by Frank Forman

from Paul Weingartner and Georg J.W. Dorn, editors, _Studies on Mario Bunge's _Treatise [on Basic Philosophy]__ (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), pp. 491-509

together with Mario Bunge's reply, pp. 657- 660.

Abstract

This chapter lays out some problems for Mario Bunge to tackle as he writes _The Good and the Right_ to crown his life's achievement. How does ethics fit into his scientific metaphysics? What is the exact scope of a scientific ethics? Is it fixed for all mankind? The chapter begins with speculations on the evolution of morality and poses the puzzle that moral systems urged on humans usually go against self-interest. It concludes by stating the many virtues of virtue as a way around the puzzle and as a central basis for ethics.

1. Morality Is a Puzzle

1.1. Why should one be moral? Most moralizing is not directed at getting men to act in their long-term self-interest but to act against it. Why should there be a morality in the first place? In non-human animals, pleasure directs them toward what furthers their interests and pain away from harm. The more lowly animals act without emotion; how emotions evolved (indeed, into a whole bunch of them and not just pleasure and pain) is not very well understood. Animals seem to have bargained a social contract, metaphorically speaking, to constrain short-run actions for long-run mutual benefit. Some animals teach their offspring, the survival advantage being that hardware costs in terms of brain size needed to handle the fine nuances of every novel situation would be prohibitive. Somehow the emotion of curiosity got wired in. In humans, curiosity is particularly acute, and it is an achievement of a tall order that public schools can kill it off.

1.2. But in man, the pleasure-pain mechanism works so poorly that one might justly conclude that man is Nature's biggest mistake. This was not obviously the case for the 98% of our history as hunting societies, though, and it might be better to conclude that civilization is Man's biggest mistake. But we had better be clear about what counts for civilization. Jaynes (1976)^ characterized near-eastern civilizations as what might be called giant mental hospitals, in that conscience took a quite literal form: men hallucinated voices of the gods in their brains, much as do twentieth-century schizophrenics. Some moral education there may have been, but it was a far cry from the complex and quite deliberate affair it has been from the Greeks onward. Complexity hardly guarantees consistency, which fact has enabled the ordinary-language moral philosophy-bureaucracy to generate endless papers in the futile quest to reconcile conflicting moral intuitions. ^Jaynes, Julian (1976). _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

1.3. Jaynes did not describe what the hallucinating, *civilized* mind evolved *from*, the chief reason no doubt being that minds leave few traces he could work with. Anthropologists have, of course, studied modern savages extensively but with a crusading effort to show that they are "just like" us, much like that of economists who have tried to show that rats are "rational". (Besides modern savages are far from isolated.) So whether savages were crazier, as defined by *our* psychiatry, than civilized near-easterners is unknown. What we do know is that agriculture allowed a ten-fold increase in population density, and by this standard civilization was a rousing success and not Man's biggest mistake. Craziness may well have been the norm (whence comparison with modern schizophrenics, who have much else wrong with them, should be pressed only so far), but life was evidently peaceful.

1.4. Warfare, as ever, disrupted things. It took over a millennium for the Egyptians and Babylonians to get a decent war going (the Old Testament being largely the tale from the viewpoint of those hapless creatures caught in the middle), with shifting coalitions among once peaceful groups and with the beginnings of the great barbarian invasions from the north, of which the Russian invasion of Afghanistan is the latest. Should the supply of barbarians be running out, I worry about what will keep mankind churned up. We may become too civilized, and biologists know that domestication leads to genetic changes that soften the bones and shrink the brain, which becomes useless as survival becomes automatic.

1.5. It has been argued, however, that Europeans do not fit Lewis Morgan's famous line of evolution from savagery to barbarism to civilization but rather evolved from low barbarism to high barbarism (Swartzbaugh 1969-1971).^ (Thus Ataturk's "modernization" program was an attempt to make (high) barbarians out of civilized Turks, a huge reversal of ordinary language!) Again, we cannot administer personality tests and brain scans to vanished low barbarians any more than with prehistoric (genuine) savages. Yet the finding that the cortex hemispheres are more integrated in Europeans than in Arabs (the former confuse left and right less often) might suggest that high barbarian morality will be far more intricate than civilized morality and even further removed from any pleasure-pain mechanism. I only note that the legal bureaucracy in Turkey has swollen enormously, though short of the world's first and second in lawyers per capita, Israel and the United States. Whether low barbarians had more lawyers and theologians than savages will take considerable ingenuity to decide. ^Swartzbaugh, Richard Grey (1969-1971). "The 'Collective' Soul", _The Mankind Quarterly_ 10-1: 22-44; 10-4: 229-236; 11-4: 221-244; 12-1: 48-54.

1.6. Whatever the causes, morality has become mostly odious, and with the breakdown of belief in Divine incentives to behave ("He's makin' a list, he's checkin' it twice/ He's gonna find out who's naughty and nice"), we are said to live in an age of moral CRISIS! Utilitarians and economists should rejoice, however, for we are in fact in the midst of a veritable happiness explosion. Life spans, the best overall measure of utility, taking one century with another, continue to rise, and in the affluent world, esp. after World War II, there has been a proliferation of *ponds* (totem poles, status spheres). Robert Frank (1985) demonstrated that men are myopic about relative status, in that they do not rejoice about having big brains and opposable thumbs but rather compare themselves with conspecifics nearby. Today, almost anyone can be a Big Fish if the pond is restricted to, say, having the best music-on-stamps topical collection in the local stamp club. (A starter set of 200 all-different music stamps can be had for only $ 19.95 plus shipping and handling.) To be sure, crime and noise may partially offset this, but much worse for happiness are the legions of professional grumblers, including philosophers. I leave it to revealed-preference types to argue that grumbling necessarily raises utility, since there is so obviously a demand for it, but I add that much of it is tax-subsidized. I am thinking particularly of "anti-racism" campaigns that periodically rage through the public schools. ^Frank, Robert H. (1985). _Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status_. New York: Oxford University Press.

1.7. Recall the argument so far. Behavioral repertoires become more complex as the possibility of learning increases. At the same time, emotional repertoires also become more complicated. Nevertheless, survival- and reproduction-enhancing behavior is rather tightly linked to emotions. With high barbarism, much more so than with civilization, the link has been severed, and there is now such a long leash between behavior and reproduction that Daniel Vining (1986)^ has issued a major challenge to sociobiologists to explain current dysgenic trends. I am afraid, though, that cultural change is going to race ahead of brain change, perhaps even after designer genes have become widespread. ^Vining, Daniel R., Jr. (1986). "Social Versus Reproductive Success: The Central Theoretical Problem of Human Sociobiology", _Behavioral and Brain Sciences_ 91: 167-216.

1.8. As the capacity to learn increases, not only do behavioral and emotional repertoires get more complicated, but so also do moral repertoires. I must leave the natural history of encomplicating morals to others, but I suggest it is most complex among high barbarians. (I trust it is completely obvious that my own historical remarks are speculative only; what is important philosophically is to recognize that morals so often go against inclination.) What barbarians, persistently maligned by the press and Hollywood, have also developed is the possibility of bringing that morality under control. Perhaps cortex integration is the key, allowing fact and theory hemispheres to work together, at first to result in Greek philosophy but later in a more robust scientific method, of which the hero of this book has given the best discussion to date along with many suggestions for its improvement.

1.9. It is odd to call such a cheerful man as Mario Bunge a hero, but this is precisely the problem! Moralizers fit much too closely H. L. Mencken's definition of a Puritan as one "who has the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy." Just how the congenitally morose among the high barbarians (Kant being all-time Big Fish in the sourpuss pond) took over morality should be the top project among historians of ideas, but for now Mario Bunge's great task is to build a scientific morality, just as he built a scientific ontology. I hope The Last Volume of his _Treatise on Basic Philosophy_ will be reasonably Panglossian, that the good prof has not been listening to too many subsidized grumblers and CRISIS! mongers.

1.10. In what follows, I shall sketch some issues for Mario Bunge to address in his _Last Volume_, which will be called _The Good and the Right_. I have exploited the two ontology volumes of the _Treatise_ in a book of my own, _The Metaphysics of Liberty_.^ The book expounds Mario Bunge's emergentist ontology in lay language, using it as a framework for restating the contractarian approach to political philosophy of the Public Choice economist, James M. Buchanan (most notably in The Limits of Liberty (1975)^^). I jump over ethics and cheerfully leave this hard task to Mario Bunge. He and I disagree sharply on politics: his views are close to those of an old fashioned (New Deal) liberal, though he does distance himself from said liberal in that he is rather more willing to recognize the unfortunate consequences of liberal policies in practice. He does not automatically endorse the omnicompetent state, while my views are toward the omni-*in*competent state. At a philosophical level of abstraction, though, I hope we need not disagree. ^Forman, Frank (1989). _The Metaphysics of Liberty_. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. ^^Buchanan, James M. (1975). _The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1.11. I shall suggest to him the potential for grounding morals on a theory of virtue and that one ought to be virtuous for the same reasons one ought to get physical exercise. Regards politics, in principle a state less than omni-incompetent could nudge men toward virtue. In practice totalitarian states have pretended to greatly foster it. (Witness Robespierre's Republic of Virtue!) Where Mario Bunge and I sit "Between Anarchy and Leviathan", the subtitle of Buchanan's _Limits_, is partly a matter of how we view the state's competence, but partly also, I shall be arguing, of how far men value doing things themselves regardless of how much better the government might do things for them.

2. What in the World's Furniture!

2.1. The big disputes often seem entirely semantic, of men talking past one another. A semantic umpire is just what the doctor ought to order. Mario Bunge could certainly qualify to be this patient physician, keeping precise track of grammar and usage among the disputants. He is a physicist, though, more than a physician, and his ontology volumes are those of a scientist more than of a man skilled at diagnosing any among a variety of ontological diseases. Though he began his _Treatise_ with semantics, I have found his ontology volumes more rewarding and think the ontological difficulties in ethics are far more serious.

2.2. Let this metaphysicist tell us what moral discourse is all about, the place of moral laws in his Great Chain of Ontological Being. Mario Bunge is emphatically not a reductionist (ontological bulldozers he calls them) and will not allow that moral statements can be reduced to declarations of preference, any more than he will reduce the emergent biological property of preferring to chemical activity.

2.3. Indignant moralizers certainly do not think they are just announcing how they might like things to be, but it is far from clear just what kinds of truth such outbursts *are* supposed to represent. To say that morals come from God, nature, or our own intuitions can be argued, and men quarrel incessantly over what God, nature, and intuition say. But are moral utterances law statements about physical or chemical or biological or social or artifactual systems, Mario Bunge's five? Or is there some sort of irreducible Great Chain of Moral Being (self, family, race, species maybe) that is off in a Popper World 4?

2.4. I know the good professor's answer, and I would understand if he succumbed to the sore temptation to write off moral discourse as an ontological illusion. He did, after all, give us two splendid hatchet jobs on dialectical materialism and Popper's World 3 in his _Scientific Materialism_ (1980)^. He cannot do the same for morality, though, for there does not seem to exist anywhere among philosophers a serious grappling with the metaphysics of morals that he could work *against*. All we have are futile attempts by ordinary-language semanticists to render the common man and the common philosopher's convoluted and incoherent talk consistent and never mind consistent about what. ^Bunge, Mario (1980). _Scientific Materialism_ Dordrecht: Reidel.

2.5. Instead, as I said, Mario Bunge will have to build a morality to fit in with the ontology he built in _The Furniture of the World_ (1977)^ and _A World of Systems_ (1979)^^. The first seven volumes of the _Treatise_, by contrast, were the easy ones. "All" he had to do was survey contemporary science and scientists, root out their underlying assumptions and methods, and systematize the lot. It is a stupendous achievement for which, if perhaps others had the ability, only he had the sheer stubbornness, though he also had a patently good time. What will make _The Last Volume_ so difficult is that there is no body of concrete results in ethics for him to work with. The emergentist materialism that resulted in _Furniture_ was foreshadowed by his _Scientific Research_^^^ ten years earlier and even by his _Causality_^^^^ in 1959 and hosts of articles in between. No wonder there is no such foreshadowing on ethics and that _The Last Volume_ has been so long delayed! ^Bunge, Mario (1917). _Ontology I_: _The Furniture of the World_. Vol. 3 of _Treatise on Basic Philosophy_. Dordrecht: Reidel. ^^Bunge, Mario (1979). _Ontology II_: _A World of Systems_. Vol. 4 of _Treatise on Basic Philosophy_. Dordrecht: Reidel. ^^^Bunge, Mario (1967a). _Scientific Research_. 2 Vols. Berlin: Springer. ^^^^Bunge, Mario (1959). _Causality: The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern Science_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

2.6. First question for the professor: **What is the scope of morality?** Is it about what men might do to pursue the good and fulfilling life? Is it about how men might treat one another? Or is it about situations where men might compel one another, privately or through government? But remember, men do not respond to threats, whether a parking ticket or Hell, out of the goodness of their hearts. My hope is that the scope of morality will include all these areas, from self-fulfillment to secular government, excluding commands from a divinity or other Being outside Mario Bunge's ontology.

2.7. Second question: **What is the content of moral statements?** Let me suggest that they are facilitative ones: do *this* if you want a fulfilling life; all of you do *this* and forswear *that* if you want a social system that facilitates individual fulfillment. This second is incredibly controversial, for it rules out collective goals and seems to endorse the opposite image of atomistic individuals pursuing ends that are wholly separate from one another in the manner of, say, Thomas Hobbes. I know what Mario Bunge will say here: only individuals value and pursue goals (holism, no), but among the things, states, and processes they value can be emergent properties of social systems, such as freedom, justice, opportunity, equality (720 major kinds, according to Rae (1981)^), and community (systemism, si; atomism, no). ^Rae, Douglas W.; Yates, Douglas T., Jr.; Hochschild, Jennifer L.; Monroe, Joseph; and Fessler, Carol (1981), _Equalities_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

2.8. Now economists build moralities: they argue that freedom of contract facilitates individual production at least of those things that can be exchanged under contracts. It is easy, in a very great number of cases, to argue that restrictions on these freedoms, such as rent control and minimum wage laws, are inferior, in the rather uncontroversial Pareto sense that all those who now benefit from such laws could be more than compensated by those who would gain from their repeal. A huge number of assumptions, some still being unearthed, go into economists' theorems, and it is too bad that Mario Bunge only gives a brief critique of (about half of) them in his _Treatise_ rather than a really constructive companion to _Foundations of Physics_ (1967).^ ^Bunge, Mario (1967b). _Foundations of Physics_. Berlin: Springer.

2.9. Economists are more like physicians (they diagnose almost as much as medicine men) than physicists. They can spot ills better than promote healthy growth, and neither kind of doctor should be taken overly seriously outside their domains of competence. Nevertheless, I should advise aspiring moral doctors to take a full year's course in economics in professional school, as being able to handle economists' skills will prove useful in their art. Economics shows better than any other field how that zone of cooperative competition called the market economy is a great though imperfect harmonizer of the long range interests of men. Laughable as it sounds, to everybody except what I call Dinosaur Liberals, so too could be politics, which was Buchanan's hope in writing _The Limits of Liberty_^, where he argued that there might be unanimous agreement, not on every law passed, but on the constitution that grants but also restricts the state's power to pass laws. I shall be suggesting to the professor a testable theory of virtue as another way the conflict of virtuous men's interests will be kept small. ^Buchanan, James M. (1975). _The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2.10. A third preliminary question for Mario Bunge: **How thoroughgoing might the science-art of morals be?** Ontology, we learn from the furniture book is the most general science, but he adds, "We shall not list the kinds of constituents of the world but shall leave that task to the special sciences. For no sooner does the metaphysician pronounce the world to be 'made of' such and such kinds, than the scientist discovers that some of the alleged species are empty or that others are missing from the metaphysician's list" (p. 153). Morals, too, may be only very general and abstract. I stated that a systems-based morals will not assume that men are atoms having no shared goals. Economists know this and mumble periodically about "interdependent utility functions", but usually without saying much specific. Any attempt to characterize this interdependence would involve very hard work, and any results would be good for only one time and one place. There are specialists, it is true, in the economic development of Lower East Volta, but only rarely does one show much facility with the logic of capitalism. I hasten to add the advice of free-marketeers is exactly the same throughout the world, namely to get government out of the economy. True, I know of no country where there is too little government interference in the economy, but Lower East Volta economists ought to be able to give advice on its tax system, its patent system, its structure of contract law rather than speak in universalist platitudes.

2.11. How can Mario Bunge keep _The Last Volume_ from getting stuck on moral platitudes? In a sense, this metaphysicist does not want to. He does not want to be a moral metaphysician like the applied medical ethics doctors who will brief legislators on the issues regarding current federal laws against selling one's organs, or like and applied economist testifying on just what the effects of halving the top marginal income tax rate will have on Lower East Volta's economy. I do know the good professor is opposed to cannibalism (does he think it is savage or lower barbarous?), but he would be hard put to erect a moral theory comprehensive enough to decide the issue or even to show just what it would take in the development of social and moral science to be able to. (My own opinion is that boiling Christian missionaries is an excellent idea! Jesus has wreaked more net psychological damage than anyone in human history and I do not exclude Mahomet or Marx.)

2.12. Cannibalism is a good test issue. Recall that only individuals value and that morality really ought to redound to the benefit of individuals and not just make their lives miserable. (What to say to a society of sourpuss Kants who quite evidently want to be miserable involves the quite problematic issue of whether the "real" Kant, the enlightened- long-run-self-interest Kant, wants to be happy. Mario Bunge would make a stupendous contribution if he could just show that this problem admits of any solution.) The question is one of comparing a given society with and without the institution of taking literally the economist's term "consumption". (Note well: If cannibalism goes, a good many other things may have to go also.) Is the society more viable with or without? A random individual (the veil of ignorance approach)? How much does the random individual care about a change in the chances of his society's survival? Or do we set up the winners and losers in the "with" situation and apply the Pareto test of compensation vis-a-vis the winners and losers in the "without" situation and, as Buchanan insists, actually carry out the compensation? Note the heroic assumption that it is possible to get a fix on what the changes will actually be! I am also assuming that social peace is not disturbed by raising such issues. Quite a number of men today, and by no means all of them Christians, feel that the remorseless questioning of religion in the modern age has caused untold social harm. Whether there is a choice in the matter, that is, whether the folks who gave the world the West are psychologically capable of forever keeping their relentless questioning and skepticism bottled up, is not asked.

2.13. A final preliminary question: **What is a "society" anyhow?** In Mario Bunge's systemic ontology, a social *system* has a composition (a set of men), an environment (both things other than men and men elsewhere), and a structure (the set of systemic laws scientifically governing interactions among the society's members and between them and the environment). These are all simply *facts* (including law statements and scientific theories). But what facts establish the boundaries of a social system? All of mankind makes up the composition of one grand social system, while those with odd Social Security numbers do not. What of those present in the United States on January 1, 1989, including aliens and visitors, legal and illegal, resident and nonresident? What of U.S. citizens anywhere, including those residing or visiting elsewhere? Or, what about members of the Mencken Society? What is the relationship between breakable by-laws promulgated by that Society and unbreakable scientific laws, such as sociologists and economists hope to find, of the structure of human social systems? I am tempted to suggest that man-made laws and by-laws belong to Mario Bunge's *fifth* ontological layer of artifacts rather than to his fourth layer of social systems. But he has claimed that the polity (legal system) is a subsystem of a fourth-layer social system. Perhaps he could describe it as an *artifactual* subsystem. (I am not sure whether conceptual, as well as material, artifacts are permitted on the fifth layer.) But what about moralities, which are only very partly designed and so often disobeyed? There are many schools of jurisprudence about what man-made laws are and I am usually persuaded by the last author I read. I suspect that there may be more than one solution compatible with the two ontology volumes. But remember these volumes constitute the *first* attempt to *build* a metaphysics compatible with modern science. Answering these ontological questions about society boundaries and man-made laws may involve understanding quite a bit more *social* science than exists today. One may well despair, inasmuch as the hermeneuticists' *practice* of social science differs far more from that of the curve fitters than, as Mario Bunge has so well argued, does that of pro- and anti-Copenhagenists in quantum mechanics. Convergence in methodologies and practices will no doubt go hand in hand but probably only slowly in the near future.

3. Virtue Is Its Own Reward

3.1. Virtue is making a comeback in philosophy. One impetus is that men are getting sick of cynicism, nihilism, decadence, and other symptoms of CRISIS! The means by which talk about virtue is possible, namely the essence of human nature, is making a comeback, too. For most of the modern era, essences were regarded as a medieval superstition that only Roman Catholic philosophers had not abandoned. Nominalism, the idea that concepts are arbitrary, has held sway in philosophy from William of Occam onward.

3.2. It was Charles Peirce who, as in so many things, helped bring essences back, but with a twist. His pragmatism was a metaphysical, not an ethical, doctrine, which held that concepts are *true* to the extent they are *useful* in scientific theories. Concepts change with our sciences; so they are not eternal (the old idea of essences), but neither are they arbitrary (science puts limits on freewheeling concept formation). Mario Bunge is a great pupil of Peirce. He is the first (and so far the only) one to carry out Peirce's call during the 1890s to establish a scientific metaphysics, and he devotes a long chapter of his _Scientific Research_ (1967)^ to the matter of definition. Unfortunately, he deals only incidentally with essence and true (useful) definitions in his _Treatise_. ^Bunge, Mario (1967a). _Scientific Research_. 2 Vols. Berlin: Springer.

3.3. The ancient (Aristotle) and medieval (Aquinas) concept of virtue was connected with the pursuit of the good life, with pursuing the proper ends of what constituted the essence of a man. But for Ockham, Hobbes, Hume, and later moderns, reason can no longer discover the good life or the essence of man. Rather, reason can only help discover the means to satisfy what Roberto Mangabeira Unger, in _Knowledge and Politics_ (1975)^, calls "arbitrary desires". (See also the chapter on Unger in my book.) That desires might be just anything allows economics, as I said above, to be completely abstract and general. But the price of such generality is a draining of empirical content ("explaining everything explains nothing") and a turning of economics into a pure logic of choice, a branch of mathematics (Buchanan 1968). In a political philosophy supportive of individual rights, it ultimately becomes impossible to locate the nose in "your freedom ends where my nose begins". Extreme generality drains the content, too, from morals and politics. The wife-beater has his arbitrary desire, the wife hers. ^Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1975). _Knowledge and Politics_. New York: Free Press.

3.4. Recall now my remark that a medical physician will tell a patient that he ought to exercise and eat right. This "ought" statement is in fact a compact "is" statement: should the patient follow the doctor's regimen, he will be healthier, happier, and more productive. Medical artists cannot pinpoint the optimal amount and kind of exercises, but it is fair to say they have enough know-how usually to make good diagnoses. (At least today: only a decade ago most Establishment doctors were hostile to jogging.) Moreover, doctors can tell their patients that, once they get over the initial effort to get into shape, exercise will become a joy, a positive addiction even. They can also overdo it, though, as not a few joggers turned marathoners have found out.

3.5. To connect with virtue: Jody Palmour states in _On Moral Character: A Practical Guide to Aristotle's Virtues and Vices_ (1986)^, that "moral virtue is thus the characteristic disposition to make choices based on one's own deliberations about what is required to promote the proper wish for human development in ourselves and others." Now "mens sana in corpore sano" comes from Juvenal (c. 60 - c. 130 A.D.) and not Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), which may be the reason why Palmour does not list moderate exercise among the virtues, which he depicts as the happy medium (Golden Mean) between the opposing vices of deficiency and excess. What he does insist upon is that character virtues require *moral exercise* (not his term), that they require less effort as time goes on, and that they can become habit forming. Indeed, his book is not just an update of Aristotle (he quotes extensively also from modern philosophers, psychologists, and general observers of the human condition); it is also intended to be a moral exercise manual. Palmour not only teaches philosophy (Georgetown University), he also conducts moral leadership development training seminars. He is a moral physicist, a moral physician, and a moral coach. ^Palmour, Jody (1986). _On Moral Character: A Practical Guide to Aristotle's Virtues and Vices_. Washington: The Archon Institute for Leadership Development.

3.6. I think that great eclectic, Mario Bunge, might be much stimulated by Palmour's work as he writes his _Last Volume_. I urge that he construe morals broadly, to be something more than conventions atomistic individuals adopt to better enable each person to satisfy his arbitrary desires. Too many economists doing morality and too many philosophers steeped in economics and game theory leave out virtues and aspirations altogether and confine morals to governing only interactions between men, which is a shame and very largely due, I think, to the fact that, essences having been banished from modern philosophy until recently, it is hard to talk about virtue except sneeringly and by putting the word in quotation marks. Palmour, at the other end, has little to say about interpersonal rules, as though virtuous men will somehow have the optimal amount of public spiritedness.

3.7. Palmour bases his ideas on psychological grounds. He argues that our reactions to men and events powerfully help determine our actions. If a man systematically overestimates the objective dangers of a situation, he develops a fearful and cowardly character. Ditto for underestimation and recklessness, courageousness being the happy mean. Conversely, a man of cowardly (reckless) character will tend to make such over- (under-) estimations. The bulk of _On Moral Character_ is given over to classifying dozens of emotions and bases of evaluation, adding cross-classifying discussion of the effects of each emotion-cognition pair on the others.

3.8. I think I know how Professor Foundations will react: these wise observers, from Aristotle to Palmour, are not wrong, but neither have they grounded their theses about this cognition-emotion link in neuroscience and evolution. I know of a general attempt at a neurophysiological link-up, Magda Arnold, Emotion and Personality (1960)^. Whether her work has been ignored, refuted, or built upon I do not know, but she did not report finding specific neural pathways for each emotion, nor did she explain the evolution of such pathways in vertebrates. (Nor was Mario Bunge able to report the exact location of the neural systems with feedback loops involved in free will.) Mario Bunge will also ask whether the Golden Mean a virtuous man thinks he has found through neuroscientific training resulting from moral exercise will really be appropriate for modern man. Mario Bunge, I am certain, would feel that the neural machinery handed down from our hunting days biases for recklessness in matters of warfare but cowardice in ideas. I call his attention to a well-known discussion of the matter, High Barbarism and its Discontents, the only book common to both rival reading lists of Radicals and Traditionalists in the CRISIS! at Stanford University last year over the required course in Western Civilization. ^Arnold, Magda B. (1960). _Emotion and Personality_. 2 Vols. New York: Columbia University Press. 4. Interpersonal Morality

4.1. Despite the implications of Genesis, we are not all stamped out from the same Divine cookie cutter. Some of us are just plain vicious and perhaps were born without a conscience, or with one too small for current reformers to do much about. Others, including perhaps most of the world's great achievers, refuse to settle on a Golden Mean and instead insist on living life on the brink. The rest of us, meanwhile, make them wear motorcycle helmets and in general try to get them to conform. We lose some progress, but we also get domestic tranquility. How might we organize society wisely? If the Great Ontologist can answer my four questions, he may now be ready to tackle questions of what makes up, by sheer tonnage of books, the largest area of morality, the interpersonal.

4.2. This is going to be tricky, if holism is to be rigorously avoided. Mario Bunge, of course, is acutely aware of this, but he leans toward politically liberalism and liberals are given to loose talk about such nebulous matters as social justice. In the chapter on Friedrich Hayek in my book, I argued that such talk, at least in certain cases such as graduated inheritance taxes, can be rendered consistent with Mario Bunge's own value individualism, the thesis that only individual men value and choose. Very great care at every turn is needed, and even libertarians, with their concentration on individual rights, hold that there are duties on the part of everyone else to avoid violating these rights and to live up to the terms of their agreements. I leave it to Mario Bunge to specify what duty-talk means ontologically.

4.3. Now, vicious men, among other things, cheat on their agreements and steal from other men. It is known from the work of Stanton Samenow, _Inside the Criminal Mind_ (1983)^, that a habitual criminal often commits several crimes a day and that he has conditioned his brain to turn off his conscience during criminal acts. Criminals are compulsive thrill-seekers and hard to wean from their kind of life to that of a humdrum middle-class producer. Samenow makes the extreme statement that every vicious man can become virtuous through the exercise of "enough" will power. He certainly presents some remarkable cases of reformed criminals and at present one would be hard put to prove that a given criminal lacked sufficient neural machinery to reform, that his viciousness is absolutely incurable on today's technology. Still, Samenow's extreme, universal statement is for now untestable. ^Samenow, Stanton E. (1983). _Inside the Criminal Mind_. New York: Times Books.

4.4. Let us nevertheless see where it might lead. Let us also suppose that virtuous people do not steal. The argument might be that an honest pride in one's achievements is a virtue, a golden mean between the deficiency of abject humility and the excess of arrogance. Acquiring something through trade is honorable, but stealing short-circuits pride and hence is not honorable. There may be exceptional cases when theft is justified, but ordinarily no thing is worth the psychological price that an otherwise virtuous man would have to pay. Another assumption: those who follow their medical doctor's advice and get into shape are grateful for having done so; ditto for those who become virtuous. Yes, I know patients relapse; it is a problem I shall leave to the good prof. (I also trust the good prof will be careful and not use words like "justified" five sentences above until his theory has been advanced to the point where the concept may be introduced and properly defined.)

4.5. What we may have here is a rationale for a non-holistic interpersonal ethics. Virtuous men do the moral thing, and all of us find it best to strive toward virtue and moral health. It takes hard work but in the end it pays. Don't steal. Abide by your agreements. Help little old ladies who are not self-righteous feminists cross the street.

4.6. The details will have to be worked out and our knowledge of evolutionary neurology will have to advance if any of these ideas about virtue are to be proven scientifically. In the meantime we shall have to rely on the wisdom of the ages from Aristotle to Palmour, educated opinion, mere opinion, and differences of opinion. It is nice to know the abstract possibility of a scientific ethics, but only a small fraction of "in principle" possibilities ever get carried out. The biggest challenge for the author of _The Last Volume_, as if I have not laid down challenges enough, is how to navigate in a sea of ignorance.

4.7. One virtue Ayn Rand (1961)^ has talked about that needs to be added to Jody Palmour's list is productivity, specifically a life plan. The corresponding vices are purposelessness or laziness and workaholism. Life plans are as open ended as biological evolution. No one could have predicted man from the first hesitant mammal, nor can one predict the future of his career. In Mario Bunge's ontology, the future is constrained by scientific laws, but the intersection of the possibilities remaining by each constraint is not necessarily, and in general fact is not, a set with a single member. Real possibility, including that open to human choice under free will, is a major feature of Bunge's metaphysics. ^Rand, Ayn (1961), "The Objectivist Ethics." Paper delivered at a University of Wisconsin Symposium on "Ethics in Our Time" in Madison, February 9. Reprinted in _The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism_. New York: New American Library: Signet Books 1964.

4.8. Choices can be automatic, and in such cases sense can be made that a utility function drives the choice, that one's brain is passively maximizing utility. (Dr. Bunge, I know mathematical objects have no causal efficacy. I am speaking of a brain that on certain occasions goes into action right away.) I can indeed predict the choices of others sometimes, as in knowing my daughters will choose ice cream over eggplant. Their choices are real: they can always choose eggplant to get their pop's goat or (a "conceptual" possibility I shall probably never observe) they might be so saturated with ice cream that they would choose eggplant out of biological calling for "real" food.

4.9. But when choices are not automatic, the notion of utility maximization becomes an empty tautology. When a man (or a child) deliberates and racks his brain for information, choice is postponed. In fact, deliberation itself can be postponed to search for information outside the brain. In these cases, the utility function (value ranking of expected outcomes of some set of alternative choices, together with the formation of the expectations, all compressed and ready to go whenever a similar set of choices comes up again) is being actively constructed. One can, moreover, deliberately alter one's utility function, as in taking music appreciation courses. As Buchanan put it in 1978, "man wants freedom to become the man he wants to become".^ ^Buchanan, James M. (1969). "Is Economics the Science of Choice?" in E. Streissler (ed.), _Roads to Freedom: Essays in honor of F. A. Hayek_. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (reprinted in Buchanan 1979) [Buchanan, James M. (1979). _What Should Economists Do?_. Indianapolis: Liberty Press].

4.10. Let me list some aspects of our sea of ignorance and tease out some implications for Mario Bunge's ontological thesis that only individuals value. The first aspect has been stated: we are ignorant of our future, esp. since our future choices help make this very future. We, all of us, value this freedom, though of course to varying degrees. Another aspect of ignorance is that the various virtuous Golden Means must be discovered by each of us separately. To say, platitudinously, that productivity is between laziness and workaholism is to state only a broad Golden Zone. A friend or virtue doctor (moral physician) can help narrow the zone, but only so far. Any further narrowing must be done by the individual. Third, even for immediate utility satisfaction, others can know me only so far. In all these cases, I am by Nature (evolution) an active animal and value being active in and of itself. Sometimes I will surrender my choices to an expert (well, I'll promise to carry out his advice!), but only when my trust in his knowledge and his care about me will result in my betterment better than I could do by myself unaided and then only if this difference of betterments overrides my always present desire to do things myself, to be master of my fate and captain of my soul.

4.11. All this ignorance makes for a great deal of subjectivity. Values are unquestionably subjective in Mario Bunge's ontology, in the sense that a thing, state or process does not have any intrinsic value apart from a valuing animal (called the subject). But values are also objective, in another sense that things, states, and processes have objective consequences and in a third sense that organisms do have objective biological requirements. However, given this sea of ignorance, the subject is epistemically privileged to know these consequences and his own probable retrospective valuations of them. Our brains are not hardwired together into some collective Mind. This privilege is not absolute and the advice that one should not eat a wild mushroom unless he can state its exact Latin species and genus is sound Ordinarily, however, my subjective *opinion* is better than all your pretended experts!

4.12. I began this essay by observing that human moralities, moralities moreover that so often urge unpleasant duties and disallow patent pleasures, are a puzzle. In other animals, there really seems to be an economist's utility function that works in their interest of survival and reproduction. Right now, I wish to observe that, even if men could have such a utility function (that is, if there were no long leash between actions and consequences that has to be bridged by learning, esp. self-directed learning), they would override it. The reason is that survival and reproduction are just two of the things men chase after. Fulfillment, wealth, glory, ideology, love, all these are also things men chase after, oftentimes fully aware that they positively conflict with survival and reproduction. Our moralities speak of these other things, too, sometimes to restrain them, other times to urge them on.

4.13. What kind of society will virtuous men want to live in? One that facilitates the flourishing of individual (by Mario Bunge, the only kind) virtue, if not one that gently nudges it. One where vices are mildly frowned upon. Gently nudging and mild frowning, for bullying and ostracism go against the sea of ignorance hypothesis: other people generally know less than I do about my own development path. Be very much aware that totalitarian states use methods far stronger than gentle persuasion to remold human nature in the name of virtue. And be aware, too, of cancerous bureaucracies in liberal states.

4.14. How can such a society be brought about? The social psychologist Raymond Cattell (see his 1972)^ has surveyed past and present societies, developed a typology of kind of social pressures, and compiled rough profiles of several. If he could survey individual members and perform tests on their brains, he might venture diagnoses of pathology. He has posited a law of convergence to the biosocial mean, whereby extraverts (those above average on extraversion) are urged to cool it and introverts urged to come out of their shells. I have examined case data in William Sheldon's (1942)^^ to test this hypothesis. Sheldon found an eighty percent correlation between degree of ectomorphy (thinness of body type, rated on a scale of 1 to 7) and cerebrotonia (the corresponding temperament type, which incorporates introversion). He also observed that mentally healthy men had temperaments close to their somatotypes. What I noted was that, in cases where ectomorphy and cerebrotonia differed, cerebrotonia was usually greater than ectomorphy, not just in cases where ectomorphy was below average (as would be the case where convergence was to the biosocial mean) but in cases going well beyond this mean. It was only among rather extreme ectomorphs that cerebrotonia was more likely to be less than ectomorphy, meaning they did come out of their shells a bit. ^Cattell, Raymond B. (1972). _A New Morality from Science: Beyondism_. Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon Press. ^^Sheldon, William H. (1942). _The Varieties of Temperament: A Psychology of Constitutional Differences_. New York: Harper & Brothers.

4.15. This instance of apparent convergence beyond the biosocial mean gives probative support to charges by many psychiatrists (who tend not to be ectomorphs, by the way, which means they will often feel pressured to cool it) that America is a "repressed society". I am speculating freely again, and I add that "repression" may very well be a public good: repression may well increase the willingness to postpone gratification and thereby boost the savings rate and spur economic growth.

4.16. The stage is now set for calculating the optimal (virtuous) amount of excess repression beyond the biosocial mean, with benevolent eugenicists waiting in the wings to propose selective breeding of ectomorphs so that there will be fewer repressed and discontented mesomorphs and endomorphs. (Those opposed to these measures will argue that the virtuous amount of repression will simply go up, with no net change in average felt repression.) Laws will be passed to bring the amount of repression into line with expert opinion about the best amount, and rent-seeking pressure groups of ectos, mesos, and endos will mushroom.

4.17. Whatever happened to the sea of ignorance?

5. A Social Contract

5.1. Let me go on record as opining that government is not very effective at doing good. It can enforce contracts, but at the expense of a lot of lawyering. It perhaps solves half of murders. On the other hand, it does a poor job of preventing robbery and rape. Governments do a magnificent job of doing bad: taxing, waging war, miseducation, misregulation, stifling competition, destabilizing the economy, fostering the vices of rent-seeking and parasitism ... Mario Bunge may be hopeful, but I suggest to him that (50%) majoritarian democracy is obsolete: the technology of special interest group formation has been so perfected that minorities routinely exploit the majority. A better rule would require a 5/6ths majority to pass legislation. Exploitation would continue (not all of us are virtuous) but in more like an optimal amount. Strict unanimity would mean exploitation only by fraud, but the business of government would grind to a halt. Five-sixths, first proposed by Knut Wicksell and repeatedly mentioned by James Buchanan, seems to this observer to be good compromise that could, upon due reflection, command wide assent. What must be borne in mind always is that no political constitution can restrict the state from doing only what I, or you or Mario Bunge, thinks is good.

5.2. I might also suggest to Mario Bunge that much of what liberals say they aim for has become metaphysical cant. My favorite example is Gordon Tullock's: liberals bellow endlessly about social injustice, specifically the maldistribution of income, but Tullock has never found one to state some specific distribution to be just and argue for it (Tullock 1983)^. Liberals operate a Ratchet Racket, so that, whatever levels of state activity in various (I say, rather ineffectual) social programs have come to exist, any roll back on any one of them is decried as evil. ^Tullock, Gordon (1983). _Economics of Income Redistribution_. Boston: Kluwer-- Nijhoff.

5.3. Enough! Libertarians can commit the sin opposite to holism, namely an implicit atomism that disallows individuals from forming opinions about emergent properties of social systems, such as income concentration, the unemployment rate, or economic growth, unless of course government has interfered with the Natural Order of the Free Market. That liberty itself is an emergent property is forgotten, as also the necessity for mere mortals to define property in the first place. Mario Bunge, the metaphysician, would do us a magnificent service by giving us handy tools to diagnose these ontological illnesses.

5.4. I spoke above of widespread consent for a 5/6ths majority rule. This is not unanimous consent, and plenty of Dinosaur Liberals would oppose what would amount to a much reduced (even if I say more effective) state. Unanimity, at the constitutional stage, nevertheless is a commendable ideal (Buchanan 1975^ and my book). A virtuous man, by implication, would not want to force his own vision of good government upon others. At the same time, he would not want to refuse to assent to a limited government that is broadly tolerable though far from ideal. (I note that my ancestors who fought in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 did not find the illegal constitution of 1789 tolerable.) Virtuous men can compromise when compromise is in order. ^Buchanan, James M. (1975). _The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

5.5. It is easier to sell social contracts (political contracts, really) and moral systems to the virtuous than to the vicious. The virtuous stay out of trouble anyhow and realize the need for some government, if only to set the boundaries of property rights and settle inevitable disputes, both with a certain amount of arbitrariness, to be sure. (Pure reason cannot be used alone to establish the optimal duration of patents and copyrights, which is why some deductivist libertarians oppose them. Mark Kelman, A Guide to Critical Legal Studies (1987)^, has done a very good job of deflating deductivist pretensions of Establishment legal academics, which apparently is necessary. This does not imply, however, that The People want leftist government, his hidden insinuation.) Virtuous social contractors may also empower the state to produce certain collective goods (Buchanan's productive, as opposed to protective, state) under its constitution. ^Kelman, Mark (1987). _A Guide to Critical Legal Studies_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

5.6. The real test of a moral system (including its provision for a political contract) is to sell it the likes of Roy Cohn (see von Hoffman (1988)^) or hardened criminals. After all, and under Mario Bunge's thesis that only individuals value, the vicious are individuals, too. How can their desires be overridden, except by holistic assumptions about the common good of the collective, virtuous and vicious alike? Rawls (1971)^^ and Gauthier (1986)^^^ are only two recent examples of scores of philosophers who have tackled this question and who have all resorted to semantic trickery, black magic, or heroic assumptions. ^von Hoffman, Nicholas (1988). _Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn_. New York: Doubleday. ^^Rawls, John (1971). _A Theory of Justice_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ^^^Gauthier, David (1986). _Morals by Agreement_. New York: Oxford University Press. [See also my review of the book in _Public Choice_ 56 (1988): 84-88.]

5.7. I am certainly no exception, when commending to Mario Bunge his exploring the idea of virtue in his _Last Volume_, for I have assumed that inside every villain is a man who could come to be nice if only he would put forth the effort, which assumption Stanton Samenow seems to think is an established fact. What I have added to this heroic thesis is a further one that the cognition-emotion links in the brain are such that knowing the various golden means and acting virtuously reinforce each other. I have also put forth for the good professor's consideration a claim that virtue can become a positive addiction once on reaches a certain level of moral fitness, much as with physical exercise. l have cited the field work of Jody Palmour^ and the neurological study of Magda Arnold^^ as evidence. ^Palmour, Jody (1986). _On Moral Character: A Practical Guide to Aristotle's Virtues and Vices_. Washington: The Archon Institute for Leadership Development. ^^Arnold, Magda B. (1960). _Emotion and Personality_. 2 Vols. New York: Columbia University Press.

5.8. By contrast, Rawls' celebrated veil of ignorance approach has the unscientific drawback that just what kinds of ignorance are to be put behind the veil are not settled in advance, nor are hypotheses about agreements subjected to testing. In the margins of my copy of his book, l wrote many times, "Is *this* going to get shoved behind the veil?" Indeed, it often seems that over half the literature spawned by his book is given over to arguing about the veil's thickness.

5.9. Gauthier, on the other hand, makes different heroic assumptions about men than I do regards virtue, several of which I unearthed in my 1988 review in Public Choice, one of them being an ability to make oneself stick to one's agreements and another being the ability of everyone to tell which of the others are prone to cheat. I think I know the answer to the second in the case of politicians: *all* of them are prone to cheat, and all of them do. But I have been taken in more than once by men I thought were honest.

5.10. In all cases, there is a powerful temptation for the philosopher to *tell* men what they have agreed to, as well as to tell other philosophers what they have really said. (Since Rawls' scheme puts liberty before redistribution, libertarians can easily claim him for libertarianism, even while Dinosaur Liberals see him as one of theirs.) The same is very much true with virtue, esp. since punishing criminals will have to be done on the excuse that criminals will be forever grateful to their jailors. Once this is allowed, excuses can be found for Big Maternalist Government. Moral bullies will parade as experts and proclaim their schemes for ordering men around to be based on the latest scientific research. Moral pseudo-science, in other words, can be dangerous. I am afraid that the price of liberty remains eternal vigilance, that a tyranny can be shoved through the loopholes of any philosophy.

5.11. The virtues of virtue as a central basis for ethics are several that might be recommended to Professor Bunge as he writes _The Last Volume_. First, virtue can accommodate human aspirations as well as rights and tedious duties. Second, it recognizes man as a shaper of his self and his destiny (Cervantes) and is thus in good accord with Mario Bunge's ontology that admits free will. Third, it is consistent with his value individualism, though stretch it we will when we lock up criminals for *their* own good. Fourth, by recognizing the sea of ignorance, it allows for a much needed dose of relativism in values as well as making a strong argument for liberty and for keeping meddlers at bay. This means it is okay for man to want to be master of his fate. Fifth, it allows for genuine enjoyment of life, unlike the sourpuss moralities. Sixth, to the extent it can be supported, the cognition-emotion positive-feedback network is a splendid finding about human nature. Seventh, virtue is amenable to progressive neurophysiological and evolutionary study. Eighth, it accords well with Mario Bunge's determined eclecticism, to fuse together the best of several theories, some of which go back to The Philosopher, namely Aristotle. Ninth, if morality is a science, it is open to correction.

5.12. A final advantage I leave till last: Ethics can very much be an applied science as well as consist of broad platitudes about the Golden Mean. This means that not every society must adopt the same emphases on all the virtues. There is no one morality that must be forever crammed down the throats of all peoples at all times. The way is open both for moral progress as well as for moral tolerance, experimentation, and diversity. No mean virtue this.

References

Arnold, Magda B. (1960). _Emotion and Personality_. 2 Vols. New York: Columbia University Press.

Buchanan, James M. (1969). "Is Economics the Science of Choice?" in E. Streissler (ed.), _Roads to Freedom: Essays in honor of F. A. Hayek_. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (reprinted in Buchanan 1979).

Buchanan, James M. (1975). _The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Buchanan, James M. (1979). _What Should Economists Do?_. Indianapolis: Liberty Press.

Bunge, Mario (1959). _Causality: The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern Science_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bunge, Mario (1967a). _Scientific Research_. 2 Vols. Berlin: Springer.

Bunge, Mario (1967b). _Foundations of Physics_. Berlin: Springer.

Bunge, Mario (1917). _Ontology I_: _The Furniture of the World_. Vol. 3 of _Treatise on Basic Philosophy_. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Bunge, Mario (1979). _Ontology II_: _A World of Systems_. Vol. 4 of _Treatise on Basic Philosophy_. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Bunge, Mario (1980). _Scientific Materialism_ Dordrecht: Reidel.

Cattell, Raymond B. (1972). _A New Morality from Science: Beyondism_. Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon Press.

Forman, Frank (1988). Review of Gauthier 1986 [_Morals by Agreement_], _Public Choice_ 56: 84-88.

Forman, Frank (1989). _The Metaphysics of Liberty_. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.

Frank, Robert H. (1985). _Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status_. New York: Oxford University Press.

Freud, Sigmund (1930). _Das Unbehagen in der Kultur_. Vienna: Intenationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.

Gauthier, David (1986). _Morals by Agreement_. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jaynes, Julian (1976). _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Kelman, Mark (1987). _A Guide to Critical Legal Studies_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Palmour, Jody (1986). _On Moral Character: A Practical Guide to Aristotle's Virtues and Vices_. Washington: The Archon Institute for Leadership Development.

Rae, Douglas W.; Yates, Douglas T., Jr.; Hochschild, Jennifer L.; Monroe, Joseph; and Fessler, Carol (1981), _Equalities_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rand, Ayn (1961), "The Objectivist Ethics." Paper delivered at a University of Wisconsin Symposium on "Ethics in Our Time" in Madison, February 9. Reprinted in _The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism_. New York: New American Library: Signet Books 1964.

Rawls, John (1971). _A Theory of Justice_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Samenow, Stanton E. (1983). _Inside the Criminal Mind_. New York: Times Books.

Sheldon, William H. (1942). _The Varieties of Temperament: A Psychology of Constitutional Differences_. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Swartzbaugh, Richard Grey (1969-1971). "The 'Collective' Soul", _The Mankind Quarterly_ 10-1: 22-44; 10-4: 229-236; 11-4: 221-244; 12-1: 48-54.

Tullock, Gordon (1983). _Economics of Income Redistribution_. Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff.

Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1975). _Knowledge and Politics_. New York: Free Press.

Vining, Daniel R., Jr. (1986). "Social Versus Reproductive Success: The Central Theoretical Problem of Human Sociobiology", _Behavioral and Brain Sciences_ 91: 167-216.

von Hoffman, Nicholas (1988). _Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn_. New York: Doubleday.

FORMAN ON MORALITY AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY (Mario Bunge's reply)

Forman addresses a bunch of interesting theoretical and practical problems. One of them is the important though usually neglected problem of the ontology underlying ethics. Are there moral facts? What is the ontological status of moral norms: are they autonomous objects, brain processes, or rules of social behavior? If the former, are they God-given? If brain processes alone, are they on a par with mathematical formulas, or do they represent actual or possible facts? And if they are part of the system of rules of social behavior, how do they come into being and how do they break down?

To such ontological problems we must add the corresponding epistemological problems. For instance, do moral norms have real counterparts, and if so what kind of correspondence is there between the two sets?; are moral principles testable, and if so how?; and how can we evaluate any given moral code unless we postulate an unassailable moral principle or two?

The two problem families are tackled in Vol. 8 of the _Treatise_, and I take it that Forman has no major quarrels with my approach. [I had not seen the draft of this volume when I wrote my article.--F.F.] In particular we share the view that, far from being Platonic ideas, moral norms (and the underlying values) are man-made and are (or ought to be) corrigible in the light of experience; that there are no values in themselves but only individuals capable of making value judgments; and that moral norms are part of the social structure since they guide social behavior.

Forman is right in holding that we do not know much about the history of morality. (It is so much easier to write about the history of ethical doctrines!) All of the histories of morals seem to be defective or obsolete, and in my view the recent sociobiological and game-theoretic work on the emergence of morality is sheer fantasy. However, we can reasonably surmise that, since there can be no viable social group without some self- restraint and cooperation, even the most primitive hominids must have practiced some moral rules. It is also likely that, as Darwin conjectured, other highly evolved gregarious animals, such as apes, monkeys, and wild dogs, practice moral rules. For example, recent observations on chimpanzees in semi-wild conditions have shown that these animals never fight to the death, and that after every fight the rivals embrace and kiss. See F. de Waal, _Chimpanzee Politics_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). But of course we do not know anything about the genetic component, if any, of such behavior patterns, nor whether chimps are anything but crass utilitarians.

Let us hope that experiments, laced with theory, will add significant knowledge about primate morality, beyond that which observation has given us. In particular, it would be nice if moral psychologists were to join forces with neurophysiologists in an effort to locate the morality centers in the brain. They might be able to conduct experiments such as the following. Take a group of subjects and pose a set of moral problems, noting their proposed solutions or lack of them. Next, lower the temperature of their frontal lobes to about 20 degrees C. [68 degrees F.], subject them to the same moral problems, and compare their solutions, or lack of them, with those they produced earlier. Use as control a group of subjects that are subjected twice to the same moral problems (with some time interval), and note whether they have had second thoughts. One of the problems, understandable to human and subhuman subjects alike, could be that of sharing a scarce resource with infants of the same species.

I disagree with Forman on three points. One of them concerns his claim that anyone, particularly "aspiring moral doctors", can get much from a full year's course in economics in a professional school. I disagree for the following reasons. Firstly, basic economics, in particular microeconomics, is supposed to be morally neutral: it counsels prudence, not morality. (See _Treatise_, Vol. 8 [_The Good and the Right_], p. 258.) Secondly, much of mainstream economic theory is half science fiction (for assuming a non-existent free market), and half ideology (for defending the interests of the propertied). Hence it is hardly a model for moral philosophy. Rather, on the contrary, as a number of businessmen have noted, big business is in need of a dose of morality if it is to be cured of the plague of levered-buyouts and speculation on junk bonds. Witness the clear warnings of such pillars of capitalism as the investment banker F. Rohatyn and the broker J. Shad. The latter, by the way, pledged $20m for the teaching of business ethics at the Harvard Business School, which has finally started to take the matter seriously: see _The Economist_, No. 7662, 1989.

I also dispute Forman's assertion that, far from living in an age of moral decay and despair, "we are in fact in the midst of a veritable happiness explosion". According to information available to anyone (a) an unprecedentedly large fraction of humankind, roughly three out of every five of is, live in poverty and, what is worse, getting poorer by the day, hence can rarely experience happiness; (b) enormous human and natural resources are being wasted the world over in military build-up at the expense of social services; (c) the very existence of the "me generation", the staggering increase in the number of cases of political and economic corruption, and the popular cult of such individuals as the Ayatollah Khomeini and Colonel Oliver North, point to increasing moral callousness. In short I would speak of an *unhappiness implosion* and of a *corruption explosion*. And I believe that to assess the moral state of the world we much look at what people do to one another, not the amount of superfluous goods that few of us can afford to consume. Social indicators are a far better moral thermometer than a stock-market or even a consumer price index.

Our third disagreement concerns government and it is only partial. I share Forman's dislike for Big Government: it is oppressive, expensive, and largely self-serving and inefficient. But Forman and I disagree on the morally right, technically efficient, and politically expedient alternative. Whereas Forman seems to echo the Reagan-Thatcher slogan "Take the government off the back of business", I favor integral technodemocracy, which involves (a) intensive public participation, with the benefit of sociotechnological expertise, in the management of all public goods, (b) cooperative (not state) ownership of all the large industries, and (c) public ownership (but cooperative or private exploitation) of all the non-renewable resources, starting with land, water and air. (See _Treatise_, Vol. 8, Ch. 11.)

I take it as unquestionable that the market is not interested in supplying such goods as clean air, basic research, social justice, and moral education. I also take it for granted that the state is no substitute for self-management--which, after all, is what democracy is all about. Further, I assume that the unrestricted domination of big business, as promoted by Nazism, is at least as bad a Pol Pot's radical egalitarianism through mass murder. Finally, I readily admit that statist socialism had failed--among other things for not being democratic--and that the welfare state is in serious difficulties--among other things for being only a relief state. For these reasons I submit that we need new ideas in sociotechnology: new utopias.

Now, utopias can be literary exercises in escapism--as we all of the 16th and 17th century utopias--or they can be sociotechnological designs based on (a) a knowledge of the sorry state of the world, (b) a projection of dangerous trends in population, utilization of resources, militarism, etc., (c) social science, (d) a realistic and selftuist (rather than egocentric or sociocentric) morality. (_Treatise_, Vol. 8, Ch. 11). Without such blueprints we won't achieve in a peaceful manner any of the necessary social reforms and we won't solve any of the huge global problems that threaten the survival of civilization or even humankind. (See also my rejoinders to Gingras and Niosi, and so Seni.)

We won't get any such new sociotechnological designs if we look back, either to Adam Smith or to Karl Marx, for history cannot be undone. And we won't get morally right, psychologically viable or politically possible blueprints unless those revolve around the basic human rights and duties, for every one of these originates in some biological or social need. (See _Treatise_, Vol. 8, Ch. 4.)

The design of viable social utopias cannot be left in the hands of dreamers: it is a task for interdisciplinary teams, some of them international, including social scientists, environmentalists, statesmen, and--why not?-- moral philosophers. The task is urgent because we are facing not only immediate regional problems, such as those of the Third World and Eastern Europe, but also global problems that threaten the survival of humankind. Free enterprise won't produce such blueprints; at least, I find it hard to visualize a successful business firm with the name *Utopia, Inc.* And bureaucrats are bound to propose fatally flawed plans: too timid, not imaginative enough, and not involving popular participation. In my opinion we need participative planning--which is inherent in technodemocracy--at all levels: local, national, regional, and planetary. But I admit that I have no solution to the key question: Who is going to bell the cats that be?