The Cage: Must, Should and Ought from Is (review)

David Weissman’s book The Cage: Must, Should and Ought from Is defends a communitarian theory of moral realism that seeks to reverse the current trend of “ethics without ontology” by reestablishing ontology’s central role within moral theory. The argument moves from global considerations of logic and nature to more local concerns of practical life, morality, aesthetics, and culture in an effort to identify a set of nested contexts within which must, should, and ought inhere.

The book’s breadth is impressive, with a chapter devoted to nearly every major branch of philosophy. But breadth poses unique challenges, one of which is the application of terms across domains. Weissman’s solution results in a somewhat unorthodox terminology. For example, normativity refers to any limit, constraint, or regulation and is used both descriptively and prescriptively. Communitarianism refers to systems theory, which “alleges that ‘things’ are systems, each created by the causal reciprocity of its proper parts” (16). The Cage argues that systems theory is a superior philosophical metatheory to its key competitors, atomism and holism.

As applied to ethics, Weissman’s theory shares much with virtue ethics. Each focuses on human flourishing, and each views character as a critical element in achieving human flourishing. But Weissman’s theory departs from virtue ethics in that the basic bearers of value are states of affairs rather than persons. Obligations derive from our position within systems supporting human flourishing. These overlapping systems include families, neighborhoods, schools, businesses, and states and are established and sustained by the reciprocal causal relations of their members (126). The reciprocal relations forming core systems generate the objective conditions within which oughts inhere and are thus the basic bearers of ethical value.

The Cage’s moral argument is supported on the one side by logical and scientific considerations and on the other by cultural considerations: “Each of us is located in nested hierarchies of constraint, from logical and natural laws at one extreme, to the idiosyncrasies of character, work, and local weather at the other” (247). The scientific argument attempts to establish systems theory as the preferred explanatory metatheory of our natural world. Its hypotheses about dispositions, cause, system, and law aim to overturn Humean skepticism by identifying “natural norms,” or natural laws, that must inhere in the facts—the is—of our experience. The physical laws of our world and the logical laws of all possible worlds form the outermost contexts constraining moral life.

Culture, according to Weissman, is society’s unique way of satisfying the generic physical and social needs of its members. Dance, music, and food vary from one culture to the next, but each cultural instantiation is connected to factual elements of practical life. Morally justified cultures satisfy generic needs, the lower limits of which are “firmly grounded in physical health, core systems, and the efficacies of practical life, but higher-order possibilities—including literacy, music, and scientific theorizing—are unknown until achieved” (224). Consequently, human flourishing is tied to our natural condition as well as the factual conditions of a particular society’s development.

This returns us to Weissman’s communitarian solution of the fact/value distinction. Our lives are constrained by the physical and social norms “that frame our places in nested systems, from the molecular through the cellular and bodily to the social and cultural” (226). As interdependent animals with physical and psychological needs, we form core systems of nested relations so as to realize human flourishing. Within these systems we develop characters conducive to maintaining the systems, as well as a critical, reflective distance (freedom) required to assess a system’s contribution to human flourishing (176–77). Moral obligations inhere in the normative constraints of core systems required for human flourishing.

These arguments aim to reestablish and confirm the central importance of ontology to moral theory. However, the book’s thesis is more ambitious than simply relating moral principles to facts...