Recovering Our Knowledge of the Good Person: A Review Essay of Dallas Willard's The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge
Have you wondered how your students or friends simultaneously deny moral facts yet accept the universal wrongness of bullying, sexual assault, or greed? Dallas Willard's much anticipated final philosophical work offers an incisive analysis of and solution to this phenomenon. Here I provide a brief overview of Willard's main argument for how moral knowledge disappeared and has thereby become publicly unavailable for teaching it to emerging generation. We first look at what caused this "disappearance" at a social level, and then consider how have contributed to the problem. Finally, we look at Willard's proposal for how we might recover moral knowledge, and I offer three lingering questions that may provide a springboard for those interested in extending his important project. Dallas Willard. The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge. New York: Routledge, 2018. 378 pages. $141.00. Have you wondered how your students or friends simultaneously deny moral facts yet accept the universal wrongness of bullying, sexual assault, or greed? Dallas Willard's much anticipated final philosophical work offers an incisive analysis of and solution to this phenomenon. For centuries, "It was assumed on all sides that systematic knowledge of the moral life was a necessity to live well, and that of course it was possible though not necessarily easy to achieve by sensible and thoughtful people" (2) However, a radical reversal has occurred. Currently our default mode is vehement expressions of approval or dislike, but we cannot find a set of publicly accessible moral facts comprising a teachable body of knowledge recognized by our institutions as providing an authoritative basis for living. Willard calls this "the disappearance of moral knowledge" (7) 1. Some readers might find it helpful to place Willard in a moral philosophical tradition. To do that, one must understand that he was an unrelenting metaphysical and epistemological realist, the former meaning there is a real world that does not depend for its existence on any mind, and the latter meaning we can be in direct cognitive contact with that world i.e. our knowledge of that world is unmediated by language, percepts, concepts, etc. Both theses inform his moral realist philosophy which may be placed in the broadly phenomenological and Willard provides six causes of the disappearance. First, religion was discredited as a source of moral reality and knowledge, because God's existence is either an illusion or item of mere "faith" (8 9) Second, the human self disappeared as an item of knowledge, because soul, mind, and self awareness seemed incompatible with empiricist, existentialist, behaviorist, and logical positivist pictures of human personality (10) Third, differences in cultural mores revealed apparent intractable moral disagreements that pushed in the direction of moral relativism (11) Fourth, "moral standards [are] seen as power plays used by the blind and hypocritical" but if that's right, then morality is just a social construct and not a set of truth claims. Without truth there cannot be moral knowledge, only social acceptance of majority opinion (12) Fifth, morality is viewed as harmful, since moral rules have either been senseless or used to bring about evil ends (14) Sixth, there's an increasing fear of knowledge, because "knowledge confers rights to act, and to direct action and policy, in a way that feeling, opinion (no matter how widely shared) and tradition do not. That proves highly threatening to self determination and freedom from social domination " (14) To remove the threat, moral knowledge becomes at most a social construct lacking authority to tell one what to do or think, whether one is responsible, guilty, morally worthy or repulsive, and so forth. The problem is that this entails all moral judgments are on par (16 17) Tragically these causes are given full force by universities we trust to provide knowledge of how to live, yet who talk as though there's no accessible body of objective moral knowledge. Ironically, universities cannot fail to provide moral guidance, because they praise or condemn acts such as honesty, discrimination, and sexual assault. Moral conformity comes at the cost of serious moral thought in pursuit of moral knowledge (30 44) For Willard, "To have knowledge in the dispositional sense where you know things you virtue traditions. Here are some important sources for understanding these realist traditions: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; Willard, "Utilitarianism and Phenomenology," in Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy, ed. John Drummond and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2002) Knud Logstrup, The Ethical Demand, ed. Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre, (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1997) Emanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) Willard, "Moral Rights, Moral Responsibility, and the Contemporary Failure of Moral Knowledge," in Guantanamo Bay and the Judicial Moral Treatment of the Other, ed. Clark Butler (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006) Walter Hopp, Perception and Knowledge: A Phenomenological Account (New York: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 2011) Willard, Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1984) Willard, "Knowledge," in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. B. Smith and D. W. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Jacques Maritain, The Range of Reason (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952) and Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Gerald B. Phelan (1932; New York: Penguin, 1995) are not necessarily thinking about at the time is to be able to represent something as it is on an adequate basis of thought and experience " (19) What role has philosophy played in the disappearance of moral knowledge? Some philosophers have sought to develop a "science of ethics." Herbert Spencer's evolutionary ethics "purported to derive or even to prove Utilitarian principles of ethics from supposedly well established biological and sociological principles (52)" For Willard, "the basic problem with [deriving an ethics from evolutionary theory] lies in connecting an evolved condition with 'good' or 'better' in a normative sense that could serve to guide and evaluate action and character. The fact that one (or one's group) has survived or prospered simply leaves open the question of whether one was right, praiseworthy, or good in so doing evil too can survive and prosper"