An old college teacher of mine once remarked to me that “[a] philosopher’s fundamental mistakes often appear on the very first page of his major treatise”. A possible instance of this eyebrow-raising historical insight is the opening page of the long section on moral philosophy found in the prominent undergraduate philosophy textbook entitled Introducing Philosophy—from Oxford University Press, no less—skillfully edited by Robert C. Solomon (2001). Solomon there begins his broad survey of this profound and important topic with the following explanatory definition:
The core of ethics is morality. Morality is a set of fundamental rules that guide our actions.
You may well wonder how there could be anything controversial about this lucid statement, for it does indeed capture the focus of at least ninety percent of the moral philosophers’ writing in the Western traditions of religious and academic philosophy. It also captures the focus of most contemporary moral discussions, even in the marketplace and at the dinner table. We are all familiar with, and frequently argue about, presumptive “moral rules,” both major and minor. We are all familiar with the competing rationales often offered in explanation of the presumed authority of such rules—that they come from God, or that they are part of the social contract, or that (when followed) they serve to maximize collective welfare, and so forth. How else should we focus and pursue our concern with moral reality? How else might one even begin to address the topic?
Hereby hangs a tale. For there are indeed other ways of approaching the topic, both as engaged citizens and as theorizing philosophers. A monomaniacal fixation on rules and on the source of their authority may reflect a fundamental misconception of what is actually going on inside successful moral agents when they engage in typical moral cognition. It may misrepresent the underlying nature of anyone’s precious moral virtue. It may misrepresent the learning process by which the moral virtues are acquired. And it may misrepresent the ways in which those virtues are actually exercised in our day-to-day moral reasoning.
Before citing historical/moral authorities in hopes of winning some credence for this admittedly audacious suggestion, let us survey some of the many non-moral, empirical, or factual reasons for entertaining an approach to understanding morality that is not focused on rules. Such extra-moral reasons are not hard to find.
First, and perhaps foremost, rules in the literal sense require a language in which they can be expressed (and taught, and imposed, and discussed, and modified). But none of the many social creatures on this planet—excepting only humans—possess any language at all, and certainly none equal to the task of expressing even the simplest of social rules. Chimpanzees, wolves, baboons, and lions, for example, are quite innocent of language, and yet their collective behavior displays a complex social order that the adult animals must respect—on pain of punishment or retribution from their peers—and which the juveniles must learn to recognize, understand, and eventually protect with their own watchful behavior. They, too, live within a more-or-less stable moral order that serves many if not most of the same functions served by our own moral order. An adult chimp will chide, sometimes severely, a juvenile chimp that steals food from the hands of an infant chimp, and will even return the stolen food to the aggrieved victim. Wolves, and even domestic dogs, will offer comfort and solace to a wounded compatriot and will spring to defend it against future threats. The trust, social foresight, and mutual dependence displayed by a pack of lions organizing and executing a hunt to bring down a gazelle is a marvelous example of collective purposeful activity. And the subsequent sharing of the spoils among all who participated in the hunt is a striking example of distributive justice, even if momentary squabbles occasionally break out over access to the choicest bits of the kill. (Nobody is morally perfect, especially a tired and hungry lion.)
In sum, moral perception, moral reasoning, moral activity, moral norms, moral defense, and moral retribution all exist elsewhere in the animal kingdom (presumably for many of the same reasons that they exist in us), but in none of those other cases do language or discursive rules play any role at all in the moral phenomena at issue. The whole thing happens—most of it, anyway—but without language.
So what is going on? What is it that regulates or steers their behavior, if not rules? Before canvassing possible answers to this question, let us ponder some additional data, this time concerning humans. Adult humans occasionally fall victim to something called global aphasia, a stroke-induced brain malady in which the cortical areas responsible for the manipulation, production, and comprehension of language—in any form: spoken, written, or printed—are totally destroyed. The loss of this critically important neuronal machinery (roughly, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, typically on the left side of the brain) leaves the victim without any capacity to formulate, process, or comprehend any linguistic structures whatsoever. That dimension of cognitive representation is now completely out of business. There is nothing wrong with the victim’s sensory inputs or motor outputs; these peripheral systems remain entirely functional. The cognitive deficit lies deeper. The capacity for even forming linguistically structured thoughts has disappeared entirely. The victim cannot formulate or comprehend any declarative sentence, nor any interrogative sentence, nor any imperative sentence, nor any rule. These elements, so familiar to the rest of us, no longer play any role in their cognitive lives.
And yet their cognitive lives in other respects remain surprisingly unaffected, despite this disaster where specifically linguistic structures are concerned. Some three decades ago, we had such a left-brain stroke victim in our own extended family. Aunt Betty, as she was fondly called, could still drive a car around town, shop for the groceries, cook a dinner, and watch a football game on TV with understanding and enjoyment. More to the point, her basic trust in other humans, and her own basic trustworthiness, were quite intact. During visits, her comprehension of the moral flux around her, especially where the adventures and interactions of our youngish children were concerned, seemed quite undiminished, as were her skills in providing comfort for the teary-eyed and fairness in the distribution of small pastries at lunch. Her moral cognition was up and running smoothly, evidently, much as before—but without the benefit of any rules to tell her what to do. She could no longer comprehend or even contemplate them, and yet somehow, she didn’t need them.
Another illustration of the superfluity of rules to moral character emerged, without warning and to much amusement, in an interview of a moderately charming Georgia Congressman on the TV comedy show The Colbert Report. The topic of their extended discussion was a recent higher-court ban on the public display of the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments in the foyer of a Louisiana courthouse, and the justice/injustice of their subsequent court-ordered removal from that public venue. The congressman, a Mr. Lynn Westmoreland, was defending their public, cast-bronze-on-granite display on a variety of grounds, but most trenchantly on the grounds that, collectively, those ten rules constitute the very foundation of our morality, insofar as we have any morality. Their public display, therefore, could only serve to enhance the level of individual morality.
Sensing an opportunity, Steven Colbert nodded his presumptive assent to this claim, and asked his guest, “Could you please cite them for us, congressman?” Westmoreland, plainly taken aback by the request, gamely began, “Don’t lie, . . . don’t steal, . . . don’t kill, . . .” as Colbert, with his eyebrows raised in expectation, held up first one finger in response, then two, then three. After an awkward pause at that point, the congressman, who had plainly drawn a blank beyond those three, bravely and with evident honesty said, “No, I’m sorry. I can’t name them all”. My immediate reaction (oh, alright, my second) was sympathy for the congressman, because I don’t think I could have named them all, either. At which point Colbert ostentatiously thanked his guest for his wisdom and brought the interview, before a large audience, to an uproariously received and laughter-filled conclusion.
The comedic point was plain enough and doesn’t need any further elaboration from me. But there is a deeper lesson to be drawn from this exchange. The fact is, the congressman is probably as good an example of worthy moral character as one is likely to encounter at one’s local post office or grocery store. After all, he inspired sufficient public trust to get himself elected, and he thinks morality important enough to defend it, with some passion and resourcefulness, on television. He is a presumptive example of a conscientious man with a morally worthy character. But if he is, these welcome virtues are clearly not owed to his carrying around, in memory, a specific list of discursive rules, rules at his immediate command, rules that he literally consults in order to guide his ongoing social behavior. He could remember only three of the ten “commandments” at issue, and, if you check the bible, he didn’t get two of those three quite right in any case. If we are looking (and we are) for an explanation of the actual ground or source of people’s moral behavior, the proposal that we are all following a specific and finite set of discursive rules in order to produce that behavior is starting to look strained and threadbare, to put it mildly.
Before addressing an alternative explanation, let us note one further domain of empirical evidence, relevant to our issue concerning the role of rules. Moral expertise is among the most precious of our human virtues, but it is not the only one. There are many other domains of expertise. Consider the consummate skills displayed by a concert pianist, or an all-star basketball player, or a grandmaster chess champion. In these cases, too, the specific expertise at issue is acquired only slowly, with much practice sustained over a period of years. And here also, the expertise displayed far exceeds what might possibly be captured in a set of discursive rules consciously followed, on a second-by-second basis, by the skilled individuals at issue. Such skills are deeply inarticulate in the straightforward sense that the expert who possesses them is unable to simply tell an aspiring novice what to do so as to be an expert pianist, an effective point guard, or a skilled chess player. The knowledge necessary clearly cannot be conveyed in that fashion. The skills cited are all cases of knowing how rather than cases of knowing that. Acquiring them takes a lot of time and a lot of practice.
To be sure, the point-guard can instruct the novice, “When you get possession of the ball at your end, dribble it down the floor toward the opposition’s basket, and when the defense starts to resist, pass the ball to whichever of your teammates has the best chance of sinking a shot.” But this rule, even if it is tatooed on the novice’s forearm, will hardly make him an effective player. It doesn’t tell him how to dribble effectively, nor could any other list of rules. It doesn’t tell him how to recognize a teammate’s fleeting opportunity to take a high-percentage shot, or perhaps set one up for yet a third player. It doesn’t tell him how to pass the ball so as to avoid interception, or how to deceive the defense with various kinds of fakes and feints. It doesn’t even address the issue of how to execute any one of the dozen or so different kinds of shots he himself might have to take, or when to take them. It doesn’t tell him .01 percent of what he needs to know to be a skilled player. And even if he did somehow memorize 10,000 rules on all of these diverse topics, he couldn’t possibly recall, from that vast store, exactly the rule relevant at any instant and then apply it swiftly enough to steer his ongoing play. The game unfolds much too quickly for that plodding strategy to be effective. Something else is going on inside the basketball player’s head. Something else entirely.
The game of chess is much slower, of course, and simpler too. But the same lesson emerges here as well, although from an unexpected direction. Unlike the basketball case, and because of the discreteness and comparative simplicity of chess, computer programmers have indeed written computer programs—that is, large sets of literal rules for the computer to consult and follow— that will enable a computer to play a creditable game of competitive chess. These programs were common by the early 1980s, and they were competent enough to defeat non-expert human chess players (such as me) quite regularly.
The computer-guiding rules were written so as to address any arbitrary configuration of chess pieces on the board, as might emerge in the course of a game, and to evaluate, in sequence, the cost or benefit of each of the perhaps thirty legal moves (or something in that neighborhood—it will vary) then available to the computer. To be at all effective, this strategy requires that the computer also considers the potential cost/benefit (to the computer) of its opponent’s possible responses to each of those contemplated moves. Each such response would of course present the computer with a new set of possible moves of its own, each requiring evaluation, and so on, for another cycle of possible moves-and-responses. If the computer is to look ahead in this fashion for only two cycles of play, it will already be evaluating something like (30 × 30) × (30 × 30) = 810,000 or almost a million possible move-sequences! And if it presumes to look forward, in this brute-force evaluative fashion, a mere four cycles of play, its task explodes to examining the cost/benefit ratio for almost a trillion possible move-sequences.
Now you and I could never hope to execute a game-strategy of this kind, but a computer can, although just barely. Let us assume that the computer’s central processing unit (CPU) has a clock-frequency of, say, 100 Megahertz ( = 100 million elementary computations per second), a fairly modest machine, these days. Such a computer will take only (1 trillion moves to be evaluated) / (100 million evals/sec) = 10,000 seconds, or about three hours to complete its evaluation of four cycles of play, assuming that the cost/benefit estimate for each move-sequence (a comparatively simple matter) can be calculated in a single elementary computation.
“But this is still ridiculous,” you might say. “Three hours of mulling per turn!? That’s not even legal. And looking ahead only four move-cycles? That’s not going to defeat a really good human chess player.” And you would be right. But in fact, some artful pruning of the decision-tree constructed by the computer’s program (e.g., through ignoring some possible moves, on both sides, that are likely to be irrelevant) will substantially reduce the combinatorial explosion in the number of moves that need to be evaluated. This can reduce the time of evaluation from three hours to perhaps three minutes, though at some cost to security. A somewhat faster CPU might further reduce it to less than three seconds. And the occasional deployment of a slightly more penetrating five or six-cycle lookahead evaluation for the occasional moves of potentially great value, positive or negative, can add some deeper, if localized, insight without adding too much in the way of a computational burden. In these ways the programmed computer can be brought into the range of real-time chess competence, even excellence.
Still, it is worth remarking that it took over three decades of program and computer development before a chess-playing computer was finally able to defeat a world-champion human chess master. The Russian master Gary Kasparov (poor devil) finally went down to an IBM monster computer named “Deep Blue” in 1997, to the celebration of nerds and technophiles everywhere (Campbell et al. 2002). That is, the gross strategy of applying discursive rules, again and again at blistering speeds, finally paid off. But it did so only because the computer CPU’s clock-speed was roughly a million times faster than any cyclic process in a human brain (which maxes out at a mere one hundred cycles per second) and only because the conduction velocity of the electrical signals inside the computer (almost the speed of light) was roughly a million times faster than the conduction velocity in a human nerve fiber (about the speed of a fast bicycle rider). These make the computer about (a million times a million = ) a trillion times faster than we are. Without these singular and superhuman physical advantages, the computer and its list of rules—its program—would be dead in the water. And so would we humans, if the rule-based strategy were how human chess-playing competence is grounded. But plainly it is not. It couldn’t possibly be. Something else is going on inside the human chess-master’s head. Something else entirely.