I hesitate to write this post because often discussion of these issues generates highly unpleasant firestorms, so at the outset I should emphasize that I’m not taking a position here one way or another. Lately I’ve been thinking a good deal about Spinoza and, in particular, the Theoligico-Politico Treatise (warning .pdf). Following Nadler’s A Book Forged in Hell, the treatise is truly one of the least read classics of modern political thought. Three central claims of the Theologico-Politico Treatise are that 1) sacred texts impart no knowledge of the natural world or being (the stories depicted in these texts are not to be taken as accounts of the world), 2) the primary function of sacred texts is to convey moral truths or truths about how to live, and 3) that because the prophets that formulated these moral truths lacked knowledge, these moral truths are formulated in the form of commandments (e.g., “thou shalt not eat shellfish”) and prohibitions rather than causal claims.
With respect to this third claim, Spinoza’s idea seems to be that the more causal knowledge we have about our bodies, our psychology, world, and how the social world functions the more we’ll be able to dispense with ethical commandments. Here it’s important to be clear. Spinoza’s thesis is not that the more causal knowledge of body, mind, world, and society we develop the more unethical we’ll become. Rather, Spinoza’s claim is that as we acquire knowledge of body, mind, world, and society our reasons for doing things will change.
To understand Spinoza’s thesis it’s best to draw on examples that aren’t ethically charged. Suppose I go to my doctor and he tells me that I need to cut things like fried okra and similar foods out of my diet. If I live in a state of ignorance, I will encounter this statement as a commandment or prohibition. My reasons for ceasing to eat fried okra will be because I respect the authority of my doctor and because I fear reprimand and punishment from him if I eat fried okra. However, if I have causal knowledge of my own body and okra and how my body and okra interact, my deliberation about okra will now change entirely. My reason for not eating okra will now no longer be that my doctor commands it, nor that he will disapprove of me eating okra and punish me accordingly. Rather, I will strive to cease eating fried okra and fried foods in general because I understand that by virtue of how these foods combine with my body they raise my cholesterol causing health conditions like heart disease.
Based on the foregoing, Spinoza’s understanding of ethics can be described as “deflationary” or “eliminativist”. For Spinoza, deontological ethics or ethical commands and prohibitions such as we find in sacred texts are heuristic devices we use in the absence of knowledge about causes and effects. For example, Mosaic law dimly sensed that shellfish are potentially dangerous for our health (a contentious claim), but lacked causal knowledge of how or why this is so. For this reason, it formulated the principle of not eating shellfish in the form of a commandment or prohibition, rather than as a causal claim about what’s likely to happen.
The advantage of norms or commandments is that they are able to motivate behavior in the absence of the person possessing causal knowledge. The person who lacks knowledge of shellfish and how it’s likely to interact with the body will, if they accept the authority of the person or deity issuing the commandment, avoid eating shellfish. The problem with deontological approaches to ethics is that in their structure as commandment they tend to foreclose any way of evaluating commandments to determine whether they are well founded. The prohibition against eating shellfish makes this point clear. If my reason for not eating shellfish lies in God’s command, then anything I might learn about the properties of how my body and shellfish interact is irrelevant to whether I ought to eat shellfish. The prohibition is absolute and there are no circumstances under which I should eat shellfish. However, if it turns out that moral commandments are really dimly perceived causal claims, then it follows that further knowledge of how my body and shellfish interact, coupled with the development of safe ways of preserving shellfish and of evaluating whether they’re safe to eat could lead the community that formulated this prohibition to abandon it. Something along these lines seems to have taken place in contemporary society surrounding prohibitions against premarital sex, sex outside of marriage, and sex for the sake of pleasure. In a society where there’s no reliable birth control, these prohibitions make good causal sense. However, with the development of reliable forms of birth control, they no longer make sense.
Spinoza’s ethical project could thus be described as deflationary or eliminativist. His aim seems to be the replacement of ethical commandments, prohibitions, and norms with action motivated by a knowledge of causes and effects. Such a project– shared by the Epicureans –would be an “elimination” of ethics. To eliminate ethics does not mean that we become “unethical”, but rather that we choose what to pursue and avoid not because of norms or commandments, but based on a knowledge of causes and effects in the domains of body, mind, world, and society. Ethics would be a branch of medicine and ethicists would be similar to nutritionists; where we consult with the nutritionist to determine the best diet for living well and we consult with the ethicist to determine the best way of living well (and there are obviously all sorts of daunting questions here as to how this is determined; but there are daunting questions in more traditional ethics as well). The greater our knowledge of body, mind, world, and society is, the more we would witness a disappearance of ethics in the form of imperatives or commandments. So what do others thing? What are the problems with Spinoza here? And in posing that question, I would encourage readers to avoid the knee jerk reaction of proclaiming that we can’t drawn an “ought” from an “is”. Certainly when affect is taken into account this is far less of a daunting problem than has traditionally been suggested by ethicists.
Larval Subjects . 
December 17, 2011 at 9:11 pm
A question this raises for me, and I haven’t read Spinoza so I’m just going from what you’ve written, is whether there is a clear distinction from an authority/ethics to a reason/ethics. A doctor can tell me why exactly okra raises my cholesterol and why this is bad for my health. If I’m not a doctor, haven’t researched this issue myself, at best have a knowledge of high school science, then there is still an element of my decision being based on a respect for the authority of the doctor as a representative of a medical institution and a corpus of knowledge that says okra is bad for my health. It may be a more deliberative decision but not necessarily one free from a norm. I still like the idea of Spinoza’s project, but I would agree that the determination of causes and effects, and especially who determines that knowledge, is still a very important one and it seems hard to imagine an ethics that would get away from matters of authority and norms entirely.
December 17, 2011 at 9:58 pm
Hi Quinn,
I don’t know that that poses a challenge to Spinoza’s thesis. Spinoza readily recognizes that we are finite beings and that therefore we have both limited knowledge and limited power over ourselves, our social world, and our circumstances. It’s therefore unlikely that we can ever completely eradicate ignorance (especially given that every body is different, so things that generally hold don’t necessarily hold for everyone, e.g., there are some people that are allergic to shellfish so they shouldn’t eat it even though it’s perfectly fine for others– barring mercury poisoning, etc). I think there are a couple of routes Spinoza could go in response to the issues you raise. The first would be to argue that what I outline here is a regulative ideal that can never be fully accomplished in actual practice, but that nonetheless we should aspire to as much causal knowledge as we can. This first route is problematic in Spinoza’s framework, however, because he tries to eradicate all teleology from his ontology, treating all things as strictly following from causes, and the idea of a regulative ideal is the idea of a goal or teleology.
The second route would be to argue that the recognition that moral commands are really dimly understood causal claims is itself cognitively transformative. When I think within a deontological moral worldview, I see the value of prescriptions as arising absolutely from authority or its status as a command. However, when I have discovered that moral prescriptions are really dimly understood causal claims, this absoluteness disappears. Following someone like Putnum, I trust my doctor because I treat him as an authority in matters pertaining to medicine, but the way in which I cognitively experience or understand this authority is very different than the way in which Moses experiences God’s authority and commandment. For Moses God’s law is the law because God commands it. For the patient, the doctor’s advice is a good prescription because the doctor is presumed to have a knowledge of causality in these matters. For Moses God’s commandment is infallible and to be unconditionally obeyed. For the patient the doctor’s advice is conditional, subject to revision, and could legitimately be abandoned as new knowledge comes to light or new technologies become available (e.g., pills or nanorobots that fight cholesterol). For Moses God is an unconditioned condition of everything else. For the patient the doctor’s authority is conditioned and dependent on his knowledge of causes. So perhaps part of the difference here is that the nature of authority differs markedly in both cases.
December 18, 2011 at 2:43 am
I think the second route you propose provides a pregnant line of ethical investigation. In theory, a cardiologist could explain the causal linkages underscoring a need for dietary changes. Since her reasoning is subject to revision, her ‘normative’ claim is grounded in a contingent explanatory mechanics. In effect, this implies a need for constant problematization to ensure that causal understandings actually justify what they purport to justify, and, thus, a dynamic interrogation that de-reifies expertise. It gets trickier with more putatively normative claims – why is torture of terrorists bad – though when you begin to look at norms as fictional objects, as circulating texts or entities retaining their own being – whole new spaces arise to question the advancement and diminshment of being.
December 18, 2011 at 3:17 am
Kris,
Interesting stuff as always. With regard to the torture example, I think there are two routes of passage. First, there’s the insidious consequentialist route that raises the question of whether terrorism is, in fact, effective and whether it helps or hinders international relations. The answer to both questions seems to be no. Second, there’s the more “ethical” route that raises the question of, given our psychology, what torture does to us. Clearly the Spinozist framework is going to be egoist in the sense that the decision procedure will pertain to maximizing our conatus and joyous affects or ability to thrive. The problem with critiques of egoism is that they often tend to be premised on very impoverished (straw man) accounts of our psychology or what contributes to our thriving as human beings. We speak as if we should just go ahead and torture like these things don’t hurt us psychologically. “So go ahead and torture”, the story goes, “so long as you can get away with it without producing international consequences!” Yet, as I suggested in a previous post (https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/ethics-and-affectivity/), this is to treat the limit case of the psychotic as the norm. We end up formulating all our “ethical” theory around the psychotic, as if we’re all a bunch of psychotics that lack any constitutional sympathy for other human beings. Yet perhaps there are constitutional facts/generalities about our psychology that render such actions inadmissable and barbarous. Likewise with my sex for pleasure example. Clearly I wasn’t suggesting that the invention of reliable contraceptives and antibiotics against STD’s should suggest that we should become promiscuous whores. It could be that promiscuous sex is, for many people, unsatisfying and psychologically detrimental (maybe others are wired differently). Rather, that remark was directed at certain variants of the Catholic church’s prohibition against sex for pleasure even in the space of a fulfilling relationship. The Spinozist thesis would be that we would have to discover the causal relationships for our own bodies (both at a general level and individually) to answer these questions… Or as Spinoza-Deleuze puts it: “We don’t know what a body can do.”
December 18, 2011 at 8:26 pm
Interesting post. I’m interested in how Spinoza would make sense of two parts of ethics: 1) our obligation to aid and 2) moral worth.
1) Take Singer’s claim that “if it is in our power to stop something bad from happening without sacrificing something of comparable moral significance, we ought, morally, do it.” I don’t understand how an eliminativist would parse this sentence. It seems like eliminativism believes that all ethical claims can be redescribed in the form a hypothetical imperative (mediated by causal understandings of the world). Singer, on the other hand, seems to take reduced suffering as a universal end. We have a (uniquely) moral obligation to maximize things with moral worth. I’m not sure how an eliminativist could make sense of this. Take your okra example. In response to the causal knowledge that fried okra is bad for my heart, I could tell my doctor that I don’t care as much about having a healthy heart as I do about having fried okra. I’d thank her for her advice, and move on with my day. In this sense, causal information is helpful for means-ends reasoning. And Spinoza seems right to claim that religious decrees can be redescribed in terms of utility: kosher laws might save lives. But what about our moral intuitions that we should do all we can to reduce suffering? How does that fit into a eliminativist ethics? What could an eliminativist say to the person who doesn’t aid, because they don’t value it?
2) Could an eliminativst ethics explain what sorts of things (actions, maxims, utils, etc…) have moral worth? Or would we have to drop that notion?
Thanks,
Joey
December 20, 2011 at 4:36 am
Yes definitely interesting. I think there is a case for at least one class of prohibitions that stands as a condition for knowledge of the world, and that is totemic taboo. If one considers a universe of beings at constant risk of entropy, then the totemic injunction against eating “this one thing” has the effect of halting the collapse of one being into another and so establishing a place (ethos) from which knowledge can proceed. Looked at in this way, the particular totem is less important than the existence of a totem as such. (The principle continues through the incest taboo, but that’s for another post). Unlike causal knowledge, this distinction of self from world is an act.
I’m not saying this form of discipline is good or bad, only that it establishes selfhood in what is otherwise a mesh of conatus. If I explicitly do not eat raccoons, then there can be things in the world that are free of each other.
In order to maintain this commitment, I also have to distinguish raccoons from other beings. Otherwise, how do I know that my independence from something is intact? So I distinguish raccoon from possum in order to keep my place in the world. And isn’t this distinction a kind of baseline definition of the very causal knowledge that Spinoza wants to promulgate?
It doesn’t seem likely that totemism grew from knowledge, but rather vice versa. In the Darwinian sense, it provided a selective advantage.for survival, so it survived. (Gene meets meme.) The question in relation to your post would then be: is the physical distinction between beings that totemism brought about now obsolete? And is it possible to think this question without enforcing a distinction beforehand?
December 30, 2011 at 6:35 am
I believe this aspect of Spinoza’s ethics Zizek identifies as the identification of the university discourse as the obfuscated core of the master’s discourse. Given the permeation of this revelation in modernity, the university discourse itself comes to function as the master’s discourse; the superego injunction then comes to issue, of course, the injunction to enjoy (in the dispensation of causal knowledge), while causal knowledge is used to eradicate object-desires of their “real, toxic kernels”, i.e. the “decaffeination” of the world. (Does that sound right? I believe you [Levi] are more knowledgeable of Zizek than I am…)
January 2, 2012 at 2:56 am
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