A Fundamental Orientation to the Good: Iris Murdoch's Influence on Charles Taylor more

A Fundamental Orientation to the Good Iris Murdoch’s Influence on Charles Taylor1 [Much contemporary] moral philosophy has tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to be, on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life; and it has no conceptual place left for a notion of the good as the object of our love or allegiance, or as Iris Murdoch portrayed it in [The Sovereignty of Good], as the privileged focus of attention or will. This philosophy has accredited a cramped and truncated view of morality in a narrow sense, as well as of the whole range of issues involved in the attempt to live the best possible life, and this not only among professional philosophers, but with a wider public. So much of my effort…will be directed towards enlarging our range of legitimate moral descriptions, and in some cases retrieving modes of thought and description which have misguidedly been made to seem problematic. (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self 3)2 There are of course, outside philosophy, in sociology, psychology, political theory, speculations about the self as historical individual, language-user, victim of identity crises, etc., which it might do philosophers no harm to peruse. But such accounts will normally treat ‘morals’, if mentioned, as a social or historical, etc. phenomena, rather than worrying about the self as moral being. In the field of philosophy Charles Taylor’s wise and learned work Sources of the Self explores in reflectively presented detail those surrounding fields, while pursuing a philosophical argument which involves establishing ab initio that ‘orientation in relation to the good is essential to being a functional human agent’. (Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals 166)3 Although history may not remember Dame Iris Murdoch as one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, her ethical works, especially the three papers collected in The Sovereignty of Good,4 have had a notable influence upon defenders of moral realism, virtue ethics and the often related position of moral particularism in the latter part of the century.5 However, with the notable exception of Charles Taylor, most of those influenced by Murdoch have tended to bracket her Platonic reflections upon reality and the good. Lawrence A. Blum says, for instance, “that there are two somewhat distinct pictures of ‘moral reality’ in Murdoch – the first quite Platonic, and the second meaning A Fundamental Orientation something like ‘other persons and their situations’” (34 nt. 8), and in his own work 2 develops what he takes to be the particularist implications of her second picture (pt. I). But Murdoch drew no distinction between these two pictures of “moral reality” and in both Sovereignty and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals clearly held that the reality of the good, conceived of in a Platonic manner, was necessary to explain those acts of attention through which an agent comes to comprehend a situation, especially an ethical situation; and in this paper, I would like to explore the way in which Taylor has taken up this often bracketed aspect of Murdoch’s thought in his Sources of the Self. Concerning the nature of the good, the differences between Murdoch and Taylor are clear: Murdoch defends a uniquely Platonic conception, while Taylor defends the good as a kind of placeholder filled by a variety of genuine, albeit differing and perhaps irreconcilable, conceptions. Be this as it may, it is still the case in Part I of Sources, where Taylor pursues his philosophical argument for the good (x), that he both cites Sovereignty at several key points and notes Murdoch’s influence upon him, saying that, “Anyone who has read Murdoch’s book will see the extent of my debt to her in what I have written here” (95 nt. 4); and the case, in Metaphysics, that Murdoch cites Taylor’s conclusion concerning a fundamental orientation toward the good on the part of human agents with approval, acknowledging both his debt to her and, broadly at least, that both pursue a similar kind of argument for the reality of the good (166). Moreover, as Fergus Kerr has already noted, both move in their respective arguments “beyond the question of what we ought to do, to the question of what it is good for human beings to be…[and] beyond the question of what a good life for human beings might be, to the consideration of ‘a good which would be beyond life’”(91).6 That is, A Fundamental Orientation beyond the questions both of obligatory moral theories and those of contemporary neoAristotelian virtue ethics. 3 Despite then, clear differences between Murdoch and Taylor concerning the content of the good, both share recognizably similar theoretical ends, which I trace out in this paper through their encounters with philosophical anthropology (§1) and the shape that this has given to their respective arguments for the reality of the good (§§2-3), in order to show, not only that Taylor has been influenced by Murdoch, but that his argument for the reality of the good solves a somewhat serious difficulty with her own. 1. Murdoch, Taylor and Philosophical Anthropology. During the period of their education and, in Murdoch’s case, the period of her career as a philosophy instructor as well, analytic philosophy, inspired by the work of thinkers like G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, displaced idealism as the dominant approach in England and came to be itself dominated by two inter-related movements: logical positivism and logical behaviorism (see, Warnock). Programmatically speaking, these movements sought, in the name of natural science, to eliminate metaphysics from philosophy in its entirety, including any reference to the “inner,” by arguing that the analysis of meaning be restricted to empirical and tautological propositions alone and that all mental concepts be reduced to empirical ones. As Murdoch reports of her student days, I first read Ayer’s [Language, Truth and Logic] in 1940 when I began to study philosophy [at Somerville, Oxford] and was, together with many others, amazed and impressed by its wonderful clarity and simplicity. We were unprovided with any weapons with which to confront it, and in any A Fundamental Orientation 4 case it was a welcome change from the scraps of Bradley and Cook Wilson with which we had been fiddling, and considerably easier to understand than Kant and Aristotle. (MGM 42) Returning to study philosophy in 1947 as a graduate student at Cambridge, though, Murdoch was already breaking out of these inter-related currents, represented, for instance, by thinkers like Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus), A.J. Ayer (as mentioned above) and Gilbert Ryle, and exploring the criticisms and alternatives to them found in the works of the later Wittgenstein (Investigations) but also and especially post-Husserlian phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.7 And during her tenure (1948-1963) as a Tutor (later Fellow) of St. Anne’s College, Oxford this break seems complete, as evidenced by her first major philosophical work, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist. Having earned a B.A. in History from McGill University in 1952 Taylor came on to this scene in English philosophy when he studied “Modern Greats” (now PPE) at Oxford. After Schools in 1955 Taylor went on to do an Oxford D.Phil., and found Iris tremendously helpful in two ways. Firstly, she herself was daring to explore those interesting philosophical issues declared out of bounds; secondly, the sheer quality of her listening when he visited her to try to sort out his confused ideas ‘was extraordinary; that and her questions. It helped enormously.’ He found much of what she wrote helpful and suggestive. She was a leading ‘role model’ to him and others trying ‘to break out of the post-positivist analytic box’; a teacher to whom he owed much. (Conradi 303)8 A Fundamental Orientation While the co-advisors of Taylor’s dissertation, later published as The Explanation of Behaviour, were Isaiah Berlin and Murdoch’s good friend G.E.M. Anscombe, the work itself, like Murdoch’s own of the period, criticized assumptions lying behind the analytic 5 philosophy of the time, in this case the assumption that psychological behaviorism provides an adequate explanation of human behavior, and favored instead a post-Husserlian phenomenology like that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which would become a regular theme in his later works (Smith, Charles Taylor ch. 1-2). Despite then, the differing periods of their education, Murdoch and not completely without her inspiration Taylor reject the kind of analytic philosophy then current in England and pursue instead the philosophical methodology of the Continent, so in this section I look to what it is that Murdoch and Taylor have taken from Continental philosophy in order to better understand the basis upon which their ethical theories are built and the implications that this may have for contemporary meta-ethical debates.9 For, while the kind of analytic philosophy once current in England has now fallen to criticisms internal to itself, contemporary naturalism is in many ways its successor. In its most general form, exemplified, for instance, by the works of Heidegger (Being and Time), Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the methodology of post-Husserlian phenomenology is one that appeals to certain features of experience in order to establish claims about the nature of the self distinct from those investigated by the natural sciences; thus, the appellation “philosophical anthropology.” And what allows philosophical anthropology to do this is its use of transcendental argumentation for, as Taylor defines it, such arguments A Fundamental Orientation Start from some feature of our experience which they claim to be 6 indubitable and beyond cavil. They then move to a stronger conclusion, one concerning the nature of the subject or the subject’s position in the world. They make this move by a regressive argument, to the effect that the stronger conclusion must be so if the indubitable fact about experience is to be possible (and being so, it must be possible). (“Validity” 20)10 Murdoch and Taylor, however, do not limit themselves to the exploration of “Being-in-theWorld” provided by Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and pursue instead arguments for “Being-toward-the-Good” as the fundamental characteristic of human subjectivity. As “The Opening Arguments of the Phenomenology” and “The Validity of Transcendental Arguments” show, Taylor has long been interested in transcendental argumentation and this carried over into Sources, where he defends the argument of Part I by saying, “that this is not only a phenomenological account [i.e., as some naturalistic critics would have it, a mere description of experience] but an exploration of the limits of the conceivable in human life, an account of its ‘transcendental conditions’” (32). And, in response to other critics of the work, Taylor ties this defence to transcendental argumentation in general before eventually coming to call it a transcendental argument simpliciter (“Comments” 250-251 and “Reply” 208-209, resp.). Murdoch, on the other hand, has a somewhat more ambivalent relationship with transcendental arguments for while she identifies Sartre and Wittgenstein as pursuing them (EM 132-133 and MGM ch. 9, resp.) she herself seems more interested in what she calls “metaphysics.” In Sartre, for instance, Murdoch defends him by saying that, A Fundamental Orientation Sartre is performing the traditional task of the philosopher; he is reflecting systematically about the human condition. The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind. Such a 7 definition will cover both analysis and metaphysics. What the psychoanalyst does for the particular consciousness of the individual the metaphysician does for the intellectual consciousness of the group he is addressing, and through them perhaps for the consciousness of an epoch. He presents a conceptual framework which is an aid to understanding. The answer to those who wish to eliminate metaphysics is the ‘moral’ answer: that it is proper for intellectual groups to make this particular sort of effort at selfcomprehension. (109) This understanding of metaphysics, however, is not at odds with the kind of transcendental argumentation employed by philosophical anthropology and in Metaphysics Murdoch clearly states that, ‘Correspondence’ [as used in “correspondence theory of truth”] contains the awareness that we are continually confronting something other than ourselves. Some exceptional people may gaze upon uncategorized manifolds and create new meanings…But we all, not only can but have to, experience and deal with a transcendent reality…and this involves perpetual effort…Most of this effort is moral effort. [And this] is the sense in which morality (value) is transcendental, concerned with the conditions of experience. (267-268) A Fundamental Orientation 8 Moreover, Murdoch says, of the “experiential” version of the ontological argument that she wishes to defend in Metaphysics, that it “is (may be seen as) transcendental” (425). In presenting and comparing, in the later sections of this paper, the arguments for the reality of the good in Murdoch and Taylor as transcendental, I am not only following their admissions and acknowledged debts to post-Husserlian phenomenology but also their rejection of later Continental thinkers, like the late Heidegger (“Letter on Humanism”), Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, who for reasons of anthropocentrism, endeavor to abandon this particular approach to ontology.11 To mention ontology, however, is to bring up the main problem faced by transcendental arguments. Although its conditional premise may be the conclusion to a hypothetical syllogism (as Taylor’s above definition suggests), transcendental arguments can be represented schematically in modal logic as an instance of modus ponens.12 What distinguishes transcendental arguments from other instances of the form, however, is their use in the attempt to defeat various types of scepticism by validly inferring some claim which the sceptic doubts (the consequent) from some other claim which the sceptic accepts (the antecedent). Assuming, however, that a transcendental argument has correctly identified an indubitable feature of experience or, according to the broadest definitions of them, an indubitable feature of anything else pertinent to the mental life of subjects, such as language-use, judgments, concepts, actions, etc. (Stern, Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism 6) and correctly traced out the conditions necessary for this, it is still the case that these argument try to move from a claim about the mental life of subjects to a claim about the world and this invites the question as to whether or not they are able to establish the reality purported by their conclusions. A Fundamental Orientation Barry Stroud, perhaps the best known thinker to raise this question, has argued in “Transcendental Arguments” and “The Goal of Transcendental Arguments” that without some verification principle established independent of the argument or the assumption of idealism (themselves questionable positions), transcendental arguments are not strong enough to establish the existence of non-mental things, only the belief thereof, and contemporary discussions follow him on this point by distinguishing strong transcendental arguments, which seek to prove the existence of their necessary conditions, from modest transcendental arguments, which seek only to elucidate the necessary psychological conditions for experience, etc., as actually had (see, e.g., Stern, Transcendental Arguments). In his own treatment of transcendental argumentation, Taylor acknowledges the fact “that there are certain ontological questions which lie beyond the scope of 9 transcendental arguments” (“Validity” 26) and acknowledges the fact that this places limits upon what philosophical anthropology can establish. For, Some philosophers have thought that the fact that we can’t be mechanistic systems in our self-understanding forecloses the question whether we are such systems in fact…But this doesn’t follow. For the possibility remains open that what we are in our own self-awareness may be in important ways misleading. (ibid.) But Taylor wishes to demonstrate that the converse holds as well. That is, the mere fact that reductivist explanations of human behavior have been offered does not foreclose the possibility that they too may be misleading in important ways about the nature of the self, and in Sources Taylor points to an anti-realist treatment of ethics as the main way in which A Fundamental Orientation 10 they do mislead. For the assumption behind this naturalistic position is that human agents can operate non-problematically while (at some level) denying wholesale objectivity to their ethical beliefs. If correct, however, Taylor’s argument in Sources that a belief in the reality of the good, rather than its reality tout court, is a necessary condition of experience demonstrates the implausibility of this assumption. Although facing a similar challenge, Murdoch’s argument for the reality of the good seems to veer between a modest and strong form of transcendental argumentation and this is the difficulty with her position that, I believe, Taylor has solved. 2. Murdoch’s Argument for the Good. Murdoch’s argument for the reality of the good is often difficult to locate and follow in her works but as Metaphysics (her last and most substantial published philosophical work) makes clear, it is intended to be a version of the ontological argument inspired by Simone Weil’s reading of such (400-401, 424-426). This, however, is a questionable contention on Murdoch’s part for, as Asiedu and the above section have shown, there are reasons to doubt that the argument as actually presented falls into the category of the ontological, as these arguments have come to be known through the works of Anselm and his critics. In this section then, I will look to how the conflict between Murdoch’s attempt to present an ontological argument for the reality of the good, while at the same time maintaining the goals of philosophical anthropology, leads her to veer between a modest and strong form of transcendental argumentation.13 As hinted at the end of Chapter Two of Metaphysics (54-57), the discussion of the work culminates in the re-interpretation of the ontological argument found in Chapter A Fundamental Orientation 11 Thirteen. Here, Murdoch distinguishes two versions of Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God: (1) the well-known logical version found in the Proslogion in which Anselm argues that something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought must be understood to exist both in the mind and in reality and (2) a supposedly experiential version, found especially in the “Reply to Gaunilo” (§8), in which Anselm attempts to establish God as uniquely something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought through His goodness (MGM 392-405).14 As Murdoch puts this second version: “We recognise and identify goodness and degrees of goodness, and are thus able to have the idea of a greatest conceivable good” (MGM 395). Like Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, Murdoch does not believe that the logical version is successful and supports J.N. Findlay’s conclusion that what it actually demonstrates is the impossibility of God’s existence (MGM 411-412). Such an attitude on the part of Murdoch should not surprise for in some of her earliest works, for example, “Vision and Choice in Morality” and “Metaphysics and Ethics” (EM), she accepts the criticisms of metaphysics found in Kant and, to a lesser extent, analytic philosophy, as well as the implications that these may have for ethics (EM 64). According to Murdoch, however, these criticisms “only prove that we cannot picture morality as issuing directly from a philosophically established transcendent background…But this is not yet to say that the notion of belief in the transcendent can have no place in a philosophical account of morality” (EM 65, 92-96). And it is this belief which Murdoch holds to be captured by the experiential version of the ontological argument. According to Murdoch then, A Fundamental Orientation The idea of Good (goodness, virtue) crystallizes out of our moral activity. 12 The concept of good emphasises a unity of aspiration and belief concerning the absolute importance of what is done on this heterogeneous scene…What is fundamental here is ideal or transcendent, never fully realised or analysed, but continually rediscovered in the course of the daily struggle with the world, and the imagination and passion whereby it is carried on. We may seem to compartmentalise value, but if we look more closely these divisions take place against a base of possible further, better, deeper, understanding and achievement. (MGM 426-427) Thus, The proof of the necessity or unique status of good runs through our grasp of an idea of perfection which comes to us in innumerable situations, where we are trying to do something well or are conscious of failure…This way of looking at the matter binds together the two arguments in Anselm’s Proof. What is perfect must exist, that is, what we think of as goodness and perfection, the ‘object’ of our best thoughts, must be something real, indeed especially and most real, not as contingent accidental reality but as something fundamental, essential and necessary. What is experienced as most real in our lives is connected with a value which points further on… The appeal to evidence, to reports of experience, and to the direct experience of the reader, is precarious, but is in some regions of philosophy not only the last resort but the proper and best move. A fundamental idea here, and one which in ordinary life is a familiar one, is that of certainty or A Fundamental Orientation (its different face) necessity, connected with the sense of a pure untainted source of spiritual power. Herein our most ordinary modes of cognition become connected with strong convictions and vision, of which the conviction and vision of the great artist is both an image and an instance. (MGM 430) 13 And this is the sense in which, “The argument is (may be seen as) transcendental” (MGM 425). All the elements basic to this argument first occurred in the three papers later collected as Sovereignty (see esp., “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’”) but there as here certain ambiguities present themselves. In the first place, it is unclear whether Murdoch intends the idea of good to embrace every conception of a spiritual power or just that provided by Plato. Murdoch holds in some of her earliest works, for instance, that the belief in transcendent metaphysical entities, “such as God, or History, or the Church” (EM 95), plays a vital role in shaping the moral vision of some agents and argues that: “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture. [And this] is the process which moral philosophy must attempt to describe and analyse” (EM 75). But in the papers of Sovereignty, Murdoch suggests that a permanent background to human activity, “whether provided by God, by Reason, by History, or by the self” (SG 53/EM 343), has disappeared and “that there is, in [her] view, no God in the traditional sense of that term …Equally the various metaphysical substitutes for God – Reason, Science, History – are false deities” (SG 77/EM 365). This tension between Murdoch’s (somewhat) Wittgensteinian attempt to point out the fundamental role that pictures play in human cognition and her un-Wittgensteinian A Fundamental Orientation attempt to show that certain pictures simply do not obtain,15 comes to a head in Metaphysics when she argues that, The reasons for rejecting God are themselves clarified by the Proof. No empirical contingent being could be the required God and what is 14 ‘necessary’ cannot be God either. The concept of an existing personal being is too deeply embedded in the traditional idea of God. One might say that God is impossible, though (in obvious senses of ‘meaning’) not meaningless. (425) And for these reasons, Murdoch suggests that “God” must be replaced with “Good” in the conclusion of the experiential version of the ontological argument if it is to be made acceptable (ibid.); thus, transforming this supposed version of the argument into her own for the reality of the good. In its origins, Murdoch’s argument for the reality of the good is meant to address what she takes to be the main problem of modern of philosophy. That is, For many reasons, chief of which is that science has altered our societies and our key concepts with a dreadful speed, it seems impossible for us either to live unreflectively or to express a view of what we are in any systematic terms which will satisfy the mind. We can [in short] no longer formulate a general truth about ourselves which shall encompass us like a house. (Sartre 84)16 And in her ethical works, Murdoch tries to provide “a general metaphysical background to morals” (SG 41-42/EM 334) that can continue to explain the sense of transcendence necessary for operations of the imagination, despite the disappearance of a permanent A Fundamental Orientation background to human activity. But these attempts to wrestle with modernity bring up the main difficulty of her argument. 15 Murdoch says of her attempt to replace “God” with “Good” that, “one must avoid here, as in the case of God, any heavy material connotation of the misleading word ‘exist’. Equally, however, a purely subjective conviction of certainty…seems less than enough” (SG 62/EM 351-352), noting, on the one hand, that what her argument offers is “a religious psychology detachable from dogma” (MGM 426), that is, “a non-dogmatic essentially unformulated faith in the reality of the Good” (SG 72/EM 360), but denying, on the other, that this is “a sort of pragmatism or a philosophy of ‘as if’” (SG 72-73/EM 360). In its most general form, Murdoch’s argument begins from the claim that experience, especially in ethical situations, contains a sense of better and worse or degrees of goodness and moves to the conclusion that the good, understood as an idea of perfection or absolute standard of judgment, is a necessary condition of this (cf. Hacker-Wright). Concerning the nature of this necessity, however, Murdoch slips, in the second place, between the good as a kind of Kantian idea of reason (see e.g., SG 28-30/EM 322-324 and MGM ch. 14), constitutive of experience but not necessarily of reality, and a uniquely Platonic conception of it which holds that because it is constitutive of experience, it must also be constitutive of reality.17 Were Murdoch to be pursuing the standard, logical version of Anselm’s argument this problem would not be so great, for there one argues from the nature of a concept that its referent(s) must exist, although in so doing one must, of course, face criticisms like those of Gaunilo and various modern philosophers. But Murdoch rejects this option and works instead to transform the supposedly experiential version, which she believes Anselm A Fundamental Orientation inherited from Plato via St. Paul (MGM 398-405), into a transcendental argument for the reality of the good that seems undecided between a modest and strong form. That is, at times, Murdoch seems simply to argue to the conclusion that the belief in some 16 transcendent metaphysical background (including that provided by modern empiricism18) is the necessary condition for the degrees of goodness found in experience. But, at others, as most often noted by critics not unsympathetic toward the goals of her work19, Murdoch argues that the existence of no other metaphysical entity, save for that a Platonic Good, can be established through experience, thus seeming to draw the conclusion that it is the existence of this good which is the necessary condition of experience.20 Given these problems with Murdoch’s argument it is, of course, understandable why those influenced by her would tend to bracket her Platonism. But in so doing they run the risk of losing that very insight upon which her criticism of the fact/value distinction is based. For, by presenting an argument for the reality of the good, Murdoch is trying to meet the sceptical challenge presented by anti-realist ethical theories proper (e.g., Ayer and Hare) and what she takes to be the ethically anti-realist implications of existentialism and structuralism à la Derrida; and by presenting a transcendental argument for such, Murdoch is trying to establish, not just that these theories themselves rely upon some conception of the good, but that no account of human behavior could ever possibly be adequate without, at the very least, recognizing this necessary condition of human experience (cf. Brugmans). This somewhat more modest conclusion, however, can be maintained without the need to deduce the existence of a Platonic Good from it and Taylor’s argument for the reality of the good not only builds upon this possibility but also allows for a variety of substantial conceptions, including that of Murdoch’s own. A Fundamental Orientation 17 3. Taylor’s Argument for the Good. In Part I of Sources that feature of experience to which Taylor draws attention is its occurrence against a background or framework of strong evaluation, that is, the “discriminations of right or wrong, better or worse, higher or lower, which are not rendered valid by our own desires, inclinations, or choices, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which they can be judged” (4), and the position he opposes in so doing is that generally naturalistic one which holds that all such frameworks can be entirely disposed of in the explanation of human behavior (see e.g., Mackie). To meet this sceptical challenge Taylor offers a transcendental argument in Chapter Two of Sources which, like Murdoch’s own, moves through the manner in which agents grasp their situation in terms of a narrative, from this feature of experience as strongly evaluative to the conclusion that an “orientation in relation to the good is essential to being a functional human agent” (42). The points, however, are closely connected in Taylor’s mind and he summarizes his argument thus, One could put it this way: because we cannot but orient ourselves to the good, and thus determine our place relative to it and hence determine the direction of our lives, we must inescapably understand our lives in narrative form, as a ‘quest’. But one could perhaps start from another point: because we have to determine our place in relation to the good, therefore we cannot be without an orientation to it, and hence must see our life in story. From whichever direction, I see these conditions as connected facets of the same reality, inescapable structural requirements of human agency. (SS 51-52) A Fundamental Orientation Unlike Murdoch, the good which Taylor defends is merely a structural feature of 18 experience rather than some substantive conception, although “much of [Taylor’s] effort in Part I [is] directed towards enlarging our range of legitimate moral descriptions” including “a notion of the good as the object of our love or allegiance, or as Iris Murdoch portrayed it in [Sovereignty], as the privileged focus of attention or will” (SS 3). As Taylor uses it then, “good” merely designates “anything considered valuable, worthy, admirable, of whatever kind or category” (SS 92) but as his phenomenological account progresses certain distinctions present themselves. As usually understood in meta-ethical debate, “good” is synonymous with the predicates of first-order ethical judgments, such as “x is courageous” or “doing y is right”, and anti-realists held to be those who deny reference to these predicates. But, like Murdoch and other moral realists, Taylor denies the adequacy of anti-realist analyses of these terms as merely expressing choice or brute instinct, and argues instead that their meanings can only be captured in full by the relations they bear to one another, especially the ranking of some over others. Usually referred to as second-order goods, Taylor explores this class of goods-held-higher-than-others under the title of “hypergoods” (SS §3.2), dividing it into two further sub-classes. As is seen most clearly in the use of virtue terms, hypergoods outrank lower-order goods according to some conception of the good life for human beings and Taylor refers to this sub-class as “life goods” (SS 93), noting, however, that while agents may be more or less articulate about this, these goods “refer us to some feature of the way things are, in virtue of which these life goods are goods” (ibid.). Taylor calls this second sub-class “constitutive goods” (SS 92), or later “final goods” (SA 16), because the relationship A Fundamental Orientation between them and our ways of life “is what makes certain of our actions or aspirations good; it is what constitutes the goodness of these actions and motives” (SS 92). That is, according to Taylor, there are goods held higher than others because they are seen as definitive of a good life (e.g., virtues) and goods held yet higher than these because they are seen as constitutive of the reality of in which a good life occurs (to use some of Murdoch’s examples, God, Reason and Nature). 19 According to Taylor, though, these constitutive goods do more than just define the content of an ethical theory, they also provide what he calls “moral sources,” that is, “something the love of which empowers us to do and be good” (SS 93), and at the end of the historical Parts of Sources, Taylor identifies theism, “a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientific form; and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism or in one of the modernist successor visions” (495)21 as the three broad domains of moral source that underlay the general agreement in modernity over life goods, such as universal justice and benevolence, freedom and self-rule and the claims of equality and the avoidance of death and suffering (ibid.). As Taylor is quick to point out, however, these domains are historically conditioned, not unchanging categories of thought, and it is the peculiar feature of modernity that even within the life of a single person, they may embrace different moral sources or, at the very least, feel the pressure to do so (SS ch. 25).22 Although these three kinds of moral source embrace different substantive conceptions of their constitutive good, roughly divided between a transcendent conception in theism and an immanent conception in the other two (SA ch. 15), Taylor’s transcendental argument does not choose between them. That is, no matter the kind of reality attributed to A Fundamental Orientation 20 a moral source by its adherents, it is still the case, according to Taylor’s argument, that the belief in the reality of any such good is a necessary condition of the lived experience of agents (see esp., Morgan). This point, however, can become lost when Taylor draws the distinction between naturalistic explanations of human behavior and his own in terms of moral ontology (SS §1.2). Following a broadly Wittgensteinian argument against the fact/value distinction in Sources (68), Taylor introduces the Best Account (BA) principle which states that, The terms we select [when attempting to “make sense” of our lives] have to make sense across the whole range of both explanatory and life uses. The terms indispensable for the latter are part of the story that makes best sense of us, unless and until we can replace them with more clairvoyant substitutes. The result of this search for clairvoyance yields the best account we can give at any given time, and no epistemological or metaphysical considerations of a more general kind about science or nature can justify setting this aside. The best account in the above sense is trumps. (SS 58) Put another way, as Taylor does in his terse polemic against naturalism, “What is real is what you have to deal with, what won’t go away just because it doesn’t fit with your prejudices” (SS 59). Although originally introduced to show why anti-realist ethical theories cannot fully capture the meaning of ethical predicates, Taylor also uses the BA principle to try to forestall anti-realist objections to hypergoods, based either upon their apparent incommensurability or claims to substantiality (SS §3.2), by arguing that: while pre-modern attempts to prove the existence of hypergoods by reference to facts about the world, rather A Fundamental Orientation than of agents, may no longer be acceptable, it is still the case in modernity that “our acceptance of any hypergood is connected in a complex way with our being moved by it” (SS 73). Thus, “The BA principle can also function as a test for the genuineness of our 21 moral stands” (SS 106) for it draws attention to those terms, which in other contexts may be repudiated, that agents actually live by and find indispensible when trying to make the best sense of their lives. The prominence of this principle in Taylor’s criticism of anti-realist ethical theories, along with its fundamental connection to his view of practical reason, has led some commentators to prefer it over that of his transcendental argument when discussing his ethical theory23. But the principle is just a corollary of this argument for: if the transcendental argument is valid, then no attempt to explain human behavior without reference to hypergoods can be adequate; naturalistic theories try to explain human behavior without reference to hypergoods because they take the ontology of the natural sciences to be exhaustive; but, given the validity of the transcendental argument, their explanations of human behavior must be inadequate; therefore, the bounds of ontology must extend beyond those of the natural sciences; and in the historical sciences, which focus exclusively upon the explanation of human behavior, the bounds of ontology are set by the terms in which agents understand and can reason about themselves and their world.24 As Taylor tries to show in the historical Parts of Sources, the best accounts of their moral sources that agents have given, and continue to give in modernity, are those that fall within the three broad domains of theism, naturalism and expressivism and it is merely the mapping of this moral ontology that Taylor has set himself to in Sources (§1.2), although in so doing he very much hopes to stimulate debate concerning the most adequate moral A Fundamental Orientation 22 ontology, entertaining as he does the belief that only some form of theism can stand as the very best account of our moral lives (ch. 25)25. But, as Taylor puts it, Even outside a theistic perspective, it is quite possible to conceive that the best theory of the good, that which gives the best account of the worth of things and lives as they are open to us to discern, may be a thoroughly realist one – indeed, that is the view I want to defend, without wanting to make a claim about how things stand for the universe ‘in itself’ or for a universe in which there were no human beings. A realist view is perfectly compatible with the thesis that the boundaries of the good, as we can grasp it, are set by that space which is opened in the fact that the world is there for us, with all the meanings it has for us – what Heidegger called ‘the clearing’. (SS 257) Given then, Taylor’s earliest statements about the limits of transcendental arguments, which he does not repudiate in Sources, along with the fact that his historical analysis has identified a variety of substantial conceptions, his argument for the reality of the good is best understood as a modest transcendental one, although Taylor himself would probably prefer to speak of his object in terms of a “pre-conceptual” orientation rather than, as I have put the matter, a “belief in its reality.”26 4. Conclusion. Although Murdoch and Taylor recognize the difference between them, they spell it out, in the few places where they discuss it, in terms of God’s place in modernity rather than modes of transcendental argumentation. Thus, Murdoch classes Taylor as a “neo- A Fundamental Orientation Thomist” in Metaphysics (150-151, 290) pointing out, one assumes, his Catholicism and acceptance of God as a moral source, while Taylor feels that he wants “to demur when 23 Murdoch invokes in Metaphysics things in which we allegedly can no longer believe” (“Iris Murdoch” 25/20). But, as I have tried to show in this paper, shifting the discussion to their modes of argumentation not only clarifies the basis of their disagreement, but also the fundamental goals of their ethical theory. In the first place, there is, among commentators on the work of Taylor, some disagreement concerning the theoretical need for hypergoods based, it would seem, upon the worry that they have only been introduced because of his religious belief.27 But Murdoch’s influence upon him suggests a motivation far broader than this. For, at the very least, hypergoods are meant to capture her Platonism just as much as his (somewhat unorthodox) Catholicism and, at most, are meant to explain an actual feature of lived experience identified by both Murdoch and he. In the second place, and as noted at the beginning of this paper, most of those influenced by Murdoch have tended to bracket her Platonism but this, as the work of Taylor has shown, closes off an important line of defence for moral realism. As usually pursued, by, for instance, Philippa Foot, Hilary Putnam and John McDowell, moral realism is defended by a criticism of the fact/value distinction and not, as Murdoch and Taylor would also have it, by an exploration of the metaphysical beliefs that shape the ethical backgrounds of agency. Unfortunately, this lacuna in moral realism has left it open to the somewhat more sophisticated ethical anti-realism of non-reductive naturalists, like Simon Blackburn and Bernard Williams, who reject the fact/value distinction as realists do but continue to hold that adequate explanations of human behavior A Fundamental Orientation can be given without reference to moral ontologies. If successful, however, the modest transcendental argument for the reality of the good provided by Taylor’s solution to the problem presented by Murdoch’s argument,forecloses this somewhat more sophisticated anti-realism just as much as it does the classical varieties of Ayer, R.M. Hare and J.L. Mackie. For, if successful, it would show that human agents cannot operate as they do without some conception of an absolute source of value taken to be real. Although formally valid, transcendental arguments are not, however, ironclad for 24 the feature of experience from which they begin may in fact be dubitable or the conditions proposed not necessary for its possibility. As Taylor puts it, echoing earlier comments by Murdoch about the status of her own argument (SG 72/EM 360), “A valid transcendental argument is indubitable; yet it is hard to know when you have one, at least one with an interesting conclusion. But this seems true of most arguments in philosophy” (“Validity” 33). These limits, however, should not prevent the exploration of transcendental arguments or the role that they can play in meta-ethical debate for as the above examination of Murdoch and Taylor has shown, the possibilities they offer, if successful, are great28. A Fundamental Orientation 25 Notes 1. My thanks to Peter Loptson and John Hacker-Wright for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2. 3. 4. Abbreviated in citation as SS. Abbreviated in citation as MGM. Abbreviated in citation as SG. The three papers have also been collected in Existentialists and Mystics, abbreviated in citation as EM, and reference will be given to both. 5. See, e.g., Foot; Williams; Nussbaum, Fragility ch. 1 and Love’s Knowledge “The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality” and “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and Moral Imagination”; Putnam, “The Place of Facts in a World of Values” and “Objectivity and the Science/Ethics Distinction”; Blum, pt. I; and McDowell, “Virtue and Reason”. 6. Kerr’s final quote is of Taylor, “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy” 5/4-5. See also, Richter and Antonaccio, ch. 1, for other authors who note similarities of this kind between Murdoch and Taylor. A Fundamental Orientation 7. 26 See, Conradi ch. 10, 11 and 21. For a discussion of Murdoch’s longstanding but not uncritical interest in Heidegger see, Leeson, “Morality in a World without God” and Iris Murdoch. See also, Steiner and Murdoch, EM Part Three. 8. Smith also points to Murdoch, alongside Isaiah Berlin, as one of “the two teachers who would have the most enduring influence on him” (Charles Taylor 12). See also, Taylor, “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy”. 9. This rejection, of course, is purely substantive for Murdoch and Taylor, against the sometimes difficult prose of Continental philosophy, attempt to retain the style in which they were educated, although Murdoch may be less successful at this than is Taylor. See, Murdoch, EM Part One; Beaulieu 119-120; and Smith, Charles Taylor 10. This attempt to retain the style of Anglo-American analytic philosophy while pursuing the insights of Continental philosophy has come to be known as post-analytic philosophy. See, e.g., Reynolds et al. 10. In this paper Taylor is only interested in defining transcendental arguments as they appear in the philosophical anthropology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. For a broader treatment see e.g., Stern, Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism. 11. See, Murdoch, MGM ch. 7 and Taylor, SS ch. 4 and 24 and A Secular Age ch. 19, abbreviated in citation as SA. See also, Chase and Reynolds. 12. i.e., ◊p→□q ◊p ∴ □q 13. Major studies of Murdoch’s philosophy have tended more towards the mapping rather than critical evaluation of her thought and thus taken her at her word that the argument is ontological, albeit in a modified sense. See, O’Connor, ch. 4; Antonaccio, ch. 5; and Widdows, ch. 4. Antonaccio, of course, holds that the argument is both ontological and transcendental but this, like Widdows’ distinction between an argument from perfection and an ontological argument for the good in works of Murdoch, is not a position that I believe can be sustained. 14. Murdoch attributes the identification of these two versions to Malcolm and Hartshorne, but they see the experiential argument as either separate from or subsidiary to the logical argument, as Murdoch A Fundamental Orientation herself seems to note, at least in the case of Malcolm, later in her discussion. See, Malcolm; Hartshorne, ch. IX; and Murdoch, MGM 409-419. 15. “Obtain” is the operative word here for, unlike Wittgenstein’s treatment of “language games” and 27 “forms of life”, Murdoch holds that certain pictures are simply false rather than misguided. See, MGM ch. 9. 16. Cf. Murdoch, EM “A House of Theory”. 17. Of course, Murdoch’s understanding of Plato is itself idiosyncratic. See e.g., EM “The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists” and Nussbaum, Rev. of The Fire and the Sun. 18. See, Murdoch, EM “Vision and Choice in Morality” and “Metaphysics and Ethics”; SG 25-27/EM 320321; and SG 57/EM 347. 19. See e.g., Hauerwas; Taylor, “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy”; Asiedu; and Mulhall. 20. That Murdoch’s novels may go some way to relieve this tension is explored by O’Connor, Antonaccio and Widdows, as well as the papers collected in Rowe and Horner. 21. See also, Taylor, SA “Introduction.” Although he never explicitly places Murdoch in one of these domains, Taylor’s discussion suggests that he sees her as embracing a kind of Romantic expressivism (SS 95-96), a position which has also been argued for by Laverty. 22. See also, Taylor, SA ch. 16. This relationship between the philosophical and historical in Taylor’s thought is nicely discussed by Ricoeur. 23. See, Abbey, Charles Taylor 2000 ch. 1 esp. 26-31 and Smith, Charles Taylor ch. 4 and “Conclusion”. See also, Smith, Strong Hermeneutics. 24. In denying that the ontology of the natural sciences is exhaustive, Taylor is denying that they provide the best account of human behaviour, not the best account of the natural world excluding the mental life of agents. See e.g., “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man”; SS ch. 3; and “Ethics and Ontology”. 25. See also, Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?” and SA ch. 20. Although I agree with Baker on many points, her attempts to read Taylor as a Christian apologist seem to rest upon this confusion between his transcendental argument for the reality of the good and his discussion of moral ontology as is seen most clearly in her “Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self.” A Fundamental Orientation 26. This use of “pre-conceptual” is drawn from Taylor’s “Foundationalism and the Inner-Outer 28 Distinction” but is also meant to invoke his use of “mentalités” in Sources (104) and “imaginaries” in his more recent work (Modern Social Imaginaries ch. 2 and SA “Introduction” and ch. 4). 27. 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