Methodologically and thematically, the first edition of A Very Bad Wizard was a groundbreaking book. The second edition builds on the same interdisciplinary format – Sommers’ engaging interviews on central issues in ethics and moral psychology with leading thinkers from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, anthropology, law, and primatology. But it significantly widens the conversation, going from nine interviews in the first edition to seventeen in the second.

          The second edition is also more user friendly for a college course in ethics or moral psychology. Sommers provides brief but helpful introductions to each section and each interview, and a glossary of terms as well. There are also references to related podcasts at the end of each interview, suggested readings, and questions for discussion. In addition, instructor and student resources related to the text are available on a companion website. I will certainly strongly consider adopting A Very Bad Wizard for an ethics course.

Although one could read the book as a series of discrete conversations on a range of broadly related topics, it hangs together much more cohesively than this suggests. Sommers organizes the various interviews around four themes: Free Will and Moral Responsibility (Part I); the “Big Questions: Virtue, Honor, Meaning, and the Good Life” (Part II); Metaethics (Part III); and “Morality Behind the Curtain” (Part IV). The fourth part is by far the biggest section, with eight interviews pertaining to “the origins of morality and the psychology behind our moral beliefs and behavior” (183). Sommers’ segues build the necessary bridges between each part of the book.

The interviews are lively and very accessible. No interview seems oddly chosen, irrelevant, or out of place. There are substantive disagreements that are acknowledged and carefully explored. In this sense, the book is a model for philosophical dialogue, both in form and content.

David Pizarro, Sommers’ co-host of the Very Bad Wizards podcast, aptly notes in the foreword to the second edition that A Very Bad Wizard could be described as a “sneaky manifesto of a moral pluralist who believes that ethics are fundamentally messy.” That certainly is one lasting impression of the book.

But it never seems like Sommers or the researchers he interviews are needlessly complicating things. Instead they underscore and illustrate Aristotle’s point that we shouldn’t seek the sort of precision in ethics that is available only in science. The “naturalizing morality” trajectory of the book represents, in my view, a badly needed and long overdue paradigm shift in contemporary moral philosophy. If you are exasperated by trolleyology, this is the book for you.

In The Upright Thinkers, Leonard Mlodinow notes: “the ability to ask the right questions is probably the greatest talent one can have” (22). Sommers clearly has this Socratic knack. Here are some of the questions he and his interlocutors raise and leave us to ponder.

 

1.    Are free will and deep moral responsibility illusory? If so, are they necessary illusions or can we abide letting them go? Is a capacity for self-control adequate to justify lesser forms of responsibility?

2.    Do philosophers in general tend to commit the “fundamental attribution error,” as described by Philip Zimbardo? (This is the practice in “individualistic societies” of focusing far too much on the internal states of a person – motives, values, beliefs, and genetics –

as the cause of her behavior.)

3.    Have moral philosophers taken a wrong turn by trying to rebut the sensible knave, by attempting to show that immorality is inherently irrational and short sighted? Or is morality – specifically norms of moral behavior toward strangers – a “discovery of reason” like the discovery of zero, as Paul Bloom claims (223)? (Ironically, Bloom, a psychologist, offers the strongest defense of the role of reason in ethical reflection in the book.)

4.    Is morality a product of evolution, a necessary adaptation? If so, what are the implications of this for morality and moral psychology? Do evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, muck things up here and commit “Beethoven’s error,” as Frans de Waal claims, by conflating the process of evolution and its outcomes (192)?

5.    Is honor an important moral category still or so gendered as to be unworthy of philosophical defense?

6.    When one’s pursuit of meaning clashes with morality, should morality always outweigh it (a question Susan Wolf raises)?

7.    Can standard ethical theories make sense of a character like Deadwood’s Al Swearengen? If not, is this a sign of a major defect?

8.    Are moral judgments really just deeply felt aesthetic judgments?

9.    Stephen Stich claims: “a vast amount of what philosophers have done recently, but also going all the way back to antiquity, belongs in the rubbish bin” (277). Is this true? Do philosophers have a regrettable practice of “intuition mongering,” as Stich claims, which we need to abandon?

 

Speaking of Stich, one of the most striking claims he advances, in the penultimate interview, gave me pause. Stich sharply notes: “the tradition of trying to justify normative claims in a deep and foundational way, the tradition of trying to provide something like philosophical or argumentative justifications for moral judgments—this is an extremelyculturally local phenomenon” (289). All the philosophers and theologians who have argued that morality would collapse in the absence of adequate philosophical or theological foundations should keep this in mind.

In conclusion, the second edition of A Very Bad Wizard is a very successful continuation and expansion of the project Sommers initiates in the first edition. I highly recommend this book.

                   

 

© 2017 Brad Frazier

 

Brad Frazier, Dept of Philosophy, Wells College