How Skeptics Do Ethics: A Brief History of the Late Modern Linguistic Turn (review)

The skeptics of the title are the intellectual heirs of the Enlightenment, which on Neal’s account has undermined the simple religious faith for which he yearns. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume started the rot with ‘Hume’s fork’: his division of all objects of enquiry into matters of fact (to be investigated by the senses) and relations of ideas (the province of reason). The viciousness of a wicked act is neither observable in the act nor logically deducible from a description of its observable features.

Hume rescued morality by attributing it to sentiment; he took the accepted language of morality to reflect a historically verifiable natural human approval of beneficent actions and character traits and disapproval of pernicious ones. Neal finds this appeal to sentiment and language ‘easy and obvious’ but problematic, since traditional moral terminology has since been undermined by our contemporary mass society of relative plenty.

Neal tells a story of successive encounters with Hume’s skepticism by the German philosophers Kant, Hegel, Dilthey, and Nietzsche; by the linguist Saussure and the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein; by the ‘modern’ thinkers Maurice Mandelbaum, Karl Hempel, Leonard Krieger, and Karl Marx; and by the ‘postmodern’ continental philosophers Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. The hero of this narrative is postmodernism, which (especially in the person of Derrida) has exposed an ‘arguably dishonest interpretive tradition’ that imitated Marx’s bourgeoisie in making a commodity out of words, treating such words as freedom and duty as having a meaning in themselves.

Unfortunately, Neal often distorts the thinkers he discusses. For example, he confuses the ‘categories’ of the understanding that Kant postulated as necessary conditions for creating a unified experience (categories like substance and cause) with the ‘categorical imperative’ that Kant took to be the form of morality (a command to do or refrain that was not hypothetical, i.e., not based on the agent’s desire for some goal). In addition, Neal engages in a kind of free association of intellectual contributions and social trends that often have only a superficial connection with one another.

Furthermore, Neal’s choice of thinkers to discuss is bizarre. Apart from Kant, none of the figures he discusses have a significant influence on contemporary ethical reflection in the English-speaking world. Consultants on medical ethics, research ethics, business ethics, and professional ethics do not turn to Dilthey or Krieger or Heidegger or Derrida for their theoretical inspiration. They might turn to the vigorous utilitarian tradition, whose major nineteenth-century contributors (Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick) are not even mentioned in Neal’s index. For meta-ethical reflection on morality and language, they might consult Charles Stevenson’s Ethics and Language or R.M. Hare’s The Language of Morals – works that Neal nowhere mentions. For a contemporary account of the content of morality, they might consult Bernard Gert’s Common Morality (2004) – the product of forty years of refinement of what Gert takes to be the shared morality of all human beings whose moral views are not distorted by special religious or scientific beliefs; Neal’s book shows no sign of awareness of Gert’s important work.

Finally, Neal’s yearning for a pre-Humean religiously based moral certainty is a yearning for a counterfeit paradise. How can we ground ethics in religious belief, when religious belief is so uncertain, so variable, and so morally reprehensible in its practical consequences? Consider the legacy of human sacrifice, crusades, inquisitions, and jihads. Given this legacy, it makes far more sense to ground one’s religion in morality.