Posner's Pragmatic Moral Skepticism (Nadelhoffer)

Since it’s publication in 1999, Richard Posner’s The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory (PMLT) has been nearly entirely ignored by the philosophical establishment.  Perhaps it is because Posner himself is a judge and professor of law rather than a trained academic philosopher.  Or perhaps it is because Posner is so critical of what he calls “academic moralists.”  For present purposes, I am less interested in why philosophers haven’t bothered to take notice of Posner’s view and more interested in whether what he says in PMLT contains some important grains of truth—especially his claim that:

[P]eople who make philosophical arguments for why we should alter our moral beliefs or behavior are wasting their time if what they want to do is to alter those beliefs and the behavior the beliefs might influence.  Moral intuitions neither do nor should yield to the weak arguments that are all that philosophers can bring to bear on moral issues. (p.ix)

Posner calls the view he develops in PMLT “pragmatic moral skepticism.”  One of Posner’s motivating assumptions is that robust versions of moral realism—whereby “there are universal moral laws ontologically akin to scientific laws” (p.3) that are “neither time-bound nor local” (p.6)—are false.  Another assumption is that “the casuistic and deliberative techniques that moral theorists deploy are too feeble, both epistemologically and rhetorically, to shake moral intuitions” (p. ix). 

Posner’s primary target in the first chapter of PMLT is a group of moral theory builders he calls academic moralists—a group that he suggests includes Elizabeth Anderson, Alan Gewirth, Frances Kamm, Thomas Nagel, John Rawls, Thomas Scanlon and others.  The unifying assumption that these philosophers purportedly share is that, “the kind of moral theorizing nowadays considered rigorous in university circles has an important to play in improving the moral judgments and moral behavior of people” (p.5)—an assumption that Posner rejects.

On his view, contrary to what academic moralists have traditionally assumed, moral theories are unlikely to have an effect on our moral beliefs and intuitions.  As he says:

Knowing the moral thing to do furnishes no motive, and creates no motivation, for doing it; motive and motivation have to come from outside morality.  Even if this is wrong, the analytical tools employed in academic moralism—whether moral casuistry, or reasoning from the canonical texts of moral philosophy, or careful analysis, or reflective equilibrium, or some combination of these tools—are too feeble to override either narrow self-interest or moral intuitions.  And academic moralists have neither the rhetorical skills nor the factual knowledge that might enable them to persuade without having good methods of inquiry and analysis. (p.7)

Pragmatic moral skepticism is hence based on several epistemological assumptions—the chief of which is the purported fact that “in the case of moral controversy, the audience for academic debate is likely to be either uninterested or, because of self-interest or moral intuition, already committed.  The committed cannot be swayed by, or the uninterested persuaded to take an interest in, arguments about where one’s moral duty lies." (p.13)  As a result of these considerations, Posner suggests that there is a certain futility to contemporary academic moral theorizing (p.13). 

Of course, he is quick to point out that he is not suggesting that we should not study morality nor is he questioning the value of theorizing in general—he is merely suggesting that while descriptive sociological, anthropological, and evolutionary theories about morality are valuable, normative theory building is not.  This suggestion is driven at least partly by Posner’s assumption that, “a person’s moral code is not a balloon that the philosopher’s pinprick will burst; it is a self-sealing tire….the volleying back and forth of these rational arguments does not result in victory for one side; the ball is too easy…to return” (p.41).  Posner does not deny that our moral views and intuitions change through time—rather, he denies that the moral theories of academic philosophers have much to do with these changes taking place. 

On his view, shifts in moral beliefs are more often the result of changes in material circumstances combined with the influence of “a very different type of moral advocate from the academic moralist” (p. 42)  Posner calls these moral advocates “moral entrepreneurs” and he gives the following account of their modus operandi:

Moral entrepreneurs typically try to change the boundaries of altruism, whether by broadening them, as in the case of Jesus Christ and Jeremy Bentham, or by narrowing them, as in the case of Hitler…they don’t do it with arguments, or at least good ones.  Rather, they mix appeals to self-interest with emotional appeals that bypass our rational calculating faculty and stir inarticulable feelings of oneness with or separateness from the people (or it could be land or animals) that are to constitute, or be rejected from, the community that the moral entrepreneur is trying to create. (p.42)

Consider, for instance, the animal rights movement—which gained a lot of traction in the wake of the publication of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation in 1975.  Given Singer’s non-technical writing style, his broad audience, his use of both emotionally charged descriptions of animal abuse and graphic photographs, Posner would likely place him in the camp of moral entrepreneurs rather than academic moralists.  Moreover, Posner would likely suggest that this explains Singer’s success in changing so many people’s beliefs and intuitions about the acceptability of certain forms of meat-eating and animal experimentation.  According to Posner, simply pointing out to the meat eater that his moral beliefs and practices are inconsistent will be inadequate for engendering change.  As he says:

They [i.e., academic moralists] believe that if you point out to a meat eater that because he considers suffering a bad thing and animals suffer as a result of his diet he is being inconsistent, you may persuade him to become a vegetarian.  But behavioral inconsistency is a weaker ordering principle that logical consistency….the meat eater can distinguish between human and animal suffering; can deny that animals have to suffer in being for food…can point out that his own consumption of meat is too slight to affect the number of animals killed; can even argue that to put animals on a par, as it were, with human beings could make us less sensitive to human suffering…can point out that Genesis explicitly invites us to eat meat; or can equivocate, by confining his meat eating to the meat of animals raised and killed humanely, or to road kill, or by adopting the position that moral philosopher R.M. Hare calls ‘demi-vegetarianism’. If you want to turn a meat eater, especially a non-academic one, into a vegetarian you must get him to love the animals that we raise for food; and you cannot urge a person into love…An academic moral argument is unlikely to stir the conscience, incite a sense of indignation, or engender feelings of love or guilt.  And if it does, one has only to attend to the opposing moral arguments to be returned to one’s starting point.
(pp. 51-52)

Posner seems to get the moral psychology correct in this passage.  If one’s goal is to convert someone to “compassionate omnivorism,” vegetarianism, or veganism, one would have markedly more success taking people on tours of factory farms or exposing them to video and audio footage of slaughterhouses than one would by giving them a well-argued but non-emotionally charged treatise on animal welfare to read.  Consider, for instance, my earlier post on what I called “non-compassionate omnivorism.”  I essentially provided the readers with the following kind of admittedly sterile argument:

1. Knowingly contributing to or complying with an immoral act is itself immoral.
2. The methods and practices of factory farming are immoral.
3. To knowingly eat and/or purchase factory farmed meat is to knowingly contribute to or comply with an immoral act.
4. Therefore, eating and/or purchasing factory farmed meat is itself morally problematic—especially when one can afford to eat and/or purchase non-factory farmed meat.

Did this convince any of the meat eating readers of this blog to convert to “compassionate omnivorism”?  I doubt it.  I suspect that had I instead posted pictures of the miserable conditions factory farmed animals are forced to endure as they make the dreary march from birth to our dinner plates, more people would have reconsidered their eating and purchasing habits.  But what does this say about human psychology?  And what does it say about the effectiveness of rational and emotionally sterilized argumentation—the bread and butter of contemporary academic moralists? 

If the method and style of argumentation we rely on in developing our views is mostly ineffective when it comes to engendering moral change, then what else should we be doing?  Is appealing to someone’s emotions any less philosophically respectable than providing them with a syllogism (see Robert Solomon’s interesting new book In Defense of Sentimentality for a insightful answer to this question)?  Should philosophers be more interested in moral change than they are?  Is simply writing to a very small audience of other philosophers sufficient--i.e., is it enough to merely construct elegant ethical theories or should moral philosophers be worried about how these theories are going to make a practical difference?  I am curious to see what the readers of this blog think about these issues.  Minimally, I think it is time that Posner’s view receives the attention that it deserves—raising as it does several interesting questions ranging from meta-ethics and moral psychology to  public policy and the proper relationship between the academy and the world at large.

Comments are open; no anonymous postings.  Please post only once; comments may take awhile to appear.

UPDATE:  Thanks to Matt for pointing out that Ronald Dworkin reviewed Posner's book (see here).  John Mikhail (Georgetown University Law) also has a review posted on SSRN here.  Searching JSTOR and The Philosopher's Index produces virtually no hits however.  So, I welcome more information concerning other reviews of the book.

UPDATE: Posner's posts from his guest-blogging days can be found here.  Leiter's earlier post on Posner's jurisprudence can be found here.

Comments

[Jussi Suikkanen]

One reason for why Posner has not received much attention is that at least the passages you site do not seem to be very original at all. In fact, I fail to see much at all which Bernard Williams didn't already say - futility of moral theorising with thin moral concepts, the fundamental nature of moral intuitions, the denial of external reasons, the importance of getting people who are assumed to have the right sensitivities to see the matters in the right moral light, and so on. Whether or not you think he was right on these issues, Williams' views have of course created small industries of fascinating literature about these matters.

[Keith DeRose]

Like many others, on the basis of arguments like those given by Singer and Unger, without much by way of pictures & graphic descriptions, I came to accept that I was morally required to give much more money that I did toward the effective relief of suffering of people in the world. I think my experience, as far as my resulting behavior goes, is not unusual: I still don't give nearly enough, by my own estimation, but do give considerably more than I did before -- and I'm fairly confident, considerably more than I would have had I not encountered the arguments. Philosophical arguments had less of an impact than one might have hoped, but the impact was significant. Would Posner deny that such significant impact is at all common?

(I said toward the start that I came to "accept" a certain view. It's a tough question, even for me, what I myself *believe* concerning the matter. This is a general issue of whether we can be accurately described as believing the various controversial positions we in some sense accept in matter of philosophy, politics, religion, etc. So I have a hard time saying whether I'm acting contrary to my beliefs about the matter, or whether my failure to act is rather a sign that I don't fully believe what I accept. My own suspicion is that the notion of belief is too slippery for there to be a correct answer here.)

In the case of Singer on moral issues concerning the treatment of animals: I'm not as familiar with this work here. But from what I remember, there is *some* argumentation along with the emotionally charged descriptions & pictures. Am I remembering right? If so, is the claim that the contribution of the arguments here is zero, or close to it?

In any case, the relatively heavy reliance on the descriptions and pictures may be explicable if, as I imagine is the case, on these issues many people were/are extremely ignorant about the relevant facts of animal treatment. Where that's true, it would seem to be of the first importance to try to get them to face the relevant facts. It's where the facts are already more widely known that arguments concerning the moral upshot of those facts will be more likely to be stressed.

[Chlump]

It is not an uncommon view in the public consciousness. People question the relevance and applicability of theoretical ethics all the time.

I have some more questions. I hope they are not bad/silly questions. I am simply interested in seeing what other people think to see how their thoughts compare to my own.

There are actually two questions, one positive and one normative. In my experience, some people are simply indifferent to rational discourse, even if they understand the argument and assent to the logical sequences. That makes an approach like Habermas' (in which one attempts to draw out a performative contradiction) somewhat moot. Merely pointing out an interlocutor's inconsistency is unlikely to cause him to change his beliefs. Logical consistency is not the trump card many seem to think it is or ought to be, pragmatically speaking.

We know that compassion, for instance, is often more powerful than argumentation. Here, the question is: what, ultimately, is the motivation for a method of thought or action? If people are simply urged by compassion, by humanism, etc., would it then be inappropriate to impose a purely logical foundation in its place? Furthermore, what if all logical foundations merely reflected an underlying non-logical sentiment that is only subsequently developed logically? At least in this respect, it would be possible to found a logical system that extended and developed its precipitating cause. Rationality, then, would be a method instead.

It is obvious that given that most people are not logical machines and see inconsistency as less troubling than one might think, sentimentality may have a role in causing a change in beliefs. But would a world in which people were motivated to do the right thing for the wrong reasons be any better? Are we to commit ourselves to achieving some desired end at the expense of what we value? Or should we simply "settle" for that nicer world?

Moreover, from a normative perspective, why should people have to evaluate moral claims solely on the basis of rational argumentation?

[tnadelhoffer]

Jussi,
Posner cites philosophers such as Annette Baier, Gilbert Harman, Richard Rorty, and Bernard Williams--who share Nietzsche's skeptism concerning normative moral theory--as kindred spirits who are more interested in "studying morality as a phenomenon or as a set of concepts, rather than in preaching." In any event, like I said in my post, I am less interested in why Posner has been largely ignored by the philosophical establishment and more interested in the underlying issues he discusses. You are nevertheless certainly correct that I could have motivated this discussion with Williams' work as well (e.g., Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy). I chose Posner instead primarily because (a) he has been a guest-blogger here before, and (b) I think it is unfortunate that more philosophers have not taken notice of his interesting (and controversial) work in moral and legal theory.

[Matt]

Posner's book did receive a fair amount of attention by philosophes when it came out. Dworkin reviewed it (harshly, of course) in the NYRB, Nussbaum commented on it (calling it, if I recall correctly, "an occassion for saddness") and I think it was also reviewed by Simon Blackburn and Jules Colman. I may be miss-remembering about the latter two, though. Rorty also wrote a largely critical review of it, despite the fact that Rorty's and Posner's positions are pretty close as far as meta-ethics goes.

[Robert Jubb]

I've often thought that people who depreciate the role of rationality and formalism in ethics are typically motivated by the thought that their own ethics wouldn't stand up to much rational or formal analysis, but that might be a bit of a cheap shot.

Posner seems to me though to be engaged in a kind of category mistake, in that he mistakenly thinks that academic philosophers are, when they write academic philosophy, writing with the aim of directly effecting moral change. I doubt very much that Tim Scanlon will be thinking of a place somewhere in the bestseller's list when he writes his next magnum opus, for example. That's not the same thing as giving up on the idea of making a moral difference though: where do we think moral entrepreneurs get (some of) their ideas from?

And as for the 'should' in the claim that moral theory shouldn't effect moral behaviour, he wants an argument to that conclusion. Williams is actually much better, I'd guess from what's been quoted here, on this kind of thing: he thinks that the problem is one of who the audience is, not of moral theorising per se, and has gestures in the direction of an argument why the audience should change. Williams is also aware of the space in existing practices for moral critique, something which Posner, and so many conservative critics, seem blind to.

[Robert]

There is research on cognitive psychology on this issue. I don't think anyone takes posner's view -- that moral reasoning is completely irrelvant to moral beliefs. That's simply not factually justified.

The debate in psychology is whether moral reasoning matters outside of social contexts. Haidt at Virginia claims to have empirically demonstrated that moral reasoning is an ex post rationalization, and a method of influencing others' moral intuitions, but not a causal variable in the formation of one's own intuitions. See here:

http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/articles/haidt.emotionaldog.pdf

Pizaro and Bloom at Yale have responded that moral intuitions might very well be causal, but that such intuiotns are shaped by prior reasoning.

http://www.peezer.net/pubs/comment_rationaldog.pdf

Speaking as a vegan, Singer convinced me to change my diet -- but it was practical ethics (which is pure philosophy) and not animal liberation that was decisive. I did not read the latter, in fact, until much later.

Speaking as a sometime-activist, I think it's simply wrong to say that philosophical reasoning plays no role in morality. When you confront someone's beliefts, you run into a whole series of (usually ill-formed) counter-arguments. If you cannot respond to these counter-arguments, then the basis for your advocacy is undermined. A strong philosophical foundation might not be sufficient for moral persuasion, but it is certainly necessary.

[Jussi Suikkanen]

Right. For what it's worth, here's my five pence. I worry that either Posner misunderstands the academic moralists or his criticism of them is confused. As far as I see, the goals of the philosophers he lists are rather more moderate. As Posner himself mentiones many of them, Rawls and Scanlon most notably, have been after 'the relfective equilibrium' in their first-order normative theories. The aim has thus been to describe *our moral intuitions* in a more systematic way by using a fundamental underlying principle which normative output hopefully is co-extensive with our intuitions. If not, then usually so much worse for the principles and moral theory. Of course the hope is that the principles provide us with means to extend our moral intuitions to provide guidance in new situations of which our intuitions may be silent as yet. Now, if this much is true, then I just cannot see how the resulting theories would be too feeble to override our moral intuitions. After all, (i) this is not their purpose or aim and (ii) the moral theories carry the very same motivational import as the moral intuitions they systematise. So, I guess I think that Posner, like Williams often, doesn't quite hit the intended target.

Maybe there are some theory builders who do not ground their views on our moral convictions but rather some fundamental moral value like well-being defended independently as such a bedrock. Maybe these people would say that in conflict cases so much worse for our pre-theoretical moral convictions. But, the odd strict consequentialist and Kantian apart, I'm not sure I've ever met any academic ethicists who would think this and pursue changing public policies on the basis of their views.

[Brian Leiter]

Prior to Dick Posner's guest-blogging stint here, I did discuss some of these sames issues here, which might be still be of interest:

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/12/a_few_words_on_.html

By the way, the Mikhail review was pretty weak, I thought.

[bk09j]

I don't know if there are any historians of the profession of philosophy, but I'd be curious if a hundred years ago "ethics" was a distinct area in philosophy departments, and a faculty member could specialize in ethics. I suspect that ethics was considered of a piece with metaphysics, theology, political philosophy, etc., so that it wasn't taught as a special subject. And perhaps what happens when you teach it as a special subject is that it gets formalized and separated from things people do actually care about, like God and politics.

[Bill Edmundson]

Singer stated in the Introduction to Animal Rights that he wasn't really fond of animals, nor did he think them "cute." Yet the book has had a profound effect. Was Singer nonetheless surreptitiously trading on emotions, such as sympathy for bored pigs? There is a vigorous debate about the demandingness of morality; but, like so much of law-and-economics, Posner's claims are mainly empiricism without the data. They're ignored even by those whom they would excuse.

[Lloyd]

The questions posed in the final paragraph of the original post can be answered easily: It depends on the philosopher.

Beyond that, from a less academic perspective than most of the prior posters, Posner illustrates some of the qualities of a political party/movement that Americans find endearing, or, to some extent, abhorrent. You don't have to look far to realize that the Democrats are the party of the "academic moralist," while the Republicans are the party of the "moral entrepreneurs." While I do not intend this to be a blanket statement, I think there is some truth to the assertion.

Democrats often pontificate on the "morality" of their cause, without being able to indicate what, exactly, they are doing about it. Republicans, on the other hand, have a "morality" unique to themselves and, most importantly, politically, at least, they compel others to act on those impulses to enact change.

Each party has its own philosophical base, to be sure, but it is the ability of the Republican party to be a better "moral entrepreneur" than the Democrats that many find attractive. The fact that the Republicans choose certain "hot button" issues as the basis of their campaigns is only illustrative of their goal of "mix[ing] appeals to self-interest with emotional appeals that bypass our rational calculating faculty and stir inarticulable feelings of oneness with or separateness from the people (or it could be land or animals) that are to constitute, or be rejected from, the community that the moral entrepreneur is trying to create."

It's almost like taking a page out of Karl Rove's playbook.

[Thom Brooks]

I take the point of many of the criticisms above, suffice to allow for the following. I too disagree with much of what Posner has to argue. However, I do enjoy reading his work and think he does have some good sense to impart to us. He is a gifted writer, however unconvincing. I certainly refer to him in my work and will continue to do so. Indeed, we all know major figures we disagree strongly with that we must read (and occasionaly profit from). Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies immediately springs to mind....

[Keith Douglas]

I have not read the book in question. But it seems to me as presented the view commits a non sequitur. As I understand it, he says academic specialists in ethics won't convince anyone so stop the system building. Well, even if we assume that the system building was meant to convince people in the public at large to change their views (which as others have said is dubious) it still doesn't follow we shouldn't be doing it. Suppose instead we think of the role of the systems as what people should change *to* after they have been persuaded by Singer's video footage or whatever it may be. Admittedly this distinction is not as sharp as one might like, but it is bound to help.

As for the post facto rationalization, I saw that a lot amongst undergraduate (I did not do any general ethics in graduate school) peers. This of course was especially true in ethics courses with non-philosophy students. But one thing that has always troubled me is how to draw principled dividing lines between a predjudice and a starting point for reflective equilibrium. Similarly, I have a great deal of difficulty with the methodology in ethics (the thought experiments and the "moral intuition pumping") that anecdotally I have noted ethicists agree with. No, I have no clear alternative, but finding out how people do in fact reason and act is bound to help. (No more armchair moral psychology!) For example, I would love for someone to test my hypothesis (suggested independently by a colleague, so it might yet have something to it) that people (or at least people in this part of the world) are a species of non-utilitarian consequentialist and rationalize themselves into deontological explanations post facto.

[Jussi Suikkanen]

Thomas,

a big thank you for linking Dworkin's review - I much enjoyed it. I also wondered whether you could try to explain something to me. Dworkin presents Posner as saying that (i) he [Posner] would hesitate to call someone immoral if that person claimed that it is right to kill infants and that (ii) we should not call slavery, Nazism, and Stalinism immoral.

This, if anything, is putting forward a astonishingly strong moral view. And, a view that actually scares me as a layperson. But, what I'm interested is what does he do to make the rest of us adopt this view. Does he appeal to our emotions in the book? Do you think he does this succesfully? Did you think there was anything unnerving about the attempt? Or, does he employ arguments from instance relativism, disagreements, and motivational internalism? If he does, I wonder why he would do that. I mean he himself writes as you quote that "people who make philosophical arguments for why we should alter our moral beliefs or behavior are wasting their time". Was he just waisting his own time? If so, why shouldn't we? If anything all of this, like many other forms of nihilism, seems quite incoherent.

[Derek Bowman]

I think this idea has come up, at least implicitly, in a few other comments, but I'd like to emphasize it.

Does Posner (more importantly, should we) think moral theory is fundamentally different in this respect than other areas of inquiry? It's certainly true that some people aren't bothered by their moral inconsistencies, but many people are equally untroubled by their inconsistencies in other areas.

Posner could equally well write a book explaining that no amount of argument and scientific evidence will convince Creationists that evoutionary theory is scientifically viable while their theory is not. Should this fact trouble biologists? Cerainly. Does it serve as an indictment of their work? Presumably not.

But Posner's position is (I assume) that there is something different about the position of professional ethicists. Is it that people care *more* about their contradictory beliefs about other matters, or is it that ethicists are supposed to be more concerned about their popular reception than others?

[Cihan Baran]

Well, I am not a philosopher myself but I read and greatly enjoy philosophy. I change my opinion from time to time by some of the arguments I read - so Posner seems to be wrong about me at least.

There are potentially two issues that I'd raise with Posner's views.

(1) Maybe Posner may be getting right some descriptive facts about moral psychology or people's moral habits but if he is prescribing a normative claim (i.e. "moral habits should change according to emotional appeals"), he is definitely wrong. Suppose that I change my view about some moral issue. As soon as I am convinced that the change in my view is due to some emotional appeal other than argumentation, I should view myself in a different light and re-examine the situation. The reason is that when I change my views about some moral issue, I do so with the assumption that I am doing so because of reasons. To assert otherwise corrupts the inner workings of one's moral system.

I think that even people who change their views with respect to some emotional appeal do so with the supposition that their change is due to some reasoning and the conclusion that their position is essentially the right one. (Such considerations are, after all, "built into" one's moral sense.) Hence, one may say that we are sometimes deceived about our moral habits. Posner may be right in asserting that appeal to emotions is far stronger in effecting change than structured reasoning but he is certainly wrong if he believes that this SHOULD be the case, since such a state of affairs corrupts the inner machinery of one's moral life.

(2) Who says that academic philosophers are interested in effecting moral change? I think what drives moral philosophers to do the work they are doing is simply their intellectual curiosity about the issues they are working on.

[Luke Weiger]

"There is a vigorous debate about the demandingness of morality; but, like so much of law-and-economics, Posner's claims are mainly empiricism without the data. They're ignored even by those whom they would excuse."

Right. And DeRose's account of how Singer's arguments changed his behavior is empirical evidence enough to provide a counterexample to Posner's strong skepticism towards the efficacy academic moralizing. However, isn't it something of a challenge to academic moralizing that we can come away from Singer's arguments regarding animal rights and the demandingness of morality without any cogent counterarguments--indeed even come away believing that his arguments are probably sound--and yet still eat factory-farmed meat and spend money on frivolous luxuries? Strong skepticism is clearly unwarranted, but there is still a puzzle here.

(Am I the only one who finds it bizarre that Posner seemingly takes the possible truth of externalism about moral reasons as grounds to doubt moral realism?)

[Matt]

After a bit more looking it turns out that the review by Rorty (and, I think, Colman) that I'd mentioned were of Posner's later book on Pragmatism and democracy. Similar arguments are made in the later book, too, though, so they might be of interest. Rorty's review was in _Dissent_ in 2003 and is here: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=472. I _think_ that Nussbaum's remarks were from a sympossium in the Harvard Law Review where the first version of Posner's book was printed (it was based on his Holmes lectures that were printed in the Harvard Law Review. I'm working from memory here so might have that wrong too.)

[Daniel Levine]

Much as I tend to find reading Posner valuable, I think he confuses more than a couple issues in _Problematics_. As many people have pointed out, he confuses the project of trying to convince people of a moral view with the project of trying to either a) figure out what the right moral view is or b) figure out a better, more systematic version of whatever moral view we happen to hold.

I think Posner also confuses two levels of "convincing," however. He seems to have in mind the project of changing someone's basic moral convictions (e.g., animals deserve compassion, Jews/blacks/etc. are people too). I'd bow to the better empirical evidence cited, but, anecdotally, it seems at least a reasonable view that moral theory is often fairly bad at changing people's minds in such fundamental ways.

However, we don't only try to convince people with whom we have deep disagreements to come 'round to our way of seeing things, we also try to convince people who basically see things our way to agree with us on some particular, tricky point. So, for instance, Nozick's work probably won't convince a committed socialist to donate to the Cato institute (and if it does, Posner might be right that it's the rosy picture of libertarian utopia he paints that does the work), but it might very well convince someone already basically committed to a vaguely Lockean liberalism to be a libertarian rather than a welfare-statist.

Not only that, but appeals to emotions seem to be rather bad at helping us decide what to do in "hard cases." For instance, having a lively impression of both the evils of tyranny and the horrors of war was a starting point, rather than an endpoint, for trying to figure out what I thought about the invasion of Iraq.

I suspect that Posner would dismiss much of this sort of conversion *within* broad moral views as boring tinkering, but I'd also hazard a guess that it represents a tremendous amount of what we actually do under the name of convincing people to change their moral views.

This function of moral theory seems highly useful - even outside dialogue, while I rarely have cause to question my most abstract and bedrock moral views, I often think hard about how they apply to particular grey-area cases, and theory is a great help there.

["Q" the Enchanter]

I'm with Derek Bowman and others who have made similar points. The perseverance of a normative attitude in the face of contravening argument is hardly peculiar to moral philosophy.

Moreover, it seems to me an error to consider, say, showing film footage depicting the brutality of the factory slaughterhouse a mere appeal to sentimentality (or "moral entrepreneurship"); such footage is arguably *evidence* that bears on a moral argument.

[nick]

In response to Keith: I think that sometimes arguments, simply in virtue of being an argument, will change a person's moral belief's/behaviors &c, but I think it is more the exception than the rule.

For an interesting discussion of this effect, that also takes into account the already mentioned Haidt data, I reccomend Chandra Sripada and Steve Stich's Paper, "A Framework for the Psychology of Norms" which can be found here:

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publications/Papers/Framework_for_the_Psychology_of_Norms_7-23-05.pdf

I don't think that academic moralizing should be given up, though I certainly doubt that it is sufficient to cause widespread changes. It is sufficient, however, to cause some changes, especially to a rarefied coterie of moral philosophers. I take it that this claim is too weak for most academic moralists to happily sign onto.

[Drew Karlberg]

I think logical consistency has more force in argumentation that Posner may believe. For example, your "admittedly sterile argument" concerning the immoral practices of factory farming is not necessarily a case in point. Those who do not accept premise two and three (the methods and practices of factory farming are immoral) but accept the first premise of the argument would not be commiting some sort of logical inconsistency. The crucial question is how do you get people to accept the soundness of premise two (and less three). Is it through argumentation or "pragmatics"? So I think that Posner's jab at logical argumentation can be soften if "pragmatics" is considered as a method of support by supplying evidence for the main premises of the argument. And it just so happens that when you provide evidence like photographs and videos for something that is morally wrong, there will be a compassionte response due to the gravity of thes situation. In summary, as humans we often need to have more epistemic sources before we accept something at face value. When an argument is given we often need (perceptual evidences) to be convince of the soundness of a premise. Therefore, it is helpful to view "pragmatics" and logical argumentation as working together and not against one another.

[RCH]

For what ever it might be worth, I think that the book's core -- assuming there's a useful distinction between "core" and "periphery" to be had in this case -- appeared originally in the Harvard Law Review in 1998. As I recall, a fuller critique by Dworkin (titled "Darwin's New Bulldog" or something like that), as well as critiques by others including Nussbaum, appeared in the same volume.

I seem also to recall, incidentally, that Posner was quite ruffled by Dworkin's ethics charges in the NYRB review, and that a testy exchange between D and P in that organ ensued.

RCH

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

The atrocious behavior of many moral philosophers is, I would suggest, a key bit of empirical evidence that there is some fundamental flaw in the idea that philosphical reasoning about ethics leads to better moral judgments and thereby to better moral behavior.

[themaiden]

Someone mentioned that no much of Posner was new, well, Posner reminds me of the Greek and Roman moral philosophers-- the stoic and cynic philosophers for example-- who largely rejected theory in favor of whatever helped in changing people's behaviors. Interesting.

[Dan]

Keith, it's not exactly a test of your hypothesis that people are consequentialists who rationalize themselves into deontology, but you should check out this book chapter by psychologist (and former philosophy student) Joshua Greene:

http://www.csbmb.princeton.edu/~jdgreene/NewGreene-WebPage_files/Greene-KantSoul.pdf

He defends a similar claim: "I will argue that deontological judgments tend to be driven by emotional responses, and that deontological philosophy, rather than being grounded in moral reasoning, is to a large extent an exercise in moral rationalization. This is in contrast to consequentialism, which, I will argue, arises from rather different psychological processes, ones that are more “cognitive,” and more likely to involve genuine moral reasoning."

[Tim Scanlon]

I agree with earlier commentators that Posner gets off on the wrong foot at the beginning of the quoted passage by assuming that the only point of moral philosophy is to convicne people to change their moral views. This is one of the reasons that I do not find his book very enlightening or challenging.

My aims in engaging in moral philosophy are (1) to get a clearer understanding of what kind of quesion I am thinking about in thinking about right and wrong and (2) to make up my mind what to think about it (both how to understand certain crucial terms such as rights, blame, responsibility, and so on, and which moral claims to accept.)

I was described in an earlier comment as someone who follows the method of Refelctive Equilibrium. I do believe that, properly understood, that method is the best description of the way to go about answering the questions I have mentioned. (I discuss this method and its proper interpretation in my contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Rawls.) But it is misleading to say that following this method is simply a matter of trying to describe our first-order moral intuitions in a more systematic way. What we start with is not a consistent set of intuitions, it includes more than first-order views, and a lot of it is unclear. The method of Refelctive Equilibtium is a process of deciding how to deal with this. It is thus in large part a process of deciding what to think, not just describing what one already thinks.

Insofar as I find my thoughts about morality to be unclear and conflicted, I imagine that some others may share these difficulties. So if I come up with what seems to me a satisfactory way of resolving one of them, I imagine that others might take these thoughts into account in deciding what to think. But persuading them to do so is not my main aim.

[Anthony D'Amato]

How passing strange that none of the above commentators thought to ask whether Posner's philosophy of morality influences his judging cases. He says, for instance, that if he were a lawmaker in 19th Century India he might outlaw suttee, but by implication he would not outlaw it if he were a visiting judge invited to decide a suttee case in India. Doesn't this contradict his view that academic morality does not change anyone's mind?

-- Anthony D'Amato
Northwestern Law School