounded Philebus does not represent something essential about philosophy, that it is an activity that cannot have a beginning or an end of a strictly determined kind, even though the philosopher always begins somewhere in the neighborhood of the true beginning of philosophy and end almost every question short of the answer he has set out to find. The philosopher’s own death or senility also cuts short his quest without affecting the unending life of philosophy itself.” Philosophy has two beginnings, the first cosmological—the quarrel of philosophers with poets concerning the status of myths—the other human, when Socrates turned away from the teleological physics that previous philosophers had offered as a replacement for myths. The uniqueness of the Philebus consists in its presentation of Socrates after his ‘turn’ not mentioning the city and almost not mentioning the law. “All of morality is out of bounds in the Philebus, and, whatever the human good turns out to be, it is not informed by any social virtues.” It might be supposed that philosophers will agree with Protarchus, since “pleasure as the good…seems to be the first deduction that speculative philosophy would make when it turned from heaven to the human things.” And indeed “all of morality is out of bounds in the Philebus, a dialogue in which the polis is “never mentioned.” “Socrates, then, has been put by Plato in the difficult position of arguing against pleasure without any of the weapons with which his discovery of political philosophy might have furnished him.” His Socrates responds by noticing a weakness in the ever-changing, shape-shifting, apparently characterless character of the sophist: he needs pleasure to be the answer to the question of what the human good is. He needs finality, even as he attempts to escape the attempted finality of the city.

The city’s laws treat human perplexity by answering questions with finality. “The dissatisfaction that Protarchus feels at the end of the Philebus must reflect the unfinishable character of any true philosophical question, but it cannot represent the true state of the issue of the human good, for that issue must be settled once and for all if the philosopher is not to be in doubt about the good of philosophy as the human good. The argument of the Philebus must come to a nonarbitrary end…while it opens up everything else.” As Socrates remarks, human pleasure is double: tragic or comic. But tragedy or comedy, alone or in combination, cannot grasp the truth. “Philosophy must be by itself the truth of comedy and tragedy and the good of human life,” else philosophy collapses back into poetry. Philosophy, then, is a way of life, as “Socrates stands not just for thinking in all its purity but for the effort to think as well.” The moral-political life represents a ‘third way,’ independent of either philosophy or the life of pleasure. 

Although his name means first beginning, Protarchus fails to achieve such perfectly free self-determination, as certain limits are inevitable in any life. Consider, for example, the meaning of his name. Despite it, he likely didn’t give it itself to himself, as “no man gives to himself his first name.” (For example, a journeyman professional wrestler named George Wagner had to rename himself, start calling himself ‘Gorgias George,’ before he could achieve fame and fortune as ‘The Toast of the Coast.’) Even “self-determination of this most elementary kind is not his.” The desire to maximize pleasure and thought simultaneously is utopian, as hedonism’s limit is the thoughtlessness that precludes knowing you’re having a good time. “Any hedonistic calculus must…devise a scale on which pleasure can be set.” But “the licentious cannot enjoy their own states since by definition they are not in a state they can identify, for otherwise they would be under control.” They preclude themselves from any rightful measure.

The demarcation set upon the moral-political man is Mardi Gras, the feast of fools, the purgative elevation of lords of misrule. As for the philosopher, “To be silly is a privilege of the wise on holiday.” Not only is hedonism “a funny form of idealism”, which conceives pleasure as a kind of universal with many particulars that ‘participate’ in it, but each of the other ways of life has its own funny form of idealism: the too-political man, whose desire for self-sufficiency forever contradicts his real dependence on others; the (in a sense) too-philosophic man, Socrates, whose life delineates the limits of philosophic inquiry and who needs Plato’s ‘poetic’ rescue.

In Protarchus, the attempt to mix pleasure and thought yields a political sort of soul, but one of the potentially the most dangerous type. As a matter of fact,”Protarchus is more eager to win, or at least not to lose, than he is interested in pleasure.” (Perhaps his praise of the hedonistic way of life is an attempt to soften the souls of would-be rivals for rule, of making them compliant subjects.)  A rhetorician unbound by the laws, an apolitical-political man, tends toward tyranny. Unlike youth-loving Philebus, he secretly craves to be honored more than he seeks to be pleasured. Socrates cannot deal with him as he deals with the respectable but wavering Crito, or as the Athenian Stranger deals with his sober interlocutors. Socrates must convince Protarchus that there are many pleasures, and that thought is needed to sort them out and rank them. Socratic knowledge of ignorance thrives when its opponents concede that pleasure is heterogeneous because then one must choose on the basis of truth, which Socratic inquiry is uniquely suited to undertake. Protarchus needs to want a science of pleasure. Yet “he does not want to believe that the perfection (telos) of life consists in perplexity. A life of eidetic analysis is not a life for him.” But desire belongs first of all to the soul, not to the body, and “soul from the start is a structure of question,” proto-philosophic not proto-hedonistic.

Recalling the stern and pious laws of the pious, Benardete observes that the philosopher launches his “second sailing,” his philosophic quest, after seeing that the first sailing, on the winds of divine inspiration, gets one nowhere nearer the truth, and that a new effort—not exactly sailing but rowing, using one’s own powers—is necessary. “Socrates stands not just for thinking in all its purity but for the effort to think well”; as such, he guards himself against sophistic blandishments and, in his dialogues with fellow citizens, prepares (a very few of) them for sterner stuff, as well.  Protarchus is well beyond the first sailing, beyond public opinion, at least in his own mind (although if he practiced the rhetoric he preaches he would find himself dependent upon the opinions of the many, the opposite of free). He is not yet at the second sailing, in that he does not know his own true powers or his own true weaknesses. He wants moral certainty without the morality; he does not want to know what he does not know. Socratic “freedom from the gods and other men” wants very much to know its own ignorance and thereby arrives at a certainty concerning the human good denied to quest-for-certitude, moral-political men and mindless hedonists.  “However different pleasure and thought might be, Socrates presents both as a state and condition of the soul with the causal power to render human life happy.” But the pleasure he is talking about isn’t the bodily pleasure Philebus wants and Protagoras professes to want and to teach the likes of Philebus how to reach. For his part, Socrates inclines to teach that “whatever is impossible is not good,” that whatever eidetic analysis brings forth, a “cosmological constant” will defeat “whatever combination of elements eidetic analysis came up with that went beyond the real.” After all, “if the good and the real do not coincide, then one might as well choose to dream one’s life or give up reason,” become a misologist. “If, however, the good sticks to the real, the first good is knowledge, and moral virtue is largely irrelevant, particularly if moral virtue includes piety, which can be only an opinion about the gods and their providence.” This is where self-knowledge comes in, as “self-knowledge, Socrates implies, is an exact knowledge of one’s own goods.”

That the life of reason is not without its problems—the problem of the one and the many being perhaps the foremost among them—does not of course escape Socrates’ notice. In terms of the life of philosophy, this is the problem of how to choose rationally the life of reason, of how to know in advance that the reasoning life is best. It is settled practically by providence or necessity, which actually may be unprovidential or random, even if very fortunate. As Benardete puts it, Socrates “can choose the life of philosophy, but he cannot choose Socrates’ life of philosophy, which shapes up as he goes along and becomes good.” 

Some souls simply do not incline to satisfied belief. “To introduce gods into human life is to make too much of human life. It is to give oneself airs.” And so “Socrates rejects with a laugh the entire basis of Antigone’s nobility.” Obviously, the philosopher does more than laugh, else there would be no distinction between a philosopher and the village atheist. “Self-knowledge, Socrates implies, is an exact account of one’s own goods”; lack of self-knowledge is more comic than tragic. The human soul by nature does not rest content—if it could, the purposeless pleasures of hedonism would suffice—nor can it never rest or “simply postulate a goal outside itself” that gives the soul no taste of its own goodness. To recognize this is to abandon “the psychology of pleasure and pain” and (what finally mirrors that psychology?) the hopes of reward for the just and pious. The truth the philosopher uncovers is “the truth of our perplexities and their necessary structure,” which is not a pleasurable truth, although it is good for the soul to recognize it. Few souls bring themselves to live happily according to this disenchanted truth.

 

Note

1. In the Republic, Plato tells “a story that solves the political problem once and for all by showing that it is impossible”—that is, that there is no human nature that is born to rule” except for philosophic souls, who don’t want to rule. “Philosophy alone can give a true account of the Cave because it starts from that element in the Cave that is connected, however tenuously, with the light.” That is, Socratic or political philosophy starts from the opinions of citizens, in principle open to reconsideration in light of reason, thought governed by the principle of noncontradiction. Philosophers stumble if they begin by gazing at the heavens in an attempt to understand nature directly.

 

James Franklin: The Worth of Persons: The Foundation of Ethics. New York: Encounter Books, 2022.

 

Franklin denies that ethics consists of a set of rules of conduct. In this, he departs both from Kant and from God. Neither the categorical imperative nor the Ten Commandments make sense as freestanding rules and, indeed, Franklin observes that Kant himself grounds his moral rule on his claim that human beings have moral dignity: hence his books on the metaphysics of morals. Human beings have dignity insofar as they share with any other rational beings which may exist a rational will, that is, a will which gives a universal (as distinguished from an idiosyncratic) law. This is what Kant means by an “autonomous” will; it wills laws for itself but not only for itself. The categorical imperative restricts individual and collective lawgivers to laws that can be obeyed without contradiction by all rational beings—for example, ‘Thou shalt not murder.’ By so willing, rational beings enter a “kingdom of ends,” a “systematic union of various rational beings” who rule themselves through common laws, laws which “abstract from the personal differences” of those beings. “All rational beings stand under the law in that each of them is to treat himself and all others never merely as means but always at the same time as ends in themselves.” Each member of that kingdom “gives universal laws in it but is also himself subject to these laws.” Each is a “sovereign” within the kingdom. Morality understood as rational autonomy and sovereignty “alone has dignity.” Its dignity inheres in the fact that it depends upon nothing but the rational will—not on success, not on “any subjective disposition or taste” which would “coax” the will to follow it. This “lets the worth of such a cast of mind be cognized as dignity and puts it infinitely above all price.” [1]

Franklin follows Kant in arguing that “the central foundational notion in ethics is the worth or dignity of persons.” He does not restrict worth to rationality alone, however; the worth of persons “supervenes on a number of properties which are not themselves explicitly ethical but which distinguish humans from other entities in the world—rationality, consciousness, the rational will, the unity and diversity of the self, emotional structure and love, individuality.” Supervenience became a key term in analytical philosophy in the twentieth century. ‘B’ is said to “supervene on” ‘A’ if some difference in ‘A’ is necessary for any difference in ‘B’ to be possible. As the saying goes, ‘There cannot be an A-difference without a ‘B’ difference.’ This does not necessarily mean that ‘B’ is entailed by or reducible to ‘A,’ a point Franklin will insist upon. Indeed, to Kantian dignity he adds “the Aristotelian notion of a perfection or excellence” of human beings as an indispensable component of ethics. He understands that combining Kantian with Aristotelian ethics is not something philosophers have usually attempted, in light of Kant’s insistence upon his own departure from Aristotelian “eudaimonism.” 

Ethics surely includes striving for right action. But not fundamentally so. “What we are most disturbed by ethically…is not anything to do with actions, but the terribleness of suffering.” Further, “whenever we ask why some action is right or wrong, we find we are led back to reasons that are not themselves about action but concern the good or evil of those affected by the action”—for example, “gross violations of the right to life.” Such “horror is an emotional as well as a rational reaction,” and a person who lacks the emotion of “compassion” or agapic love in reaction to suffering strikes one as a defective human being. Such emotion does not contradict reason but supports it. “There must be some rational explanation as to why worth gives rise where appropriate to those emotional reaction and an account of when they can be trusted.” But “rules, rights, and virtues…make no sense without reference to worthy” or dignity. Action takes aim, it “is for something”; “the rightness of the action depends heavily on the rightness of the purpose and the value of the outcome.” Although he doesn’t say so, Franklin knows that Kant’s attempt to ground morality on ‘pure’ reason or universalizability, abstracted from ends was refuted by Hegel, only a few decades after Kant had attempted it. [2] 

But Kantian personalism, his idea of human dignity or worth, withstands scrutiny much better. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant contrasts the human being “in the system of nature”—a “being of slight importance” within that system, slightly more valuable than other animals for the work he does and usually able therefore to command a higher price for his services than they—to the human being “regarded as a person, that is, as the subject of a morally practical reason.” This homo noumenon “is exalted above any price,” an “end in himself,” “possess[ing] a dignity, (an absolute inner worth) by which the respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world,” with whom he lives “on a footing of equality.” Such a being is humble with regard to the moral law but ambitious when striving “to equal or surpass others” in performing his duty, in acting in accordance with that law. The law itself, however, comes from his own exercise of his reason, from thinking through the universalizing character of reasoning. [3] Franklin concurs with the dignity or worth of the capacity to reason while admitting that human nature is more than a mere mechanism. That is, he balks at Kant’s strict dualism, using the idea of supervenience to bridge the gap between the natural ‘is’ and the supposedly purely rational ‘ought.’

Franklin considers “three main approaches to ethics,” finding each of them “superficial if they are meant as accounts of foundations” or groundworks of ethics. They are “deontological” accounts (emphasizing rules and duties), “consequentialist” (emphasizing ends or outcomes), and virtue-centered (emphasizing character). Deontological accounts rightly look at the effects of one’s actions on others (in Kant, this is the ‘universalizability’ feature of his doctrine). They get us away from mere self-regard. But the need of another “only has moral significance if the being having the need is of moral worth.” The same goes for consequentialist accounts; their moral weight depends upon a prior assumption of the worth of the person who enjoys or suffers the consequences of a given action. Virtue-centered ethics, “living the ‘good life’ of justice, courage, temperance,” and prudence, “a dominant approach of ancient ethics,” aims at fostering “a right character, which will then issue in right action.” But again, this fostering “only makes sense if the entity possessing the character is itself of ethical worth,” since “virtues are for something outside themselves.” Virtues aim to benefit “a person, who possesses worth.” At a minimum, persons possess life and liberty, neither of which may rightly be abrogated except “for a reason itself strongly based in the worth of person, such as self-protection and the harm of others.” 

Franklin next turns to claims about the foundations of ethics by Darwinists, Calvinists, Humeans, Socratics, and Aristotelians, charging that none of them “incorporate a commitment to worth.” Darwinian ethics (seen in the ‘sociobiology’ of E. O. Wilson and others) regards the foundation of ethics in a way that attempts to substitute scientific thinking for ethical thinking. To say that such and such a behavior, called ethical, has won adherents because it benefits them in the struggle for evolutionary survival may be true or false, but it is ethically irrelevant. “The theory just says, ‘What happens, happens,'” and as such it fails to ask whether those who survive the struggle are worth much of anything.

The theory of divine command, seen in Calvin, “has the same problem as the naturalist theory—lack of an independent moral viewpoint for saying that God has got it right (or wrong).” Franklin cites the Euthyphro, where Socrates asks whether something is good because the gods command it or because it is good, and the gods command it for that reason. Since “the wrongness of murder is an implication of the worth of persons,” if the gods commanded murder, then they would be wrong. The good must be enforced by but not the result of the gods’ arbitrary will. Kant writes, “even the Holy One of the Gospels must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognize Him as such.” It must be said that the Socratic argument applies less well to the God of the Bible than it does to the ‘gods’ of ancient Greece, and not only because the latter are fictitious. Even if they were real, they would still not be Creator-gods, the givers of meaning and the makers of Man. Moreover, if God is Logos, as John’s Gospel says He is, then his commands are not merely arbitrary but reasonable; that is, the divine Person embodies the moral standards according to which He issues His commands. Franklin admits this, falling back to say that if God created human beings to have “inherent worth,” then we can recognize that fact rationally without any but a practical need for God’s commands as means of motivating us to resist the pull of our ‘fallen’ nature.

Hume’s critique of morality—the supposed impossibility of deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’—gives his readers no argument against the idea that persons have worth, contenting itself with assuming that they don’t. For Hume and his followers, there can be no “reasons or ground for our ultimate wishes,” which are established only by customs. In this, they share the moral skepticism of the Darwinists, if for different reasons. Darwinians fail to recognize the ‘is-ought’ distinction; Humeans treat it as a refutation of ethical theory itself. Both explain away ethics as a sort of pseudo-problem, although the Darwinians don’t know that that’s what they’re doing.

According to Franklin, Socrates erroneously replaces virtue with reason, defining virtue as knowledge, evil as ignorance. Socrates thus disagrees with the teaching of Genesis, which locates goodness in innocence—a form of ignorance, namely, ignorance of the distinction between good and evil. “That idea appeals to the class interest of philosophers” by making them the rightful kings of the ignorant. (But not tyrants, a point Franklin overlooks.) It has survived into our modern, egalitarian times in the analytic philosophers’ notion of “symmetry between humans,” which means that “I put my interests on a par with others’ because there is no reason why mine should be preferred to theirs.” But again, “appeals to symmetry are meaningless without establishing what, at the bottom level, symmetry is symmetry of.” If it is symmetry of “interests,” why are those interests good? One still needs “inquiry into what the good of a person is, and what it is about a person that makes their good a reason for action.”

As for Aristotle, Franklin objects to his teleological account of nature as the foundation of ethics. Admittedly, “there is something correct…about seeing virtues as serving a purpose in human life and in giving an account of the virtues as perfection of humans that animals do not have,” but why is “the smooth running of something of a kind” to be deemed good, “without a prior account of why a thing of that kind is valuable”? A fast-running cockroach is a damned good cockroach, but is a cockroach intrinsically good? (Or a man?) To put it more philosophically, Aristotle splits theory and practice too sharply. “The discovery of worth in individuals is as much a function of the ‘speculative reason’ as the discovery of length or mass in physical things.”  To fail to do this, to make ethics primarily a matter of practical reasoning about fitting means to ends, is to fail to distinguish “the good in itself and the good for us.” I may be grateful for “a gift that is an objective good for me,” but I rather admire “a virtue that is an objective good in itself.” “The whole Aristotelian edifice of ‘natural goodness’ rests on the assumption that the organisms for whom things are a good are things worth having on the planet”; “without this assumption, the Aristotelian superstructure is a house of cards.” To make prudential or practical reasoning the foundation of ethics is fundamentally unserious and egocentric.” And if “we then attempt to fill the gap by appealing to some symmetry between myself and others, which would make their flourishing a motive for me, we have gone beyond Aristotelian ethics, as we have implicitly imported a principle of equal (or at least comparable) worth of persons,” an ‘equality principle’ that Aristotle, with his arguments for natural slavery and his praise for the magnanimous or great-souled man, seems to deny.

But does he? On the matter of egocentricity, Franklin ignores the fact that Aristotle follows his Nicomachean Ethics with the Politics. Human beings are by nature political animals, flourishing best when ruling and being ruled in turn. His ethics doesn’t divorce ‘self-regarding’ from ‘other-regarding.’ As to the good of men and cockroaches in relation to the planet, the same holds true. Earth requires reciprocity of species. If any one of them threatens to overrun the earth, ruining the natural foundation for its own existence, then it deserves to be reeled back in. That goes for a plague of locusts or human destruction of ‘the environment.’ Reeling in locusts might rightly be done with less violence than reeling in humans, but that is a matter of means, not a refutation of the foundations of Aristotelian ethics. That is, human beings are political animals and rational animals, their rationality making their political nature possible.

To this, Franklin might reply: very well, Aristotle still doesn’t prove that human beings organized in political communities are things worth having on the planet. According to the Bible, God Himself has had his reservations about us, on occasion. But absent God or any other known superior beings, who, other than human beings, can judge the issue? Speciesism is inevitable. Kant’s own notion of human dignity assumes that rational beings are dignified because, well, they’re rational. That’s just the way they are.

In general, Franklin objects to the lack of tragedy and of remorse in all of these theories. Oddly, he claims that “even Calvinism” regards “the main content of divinely commanded ethics to be Jesus’s rules of love,” ignoring the obvious point that those laws command Jesus to allow Himself to be tortured and killed on the Cross, and that Christians are adjured to imitate His example, if moral push comes to moral shove. This notwithstanding, he prefers Kant’s idea of human dignity and the consequent duty to respect human beings as such to any of its competitors. He excises, however, the duty to treat human beings as ends not means, inasmuch as “there is no use pretending that one’s firing at an enemy soldier is treating him as an end in himself,” especially since “the necessity to survive is also of extreme moral urgency, and that, too, follows from the worth of persons.” And he passes over the categorical imperative in polite silence.

Very well, then, how exactly should one show a foundation for the worth of persons? Here is where “supervenience” comes in. “One of the very few widely agreed principles about ethical foundations is that there is no difference between two things in worth (or ethical properties generally) without a difference in their natural properties.” That is, if worth can be established, it cannot hover above the nature of the beings in which it inheres; their nature limits their worth, defining it without necessarily determining it. In bringing ethics into coordination with human nature, Franklin departs from Kant, who attempts to leave nature behind.

He continues to share in Kant’s search for a metaphysics of morals, chiding the “phobia of metaphysics” that is “widespread in ethical theory,” perhaps most prominently in the work of John Rawls, who in his extraordinarily influence A Theory of Justice attempts to formulate an ethical theory free of any substantial realist claims about the worth of persons.” But “if, as a matter of fact, humans are not equal persons, there is no justice in conducting politics as if they are”; and “if they are not in fact, free there is no point in giving them choices such as votes.” “But whether persons are free and of equal worth are basic metaphysical questions.”

As for the historicist claims of Richard Rorty and many European philosophers, “only humans are subject to historical social and cultural pressures via language, and that is so in virtue of the nature of humans.” Historicism cannot in fact leapfrog over human nature. Franklin commits himself rather “to inquiry into ‘metaphysics’ in the basic sense of distinguishing the morally relevant from the morally irrelevant properties of things.” Metaphysically speaking, then, “what is most central in ethics is not human interests”—which might be explicable in terms of our material nature—but “why humans and their interests should matter in the first place.”

The search for natural human properties upon which ethics can supervene nonetheless does lead to “a serious problem.” Is there any such property or set of properties that “some human beings lack”; if not, it cannot be treated as a universal without leading “prima facie to grossly unequal worth.” Aristotle’s great-souled man gives Franklin the creeps. Does his superiority not justify treating “lesser mortals” as “vermin”?

Well, no, and Aristotle never suggests that it does. This vitiates Franklin’s claim, but does not necessarily wreck his worry that “if one chooses an occurrent property such as rationality or consciousness as the foundation of moral worth one risks denying the moral equality of persons, since humans can differ widely in how currently rational they are,” or how free they are, or how apt to care for themselves they are. Indeed, the same person typically will differ widely in all of those characteristics, over a lifetime. Does ethical conduct not entail protecting the vulnerable, not exploiting them?

Franklin therefore turns away from “occurrent-property” theory to a “capacity” theory. Human begins are, as Jonathan Swift was wont to insist, not rational animals but animals capable of reason. A human being incapacitated by Alzheimer’s Disease can no longer exercise that capacity; it is a loss, there is “something in them that is in a defective state,” whereas no one would call it “a tragedy for a cat to be unable to exercise rationality.” There is “something about being human, inherent to them, something which is now defective in expression.” Their capacity is natural, but their loss is personal.

“The aim of moral life is to transform potency into act, because act is better,” being the fulfillment of potential. “Those who fall short in those respects but are still human lack something important, but what give them moral equality in a more basic sense is their (sadly unrealized) potentiality to realize those properties.” We see this when a woman suffers a miscarriage. She never says, ‘I lost the fetus’ or ‘I lost the tissue.’ She always says, ‘I lost the baby.’ And when adults make horrific moral choices, they kill people who “have lives worth living, but are unable to live them”; their murderers, too, could have had lives worth living but rejected any such way of life.

Franklin thus has moral worth supervening on human nature. Having excised the categorical imperative from Kantianism, and having rejected both utilitarianism and historicism, this leaves him tolerably close to a natural right theory while attempting to avoid Aristotelian teleology. [4] How close? He turns to a fuller account of “the supervenience of worth on natural properties.” The relation between worth and those properties is, he admits, “a difficult one,” as Hume’s is-ought “gap” cannot be closed readily. 

So: “What does an assertion of being ‘good’ add to just being rational, emotive, or whatever natural properties are the grounds of worth?” And how can one “explain what the relation is between supervenient goodness” and those grounding properties? These questions are made more difficult when a philosopher joins with Hume in rejecting natural teleology, which holds that all things aim at the good. Franklin argues that to say, as Aristotle does, that every thing by nature aims at its perfection, and that evil consists in some impediment to that natural aiming, does not explain why a human being’s perfection is “worth more, better than, say, a rock’s perfection. Why, if we need to choose between human happiness and splitting a rock to accommodate us, is it the right moral choice to choose to split the rock? “We need an additional theory of the grading of forms, to explain why some forms such as rationality confer a great deal of worth and others such as rockness a nugatory amount.” Also, does the perfection theory mean that a defective member of a species has “no source of worth” at all? This is a reprise of Franklin’s worries about the great-souled man and natural slavery. “Some supervenience theory is still needed to explain how being a certain way, naturalistically, necessarily results in its being of ethical worth.”

“Entities the same in all natural properties are morally equivalent,” intrinsically, regardless of circumstances such as, for example, market value. Franklin agrees with Hume that natural properties such as rationality, capacity for free action, and individuality are non-ethical. Moral facts are not found in the nonmoral facts. They do nonetheless “necessarily give rise to the supervenient entities or properties,” which are not reducible to their natural foundation or grounding. “It is not true that the supervenient entity is ‘nothing but’ the base.” Good isn’t “identified with a natural property, but is said to arise of necessity from natural properties.” 

How so? The human person may be summarized by its nature as “embodied rationality”—not rationality abstracted from all his other qualities. The foundational features most relevant to worth are those which would be those whose loss would be most “devastating” to the person, leaving him “unable to operate as a human being,” if “still human.” Aristotle is right to find in “purely intellectual rationality”—the ability to understand reasons as distinguished from the calculations that artificial and animal intelligence do have,” as “the uniquely human ability.” “Understanding is essentially entirely unlike rule following, the manipulation of uninterpreted symbols, and the application of statistical algorithms.” Kant is also right in maintaining that rationality in itself doesn’t make us moral, that one needs “a good will,” a commitment to fulfill and defend our nature as rational embodiments; “an exclusive focus on rationality omits the crucial emotional aspects of humanity.” “Actually thinking rationally, as opposed to merely being able to, requires some motivation to translate potentiality into actuality; even extremely rational activities like pure mathematics require passion and commitment to drive them forward.” Plato and Aristotle identify that as erōs. With Kant, Franklin calls this the rational will. Both the classics and the moderns call it practical reason or prudence. For Franklin, not so much natural erotic love as willed agapic love issues from the moral person. With the moderns generally, Franklin separates human nature from the human will, although the human will, supervenient upon nature, rightly should be directed rationally.

Additionally, a “central aspect of rationality” is that “we know who we are.” Human beings naturally exhibit consciousness and personal identity, a “unified self” which is “necessary for agency,” a necessity seen in those suffering such mental disorders as schizophrenia. Memory and imagination make this unity possible. Our interests and experiences can be good, but they are not good “primarily,” as they “do not exist separately except possibly in very disturbed psyches, and the value they have is that of the self of which they are a part (or state). 

“A real human being,” then “is not simple but contains a vastly complex, multifaceted and changing panorama including a representation of itself (mind and body) and a good portion of the surrounding world, and of the past and anticipated future of both self and world,” including “a basic sociality.” “Understanding reasons and choosing to act on them” are “central” to being human; it is the “rational will,” not the rational nature of human beings that gives “a person absolute worth”—as distinct from a human being’s rational nature. That will therefore deserves to enjoy freedom of action “in some sufficiently strong sense” in order “for bodily movements to actually be actions of a person.” Without freedom, no practical reason; without practical reason, no humans; without humans, no persons. Without persons, no agapic love, since erotic love or admiration, in the low sense of physical attraction or the high sense of attraction to a beautiful soul, can motivate “‘trading up’ to anyone who exemplifies those qualities better.” The love Franklin regards as genuinely moral “is directed to an individual, not to a set of qualities or even to an individual just in virtue of a set of qualities.” The latter lends itself to ‘pricing,’ the former “to dignity, in Kantian terms.” Human rationality “enables” human individuality or personhood, without being the same as it. The person’s “absolute worth” inheres in his irreplaceable individuality. “Wipe out a rainforest or zombie and it can be replaced with a copy without a loss. Not with a human.”

Franklin distinguishes worth from obligation. “The worth of humans is a (moral) fact about them, but my obligation to assist or respect them is a relation of me to them.” What bridges the gap between them is Aquinas’ “synderesis” or conscience. In Kantian terms, “the connection of worth to obligation is synthetic a prior (necessary but not conceptual).” For example, “if someone falls in the river near me, it is my responsibility to help him if he appears to need it” and if I can do so,” on the grounds that “a prospective injury which I could easily prevent is a harm to something of great worth.” It is conscience that links the moral worth of the person to the obligation to act in a certain way in a given set of circumstances. Aquinas is also right to claim that one can deduce “principles of obligation from the grounds of worth such as rationality,” thereby generating natural law ethics. I this, Franklin’s “worth-based” ethics and Aristotelian-Thomist naturalist ethics concur. 

This in turn is not the same as motivation. A virtuous man will act to save a fellow human from drowning, if he can, but “that took work in training virtue.” A person might be evil, fully intending evil, as in Satan’s famous prayer in Paradise Lost, “Evil be thou my good.” “Obligation ought to motivate, but it does so only for the virtuous.” Education, including education in practical rationality, “is a right, and failure to be educated is a harm and thus a violation of that right” when such education is available. The refinement of the human soul is something we owe ourselves, and one another. Here as elsewhere, “worth generates obligations.” “The supervenience of worth on rationality, consciousness, and its other bases, is, like any supervenience, obvious to a well-disposed mind that understands the question.”

How do we know the worth of persons? What is the ‘epistemology’ of morals? We know things ethically the way we know some non-ethical things, although not so directly as we know some things by sense perception. The natural properties upon which worth supervenes are known, but not in the same way as “scientific properties like mass, length, and charge.” I once talked with a man who was attempting to claim that all real knowledge is ‘scientific.’ I suggested that his small daughter didn’t know much about him, ‘scientifically’. She probably couldn’t say much about his DNA structure or the other various compounds that compose him. But it would be very odd to say that she didn’t know a lot about him in other ways, especially ways concerning his character. “To understand what it is like to be another human, with a unique life history and experience, point of view and emotions, requires a kind of imaginative sympathy that can be objectively right or wrong but which contrasts with the method of the natural sciences.” We have all known people who were very good at knowing scientifically, not so good at knowing persons, and others who were just the opposite. When it comes to conduct, we trust the latter persons more. “Human communication depends on success being the norm when inferring how other humans are thinking,” inferences drawn by comparing “the conclusions by others with those drawn by our own rationality”—a process animals, “highly cognitive as they are in a way, cannot do.” This is what “makes the social sciences methodologically different from the natural sciences, more hermeneutic” than they. Social scientists who attempt to reduce humanity to the measurable behavior of human persons don’t have the brains they were born with, as it were. But “babies are right. Empathy is at the bottom of ethics, and it is a form of ethical knowledge.” Aristotle knows what babies know, Franklin remarks, in writing “The soul is in a way all things.” This is the foundation of the ‘Socratic turn’ in philosophy, away from untroubled contemplation of the cosmos and toward political philosophy, reasoning with other human persons. Or, as the Bible has it, “Fear of the Lord,” a Person, “is the beginning of wisdom.” Love of the Lord, and of other persons, may ensue. “Before any physical action on behalf of its object,” love “requires a mental action, attention.” God and other persons need to ‘get our attention’ before we can love them and come to know them. 

“So what does love attend to, and respond to?” Love is “on the lookout for anything good in the object of love,” being “keen to recognize any of the bases of worth,” delighting “in any perfection of the beloved, any progress toward being more fully human any toddler’s first steps or first words.” But those bases of worth inhere in a person, an individual, “that is one of the things—perhaps the principal thing—that love responds to.” As knowledge, “love can make mistakes.” We can commit idolatry, loving money, or for that matter knowledge, justice, art, our country’s traditions, universal law, a good will, forgetting that the things we love are “possible objects of love only because of their intimate connection with the bases of the worth of persons.” This is why a Jane Austen novel provides a sounder moral education than, say, Professor Franklin’s book or a Will Morrisey Review of it. “Knowledge of human worth should arise naturally from the attributions of the bases of worth” to other human beings, since “we know the bases of worth in virtue of possessing them, and barring any cognitive defect, we can conclude to the worth that supervenes on them.” That is a philosophically formal description of what Austen’s heroines do, and what her comic minor characters fail to do.

 

 

Notes

1. Immanuel Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Mary Gregor translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 4:433-4:436.
2. G.W.F. Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right. H. B. Nisbet translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Section 135.
3. Immanuel Kant: The Metaphysics of Morals.  Mary Gregor translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 6:435-6:436.
4. Regarding utilitarianism, Franklin writes: “If taken literally, the ideal of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ implies loading the ills of the many onto a single scapegoat if possible, or favoring those with special talents for enjoying a champagne lifestyle. That is because happiness is valued a sa kind of stuff to be calculated with and maximized, in abstraction from the people possessing the happiness. That is, it values experience in abstraction from the experiencer.”