Montesquieu was a Straussian

Here is something to chew on, from Montesquieu’s My Thoughts [HenryC. Clark, trans.]:

Look at how, in Plutarch’s Life of Nicias, the scientists who explained lunar eclipses by natural causes were suspect to the people.  The called them weather fanatics, convinced that they reduced all of divinity to natural and scientific causes, until Socrates cut to the root of everything by subjecting the necessity of natural causes to a divine and intelligent origin.  The doctrine of an intelligent being was thus discovered by Plato only as an antidote and a defensive weapon against the calumnies of the pagan zealots. 

Wow.  Montesquieu (1689-1755) was a Straussian!  That is to say that he interpreted a very significant element in Platonic/Socratic thought as essentially political in nature.  Plato came up with the idea of an intelligent designer in order to protect philosophy against religious opposition. 

I suspect that Montesquieu is right about that.  Most of the speculation about God in Plato’s dialogues comes in the form of deliberately constructed myths or, what is the same thing, discussions of what teachings are proper to a healthy political community.  It is an open question whether or in what way Plato believed in the divine, though I see no evidence of atheism in his thought. 

Two more things stand out in this passage.  One is that the tension between philosophy and religion has always turned on the problem of reductionism.  It is the fear that, by explaining something, one explains it away.  The second is that Plato was the originator of the doctrine of intelligent design.  Surely that is wrong, one might object.  Didn’t the pagan zealots believe in such a thing?  No.  Their beliefs were grounded in the myths.  Plato’s notion of the intelligent designer begins with the intelligible Kosmos and reasons from that to God.  That kind of thought might well begin with Socrates.  

Intelligent Virtue 4: Thick & Thin Ethics

An ethical concept is thin to the extent that it narrowly describes an action, as for example: the right thing to do is the thing that maximizes utility or satisfies the categorical imperative or is in accord with the commands of God.  It is intended to work regardless of what assumptions we make about the world and the persons that act morally in that world. 

An ethical concept is thick to the degree that it includes descriptive elements about the context of the action, based on shared notions about people and the nature of human existence.  Hiding Jews from Nazis was the right thing to do because it was the brave thing to do, knowing what we know about the peril faced by the persecuted and their defenders. 

In Chapter 3 of Intelligent Virtue, Julia Annas defends the thickness of virtue ethics.  Her best point employs the skill analogy against thin ethical theories.  Such theories demand “right-making characteristics” that have to be present in all right actions.  The best example would be in Kantian ethics.  An action is right if and only if it is done because it is right.  Okay, but which actions should be done because they are right? 

To answer that question, Kant deploys his two versions of the categorical imperative: a right action is one based on universal principles and it is one that treats human beings as ends and never as means.  Okay again, but do these principles tell us what to do when the Nazis show up at my front door?  Maybe, but it isn’t clear.  Should I universalize the principle that everyone should always tell the truth or the principle that everyone should protect the innocent against the evil? 

Annas considers the case of learning Italian.  Is there some principle that all grammatically correct Italian sentences must comply with?  Or is it rather the case that you have to know whether it is a statement or a question or an exhortation, who is speaking to whom, whether it is about the past, present or the future?  To know the correct way to speak in any actual case it is necessary to have thick concepts of grammatical correctness.  You need to understand tenses, moods, parts of sentences, etc. 

Likewise with moral actions, you need to know how to act in a range of contexts that vary widely in ways that will resist reduction to any simple formulation.  To decide whether I should lie to the Nazis about the Jews hiding in my basement, I need to know something about bravery in particular.  To be truly virtuous, I have to have the dispositions and understand to act bravely (and creatively) in a range of situations.  I am more likely to act calmly and effectively if I am fluent in the virtue in question. 

To add to Annas’ reflections, the development of virtue, like mastering a language or learning to play the piano, depends on a considerable number of evolved dispositions and capacities.  It is not reducible to those products of evolution because it must be developed creatively in response to unforeseeable circumstances.  Virtue is as much a product of that development as it is of the basic evolutionary legacies. 

It seems clear to me that the thick concepts of virtue ethics are far more realistic and richly endowed than the any thin, abstract approaches to ethics.  It is also the case that virtue ethics can be grounded in evolutionary biology and so has the most solid foundation of all the modern theories. 

Intelligent Virtue by Julia Annas

I am reading Intelligent Virtue, by Julia Annas.  I gather from the review in the Times Literary Supplement and from the first chapter, that this is a forceful defense of the Aristotelian account of virtue.  I am all ears. 

Annas wants to press two points about virtue.  One is that virtue can be understood in terms of what she calls the skill analogy.  Virtue is learned in the same way as playing the harmonica is learned.  I use the harmonica as an example only because it is the only musical instrument I have ever made progress on. 

The second is that virtue is an essential component of happiness.  Happiness is here understood in Aristotle’s sense of eudaimonia.  This word, central to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, means literally “good spirited.”  That is, blessed by good daimons.  In ordinary Greek usage, it indicated a person for whom everything generally goes well.  In Aristotle’s hands, it comes to mean a life that is good as a whole. 

So a virtue is something that can be acquired by practice and that, as it is acquired, enables virtuous actions.  A person learns to play a musical instrument and then can be counted upon to play it well when it is appropriate.  A complete set of virtues makes for a person who is reliable and admirable and lives the best life that his or her circumstances allow. 

I will keep posting as I read along. 

On a very different topic, I see a big problem here for Barnes & Noble.  I downloaded Annas’ book for about twenty dollars for my Kindle.  B&N is offering it for $81.60 with no option to download it to a Nook.  I love Barnes & Noble bookstores, but this makes me wonder whether they can possibly survive in the current market. 

Roger White on Origin of Life Explanations 2

Roger White distinguishes three types of phenomena, illustrated by “pebble patterns.” 

The Chancy Explanation: Pebbles scattered randomly on a sidewalk require no other explanation than chance. 

Unintentional Biasing: Pebbles arranged in order of diminishing size as they a near the shoreline. 

Intentional Biasing: Pebbles arranged in the shape of a fish (without legs). 

I altered the last one in a way that I hope will be amusing.  According to White, all but a few of those who write with expertise on the problem of the origin of life believe this phenomenon must fall into the second category.  Some natural forces must bias the Kosmos toward the emergence of life, just as the tides bias the pebbles toward a coherent pattern. 

The third explanation is ruled out as unscientific.  The first is ruled out because it is wildly implausible that the conditions upon which the emergence of self-replicators depends should have come about, in the time allotted, merely by chance.  Unintentional biasing must therefore be true by default. 

White argues that the reason that the origin of life is not at all like the unintentional biasing of pebbles by size on the beach. 

The numerous steps required for life to exist are quite unlike this. It is not a matter of the same event-type or property being instantiated many times without exception. The conditions required for the emergence of life have little at all in common.

Adding a bit to what White says, the emergence of life on earth seems to have been a single event (however long it took), not a repeated pattern. 

Why then are most scientists so reluctant to allow too much chance into their accounts of life’s emergence? I will offer a speculative diagnosis. The conviction that life couldn’t have arisen by chance is typically a gut reaction to the data, not a conclusion arrived at on the basis of a theory about when it is plausible to ascribe something to the work of chance.

What makes this event seem so implausible to so many is that it seems to suggest unmistakable evidence of design. 

Again adding to White, I would contrast the origin of life problem with the problem that Darwin addressed.  Why do so many different organisms exist, all of them more or less well adapted to their respective ecological niches?  That is a pattern that is persistent historically and geographically.  Natural selection then can be seen as the unintentional biasing mechanism analogous to the motion of water acting on the pebbles. 

Interestingly, unintentional biasing would be a much more likely explanation for the origin of self-replicators if Aristotle had been right about spontaneous generation.  If the emergence of living organisms from non-living matter under predictable conditions were a persistent feature of nature, as Aristotle, for understandable reasons, believed that it was, then unintentional biasing toward the emergence of life would be very likely indeed.  Of course, this is not the case. 

White makes a strong case that unintentional biasing in nature is not a well-grounded explanation for the origin of life.  That leaves chance and intentional (or intelligent) design.  I would suggest, however, that his dismissal of the gut reactions of so many scientists is premature.  To use one of his analogies, if a tornado picked up a pile of spare parts and assembled it into a working 747 airliner, no one would interpret this was the work of mere chance.  If even the simplest molecular self-replicators as well-designed as the airplane (which may be the case) and unintentional biasing is not a plausible interpretation of the former, then…

I am not making an argument for intelligent design here.  I am not particularly interested in it only because I don’t know what to do with it when thinking philosophically and scientifically about the phenomenon of life.  I do think that White’s argument could be turned almost as easily (perhaps just as easily) into an argument for intelligent design as for the origin of life by chance.  That fact may tell us something about the phenomenon.  If so, it would be unscientific to ignore it.