Morality

Our Lord Coe ascending to Heaven

[This page is a work in progress. From time to time I feel the need to make alterations and improvements, so don't be surprised if it has changed the next time you read it!]

Morality isn't about doing the right thing; it's about finding the highest possible truth. We seek this truth, we find this truth, we demonstrate this truth. And in doing so we find we 'do the right thing'.

This is something I did not appreciate until after I read Caird's commentary on Kant's philosophy. Prior to that I thought morality was all about 'values'. You have yours. I have mine. They may or may not overlap. And they certainly cannot be deemed 'true' or 'false', like empirical hypotheses. Morality, to me, was always on the far side of the so-called 'is-ought gap'. Perhaps we use moral principles to somehow justify our actions, but someone with different moral principles could always justify a different if not opposite action. So - I thought - all we can really do is hope that other people come over to our way of thinking.

At the same time, however, I had the nagging doubt that to dismiss morality as merely personal was to do it a disservice. Moral principles have the capacity to move the masses and change the world. There is something objective about morality: a moral act is more than just a personal expression, it proves something invisible for all the world to see. The agony of such proof can be seen in Coe's expression as he won the men's 1500m final in Moscow in 1980. That race was a moral act, as every race is.

We tend to think of moral actions as involving helping other people, that morality = altruism. In which case, Coe's victory, and indeed every victory (since it involves depriving others of what you yourself desire), cannot be moral. A victory is rather selfish, in fact. But although morality and altruism are related, moral philosophy doesn't start there, and to unthinkingly equate the two is an arbitrary connection. We must dig deeper.

Kant's philosophical development from epistemology to moral philosophy shows that a different starting point yields a better understanding of how to act. He had addressed the problem of epistemology - how we know what we know - in the Critique of Pure Reason, and the problem of moral philosophy - how we should act - in his Critique of Practical Reason a few years later. In the first Critique Kant explored the relationship between man and the world around him. Previous philosophers had failed to explain how it is that man can reproduce an image of the external world in his own mind and thereby claim knowledge of that world, so they usually invoked the notion of God as guaranteeing some sort of harmony between subject - the mind - and object - the world.

But Kant turned this paradigm upside-down and said we do not reproduce the world in our mind, but we actually produce the world. If we were not involved in its production we couldn't possibly know it, and so it is our world in the most fundamental sense of 'our'. We produce it by imposing a structure on the raw data that comes to us via sensation. We 'see' an object, but all we are really 'seeing' is an ever-changing stream of data (colours, shapes, movement, etc); the experience of seeing an 'object' comes largely from the concepts we apply to the world.

After effecting this 'Copernican revolution' in philosophy Kant struggled to explain the cause of the stream of data that we impose our structure on. If such a stream has a cause then surely that cause is 'out there', and is in fact the world of objects as they really are 'in themselves', prior to being experienced by consciousness. And because such things-in-themselves exist prior to experience there was absolutely nothing Kant could say about them, except that they exist, and that they somehow act as a limit to possible experiences, since objects tend to resist human desires rather than act in immediate accordance with them. (Try wishing your legs to run faster at the end of a 10,000m race and you'll appreciate the meaning of such objective resistance).

It was this sticking point in Kant's epistemology that led to his remarkable step forward in moral philosophy. In our moral actions we are free to choose between good and evil. Our choice cannot be the result of the usual chain of cause and effect that applies to the world of objects. So if we choose a course of action in order to obtain material reward, or even to attain a feeling of well-being, then we are not being moral. Indeed we are not truly free. We act morally because we know it to be our duty. And what is our duty? It is simply what remains when we have stripped away all the causal reasons for acting one way rather than another. (It's a bit like the Saucony 'Find Your Strong' ad - Maybe duty is just what you have left when you've used up all your excuses.)

This removal of morality from all causal links with the material world makes Kant's categorical imperative (ie. the inner voice that commands you to do your duty) universal, applicable to everyone everywhere. From it Kant derived some universal moral principles such as (i) act as you would expect everyone to act, and (ii) treat others as you would have others treat you.

The thing is, these are hardly guides to life. They do not tell you what to do. But that is not surprising since they are based on a sense of duty which is purely an 'inner voice', wholly removed from the world 'out there'. But here's the thing from Caird: Kant's unsatisfactory moral conclusions aside, his method at least shows promise. Kant tried to find a universal morality by abstracting from the world; what he could have done instead was put morality (and the human freedom that goes with it) in the heart of the world. In other words, Kant could have more thoroughly pursued the line that identified moral freedom with the thing-in-itself identified in the first Critique. After all, both seem to exist behind the material world of cause and effect. When we focus our attention on understanding an external object in nature, the object itself seems to guide and constrain our behaviour. The object speaks to us - each hypothesis we provisionally confirm about the object seems to suggest a further hypothesis to be tested. And as we widen our field of objects to include those further away in space and time, and eventually to include those that relate to man himself, our tests need to become increasingly sophisticated and subtle. We must leave the laboratory and put ourselves to the test in the real world. Every moral act is therefore a test of some hypothesis concerning our own nature.

To adapt Wittgenstein, "Whereof we put ourselves to the test, thereof we find morality".

There are immense truths to be sought in art, religion and politics, by means of debate and social action. But one could do a lot worse than seeking the fundamental truths that emerge from running. Of course, not all running tests our human qualities, but you know when your running is such a test. That is when, towards the end of the race, the noise of the crowd recedes and you can hear only your own heartbeat and Kant's categorical imperative pushing you ever onward, just when it seems pointless or even foolish to keep pushing. Each unit of time in a race is a test of your moral goodness that you can pass or fail, no matter what your finishing position.

Seb Coe's victory in the 1500m Olympic final in 1980 displayed such a moral quality, perhaps not in the event itself but certainly once you consider how he had handed the 800m victory to Steve Ovett a few days earlier. Coe, however, refused to let the earlier defeat affect him and on the day he ran a tactically perfect 1500m, so perhaps he was right to attempt to ascend to Heaven on crossing the finish line! This demonstration of Stoic determination is a victory we all - even those whom Coe defeated - can share in.

You want to do the right thing? Start by entering a race...