Ethical Theories in Conflict

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ETHICAL THEORIES IN CONFLICT REV. THOMAS J. HIGGINS, S.J.

THE BRUCE PUBLISHING COMPANY/

MILWAUKEE

PREFACE Philip B. Rice's book, On the Knowledge of Good and Evil, de­ veloped out of a paper which he had read to an academic audience. So also ETHICAL THEORIES IN CONFLICT originated in a paper en­ titled "The Deadlock Among the Non-Scholastics Concerning the Definition of the Good" which I have read in Detroit, Washington, and Gettysburg. Papers of the survey type barely scratch the surface but they can open the author's eyes to rich lodes which lie beneath. Every attentive observer is aware of the conflict of ethical doctrines in our time: it is one of the very obvious facets of our pluralistic so­ ciety. Is it necessary to speculate upon the cause of this diversity? Is it because the world is shrinking and men are coming closer together? Or shall we leave the answer with The Secular City and agree with Cox that modern man, attaining to maturity ( in the meaning of Bonhoeffer), witnesses a deconsecration of values? The perceptive reader of history, however, may see that changes in moral evalua­ tions have always followed upon any radical loosening or enhance­ ment of religious views. Let us leave it at that. These differing opinions I have tried to set forth in as objective a manner as possible. My point of view, however, is not to give a complete summary of the views of the authors whom I introduce but rather to show how A differs from B and C from D: each has his distinctive tint to add to this Joseph's coat of many colors. But not every author nor every shade of opinion is treated; to attempt this task would mean a book of impossible length. Thus I have made no mention of the effort to express the ethical concepts by means of mathematical symbols. The authors I have selected are types of other authors. Hence I did not deem it necessary to make a detailed analysis of the writings of respected authors such as Stuart Hamp­ shire, P. F. Strawson, H. D. Aiken, etc. I have felt it necessary, however, to give a more detailed account of existentialism and phenomenology than one might expect in an ethics book. The reason is, first, that much of what is offered as ontology is really ethics. Second, the combination of these two iii

90·2·79

IV

PREFACE

strains is modern philosophy. A number of its expressions have already passed into common parlance. Nor is there any understand­ ing of the modern situation without some knowledge of this kind of thinking. One need put less emphasis on the analysis of language because, despite its roots in Oxford and Cambridge, its philosophic future is not a rosy one. It may continue to have value for graduate students in literature and other disciplines or even as a propaedeutic for philosophy, but, as a philosophy, it is over-sophisticated, nomi­ nalistic, sterile, an intricate game of wits. We are in the midst of change. Nothing comparable to the change of our times has happened in at least four hundred years. So a book which does not take change into consideration might just as well not appear. But does change necessarily mean a looking to the future alone? the introduction of something entirely novel? Hearing that I was about to bring out this book a younger colleague asked me, But what is your thrust? His implication was that I had none. For an answer I can only fall back upon the wise householder "who brings forth from his storeroom things new and old" (Mt

13:52).

The avant-garde who hopes to be taken seriously expects that anything worthwhile must be brand new and he rejects anything older than Vatican II. In this connection it might be well to recall how Solomon's son Roboam lost five sixths of his kingdom because he despised the counsels of the elders and followed the advice of the young men. Homer is great literature because men of all ages recognize themselves and their contemporaries in Hector, Androm­ ache, and Agamemnon. It is our opinion that certain old things have an unfailing vitality and can serve perennial purposes; they can be properly fitted into modern circumstances and thus become part of the new. Applying these thoughts to ethics we think that the Natural La,v has a relevance for men which will never become obsolete. Despite the claims of the positivists and the process phi­ losophers, we look forward to a resurgence of Natural Law doctrine in the days ahead. It is part of the maturing of our civilization that we gain deeper insights into the mysteries of human nature: one of our modern insights is a fuller appreciation of human freedom and dignity. In days when men felt less free they were content to let authority, especially ecclesiastical authority, spell out for them the content of their moral obligations. It was this unawareness which supplied the

PREFACE

V

ground for what is now decried as legalism. Legalism is now every­ where in retreat. Thus the Church in certain disciplinary areas is willing to cut down the impact of positive law and to leave it to the individual conscience to choose the method of fulfilling certain substantial obligations. For example, the laws of fast and abstinence have been stripped of practically all positive content. Yet the sub­ stantive obligation of doing penance remains. How shall the indi­ vidual conscience make its decisions when it is deprived of many of the ancient supports of positive law? By sheer whim? By choosing the path of least resistance? In the course of this book we shall show that subjectivism will not do. There must be objective ethical norms and these we shall show to be precepts of the Natural Law. St. Paul rightly extols the freedom of the Christian. This is freedom from the yoke of the Mosaic law, not freedom from moral law. A man is all the more a man when, without the pressure arising from the law of man, he forms his conscience according to principles of an eternal law which has relevance for all the times and ages of man. I wish to express my thanks to the administrators of Loyola College for affording me the leisure in which to complete this book, to the Reverend Edwin C. Convey, S.J., and to the Reverend John E. Murphy, S.J., for their wise advice, and to Mrs. Robert H. Golds­ borough and Miss Martha Carroll for their clerical assistance. Loyola College, Baltimore

CONTENTS

iii

Preface

PART I THE MODERN IMPASSE

I II

THE OUTLINES OF CONFLICT Is THE ETHICAL PROPERTY?

III

Goon

IV

Is ETHICAL

V VI VII VIII IX X

Goon

A NATURAL

VERSUS RIGHT

Goon

SUBJECTIVE?

THE OBJECTIVISTIC VIEW SELF-REALIZATION THEORIES THE EMOTIVISTS AFTER THE EMOTIVISTS RELATIVISM THE EXISTENTIALISTS

3 7 21 34 44 61 71 82 99 118

PART II THE POSSIBILITY OF A SOLUTION XI XII

THE NEED OF METAPHYSICS WHAT Is MAN?

XIII

THE END OF MAN

XIV

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

xv

AND EVIL THE NATURAL LAW

Bibliography Index vii

Goon

145 174 192 201 216 239 247

PART I THE MODERN IMPASSE

CHAPTER I THE OUTLINES OF CONFLICT Whoever is acquainted with modern ethics is aware of the con­ fusion which has taken over that area of thought. Although writers of every age have accused their contemporaries of abandoning morality, those complaints have been about practice. Now it is theories and standards which are being abandoned. Change has thoroughly shaken the world of moral philosophy. In matters of practice, we are uncertain about the human prob­ lems raised by technology, automation, the cold war, and the big bombs. People resent the lack of upright conduct on the part of public officials and businessmen, and are asking that official codes of conduct be established for many classes of people. In the area of theory, the nonscholastics are asking whether ethical values are in any sense real and present in the world, and if so, what their nature and status are. Since 1903 they have been giving one another mutu­ ally unsatisfactory answers. In 1950 an author enumerated eighteen different theories and summarized the thought of at least eighty-five authors offering personal deviations from the more general theories. With the publication in 1903 of G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica a battle royal began among English-speaking moralists. The main target of criticism was the naturalists who were opposed on grounds either of their ontology or of their system of knowledge. The onto­ logical opponents of the naturalists are called nonnaturalists. On the basis of their system of knowledge, the naturalists call them­ selves empiricists and, at this level, their adversaries are intuitionists. The intuitionists are split on the question of whether "good" or right" is the basic ethical concept. Those who hold that right or duty is basic are the deontologists. Those who hold with Moore that good is basic are the ideal utilitarians. The naturalists are at odds among themselves as to whether the ethical good is subjective

11

3

4

THE MODERN IMPASSE

or objective. The subjectivists hold an affective theory, the objectiv­ ists a conative theory. Until 1933 every one held that the ethical good was cognitive, i.e., an object of knowledge; but at that time emotivism, a radical development of logical positivism, asserted that "good" expresses, not an object of knowledge, but of emotion. This position, however, was modified by those who seek to restore some measure of reason to ethics. They are the "good-reasons" ethicists or logical naturalists. For them, the function of ethics is the analysis of language: investigation of meaning solves all philosophical prob­ lems. Although Victorian utilitarianism has faded, there has been inherited from the nineteenth century a dispute over the relative or absolute character of ethical norms. Relativism is upheld by naturalists whose opponents are many intuitionists, the Kantians, and the scholastics. Finally, while the existentialists have not spelled out a system of morals, their views of the human situation have far­ reaching ethical implications. For one thing, they would do away with the anciently received distinction between "subjective" and "objective." A deadlock has ensued which is described: "I think it is particu­ larly easy in our time for the philosopher who asks [moral] questions to feel that he is beating his head against a brick wall. For, in the first place he is faced by the logical objection to any form of natural­ ism: the impossibility of deriving 'ought' from 'is'; secondly, he is unlikely in the present climate of opinion to feel satisfied with traditional forms of nonnaturalism: with a transcendental world of values, for example, or with simple, nonnatural qualities; thirdly, he is likely to feel that subjectivism, in any of its forms, fails to do justice to the way people actually think and behave. All the tradi­ tional answers, then, are unacceptable; and yet there seem no other possible answers.''.1 The deadlock has had these effects: ( 1) Scholars who once spoke confidently on moral matters, are now, like so many common people, a prey to doubts. ( 2) Frustration is general. "We cannot in correct language formulate an answer to our question, What is value? I shall not conceal my own moments of despondency when I am tempted to throw aside the whole philosophical endeavour to find an answer to such questions as, What is value? What is fact? What is truth? I am convinced that the perplexities that give rise to such

1 D. H. Monro, " Are Moral Problems Genuine?" Mind, Vol. 65 (1956), p. 166.

THE OU1LINES OF CONFLICT

5

despondency are not merely psychological in ongm. They are real problems concerning our world to which an empirical solution is not possible." 2 Nowell-Smith says: "The study of ethics seems to end in a blind alley. The older philosophers set out confidently to 'erect schemes of virtue and of happiness' but we end with an argu­ ment the burden of which is to show that all their efforts rested on a mistake." 3 ( 3) Baier is scandalized because none of the tradi­ tional theories can solve the problem of right and wrong: "none of the three fundamental questions of ethics has so far been satis­ factorily answered. The state of our knowledge in this field is particularly disheartening. Neither the various attempts to solve the epistemological problems in ethics nor the attempt to dismiss them as pseudo problems have succeeded. They are therefore still with us and unsolved." 4 ( 4) The traditional ethical enterprise has been abandoned. The emotive theory was supposed to be a new therapy but something went wrong. The interminable debates among the naturalists, the emotivists and the intuitionists reached an impasse by the turn of mid-century. Some think that the way out is by solving the problem of meaning. Others, despairing of finding their way out of that Cretan maze, live with the problem by means of various devices: by denying the normative character of ethics, by treating it as a physical science, by regarding it as a unique form of logic or even of rhetoric. Various reasons have been hazarded for the failure to resolve the deadlock. One reason which keeps turning up is that the ethicist has not been sufficiently recondite: "Most ethical studies have insisted upon remaining at the level of enlightened common sense, and this has kept them evidential and simple. It has also prevented them from succeeding." 5 Here is a manifestation of the old notion that philosophy is something esoteric, a secret known only to the initiated. Thus Jorgensen says: "So far only philosophers and sociol­ ogists know that there is no absolute good or absolute evil." 6 Our

E. W. Hall, What is Value? (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 195 2), p. 247. 3 P.H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics (London: Penguin, 1954), p. 61 . � Kurt Baier, The Moral Point of View (Ithaca: Come11 University Press, 1958), p. 45. 5 J. K. Feib1eman, "Introduction to an Objective, Empirical Ethics," Ethics, Vol. 65, p. 104. s Carl Jorgensen, "On the Possibility of Deducing What Ought To Be From What Is," Ethics, Vol. 66, p. 2 74. 2

6

THE MODERN IMPASSE

explanation for the existence of the deadlock will unfold as we go along. Between the scholastic and the nonscholastic philosophers of the English speaking world there seems to have been fixed a great abyss like that mentioned in the parable of Lazarus. Although both parties do not speak the same philosophical language, communica­ tion should flow between them. May we then set forth the main elements of this deadlock and inquire into the possibility of a solution? In Part I we set forth the conflicting opinions. Following a more or less chronological order we isolate these foci of opposition: I) Is ethical good a natural or a nonnatural property? 2) Is the basic ethical concept "good" or "right"? 3) Is ethical good objective or only subjective? 4) Is ethical good an object of reason or is it merely an emotion? 5) Is ethical good measurable by absolute standards? These problems are logically interconnected. We conclude our survey with existentialism which is a problem apart and poses novel ways of viewing the ethical situation. In Part II we inquire if this impasse should not be resolved by reconstituting metaphysics and we proffer a solution in the form of a natural-law theory founded on metaphysical principles.

CHAPTER II IS THE ETHICAL GOOD A NATURAL PROPERTY? The first dispute was between naturalists and intuitionists. Natural­ ists held that the ethical good is a property existing in things or events, just as hardness or viscosity exists in bodies, and can be known only by scientific methods. Intuitionists denied that the ethical good is such a property and said that it is known only by intuition. A. NATURALISM

Naturalism is the name which evolutionary materialism took at the turn of the century. It represents (a) an ontological position, ( b) a method of inquiry, (c) an ethical doctrine. a) The ontological position. "Nature" or "natural" is used to express one term of a distinction which has taken these forms. (I) Aristotle opposed nature to art or man's contrivance. (2) The medieval philosophers opposed nature to the supernature of grace. The natural is whatever belongs to man by the fact of his being a man while the supernatural is whatever is given him above his natural endowments with a view to his destination to the vision of God. (3) Locke and the early empiricists opposed nature to man, or one world of unreasoning beings explainable in terms of Newtonian physics to another world of human consciousness which cannot be so explained. (4) Kant called natural whatever is known by experience as opposed to the transcendental or what is beyond human experience. Naturalism denies these distinctions and says that the only real beings are objects existing in time and space. The visible universe is a self-existing and self-explanatory system which is the whole of reality. 1 1 J. H. Randall, "Epilogue: The Nature of Naturalism," Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Y. H. Krikorian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 355 ff.

7

8

THE MODERN IMPASSE

Nineteenth-century materialism explained the universe in a mech­ anistic or dynamic way. According to the first view, all things are reducible to particles of matter ( atomism) or mechanical processes ( mechanism); the mental is either nonexistent or conscious activities are shadows of mechanical processes. Human activities are so many physical and chemical reactions. The second view presents man as governed by economic determinism. In either view everything is reducible to matter or to energy or to matter in motion. The uni­ verse was not caused by a supernatural agent nor can it suffer any intrusion from such an imaginary being. Man is but an accident in a universe which was not made for him. He has no conscious life after death. Whatever happens is determined by rigid causal laws. The universe is devoid of freedom, purpose, and transcendent destiny. While there is still a hard-boiled materialism which denies the existence of a self or a soul, there is now a milder sort which deprecates the reduction of all things to matter in motion and holds that there are human, aesthetic, mental, volitional, and religious phenomena which cannot be reduced to anything but themselves. These authors are humanistic naturalists. They profess to be natural­ ists while denying part of the old-time materialistic creed. They mention what has been among materialists the unmentionable word - the spiritual. They talk of the primacy of matter, conceding that there may be something other than matter. They admit some kind of minor teleology but deny that the universe as a whole is subject to final cause. They admit the fact of religion, but for them it is a vague humanism, similar to Comte's apotheosis of scientific humanism. They talk of God, but He is not a personal transcendent God; just part of nature. The word God can mean anything: "As no experienced object corresponds to it, it is without fixed indicative force, and admits any sense which its context in any mind may happen to give it." 2 Naturalists are resolute in their denial of the supernatural, which they see as the extension of the imagination, the desire for the mythical, the refuge of the uncourageous who refuse to build their lives on the real. However, these naturalists are not steadfast in their principles because they think that all principles are subject to change. b) Method of inquiry. For the naturalist the only kind of 2 The Wisdom of George Santayana (Atoms of Thought), ed. I. D. Cardiff (New York: Philosophical Library, 1964), p. 62.

IS THE ETHICAL GOOD A NATURAL PROPERTY?

9

knowledge is the scientific: "Reliance on scientific method, to­ gether with an appreciation of the primacy of matter and the per­ vasiveness of change, I take to be the central points of naturalism."3 Hence the only acceptable account of anything in the universe being, event, occurence, human action, thought, desire, principle­ is that given by modern science. By combining the particular meth­ ods of several sciences we get an overall procedure for solving scien­ tific problems: statement of the problem; collection of data; analysis and classification of data; formulation of a hypothesis or tentative answer to the problem; deduction of probable consequences from the hypothesis; verification of the hypothesis by testing it against experienced facts or for the power to make predictions on the basis of it. Those who hold that the sole source of knowledge is the scientific method are empiricists. The father of empiricism, David Hume, rejected that rationalism which held that all knowledge could be deduced from one or other primordial principle. Hume's explanation of knowledge begins with the "impression" or the immediate datum of experience. This is a sensation and the corresponding act of the mind is the idea, a feebler, less vivid representation of the impression. Ideas are always copies of impressions so that if an idea cannot be traced to an originating impression it must be regarded as meaningless, for ex­ ample, substance, essence, cause. "It is impossible for us to think of anything which we have not antecedently felt, either by our external or internal sense." 4 What connects one idea with another is the association of ideas which he calls the cement of the universe. In his system of sensism there are no universal ideas because a universal sensation to which a universal idea would correspond is impossible. Nor is there any induction from facts to universal prin­ ciples; for there is no physical necessity binding cause and effect together. 5 Hume divides knowable objects into two classes: 6 ( 1) the relations between ideas which are expressed in analytic propositions. Hence, the truths of mathematics, and they alone, can be known apart from experience and with certainty. When we know the meaning

s Abraham Edel, Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Y. H. Krikorian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), p. 65. 4 Hume Selections, ed. C. W. Hendel (New York: Scribners, Modem Stu­ dents Library 1955), p. 147. s Hume, Theory of Knowledge, ed. D. C. Yalden-Thomson (Edinburgh: 6 Ibid., p. 24. Nelson, 1951), pp. 224, 253.

THE MODERN IMPASSE

of the mathematical symbols we can deduce propositions about their mutual relations. This is the only valid a priori knowledge. ( 2) Matters of fact and experience. We do not demonstrate facts; 7 we believe them. Generalizations about facts are expressed in syn­ thetic propositions, but they can be known only with probability. A general statement is no more than a summary of exactly so many experiments. Hume's contempt for metaphysics is well known. While Ayer is typical of the naturalists who heartily accept the Humean epistemology, Rice thinks that some empiricists are veering from Hume's assumption that ideas originate in experience alone. They admit that the ultimate "presuppositions of empirical knowl­ edge are not themselves verified by experience but in some other way." 8 Be that as it may, naturalism clings to empiricism, namely, all knowledge is through the external senses or by introspection. What is not verifiable against these sources is not knowable. Mean­ ing is restricted to the empirical. "To admit any nonempirical knowl­ edge of reality or to admit any necessary truths about reality would be to give up naturalism." 9 c) Ethical doctrine. The only good life for the naturalist is one that is temporal, pleasant, and secular: Rejecting any orientation of life to happiness in another life, he espouses some kind of personal or social hedonism and holds the end of life to be the pleasure of the individual or the group. His ethics is one of sophistication, tolerance, skepticism, -and indifference: "Human morals draw their vigour from earthy economy and find their sanction there." 10 We distinguish three types of ethical naturalists: ( 1) classical naturalists, who hold that ethical terms have cognitive meaning and can be translated into the language of science; ( 2) emotive natural­ ists, who hold that ethical terms do not express truth but emotion; ( 3) "good reasons" or logical naturalists, who hold that ethical sentences, although they are neither true nor false, have meaning and can be justified if they have good reasons behind them. The classical naturalists hold that moral phenomena are as natural as the phenomena of science, that ethical terms are to be interpreted

Ibid., p. 1 70. P. B. Rice, On the Knowledge of Good and Evil (New York : Random House, 1955), p. 24. 9 E. M. Adams, Ethical Naturalism and the Modern \Vorld-View (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), p. 3 3 . 1 0 G . A. Santayana, Platonism and the Spiritual Life (New York : Scribners, 1927 ) , p. 9 1 . 1

8

IS THE ETHICAL GOOD A NATURAL PROPERTY?

11

by scientific means. Thus the ethical good is a property existing in some object and of a sort similar to color, shape, or hardness. Natu­ ralistic views of goodness have been listed as follows. According to Hobbes good means "what I want" and morally good means "what the ruler wants." According to Hume good is "what is pleasant" and morally good is "what a disinterested person would approve of." According to Mill good is "what is desirable for its own sake" and morally good is "what is desirable by society." According to Perry good is "the object of someone's interest" and morally good is "the object of someone's fully integrated interests." According to Dewey good is "that which is capable of promoting a course of action by resolving tensions" and morally good is "that which is capable of promoting a set of coordinated activities of society by resolving tensions." 1 1 Morality then is reducible to some object of desire, some event, some feeling capable of being described in descriptive terms. Modem naturalists, however, are not in agreement as to whether goodness is a property of a situation ( objectivistic view) or the response of the agent to the situation ( subjectivistic view). In their effort to be scientific some of them look for chemical or physical processes going on in the object they call good or in the body of the agent reacting to this object; and either they identify goodness with these processes or at least call them the grounds of goodness. Since goodness is the expression of concrete tendencies of natural organisms, moral right and wrong are relative. There are no moral absolutes; for as men and social groups evolve, the goals they aim at are bound to change, and hence what is capable of satisfying these goals must change too. Since the sources of ethics are observation and experience and the criterion of its effectiveness accurate prediction, ethics is an empirical science. Tyndall sees ethics as a branch of physics; the nineteenth­ century materialists, as a biological science; Durkheim and Nordau, as part of sociology; Pepper and Schlick, as part of psychology. Upon the principle that whatever nature does is right, some regard ethics as the record of what men have done or the prediction of what they will do. Ethics then is social history or anthropology, and ethical sen­ tences are purely descriptive of fact. Others, however, with less logic, say that ethics is normative or ought-implying. For, since knowl­ edge in the empirical theory is concerned only with facts, these naturalists have great difficulty explaining how they make their 11

Cf. E. M. Adams, Ethical Naturalism and the Modem World-View, p. 37.

12

THE MODERN IMPASSE

transitions from descriptive premises to normative conclusions. Briefly, the naturalistic position holds that goodness is a natural concept which represents either a characteristic of an object or a subjective relation, both of which can be described in scientific, nonethical language. The opposition between naturalism and non­ naturalism is thus expressed: the naturalist thinks that things are good because we desire and choose them and evil because we dis­ like and avoid them, whereas the nonnaturalist thinks that we ought to choose things because they are good and avoid them because they are evil. B. INTUITIONISM

The chief opponents of the classical naturalists are the intuition­ ists who assert that it is impossible to deduce normative conclusions from descriptive premises, that ethics is an autonomous science. Their main contention, however, is that ethical good cannot be reduced to a natural property and is known only by intuition. When an object is intuited the knower does not go beyond that object for evidence of its truth; for he sees it to be self-evident. Writers have claimed intuition of the rightness or wrongness of particular acts, of general moral principles, of the moral predicates good, right, ought, etc. It is with this last that modem intuitionism concerns itself. There has been a tradition of intuition in British philosophy since the time of Shaftesbury. Reid reacted strongly to the naturalism of Hume. lntuitionism, however, suffered eclipse in the nineteenth century but it was revived by Sidgwick. It remained for G. E. J\1oore to be its banner bearer in the twentieth century. What is peculiar to ethical judgments, says Moore, is that they are concerned with the predicate "good" and its converse "bad." Hence what ethics must know above all else is what this predicate is. For unless one knows what is good in general he cannot tell what is ethically good. About "good in general" Moore makes four pro­ vocative statements : ( a ) good is undefinable; ( b ) the naturalists are wrong in identifying "good" with some natural property; ( c ) "good" is nonnatural and ( d ) is known only by intuition. a ) To define, says Moore, is to reduce an object of thought to its component elements. Only complex ideas are capable of being de­ fined. But "good" is like "yellow" and other simple concepts which

13

IS THE ETHICAL GOOD A NATURAL PROPERTY?

cannot be analyzed into parts. Since "good" is simple, it is unique, unanalyzable, and undefinable. "If I am asked," says Moore, " 'What is good?' my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter." 1 2 b) Since "good" is undefinable, whoever would identify "good" with some other thought-object is guilty of an error which Moore calls the naturalistic fallacy. He calls it "naturalistic" because he deals with the problem of "good" which naturalism identifies with a natural property. Moore holds that "Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties were absolutely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the naturalistic fallacy." 13 Since good is just itself, it is a mistake to try to identify it with any other thing, especially with some empirically observable property such as "productive of life," "being willed," "being felt," "being desired." Moore thinks he can lay bare the fallacy by asking a simple question. If some one says that good is pleasure or a feeling, Moore asks, "But is this pleasure or feeling good?" To regard pleasure or feeling as good in general is to commit the naturalistic fallacy and so "it will always remain pertinent to ask whether the feeling itself is good; and if so, then good cannot be identical with any feeling." 14 c) Good is nonnatural. By a natural object Moore means one which is the subject matter of the natural sciences or psychology, a thing which existed or does exist or will exist. Natural objects have various properties some of which are natural, like color, shape, hard­ ness, etc., and at least one which is nonnatural - goodness. Since Moore cannot imagine goodness as existing by itself in time, it is not a natural property. 1 1' d) Good is known only by intuition. While Moore claims that the indefinability of good is susceptible of proof - to deny it involves contradictions - his contention that good is a simple unanalyzable property rests on intuition. He appeals, first, to the intuition of the expert philosopher: "Whoever will attentively consider with himself what is actually before his mind when he asks himself the question 'Is pleasure ( or whatever it may be) after all good?' can easily satisfy 12

p. 6.

G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge : The University Press, 195 6),

1s Ibid., p. 10.

u Ibid., p. 41.

15

Jbid.

14

THE MODERN IMPASSE

himself that he is not wondering whether pleasure is pleasant. And if he will try this experiment with each suggested definition in suc­ cession, he may become expert enough to recognize that in every case he has before his mind a unique object, with regard to the connec­ tion of which to any other object, a distinct question may be asked." The argument goes on to appeal to every man : "Every one does in fact understand the question, 'Is this good?' When he thinks of it, his state of mind is different from what it would be, were he asked, 'Is this pleasant, or desired, or approved?' It has a distinct meaning for him, even though he may not recognize in what respect it is distinct. Whenever he thinks of 'intrinsic value,' or says that a thing 'ought to exist,' he has before his mind the unique object - the unique property of things - which I mean by good." 1 6 The thin gs which are good are those which are sought not as means but as ends. They are intrinsic values, things which ought to exist. To discover what these are, two principles must be followed : ( 1) "What things are such that, if they existed by themselves, in absolute isolation, we should yet judge their existence to be good" 1 1 and ( 2) intrinsic values are wholes and the intrinsic value of a whole "is neither identical with nor proportional to the sum of the values of its parts." 1 8 Good then is not something relational but it is an intrinsic quality. It is central to the system of Moore that the basic notion of ethics is intrinsic good and hence the right act ( the one which we ought to do) is the one which promotes as much intrinsic good in the universe as a whole as possible. While judgments about the rightness of acts are susceptible of proof from premises, judgments about intrinsic good are synthetic, intuitive, incapable of proof or dis­ proof, logically independent of all judgments of existence, and of all judgments of �he relation of the thing to any mind whatever. THE REACTION TO MOORE

Moore is an important figure because analytic philosophy arose from his methods. However, it has been said of his questioning and arguments that "they confound and agitate the mind, but do not give it peace." 1 0 16

19

1 7 Ibid., p. 1 8 7. 1 8 Ibid., p. 1 8 4. lbid. , p. 17. The Philosophy of G. E. Moore , ed. P. A. Schilpp (New York: Tudor,

1952 ) , p. 5 2 1 .

IS THE ETHICAL GOOD A NATURAL PROPERTY?

15

Among those who are favorable to his general position some offer severe criticisms. W. K. Frankena20 says that the notion of obliga­ toriness is part of the notion of nonnatural. But if good is simple, nonnatural, and intrinsic in Moore's sense, it cannot be obligation­ implying; for the connection between good and obligation in Moore's view is purely synthetic. So if good cannot be defined in terms of ought, it should not be called nonnatural. Since the nonnatural is necessarily obligation-implying, good should be defined in terms of ought. Therefore it cannot be simple. Ewing, a nonnaturalist, defines good as "what ought to be the object of a pro attitude" 2 1 and claims that he has resolved good into terms which are partly psychological and partly ethical thus avoiding the naturalistic fallacy. The psychological term is "object of a pro attitude" ( desire, choice, liking, pursuit, approval, admiration) and the ethical term is "ought to be" which expresses, not moral obliga­ tion, but fittingness.22 H. J. Paton questions Moore's contention that the goodness of a thing is wholly independent of the thing's relation to anything else. Paton cites instances of actions whose goodness is partly dependent on the circumstances in which they happen. Moreover, Moore has not disproved a necessary connection between being good and satis­ fying the will. Paton says: "This necessary connexion [between willing a thing and thinking it good] is explicitly denied. But if we will only what we think good, this suggests that what the will aims at is the good, that the good alone satisfies the will, and even what satisfies the will must be good. If nothing could be good unless it satisfied some will, we would have precisely that necessary and reciprocal connexion between good and satisfying the will which Professor Moore supposes to be impossible."2 3 Moore might have asked two other questions about good: (a) What do people mean when they call an object good? The analysts have been asking that question ever since Moore's time. ( b) If one examines the different meanings in which good is used, can one find a univocal element of meaning common to, and uniting, them all? If Moore had done this, would he have come up with his simple unanalyzable quality? Ibid., p. 103. C. Ewing, The Definition of Good (New York : Macmillan, 1947), p. 1 78. 22 Ibid., p. 1 89. 2a Philosophy of G. E. Moore, p . 1 3 3. 20 21

A.

16

THE MODERN IMPASSE

How has Moore's charge of naturalistic fallacy fared? Some have disregarded it. Others say they fail to grasp its force, especially the pertinence of Moore's question, "is this pleasure ( or whatever) good?" And understandably so; for to the disinterested spectator this is an idle question. For if one has established his general position that pleasure ( or whatever) is good, he should disregard any ques­ tion about a particular pleasure being good on the ground that the answer is already contained in his established position. To answer this question is to admit that one has not yet established his general position. Aristotle who holds that good is the object of appetite would have stopped Moore effectively. Others reject Moore's charge. Frankena thinks Moore should have spoken of a "de:6.nist" fallacy which would consist of defining the indefinable or of confusing one property with another. No such error has been committed. The difficulty does not lie in an attempt to define the ethical by the nonethical or the nonnatural by the natural; for "to assume that the ethical characteristic is exclusively ethical is to beg precisely the question which is at issue." 24 The real trouble, continues Frankena, is that those who would define good hold that the fundamental ethical sentences are analytic and tautologous : thus R. B. Perry regards the statement, "All objects of desire are good." But the intuitionists hold that such statements are synthetic. What underlies this difference is that in the area of ethical terms the intuitionists claim to have an awareness of a simple unique quality of goodness whereas the definists claim to have no such awareness. "The definists are in all honesty claiming to find but one character­ istic where the intuitionists claim to find two, as Perry claims to find only the property of being desired where Moore claims to find both it and the property of being good." 2 5 Consequently, if the intuitionists are right, the naturalists are blind and fail to discern the relations which are central to ethics; if the naturalists are right, the intuitionists are seeing something in things which is not there. S. C. Pepper26 says that it would be a fallacy to identify good with some other quality if good were in fact a unique unanalyzable quality. To convict his adversaries of the fallacy Moore must prove the exis­ tence of his simple unanalyzable thing. Pepper contends that, while a descriptive definition of good may not be possible, an ostensive defiW. K. Frankena, "The Naturalistic Fallacy," Mind 48 ( 19 39 ) , p. 474. Jbid., pp. 474-475 . 2 6 S . C. Pepper, Ethics ( New York : Appleton, Century, Crofts, 1960 ) , pp. 260 ff. 24

25

IS THE ETHICAL GOOD A NATURAL PROPERTY?

17

nition, differentiating good from all other things, should be possible. To prove the existence of his unique quality Moore uses linguistic arguments which purport to show that the meaning of good is not the same as the meaning of pleasure, being desired, etc. Pepper admits difference of meaning but difference of meaning does not prove that Moore's unique quality exists; nor more than the words "dragon" or "griffon" prove the existence of the things to which they refer. Moreover, good has many meanings: "No other word has just this connotation. But its uniqueness lies in the complexity of its refer­ ences, and this complexity is analyzable. A study of ethics may be regarded as an attempt to analyze the references of the meaning of 'good' and to show which of these can be justified." 21 Moore's other argument is that he has an intuition of this unanalyzable quality and so do all men. No one can prove or disprove that Moore has such an intuition but he adduces nothing to show that all men have it. So Pepper concludes that Moore's naturalistic fallacy is a mis­ conception based on the mistake that the unique meaning of good is a reference to a simple intuited quality. Despite these criticisms many competent authors think that Moore's charge of fallacy is legitimate, that it consists in the at­ tempt to explain the ethical good in nonethical terms. This latter point, however, is not the basic charge of Moore but a borrowing from Hume. Hence a number of naturalists, like Rice, think that all attempts to explain ethical terms by descriptive terms wind up in an infinite regress.28 In our opinion, the entire dispute is confused because, first, Moore sets out to discover good-in-general but mixes this topic with the ethical good, and second, in discussing the ethical good both parties confuse this topic with that of obligation. In due time we will hope to examine good on the level of being, then on the level of man as man, and finally relate this moral good to obligation. What of the nonnaturalness of good? Nothing could be more confusing than the choice of the terms "natural" and "nonnatural" in this context. Since by natural Moore means "physical-science­ natural," his nonnatural is "not-physical-science-natural." According to expert opinion "nonnatural" is a property which is neither natural, as yellow is, nor metaphysical, as absoluteness is; but it is one which is known, not by the senses nor by introspection, but in some in­ describable intellectual-emotional way; it is nondescriptive, nonex21

Ibid., p . 269.

2s Rice, op. cit., pp. 46--47, 278.

18

THE MODERN IMPASSE

pository, nonexistential, and is the consequence of some other prop­ erty, as for example, an experience is good because it is pleasant. 2 9 Both the naturalist and the intuitionist made the mistake of think­ ing that ethics is a science in the same way as geology or ornithology is. Whereas the subject of these sciences is rocks or birds, the sub­ ject of ethics is moral judgments, emotions, and volitions. As the physical scientist observes, classifies and seeks to discover the laws by which these nonhuman agents operate, so the ethician does the same for the human agent. The scientist and the ethician find characteristics in their materials which make them classifiable. But the naturalist ethician regards the characteristics he finds just as natural as those of geology. "Oh no," says the nonnaturalist, "they are different; ,they are nonnatural. They belong to another world, the moral order of which one is aware by a special sense, an aware­ ness analogous to the sense of sight and touch." But what is this moral world? While he hints that it is like the world of beauty, practically all the intuitionist does is to contrast his nonnatural world to the physical world and say that the nonnatural is different. What has provoked most criticism of Moore is the basing of his doctrine ultimately upon intuition of intrinsic good. The reaction of naturalists is denial. The more tolerant among them say that they have no such intuition and wonder if Moore is not self-deluded. Moore's followers today call their viewpoint a Realistic Value Theory.3 0 They describ-e their intuition as an immediate apprehen­ sion of self-evident truth. No evidence can be adduced to support it; it cannot be inferred from some other truth. A question as to whether a thing is good or right is not subject to argument; a statement about the intrinsic goodness of a thing is not debatable. lntuitionism is an appeal to what will appear obvious to the reader if he will take time to think clearly. Some mysterious eye of the mind, which the intuitionist is at a loss to identify psychologically sees something - ethical values - which the senses cannot perceive. As a species of knowledge it is qualified in two important ways: it is confined to the field of ethics and it is unique knowledge. Hill says: "Such immediate apprehension of good is not knowledge in the strict sense. It is like immediate sense experiences, which,

Cf. C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 195 6), pp. 2 66-273. "Is 'Goodness' a Name of a Simple Non-natural Quality?" Proceedings, The Aristotelian Society ( 1933-1934), pp. 249-2 68 . 8 0 T. E . Hill, Contemporary Ethical Theories (New York: Macmillan, 1950), pp. 291 ff. 29

IS THE ETHICAL GOOD A NATURAL PROPERTY?

19

being simply there for us in our experiences, are more likely to be said to be given than known but remain much more certain than things known and constitute major sources of knowledge." 31 The naturalist says that the intuitionist has not proved his case and the intuitionist replies that his case requires no proof, that when a claim rests on intuition questions of empirical proof are irrelevant. Pepper rejoins : "Claims for incorrigible modes of cogni­ tion - whether of self evidence, intuitive certainty, or indubitability of immediate data - have so often proved false or doubtful that this type of justification ceases to have any claim of credibility." 32 Finally, when the naturalist asks how the intuitionist knows that he has an infallible intuition of good, the best that the intuitionist can reply is that "modes of human apprehension of values and of communication concerning it are at best none too clear." 33 The naturalist then sniffs at intuition as a handy deus-ex-machina devised to rescue the intuitionist from the difficult passages of ethics. *

*

*

The naturalists are wrong in denying the distinction between the moral and the physical, in reducing the moral to the physical. For there is a moral world of human acts, norms, virtues, and vices as real as the world of sense. You cannot see justice but you cannot live as though it did not exist. The intuitionist rightly upholds the distinction but he made a mistake in calling the moral nonnatural; both the physical and the moral are natural to man. The prestige of science misled both disputants into thinking that ethics is a physical science. It is not. It is an ordered body of truths, resting on metaphysical principles, which aims at discerning the right order of human acts. Each human act has its physical ( natural) aspect, namely, the physiological and psychic realities which make the act to be this particular choice. The moral (nonnatural) aspect begins where the physical leaves off and it consists in the relationship of the act to a human value, promoting this value if it is good, denying or destroying the value if it is bad. All choices are related to that supreme value which is the final end of man. By good or bad choices a man becomes better or worse in that wherein he is peculiarly 31

T. E. Hill, Ethics in Theory and Practice (New York: Crowell, 1956),

33

T. E. Hill, Contemporary Ethical Theories, p. 3 1 7.

pp. 220-221. s2 Ethics, p. 2 69.

20

THE MODERN IMPASSE

human. None of this is directly discernible to the senses. Instru­ ments cannot measure human goodness. The empiricist is wrong in saying that the scientific is the only way of making contact with the real. Indeed, according to the most modern developments of epistemology, the moral dimensions of reality are closed to the positivist and empiricist. He cannot affirm moral values as if they were objectified facts. And what else has he to affirm? Marcel inter­ venes to explain that moral values are absolutely real but only as an appeal to a subjectivity. However that may be, there is a moral world which is open to reason : partly through deduction from self­ evident principles, partly through experience of good and bad con­ duct, partly through the feelings of shame and guilt on the one hand and of the approval of conscience on the other. We cannot accept the intuition of the nonnaturalists as the epis­ temological basis of the moral life. Intuition figures in our moral experience but no moral system should rest on intuition of moral concepts. We have no intuition of abstract right, wrong, good, bad, duty, and obligation. While we have intuition of certain first prin­ ciples of action, this knowledge would be inadequate without intui­ tion of the more fundamental principles of being, as we explain on pages 166 ff. lntuitionism misplaces intuition by putting it on moral concepts rather than on metaphysical principles.

CHAPTER III GOOD VERSUS RIGHT The intuitionists got their name from their theory of moral knowl­ edge. When we inquire what is known by intuition and what is the relative importance of what intuition reveals, problems divide the intuitionists. 1The intuitionist with a philosophy of duty now becomes a deontologist ( from Uov, it is necessary) who claims that we intuit the rightness of particular acts, that the basic concept of ethics is right or duty which is independent of good, that the right­ ness of an act depends not on its consequences but on its fittingness to the given situation. Thus he denies substantive doctrines of Moore who here emerges as an ideal utilitarian. Moore is a utilitarian because he subscribes to the doctrine that the right act is the one, of all those possible to the agent in the circumstances, which will produce the greatest amount of pleasure in the universe. He adds this qualification, however, that other things besides pleasure are to be included in the end of conduct. Hence he makes the central word of ethics not to be "pleasure" but "in­ trinsic good." He is an ideal utilitarian because he holds that the supreme good toward which action should be directed is the Ideal the best possible ( most pleasurable) state of things achievable. Here an ethics of value clashes with an ethics of duty. The issues in dispute are: Is the basic moral concept good or right? Does the morality of an act depend on its nature or its consequences? What is the explanation of moral obligation? These questions, says Edel,1 aroused deep passions in Oxford in the twenties. In 1939 Ewing2 called this the chief controversy of modem ethics. 1

2

Philosophy of G. E. Moore, p. 1 3 7.

A. C. Ewing, The Definition of Good, p. 18 6.

21

22

THE MODERN IMPASSE

A. AN ETHICS OF VALUE

What is peculiar to ethical judgments, says Moore, is not that they are concerned with human conduct but with the predicate good, "the notion upon which all Ethics depends." 3 To settle any­ thing in ethics you must first know what good is. Speculative ethics has only two problems : "Has a thing intrinsic value?" and "Is a thing a means to the best possible?" Thus Moore taught an ethics of consequences saying that the right act is the one which causes a good ( or better) result. When one asks what kind of actions he ought to perform, he is inquiring into the effects his conduct will have. The whole orientation of conduct is toward the future : "for it is certain that our actions can affect only the future." 4 All moral laws are assertions that certain kinds of action will have good effects. A good effect is whatever will help bring about the Ideal. Ideal has three meanings : ( I) The absolute good or the best state of things conceivable; ( 2) the best possible state of affairs in the world; ( 3) what is good in itself in a high degree. Since ( I) is beyond reach of our knowledge, we may forget about it. ( 2) is the human good and in order to determine what is the best state of affairs we have to know ( 3) . What then are the things which have a high degree of intrinsic value? Whatever is sought as a means to what is good in itself may be disregarded. Although it is an extrinsic good and may be called a good effect in an improper sense, it has no intrinsic value. In order to determine whether a thing has intrinsic value and how much that value is the general rule is : "consider what things are such that, if they existed by themselves, in absolute isolation, we should yet judge their existence to be good; and, in order to decide upon relative degrees of value in different things, we must similarly con­ sider what comparative value seems to attach to the isolated exis­ tence of each."5 To assist us in the search for these things Moore offers his doctrine of "organic wholes." He means that intrinsic good is almost universally not a simple but a complex thing com­ posed of parts which themselves may be good, bad, or indifferent. It is not the parts which count but the whole. Nor is the value of the whole the same as the sum of value in the parts. Thus pleasure a Principia Ethica, p. 1 42. 4 Ibid., p. 1 1 5 . 5 Jbid., p. 1 87.

GOOD VERSUS RIGHT

23

with knowledge can have a greater value than either is worth alone even in cases where one of them is worth nothing. The whole is not a subjective estimate but it has an objective and everlasting character; for "if any given whole is once intrinsically good or bad, any whole precisely similar to it must always be intrinsically good or bad in precisely the same degree." 6 Besides these general require­ ments, a thing will be intrinsically good if it is a conscious experi­ ence, which evokes a proper emotional reaction toward the object of experience, and produces more pleasure than harm. There are an infinite number of such things among which are aesthetic en­ joyments and personal affections. These are unmixed goods. Supreme among all values is consciousness of beauty. The fundamental truth of moral philosophy is "that it is only for the sake of these things in order that as much of them as possible may at some time exist that one can be justified in performing any public or private duty; that they are the raison d'etre of virtue; that it is they - these complex wholes themselves, and not any constituent or character­ istic of them - that form the rational end of human action and the sole criterion of social progress." 1 There are also wholes which are intrinsically evil but Moore does not tell what he means by evil-in-itself. He mentions cruelty and lasciviousness as evil in themselves and says that a universe filled with minds forever occupied with these passions would be a worse evil than the existence of no universe. Is evil-in-itself something whose nonexistence is preferable to its existence? Perhaps he would not say this; for he considers certain evils necessary for the having of certain goods. At any rate he offers three classes of evils: ( 1) contemplation and enjoyment of things ugly or evil in themselves; ( 2) mixed evils, the recognition of what is good or beautiful ac­ companied, however, by an inappropriate emotion such as envy, hatred, and contempt; ( 3) all pains; consciousness of pain is a far worse evil than pleasure is a good. There also are mixed goods, a combination of great good and evil. They consist in an appropriate attitude of mind towards things ugly or evil and include the greater number of the virtues having any claim to intrinsic value. Some of these mixed goods cannot be good on the whole ( instances of retributive justice); others, like courage and compassion, can. s G. E. Moore, Ethics (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), p. 1 71. 1 Principia Ethica, p. 189.

24

TIIE MODERN IMPASSE

It is impossible to speak of a moral criterion unless one first knows the things which are good and evil and the means for bringing them about. Once this is known, then the rule of morality is that one ought to maximize the good and minimize the evil. The right act is the one which will actually produce the most intrinsic good. Rightness does not depend on the nature of the act, or the motive of the agent, or probable consequences, but only on actual consequences. Thus of a man whose action turns out badly owing to some unforeseen accident when he had every reason to expect it to tum out well, Moore says that, while he is not blame­ able, his action was not right. Some of his followers desert him at this point. They distinguish between the act ( 1) which is objectively the best;8 ( 2) which is probably the best; ( 3) which is believed to be the best. In a given case all three may coincide. But suppose they do not; which is the right act? These authors do not make it the rule that the right act must consist in the choice of what is objectively the best; for com­ plete knowledge of the results of his acts is beyond the capacity of the human agent. They hold the right act to be that which is probably the best. Their reason is that people often fail to be diligent and rational in their thinking about moral problems. Hence today's utilitarian holds that an act is right if and only if no possible alternative is better. Baylis adds this flourish, that to be moral "an act must be selected 'not only in the belief that it is right but also because it is believed to be right." 0 Ought, to Moore, does not mean, that which is commanded. For good, the basis of ought, does not depend on relation to will. His explanation of ought reveals the full extent of his doctrine of consequences. Thus a good always implies some kind of ought; for "by saying that a thing is intrinsically good it means that it would be a good thing •if the thing in question should exist." 1 0 He rejects, however, this proposition : "A thing's having intrinsic value makes it a duty to produce it if possible." 1 1 The reason for his rejection is that in some circumstances it might be in our power to do some­ thing better. He has some extreme expressions. Thus he says that " 'I am morally bound to perform this action' is identical with 'This 8 C. A. Baylis, Ethics (New York : Holt, 195 8 ) , pp. 107 ff. o Ibid., p. 117. 10 G. E. Moore, Ethics, p. 65 . 1 1 Philosophy of G. E. Moore, p . 564.

GOOD VERSUS RIGHT

25

action will produce the greatest possible amount of good in the Universe.' " 12 Under the impact of criticism he modified his expres­ sion to "The total results ( or consequences) of this action will be intrinsically better than would the total results of any other action in my power." 13 Hence if two actions are possible, one of which A has more intrinsic value than the other B, yet if by the existence of A the sum of good in the universe will be less than if B be done, then I am obliged to omit A and do B. Hence "ought" expresses a somehow necessary link between an action possible and the best possible result, but Moore never explains why this link must exist. Indeed all the utilitarians take the existence of this necessary connection to be self-evident; yet this point is the heart of their doctrine on moral obligation. Queried on this point, followers of Moore tone down his expression to : "The relation of 'intrinsic good' and 'ought' is then best expressed, not by saying that every good experience ought to be brought into existence, but by saying that each type of experience tends to produce an obligation to bring it into existence that is proportional to its intrinsic goodness and accordingly that, all things considered, what ought to be done is presumably that which will bring about the most intrinsic good altogether." 14 They imply that we are always morally obliged to do our best but they never tell us why. Duty "is merely that which will be a means to the best possible." 1 6 Since Moore in later life explains good in terms of better, he wavers in his explanation of duty between use of better and best. Thus while it is our duty to provide the best balance of intrinsic value, he also calls our duty that action which will produce better results in its circumstances than any other. On the one hand he makes the terrific claim: "The only possible reason which can justify any action is that by it the greatest possible amount of what is absolutely good should be realized." 16 Then he subsides into less spectacular ex­ pressions : "[Duty] can . . . be unique only in the sense that the whole world will be better, if this act be performed, than if any possible alternative were taken." 1 7 He takes the same rigidly objec­ tive view with regard to duty that he does to right: "For the term 12 Principia Ethica, p. 1 47. 1s Philosophy of G. E. Moore, p. 559. 1 4 T. E. Hill, Ethics in Theory and Practice, p. 226. 1 5 Principia Ethica, p. 167. 1a Ibid., p. 1 01 . 11 Ibid., p. 1 47.

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THE MODERN IMPASSE

duty is certainly so used that, if we are subsequently persuaded that any possible action would have produced more good than the one adopted, we admit we failed to do our duty." 18 Duties are for the most part negative, consisting in abstention from things toward which we are tempted by strong natural impulse. The followers of Moore adopt his ideas on duty and obligation. Thus : "What we do in morality as well as in the law is to hold people to the goal of doing their best and to blame them if they do less than this. Since they can do what they are able to do at their best we say that this is what they ought to do." 19 By the best they mean that maximum of convenience and satisfactoriness which goes with temporal felicity. Among intrinsic goods none of them identifies a good which is supreme and final nor do they speak of sin, guilt, and sanction. Nor do they tell us what they see in good which demands that it be brought into existence. But they make it clear that morality is a matter of good results, that duty is the means to the best possible, that we ought always to do our best. The moral concepts are thus reducible to good and the purpose of con­ duct is the bringing into existence of the greatest possible balance of intrinsic good. B. AN ETHICS OF DUTY

Ross holds that ethics has two questions : What is the nature of duty? What are our duties? He finds the answer to the first question by inquiry into the right act. All would agree that the right act is the correct answer in any life situation to the question, What ought I to do? In most situations there are claims upon me which I can by my action satisfy or fail to satisfy. A right act is that which fulfills a given claim: the right act is the one which "would satisfy in the fullest possible measure the various claims . . . that are involved in the situation." 20 The right act then is the one which fulfills duty; and consideration of rightness is the first concern of ethics. In seeking the nature of rightness Ross rejects all naturalistic explanations. Rightness is not an emotional reaction in the spectator of the act, either in all men or a large group of men, or in the

Ibid., p . 150. C. A. Baylis, Ethics, pp . 112-1 1 3 . 2 0 W . D . Ross, Foundations of Ethics (Oxford : Clarendon, 1939), p . 190. 18

19

GOOD VERSUS RIGHT

27

agent himself. Nor is an act right because it produces the happiness of the agent or the community. Indeed of itself rightness cannot be said to be productive of any sort of result. Here he contradicts Moore and the ideal utilitarians. Broad states the position of the deontologist thus : "Such and such a kind of action would always be right ( or wrong) in such and such circumstances, no matter what its consequences." 2 1 Hence right­ ness cannot be analyzed into conducive-to-good-consequences. "Is it not plain on reflection that [productive of the best possible conse­ quences] is not what we mean by right. . . . It seems clear for instance that when an ordinary man says it is right to fulfill promises he is not in the least thinking of the total consequences of such an act, about which he knows and cares little or nothing." 22 More­ over, the right act differs from the good act. The right act must always be within the control of the agent but sometimes the morally good act is not. For to be morally good the act must pro­ ceed from a good motive but one cannot at will conjure up the proper good motive which will motivate his act. Finally, while productivity of good consequences may be one of the grounds of the rightness of acts, rightness is something different. Right means the same as the moral ought. Broad23 distinguishes two main senses of ought: ( a) a narrow sense which refers to an act within the control of the agent ( you ought to tell the truth) ; ( b) a wider sense which refers to an agent who has not control of the act (you ought to feel sorrow for the death of your aunt) . Only the first contains the moral ought. He then distinguishes three applications of ought: ( I) the deontological where reference is to certain types of action which ought to be done in certain or all circumstances regardless of consequences; ( 2) the teleological where reference is to an end which one ought to aim at without ulterior motive, e.g., one's own greatest happiness; ( 3) the logical; that is, if one aims at a certain end, he ought to take the proper means to effect it. The teleological application involves ought in the wide sense; for we cannot at will desire any end. The logical application involves ought in the narrow sense ( if we aim at some 21 22

8-9.

C. D. Broad, Five Types of E thical Theory, p. 20 6. W . D . Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford : Clarendon, 1 9 63), pp.

C . D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory, pp. 1 61-1 63 and 20 6 ff. Broad's doctrine as summarized by W. D. Ross in Foundations of Ethics, pp. 45-48 . 23

28

THE MODERN IMPASSE

end we can if we try adopt the appropriate means) ; but it can be improper because if we desire a bad end, we ought not to desire the means. Hence there is only one moral ought, namely, the ought which applies to acts which lie within the power of the agent and is imposed by the moral law. Does ought refer only to situations where one is disinclined to do one's duty? Is it a mistake to speak of duty in cases where one has a strong natural inclination to do what is right? Although some deontologists think that duty attaches only to acts toward which one is disinclined, Ross is typical of his school when he says that "duty is something we ought to do irrespective of . . . inclination." 2 4 The final explanation of the deontologist is that right is that which is appropriate to a situation, either an immediate situation or a total situation, and wrong is what is inappropriate. "It is worth while," Ross observes, "in this connexion to contrast the meaning of 'the right road' with that of 'a good road.' Goodness is an at­ tribute which belongs permanently to the road . . . so long as it remains unchanged in its other characteristics; rightness is an attri­ bute which [it has] only relatively to a particular situation and a particular need. A good road need not be the right road, and a bad road may be the right road, if one does and the other does not meet requirements of the particular situation." 25 So also certain emotions may be good or bad in themselves but not necessarily right. Their rightness is judged in terms of appropriateness to a given situation. As rightness in general, so moral rightness in particular is relational and means fittingness. An explanation of moral fittingness cannot be given in nonethical terms, for the deontologist is also a nonnaturalist. But this much can be said: moral fittingness is complete and ac­ counts for all the factors in a situation. For "we call right that act which is the most suitable of those possible in the circumstances." 2 6 Is this overall fittingness a capacity for fulfilling a human purpose better than any other act possible in the circumstances? The de­ ontologist admits a resemblance between utilitarian suitability and moral suitability, which is that both evoke favorable reactions, but resemblance is not identity. The affinity of moral suitability is rather with aesthetic rightness. There is "something not altogether Foundations of Ethics, p . 5 1 . 2 6 Jbid., p. 5 1 . 26 Ibid., p. 53.

24

GOOD VERSUS RIGHT

29

different in the way in which a situation calls for a certain act, and the way in which one part of a beautiful whole calls for the other parts. Here, as in the case of a right act, there is no question of subserving an extraneous purpose; there is a direct harmony between the parts of the composition, as there is between a moral situa­ tion and the act which completes it. The harmony is not of the same kind - rightness is not beauty; but there seems to be a genuine affinity, which justified the Greeks in their application of the word KcfAov to both." 2 7 Here Ross's analysis ends with the assertion that moral suitability is unique and unanalyzable. Although the deon­ tologist can begin to define moral rightness by naming its genus, which is suitability, he cannot complete the definition by naming the differentia. The grounds of right are the characteristics of an act which make it morally right. Broad speaks of right-making and wrong-making characteristics. The utilitarian says that all right-making character­ istics are "optimific" - they have the capacity of producing the great­ est good. But the deontologist is at pains to deny the utilitarian position. After saying that it would be right to promote a higher level of happiness among a smaller population than a lower grade of hap­ piness among a larger population and that a proper distribution of good is as important as a sum total of good, Ross ridicules the greatest-happiness theories for presuming to assume the prerogatives of Divine Providence. What kind of god does man become when you make him responsible for the greatest amount of good in the universe which can follow from his actions! Moreover, in the in­ stances of promise-keeping, gratitude, and repair of injury, the right­ ness of the act has no relation to consequences but depends on acts already performed. 28 Broad accuses utilitarianism of being too simple an explanation to cover all the facts without distorting them. The utilitarian makes the mistake of thinking that right and optimific are names for the same characteristic whereas all he has done is to show that these two characteristics mutually involve each other ( just as equilateral involves equiangular) without meaning the same thing. Hence there is no single principle underlying all right­ ness. The ground of right is not monistic but pluralistic. 29 2 7 Ibid., p. 54. 2s W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good, pp. 21, 27. 29 C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory, p. 215.

30

THE MODERN IMPASSE

The grounds of right are manifest in our particular duties. Ross distinguishes prirna facie duties and proper duties. A prirna facie duty is one which at first sight seems right or which tends to be morally obligatory, that which immediately appears from a partial view of the moral situation. He makes a rough enumeration of them: duties resulting from one's own acts such as fidelity; duties resulting from the acts of others such as gratitude; duties of making a fair distribution, of self-improvement, or refraining from injuring others, of doing good. One's proper duty, however, is that which fits the entire situation. "Tendency to be one's duty may be called a parti-resultant attribute, i.e., one which belongs to an act in virtue of one component of its nature. Being one's duty is a toti-resultant, one which belongs to an act in virtue of its whole nature and of nothing less than this."30 Ross thinks that some acts are prirna facie right and prirna facie wrong but he offers no method of solving conflicts of duty. Hence that which is one's proper duty is left to the immediate insight of the agent. When we ask how do we know this or that act is our duty, Pritchard says that no one can prove by a reasoning process that any act is obligatory any more than he can prove that he really knows. To know that a certain act is obligatory ( say the payment of a debt) , one must put himself in the moral situation ( where one owes a debt) , and then he immediately perceives what is the right thing to do. Any ultimate basis of moral obligation is unknown; for, like the concept of good, the concept of obligation is unique and unanalyzable. All that one can say is that certain actions are to be done or not to be done and that one immediately perceives their obligatory character. If, however, someone does not see a particular obligation, you cannot by reasoning prove him to be wrong. As in the case of one who gets the wrong answer to a simple arithmetic problem, all you can do is to tell him to do the sum again. Can anyone give reasons why he should be moral? The answer is, No; and if ethics is looked upon as the attempt to answer this question, it is based upon a mistake. 3 1 The question is illegitimate because we have no overall perception of what life is about; all that we can do is see what our duty is in particular instances. Carritt says: "The judgement that this act is right is both

so The Right and the Good, p. 28. H. A. Pritchard, "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" Mind ( 19 1 2 ) , Vol. 2 1 , pp. 21-37. 31

GOOD VERSUS RIGHT

31

indemonstrable and particular. Yet it is more like an apprehension of a self-evident truth than like a perception of a physical fact, since, though we can give no reason for it, we see its reasonableness." 32 Some further peculiarities of the deontologists may be noted, although not all of these doctrines are held by all. First, while most deontologists would agree with Moore that good is a simple, un­ analyzable concept, some like Carritt say good is of secondary im­ portance. Second, some think that unless one acts from sense of duty one's act is amoral. Third, while morality is limited to the area of duty, the good extends to a much wider field. Hence they hold that morality and virtue are utterly distinct. They argue that to be virtuous an act must be done willingly and from a good motive; but motive is not always within a man's control. Of course a person can act both from a sense of obligation and a motive of virtue but unless sense of obligation is present the person is not acting morally. Moreover, an obligation can no more be derived from a virtue than a virtue can be derived from an obligation. For example, you cannot say that a man is obliged to act courageously. You are asking for the impossible, that is, that the man act from a certain feeling which he cannot summon up. All deontologists say that right is independent of good, that the assertion that an act is right or wrong is not the same as saying that it is good or bad. For an act good in itself need not be right and a bad act may be the right act. Moreover, when we act from sense of obligation we have no purpose. For the moral act is placed neither for the sake of itself nor for anything to be got out of the act. The purposelessness of the moral act is so obvious that it is hardly worth mentioning but Pritchard does mention it for two reasons : ( I) "If we fail to scrutinize the meaning of the term 'end' and 'purpose' we are apt to assume uncritically that all de­ liberate action must have a purpose; we become puzzled both when we look for the purpose of an action done from a sense of obligation, and also when we try to apply to such an action the distinction of means and end, the truth all the time being that since there is no end, there is no means either. ( 2) The attempt to base the sense of obligation on the recognition of the goodness of something is really an attempt to find a purpose in a moral action in the

32 E. F. Carritt , Theory of Morals (London: Oxford University Press , 1930), p. 122.

32

THE MODERN IMPASSE

shape of something good which, as good, we want." 33 \Vhile Pritchard re-echoes the Kantian dictum that if you want some­ thing out of your act for yourself the act cannot be good, he lets the cat out of the bag in this way : if he should admit that the moral act operates for a motive, he admits that right is based on good. That he cannot do and be a consistent deontologist. Rather he must assert that good is based on right: "If the motive in respect of which we think an action good is the sense of obligation, then so far from [the sense of obligation] being derived from our apprehension of its goodness, our apprehension of its goodness will presuppose the sense that we ought to do it." 34 *

*

*

\Vhereas the clash between the intuitionists and the naturalists was chiefly about the mode of knowing moral realities, this clash among intuitionists is over substantive doctrine. The utilitarians are justified in claiming that right is not independent of good, that good is the fundamental concept. For if right were independent of good we should sometimes be obliged to do what is evil. However, the claim that moral good consists in optimal pleasant consequences is false. First, as we shall see ( p. 198), pleasure is not the ultimate good. Second, it is generally impossible to know which of the alternatives in our power will produce in the universe a surplus of pleasure over pain. At the heart of morality is the act good or evil by its nature; consequences of pleasure or pain are of peripheral importance. The utilitarians cannot sustain their position that men are obliged to produce the maximum good of pleasant consequences; for they fail to distinguish good which is of obligation from good which is of supererogation. The moral good is not that which is productive of _the most pleasant result; it is what conforms to the nature of man. Nor can the doctrine of maximizing the good be supported by any realistic sanction; it tends to make supermen of men and to produce a breed of starry-eyed "do-gooders." The deontologists' idea of moral fittingness is closer to the mark and they evoke sympathy by their efforts to keep close to the demands of common sense. For the normal adult has easy insight into his duties in obvious cases. But all cases are not obvious; some require a good deal of close reasoning. It is not true that we cannot H. A. Pritchard, "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?", p. 3 1 . s , Ibid., p. 26. 33

GOOD VERSUS RIGHT

33

give reasons for doing our duty. If we cannot, we live i n a n irrational world. We do our duty because we are obliged to seek our last end and it is implicit desire for our perfect happiness which radi­ cally motivates the good act. While the deontologists make so much of duty, they disappoint us because they fail to give an ulti­ mate and satisfying account of moral obligation. In this respect both disputants are seriously lacking. If they had made a complete precision between goodness and obligation so that each concept was treated separately, some issues would have been clarified. The at­ tempt to handle both concepts simultaneously was disastrous.

CHAPTER IV IS ETHICAL GOOD SUBJECTIVE? The third great clash of opinion centers on the subject-object polarity. The subjectivist says that the ethical good consists in his feelings of pleasure or in his judgments of approval. \Vhen he calls a thing good either he is reporting on the feelings which he or the members of his group have about the thing or he is asserting that the thing becomes good by his thought or feeling about it. The objectivist says that good exists in something outside the agent and that ethical good is brought into being by the agent choosing the thing, but the object chosen is not made good by the agent's thought, feelings, or desire for it. Feelings which may accompany choice are mere by-products. This chapter gives the subjective view, Chapter V the objective view, and Chapter VI the views of those who straddle the issue. SUBJECTIVE THEORIES

The subjectivist position rests upon the proposition that the judgment of the individual or group is the final court of appeal in moral matters. This moral judgment is arrived at in various ways accordingly as one supports (a) the moral sense view, ( b) hedonism, (c) one of the affective theories, ( d) the social approbative theory, ( e) the interest or conative theory. a) The Moral Sense Theory. In the seventeenth century Shaftes­ bury initiated, and Hutcheson, Butler, and Reid developed, a theory according to which everyone has a moral sense, distinct from reason, which enables one to perceive immediately what is right and what is wrong. Consequently, an act is good if it evokes a favorable reaction from this sense, it is bad if the reaction is un­ favorable. 34

IS ETHICAL GOOD SUB JECTIVE?

35

The doctrine is found in this century. Westermarck is an out­ standing subjectivist who holds that an act is bad if it arouses one's moral disapproval, it is good if it arouses one's moral approval. These views, however, will be treated when we deal with relativism. According to A. K. Rogers a thing is good if we approve of it and goodness is the abstract character of calling forth approval. This approval is the result not only of an emotional reaction but of a reflective judgment. We discover whether a thing is truly good by asking : "On continued reflection and further experience shall I find it retaining my approval." 1 F. C. Sharp says that an experience is intrinsically good when it is capable of becoming the object of reflective desire. He enumerates what he considers the best things in life and says that "for those to whom they mean most their highest manifestations bring the most unalloyed . . . joy open to the human race. In so far as a man is indifferent to any one of these values it is assuredly not a good for him." 2 Authors like A. Sutherland, 3 W. MacDougall,4 and A. Shand,5 writing on anthropological or psychological ethics, have built a system on instincts and sentiments. In the course of evolution man developed the parental instinct, instincts of sympathy, of duty, of self-respect and the like. When these instincts became organized around centers of interest, they gradually, through the influence of ideas, became sentiments. A psychoanalytic view holds that our moral feelings are shaped in early childhood by sex relations to the members of our family. In every case conduct which accords with these sentiments or feelings is good; conduct which is repug­ nant to them is bad. b) Hedonism holds pleasure to be the sole good and pain the sole evil. Most naturalists hold some form of pleasure to be the fundamental value. Thus R. M. Blake says : "Pleasurable conscious­ ness is always ultimately good; and nothing else is ultimately good." 6 There is ( 1) psychological hedonism which holds that the sole motive of conduct is desire for pleasure and avoidance of pain.

1 A. K. Rogers, The Theory of Ethics (New York : Macmi1lan, 1922), p. 1 7 . 2 F. C. Sharp , Ethics (New York: Century, 1928 ), pp. 449-450. a A. Sutherland , The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct (London : Longmans Green, 1898 ). 4 W . MacDougall, An Introduction to Social Psychology (Boston : Luce, 1926). 11 Alexander Shand , Foundations of Character (London: Macmi1lan, 1920). 6 R. M . Blake, "Why Not Hedonism?" International Journal of Ethics, XXXVII, p. 3 .

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THE MODERN IMPASSE

The will always acts in the direction of the most pleasant end-in­ view : "of the ideas which function as motive, that one gains the upper hand which finally possesses the highest degree of pleasant emotional tone." 7 Then there is ( 2) ethical h edonism which holds that while men may not always act from these motives, this is the way they ought to act. Pepper supports both theories : "When the basis for a hedonistic ethics is psychological hedonism, the theory is as strongly supported as possible. It appeals for the support of its standards of conduct to the empirical results of psychological and physiological research. To deny these standards is to deny estab-­ lished scientific theories and the data confirming them." 8 To the question, Whose pleasure is paramount? three answers are possible: One's own (personal hedonism) ; society's ( utilitarianism) ; and a third tries to reconcile personal hedonism with utilitarianism. George G. Nathan subscribes to personal hedonism : "To me, pleasure and my own personal happiness . . . are all I deem worth a hoot. . . . Pleasure, whatever its species, is the drink in the desert. It is the beautiful, transient reward of pain and travail. There is no other reward." 9 According to W. H. Sheldon, "The goodness of t]ie good is the pleasantness of it, pleasantness explicit at the moment or implicit for the future . . . psychological hedonism is correct . . . we want maximum pleasure. . . . Here enters the truth and import of ethical hedonism. We ought to choose the most fruitful pleasures, even if for the present that means choosing the painful. Yet the oughtness of the ought is only the fact that ever the motive is at work within us, the subconscious drive toward maximum happiness." 1 0 According to utilitarianism a pleasant experience is not more valu­ able for happening to the agent; its value is the same whether it happens to you qr to me. Hence in deciding upon an action the agent must consider its consequences to others as well as himself. It would be wrong if he gave preference to his own pleasure. This is the social justice principle and from it flows the supreme principle that that act is morally good which promotes the greatest good of the greatest number. This principle may require a man to sacrifice

Moritz Schlick, Problems of Ethics ( New York : Prentice Hall, 1939), p. 39. S. C. Pepper, Ethics (New York : Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1960), p. 1 02. 9 G. J. Nathan in Living Philosophies ( New York : Simon Schuster, 193 1), pp. 222, 224. 1 0 "The Absolute Truth of Hedonism," American Philosophers at Work ed. Sidney Hook ( New York: Criterion, 195 5), pp. 4 69, 475. 7

8

IS ETHICAL GOOD SUBJECTIVE?

37

his happiness for others; for the pleasure of one is a less good than the pleasure of all concerned. The tendency now is to reconcile personal hedonism with the demands of social life. M. Schlick holds that while men always act in the direction of the greatest pleasure, the height of immorality is inconsiderateness, the pursuit of personal ends at the expense of others. Since selfishness stands condemned, "the good is good only because it is considered by society to be useful." 11 By "useful to society," he means "what is conducive to pleasure." But "how can it please men to do what pleases others?" 12 The answer is that the good of society and the good of the individual are identical. The practical problem is to see to it that the pleasure experienced in realization turns out to be the same as the pleasure felt in motiva­ tion. It is possible, on the one hand, for people to learn that only conduct which springs from social impulses produces happiness. On the other hand, the fact that individuals are actually happy is the sign that the claims of society are being met. W. T. Stace agrees with the utilitarians that the morality of actions depends on their consequences but the utilitarians are wrong in thinking that these desirable consequences are nothing but a collection of pleasures or an aggregate of satisfactions. The worth of our pleasures depends on the happiness they produce but pro­ duction of happiness is not the only characteristic of the morally good act; it must also be unselfish and just. For Stace seeks to recon­ cile pursuit of personal happiness with altruism and he finds the basis of reconciliation in the social nature of man. Hence he enun­ ciates this supreme law: "Act always so as to increase human happi­ ness as much as possible. And at the same time act on the principle that all persons, including yourself, are intrinsically of equal value." 1 3 c) The Affective Theories. Proponents of affective and conative theories see life as an earthly affair to be explained in a naturalistic way. Whereas the hedonist says that man acts for pleasure and assumes that everyone knows what pleasure is, the affective and conative theorists enter the field of psychology to explain what pleasure is and to discriminate among pleasures. "Affective" and "conative" are subsumed under a general motor-affective theory 11Problems of Ethics, p. 96. 1 2 J bid., p. 1 6 1 .

W . T . Stace, The Concept o f Morals (New York: Macmillan, 193 7), p. 1 80. 13

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TIIE MODERN IMPASSE

which regards man as a being of feelings and wants who, under the pressure of their stimulus, acts to fulfill them. Our motor­ affective apparatus is the psychological equipment by which we are motivated to act so as to get what we need and like and avoid what we don't like. The theory is called affective if emphasis is upon feeling; it is called conative if emphasis is upon goal-seeking and desire-fulfillment. Prall is typical of the naturalists who say that "x is good" means "I like x." Value is an interest relation based on preference. Essen­ tially an interest in religion is the same as a cat's liking cream: both are based on liking. Truth itself would not be valuable if there were no one to like it. "Value is adequately defined in terms of motor-affective attitude. Judgment never itself constitutes that atti­ tude. The liking is all we have.'' 14 Prall has a scale of values which distinguishes between "good for" and "good." The former includes the things we like because they promote our likes for other things. The latter are the things we like for themselves . Moral good is of this type; yet Prall subordinates it to contemplation. Contemplation of beauty is the supreme good. Santayana is a naturalist who says that, while morality is an expression of animal life, yet it is also something of the spirit imaging forth some timeless essence. Inconsistent with his material­ ism he accepts spirit which he makes part of nature but cannot understand. Value is neither an essence nor a physical process but a favorable feeling toward many essences: "Satisfaction is the touch­ stone of values; without reference to it all talk of good and evil . . . is merely confused verbiage.'' 1 5 \Vhat is to be satisfied? One's own preferences! "The nerve of moral judgment is preference: and prefer­ ence is a feeling or an impulse to action which cannot be true or false." 16 Ethics, then, belongs to the affective part of man's being for "rational ethics is an embodiment of volition . . . the expres­ sion of living interest, preference, and categorical choice." 1 1 Whose choice? The choice of society? While he sees some need to be altruistic he is at rock bottom an individualist: "Moral life is [the assertion of] a private ideal in the face of an intractable and omni1 4 D. W. Prall, A Study in the Theory of Value (Berkeley : University of California Publications, 192 1), p. 2 67. 1 5 G. A. Santayana, Reason in Common Sense (New York: Scribners , 1905), p. 222. 1 6 G. A. Santayana , Realm of Truth (New York : Scribners, 1938), p. 67. 1 7 G . A. Santayana , Reason in Science (New York: Scribners, 1906), p. 244.

IS ETHICAL GOOD SUBJECTIVE?

39

potent world." 18 However, intellect, which does play a part in esti­ mating values, leads him to distinguish in history three phases of morality: ( 1) prerational ( the pre-Socratic Greeks) where impulse plays the greatest part and is the basis of all morality; ( 2) rational, which was brought in by Socrates and consists in the harmonizing of impulses; ( 3) postrational ( Christianity) which is over-rationalized and disillusioned. Santayana places contemplation high in his scale of values wherein, however, the affective rather than the intellectual element is supreme : "The highest good open to the spirit of man . . . is found in those moments of life in which the joy of awareness is so perfect that the proper objects of either action or thought are loved only for their essences, and the illusion of exclusiveness or profit is dissolved in gladness. Now this joy or gladness . . . is the cer­ tain touchstone for the purity of the spirit in any instance. The good is simply this unique quality of experience which any object, or state of affairs, may conspire to minister to or sustain." 19 The supreme value then is experienced in ecstatic moments and his moral system is summarized : "The ultimate intuitions on which ethics rests . . . are not opinions we hazard but preferences we feel." 20 According to C. I. Lewis the moral act is what it is on account of its consequences. It is objectively right if, in the light of available evidence, it will probably produce that result which is best in terms of good consequences. Basic goodness is an immediately felt quality of satisfactory experience. "There is nothing which is desirable or undesirable for its own sake and entirely without reference to any­ thing beyond itself except that quality of passages of experience by which he who experiences them finds them satisfying and such as he would prolong, and dissatisfying and such as he would terminate and avoid." 2 1 If we are inclined to regard these experiences as subjective and trivial, let us remember that the occurrence of this value-quality is the one fact "in the absence of which there would be no mean­ ingful distinction between good and bad at all." 22 This is intrinsic value and any object which can produce it for us regularly has inherent value. To do good to others is to present them with occa-

1s G. A. Santayana, Winds of Doctrine (New York: Scribners, 1 926 ) , p . 1 60. 1 9 Philosophy of George Santayana, ed. by P. Schilpp (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1 940 ) , p . l l 0. 2 0 Winds of Doctrine, p. 1 44. 21 C. I. Lewis, The Ground and Nature of Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 955 ) , p. 64. 22 Ibid., p. 66.

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THE MODERN IMPASSE

sions of enjoying similar experiences. Our attention, however, should not be taken up with the transitory experience as with the larger end which is "realization of the maximum possible goodness in a whole life."23 This whole life Lewis does not evaluate as Bentham would by adding up its pleasures and subtracting its pains; but life is to be lived and appreciated "whole-wise or Gestalt-wise, much as we hear a symphony which is being played and not merely as a succes­ sion of notes or chords." 2 4 But when it comes to choosing which is the overall rule of morals, the prudence of the personal hedonist or the justice of the utilitarian, he cannot make up his mind. d) The Social Approbative Theory. Many naturalists think that for transient feelings one should substitute permanent attitudes. Goodness then would be a habitual pro-attitude, the attitude of approval. Likewise in determining moral good they would substitute group attitudes and preferences for individual tastes and preferences. Hence the moral good is that which a given society approves and custom is the source of morality. Since custom gives rise to a relativistic ethics, we shall discuss this theory when we treat of relativistic theories. e) The Conative Theories. The founding of goodness on feel­ ing or even attitude is too slippery a basis in the eyes of some naturalists to make their theory sufficiently scientific. vVithout pass­ ing to the objectivistic side they offer a conative theory which regards good as a function of the process of desire or goal-seeking. "Conative" is named from conatus, a striving after, the effort to secure a good or avoid an evil. The conative and affective theories represent a basic split among the empiricists : the affective theories say that feeling is the basis of value and the conative theories make this claim for desire. R. B. Perry seeks for the value-in-general which will apply to all the disciplines which discuss value. He starts with the thought of Spinoza that we do not strive for things because we think them good but we think them good because we strive for them. His conclusion is that "a thing . . . has value . . . when it is the object of an interest - any interest." 2 5 Hence he would not say that "x is good" = "I like x," but "someone has an interest in x." Value is 28

24

Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 68.

25 R. B. Perry, Realms of Value (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 3 .

IS ETHICAL GOOD SUBJECTIVE?

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not conferred by a valuing judgment, as Dewey thinks, but by the supervening interest. Interest is the relation between an object, real or imaginary, and a subject capable of a motor-affective response to it. A thing is interesting to someone when he likes it and tries to get it or dislikes it and avoids it. Perry calls his theory an interest theory and its claim to objectivity is that the liking or disliking of the agent is capable of public verification. The psychology of interest is elaborately described in behavioristic terms. TI1e interested act is the purposive act and supposes two main elements : ( 1) a determining tendency or governing propensity in virtue of which one is attracted to a goal; ( 2) the expectation that the act selected will help attain the goal. Interests are classified as positive and negative, progressive and recurrent, playful and real, submissive and aggressive, subjective and objective, immediate and mediate, personal and social. Corresponding to these interests are the psychological values. The traditional classification of values is thus summarized: "thought, when universalized, is Truth; feeling, when universalized, is Beauty; will, when universalized, is Goodness; while that harmony in which these three are reconciled is God." 26 He finds much to object to in this last classification. Morality is one among many values and it belongs only to beings who have interests and can appreciate the interests of others. Moral­ ity is the human effort to harmonize conflicting interests. It aims to "prevent conflict when it threatens, to remove conflict when it occurs, and to advance from the negative harmony of non-conflict to the positive harmony of cooperation." 2 1 The supreme good is that all persons should attain and enjoy what as persons they like and desire - a goal, however, which requires that all should be person­ ally integrated and harmoniously associated. This ideal must present itself as something to be realized and its consummation must be anticipated in imagination in order that it may operate as · an ex­ pectation and a goal of aspiration. An object is morally good when "the interest which makes it good satisfies the requirement of harmony, that is, innocence and cooperation." 28 Innocence means that indulging this desire harmo­ nizes with my other interests; cooperation, that this desire is R. B . Perry, General Theory of Value (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 693. 2 1 Realms of Value, p. 90. 2 8 Jbid., p. 104. 26

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THE MODERN IMPASSE

moderated by concern for the interests of others. An act is right when it conduces to harmonious happiness; it is wrong when it leads to disharmony. The morally obligatory is that which is demanded by the morally good. Duty is a stronger term than ought because it is fortified by an implied promise by which the agent has bound himself. Moral obligation is categorical, as Kant says, but condi­ tional. The condition is not that one safeguard his own interests but the interests of all and thus produce the happiness of all. According to D. H. Parker, value is found only in experiences and is defined as "a joy-giving activity or passivity or else the assuagement of desire." 29 Value always resides in the self, not in the object of experience. He differs from Perry by saying that value is not so much interest as the satisfaction of interest; the good is the fulfillment of desire. Naturally he finds difficulty in transferring this self-interest notion of satisfaction to the field of morals. For morality demands transcendence of self, a seeking after the good of others. He reconciles value with morality through the medium of duty, which is a demand-response situation. Duties are demands made upon us by others in the form of "you ought to do this"; to which we respond by transforming their wishes into our desires so that what they want of us now becomes "I ought to do this." This is accomplished by identification, "the appreciation through the sympathetic imagination of the desires of other persons as if they were our own." 3 0 The objective of morality is the preservation and fostering of a desired way of life for all the members of the group with whom identification is possible. Hence the right is what others demand of us and the morally good is the fulfillment of this desire. Ordinary morality (practice) consists in the mores of the group. It is relativistic. It is partial, representing the desires of the dominant members of the group. Its motive is impure "for the demands which · are the core of morality express the kind of life that I want for myself, as well as for others." 3 1 There are no real standards of morality but from what people do some intimation of the structure of the ideal is discernible. An ideal morality would rest upon the demands of liberty, fraternity, and equality for all; but even this norm would not be absolute. The supreme good is neither Nirvana nor the love of God but the subordination of

D. H. Parker, The Philosophy of Value (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 195 7), p. 1 4. 30 Ibid., p. 264. 3 1 Ibid., p. 268. 29

IS ETHICAL GOOD SUBJECTIVE?

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lower to higher desire into one system of harmonious satisfaction. Pepper makes out a strong case for personal hedonism which alone, he contends, fits the facts. Man's acts are purposive, goal­ seeking, and he has a built-in, selective (trial-and-error) system for attaining goals. What the person aims at is an integrated personality which lies in the body, is identified with it and lasts as long as it lasts. His big problem is how to reconcile personal drives with social demands. For this he has a floating rule: whenever great social needs arise, the individual must knuckle down to help society survive; when, however, social pressure relaxes, one should enjoy freedom and initiative in pursuit of his personal aims. Hence the morally good is that which satisfies the total set of one's drives or selective systems. "An act would be morally good only if it had passed through all the applicable selective systems of empirical ethics. It would be the final judgment of the whole structure of evaluative criteria relevant to the matter at hand . . . what the totality of social conditions and his own personality and position require of him at that juncture." 32 * * * If, for the feelings or thoughts of the individual, we substitute the demands of society, we have a relativistic ethics which we discuss in Chapter IX. As pure subjectivism in thought is condemned as of no value except to the subject thinking, so pure subjectivism in morals is likewise valueless. Certainly there is a subjective method by which one knows the difference between right and wrong ( the dictates of conscience) but this cannot be the whole story. For if there are no objective standards by which conscience is formed, then we have the singular situation of having objective standards by which to evaluate a good president, a good shortstop, a good soprano, a good teacher but none for estimating a good man. If being a good man is more important than being a good anything else, then an essential element of order has been omitted in the universe. God, then, has failed to make proper provision for His rational creatures. More­ over, without objective moral criteria everyone is on his own, a state of affairs which makes social life chaotic if not impossible. s2 S. C . Pepper, Ethics, pp. 3 35-3 36.

CHAPTER V THE OBJECTIVISTIC VIEW According to the non-scholastic objectivists, conduct is good when it accords with an objective standard such as (a) the cosmic process, (b) organic evolution, (c) the will to live, (d) the ongoing process, (e) the demands of Marxist society, (f) the will of God. a ) The cosmic process. What a man should strive for, says Stapledon, is the harmony of his actions with the cosmic process, the most universal kind of teleological activity. Action is teleological when it is directed toward a future state though not necessarily by intelligence. Good is the fulfillment of a teleological tendency and ethical good is free · subordination to the teleology of the cosmic process whose end is "the exfoliation of the whole." The ideal is t�� greatest possible fulfillment of whatever capacities are inherent in the universe. The highest of these are not necessarily human. The better is that which fulfills more of the potentiality of the teleological substance. The best is "the greatest possible fulfillment of the tendencies in the universe."1 What the origin of this process is and who is its author Stapledon has no idea. From cosmic need arises moral obligation : When we say that any one ought "we mean that the universe is such that there is a dominant need whose ful­ fillment demands these activities of a man." 2 Woodbridge echoes these ideas in a less incisive way. Nature uses man "for her subtle purposes, as she uses soil and moisture and sunlight, to diversify existence with illustrations of her power." 3 Hence a man does well who reviews a typical day and searches for the instances of which he • can 'say : "Here my conduct was

1 W. 0. Stapledon, A Modern Theory of Ethics (London: Methuen, 1929), • p. 170. 2 Ibid., p. 174. 3 F. J. E . Woodbridge, "A Preface to Morals," The Yale Review, XX, p. 704.

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THE OB JECTIVISTIC VIEW

45

motivated by the claims of a cosmology which I and others have framed."4 b) Organic evolution. Kropotkin denies that nature is a battle­ field where one sees nothing but the struggle to survive and the extermination of the weaker by the stronger. For in the tooth-and­ claw view all that we would learn from nature would be evil. The truth is that "mutual aid is the predominate fact of Nature." 5 It is the principle of mutual aid which makes for the preservation and development of animal species and the human race. Kropotkin notes among carnivorous animals the single rule that they never kill one another. Man has developed because the tribes of primitive times followed a similar rule. "The origin of this morality lies . . . in the feeling of sociality, in the herd instinct, and in the need of mutual6 aid." Concepts of good and evil evolved not on the basis of what was favorable or unfavorable for the individual but good or evil for the whole tribe. Unfortunately, the rule of "everyone for all" did not extend beyond the individual's own tribe. According to C. H. Waddington ( a biologist writing on ethics) the basic good is the evolved, better is the more evolved, and fu­ ture good is measured by the evolutionary process. "Real good cannot be other than that which has been effective . . . in the course of evolution." 7 Evolution from the animal to the human condition has been superseded among us by a socio-genetic process of transmitting and receiving information. The most important items to be transmitted are ethical beliefs about the nature of the most human demands. Ethical beliefs are formulated by conscience or the Freudian super-ego. Since conscience is a function its effective­ ness is measured by its success in doing what it is meant to do. Waddington is not too sure what this function is except that the trend of evolution "is toward what may crudely be called rich­ ness of experience." 8 If we may judge from neurotic disorders and horrendous asocial behavior, neither now nor in the past has conscience been too efficient. This erratic behavior 6f conscience Waddington is willing to call original sin. Human wisdom, how-

Jbid., p. 699. P. Kropotkin, Ethics (New York : Dial Press, 1924), p. 14. 6 Ibid., p. 7 3 . 1 C. H. Waddington, Science and Ethics (London : Allen & Unwin, 1942),

4

5

p. 1 8.

s C. H. Waddington, The Ethical Animal (New York: Atheneum, 1961 ) ,

p. 204.

46

THE MODERN IMPASSE

ever, consists "in the encouragement of the forward progress ( ana­ genesis ) both of the mechanism of the socio-genetic evolutionary system, and of the changes in the grade of human organization which that system brings about." 9 Today these changes highlight problems of a healthy authority structure, social communication, warfare and killing, the improvement of man's environment. Pepper regrets the abandonment of evolutionary ethics because of the mistakes of its advocates. These are : first, the concept of the survival of the fittest has been poorly explained. What the concept really means is : "the selection through the dynamics of biological propagation of the offspring most closely adapted to the living conditions of the en­ vironment so that they propagate for the next generation." 1 0 The second mistake is oversimplification of the tooth-and-claw formula­ tion of the theory. Actually, natural selection works in man through social solidarity. The third mistake is to endow later and higher forms of life with more value than lower and earlier forms. For the value quality in natural selection is adaptation and that alone. It is not true that the forms which emerged later were better adapted to their life zone than those which emerged earlier. Natural selection is like the selective system of a purposive act; it consists of these elements : ( a ) comparable to the drive in the structure of a pur­ posive act, natural selection has a dynamic element which is an interbreeding population; ( b ) comparable to the trial-and-error acts instituted to achieve the end of the purposive act, there are in natu­ ral selection trials which are the varied offspring of the population; ( c ) comparable to the selection of right means and the rejection of wrong means in any selective system, there is in natural selection the rejection of unadapted offspring. However, natural selection has run its course as far as the individual goes . Society has put its protective covering around him so that even if he personally is less adapted for survival he still survives. Hence the evolutionary process has passed over into society and its cultural patterns.11 Competition is not now between individual and individual but between society and society; the one which will survive is the one which provides itself with the best tools. c ) The will to live. Albert Schweitzer says that while ethics aims at securing the inner perfection of a man's personality, yet Ibid. E thics, p . 202. 11 Ibid., p. 209. 0

10

THE OB JECTIVISTIC VIEW

47

that purpose is achievable only through reverence for life. For man is thoroughly moral only "when life as such is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of his fellow man, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help." 1 2 Hence the fundamental rule of morals is: it is good to maintain and cherish life, it is evil to destroy and check it. Moral problems are about not only ourselves and our human neighbor but all living things. "An ethical system which is concerned only with the attitude of man to his fellow man cannot really be in harmony with a world­ view. To found an ethical world-view on ethics which are only concerned with our fellow man and human society is a logical impossibility." 1 3 Although he believes in a personal God, he derives his thesis from pantheism and believes in "the great mystery that all that is is will-to-live . . . that all Being is life, and that in loving devotion to other life we realize our spiritual union with infinite Being." 1 4 While he would like to believe that man is the goal of nature, he does not think that the facts support that view. The Christian ethic of love is reverence for life. d) The ongoing social process. In evaluating John Dewey, three things must be kept in mind: ( I) He began with, and never aban­ doned, the pragmatic premise that "the hypothesis that works is the true one." 15 ( 2) Society is the matrix of all human action. ( 3) Everything changes including Dewey's doctrine. He first sees the good as the attractive, that which satisfies want. He distinguishes between fulfillment of an immediate need and the thoughtful quest of a more distant end. Not that the second is always better; for he insists upon "the importance of nurturing the present enjoyment of things worth while, instead of sacrificing present value to an unknown and uncertain future." 1 6 Then he comes to the notion of good as that which approves itself upon reflection.1 7 What he always looks for in ethics are pleasurable, satis­ factory consequences. These are summed up as social progress and

12 A. Schweitzer, My Life and Thought (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946) , p. 1 88. 1s A. Schweitzer, Indian Thought and its Development (New York: Holt, 1936) , pp. 259-260. 1 4 Ibid., pp. 263-264. 1s J ohn Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Holt. 1920 ) , p. 1 56. 1s Dewey-Tufts, Ethics, (New York : Holt, 1932) , p. 227. 1 1 Ibid., p. 2 1 0.

48

THE MODERN IMPASSE

the tool by which progress is achieved is his scientific method of experimentation ( trial and error). The moral standard is approval, the viewpoint from which one regards the human act as already performed and worthy of praise or blame.1 8 The primitive standard is that which is done, the ap­ proved. But once reflection enters in, one should seek the approv­ able. The basis of approvability is not only personal satisfaction but social well-being which includes whatever is a due contribution to a shared good. Since morals looks exclusively to the future, praise and blame are not rewards or demerits for past acts but incentives to the future improvement of the self. Dewey's view that morality disregards the past affects his ideas of responsibility and freedom. Responsibility is not based on present acts and accountability for past controllable acts. It looks to the future solely and consists in the ability to learn and act differently next time. We are held responsible in order that we may become responsive to the claims of others. Freedom, as a natural endowment, is the capacity to grow. Actual freedom is acquired and consists in the awareness of one's ability to remake old tendencies, of concern for the process and direction of one's growth, of struggle against fixity.1 9 There is nothing fixed in the realm of the true and the good: from our heritage must be expunged the immutable, the system­ atized, the once-for-all ordered. 2 0 Man has progressed from behavior, motivated by immediate desire, to behavior regulated by the social group and uncritically accepted, to the reflective morality where each one decides for himself after critical reflection. The old com­ mandments are changing. Moral ideas must fit the scientific era. Fixed rules become ossified errors. Change shatters that unity which tradition once attributed to human life and · moral principles. This fragmentation first appears in his denial of any final end of life. TI1is notion must be scrapped for "a belief in a plurality of changing, moving, individualized goods and ends. The end is no longer a terminus. It is the active process of transforming the existent situation." 2 1 One should not only review the means he has chosen for his ends-in-view but the ends them-

1s Ibid., pp. 260 ff. 1 9 J ohn Dewey, "Challenge to Liberal Thought," Fortune, Aug., 1944, p . 186. 2o J ohn Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 211. 2 1 I bid., pp. 162, 177.

THE OB JECTIVISTIC VIEW

49

selves must be constantly reappraised. For the individual is a self in process of creation. He will become a mature self if he is wise, desires lasting satisfactions which embrace others as well as himself, is sensitive to the claims of others, is alert to new values, and is ready to reconsider his ideals in order to establish new ones. He will be happy with a happiness which is temporal, stable, and full, dependent on the enduring dispositions of his soul. This happiness, however, is not a goal to be deliberately aimed at but a result which happens. One can move in this direction only if his social virtues are formed and active, but the only effective means of changing personalities is improvement of social conditions. Society - the process of associating in such ways that ideas, emotions, and values are transmitted and made common - is supreme. 2 2 To its process both individuals and institutions are subordinate. Here is the ele­ ment central to his doctrine - the on-going social process. Hence the task of the individual is to transform his impulsive tendencies "into a voluntary self in which desires and affections center in . . . values which are common to all." 23 Dewey's fragmentation is also seen in his position that each situation requires a unique choice. "The good is never twice alike. It never copies itself." 2 4 Two consequences follow. ( 1) General principles are not much help in solving problems. No old principle can be relied on to justify a course of action. 2 5 While principles may help to an insight into the problem, it is the situation itself which must offer the means of solution. It was this problem-situation which led him to his final notion of good as that which "contributes to the amelioration of existing ills." 2 6 He sees no point in talking about good or evil until a conflict of interests arises in a concrete social situation. Good then is whatever resolves the tensions of conflict. ( 2) The other consequence is that Dewey recognized no distinction between intrinsic and instrumental goods, between spirit­ ual and material values, between moral and merely technical prob­ lems. Whatever needs fixing is a final intrinsic end. Every choice is directly moral. How to live healthily or who is the right dry cleaner to patronize is as much a moral problem as how to be just. Ibid., p. 207. Dewey-Tufts, Ethics, p. 3 36. 2 4 John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Modem Library, 1950 ) , p. 211. 2 5 Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 175. 2 s Ibid., p. 1 72. 22

23

50

THE MODERN IMPASSE

But since how to live healthily and justly is a matter which differs with every person, every moral situation is unique and has its own end. Principles ( classification in morals) are only tools of experi­ ment. They are like the dentist's instruments: he drops what he no longer needs and looks for another. The same is true of moral doc­ trines. Hence Dewey's doctrine is also called instrumentalism 21 which means that a principle is only an instrument for analyzing a situation of conflict. Right and wrong are determined by the exigencies of the situation and not by fixed rules, which are a hangover from prescientific philosophy. What then is the good Deweyan consequence which is the basis of morality? Whatever unravels a tangled situation where persons adversely confront one another and which affords to everyone con­ cerned the utmost satisfaction. This is what makes for progress and forwards the social process which has no limits. e) The demands of Marxist society. The goal of Marxism is a material paradise on earth which consists of freedom, equality, and great abundance of material goods. Marxism has its peculiar way of defining things. Thus "freedom," says Engels, "is the control of ourselves and over external nature which is founded on knowledge of natural necessity." 28 The needs of men can be scientifically determined and satisfied by a socially controlled system of production and distribution. Hence the first kind of Marxist freedom is freedom from want. Once this is ac­ complished a higher freedom will be evolved when greater needs will be created and satisfied by the material paradise. Freedom, then, is the satisfaction of needs through an abundance of material wealth. Engels said that Marxist equality means the abolition of all classes. Men originally e�joyed community of goods. When these were stolen by greedy people and private property established, there arose ( a) the class of capitalists against the proletariat. To confirm their robbery the capitalists instituted the State which is the armed might of the capitalists keeping the masses in subjection; hence the class of ( b) rulers and ruled. The capitalists called upon the Church to teach the masses obedience to the capitalists in the hope of a

H.H. Titus, Living Issues in Philosophy (New York: American Book Co. , 1953 ) , pp. 2 78 ff. 2 8 Handbook of Marxism, ed. Emile Burns (New York : International Pub­ lishers, 193 5), p. 47. 27

THE OB JECTIVISTIC VIEW

51

reward beyond the grave; hence the class of ( c) priest and layman. With the disappearance of private property all classes will disappear. But since the capitalist will not yield his property without a struggle he must be forcibly dispossessed. Every national State must be destroyed and a world-wide dictatorship of the proletariat substi­ tuted. As conditions of life are bettered under the dictatorship of the proletariat, people will so improve that they will lose the will to exploit others. But "while the State exists there will be no free­ dom. Where there is freedom, there will be no State." 29 The dictatorship will gradually disappear as all men are trained to be socially responsive and participate in public life. When antisocial desires are purged away, the State will give way to a stateless ad­ ministration of things. Society will have attained completest equality and the ultimate rule will be: From all according to his ability; to each according to his needs. With the disappearance of the State and private property the shackles which now impede an efficient production and distribution of goods will vanish and a horn of plenty will be poured upon the human race. Thus pure communism - the final estate of the human race - will be ushered in. Its advent is inevitable. In view of such a goal and such a program serious doubt has been cast upon the existence of Marxist ethics. Among the special­ ized philosophic disciplines Engels found room only for epistemol­ ogy. The reason is clear : the fall of capitalism proceeds with ines­ capable necessity and the role of the individual in history is reduced to next to nothing. Furthermore, the Marxists agree that there is no Marxist ethics in the sense of ideals which regulate conduct. They reject an eternal moral law and assert that all moral theories are the product of the economic stage which society may have reached at a particular moment. Lenin says : "We deny all morality taken from superhuman or non-dass conceptions. . . . We say our morality is wholly subordinate to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. We deduce our morality from the facts and needs of the class struggle of the proletariat." 3 0 Therefore, that is good which promotes the class struggle and world revolution, that is bad which hinders these goals. Who or

29 V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution in Handbook of Marxism, ed. by Emile Burns ( New York , Random, 1935), p. 752. so v . I. Lenin, Religion (New York: International Publishers, 1933), pp. 4748.

52

TIIE MODERN IMPASSE

what determines good and bad in the concrete? The present leaders of society! For as Marxism marches to its goal strict control of every one by society is absolutely necessary. Understandably very few books on Marxist morals have been written. As of 1952 Wetter says: "Among topics of discussion, the problems of . . . communist ethics and aesthetics are unduly ne­ glected." 3 1 Bakunin believed that "morality is a variable product of society. It expresses what is useful for the group. Class is the sole source of morality." 3 2 Karl Kautsky held the orthodox Marxist line that morality depends on the productive process, that presently "the moral ideal is a special weapon for the peculiar circumstances of class war." 33 E. B. Bax holds "an ethics whose ideal is neither personal holiness nor personal interest, but social happiness - for which the perfect individual will ever be subordinate to the perfect society." 34 H. Selsam says that everyone should choose the side of the workers because they are bound to win. He does not say that the goals of the workers are "good in themselves . . . but rather . . . they are the sole means to the general human progress and the widest human good . . . . Morality consists of the codes or principles whereby men guide and evaluate actions as leading, or not leading, toward the wider fulfillment of their material and cultural needs and desires. Inasmuch as every gain in the standard of living of the masses of people is a step in that direction, Marxists judge it good; and inasmuch as only the socialization of the means of production can solidly establish such gains for all people . . . it is the highest good and hence the moral standard by which all acts are to be judged." 3 5 What happens when the material paradise is realized? Some Marx­ ists say that when the end is reached morality ceases. Engles says that then a truly . human morality will be possible because all class antagonism will have ceased. f) The will of God. ( l ) Emil Brunner rejects philosophic ethics.

31 G. A. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism, trans. Heath (New York : Praeger, 195 8 ) , p. 202. 3 2 E. Delaye, S .J., What is Communism?, trans. B. F. Schumacher ( St. Louis: Herder, 1938 ) , p . 19. 33 K. Kautsky, Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History (Chicago : Kerr, 19 18 ) , p . 202. 34 E. B. Bax, TI1e Ethics of Socialism ( London : Swan Sonnenschein, n. d. ) , p. 28. 8 5 H. Selsam , Socialism and Ethics (New York : International Publishers, 1 9 43 ) , pp. 96, 98.

THE OB JECTIVISTIC VIEW

53

For these systems are infected with universal principles and are self-contradictory. They manifest man's effort at self-security and are rooted in sin. A eudaemonistic ethics is man's effort to find his good within himself; a duty ethics is the legalism condemned by St. Paul. Hence only revelation, as interpreted by Calvin and Zwingli, can tell us what is approvable conduct. In his system there is no intrinsic good. The formulation of such an abstraction means that one seeks his good apart from God but "the Good has its basis and its existence solely in the will of God." 3 6 Moreover, God is the agent of good and man is but His tool. For good is that which God does in us and through us. Brunner views man as totally corrupt and conscience as man's awareness of his guilt. The fundamental contradiction which is at the core of man's being was induced by original sin which is the work of God and man. God, therefore, works both the good and evil of man. Man is restored or justified by faith alone. Now faith exists "wherever God as the Holy Spirit speaks within the soul, and Himself, within man's self, responds to the call of God." 3 7 Faith on man's part consists in knowing that his life is the gift of God, in receiving the divine gift with implicit trust in God, in the quiet­ ing of his conscience. When he receives faith man experiences a New Birth. But he is not made a new creature; his righteousness is not within him: "God addresses the unrighteous as though they were righteous - not because they will be righteous one day, but because they are 'right' in His sight, because He wills it so." 38 In man's rebirth the Evangelical distinguishes: ( I) the divine call "Come"; ( 2) the all-inclusive divine imperative - "Believe"; ( 3) the rule of Christian life - "Obey," that is, love God and neighbor. As for love of God, He does not desire a service directed to Himself alone. Since His will for His kingdom is a social will, He recognizes no service of God which is not also a service of man. The love of neighbor is not an ordinance whose particulars can be known before­ hand and codified in a legal program but swift response to the needs of others in their particular circumstances. The general rule of Evangelical morality is that for an act to be

36 Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative, trans. 0. Wyon ( New York: Mac­ millan, 193 7), p. 5 3 . 3 1 Ibid., p . 80.

ss Ibid., p.

76.

54

THE MODERN IMPASSE

good it must be done in faith. The act must be motivated solely by obedience to the divine command. The content of morality cannot be summarized in general principles but it comprises what­ ever God wants here and now : "the Good consists in always doing what God wills at any particular moment." 3 9 The Christian, how­ ever, is not free of the Law. Since he remains a sinner, the Law remains but not as legalism. The Law - the Ten Commandments can point in the direction of the divine command; but it is only the divine command here and now which indicates the right thing for each man. One knows the divine command only through the Holy Spirit working within him. 2) According to Reinhold Niebuhr, any morality founded on the aspirations of humanity is to be rejected; for the alloy of sin is in all human virtue. The natural is sinful because it contains the assertion of self which is the will to power. Therefore, morality depends on the will of God : "No pattern of human reason but only the will of God can be the principle of the form and order to which human life must be conformed." 40 The divine will comes to man through revelation, which is par­ ticular to every man, and also historic, given to mankind. Niebuhr equates the former with conscience and the confrontation of a man with God in his moral life : "The moral experience consists of the sense of moral obligation as being laid upon man not by himself, nor yet by his society but by God." 4 1 The counterpart of conscience is the public revelation of God which has been completed by the teachings of Jesus. The moral content of this teaching is summed up in the divine command to love. For the essence of God is love and ethics is the divine command to imitate. But this ethic contradicts every human impulse and makes impossible demands on man : "The ultimate moral demands : . . transcend all conceivable possibilities." 4 2 Niebuhr plays up the paradox of the impossible possibility; it is his way of explaining the tenet of Luther that since the moral law is necessary it is possible; but since it contains precepts which man cannot keep, it is impossible.

s 9 Ibid., p. 8 3 . 4 0 Reinhold Niebuhr , The Nature and Destiny of Man ( New York: Scribners, 1949) , pp. 28-29. 4 1 Ibid., p. 1 3 7. 4 2 Reinhold Niebuhr , An Interpretation of Cluistian Ethics ( New York : Harper , 1935), p. 59.

TIIE OB JECTIVISTIC VIEW

55

Niebuhr says little of good and much of evil. Good is the harmony of one's life with life. Obligation is the necessity of accepting God's will: "Obedience to God . . . must be absolute and must not be swayed by ulterior considerations." 43 Evil is not ,the conscious rejec­ tion of good but the corruption of good. This doctrine he rests upon the Fall, which is not a fact of history, but a symbol of the sinful­ ness of man: "Moral evil lies at the juncture of nature and spirit." 44 Man's sinfulness derives from his refusal to accept his finiteness. While verbally rejecting Luther's doctrine of the total depravity of man, Niebuhr admits it in fact. For the most righteous man must have an uneasy conscience; in the best of his acts there is an element of perversity - a conscious choice of the lesser good. The root of man's sin lies in his pretension of being God. While Niebuhr admits man is free, yet man is destined to make absolute claims for his partial self and finite values; and thereby sin. This is inevitable. Yet man is saved by the mercy of God and his own repentance, which is recognition of his finiteness. The cleavage between good and evil in man is to be healed at some future time by a love whose supreme manifestation is forgiveness. 3) Bonhoeffer advocates a total morality whose immediate pur­ pose is that we live as men before God, whose ultimate purpose is the glorification of Christ. Total morality demands goodness m both the being and the action of a person. Although he knows no universally valid explanation of good­ ness, in one place he identifies goodness with reality as seen and recognized in God. Hence a man is real and good insofar as his nature and action, his origin and goal, are at one with God his Creator and Redeemer. In another place he identifies goodness with life. Our lives are now in a tension between a "no" and a "yes." The "no" is man's natural life which is death; the "yes" is man's supernatural life which is Jesus Christ, "the origin, the essence and the goal of life." 45 Men do not achieve goodness but have it im­ pressed upon them through the instrumentality of grace. It is God's merciful judgment on, His forgiveness of, the sinner; but there is no "method of achieving it by a way of one's own." 46 It is final; for once justified a man is made good forever. 43

45

4 4 Jbid., p. 7 6. 5 1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, tr. N. H. Smith (New York: Macmillan,

Ibid., p.

1955 ) ,

p.

1 89.

4a Ibid., p. 82.

56

TIIE MODERN IMPASSE

To discover goodness in one's action "one must ask what is the will of God."4 7 Bonhoeffer has no time for human reason deciding problems of what is the right thing to do. For man has declined from justice because he sought knowledge of good and evil. Such also was the sin of the Pharisee who thought that by knowledge of good and evil he could choose between them and make the right decision. The Pharisees tried to involve Jesus in similar situa­ tions but He always evaded these snares because he had only one criterion of action - the will of God - and this He always knew. So in our case, the will of God is the sole rule of action and the problem is to know it authentically. We do not grasp it by intuition or by reasoning. It does not come by inspiration but solely by grace which requires to be new each morning.4 8 While holding that the will of God is particular to each occasion, Bonhoeffer says that God binds us by mandates which, however, he hesitates to call laws. These mandates have been revealed in the Bible and concern labor, marriage, government, and the Church. 49 Morality then consists in obedience to divine commands which suppose a necessary superiority in some person and a necessary inferiority in others. This is a relationship of persons, founded not on power vis a vis weakness nor on a suffrance coming from below, but solely upon a mandate from above, the limits of which are indicated by God. 4) According to Elert, philosophical ethics is man's view of him­ self while theological ethics is God's view of man. "The Christian ethos conceives of itself as the divine judgment of the human quality." 50 To learn what God thinks of human conduct we go to The Law ( Old Testament) and to The Gospel ( New Testament) . In his state of innocence man was a responsible being wholly oriented to God. By sinning he becomes wholly corrupt so that he now responds to God as one who has taken the direction of his life into his own hands. Hence man is a sinner, "and that applies to the Christian man until the day of his death." 5 1 God's reaction to man's sin is twofold: in the Old Testament He passes a verdict of condemnation; in the Gospel, He offers man forgiveness.

4 8 Ibid., p. 1 62. 4 9 Ibid., pp. 3 1 0 ff. Ibid., p. 77. Werner Elert, The Christian Ethos (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press , 195 7), p. 7. Ill Ibid., p. 14. 47 50

57

THE OB JECTMSTIC VIEW

According to Elert, Law in the widest sense is that total relation­ ship to Himself and the cosmos in which God has placed man. This Law has three main bonds : ( 1) that of the existential condi­ tions in which man finds himself in the universe as male or female, member of a family, race, state, etc.; ( 2) that of God issuing com­ mands; ( 3) that of God issuing a sentence of retribution. Law in the first sense indicates the natural order of human existence. Law in the second sense, The Torah, is not a manual of what we ought to do nor a help to the regulation of conduct but something which shows man to be in opposition to God. The Law accuses. Nobody can keep The Law. Hence it is disclosure of human weakness and of divine retribution upon sin. Sin is a positive force tending to destroy all natural order. It is unbelief, lack of trust in God, "attack upon the judgeship of God, because we do not trust it implicitly but would rather make our recognition of his judgeship dependent upon his acceptance of our moral standards." 52 Since there is neither repentance nor forgiveness under The Law, the verdict of The Law is that man deserves death. However, a second appraisal of mercy and forgiveness appears in the Gospel. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, appeared in history and by dying for sinners made them his equals and saved them from sin. Men are saved by faith, a grace which enables them to confess their sinfulness and evince their trust in Jesus so that they are con­ verted from the old man of sin, who lives under The Law, to the new man, who lives by The Spirit. The sinner is interiorly renewed by the Holy Spirit who now dwells in him. This is what happens to every man who encounters Christ and experiences that break­ through from a life of sin to a rebirth under God. One cannot prepare for this great event in the life of a Christian; one can only accept it. The first effect of conversion is a new judgment on God's part concerning him. He is no longer under the curse of the Law; there is restored to him the image of God lost through sin; he is free. Under the Law there was no freedom but "Christian liberty is free access ,to God which was formerly blocked on God's part through the threats of the Law, through His wrath, through the whole order of the Law. On our part we were kept away from Him through our sin, unbelief, and fear." 53 Since grace and the Law are mutually 52

Ibid., p. 1 57.

53

Ibid., p. 2 3 3 .

58

TIIE MODERN IMPASSE

exclusive, the converted man is free of the Law. Consequently he enters a new obedience whose imperatives of grace take the place of the Law. What are the new imperatives? The major imperative is continuing repentance and faith in Christ. This faith is not an intellectual assent but supreme trust in the readi­ ness of Christ to save. The minor imperatives are : ( 1) endurance of suHerings imposed by others; ( 2) renunciation of all aspiration for rewards in the next life; for hope of reward is incompatible with trust in Christ; ( 3) sanctification or living in a holy com­ munity. It is also abstention from impurity, strife, and selfishness together with practice of sincerity; ( 4) love of God and neighbor. This is not eras, love of desire, but agape, love of another which excludes love of self. The Christian is to imitate the divine agape which "consists in the fact that by surrendering his status as ruler, which he almost seems to forget, he even forgets himself for the good of the creatures." 5 4 The Christian must do the same on behalf of his brother, his neighbor, his enemy; ( 5) good works according to one's individual vocation. The life of a Christian is one of inward struggle and anxiety. For ( I) the law of sin still dwells in him and if he is not vigilant he will fall from grace. He is anguished because the Law retains its validity against him. Whereas under the Law there was a certain security, under grace every decision of conscience is a risk; that is, he is not sure he is doing the right thing. However, the security of the Law is the security of the Pharisee who justified himself by the works of the Law and thought himself safe. But the Christian is tom between desire of security and despair of doing right. ( 2) He is ever faced with this contradiction: on the one hand, grace has made him free from the Law so that no one should tell him what he ought to dq; he needs no instruction for he can do the right thing without it; but on the other hand, he does not always know the right thing to do and if he offends against the Law he falls from grace and comes under the Law again. He can stand this strain only by putting complete trust in Christ. This dilemma, however, has to remain because "retreat out of the objectively irreconcilable divergence of law and gospel is not permissible." 55 5) Christian ethics, according to Lehmann, "is the reflection upon the question, and its answer: What am I, as a believer in Jesus 54

Ibid., p. 278.

55

Ibid., p. 302.

59

TIIE OB JECTIVISTIC VIEW

Christ and as a member of the church, to do?" 5 6 He does not ask, What ought I to do? but, What am I to do? For obligation would interfere with his notion of conscience and his final answer. To be realistic, the answer must come from and within the koinonia, the fellowship with Jesus Christ and one's fellow believers; but the church is not a prescriber of moral propositions. To offer the "will of God" as the answer is to utter a cliche. Lehmann's answer is : I am to do what my theonomous conscience tells me God is freely doing in the world. Upon this basis he rests a contextual or situa­ tional ethics. Whereas man dehumanizes human life by subduing all things, including his brother, to his will to be himself by himself, "what God is doing in the world is setting up and carrying out the condi­ tions for what it takes to keep human life human." 5 7 For Christians, "what is fundamentally human in human life is the gift to man of the power to be and fulfill himself in and through a relationship of dependence and self-giving toward God and toward his fellow man." 58 The outcome of God's activity is human maturity, self­ acceptance through self-giving, that wholeness of every man in the new humanity inaugurated and being completed by Jesus Christ. A theonomous conscience is not subject to preceptual directives; it is one which is immediately sensitive to the freedom of God to do what His purposes require in the ever changing human situation. No human action is good or bad in itself but all acts of man can be instrumental to what God is doing. But Lehmann's idea of con­ science is quite unusual. Conscience is not " 'a built-in' human device for spot-checking right from wrong, good from evil." 59 It neither accuses nor excuses. It is a kind of knowledge-bond betwixt two, a knowledge of the heart, between what God is doing and human behavior. It would seem also to be a decision for "con­ science is the focal instance of theonomous belrnvior." 60 While he calls conscience free, Lehmann gives freedom a strange explanation. Man's freedom is not freedom to choose the good rather than the evil; "it is fundamentally an obedient act showing in concrete be­ havior where the line between God's humanizing activity and man's dehumanizing action is being drawn. . . . 'It's terrible what mysteries 56

Paul Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Context (New York: Harper & Row,

51

Ibid., p. 1 24.

1963 ) , p. 2 5 . 58

Ibid., p. 16.

59 60

Ibid., p. 3 5 1 . Ibid.

60

TIIE MODERN IMPASSE

there are! says Mitya Karamazov . . . God and the devil are fighting there, and the battle field is the heart of man. . . .' The impasse in each instance is broken through on the boundary of man's humanity or man's inhumanity to man. Here either God or the devil takes over. If man be made in the devil's image there is no egress from . . . 'the hateful seige of contraries.' . . . But if God is doing in the world what in the koinonia he is known to be doing, then man is being hammered into humanity in the image of Christ and 'must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only [His] image before him as guide.' "6 1 Thus Lehmann gives the impression that, provided man keeps his eye upon God's action, man is free to decide for himself what is good and evil; and yet, all the while man is choosing, it is God who is doing this. *

*

*

There must be an objective criterion of morals but the first three opinions given above are not sufficiently humanistic. Since human goodness is peculiar to man alone, that which measures human goodness should also be peculiarly human; but the cosmic process, organic evolution and the will to live are common to many things besides man. As for Dewey, a process, no matter how enjoyable or ongoing cannot be the measure of its own goodness or efficiency. A process must lead to a goal; otherwise it has no rational explanation. One does not merely go, he goes to arrive somewhere. Process without end is irrational. A program of worldwide revolution and class warfare needs only to be stated to invite its condemnation. The will of God cannot be the last word in morals. Because some things are first good or bad, God commands or forbids them; not vice versa. For if the will of God made acts good or bad, then actions which He now forbids He could allow. But certain actions, wrong in themselves, He could never allow; their tolerance would destroy all human order. Furthermore, the moral law, revealed in the Bible, is an enunciation of the Natural Law which we shall show to be immutable. Finally, most of the proponents of the will-of-God theory wrongly interpret law and human freedom. 01

Ibid., p. 349.

CHAPTER VI SELF-REALIZATION THEORIES The subjective-objective dispute is not fully told unless mention is made of the self-realization theories which tend to straddle the issue. Many moralists have emphasized fulfillment of the human being. Plato and Aristotle regard man as an incomplete being seeking the fulfillment of his peculiarly human characteristics. End is good and good is fulfillment of being. Man fulfills himself when he recognizes that his true nature is capacity to exercise reason and makes it function perfectly. Since the time of Hegel, however, what is to be fulfilled is not a nature or essence but a self. The self is variously described: the bearer of subjective experi­ ences; the knowing and feeling subject as distinguished from the object of thought and feeling; the total man, body and soul; that which explains the uniqueness of a person, persists through all changes and remains the principle of his unity. In psychoanalysis the self is the ego, that part of the psychic apparatus which experi­ ences the external world and mediates between the id or complexus of primitive drives, and the superego, or the conscience formed by social ideals. Prominent among advocates of self-realization in the nineteenth century were Hegel, Green, and Bradley who held a pantheistic doctrine that there is an absolute, an Eternal Self of which human selves are copies. What is to be realized is not the empirical self but the Eternal Self which, now manifest in the empirical self, is to reabsorb the empirical self into Itself. Hence a pantheistic aura attaches to this theory though not all its proponents are pantheists. All versions, however, agree that it is the goodness of the person rather than of his act which counts. Improve the person and his conduct responds. The person is good if his personality structure is integrated. This happens when natural appetites and dispositions are harmonized. 61

62

THE MODERN IMPASSE

The pantheistic versions of the theory are objective while the non-pantheistic versions tend to be subjective. 1. J. H. Muirhead thinks that in order to judge conduct as right or wrong we need a standard of evaluation. This cannot be a code of fixed laws nor the pronouncements of conscience; for morality is free obedience to a self-imposed moral law whose claims are explicable only by reference to an end which is both the ultimate principle of conduct and the standard of moral judgment. This end, or Summum Bonum, is something in which each man can take personal interest. It is neither pleasure nor reason which sup­ presses desire but the realization of self. The self is not an aggregate of parts mechanically joined and exclusive of one another but an organic whole which asserts its personal identity as the underlying unity of its passing experiences. Each self has two aspects. The personal self is our desires harmo­ niously organized; and "the good of the self or whole cannot be secured, except through the relative satisfaction of each of [these desires] ." 1 The second aspect of the self is social. A man is so condi­ tioned by society that his personality depends on it. All individual duties have a social reference because society is a joint owner of a man's life. Hence "self and society are related to one another as particular to universal, and are therefore only different sides of one reality." 2 The ideal which good conduct aims at realizing is not something to be had in the long run, the Summum Bonum is not some far-off divine event which comes to pass at life's end. "It is daily and hourly realized in the good act itself. Such an act is not a means to a further end; it is the end itself. In its completeness . . . the end is realized. The good is not something to be hereafter attained; it is attained . from moment to moment in the good life itself." 3 The will is good not when it suppresses desire but when it indulges desire according to a pattern of mutual subordination. For morality means that the human spirit, taking flesh in the ordinary activities of daily life, both realizes and reveals itself. The dictates of morality vary with social outlook and the good of the individual depends on the social good. Morality nevertheless is not relativistic but universal, that is, while the content of morality 1

J. H. Muirhead, The Elements of Ethics (New York: Scribners, 1910),

p. 8 3 . 2

Ibid., p. 1 8 1 .

s Ibid., p . 1 74.

63

SELF-REALIZATION THEORIES

may change, its form remains the same. Muirhead tries to reconcile these positions by arguing that, while social conventions change, they do so in obedience to a law of progress. With Victorian opti­ mism he saw the nations growing morally better and noted a tendency among them to adopt a common universal moral ideal. Social conventions supply the objective element in morality and conscience, the subjective element, interprets social institutions, thus yielding the ideal. Muirhead hesitates to say whether the ideal at which progress aims should be a better form of social life or a higher type of personal character. There should exist in one's mind the ideal, a picture of the self each one can and should become. Whether this ideal should be stated in terms of internal worth or social rela­ tions really does not matter. He inclines, however, to the side of social values; for his ideal character is the social reformer and his final commendation is reserved for the martyr to a social cause. 2. According to H. W. Wright the problem of ethics is to discover and identify the Summum Bonum, the end whose attainment satis­ fies all volitional tendencies. This is not something which, formed and real, exists here and now; it is the Ideal existing in one's thought and imagination. As the good is the kind of life which is necessary to satisfy completely the human will, so the highest good is the realization of the self and is the source of all moral obligation. Now "the sum total of the individual's tendencies and capacities, expressed in their conscious unity, constitute . . . his selfhood or personality." 4 To show the full nature of the self to be realized he distinguishes : ( I) the individual self or the harmonious organization of personal desires so as to obtain the most comprehensive human ends which are self-preservation, pleasure, and culture. Such ends involve fulfillment of a man's spiritual capacities for truth, power, and beauty; ( 2) the social self or the individual in relation to other people. This self is perfected by altruism - seeking the interests of others as well as one's own - and by humanitarianism - and sub­ ordination of one's particular interests to that of the human race; ( 3) the universal self, or adjustment to the all-comprehensive reality, the spiritual being or universal purpose whose existence Wright cannot prove but must take on faith. While morality gives the norms for the development of the individual and social self, religion provides the third adjustment so that "the claims of religion and t H. W. Wright,

Self-Realization

(New York: Holt, 191 3), p. 1 52.

64

THE MODERN IMPASSE

morality are brought into perfect harmony, and man by performance of earthly duty, identifies himself with universal reality. This final form of religion may be called . . . spiritual pantheism." 5 3. Felix Adler, who founded the Society for Ethical Culture, a vague kind of natural religion, rejects a personal God and pantheism. God is the God-idea and this is the moral law. Man, as a being of worth, is an end unto himself because he has "a supreme unique energy and it is to this that the quality of worth belongs." 6 Since the individual has his worth in the community, there is both unity and manifoldness. Every man is holy living in a holy community, and the highest good of each is to be achieved in agreement with that of all others. Ethics, whose purpose it is to evoke respect for the personality of all, faces three problems: ( I) "How to remedy the belittlement of man, the infinitesimal insignificance of him as a crea­ ture of time and space. . . . (2) How to discover a way of retaining the connection between man and the lower forms of life which preceded him. . . . ( 3) How to overcome the various forms of frus­ tration."7 He offers as the supreme rule of ethics : "Act so as to elicit the sense of unique distinctive selfhood, as interconnected with all other distinctive beings in the infinite universe." 8 4. Richard Cabot thinks that the end of life is the nourishing and developing of our existence and the supreme rule for achieving the goal is : "Be guided by what you are, follow the lines of your make-up." 0 Ethical conduct begins with the keeping of agreements made with ourselves and others. The agreements to which we bind ourselves depend on our desire. Our desires are to be tailored to fit our permanent needs, the chief of which is growth or "progress in certain directions which seem characteristic of humanity at its best." 1 0 Our particular needs are for work, play, love, and worship. The principles of right conduct are growth and stability. The latter means persistence of the self, the keeping of agreements, consis­ tency, the fitting of our needs with the facts around us, the ability to face reality. The principle of wrong conduct is self-deceit. As

Ibid., p. 420. Felix Adler, An Ethical Philosophy of Life (New York : Appleton, 191 8 ), p. 101. 1 Ibid., pp. 68-69. s Ibid., p. 208. 9 Richard Cabot, The Meaning of Right and Wrong (New York: Macmillan, 193 6), p. 72. 10 Ibid., p. 9 7. r,

6

SELF-REALIZATION THEORIES

65

right desires are those that are governed by reality as it shows itself in our needs, so wrong desires and acts "are those which diverge from reality and our needs through self-deceit." 1 1 The good man is he who does what he is built to do. 5. According to H. J. Paton the ethical is found only in willing and the purpose of willing is the realization of the self. A self is a spirit which knows and wills. It is not a substance but that which unifies spiritual activity. The self is the act of knowing, willing, and enjoying; it is a process. For one always wills; to cease from willing is to cease to be. The self is not something which is but becomes. One is always giving up his old self and going on to a new self. But still "it is one self which wills and thinks, and its character is to seek unity in thought and action. It is only insofar as it attains such unity that it is really a self." 1 2 The self develops inasmuch as in our spiritual activity coherence replaces mere continuity. Goodness belongs to things, not as they are in themselves, but as they are willed. Is then any willed object good? No; to be good it must be the object of a coherent will. The key to goodness is coher­ ence and coherence is unity amid diversity - a unity which will vary as does the type of volition. First is elementary willing - that narrow experience where one is borne to one's object without waiting for the deliberations of reason. It is not blind impulse; for willing and knowing cannot be separated. It is a manifestation of the impulsive self, the conscious effort to fulfill a vital need. The good which corresponds with this willing is the immediate good, the momentary reaction to a momentary situation. On the one hand, such instinctive action must be called good; for it is the object of will and is wholly coherent with itself. Here coherence means spontaneity, self-consistency. On the other hand, if we had only such experiences we could not call them morally good. For moral good is present only where evil is also possible, that is, where the one will can be divided against itself. A bad will is a will in conflict with itself. Hence elementary willing is neither selfish nor unselfish, moral nor immoral. Second, above immediate impulse is policy. As we develop we become conscious of more than here-and-now needs. A policy is the answer to a wider situation, a plan for attaining more remote 11

12

Ibid., pp. 459-460. H. J. Paton, The Good WiII (New York: Macmillan, 1927) , p. 162.

66

THE MODERN IMPASSE

goals and it may embrace the whole of life. To be good on this level we find out what we really want and see to it that we get it. We formulate a plan based on knowledge of the desires and dis­ positions of our impulsive self and choose such desires as are worthy and possible of realization. What we aim at is to be realized as part of a coherent life. Coherence here is efficiency, unity between what we will and what we attain. Our willing is bad if it is wasted on incompatible goals, if it is opposed to a wider and more coherent policy, especially to a wise policy of life. To succeed is to lead the good life but such a life is not necessarily a morally good life. Third, there is the social will to cooperate with others and with social institutions. A self is not to pursue a life policy in isolation, but, in conjunction with others, it must subordinate itself to family, community, state, and humanity. The good which corresponds with the social will is moral goodness. This can exist only in a will which is coherent with itself and as a member of a society of similarly coherent wills. Moral evil is the will which might be but is not coherent in a man as a member of such a society. Hence the morally good man "is the man who is good as a member not of a, but of the, good whole." 13 He is good not only as a member of a limited society but of a society of societies whose purpose includes all pur­ poses; and beyond it there is no other society to be a source of conflicting claims. He who lives a life better than the life of his society is a saint who strives for coherence with the divine will and with a society more perfect than any of this life. There is no criterion of morality; the goodness of the moral will lies in itself. For to the question, Why should I be moral? there is no answer. I should be moral because being moral is desirous for its own sake. 6. Erich Fromm holds that "man's aim is to be himself and the condition for obtaining this goal is that man be for himseif." 1 4 He claims that his doctrine is not subjectivism but a system of objective norms based on scientific knowledge of man. The good life can be achieved only by him who knows what he is : both the nature common to all men and the individuality proper to himself. Ethics is applied psychology and psychoanalysis. Fromm offers a model of human nature which is a modified Freudian version of man. 1a Ibid., p. 3 1 1 .

14

Erich Fromm, Man For Himself (New York : Holt , Rinehart and \Vinston,

1960) , p. 7.

67

SELF-REALIZATION THEORIES

The self is not the soul but the total human being which is neither immortal nor dependent on God. To understand self we start with the difficulties of the human situation. Man has overcome many of his shortcomings by means of reason but the emergence of reason has resulted in a division within man. From this split follow certain existential contradictions such as the dichotomies between life and death and between the potentialities which exist in every man and his inability to realize them. Man tries to repair his lack of inner unity by pursuing some ideal above him such as God or devotion to a cause but since he cannot expunge the existential dichotomies "there is only one solution to his problem : to face the truth, to acknowledge his fundamental aloneness and solitude . . . to recognize that there is no power transcending him which can solve his problem for him. Man must accept the responsibility for himself and the fact that only by using his powers can he give meaning to life . . . there is no meaning to life except the mean­ ing man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers." 1 5 Fromm holds that man is naturally good and castigates Luther and Calvin for saying that he is totally corrupt. However, Freud's dictum that destructiveness is inherent in all men gives him pause. His answer is that destructiveness is only a secondary potentiality which will never be brought out unless a man is blocked from developing himself. It is the outcome of unlived life.1 6 The character of everyone is an amalgam of inherited and acquired traits. Fromm takes the determinist view that one's character is formed in childhood by external influences over which one has no control, that one's adult decisions are determined by character. There is a good character which is productive and a bad character which is unproductive. The chief types of unproductive character are : the receptive for which the source of all good is outside the self; the exploitative or the "I take what I need" type; the hoarding or possessive kind; the marketing kind which knows how to "sell" itself to others.11 The key to Fromm's doctrine is productivity. This is not neces­ sarily the same as activity or even creativity; "it is an attitude which every human being is capable of, unless he is mentally and emotion­ ally crippled." 1 8 By being properly related to all realms of experience the productive character is capable of using its power to the utmost. 15

ie

Ibid., pp. 44-4 5 . Ibid., p. 2 1 6.

Ibid., s Ibid.,

11

1

pp. 62 p. 85.

ff.

68

THE MODERN IMPASSE

A power is capacity to do; it is not domination over persons and things. One uses his powers productively in regard to the outside world by perceiving it as it is and by conceiving it as enlivened and enriched by his own powers. The most important object of productivity is man himself; each one is to make of himself all that his powers call for. Productivity is virtue; not gruesome self­ conquest. To be productive is easy enough. The universal condition for productivity is freedom: freedom from pressure, from possession by another, from being an automaton; freedom to know, love, and act in accord with one's potential. The difference between a productive and an unproductive char­ acter is seen in interpersonal relations. The first kind of unproduc­ tive relatedness is symbiosis, the parasitic relation. This is passive if one person loses or never attains his independence but is swallowed by the other. It is active if one tends to obtain mastery over the other. The second kind of unproductive relatedness is withdrawal and destructiveness. When other people are experienced as threats one reacts in a passive way by withdrawing from them and in an active way by destroying them.19 While there is productive thinking which manifests itself in its penetration, its objectivity and its concern for the thing known, productivity is best shown in love. To love a person productively is to be related to his human core, to see him as representing man­ kind, to have for him care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. The care and responsibility is "for his life, not only for his physi­ cal existence but for the growth and development of his human powers." 20 Respect is not fear or awe but the ability to see the person as he is, to know him as this unique individual. What of self-love? It is wrong to propose love of self and love of others as opposing alternatives. For "if it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue - and not a vice - to love myself since I am a human being too." 2 1 The trouble with selfish people is not that they love themselves too much but too little; their care for themselves leaves them frustrated. There is, therefore, a reason­ able self-interest which is expressed by the formula "To thine own self be true." To do this and be productive one must have faith, not in God or in leaders, machines or success; but a rational confi­ dence in our power to produce. A productive self abhors an authoritarian conscience and culti10

Ibid., pp. 216 ff.

20

Ibid., p. 100.

21

Ibid., p. 128.

SELF-REALIZATION THEORIES

69

vates a humanistic conscience. An authoritarian conscience 1s the voice of external authority - parents, state, and church - received internally. The person desires approval and fears disapproval and rejection so that a good conscience is awareness of being pleasing to authority and a guilty conscience is realization of being displeas­ ing. According to Luther and Calvin one should know that he is always a sinner so that a good conscience in their view is one that is burdened with guilt feelings. A humanistic conscience is knowledge of our successes and failures, the reaction of ourselves to ourselves, the voice of our loving care for others. Whereas an authoritarian conscience inculcates obedience, self-sacrifice, duty, social adjustment, a humanistic conscience up­ holds the dignity and integrity of the personality. To cripple oneself by becoming the tool of another no matter how dignified, to be selfless, unhappy, resigned, discouraged is contrary to an illuminated conscience. For "no power transcending man can make a moral claim upon him." 2 2 Hence right action is that which wins inner approval and the result of listening to one's own authentic voice is happiness. Unproductivity begets emptiness, incapacity to love, fear, sense of powerlessness, and the interior defects which make us unhappy. Happiness is the well-being, conscious or unconscious, of the total personality. It is accompanied by pleasure but not by every kind of pleasure. Its first kind of pleasure is satisfaction, the release from the painful tension brought on by bodily and psychic needs. These needs are a hunger. They arise in a realm of hunger but beyond them is the realm of abundance where all specifically human achieve­ ments occur. Its second kind of pleasure is joy. It goes with the fulfillment of appetite which differs from need. Appetite is the anticipation of pleasurable experience, it creates no tension and occurs as a phenomenon of abundance. Fulfillment of appetite is the proper pleasure of h�ppiness which is the achievement brought about by man's inner productiveness. It is not a gift of the gods, nor the satisfaction of a need springing from some lack, nor the relief of tension, but the accompaniment of productivity in thought, feeling, and action. Its highest form is productive love. It is proof ' that a man has found the answer to the problem of human existence. Moral good is the well-being of the whole personality: bodily, mental, and psychic. The good man is he who grows, matures, 22

Ibid., p. 1 70.

70

TIIE MODERN IMPASSE

enjoys, and fulfills himself. Moral evils are the obstacles in oneself and one's surroundings which prevent growth. A neurosis or conflict between one's powers and the forces which block them is a moral problem. Even the lack of integration and productiveness which does not become a neurosis is also a moral evil. Every failure to integrate personality is a moral failure. * * While it is true that man is an incomplete being who moves to a goal of completion, yet the validity of the various theories of self­ realization depends on the philosophy of man which they advocate and their estimate of what will fulfill man. An answer to the ques­ tion. What is man? will be proffered in Chapter XII.

CHAPTER VII THE EMOTMSTS The stalemate to which the rival ethicians had come by 1936 was shattered then by the astounding charge that they had all along been arguing about nothing. They had thought they were addressing the intellects of one another but they had really been posing false problems and fighting shadows. For ethical propositions have no meaning. Thus the emotivists, of whom Ayer and Stevenson are most prominent, entered the hurly burly. I. A. J. Ayer, an empiricist in the tradition of Hume and an adherent of the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, offered a theory of philosophy's function and of the nature of truth which was designed to sweep away both controversy and ethics. Contro­ versy would stop if philosophers would adopt his view of philosophy and become analysts of language. Ethics should go because it is a pseudoscience: "It cannot be significantly asserted that there is a nonempirical world of values." 1 To establish his view of philosophy he discards metaphysics. He argues that since metaphysicians violate "the rule which determines the literal significance of language," 2 they utter nonsense. Only two kinds of propositions make sense: ( I) the tautologies of logic and mathematics which are verifiable by immediate inspection; ( 2) em­ pirical propositions which are verifiable by sense observation. Since metaphysical statements are not meant to be tautologies and since no possible sense observation could confirm or confute them, they are nonsense. The metaphysician has been deceived by faulty gram­ mar and errors of logic into thinking that his utterances are a con­ tribution to knowledge. 1

2

A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Ibid., p. 35.

Logic (London: Gollancz, 1956 ) , p. 31.

71

72

THE MODERN IMPASSE

The function of philosophy then is to clarify scientific statements by exhibiting their logical relationships and by defining the symbols they contain. The philosopher is not to analyze things but only what is said about them. Therefore, the propositions of philosophy are not factual but linguistic : "they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental objects; they express definitions. Ac­ cordingly, we may say that philosophy is a department of logic." 3 Definition, however, does not state the nature of a thing; it merely explains the meaning of the symbols one is using. Ayer is not talk­ ing of dictionary definitions ( the giving of synonyms) but of defini­ tions in use, which show how propositions in which a given symbol occurs can be translated into equivalent propositions which do not contain the symbol or its synonyms. Finally, the analyst enumerates the types of propositions which are significant in his language and displays the relations of equivalence which holds between the various types. Once he knows how symbols are used and how meaningful propositions are equivalated he has grasped the essential structure of the language and is in a position to analyze what the scientist has written. The philosopher is a grammarian with nothing of real significance to argue about. The problem about the nature of truth vanishes. Philosophers have been misled by grammatical form into thinking that "true" indicates a real relation between intellect and the world outside the intellect; but the question of truth is a false problem. First, the predicates "true" and "false" connote nothing. By adding "true" to a proposition you merely assert it; by adding "false" you merely deny it. Since "true" and "false" are merely marks of as­ sertion or denial there is no sense in asking for an analysis of "truth." Second, to ask Ayer "What is truth?" is to request a trans­ lation of the proposition "p is true" into equivalent propositions which do not contain "true" or its synonyms. \Vhen you make the analysis you find that propositions of this type "contain sub-sen­ tences of the form 'p is true' or 'p is false,' and when they are translated in such a way as to make these sub-sentences explicit, they contain no other mention of truth." 4 Hence the ancient question "What is truth?" is reducible to "What is the analysis of the sentence 'p is true'?" Here certainly is no problem; for Ayer has just said that 'p is true' is merely another way of asserting p. By shifting propositions around Ayer would have us gather that 8

Ibid., p. 57.

4 Jbid., p. 89.

73

THE EMOTIVISTS

truth does not belong in the real world but only in his logical or linguistic world as a sign of assertion. So the question "What is truth?" merely means "How are propositions validated?" But validation does not mean that we proffer a referent in the real world to support our proposition but only that we know the meaning of the symbols we employ and employ them with con­ sistency. A man has truth when he knows how to manipulate the symbols in a proposition. Sentences which express emotion may be emotionally significant but they are not literally significant unless they convey some in­ formation to the mind. All literally significant propositions fall into the two classes mentioned above. First are the analytic propo­ sitions of logic and mathematics which are not connected with reality and make no assertion about the empirical world. The rules of logic are not the laws of the working of the human mind. These tautologies are universal, good for every conceivable instance, and absolutely certain. They are valid because "we see that they are necessarily true. We cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves." 5 The principle of contradiction to which he appeals is not a principle of being but a rule of expression; for we cannot deny analytic propositions "without sinning against the rules which govern the use of language, and so making our utterance self-stulti­ fying."0 But he sees no principle of being which supports his linguistic principle. Such a principle would be metaphysical and anathema. The second class of propositions is synthetic. Such a proposi­ tion has factual content but Ayer does not make it clear what he means by "fact." These propositions are empirical and about them we can have only one probability. No general empirical proposi­ tion can be necessarily and universally true. For no matter how often a proposition has been verified, "there still remains the possi­ bility that it will be confuted on some future occasion.'.' 1 He as­ serts the same of all particular and singular propositions without exception. When it is objected that ostensive propositions, which relate the immediate data of consciousness, are certain, Ayer re­ plies that there are no such propositions. Just as one cannot say that any empirical proposition is certain, so no one can say that any is absolutely false. Hence all statements about facts, past, pres­ ent, or future, are only rational guesses or hypotheses. Since the 5

Ibid., pp. 75, 77.

6

Ibid., p. 77.

7

Ibid., p. 72.

74

THE MODERN IMPASSE

purpose of formulating hypotheses is solely to enable us to antici­ pate the course of our sensations and to make accurate predictions about the future, the criterion by which we validate empirical propositions is that they should enable us to anticipate experience. Against his basic position that all synthetic propositions are em­ pirical hypotheses stands the objection that statements of value are synthetic propositions which cannot be classed as hypotheses predicting the courses of our sensations. His reply to the objection and the manner in which he disposes of statements of value reveal his ethical doctrine. He puts ethical propositions into four classes: ( 1) those which define ethical terms; ( 2) descriptions of moral experience; ( 3) ex­ hortations to moral virtue; ( 4) ethical judgments like "lying is wrong." He says that ethical definitions are legitimate and these things alone should be the object of ethical inquiry. Propositions explaining moral experience belong to psychology or sociology. These two classes are made up of scientific statements amenable to his principle of verification. Exhortations to virtue are not propo­ sitions but commands and have no literal meaning. What about ethical judgments which tradition has considered the heart of ethics? They do not belong to philosophic discourse because they are only expressions of emotion. To arrive at so radical a conclusion he starts with the challenge, Can ethical judgments be translated from ethical ( normative) to nonethical (descriptive) terms? The subjectivists and the utili­ tarians think that they can. The subjectivists say that the goodness of a thing can be translated into terms of feelings of approval. But Ayer denies this. For if approval of the community is meant, then "it is not self-contradictory to assert that some actions which are generally approved are not right, or that some things which are generally approved are not good." 8 Similarly, if approval of the agent is meant, then a man who admits that he sometimes ap­ proves of what is wrong would not be contradicting himself. The utilitarians say that of all actions possible in a given circumstance that one is right which would cause the greatest happiness or the greatest balance of pleasure over pain. Ayer rejects this position because it would not be self-contradictory "to say it is sometimes wrong to perform the action which would actually or probably cause the greatest happiness." 9 Hence he rejects both systems on s Ibid., p. 1 04.

9

Ibid., p. 1 0 5 .

THE EMOTIVISTS

75

the purely linguistic grounds that their analysis of ethical notions is faulty and he is sure that ethical terms are not equivalent to psy­ chological propositions or to any sort of empirical proposition. He admits then with Moore that ethical concepts are unanalyz­ able. But he does not accept the intuitionist view of ethics be­ cause this system provides no criterion of verifiability. For to say that an act is right because one sees it to be right carries little weight in the face of another's assertion of its wrongness. He gives the standard objection to intuitionism by asking how is one to choose between conflicting intuitions. If ethical judgments are synthetic propositions, as the intuitionists claim, they should be subject to some relevant test; but they are not. Now he comes to the real meat. Ethical concepts are unana­ lyzable and no criterion exists to test their validity. The reason is not, as Moore said, that they are simple concepts but that they are pseudo-concepts. They add nothing to the factual content of a proposition. "Thus if I say to someone, 'You acted wrongly in stealing that money,' I am not stating anything more than if I simply said, 'You stole that money.' In adding that this action is wrong I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my disapproval of it. It is as if I had said, 'You stole that money,' in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with some special exclamation marks. The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker." 1 0 If then one should generalize and say, "Stealing money is wrong,'' his sentence says nothing. It is a kind of exclamation showing disapproval of the practice. If another person has not the same sentiments as I have about stealing and should express his sentiments, he would not be contradicting me. The reason is that neither party is making a factual statement, not even about his state of mind; therefore no contradiction is possible. The heart of this doctrine is that the prime function of the ethical predicates good and bad, right and wrong, is purely emo- j tive. They express feeling about acts or objects but make no ' assertion about them. Their secondary function is to arouse similar feeling in others and thus stimulate them to action. In that case they function as commands or heightened suggestions. 10

Ibid., p. 1 07.

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THE MODERN IMPASSE

This view is not to be confused with the ordinary subjectivist view. The subjectivist holds that moral sentences say something about the speaker's feelings and can be verified as true or false accordingly as one has or has not the asserted feelings. Ayer, how­ ever, claims that in using the moral predicates he is making no assertion about the possession of feelings; he is simply evincing them. Therefore, an ethical judgment of the rightness of an action is no more assertive than the action of a little girl who hums as / she eats her beloved wheaties. For no statement of value can con­ tain any assertion. Moore had argued against subjectivism that if ethical state­ ments were simply reports about the speaker's feelings, it would be impossible to argue about questions of morals; since there is ethical dispute, subjectivism must be wrong. Ayer says that he avoids this difficulty, first, because ethical sentences assert nothing; second, Moore's taking it for granted that there is ethical dispute is a delusion. What appears to be a dispute about values is merely disagreement about the facts of a case. With one who holds the same values as ourselves we can try to show him that his view of the facts is mistaken; but if one has a different set of values we cannot bring forward any arguments to show that his values are worse or that ours are better. For the argument would consist of a set of value judgments and these are outside the scope of cogni­ tive discourse. We cannot argue about the validity of moral prin­ ciples: we can only praise or abuse them in the light of our own feelings. Hence there is no ethical science "if by ethical science one means the elaboration of a 'true' system of morals. For we have seen that, as ethical judgments are mere expressions of feeling, there can be no way of determining the validity of any ethical system, and, indeed, no sense in asking whether any such system is true. All that one can legitimately enquire in this connection is, what are the moral habits of a given person or group of people, and what causes them to have precisely those habits and feelings? And this enquiry falls wholly within the scope of the existing social sciences." 1 1 By such skepticism Ayer writes finis both to ethical controversy and to ethics. Nothing is left of venerable systems; and the moral­ ist can do no more than make little definitions and warn psycholo­ gists and sociologists to watch their logic. n Jbid., p. 1 1 2.

THE EMOTIVISTS

77

2. C. L. Stevenson accepts in principle the emotivism of Ayer but makes the theory less radical by restoring to reason some function in the ethical field. His Ethics and Language is a book on methodology in ethics; its working models, patterns of analysis and examples in algebraic form set a form-pattern which subse­ quent analysts have followed rather closely. The first task of the ethician is to analyze ethical language. By applying logic and the rules of communication to ethical discourse the analyst will free it from many though not all ambiguities. While one can hardly expect an empiricist to develop first prin­ ciples, the foundations of Stevenson's analysis rest on certain lin­ guistic rules which, however, he takes no pains to justify. Of first importance to the analyst is the concept of meaning. Stevenson calls meaning "the dispositional property of a sign," that is, a word is a stimulus calculated to produce some psycho- ,/ logical reaction in a hearer. If the reaction is cognitive, the meaning is descriptive; if the reaction is emotional, the meaning is emotive. Although he rejects distinct faculties of intellect and will, he lines up descriptive meaning with "believing, thinking, supposing, presuming, and so on." 12 The immediate effect of emo­ tive meaning is to excite feeling : its ultimate effect, to build atti­ tudes. This difference between descriptive and emotive meaning is fundamental to his ethical theory. "The error of treating lan­ guage as though its function were always cognitive is almost in­ credibly na"ive; and yet it is an error which is largely responsible for the impracticalities of traditional ethical theory." 13 Nowhere, however, does he admit with Warnock and many others that emotive meaning is mediated via cognition. His second major point concerns the purpose of ethical dis­ course. As Dewey sees ethical discourse as the attempt to resolve social tensions, Stevenson sees it in the context of a disagreement between two parties as to the practical thing to do. The end of ethics then is not the establishment of norms of conduct but persuasion; for one party tries to win the others to his beliefs and attitudes and vice versa. Disagreement arises because the parties have different beliefs and attitudes. Beliefs are cognitive views of facts or states of affairs; attitudes are more or less habitual casts

J

C . L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language ( New Haven : Yale University Press, 1 95 3 ) , p. 62. 1 a Ibid., p. 1 1 7. 12

78

THE MODERN IMP.A.SSE

of appetite, inclinations to approve or disapprove, or to act in cer­ tain ways. Whereas beliefs are intellectual, attitudes belong on the side of will and emotion; for a choice is an attitude in action. Beliefs are guides to attitudes, the means of directing them. Those who hold that ethics is a branch of some science (psychology, bi­ ology, sociology) think that agreement and disagreement is one of beliefs only. Steve�son thinks that ethical disagreements are about beliefs and attitudes. Hence the ultimate end of ethics is to sway attitudes; the proximate end, to control how people will act.H Attitudes are changed in a rational way by offering reasons de­ signed to change the other's beliefs. These reasons are not true or false but valid or invalid. If, however, disagreement is not rooted in differing beliefs we can change attitudes by irrational methods, the most important of which are "persuasive." Their effectiveness depends on "sheer, direct emotional impact of words - on emotive meaning, rhetorical cadence, apt metaphor, stentorian, stimulating, or pleading tones of voice, dramatic gesture." 1 5 In Stevenson's view persuasion is not mediated by articulate belief. Writing as he did in the days of Hitler and Mussolini, small wonder that he says that a moralist is a propagandist and a propagandist is a moralist, that pleading a moral cause is a nonrational act. Among nonrational methods he gives extended treatment to the "persuasive definition." 16 A detached definition is one that deals with knowledge and is emotionally neutral. A persuasive definition is a device of rhetoric bestowing praise on what the speaker ap­ proves and blame on what he disapproves of. Whenever a specially defined sense is singled out and recommended for exclusive use, especially by saying that this is the "true" meaning of the thing, then the matter is evaluative an� the definition persuasive. He supports _the main emotive theme but warns that "emotive" should not be taken in a derogatory sense. For to assert that ethical judgments express feelings is not to say that they are to be made capriciously or in ignorance. One of his main intents is to amend the statement of Ayer and Carnap that ethical statements are neither true nor false.17 He advises one to be very cautious in as­ serting that all non-verifiable statements are nonsense. And he parts company from Ayer when he denies that ethical words can have only one meaning. Tirns "good" has a descriptive and an emo14

16

Ibid., pp. 1 56, 2 5 2 . Ibid., p. 1 39.

16

17

Ibid., pp . 2 1 0 ff. Ibid., p. 267.

THE EMOTIVISTS

79

tive meaning. "X is good" means: ''I approve of X," for it relates a fact and describes the mental state of the speaker. The emotive element is the hidden imperative, "You do so as well," which is di­ rected at changing or enhancing the attitude of the hearer. The belief or statement of fact is the support of the imperative. In analyzing ethical terms Stevenson uses two analytic patterns. In the first he examines the descriptive element of moral words from the standpoint of the speaker. Thus "This is wrong" means "I disapprove of this: do so as well." "He ought to do this" means "I disapprove of his leaving this undone: do so as well." This pattern, which contains Stevenson's own views of good and ought, is applied to a number of examples in order to see what combi­ nations of meaning, chances of logical error, problems of persua­ sion, etc. will turn up. A second pattern is constructed whose de­ scriptive content consists of other prominent views of good such as "productive of the greatest happiness," "conducive to survival," etc. All of these, Stevenson thinks, are persuasive definitions whose emotional influence extends beyond their intellectual grounds. But how much reason does he reintroduce into the motive theory? As an empiricist, who holds that God and the voice of conscience are beyond the ken of empirical inquiry, he rejects uni­ versal principles. He makes his own Prall's18 impassioned rejec­ tion of metaphysics. Nor does he have much use for general princi­ ples. For while broad principles may help in the making of specific decisions, "broad judgments are often rash." There are no valid steps from reasons to ethical judgments: "any statement of fact, so long as it is likely to direct attitudes, may serve as a reason for an ethical judgment." 19 While he says that the formulation of eth­ ical arguments is the immediate concern of the ethician, the reasons involved in these arguments are at best plausible, short-term, ad hoc reasons. These reasons are not to be too closely scrutinized for truth content because it is a general rule "that ethical judg­ ments are supported or attacked by reasons related to them psycho­ logically, rather than logically." 20 This view of reason fits in with two other convictions of his : ( 1) knowledge of one ultimate end is impossible; we are to seek not ultimate ends but only focal 1 s David W. Prall, "Knowledge as Aptness of the Body," Philosophical Re­ view (March, 1938 ) , pp. 1 29-1 30. 1 9 Stevenson, Ethics and Language, p. 329. 2 0 I bid., p. l l 5.

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THE MODERN IMPASSE

aims understood in the Deweyan sense; ( 2 ) there are no certainties in the ethical field. At the final tally Stevenson relegates ethics to the nonrational and emotional. People can assume attitudes and cling to them stubbornly. My reasons may affect the beliefs of others and fail to budge their attitudes. Hence attitudes become blind preferences un­ assailable by reason. These blind preferences are the last hideout of ethics. There is no final justification of the "I approve" except the fact that I approve. Stevenson thinks that the field of ethics extends beyond the realm of actions subject to moral norms and includes all free choices. Since ethics cuts across the field of many sciences it can­ not be one science. To sidestep the controversy between determin­ ism and indeterminism he avoids the word "free" and says that the scope of ethics is the "avoidable" action. Without repudiating normative ethics he suspects that "normative ethics is always in danger of becoming a quasi-myth." 21 He is against static, other­ worldly norms and favors norms which are flexible and "realistic." As to the modem ethical controversies, he admits the force of ob­ jection in Moore's naturalistic fallacy and holds that the natural­ ists have had the worst of this debate. Each of their attempts to define good in terms of some natural property is the offering of a persuasive definition. He will, not, however, take refuge in intu­ itionism which he takes to be a form of Platonism. His final word is that normative language cannot be translated into de­ scriptive language, that the purpose of ethics is the "power of in­ fluence alone," control of others' actions, the redirecting of their attitudes and interests. Ethics has thus become rhetoric. * * * This view denies that truth exists in the area of aesthetics, morals, and religion, thereby offending the common sense and understanding of mankind. We shall show that there is moral knowledge. Emotivism falls by its own basic principle; for when it asserts that truth exists only in logical, mathematical, and empirical statements, it condemns itself. Its statement of doctrine falls into none of these categories. Moreover, since ethical judgments are so important, it would be surprising if they were not often accompanied by emotion, but to say that they are wholly emotional is to assert 21

lbid., p. 3 3 5 .

THE EMOTIVISTS

81 -�

that man in his most important area of choice is irrational. The claims of emotivism raise two fundamental questions: Does man have a spiritual faculty of knowing? Is this faculty capable of grasp­ ing universal ideas and of formulating a metaphysics? These prob­ lems we shall face when we deal with the philosophy of man and with metaphysics.

CHAPTER VIII AFTER THE EMOTIVISTS The emotivists said two new things: the object of philosophic in­ quiry is language; ethics is not an intellectual discipline. Many British ethicians accepted the first statement. For some time they had been studying the language of ethics because, as Anscombe says, the old questions of right and wrong had been played out. Moore began the careful analysis of language and his followers said that many of the puzzles of ethics would disappear if semantic ambiguities were removed. A language, flawless in its logic and whose terms would be universally accepted, was dreamed of but it never materialized. Hence the aim of ethics is analysis of ordi­ nary language in order to establish the proper meaning of ethical terms and the correct way to reason in ethical matters. Most British ethicians did not accept the exclusion of reason from ethics. Ethical choices are based on ethical knowledge and the problem of the ordinary-language analysts is to show that one can support moral decisions with appeals to reason. These analysts are sometimes called "good reasons" ethicians. Of the four analysts whose views we give, Hare and Nowell-Smith base these reasons upon elements w�ich are quite subjective but Toulmin and Baier tend to be more objective. 1. R. M. Hare sympathizes with Ayer by saying that "ethics is the logical study of the language of morals" 1 and a branch of logic. He accepts Stevenson's distinction between the cognitive and the noncognitive elements in moral terms. With Stevenson he calls the cognitive element descriptive but the noncognitive element, which Stevenson calls emotive, Hare calls prescriptive. Although he rejects Stevenson's claim that value judgments have a function 1

R . M. Hare, The Language of Morals ( Oxford : Clarendon, 1 9 5 2 ) , p. v. 82

AFI'ER THE EMOTIVISTS

83

of propaganda, yet, since he reckons the prescriptive element to be paramount and reduces it to imperatives which are neither true nor false, he has been rated as an emotivist. In his Freedom and Reason, however, he protests this classification and calls himself a prescripti­ vist. He thinks the great issue of modem ethics is between the de­ scriptivists and the prescriptivists2 but just how momentous the is­ sue is he never makes clear. His first thesis is that value statements are prescriptions. 3 \Vhereas a descriptive statement tells us that something is the case, a pre­ scription bids us make something the case. The descriptivist says that descriptive meaning exhausts the meaning of moral terms which can be reduced to statements of fact. This the prescriptivist denies and says that descriptive meaning is subordinate to the pre­ scription. This answers the question, "\Vhat ought I to do?" and takes the form of a command, request, or plea. A prescription commends, or holds up for imitation, a certain way of acting. For prescriptive speech connotes the personal involvement of the speaker who prescribes this way of acting because he sincerely holds and lives by it. How does Hare's theory of prescriptions hold up? In The Lan­ guage of Morals he holds that all value judgments entail an impera­ tive.4 He gives an elaborate but unconvincing argument which con­ cludes with a resort to definition. Hence whoever says that an imperative is not entailed by a value judgment is not accepting the moral judgment in the evaluative sense: "This is true by my defini­ tion of the word evaluative." 5 But when he says that all value state­ ments entail an imperative he is confusing the concept of goodness with that of obligation. In Freedom and Reason he holds the more modest position that there is a way of using moral words to which he can properly give the name of prescription. 6 While denying this about "good," many would admit that the strict moral "ought" expresses a prescription which entails an imperative. When one inquires into the source of the imperative, some would reply, "Society"; the Natural-Law theorists would say, "the Author of human nature." Hare replied to this question, "the speaker!" \Vhile there is no logic peculiar to ethics, neglect of the logic underlying imperatives has caused "the most insidious confusions in R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), p. 69. 5 Ibid., p. 1 72. a The Language of Morals , p. 3. 6 Freedom and Reason , p. 8 4. • Ibid., pp. 1 62 ff. 2

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THE MODERN IMPASSE

ethics." Each prescription is the conclusion of a practical syllo­ gism.7 The minor premise is a statement of fact which renders a conclusion necessary by applying the principle set forth in the major premise. Man is a creature of principle. Not only does he learn through inculcation of principles but each time he makes a moral choice he subscribes to a principle. What is a moral principle? Is it a directive for particular cases subsumed under a general rule which reason discovers ready at hand? Hare's answer is affirmative only to the extent that when we invoke a moral principle "we are appealing to something that is there already." 8 But he is against general maxims of the copybook variety; and even if a principle is one which his forefathers have ever acted on, he cannot take it as simply given. A rule becomes a moral principle when it is formed, modified, and accepted by a decision of the agent. "This decision of principle" does not mean that one is acting in accord with a rule accepted from on high or with a social convention. It is the agent deciding to alter the rule to suit his present case. :Moral principles are like principles for driving a car - standards we use, modify as occasion demands, and thus make our own. Morals is the search for principles and the testing of them against particular cases. It is our business as moralists "to test the moral principles that suggest themselves to us by following out of their consequences and seeing whether we can accept them." 9 There are four ingredients in a moral argument : ( I) a set of facts; ( 2) logic or the meaning of "ought" as a universal pre­ scription; ( 3) the imagination to put ourselves in the place of an­ other; ( 4) inclination to accept a particular prescription. The first two conditions are necessary because if my hearer and myself have a misconception of the facts or are using modes of reasoning ( mean­ ings) which are different, we will never arrive at any satisfactory conclusion. Howe·ver, on the second requirement a descriptivist would not agree with a prescriptivist. Imagination is a require­ ment because, before subscribing, for example, to the principle that a defaulting debtor should be put in prison, I should put myself in the debtor's shoes and appreciate how application of the principle would affect him. 111e fourth requirement is demanded by the uni­ versalizability of moral judgments. Since a prescription should apply to all similar cases, I should consider how I would tolerate my being 1

11

The Language of Morals, pp . 56 ff.

R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason , p . 92.

8

Ibid., p. 195.

85

AFTER THE EMOTMSTS

put in prison if the roles were reversed. For people's inclinations about nasty things happening to them tend to be very much the same. But if someone were to say that he would not mind if the same thing were done to him in a reversal of roles, Hare would call him a fanatic.10 Hare's major thesis is the universalizability of moral judgments. While desires, interests, and imperatives are not universalizable, all value judgments have this hallmark of intellectuality that they are universal in scope. Universalizability, however, does not mean that everybody accepts or should accept a given principle but that moral judgments "must be taken as committing the speaker to some universal judgment applying to anyone in relevantly similar circum­ stances." 11 Therefore, when I subscribe to a principle in a particular case I do so for all similar cases. When I make a moral judgment, I also judge others, myself included, as having to make a like choice. When I commend an object my judgment is not solely about that object but about all objects like it. On the other hand, "if, when we consider some proposed action, we find that, when universalized, it yields prescriptions we cannot accept, we reject this action as a solution to our moral problem - if we cannot universalize the pre­ scription, it cannot be an 'ought.' " 12 Universalizability gives an intellectual dimension to his theory of ethics. His first argument on behalf of universalizability is that de­ scriptive judgments are universalizable. If I say, "That object is red," I must call red all other objects which are just like it. This con­ clusion rests on a meaning-rule. His application of universalizability to prescriptions is unmistakable: "If a person says, 'I ought to act in a certain way but nobody else ought to act in that way in rele­ vantly similar circumstances'; then he is implicitly contradicting himself." 13 In the case of moral principles the universalizing factor is not only a meaning-rule; it is also a moral principle. Thus when I call a certain kind of man good I am not giving merely verbal but also moral instruction. For ''in learning that, of all kinds of men, this kind can be called good, our hearer will be learning a moral principle. He will be learning, not merely to use a word in a certain way, but to commend, or prescribe for imitation, a certain kind of man." 14 Ibid., pp. 192-200. Ibid., p . 5 3 . 12 Ibid., p . 90. 10

13

11

14

Ibid., p. Ibid., p .

32. 23 .

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TIIE MODERN IMPASSE

Universalizability leads Hare to his one manifestation of substan­ tive moral doctrine - utilitarianism. He sees an easy connection be­ tween universalizability and the utilitarian principle. Hence he justifies the moral principles implicit in prescriptions by their effects but since utilitarianism does not cover all cases, his final recourse is to ideals, to the kind of life one chooses to lead. "If pressed to justify a decision completely, we have to give a complete specifica­ tion of the way of life of which it is a part. If the inquirer goes on asking 'But why should I live like that?' then there is no further answer to give him. He has to decide whether to accept that way of life or not; if he accepts it, then we can proceed to justify the decisions that are based on it; if he does not accept it, then let him accept another, and try to live by it." 1 5 To forestall a charge of arbitrariness at this juncture, Hare says that his explanation of the moral decision is based upon all relevant considerations. But there is one important gap, namely, how does one justify the most basic thing of a choice of life? Is there some vision of truth, for example, knowledge of a final end which motivates choice of life? No; Hare thinks consideration of a final end is only a source of confusion. One chooses the sort of life he thinks he can lead. But does it make any difference whether one chooses to live like Ghandi or Al Capone? One may not override the interests of others. Outside of this single limitation one is free to follow what ideals he chooses and these are not subject to argument. Insofar as ideals and principles depend on one's choice of them they are eclectic and voluntaristic; and by that much they recede from the intellectual. At each critical juncture of his theory we are met by the will act : he accepts a principle by deciding to use it and he accepts as much of it as he cares to; he takes up the kind of life he wants; he wants to be free to follO\v his opinions; he likes to call his reasoning liberal and protestant. His final step in a moral argument is inclination: no one need accept a principle entailing an imperative which runs counter to his inclinations. From such volun­ tarism it would seem that the final word in morals depends on the preference of the individual. But there is a counterbalancing intel­ lectual note. Decrying racism he says : "The duties which we ac­ knowledge toward people are acknowledged because we say 'There, but for my good fortune, go I.' " 1 6 This Hare cannot mean in a The Language of Morals, p. 69 . 1a Freedom and Reason, p. 222 .

1 is

AFTER THE EMOTIVISTS

87

purely personal sense. Despite an explicit disclaimer of any reference to the essence of man, he really means that he looks within himself and sees there a human nature common to all men. For unless each man has something that is common to all men and is, in a sig­ nificant way, all men, then the situationist is right, no moral situa­ tion can be like any other, and universalizability is a delusion. 2. Nowell-Smith, unlike Hare, thinks that ethics has its own logic. According to this logic it is incorrect to think that all adjectives are names of properties or that all nouns stand for particular enti­ ties. He classifies adjectives, nouns, and sentences as A- or aptness­ words like sublime or terrifying; they indicate that an object has certain properties apt to arouse certain emotions; D- or descriptive words like yellow or dandelion, which tell us what is the case; G­ ar gerundive words like laudable or damnable, which tell us that something is worthy to be praised, condemned, or the like. Gerun­ dive words are the proper words of ethical discourse and they imply not merely that a person will have a certain reaction but also that he ought to have it. Whereas A-words and D-words are for explain­ ing choice, the role of G-words is to urge, command, and advise. Then there are pro-words which manifest a person's inclination toward an object. These provide logically impeccable, though not necessarily morally good, reasons why someone chooses to do some­ thing. Finally, there are Janus-words,1 7 capable of acting as an A­ ward, a D-word, or a G-word. Good is par excellence the Janus-word. The task of the moral philosopher is to make a logical map, 18 locating on it the chief moral terms and showing the relationships of the words, sentences, and arguments, v.g., how A-words are related to G-words. The logic of ethics differs from that of science in two main ways: for the concept of logical implication it substitutes contextual im­ plication, 1 9 and for that of logical contradiction, logical oddness.20 The rules of contextual implication are : when a speaker makes a statement it is contextually implied that he believes his statement to be true, that he has good reasons for his statement, that what he says is relevant to the interests of his hearer. Logical oddness does not indicate how one statement contradicts another but how in a given context it would be out of order to assert one thing and P. H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics ( Baltimore: Penguin, 1954), pp. 100, 107. 2 0 Ibid., p. 8 3. 1 9 Ibid., p. 8 1. 111 Ibid., p. 8 3.

11

88

TIIE MODERN IMPASSE

deny another, or to ask a particular question whose answer has already been given. But he pushes his logic too far when he asserts that the meta­ physical question about the final end of man and the basic ethical question about the origin of moral obligation are barred by verbal difficulties. Hence the teleologist cannot construct a universal sys­ tem of morality because "the special role of sentences including the words 'ought,' 'duty,' 'obligation' and 'right' cannot be construed in this way." 21 Nowell-Smith allows for reason in ethics when he says that choices should be for "reasons" but his final explanation of moral choices is voluntaristic, that is, the final reason why a man acts as he does is that he chooses so to act. He says of himself : "I am a noncog­ nitivist." His views of truth in moral matters and his ultimate ex­ planation of morality bear out this self-appraisal. He holds an endorsement theory of truth : "When a man says of someone else's empirical statement 'that's true' he is not saying that it corresponds with the facts; he is endorsing, siding with it. In empirical cases, one of the conditions which make the use of 'that's true' proper is that he should believe that the other man's state­ ment corresponds with the facts. In a moral context it is proper for Brown to say of Jones's advice 'that's true' if it would be proper for him to give the same advice, but it is not necessary that he should believe that Jones's advice corresponds to the facts, because pieces of advice are not statements and neither correspond nor fail to correspond to facts." 22 Does he admit truth in moral judgments? He does, insofar as a particular dictate of conscience may be likened to a statement of fact, but he does not predicate truth of a principle except in the sense that it is "worthy of endorsement." He calls a principle "valid" or "acceptable" and restricts "true" to one kind of endorsement-worthy pronouncement, namely, the statement. He takes the narrow view of truth which is common to the empiricists, and his ultimate explanation of truth is that it is an endorsement or vote, which is a will act. In his overall explanation of morality he holds that moral rules are absolutely necessary. They are universal and applicable to all men in the same circumstances. Thus he cannot conceive of some acts ever being right or some human states like envy or malice ever 21

22

Ibid., p. 222. Ibid., pp. 196-197.

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being good. Here he asserts that moral rules have an objective in­ telligible character. Then he asks why do we have the rules we do? In one place he says "because we have inherited them and stick to them uncritically or because we believe them to promote our ends." 23 In another place he says that the moral rules adopted in a given society are believed to promote the ends of the members of that society and when these beliefs are discarded the rules in ques­ tion fall into disuse. Here he verges toward the voluntaristic ex­ planation that moral rules depend for existence on the choice of men. When he asks, "What moral rules ought we to have?" he replies in a similar vein that we should act on principles that we freely accept. The same voluntaristic tendencies appear in his explanation of good, ought, and moral obligation. The primary use of good is preference, which is a volitional notion. Then it is used in a context of praising where it implies that reasons must be given for one's praise. Next is the commendatory force of good, the exhortation to do or choose. As the uses of the word recede from the fundamental meaning of preference, good almost comes to be a descriptive word but "it never quite does this and in moral contexts it can never wholly lose its gerundive or pro-force." 24 His notion of moral wrong is "something that a spectator would condemn." His explanation of ought has a similar preferential flavor. He claims that the emotive theory that ought-sentences are disguised imperatives is an oversimplification. Although imperatives and ought­ sentences are used to tell someone to do something, their logic is different. For imperatives issue from authority which does not have to give a reason for its command; the legal ought is impersonal and objective. But if we say "you ought" to people to get something done, we must be ready to give reasons for saying so. Yet ought­ sentences cannot be equivalated to general impersonal commands nor can the moral ought be defined in terms of God's will. For even if the command does issue from the will of God that fact is not a good reason for obeying it. For whenever we appeal to a command to back up our ought-sentence, we must rely upon a general pro-attitude on the part of the recipient toward obeying the command. But in the absence of such a pro-attitude "the mere fact that God commands something is no more reason for doing it than the fact that a cricket coach tells you to do something." 2 5 25 Ibid., p. 192. 24 Jbid., p. 1 64. :.1 3 Ibid., p. 2 36.

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He distinguishes obligation by natural circumstances (unforeseen circumstances like a blocked road force us to do or omit what we had not intended to do or omit); obligation by threats; legal obli­ gation whose force lies in the penalties attached to breaking the law; and moral obligation. This last is like legal obligation or the force of circumstances in that it is "something which obliges me to act in a way, but for the obligation, I would not have acted." 26 For the logic of obligation requires a conflict between the duty to do something and the inclination not to do it. While this is not true for every case, there is a general presumption that a given item has been incorporated into a moral code because on the whole people are disinclined to do it. Yet that which distinguishes moral from every other kind of obligation is that it is self-imposed or voluntarily accepted. He cites reasons why people obey moral rules and says that these reasons presuppose that we are in favor of what the rule enjoins. But suppose one does not have a sufficiently pro­ attitude toward a rule; why should he obey it? The answer is his basic explanation of obligation, namely, we are to obey because obedience is required by the sort of life we have chosen to lead. "The most a moral philosopher can do is to paint a picture of the various types of life and ask which type you really want to lead. The type of life you most want to lead will depend on the sort of man you are." 2 1 Nowell-Smith identifies objectivism with the intuitionists whom he cannot abide; yet he protests at being put down as a subjectivist. He says that the subjective-objective contrast does not hold in morals for the reason that the contrast between "is" and "seems" cannot there be drawn. Until the appearance of the phenomenologists the subjective-objective contrast in morals was phrased in this way : if reason discovers and enunciates a moral order, moral rules are ob­ jective; if moral· rules depend for existence upon the choice of men, moral rules are subjective. While he has a foot in either camp, he gravitates toward a subjective eclectic position. Thus he does not see how the terms "correct" and "mistaken" can be applied in cases of dispute about moral judgments; where parties disagree about moral principles neither of them has grounds for saying that he is correct and the other mistaken. He thinks an objective theory of value requires force to have it accepted by the unwilling. He chooses the subjective side when he says that a principle is not a principle for 26

Ibid., p. 2 1 0.

27

Ibid., p. 3 1 9.

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him unless he freely accepts it, that acceptance of moral rules im­ posed from without would indicate a slavish attitude. His closing words are : " 'What shall I do?' and 'What moral principles should I adopt?' must be answered by each man for himself." 28 3. Stephen Toulmin reduces ethical theories to the objective, subjective, and imperative approach. He rejects the first because it holds goodness to be a property of things whereas it is not.2 9 He rejects subjectivism for holding that contradictions in ethics are not possible. He criticises both theories for wrangling over a false prob­ lem. He presents the objectivist as seeking for some process in an object with which to identify goodness and the subjectivist as seeking a like process within the agent, and then both of them asking, "Where are values, in the object or in the agent?" No, says Toulmin; values are neither in an object nor in an agent. The trouble is that both parties are deceived by their use of "in." They think that in order to be a genuine concept values must reside "in" the object or "in" the subject. 3 0 They misunderstand a spatial metaphor and so their search for an answer is a wild goose chase. The imperative approach (emotivism) is a reaction against the two older approaches. Toulmin treats emotivism indulgently. When the imperativist is accused of pessimism for saying that there are no good reasons for passing from facts to ethical judgments, Toulmin excuses him for having mixed up statements of fact_ with propositions of logic. The imperativist has mistakenly identified the logical prop­ osition, "There are no reasons for ejaculations," for a statement of fact, "There are no reasons for ethical judgments," and consequently has deceived himself by his form of words. 3 1 But Toulmin does reject emotivism and sets out to restore reason to the field of ethics. His restoration, however, is of limited extent. Toulmin is disquieted by the larger philosophical concepts of goodness, truth, and reality, especially ultimate reality. For quest of ultimate reality introduces problems of metaphysics which to him are pure metaphor. He has no answer to the question, "What is truth?" Nor is there any universally valid answer to the question, "What is reasoning?" 3 2 He gives short shrift to philosophical ethics. If one takes these theories literally they are false. If one takes them as disguised comparisons they are not mutually exclusive. Leave

2 s Ibid., p. Stephen versity Press, 3 0 Ibid., p. 29

320. Toulmin, The Place of Reason in Etl1ics (Cambridge : The Uni­ 1953), p. 28 . 3 2 Ibid., p. 80. 3 1 Ibid., p. 58. 44.

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them to themselves and they become partisan slogans. The central problem of ethics is a logical one, "What are good reasons for an ethical decision?" 33 To set up his problem he says that the concepts of logic, ethics and aesthetics, are gerundives, "worthy-to-be-something-or-other." Thus the true is worthy of belief; the beautiful is worthy of admiration; the good is worthy of ap­ proval. To be able to say of a proposition that it is true it must be shown to be worthy of credence; so in ethics it is not enough for the rightness of a deed that someone approve it; there must be reasons for thinking the action worthy of approval.34 When we assert gerundives, we must adduce "reasons" to support them. If the reasons are such as to render the gerundive worthy of acceptance, they are "good reasons." What will serve as good reasons depends on the type of conclu­ sion and the purpose of the enterprise. Thus the function of scien­ tific reasoning is to explain natural phenomena, "to correlate our experiences in such a way that we know what to expect." 3 5 vVhatever reasons of predictability, coherence, or convenience support the de­ scriptive and predictive statements of science are good reasons in science. In the case of the gerundives "good" and "right," one must seek different kinds of reasons, which, however, are not to be called true or false. For the purpose of ethics is not to predict our actions but to alter feeling and behavior. Ethics is not for people who are immutably fixed in their ways of acting or who always instinctively know the right thing to do. There are two types of moral questions. TI1e first is, "Is this action right or wrong?" It has place only in a community of persons re­ specting one anothers' interests so as to live in harmonious co­ operation. Morality, in the strict sense, exists only in situations where the conduct of one is liable to trespass on the interests of another. Hence "we can fairly characterize ethics as part of the process whereby the desires and actions of the members of a com­ munity are harmonized." 3 6 Moral principles, then, are procedures for minimizing the effects of the collision of interests in a com­ munity. Hence the right action is the one which conforms to the rules established by the community and the final good reason for Toulmin why an act is right is that it conforms to social practice. If, however, two courses of action are equally acceptable to the 33 Ibid., pp. 69, 84. s4 Ibid., pp . 71-72 .

35

36

Ibid., p. 125 . Ibid., p. 1 36.

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AFTER THE EMOTIVISTS

prevailing code and their foreseeable effects on others equally toler­ able, then moral rules are no longer directive. One is then free to develop a private rule of life and ask, "Will this course of action promote my happiness?" By an extension of the term these choices and rules might be called moral. And what are good reasons in these circumstances can be determined only in retrospect. One can call the reasoning good only if the course chosen has actually led to deep and permanent happiness. Since Toulmin confines the strictly moral type of question to a particular community, there can be no morality universally valid for all men, except incidentally, where certain rules like promise­ keeping would appear in all codes.37 It is idle to compare varying practices of different communities. Who can say that the monogamy of the English community is better than the polygamy of the Arabic communities? What should be compared are not particular prac­ tices but the ways of life as wholes and this can be done only by private evaluation. While a person may have reasons for thinking his way of life is best he cannot prove it; all he can do is choose it and live by it. 3 8 In a primitive society where one never questions but uncritically accepts the social rules only one type of reasoning exists, "Does my act conform to the rule?" In an enlightened community, however, one meets a second type, namely, "Is this rule the best thing for the community?" Since the ideal of the community is to become a society in which no misery or frustration is tolerated within its existing resources and state of knowledge, there is bound to be criticism of existing rules. The criterion here will be: "If we changed the rule would the change have happy or unhappy consequences?" 3 9 Here is place for the moralist, the social engineer who sees in which direction the existing code needs changing, recognizes that a princi­ ple or institution has outlived its usefulness and has a vision of the community's capacity for enhanced enjoyment. To his central question, "What is good reasoning in ethics?" no single answer can be given. 40 The only valid answers apply to par­ ticular types of argument. So also if you ask, "Why should there be reasoning of any kind for making a moral decision?" no answer is possible. You might as well ask, "Why ought one to do right?" Ethics has no answers for what Toulmin calls "limiting questions." Ibid., p. 3s Ibid., p.

31

1 50. 1 5 3.

39

40

Ibid. Ibid .• p.

161.

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THE MODERN IMPASSE

For him these are questions in a given field which a person con­ tinues to ask after the logical resources of that field have been ex­ hausted. One might go to religion for answers to limiting questions but the answers will not be literal. Religion will help us to accept ethical conclusions but it will not afford a rational justification of them. Limiting questions are really metaphysical questions but meta­ physics does not exist for him.4 1 Briefly, Toulmin allows reasoning within the limits of conduct involving the interests of others, justification of conduct according to social norms, and justification of the social norm. But there are more general questions. Is the norm of one nation better than the norm of another? Why ought one to choose this way of life rather than another? Why ought one to do what is right? Why should ethics have an intellectual basis? Toulmin says that there is no answer or else leaves the questioner to his personal choice. Answers to these questions do not belong in a book of logic but in an auto­ biography.4 2 He should have said, "In a metaphysics!" Toulmin evades answering the ultimate questions which ethics ought to answer by the devise of pinning on them the pejorative name of "limiting questions!" 4. Kurt Baier asks three questions: ( 1) vVhy should we do what is right? ( 2) Why do we do what is right? ( 3) How do we know what is right? The only way to answer 1 and 2 is to find the answer to 3, the epistemological question. The emotive theory denies the epistemological problem on the grounds that since moral judgments are incapable of empirical verification, they are neither true nor false. But the empiricist forgets that assertions of fact and value judgments have different purposes. The purpose of the former is to describe something so that it may be identified or correlations made about it. The purpose of the latter is to afford rational guidance about the means of fulfilling our wants and aims. What makes guidance rational is the reason why we say something is good or bad; and in countless cases that reason can be found to be correct or incorrect. We solve our practical problems, first, by instituting a deliberation the purpose of which is to determine the best course to follow. We survey the facts. A fact becomes a reason when in the light of a principle it furnishes grounds for choosing or rejecting a course of action. If a solution is not apparent, there are other facts to con4 2 Ibid., p. 221. 4 1 Ibid., p. 1 16.

AFTER THE EMOTIVISTS

95

sider in the light of other consideration-making beliefs. Once the facts are all in we weigh them in the light of their respective princi­ ples to see which on balance has the greater weight. That which has the greater weight becomes the "good" reason for acting. We arrive at such a good reason only if we can evaluate principles which may conflict. There are individual, social, long-range rules of reason. In evaluating them we use a principle of superiority. Thus "reasons of self-interest are superior to reasons of mere pleasure. Reasons of long-range interest outbalance reasons of short-range interest, and reasons of law, religion, and morality outweigh reasons of self-inter­ est."4 3 Moral reasons are superior to all other kinds of reasons. Second, we sometimes look for advice and ask, "What shall I do?" The proper answer is a value judgment, not a commendation, which is a rite or performance ( a patting one on the back with words) and is neither true nor false. It was Hare's calling value judgments commendations which led people to say that value judgments cannot be verified. When we ask, "What shall I do?" we appeal to the knowledge of our hearer. We do not want an order; we want to find out what the other thinks is the best thing to do. Hence the hearer should answer from his practical wisdom with guidance which takes the form of a practical judgment suggesting the best thing to do.4 4 This is what is supported by the best reasons and none are better than true ones. If, then, reasons for making moral judgments can be true or false, these judgments are verifiable. Not only can single principles be true but a whole morality ( the moral convictions accepted within a given community) can also be true. To discover whether a particular morality is true we compare it, not to morality in the abstract; there is no such thing. We compare it with the moral convictions which constitute absolute morality. These convictions are true in any social setup; for they are based on human nature. A particular morality will be true if it contains as its core the convictions of absolute morality. There may be many true moralities. "For there will be many different moral• ities all of which are true, although each may contain certain moral convictions which would be out of place in one of the others."4 5 Thus certain property or marriage arrangements could be immoral in one morality but not in another.

4 3 Kurt Baier, The Moral Point of View ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 195 8), p. 99. 45 Ibid., p. 1 82. 44 Jbid., p. 57.

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We test the truth of our own moral convictions by weighing them from the moral point of view which is that of an impartial, dis­ passionate observer. To pass the test we must meet four conditions.46 First, our point of view cannot be that of mere self-interest. Second, we must act on principle. Third, moral principles are meant for everyone and are to be taught to all members of the group. Fourth, a moral principle must be for the good of all alike. This last intro­ duces the test of reversibility, 4 7 that is, the conduct must be ac­ ceptable to a person whether he is on the giving or receiving end of it. Whoever engages in nonreversible conduct does wrong irre­ spective of consequences. From these conditions Baier deduces primary moral rules which forbid stealing, murder, lying, adultery, and enjoin help to one's neighbor. Secondary rules derive from the need to make even again the moral equilibrium which has been put out of balance by good or evil conduct. Hence there is need for gratitude, punishment, justice, and discharge of obligations. These primary and secondary rules belong to absolute morality. Since morality does not exist outside of society there are no moral obligations to oneself.4 8 On account of this exclusively social view Baier construes obligation in the narrow sense of something which can exist only between two persons and as the result of something which has already happened. Duty is that which one has to do in view of his job in society. There is no all-encompassing obligation, no ultimate ground of obligation, no chain of reasoning which, beginning with an initial reason, is anchored on "something such as a self-evident ultimate reason, a First Cause, an Unmoved Mover, or a Tortoise on which it all rests." 49 There are only here-and-now reasons for discharging a particular obligation. There are, however, absolute moral truths which are independent of social change and are the norms by which the institutions of a given society may be criticized. With this account of moral principles Baier answers question 3, "How do we know right from wrong?" To question 2, "Why are we moral?" he says that we are not driven by an inner force but reason and society act on us from without. Acting morally is a special case of choosing the side of the weightiest reasons. We do this because "we have been trained to regard moral reasons as su