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Absolutes and Particulars1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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How is it possible to love some particular person for herself, or for himself, alone? Love—especially erotic love—does not typically begin when we love someone ‘for herself alone’. It very often begins with some strikingly superficial feature or property of the beloved: a certain grace of movement, maybe, or a glimpse inside a young man0027;s shirt (Plato, Charmides 155d4), or the colour of Anne Gregory's hair in Yeats's poem. As Yeats sardonically points out, it is quite common for love never to get any further than this. It's hardly news that plenty of love affairs have rested on no deeper foundations than hair coloration.
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2 On focal meaning see Owen, G. E. L., ‘Logic and Metaphysics in some Earlier Works of Aristotle’, in his Logic, Science and Dialectic (London: Duckworth, 1986)).Google Scholar
3 Aristotle does not say ‘people’; he says ‘men of virtue’. He thinks full friendship impossible for those who are not agathoi (1157a16–20), since ‘bad men take no pleasure in each other, except where there is something in it for themselves’. This is simply wrong; you don't have to be an agathos to be capable of taking disinterested pleasure in other people. Possibly Aristotle has in mind the truth that there is more to take pleasure in when you contemplate a good person than when you contemplate a bad one. But then, as Aristotle himself tells us (1143b18), bad people typically take pleasure in the wrong things; including, perhaps, the contemplation of other bad people.
Aristotle too remarks that only a limited number of full friendships is possible: NE 1158a10.
4 Presumably the next move in this dialectic is a Kantian one: even though we have no idea of the person in himself, loving the person in himself is a moral necessity. So the person in himself is transcendentally reinstated.
5 Anscombe Three Philosophers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), p. 17Google Scholar: ‘The theory of accidents … lends itself to representation as a cluster or veneer theory of properties; as if the substance were the underlying material, and the properties a … barnacle-like cluster of dependent quasi-substances stuck on to the substance…’
6 Cp. Martin, Christopher, The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Introductory Readings (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 62–63Google Scholar: ‘People often talk as if the accidents were that which can change, and the substance that which does not change … [Bthis] leads people in the end to suppose that the substance is a “bare particular”, that has no accidents, that has no colour or shape, that is a “something I know not what” that is completely unknowable.’ Contrast the Aristotelian view that particular substance is not only knowable by perception, but the primary object of knowledge by perception (e.g. Metaphysics 1018b31–34).
7 Perhaps ‘we should prefer’ makes it sound as if this philosophical choice was a completely free one, a choice not made, for instance, under the formidable pressures of Newtonian and Cartesian scepticism that led Locke to say what he said about substances. The answer to this doubt is another story, which I can't tell in this paper. See my forthcoming Western Philosophy: The Inescapable Self(London: Orion Books, 2004).Google Scholar
8 See also Murdoch p. 38: ‘Goodness is connected with knowledge: not with impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world, whatever that may be, but with a refined and honest perception of what is really the case, a patient and just discernment and exploration of what confronts one, which is the result not simply of opening one—s eyes but of a certain perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline.’
9 See e.g. Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, pp. 200–201 in Marsh, R. C., (ed.), Logic and Knowledge (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956)Google Scholar: ‘The names that we commonly use, like “Socrates201D;, are really abbreviations for descriptions… what they describe are not particulars but complicated systems of classes or series. A name, in the narrow logical sense of a word whose meaning is a particular, can only be applied to a particular with which the speaker is acquainted, because you cannot name anything you are not acquainted with… That makes it very difficult to get any instance of a name at all in the proper strict logical sense of the word. The only words one does use as names in the logical sense are words like “this” or “that”’ [for items of immediate subjective experience005D;. Cp ‘On the nature of acquaintance’, at p. 138 in Marsh (italics added): ‘For the present, let us assume as a working hypothesis the existence of other people, and of unperceived physical things.’
10 Williams, Bernard, Utilitarianism: for and against (Cambridge: CUP, 1973, p. 118.Google Scholar
11 Vlastos, loc. cit. Vlastos's first quotation is from the Emile, at Vol. IV, p. 743, in the Pléiade, edition (Paris, 1969)Google Scholar. The second quotation is from The Confessions, at Vol. I, p. 427Google Scholar. Compare a poignant sentence from Book 3 of The Confessions (my italics): ‘Je ne sentais toute la force de mon attachement pour elle que quand je ne la voyais pas.’
12 And, perhaps, vice versa. I won't speculate here about whether the philosophy caused the pathology, or merely expressed it. Maybe it did both.
13 ‘Diotima's Platonism': no sensitive reader of the Symposium can possibly miss the evidence that Plato himself feels torn between Diotima's values and Alcibiades'. See Nussbaum, Martha, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: CUP, 1986)Google Scholar, Ch. 6, ‘The Speech of Alcibiades: a reading of the Symposium’, at p. 167: Vlastos' ‘criticism of Plato's perceptions… requires us to treat as Plato's only the view expressed in the speech of Diotima as repeated by Socrates, and to charge [Plato] with being unaware of the rest of what he has written' in the Symposium.
14 Cp. McCabe, Mary Margaret, Plato's Individuals (Cambridge, MA: Princeton UP, 1994)Google Scholar, for further argument that Plato's metaphysics gives properties a crucial ontological priority over individuals.
15 For instance: Williams, Bernard, ‘A critique of utilitarianism’, in Smart, and Williams, , Utilitarianism: for and against, and ‘Persons, Character, and Morality’ in Williams, Moral Luck Cambridge: CUP, 1981)Google Scholar; Railton, Peter, ‘Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1984Google Scholar; Kapur, Neera Badhwar, ‘Why it is wrong to be always guided by the best’,Ethics 1991Google Scholar; Cocking, Dean and Oakley, Justin, ‘Indirect Consequentialism’, Ethics 1995Google Scholar; Mason, Elinor, ‘Can an indirect consequentialist be a true friend?’, Ethics 1998Google Scholar; Powers, Madison, ‘Rule Consequentialism and the value of friendship’, in Mason, Hooker, and Miller, , (eds.), Morality, Rules, and Consequences (Edinburgh: EUP, 2000).Google Scholar
16 This distinction is also deployed by Ackrill, John in his classic paper ‘Aristotle on Eudaimonia’, in Rorty, A. O., (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).Google Scholar
17 Williams' phrase in ‘Persons, Character and Morality’.
18 See Williams, Bernard, ‘Persons, Character and Morality’, at p. 18 in his Moral Luck.Google Scholar
19 This is about my only allusion to moral absolutes in the sense of unbreakable moral rules. Most of this paper is about a different absolute/particular contrast from the contrast most discussed recently. That is the contrast between moral particularism—roughly, the view that any morally relevant property whatever can vary in its valence—and moral absolutism—roughly, the view that some morally relevant properties not only never vary in their valence, but also invariably provide a decisive reason for a specific type of action or abstention. I used to think that I knew I was an absolutist and not a particularist. Three very fine recent papers have made me dougbt that I do know that: Mark Lance's and Maggie Little's ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ (unpublished; presented at the British Society for Ethical Theory, Reading 2002), and the symposium between Cullity, Garrett and Richard, Holton in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Suppl.) 2002Google Scholar. The Lance/Little paper suggests that a particularist can also be a generalist, someone who believes in general moral principles, provided these take the form of ceteris parihus laws; the Cullity/ Holton exchange suggests that a particularist can be someone who thinks that adding further moral information about a situation can change its moral character in non-monotonic ways. My question in both cases is the same: What, on these characterisations, counts as being an absolutist? The answers that I think this question must evoke leave no room for a more than technical distinction between absolutism and particularism.
Lance and Little take absolutism to involve thinking that there are some general moral principles that have no ceteris paribus clauses. If that is absolutism, then absolutism looks irresistible (cp. Cullity, loc. cit. p. 182, on the absolute wrongness of making someone suffer for your own enjoyment). Understood this way, the absolutism/ particularism dispute is too easily settled to be interesting. Presumably absolutism might be understood, instead, as a stringent view of what it takes for cetera to be imparia (e.g., denying that we can invoke the ceteris paribus clause in the principle ‘Murder is wrong’ in any situation that we can think of, while admitting that a case where this clause could be invoked is theoretically possible). Here the difference between particularism and absolutism is only about degrees of stringency, which doesn't seem a very interesting difference either.
Meanwhile Holton and Cullity characterise the absolutist as someone who denies non-monotonicity on the evaluative side. Absolutism means thinking that once some moral descriptions are in (e.g. ‘This is an act of murder’), no further moral descriptions that we might add can change the overall moral character of the situation or action that we're considering. Fine; but you could accept non-monotonicity on the evaluative side while denying it on the factual side. That is, you could hold that the correct moral description of something as murder settled the question of its wrongness (and settled it indefeasibly, as suggested above), while also holding that there is no finitely specifiable factual description which settles the question of whether a given act is an act of murder. Something like this may be Anscombe's own view in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’: ‘exceptional circumstances can always make a difference’ to the correct factual description of a situation (p. 28), but there are cases where ‘no circumstances, and no expected consequences, which do not modify’ a given moral description of a situation can alter its moral character (p. 39). This distinction between two places where non-monotonicity might occur is real; but rather fine. If this is all there is to the distinction between particularism and absolutism, you are left wondering how big a deal that distinction actually is.
20 We need the word ‘multiplicity’ because, presumably, even the simplest form of consequentialism recognises as basic one single constraint: ‘Don't fail to maximise the good’.
21 The argument of this paragraph is developed further in my ‘Implications of Incommensurability’, Philosophy 2001, and ‘Practical Rationality for Pluralists about the Good’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2002.
22 The idea of persons as receptacles for pleasure is not new: see Plato, Gorgias 493e, on Callicles' version of the receptacle view.
23 Anscombe, , ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ p. 36Google Scholar: 'It is a necessary feature of consequentialism that it is a shallow philosophy… the consequentialist has no footing on which to say “This would be permissible, this not”; because by his own hypothesis, it is the consequences that are to decide, and he has no business to pretend that he can lay it down what possible twists a man could give doing this or that… the consequentialist, in order to be imagining borderline cases at all, has of course to assume some sort of law or standard according to which this is a borderline case. Where then does he get that standard from? In practice the answer invariably is: from the standards current in his society or his circle. And it has in fact been the mark of all these philosophers that they have been extremely conventional; they have nothing in them by which to revolt against the conventional standards of their sort of people; it is impossible they should be profound.'
On shallowness in attitudes to persons see also, more recently, Gaita, Raimond, A Common Humanity (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 26–27Google Scholar: ‘Our sense of the preciousness of other people is concerned with their power to affect us in ways we cannot fathom and in ways against which we can protect ourselves only at the cost of becoming shallow.’
24 Of course, a consequentialist could also say that the existence of any particular person has some value in itself, but that this value can sometimes be outweighed by the disvalue of that person's disutility. One question for the consequentialist who says this is: What is meant by this talk of outweighing? Another question is: What actions (or omissions) are supposed to be justified by this alleged outweighing? Even if someone's life is ‘not worth living’, it is not obvious—especially not if the values of pleasure/ pain and of human life are incommensurable—that there is any good sense in which he ought to be dead. Still less that we ought to procure his death. Cp. my paper ‘Why euthanasia is in no one's interest’, Philosophy Now 40 (March 2003), pp. 10–12.
25 McMahan p. 80 makes the distinction between an interest and a timerelative interest like this: ‘One's interests are concerned with what would be better for one considered as a temporally extended being… One's present time-relative interests are what one has egoistic reason to care about now’.
26 The usual qualifications apply about (1) involuntariness, (2) omission and (3) intention. On (2) and (3) see my ‘Two Distinctions that Do Make a Difference’, Philosophy 2002.
27 Jeff McMahan's view of the wrongness of killing, the ‘ Intrinsic Worth Account’, might seem an exception to this generalisation (McMahan, , The Ethics of Killing, p. 242)Google Scholar: ‘While the badness of death is correlative with the value of the victim's possible future life, the wrongness of killing is correlative with the value or worth of the victim himself… a person, a being of incalculable worth, demands the highest respect. To kill a person, in contravention of that person's own will, is an egregious failure of respect for the person and his worth… because killing inflicts the ultimate loss—the obliteration of the person himself—and is both irreversible and incompensable, it is no exaggeration to say that it constitutes the ultimate violation of the requirement of respect.' In fact McMahan is not an exception, because what he means by a ‘person’ is a ‘being with psychological capacities of sufficient complexity and sophistication’ (quoted from personal communication, 1/2/03). In other words, McMahan straight-forwardly accepts a Receptacle View: he thinks that the human substance has no value in itself, and only becomes valuable when certain favoured properties (the psychological capacities) are instantiated in that substance.
28 Singer, , Practical Ethics p. 126Google Scholar: ‘Rational, self-conscious beings are individuals, leading lives of their own, and cannot in any sense be regarded merely as receptacles for containing a certain quantity of happiness… In contrast, beings who are conscious, but not self-conscious, more nearly approximate the picture of receptacles for pleasure and pain.’
29 And don't say that no Nazi could be resolute and clear-headed. Self-evidently, lots of Nazis were both.
30 On this too cp. my ‘Why euthanasia is in no one's interest’, Philosophy Now 40 (03 2003).Google Scholar
31 Cp. Parfit, , Reasons and Persons pp. 204–209.Google Scholar
32 Parfit's, term: see, e.g., Reasons and Persons p. 262.Google Scholar
33 The argument of the next two paragraphs is developed further in my ‘Persons in time’, in Heather, Dyke, (ed.), Time and Ethics (Amsterdam: Kluwer 2003).Google Scholar
34 Wittgenstein, , Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1951)Google Scholar; Ryle, , The Concept of Mind (London: Fontana, 1950)Google Scholar; Strawson, , Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anscombe, , ‘The First Person’, in Rosenthal, , (ed.), The Nature of Mind (Oxford: OUP, 1991).Google Scholar
35 Parfit's Psychological Account is not the only theory whose account of persons in this way ends up as a version of the receptacle view. Mutatis mutandis, my comments on Parfit apply also to Singer (again), Practical Ethics pp. 86–87: ‘I propose to use “person”, in the sense of a rational and self-conscious being, to capture those elements of the popular sense of “human being” that are not covered by “member of the species Homo sapiens”.’ And to Harris, John, The Value of Life pp. 16–17Google Scholar: ‘persons are beings capable of valuing their own lives.’ And to Tooley, Michael, ‘Abortion and Infanticide’ [1972], in Singer, , (ed.), Applied Ethics (Oxford: OUP, 1987), p. 82Google Scholar: ‘An organism possesses a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such an entity.’ And to Warren, Mary Anne (‘On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion’, in H., Lafollette, (ed.), Ethics in Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 83–84)Google Scholar: ‘What characteristics entitle an entity to be considered a person? This is not the place to attempt a complete analysis of the concept of personhood… All we need is an approximate list of the most basic criteria of personhood… I suggest that among the characteristics which are central to the concept of personhood are the following: (1) sentience… (2) emotionality… (3) reason… (4) the capacity to communicate… (5) self-awareness… (6) moral agency.’ Mary Anne Warren's more recent ‘multi-criterial theory of moral status’ (see her book Moral Status) is also, in its application to persons, a version of the receptacle view.
36 Anscombe, , ‘The First Person’, p. 79.Google Scholar
37 Afterthought: The suggestion that persons are ‘living human bodies’ is often countered by the Martians Question (first clearly put, perhaps, by Warren as cited in Note 34): ‘There might be persons of other species—intelligent aliens. These persons would not be living human bodies.’ Correct. The right response is to widen the definition of persons: ‘persons are living human (or intelligent alien) bodies’. But, the Martians Question continues, ‘So how do we recognise persons? The intelligent aliens show that persons are not recognized by their being living bodies, but by their displaying a particular type of psychology. So a person can't be simply a living human (or intelligent alien) body. A person must be at least a living body of some kind that possesses a particular psychology.’
This is a non sequitur. The criteria whereby we first diagnose a natural kind—water, say—may include e.g. wetness. It does not follow that water is essentially wet, still less that water is wetness. Similarly, the criteria whereby we first diagnose personhood need not be even part of the essence of persons. Still less need personhood be identified with the sum of those criteria. (See Kripke, , Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), pp. 116ffGoogle Scholar.) Further, the normal use of this line of argument—which, as in Warren, is to exclude e.g. very old and very young humans from person-hood—depends upon unstated presuppositions about what counts as possessing a particular psychology or other characteristic. It is assumed that, because the infant does not actually perform any reasoning, we cannot describe it as a rational being. Yet we also describe the infant as a biped, even though the infant does not actually walk on two legs, and as a mammal, even though the infant does not actually breast-feed anyone (and will never even be able to, if it is male).