An Interview with Joseph Raz 2001

On Values. An Interview with Joseph Raz, December 2001 An interview 22.12.2001 - 9.1.2002 for Niin&Näin, A Finnish Journal of Philosophy. Published in Finnish as “Arvojen arvoitus. Joseph Razin haastattelu”, Niin et Näin 2002:35, 3742. Unpublished in English. Joseph Raz, Professor of the Philosophy of Law and a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. Visiting Professor, Columbia University Questions by Arto Laitinen, University of Jyväskylä. 1. ARTO LAITINEN: Professor Raz, what are you working on at the moment? JOSEPH RAZ: I am trying to write a couple of essays about single-agent practical conflicts. That is, about one person confronting a conflict about what to do. I interpret such conflicts as do most writers, namely as conflicts of reasons facing the agent and pulling in different incompatible directions. My aim is not to offer recipes for the resolution of such conflicts. I do not believe that there are such recipes. Rather it is (1) to examine their relations to value pluralism. Some people suggest that conflict presupposes pluralism. I think that interesting conflicts do presuppose pluralism, and that one question they raise is that of how to compare the strength of reasons which arise out of different values; (2) to consider the question of what follows from the fact that when confronted with conflicting reasons some reasons must be sacrificed, i.e. will not be followed. Incidental to the first is the question of the role and status, if any, of principles of conflict resolution. 2. ARTO LAITINEN: You defend what you call a "classical theory" according to which action is always action for a reason, and also that it is values or evaluative aspects of the 1 world that provide reasons for action. You say that this belongs roughly in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle. Do the major influences in your way of thinking come from these classics or perhaps from some contemporary thinkers or teachers? JOSEPH RAZ: The honest truth is that I do not know. Influences are mysterious. Some come from reading and study, some from conversations, from lectures and seminars one attends, from colleagues and students, from the atmosphere around one. I suppose that I feel affected by all of these in ways I cannot analyse. I am not a scholar, or student of any particular authors. Therefore I miss the deep engagement with the writings of a single author which shapes the work and thought of so many philosophers. I am much more eclectic. 3. ARTO LAITINEN: In this interview I would like to concentrate on the notion of value, especially as presented in your recent books Engaging Reason and Value, Respect and Attachment. Let me ask first how you would respond to the claim that we moderns cannot really believe in values or normative aspects of the world at all, or at least not in the sense that Plato or Aristotle did. Modern science has shown us that the disenchanted natural world obeys mechanistic laws and pace Aristotle things do not have any natural goals to aim at. The evaluative or normative aspect of the world does not seem to fit in to this modern cosmology. Also the idea that values are historically and culturally created may seem problematical, because we presumably want to be able to say that not everything that is taken to be valuable in fact is valuable, and nevertheless that there is plurality on the level of cultures and individuals. For skeptics like Mackie this pluralism shows not that most cultural communities simply misperceive values, but rather that it is not a matter of perception at all, because there is nothing to perceive. Can these considerations be taken as reasons to avoid talking about values altogether? JOSEPH RAZ: It is old wisdom that not only can we not think, and therefore not act intentionally either, without concepts, but that those concepts necessarily belong to certain categories, so that while many of the concepts we have are relatively ephemeral, creatures of certain 2 cultures or of cultural trends and fashions, they are necessarily classifiable into categories of thought which must be exemplified for thought to be possible. Value or The Good is the name we give to what I take to be one such category. Specific concepts which belong to it are many and divers: beneficial, efficient, worthwhile, beautiful, convenient, rewarding, meritorious, are but a few examples. We can do without any of them, but not without some concepts of that category. Value concepts along with virtue concepts and normative concepts are essential for our ability to orient ourselves in the world, our ability to respond to it emotionally, in our imagination or in action. In that regard they are like concepts of space and time, of solidity and of shape, and others, without which we cannot think of the physical world, or other concepts (such as that of subject, object, language, representation, thoughts) without which we cannot think of thought itself. If so then while there can be doubts about particular claims regarding particular values there cannot be doubts about value in general, unless they show some fundamental mistake or incoherence which may force us to give up any form of rational reaction to the world. I know no good grounds for such skepticism. Certainly science has not provided us with any, and it is not clear that it can. That is, it is not clear that anything, which can be established experimentally by science, can provide the foundations for such skepticism. Of course, the fact that scientists did not discover values in their laboratories is only reassuring. Values are not the sort of thing which can be discovered in that way, and the only worry is that some scientists (not all of them skeptical about values) have sometimes thought otherwise. Science has, of course, undermined many false beliefs about the nature of the world, many associated with various religions, but also others. To that extent the sciences posed a challenge to the religions and the other world views which were associated with these false beliefs, and in doing so may have also exposed many bad arguments for some specific beliefs about values. Arguably any specific beliefs about values are associated with some views of the nature of reality or some parts of it, e.g., with beliefs about the nature of people, and of other animal species. To that extent, while science cannot raise doubts about values in general it can cast doubt about beliefs in specific value systems, when they are moored in false views about the world. 3 There is another problem. We wish to be reassured that our beliefs are consistent, and that includes reassurance that our beliefs about physics, let us say, are consistent with our moral beliefs. We also wish to understand how our beliefs fit together, how they are integrated in one coherent view of the world. We do not know how our beliefs about physics mesh with our beliefs about values. That is hardly surprising. We still have difficulty in understanding how beliefs about physics, including the view that all material objects consist of sub-atomic particles, are to be reconciled with our belief in the existence of mountains, oceans, buildings, chairs and tables. Where values are concerned the difficulty is greater. It results primarily from the weakness of our scientific understanding of human beings. At the moment the best explanations of people’s emotions, imaginings and actions are those given by them, their friends and acquaintances in terms of ambition and jealousy, love, moral beliefs and aspirations, etc. There is relatively little that sciences like psychology, sociology, etc., let alone physiology, neural sciences, cognitive sciences, and their like, can do to explain actual human behaviour, though arguably they are slowly getting better at it. Furthermore, explanations in these special sciences have an as yet little understood relation to explanations in physics. While the sciences remain so weak it is hardly surprising that our understanding of the relations of scientific explanation and evaluative explanation remains incomplete and largely speculative. 4. ARTO LAITINEN: You have said that values are intelligible, that there are no brute evaluative facts, which we could invoke by saying "this is just the way things are". We can always give a further explanation. From the intelligibility of values some kind of universalism follows. This universalism is nevertheless not of the kind which leads to the stronger universalist conclusion that everyone ought to pursue the same goals. The kind of universalism that is entailed by the intelligibility of values is purely formal in that it forbids any reference to singular names or places or times. It demands that every difference in evaluative judgement must be explained by some further difference. A thing cannot be good now but neutral later, if no other changes take place. The next set of questions will concentrate on your view of the universality of value. 4 You have said that many practical concepts are parochial and not universally accessible to all. Is this compatible with the intelligibility of values and the formal universality it entails? JOSEPH RAZ: That concepts are parochial shows in the first place that our ability to understand values is subject to historical conditions making this understanding possible, e.g., by making available concepts necessary for such an understanding. Arguably, if, as I believe, the existence of at least some values is not independent of human activity, and can therefore be located in time, the temporality of concepts may also entail the temporality of some values. Now, to the extent that only concepts, and not values, are temporal there is no sign of tension with the view that values are universal. My claim is, however, that even if values have a beginning in time they can still be universal. Their universality means that in specifying their conditions of application one need not use any singular references. And that is consistent with the value coming into existence at a certain point in time. It leaves open the possibility of there being instances of a value which exist before the value comes into being. I believe that that cannot happen. Values are temporal when their existence depends on people being able to grasp their existence, for when that is so – and it is so with regard to some values, but not all – the value cannot exist before the concepts which enable knowing what it is. In those very same cases the value cannot be instantiated without the concept. Suppose, for example, that there is a value of playing games, and that you cannot play a game without knowing that you play a game, and cannot understand what a game is without knowing at least something about the value of playing the game. Given these assumptions (a) the existence of the value depends on the existence of the value-concept, and (b) there cannot be instances of the value before the value comes into being for they too (playing the game well) depend on possession of the value-concept, and (c) nevertheless the value is universal for the specification of its condition of application does not require any singular reference. But you raised another question: is the temporality of values (again there is no problem if only value-concepts are temporal) consistent with their intelligibility? I 5 believe that it sets limits to their intelligibility in the sense that there is no value-based answer to the question why did this value come into being at this time? Such questions are often not hard to answer, For example, the rise of circuses, with animal tamers, athletes, clowns and freak shows, brings with it new forms of excellence, excellence as a circus clown, let us say, and that means that it brings with it a new value. Sometimes we have very good social-cultural explanations for the rise of such values, but these are not primarily evaluative explanations. They do not say that it came into being because it was good, or needed for some good, etc. They are ordinary sociological explanations. Here there is contingency in matters of values, and a limit to their intelligibility. 5. ARTO LAITINEN: Let me add a follow-up question here. While there are socialcultural explanations for the rise of practices, do you think there are explanations of any kind for conditional statements like "if circuses come to existence, they bring with them new values"? It has been argued that not all practices are in fact valuable so that such conditional statements are not true of all practices. For example, counting grass blades for no further reason is often mentioned to be of no value. Would you agree that there can exist practices which are not in fact valuable? If so, what is it that determines whether a practice is valuable or not, and thus explains why conditional statements of the kind mentioned above are or are not true? JOSEPH RAZ: You are quite right. Many practices are without value, some are worse than worthless. They are demeaning, corrupting, wicked in various ways. What is it that determines that? It all depends on whether the practice contains good or bad properties, what else. It is true that those who engage in it will always claim some virtue for it. But their claim, like all other claims, does not go unchecked. As with all other cases we have to apply our concepts and beliefs, themselves subject to evaluation and revision, to every question like this in order to determine which practice incorporates good properties, sometimes giving rise to new values, and which does not, sometimes giving rise to new forms of wickedness. 6 6. ARTO LAITINEN: You say that the common view of universalism of values, related to arguments against racist, sexist or aristocratic views, is substantive, and that from it we cannot generalize anything concerning the nature of all values. You agree of course that we ought to reject racist and sexist values and that these value-claims are substantively wrong while perhaps formally intelligible. Do you think that at this substantive level there are valid universalistic principles? (Perhaps the duty of respect for people, or some substantive principle of equality?) JOSEPH RAZ: Here there is little I can say. As you rightly point out, I claimed that normal declarations of the universality of human rights or of values cannot be understood as an appeal to any formal feature of values or rights. The right to own slaves, were there to be one, is as universal as the right not to be enslaved. The claims we make are substantive moral claims rather than claims about the formal features of values or rights. It follows that any moral principles which apply ‘at that level’, as you put it, are universal in the formal sense (since all moral principles are) and universal in the loose sense that they apply to moral matters which are associated in the popular press (and unfortunately also in some scholarly work) with the term ‘universal’. But calling such principles universal does not add to our understanding of their content or grounds. 7. ARTO LAITINEN: This is perhaps a silly question, but what would you say is wrong with the stronger universalist assumption that everyone ought to pursue the same goals everywhere? JOSEPH RAZ: This question raises the deep issue of whether morality sets the same goals or aims to everyone. In common with other writers I do not believe that the universality of value bears on that question either way. I see no reason to think that morality sets people the same goals. Remember how we use these terms, in the current context. If morality requires that each person ought to look after his own interest then it does in some sense set us all the same goal: to look after our own interests. But that sets people against each other as their interests conflict. We do not mean ‘same goal’ in this sense, but in a sense which guarantees the absence of conflict, and I know of no sound 7 argument to show that that is so, that is that it is a moral requirement that our aims be such that they cannot conflict. ARTO LAITINEN: This kind of formal universalism can go together with substantive particularism. What kind of particularism is this thesis directed against? JOSEPH RAZ: {I have nothing to say in reply to this question, other than that it is directed against forms of particularism inconsistent with it.} 8. ARTO LAITINEN: What are your views on the classical questions of, first of all, whether something is valuable, because the valuers take it to be valuable or whether they ought take it to be valuable because it is valuable (independently of whether it is taken to be)? And secondly, is something of value because it is good for someone or something (where this something need not be a valuer, but for example a plant) or vice versa? JOSEPH RAZ: Regarding any single person it is clear that it cannot be the case that to be good is to be taken by that person to be good. That would entail that when he takes it to be good he takes it to be something which he takes to be good, namely something which he takes to be good, and so on ad infinitum. This is true, but uninformative. So if that is what value means then it has no real meaning. Suppose that good means something else, but the ground why something is good is because that person takes it to be good. This will make it impossible for anyone to reason whether something is good. If he does not know he does not take it to be good and therefore it is not good. One can therefore never be convinced to change one’s mind about the good, and all claims to that effect are mistaken. This is one small problem with the view. The real problems are (a) that it leads to contradictions since regarding many things some think them good and others do not, so it follows that they are both good and not good. (b) No one who thinks that something, say love, or peace, or equality, is good thinks that it is good because he thinks that it is good. So the account is without any plausibility since it bears no relation to the concept of the good which we have. 8 One may try to recast the analysis in terms of social practice: what is good is good because many people hold it to be good, etc. But that would encounter the same difficulties, of contradiction and lacking any relation with our concepts. As to whether what is good is so because it is good for someone, it is all too easy to give examples of good things which are not in fact any good for anyone. Food going to rot, unappreciated works of art, are the sort of examples which can be varied and multiplied. It is possible to claim that everything which is good can in principle be good for someone, and I believe that to be the case. It does not follow, of course that it is good because it is good for someone. No doubt in some cases (food) that is so. But there is no way in which we can explain the value of a Beethoven quartet by showing how it is good for people. That would suggest that the features which make most, if not all, Beethoven quartets good, are identical and are the same as those which make many other works good. What make them good quartets are musical properties which we understand by reference to musical structure, harmony, expression, etc.. They are good for people because it is good for people to write, perform, study and listen to good music. 9. ARTO LAITINEN: You have also worked on the question of what kind of personal differences are compatible with the universality of values. You suggest that legitimate diversity results from "the partiality of people to some people or goals which are all valuable, but to which some people are attracted or committed, whereas others are indifferent, or much less attracted" 1. a) Does it make a difference, whether partiality is fully involuntary (say, who one's parents are) or (more or less) voluntary (say, whether one is attracted to music or golf)? b) At least when partiality is voluntary, the options are either eligible or required. Would you say that even if both music and golf are equally eligible, it can yet be unwise for me to choose one, if I am attracted to the other? I.e. can the fact of attraction give (additional) reasons for choosing between two (impartially) eligible options? JOSEPH RAZ: Only rarely are partialities either fully voluntary or fully involuntary. The case of parents is not one of fully involuntary partiality, as we grow to love, or be 1 Raz 2001, p.3 9 dedicated to our parents or children, a process involving attraction, common history, and much else besides role responsibilities. Parental role responsibilities are themselves in part voluntarily assumed, as parents can have abortions, give children for adoption, or define their role by choosing from a variety of options from sending them to boarding institutions when they are babies to being closely involved in all aspects of their life till one or the other dies. Our attachments vary greatly. But they vary along many dimensions, and degree of voluntariness is but one, and not the most important of those. Are felt attractions reasons? They certainly feed into practical reasons in a variety of ways. For example, many activities are pointless unless undertaken willingly, by interested agents. While people can come to like and enjoy what they are doing even if it did not attract them before they started, being keen on the activity will help at least in the initial stages, and reduces the risk that one will find it a disappointment. Or, to give another example, that a person who has no reason not to do what he likes doing or is attracted to chooses an alternative, albeit one which is equally eligible, is normally a sign of some malaise, of fear of failure, fear of challenging oneself, or fear of success. Or it could be a sign of self-loathing, or of some other pathological motivation. One has reason to resist such pathologies, and because of this one has reason to follow one’s inclination, to choose the option one is attracted to. These and others are ways in which an attraction affects our practical reasons without being itself a reason. I do not think that attractions themselves are reasons. 10. ARTO LAITINEN: One of your theses is that universality of values is compatible with change. That will be the topic of the next set of questions. You argue that values can change over time, but that the intelligibility of values demands that this change can in principle be explained by referring to a more abstract value which stays constant during this change. Does this mean that the values can change only towards one direction (towards greater abstractness and comprehensiveness)? JOSEPH RAZ: 10 Not necessarily. I am inflationary about values. I believe that there are many values, though many of them are species of some more abstract ones. Test it this way: if there are two intrinsically (i.e. non-instrumentally) valuable items, say activities, or objects, such that they have different good features, so that you cannot say why bother with this one when you can have the other, because while the other may be good, may be as good as the first, there is some value in the first absent in the alternative (and vice versa) then they exemplify different values (though there may also be values which both exemplify). Given this understanding of value it is not surprising that new relatively concrete values come into existence over time. The emergence, say, of new forms of art, or of friendship, is typically associated with the emergence of new values. 11. ARTO LAITINEN: If values change, does it mean that at the point T1 in time Peter may be mistaken to believe that V is valuable, and yet at the next point of time T2 Peter no longer is mistaken so to believe, because V has become valuable? Is this really intelligible, if there is no change in what is available to the agent? JOSEPH RAZ: No it is not intelligible, nor can it happen. What he believes is either true or false and its truth value cannot change. That is not a feature of the world, or of beliefs, it is a feature of our way of representing them. We could represent them otherwise: If you represent beliefs in sentences like ‘X is tired’ then the belief’s truth value can change over time. But standard logic avoids this mode of representation, and the same is true of changing values: Peter’s belief would be represented by sentence such as ‘X (being some singular referring expression) is good at T1’. That belief will be atemporally either true or false. The thought that its truth value can change over time is without content. It is disallowed by the conventions of representation we chose. That there can be items whose value changes over time is obvious. The value of my house may go up and down with the fortunes of my neighbourhood. It does not follow that the value of some items can change because new values came into existence. In my answer to question 4a I explained why that cannot happen. 11 12. ARTO LAITINEN: Let us next take Paul, who unlike Peter, at T1 believes (correctly) that V is not valuable and at T2 comes to believe (correctly) that V is valuable. Normally, when we change our belief on whether V is valuable or not, we think something like "I was mistaken before, when I did not realize that V is valuable", or perhaps "we all were mistaken before". Would not Paul think the same way? JOSEPH RAZ: Exactly. And my previous answers explain why. 13. ARTO LAITINEN: Let us take the case that someone comes to grasp the universal dignity of all persons for the first time in human history. One crucial idea in your argument is that morality is intelligible. Perhaps the idea of universal dignity of persons was not intelligible for people in the past, and thus was not a moral reason at all. Does this mean that if some imaginative person would have claimed that all persons have equal dignity, it would have been a mistake at that time (because her compatriots would not have been able to grasp this principle)? Or could it have become morally binding the moment it was conceived for the first time? Would the first person be wrong to think that this principle was binding even before she grasped it? (Or are these questions too counter-empirical to be enlightening?) JOSEPH RAZ: If she could have claimed, understanding what she claims, that humans have equal dignity then it would have been conceivable at the time. For while it is possible for it to be conceivable without anyone conceiving it, it is impossible for someone to conceive it without it being conceivable. I doubt that there is an interesting moral principle or truth which is expressed by saying ‘all persons have equal dignity’. But if there is such a principle it would be a good candidate for a principle whose truth is due to a value which existed for as long as there were persons. It does not follow that it was conceivable to 12 people at all times either (a) completely, i.e. with perfect understanding, or (b) in that form, using these concepts. But persons are concept-using creatures, and they would have had concepts to enable them to understand that others are like them, etc., that is concepts enough for at least a partial understanding of the principle. 14. ARTO LAITINEN: Let us assume that a moral principle is intelligible in a culture C1 (say one which has gone through the transformation to monotheism), but is not intelligible in another culture C2 at the same time. Although the members of C2 may not know it, it is now de facto possible for them to learn this principle from this other culture. Does this possibility affect what is morally right and wrong in this culture C2? JOSEPH RAZ: When we think that (1) we can understand what is morally required of us, even if the understanding available to us can be improved upon (as it always can be with a richer experience, etc.) it does not follow that we think that (2) there are things which are really morally required of us, but that requirement is suspended because we cannot understand it. I believe (1), but I do not believe (2). That is I believe that we can have sufficient grasp of what is morally required of us, but not that there are requirements which would have applied to us had we better capacity for moral knowledge. 15. ARTO LAITINEN: You stress the role of uniqueness in love and friendship, and you link irreplacability to logical uniqueness: someone is logically unique because she has characteristics that cannot be instantiated in any other persons. Can this uniqueness be brought about also simply by forming the attachment, making a commitment (and then others cannot logically speaking ever become the objects of this commitment)? JOSEPH RAZ: Absolutely. My point is that the uniqueness of what we value (when what makes things valuable for us is in part something which is unique) is a relational one, they are unique 13 to us, like our first love, or first child, though not in the world (since lots of people were in love or had children). 16. ARTO LAITINEN: A rival view of these relationships would say that love and friendship are unconditional in the sense that they are not conditional on characteristics at all, not even on uniqueness. This is echoed in expressions like "I will love you whatever happens to you and however much you change", where love is not tied to characteristics but numerical identity of the loved one. Thus, the idea of irreplacability is not based on unique characteristics but rather on the factual numerical identity of distinct persons. How would you see the difference between this rival view and your position, which also stresses irreplacability? JOSEPH RAZ: The difference is that on this alternative view there is nothing to distinguish an admirable love from a stupid, self-demeaning or just crazy one. If someone loves an orange, dotes on it, cares for it, sacrifices his career for it, abandons other friends for it (we can abandon friends without improperly treating them), etc. his love is as admirable as any. This demeans love, reducing it to an irrational obsession. 17. ARTO LAITINEN: Do you think that values are gaining a more central position in the agenda of contemporary philosophical discussions, perhaps once some of the obstacles for thinking about values are removed (that they are metaphysically suspect, that they lead to wrong kind of uniformist, impersonal and ahistorical views about morality etc)? JOSEPH RAZ: I do not know. This is a good time in the history of ethics. Not because great insights have been gained. I doubt that. But because 50 years ago the subject was dead, and its very possibility in doubt. Now its possibility is hardly ever questioned, and it attracts some of the best philosophical talents around. But, as you know, a variety of approaches to practical philosophy are actively explored. I hope that this leads towards greater and 14 richer understanding. To the extent that my work contributes anything to that enterprise no one who read your questions will suspect it of leading towards an impersonal and ahistorical view of value or morality. ARTO LAITINEN: Professor Raz, thank you for this enlightening interview! 15