This kind of valuing --at the level of preferring to eat fruit and not rocks, and choosing to be stroked rather than bashed-- is a couple of steps from yielding moral judgments (those steps will begin the next chapter). But we are not at present looking for morality yet. We've been seeking to know what is demonstrably good in itself, on what judgments of goodness can ultimately find a resting place. Our search has been for that bedrock, that foundation without which any morality will seem ultimately arbitrary.
The question was: what can we say is good without having to go further to answer, "What's good about it?" And the answer, I propose, is now at hand. Goodness (along with its opposite) is an inherent quality of the experience of sentient creatures. The positive or negative quality of their experience matters in the only way anything can matter. Whether a dog is frolicking with delight in a mountain stream or whimpering with a mangled paw is a matter of better or worse because there is a creature who feels them in terms of better or worse. What is good? Experience that feels positive to a sentient creature (which tends to be experience that the design of that creature leads it to want, which tends to be experience that meets the needs of that living being). What is good about that feeling-good experience? It just is!
It just is. This is the one place, as I see it, that this answer is not arbitrary. It is in the realm of the quality of felt experience, I am proposing, that all meaningful statements about value must find their bedrock. In saying this, I am making two claims-- both arms of the "if and only if" formulation. First, that the fact of felt experience having a quality of welcomeness or unwelcomeness to the creature experiencing it does confer a bedrock goodness or not-goodness to that experience. And second, that no declaration that "this is good" that does not have ramifications ultimately in the realm of the experience of sentient creatures can be meaningfully valid. Both these points will be revisited.
If the experience of goodness has been elaborated and deepened in this way in our species, it is not just happenstance. Rather, like the earlier development of the animal capacity for physical pleasure and pain, the crucial human components of the quality of felt experience have grown out of the evolved deepening of animal life into human culture, with its more complex ways of regulating behavior in the service of the perpetuation of life. Even the transcending of hedonism's simple calculus in the human experience of value, therefore, has been crafted into our very nature.
With the unfolding of sentient life, then, something new --value-- has come into existence. The indifference of the lifeless and value-free universe postulated by rationalist science has been overcome by the emergence of creatures who are not indifferent. The dimension of "goodness" has emerged as part of the structure of a kind of entity that had not existed before.
And it is here --the place where we can say "It just is"-- that we begin to discover the illusion that made it seem that there is a chasm between "is" and "ought," between reality and value. Premises without value were thought incapable of yielding conclusions containing evaluation. By a kindred logic, one might argue that a lifeless universe could not develop into one that is alive, a universe in which all is indifferent could not unfold into one where things matter. But that, of course, is precisely what positivist science says has happened. One speaks of the evolutionary concept of emergence, in which some new category of reality that was missing in an earlier stage has appeared in a later stage. The pertinent new category here is consciousness, or more particularly, experience with a felt evaluative dimension.
The evaluative dimension disappeared from our rational accounts of reality, and thus became regarded as not really real, because of the particular understanding of reason that modern Western civilization developed. Modern rationality is defined in terms of objectivity, and objectivity looks at things from a vantage point "out there." But what emerged in the evolution of life is an experiential space "in here," and it is from the realm of internal experience that evaluation inherently and inevitably derives.
No wonder our reason concluded that evaluative statements can have no basis in reality! If the quality of experience from the inside is defined apart from what really "is," then it would follow that "is" can tell us nothing about "ought" or anything else evaluative. Should I hit my thumb with a hammer? Objective rationality can tell me what will happen to bone and blood vessels and thumbnails, but it cannot tell me whether it's a good idea. Ultimately, it is the quality of my experience that tells me that it's not. I would argue that this quality of experience, that the nature of our feelings, is an important and natural part of the "is" that a rational Reason would regard as real and take into account in its assessment of validity.
But instead, in our modern rational worldview, our feelings are regarded as "merely subjective," meaning ours alone, idiosyncratic, incapable of weighing persuasively in any interpersonal discussion of what is true. But to regard our subjective realm as merely idiosyncratic is to misunderstand the crafting of our natures. I have hit my thumb with a hammer before, and the experience has taught me that it's something I ought to avoid doing. But there's nothing idiosyncratic about the quality of my experience. It's pretty much the same for anyone with a human thumb. At their root, the evaluative structure of our feelings is as much a property that we share with one another as our anatomy, and for the same reason: the evolution that crafted us to have hearts and livers --and thumbs that hammers can smash-- crafted us also to have the same evaluative tendencies. But Western rationality has treated anatomy (something dissected from the outside) differently from feelings (something experienced from the inside).
Of course, it is not only because our feelings are experienced from the inside that we see them as more idiosyncratic than our anatomy. Our feelings are significantly molded by our experience, and experience varies from life to life and from culture to culture. There is more idiosyncrasy in the domain of the evaluations we place on things than in the anatomical structures of which our bodies are built. But the role of learning in shaping the structure of our evaluative feelings does not eliminate the reality of a significant inborn component to that structure, a meaningful component that we have in common.
The importance of learning does not eliminate the reality of shared human nature in other areas. Consider the way we move along the ground. We walk. Of course, one person's walk is not the same as another's. You can often see a little boy unconsciously learning to walk like his father. And I've observed that one can distinguish the walk of Americans from that of Europeans. But none of these idiosyncrasies --from individual to individual or from culture to culture -- alter the basic underlying reality that we as a species are by nature bi-pedal walkers. So also is our sense of what is good, although it can be greatly molded by individual and cultural learning, not completely idiosyncratic.
It is widely known that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." By which it is generally implied that it is "only" in the eye of the beholder. What is not so well recognized is that each beholder's eye has been crafted by an evolutionary process with an inherent allegiance to life-serving values, and that the experience of beauty is part of the shared truth of having a human eye, just like the retina and the cornea. In recent years, a variety of cross-cultural studies have disclosed that all across the planet, when members of widely different cultures view pictures of faces of people of very different racial types, there is substantial agreement about which faces, within each of the racial groups, are the more beautiful.
As with what is beautiful, so also with what is good. "Goodness," we might say, "is in the heart of the beholder." But it is not "only" there. We know in our hearts that the good-feeling of sentient creatures, and thus also the meeting of their needs, which engenders those feelings, is good. Within that wide boundary, there is plenty of room for us to disagree and dispute, based on our learned ways of thinking and feeling. Just which of our needs as human beings is more fundamental? Which good feelings should be given greater weight? How should the needs of different people, when they come into conflict, be adjudicated? How important is the experience of non-human living creatures in relation to that of our own kind? All these are questions of great importance. But for the present discussion, those questions are set aside to underscore the breakthrough to bedrock that we do know something about what is good, and that it is part of the "is-ness" of being a human being to know it.
As with the pictures of the faces, let us do a thought experiment with mental pictures. Picture first a world in which families are loving, people deal with one another with compassion and honesty, they are healthy and well-fed, they richly develop their full human capacities to think and feel and create, and they tend lovingly the rest of the living system. Next imagine a world filled with violence and misery, people are tortured, they lie and steal from each other, children are beaten and neglected, pestilence and famine are ubiquitous, and the biosphere is gasping from the careless exploitation of natural systems. I would wager that all kinds of people --Biblical fundamentalist, New Age spiritualist, secular humanist, corporate mogul and streetsweeper, Muslim and animist, Taoist and Hindu-- all of them would agree that the first of those pictures is a better state of affairs than the second. And I would say that there is nothing "arbitrary" about that judgment. There is real goodness represented in the first picture that is missing in the second.
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