The Roots of Morality by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

This book argues the case for a foundationalist ethics centrally based on an empirical understanding of human nature. For Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, "an ethics formulated on the foundations of anything other than human nature, hence on anything other than an identification of pan-cultural human realities, lacks solid empirical moorings. It easily loses itself in isolated hypotheticals, reductionist scenarios, or theoretical abstractions--in the prisoner's dilemma, selfish genes, dedicated brain modules, evolutionary altruism, or psychological egoism, for example--or it easily becomes itself an ethical system over and above the ethics it formulates," such as the deontological ethics of Kantian categorical imperatives, the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, or the ethics of care.Taking her cue from Hume, especially his Treatise on Human Nature, where he grounds "the moral sense" in human nature seen as always in tension between the natural tendencies of selfish acquisitiveness and sympathy for others, Sheets-Johnstone pursues her phenomenological investigation of the natural basis of human morality by directing her attention, first in Part I, to what is traditionally considered the dark side of human nature, and then, in Part II, to the positive side. The tension between the two calls for an interdisciplinary therapeutic resolution, which she offers in the Epilogue by arguing for the value of a moral education that enlightens humans about their own human nature, highlighting both the socialization of fear and the importance of play and creativity.

Genres: Philosophy

Unknown Binding

First published October 3, 2008

Reviews

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author is an intelligent writer who connects many different stray thinkers such that she’ll ultimately argue that phenomenology as applied to human nature is the key for understanding our dark side and our good side.

I discovered this relatively obscure book (as of today, 6/6/2020 there has only been one review on Amazon and none on Goodreads and the book came out in 2008) because my wife had read the introduction to Brian Greene’s new book and how he had previously believed that by ‘expanding on the thoughts of people like Otto Rank, Jean-Paul Sartre and Oswald Spengler, is that we want to transcend death by attaching ourselves to something permanent that will outlast us: art, science, our families and so forth’. (That quote is from the NYT review of Greene’s book). I realized that though I was familiar with Otto Rank in as much as he figured prominently in the book, I had been currently reading at the time Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, I still did not understand who he was. The Wiki lead me to this obscure book and this author by connecting what she thought about Rank through her reassessment of Heidegger, Derrida and Descartes. Well, that hooked me and I wanted to read for myself to discover a little bit more beyond a Wiki article.

I’ll say I’m glad I took the time to read this book. It is intelligently written with a depth that I seldom find in modern books. Perhaps, that’s why only one person has reviewed it so far on Amazon and no one has yet on Goodreads. I don’t want to spoil it for any potential reader, but I will say that the author was channeling Jordan Peterson before Jordan Peterson got his fame. Peterson, to me, strikes me as somebody who was always out of his depth when he tried to connect the dots. This author very well might be the only author who quoted from Peterson’s other book Maps of Meaning and wasn’t mocking him when she did.

Sheets-Johnstone connects Otto Rank with Ernst Becker's Denial of Death and sees the world through Husserl’s phenomenology. In her world, the only true binary would be birth and death and everything in-between gets smeared by our facticity of existence and that human nature is mostly Hobbesian in the sense that life is ‘solitary, brutal and short’ in regards to human nature and survival. The author is very much evo-devo (evolution development) while explaining humans (in particular men) and their nature. If you read Schopenhauer, you’ll notice two things that standout he, precedes Freudian (and Rankian) thought before they do, and he understood evo-devo before just about anyone else. She’ll quote him in this book to the effect that ‘first do no evil, and then do good’, that Schopenhauer maxim is a mixing of Confucius and Jesus, but give’s priority to not harming and tends to fit into how Sheets-Johnstone is connecting her dots with her particular bookends of narrative.

Sheets-Johnstone also will rely on Carl Jung for her guidance, as Jung is quoted in this book, wisdom precedes power for understanding. Jordan Peterson can’t connect the dots with his lack of rigorous foundations and will ultimately babble about lobsters are the same as humans, and that red lipstick is how women entrap men and is an outgrowth of our natural human evolution. Sheets-Johnstone wisely stays away from such non-sense as she paints her story of human nature. Obviously, everyone knows that ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny but Sheets-Johnstone (as does Jordan Peterson) skirts around that weirdness with their evo-devo non-sense.

Why do I like this book even though I would reject all of her conclusions and probably all of her premises? I think because she connects disparate dots thus allowing me to understand and perhaps think differently about the world from what my previous worldview would have assumed. Though, she doesn’t manage in changing my mind, I did enjoy the familiarity she obviously had with the topic and thinkers and her ease at explaining. She did quote once from the last of the great phenomenologists, Hans-Georg Gadamer during her section on play and its importance for childhood development but in the end most of what she was writing seemed antithetical to his book Truth and Method which would say that emotions are not things and that ‘all understanding is interpretation, being that can be understood is language’, sentiments that are counter to what Sheets-Johnstone is getting at, and moreover, Sheets-Johnstone thinks of reason as if it was capitalized and was a thing in itself and for itself and that our nature is a thing independent of context and experiences throughout our whole life (i.e. ontogeny) which, of course, I do not. She appealed to Hume for his importance of sympathy not so much for his appeal to experiences, perhaps she could have included our experiences in her analysis and made for a better thesis.