Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 8)
/John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part VIII, Norm-Expressivism
David Baggett
Allan Gibbard denies the new-wave realist claim that value properties have causal effects on the world, but he does think that a causal process operates in the world to produce our affective response mechanisms, and that this causal process results in our good. This is what Hare calls the “third expressivist concession.” Gibbard thinks that the moral emotions such as guilt and resentment are themselves the fruit of a beneficent causal process, though the process is not benevolent because it is not personal (it is evolutionary). The emotions are good for us because they enable coordination, broadly conceived.
His view is that evolution selected in favor of affective dispositions in us which promote coordination, and hence the human goods that are available only through coordination. In particular, evolution gave us specifically human kinds of anger such as outrage and resentment, and it gave us the feeling of guilt, which is an adaptive response to anger because it invites reconciliation, and thus promotes cooperation instead of conflict between the parties. In the case of such emotions, Gibbard thinks that it is good for us that we have them. This is the first kind of causal process he discusses, the process by which we have been given through the emotions a route to coordination.
A second kind of causal process connects these emotions to the stimuli to which they are responses. Gibbard wants to find an account of practical rationality in a broad sense, which will give us the kind of objectivity we want. For an agent to judge that her action is morally reprehensible, he says, is for her to express her acceptance of norms that impartially prescribe, for such a situation, guilt on the part of the agent and resentment (or anger) on the part of others.
There is an important truth here that prescriptive realism can incorporate. The truth is that a value judgment endorses not just the particular response but the whole causal network of typical situation and emotional response to the situation invoked by the evaluative term. When judging something to be wrong, she is expressing her acceptance of the whole structure in which she is embedded, in which people respond in this way to this kind of action. What Gibbard has added is the widening of the scope of the evaluation to include this whole structure.
Hare wants to do something different from Gibbard, but faithful to the concession as just formulated. He’s going to give a Kant-style argument for what he will call a “postulate of prudence,” that an agent has to assume that the world is such that her evaluation of something as good to pursue is consistent with her happiness. The connection with Gibbard is that Gibbard uses evolution as a substitute or improvement on the doctrine of providence, but the realist implications are the same in either case.
The argument for the postulate of prudence proceeds by pointing out how many assumptions are required by an evaluation of something as good to pursue. Hare will mention five: (1) I have to assume that the good I pursue can be achieved. My emotions and desires have to be coordinated with the way the world is such that my basic concerns fit at least roughly what the world allows. (2) I have to assume that the good I aim at is possible as a result of my effort. (3) I have to assume that I can will my good not merely at the moment but consistently. (4) The goods I pursue are at least by and large consistent with one another. (5) I have to make assumptions about other people, that what they evaluate as good to pursue is at least roughly consistent with what I evaluate as good to pursue.
When Hare adds these five assumptions together, and supposes the world is such that they are all justified, then he will have postulated, when one evaluates something as good to pursue, this evaluation and pursuit is consistent with one’s happiness. But there are challenges to such a moral postulate. In the face of the ever-present possibility of a pessimistic outlook, we need a kind of realist faith, that the world and we ourselves in it are in fact governed in such a way that these five assumptions are legitimate, and our pursuing some good is consistent with our happiness.
We can then interpret the hints of fit we get as signs of the truth of a larger picture in which the good is, so to speak, more fundamental than the evil. There’s no inconsistency between such a faith, realist though it be, and expressivism as Hare’s defended it. What expressivism adds is that in an evaluative judgment I have to put that faith into practice in my decision about when to endorse and when to withhold endorsement.
