Philosophical Review

Commitment, Value, and Moral Realism by Marcel S. LiebermanReview by: David PhillipsThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 110, No. 2 (Apr., 2001), pp. 278-280Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2693682 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

to contemporary thought. In presuming that we can directly indulge in the rational framing of a new and compelling vision of the good life, Brudney falls back into all the fatalities of philosophical hubris, no matter how modest in appearance, from which Marx was attempting to extract himself.

J. M. BERNSTEIN

Vanderbilt University

The Philosophical Review, Vol. 110, No. 2 (April 2001)

COMMITMENT, VALUE, AND MORAL REALISM. By MARCEL S. LIEBERMAN.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xi, 210.

In this interesting book, Marcel Lieberman develops a novel and sustained argument for moral realism. He focuses on the psychological phenomenon of commitment, and argues that commitments psychologically require realist beliefs: paradigmatically, one cannot be committed to, say, social equality, without believing that social equality is genuinely valuable. In so arguing, he disagrees with those, on both sides of the debate over moral realism, who have argued that moral realism makes little practical difference. He draws on and criticizes a number of important and influential figures, most particularly Rorty, Gibbard and Velleman, but his range of reference goes well beyond familiar figures in contemporary metaethics, taking in also inter alii Ricoeur, Gabriel Marcel, and rational expectations theorists in economics.

Lieberman's argument is composed of a number of strands, most impor- tantly critiques of Rorty and Gibbard, an analysis of commitment involving a distinction between commitment and intention, arguments for the claim that commitment requires realist beliefs, and the development of an interpretive account of the explanation of action. I will have space to focus only on the overall structure of the argument and on the central claim that commitments psychologically require realist beliefs.

Begin with this central claim. Lieberman defends it by arguing against two alternative views according to which commitments are constituted by desires: a view inspired by Frankfurt that commitments are constituted by second- order desires, and a view taken from Velleman that commitments are consti- tuted by intrinsic desires. Lieberman's arguments on this central question are scattered, allusive, and hence a little difficult fully to reconstruct. But, I think, the main parts of the argument are to be found on 102-15, and in the dis- cussion of Velleman at the start of chapter 5.

In the first of these passages, Lieberman's explicit goal is to defend the claim that

(2) S is committed to A only if S believes A is valuable or doing A is worthwhile.

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The argument is that only if (2) is true will commitment be able to play three cru- cial psychological roles it in fact plays: the roles of filtering options, providing self- understanding, and helping agents plan what to do in the future. But, both because it is the role he most emphasizes and because I think it easy enough to see how commitments constituted by desires could play the other two roles, I pro- pose to focus only on the role of commitment in providing self-understanding. In criticizing the model he derives from Velleman, Lieberman writes:

The only way of making sense of a certain desire being more an agent's own than another, and why a higher-order desire should be more constitutive of a person than a lower-order one, [is] by introducing an evaluative belief....Hierarchy itself [has] no identity-conferring power. Likewise the intrinsic nature of a desire [to which Velleman appeals] has no independent power to enhance self-understand- ing. (140)

I think this argument mistaken. Realist evaluative beliefs do no better than

desires do in providing identity and self-understanding. Beliefs may be more

amenable to justification than desires, but they are not for that reason more apt to provide the core of one's distinctive identity. We all have many beliefs that, for all their openness to rational revision, are quite incidental to our con- ceptions of ourselves. So insofar as the issue is what constitutes one's identity, it is hard to see why beliefs do a better job than desires.

Even if Lieberman's explicit arguments against the idea that commitments are constituted by desire are unconvincing, (2) may still be true of many cases of commitment. For there are various possible accounts of the relationship between commitment and belief: commitment might be wholly constituted by desire and presuppose no beliefs, wholly constituted by desire but presuppose beliefs, constituted partly by desire and partly by belief, or wholly constituted by belief. Even if Lieberman's arguments against desire models fail, there still is rea- son to think that in many normal cases commitment at least presupposes beliefs.

This may not hold, though, in less typical possible cases. It is one thing to argue that most actual people's commitments to things A are partially consti- tuted by or presuppose the belief that As are valuable, another to argue that it is psychologically impossible to be committed to something without the

belief that it is valuable. One possible view would be that there is room for commitment even if all realist beliefs are given up, but that such commitment would, for most people, have to be reconstructed.

Insofar as Lieberman's main objection to thinking of commitments as desires is that doing so introduces an element of arbitrariness that undermines self-under- standing, there is also reason to worry about whether commitment is the psycho-

logical phenomenon he needs. For one might well think that one thing that is dis-

tinctive of (many central cases of) commitment is that one regards the commitment as optional. Someone committed to learning a foreign language doesn't think oth- ers who lack such a commitment are thereby at fault. Similarly for at least some cases

of those committed to causes like saving whales or rain forests. But, if so, any self-

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BOOK REVIEWS

understanding of such commitments will need to include some element of arbi- trariness or individual decision, in the shape of such permissive second-order atti- tudes. If so, it is no deep problem with models of commitment as desire that they necessarily involve such an element of arbitrariness or individual decision. Lieberman notices something like this distinction between commitments that involve permissive and commitments that involve restrictive second-order attitudes. He also draws a distinction between intention-like and substantive commitments: the intention-like ones involve commitment to fairly specific courses of action, the substantive commitments are much less closely related to specific actions. He appears to think these two distinctions are coextensive, so substantive commitments are associated with restrictive second-order attitudes. But this seems to me a mistake: one may have a substantive commitment-for example, to saving whales- while regarding such a commitment as optional. The cases of commitment where com- mitment is least likely to involve such permissive second-order attitudes are cases of moral commitment. So, one might think, this, rather than commitment more gen- erally, is the phenomenon Lieberman really needs.

Finally, consider the overall character of Lieberman's argument. One might well object that the fact, if it is a fact, that realist beliefs are psychologically required for commitment does nothing to show that they are true. Lieberman clearly recognizes this objection. It is a little less clear just what his response to it is. One quite reasonable line he sometimes suggests (for example at 170-71, 195) is that the argument is important at least in showing the untenability of views like Gibbard's and Rorty's, views according to which noncognitivism or anti- realism is perfectly psychologically compatible with commitment. Still, there then remains room for more debunking nonrealist views, views that hold that there are no true moral beliefs and that it is only our failure to recognize this in everyday moral life that makes commitment possible. But Lieberman sometimes seems to want to go further and to argue against such debunking views. In this connection he invokes an "Indispensability Thesis":

The terms an interpretation uses and the objects it posits will be deemed valid orjus- tifiable to the extent that they are indispensable for understanding oneself and one's actions across a broad range of instances and within a variety of contexts. (169)

I am more skeptical of this further step. Surely, for example, the fact that real- ist beliefs about the influence of the stars on character are required by the self-understanding of astrologers does not give us or them good reason to accept such beliefs.

Though his treatment is not unobjectionable, Lieberman develops in a sustained way an important and hitherto insufficiently explored line of argu- ment. His book makes a useful contribution to metaethics.

DAVID PHILLIPS

University of Houston

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