If you’re lucky enough to have several million dollars more than you need, what should you do with this money?
One answer is that you should do whatever you want, at least within the bounds of legality: it’s your money, and nobody has the right to tell you how to spend it. Another is that you should try to do as much good as possible by, say, donating it to a charity that will use it to remedy a great deal of suffering. Another is that you should act in accordance with the duties you owe to your family, your neighbourhood, or your place of worship. Yet another is that you should invest it in order to make more money, enabling you to do even more good down the line. Or perhaps you should give it to an organisation seeking to mitigate an existential risk, like nuclear or biological warfare; or to an artist capable of creating an enduring masterpiece. Or you may prefer to shrug and return to option one.
The history of philosophy consists of a series of attempts to shed light on questions like this. As anyone studying this history soon realises, however, philosophy’s open secret is that these attempts don’t add up to something decisive. When it comes to what we ought to do in any given situation, different schools of thought offer different guidance. Deontological ethics tells us to consider the duties we owe to one another as human beings. Consequentialist ethics tells us to focus on the outcomes of our actions. Virtue ethics tells us to become the kind of person who acts well and wisely. Various other traditions tell us to consult sacred books, practice particular rituals, seek spiritual revelation – or maximise our own pleasure. Conflict is baked into the basics of asking questions like, “What ought I to do?”
Or is it? An awareness of difference is certainly integral to such an inquiry. But this needn’t become a conflict until you’re forced to pick a side. Up to that point, it’s a matter of exploring – and, perhaps, finding a compromise between – your options. Indeed, some philosophers have sought to eliminate the very prospect of conflict between ethical systems. Derek Parfit, among the most revered English-language philosophers of the last fifty years, devoted the second half of his life to precisely this task. As the author David Edmonds subtitled his recent biography of Parfit, he was on “a mission to save morality”, and this meant proving that the ethical systems outlined above could be reconciled.
Unfortunately, the position that different ethical positions can be reconciled is itself a position others may not accept – and Parfit found this hard to bear. Disagreements with his academic peers, like the great Bernard Williams, could move him to despairing tears. “How,” Edmonds reports him asking, “could Bernard not see this?” – with the “this” in question being the objective status of people’s reasons for behaving in certain ways. Parfit believed that it was possible for people to have a good reason for doing something that was independent of their own knowledge or beliefs. If, to generalise from my opening example, you find yourself in a position to alleviate others’ suffering without significantly harming or inconveniencing yourself, Parfit believed that you have a good reason to act in this way whether or not you agree with it (or is simply a moral fact that there is a right thing that you ought to do. By contrast, Williams argued that it made no sense to talk about people’s reasons independently from their motivations. Someone cannot have a reason to do something that they have no desire to do – because, however wrong-headed or perverse their preferences may be, subjectivity is the ground truth for ‘having a reason’. You can present a billionaire with a dozen compelling arguments for giving away most of their money, but you cannot prove beyond all possibility of objection that these reasons should compel them.
In Edmonds’ telling, the later Parfit cuts a strangely tragic figure. Revered in his field, intellectually generous, passionately devoted to his work, his life was a litany of remarkable insights and achievements. Yet his pursuit of moral truth brought him pain and upset without, most commentators agree, its prize ever being realised.
You may have spotted, in the example above, an echo of one of the most influential thought experiments of recent decades: Peter Singer’s parable, from his 2009 book The Life You Can Save, of a child drowning in a shallow pond in front of you. If the only cost that saving this child would incur is spoiling your new pair of trainers, it self-evidently seems immoral for you not to do so. Thus, given that plenty of lives around the world can as surely be saved by a minimal act of generosity, Singer argues that you have an obligation to practice such generosity to the best of your ability.
This is as about as stark and impactful as a philosophical argument gets. Yet you cannot be forced to find its conclusion forceful. As is the nature of any moral reasoning, you remain free to be unmoved: to reject, if not its logic, then its premises or assumptions. While someone may be able to compel you to act in accordance with their conclusions through physical coercion, they cannot compel you to accept their rightness in your heart of hearts.
Parfit was a philosopher’s philosopher: widely-read, always ready to debate and explain, deeply engaged with the history of his discipline. Yet he was tormented by the very fact that rival, irreconcilable ethical systems exist. Why? Because one conclusion that follows from this is that, if the differences between such systems can never be resolved by philosophical means, conflict of a literal kind will always lurk beneath their differences.
Karl Popper articulated this point with painful clarity in The Open Society and its Enemies: “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” This is the rub. Philosophy is of the world as well as of the page – and even the gentlest words may, sooner or later, need an army to defend them. “We should therefore claim,” Popper continued, “in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.” In some ways, I’m not surprised that Parfit felt despair at the limits of his persuasiveness. What’s amazing is that more philosophers don’t feel the same way.
