Values are not ‘just opinions’: How our moral teaching has gone wrong

Children today are taught from a young age to distinguish between opinion and fact, which sounds very progressive until you ask: where do values fit in?

Are values opinions, or are they facts?

Try these for size:

– Children should tell the truth;

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– Killing for political ends is wrong;

– We are all created equal.

Opinions or facts?

Navigating this territory is not easy. A “key skills” framework for the senior cycle in Ireland encourages teachers to explore an intermediary category with students – that of “reasoned judgment”. This is where an opinion has “some evidence to back it up”.

In practice, however, in schools and across society, moral judgments are characterised as mere “feelings” or beliefs. This was sadly prophesied decades ago by four remarkable philosophers and friends who first met in Oxford in the 1940s.

Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch responded in different ways to a "positivist" dogma which came into fashion around then, and which continues to hold the upper hand today in terms of influence within universities and among elites.

This, as summarised by Ben Lipscomb in a superb new book on the Oxford quartet, states that: “Moral judgments can show feelings of approval or disapproval. But they can’t, strictly speaking, say anything. They are like cheers or boos at a sporting event.”

There has been a resurgence of interest in recent years in the Oxford quartet and a second book is due out in February on the subject from the In Parenthesis research group, which teamed up with An Post a couple of years ago to mark the centenary of Murdoch's birth in Dublin.

Out of the traps first, Lipscomb’s book is a five-star production in every sense. The four protagonists are vividly brought to life but the real star of the show is their philosophy.

“Murdoch called the fact-value dichotomy into question,” Lipscomb explains. Anscombe and Foot undercut dominant theories “and urged a recovery of the concepts of vice and virtue, and what Aristotle called eudaimonia: a flourishing life. Midgley connected this idea of human flourishing to an updated account of the animals we are”.

He explains their significance further as this week’s Unthinkable guest.

You identify a key distinction between thinkers who believe “the universe is billiard balls” and those who see it as a more of an organism. Can you explain why that is such a critical dichotomy, and why it matters to morality?

Ben Lipscomb: “This is roughly the distinction between the dominant world picture in the modern west and the premodern picture it supplanted. The premodern picture wasn’t exactly that the universe is an organism, but that every natural process can be understood by analogy to the life-cycle transformations of an organism.

“That is, every natural process can be understood as a self-directed movement from germinal beginnings toward mature fullness, or from mature fullness toward senescence. This is really plausible when you’re talking about organisms. And that got Aristotle and his followers thinking in those terms about everything…

“Moderns replaced this background picture with a different one: a picture of matter in motion, billiard balls on a table. Everything is made up of bits of matter that are essentially inert; unlike tomato plants, these bits of matter don’t tend toward anything.

“That too is a powerful pattern of explanation; and it too was taken as an all-purpose pattern by those who perceived its power.

If you think about everything as inert matter in motion, then it's hard to see how value belongs to the world

“What does this have to do with moral thinking? The older picture incorporates into ordinary factual judgment ideas of better and worse, being closer to or further from a peak state.

“So when Aristotle writes about ethics, he doesn’t have a fundamentally different method than when he writes about physics. He doesn’t think of the latter as an exploration of ‘facts’ and the former as an exploration of ‘values’. Value is factual for him.

"By contrast, if you think about everything as inert matter in motion, then it's hard to see how value belongs to the world. The world is represented as a bunch of dead stuff, colliding and ricocheting off itself forever. The generalisation of that picture leads to the idea that, to quote Frank Ramsey, ethics is 'a subject without an object'."

If the Oxford quartet had a shared purpose it was to prove that moral truths exist. Did they succeed?

“How often do we get proofs in philosophy? Very seldom. And not here… What I would say is that these four philosophers highlighted limitations of the billiard-ball picture – particularly with regard to human life and ethics – and showed how instructive the older picture remains.

“They developed a model for understanding moral truth. In so doing, they helped make moral truth thinkable again.”

How did they draw on Aristotle to this end?

“They revived the Aristotelian – and generally premodern – ideas of vice and virtue. Following Aristotle, they said, look; there just are characteristically human pursuits, characteristically human communal structures, characteristically human satisfactions. And these aren’t just matters of subjective opinion. Anthropology is a thing.

“Here is where virtues and vices come in. Virtues are personal traits that human beings need in order to succeed in characteristically human pursuits… So courage is a virtue: not because it’s canonised in sacred texts – though it is – but because human beings need courage.”

In your conclusion, you suggest one of the dominant views today is that morality is bound up with being true to an identity. What would the Oxford four have to say about that idea?

“I’m hesitant to put words in the mouths of the dead but I’ll speak for myself as someone deeply formed by the views of these four.

“There’s something instructive about the identity-based view. Our particular identities are powerful sources of reasons and obligations. If I understand myself as someone’s friend and have a normal sense of what that entails, then I have to find a way to support my friend when she is grieving. If I don’t, I’ll be in conflict with myself. Well and good.

“What proponents of that view seem reluctant to explore, though, is that friendship is a basic human good, and so – while I don’t have to be any particular person’s friend – I’m living badly if I don’t have friends and honour them. The identity-based view rests on the Aristotelian view – or it should.”

You highlight the muddled thinking in schools about how to understand facts and values. How would you go about defining values for young people, without falling into the trap of saying they are “just opinions”?

“We’re conflicted about this in the contemporary west. We denounce racial and other injustices – sexual abuse, the horrific conditions in refugee camps – and we do so in terms that imply objective standards. But then we also give our children school exercises sorting ‘facts’ from ‘opinions’.

“In these exercises, they’re given to understand that statements like ‘a manager who has harassed his subordinate should be removed’ are mere ‘opinions’. Nothing real, like a fact is real.

Picking good human beings can be an exercise of ordinary, factual judgment

“I have sometimes found with my students that it breaks the grip of this view to think about other species. Let me take wolves as my example.

“Suppose you’re part of an effort to reintroduce wolves into a national park. You want good wolves, right? And it’s clear enough what that means. With reference to the characteristically wolfish pattern of life – pack hunting, hierarchies of submission, etc – you’ll look for wolves that have what it takes to be successful in that kind of life. You’ll look for wolves with wolf-virtues.

“To head off a misunderstanding, let me add: both wolves and human beings succeed in their characteristic patterns of life by caring for the weak and injured, and by accepting care from others.

“But all this talk of ‘good wolves’, someone might ask: isn’t it all opinion? The answer is clearly ‘no’. What you need, in order to find a good wolf – or a bunch of them – are wolf experts. And those experts will draw on their scientific knowledge to pick good ones.

“Picking good wolves is an exercise of ordinary, factual judgment. It can be like that with human beings, too.”

The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionised Ethics by Benjamin JB Lipscomb is published by Oxford University Press