Book Response:

Ruling Passions

by Simon Blackburn

2-12-00
by Matt Landreman

Ruling Passions has definitely changed the way I see morality. In Blackburn I have found a professional philosopher who sees decision-making the same way I do. He then addresses my precise question: what do we do in light of this deterministic process of deciding?

The purpose of the book is to lay out the author’s general opinions of topics related to meta-ethics. Only at the end of the book, in fact, does Blackburn really discuss my particular topic of interest. The first seven chapters lay out most of the groundwork for the eventual thesis. In this first section, we see presented most of the important ideas in meta-ethics, including Moore’s open question argument, Hume’s gap, Butlers refutation of egoism, and others. He also puts on the table several useful images he will use later, including the moral sense as a "function machine."

Then in chapter 8, Blackburn finally presents the core of his idea. He uses the metaphor of two ships for the two sides of a debate in philosophical psychology. Kant’s boat has a captain (free will), while Hume’s has only workers (desires). While we usually think in terms of Kant’s model, it cannot be right. Our sense of morality, then, is a subset of our desires- some of the workers on the ship. We can still be moral people even though ethics has this natural basis, because that basis is in the desires that direct our actions anyway.

Blackburn strikes such a chord with me because his philosophical psychology is so in line with my own. His ideas are – although he doesn’t seem to realize it – a way of looking at things very akin to that of science. He throws out any notions of a non-natural will, and sees the person as a deterministic bundle of desires. With the scientific paradigm, we need no supernatural aspect to ethics or the mind. Blackburn never explicitly discusses the fact that he is working within this paradigm, but his theory does not suffer because we share a confidence in science. The author has thought through the consequences of this model that I had so far been unsuccessful in finding. We began very much on the same plane, but Blackburn’s extensive background in the history of philosophical thought has allowed him much more insight into the situation. He has the complete theory of meta-ethics for which I have been searching.

Thanks to Blackburn’s ideas, then, the nature of my inquiry this semester has dramatically changed. I now have the theory of meta-ethics, so the next step is to pop back to the lower level of normative ethics. Now that I know what is happening when I think ethically, I can start trying to consciously reason ethically again (of course, I have all along been using unconscious ethical reasoning in every decision I have made). I do not feel like my grasp on quasi-realism is 100%, so I expect to firm up my knowledge of meta-ethics in this process of normative ethics. Now that I know the question "what should I do?" means, I can try to answer it.

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