Reasons and Persons

On an episode of the TV show The Big Bang Theory, supernerds Sheldon Cooper and Amy Fowler argue about whose scientific field is more fundamental: physics or neurobiology. Sheldon, the physicist, says his field is more fundamental because a Grand Unified Theory would explain everything in the universe, including brains and anything else neurobiologists study. Not so, says Amy, for a complete theory in neurobiology would explain how physicists' brains would work in deriving that Grand Unified Theory, thus subsuming physics into neurobiology. Or, as Amy says it: My colleagues and I are mapping the neurological substrates that subserve global information processing, which is required for all cognitive reasoning, including scientific inquiry, making my research ipso facto prior in the ordo cognoscendi.

Physics and neurobiology aren't the only fields that vie for being most fundamental. I think of ethics as having an even stronger claim, for what's the use of explaining anything—including particles, waves, and brains—without having started with some notion of the Good and what's worth doing? Everything we humans do, including scientific inquiry, starts with ought. That puts ethics first.

But whereas the sciences have instilled most people with a strong sense of progress—that we really do know more about particles, waves, brains, etc.—ethics has achieved no such thing. Ethics may have gotten more abstract during the last few centuries, just as most other active fields of knowledge have, but we're no closer to being better people as a result—presumably the end goal of any pursuit in ethics. Instead, humans rely as much as ever on base mammalian responses such as emotion and intuition to guide themselves through difficult moral choices. Ethics remains as theoretical and irrelevant as ever as it relates to how people act in real life, with the few attempts during the past century to sell ethical systems wholesale to the public being, by most accounts, disasters—e.g., Soviet communism and religious fundamentalism.

I'm an ethics agnostic: I believe it's impossible to make objectively true statements one way or the other about value propositions. I also believe in moral dissensus, that there's rarely a universal best way to act in any given circumstance for any given person. And yet I love ethics. Despite its continuing pursuit of the objectivity and universality I don't believe in, modern ethics thrills me as a set of logic puzzles where tricky, sometimes paradoxical problems are presented for resolution. Working through those problems may not make me a better person in the direct sense, but they help me to see the weaknesses in other people's ideas. There's solace in having, if nothing else, a healthy mental immune system strong in skepticism.

This year I'm going to hone that defense a little more. In the last half of 2011, I posted a series of essays here on JEC as I read through two religion books, first John Michael Greer's A World Full of Gods (all posts here) and then Edward Feser's Aquinas (all posts here). Though I have my doubts whether many of you readers got much out of those posts—just last week, for example, Laura expressed confusion as to whether Thomas Aquinas was a moral relativist—I found the toil of taking notes and later drafting analyses and critiques to be intrinsically rewarding. That's reason enough to repeat the process and post a new series of essays on a new book.

The book I'll be writing about is an ethics books, Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons. To put it bluntly, this book scares me. Many times I've started it without having yet gotten past the first hundred pages. But being unable to finish isn't my only concern; unlike the Greer and Feser books, Reasons and Persons is an academic book and not targeted to a popular audience. More specifically, it's an academic philosophy book, with a degree of precision and a density of logic that make it unsuitable for most unpopular audiences too.

Furthermore, the book is separated into 154 sections, each ranging in length from one to a few pages, and I'm unsure how to break that down into a schedule suitable for blogging. Two years ago, with the two religion books, I aimed to do about one chapter each week, and the books were conducive to me doing just that and finishing in a couple months. Pacing a section per week with Reasons and Persons would have me wrapping it up not until after the 2015 World Series—far too much time. I expect to settle into a faster schedule as I go.

So with all these challenges, why have I chosen this book? In short, Reasons and Persons raises good questions about two ethical concerns that fascinate me: time and personal identity. As living things we move through time as surely as we move through anything, and so it would be appropriate to know how our moral choices affect not just the present but also the future, including the far future. Yet it turns out that's really hard to do, and most ethical systems fail at it, breaking down into paradox or outright self-contradiction given the right questions.

The second concern, personal identity, intrigues me because conventional concepts of what a person is—what makes me a different person than you, yet what makes me the same person as I was five years ago, etc.—don't hold up well to scrutiny. And yet we base most of our moral choices chiefly around such dubious notions of the self, starting with how what we choose affects other people. Shouldn't we have a better idea of what we are when we make those choices?

I don't expect to find a lot of answers in Reason and Persons—none, maybe. But I hope to gain a few new questions.