In his forthcoming book, “Idealization and the Moral Point of View: An Adam Smithian Account of Moral Reasons” (Oxford University Press), philosophy professor Nir Ben-Moshe explores the nature of moral judgment and moral reasons. Drawing on Adam Smith and contemporary debates in metaethics and practical reason, Ben-Moshe offers a framework that connects human psychology and the possibility of an objective and universal morality.
Q: You work across both biomedical ethics and more abstract moral philosophy. How do your research areas connect?
My research falls primarily into two areas. The first area lies at the intersection of contemporary moral philosophy and 18th-century moral philosophy, especially David Hume and Adam Smith. The second area is biomedical ethics, especially the nature of the physician-patient relationship and the values at play in it.
Both of my areas of research pertain to ethics, even though the first area is more abstract, while the second one is more applied. In the first area, I am interested in the very nature of moral judgment and practical reason: for example, what makes a moral judgments correct and what is the sources and authority of our reasons for action. In my second area, I am interested in, for example, the question of whether there is a unique ethics internal to medicine or whether medicine gets its morality from sources external to it.
Q: Your book brings those philosophical concerns together. What is the central idea of “An Adam Smithian Account of Moral Reasons”?
Generally speaking, the book develops an Adam Smithian account within contemporary metaethics and the theory of practical reasons. My point of entry into the book is from the practical reasons angle, and, more specifically, the Humean theory of reasons. According to the Humean theory of reasons, an agent has a reason to perform a certain action only if the agent has a desire that would be furthered by performing the action in question. So whatever reasons you have, they have to be tracked back to your desires.
The problem is that since the Humean theory of reasons postulates that only desires give rise to reasons, agents will have too few reasons. In particular, since any reason that does not further one’s desires is ruled out, the Humean theory cannot account for shared reasons, reasons that are shared by all agents regardless of their desires; and this includes moral reasons, overriding reasons to act on moral demands regardless of one’s desires.
In the book, I use ideas from Adam Smith’s moral philosophy in order to offer a novel account of moral reasons that is both desire-based—and so congruent with the Humean inspirations—and accommodates an adequate version of the requirement that moral demands have overriding reason-giving force.
One of the main strands of the book is the thought that if one wants an adequate account of moral reasons, even on this Humean picture, there needs to be a standard of correct deliberation, one of an idealized agent, that somehow transcends the motivations of individual agents but that is nevertheless connected to those motivations. That’s the trick.
Q: And that’s where Adam Smith comes in, especially his idea of the “impartial spectator”?
Exactly. The relevant idealized agent is Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator,” a central concept in his “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” The key thought is that the impartial spectator can both determine what is morally appropriate and inappropriate and provide the basis for reasons for action—including reasons to act on moral demands—to nearly all people (and these reasons have the correct normative weight).
Now, at the same time, this idealized agent has to be accessible to most of us, so that we are not left wondering as to why his decisions should bind us or motivate us. Smith’s impartial spectator is accessible in the relevant ways. Moreover, I show in the book how most people have, per Smith, a certain desire, the desire to be worthy of approval, that explains why they are or should be committed to the authority of the impartial spectator. This desire-dependence makes the view a Humean account of moral reasons.
Q: Many people know Adam Smith mainly as an economist. Why is he so important for moral philosophy, and for your book in particular?
Adam Smith wrote two famous books. One book is “The Wealth of Nations,” which is a foundational text of modern economics in general and of political economy in particular. People tend to associate this book with Smith’s talk of an “invisible hand” (although he also uses this phrase elsewhere). The other book is “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” which is primarily a work in moral psychology and moral philosophy.
In the latter book, Smith, like his friend and fellow Scotsman David Hume, presents a form of metaethical sentimentalism, according to which moral judgements are derived from the sentiments, rather than from reason or external objects. The key thought here is distinctions between such things as good and bad, right and wrong, are to be traced back to our sentiments. Reason, in and of itself, cannot determine what is right and wrong. And there’s also no fact in the world, existing independently of us, which determines that.
While both Hume and Smith are major figures in the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century, scholars working on Smith think that Smith’s account is more impressive, since it is richer psychologically and more appealing normatively. Among other things, it includes a more interesting account of sympathy and a more robust account of morality. So, if you think that morality ultimately stems from the sentiments, then Smith offers a better account than Hume (and, in my humble opinion, the best account out there).
Q: A lot of your work focuses on metaethics, which can sound abstract. How should readers understand the difference between first-order morality and what you’re doing?
Right, so there are two separate questions. There’s what people generally call ethics or moral philosophy, which deals with first-order questions of the following sort: What should I do in a certain situation? Which moral rules or principles should govern our behavior?
And then there’s metaethics, which deals with second-order questions of the following sort: Are moral statements true, and, indeed, are they even aspiring to be true? Do moral facts exist? In other words, here the question is not what you should be doing, but what is the status of claims about what you should be doing. So, when you say, for example, that one should promote happiness, that's a first-order claim. The second-order questions are: What kind of statement is this? Can it be, and is it, true? What in the world makes it true?
I’m primarily interested in is the second-order questions, such as: What is the nature of moral judgment? What makes moral judgments correct?
Q: So how does Smith’s framework help answer those second-order questions?
Smith develops the idea that the correctness of moral judgment depends on the reactions of people under certain conditions. The thought is that we approve and disapprove of various things. However, it is only when we are under certain conditions that objects of our sentiments of approval and disapproval actually merit that approval or disapproval.
A useful analogy is color perception. If you want to know if a certain object is red, you appeal to the reactions of people under certain conditions. For example, these people should be under normal daylight conditions, have well-functioning eyes and brains, and so on. When those people say, “this is red,” their reactions are authoritative.
The thought is that something similar applies in morality. Of course, the conditions in question cannot be defined in terms of people getting the right results, on pain of circularity. However, these conditions are required to guarantee that the agents’ responses are in fact authoritative, and one strategy is to idealize these responses. In my Smithian account, the idealization is built into the standpoint of the impartial spectator, an idealized agent who has all the relevant information and is impartial.
Q: How does this idea of the “impartial spectator” actually arise in everyday moral life?
Smith notes that we constantly judge others and find others judging us. This allows us to see ourselves through the eyes of others, by internalizing the way in which others respond to us, and so enables us to judge the propriety of our own sentiments.
But Smith also argues that, given our desire to be worthy of approval, we might come to realize that the actual spectators who judge us are biased, either because they are not informed about the relevant facts or because they have a personal stake in the circumstances, and are thus unreliable judges of what is worthy of approval.
Thus, we eventually come to judge ourselves through the eyes of an imaginary well-informed and impartial spectator. So, it’s an imagined standpoint, which is constructed out of our interactions with others, but which ultimately can transcend those interactions.
Q: You also distinguish between a “societal” and a “universal” impartial spectator. Why is that distinction important today?
A societal impartial spectator reflects the standards of a given society, but applies them fairly and with full knowledge. A universal impartial spectator is an impartial spectator of that society and its standards, who can judge the social standards themselves.
The possibility of the latter is important because it allows for a more objective and universal morality. In particular, it allows for universal normative constraints that are placed on the specific standards of a given society (without necessarily eliminating them). For example, think of 1930s Germany. A societal impartial spectator might still accept many standards of that society. However, certain standards, such as those pertaining to discriminatory action, would be ruled out by a universal impartial spectator, because not everyone’s interests and perspectives are taken into account. (I argue in the book that a universal impartial spectator takes everyone’s interests and perspectives into account.)
Q: What do you see as the broader significance of your book, especially for thinking about moral disagreement today?
While several philosophers have recently brought Smith’s work to bear on contemporary questions and issues in metaethics and practical reason, there has yet to be a book-length account that presents a comprehensive and distinctively Smithian metaethical position that also has implications for the nature of our reasons for action. In terms of its broader significance, especially for thinking about moral disagreement, I hope that the book helps explain why such disagreement exists in the first place, but also how it might (at least to some extent) be overcome by the emergence of a universal impartial spectator.