Appraisal Vol. 11 No. 4, Spring 2018​
​Article

​ISSN 1358-3336​

Why Ethics is a Normative Science: On Brightman's Moral Laws

​J. Edward Hackett

Abstract

By normative science, I mean that (i) ethics is like logic in the sense that it actively tries to arrive at knowledge of objective norms that apply to all people at all place and at all times and that moreover, (ii) ethicists have a particular expertise about the content of their discipline in the same way that the law professor or physicist claims in their own respective fields if ethics can be made scientific in the normative sense. In what follows, I explain Edgar Sheffield Brightman’s (1884-1953) model of ethics described in his Moral Laws and evaluate his reasons for thinking that ethics is a normative science. Along this argumentative journey, I adopt Brightman’s language as I walk with the reader in the text almost to appear as if I am endorsing the view of ethics as a normative science. In writing this way, I want to experiment with this thought as if I had adopted it. [1]

Keywords

​Brightman, ethical personalism, personalistic idealism, normative science

1. Introduction: Implications of Ethics as a Normative Science​

​In this essay, I will explain what I call Brightman’s Argument from Science Conditions obtains. In other words, I will explicate the central reasons for why Brightman considers ethics a normative science. I begin by presenting Brightman’s Argument from Science Conditions. I will explain Brightman’s three conditions for science below.
  1. If the three conditions of any science obtain, then x is a science.​ Phenomenal-Limit Condition: Every science is limited by its field of study. Methodological Limit Condition: Every science has its own methods of study. Unity of Explanation Condition: Every science strives for explanatory unity of its observations to formulate laws.
  2. The three conditions of science obtain in ethics: Ethics is limited by its own field of study in that it  studies ideals and possibilities. Ethics employs its own methods to study how values are given in experience. Ethics systematizes what it studies to formulate the best moral laws of conduct.
  3. Therefore, ethics is a science.
  4. Either ethics is a descriptive science in which inquirers formulate explanations about what is the case through experimentation and discovery or ethics is a normative science in which inquirers formulate expla­nations about what ought to be the case.
  5. It’s not the case that ethics is a descriptive science in which inquirers formulate explanations about what is the case.
  6. Therefore, ethics is a normative science in which inquirers formulate explanations about what ought to be the case.
Restatement of 6 using Brightman’s own language: Therefore, ethics is a normative science of principles or laws of the best types of human conduct.’ [2]

In considering ethics a normative science, one might object to the constitutive conditions of science pre­sented in premise (1). [3] In fact, Brightman’s conception of science conditions is ambiguous with respect to exactly what might count for the methods employed in any science. With that said, many methods can count as scientific insofar as regularities and patterns allow moving from observations to generalization, criticism, and interpretation. This moving between regularities and patterns is only a problem if reality is not experienced-as-coherent with the chosen scientific methods employed. For Brightman, even as a proto-phenomenologist (as I think the case can be made), the content of reality is always being interpreted coherently since either reality is given to us because it is intelligible or consciousness constitutes the content coherently. [4] In the Moral Laws (1933), Bright­man suggests that the moral law system would still be true regardless if the reality of values were naturalistic or idealist. [5] In more contemporary meta-ethical lan­guage, ethical naturalism and non-naturalism would stand in for values being naturalistic or idealist. In other words, there would still be a systematicity of such moral laws regardless of what the underlying nature of the connected whole truly is. In what follows, I will explain why this is for Brightman and ask whether or not this argument is adequate to establish what a normative science can be.

​2. Ethics and its Fundamental Concepts

​Brightman defines ethics as ‘the normative science of principles or laws of the best types of human conduct.’ [6] Throughout this essay, I will expound upon this definition. Since ethics is a study of human conduct, ethics is similar in scope to other social sciences. Both ethics and other social sciences are all rooted in human experience. However, the striking difference between social sciences and ethics is that ethics is a normative science, not a descriptive science. A descriptive science tries to formulate what is the case through systematic observation and experimen­tation. In the strictest sense, descriptive statements are different than normative statements. Norms are rules, and in the case of Brightman’s definition of ethics, one must take note of his notion of ‘best types.’ Ethics deals with not just a descriptive statement about what various populations believe to be valuable, but addresses directly what is valuable, the ‘best types of conduct’ are achievable even if this conduct is not yet manifest in the world—in other words, what ought to be! To put this difference more clearly, Brightman states: ‘The so called descriptive sciences deal only with the actual and the necessary; ethics deals with the ideal and the possible.’ [7]
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I should also like to say that a science of the ideal and possible is already seen in logic and this analogy might render my claims regarding ethics clearer. Logic is the study and evaluation of arguments. In logic, we have discovered that deductively-valid argument forms will guarantee the truth of the conclusion. Validity expresses the logical truth that some argu­ment forms are better than other forms. If we contrast invalid structures with valid ones, then these invalid forms allow that the premises be true and that the conclusion could be false. In essence, these are bad argument forms since they do not guarantee the truth of the conclusion like valid forms do when you have true premises. Human beings are free to argue poorly or effectively according to the standards suggested by logic just as much as human beings are free to act morally wrong or right according to the standards suggested by ethics. The normativity of both logic and values transcend history. Consider,
Not only is validity of logical analysis and coherence Given, but so also is the realm of true value... Here, of course, there will be more difference of opinion, especially from naturalists, pragmatists, instrumen­talists, and positivists; and at this point, no attempt will be made to argue the matter out. Suffice it to say that if truth is better than error, if science is better than ignorance, if respect for persons is better than violence; if love is better than hate; if beauty is better than chaos--then no will, no activity, no war, no experiment can reverse these judgments. However confused [humanity’s] understanding and applica­tion of them, however different the tribal mores of the communists and the capitalists may be, no social or economic revolution and no anthropological deviates can affect the truth of the true values. [8]
From the passage above, the ideal and possible are real objects of inquiry, ‘the realm of true value.’ Despite one’s philosophical proclivity or tradition, one will find that there is agreement that science, truth, respect, love, and beauty are better than ignorance, falsity, violence, hatred, and chaos. The same holds true about one’s political persuasion. The truth of these ideals, the realm of true values, does not depend on the contingent facts of real life. The contingent facts of real life may call for the realization of some of these higher values just as much as an unjust world will call for that which is not yet.

In noting that ethics deals with the ideal and possible is to situate ethics in relationship to its fundamental concepts given in his definition. Bright­man lists three fundamental concepts concerning: good (value), duty (ought), and principles (law). ‘Ethics must reveal what value ought to be attained; it must explain the obligation to achieve the good.’ [9] Values refer to concrete possibilities of action about what we ought to do. Duties refer to those specific obligations that we find are possible, and most impor­tantly for the purposes of my analysis, the moral laws are required in order to be a science. ‘The concept of law is required for any science.’ [10] Without laws, which give and express the unity of related facts, we could only have a bunch of unrelated facts and statements. For Brightman (and me), a science must aspire to explanatory unity of either its actual or ideal facts. If it cannot exhibit unity, then it cannot be a descriptive or a normative science.

At this point, someone may ask what Brightman means by the ‘best types of conduct?’ Conduct is synonymous with morals according to Brightman. According to any ethicist, conduct does not mean an empirical account of what someone has done like a police officer taking a witness’s statement of a crime or the anthropologist observing societal behaviour. Instead, conduct in this context refers to the freely chosen voluntary behaviour of a person—what we would call their will or their choosing. From Kant onward (and perhaps earlier), if ethical actions are not freely chosen, they have no moral value since they could not have happened otherwise. Therefore, a postulate of any ethical science depends on the ability to choose and will moral conduct freely. Alongside Kant, Brightman embraces ‘ought implies can.’ The best types of conduct do not refer ‘to Utopian or to a purely theoretical ideal,’ but only to the ‘best types of willing (choosing).’ [11] While a normative science, ethics is grounded in achievable willing.

For Brightman, there have been several influential historical theories in ethics (Epicureanism, Aristote­lian, Kantian, and Christian Ethics), and to some degree, there’s an element of truth in all of them (though his list omits utilitarianism without giving a reason why). What’s really at issue is that ‘there has been a clear-cut lack of progress and of scientific systematization in ethical thought.’ [12] Indeed, the lack of theoretical progress is often evidence used against the possibility of objectivist ethics. Moreover, this claim is often repeated in the actual historical lives of every moral philosopher. Sometimes, moral disagree­ment is framed as an argument to establish that no unity is possible. Recall that any science for Bright­man must be capable of ‘systematization’ and unity of those fundamental propositions that make up the science. Coherent unity is necessary for anything to be a science such that it can explain phenomena adequately. Hence, we can thus ask the question of this essay: Is there a possible unified normative science about the best types of conduct?

If we answer the previous question negatively, then we concede that ethics is even possible, and yet that rejection seems false. For Brightman, the negative answer flies in the face of how we experience the world. Like a phenomenologist, he seeks out how moral experience functions. At first glance, appealing to human experience might seem like an embrace of subjectivism, and yet it’s not. Brightman’s appeal to experience will conform to later criteria for the requirements of a science (which I will explain in an upcoming section). At this point, I claim only that Brightman’s methodology in the Moral Laws makes it possible to appeal to moral experience. Values are experienced. ‘If I actually experience the value of at least some moments of life, I cannot logically deny all value to life, nor can I deny the possibility of some knowledge about value.’ [13] In other words, the very irreducible content of experiencing values should be taken as evidence that it’s inconceivable that values are so apparent that it’s not just my experience of them that proves their reality, but the fact that we experience them like others.

To say that Brightman is appealing to experience to explain values doesn’t mean that he is claiming knowledge of all values. That would be too ambitious and too philosophically irresponsible. In fact, ethicists might only be capable of knowing some of these moral principles better than others principles, but as Bright­man would, and as I contend, values are a phenome­nological reality, which is to say that evidence for the moral laws can be made intelligible through conscious experience. [14] As such, first-order phenomenological evidence (here not meant in the way that neither Nagel or other analytic philosophers employ the term ‘phe­nomenological’ to mean simply the subjective report of what-its-like-to-experience-x) indicates a commit­ment to a theory of how experience works, and for Brightman, ethics cannot be ‘built solely out of ‘ought’ with no relation to what ‘is’ [such an account would have] no basis and no function.’ [15] Experience, then, functions as the bridge between the descriptive and the normative.

Given what we can appeal to experience for objective ethics, sadly, ethics is in an unsatisfactory state. Just as in Brightman’s time, there is no systematicity of ethics today and the very demand for unity and possibility of a normative science can find traction in today’s world. Brightman’s moral law system can be offered as a new possibility just as it was back in 1933. [16] There are plenty of discussions about applied ethics or courses in professional ethics internal to many majors, but not much in the way of what principles should be applied in these many discussions or professional codes. In some of these endeavours, prudence is mistaken for moral truth. At both Notre Dame College and Savannah State University, I have been involved in seeking and asking if philosophy faculty should teach business ethics either in business departments or if philosophy departments should teach the course for them. I get the same response all the time. The answer is always negative, and when I learn how it is they teach ethics, there is a constant refusal to see ethics as involving any expertise on the part of moral philosophers, or that ethics is capable of being a normative science. Instead, the discipline of business ethics never questions the very foundation on which the entire edifice of business rests. Values are an inconvenience to the attainment of profit, and ethics almost always means either public relations dilemma, human resources problems, or an uncritical identifica­tion of legal procedures and morality. How is this so? Oftentimes when non-philosophers teach ethics, the class looks at applying principles of a professional code to likely anticipated problems faced in a profes­sion. In those discussions, there is no awareness about what moral principles should be applied (or even if those principles found in the professional code are enough). Ethics goes deeper and asks what moral principles should be applied in the first place or about the underlying reasons why these principles in the professional code are moral?

Within moral philosophy, the same lack of unity about ethics is present, though for completely different reasons. Contemporary moral theorists are often simply taking up the mantle of a historical thinker and/or approach and attempting to be logically con­sistent (e.g., Peter Singer as a utilitarian or Carol Hay as a Kantian) with that thinker or approach. In this way, ethicists are not striving for the unity that thinking about ethics as a normative science can provide. Instead, these ethicists present historical figures and approaches as if they satisfy the unity of a normative science. Now, presenting Kantian deon-tology or utilitarianism as if they are theoretically complete and autonomous answers to satisfying the demand of a normative science, these approaches are still closer to being a normative science than when non-philosophers present problems one will face in a future profession rather. The upshot is that even these ethical theories cultivate in students the vision of the good, duty, and law to see, appreciate, and understand the objective scope of ethics as a normative science.

​3. Brightman’s Criteria of Science

As I outlined in premise (1): If the three conditions (Phenomenal-Limit Condition, Methodological Limit Condition, and Unity of Explanation Condition) of science obtain, then x is a science, Brightman outlines three criteria for something’s qualifying as a science in general. First, the Phenomenal-Limit condition spells out that every science is limited by its field of study. Second, the Methodological-Limit Condition indicates that each science uses its own methods of observation, and finally, the Unity of Explanation Condition spells out that every science aims at discoverering and formulating laws as limited by its phenom­ena and methods. Let me take them up in order.

There is a difference between science and philos­ophy. For Brightman and the phenomenologist, ‘phi­losophy deals with experience as a whole, in its completeness, its unity, and its totality.’ [17] Brightman never abandons this separation of philosophy from science. For instance, ‘philosophers have been distin­guished from works in the special sciences by their interest in the unity of experience.’ [18] Accordingly, the philosopher must know all relevant information, facts and points of view whereas the scientist need not know the whole. According to Brightman, ‘philosophy is an attempt to discover a coherent and unified definition of the real.’ [19] Scientists must only deal with the part given the overwhelming complexity and division of labour with respect to their explanatory domain. For instance, the biologist is always limited to and restricted to life and its processes. The astronomer, if asked about Europa’s oceans, must default to the microbiologist’s expertise about the possible condi­tions of aquatic life and extrapolate from there to what we can know about Europa. Thus, each science is wholly interrelated in terms of seeking out the truth about its phenomenon, but largely operates in limits with regard to its own region of study. Accordingly, it follows that for Brightman, ‘the sciences, in this sense, are all abstract, while philosophy is concrete, in that it tries to unite and relate together what the special sciences have ultimately separated.’ [20] Philos­ophy is, for Brightman, a way to unify the various parts studied by the natural sciences.

Every science has its own methods of observation. The logician observes differently than the biologist. The logical observes abstract terms and relations whereas the biologist may, for example, collect water samples along the Lake Erie shoreline or Georgia coast. Each subject has its own methods of observation and these methods differ depending on the phenomena in question. However, what cannot be denied is that in every case, ‘science builds on observation of some sort of experience.’ [21] The meaning of observation is quite wide for Brightman. According to Brightman, ‘all sciences are attempts to explain what is given in experience...nothing else than ways of dealing with experience.’ [22] In other words, observation includes not only making sense of external phenomenon, but also the irreducible contents that are given to the subject of experience and how the subject deals with those contents in relationship to others and the inter-subjectivity of the irreducible content.

Third, every science not only builds from observa­tion of some sort of experience, but also tends to greater unity from those observations. In Brightman’s words, ‘all sciences aim at laws or generalizations on the basis of observations made.’ [23] The end of any science is, thus, the formulation of laws. While the laws of physics deal with real relations in space-time, geometry, by contrast, deals with ideal space, and sociology tends to formulate and examine/discover the laws and generalizations of human societies. According to Brightman, these three criteria qualify any inquiry as either a descriptive or normative science. ‘If ethics is to be a science at all, it must conform to these conditions.’ [24]

Let us move onto distinguishing between norma­tive and descriptive science.

​4. Normative Science vs. Descriptive Science

I should say a little more about what a normative science is. Recall that descriptive sciences try to observe and discern some state of the affairs in the world. Biology aims at describing the processes of life; physics describe the real-time relations of parti­cles; chemistry describes the chemical compositions of matter. For Brightman, every descriptive science builds its knowledge on the physical realm of what is actual and necessary. These scientific observations are the mere description of given facts about a causally deterministic world—what Heidegger would call ‘regional ontologies.’ While ethics must indeed pre­suppose some descriptive knowledge, e.g. the surgeon must know what’s wrong with the patient before she can decide if she ought to operate or do another less invasive procedure, ethics goes beyond describing what is. The question of the surgeon is about what she ought to do. Such knowledge is not based in discerning causal structures of nature alone. Instead, moral knowledge is teleological; ethics asks, ‘what purposes the facts serve and whether it be a worthy purpose or not.’ [25]
Concerned with purpose, moral knowledge is about the purposes behind what facts serve. Let me give you an example. The surgeon certainly knows the science of anatomy and physiology. She knows how body parts function, but nothing in this knowledge tells the doctor that health is better than disease. Moreover, it’s possible to conflate the fact that a descriptive science may study values with normativity itself. We might study why some surgeons value X over Y in their human experiences, yet that study is not itself an instance of a normative science. Normative science discriminates among our experiences and selects the best; explaining why a surgeon in all her years of experience selects to value X over Y (for instance, health is preferred over disease as the better state of affairs). In applying the definition of a normative science to ethics, we can see that ‘the only ethics worth having would be one that would enable us to distin­guish between right and wrong, good and bad, value and disvalue. To be more precise, it would give us principles by which we might confront the many conflicting value-claims of our daily experience.’ [26] For Brightman, these moral principles would apply ‘in all times and places.’ [27]

Before ending this section, I want to make one final comment. Since ethics is ‘the normative science of principles or laws of the best types of human conduct,’ ethics must be ‘progressive’ like any other science. Progress does not mean what it usually means in contemporary politics. Instead, science is practically geared towards future investigation. In this way, ethics is like any other science; it has built into its practice the expectation of future investigation. New problems will inevitably arise, and like scientists, ethicists must be intellectually humble about the future possibility of increasing complexity in moral situations, espe­cially given that some fields of applied ethics tend to increase in controversy the more our technological capacities introduce unexpected changes and innova­tions (e.g., bioethics and engineering ethics).

5. The Scope of Moral Principles

According to Brightman, the sought after moral principles are moral laws, and the moral laws are also the namesake of his magnum opus’s title, The Moral Laws (1933). ‘[A] moral law is a universal principle to which the will ought to conform in its choices.’ [28] The universality of a moral law encompasses the function of morality for Brightman. For something to qualify as moral, the chosen action must be an act freely chosen by the will. The choice of how to act is not like adhering to a social code or a societal conven­tion. We may pretend that our willing is a choice of convention like choosing to drive on the right-side of the road in North America whereas I drive on the left-side of the road if I were to rent a car in the United Kingdom. Instead, I am concerned to not endanger others, and I obey what the rules prescribe for this reason. If the rules of driving endangered pedestrians mercilessly, then I should not obey those laws. Con­vention and codes can detract from morality as much as help us realize what ought to be, and this ultimately proves that religious and civil law ultimately depend on the moral law. ‘If we did not know something about the good, there would be no criterion for just legisla­tion and no basis for acknowledging a good God.’ [29]

There are, of course, other types of sustained disagreements between various other domains of the law. Logical law cannot be judged morally, and, in fact, the moral law can only be said to be illogical as logic is not subjected to morality. Our moral laws, however, are subject to logical laws. The natural law and the moral law cannot conflict since the natural law is, after all, in a different sphere of descriptive sciences altogether from the normative sciences. Moral laws can conflict with religious laws, and often religious laws sometimes stand in need of revision. Jesus of Nazareth and Siddhartha Gautama are two religious geniuses that act as reformers of the religious law through the use of the moral law.

Evidence for moral laws, then, like any other science must be sought in moral experience. For Brightman, ‘moral experience occurs wherever there is a feeling of obligation or a choice between what is felt to be better and what is felt to be worse.’ [30] Moreover, this immediacy of feeling is not just a subjective report of what people believe. This is the heart of Brightman’s ethical project: ‘the systematiza­tion of moral experience [such] that moral laws can be discovered.’ [31] It’s at this point that we could call Brightman’s position a rational empiricism, but perhaps it might be better to call it a moral phenome­nology. ‘Embedded in all human consciousness, as far as our knowledge goes, there have been universal principles and particular facts.’ [32] Like Max Scheler, Brightman is building up ethics as a normative science based on discovering what the moral laws will be within moral experience. [33] Like the phenomenologist, Brightman is assuming the coherent intelligibility of experience itself. As he continues throughout The Moral Laws, Brightman appeals to this conception of moral experience as primary evidence for each moral law discovered. Like a geometric system, every discovered moral law reflects the growing complexity of the other moral laws. Each moral law reinforces the truth of other moral laws in his ethical system. As one moral law can seriously be abused, the fact that each moral law limits the others in terms of abusing them.

Brightman offers three categories of the moral law. First, there are the Formal Laws, and the various laws in this first set are the Logical Law and the Law of Autonomy. Next, there are the Axiological Laws, and in this second set, there exist the Axiological Law, the Law of Consequences, the Law of the Best Possible, and the Law of Specification. Finally, there are the Personalistic Laws. These include the Law of Individ­ualism, the Law of Altruism, and the Law of the Ideal of Personality. The formal laws deal with the structure of the will. The axiological laws deal with what types of values we should choose, and the personalistic laws deal solely with the person and the person’s relation to oneself, others, and the community.

Brightman's moral law system is different from prescriptive theories of Kantian ethics and utilitarian­ism. Though certainly not as common as the more traditional options between deontological systems and consequential systems, what it lacks in commonality it makes up for in creativity. Brightman offers a type of systematicity in ethics since philosophers have failed to make ethics scientific. In his own words, ‘In a system of laws, every law is limited by the other laws. This we have found throughout our investigation of ethical science.’ [34] A person's actions must conform to the various moral laws. In doing so, the person demonstrates and understands the interrelationship between all the moral laws, but the moral law does not prescribe stringently specific ways that we ought to act. Instead, for Brightman, the moral laws are regulative ideals that give us the boundaries of what moral living requires. Put another way, Brightman’s ethics is prescriptive but in a manner less robust than other moral theories such as act utilitarianism and Kantian deontology. Brightman asks us to choose actions that attempt to cohere with the various moral laws, but Brightman is philosophically modest in thinking that he would have the final say about how each moral law should be applied in the possibilities open to us. By analogy, logic gives us the various logical laws that should regulate our thinking, and the logical law should be applied to the possibilities before us since it gives us boundaries we should not cross given that it suggests the best types of reasoning just like ethics suggests the best types of conduct.

Let’s focus on Brightman's last three Personalistic Laws. Since I do not have space to undertake an examination of the entire moral law system, I will explore the last three moral laws, and show how they presuppose and simultaneously build off each other. I call your attention to these moral laws since, as I glossed Brightman before, each law is a principle that explains how actions should conform to these ideal standards. Unlike utilitarianism that prescribes us moral guidance about what we ought to do precisely, Brightman's moral law system demands that persons ought to judge their actions mesh with his proposed moral laws. There’s less exacting precision in Brightman’s ethics than act utilitarianism. Moral truth is studied in relation to other living truths demanded by the context one is facing. In this way, the ethical ‘truths function in living relation to other truths are understood and proved.’ [35] According, all ethical truths exhibit unity and a relationship to other discourses. In this way, Brightman offers us a regulative system without asking us precisely what we ought to do in a particular circumstance. Instead, Brightman provides the form that moral living requires since it is ‘a matter of individual creative imagination and aesthetic taste.’ [36]

First, consider the Law of Individualism: Each person ought to realize in his own experience the maximum value of which he is capable in harmony with the moral law. [37] Living a moral life requires us to start with ourselves, but also preserve a vision of the interdependent social relations that constitute our own individuality. In this way, the moral law starts with ourselves is not to privilege a form of individual atomism. Instead, we realize that the individual has social relations that must be taken into consideration. This law meshes with the next one. Consider the Law of Altruism: Each Person ought to respect all other persons as ends in themselves, and as far as possible, to co-operate with others in the production and enjoyment of shared values. [38] This recognition is an invitation to co-operate with others in the production and enjoyment of shared values, but also presupposes that it is the individual person realizing the ‘maximum of which he/she is capable in harmony with the moral law.’ These two laws are presupposed in the Law of the Ideal Personality: All persons ought to judge and guide all of their acts by their ideal conception (in harmony with the other laws) of what the whole personality ought to become both individually and socially. [39]

This final law brings Brightman’s whole system together. It states that any action a person imagines taking must be consistent with the moral laws, and if they have an ideal possibility consistent with the other laws, then that action should be the basis for creating and achieving a person’s own ideal. We are responsi­ble for our own moral becoming, and the personal experience of values calls for us to unify them to construct a social and cultural ideal for oneself and others. The basis for this call to be consistent reflects the underlying unity of our own self and the coherent intelligibility of the ideals taken together. Since the self is an experienced unity, we find that being led by ‘a conception of life purpose’ appeals and resonates with the cultural allure of finding purpose in one’s life. There is an ideal and personality for many vocations— i.e., the loyal and courageous soldier, the compassion­ate and knowledgeable doctor charged with healing us, or maybe more poignantly, the steadfast dedication of the Saint to willingly sacrifice himself or herself for others. [40]

​6. Moral Experience and the Adoption of Phenomenological Language

Brightman adopts phenomenological language to refer to the evidence of experience. For him, ‘all sciences deal with objects either given in or implied by experience.’ [41] It’s here that the term givenness invokes intuitions that are given to the experiencer, or, to put it a little more differently, that intuitions can imply realities not present in experience. We may contem­plate some moral situation and feel the givenness of values even though no such actual moral situation confronts us. Ever more like the phenomenologist, Brightman will narrow the scope of what he means by the term ‘experience’ For Brightman, experience means explicitly,
...the whole field of consciousness, every process or state of awareness within it; not sensation alone, nor scientifically interpreted experience alone. It is not taken in contrast with reason or speculation, but, rather, in contrast with the absence of experience, or unconsciousness. It is Erlebnis, not the Kantian Erfahrung alone. Experience is always complex, ongoing conscious activity; thought and will belong to it as truly as do sensations and memory images...[E]xperience contains both what have been called empirical and what have been called transcen­dental (rational) factors. [42]
Without experience, we cannot have any ethical knowledge. Experience furnishes the very conditions that we encounter and relate to all the irreducible contents. These irreducible contents enter the field of consciousness and they are in part consciousness’s access to those objects of experience that underlie its science—even ideal sciences of oughts. Just like Husserl, Brightman refers to the German Erlebnis to explain what he means by experience. Erlebnis is most often translated into English as ‘lived-experience.’ For Brightman, these irreducible contents can refer to acts of voluntary choice, consciousness of value, con­sciousness of obligation and the moral law itself. All of these components of subjective and intersubjective awareness make up what Brightman means by ‘expe­rience.’ It would not be wrong, I imagine, to think that Brightman’s term ‘experience’ should be supple­mented with the phenomenological elements of inten­tionality and method, if not identified with them. In fact, he comes close to identifying his method with phenomenology. Ten years after the Moral Laws was published Brightman wrote: ‘The method pursued will be broadly empirical—a method closer to that of phenomenology than to traditional sensationalistic empiricism or to naturalistic empiricism of the instrumentalists.’ [43]

Thus far, Brightman’s ethics looks like a form of intuitionism as if ‘the ethical scientist has only to ‘read off’ these intuitions to arrive at a knowledge of right and wrong’ from a pre-existing reality. [44] However, Brightman thinks that intuitionism ‘overlooks the fact that thinking is one of the most significant aspects of experience and that no intuition, whether moral or mathematical or sensory, can be trusted as leading to the truth of about conduct or fact.’ [45] For Brightman, thinking refines intuitions in much the same way that phenomenological method claims to refine our contact with the world (and therefore experience) in the right type of way rather than falling to the dangers of the natural attitude becoming an uncritical assumption about the contents of experience. Intuitionism, like the danger of phenomenology, is when intuitionists (or phenomenologists) privilege the social authority of our present age in the very intuitions that are claimed to be self-evident. It’s for this reason that the goal of ethics qua normative science is to give philosophical reasons why such intuitions should be elevated from merely accepting what we believe to be self-evident. [46] ‘Moral laws, then, cannot be based on intuition, authority or desire alone.’ [47] They must be seen as cohering in experience.
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An appeal to reason must not also depart from experience. Reason cannot cut any ice if it is not grounded in the actual existence of reasonable persons, yet we should not be deceived by the same dangers of intuitionism either. A rationalist can abuse reason, call her propositions self-evident, and never look back. It’s at this point that Brightman suggests his method for thinking that the moral laws are derived from total moral experience. Let me outline the claim in more detail. Brightman says,
The first step, as in every science, is observation; in this case the experiences of value, obligation, and law as voluntarily chosen or controlled, and of experiences related to them. The next step is gener­alization, the formulation of such general likenesses or tendencies as they appear. But the generalizations of moral experience are certain to contain contradictions...the next step is criticism, with a view to eliminating these contradictions...there is a

final stage, which may be called interpretation; this consists of two phases, hypothesis and systematization...the hypothesis is tested by a twofold systematization; the practical system of living and the theoretical system of our most general and best established hypotheses, which we call laws. [48]
Brightman thinks every science tends to unity, but ethics must possess enough in common with the general category of science to satisfy calling it a normative science. In the above passage, the first step is observation, that is, the very datum of experience as it is given in the field of consciousness. Brightman draws upon reference to phenomenology to describe the first step of value-theory. ‘The first step in value-theory is empirical, phenomenological observation of our own value-claims and of reports about the value-claims of others.’ [49] Next, we attend to that datum of experience through generalization. We look for pat­terns, regularities, and likenesses in those observations—a way to unify the initial datum given in observation. After we generalize, we must criticize the datum and provide some logical consistency to the disparate collection of generalizations we have made about those patterns, regularities, and likenesses in the initial datum. Then, we interpret those generalizations. We must test the generalizations and infer as to which principles can be systematized to the other principles in a system—this is the work of ethical theory accord­ing to Brightman!

Ethics exhibits a unity about goods, values, and duties. If it didn’t attempt to capture a ‘rational account of moral experience,’ then it would only consist of ‘isolated propositions’ rather than a ‘con­nected whole.’ [50] Put more practically for the ethical scientist, goodness (like any moral concept) is never understood in an isolated action. Instead, the whole unity of the person emerges in life as a connected whole. The good is not an aggregate as Aristotle defined it, nor is it an isolated proposition about a particular situation abstracted from the whole to which the action is connected. Every moral situation presup­poses the very unity and analysis of those moral concepts (goods, values, and duties) as they emerge in an entire system, and it’s for this reason that moral laws can be derived from experience. Capturing this unity is the goal of ethics as a normative science. What’s more, Brightman engages in systematic descriptions of moral experience and derives every moral law in his system (see the attached Addendum to this essay) for every law. This paper has tried to explore why it is that he can derive moral laws from moral experience; Brightman can derive those moral laws from moral experience precisely because norma­tive sciences are genuine endeavours.

​7. Returning to the Argument from Science Conditions

We can still ask about those science conditions (Phenomenal-Limit Condition, Methodological Limit Condition, and Unity of Explanation Condition): Is it truly the case that ethics studies its own phenomena as a normative science? The phenomenological evi­dence about moral experience seems plausible enough. Persons try to systematize their thoughts regarding ideals and possibilities apart from what is actual and necessary, yet this systematisation also pushes the argument back on its heels to premise (4). To remind the reader, (4) reads as ‘Either ethics is a descriptive science in which inquirers formulate explanations what is the case through experimentation and discov­ery or a normative science in which inquirers formu­late explanations about what ought to be the case.’ This premise is where the real crux of the issue of Brightman’s claim of ethics constituting a normative science fails or succeeds.
Persons experience a difference between ought and is. However, the skepticism rears its head when we ask: When we consider (4), we must ask whether or not there has been a collapse of facts and values. While the literature on the relationship to fact and values is extensively large, no matter the underlying nature of the connecting whole, the moral law seems true. Phenomenologically, the systematicity of the moral laws appears as such by the fact of its alleged coher­ence. Put another way, the oughts are given to us by the intentional relationship of the experient to the various givennesses we spelled out earlier: to acts of voluntary choice, consciousness of value, conscious­ness of obligation and the moral law itself. In their sheer givenness, persons find coherence of those ideals, and this systematicity – discovered in experi­ence – points to the possibilities of a normative science in which the moral laws are discovered in their self-evident coherence.

Some questions arise in light of this alleged coher­ence. What happens when we abandon this belief in the coherent givenness between ought and is? Does it make a pragmatic difference? It does. For Brightman, there’s an element not just of phenomenology in terms of method, but a spirit of pragmatic inquiry. [51] He accepts the descriptive and normative distinction. In accepting this distinction, morality is regarded exactly like logic. Both logic and morality are ideals that are largely (but not entirely) about content of not-yet possibilities. Moreover, the assumption of coherence generates the possibility of unity in the science condi­tions of premise (1) in which a normative science of not-yet possibilities can be expressed in a unified manner.

Because Brightman suggests that it doesn’t matter what underlying reality values possess, the fact is one could invoke any possible solution for why there is an intelligibility unity in experience (e.g., a Jamesian neutral monism). Neutral monism is the view that there is one type of primal nonreductive stuff of experience, and also that there is no difference between how this primal nonreductive stuff is regarded as either thought or object, mental or physi­cal. Neutral monism is, however, one possibility of something that provides this underlying coherence and unity. Of course, I admit this is only one speculation.

What is at least clear on a speculative level for the distinction to hold between Brightman’s account of descriptive and normative sciences in (4) is that there is an experience of an immediate datum. This imme­diate datum is a pure intuitive givenness to which Brightman also thinks reason can evaluate and reflect upon whereas other approaches in phenomenology do not reflect upon the essences discerned through phenomenological description. For example, Scheler’s phenomenological facts are given immediately and fully. In Scheler’s phenomenological attitude, the entire person can experience immediate datum and be existentially invested as that content of intentional feeling and value-qualities fills out the experience of the whole person. These phenomenological facts reveal what’s already there (the nonreductive content of ideal possibilities), the essence which all particulars and universals must assume. For Brightman, reason tests these given intuitions of immediate datum whereas for Scheler intuitions are more fundamental in revealing the underlying layers of discursive think­ing. Discursive thinking finds these intuitions coher­ent, the nonreductive content expresses a living reality in relation to other ideal facts.

For Brightman, the pragmatic difference between ought and is has a bearing in experience and helps establishing the truth of (2): The three conditions of science obtain in ethics: (i) Ethics is limited by its own field of study in that it studies ideals and possibilities, (ii) Ethics employs its own methods to study how values are given in experience; and (iii) Ethics system­atizes what it studies to formulate the best moral laws of conduct. Recall the phrases earlier that divide descriptive from the normative: normative sciences describe the ‘ideal and possible’ whereas descriptive sciences describe the ‘actual and necessary.’ When I consider what is ‘ideal and possible,’ I do not relate to the ‘ideal and possible’ in the same way as what is ‘actual and necessary.’ The ‘actual and necessary’ appears determinate to the subject in in the causal order of objects in the horizon of personal experience. In other words, our experience gives us prima facie evidence that there is a difference between the descrip­tive and normative. When asked if my wife Ashley and I ought to go to a movie on Saturday or Sunday, the physical fact of a cinema’s existence and its location in Cleveland never enters into our delibera­tion at first. Instead, our deliberation is about what is only ‘ideal and possible.’ What is ‘actual and neces­sary’ limits what might be possible. If we are on the West side of Cleveland, then we will go to the AMC in Brooklyn, Ohio. If we are on the East side, then we must travel to Richmond Heights. The physical fact of distance limits which theatre we may pick amongst other factors. Persons, therefore, are beings that can apprehend the ideal and the possible such that they seek to bring possibility into concretion with what is actual and necessary.
​
Now, this pragmatic spirit might not sate others philosophically, and this essay leaves many themes unanswered. How does Brightman’s personalistic idealism undergird the distinction between the descrip­tive and the normative? How does this idealism operate in his system of moral laws? Indeed, Bright­man is a Christian philosopher and God can be invoked as a solution to many problems. Yet, if the moral laws are derived from moral experience inde­pendently of whatever metaphysical view of the whole is true, then Brightman’s system of moral law will be true independent of a different conception of theism or the Divine than Christian philosophy allows. Indeed, the Divine may even be closer to a process conception like Taoism, and while this claim may appear out of nowhere, I will be taking this claim up in a different essay.

Despite the lack of metaphysical grounding (or whether or not phenomenological grounding is enough) to establish a normative science, these ques­tions are not answered directly by the Moral Laws though there are gestures made to these very questions within it. Clearly, an ethics as a normative science is only possible if there is a continuity and unity of the irreducible contents of the ideal and possible, and it’s because of the manner in which we experience these irreducible contents that a normative science is possi­ble. Put another way, the implication, I think, is that a moral phenomenology must express this unity and without the Divine as the source of that unified moral phenomenology, the case for a normative science cannot be made as strongly as Brightman insists. What is left unanswered for me is if some supradivine reality must be a personal or cosmic mind to establish the necessity of continuity and unity of irreducible con­tents from which the moral laws are derived in Brightman’s moral law system?

​8. Addendum: Brightman’s System of Moral Laws 

​Since this article has dealt with the metaphysical underpinnings of value and whether or not its ideal contents can be understood as a unified normative science, I want to enumerate Brightman’s various moral laws:

A. The Formal Laws ‘have to do with the will alone, and state principles to which a reasonable will must conform irrespective of the ends (values to which it is trying to realize).’ [52]
  1. The Logical Law: All persons ought to will logically; i.e., each person ought to will to be free from self-contradiction and to be consistent in his/her intentions. [53]
  2. The Law of Autonomy: All persons ought to recognize themselves as obligated to choose in accordance with the ideals which they acknowl­edge; self-imposed ideals are imperative. [54]

B. The Axiological Laws ‘show the principles which the values that a good will is seeking to embody.’ [55]
  1. The Axiological Law: All persons ought to choose values which are self-consistent, harmonious, and coherent, not values which are contradictory or incoherent with another. [56]
  2. The Law of Consequences: All persons ought to consider, on the whole, approve the foreseeable consequences of each of their choices. [57]
  3. The Law of the Best Possible: All persons ought to will the best possible values in every situation; hence, if possible, to improve every situation. [58]
  4. The Law of Specification: All persons ought, in any given situation, to develop the value or values specifically relevant to that situation. [59]
  5. The Law of the Most Inclusive End: All persons ought to choose a coherent life in which the widest possible range of value is realised. [60]
  6. The Law of Ideal Control: All persons ought to control their empirical values by ideal values. [61]

C. The Personalistic Laws ‘show values is always an experience of persons.’ [62]
  1. The Law of Individualism: Each person ought to realize in his/her experience the maximum value of which he/she is capable of in harmony with the moral law. [63]
  2. The Law of Altruism: Each person ought to respect all other persons as ends in themselves, and, as far as possible, to co-operate with others in the production and enjoyment of shared values. [64]
  3. The Law of the Ideal of Personality: All persons ought to judge and guide all of their acts by their ideal conception (in harmony with other Laws) of what the whole personality ought to become both individually and socially. [65]

The Formal Laws are the principle form of subjective ethics. By subjective ethics, the faculty of the will must will itself consistently and freely choose what it seeks to realize.

Axiological Laws are the principles of content of objective ethics. In other words, these principles govern how persons ought to deliberate about which values to realize.

Personalistic Laws are the synthesis of subjective form of the will and objective content of ethics that persons ought to realize in relation to other persons. [66]

Brightman is thought to assume individualism without community, and Walter Muelder and L. Harold DeWolf added Laws of Ideal Community: the Law of Cooperation, Law of Social Devotion, and the Law of Ideal of Community. Paul Deats added the Laws of Praxis: the laws of conflict and reconciliation and law of fallibility and corrigibility. [67]
Savannah State University
[email protected]

​Bibliography

Burrows, Rufus
  • God and Human Dignity: the Person­alism, Theology and the Ethics of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 2006).

Brightman, Edgar Sheffield
  • A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Prentice Hall, 1940).
  • Moral Laws (New York: Abingdon Press, 1933). Person and Reality (New York: Ronald Press, 1958).
  • ‘Values, Ideals, Norms, and Existence’ in Philos­ophy and Phenomenological Research vol. 4 no. 2 (December 1943): 219-224.

Hackett, J. Edward
  • ‘Ross and Scheler on the Given-ness and Commensurability of Values’ in Phenom-enology for the Twenty-First Century, Ed. J. Aaron Simmons and J. Edward Hackett (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Vannatta, Seth
  • ​‘Radical Empiricism and Husserlian Metaphysics’ in The Pluralist vol. 2 no. 3 (Fall 2007): pp. 17- 36.

Notes

  1. A shortened version of this paper was given at Notre Dame College’s Presidential Lecture in Spring 2017. I want to thank Ken Palko and Louise Prochaska for comments.
  2. Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Moral Laws (New York: Abingdon Press, 1933),13.
  3. Brightman will keep the term ‘normative science’ throughout his life. For instance, in 1940 – seven years after the Moral Laws are published, he will describe normative science in his A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Prentice Hall, 1940). What I find interesting is that he includes more than simply ethics and logic, but also aesthetics and philosophy of religion (p. 20).
  4. Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Person and Reality (New York: Ronald Press, 1958), p. 37. In Chapter 3 ‘Present and Absent,’ Brightman tries to capture the continuity of personal experience, which informs his explication of method. For him this situated experience is an experienced interrelation, and in theorizing what he calls the ‘shining present,’ which is the same term he refers to in A Philosophy of Religion in a variety of several phrases: ‘situation-experience,’ ‘situation-believed-in,’ and ‘datum self.’ The datum self is important because it’s the immediacy of feeling and non-reductive content that would inform both the Jamesian radical empiricist and the phenomenologist both. I may address how these themes fit together both for Brightman and myself in a later work.
  5. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 286.
  6. Brightman, Moral Laws, 13.
  7. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 13 (italics mine)
  8. Brightman, Person and Reality, p. 60.
  9. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 14.
  10. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 14.
  11. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 15.
  12. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 21.
  13. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 22.
  14. Throughout this essay, the reader will note that I employ the term ‘phenomenological’ and while it’s unclear in what sense I mean the term (as this essay is opening up that question for me), I am tending to think of phenom­enology here as a cross between Husserl and Scheler— something tending toward a transcendental phenome­nology. As I am also well aware, Brightman made gestures to phenomenology in his posthumously pub­lished Person and Reality in which he claims that phenomenology needs to clarify ‘the shining present’ [such work] ‘needs to be done’ (p. 45). If anything, then (perhaps) Brightman’s work may be seen as its own form of contribution to phenomenology, but only after sustained attention to Bertocci’s vision of the posthu­mous work of Person and Reality can be discerned. At this stage in my expertise, I can only provincially say that Brightman is more a synthesis of a pragmatic phenomenology than tending to Husserl.
  15. Brightman, Person and Reality, p. 286
  16. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 91.
  17. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 24
  18. Brightman, A Philosophy of Religion, p. 20.
  19. Brightman, A Philosophy of Religion, p. 21.
  20. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 25.
  21. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 26.
  22. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 55 (italics mine). It’s at this point in the text that Brightman offers both the language of givenness and dealing with experience sounding like both a phenomenologist and a pragmatist.
  23. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 26.
  24. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 26.
  25. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 27.
  26. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 29.
  27. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 30.
  28. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 45.
  29. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 51.
  30. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 53
  31. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 53
  32. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 81.
  33. While I do not have the time to devote a comparison between Scheler and Brightman, Brightman distin­guishes his approach from Scheler’s methodology. For Brightman, Scheler’s mistake is in an over reliance on intuition. ‘Appeal to intuition, even when made by Max Scheler really reduces to appeal to the deep-rooted present convictions of the individual and society’ (Moral Laws, p. 83). A Schelerian might raise the objection to Brightman that his appeal to givenness and moral experience requires a more coherent affective dimension that one might find in Scheler’s affective intentionality.
  34. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 220.
  35. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 87.
  36. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 250.
  37. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 204.
  38. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 223.
  39. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 242.
  40. It’s important to note that Brightman's Law of Altruism forbids suicide, but not being a martyr.
  41. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 55.
  42. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 56.
  43. Edgar Sheffield Brightman, ‘Values, Ideals, Norms, and Existence’ in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol. 4 no. 2 (December 1943): 219-224. Brightman, ‘Values, Ideals, Norms, and Existence,’ p. 219 cited here.
  44. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 82.
  45. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 83.
  46. I will be exploring a possible synthesis with Brightman and Scheler at a later date. If one wants a sense to how ethical intuitionism might mesh with Scheler, see my ‘Ross and Scheler on the Givenness and Commensura­bility of Values’ in Phenomenology for the Twenty-First Century, Ed. J. Aaron Simmons and J. Edward Hackett (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
  47. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 84.
  48. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 86. Italics mine.
  49. Brightman, ‘Values, Ideals, Norms, and Existence,’ p. 221.
  50. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 86.
  51. The only lengthy essay that bridges the pragmatic and phenomenological themes in Brightman is Seth Vannat-ta’s ‘Radical Empiricism and Husserlian Metaphysics’ in The Pluralist vol. 2 no. 3 (Fall 2007): pp. 17-36.
  52. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 90.
  53. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 98.
  54. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 106.
  55. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 90.
  56. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 125.
  57. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 142.
  58. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 156.
  59. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 171.
  60. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 183.
  61. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 194.
  62. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 90.
  63. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 204.
  64. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 223.
  65. Brightman, Moral Laws, p. 242.
  66. In these laws, there are no principles governing commu­nity, and this theoretical neglect requires supplement. For me, our shared vulnerability would be put front and centre as the central feature of moral life and communal living.
  67. Rufus Burrows, Jr. God and Human Dignity: the Personalism, Theology and the Ethics of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 2006), p. 198

​Vernon Press Presents

​Persons and Values in Pragmatic Phenomenology
Explorations in Moral Metaphysics

​This book brings together the author’s overall research trajectory of the last five years of his life and the questions he has been asking himself: What is the person? And, what are values? In answering the latter question, Hackett arrived at an answer within the boundaries of Max Scheler, the German phenomenologist, but consequently started to explore the depths of which Scheler’s value ontology was predicated on certain assumptions about the person. From these questions, Hackett started to draw upon philosophical approaches that thematize   experience—pragmatism and phenomenology.
Rooted in the philosophical contributions of Scheler and the American philosopher, William James, this book guides the reader through a fascinating exploration of these philosophical approaches in relation to the person and values. Through thematizing experience, this book reveals that the ontology of value for Scheler resides not only in a person’s intentionality but also in the being-of-an-act. As such, this book argues that the deficit of an ontology of value in Scheler rests on interpreting his affective intentionality in much the same way that Heidegger employed phenomenology to discern the ontological care structure of Dasein. In other words, for Scheler, the ontology of value rests on the manner in which values were realized by a person’s intentionality. Moreover, this book goes further to reveal that the intentional act life is the source of participation and can be understood as a process-based account of value, otherwise known as account participatory realism. Importantly, within participatory realism Hackett addresses how values have their origin in the process of intentionality since intentionality is generative of meaning.
​
As an important contribution to the field of moral metaphysics, Hackett’s critical reflection on the person and values provides a stimulating insight into some of the key debates surrounding pragmatism and phenomenology that will be of great interest to both experienced scholars and researchers, alike.
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