David Wiggins was Fellow and Praelector in Philosophy at University College, Oxford, from 1981 to 1989. Needs, Values, Truth (NVT) was his third book. It collects three previously unpublished essays on broadly ethical and metaethical matters, with revised versions of six essays on the same kind of topics published over the years since 1973. (Though some go back a good deal further than 1973: a footnote on the first page of Essay VI reveals, slightly coyly, that at least its first three sections originated in the early 1960s.) Essay I is the longest, at 58 pages; it explores what is logically and ethically distinctive about claims of need. Essays II-V are all in different ways about truth in ethics, as contrasted with truth in other areas: how much there can be, and why, in ethics unlike some other domains, there is some determinacy but not complete determinacy. Essays VI-VII consider and refine an Aristotelian understanding of practical reason (and un-reason). Essay VIII is about free will. Essay IX addresses personal identity, the value of survival, and so in a way the meaning of life, which is also a central theme of Essay III. A tenth chapter, 37 pages long and divided into 4 main sections, does not deserve the relative neglect that is risked by its being titled ‘Postscript’. This characteristically self-critical closing chapter adds reflections and qualifications to Essays I-IX: its section 1 draws some threads together about ‘intuitionism’ in ethics, section 2 adds some further thoughts about needs, and sections 3–4 have more to say about truth, both as to its philosophical logic and as to its applicability (or otherwise) in ethics.
Between Professor Wiggins’ first two books, Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967) and Sameness and Substance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1980) there was (if I may) a certain continuity, to the extent that the second is almost an update of the former. Of course there are changes and adjustments, repudiations, refinements, and (again) self-criticisms; to such an extent of self-revision, indeed, that it seems quite possible that one day Wiggins will want to renew his inquiries into sameness and substance a third or even a fourth time.Footnote 2 Still, the project of those two books is recognisably unitary. The project is to apply wider metaphysical and logical resources to a question that has been discussed in depth in the last two decades by, for example, Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, Sydney Shoemaker, and Wiggins’ olim pupil Derek Parfit. In three words, this is the question ‘What are we?’: the question of diachronic personal identity.
Wiggins’ preferred style of answer is recognisably Aristotelian (with a strong Lockean flavour). Broadly speaking, it is that we are individual substances whose nature is to endure over time (preferably quite a lot of time), and to be subject to something like the diachronic identity-conditions of most other animals; with the crucial, and very Lockean, proviso that we – unlike other animals as far as we can tell – are crucially determined in our nature by our psychological lives. So Wiggins argues that while psychological continuity cannot, pace Locke, be a sufficient condition for diachronic personal identity, Locke does seem right to take it to be something like a necessary one.
The philosophy of mind is always a humanistic discipline. Any answer to this question ‘What are we?’ will always have a bearing on a different question, the practical or ethical question ‘What should we value, and what should we do?’ This question of practical philosophy is central to Wiggins’ inquiries as now presented in NVT. And the neo-Aristotelian account of what we are that he developed in his first two books, while hardly ever foregrounded, underlies everything he says in NVT to answer the practical question. Most obviously, Wiggins’ account of our nature forms a crucial backdrop to ‘Claims of need’, Essay I; his approach to diachronic personal identity is also central to Essay IX, ‘The concern to survive’, first published in 1979, just before Sameness and Substance. Still, in most of NVT Wiggins’ neo-Aristotelianism takes as its originary text not Metaphysics Zeta and de Anima Book 3, but the Nicomachean Ethics.
NVT is a rich and remarkable exposition of some crucial philosophical possibilities. In this brief review I must limit my discussion, or at least its starting-point, to one small suggestion about Wiggins’ engagements with the question of truth in ethics in Essays III-V, and with the Aristotle of the Ethics in Essays VI-VII. In these engagements the focal question for him is ‘What is truth in practical matters?’Footnote 3 Without in any way rejecting that question, I suggest that we can usefully juxtapose to it a slightly different question which is at least equally enlightening, namely: ‘What is wisdom in practical matters?’
The difference between the two questions – and a clue about Wiggins’ whole approach to the question of truth in ethics – comes out as follows: we might think that the truth in practical matters is such that there is little or no need for phronesis, practical wisdom. This would be so if, for example, something like the following picture of deliberation were correct (NVT, pp. 230–231):
There are theories of practical reasoning according to which the ordinary situation of an agent who deliberates resembles nothing so much as that of a snooker player who has to choose from a large number of possible shots that shot which rates highest when two products are [added: the positive utility of success times the probability of success, and the negative utility of failure times the probability of failure]. It is neither here nor there that it is not easy to determine the values of some of these elements for purposes of comparing prospects. There is no problem about the end itself, which is maximising points…
On such calculative theories of practical reasoning – which have been around at least since Plato's Protagoras, 356b-e – there will be truth in practical matters, but no need for wisdom about them, simply because it is not an exercise of wisdom to get these calculations right; all that is needed is relevant information plus arithmetical technique. And this, to put it as Rosalind Hursthouse likes to put it (Reference Hursthouse1991, p. 232), is a facility that ‘any clever adolescent’ might possess. I take it that Hursthouse means these words as metaphorically, and as non-literalistically, as Aristotle evidently means it when he repeatedly says that political understanding, hê politikê, or practical wisdom, phronesis, is the possession only of the mature (NE 1095a6; cp 1142a12-17, 1143b15) – though immediately afterwards, at least in the Book-One discussion, he is careful to add that the maturity he means is not merely chronological – some people never become ‘mature’: 1095a7-8.
On a calculative account we get things right in ethics, we hit the truth in practical matters, by means of a gimmick, a technique. This approach has the attraction – an almost irresistible one to many philosophers – that it demystifies our account of deliberation by operationalising it: it furnishes us with a universally applicable technique for deliberation. But Wiggins would say – and Hursthouse too; and I as well, if only I could find the wordsFootnote 4 – that to operationalise deliberation is to destroy it:
No theory, if it is to recapitulate or reconstruct practical reasoning even as well as mathematical logic recapitulates or reconstructs the actual experience of conducting or exploring deductive argument, can treat the concerns which an agent brings to any situation as forming a closed, complete, consistent system. For it is of the essence of these concerns to make competing and inconsistent claims. This is a mark not of human irrationality but of human rationality in the face of the plurality of human goods. (Wiggins, 1978, pp. 144–45)
Given this lack of closedness, this ‘indefiniteness’ in ‘the matter of the practical’ (NVT p. 215), there is space for a kind of practical wisdom that outstrips mere truth, or knowledge, about the practical, in that it is more than simply knowing how to apply a measuring technique or an algorithm. For there is a ‘space in practical judgement that plain truth cannot always fill’, and a corresponding ‘scarcity of unique solutions to problems of individual and social choice’ (NVT p. 181).
This ‘measure of cognitive underdetermination’ (NVT p. 210) is not a scandal to philosophy, as it might perhaps be if there was any reason to think that anything goes in ethics. For one thing, there is no reason to think that; what we have is only a measure of underdetermination. There are some things in ethics about which there is ‘nothing else to think’ (NVT p. 153, p. 178) but the truth, just as in arithmetic there is nothing else to think but that 7 + 5 is 12 – ‘we have no choice’. (This notion of there being ‘nothing else to think’ is a suggestive, but also a tantalising, one; we may hope that some day soon philosophers will probe it more deeply.Footnote 5) But there are also some matters on which (to allude to one of Wiggins’ essay-titles) a moderate subjectivism is sensible, and on which (to echo another) what we need, and have, is neither the discovery of a simple technique or gimmick, nor any other kind of discovery, but invention. Alternative conceptions of the right thing to do can still be available, even when they do not ‘win out’ in the arena of deliberative decision.
Even for a rational person, in other words, many practical situations will involve ineliminable regret; one example cited by Wiggins is Peter Winch's famous discussion of Vere's dilemma in Billy Budd (Winch, Reference Winch1965). As Wiggins puts the general point:
[Where] there is no one answer to a practical question whose authoritative revelation can dissipate the force of all other answers, then… there will be room for different kinds of answers, each answering to a different personal choice of the kind of life to lead… Not only was the world not made for us or to fit our concerns; we have not made our moral concerns… simply in order to fit the world… What else ought we ever to have expected then but a diversity of equally defensible practical conceptions of the good life? (NVT pp. 175–76)
So then, in particular, we are not, and never have been, awaiting the discovery (nor even the invention) of the correct moral theory. Not anything like utilitarianism, for reasons already evident above. But not anything like Kantianism either, which Wiggins takes to be either an empty formalism, or necessarily dependent – in covert and unacknowledged ways – on sentiments of solidarity that Kant has no good way of representing as outputs of what he takes to be a priori in ethics.
Perhaps we may imagine Wiggins saying more about all this some day, in order to spell out more explicitly what he takes to be the real roots of a healthy ethical philosophy. As if in a dream, in fact, I seem to hear something like the following words – words that we may well hope at least some philosophers of the future will take as seriously as they deserve to be taken:
[A] true answer to Plato's question [‘Why be just?’] will begin as a set of reminders. [So] I exhort the reader, in considering… this book, to draw constantly upon his or her lived experience in the world … Let the reader never forget the things he or she already knows about our subject matter. For in [ethics], philosophy itself will lack all authority unless, from the outset, it pays eager attention that that which is always present, on the surface or some way below the surface, in the ordinary thoughts and ideas of ordinary, passably good, passably sensible people—and present there entirely independently of the ministrations of philosophy… the first aim of philosophical ethics is not to supersede or streamline the moral ideas that the reader brings to the subject, or to lord it over ordinary notions, nor yet to put them to the test by instantly transposing everything into the language of planning, execution, and command. Better counsel, counsel too rarely heeded but familiar from the writings of Bernard Williams, will be to study our moral ideas for themselves and for all they are worth, avoiding every preconception of what they ‘must’ be like… Let us leave the expression ‘moral theory’ in the hands of those who relish its present connotation of reconstruction or believe that it is the business of moral philosophy to trespass on the preserve of the moralist by remaking first-order morality… At the outset, let us bracket all preconceptions and allow the notions we already have to speak to us for themselves. (Wiggins, Reference Wiggins2006, pp. 4–7)
