Karol Edward Soltan

Attractiveness and Empirical Normative Ethics

empirical social science and within non-empirical normative ethics. And it has a far from glorious history (now mostly forgotten) of failure. Who remembers today Durkheim’s unfinished work on La Morale, or Sorokin’s work on creative altruism? But empirical normative ethics now shows signs of serious intellectual life and growing internal diversity. It is tempting to write a survey of the different approaches now being developed. But I will resist temptation and let others speak for themselves. I will sketch instead one line of thought, which uses attractiveness as an indicator of the goodness of ends, develops a methodology for the study of attractiveness, and uses that methodology to study what contributes to the goodness of ends. One key task of moral theory is to identify and describe good ends. Another task is to identify and describe the different ways in which our conception of good ends can be used in the evaluation of actions and institutions. Many of the more prominent controversies in ethics center around different possible answers to the latter question. According to one view, the rightness of actions depends on goodness of consequences, or on the degree to which the action promotes (helps us achieve) good ends. This is the familiar consequentialist view, exemplified by the various forms of utilitarianism. According to another view, some actions are (to a degree, or in part) ends in themselves. They are right to the degree they are good ends. Or, alternatively, we can have a situation like that exemplified by Rawls’s pure procedural justice: An action is right to the extent it follows a certain method, and its consequences, whatever they may be, are made good by being the product of that method. Finally, the good end may be some feature of an agent’s character, a virtue. It may be specific to some sphere of activity (as courage is) or more general (maturity may be an example). An action is right either if it brings about greater maturity (which is the consequentialist evaluation), or because it is mature. In the latter case the action is a sign of, and a part of, some good end. For the present, my aim is to avoid the controversies between these different views of how good ends enter into our evaluation of actions by sticking to the question of what makes ends good. This will involve enough controversies of its own. How indeed can we identify and describe good ends? How can we study, more generally, what contributes to the goodness of ends? To this question I propose an answer with a strong empirical component, which allows us to say that the goodness of ends is discovered, and in a manner not radically different from discovery elsewhere in the sciences, combining theoretical speculation with observational and experimental tests. The view that good ends are to be discovered has been traditionally defended by the natural law tradition. So if you need to locate my proposal in intellectual terrain, think of it as natural law with a scientific twist. But it is hard to squeeze normative conclusions out of purely descriptive premises. It may be impossible to do so. And I don’t suggest doing any such thing. I rely rather on the normative claim that goodness of ends implies their objective attractiveness, or that the strength of attractiveness is a reliable indicator of goodness. And attractiveness is an empirical property of ends, even if it is difficult to study (largely because attractiveness is not the same thing as felt attractiveness). The central moral thesis of the approach I propose is that better ends and ideals are more objective and have greater power. They are marked by greater capacity to attract minds, or capacity to generate consent, or persuasive capacity, or legitimating capacity, or—most simply—greater attractiveness. The basic thesis can be put briefly: GOOD ENDS ARE OBJECTIVELY ATTRACTIVE FORCES. And objective attractiveness is something we can study empirically. This thesis requires conceptual and empirical elaboration as well as normative justification. On I will sketch instead one line of thought, which uses attractiveness as an indicator of the goodness of ends, develops a methodology for the study of attractiveness, and uses that methodology to study what contributes to the goodness of ends. S Y M P O S I U M

Round-Robin Commentary

What precisely is the relationship of ‘is’ to ‘ought’? With the development of modern behavioral research and experimental methods, we have found that certain patterns of moral judgment are nigh everywhere. Does this impact the almost universally held belief that is does not imply an ought? But it is also widely believed that if there is no can, there is no ought: you need not help if you cannot. But in a world of rapidly changing abilities, this latter boundary of what one can do is fuzzy and malleable: anyone can send money to fund medical care to a remote section of the world with the touch of a button and our country can ship tons of aid within hours of a disaster to anywhere in the world with but a nod of our President. What precisely is to become to the status of these touchstones of moral theory? And what is the epistemic value of universally found moral judgments? And what are we to make of the omnipresent opportunities to micro-help the needy and the oppressed by marginally supporting worthy causes and so on? Must the world’s needs yield moral imperatives that would drain the average Joe’s resources? How do we answer these questions?

Impartial Attractiveness as a Moral Test

1. Bring it in closer alignment with the modern scientific spirit, as it is understood today, not as it was understood in 17th or 18th century (no self evident moral truths as axioms, for example) and not as it was understood in 13th century either (no return to Aristotle or to Saint Thomas Aquinas). 2. Make systematic moral thinking as helpful as it can be in improving the world. Certainly it would then have to have normative force, and it would need to pay attention to the problem of motivation, and to possible supporting institutional instruments, such as the courts of law, or self-limiting social movements.

Conservative Liberal Socialism and Politics of a Complex Center

wrote the conservative-liberal-socialist manifesto and gained considerable sympathy for it, at least among those (including myself) concerned with the struggle against communism. Now that communism is all but dead, has the great cause of conservative-liberal-socialism died with it? Some think so, but they take too narrow a view of the significance of Kolakowski’s manifesto. The larger cause to which that manifesto contributed was a certain form of politics of the center, which I will call interchangeably the politics of a complex or a principled center. This cause, I certainly hope, is not dead. It is in fact now facing its most ambitious task. But it is under perpetual threat, not only from various fanaticisms and extremisms, but also from other petty, small-minded and cynical forms of the politics of the center. What is the politics of the center? Is it the politics of the middle class, which some have considered essential to democratic stability? Is it the politics of the median voter, the inevitable winner in certain very simple voting situations? Do we need to adopt the Aristotelian or the Confucian doctrine of the mean? It can be any of those. But at bottom, politics of the center is an effort to move away from extremes, however defined. It is also a battle against violence, destruction, and their influence in politics and in life generally, against war and revolution, but also against coercion. The center plays an important role in ethics and politics in a number of distinctive ways. In this essay I want to sketch the case in favor of politics that searches for and aims to create a morally and institutionally complex center, distinct from the center that is simply a balance of power. We can trace a long and only intermittently glorious history of the politics of the center in action, including the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the United States Constitution of 1787, but also the altogether less glorious French regime established in 1830 with Louis Philippe as king, and Guizot as chief political mentor, trying to establish a “juste milieu” between reaction and revolution. More recently politics of the center has been best exemplified by those who created, reformed, and maintained the welfare state, avoiding the extremes of pure free-market capitalism and full state socialism (the work of a combination of Christian Democrats, Ordo Liberals, and Social Democrats in Europe, and New Deal Democrats with their allies in the United States). This is in many ways a glorious history to be sure, but it also leads to the not-so-glorious current state of democratic politics in the United States, as vividly described for us by Lowi, among others. More recently still, the politics of the center has had a significant appeal to dissident groups and the anti-communist opposition in communist countries. Kolakowski put forward a conservative liberal-socialist manifesto speaking in favor of an ideologically and morally complex center. Writing in 1978, he included a historical prediction: that his movement would never develop a mass following. Arguably it did, however: in the form of the trade union Solidarity, at least in its most complex incarnation of 1980–81. Under the pressures of partisan politics after the collapse of communism, Solidarity has split into various combinations of its components, and conservative-liberal-socialism has returned to power in Poland only occasionally in the guise of coalition governments. But meanwhile in the West the politics of the center takes new forms. We find it in the international Communitarian Network, or the efforts to build a new program for the center left, a new Third Way. The classical ideal of the center and of moderation, is represented best by Aristotle and Confucius, with their identification of virtue as a center between extremes, and of vices as those extremes. The degree to which contemporary politics of the center is, or ought to be, Aristotelian or Confucian, I leave to the side in this essay. I want instead to sketch a politics that pursues a different ideal: a complex center, reflecting and favoring moral, ideological, and institutional complexity. What is good about the politics of a complex center? If we want to build a better world when we face moral complexity (multiple conflicting ends and ideals) and complex constraints, we need to be prepared to develop a complex program full of hybrids. If we want to maintain and enhance uniqueness of persons, cultures, institutions, and natural locations, then we must both protect and promote complexity. Liberal Conservative Socialism and the Politics of a Complex Center