Transcending Rigidity Part VII: Moral Incommensurability and the Rise of Emotivist Culture

Disagreement About Moral Ends 

         Disagreement is not necessarily confusion. We can have a disagreement and yet be very clear about the terms of our disagreement—what we agree about in substance, and how our views differ. Confusion sets in when we are not sure what the disagreement is about or what you’re saying or what I’m saying.

         Confusion also sets in when we are arguing with different assumptions about what is good, right, or meaningful. Consider, for example, this real-life anecdote: a self-described pro-lifer and pro-choicer walk into a bar for a civil conversation. (Too outlandish? Just humor me.) The pro-lifer states her case on the sacredness and sanctity of life; she has credible scientific evidence that life begins long before birth. The pro-choicer stakes her argument on the inviolable right of a woman to choose, which is rooted in the individual liberty core to our entire system of political thought. Both individuals, then, are arguing from a strong moral end. And both have different assumptions about which end is most meaningful. How does one resolve such a disagreement and come to a moral understanding of abortion when both participants are engaging from both reasoned and deeply felt passions? In fact, when two parties argue for a moral good with no means of prioritizing the goods in play, there is no way to resolve such a debate.

         Perhaps a simpler analogy will make the problem clearer: a couple gets into an argument about why the husband didn’t help the wife get their children out the door in the morning. “I was busy sweeping the floor,” the husband says. “Well, next time, please help me get the children out the door,” she replies. The issue at play here, also, is different assumptions about what is most important and what should have priority. In the husband’s mind, clearly, cleaning the floor was the more important end; in the wife’s, helping with the kids. Confusion reigns until these ends can be located, discussed, and prioritized. But imagine (silly as it might sound) that, as in the argument about abortion, the husband and wife can never arrive at a consensus about which end is most important and that neither is willing to budge. The argument would become intractable; just as we can’t resolve a domestic argument about cleaning the floor if we can’t establish a priority of ends, so we can’t have moral conversation if we have confusion about what ends are most important.[1]

         Every human being, as is illustrated in the above examples, holds moral ends—some good to which they aspire.[2] These goods may be nothing more than the pursuit of their own satisfaction or pleasure, but there is always some end pursued, consciously or unconsciously. As David Bentley Hart writes, “We act always toward an end that we desire, either morally, effectively, or pathologically.”[3] This ability to pursue an end is the freedom of our humanity. As Richard Neibhur says, “The freedom of man appears…[as] the necessity of self-determination by final causes: [a man’s] practical reason appears as his ability to distinguish between inclusive and exclusive, immediate and ultimate ends and to relate means to ends.”[4] In other words, humans are those beings which are free because they can identify and chart a course towards some desired goal, which by necessity requires the prioritization of some ends over others.

         Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (see ‘Essay 6’ in this series) is an example of prioritizing moral ends. Maslow’s distinction between actualization and transcendence represents an attempt to name a felt good and draw a priority distinction; he placed transcendence above actualization. But imagine if someone said, “No, giving ourselves to something bigger than ourselves (transcendence) is not as important as our own self-expression (actualization).”[5] How would we resolve such a debate? We can appeal to common sense and basic human sensibilities or point to the outcomes of various philosophies of living, but there is little way to prove which end is higher. To do so, we would have to have some agreed upon end (in Greek, the word is telos, meaning an ultimate aim or endpoint) constituting the highest endpoint of a human life. We would have to have an agreement about “the good life” is, philosophically speaking. But in moral debates, we almost always arrive at a place where we cannot logically resolve disagreement because we prioritize moral ends differently (a subject I will explore in future essays). Often, disputation takes place with growing frustration because neither side knows how to articulate this discrepancy in moral assumptions.

         In his magnum opus After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Alasdair MacIntyre calls situations in which we have no means of prioritizing moral ends and resolving moral debate instances of “moral incommensurability.” Moral incommensurability is the inability to find an evaluative approach by which to measure moral ends against each other.[6] When our ends differ and we have no means to bridge the gap between my perception and yours, neither rhetorical flourish nor passionate insistence is able—generally speaking—to convince another or bridge the gap between different points of view. We have no means of resolving such moral incommensurability because “there is no rational way of deciding which type of claim is to be given priority or how one is to be weighted against the other.”[7] 

         This situation is the default experience in our culture. The orientation of almost all societal discourse is now rooted in moral incommensurability. Debates on social media exemplify this dynamic (to call them “debates” is a stretch, admittedly), but the dynamic is everywhere. We have little means of determining which ends are higher ends and why. The end result is chronic anxiety and a deterioration of discourse patterns. That is, we are losing our ability to talk about important matters, and we are increasingly anxious because of it.

No Guiding Narratives—No Big Deal?

         In the last two essays, I stated that what makes our historical era, post-Enlightenment, unique, is the diminution or outright loss of guiding narratives—the stories we tell ourselves to make the world and our place in it meaningful. Moral incommensurability flourishes in such a world. We once believed that hierarchical religion and aristocracy would order the world and save our souls (the medieval worldview); then we believed that science would save us (Modernism, via the Enlightenment). So we no longer have a medieval worldview, with a clear narrative about God and aristocratic hierarchy; and neither do we have a Modern worldview, in which we trust science and reason to lead us into a bright and better future. Is this such a bad thing? Moral incommensurability was lessened under these guiding narratives, which made for less debate and, in some sense, greater clarity. But those narratives were faulty or incomplete, if based on no further evidence than that they stopped working and we no longer trust them.[8] If postmodernity is pessimism about finding any transcendent truth, and thus any guiding narrative…so what of it? If we enact virtue—if we “try to be good people,” to put it simply—for no other reason than it’s a practical, materialistic mandate (an evolutionary injunction, as it were) and with little other narrative or imperative behind it…does it really matter?

         After all, guiding narratives are not necessarily holy or good. They can be abused and manipulated for all sorts of reasons. The Christian narrative of “going forth to make disciples of all nations” was abused to force baptize—along with rapine and pillaging—countless thousands, in both the Medieval period and in the Age of Reason, with the Crusades and the “Christian” conquest of the New World. Shouldn’t grand ideals, when they can be so easily manipulated and abused, be avoided?

         But it is not our lack of guiding narratives alone that is troubling, but the concomitant inability—always on the rise, so it seems—to have any civil conversation or disagreement at all, whether about moral ends, political opinions, or anything else. When great guiding narratives—such as those of Christendom or the Age of Reason—fail, we are less likely to put much stock in any guiding narrative. This bolsters moral incommensurability, giving rise to greater levels of debate. But if there is no means of having that debate—if people lack the skills or stomach to thoughtfully engage such debate, for example—chaos can be the only result. We are witnessing the rise, in fact, of a chaos-inducing pattern of discourse that follows this basic pattern:

(1) I am right. Certainty always masquerades as a sort of “righteousness.” It serves an emotional needs by convincing one that “I am right and therefore I am good.”

(2) I can prove I’m right. I can confirm, through a media source, scriptural text, or other authority, my rightness. Our ability to confirm our biases has never been so readily available, given the proliferation of “news” sources so easily customized to fit our biases.

(3) You are wrong. Obviously, since I am right.

(4) Not only you are wrong, you are evil. This is the dehumanization of those holding a counter point of view. When under thread, dehumanization allows us to protect our viewpoint, thus allowing us to continue securing the emotional benefits of rightness we so crave. People are willing to defend their certainty to the hilt because what’s really at stake is their emotional security.

As you can see (and have no doubt experienced yourself), this pattern of thinking leaves no space at all for disagreement, let alone debate. This is a major problem, since vibrant debate—about guiding narratives, moral ends, political opinions, or anything else—is healthy. The alternative, after all, is totalitarianism, politically and intellectually. When we lose the ability to debate, to converse, to hold opposing tensions without de-humanizing each other, we are in uncharted, dangerous territory.[9] We are in the midst of a new moral culture.

The Rise of Emotivist Culture

         So what has changed? There has always been moral disagreement, that is nothing new. Why is moral incommensurability—marked by our increasing inability to have civil conversations outside our predilections and preferences—such a growing feature of our society? It is helpful to look to the past, for comparison. Simply put, what moral cultures before us—Ancient, Medieval, and Modern—had in common was a belief that human beings had a function in the world. Philosophical thought was grounded in the notion that humanity has a telos, an ultimate end or aim. This formed the basis of moral conversation. In Aristotelian thought, for example, an object could be defined in part by its functional purpose, its telos.[10] And just as you could describe an object as good if it met its functional end (a walking stick being good because it fulfilled the purpose of a walking stick, or a statue being good because it fulfilled its end as an object of beauty in a garden, for example) or so you could define a man by the pursuit of functional ends. Thus, you could take steps to define what a good man or woman was. Of course, there was vigorous debate about what the function or endpoint of humans is, but the belief was always that there are certain transcendent ends to which we can aspire. The universe was, in turn, conceived of as meaningful. In the ancient world, the cosmos was, in Stoic thought for example, guided by the Logos, a principle that maintained order and harmony in the universe. In Medieval Europe, the world was perceived to be guided by the divine right of kings, under God. In Enlightenment Europe, a man was defined as good if he lived according to rational ends. Thus, a Roman man was good by his ability to live harmoniously with nature, accepting his place within the patriarchy, just as a Medieval man was good by virtue of his faithful piety, just as an Enlightened modern was good through his use of reason. Up until the Enlightenment, then, the world was conceived of as meaningful and orderly, such that men and women could find meaningful ends—their own telos—within it.

         Now, by and large, we don’t believe the universe is ordered and meaningful, nor that there are any meaningful ends for us to pursue. We have no societal center. We have no guiding narrative. Where there are ends, they are the result of our need to construct ends for our own sanity, not because there is any transcendent reality behind them. Rules for moral life become a necessary arbitrariness. Now “meaning” is construed as a necessity simply to stave off chaos. There is largely no shared conception of what human beings are and thus, what our moral ends are. And since there is no notion of telos, there is little ability to discuss “the good life.” As MacIntyre writes, “Questions about the good life for man or the ends of human life are to be regarded from the public standpoint as systematically unsettlable.”[11] Before Modernity, to make progress in life was to move towards a given telos. We are now moral agents without a telos, without a function. “Each moral agent now [speaks] unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology, or hierarchical authority.”[12] In other words, we have lost the sense that has any function in the world at all.[13] In such a situation, how does one begin to have moral conversation?        

         At the same time, it’s important to note that we do not necessarily construe a loss of telos as a bad thing, given that we often perceived (and perceive) such ends as coming from restricting authorities. Indeed, many experience the end of ends as a liberation. Says MacIntyre, “Many of those who lived through this change in our predecessor culture [the loss of traditional narratives of meaning, such as the ancient or medieval worldviews described above] saw it as a deliverance both from the burdens of traditional theism and the confusions of teleological modes of thought.”[14] In other words, moral ends were connoted with restrictive institutions of authorities—God or aristocracy, for example—and to be free of those ends is to be released from a burden. (One can imagine a child finally getting the keys to a car and breaking out of the constraining restrictions of life under mom and dad.) “Modernism,” says MacIntyre, is characterized to some degree by the loss of any claim to our duty or function, and this is often considered a gain, "as the emergence of the individual freed on the one hand from the social bonds of those constraining hierarchies which the modern world rejected at its birth and on the other hand from what modernity has taken to be the superstitions of teleology."[15]

         We are in the “active nihilism” that German philosopher Friedrick Nietzsche predicted. Philosophy since the Enlightenment has been a deconstruction of what we had believed but no longer can bring ourselves to believe—the Judeo-Christian narrative of a transcendent, personal, Creator God, for example, who promises life in a world to come, and so forth. Nietzsche predicted that after a serious bloodletting and a battle of philosophical worldviews, a new world would lead to a new world in which supermen who embodied new values would emerge.

         Indeed, we are now trying to fill the void created by the loss of moral frameworks and agreed upon ends. In such an environment, any end can be king. What increasingly fills the void of our inability to dialogue is strong sentiment. Moral discourse becomes subject to emotional feeling.[16] This results in what MacIntyre calls an “emotivist culture” in which personal sentiment, as opposed to any agreed upon moral narrative, reigns. In an emotivist culture, authority is no longer vested in moral narratives, but in feeling. In such a mode, we are doubling down on individualism. That what I feel, because it feels good (generally speaking, because it makes me feel right), must be right.[17] This brings us full circle: in such a situation, again quoting MacIntyre, “there is no rational way of deciding which type of claim is to be given priority or how one is to be weighted against the other.”[18] Emotivism and moral incommensurability go hand-in-hand. To put it in the language in our last essay: “Whatever I believe is just me doing me, and how dare you question that?” Once this sort of statement is accepted, there is no further basis for civil conversation. Disagreement becomes conflict. Conflict is taken as abuse. Opposing opinion becomes an attack. And the possibility of civil discourse is broken.

         So, on one hand, the loss of guiding narratives is a type of freedom, sure; but we are also in confusion. And the danger beyond the loss of moral frameworks is the increasing incivility which undermines even having a conversation, rendering discussion in situations when we have different moral assumptions nearly impossible. It’s not, in other words, that we have different opinions, but that, increasingly, we have no means to talk about those disagreements. The alternative is to conclude that we see the world clearly and are right and righteous. Moral incommensurability and emotivist culture, then, buttress the discourse outlined above: (1) I am right, (2) I can prove I’m right, (3) You are wrong, (4) Not only you are wrong, you are evil.

Emotivist Culture and The Loss of Civil Discourse

         The end result of an emotivist culture is confusion. Specifically, the confusion of confronting “one contingent arbitrariness against another.”[19] And the headwaters of emotivism play out downstream. Settled facts or the notion of any fact at all becomes debatable. President Trump (who is an exemplar of emotivist culture par excellence) can say that his inauguration set attendance records despite photographic evidence because…well, he because he strongly wishes it to be so. This sort of confusion also plays out in moral debate, as in the imagined abortion argument, above, and in public and political debate of every sort. We live in an emotivist culture, with dizzying effects and amplified confusion, and such confusion undermines moral conversation. In addition to the confusions outlined in Essay 5 (‘What Story Are We In?’), here are further confusions resulting from an emotivist culture:

         I. Loss of Discourse Patterns

         “Speaking your truth” (a cultural corollary of “you do you”) for authenticity’s sake is a great discourse pattern. Speaking honestly is generally far better than being false-faced. But if this is your only discourse pattern, you have annihilated the basis for moral conversation. Or if you believe something is true because you deeply wish it to be so, you have obviated the possibility of rational conversation. Further, once you have made the move that something is moral or praiseworthy because it is authentic or because you feel it strongly, then any moral narrative is permissible. A white supremacist can make a strong moral argument based on these terms, in that his racism is deeply felt and is only, after all, “my experience.” When we pit the morality of an individual’s personal preference against a collective “we”, there is little space for thoughtful dialogue. Indeed, in such a situation, any narrative which “feels good,” even if it is a twisted narrative, can be justified. A dignity culture (by which I mean a culture which appeals to legal bodies to resolve disputes rather than direct retaliation, such as dueling, as in an honor culture) such as our contemporary culture has traditionally used public shaming to curb outrageous moral narratives, but if we are entering into a new moral culture, as sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning posit, then curbing twisted narratives may be harder work moving forward.[20] The rise of White Nationalism is, again, one such example.

         Once rational dialogue is subsumed by emotivism, all sorts of demons are let out of Pandora’s box. Once I locate moral ends in my own self based on my feelings alone, curiosity is interrupted and downstream, over time, transformative modes of discourse are undercut. Soon, there’s no need to engage in thoughtful dialogue with anyone at all.

         II. Loss of Facts 

         In an emotivist culture, facts become increasingly meaningless. Facts that are dissonant with our preference may be dismissed. Meanwhile, the rise of infotainment—statistics, information, and news media tailored to our preferences and emotional reactions—supplies us with armament to justify our preference. How many times have you seen a fact re-butted on social media by a specious yet hard-to-debunk counter claim, backed by some quasi-reputable science or media outlet? Or consider how this dynamic plays out politically: The Age of Trump is marked by the mainstreaming of ad hominem attacks over any debate of substance and the seeming disregard of facts altogether.[21] This is a serious matter. Such individuated emotivism loosens the bonds that hold us together. 

         III. Rise of Anxiety

         The loss of thoughtful moral dialogue, unending stimulation via entertainment-driven news media and social media, and the loss of facts as hard realities, not surprisingly, leads to ongoing anxiety, ennui, languor, meaningless, and purposelessness. We are what Edwin Friedman calls “chronically anxious.”[22] Chronic anxiety creates a vicious loop; it reduces the capacity to be thoughtful, which is the very faculty which could undercut emotivist culture.[23]

Looking Forward

         The rise of moral incommensurability and emotivist culture makes it hard to progress to spiritual maturity of Stage 4 (see the first two essays in this series). And it’s hard to see a way out of our confusion. But our map forward must start with understanding where we are, before we can map a path forward. Before we chart that direction, let us further understand what emotivist culture creates, so that we can chart our way more surely. In the next essay, we will explore the moral superiority, virtue signaling, and de-humanizing which becomes part and parcel of an emotivist culture.

[1] Of course, in the floor cleaning scenario, one partner is very likely to “give in” or compromise, for the sake of domestic tranquility. In many moral debates, however, since passions are so deeply felt, neither side is willing to give in.

[2] “The ends to which men as members of such a species love are conceived by them as goods.” MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame, IN. Page 82.

[3] Hart, David Bentley. That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. Yale University Press. September, 2019. Page 42.

[4] Neihbur, H. Richard. “The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy.” Harper and Row Publishers. New York, NY. 1963. Page 51.

[5] This may seem a silly example, but consider Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, which does not draw a distinction between self-expression as an experience of own’s own happiness and transcendence.

[6] MacIntyre. See Chapter 6 and page 70, in particular.

[7] MacIntyre, 70. MacIntyre is talking, in the above sentence, about claims of utility made by Jeremy Bentham and rights over against traditional concepts of justice; nevertheless, we could just as easily talk about contemporary matters.

[8] Ferry, Luc. A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living. Harper Perennial. 2011. Pages 212-214. And leaving aside the fact that they often allowed gross excesses or abuses.

[9] While we can’t hearken back to some non-existent ideal age, we can, nevertheless, look with serious concern at the future, questioning whether our moral advancement will continue. As Edwin Friedman says in Failure of Nerve, societies can continue to progress materially long after they have reached their moral and ideological zeniths and are, in fact, in decline. See Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix by Edwin Friedman. Church Publishing. New York, NY. 2017. See “Chapter I: Imaginative Gridlock and the Spirit of Adventure.”

[10] Among Aristotle’s four causes, this is the “final cause.”

[11] MacIntyre, 119.

[12] Ibid, 68.

[13] MacIntyre, 59-60.

[14] Ibid, 60.

[15] Ibid, 34.

[16] Again, to quote Jonathan Sacks: “We [have moved from a world of “We” to one of “I”, the private pursuit of personal desire.” Sacks, Jonathan in Covenant and Conversations: Life-Changing Ideas in the Parsha. “Making Space.” March 7, 2018.

[17] The collapsing of “we” to “I” has been accomplished on a philosophical basis by the new empiricism which arose in the 17th and18th century “…by making every experiencing subject a close round; there is nothing beyond my experience for me to compare my experience with, so that the contrast between seems to me and is in fact can never be formulated.” MacIntyre, 80.

[18] MacIntyre, 70. In this sentence, MacIntyre Is discussing claims of utility made by Jeremy Bentham as well as rights versus traditional concepts of justice, but he could just as easily be discussing contemporary matters.

[19] MacIntyre, 33.

[20] See “Microaggression and Moral Culture” by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning. Comparative Sociology. Volume 13. 2014. Pages 692-726.

[21] Again, President Trump claimed, for example, that 1.5 million people came to his inauguration. See “Here’s What the Evidence Shows” by Timothy B. Lee in Vox.com, online. January 23, 2017. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/21/14347298/trump-inauguration-crowd-size [June 1, 2020]

[22] See Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix by Edwin Friedman. Church Publishing. New York, NY. 2017.

[23] “Cerebration that occurs in a reactive mode should not truly be labeled ‘thinking.’ The key to thinking lies in an emotional category, the differentiation of the thinker’s self.” Friedman, 137.