How can reason tell us what we ought to do?

How can reason tell us what we ought to do?

Children, even infants, seem to have a provable sense of fairness. (1) As we grow parents, teachers, and religious leaders try to fill out the details of the right and wrong ways to treat other people.  At some point in life, we encounter a situation where the rules we have been taught seem unclear or contradictory, and the consequences of any available choice of action are unsatisfactory. Do we retreat to common practice, a scriptural authority, or self-interest and just move on, unsatisfied that we have made the right choice? Or is there another option? Can reason help us decide what we ought to do?

According to the philosopher James Rachels, “Morality is, at the very least, the effort to guide one’s conduct by reason – that is, to do what there are the best reasons for doing – while giving equal weight to the interests of each individual affected by one’s decision.” (2) Immanuel Kant wrote: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe - the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”  (3)  It would seem simple and easy then for a being with an embedded natural moral law to discover the best reasons for an action and give equal weight to the interests of others – until you examine the realities of human nature and human history.

For the last few million years, we’ve gotten by one day at a time by the very skin of our teeth. Each day of history we’ve been lucky if we weren’t killed before the sun went down by a famine caused by greed, a war, a terrorist bomb, or the crazy guy next door with five guns in his garage. Is it possible that Kant could be right - there is “moral law” somewhere inside of us? To tell the truth, I’m not exactly filled with “wonder and awe” when I look in the mirror. I’m not all that proud of the number of times I haven’t chosen the “best reasons” for my actions, and there are plenty of people whose “moral law” doesn’t seem moral at all to me.

If I’m arguing that the right path is to find the best reasons for my actions and always take into account how those actions affect others, what’s my proof? The best proof is that humanity is here today. Okay, yes, we’re here just by the skin of our teeth. We are, in fact, really nasty creatures. We kill every other species we encounter that isn’t useful to us. We are murderous, raging, selfish, clever monsters, who have invented dozens of ways to destroy each other and our entire planet. We'll be lucky if we don't do exactly that tomorrow, but we haven’t done it yet. I propose that we have survived because we not only have the capacity to think about the "best reasons"-- occasionally we act on them.

As further proof of the value of reason, I can offer some artifacts -- the record of the on-going, always lively discussion of morality in literature, art, and philosophy that continues today. (I left out politics for obvious reasons.) While it may not be provable that Kant is right and “moral law” is embedded within our nature, these artifacts are proof that moral law is embedded in our civilization. 

I think one of the greatest contributions to world literature is Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth.  It’s a comedy depicting the horrors of human nature and human history. Yet, it’s not a dark comedy; it’s very hopeful. In the last act one of the actors describes the final scene:“Mr. Fitzpatrick, you let my father come to a rehearsal; and my father’s a Baptist minister, and he said that the author meant that -- just like the hours and stars go by over our heads at night, in the same way ideas and thoughts are in the air around us all the time and they're working on us, even when we don't know it.”  (4.)

Wilder ends the play with a scene set in the aftermath of war. The actors huddle together, having barely survived, while the actor/philosophers cross the stage reading somberly from Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle, and Moses. Wilder offers the following as some hope that maybe again, we’ll make it through the night.

Spinoza: After experience had taught me that the common occurrences of daily life are vain and futile; and I saw that all the objects of my desire and fear were in themselves nothing good nor bad save insofar as the mind was affected by them; I at length determined to search out whether there was something truly good and communicable to man.(4.)

Plato: Then tell me, O Critias, how will a man choose the ruler that shall rule over him? Will he not choose a man who has first established order in himself, knowing that any decision that has its spring from anger or pride or vanity can be multiplied a thousandfold in its effects upon the citizens?(4.)

Aristotle: This good estate of the mind possessing its object in energy we call divine. This we mortals have occasionally and it is this energy which is pleasantest and best. But God has it always. It is wonderful in us; but in Him how much more wonderful.(4.)

From Genesis: In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the earth; And the Earth was waste and void; And the darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Lord said let there be light and there was Light.(4.)

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References

1. Paul Bloom,  Just Babies, 2013.

2. James Rachels, Elements of Moral Philosophy, 1986. p.13

3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason,1788.

4. Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth, 1942.