It's Hard Out Here for a Rationalist

One of the dirty little secrets of contemporary moral theory is that we haven't dealt very well at all with what one might call Glaucon's Inverse Challenge: that being immoral is bad for you. My favored theory, Kantianism, has a rather high-falutin' answer to the challenge, which is that immorality entails unfreedom. It's high-falutin' because it turns out that almost nobody really cares about having the sort of freedom that Kant is talking about, which is to say: I'm currently resigned to the fact that we will never be good Kantians. Nevertheless, lots of people care about "morality" or "being ethical", which raises the question: what is it that they care about under those names?

My current appointment outside of the philsoophy department has brought me in contact with a bucnh of very smart folks who care about (applied) ethics but aren't philosophers. At the same time, I've been reading up on the burgeoning field of empirical moral psychology. These two things have made vivid how far from my rationalist ideals ordinary "moral judgment" falls, and how far anything I have to say about morality is from having practical application (conversely, how much closer some form of subjectivism is to capturing our actual "moral" practices). This I find depressing. I place a some of the blame on reckless use of intuitions as if they were data, which invites deflationary psychological accounts of moral reasoning. But most of it, I think, is due to the fact that we find a need to do things in the name of "morality" (e.g. set certain limits on genetic engineering), so we do them, with still very little agreement or understanding about why we're doing them (Mary Warnock writes in the official British government commission report on embryo research something like, "at least we all agree that *some* moral line must be drawn") except that what we're doing is broadly consistent with our past practices and our intuitions about the cases. I don't really know where I'm going with this, except: I'm skeptical of what goes on in the name of morality even among well-meaning, non-religious, highly intelligent professionals whose job is to deal with ethical concerns, I think they need help, and I doubt that help is forthcoming in a form they would accept because they want help that would, say, answer Glaucon's inverse challenge, perhaps preserve moral responsibility of the "heaven and hell variety" (to quote the Strawson the Lesser), and otherwise confirm their deeply held "moral beliefs." (To be clear: I think a lot of the lines drawn are good - it's just that professional applied ethics is pretty much as much of a crapshoot as the way ethical issues get resolved on "House".)

For example, the British gov't commission was in part a response to scandals over medical tissue use -- in one well-publicized case, a doctor had retained bits of a dead child (including, grossly, the head) without knowledge of the parents, for research purposes. Now, everybody around me (and me) reacted with horror at this story. But when I suggested that maybe it was not wrong for the doctor to do this, the only other moral philosopher in the room said (half-seriously) to me, "how did you get into ethics, again?" Maybe the doctor's actions were wrong. But we didn't hear anything more about the case than I just presented, and I'm certainly not confident that what the doctor did was wrong just from hearing those facts. To allow our gut reaction to the case to set the ethical conclusion is silly, and I think can only lead to a philosophical morass. But of course, the panel was driven by cases like this in drawing up their ethical guidelines.You've got to at least give Peter Singer credit for willing to consider the disgusting (he quickly loses that credit elsewhere).