{"id":5042,"date":"2017-01-09T17:58:09","date_gmt":"2017-01-09T22:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=5042"},"modified":"2017-01-09T18:00:38","modified_gmt":"2017-01-09T23:00:38","slug":"edvard-westermarck-and-his-detractors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2017\/01\/09\/morality\/edvard-westermarck-and-his-detractors\/","title":{"rendered":"Edvard Westermarck and His Detractors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Judging by the amount of space devoted to him on Wikipedia, Edvard Westermarck<\/a> was little regarded as a moral philosopher.\u00a0 Contemporaries such as G. E. Moore<\/a> and W. D. Ross<\/a>, not to mention such immediate predecessors as John Stuart Mill <\/a>and Henry Sidgwick<\/a>, made a much bigger splash.\u00a0 For all that, Westermarck was aware of some simple but very significant truths about morality, and the rest were blind to them.\u00a0 Apparently you don’t get a lot of space in Wikipedia for being right, or at least not for being right about morality.\u00a0 When it comes to that subject, people tend to listen only when you say what they want to hear.\u00a0 Westermarck most definitely did not.<\/p>\n

It was no secret to Westermarck that he was stepping on some toes.\u00a0 He told the legions of moral philosophers and experts on ethics that they were superfluous because they were experts about something that didn’t exist.\u00a0 He told the legions of religious zealots that the source of their moral dogmas was imaginary.\u00a0 He told all the rest of us that the “facts” about morality that we “feel in our bones” are illusions.<\/p>\n

It is natural for us to perceive Good and Evil as absolute facts.\u00a0 Morality is a manifestation of evolved traits, and traits evolve because they happen to improve the odds that the genes responsible for them will survive and reproduce.\u00a0 Obviously, morality is most effective at improving the odds when we perceive Good and Evil, not as subjective entities that we can change from day to day according to our whims of the moment, but as objective things-in-themselves that have a “real existence apart from any reference to a human mind,” as Westermarck put it.\u00a0 If someone tells us it just ain’t so, our reaction is predictably negative.\u00a0 He addressed the objections of one such critic, the utilitarian Dr. H. Rashdall in his Ethical Relativity<\/em><\/a>, published in 1932.\u00a0 According to Dr. Rashdall, the denial of the objective validity of moral judgments,<\/p>\n

…is fatal to the deepest spiritual convictions and to the highest spiritual aspirations of the human race.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

to which Westermarck replies,<\/p>\n

It is needless to say that a scientific theory is not invalidated by the mere fact that it is likely to cause mischief… Another question is whether the ethical subjectivism I am here advocating really is a danger to morality… My moral judgments spring from my own moral consciousness; they judge of the conduct of other men not from their point of view but from mine, not in accordance with their feelings and opinions about right and wrong but according to my own.\u00a0 And these are not arbitrary.\u00a0 We approve and disapprove because we cannot do otherwise; our moral consciousness belongs to our mental constitution, which we cannot change as we please.\u00a0 Can we help feeling pain when the fire burns us?\u00a0 Can we help sympathizing with our friends?\u00a0 Are these facts less necessary or less powerful in their consequences, because they fall within the subjective sphere of our experience?\u00a0 So also, why should the moral law command less obedience because it forms a part of ourselves?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think this is an excellent response to those who warn that accepting the truth about morality will lead to nihilism and moral chaos.\u00a0 The subjective nature of moral judgments will hardly alter our tendency to make them.\u00a0 Westermarck adds,<\/p>\n

…it seems to me that ethical subjectivism, instead of being a danger, is more likely to be an advantage to morality.\u00a0 Could it be brought home to people that there is no absolute standard in morality, they would perhaps be on the one hand more tolerant and on the other hand more critical in their judgments.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It would be hard to overestimate the significance of this last quote.\u00a0 When it comes to morality, we live in an age of gross intolerance, particularly on the part of the “progressive Left.”\u00a0 These people pull new “absolute moral truths” out of thin air on a regular basis, and then proceed to stuff them down the throats of the rest of us.\u00a0 I may not be able to say that such behavior is absolutely “Good,” or absolutely “Evil,” but I personally find it extremely disagreeable.\u00a0 I think many others would agree with me on that point.\u00a0 The truth about morality hardly encourages this type of moral bullying.\u00a0 Rather, it pulls the rug out from under the feet of the bullies.\u00a0 In fact, they have not the faintest basis for their moral claims.\u00a0 They can in no way justify elevating what amount to personal whims to the status of absolute moral laws and then insisting that the rest of us respect them.\u00a0 They manage to get away with it by appealing to\u00a0subjective moral emotions.\u00a0 This will only work as long as they can maintain the fantasy, cherished by so many of us, that these emotions somehow relate to real, objective things.\u00a0 That fantasy is hardly a barrier between us and moral chaos.\u00a0 It is the reason for moral chaos.\u00a0 We will never escape the prevailing “moral nihilism” until we accept the truth.<\/p>\n

Westermarck had it right in the above quotes.\u00a0 If all of us were aware of the truth, we would also be aware of the real provenance of moral judgments, and would be more tolerant of the similar judgments of others as a result.\u00a0 It might finally be possible for us to take a critical look at those judgments, as Westermarck suggests, and come up with a system of morality that best suits the needs of all of us, instead of enabling the moral tyranny of a minority.<\/p>\n

So much for the “danger” of Westermarck’s ideas.\u00a0 If we look at some of the other objections posed by his contemporaries, their claims to “expertise” in matters of morality grow increasingly dubious.\u00a0 For example,\u00a0Danish philosopher Harald\u00a0H\u00f6<\/span><\/span>ffding<\/a> argued that, “the subjectivity of our moral valuations does not prevent ethics from being a science any more than the subjectivity of our sensations renders a science of physics impossible, because both are concerned with finding the external facts that correspond to the subjective processes.”\u00a0 According to this “H\u00f6<\/span><\/span>ffding’s fallacy,” anything we can imagine must relate to some “external fact.”\u00a0 Unfortunately, Professor H\u00f6<\/span><\/span>ffding completely missed the point.\u00a0 In this case the “external facts” don’t exist.\u00a0 They are a figment of his imagination.\u00a0 Westermarck adds,<\/p>\n

It may, of course, be a subject for scientific inquiry to investigate the means which are conducive to human happiness or welfare, and the results of such a study may also be usefully applied by moralists, but it forms no more a part of ethics than physics is a part of psychology.\u00a0 If the word “ethics” is to be used as the name for a science, the object of that science can only be to study the moral consciousness as a fact.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My personal favorite among the critics of Westermarck is G. E. Moore<\/a>, who became far more highly regarded as an “expert on ethics” by debunking all previous practitioners of the trade as victims of the “naturalistic fallacy<\/a>,” and being extremely coy about the nature of morality himself.\u00a0 No one could ever pin him down as to whether Good and Evil were animal, vegetable, or mineral.\u00a0 From the few broad hints he gave us, it appears that the Good has a remarkable resemblance to\u00a0what a\u00a0Victorian rent seeker would consider “nice things,” or at least the ones that they admitted to openly.\u00a0 In any case, here is Westermarck’s account of Moore’s criticism:<\/p>\n

He argues that if one person says “this action is wrong,” and another says of the very same action that it is not wrong, and each of them merely makes a judgment about his own feelings towards it, they are not differing in opinion about it at all, and, generally speaking, there is absolutely no such thing as a difference of opinion upon moral questions.\u00a0 “If two persons think they differ in opinion on a moral question (and it certainly seems as if they sometimes think<\/em> so), they are always on this view, making a mistake, and a mistake so gross that it seems hardly possible that they should make it:\u00a0 a mistake as gross as that which would be involved in thinking that when you say, ‘I did not come from Cambridge today’ you are denying what I say when I say ‘I did.'” This seems to Professor Moore to be a very serious objection to my view.\u00a0 But let me choose another, analogous case, to illustrate the nature of his argument.\u00a0 One person says, “This food is disagreeable,” and another says of the very same food that it is not disagreeable.\u00a0 We should undoubtedly assert that they have different opinions about it.\u00a0 On Professor Moore’s view this shows that the two persons do not merely judge about their feelings but state that the food really is, or is not, disagreeable, and if they admitted that they only expressed their own feelings – as they most probably would if their statements were challenged – and yet thought that they differed in opinion, they would make a mistake almost too great to be possible.\u00a0 For my own part I venture to believe that most people would find it absurd if they denied<\/em> that they had different opinions about the food.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems to me that Westermarck could have had a lot more fun with Moore if he had been so inclined.\u00a0 After all, the point of this flimsy argument, which was taken quite seriously by several other “experts on ethics” at the time, was that moral judgments are not purely subjective in nature.\u00a0 If it really made any sense, we could magically transform anything we pleased into a real thing.\u00a0 One could, for example, resurrect the Greek gods out of thin air simply by virtue of believing in them.\u00a0 If one were merely making a judgment about his own feelings, than, according to Moore, a difference of opinion on the matter would become impossible.\u00a0 The only alternative is that the Greek gods actually do exist.\u00a0 To deny it would be tantamount to denying the objective existence of Good and Evil!\u00a0 I note in passing that Moore’s argument was considered “unanswerable” by W. D. Ross, who added some objections of his own based on a similar conflating of objective facts with subjective feelings.\u00a0 If you’re interested in more detail, it’s all there in Westermarck’s Ethical Relativity<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When it comes to moral philosophy, fame doesn’t depend on the truth of what you say, but on how well it fits the prevailing narrative.\u00a0 Then and now, too many people have too much to lose by admitting that Westermarck was right.\u00a0 Their tedious reading of many dry tomes of moral philosophy would have been for nothing, and their claims to “expertise,” would vanish like the morning fog.\u00a0 Hence the few lines devoted to him on Wikipedia and elsewhere.\u00a0 He was right where so many have been wrong, but I doubt that he will get the recognition he deserves anytime soon.\u00a0 Perhaps, in view of the mountains of bilge that somehow\u00a0are published\u00a0as “moral philosophy” these days, it might at least be possible to put his two major books on the subject, Ethical Relativity<\/em> and The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0back into print.\u00a0 I would certainly be willing to contribute my widow’s mite to the cause.\u00a0 I’m not holding my breath, though.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Judging by the amount of space devoted to him on Wikipedia, Edvard Westermarck was little regarded as a moral philosopher.\u00a0 Contemporaries such as G. E. Moore and W. D. Ross, not to mention such immediate predecessors as John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick, made a much bigger splash.\u00a0 For all that, Westermarck was aware of … Continue reading “Edvard Westermarck and His Detractors”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[101,110,105,6,166,28,5],"tags":[120,299],"class_list":["post-5042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-ethics","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-good-and-evil","category-human-evolution","category-human-nature","category-morality","tag-morality-2","tag-westermarck"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-1jk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5042"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5051,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5042\/revisions\/5051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}