Living Together
Inventing Moral Science
Is moral philosophy more foundational than political theory? It is often assumed to be. Plato's question was "how to live?" not "how to live together?" We took our cue from Plato, with real consequences.
David Schmidtz argues that questions about how to live in a community are more fundamental than questions about how to live. The latter kind of question does not have enough content of context until we interpret it as a question about how to live as the social animals we are. We contextualize our thinking about how to live by understanding the question against the background fact that we have no real-world alternative to living as social and political animals. If we want to get at the foundations of human morality, we cannot start by ignoring contingent features of communities in which political animals live.
Schmidtz disputes the idea that reflection on how to live needs to begin with timeless axioms. Theorizing about how to live together can instead take its cue from contemporary moral philosophy's attempts to go beyond formal theory, and ask which principles have a history of demonstrably being organizing principles of actual thriving communities at their best. Ideals emerging from such research should be a distillation of social scientific insight from observable histories of successful community building. What emerges from ongoing testing in the crucible of life experience will be path-dependent in detail even if not in general outline, partly because any way of life is a response to challenges that are themselves contingent, path dependent, and in flux.
Building on this view, Schmidtz argues that justice evolved as a device for heeding the fact that everyone has their own life to live, and everyone to some extent has to decide for themselves what to want. Justice, Schmidtz says, evolved as a device for conveying our mutual intention to avoid and manage conflict by learning how to stay out of each other's way—and beyond that, our mutual intention to build places for ourselves as contributors to a community. Any understanding of justice can, accordingly, rely not on untestable intuitions but can instead be (to that extent) grounded in observable fact.
Published in 2023 by Oxford University Press
Here is a podcast hosted by Chris Kaufman on Living Together from summer of 2023.
Here is an interview by host Ben Klutsey on the topics of Living Together for Discourse Magazine.
Here is a review of Living Together by scholar Michael Huemer in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.