"Reasons to Be Good?"

Lars Hertzberg's paper is another interesting one. He's interested in questions about reason, morality, and self-interest. In response to what Philippa Foot says in "Moral Beliefs", Hertzberg argues that "self-interest cannot ground a genuine life of justice, and that if someone is in need of a reason for a just life, there is no reason that can fulfill that need" (p. 180). He also discusses Bernard Williams' view that "a person can be given a reason for acting well only if the reason accords with some motive she embraces" and the case of the Badou family, who adopted twenty children with special needs, in addition to having two children who were not adopted.

Foot argues that it is in one's self-interest to behave justly. Not in any religious, poetic, or otherwise potentially mysterious sense, but in the sense that it is more profitable to be just, that 'honesty is the best policy.' Her thinking is that if, as Thrasymachus might recommend, one behaves unjustly whenever one can profitably get away with it then, in fact, one will never behave unjustly, because the cost of making sure one's tracks are covered, that no one else will ever find out, will be prohibitively high. So purely in terms of a cost-benefit analysis, it makes most sense to avoid unjust actions. Against this, Hertzberg argues that this kind of self-interested behavior is not real justice. Really being just means valuing justice even when there is nothing in it for you. Hence "If our thinking starts from self-interest, wherever it leads us to will not be genuine justice" (p. 185). In this sense, concern for justice "is not dependent on having reasons" (ibid.)

Hertzberg takes this idea up again in the second part of the paper, which he concludes by noting that "we are not necessarily in need of reasons for acting morally" (p. 191). He also says in this concluding paragraph that "one may give a person reasons for acting in a morally responsible way even if she initially had no inclination to do so, provided the word "reason" is understood in a wide enough sense." This also seems right.

The third part of the paper is more unusual and starts less with engagement with a text (although it does that) and more with thinking about a specific case. The case is that of Hector and Sue Badou, who decided, not all at once, to look after lots of children, most of them with special needs, some physical and some emotional. Hertzberg discusses the impressiveness of this case carefully. The Badous are not some special breed of person who can do this kind of thing without struggle. They thought hard about each potential adoption, deciding against some. And they cared about having joy in their lives, and the lives of their children. They were not weird saints or Kantians. But they behaved differently from the way most of us behave. What should we make of this difference?

Where the Badous differed from most other people [...] was not in their having embraced a line of reasoning that took them in a different direction from a shared reality. If by a reason we mean a conversational move, an articulated claim that is apt to make a person act in some particular way, we might not be able to identify any set of reasons that would set the Badous off from the average citizen. (p. 194)

Hertzberg's response to Foot seems completely right. But it also has me wondering about the nature of reasons and self-interest. Edward Harcourt considers various reasons why a character in the Iliad might prefer, say, killing more Thracians to stealing more armor. One kind of reason is that one course of action might be easier or safer than the other. A different kind of reason, it seems to me, is that one (presumably killing more Thracians) would be more awful than the other. The first kind of reason is the kind that might motivate an animal. The second kind seems more uniquely human (although maybe angels, aliens, or other rational beings might be motivated in the same way too). And it seems to be a very important kind of reason, this non-animal (for want of a better term) kind. Think of Plato's example of wanting to go and see dead bodies behind a wall. That isn't self-interested in the animal sense. Or the concern with retrieving the bodies of the dead after a battle in Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian war. Or the appeal of human sacrifice (because it is awful) that Wittgenstein discusses in connection with Frazer's Golden Bough. Or, for that matter, concern with honor (not just one's reputation, although the line might be blurred at times). These non-animal or rational or human concerns (which might vary quite a bit and are perhaps not best lumped together as I'm doing now) seem like the kind of thing that Anscombe says we know about by way of mystical perception. They also seem connected, to me, to Wittgenstein's idea of absolute value, as opposed to relative value, which comes down to matters of scientific fact. There is, I think, a somewhat mysterious and yet not hard to share sense in which it is against my self-interest for my remains to be dishonored after my death. Or for me to behave in seriously dishonorable ways while I am alive. And this kind of thinking, which Foot seems to ignore (although I haven't re-read her paper fully), could suggest a reason to be just. It won't be the kind of reason she focuses on though.

Perhaps we shouldn't call it a reason. After all, we are in mysterious territory here. But it isn't that mysterious. Caring about the dead is very normal. And even animals might care about such things as fairness, death, and where one stands in the pecking order. There is a tendency to think that really everything must come down to pleasure and pain, but this reductive tendency should be resisted. Perhaps Wittgenstein's remarks on pain might even help with this resistance, bouncing us back from reduction out into the wider and more animate world. (Harcourt says something very interesting that relates to this. The very last sentence of his paper reads: "It may well be that the question--as it might be--whether the mind is the brain is one of the most pressing moral questions of our day, and if it is, this fact is not readily captured in terms of the machinery of progressively sophisticated levels which have been the stock in trade of this chapter" (p. 60).)

What, though, is a reason? If we take it to be an articulated claim then I think Hertzberg is right. But there does seem to be a sense in which the Badous did embrace a line of reasoning that took them in a different direction from a shared reality. The shared reality, let us say, is that there are children who need to be adopted if they are to grow up in a loving family. And it is good for children to grow up in a loving family. The line of reasoning that the Badous embraced (simplifying a bit) is one that goes from here to actually adopting some of these children. The rest of us, for the most part, move instead to looking for excuses not to do so, or to changing the subject. The trajectory of thought and action is different. But not because of some line of ethical code that the Badous have in their programming that we lack. If anything, we have extra, distracting lines that they leave out. Or we could equally, perhaps better, say that they mean what they say and believe more than the rest of us do. That is, in the sentences There are children who need to be adopted if they are to grow up in a loving family. And it is good for children to grow up in a loving family they really mean the words 'need' and 'good' (and perhaps 'children') while most of us mean them in a faded or half-hearted or 'yeah yeah' kind of way at best. Hertzberg says that "for someone to point to [the Badous] and say that that is how we all should live would in all likelihood be a pointless, empty gesture" (p. 193). This is true, and brings out the element of bull in our saying such things. Which suggests maybe we should agree with him that there really is no shared reality after all from which the Badous reason along one line and most people reason along another.

The emptiness of the words here seems reflective of an emptiness of their speaker. A very different kind of self-interest from the one Foot apparently has in mind would be served by meaning words like these, acting on them. This would be a matter of making oneself more substantial, more real. It would not get one what one wanted, although it might bring joy, or at least satisfaction (and it might bring neither). And it would, it seems, avoid something that one is averse to. At least, that's my interpretation of the Badous, that they felt they couldn't leave unadopted the children that they adopted. They couldn't live with that. And I think (hypocritically) that really taking in (and keeping in, not pushing down or away, not deflecting) the reality of those children and their situation would mean not having much option but to adopt them. Perhaps this is at least one way that really tremendous things get done. Not through some heroic leap or one-off moment but through a possibly very long series of small acts of honest attention, through having always the (non-miraculous, available to everyone) courage to look and respond to what one sees.