Managing our Moral Task: Is that a Fact?

     Even if we lament a lack of transcendent reach into a moral domain of "forms" that somehow govern our everyday social and poltical lives--in other words, even if we find morality hopelessly subjective, and always serving the schemes of either individual self-interest or wider-scale social provincial self-interest--the bare task of grappling with the fact of moral agency never eludes us.

    We are through and through social and moral beings. Propriety, duty, rights, fairness, and evaluative sentiment are concepts that dictate the contours of choices and implicit and explicit (internalized and external) values attached to actions.

   Therefore, the question of the "Ultimate" foundation for morals ("ultimate" read, transcendent or mind-independent fact-based justification of morality) simply misses the really interesting questions.

    What are some of these questions? Given that we will always generate normative constraints on our behavior, by what means may we help win allies in our view of the good? As far as "facts" are concerned: how does moral discourse gain legitimacy from a ground of facts that are not necessarily tied to perfectly quantifiable empirical metrics? Must morality be confined to quantitative statistical analysis? Must we reduce value to some empirical domain?

    I have a pragmatic overall answer to some of the questions raised above. First, as Aristotle recognized, we must begin analysis from some set of governing assumptions. If such assumptions are undone, then so be it--but nevertheless, we always begin from the beginning (however questionable). Our hope with morality and normative analysis is not simply to find "the truth" behind a claim, and match a one-to-one correspondence with some statement of morality with a piece of naked factual data "out there" in the "objective" mind-independent world of facts. Rather, we aim to discourse toward a satisfactory sense of personal-social achievement and personal-cultural identity: we aim to define ourselves by how and what we value. We enculturate and define our subjectivity through normative assessments. We define who we are by the duties and principles we take up and honor. We build our cultural identity through our ideas about the good. Thus, any ultimately nihilistic idea of the good (or lack thereof) leaves us with Nothing in the way of identity, or criteria for evaluating the depth and width of an action. The good exists as long as we realize it through our behavior, and its contours are never finally delimited, but always underway, processually, dynamically, and evolving to not only meet the demands of species survival, but the quality of that survival--i.e., the normative and evaluative dimensions of how we survive.

   Proving morality may not be inscribed on tablets from above does not relinquish the task of grappling with our innate propensity to evaluate reality and our actions as a synergistic function of that reality.

    We are moral. Is that a fact?

   The "fact" of the matter is not "thin" or trivial. Of course, you might say, we obviously develop values. So what? Prove to me your values make sense!

   My humble point is this: There are perpetrators of nihilistic anti-value "sets." There is a call to ignore the constraints that construct identity, and focus on the the will and satisfaction of self-interested desire. The hope is to strip evaluations of the good from anything other than bare naturalistic definitions (biological-evolutionary discourse) which offer little in the way of any substantive and specific measures, and or to reduce morality to Nothing! That is, morality is a constraining illusion that serves the weak in fending off the naturally elite (Nietzschean Perfectionism writ Nasty).

   So the stakes are high. The attacks against taking up the slow, meticulous assessment of normativity are always carried out in the name of the "aesthetic," the "empirical," and the reductive. However, perhaps morality is an emergent phenomenon, complex in its nature, and not readily reducible to a simple set of bare, naked physical facts. We are not let off the hook. The social struggle to articulate our political and cultural identity always remains pressing.