1
What Is Morality?

Terms such as "moral," "morality," and "morally wrong," occur frequently in personal discourse and political argument. But it is often unclear what the people using these familiar terms have in mind, and unclear whether they are all even referring to the same thing. For example, many people seem to believe that sexual conduct is a central element in morality. When you read in the newspaper that there is a question about some politician's morals, you know right away that it has to do with sex. But others believe that, although some moral wrongs, such as rape, or infidelity, involve sex, these things are wrong because they are instances of more generic wrongs that are not essentially concerned with sex, such as coercion, or promise-breaking. When no other form of harm or wrong is involved, sex itself is not a moral issue, according to this view. Differences such as this, which are not so much about the content of morality as about its scope - the range of actions it applies to - suggest that people disagree not just about which things are morally wrong but also about what it is to be morally wrong.

These different views of morality agree in taking moral standards to be ones that we all have good reason to accept as a normally conclusive basis for deciding what to do and for assessing our claims against others. Some people who believe morality is authoritative in this way may have specific ideas about the reasons why this is so - for example, that these standards are commands of God. But different people may have different ideas about this, and I believe that many people, even though they take moral standards seriously, are quite unclear about exactly why one should do so.

Answering this question has been one of the central aims of moral philosophy since its beginning. Plato's dialogue Gorgias, for example, is devoted to the question of why we should act justly, and whether there are correct answers to basic questions of morality and justice, or whether, as some participants in the dialogue maintain, these are matters of opinion rather than knowledge, and mere persuasion rather than argument. Callicles, the toughest of these participants, holds that the best life, if one could attain it, would be a life in which one was able to persuade other people to do whatever one wanted them to, without regard to considerations of justice or morality. Socrates' response to this challenge illustrates several important features of this central question of moral philosophy.

The first is that any attempt to answer the question, "Why be moral?" faces a dilemma. On the one hand, a satisfactory answer to this question cannot be based on any avowedly moral claim. It would be obviously circular to argue that one should obey moral requirements because it would be morally wrong not to do so, or because one would be morally bad if one did not. On the other hand, a response to this question that appealed to some consideration that was obviously unconnected to morality - such as that being moral would make one rich, because "honesty is the best policy" - would offer the wrong kind of answer, which would fail to give morality the kind of significance that it is generally thought to have. It would be more like a bribe, making what had been thought of as noble behavior in fact self-interested.

Socrates' answer responds to this dilemma. He maintains that immoral or unjust action is only possible if one has a disordered soul, and that the health of one's soul is the most important thing in life. Because of this, he says, acting unjustly is worse than suffering even the most severe injustice at the hands of others.1 This answer may not be very convincing, but it has the form required to avoid the dilemma I just described. Socrates' conception of the health of one's soul is not simply a circular appeal to morality, but rather offers an independent reason for being moral, and one that does not seem like a bribe.

When Socrates offers this answer, Polus, another participant in the dialogue, says that it is ridiculous. He adds that if Socrates were to go into the assembly and say that committing an injustice is worse for a person than suffering an injustice, people would laugh at him, and no one would agree. Socrates responds that the kind of inquiry he is engaged in is not settled by taking a vote. The only relevant way to show him to be wrong, he says, would be to offer an argument refuting what he has claimed.2

This illustrates a second important point about philosophical inquiry into morality (or into any other philosophical issue). However plausible or implausible Socrates' thesis may be, any answer to the question he is addressing is bound to be controversial. Given any account of the reasons for taking moral requirements seriously, there are bound to be some people who reject this account and are not convinced by the arguments we offer (as, indeed, the opponents in Plato's dialogue seem in the end not to be really convinced by the argument Socrates has offered).

This would be discouraging if the aim of philosophical inquiry were to find an argument that would force any imagined opponent to accept one's conclusion. But this is not the aim of philosophy, not only because it is unrealistic to think we could attain it, but also because it is not the main thing we have reason to aim at. Philosophical inquiry is a process of making up one's own mind what to think. It is not, primarily, about convincing others. After all, one does not know what one wants to convince others of until one figures out what to think oneself.3 The dialogue format of Plato's writings can be confusing on this point. It is natural to read dialogues as debates, in which Socrates is trying to "defeat" his "opponents." But this is not the way Socrates himself sees it. He emphasizes that being shown to be wrong is not defeat, but something to be welcomed, because one will have benefited by learning something.4 He sees his interlocutors not as opponents but as coinvestigators. This is why he insists that he is interested in talking only with people who will say what they themselves believe, and will submit to questioning about what they say.

The fact that philosophical inquiry aims at deciding what to believe oneself rather than at convincing real or imagined opponents does not mean that one is free to ignore what others think. It just alters the relevance of conflicting opinions. The question is not "How could I convince them?" "They" may be unreasonable, and refuse to accept even good arguments. The relevant questions, rather, are, "Why do they think that?" and "Do their reasons provide good grounds for me to accept their view?" If one can resolve these questions satisfactorily, then one need not change one's mind, even if others continue to disagree.

Before taking up the question of the basis of morality, we need to consider the broader question of what makes a life a good life for the person who lives it. This is relevant to an account of morality in two ways. First, an answer to the question, "Why be moral?" must consider how morality is related to the kind of life that is desirable for the person whose life it is. Second, the content of morality depends in part on the answer to this question, since one thing morality requires of us is that we help others in various ways, and at least not harm them. So, to know what morality requires we need to know what is good for people - what makes their lives better, and what makes them worse.

In his argument with Callicles, Socrates considers and rejects two accounts of what makes a person's life better that still have appeal for many people today. These are hedonism, which is the view that the quality of a life for the person who lives it is measured by the amount of pleasure that it contains, and a desire theory, according to which the quality of a life for a person depends on the degree to which it fulfils his or her desires. Although each of these views has considerable appeal, neither is in fact a satisfactory account, for reasons that Plato recognized in Gorgias.5

Consider hedonism first. There is, of course, the difficult question of exactly what pleasure is, and which kinds of pleasure are most worth having. Advocates of hedonism may underestimate this problem, but there is a further objection to hedonism, which can be seen by noting that it is a form of experientialism - that is, it makes the quality of a life for the person living it depend entirely on the experience of living that life. Robert Nozick provided a famous argument against experientialism with his thought experiment of the "experience machine."6 Suppose, he said, that it were possible to have oneself connected to a very powerful computer, which would stimulate your brain in a way that would make it seem to you exactly as if you were living whatever kind of life you take to be best. Would a life connected to such a machine actually be as good as a life could be? Nozick claimed, very convincingly I think, that it would not be. The quality of a life depends on what one actually does, and what actually happens to one, not just on what it seems like. The same point can be made without the science fiction involved in Nozick's example. Consider the possibility that the people whom I think of as my good friends are in fact...