Philosophy of Law & Legal Theory: A Basic Bibliography

Our next bibliography in the Directed Reading series covers “philosophy of law and legal theory.”

Some of the titles are from the discipline of philosophy proper but I thought to include them owing to their demonstrative or possible relevance to philosophy of law and legal theory (Larry Solum’s references in many of the entries in his Legal Theory Lexicon are exemplary in this regard). Still, there is much one might have included that I’ve left out: for example, “neuroethics and law” has become an increasingly important subject area that raises questions (some novel, others long-standing) in part addressed with the conceptual resources provided by philosophy, yet I’ve not included works in the philosophy of mind or the philosophy of science (in this case, neuroscience) essential to treating such questions. As a basic or “select” bibliography, the list is not exhaustive, yet I trust it fairly represents the scope and substance of philosophy of law and legal theory, at least in some parts of the globe. And I welcome suggestions for possible additions to the next draft of this compilation.

I want to thank Larry Solum of the Legal Theory Blog as well as Matt Bodie and Dan Markel of PrawfsBlawg for posting earlier drafts of this list (with the latter, as part of the ‘Research Canons’ project). And I'm most grateful to Dennis Patterson (see too here) for awakening and shaping my intellectual interest in the philosophy of law and legal theory.

Political & Legal Obligation: An Introduction — Part 3

But the contract, on which government is founded, is said to be the original contract; and consequently may be supposed too old to fall under the knowledge of the present generation. If the agreement, by which savage men first associated and conjoined their force, be here meant, this is acknowledged to be real; but being so ancient, and being obliterated by a thousand changes of government and princes, it cannot now be supposed to retain any authority. If we would say any thing to the purpose, we must assert, that every particular government, which is lawful, and which imposes any duty of allegiance on the subject, was, at first, founded on consent and a voluntary compact. But besides that this supposes the consent of the fathers to bind the children, even to the most remote generations, (which republican writers will never allow) besides this, I say, it is not justified by history or experience, in any age or country of the world.

Almost all the governments, which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been founded originally, either on usurpation or conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent, or voluntary subjection of the people. When an artful and bold man is placed at the head of an army or faction, it is often easy for him, by employing, sometimes violence, sometimes false pretences, to establish his dominion over a people a hundred times more numerous than his partizans. He allows no such open communication, that his enemies can know, with certainty, their number or force. He gives them no leisure to assemble together in a body to oppose him. Even all those, who are the instruments of his usurpation, may wish his fall; but their ignorance of each other's intention keeps them in awe, and is the sole cause of his security. By such arts as these, many governments have been established; and this is all the original contract, which they have to boast of.

The face of the earth is continually changing, by the encrease of small kingdoms into great empires, by the dissolution of great empires into smaller kingdoms, by the planting of colonies, by the migration of tribes. Is there any thing discoverable in all these events, but force and violence? Where is the mutual agreement or voluntary association so much talked of? [….]
It is in vain to say, that all governments are or should be, at first, founded on popular consent, as much as the necessity of human affairs will admit. This favours entirely my pretension. I maintain, that human affairs will never admit of this consent; seldom of the appearance of it. But that conquest or usurpation, that is, in plain terms, force, by dissolving the ancient governments, is the origin of almost all the new ones, which were ever established in the world. And that in the few cases, where consent may seem to have taken place, it was commonly so irregular, so confined, or so much intermixed either with fraud or violence, that it cannot have any great authority.

My intention here is not to exclude the consent of the people from being one just foundation of government where it has place. It is surely the best and most sacred of any. I only pretend, that it has very seldom had place in any degree, and never almost in its full extent. And that therefore some other foundation of government must also be admitted.—David Hume, “Of the Original Contract”

1) ‘A state is legitimate only if it claims to impose on its subjects a general, at least prima facie, duty to obey its law and its subjects have a general prima facie duty not to interfere with their enforcement.
2) There may be no general, even prima facie duty to obey the laws of a state, not even those of a just state; but there is a general prima facie duty not to interfere with the administration of the laws of a just state.
3) Legitimate states are not only possible, but actual.’—William A. Edmundson

‘Law changes our moral situation in at least three ways: (1) Legal judgments and enactments can alter the balance of reasons and thereby create new moral duties; (2) legal judgments and enactments provide a mechanism for enforcing moral duties, whether preexisting or flowing from legal acts; and (3) sufficiently just states impose a general duty not to interfere with their administrative prerogatives. These powers are enough to constitute a robust conception of legitimate political authority. This is the only sense in which political obligation and legitimacy need to be correlated.’—William A. Edmundson

‘In fact, because there is a degree of parallelism between political and epistemic authority, a legitimate political authority gives citizens good reasons to believe they ought to obey its laws, just as legitimate scientific authorities give the laity good reasons to believe what they say about the workings of the world. [….] Good reasons needn’t be sufficient or conclusive reasons, whether the issue is scientific or political authority. What those good reasons are, in the case of political authority, is not always made vividly clear. In many instances, the best that can be said of a law that is a legislative compromise (as most are) is that important but conflicting ends and interests were weighed and balanced, and general conformity with the means specified by the law in question is better than the alternatives (including the alternative of doing nothing).’—William A. Edmundson

‘Anyone who claims that there are actions that are both illegal and justified surely need not be thereby asserting that it is right generally to disobey all laws or even any particular law. It is surely not inconsistent to assert both that indiscriminate disobedience is indefensible and that discriminate disobedience is morally right and proper conduct. Nor, analogously, is it at all evident that a person who claims to be justified in performing an illegal action is thereby committed to giving endorsement to the principle that the entire legal system ought to be overthrown or renounced. At a minimum, therefore, the appeal to “But what if everyone did that?” cannot by itself support the claim that one has an absolute obligation to obey the law—that disobeying the law can never be truly justified.’—Richard A. Wasserstrom

‘We should comply with and do our part in just and efficient social arrangements for at least two reasons: first of all, we have a natural duty not to oppose the establishment of just and efficient institutions (when they do not yet exist); and second, assuming that we have knowingly accepted the benefits of these institutions and plan to continue to do so, and that we have encouraged and expect others to do their part, we also have an obligation to do our share when, as the arrangement requires, it comes our turn. Thus, we often have both a natural duty as well as an obligation to support just and efficient institutions, the obligation arising from our voluntary acts while the duty does not.’—John Rawls

‘…[T]he principles to which social arrangements must conform, and in particular the principles of justice, are those which free and rational men would agree to in an original position of equal liberty, and similarly, the principles which govern men’s relation to institutions and which define their natural duties and obligations are the principles to which they would consent when so situated. It should be noted straightway that in this interpretation of the contract theory the principles of justice are understood as the outcome of a hypothetical agreement. They are principles which would be agreed to if the situation of the original position were to arise.’—John Rawls

‘…[E]ven under just constitutions unjust laws may be passed and unjust policies enforced. Some form of the majority principle is necessary but the majority may be mistaken, more or less willfully, in what it legislates. In agreeing to a democratic constitution (as an instance of imperfect procedural justice) one accepts at the same time the principles of majority rule. Assuming that the constitution is just and that we have accepted and plan to continue to accept its benefits, we then have both an obligation and a natural duty (and in any case the duty) to comply with what the majority enacts even though it may be unjust. In this way we become bound to follow unjust laws, not always of course, but provided the injustice does not exceed certain limits. [….] The right to make laws does not guarantee that the decision is rightly made, and that while the citizen submits in his conduct to the judgment of democratic authority, he does not submit his judgment to it. And if in his judgment the enactments of the majority exceed certain bounds of injustice, the citizen may consider civil disobedience.’ Civil disobedience is understood to be ‘public, nonviolent, and conscientious acts contrary to law usually done with the intent to bring about a change in the policies or laws of the government. [….] In this way it manifests a respect for legal procedures. Civil disobedience expresses disobedience to law within the limits of fidelity to law and this feature of it helps to establish in the eyes of the majority that it is indeed conscientious and sincere, that it really is meant to address their sense of injustice. Being completely open about one’s acts and being willing to accept the legal consequences of one’s conduct is a bond given to make good one’s sincerity, for that one’s deeds are conscientious is not easy to demonstrate to another or even before oneself.’—John Rawls

‘Morality is that system of conduct which is determined by a consideration of the greatest general good: he is entitled to the highest moral approbation whose conduct is, in the greatest number of instances, or in the most momentous instances, governed by views of benevolence, and made subservient to public utility. In like manner the only regulations which any political authority can be justly entitled to enforce are such as are best adapted to public utility. Consequently, just political regulations are nothing more than a certain select part of moral law. The supreme power in a state ought not, in the strictest sense, to require anything of its members that an understanding sufficiently enlightened would not prescribe without such interference.’—William Godwin

‘…[A] man may be right to comply with the commands of the government under whose de facto authority he finds himself. But none of this settles the question of legitimate authority. This is a matter of the right to command, and of the correlative obligation to obey the person who issues the command. [….] Obedience is not a matter of doing what someone tells you to do. It is a matter of doing what he tells you to do because he tells you to do it. Legitimate, or de jure, authority thus concerns the grounds and sources of moral obligation.’—Robert Paul Wolff

‘The defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule. The primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled. It would seem, then, that there can be no resolution of the conflict between the autonomy of the individual and the putative autonomy of the state. In so far as a man fulfills his obligation to make himself the author of his decisions, he will resist the state’s claim to have authority over him. That is to say, he will deny that he has a duty to obey the laws of the state simply because they are the laws. In that sense, it would seem that anarchism is the only political doctrine consistent with the virtue of autonomy. Now, of course, an anarchist may grant the necessity of complying with the law under certain circumstances or for the time being. He may even doubt that there is any real prospect of eliminating the state as a human institution. But he will never view the commands of the state as legitimate, as having a binding moral force.’—Robert Paul Wolff

‘…[A]n organization that is just, effective, and legitimate (in the sense of being singled out as the salient organization for this territory) has eo ipso a claim on our allegiance. Though popular consent may be implicated in its justice, its effectiveness, or its legitimacy, the moral requirement that we support and obey such an organization is not itself based on any promise that we have made.’—Jeremy Waldron

‘It is the contention that the idea of individual self-development is contradicted by the idea of government. This is so, it is held, because government is coercive power (perhaps “the monopoly of legitimate coercive power”) over individuals, whereas self-development implies the voluntary initiative of individuals and therefore cannot be coerced. But this argument mistakenly supposes that whatever characterizes self-development must likewise characterize its conditions. To say that self-development is voluntary is to say that it is optional. If it has a necessary condition, then self-development is an option only when these conditions prevail. And this is to say that for the option of self-development to exist, supply of its necessary conditions is mandatory. To be sure, the supply of the necessary conditions that are to be self-supplied by individuals fall within the option of self-development and is not mandatory. But conditions that must be furnished to individuals by external agencies do not partake of the voluntary character of self-development. Recognition that their presence is mandatory commensurates the provision of them with the coercive nature of government, while respecting the voluntary nature of individual self-development: individuals remain free to avail themselves, or not, of the provided conditions. It is mandatory, of course, that individuals contribute (notably through taxes) to the government that provides the necessary conditions that individuals cannot self-supply, but this is a different issue, namely the balancing of liberty with autonomy, where “liberty” is understood “negatively,” as freedom from interference, but “autonomy,” as “self-direction,” entails positive conditions of enablement.’—David L. Norton

References and Further Reading:

• Cudd, Ann, “Contractarianism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/contractarianism/
• Dagger, Richard, “Political Obligation,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/politicalobligation/
• Dworkin, Ronald M. Law’s Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
• Edmundson, William A. Three Anarchical Fallacies: An Essay on Political Authority. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Edmundson, William A., ed. The Duty to Obey the Law: Selected Philosophical Readings. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
• Estlund, David M. Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
• Finnis, John. Natural Law and Natural Rights. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1979.
• Freeman, Samuel. Justice and the Social Contract: Essays on Rawlsian Political Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Gans, Chaim. Philosophical Anarchism and Political Disobedience. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
• Gaus, Gerald F. Justificatory Liberalism: An Essay on Epistemology and Political Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Godwin, William (Isaac Kramnick, ed.). Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1976 (1793).
• Goodin, Robert E. Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Green, Leslie. The Authority of the State. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1988.
• Green, Leslie. “Legal Obligation and Authority,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
  http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2004/entries/legal-obligation/
• Greenawalt, Kent. Conflicts of Law and Morality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
• Hardin, Russell. Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Hobbes, Thomas (A.P. Martinich, ed.). Leviathan. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002 (1651).
• Hume, David. “Of the Original Contract,” in Alasdair, MacIntyre, ed., Hume’s Ethical Writings. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979.
• Klosko, George. The Principle of Fairness and Political Obligation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992.
• Klosko, George. “Presumptive Benefit, Fairness, and Political Obligation,” in Edmundson, ed. (above): 193-212.
• Kraut, Richard. Socrates and the State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
• Lloyd, S.A. Ideals as Interests in Hobbes's Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
• Lloyd, S.A. Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Law of Nature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Locke, John (P. Laslett, ed.). Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988 (3rd ed., 1698).
• Martinich, A.P. Hobbes. New York: Routledge, 2005.
• Norton, David L. Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.
• Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974.
• Pennock, J. Roland and John W. Chapman, eds. Political and Legal Obligation. New York: Atherton Press, 1970/New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 2006.
• Philp, Mark. Godwin’s Political Justice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986.
• Philp, Mark. “William Godwin,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2006/entries/godwin/
• Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, revised ed.
• Rawls, John. “The Justification of Civil Disobedience,” in Edmundson, ed. (above): 49-62.
• Rawls, John (Samuel Freeman, ed.). Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Raz, Joseph. The Authority of Law. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1979.
• Raz, Joseph. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1986.
• Sartorius, Rolf. “Political Authority and Political Obligation,” in Edmundson, ed. (above): 143-156.
• Shapiro, Ian. “The Social Contract,” in his The Moral Foundations of Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003: 109-150.
• Simmons, A. John. Moral Principles and Political Obligations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.
• Simmons, A. John. Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Springborg, Patricia, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes's Leviathan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Waldron, Jeremy. “Special Ties and Natural Duties,” in Edumundson, ed. (above): 271- 299.
• Wellman, Christopher Heath and A. John Simmons. Is There a Duty to Obey the Law? Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Wasserstrom, Richard A. “The Obligation to Obey the Law,” in Edmundson, ed. (above): 17-47.
• Wolff, Robert Paul. In Defense of Anarchism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998 ed.
• Wolff, Robert Paul. “The Conflict between Authority and Autonomy,” in Edmundson, ed. (above): 63-74.

Political & Legal Obligation: An Introduction — Part 2

‘I am not an anarchist because I believe political states provide vitally important benefits that are not to be secured in their absence, and they supply these benefits without requiring their subjects to make unreasonable sacrifices. This defense of statism openly depends upon the truth of three claims: (1) political states supply crucial benefits, (2) these benefits would be unavailable in the absence of political states, and (3) states can render their services without imposing unreasonable costs upon those they coerce.’—Christopher Heath Wellman

‘Put plainly, for the vast majority of us, life without political order would be a horribly perilous environment.’—Christopher Heath Wellman

‘I say that the benefits of citizenship are greater than the costs because what each of us gains from everyone else’s compliance with the state’s law is much more valuable than what we lose by having to obey these laws ourselves.’—Christopher Heath Wellman

‘I want to insist that a state is justified in nonconsensually coercing me (even if I am not benefited and/or would genuinely prefer to take my chances in the state of nature) because the state’s uniform coercion over all those within its territorial borders is the only way for it to rescue any of us from the perils of the state of nature. My account of political legitimacy is nonpaternalistic, then, because it insists that my state justifiably coerce me only because this coercion is a necessary and not unreasonably burdensome means of securing crucial benefits for others.’—Christopher Heath Wellman

‘[There are] certain roles which groups necessarily have to play in coordinating behavior. First, where coordination does not emerge naturally, coordination schemes can function as coordination schemes at all only if they are embraced by the group whose behavior is to be coordinated by them. This, in turn, means that someone must intentionally have engineered the coordination scheme, and everyone must act intentionally in compliance with it. That is to say, coordination requires everyone to “track” everyone else’s behavior. [….] Second, even where there is no need to organize a coordination scheme formally, the group as a whole still has a residual supervisory function. This entails, in the first instance, a responsibility to undertake regular monitoring. It entails, in the second place, a responsibility to be prepared to organize a more formal coordination scheme should the less formal ones fail to perform satisfactorily. Thus, groups must be at least ultimately responsible for coordination. The reason is the same as the reason why I must be responsible for rescuing the drowning swimmer—no one else can, or will. Coordination is, by its nature, our collective enterprise. No other agent, individual or group, can do it for us. [….] If individuals are rightly to be excused from achieving the good through their own isolated actions, pleading “It’s not my job,” then the collectivity must be empowered and enjoined to do whatever is necessary to eliminate those barriers that block morally efficacious individual behavior. The collectivity must be empowered to make it someone’s job, if anyone is allowed to plead, “It’s not my job.” [….] Where there is some collective agency in existence…there is no problem in ascribing group responsibilities…directly to it. The state is preeminent among such organized collectivities. Our paradigm of moral agency is essentially individualistic, to be sure. The natural person is our model. Only those things that are possessed of clear values, goals and ends, and capable of deliberation upon and intentional implementation of action plans in pursuit of them—can count as agents at all, for moral purposes. It is only to them that moral injunctions can be addressed. The limits of their capacity for effective action mark the limits of our moralizing. But artificially created agencies are agents, too. Most especially, the state is a moral agent, in all the respects that morally matter. It, like the natural individual, is capable of embodying values, goals and ends; it, too, is capable (through its legislative and executive organs) of deliberative action in pursuit of them. The state is possessed of an internal decision mechanism (a constitution, and the processes that it prescribes) that mimics perfectly, for these purposes, that which is taken as the defining feature of moral agency in the natural individual. [….] [It is the state that] must be ultimately responsible, because the state is the preeminent organization among them in any given territory. Other organizations exist by leave of—and at least in one (legalistic) sense, only under a charter from—the state. [….] Where shared, collective responsibilities are concerned, it is—by definition—everyone’s business what everyone else does. And this tautology is far from an empty one. It is everyone’s business, first and most simply, because it is a responsibility that everyone shares with everyone else. It is everyone’s business, second and more importantly, because, for anyone else’s contribution to be efficacious, each agent must usually play his part under the scheme that has been collectively instituted for discharging that share responsibility. [….] The failure of any one party to abide by the coordination scheme will typically undermine, to some greater or lesser extent, the success of the scheme as a whole, thereby preventing other moral agents from successfully discharging their assigned duties. It is for this reason that we may rightly force people to do their duties to schemes for discharging collective responsibilities—even if we may not so enforce isolated, individual responsibilities.’—Robert E. Goodin

‘To the extent that the avoidance of injustice is a moral imperative, the establishment of coordinating institutions is a moral imperative.’—Jeremy Waldron

‘…[G]oods provided by cooperation can be termed “excludable” or “nonexcludable.” Excludable goods can provided to some members of a given community while being denied to specified others. [….] Nonexcludable goods, in contrast, cannot be denied to specified others. Frequently, if provided at all, they must be provided to all members of some community. Familiar examples of nonexcludable goods are the rule of law, relief from various forms of pollution and other environmental hazards, and national defense. These goods and others like them that also depend on the cooperation of large numbers of people are often referred to as public goods. The two main features of public goods are (a) that they are nonexcludable and (b) that they depend upon the cooperation of numbers of people. [….] Because of the benefits provided by [schemes providing nonexcludable goods], individuals are no longer able to decide whether or not to receive them. Accordingly, the contractarian implications of the receipt of such benefits are blurred.’—George Klosko

‘The principle of fairness is able to generate obligations to contribute to nonexcludable schemes if certain conditions are met. The main conditions are that the goods in question must large be (i) worth the recipients’ effort in providing them and (ii) “presumptively beneficial.” [….] [B]y “presumptively beneficial” goods I mean something similar to Rawls’s primary goods, “things that every man is presumed to want.” [….] Because obligations to support cooperative schemes are grounded upon a broad principle of the fair distribution of burdens and benefits, they hold only as long as the costs and benefits of the scheme in question are fairly distributed. We can say that a scheme in which this condition is met passes the “fair distribution” test and so is “fair.” Because of the complexity of the distribution of benefits and burdens in actual schemes, however, it may be difficult to say whether any given scheme passes this test. Similarly, it may be difficult to say at exactly what point the pattern of distribution in a given scheme moves from being fair to being unfair. But it is clear that at the point at which a given scheme begins to fail the test, individuals’ obligation to it are dissolved.’—George Klosko

‘It is not merely that political coercion is a possible solution to the harmful circumstances of the state of nature; it is the only viable solution because only coordination will solve the problems, and there is no way to ensure sufficient coordination without coercion. [….] The point…is that the perils that prevail in the absence of political society are distinct insofar as they create what is fundamentally a coordination problem: There is no way other than general compliance with a single authoritative set of rules to secure peace and protect basic moral rights.’—Christopher Heath Wellman

‘…[W]e all have a defeasible moral duty to follow a just law validly enacted by a legitimate regime.’—Christopher Heath Wellman

‘Socrates’ duty not to try to destroy the Laws is explained…by appeal to the moral quality of the Law or the impartial moral values that this legal obedience will bring about or advance—values such as happiness [eudaimonia] or justice. Our general duties to advance or respect such values by…upholding the institutions that embody and promote them, are what explain the wrongness of Socrates’ proposed escape on all three readings of the opening “destruction argument.” The theories that in this way ground our duty to obey the law in one (or more) of the general moral duties that we have as persons and moral equals are…[called] Natural Duty theories.’—Christopher Heath Wellman

The Natural Duty argument:
Premise 1: Government (political society, law) is necessary for human beings. Among other things, this premise assumes the hypothetical ‘state of nature’ is synonymous with coordination and assurance problems and thus without coercive law and government the human condition would be aptly characterized, in Hobbes’ words, as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’
Premise 2: All persons have a natural moral duty to (one or more):
(a) maximize goodness in the world (e.g., eudaimonia, perfection…)
(b) perform necessary tasks to which they are well suited and support and obey those who perform necessary tasks
(c) respect and defer to those who do necessary tasks by occupying positions of authority
(d) do and promote justice
(e) assist those in peril
Conclusion 1: Therefore all persons have a natural moral duty to:
(a) leave the state of nature and join together with others to create government and law where none exist; and
(b) support and comply with stable and existing governments and law within their jurisdiction (provided they are reasonably just)
Conclusion 2: All persons have a moral duty to obey domestic law. (Christopher Heath Wellman)

Philosophical anarchism denies ‘that legitimate states are possible and actual. “There are,” as John Simmons tersely puts it, “no morally legitimate states.” The position is called philosophical anarchism to distinguish it from the more notorious political anarchism popularly associated with bombs and beards, Sacco and Vanzetti. Philosophical anarchists are not committed to bringing down the existing political order and even concede that “government may be necessary and that certain governments ought to be supported.” But their support rests on general moral reasons that deny the state any right to rule or any presumption that there is moral reason to act as its laws require.’—William A. Edmundson

‘Where what morality requires and what the law requires converge, the philosophical anarchist’s practical recommendation will coincide with that of the state.’—William A. Edmundson

Please Note: References and Further Reading will be appended to the third and final part of this series.

Political & Legal Obligation: An Introduction — Part 1

This is the first of three parts:

‘There are at least three central areas of disagreement in attempts to solve the problem [of political obligation], as a result of the various answers which have been given to three basic questions: To whom is this obligation owed? What is the obligation an obligation to do? How does one come to be under the obligation?’—A. John Simmons

‘The two most fundamental questions of political theory are: (1) Under what conditions, if any, may those in power claim to rule as a matter of moral right? This I shall call the question of political authority, and (2) Under what conditions, if any, may the citizen lie under a prima facie moral obligation to obey those who claim political authority? This I shall call the question of political obligation.’—Rolf Sartorius

‘Many people feel…that they are tied in a special way to their government, not just by “bonds of affection,” but by moral bonds’—A. John Simmons

‘Political obligation is closely linked with the obligation to obey some legitimate political authority, and insofar as that authority operates through laws, with the obligation to obey the law.’—A. John Simmons

‘Obligations are limitations on our freedom, impositions on our will, which must be discharged regardless of our inclinations.’—A. John Simmons

‘…[W]e can make sense of the idea of a legitimate political authority without positing the existence of a general duty to obey the law.’—William A. Edmundson

‘Philosophers have long understood the duty to obey the law to be a prima facie duty rather than an absolute duty…. A prima facie duty is, one might say, a candidate duty, one that will in fact be one’s duty unless a conflicting duty or other moral consideration outweighs it.’—William A. Edmundson

‘Thus there are at least three different positions which might be taken concerning the character of the obligation to obey the law or the rightness of disobedience to the law. They are (1) One has an absolute obligation to obey the law; disobedience is never justified. (2) One has an obligation to obey the law but this obligation can be overridden by conflicting obligations; disobedience can be justified, but only by the presence of outweighing circumstances. (3) One does not have a special obligation to obey the law, but it is in fact usually obligatory, on other grounds, to do so; disobedience to law often does not turn out to be unjustified.’—Richard A. Wasserstrom

‘Whatever else they do, all legal systems recognize, create, vary and enforce obligations. This is no accident: obligations are central to the social role of law and explaining them is necessary to an understanding of law’s authority and, therefore its nature. Not only are these obligations in the law, there are also obligations to the law. Historically, most philosophers agree that these include a moral obligation to obey, or what is usually called “political obligation.” Voluntarists maintained that this requires something like a voluntary subjection to law’s rule, for example, through consent. Non-voluntarists denied this, insisting that the value of a just and effective legal system is itself sufficient to validate law’s claims.’—Leslie Green

A moral obligation…
1. is a moral requirement generated by the performance of some voluntary act (or omission); furthermore, unlike duties, obligations require special performance
2. is owed by a specific person (the “obligor”) to a specific person(s) (the “obligee[s[“), whereas duties are owed by all persons to all others
3. simultaneously generates a correlative right: ‘By incurring an obligation to do A, the obligor creates for the obligee a special right to the obligor’s performance of A.’
(after A. John Simmons)

‘Obligations correlate with the moral version of what are called in legal jargon “rights in personam.”’ Duties ‘correlate with “rights in rem,” that is, rights which are held against all other people.’—A. John Simmons

We might speak of four kinds or principles of obligation: the principles of ‘fidelity’ and ‘consent’ (1 & 2), which are obligations deliberately undertaken, like promising or consenting; and the principles of ‘fair play’ and ‘gratitude’ (3 & 4) or principles of reciprocation, being understood as obligations generated by the receipt or acceptance of benefits. (after A. John Simmons)

‘The mere fact that an institution (or set of institutions) exists, and that its rules apply to me, will not bind me to that institution. If I am morally bound to obey the law or to be a good citizen, the ground of this bond will be independent of the legal and political institutions in question.’—A. John Simmons

‘…[T]he first recorded argument for political obligation, that of Socrates in Plato’s Crito, suggested at least three distinct ground for political obligations: that the State was a good State and thus owed obedience, that the State was a benefactor to be repaid, and that Socrates had tacitly consented to the State’s authority over him and so became bound.’—A. John Simmons

‘Consent theory has provided us with a more intuitively appealing account of political obligation that any other tradition in modern political theory. At least since Locke’s impassioned defense of the natural freedom of men born into nonnatural states, the doctrine of personal consent has dominated both ordinary and philosophical thinking on the subject of our political bonds. The heart of this doctrine is the claim that no man is obligated to support or comply with any political power unless he has personally consented to its authority over him; the classic formulation of the doctrine appears in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. There is no denying the attractiveness of personal consent (and of the parallel thesis that no government is legitimate which governs without the consent of the governed).’—A. John Simmons

‘Consent theories of political obligation are the foundation from which the political works of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau were constructed. Consent theory characteristically advances four central theses:
1. Man is naturally free. This is normally a claim about a “natural right” man is supposed to possess. In calling a right “natural,” we mean, first, that it is possessed by all men (or “all rational agents,” or “all agents capable of choice”) solely by virtue of their humanity (or “rational agency” or “power of choice”). And second, a “natural right” is not the product of some voluntary act, as other sorts of rights are. The natural right in question here is the “natural right of freedom”….
2. Man gives up his natural freedom (and is bound by obligations) only by voluntarily giving a “clear sign” that he desires to do so. "For while the individual gives up his natural freedom (to some extent) in authorizing the government to direct his actions, he allegedly both gains in the ‘new freedom’ available under the rule of law, and also, since his authorization ‘makes the government’s acts his own,’ does not really lose any freedom of action to begin with."
3. The method of consent protects the citizen from injury by the state. According to one version of the claim: "the method of consent guarantees that a government which has been consented to can never (logically) injure (in the classical sense of ‘wrong’) the citizen, provided it is acting ‘intra vires’ (within the terms of the citizen’s consent). Consent theorists also recognize limits on the sanctity of personal consent, for example, those captured in the doctrine that certain rights are "inalienable."
4. The state is an instrument for serving the interests of its citizens. The consent theorists demonstrate a preference for individual commitment over unavoidable benefits or protection of interests. [….] Thus, consent theory maximizes protection of the individual’s freedom to choose where his political allegiance will lie. Political obligations cannot be inherited or unwittingly acquired. And a deliberate undertaking, of which promising is the paradigm, is the only ground of obligation which allows this feature to be present in a theory of political obligation.’—A. John Simmons

Implied consent might be construed in at least three different ways:
1. ‘An act may be such that it leads us to conclude that the actor was in an appropriate frame of mind to, or had attitudes which would lead him to, consent if suitable conditions arose. This conclusion may be expressed by the conditional: if he had been asked to (or if an appropriate situation had otherwise arisen), he would have consented.’
2. ‘An act may be such that it “commits” the actor to consenting.’
3. ‘An act may be such that it binds the actor morally to the same performance to which he would be bound if he had in fact consented. I may do something which is not itself and act of consent, but which nonetheless binds me as if I had consented; after performing the act, it would be wrong (ceteris paribus) for me not to do those things which my actual consent would have bound me to do.’—A. John Simmons

‘The problem is that consent, whether express or tacit, must be fully voluntary in order to bind. Hume was surely correct when he remarked that it was simply not a live option for the average citizen to leave the country of his birth and native language and to abandon his friends, family, employment, and cultural ties. As an account of the putative foundation of political obligation it thus seems to me that any theory of an implied social contract must fail.’—Rolf Sartorius

‘Almost every member of every community that has existed on the face of the earth might reasonably say, “I know of no such contract as you describe; I never entered into any such engagements; I never promised to obey; it must therefore be an iniquitous imposition to call upon me to do something under pretense of a promise I never made.” The reason a man lives under any particular government is partly necessity; he cannot easily avoid living under some government, and it is often scarcely in his power to abandon the country in which he was born: it is also partly a choice of evils; no man can be said, in his case, to enjoy that freedom which is essential to the forming of a contract, unless it could be shown that he had a power of instituting, somewhere, a government adapted to his own conceptions.—Government in reality, as has abundantly appeared, is a question of force, and not of consent. It is desirable that a government should be made as agreeable as possible to the ideas and inclinations of its subjects; and that they should be consulted, as extensively as may be, respecting its construction and regulations. But, at last, the best constituted government that can be formed, particularly for a large community, will contain many provisions that, far from having obtained the consent of all its members, encounter even in their outset a strenuous, though ineffectual, opposition.—From the whole of these reasonings it appears that, in those measures which have the concurrence of my judgement, I may reasonably be expected to co-operate with willingness and zeal; but, for the rest, my only justifiable ground of obedience is that I will not disturb the repose of the community, or that I do not perceive the question to be of sufficient magnitude to authorize me in incurring the penalty.’—William Godwin

‘It has appeared that the most essential of those rights which constitute the peculiar sphere appropriate to each individual, and the right upon which every other depends as its basis, is the right to private judgement. [….] To a rational being there can be but one rule of conduct, justice, and one mode of ascertaining that rule, the exercise of his understanding. [….] The universal exercise of private judgement is a doctrine so unspeakably beautiful that the true politician will certainly feel infinite reluctance in admitting the idea of interfering with it.’—William Godwin

A. John Simmons concludes his powerfully argued and influential book, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (1979), with the claim that ‘Most citizens have neither political obligations nor “particularized” political duties, and they will continue to be free of such bonds barring changes in political structures and conventions.’ And yet, he argues, we still have a duty to support just government (as well as a duty to fight injustice). Moreover, the ‘absence of political obligations in a political community…will not entail that disobedience or revolution is justified.’

Please Note: References and Further Reading will be appended to Part 3.

Facts & Values, Truth & Objectivity

Value means goodness as an end: that which is worthwhile or desirable for its own sake.

We choose or determine that there be values, that they exist, but their character is independent of us.

To judge that something is good is to judge that it is properly valued.

Values are "intrinsic goods" that by their nature enhance a life, that make a fundamental and positive contribution to human flourishing (eudaimonia).

'Values are to be brought about, maintained, saved from destruction, prized and valued (where this last is some descriptive term of psychology plus the theory of action).’ We ought to ‘care about, accept, support, affirm, encourage, protect, guard, praise, seek, embrace, serve, be drawn toward, be attracted by, aspire toward, strive to realize, foster, express, nurture, delight in, respect, be inspired by, take joy in, resonate with, be loyal to, be dedicated to, celebrate values. With the very highest values, we are to be elevated by, enthralled by, love, adore, revere, be exalted by be awed before, find ecstasy in these highest values.’—Robert Nozick

‘We are born, as social animals, into a cultural world of value and disvalue—a world where certain things matter, as harmful, dangerous, comforting, warming and so on. If we have been brought up in the right way, we will be disposed reliably to recognize these values and disvalues and to respond as we should: as Aristotle says: “at the right times, about the right things, towards the right people, and in the right way.” And if this happens, then we will care in the right way about the things that matter: not simply caring for justice and kindness as if for some vague idea, but caring that particular people in particular circumstances are treated as they should be—with fairness, honesty and consideration, so that we get angry (justifiably angry) if this doesn’t happen. It will become “second nature” to have these responses, so that our own interests narrowly conceived, are quite naturally far from being our only consideration in deciding what to do. Being disposed reliably to be motivated by specifically other-regarding moral considerations is part of what it is to have a virtue.’—Peter Goldie

‘There are some individuals whose lives are infused by values, who pursue values with single-minded purity and intensity, who embody value to the greatest extent. These individuals glow with a special radiance. Epochal religious figures often have this quality. To be in their presence (or even to hear about them) is to be uplifted and drawn (at least temporarily) to pursue the best in oneself. There are less epochal figures as well, glowing with a special moral and value loveliness, whose presence uplifts us, whose example lures and inspires us.’—Robert Nozick

‘Most philosophers who have written on the question of what has intrinsic value have not been hedonists; like Plato and Aristotle, they have thought that something besides pleasure and pain has intrinsic value. One of the most comprehensive lists of intrinsic goods that anyone has suggested is that given by William Frankena (1908-1994). It is this: life, consciousness, and activity; health and strength; pleasures and satisfactions of all or certain kinds; happiness, beatitude, contentment, etc.; truth; knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom; beauty, harmony, proportion in objects contemplated; aesthetic experience; morally good dispositions or virtues; mutual affection, love, friendship, cooperation; just distribution of goods and evils; harmony and proportion in one’s own life; power and experiences of achievement; self-expression; freedom; peace, security; adventure and novelty; and good reputation, honor and esteem, etc. (Presumably a corresponding list of intrinsic evils could be provided.) Almost any philosopher who has ever addressed the question of what has intrinsic value will find his or her answer represented in some way by one or more items on Frankena’s list. (Frankena himself notes that he does not explicitly include in his list the communion with and love and knowledge of God that certain philosophers believe to be the highest good, since he takes them to fall under the headings of “knowledge” and “love.”) One conspicuous omission from the list, however, is the increasingly popular view that certain environmental entities or qualities have intrinsic value (although Frankena may again assert that these are implicitly represented by one or more items already on the list). Some find intrinsic value, for example, in certain “natural” environments (wilderness untouched by human hand); some find it in certain animal species; and so on.’—Michael J. Zimmerman

‘Values enter into the very definition of what a fact is; the realm of facts cannot be defined or specified without utilizing certain values. Values enter into the process of knowing a fact; without utilizing or presupposing certain values, we cannot determine which is the realm of facts, we cannot know the real from the unreal.’—Robert Nozick

Rational acceptability in the natural sciences depends ‘on such cognitive virtues as “coherence” and “functional simplicity,” show[ing] that at least some value terms stand for properties of the things they are applied to, and not just for feelings of the person who uses the terms.’—Hilary Putnam

‘[F]act, (or truth) and rationality are interdependent notions. A fact is something that it is rational to believe, or, more precisely, the notion of a fact (or a true statement) is an idealization of the notion of a statement that it is rational to believe. [….] [B]eing rational involves having criteria of relevance as well as criteria of rational acceptability, and…all of our values are involved in our criteria of relevance. The decision that a picture of the world is true (or true by our present lights, or “as true as anything is”) and answers the relevant questions (as well as we are able to answer them) rests on and reveals our total system of value commitments. A being with no values would have no facts either. The way in which criteria of relevance involves values, at least indirectly, may be seen by examining the simplest statement. Take the sentence “The cat is on the mat.” If someone actually makes this judgment in a particular context, then he employs conceptual resources—the notions “cat,” “on,” and “mat”—which are provided by a particular culture, and whose presence and ubiquity reveal something about the interests and values of that culture, and of almost every culture. We have the category “cat” because we regard the division of the world into animals and non-animals as significant, and we are further interested in what species as given animal belongs to. It is relevant that there is a cat on the mat and not just a thing. We have the category “mat” because we regard the division of inanimate things into artifacts and non-artifacts as significant, and we are further interested in the purpose and nature a particular artifact has. It is relevant that it is a mat that the cat is on and just something. We have the category “on” because we are interested in spatial relations. Notice what we have: we took the most banal statement imaginable, “the cat is on the mat,” and we found that the presuppositions which make this statement a relevant one in certain contexts include the significance of the categories animate/inanimate, purpose, and space. To a mind with no disposition to regard these as relevant categories, “the cat is on the mat” would be as irrational as “the number of hexagonal objects in this room is 76” would be, uttered in the middle of a tête-à-tête between young lovers. Not only do very general facts about our value system show themselves in our categories (artifacts, species name, term for a spatial relation) but, our more specific values (for example, sensitivity and compassion), also show up in the use we make of specific classificatory words (“considerate,” “selfish”). To repeat, our criteria of relevance rest on and reveal our whole system of values.’—Hilary Putnam

‘There are a variety of reasons why we are tempted to draw a line between “facts” and “values”—and to draw it in such a way that “values” are put outside the realm of rational argument altogether. For one thing, it is much easier to say, “that’s a value judgment,” meaning, “that’s just a matter of subjective preference,” than to do what Socrates tried to teach us: to examine who we are and what our deepest convictions are and hold those convictions up to the searching test of reflective examination.’—Hilary Putnam

‘The moral life is not intermittent or specialised, it is not a peculiar or separate area of our existence…. [W]e are always deploying and directing our energy, refining it or blunting it, purifying it or corrupting it…. “Sensitivity” is a word which may be in place here…. Happenings in consciousness so vague as to be almost non-existent can have “moral colour”… (“But are you saying that every single second has a moral tag?” Yes, roughly.)’—Iris Murdoch

Because our states of consciousness and action presuppose perceptual (or epistemic) discrimination, any such discrimination is subject to moral evaluation.

‘The moral point is that “facts” are set up as such by human (that is moral) agents. Much of our life is taken up by truth-seeking, imagining, questioning. We relate to facts through truth and truthfulness, and come to recognise and discover that there are different modes and levels of insight and understanding. In many familiar ways, various values pervade and colour what we take to be the reality of our world; wherein we constantly evaluate our own values and those of others, and judge and determine forms of consciousness and modes of being.’—Iris Murdoch

'There is a value cost to immoral behavior: The immoral life is a less valuable life than the moral one. ‘The immoral person thinks…his immoral behavior costs him nothing. But that is not true; he pays the cost of having a less valuable existence. He pays that penalty, though he doesn’t feel it or care about it.’—Robert Nozick

'Emotions...involve value judgments about important things, judgments in which, appraising an external object as salient for our own well-being, we acknowledge our neediness and incompleteness before parts of the world we do not fully control. [....] Emotions...view the world from the point of view of my own scheme of goals and objects, the things to which I attach value in a conception of what it is for me to live well.'—Martha C. Nussbaum

'[E]udaimonism is not ethical subjectivism. It is true that it exhibits great concern for the subject—the self of each person—for example, by insisting upon the importance of self-knowledge and self-development. But the self is here conceived as a task, a piece of work, namely the work of self-actualization. And self-actualization is the progressive objectivizing of subjectivity, ex-pressing it into the world. [....] For eudaimonistic individualism, it is the responsibility of persons to actualize objective value in the world.'—David L. Norton

The self-fulfilling life of each person requires more values than he or she personally realizes and is dependent upon others for these values. [...] Accordingly, the meaning of "autonomy," if the term is to be applicable, must be consistent with interdependence. ...[I]t means, not total self-sufficiency, but determining for oneslef what one's contributions to others should be and what use to make of the values provided by the self-fulfilling lives of others.'—David L. Norton

‘A person who tracks bestness, who seeks value, will have to formulate her own package of value realization; she cannot simply “maximize” on the value dimension. This package need not be an aggregate, it can pattern and unify the diverse values it realizes. In thus patterning value, the person may emulate a previous pattern exhibited by a value exemplar, or described in some tradition, or she may create a new complex unity, sculpting the value contours of her life in an original, perhaps unique way. Some significant part of the vividness of characters we read about in fiction, history, or religious texts or scriptures is their individuality in (valuable) value contouring.’—Robert Nozick

‘[T]he perfectionist aspiration to self-development…to a harmoniously hierarchically ordered being [cf. here Plato’s distinguishing and ranking of the rational, spirited and appetitive parts of the soul]…[should not] be interpreted as a denigration of what one hopes to improve on or of others not so intent. If we are to strive for a state judged higher, then something also must be ranked lower: to judge something as less than the best need not involve any elitist contempt for it.’—Robert Nozick

'One difficulty in discussions of value is that the descriptive language we have for what we value or disvalue is broad and inexact, and the terms that are readily available turn out to fit cases that differ significantly in value. Is a life marked by selfishness undesirable, or inferior to one that is less selfish but otherwise similar? Nietzsche, in a section of Thus Spake Zarathustra, ironically entitled "On the Three Evils," points out, both for selfishness and for two other examples, that generalizations fail in the face of the variety of instances. Indeed, we can see that the 'selfishness' of a creative, work-absorbed artist might be much more positive than the 'selfishness' of a petty profiteer or a family tryrant. One reason that Nietzsche's preoccupation with value is pursued in oblique utterances is that anything resembling a formula can be misapplied by someone who is insensitive to significant differences among cases. Camus makes a related point when, after presenting some models of very good kinds of lives, he observes that a recommendation of the models does not include assurance that imitations of the models are to be esteemed. Nuances matter. The difficulty with language points toward one of the ways in which context, especially the context provided by an individual life, matters in the assessment of value. [....] The importance of context to value exacerbates what is in any case a serious problem. If, as Aristotle says, every subject has its due degree of precision, and that of ethics is not great, it must be admitted that the precision generally to be expected in discussion of value is very low indeed. There are two strategies that a philosopher who believes in, and wishes to convey, a hierarchy of values can pursue in an attempt to mitigate this. One is not to rely entirely on general characterizations of the hierarchy of values, but instead to fill in meaning by presenting a concrete (and highly contextual) example of someone whose life was marked by the highest values. Thus, much of the meaning of Plato's ethics is in the portrait of Socrates that emerges, the students who compiled The Analects of Confucius pursued much the same strategy. A second strategy is to indicate one's hierarchy of values in a way that allows for elements of irony and a pervasive sense of the personal and elusive nature of what is being talked about. This is the strategy of Nietzsche and Camus.'—Joel J. Kupperman

‘[People] differ in temperament, interests, intellectual ability, aspirations, natural bent, spiritual quests, and the kind of life they wish to lead. They diverge in the values they have and have different weightings for the values they share. (They wish to live in different climates—some in mountains, plains, deserts, seashores, cities, towns.) There is no reason to think that there is one community which will serve as ideal for all people and much reason to think that there is not. [….] For each person, so far as objective criteria of goodness can tell (insofar as these exist), there is a wide range of very different kinds of life that tie as best; no other is objectively better for him than any other one in this range, and no one within the range is objectively better than any other.’—Robert Nozick

‘[Moral values] refer to things we consider worth cherishing and realizing in our lives. Since judgments of worth are based on reasons, values are things we have good reasons to cherish, which in our well-considered views deserve our allegiance and ought to form part of the good life. Universal moral values are those we have good reasons to believe to be worthy of the allegiance of all human beings, and are in that sense universally valid or binding. Moral values are meant for beings like us and intended to regulate our lives. Reasons relevant to a discussion of them are therefore of several kinds, such as our assessment of our moral capacities, what we take to be our basic tendencies and limits, the likely consequences of pursuing certain values, their compatibility, the ease with which they can be combined into a coherent way of life, and the past and present experience of societies that lived by them.’—Bhikhu Parekh

'[O]rdinary people—which means all of us—find [the] story mode of moral discourse [i.e., the form which includes parable, the play, short story, the narrative poem, the novel and the film] uniquely palatable and nutritious; it seems perfectly designed to engage our moral faculties. Our moral understanding and the story form seem fitted for one another. No rote learning is necessary: it all seems to flow quite naturally. This is the way our moral faculty likes to operate. It is almost effortless to take in a story, pleasant even, though the story may be replete with moral discourse. The novel, in particular, is a text of a very different kind from the scientific treatise. It is also very different from the philosophical text, which is what philosophers, naturally, are most comfortable with. Thus the novel form has tended to be ignored by moral philosophers: it is not, for them, the place to look for canonical expressions of ethical truth. Yet, quite obviously, it is for most educated people one of the prime vehicles of ethical expression. (Film plays a similar role for the less word-minded.) In reading a novel we have ethical experiences, sometimes quite profound ones, and we reach ethical conclusions, condemning some characters and admiring others. We live a particular set of moral challenges (sitting there in our armchair) by entering into the lives of the characters introduced. [....] Stories can sharpen and clarify moral questions, encouraging a dialectic between the reader's own experiences and the trials of the characters he or she is reading about. A tremendous amount of moral thinking and feeling is done when reading novels (0r watching plays and films, or reading poetry and short stories). In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that for most people this is the primary way in which they acquire ethical attitudes, especially in contemporary culture. Our ethical knowledge is aesthetically mediated.'—Colin McGinn

Truth is objective; it is good to believe what is true; truth is a goal worthy of human inquiry; and truth is worth caring about for its own sake.‘Thinking about why we should care about truth tells us two things about it: first, that truth is, in part, a deeply normative property—it is a value. And second, this is a fact that any adequate theory of truth must account for. In light of this fact, I suggest that truth, like other values, should be understood as depending on, but not reducible to, lower-level properties. Yet which properties truth depends on or supervenes on may change with the type of belief in question. This opens the door to a type of pluralism: truth in ethics may be realized differently than in physics.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Truth is a property that is good for beliefs to have. Since propositions are the content of beliefs, and it is the content of a belief and not the act of believing that is true, we can also say that truth is the property that makes a proposition good to believe.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Objectivity calls for putting one’s idiosyncratic predilections and parochial preferences aside in forming one’s beliefs, evaluations and choices. It is a matter of proceeding in line not with one’s inclinations but with the dictates of impartial reason. The universality of reason must be recognized: What is rational for one person to do, to believe, or to value will thereby also of necessity be equally rational for all the rest of us who might find ourselves in the same circumstances. For rationality is inherently “objective:” it does not reconfigure itself to meet the idiosyncratic predilections of particular individuals. To be sure, objectivity will have to take context into account, seeing that different individuals and groups confront very different objective situations. Rationality is universal, but it is circumstantially universal—and objectivity with it. It is a matter of what “any of us” would do in one’s place. [….] The contextuality of good reasons can be reconciled with the universality of rationality itself by taking a hierarchical view of the process through which the absolutistic (and uniform) conception of ideal rationality is thought to bear context differently, on the resolution of concrete cases and particular situations.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘The content of an assertion is intrinsically related to a conceptual scheme. [….] In effect, propositions, true or false, are implicitly indexed to some conceptual scheme or schemes. [….] Facts are internal to conceptual schemes, or ways of dividing the world into objects, among which there can be equally acceptable alternatives. [….] [S]uch metaphysical pluralism is consistent with realism about truth.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[I]n taking concepts to be flexible and fluid like, the pluralist is not saying that we are confused about our concepts. Rather, the point is that concepts are not absolutely determinate or closed; they do not have a fixed use in every possible situation. This does not imply, however, that no concepts have determinate uses in all actual situations. Some concepts may be perfectly determinate in actual situations, but not in all possible situations. [….] For the pluralist, concepts are…flexible; they are subject to possible extension in the fact of unforeseen circumstances. Hence, there can be irresolvable disagreements over how to apply any concept. In a sense, concepts are therefore always possibly vague in a nonpejorative sense; they have what Waismann called “open texture.”’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Minimally speaking, a proposition is true in the realist sense when things are as that proposition says they are. Some aspect of objective reality must simply be a certain way. If it is, then the proposition is true; if not, the proposition is false. The truth of the proposition hinges on the world alone, not on our thought about the world. In short, realism about truth minimally implies two commitments: (a) truth is an authentic property that some propositions have and others lack, and (b) the concept of truth is, in Putnam’s words, “radically non-epistemic;” that is, whether a proposition is true (in most cases) does not depend on what I or anyone else believes or knows. [….] According to correspondence accounts of truth, there are three metaphysical aspects to any true proposition: the proposition itself (the truth bearer), its correspondence (the truth relation), and the reality to which it corresponds (the truth marker). [….] In other words, propositions are true when they correspond to the facts.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[T]here is no logical incoherence in supposing that facts and propositions are relative to conceptual schemes and that truth is the correspondence of (relative) propositions with (relative) facts.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘All truths are relative, yes, but our concept of truth needn’t be a relative concept.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[T]he conditions under which a proposition is true are partly determined by the conceptual scheme in which the proposition is expressed. But what makes a proposition true is not its relation to a scheme but whether or not the conditions in question obtain. For a claim to be true (or false), the conditions must be relative to a scheme. Yet the reason that the claim is true is not because it is relative to a scheme (as the truth relativist must hold); it is true because it is the case.[….] A fact, in the human sense, is simply what is the case.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[A] uniformitarian absolutism at the high-generality level of “what rationality is” is perfectly consonant with a pluralism and relativism at the lower level of concrete resolutions regarding “what is rational” within the contextual setting of particular cases. The ruling principles of rationality never uniquely constrain their more specific circumstantial implementations. At each step along the way we repeat the same basic situation: delimitation, yes; determination, no. The sought-for reconciliation between the universalistic absoluteness of rationality and the variability and relativity of its particular rulings is thus provided for by the consideration that the absolutism of principles operates at the highest level of the hierarchy of rational development, while there is ever “slack” and variability as one moves towards the lowest level of concrete determinations. The variability and relativity of good reasons at the level of our actual operations can indeed be reconciled with the absolutism of rationality itself by taking a hierarchical view of the process through which the absolutistic conception of ideal rationality is brought to bear on the resolution of concrete circumstances and particular situations.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘In characterizing a belief as objectively rational we are certainly not claiming that there is a universal consensus about it. No matter how sensible a contention on any significant issue may be, there is an ever-present prospect that some people—perhaps even many—will nevertheless quite defensibly and appropriately dissent from it. The validity of our judgments is emphatically not destroyed by finding that there are people who reject them.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘We have to come to terms with epistemic realities, which include: 1) the diversity in people’s experiences and cognitive situations; 2) the variation of “available data;" 3) the underdetermination of facts by data (all too frequently insufficient); 4) the variability of people’s cognitive values (evidential security, simplicity, etc.); and 5) the variation of cognitive methodology and the epistemic “state of the art.” Such factors—and others like them—make for an unavoidable difference in the beliefs, judgments, and evaluations even of otherwise “perfectly rational” people.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘If we are going to be rational we must take—and have no responsible choice but to take—the stance that our own standards (of truth, value, and choice) are the appropriate ones. Be it in employing or in evaluating them, we ourselves must see our own standards as authoritative because this, exactly, is what it is for them to be our own standards—their being our standards consists in our seeing them in this light. We have to see our standards in an absolutistic light—as the uniquely right appropriately valid ones—because this is what is at issue in their being our standards of authentic truth, value, or whatever. To insist that we should view them with indifference is to deny us all prospects of having any standards at all. Commitment at this level is simply unavoidable. Our cognitive or evaluative perspective would not be our perspective did we not deem it rationally superior to others.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘What people think to be true is clearly something that is person-variable and thus relative. We can take the line that “What is true?” is a question that different people can quite appropriately answer differently because of the interpersonal variability of available information. But what truth is all about is something that is…altogether definite and fixed. The evidentiation at issue in the epistemic sector is doubtless interpersonally and intercommunally variable. But variability on the side of information does not make for variation on the side of concepts.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘[W]e can (quite appropriately) disagree about what it is that is true and what good reasons are at hand, while yet maintaining an (appropriately) absolutistic view of what truth and good reasons are. The ideal nature of actual truth and of actual good reasons that inhere in our (defining) conceptions of inquiry establishes a clear limit to the implications of cognitive relativism. To re-emphasize: a pluralistic contextualism of potential basis-diversity is altogether compatible with an absolutistic commitment to our own basis. One can accept the prospect of alternatives as available to the community at large without seeing more than one of them appropriate for oneself. One can combine a pluralism of possible alternatives with an absolutistic position regarding ideal rationality and a firm and reasoned commitment to the standards intrinsic to one’s own position. We ourselves are bound to see our own (rationally adopted) standards as superior to the available alternatives—and are, presumably, rationally entitled to do so in light of the cognitive values we in actual fact endorse. The crux of the pluralism issue lies in the question of just what it is that one is being pluralistic about.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘The immense success of quantitative techniques in the mathematicizing-sciences has misled people into thinking that quantification is the only viable road to objectively cogent information. But think—is it really so? Where is it written that numbers alone yield genuine understanding—that judgment based on structural analysis or qualitative harmonization is unhelpful and uninformative, so that where numbers cannot enter, intelligibility flies away? (Modern mathematics itself is not all that quantitative, since it is deeply concerned with issues such as those of topology and group theory that deal with structures in a way that puts quantitative issues aside.) [….] To be sure, to acknowledge the limits of measurability is not to downgrade the whole process, let alone to propose its total abandonment. It is precisely because we are well advised to push the cause of measurement as far as we legitimately can that we need to be mindful of the line between meaningful measurement and meaningless quantifications. That we cannot draw this line better than seems to be the case at present is—or should be—a proper cause for justified chagrin. But for present purposes the salient point is that quantification does not carry measurability in its wake nor necessarily indicate objectivity. Polls quantify public opinion, but need they indicate anything objective? The sales price of entries in an art auction are perfectly good quantities, but they reflect no more than the elusive fashion and passion of the moment. There is nothing about quantities as such to indicate that they measure anything objective. Three lessons emerge: (1) While measurement requires quantification, quantification is not sufficient for measurement. (2) Quantification is neither necessary to nor sufficient for objectivity. (3) Actual measurement, while indeed sufficient for objectivity, is not necessary for it. The long and short of it is that the linkage between objectivity and quantification is more distant and more complex than is commonly envisioned.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘Any adequate worldview must recognize that the ongoing process of scientific inquiry is a process of conceptual innovation that always leaves various facts about the things of this world wholly outside the cognitive range of the inquirers of any particular period.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘[F]ailures of objectivity—wishful thinking, self-deception, bias-indulgence, and similar departures from the path of reason—may be convenient and even, in some degree, psychologically comforting. But they are ultimately indefensible. For if it is a viable defense of a position that we want, it is bound to be a rational one. In the final analysis, “Why be rational?” must be answered with the only rationally appropriate response: “Because rationality itself obliges us to be so.” In providing a rational justification of objectivity—and what other kind would we want?—the best we can do is to follow the essentially circular (but nonviciously circular!) line of establishing that reason herself endorses taking this course. The only validation of rationality’s recommendations that can reasonably be asked for—and the only one worth having—must lie in the consideration of the systemic self-sufficiency of reason. Reason’s self-recommendation is an important and necessary aspect of the legitimation of the rational enterprise. And in those matters where rationality counts, objectivity is the best policy by virtue of this very fact itself.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘Heeding the strictures of morality is part and parcel of a rational being’s cultivation of the good. For us rational creatures morality (the due care for the interests of rational beings) is an integral component of reason’s commitment to the enhancement of value. Reason’s commitment to the value of rationality accordingly carries in its wake a commitment to morality. The obligatoriness of morality ultimately roots in an ontological imperative to value realization with respect to self and world that is incumbent on free agents as such. On this ontological perspective, the ultimate basis of moral duty roots in the obligation we have as rational agents (toward ourselves and the world at large) to make the most and best of our opportunities for self-development. Moral obligation ultimately inheres in this ontological obligation to the realization of values in one’s own life.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘[T]he crucial question for rationality is not that of what we prefer but of what is in our best interests; not simply what we happen to desire but what is good for us in the sense of contributing to the realization of our true interests. The pursuit of what we want is rational only insofar as we have objectively sound reasons for deeming this to be want-deserving. The question of whether what we prefer is preferable, in the sense of deserving this preference, is always relevant. Ends can and (in the context of rationality) must be evaluated. It is not just beliefs that can be stupid, ill-advised, and inappropriate—that is to say, irrational—but ends as well. [….] What separates evaluations from mere preferences is that the former involves standards. In evaluating we bring criteria to bear on whose basis the ideas in question are rated as good or bad, superior or inferior, just or unjust, etc. Evaluations will, as such, have to be backed by reasons articulated in terms of the relevant norms—norms which ultimately inhere in the architecture of our generalizable needs.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘To proceed objectively is…to render oneself perspicuous to others by doing what any reasonable and normally constituted person would do in one’s place, thereby rendering one’s proceedings intelligible to anyone. When the members of a group are objective, they secure great advantages thereby: they lay the groundwork for community by paving the way for mutual understanding, communication, collaboration. And in cognitive matters they also sideline sources of error. For the essence of objectivity lies in its factoring out of one’s deliberations personal predilections, prejudices, idiosyncrasies, and the like that would stand in the way of intelligent people’s reaching the same result. Objectivity follows in reason’s wake because of its effectiveness as a means of averting both isolation and error.’—Nicholas Rescher

Global and historical meta-philosophical reflection helps us appreciate the manner in which reason is ‘embedded, articulated and manifested in culturally specific ways,’ the manner in which the ‘forms of rationality’ are ‘interculturally available even if they are not always interculturally instantiated.’ As Jonardon Ganeri notes, some paradigms of rationality, for instance the instrumentalist and epistemic conceptions, do not respect the oft-cited geo-historical division between East and West, while ‘others, for instance the Jaina notion of a rationality of reconciliation, or the modeling of reason by game-theory, are found in one but not the other [culture].’—Jonardon Ganeri

‘We learn most of what we know about what makes life worth living, and how to live it well, from non-scientific [or, if you prefer, non-legal] sources–biography, narrative history, serious journalism, and religious texts [I would add 'philosophy'], not to mention novels, poetry, drama and the visual arts. For Europeans at least, there is more insight to be got from a single volume by Jane Austen or Gustave Flaubert than a whole shelf of treatises on the social psychology of bourgeois love and marriage.’—John Ziman

‘In recognizing the compelling power of values, and of logical principles (their normative, or what is sometimes called their “magnetic quality”), we humans are plainly recognizing something that goes beyond the observed facts of the natural world. And the theistic outlook now proposes to interpret these features as signifying the presence, beyond the empirical world, of a transcendent supernatural domain that is by its very nature normative—rational and moral. The two principal categories of the normative, the rational and the good, are features which traditional theology has held to apply to God in virtue of his very nature. God is goodness itself (Aquinas), he is the Logos—ultimate rationality (St. John). In short, beyond, or behind, the observable universe—the sequence of events that is simply one contingent happening after another—there is for the theist a domain of eternal value and reason, a domain that impinges on our empirical world, making us respond to something beyond the mere sequence brute facts. We human creatures (since we are ourselves rational and moral beings, at least in part) are responsive to reason and value, and in being so responsive we participate, however dimly, in the divine nature.’—John Cottingham

‘To affirm that there can be several different systems all giving us, at the same time, varying and yet legitimate “true” metaphysical descriptions of the world does not…necessarily entail that there are many realities, that nothing is absolutely real, or, put less dramatically, that there is no such thing as a single, context neutral description or account of the world, that is, as the world really is. It only means that no metaphysical description of it can be outside every possible conceptual framework, but Reality itself is. Nor does it follow that any assertions about this “real” or “true” world beyond all conceptual frameworks, are nonsense. [....] The conceptual frameworks we build in the realm of rational thought are not useless just because they cannot describe Ultimate Reality. Serious examination of, reflection on, these explanatory and interpretive schemes, their differences and overlaps, are crucial to expanding and deepening our understanding of reality, even if these conceptual frameworks (any or all possible combinations and collections of them) cannot bring us the Absolute Truth. If nothing else, they enable us to understand the relativity of conceptual truths and structures, and make us see what Pascal meant when he said that the highest function of reason is to show us the limitations of reason.’—Nandini Iyer

References & Further Reading:

• Anderson, Elizabeth. Value in Ethics and Economics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Dupré, John. Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2001.
• Ganeri, Jonardon. Philosophy in Classical India. London: Routledge, 2001.
• Goldie, Peter. On Personality. London: Routledge, 2004.
• Iyer, Nandini. “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” in Knut A. Jacobsen, ed. Theory and Practice of Yoga: Essays in Honour of Gerald James Larson. Leiden: Brill, 2005: 99-127.
• Kupperman, Joel J. Value...and What Follows. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Lloyd, G.E.R. Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity & Diversity of the Human Mind. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2007.
• Long, Jeffery D. "The Jain Doctrines of Relativity: A Philosophical Analysis," in Long's Jainism: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009: 141-171.
• Lynch, Michael P. Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
• Lynch, Michael P. True to Life: Why Truth Matters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
• Lynch, Michael P., ed. The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Mason, Elinor, “Value Pluralism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/value-pluralism/.
• McGinn, Colin. Ethics, Evil, and Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Mou, Bo, ed. Two Roads to Wisdom? Chinese and Analytic Philosophical Traditions. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2001.
• Mulhall, Stephen. ‘Misplacing Freedom, Displacing the Imagination: Cavell and Murdoch on the Fact/Value Distinction,’ in Anthony O’Hear, ed. Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 255-277.
• Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
• Murdoch, Iris. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Penguin, 1993.
• Newell, R.W. Objectivity, Empiricism and Truth. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
• Norton, David L. Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.
• Nozick, Robert. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Parekh, Bhikhu. Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
• Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
• Putnam, Hilary (James Conant, ed.). Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
• Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
• Rescher, Nicholas. Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1993.
• Rescher, Nicholas. The Validity of Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
• Rescher, Nicholas. Objectivity: The Obligations of Impersonal Reason. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997.
• Rescher, Nicholas. Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2000.
• Rescher, Nicholas. Cognitive Pragmatism: The Theory of Knowledge in Pragmatic Perspective. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.
• Sen, Amartya. On Ethics and Economics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1988.
• Stocker, Michael. Plural and Conflicting Values. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1990.
• Wedgwood, Ralph. The Nature of Normativity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Wiggins, David. Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998.
• Wong, David B. Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Ziman, John. Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Zimmerman, Michael J. The Nature of Intrinsic Value. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.
• Zimmerman, Michael J. “Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007), Edward N. Zalta, ed. URL =http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2007/entires/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/

A Jaina Propaedeutic for Metaphysical Relativism, Perspectival Rationalism and Contextual Pluralism

Ceiling inside the large Jain temple at Rankpur, Rajastan, India.

Immediately below is a slightly edited version (I’ve removed all but one of the hyperlinks and references and some diacritics were unavailable) of a section from Wikipedia’s entry on the Jain doctrine of Anekantavada. Jaina contributions to rationality and logic are among the sources of inspiration for how I’ve come to think about questions of fact and value, and especially truth and objectivity, so I thought to introduce it here by way of a preface or propaedeutic to a forthcoming post on “facts and values, truth and objectivity.” The Jains enable us to see what may be involved in formulating an “epistemology of perspective” that is at once pluralist, relative and objective, thereby exemplifying, among other things, the epistemic virtues of scepticism without succumbing to what Michael Williams has defined as “radical scepticism” (2001: 59).

Anekāntavāda is one of the most important and fundamental doctrines of Jainism. It refers to the principles of pluralism and multiplicity of viewpoints, the notion that truth and reality are perceived differently from diverse points of view, and that no single point of view is the complete truth.

This is to contrast attempts to proclaim absolute truth with adhgajanyāyah, which can be illustrated through the parable of the "blind men and an elephant". In this story, each blind man felt a different part of an elephant (trunk, leg, ear, etc.). All the men claimed to understand and explain the true appearance of the elephant, but could only partly succeed, due to their limited perspectives. [….]

The etymological root of anekāntavāda lies in the compound of two Sanskrit words: anekānta (‘manifoldness’) and vāda (‘school of thought’). The word anekānta is a compound of the Sanskrit negative prefix an, eka (‘singularity’), and anta (‘attribute’). Hence, anekānta means “not of solitary attribute.” The Jain doctrine lays a strong emphasis on samyaktva, that is, rationality and logic. According to Jains, the ultimate principle should always be logical and no principle can be devoid of logic or reason. Thus, the Jain texts contain deliberative exhortations on every subject, whether they are constructive or obstructive, inferential or analytical, enlightening or destructive.

Anekāntavāda is one of the three Jain doctrines of relativity used for logic and reasoning.

The other two are:
syādvāda—the theory of conditioned predication and;
nayavāda—the theory of partial standpoints.

These Jain philosophical concepts made important contributions to ancient Indian philosophy, especially in the areas of skepticism and relativity.

Syādvāda is the theory of conditioned predication which provides an expression to anekānta by recommending that the epithet Syād be prefixed to every phrase or expression. Syādvāda is not only an extension of anekānta ontology, but a separate system of logic capable of standing on its own. The Sanskrit etymological root of the term syād is “perhaps” or “maybe,” but in the context of syādvāda, it means “in some ways” or “from a perspective.” As reality is complex, no single proposition can express the nature of reality fully. Thus the term “syāt” should be prefixed before each proposition giving it a conditional point of view and thus removing any dogmatism in the statement. Since it ensures that each statement is expressed from seven different conditional and relative viewpoints or propositions, syādvāda is known as saptibhangīnāya or the theory of seven conditioned predications. These seven propositions, also known as saptibhangī, are:

syād-asti—in some ways, it is,
syād-nāsti—in some ways, it is not,
syād-asti-nāsti—in some ways, it is, and it is not,
syād-asti-avaktavyah—in some ways, it is, and it is indescribable,
syād-nāsti-avaktavyah—in some ways, it is not, and it is indescribable,
syād-asti-nāsti-avaktavyah—in some ways, it is, it is not, and it is indescribable,
syād-avaktavyah—in some ways, it is indescribable.

Each of these seven propositions examines the complex and multifaceted nature of reality from a relative point of view of time, space, substance and mode. To ignore the complexity of reality is to commit the fallacy of dogmatism.

Nayavāda is the theory of partial standpoints or viewpoints. Nayavāda is a compound of two Sanskrit words—naya (‘partial viewpoint’) and vāda (‘school of thought or debate’). It is used to arrive at a certain inference from a point of view. An object has infinite aspects to it, but when we describe an object in practice, we speak of only relevant aspects and ignore irrelevant ones. This does not deny the other attributes, qualities, modes and other aspects; they are just irrelevant from a particular perspective. Authors like Natubhai Shah explain nayavāda with the example of a car; for instance, when we talk of a “blue BMW” we are simply considering the color and make of the car. However, our statement does not imply that the car is devoid of other attributes like engine type, cylinders, speed, price and the like. This particular viewpoint is called a naya or a partial viewpoint. As a type of critical philosophy, nayavāda holds that all philosophical disputes arise out of confusion of standpoints, and the standpoints we adopt are, although we may not realize it, “the outcome of purposes that we may pursue.” While operating within the limits of language and seeing the complex nature of reality, Māhavīra used the language of nayas. Naya, being a partial expression of truth, enables us to comprehend reality part by part. [….]

Thus Jaina "standpoint" epistemology or perspectival rationalism entails in the first instance the idea that the nature of an object cannot be expressed by any one proposition, such a proposition necessarily expressing only a conditional or relative point of view. It's not that the Jainas are thereby committed to a non-propositional theory of truth but instead, it seems, to a para-propositional theory insofar as propositions rely on presuppositions and assumptions and these selfsame propositions are necessarily partial. And yet we cannot dispense with these propositions: hence a para-propositional theory rather than a non-propositional theory of truth. The Jaina doctrines sketched in outline form here bring attention to little noticed features of our concepts and certain structural characteristics intrinsic to our philosophical language, for example, that there are "hidden parameters in belief and assertion" and that our propositional utterances are subject to a high degree of under-specification. In short, our knowledge claims are invariably perspectival and partial, in addition to being primarily presumptive (in the sense that, as Michael Williams says, 'no move in the game of giving and asking for reasons is presuppositionless' and that all moves made by both claimants and challengers 'depend for their legitimacy...on commitments currently not under scrutiny, at least some of which have the status of default entitlements'), and thus it behooves us to understand rationally expressed and seriously held alternative claims or views as liable to possession of at least some measure of truth. While we may not want to go as far as the Jains in viewing all contradictory claims as, in some sense, merely ostensible or prima facie contradictions, perhaps we could adopt such a stance as a preliminary or presumptive heuristic until or unless we definitively conclude that we're confronted with an insoluble (for even the Jains) or an intractable or real contradiction.

Jonardon Ganeri has termed the apparent meta-metaphysical or meta-philosophical aspiration of these Jain doctrines a "rationality of reconciliation" (or 'harmonization'), the goal of which is the complete knowledge of truth, although the Jains, like other Indian philosophers (e.g., the Advaita Vedāntins and the Buddhists), believe we are also capable of possessing (God-like) omniscient knowledge, that is, absolute truth (kevalajñāna; the functional equivalent of [nirguna] Brahman-realization for the Advaita Vedāntin and nirvāna for the Buddhist). I'm more interested in the former sort of knowledge (thus setting aside soteriological concerns), particularly insofar as Jaina rationality and logic reflect, in Matilal's words, a concern that is "somewhat ethical," meaning that a

Rejection of a seriously held view is discouraged lest we fail to comprehend its significance and underlying presuppositions and assumptions. [....] [The Jainas] emphasize not only different facets of reality, not only the different senses in which a proposition can be true or false, but also the contradictory and opposite sides of the same reality, the dual (contradictory) evaluation of the same proposition and the challenge it offers to the doctrine of bivalence or reality.

This "somewhat ethical" concern is likewise evidenced in an intriguing point made elsewhere by Matilal, namely, that the Jaina doctrine of truth as a metaphorical many-faceted gem (or light refracted through a prism) entailed carrying their well known (if at times extreme) adherence to the principle of nonviolence "from the physical and practical plane to the intellectual plane."

Metaphysical and epistemological insights related to those we find among the Jains can be gleaned from the views of a handful of contemporary philosophers as diverse as Willard Van Orman Quine (e.g., the indeterminacy of 'radical translation' thesis), Hilary Putnam, Nicholas Rescher, Michael Lynch, Nelson Goodman (e.g., 'frames of reference'), Peter Unger, and David B. Wong. Consider, for instance, the following from Unger's Philosophical Relativity (1984):

The answer one prefers for a certain philosophical problem will depend on what assumptions one has adopted in relation to that problem. And, irrespective of the problem in question, assumptions crucial to one's answer will always be somewhat arbitrary, not determined by objective facts, including facts of logic and language. A certain set of assumptions yields one answer, another set another; whatever facts pertain to the problem fail to decide between the one set or the other.

Unger illustrates his "hypothesis" with an examination of "contextualist" and "invariantist" arguments in semantics as equally plausible "reference frames," a discussion that suggests a comparison with the semantic implications of Jain ideas. But here I'll confine myself to noting one obvious difference between Unger's general account of "philosophical relativity"and the Jaina idea that the means and method of acquiring knowledge are necessarily perspectival. Unger states, "Emphatically, I consider these relativity theses as no more than hypotheses, not as propositions for which we now, or soon will, have ovewhelming or even compelling reason." Of course Unger's theses on relativism were restricted to a particular class of problems in philosophy, not all philosophical topics or questions. By way of contrast, the Jaina rationality of reconciliation and non-onesidedness, apart from being global in scope, has been described by Matilal as "dogmatic:" "above all, the Jains were non-dogmatic, although they were dogmatic about their non-dogmatism." Given the soteriological motivations of Jain doctrine (which we've set aside for our discussion), alongside the vigorous religio-philosophical milieu the Jains were members of, we might forgive them for at least this type of dogmatism (that environment included both āstika sad-darśanas: Nyāya, Vaiśesika, Sāmkhya, Yoga, Mīmāmsā, and Vedānta, as well as the nāstika philosophical systems: Jainism, Buddhism, and Cārvāka).

Although we could conceivably call upon Jaina ideas in support of this or that form of cognitive pluralism, strictly speaking, it would seem their doctrines fall within the ambit of syncretism, in which the various viewpoints or perspectives are integrated so as to get a truer or complete picture of what is real. Ganeri makes this clear in his discussion of the Jaina application of these doctrines to an ontology of objects in which statements are "conditionalized" by the "somehow" operator (the syād prefix above):

A complete description of an object is a description with explicit reference to the state of the object at each [of the values of the otherwise hidden parameters of substance, place, time, and state]. What the insertion of 'somehow' [ syāt/syād] allows us to do is to begin to build up such a pointwise description of the object, each somehow-conditionalised statement carrying information along a line of sight of points. As more statements are added, a picture builds up of the whole object, just as (to use a favourite metaphor of Sukhlalji Sanghvi) we build up a picture of the whole house by inspecting it from different sides, inside and out. [....] But a question still remains—can we ever by this means, reach a complete description of the object? [....] The Jaina rationality of reconciliation certainly leads to ever more complete descriptions, but does the description ever become complete?

We need not here try to answer this otherwise important question. But we should note that, within the Indian philosophical environment at least, these selfsame doctrines might equally be characterized in toto as "synthetic," if by that we mean, with Rescher, "the construction of a combining standpoint that mixes a piece of one position with some different piece of another—that grants one the right in this respect and another the right in that one." Rescher thereby proffers at least one reason Matilal is justified in describing the Jains as "dogmatic about non-dogmantism:" "every standpoint (perspective, doctrinal stance), however 'synthetic' it may be, is just exactly that—just one more particular standpoint," even if we detect meta-metaphysical or meta-philosophical implications or possibilities as a result of this standpoint. We can similarly conclude that the Jains did not succumb to what Rescher calls "relativistic indifferentism" in formulating their doctrine of non-onesidedeness (or conversely, 'many-sidedness'), for even "if we are pluralists and accept a wide variety of perspectives as being (abstractly speaking) 'available,' we still have no serious alternative to seeing our own stance as superior—at any rate, if we have such a stance at all, as we must do if we are actually philosophizing."

The overarching moral I'd like to draw from Jaina philosophy as a propaedeutic to my forthcoming post on "facts and values, truth and objectivity," is largely metaphorical if not "ethical" in the sense invoked above by Matilal, which is to say it is more about the spirit than the letter of these particular Jain doctrines. Put differently, it revolves around notions of philosophical temperament, the motivation of our philosophical endeavors, and the possible metaphysical and epistemological lessons we might discover in a sensitive examination of the conditions provided by a global environment or civil society defined by a commitment among its members to "moral minimalism" if not democratic values, principles and praxis or cosmopolitan justice. Among these lessons might be an appreciation of the significance of metaphysical relativism and perspectival epistemology or rationalism, or simply something on the order of what Rescher calls "contextualist pluralism." This would mean that, with the Jains, we have begun to appreciate the non-onesidedness (or the complex and multi-faceted nature) of reality or the many facets of truth, a realization underwritten by the different contexts of experience unique to each of us, thereby "combin[ing] a pluralistic acknowledgement of distinct alternatives with a recognition that a sensible individual's choice among them is not rationally indifferent, but rather constrained by the probative indications of the [reflective] experience that provides both the evidential basis and evaluative criteria for effecting a rational choice" (Rescher).

References and Further Reading:

• Ganeri, Jonardon. Philosophy in Classical India. London: Routledge, 2001.
• Long, Jeffery D. Jainism: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009.
• Lynch, Michael. Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
• Matilal, Bimal Krishna. The Central Philosophy of Jainism: Anekāntavāda. Ahmedabad: L.D. Institute of Indology, 1981.
• Matilal, Bimal Krishna (Jonardon Ganeri and Heeraman Tiwari, eds.). The Character of Logic in India. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.
• Matilal, Bimal Krishna, "Religion and Value," in Jonardon Ganeri, ed., The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal: Ethics and Ethics (Philosophy, Culture and Religion). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Rescher, Nicholas. Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1993.
• Sharma, Arvind. A Jaina Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2001.
• Unger, Peter. Philosophical Relativity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
• Williams, Michael. Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Wong, David B. Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.