This is an enormously ambitious book packed with history, ethics, and philosophy of science as well as sociology. It is more historical than much history of philosophy and takes business ethics more seriously than most ethicists do. It is an important contribution to creating a field in which researchers in a variety of traditions mutually inform each other about morality.
The book focuses on two distinct but related projects. The first is to provide “a conceptual framework for the scientific investigation of morality” (p. 20). The second aspires to tell the story of business ethics in America. My comments will be limited to the first project.
In developing his conceptual framework, Abend distinguishes moral behaviors from moral judgments. This is an important distinction that is often ignored by philosophers who tend to see the relationship between moral behavior and judgments as similar to the distinction between performance and competence in linguistics (one being a degraded version of the other) rather than as two distinct domains.
Abend goes on to identify a background that is presupposed by both moral behavior and moral judgment. The background is a set of presuppositions and commitments that provides accounts of the following:
1. Grounding: what is in the domain of the moral?
2. Conceptual repertoires: what counts as a moral concept?
3. Objects of evaluation: what actions and objects are moralized?
4. Method and argument: what counts as a moral reason?
5. Metaethical objectivity: how objective is morality thought to be?
6. Metaphysics: what are the ontological commitments of a morality?
Invoking the background is important for many reasons but especially because it is a way of bringing out the holism of human action. Moral behavior is not insulated from etiquette, custom, or the pursuit of self-interest. It relies on many of the same mechanisms and it is not always easy to tell which domain we are in. Think, for example, of how moralized British etiquette can be.
Abend’s scientific aspirations lead him to a kind of Cartesianism that is all too characteristic of other qualitative social scientists concerned with methodological rigor. They forswear the investigation of mentalistic phenomena such as motives and intentions for that, they believe, would require access to the private minds of agents. Yet they happily talk about the meaning and significance of actions as if they were simple observables, unrelated to an agent’s psychology. But acts are partly constituted by the intentions they express. This is what explains the difference between raising your arm and your arm raising, or between lying and causing someone to have a false belief. The moral vocabulary, in particular, does not get going without the psychological. Indeed, to talk about agents in the first place (as opposed to bodies moving in space) is already to invoke psychological phenomena. If twentieth century Anglophone philosophy has been about anything, it has been about breaking down the stark distinction between the psychological and the behavioral.
The concern with being scientific also leads to competition about who has the best conceptual framework and who is doing the best science. Abend thinks his conceptual framework wins; he does not think much of rivals from cognitive science and evolutionary biology. He also thinks that social scientists “would benefit from asking transcendental questions and pursuing transcendental lines of inquiry”. Many will be surprised at the thought that social scientists should be working shoulder to shoulder with Kant and his intellectual descendants.
In taking on the psychologists and biologists Abend quotes some of their outlandishly grandiose claims and then accuses them of confusing the output of brain scans and various evolutionary products with real morality. It should be granted by all parties to the dispute that there is a great deal of controversy about what exactly constitutes morality, as opposed to its precursors, building blocks, or near neighbors. Moreover, everyone should be modest in their claims since the progress of science often leads to redrawing the boundaries around concepts. Consider, for example, how the concept of energy changed in the post-Newtonian world. No eighteenth century natural philosopher would have thought that energy and matter could be interdefined. Think also of how the concept of desire has changed in a post-Cartesian (Freudian) world. Only the most obtuse still insist that desires are essentially transparent to those who have them. Yes, animals do not have morality in the Kantian sense, but we may discover that no one has morality in this sense, and so we may redraw the boundaries of the concept. At this point in the investigation it is an open question whether things will go one way or another.
Like many people I think that the psychological and biological work on morality is incredibly exciting and insightful. Moreover, unlike much work in the sociology of morals, it often stands in strong, mutually informing relationships with philosophy and other disciplines. Given the power and fecundity of these approaches, any attempt at hegemony on the part of sociology is likely to lead to marginalization rather than conquest.
At this point in the investigation all we can hope for is a marvelously creative and delirious mash-up between disciplines, methodologies, and lines of research. It is to this that Abend’s book makes an important contribution. The author has contributed to describing, analyzing, understanding, and even perhaps explaining several particular features and eddies of moral phenomena. Whether or not this constitutes the best available conceptual framework for the scientific investigation of morality is of little moment.
