Abstract:- The first stage is to explain the two strands of criticism of an idea of certain or precise truth, not least in science, which have been current since the 1950s. Although only that commonly referred to as ‘postmodernism’ attempts to challenge the concept of truth by denying the presence of a 'reality' existing 'outside' our words and thinking and capable of confirming or refuting them, the second thread represented by ‘fuzzy’ logicians still more strongly emphasises uncertainty and vagueness as inherent in the natural universe itself. Thus the latter endorses the concept of truth but warns us to accept that specific propositions or statements we make will not be entirely true.
These themes are illustrated by reference to the contemporary issues of abortion and climate change – the one in the area of human intentional behaviour and the other a physical system. Yet both display vagueness and uncertainty in whatever propositions we may put forward about them. There are elements of disputation over language involved, especially as regards the concepts of 'innocence' and 'choice' in the case of abortion, but essentially uncertainty arises in the conditions and phenomena themselves more than in the language we use to interpret and argue about them, and so is found to be closer to the paradigm offered by fuzzy logic.
Two kinds of criticism of certainty
It may best be said that in the latter part of the twentieth century critical thought around truth has taken two quite distinct forms. In the one case the conception of truth itself is subject to criticism, whilst in the other the expectation of finding dependable, clear, and simple truths is subject to criticism. The first step in the argument of this paper is simply to indicate the two different strands of thought involved, since both the comparison and contrast seems to have been neglected in recent philosophical debate.
The more familiar – in most philosophical circles – strand, broadly indicated by the term ‘post-modernism’, seeks to minimise the function to be allocated to truth in thinking. For instance, Richard Rorty’s (1991) version of this argument is to defend a pragmatism which denies truth any explanatory function and which rejects a metaphysical dichotomy between whatever statements or propositions we may express in words, or beliefs we may hold and which may be expressed in words as statements or propositions, and something outside in the world which can confirm or refute our beliefs and statements. In his work Rorty has tried to develop a structured philosophy drawing on his interpretations of Davidson and William James, and even of Dewey, Quine, and Wittgenstein. However, many other postmodernists have tended to refuse systematic argument, holding that we ought to accept and even welcome inconsistency, for instance; so that Derrida actually praised Nietzsche for lack of consistency in his remarks (a lack which has perhaps been exaggerated).1 At the centre of much of this sort of thinking are the notions that language is a social practice and should not be expected to carry clearcut truths from the outside world into our minds, and, further, that even science along with its methods of observation, classification, and analysis is a social construct and does not provide us with dependable truths external to ourselves. Ironically, the resulting push to minimise the role of truth, or possibly even eliminate it from the philosophical picture contains an echo from the Logical Positivism of the early twentieth century, although the outlook which led the Logical Positivists to their claim that ‘true’ and ‘truth’ serve only a limited purpose, if any at all, is far removed even from that of Rorty, let alone other postmodernists.
Naturally, such a push leads to at least minimising, if not rejecting altogether, any idea of certainty. That includes even the provisional and practical kind of certainty which scientific method adopts. Rorty (1991: 35-45) presents his substitution of ‘unforced agreement’ for ‘objectivity’ in science as dropping subservience to a nonhuman power and taking a more relaxed attitude to pursuit of knowledge. He explains it thus:
On this view there is no reason to praise scientists for being more ‘objective’ or ‘logical’ or ‘methodical’ or ‘devoted to truth’ than other people. But there is plenty of reason to praise the institutions they have developed and within which they work, and to use these as models for the rest of culture. For these institutions give concreteness and detail to the idea of ‘unforced agreement.’ Reference to such institutions fleshes out the idea of a ‘free and open encounter’ – the sort of encounter in which truth cannot fail to win. On this view, to say that truth will win in such an encounter is not to make a metaphysical claim about the connection between human reason and the nature of things. It is merely to say that the best way to find out what to believe is to listen to as many suggestions and arguments as you can. (‘Science as solidarity’, Objectivity, relativism, and truth, 1991, 39).
In the first place, this plausible view meets up with the objection that innovating scientists frequently have to challenge orthodox opinions held by incumbents of their professional institutions, and they can do this only by appeal to different, and ‘objective’, truths which they have found in their own observations. That is not to ignore the point that, in the final analysis, scientific innovations prove their worth through observation and experiment using practical technologies suitable for the task, and then through development of technological applications which serve human purposes. That is, the final justification for the new ideas is practical experience, and not a metaphysical argument. But that in its turn arises from the nature of the universe in which we live, which, subject to the ongoing argument about quantum indeterminism2, appears to endorse a ‘rational’ approach to knowledge. It might be noticed that reliance on conventional opinion, even in science, may lead people to dismiss as irrational those who, for example, turn to homeopathy not out of blind faith in its strange claim that energy may be retained when molecules of a substance are absent, but out of cool recognition that conventional medicine has little to offer for their condition unless further innovations are made, and so the gamble appears worth taking. This last point illustrates that what Rorty does is not really to deny certain knowledge, since science does not, strictly speaking, claim it, but rather to impose further restrictions on that already basically pragmatic form of certainty which scientific research with its empiricist philosophy seeks. It is well known from history and social anthropology that forms of knowledge, and claims to truth, which rely on social solidarity are more likely to end by insisting that they hold certain truth, and that anyone who denies them is apostate and deserving of punishment, than the model of empirical science. The development of scientific understanding requires precisely that the solidarity of scientific institutions be kept fluid enough to allow dissenting views to be put forward, just so that the ‘free and open encounter’ which Rorty seeks actually happens.
The other strand of criticism of orthodox notions of truth, especially in science, is in fact a more thoroughgoing critique of certain truth, just because it has arisen from within the scientific tradition itself. Significantly, whereas most of the followers of postmodernism, apart from dissentient philosophers like Rorty and Derrida, are to be found within the realm of literary criticism and linguistics, most of the advocates of ‘fuzzy logic’ and related ideas are to be found amongst practitioners of engineering, computer science, expert systems, and similar disciplines related to technical application of scientific knowledge itself. These latter ideas do not oppose use of the concept of truth either in philosophy, or in everyday life where the postmodernists would say we use it only in a very limited way (a claim many would dispute). What ideas based on fuzzy logic challenge is any presumption that we can eliminate uncertainty, even from mathematical systems and a scientific view of the universe. Further, these notions of ‘fuzzy logic’ and recognition of vague and uncertain propositions go a step further than classical probability theory, which considers the chance of particular events or patterns being found to occur within a range of possibilities, each of which has no certainty of occurring, but where the level of probability is either known or at least may be estimated with some degree of confidence. In the theory of vague propositions the propositions are no longer treated as having some known or knowable probability p of being true (or false) in entirety, but as being in themselves partly true and partly false.
On this view, which in its own terms deals with vagueness as distinct from the form of pragmatism developed by Rorty in particular, there is after all a non-linguistic universe outside of ourselves which we can investigate and analyse, but that universe is itself subject to an inherent vagueness leading to degrees of uncertainty in what we can know about it. One way to distinguish these two views in terms of metaphysics would be to say that Rortian pragmatism, and even more the critiques of Derrida, insists that there is no definite world outside our languages so that nothing determines which concepts we have to use, whereas the vagueness of the fuzzy logicians insists that while we can and must use certain concepts to deal with the universe these will perforce be vague concepts. Here there will, after all, be a dualism of the sort Rorty rejects but it is a loose and fuzzy dualism between categories of ourselves and our means of expression or communication on the one hand and the external universe on the other, categories which in fact interact with each other to varying degrees.
Uncertainty and truth
Where these two metaphysical outlooks agree is that both deny that our limited resources of observation and expression can provide us with entirely trustworthy and reliable knowledge of an exterior universe around us, and insist that we should not expect otherwise. Now, it is not obvious why, whatever may apply in the more esoteric regions of mathematics and particle physics, we have to resign ourselves to an inherent uncertainty about what we can know and understand, and therefore about the truths which we can grasp and express. Benson and Stangroom (2007: 40-3) suggest that, at least for purposes of ordinary living, we do experience certain ‘foundational’ truths as being dependable and not subject to uncertainty (or vagueness as to how we express them). As they put it: ‘…walls are solid; knives cut; jumping off a cliff will cause serious injury; it hurts more to be hit with a rock than with a violet; rain is wet…’ These are things we know from our instinct to survive. Further, any sceptical argument about certain truths encounters what Blackburn (2006) has termed the ‘recoil argument’ which can be traced back to Socrates and Plato – that the scepticism must itself claim to be reliably true, thereby undermining its own claim about certain truth.3
However, even in terms of accepting ‘foundational’ truths on a sort of pragmatic basis as, so to speak, a necessary but reliable convenience for everyday living, there are two caveats which need to made. Both of these caveats arise from the nature of human activities in the contemporary world, and not just from use of language: (a) Until very recently it could be taken for granted (including by myself)4 that the uncertainties which prevail in the realm of quantum effects are not relevant for purposes of ordinary human living. This assumption must now at least be called into question as not only scientific observation but also technical application enters into the realm of particle action where quantum effects are really important, so that, for example, in the future we may have to factor in quantum effects for purposes of industrial processes, something hitherto inconceivable. But, in addition, there is a wider point which was already applicable where basic facts of the physical world, such as the examples given by Benson and Stangroom, are concerned. Simple technologies, like use of an umbrella or hood in rain, do not of course obviate these facts but they can and do very much limit their impact on our lives. Once technology extends its scope into areas felt basic to human existence, like contraception and fertility, many facts of our own physical existence and not just of an external physical world similarly become limited to a greater or lesser degree in terms of their impact on human living. A fact which has often been neglected in discussions of freedom in relation to determination of human life is that as choices appear, as a practical reality, in areas where there was previously no choice, the degree of uncertainty and unpredictability about human affairs increases, since free choices by their very nature cannot be entirely ascertained in advance. (The neglect of this fact arises from the ancient assumption that irrational behaviour is unpredictable. That may be true with individuals in some cases – not all, as mental illness demonstrates – but in a broader social context irrational behaviours are likely to be more predictable than rational ones.) It is here that we encounter the difficult question of determination with regard to choices and intentions. Salmon (1998) has suggested that indeterminism is compatible with causality for physical systems and that interesting theories of probabilistic causality are already available. But that kind of analysis may or may not be applicable to (intended) human actions. Even if we can apply it, for example, to human behaviour as influenced by either, or both, genetic inheritance and culture, that may tell us surprisingly little about what possibilities may be open with the advanced technologies of today. Perhaps all we can say on the basis of a biological and cultural past is that humans are likely to continue to develop and use technologies, even when these are presenting new issues and choices which had not previously existed.
Once we arrive at the question, and recognise that it is a question with no certain answer, as to whether homo sapiens will make a swift exit from the ecological scene through either (or both) mass destruction weapons or environmental chaos, we find human life is very much an uncertain matter. (b) Closely related to that first caveat about any ‘foundational’ truths of human life is the second, namely, that nothing which is said in social science, and analysis of social facts, can be treated with the degree of certainty that we expect with some facts about the physical world. (Even in relation to those facts, we are thinking on the level of practical human affairs, so that the uncertain behaviour of individual molecules does not prevent us from experiencing – say - the inverse pressure law as a reliable certainty and not at all vague.) Moreover, it is usual in the context of social analysis that not only will the facts carry a measure of uncertainty and approximate estimates have to be made about them, but also we have to expect that the statements we make or the propositions we put forward about social phenomena will not be entirely true, and it will not be possible to eliminate vagueness and uncertainty from them, however rigorous we may be in defining our concepts. The concepts we use in areas like ethics, sociology, history, anthropology, economics, etc., are always liable to modification for different cases and epochs and rarely describe anything with the precision expected in natural science. So far, so often said, but it deserves to be noticed that the ideas of the fuzzy logicians are relevant here because vagueness and uncertainty extend both to the concepts used and to the phenomena being described as well as to the probability of particular phenomena occurring in particular ways. In these cases the notion of rough sets by which greater precision of conceptualisation may be sought through replacing one vague concept with a pair of more precise concepts can be helpful in some social analysis cases, but it cannot manufacture certain (entirely true) propositions about inherently vague phenomena.
In social science contexts like economic forecasting, strategy, and so on, it is a commonplace to offer estimated ranges of probability for possible events or phenomena. For example, a 50 per cent to 70 per cent range of probability may be proposed for occurrence of a terrorist attack on the US food supply, or decline in number of divorces, or an increase in attendance at evangelical Christian services, and so on. Commonly, if the probability range estimates are vague they will prove of little real value in terms of either prediction or understanding. In addition, as hinted earlier, the uncertainties relating to human activities and to a degree even other animal behaviour are different in character from those relating to sheer random phenomena because the factors of choice and intention come into play. In some fields, especially psychology, repeatable experiments can be conducted, but in most instances relevant for social and historical analysis they cannot. Accordingly, we must expect to have to remain content with theories and statements that are as likely to be true and contain as much truth within them as possible with the information we have available, but are frankly not entirely true or may turn out actually misleading if more were known.
The case I argue in this essay is that we do not, as some ‘postmodernists’ might say, have to abandon pursuit of truth altogether in these cases, still less that we can do so in cases which are sometimes highly contentious and where fear and deception may be rife. What we do have to do is face the reality – for it is a ‘reality’ if anything is – that the truths we discover will not be absolute and eternal, or completely precise and certain. Truth continues to serve as a necessary standard and focus for knowledge being sought, precisely when the intention is to find genuine knowledge and not to deceive. But we cannot pretend that the standard is simple, not only because the propositions we can put forward cannot be proved – or disproved - with 100 per cent certainty for all times and cases, but also because people have an awkward liability to make free, or partly free, choices at times. We can never entirely predict when they will actually make free choices; that is, decisions between feasible alternatives for action and/or demand more freedom than they currently have, and when they will simply accept that they ‘have no choice’.
An illustration with the abortion case
The case of abortion, and the issues surrounding it, is especially illuminating both because it brings in the elements of intentional and consciously chosen action, sometimes in the harshest of circumstances, and because owing to the raw emotions and ethical impulses it arouses the temptation to eliminate vagueness and uncertainty is especially strong. The protagonists in the abortion arena are especially keen to claim their ideas, and their information, are reliably true. That in turn means that pursuit of truth where vagueness is present becomes an especially sensitive matter.
A natural response for both protagonists driven by moral claims and the intending scientific analyst would be to try to minimise the significance of intentional action – i.e., action resulting from a decision by a conscious agent rather than action following unconscious impulses or instincts. In the former case that arises naturally from the desire of those of those with a strong moral commitment (as ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ enthusiasts both have) to avoid the conclusion that large numbers of people might be prepared to defy the moral imperative to the point of either accepting a serious surgical procedure and giving up a child, or to the point of organising their lives to accommodate an unintended pregnancy. In the latter case the response arises just as naturally from the analyst’s desire to find clear and predictable results for the question of how people will in fact behave, as distinct from the wish of the committed that they behave in a particular way. But in any event, we may be perplexed at some of the directions which intentional behaviour can take.
For instance, the respective lobbies dispute over how many women will be willing to accept abortion if either abortion information is readily available or alternatives like adoption and raising the child themselves (perhaps with external support) can be pursued. To begin with, there is the vexed question of how far cultural differences will affect the decision a woman might make between keeping her child (and under what circumstances) and abortion.5 It is only natural that ‘cultural’ factors will be involved, since these include what people believe and beliefs can be expected to have some bearing on actions. Accordingly, the results of a survey such as that among pregnant sexual assault victims carried out by Dr. Sandra Mahkorn (1979) are likely to differ at the beginning of the twenty-first century between the United States, which is a strongly religious society, and northern Europe where religious belief and practice is less widespread. In turn, the results in either would probably differ – perhaps very sharply – from those in a ‘shame culture’ in which the self depends upon a collective family or clan identity recognised throughout the community. The willingness of some Christian pro-life believers to celebrate those women who choose to keep a child even from sexual assault (and indeed enlist their active support) contrasts with what might ever have been expected to happen in a shame culture, as well as with the record of many Christian societies in the past when the domestic forms of the honour and shame conceptions were more potent than they are in contemporary America with its individualistic culture. It might be noticed in this context that contemporary America is quite at home with the military form of honour (as witnessed by the ‘Duty, Honor, Country’ motto of West Point military academy) even as the domestic family form is alien to American mores.
Although these elements of religious and secular belief about the rights and choices attaching to abortion, child rearing and family life clearly differ between cultures and historical epochs, accurate cross-cultural comparisons of the impact of these beliefs and their differences is not only unavailable at present but likely to be exceedingly difficult. Individual choices will obviously be affected by the amount of practical support available (for instance, for raising a child) from public, family, or charitable sources, and opportunities for working mothers (and fathers), and that in turn will be influenced by cultural beliefs. Amongst such will be not only specifically religious ideas but also the complex history of individualism and collectivism which connect with an historical past of Protestant and Catholic ideas in addition to the ancient threads of reasoned judgement, family honour, and patriotism, but which are now secular ideologies. The cultural influences are of course joined by more easily definable influences of political and economic resources. But as will be discussed shortly, the range of possibilities is widened by the impact of another powerful influence here, namely technology6, with the most direct instance concerning abortion being the new development of emergency contraception. The sheer complexity of these influences, and the sheer diversity of both particular cases and personal needs and inclinations renders it unreasonable to expect quantitative precision about how readily or otherwise people turn to abortion, including when they may actually feel pressured to either have an abortion when they do not want one, or, for instance, try to cope with a disabled child when they fear they may not be able to. The investigator will indeed be fortunate if counting numbers alone, let alone any more subtle analysis, yields exact truths in these matters. Whatever various dogmatists may yearn for, we have to be content with statistical approximations and generalisations, all carrying exceptions to their rules. Put another way, any propositions we may advance about the abortion issue and women’s choices in particular cases will be, perforce, ‘fuzzy’ propositions with a recognised degree of vagueness.
Although, just because the abortion question turns on human intentional conduct and cultural values and is not simply a question about the workings of the natural world, it is still the case the vagueness and uncertainty attaching to any propositions relating to it and to women’s choices turns out to be of a kind described by fuzzy logic rather than relating to the concepts and language involved. This is not to say there are no problems with language and conceptualisation to be considered here. But, except in case of the new techniques of emergency contraception, these do not relate to the definition of abortion itself. It is sufficiently clear, for example, that the term ‘abortion’ in moral argument refers to deliberate termination of a pregnancy and not to miscarriage or ‘spontaneous’ abortion. Where vagueness of language acquires more significance is as regards the philosophical concepts regularly employed by apologists for both ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ positions. In the case of the former, probably the most difficult concept is that of ‘innocent life’, bearing in mind that in the context of just war (an ancient part of Christian doctrine and argument) there remains a dispute as to whether ‘innocent’ means blameless, presumably lacking in responsibility, or harmless following on from the Latin derivation nocere (to harm).7 In the case of any unborn child, the notion of blameless (as distinct from shameless) would clearly apply, but a notion of harmless might not necessarily apply, most obviously where the life and health of the mother is in danger. Many, but not all, ‘pro-life’ apologists would indeed accept legal abortion if the mother’s life is in danger, as do most religious teachings except the Catholic. Where a ‘pro-choice’ position is concerned, the most difficult concept is likely to be that of ‘choice’ itself, not least because in many instances ranging from economic poverty to a severely disabled foetus, mothers – and fathers - may feel they have no choice but abortion, so being ‘given the choice’ or ‘allowed’ abortion hardly feels like a right, let alone a privilege. It is in the cases where career prospects or social convenience apply (the term ‘convenience’ itself being more appropriate in a relatively liberal setting than it would be in a culture where pregnancy outside marriage is either strongly disapproved of or shameful) that a notion of choice between practicable alternatives seems to fit the case more easily.
However, to say that in harder cases abortion is less likely to appear to the mother (and frequently father also) as a ‘choice’ in that sense simply turns out to replace one conceptual problem with another. It is a commonplace, especially but not exclusively amongst religious commentators, to talk of abortion as a ‘moral tragedy’ and, indeed, it is precisely in the most difficult cases that those turning to abortion will often feel their situation to be tragic in a common sense of that word. Unfortunately, in the realm of moral philosophy the concept of ‘moral tragedy’ has been invoked, for instance by Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), to refer to any cases where there is, in MacIntyre’s terms, an ‘incommensurable’ conflict between moral values both held absolute so no one is supposed to set an order of priorities, i.e, make a choice, between them. One of the strengths of MacIntyre’s analysis has been to recognise that conflicts of this kind are indeed a regular feature of contemporary culture. Abortion is one of the most potent of them, but there are numerous others ranging from the vexed question of international intervention in wars or internal conflicts of other states with humanitarian motives in view to the issues of voluntary euthanasia or assisted suicide. Not the least of the impacts of developing medical technology is to multiply the number and complexity of such moral conflicts, whilst other technical developments have a similar effect; for instance, between expanding freedom of travel and commerce and generating atmospheric pollution which can have adverse effects on many populations around the world. The problem with an analysis such as that of MacIntyre, and, more generally, with describing abortion or any other example of intense moral conflict as a ‘moral tragedy’ is that we are implicitly refusing to make any (moral) decisions at all. MacIntyre suggests that resolution of incommensurable moral dilemmas requires a common language of values, but in the context of any particular cases, including abortion, that in effect means one particular standpoint must become accepted by everyone. The prospect of that happening in reality, let alone happening peacefully, would appear to be remote indeed. The weakness of philosophy in this case is compounded both by the notorious reluctance of a liberal tradition to consider a world of harsh choices – even in economics – at any length, and the corresponding reluctance of religious traditions claiming divinely inspired values to recognise any possible conflict between them.8 From the point of view of ordinary people the situation is tragic if it is unavoidably painful (for such, together with sheer misfortune, is the common understanding of the word ‘tragedy’), but for philosophers, politicians, or theologians to then describe it as a moral tragedy, thereby implying that even a difficult choice must not be made unless an entire society can be brought to agree on what it should be, is to add insult to injury.
None of this, however, serves to do other than emphasise the point that a simple analysis of ‘choice’ in terms of differing utilities hardly meets the task of describing cases of harsh and difficult choices where alternatives do in fact exist, but none is even remotely painless, not to mention pleasurable. Possibly the best approach to clarifying the choice concept would be employment (at least in effect) of a rough set analysis to break the concept of choice into relevant components used by the protagonists themselves – choice for and against abortion, choice for and against continuing pregnancy, choice about sexual relations in the first place, and so on – would serve to leave matters of language as clear as we can ever expect them to be. For what is happening in the abortion case remains different from what postmodernist thinkers would portray. Each side is only too ready to gloss over the complexities in the concept it uses to make its case, and even opponents usually take for granted the way a concept is being used for the rival stand; not least because opponents will simply deny the importance of the other side’s values, such as represented by the concepts of innocence and choice respectively. Hence there is no sense of moral tragedy for them. No one, however, denies that the concepts can be used to refer to realities, not least physical and spiritual realities, in the world in which people live.
The influence of technology
The case being argued here is that, whatever the intricacy of particular applications such as arise with abortion, applying a notion of approximately correct analysis which can accommodate an idea of vagueness as a best guide for decisions does not mean we are compelled to abandon the notion of truth. Provided the concepts and terms we are using to describe specific phenomena of classes of actions are at least capable of being criticised so as to yield a degree of clarity to their meaning, which seems to apply in the abortion case, then truth is still a usable concept in relation to what are, after all, very complex realities. Vagueness and uncertainty apply anyway, however far the concepts are analysed, and that point is emphasised by the factor of technology. Even in that area of reproduction, where human (like other animal) behaviour is supposedly most ‘hard-wired’ and determined by basic instincts, the impact of technology is immense and increasing. In the first instance, technology in this context has meant technologies of contraception. The precise degree of their effect is hard to gauge even historically because birth rates, for example in the UK, began to fall during the nineteenth century before contraception became widely known or available as improved sanitation (itself linked to scientific discoveries in biology and medicine) led to reducing infant mortality, so that people expected to lose fewer children in infancy. But the charged response to the ideas of Marie Stopes illustrated that scarcely anyone doubted that availability of contraception would change family life and the position of women in particular. That debate is still very much present in relation to the teachings of the Roman Catholic church and world poverty. Again, almost half a century since the contraceptive pill first appeared on the scene it remains a major step in the growth of sexual freedom for women (and men) or removal of healthy constraints on sexual conduct according to the ideological stance of the commentator. What is not in dispute is the power of chemistry, and its technical applications, to influence the most intimate parts of our lives.
Subsequently, technology has come to bear also upon the opposite side of reproductive anxiety: namely, fertility. At first sight it is a curious fact that despite the usual attitudes of moral traditionalists, technical devices, and resulting unconventional practices, in that area have proved quite as controversial as any contraception. The arguments become more understandable with the reflection that with practices like IVF and surrogacy children are being brought into the world in ways far removed from the ‘natural’ beginning of life. What bears repetition here is the further reflection that use of technology has always been part of human activity and it has been rare to refuse technical possibilities once they become available – that is to say, it can be argued that use of technical innovations even in regard to human life itself is quite ‘natural’.
Indeed, human reproduction is not the only field in which the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed a dramatic transfer of those aspects of living and experience commonly felt to be most basic and immutable (described in terms religious and secular alike as ‘God given’, ‘hard wired’, ‘acts of God’, ‘Nature’, and so forth) into a sphere of technologically driven change, and therefore of human choice and responsibility. No less formidable in its own way is the seepage of that choice and responsibility into the field of purely physical systems, and most importantly weather and climate. Although these are subject to natural variations, in this context ‘natural’ is the operative word, implying changes not at all amenable to human control save by the grace of the spiritual world.9 In some instances, like late medieval Europe, people were vaguely aware of harsher climatic conditions but simply had to move or adjust if they could, with notions of choice and responsibility being irrelevant to their situation. There was, of course, uncertainty in such cases, an uncertainty which made the world a cruel and fearful place and which helped to establish the traditional, but not always correct, belief that predictability is benign. The new element in the twenty-first century is not uncertainty; on the contrary, we now have an expanding capability of prediction for weather and climate which is now being tested in the familiar way of scientific hypotheses. Rather the added element is a new kind of uncertainty external to the physical system itself, namely, human intentionality and choice, not least in response to the information which scientific analysis affords. The emergent ‘Transition Towns’ movement, which may or may not prove to have a significant impact on energy consumption patterns – the future of that movement being itself very uncertain – illustrates just how unpredictable human response, and the speed of that response, might be precisely because it is an initiative taken by groups of people in various localities without reference to the larger scale agreements or plans made by governments and even corporations.
However, even more than in the case of abortion the uncertainties generated by the presence of human choice and responsibility have only a minor connection with vagueness and limitations in the conceptualisation of climate and the related problems. The distinction between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ is quite clearly understood, as is the question of whether, and how far, observed changes could be explained by other factors than so-called greenhouse gases produced by human activity, such as levels of solar activity. (The evidence suggests that increased solar activity can more easily explain developments prior to c.1940 than since that date.) The nature of variation in solar activity is still not properly understood, but the properties of gases like carbon dioxide and methane are well attested by measurement and the concept of entrapment of energy in certain wavelengths is fairly clear. Therefore, vagueness and doubt attach more to, first, the question of how much we really know about how an extremely complex physical system is likely to behave under unprecedented conditions and, second, the degree of sheer ‘chaos’ and unpredictability which may be generic to the system itself. As in the abortion case, vagueness of language may be a problem in relation to the degree of ‘choice’ and scope for action humans actually have.
For example, one line of argument could be that intense action to combat climate change is already a matter of survival for millions of poor people and likely to become one for everyone else within the present century, in which case there would be on a common understanding no real choice at all. Such would be a great extension in scale from the cases where people in a particular situation might feel they have no choice but abortion, without that meaning that everyone else feels compelled to accept abortion generally, let alone make it compulsory. However, even if this sort of argument about climate eventually turns out to be correct, a degree of choice, i.e., of effective ability to follow more than one feasible alternative, might still emerge as regards priority given to social and economic changes like patterns of consumption and decentralised economic organisation on the one hand, and to technical developments like solar power or hydrogen powered cars on the other. Naturally, if the survival argument proves to be overstated there would be more choice, especially for the affluent, about how much action is to be taken of any kind. For example, decentralisation to local communities and help to the poor would appeal to some people quite apart from any issue about climate change, and therefore apart from any question of their own survival. It is only to be expected that this would be a more limited number of people than those who would be influenced by an argument pertaining to their own survival, but probably still enough to make an impact through charities, business enterprises, and so on. The major difference is that, without an issue of survival, such activity would normally remain voluntary (understood in the usual sense of the word that those who did not share commitment to such causes need not take part) without the wider sense of emergency.
The point which emerges from such considerations is similar to that coming out of debate about ‘choice’ with abortion; that is, even a question of language and conceptualisation may be at least clarified by a process of breaking the question down into component parts analogous to the creation of rough sets. It is easy to imagine that questions of language are impenetrable because of the nature of partisan rhetoric in which terms acquire an emotional charge of their own capable of obscuring their own references and then the concepts they may purport to represent. Naturally, the claims of Derrida and Rorty about the impossibility of resolving such questions have some force, and no one is likely to suggest that natural language can ever be completely precise or absolutely transparent to an outside world. But it seems bizarre to deny that the language is incapable of conveying anything to people not already committed to one particular mode of expression and/or standpoint on what is, after all, an issue being debated in public. To call a process of breaking down, for instance, into a set of more limited sub-choices, ‘deconstruction’ can itself be misleading, since the point can be to show how particular components of the issue surrounding climate change or abortion give rise to particular choices of their own between alternative courses of action which people can actually find, and not merely reveal the issue dissolving into an incomprehensible morass.
Conclusion
Thinking about cases like abortion and climate change which are generally reckoned to carry a philosophical dimension with them (although they are obviously not purely philosophical issues) does show is that Wittgenstein’s ambition to resolve philosophical arguments purely by linguistic analysis is never likely to be achieved, at least where the issues involve a question of value or even of technical feasibility. We see that even in these cases where some of the central concepts are quite clearly definable and understood, language analysis can make a contribution especially for the concepts which appear more vague, like that of choice. Sometimes, as in the argument over whether emergency contraception is a form of abortion or not, science may provide a resolution by showing a point at which the separate cell begins to develop. But even here linguistic analysis takes a subordinate role as assistant to the precise delineation of technical terms.
This arises when there is something we can describe as ‘intentional action’ involved; that is to say: (i) There are effective choices of some kind between alternatives, even if, as with abortion or climate change, the choices turn out to be harsh ones between unpalatable alternatives. (When the alternatives are also morally unpalatable, the situation may be called a ‘tragedy’, although that can be a misleading term since it is also often used to mean misfortune with no choice available.) (ii) Following on from that, the actions which people take amount to making a decision between the possibilities, or choosing between the alternatives.
This is not the occasion for a renewed discussion of the issues around ‘free will’ and determination, but in a sense intentional behaviour means a measure of uncertainty irrespective of which position is taken thereon. In individual cases the person confronted with a decision is likely to have the clearest idea possible about how far she has a real choice (i.e., how feasible any alternatives might turn out to be), but obviously no one can prove either that their ‘choice’ was really determined by prior conditions – internal or external – or that she in fact has no choice when she believes she has none. In the examples of abortion and climate change the partisan issue readily extends to the circumstances or kind of information leading people to feel the way they do. Climate change appears to give an opportunity for local or personal action, like installing low energy light bulbs or driving at reduced speed, amongst other things, enabling people to have a sense that they can ‘do something’ about the climate change by their own free action. Naturally, the sceptic – or the determinist – can claim such a sense would be illusory. At the same time, those philosophers who contend that freedom is compatible with at least a rational determination would presumably say this implies free action even if the people concerned feel they must act to reduce their energy consumption because of the dangers involved. Naturally, individuals or communities who feel that way might not agree with such an interpretation, preferring simply to say they have no choice but to reduce their energy consumption, and that therefore they are not free agents in the customary sense of that term.
The very fact that people’s actions in that sort of case, and in many instances of abortion, are open to a wide variety of interpretations as to how far, if at all, they display free choice illustrates that the factor of sheer vagueness has to be taken into account. We cannot say for certain how free the individual decisions really are, and even how accurately individual witnesses understand their own situation in that regard. But, in addition, to whatever extent that people do in fact have a free choice about what action they take, it will be impossible to predict with certainty which of the available alternatives they follow. (That leads to the enduring appeal of determinism, namely, that it seems to say that existence is predictable.) It is worth reiterating here that these conditions of uncertainty apply to the nature of human action itself, and its consequences, and are not amenable (except perhaps in small part) to clarification of language.
Despite the deep rooted nature of vagueness in our condition, which the above themes are meant to illustrate, there is no need to resign ourselves to ‘postmodernist’ despair (or relaxation in the case of Rorty) and say that truth is a lost cause. The simple fact that people confronted with difficult decisions will try to find out as much information as they can about what advice and resources are available, whether others are likely to help them or take part in common schemes, and, indeed, what their own moral feelings or personal interests are in the situation, shows that they think truth has relevance for them. At the same time, they are very likely to feel they must ‘do the best in the circumstances’ or ‘given the information available’, and decide whose expert opinion, for instance on medical matters about an abortion or climate systems in case of climate change, they trust the most. Such feelings recognise vagueness and uncertainty as inherent in the situation, while trying to minimise that uncertainty so that they can make a decision at all, but they also recognise truth as essential.
Notes.
1. Nietzsche’s refusal to write as a system builder in no way means there were no consistent themes in his thought, beginning with the problem of values without religion (a sociological and psychological problem at least as much as a philosophical one). From there the themes run onto power and leadership in various forms, rejection of objective truth outside our varying perspectives, and rejection of what Nietzsche understood as Christian humility, to name but some of the most significant. Moreover, there can be little doubt that Nietzsche himself saw these themes as mutually connected, as well as arising naturally, if not actually logically in the strict sense, from a general decline in religious faith and authority.
2. Salmon (1998: 279-80) has expressed the belief that quantum indeterminacy, meaning the idea drawn from Heisenberg that exact values for the position and momentum of particles do not exist, is an objective feature of the world, but that the question of quantum indeterminism – meaning existence of a noncausal mechanism that is ‘irreducibly stochastic’ – remains open.
3. Blackburn (2006: Ch. 2) argues that the sceptic or relativist can avoid a devastating self-refutation in the manner of the recoil argument, by backing away from the authority of reason on our minds, replacing this with the classic cultural relativist emphasis on the particular rules and practices we have developed in particular times and places. But Blackburn himself leaves open the question of whether this can be a satisfactory substitution, a question which history and sociology may guide us on as much as any abstract philosophical argument.
4. Although my past writing from Politics and Morality under Conflict (1994) onward has consistently challenged any notion of shared certainties in ethics, whilst holding to the position that ethics and morality deal with practical requirements for human living, I have always accepted that the uncertainties which apply here have no connection with those applying at the quantum level. Instead, they are uncertainties arising from conflicts in cultural ideas and especially in their political and moral components, or sometimes tensions within moral principles themselves. But if the future is to see quantum phenomena playing a part in everyday human activities like industrial production, then we must be prepared for quantum uncertainties becoming involved in moral/ethical life.
5. Although American surveys featured on the Web suggest that some 70 per cent of women involved in abortion think it is (morally) wrong, there appears to be room for further cross-cultural study between societies with differing religions and levels of religious faith, as well as secular elements like individualism. Were such comparisons to reveal similar results, that might provide evidence for a biological and psychological interpretation of women’s attitudes to abortion, although the surveys which have already been done make clear that many women will resort to abortion even if they feel it to be wrong in abstract terms.
6. I have explained elsewhere (O’Kane, 2004: 14-5) that, whilst I see technology as of immense importance for culture and values, my interpretation differs considerably from the classical Marxian. In Ethics and Radical Freedom, I gave much attention to the sheer destructive power of technology in addition to tools of work, but it may also be noticed that in some cases, for instance medical equipment, tools of work can impact profoundly on the lives and values of other people besides those actually working with them.
7. Coates (1997: 234-5) has suggested in the context of just warfare that the problems of identifying who might be seen as innocent – not a legitimate target for attack - might be removed by interpreting ‘innocent’ as harmless or non-threatening in line with the etymological derivation from Latin, rather than as blameless. Naturally, those problems do not arise with regard to an unborn child, but if there is no logical ground for ascribing a different meaning to the word ‘innocent’ in that context from the one it may be given in the context of war, then innocence becomes a dubious basis for any ‘pro-life’ position.
8. The story of Antigone, sometimes cited in discussions of moral dilemmas or moral tragedy, is not necessarily a good illustration for the questions which trouble present culture because from an emotional perspective Antigone’s decision to defy Creon’s prohibition on traditional burial practice did not imply a great sacrifice of commitment in the way that many contemporary moral dilemmas do whichever path is taken by the individual person confronting the dilemma.
9. Frequently, including when speaking of ‘natural’ variations in climate, we use the word in a way analogous to the idea of the ‘grace of God’, as being outside human control, and subject to the control of God alone. Such a line of thought suggests it will be this idea of divine grace as leading to salvation which is most directly challenged by powerful human technologies, especially as they enter the most intimate parts of people’s lives.
References
1. Benson, Ophelia and Stangroom, Jeremy, (2007), Why Truth Matters, Continuum, 42-3.
2. Blackburn, Simon, (2006), Truth, Penguin Books.
3. Coates, A. J., (1997), The Ethics of War, Manchester University Press, Manchester & New York.
4. Mahkorn, Dr. Sandra, (1979), ‘Pregnancy and Sexual Assault’, The Psychological Aspects of Abortion, Mall & Watts (eds.), 55-69.
5. O’Kane, S. G., (2005), Ethics and Radical Freedom, Melrose Books, Ely, Cambridgeshire. ---(1994)Politics and Morality under Conflict, Pentland Press.
6. Rorty, Richard, (1991), Objectivity, relativism, and truth, Philosophical Papers Vol 1, Cambridge University Press.
7. Salmon, Wesley C., (1998), Causality and Explanation, Oxford University Press.
Decision Time: Move over to another essay: