Abstract
In this chapter, Colin Marshall argues that Schopenhauer’s views about the foundations of morality pose important challenges for five tenets of contemporary metaethics. After presenting these challenges, Marshall explores the potential viability of contemporary Schopenhauerian approaches to metaethics that would leave aside his radical metaphysical monism.
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Metaethics , the investigation of the ultimate nature of morality , is one of the most historically oriented areas of contemporary philosophy. Plato , Hume, and Kant make regular appearances in the literature and provide continual inspiration for metaethicists. Schopenhauer, however, is almost completely absent from recent metaethics , despite his deep concern with the foundations of morality . My aim in this chapter is to show that Schopenhauer’s metaethics deserves more attention, even by metaethicists without historical interests. Schopenhauer’s views provide important challenges to several widely held assumptions in contemporary metaethics , and there are grounds for thinking that some modified version of his views could be plausible even by contemporary lights.
I proceed as follows. First‚ I describe five widely accepted tenets of contemporary metaethics . Second‚ I describe Schopenhauer’s core metaethical views, along with his (less central) views on moral judgment. Third‚ I argue that Schopenhauer’s views pose important challenges for each of the five tenets. Finally, I explore the prospects for neo-Schopenhauerian views, which retain Schopenhauer’s distinctive attitude toward compassion without appealing to his radical metaphysical monism .
Five Tenets of Contemporary Metaethics
There is a little consensus in contemporary metaethics . Some philosophers hold that morality is a mere illusion, while others hold that it is just as real as the realm of science . Some hold that moral language merely expresses motivational states, and so can no more be true or false than cheers or boos, while others hold that moral language describes the world just truly or falsely as any ‘objective’ language does. Finally, some hold that scientific knowledge sets limits to how we should understand morality , while others hold that our moral convictions should make us accept that reality includes more than the objects of science .
Despite those disagreements, most metaethicists agree about the boundaries that supposedly define the range of possible views. In this section, I describe five widely accepted tenets of contemporary metaethics concerning these boundaries. Though some current philosophers would reject one or more of these tenets, each is explicitly or implicitly accepted by the vast majority of metaethicists.
First Tenet: Moral Realism Requires True Moral Claims or Moral Facts
Arguably, the central question of metaethics is whether moral realism is defensible. Loosely speaking, a moral realist view is one that “vindicates morality if correct,” and so “justif[ies] morality ’s apparent importance,” while a moral anti-realist view is one that denies morality can be so vindicated or justified. 1 This distinction is meant to be intuitive and is often illustrated with historical examples. Plato ’s view is a canonical example of moral realism . In the Republic, Plato claims that there is a certain metaphysically deep entity, the Form of the Good, which only virtuous people perceive and which guides their action. 2 By contrast, David Hume ’s view is a canonical example of moral anti-realism . Hume claims that moral distinctions are based merely in contingent emotions, not in reason. 3 However, some anti-realists (including Hume 4 ) offer a sort of vindication or justification of morality . For this and other reasons, recent metaethicists have tried to find a more precise articulation of the intuitive distinction between moral realism and anti-realism .
Two more precise characterizations of moral realism are prominent in the recent literature. According to one characterization, moral realism should be understood as the view that some morals claims, like “torture is wrong,” are literally true. 5 According to another characterization, moral realism should be understood as the view that there are some moral facts, like the fact that torture is wrong, that hold independently of anyone’s attitude (i.e., desires or evaluative beliefs). 6 These characterizations are logically distinct, but related. After all, there is clearly some connection between the truth of moral claims and the existence of moral facts. Regardless of how tight that connection is, though, advocates of either characterization would agree that a view qualifies as moral realism only if it shows either that some moral claims are true or that there are some moral facts. This is the first tenet of contemporary metaethics .
Before moving on, I want to note a third way of characterizing moral realism . This characterization has received relatively little attention because, I suspect, most philosophers have held that it is equivalent to one of the other two. According to this third characterization, moral realism should be understood as the view that there is an epistemic asymmetry between paradigmatically good and paradigmatically bad agents, such that the latter, but not the former, are “making a mistake … [or] missing something.” 7 One way this asymmetry might hold is if there are some true moral claims that only paradigmatically good agents accept. Another way it might hold is if there are some moral facts that only paradigmatically good agents recognize. However, if there were some other way of establishing that asymmetry, then this third characterization might come apart from the others. 8 We would then be faced with a question of which characterization better captures the intuitive distinction between moral realism and anti-realism .
Second Tenet: Sentimentalism Implies Moral Anti-realism
Hume’s view is a canonical example not only of moral anti-realism , but also of moral sentimentalism . In contemporary philosophy, “moral sentimentalism” refers to the view that sentiments (i.e., emotions and desires) are central to morality . Sentimentalists are typically skeptical of views that give rational thought any essential role in morality . Instead, they hold that moral thought and action is ultimately grounded on sentiments.
Most sentimentalists are moral anti-realists, and so deny that morality can be vindicated or justified in any deep sense. If moral thought and action were ultimately grounded on sentiments, then it might seem that there would be no room for true moral claims or attitude-independent moral facts, since our sentiments are (the thought goes) not concerned with truth or facts. Moral language might make claims about our sentiments, but those would not be the right sorts of claims needed for moral realism . This view appears to be widely accepted. 9 The second tenet of contemporary metaethics is therefore that moral sentimentalism implies moral anti-realism .
Third Tenet: At Best, Moral Insight Goes as Deep as Scientific or Mathematical Insight
We can use the phrase “moral insight” to refer to whatever mental states distinguish paradigmatically good people from paradigmatically bad people. According to some moral realists, moral insight is the acceptance of true moral claims or the belief in moral facts. According to some moral anti-realists, moral insight is merely a matter of emotion, such as the feeling of pity.
One prominent contemporary metaethical question is how moral insight compares to scientific or mathematical insight. For instance, in one influential anti-realist argument, Gilbert Harman tries to show that morality compares unfavorably to science . 10 Harman argues that the explanation of scientific beliefs (e.g., the belief that a particle just passed through the cloud chamber) requires an appeal to scientific facts (e.g., the fact that a particle that passed through a cloud chamber, generating visible light), but that moral beliefs can be explained without any reference to moral facts. Richard Joyce makes a similar argument using a comparison with mathematics, claiming that while any evolutionary account of our mathematical beliefs requires assuming some mathematical truths, nothing similar is true for moral beliefs. 11 In response to such arguments, moral realists have defended accounts of moral insight that are modeled on scientific and mathematical insights. 12
In these discussions, the following assumption is at play: at best, moral insight goes as deep as scientific or mathematical insight. This is the third tenet of contemporary metaethics .
Fourth Tenet: Moral Realism Requires Some Substantive, Necessary Moral Truths
The next tenet concerns the relation between morality and modality. For the sake of simplicity, we can use the phrase “moral truths ” to describe both true moral claims and moral facts. The moral truths that are most relevant to moral realism are substantive truths. I have in mind a broadly Kantian contrast here, where a non-substantive truth is one that merely defines or unpacks one of our concepts. For example, it would seem to be a non-substantive truth that it is wrong to perform an impermissible action. Non-substantive truths like that might hold necessarily, but they are relatively unimportant for metaethics . Anti-realists can grant any number of non-substantive moral truths , but then deny that (e.g.) any action is ever impermissible. A realist, by contrast, would also affirm the substantive truth that mass killing is impermissible.
Say that we allow that there are some substantive moral truths , thereby setting aside some forms of anti-realism . Most metaethicists think that moral realism requires that at least some of these truths have a strong modal status, that is, that at least some moral truths are necessary. If moral realism held, then it would not merely be that mass killing happens to be wrong—rather, it would necessarily be wrong. The necessity in question appears to be unconditional or absolute. That is, mass killing is not wrong conditional on something else (e.g., society’s disapproval), but rather is necessary full stop. Given these intuitions, it would seem that a genuine vindication or justification of morality would require showing that at least some substantive moral truths are (unconditionally) necessary. The comparison with science and mathematics is relevant again here, for, insofar as realism about the objects of these disciplines implies that there are necessary scientific and mathematical truths. This presumed necessity is why some anti-realists have thought that evolutionary considerations pose a threat to moral realism . That is, some anti-realists ask, since our moral beliefs are the result of highly contingent forces, how can they possibly have latched on to necessary truths? 13 Behind this line of argument is the assumption that if there are any substantive moral truths , at least some must be necessary.
The fourth tenet of contemporary metaethics is thus: moral realism requires that there be some substantive, necessary moral truths .
Fifth Tenet: No Moral Concept Can Be Derived from a Non-moral Concept
The final tenet concerns the nature of moral concepts. For the most part, moral concepts are fairly easy to recognize. The concepts of right, wrong, permissibility, good, bad, virtue, and vice seem all obviously moral, while the concepts of pain, desire, belief, action, and life are all not. 14 There appears to therefore be a divide between moral and non-moral concepts. Nearly all contemporary metaethicists think that this conceptual divide goes quite deep such that, to use Hume’s phrase, no “ought” can be deduced from an “is.” The most influential argument for accepting such a divide is G. E. Moore’s open question argument, which claims that, for any moral term M and any non-moral term N, the question, “if something is N, is it M?” can always be meaningfully asked. At least some instances of that question would not be meaningful, the thought goes, unless there were a gap between moral and non-moral concepts. 15 This is meant to stand in contrast to questions like “if something is a cat, is it feline?” This latter question, it seems, could not be meaningfully asked by someone who understood the relevant concepts, and this is supposed to show that there is no deep conceptual divide between the concepts cat and feline.
The fifth and final tenet of contemporary metaethics is: no moral concept can be derived from a non-moral concept, and no moral concept can be analyzed using non-moral concepts.
Schopenhauer’s Metaethics
Many historians of philosophy seem to accept the five metaethical tenets as well, and to think that these tenets help determine what makes a given interpretation charitable. On one natural reading, however, Schopenhauer’s views not only go against all five tenets, but also give us good reasons for doubting them. That said, I should acknowledge that the natural reading in question is not the only possible one. Space limitations keep me from properly discussing other readings here.
In this section, I describe Schopenhauer’s metaethical views. In the next section, I return to the five tenets.
Paradigmatically Good Vs. Paradigmatically Bad People
Schopenhauer’s metaethics is built around a claim about the psychological origin of virtue and virtuous action, namely that these are based on compassion:
the everyday phenomenon of compassion [Mitleid] , i.e., the wholly immediate sympathy [Theilnahme], independent of any other consideration, in the first place towards another’s suffering … This compassion alone is the real basis of all free justice and all genuine loving kindness. Only in so far as an action has sprung from it does that action have moral worth. (OBM, 200)
the good character … feels himself akin to all beings inside, immediately participates with sympathy in their well-being and woe. (OBM, 254–55)
Schopenhauer does not think these claims are novel. He asserts that “all ages and lands have recognized [this] source of morality perfectly well” (OBM, 235).
The term “compassion” (like the related terms “empathy” and “sympathy”) can refer to a variety of familiar mental phenomena: feeling upset by someone’s situation, judging that someone’s situation is bad, being disposed to help someone else, or imagining what someone’s inner situation is like. Those familiar phenomena all seem amenable to straightforward psychological explanations. Schopenhauer, however, uses “compassion” to refer to something that he thinks is more mysterious:
I must also rebuke the error… [according to which] compassion comes about through a momentary deception of fantasy, as we ourselves substitute ourselves in place of the sufferer and then, in our imagination, take ourselves to be suffering his pains in our person. It is not like that at all… We suffer with him, thus in him: we feel his pain as his, and do not imagine that it is ours… the explanation… of this highly important phenomenon is not… to be obtained by the purely psychological route. (OBM, 203)
Similarly, Schopenhauer states later that what is essential to the character of a good human is “his making less of a distinction than everyone else between himself and others” (OBM, 249).
According to our ordinary world view, it is impossible for one person to literally feel another creature’s pain because, we think, each person’s mind is metaphysically isolated. Yet Schopenhauer holds that morally good people do not experience things that way—rather, they feel as though they are not distinct from others, and so do literally feel others’ pains. Schopenhauer thinks that this raises a metaphysical question: Is such a compassionate experience of non-distinctness “an erroneous one… rest[ing] on an illusion” (OBM, 249), or is it instead the normal appearance of distinctness and metaphysical isolation that is erroneous? Schopenhauer thus thinks that locating compassion as the motivational source of morally worthy actions leads to a metaphysical question. His answer to this question constitutes the core of his metaethical view.
The Core View
Schopenhauer holds that compassion, in his particular sense, is not an illusion:
the plurality and distinctness of individuals is… mere appearance, i.e. is present only in my representation. My true, inner essence exists in every living thing as immediately as it reveals itself in my self-consciousness to myself alone… [T]his knowledge… erupts as compassion, upon which, therefore, rests all genuine, i.e. all disinterested virtue, and whose real expression is every good deed. (OBM, 253–54)
Hence, the “morally noble” person “displays through his actions the deepest knowledge, the highest wisdom” (OBM, 253). Moral virtue, for Schopenhauer, is thus founded on a profound metaphysical insight. Nothing similar is true for morally vicious agents—they are instead caught up in an illusion of distinctness. 16
In OBM, Schopenhauer seems to suggest that this insight can be expressed linguistically. He says that its “standing expression in Sanskrit is the formula tat-twam asi” (OBM, 254), a phrase which he suggests can be translated as “I once more.” Likewise, Schopenhauer states that the wisdom of the compassionate person can also be reached through “the theoretical philosopher’s greatest profundity and most painstaking study” (OBM, 253). This all suggests that even non-virtuous people can understand the moral insight. However, when pressed on this point in his correspondence, Schopenhauer denies that the phrase “I once more” literally captures the insight, saying that it “is just a figurative turn of expression. For ‘I’ in the proper sense of the term refers exclusively to the individual and not the metaphysical thing in itself which appears in individuals.” 17
Schopenhauer has systematic reasons for denying that the insight involved in compassion can be adequately expressed linguistically, by a philosopher or by anyone else. For he thinks that language is, in the first place, the expression of concepts (see WWR I, 60–61) and that “the whole essence of concepts… consists of nothing other than the relation the principle of sufficient reason expresses in them” (WWR I, 63–64). 18 Yet the principle of sufficient reason is essentially about individuation, which is why Schopenhauer sometimes calls it the “ principium individuationis .” 19 Hence, the principle “has a merely relative and conditional validity within appearances alone” (WWR I, 55) and “governs only the appearance of the will, not the will itself” (WWR I, 131). This is why Schopenhauer thinks even the basic words like “I” cannot literally capture the insight involved in compassion, for language is essentially a tool for describing the relation between individuals, while the compassionate person sees deeper than the world of individuals. Not even the philosopher can work around this, since, at best, “philosophy will be a complete recapitulation, a reflection, as it were, of the world, in abstract concepts” (WWR I, 109, see also 297–98).
Limiting the principle of individuation to appearances has further implications. For one, Schopenhauer holds that spatiotemporal and causal relations are all thoroughly governed by the principle (see FR and WWR I, 34). The compassionate insight therefore has neither spatiotemporal nor causal content. Similarly, Schopenhauer thinks that all modal concepts arise from the principle of sufficient reason (WWR I, 492). In fact, he holds that “the notion of necessity and that of consequence from a given ground [i.e. a sufficient reason] are… completely identical” (WWR I, 492). This has two further implications. First, it means that all necessity is conditional, that is, a necessity in light of some condition. Hence, “absolute necessity is a contradiction” (WWR I, 492, see also FR 146). Second, it means that nothing can be necessary unless it is governed by the principle of sufficient reason . That principle governs all natural, individuated objects (which Schopenhauer, following Kant, holds are appearances (see WWR I, 135, 301)), but not the will. The same holds, according to Schopenhauer, for contingency and actuality (WWR I, 493).
Moral insight, for Schopenhauer, is an insight into a non-modal, non-causal, non-spatiotemporal, non-conceptualizable, but metaphysically deep fact: the non-distinctness of (apparent) individuals. This is the core of Schopenhauer’s metaethical view.
Moral Judgment
Given Schopenhauer’s core view, it is not surprising that he devotes relatively little attention to moral judgment. 20 Judgment is conceptual, for Schopenhauer (see WWR I, 90), while moral insight is not. Moreover, Schopenhauer sometimes seems to imply that, strictly speaking, what we take to be moral principles are not judgments at all. For instance, he claims that “the principle, the basic proposition, over whose content all ethical theorists are really united” is: “Harm no one; rather help everyone to the extent that you can” (OBM, 139–40). This principle is an imperative, a command, not a description, however. Judgments, however, are typically thought to be descriptive. Yet if the basic moral principle is non-descriptive, it is hard to see how any moral principles are.
In a similar vein, Schopenhauer writes that
although principles and abstract cognition in general are in no way the… prime basis for all morals, they are indispensable for a moral life, as the container, the reservoir in which the disposition that has risen out of the source of all morality , which does not flow at every moment, is stored. (OBM, 205)
Moral principles, on this view, are reservoirs of compassionate motivation. This seems to suggest that, unlike judgments, their role is not to describe how things are. 21
Nonetheless, Schopenhauer elsewhere seems to countenance moral judgments in a straightforward sense. This is clear when he explains the meanings of some central moral concepts:
The concepts of wrong and right, as synonymous with injury and non-injury, the latter also including the prevention of injury, are obviously independent of all positive law-giving and prior to it. (OBM, 208, see also WWR I, 360–61)
Everything that is in accordance with the striving of any individual will is called, relative to it, good… the opposite is called bad, in living beings evil. (OBM, 249)
These explanations take certain moral concepts to be semantically equivalent to the concepts of negating another’s will. The will, “[r]egarded simply in itself, is just a blind and inexorable impulse” (WWR I, 301), though this impulse takes on more complex forms when attached to conscious cognition, and is then a willing for life (see WWR I, 301, 311). One creature negates another’s will “either when the first individual destroys or harms the other body itself, or when it forces the energies of that other body to serve its own will” (WWR I, 360).
Schopenhauer is explicit that the relationship between the concepts of wrong and of the negation of the will are analytic (“[w]e have analyzed the concept of wrong in the most universal abstraction” (WWR I, 361)), such that “[t]his purely moral meaning [in terms of the negation of the will] is the only meaning that right and wrong have for human beings as human beings, rather than as citizens of a State” (WWR I, 367). On this view, the judgment that someone has been wronged means the same thing as the judgment that someone’s will has been negated, and the judgment that injuring someone (negating their will) is wrong is a conceptual truth.
Challenging the Tenets
I now turn to explaining how Schopenhauer’s metaethics , as described in the previous section‚ challenges the five tenets of metaethics as described in above.
Against the First Tenet
According to the first tenet of contemporary metaethics , moral realism requires true moral claims or moral facts. Recall that the intuitive aim of moral realism is to vindicate or justify morality . One way to understand this is in terms of an epistemic asymmetry between paradigmatically good and paradigmatically bad agents. By this latter standard, Schopenhauer is a moral realist. He thinks good people are compassionate people, and that compassionate people have an insight into reality that bad (i.e., egoistic and malicious) people lack. He even states that bad people are caught in an illusion, whereas good people are free from illusion. This is obviously meant to be a strong vindication of morality . 22
Contrary to the first tenet, Schopenhauer is able to offer this vindication of morality without relying on anything about moral claims or moral facts. 23 The crucial insight he attributes to compassionate people does not have any moral (or, indeed conceptual) content at all. To be sure, Schopenhauer does claim that compassion is the essence of virtue and the source of morally worthy actions, but all that his core view requires is the empirical claim that we attribute virtue and moral worth only to compassionate people (Schopenhauer explicitly claims that his approach here is empirical—see OBM, 189). This is a claim about linguistic usage, not a moral claim. In addition, as we saw, Schopenhauer holds that good people need moral principles as reservoirs of moral motivation. These principles need not be true, or concern facts, however, and the purest form of the basic principle is non-descriptive (“harm no one; rather help everyone to the extent that you can”).
Schopenhauer’s core metaethical view can be thus adequately stated without positing any moral facts or properly moral claims at all, even if he does posit the existence of moral truths (a point I return to below). Whether his view is plausible, all things considered, is an important question. The view is, however, recognizably part of moral realist tradition, and this suggests that the first tenet of contemporary metaethics draws the boundary between moral realism and anti-realist in the wrong place.
Against the Second Tenet
According to the second tenet, sentimentalism implies moral anti-realism . In placing compassion at the center of his moral system, Schopenhauer puts himself squarely in the sentimentalist tradition. In fact, many of the best-known sentimentalists have privileged the closely related sentiments of compassion, sympathy, and empathy. This is true of Hume, Adam Smith, and the contemporary sentimentalist Michael Slote.
Like Hume, Schopenhauer draws a sharp line between moral sentiments and judgments. Unlike Hume, however, Schopenhauer takes the relevant sentiment to be a form of deep insight into reality. It is because of this that he is able to establish the epistemic asymmetry that distinguishes good agents from bad agents, which amounts to a vindication of morality . Moral sentiment is therefore central to Schopenhauer’s core, realist metaethical view in a way that moral judgment is not. He therefore shows us that, contrary to the second tenet of contemporary metaethics , sentimentalism does not imply moral anti-realism .
Against the Third Tenet
The third tenet states that, at best, moral insight goes as deep as scientific or mathematical insight. Now, according to Schopenhauer, science and mathematics are essentially conceptual and essentially concerned with the spatiotemporal world of individuals, which is governed by the principle of sufficient reason (see WWR I, 51). This, however, is merely the world of appearance. If appearances exhausted reality, then the world “would have to pass over us like an insubstantial dream or a ghostly phantasm” (WWR I, 123). Mathematical and scientific insight is therefore relatively shallow for Schopenhauer.
By contrast, moral insight, the “deepest knowledge” (OBM, 253), goes beneath appearances. Schopenhauer would therefore deny that we should try to understand moral insight on the model of mathematical or scientific insight. Contrary to the third tenet of contemporary metaethics , he holds that moral insight goes deeper.
Against the Fourth Tenet
According to the fourth tenet, moral realism requires at least some substantive, unconditionally necessary moral truths . For Schopenhauer, modal notions like necessity have meaning only within the realm of individuals. The non-distinctness of individuals, which holds outside of that realm, is therefore neither necessary, actual, nor contingent (hence, for Schopenhauer, “not necessary” does not imply “contingent”). Whether or not we classify metaphysically deep truth as moral or not, it is not necessary. Because of this, the content of compassionate moral insight is likewise not modal. The virtuous person does not grasp the non-distinctness of apparent individuals as actual, contingent, or necessary.
Of course, there could still be substantive, necessary moral truths , even if moral insight lacks modal content and the deep facts that insight concerns are non-modal. Given his claims about the meaning of moral concepts, it is safe to say that Schopenhauer accepts some moral truths , such as that injury is wrong. However, Schopenhauer would count that truth as non-substantive, since he holds that the concepts of wrongness and injury (the negation of the will) are synonymous (OBM, 208). 24 If so, then a substantive moral truth about wrongness would have to involve a concept that did not analytically involve the negation of the will. An example would be the truth that Schopenhauer did something wrong on August 21, 1821 (the date of his notorious conflict with a neighbor). This truth, however, is not unconditionally necessary. Like any event in the empirical world, this event has its grounds (previous events, Schopenhauer’s motives and character ), but those grounds give it only a conditional necessity.
It is therefore hard to see where substantive, unconditionally necessary moral truths could fit in Schopenhauer’s system. Yet this does not in any obvious way threaten his qualifying as a moral realist, contrary to the fourth tenet of contemporary metaethics . If anything, it is because he thinks moral insight goes deeper than necessity that his vindication of morality is as strong as it is.
Against the Fifth Tenet
According to the fifth tenet, no moral concept can be derived from any non-moral concept. Schopenhauer does not give any argument in support of his claims that the concepts bad and wrong are equivalent to the concept negation of the will. This suggests that he takes these claims to be knowable through reflection on our concepts, as Kant thought was the case with all analytic truths. That does not imply that the conceptual truth must be immediately obvious to anyone who considered it, 25 but it does suggest that careful reflection should support Schopenhauer’s claim.
Schopenhauer’s claim is more plausible for the concept expressed by the English “bad” than for the concept expressed by “wrong,” since wrongness seems to imply the possibility of non-wrong alternatives, whereas there can be situations in which all options are bad. It is also more plausible if the badness in question is badness to some extent, as opposed to badness all things considered, since something with some bad aspects might still be good all things considered. We can therefore understand Schopenhauer as saying that “bad to some extent” and “negates the will” are synonymous. If it holds, this synonymy would go against the fifth tenet of contemporary metaethics , since the concept of negating the will does not appear to be a moral concept. 26 To see whether Schopenhauer’s claim is plausible, however, we should apply Moore’s open question argument. Applied here, we then ask whether the question “if something is a negation of another’s will, is it bad to some extent?” can be meaningfully asked, in comparison with questions like “if something is a cat, is it feline?”
Of course, someone who only partly understands “feline” might find the latter question meaningful. Similarly, someone who only partly understands “negation of another’s will” might find any question involving that phrase meaningful. So we should consider whether the relevant question could be meaningfully asked by someone who fully understood the relevant terms. A proper discussion of this issue would occupy more space than I have here, but my intuition, at least, is that that question cannot be meaningfully asked in the relevant sense. If someone sincerely asked that question, it would make me doubt whether they really understood the relevant concepts—just as I would have parallel doubts about someone who sincerely asked whether cats were felines. Put more colloquially, the question “sure I’m inhibiting what someone is striving for, but am I doing anything at all bad?” seems like a sign of conceptual confusion. If my intuition here is not idiosyncratic, then Moore’s argument does not provide a knock-down objection to Schopenhauer’s claim about the conceptual equivalence of the concepts bad and negation of the will. Schopenhauer’s views would then pose an interesting challenge to the fifth tenet of contemporary metaethics .
Prospects for Neo-Schopenhauerian Metaethics
If the above arguments are right, then Schopenhauer’s metaethical views offer important challenges to some central tenets of contemporary metaethics . A further question, though, is whether Schopenhauer’s views are plausible. There is one part of Schopenhauer’s view that few contemporary philosophers would take seriously: his radical monism . Though Schopenhauer is right that radical monism has been accepted across a range of cultures (OBM, 251–52), that fact is unlikely to move any scientifically minded readers today. My topic in this final section, therefore, is whether there might be defensible, recognizably Schopenhauerian views without radical monism .
As Schopenhauer emphasizes, he is hardly alone in giving compassion a central place in morality (OBM, 232–35). What is more distinctive about his view, however, and which makes it qualify as a form of moral realism , is his claim that compassion involves a non-rational insight or grasp of reality, as opposed to being a mere emotion without epistemic value. While Schopenhauer understands the content of this insight in terms of radical monism , a neo-Schopenhauerian view could take compassion to be a form of insight while understanding its content in some other (more plausible) way. This could go two ways: either ascribing (irreducibly) moral or normative content to the insight or not. I consider each approach in turn.
Moral Content Approaches
Perhaps the most straightforward neo-Schopenhauerian view would take compassion to be insight into certain moral or normative facts. Those moral facts, in turn, could be understood in terms of moral realism : attitude-independent facts, especially ones that cannot be reduced to natural facts. For such a view to be plausible, however, there should be some sort of natural fit between the relevant facts and the experience of compassion. After all, perhaps it is a moral fact that even victimless crimes should be punished, but it is hard to see how that could be the content of compassionate insight.
Which sorts of moral facts fit with the experience of compassion? There are at least two candidates. First, compassion might be insight into the fact that someone else’s suffering is bad or (perhaps equivalently) the fact that we have a reason to alleviate someone else’s suffering . Second, compassion might be insight into the fact that other creatures themselves have value, perhaps the value of the same sort we take ourselves to have. The first candidate is somewhat in line with traditional utilitarianism, which locates moral value in states of pleasure and pain. The second candidate is more in line with traditional Kantianism, which locates moral value in the subjects themselves. 27 Both these candidates fit with the experience of compassion because they concern the sort of things we take compassion to be directed at.
If our aim is a plausible metaethical view, an obvious question for such an approach is how this view of compassion accords with our best scientific understanding of compassion. It does not seem that we need to appeal to moral facts of any sort in order to explain our compassionate experiences, and this may suggest that those experiences are not caused by moral facts. However, on some views of experiential content, an experience can represent some fact only if it is causally connected to that fact. This question might be addressed in a number of ways, of course, but addressing it will be one task for a neo-Schopenhauerian view focused on moral content.
Non-Moral Content Approaches
A less straightforward way of filling out a Schopenhauerian view would be to ascribe non-moral content to compassionate insight. In principle, this approach could avoid the above question about scientific understandings of experiential content. At the same time, the approach would face a challenge in explaining what the connection was between compassion’s non-moral content and morality . There should thus be a fit between the presumed content or effects of the insight and morality . For example, imagine that compassion provided immediate insight into specific types of genetic similarities. Genetic similarities themselves, however, are (on any plausible view) morally irrelevant, however, so this view about compassion would hardly strike us as a form of moral realism .
There seem to be at least three promising ways of pursuing this approach, though each would require significant development. First, one could appeal to some more moderate forms of monism than Schopenhauer’s. For example, Jonathan Schaffer has recently defended the view that, fundamentally, there is only one thing (the whole universe), such that all distinction between individuals is metaphysically derivative. 28 Perhaps, then, compassion is our insight into the fact that we and other creatures are fundamental parts of the same thing. After all, as Schopenhauer recognized, compassion does involve something like a feeling of connection.
Second, perhaps compassion is insight into the fact that other beings are as real as we are, such that their suffering strikes us as being as real as our own. At an extreme, one might think that non-compassionate experience involves feeling as though one is somehow metaphysically special. The phenomenologist Max Scheler , for instance, thought that compassion freed us from the mistaken “egocentric ascription to others of an ontological status of mere dependence on oneself.” 29 Such a view would be quite similar to Schopenhauer’s, since he also thought egoism was essentially tied to an illusion. Yet the idea that different subjects are equally real is far more plausible than radical monism .
Finally, we might understand compassionate insight in terms of the perceptual revelation of others’ suffering (a state or property, not a fact). Consider, for example, the early modern view that an idea reveals a property of its object if the idea resembles some quality of the object (Locke, for instance, held that this was true of ideas of shapes, but not of colors). Since compassionate suffering resembles non-compassionate suffering , 30 we might be able to say that compassion reveals a property of the creature it is directed at. This would give compassion the special, objective status that some early modern philosophers assigned to (say) spatial perception. 31 On such a view, non-compassionate people would fail to perceive one aspect of reality, even though they could know it was there.
Before concluding, let me expand on this last point, since it bears on all forms of neo-Schopenhauerian metaethics I have considered. Contemporary epistemologists and metaethicists have tended to focus on propositional knowledge, and often seem to think that perceptual states have value only insofar as they contribute to such knowledge. That view is not obviously right, however. Most of us would still want to perceive the world even if we could have full knowledge without perception. Now, on any view of its content, compassionate insight is more like perception than like propositional knowledge (hence Schopenhauer’s description of it as intuitive at OBM, 232). We could grant that a non-compassionate person could know whatever the compassionate person has insight into, yet this would not deprive compassion of its value. My suggestion, then, is that if a neo-Schopenhauerian moral realist wants to locate an epistemic asymmetry between good and bad agents, she does not need to identify any asymmetry at the level of propositional knowledge.
In evaluating the prospects of neo-Schopenhauerianism on this front, it is worth noting its connections to contemporary views about ‘moral perception.’ Some recent philosophers share Schopenhauer’s hunch that our primary way of grasping moral reality is more perceptual than judgmental. One motivation for this is phenomenological, namely, that emotional experience seems to put us in touch with value. Michelle Montague, for example, claims that in emotional experience, “one seems to feel the very nature of value and disvalue.” 32 Another motivation is ethical, namely, that virtuous people’s sense of what to do is not simply a matter of moral judgments. Lawrence Blum, for example, argues that “one of the most important moral differences between people is between those who miss and those who see various moral features of situations confronting them.” 33 Though these philosophers do not give compassion the priority that Schopenhauer does, their arguments might provide support and guidance for those wishing to defend a contemporary version of Schopenhauer’s views.
Regardless of the viability of a neo-Schopenhauerian metaethics , however, Schopenhauer’s actual views offer a rich set of challenges for those who want to answer the central metaethical question: can morality be vindicated? 34
Notes
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1.
These characterizations are from Sharon Street, “Reply to Copp: Naturalism, Normativity, and Varieties of Realism Worth Worrying About‚” Philosophical Issues 18 (2008): 207–28 at 223 and Essays on Moral Realism , ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 2, respectively.
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2.
See Plato , The Republic, 517b.
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3.
See David Hume, Treatise, 3.1.1.26.
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4.
See David Hume, Treatise, 3.3.6.3.
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5.
See Essays on Moral Realism , ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). This characterization should be restricted to something like positive (or logically atomic) moral claims, since some moral anti-realists would allow that “rocks are not virtuous” is literally true.
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6.
Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism : A Defense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) offers one influential defense of this approach. For a helpful overview of the debate about moral realism , see Stephen Finlay, “Four Faces of Moral Realism ,” Philosophy Compass, 2 (2007): 1–30.
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7.
Street “Reply to Copp…,” 223. For related thoughts, see Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) and Zed Adams, “Against Moral Intellectualism,” Philosophical Investigations 37, no. 1 (2014): 37–56.
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8.
David Lewis writes that the distinctive claim of moral realism is that “there are properties… such that we can somehow detect them; and such that when we do detect them, that inevitably evokes in us pro- or con-attitudes toward the things that we have detected to have these properties” (David Lewis, “Quasi-Realism is Fictionalism,” in Fictionalism in Metaphysics, ed. M. Kalderon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 322–38, 315–16). Note that Lewis talks of detecting properties, not grasping facts.
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9.
Michael Slote, Moral Sentimentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) is a potential exception. However, Slote’s claim to realism hinges on his using a broadly Kripkean semantics for moral terms. For (to my mind, convincing) reasons to doubt that this approach yields genuine moral realism , see Sharon Street, “Reply to Copp: Naturalism, Normativity, and Varieties of Realism Worth Worrying About” Philosophical Issues, 18 (2008): 207–28.
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10.
Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
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11.
Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 182.
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12.
See, e.g., Richard Boyd, “How to Be a Moral Realist,” in Essays on Moral Realism , ed. G. Sayre-McCord (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 181–228 and Timothy Scanlon, Being Realistic About Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
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13.
See Sharon Street “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value‚” Philosophical Studies, 127, no. 1 (2006): 109–66. For an argument that the necessity of moral truths in fact undermines this anti-realist argument, see Justin Clarke-Doane, “Morality and Mathematics: The Evolutionary Challenge,” Ethics , 122, no. 2 (2012): 313–40.
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14.
This is a simplification. Strictly speaking, the former set of concepts is normative/evaluative, and so extends beyond the moral (including, for instance, epistemic norms). The present point arguably applies to normativity generally, however.
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15.
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966/1903), §10–14. Moore took his argument to show the distinctness of moral properties from non-moral properties. Since distinct concepts can refer to the same property, most philosophers today think it succeeds only for concepts.
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16.
For an interesting precedent, see Kant’s idea, in “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer,” that the altruistic tendency arises from the action of others’ wills on ours, on analogy with gravitational influence (Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, eds. and trans. David Wolford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 321–22).
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17.
Schopenhauer, GB, 220–21, translation from David Cartwright, Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 510.
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18.
Though language is essentially conceptual, it is also able to refer to intuitions.
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19.
Sometimes Schopenhauer seems to identify the principle of sufficient reason with the principle of individuation (WWR I, 191–92, 301). At other times, though, he suggests they are distinct (WWR I, 137–38). My view is that Schopenhauer’s principle of individuation is one form of the principle of sufficient reason , since the latter governs relations that do not immediately concern individuals, such as logical relations.
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20.
Much of his concern with moral judgment is negative. He argues at length against Kant’s views of morality stemming from rational judgment (see, e.g., OBM, 127–30).
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21.
For more detail about this non-cognitivist vein in Schopenhauer, see Colin Marshall “Schopenhauer and Non-Cognitivist Moral Realism ,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 no. 2 (2017): 293–316.
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22.
The most important complication here is Schopenhauer’s view that the “moral virtues are not really the ultimate end, but only a step towards it” (WWR II, 608), where the ultimate end is the quieting of the will (but cf. Sandra Shapshay and Tristan Ferrell, “Compassion or Resignation , that is the Question of Schopenhauer’s Ethical Thought,” Enrahonar: Quaderns de Filosofia 55 (2015): 51–69). Someone who has quieted his will would be neither egoistic nor malicious, but would also not perform actions of moral worth: “He gazes back calmly and smiles at the phantasm of this world” (WWR I, 417). Though Schopenhauer denies his philosophy is prescriptive (WWR I, 297), his talk of an ultimate end sounds like a fundamental prescription. There is therefore room for a realist reading according to which the fundamental norm is “quiet the will.”
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23.
At the same time, the non-distinctness of individuals might be a moral fact in an indirect sense, insofar as it is the fact the grasping of which defines the relevant epistemic asymmetry.
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24.
Schopenhauer would deny that even conceptual truths like this are absolutely necessary. Instead, he thinks they rest on, and so are conditioned by, the metalogical principles of identity (a = a) and contradiction (a ≠ not–a). The metalogical principles presumably have no modal status (see FR, 101–04).
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25.
Arguably, Kant himself believed there were non-obvious analytic truths concerning normative concepts (see Colin Marshall “Kant’s Derivation of a Moral ‘Ought’ from a Metaphysical ‘Is’,” in The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds, ed. Nick Stang (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)).
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26.
It is probably not a naturalistic concept, however, since the will, for Schopenhauer, lies beyond the reach of natural science . That said, I suspect many contemporary naturalists would be comfortable with some notion of infringing on another’s will.
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27.
Something like the first candidate is defended by Arne Vetlesen, who writes that empathy is “indispensable in disclosing to us that others’ weal and woe is somehow at stake in a given situation” (Arne Johan Vetlesen, Perception, Empathy, and Judgment (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 1994), 153). In Schopenhauer’s Ethical Thought (currently in progress but previewed in Shapshay and Ferrell 2015), Sandra Shapshay defends the second candidate, based on a close reading of Schopenhauer. One noteworthy feature of Shapshay’s approach (which is also hinted at in Vetlesen) is her argument that morality requires rational reflection in addition to compassion. This puts less of a burden on compassion to deliver all the moral truths .
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28.
Jonathan Schaffer, “Monism : The Priority of the Whole,” Philosophical Review 119, no. 1 (2010): 31–76. In a similar vein, Descartes claims that, in loving something, “we consider ourselves… as joined with what we love, in such a way that we imagine a whole of which we think ourselves to be only one part and the thing loved another [part]” (René Descartes, Passions of the Soul, trans. Steven H. Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett Press. 1989), Article 80). See also Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (7th ed.) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 498.
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29.
Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 59. Similarly, Nel Noddings claims that “[a]pprehending the other’s reality, feeling what he feels as nearly as possible, is the essential part of caring… [I]f I take on the other’s reality as possibility and being to feel its reality… I am impelled to act as though in my own behalf, but in behalf of the other” (Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics & Moral Education (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 16).
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30.
For neurological reasons to think this, see Tania Singer, Ben Seymore, John O’Doherty, Holger Kaube, Raymond Dolan, Chris Frith, “Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective but not Sensory Components of Pain,” Science 303, no. 5661 (2004): 1157–162.
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31.
In “Lockean Empathy” (Southern Journal of Philosophy 54 no. 1 (2016): 87–106), I discuss how such a view of compassion or empathy can be based in Locke’s view. In Colin Marshall, Compassionate Moral Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), I develop this line of thought into a neo-Schopenhauerian metaethics . One way to gloss the idea is that compassion is as good as direct perception of another’s mind would be, just as experiential states generated by artificial eyes could be as good as normal sight (Derek Partfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 208–09). For a broadly similar but less Schopenhauerian line, see Christoph Fehige, Soll ich? (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004).
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32.
Michelle Montague, “Evaluative Phenomenology,” in Emotion and Value, eds. Sabine Roeser and Cain Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 32–51, 46. See also Mark Johnston, “The Authority of Affect‚” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63, no. 1 (2001): 181–214, 189.
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33.
Lawrence Blum, “Moral Perception and Particularity,” Ethics 101, no. 4 (1991): 701–25, 701. See also Bridget Clarke, “Iris Murdoch and the Prospects for Critical Moral Perception,” in Iris Murdoch: Philosopher, ed. Justin Broakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 227–53 and Nomy Arpaly, Unprincipled Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 76–77, though the latter does not explicitly talk of moral perception.
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34.
For helpful comments and discussion, thanks to Mike Raven and Sandra Shapshay.
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Marshall, C. (2017). Schopenhauer and Contemporary Metaethics. In: Shapshay, S. (eds) The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62947-6_12
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