Living Together: Inventing Moral Science

by David Schmidtz

Is moral philosophy more foundational than political theory? It is often assumed to be. David Schmidtz argues that the reverse is the question of how to live in a community is more fundamental than questions about how to live. This book questions whether we are getting to the foundations of human morality when we ignore 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. Rather, theorizing about how to live together should 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 grounding peace in the mutual recognition that everyone has their own life to live, and everyone has the right and the responsibility to decide for themselves what to want. Justice, he says, evolved as a device for conveying our mutual intention not to be in each other's way, and beyond that, our mutual intention to build places for ourselves as contributors to a community. Any understanding of justice should thus rely not on untestable intuitions but should instead be grounded in observable fact.

Genres: Philosophy

290 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 21, 2023

About the author

David Schmidtz is a Canadian-American philosopher. He is Presidential Chair of Moral Science at West Virginia University's Chambers College of Business and Economics. He is also editor-in-chief of the journal Social Philosophy & Policy. Previously, he was Kendrick Professor of Philosophy and Eller Chair of Service-Dominant Logic at the University of Arizona. While at Arizona, he founded and served as inaugural head of the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science.

Reviews

[José Pereira · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very much a vibes book rather than a seriously argued, systematic piece. I applaud the unorthodoxy and originality, and the concern with methodology, though. It did make me think.
There’s a lot of libertarian wishful thinking, which gives Schmidtz big blindspots. Some of his core points on justice and his analysis of corruption are just plain wrong.

[Per Kraulis · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is widely assumed that political philosophy is dependent on moral philosophy. That is, in order to argue about political issues, one has to first sort out morality. The philosopher David Schmidtz argues in his book "Living together. Inventing moral science" that it is the other way around. The problem of how to live together, that is, politics, is primary. Morality then becomes part of the solution. The question "how to live together?" is more fundamental than "how to live?".

The book takes the form of a set of separate essays which are arranged to fit together. This is successful up to a point; a few of the chapters do not really contribute all that much to the main theme. It makes for an uneven reading experience. Some of the chapters are excellent, with insights that make you think, while a few are more technical and not very inspiring.

Schmidtz uses the term "moral science". This refers to the constellation of subject fields such as social science, philosophy, economy, anthropology, etc, which can or could contribute to the study of how humans could live together and flourish. During the Scottish Enlightenment, whose main figures were David Hume and Adam Smith, moral and political philosophy was an empirical project. Their salient question was "what works?". However during the 1800s, and even more strongly during the 1900s, the discussion changed topic to "how to act?". This was a change for the worse, in Schmidtz view.

Schmidtz points out that in a world where there are multiple agents, each with their own project(s), it is not enough to just consider how to act. One must include the fact that others will respond from the very beginning of the analysis. These others will not necessarily want to act according to your wishes, and they will not have the same goals. Every act of yours will entail a response from them which will affect the outcome. Living together implies having to deal with this. Moral and political philosophy must therefore seriously consider the problems of living together and the strategies that can be employed to solve these problems. Schmidtz accuses, among others, John Rawls for making assumptions which amount to serious evasions of several basic conundrums of life in a society. Strategy is essential and cannot be approximated away.

The book contains a very interesting discussion of idealist versus realist positions in moral and political philosophy. One important strand here is the argument that justice cannot be derived from axioms, but is instead an evolving response to the human condition. Empiricism, in a certain sense, must be the focus, rather than deductively arguing from first principles.

I am intrigued and happy to see that David Schmidtz towards the end of the book makes explicit the point that I believe is implicit in how he starts out his argument. Namely, that one must consider the evolutionary history of the human species to fully understand justice and morality. He writes: "We are social and political animals, and justice is a human adaption to an ecological niche." In a chapter written with Jason Brennan titled "A Brief History of the Human Condition", there is a description of how important cooperation is for humans, and how it has evolved and formed our species. I wish that this would have been the starting chapter of the book, because this story is in fact central to how moral and political philosophy should be restated.

There are many thoughts and arguments in this book that invite discussion. Indeed, there are many that are not fully developed or joined together in a more coherent fashion. I leave the book with a sense of having seen glimpses of a new start for moral and political philosophy. But it is tentative, which is both good, since it opens the door for further development, and bad, since as it is, the account is too fragmented and does not form a sustained and complete argument.