Thinking about Morality 0472093169, 0472063162

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THINKING ABOUT MORALITY

Cs)

Michigan Faculty Serles The Quest for World Order, by Robert Cooley :\ngell

Law, Intellect, and Education, by Francis :\. :\lien

THINKING A.Bou·r

WILLIAM K. FRANKENA

ANN ARBOR THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Copyright

© by The University of Michigan 1980

All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press and simultaneously in Rexdale, Canada, by John Wiley & Sons Canada, Limited Manufactured in the United States of .--\merica

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Frankena, William K Thinking about morality. (Distinguished senior faculty lecture series ; 1) (Michigan faculty series) An expansion of 3 lectures presented by the author in 1978 at the Uni\·ersity of Michigan. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Ethics-Collected works. I. Title. I I. Series 79-27011 170 1980 BJ1012.F733 ISBN 0-472-09316-9 ISBN 0-472-06316-2 pbk.

FIRST DISTINGUISHED SENIOR FACULTY LECTURE SERIES

in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts The University of Michigan

The Distinguished Senior Facuity Lecture Series, initiated in 1978, honors senior members of the College faculty who are selected to speak on the state and future of their discipline or to reflect on their individual growth and experience in scholarship. The lectureship has three purposes: to give special recognition to those senior members of the faculty who have achieved outstand­ ing scholarly distinction; to provide students, faculty, and mem­ bers of the larger University community with an opportunity to hear from these scholars a broad overview and synthesis of a major aspect of their scholarly work; and to stimulate large sec­ tors of the College and University to focus, even if only tran­ siently, on major ideas of basic importance to the liberal arts as a whole, thus generating a sense of collegiality and common purpose.

A.BOUT THE A.UTHOR

The present book is an expansion of three public lectures pre­ sented in the fall of 1978 by William K. Frankena at the Uni­ versity of Michigan, where he received the first of the annual Distinguished Faculty Lectureship appointments made by the College of Literature, Science, and the :\rts at the University. Frankena's lectures were attended by a large and enthusiastic audience. In substance, this book represents the essentials of the theory of morality at which Frankena has arrived after a lifetime of study and reflection. It may enhance the reader's understanding and appreciation of Frankena's position to be provided some idea of the route over which he travelled in reaching it. William Klaas Frankena was born in 1908 in Montana, of parents who had emigrated from the Netherlands. Soon thereaf­ ter, the family moved to Zeeland, Michigan. The religious tradi­ tion of the family was strict Calvinism, in accordance with which prayer and Bible readings accompanied each meal. In 1926 he entered Calvin College in Grand Rapids, majoring in English literature and philosophy. There he came to accept, for a time, the philosophy of absolute idealism: the doctrine that experience and thought alone are real, and that they are or­ ganized into an integrated whole. His lifelong interest in ethics began at Calvin, and Frankena found himself accepting the ethi­ cal theory typical of absolute idealism, that the good and the right are defined by the realization of one's true self.

[vii]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In 1930 Frankena entered the University of 1',1ichigan as a graduate student in philosophy. There he learned, chiefly from C. H. Langford, a more analytic way of doing philosophy, one which traces its ancestry to Socrates, and which emphasizes clar­ ity about one's meaning, identification of justifiable premises for an argument whether observational or reflective (as in mathemat­ ics and logic), and careful inference. He also learned, from D. H. Parker, how to apply this way of philosophizing to ethics. Parker urged that ethical reasoning can begin from a sound premise, namely, that the good is what satisfies desire, since good just means "satisfies desire." In 1933, after passing the preliminary examinations for the doctorate in philosophy at Michigan, Frankena decided to move to Harvard. The depression was at its worst and openings in philosophy were scarce; it seemed better to acquire more knowl­ edge and earn a Harvard degree before looking for a position. The move involved repeating preliminary examinations in phi­ losophy, and Frankena sometimes wryly remarks that he had to take preliminary examinations twice, not adding that he passed with distinction on both occasions. At Harvard he studied with A. �. Whitehead, but was most influenced by the ethical vie\vs of R. B. Perry and C. I. Lewis, both of whom inclined toward forms of naturalism, thereby sup­ porting the earlier influence of Parker. Frankena there became a close friend of Charles L. Stevenson and became familiar with, and was to some extent eventually influenced by, Stevenson's view that ethical beliefs are essentially matters of attitude and as such are true (or false) only in a secondary sense. (Frankena \Vas later instrumental in bringing Stevenson to i\-1ichigan as his col­ league.) After receiving a travelling fellowship for 1935-36, Frankena spent most of the year at Cambridge University. There he stud­ ied with G. E. Moore and C. D. Broad, and was influenced both by their methods and by their conclusions. Specifically, he

[ viii ]

ABO UT THE AUTHOR

adopted their method of meticulous attention to the meanings of ethical words and the various senses of these words in different contexts, and he learned to utilize these distinctions of meaning in resolving long-standing puzzles, e.g. , about whether 'ought' implies 'can'. He was also deeply influenced by the intuitionism of ,Moore and Broad, the view that 'right' (or 'good') does not refer to an observable property and hence that knowledge about what is right (or good) is not obtained by observation but by reflective insight or "intuition." As the years went by, however, he moved away from the Cambridge tradition and came to take a much broader view of the methods of ethical inquiry, allowing for such things as human psychology and the function of morality in human society, thus refusing to limit the moral philosopher's inquiry to a study of the meanings of ethical words, and to definitional and intuitive knowledge. Frankena wrote his thesis on intuitionism in ethics, and re­ ceived his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1937. His own view at the time was partly naturalist and partly intuitionist. His sympathy for naturalism in ethics led him to find the flaw in Moore's argument that every naturalistic definition of 'good' is fallacious, and to accept a naturalistic account of 'good'. He believed that 'good' refers to observable properties and hence that what is good can be determined by empirical methods. But he agreed with the intuitionist that 'right' does not refer to any observable property, and hence that knowledge of what is right must come by way of reflective intuition. This theory contrasted sharply with the emotive or "attitudi­ nal" ethics of his friend Stevenson, for Frankena maintained that both 'good' and 'right' refer to properties of some kind, and that ethical statements ascribe these properties to states of affairs, objects, actions, and persons. On this view ethical statements are descriptive in the sense of being either true or false, whereas on Stevenson's view ethical statements are nondescriptive. Frankena held this ethical theory only tentatively. He leaned

[ix]

ABO UT THE AUTHOR

toward a naturalistic view about 'good', because he thought the definitions of 'good' offered by Parker and Perry were essentially correct. He also thought it simpler to hold that there is only one basic term in ethics, 'right', which does not refer to an observable property. He leaned toward intuitionism about 'right', because he was not satisfied with the naturalistic theory of the right. But he had doubts about the intuitionist's general views on properties and intuitive knowledge. Such were Frankena's views about ethics when he returned to the University of Michigan as an instructor in 1937. From that time on he not only had a distinguished career as a writer on ethical theory and related subjects but also made great contribu­ tions to the university both as a teacher and as an administrator. He was chairman of the Department of Philosophy from 1947 to 196 1, and served on many college and university committees. :\s a teacher of graduate and undergraduate courses in general phi­ losophy as well as in ethics, he brought remarkable freshness, clarity, and depth to the classroom. For many years Frankena taught a course in the history of ethics, taken by most graduate students, who invariably acclaimed it for the assiduousness and fairmindedness with which the positions and contributions of each thinker were formulated and expounded. He also developed an interest in the philosophy of education, and frequently taught a course in this subject. Over time his erudition in ethics and the philosophy of education became awesome. The university rec­ ognized both these services and his achievements in research and scholarship by naming Frankena to a Distinguished Service Award, and later by appointing him Roy Wood Sellars Col­ legiate Professor of Philosophy. Frankena's contributions to philosophy began with a series of important articles; his literary production gradually swelled into a flood. He has now, in 1979, published well over a hundred articles in his field. His book Ethics appeared in 1963, followed by a second edition in 1973. In only about one hundred pages he

[ X]

ABO UT THE AUTHOR

presented a rigorous, balanced, and critical review of the central issues of the subject, as well as his own conclusions. The book has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Swedish. He has also written on applied ethics and on the philosophy of education. His Three Historical Philosophies of Education: Aristotle, Kant, Dewey appeared in 1965. The most important of his articles have been collected in Perspectives on Morality-Essays by William K. Frankena ( 1976), edited by Ken­ neth Goodpaster. The work contains a bibliography of his writ­ ings, as does Values and Morals: Essays in Honor of William Frank­ ena, Charles Stevenson, and Richard Brandt (1978), edited by Alvin Goldman and Jaegwon Kim. Frankena's creative and scholarly talent_s have been recognized outside the University by awards of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a senior fellowship of the National Endowment of the Humanities. He has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education. He has served as president of the American Philosophical Association, Western Division. He has received the highest recognition possible for philosophers to be­ stow, having been named Carus Foundation Lecturer of the American Philosophical Association for 1974. The three lectures offered here spell out Frankena's current intellectual position in satisfying detail. His present ethics is a complex and sophisti­ cated attitudinal theory built around a carefully formulated con­ cept of the moral point of view. The attitudes of a rational person who takes the moral point of view are central to the theory. In the process of arriving at his concept of the moral point of view, Frankena searched moral experience in order to preserve those of its features that had led him to accept naturalism and in­ tuitionism. Both schools held that rational inquirers would agree on the truth and falsity of moral statements. Correspondingly, Frankena maintains that those who are rational and who take the

[ xi ]

ABO UT THE A UTHOR

moral point of view will agree in their moral judgments. But, while the intuitionists claimed that the basic moral principles are self-evident, Frankena believes that they will seem self-evident to a rational person employing the moral point of view.

RICHARD ARTHUR

B.

w.

BRANDT BURKS

Department of Philosophy University of Michigan

[ xii ]

CONTENTS

LECTURE ONE

What Is Morality?

LECTURE TWO

What Is Being Moral? 41

LECTURE THREE

Why Be Moral? 73 NOTES 95

�cturcOne

I:\:T R ODU CTI ON

�

"f I were writing in the first part of the eighteenth century I would have sought to catch my audience's interest with a title something like this: An Essay on .\1orality, wherein the conception and forms of \1orality, and the �otion of Virtue, together with certain recent attacks on them, as also the question, Why should we be .\1oral? and diverse other related Matters, are in­ quired into: in opposition to Immoralists and Sceptics. As it is, my title reads simply Thinking about Morality because that is what I have be.en doing for most of my career as a philosopher. :\part from the history of ethics and a little philoso­ phy of education, much of my teaching and all of my writing has consisted of thinking about morality. Theologians call me an ethicist, a label I hate even though I am ready to call other people physicists; others might call me a moralist, a label that suggests something I have seldom done; but as James Whitcomb Riley might have put it� "the fellers" call me a moral philosopher. Moral philosophy is philosophical thinking about morality. Another word for it is ethics, if we understand by this the branch of philosophy also called ethical theory. The word ethics is, how­ ever, also used as a synonym for morality; for example, when we speak of professional ethics or the ethics of the Navajo we do not mean a branch of philosophy, but a morality.

LECTURE ONE

We may distinguish here between two kinds of thinking about morality in the broad sense: the exercise of moral thinking and thinking about morality as a subject. .\lloral thinking is thinking within morality, as mathematical thinking is thinking within mathematics. In moral thinking one is trying to answer a first­ order substantive question, general or specific, about what is right or wrong, good or bad, such as, "Is abortion morally wrong?" Thinking about morality proper is a kind of second­ order thinking, as thinking about mathematics as a subject would be; in it, one looks at morality more or less from above or from the outside and reflects on it, as one does when asking, "Is morality relative?" Briefly, thinking about morality is not moral thinking; it is thinking about moral thinking. But, of course, we can and do say we are thinking about mathematics when we are merely trying to solve a problem within it and are not really thinking about mathematics itself, e. g. , when we are working on a problem in geometry. So, too, we may loosely refer to both moral thinking and thinking about morality simply as thinking about morality, and this is what I was doing when I said moral philosophy was thinking about morality . .\loral philosophy, as I conceive of and practice it, includes both moral thinking, at least of a somewhat abstract and general sort, and thinking about morality proper! y so-called. There are, however, three kinds of thinking about morality in the strict sense. First, there is factual or scientific thinking about it, which may be either descriptive or explanatory; this is the kind of thinking about morality that anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists do or should do when they are being scientists and not philosophers (as they often are, some­ times without knowing it or saying so). Second, there is concep­ tual thinking or analysis, i. e. , thinking that seeks to clarify moral concepts like 'obligation' or 'virtue', to analyze moral judgments, or to elucidate the logic of moral reasoning-in short, what has been called metaethics (as distinguished from normative ethics, which is a species of moral thinking). Third, there is metamoral

WHAT IS MORA LITY?

reflection of a somewhat different sort, which asks questions like "What is morality?" "What is its object?" "What forms may or should it take?" and "Why should we be moral?" Tra­ ditionally, moral philosophers have done thinking about morality of all three kinds, as well as moral thinking proper. For a time in this century, under the influence of G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, C. D. Broad, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, many British and American philosophers thought that moral philoso­ phy should limit itself to the second kind of thinking about morality, i. e., to ethical analysis or metaethics. Now, many (but not all) moral philosophers still feel that they should leave scien­ tific thinking about morality to the scientists, and some of them still do the conceptual or metaethical kind of thinking about it, but more and more of them are emphasizing the third kind of question about morality, while at the same time returning to the doing of normative ethics or moral thinking proper. In these lectures, I shall be doing a little moral thinking proper, but mostly thinking about morality of the second and third kinds, especially the third. Let me put what I shall be doing in a slightly different perspective. Philosophers, academic and nonacademic, have often done ethics or moral philosophy simply as part of their job of doing philosophy. To some extent this has been true of me, though I have limited myself to moral philosophy more than most philosophers have. This does not mean that one's interest in morality is merely academic, incidental, or hedonistic; one may still be genuinely concerned about morality, its condition and its future. I am not opposed to doing moral philosophy in this way, and certainly do not mean to be recanting, but on this occasion I am trying to do it differently, and to do it, not for a class or for my colleagues, but for a general educated audience. Such an audience should find interesting two developments in the field today. rl 'he first is a widespread cultural ado about morality; many people are attacking it in one way or another, and others are coming to its defense. Accompanying this debate

[ 5 ]

LECTURE ONE

is a deep concern about moral education, about whether it still exists or should exist and how it should or should not be con­ ducted. Philosophers are taking part in this debate, along with novelists, journalists, educators, theologians, and activists, and I am pleased with much of what philosophers are doing. The second development is a lively concern about and discussion of a number of contemporary moral problems like abortion, euthanasia, and the environment. Philosophers are very active in this discussion too, and again I am pleased with much of what they have done. In both cases, obviously, philosophers are not just minding their shop, tending their knitting, or doing moral philosophy only as part of working out a philosophy as a whole. I shall not address myself here to problems of the second or practical kind, since I believe that for dealing with such current problems satisfactorily one needs a general theory of morality, and it is this, or some of it, that I wish to present in these lectures, praying that it may not seem a rather meager result for the fifty years I have put into it. The first development, how­ ever, I shall constantly have in mind, and, in this larger sense, I am convinced that what I shall say is both current and practical. A few points must be made before we go to work. One is that moral philosophers, of whom I am one, try to do their thinking about morality independently of authority, tradition, or revela­ tion; in this respect, they are like the scientists. T. S. Eliot referred to them thus in his lament in one of the choruses from The Rock, 0 weariness of men who turn from GOD To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action, To arts and inventions and daring enterprises, To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited, Engaged in working out a rational morality... . 1 However, they are not necessarily anti- or irreligious, as Eliot implies; rather they mean their thinking about morality to be

[6]

WHAT IS MORALITY?

philosophical, holding that morality does not depend on religion, excepting perhaps in certain limited ways (e. g. , they may admit, as I shall shortly, that morality as we now understand it is, in large part, a historical product of the J udeo- Christian tradition). Secondly, as will appear in these lectures, philosophy is in some important respects more personal than science, or even history or theology; in this sense it belongs clearly to the humanities and resembles poetry, different as it is from poetry in other ways. Its mode of presentation must, therefore, be rather personal; in­ deed, because of the nature of this occasion, I shall be even more personal than would otherwise be appropriate. In the third place, in presenting my arguments and conclusions, I do not mean to be pretending to prove anything in any very demonstra­ tive way. Philosophy, in my opinion, is not like that, and ethics cannot be demonstrated after the manner of geometry, as Spinoza and even Locke thought it could be. This in itself is no reason for being an antimoralist or a skeptic, but it is a reason for not pretending to do what one is not doing. Here, then, I mean merely to be thinking aloud about morality, presenting my thought and reasoning in such a way as to be helpful to others in their own thinking, in the hope that, as they reflect on these matters, they will come to agree with me.

H I S T O R I C A L PE R S P E C T IVE* It may help us if we put our reflections on morality in some kind of temporal perspective. According to Genesis, one of the two special trees in the Garden of Eden was the Tree of the Knowl­ edge of Good and Evil; if we were to eat of it, we would come to have this knowledge, but we were forbidden to eat of it on pain of death. The other was the Tree of Life; if we were to eat of it, *Not presented in the lectures, this section has been added especially for publication.-Eo.

LECTURE ONE

we would have eternal life, but we were prevented from eating of it once we had eaten of the other. The implication is that we would have been free to eat of the Tree of Life, and so to gain eternal life, if we had not eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowl­ edge. One way offered eternal life and no problems; the other offered a knowledge of good and evil, death, and problems. Why were we given such a hard choice? Why were we forbidden to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, rather than, say, of the avocado with all of its cholesterol? Satan said it was because God did not want us to become like him (God) in having a knowledge of good and evil, which seems to mean that God wanted us to live in a state of happy innocence, without passing judgments of good or evil on anything, let alone on our own lives or those of others, which is not easy to believe. But, of course, Satan may have been lying about God's motives, and I am inclined to think he was; it would be like him to lie. After all, God did create us in his own image, including the natural capacity to make value judgments, without which, if I am right in what I am going to say, we should not have been left. In any case, with an assist from Satan, we did eat of the forbidden tree-we chose to be like God in making value judgments. The irony of it all is that we lost eternal life without actually gaining a knowledge of good and evil; even after taking those initial bites and all the years since, we still have problems about what is good or bad, right or wrong; we still have to think about morality. Whether or not the Genesis story is history, it will be useful to have some sort of picture, however rough, of ethical thinking between then and now, though I shall also introduce other bits of history later. The shape or shapes of morality in the past have, of course, been affected by factors other than human thinking, such as natural circumstances and political events. Furthermore, the thinking that has affected morality has not always been philosophical; much of it has been traditional, political, religious, racist, or sexist-and some of it, perhaps, accidental or casual. Moreover, not all thinking about how we humans are to behave

[8]

WHAT IS MORALIT Y ?

or l i ve constitutes either moral thinking or thinking about morality, a point that i s not always kept in mind . Such thinking m ay be lega l , political, aesthetic , or religious, rather than moral, and it m ay be about law, govern ment, art , or religion , rather than about moral ity . Lumping a l l such thought together, George S antayana distinguished preration al, ration al, and postrational morality . 2 I n the West, at least , the idea of rational thinking about morality and/or about how we are to live was first at­ tempted and achieved by the Greek philosophers , in particular the Sophists , Socrates , Plato, and A ristotle . Before that, accord­ ing to S antayana, such thinking as there was was prerational, and after that it was postrational or religious for many centuries . A ri stophanes cleverly lampooned the idea o f what Eliot calls "working out a rational morality" in The Clouds. He portrayed the Sophi sts and Socrates, whom he d id not d i stinguish, as meaning to run life through the Think Shop, each in their own fashion . In Socrates' word s , "The unexamined life is not worth l iving by a man . " 3 Aristophanes and his fellow dogmatists who fought against this program were for burning the Think Shop, and succeeded in getting Socrates tried and put to death. Sti l l , the idea o f rational l iving persi sted ; indeed , it w a s more alive in the Midd le A ges than Santayana allow s, even though his picture i s partly true . I n early modern times it came fu l ly to life again in the w ritings of Hobbes, Spinoza , Hume, and Kant . But, of course , there was also another reaction-Burke, Romanticism, Freud , existentialism, and a l l that-and today , we are again de­ bating the merits of what I am doi ng in these lectures: running cond uct and moral ity through the Think Shop. However, it is not clear that the Greek rationalists were think­ ing about moral ity in our sen se . They were thinking about how a m an should l ive , as Plato says near the end of book I of the Republic, and their answer was to give us a table of virtues, but these virtues are not all such as we would call moral . Besides, if we look at t heir defin ition s of the virtues , we find that they are hard ly in terms we would regard as moral . Pl ato, for example,

LECTURE ONE

makes no distinction between moral and nonmoral virtues, and his definitions of the four cardinal ones involve no reference to or consideration of other people (I refer only to his definitions of the virtues of the individual in Republic, bk. 4). Aristotle does distin­ guish moral (ethike) and intellectual virtues, but by a moral virtue he means one that is acquired by habit or practice, which covers traits that are not moral in our sense. Furthermore, he defines these virtues by reference to the notion of a mean between excess and deficiency, a notion which is not clearly moral and may even be aesthetic. The beautiful (kalos) and the good (agathos) were, after all, very close together for the Greeks. Speaking still in this rough way, we may say that for our purposes two things happened in the long interregnum between the Greeks and the moderns who revived the Think Shop. The first is what Elizabeth Anscombe has called "the divine la,v con­ ception of ethics," which she sees in the Stoics and especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition. 4 This is the conception of ethics, or rather morality, as essentially a set of divine commands known either by nature (or reason) or by authority (or revela­ tion), a view especially characteristic of the Old Testament pre­ sentation of "the Moral Law" as God's law in Ten Command­ ments. The idea of divine commands was not foreign to the Greeks, as their dramatists make clear, but still this conception of ethics is a far cry from Plato and Aristotle. �ot only is it couched in terms of commandments instead of virtues, giving ethics a different form, but also it is filled with a rather different content. In particular, the commandments of the Second Table, which are the more properly moral ones, all explicitly forbid us to treat other people in certain ways; they also differ from those of the First Table by failing to adduce self-interest as a motive for obeying them. They center on other people in a ,vay in which the virtues of Plato and Aristotle do not. On the other hand, those of the First Table center on God in a way in which their virtues also did not. The other new thing was the Christian ethics of love (agape,

[ IO ]

W H AT IS MORALITY?

not eros) of the New Testament . In form this is sti l l represented as a pair of command ments, so that the divine l aw conception of ethics is not given up, but, so to speak , the content of ethics is m ade to con sist of a virtue , namely love (or pe rhaps two loves), instead of prescriptions and proscriptions of particular kinds of action . There is also no suggestion of self-interest or fear of consequences as a motive for doing what love requires. This ethics i s supposed to be only a recasting of that of the Old Testament, but it is at least a restatement, and , in any case, it too i s very different from the ethics of the Greeks . Both versions of J udeo-Christian ethics, especia l ly in their second halves, w hich center on our rel ations to our fellowper­ sons , come much closer to morality as we have thought of it in modern t i mes than do the ethics of Plato and Aristotle . That is one reason w hy I have not spoken of Pl ato and Aristotle as having moral ities or conception s of morality . I n fact, we m ay assert , I thi nk, that our modern way of concei ving of morality, w hich I shall shortly try to define, is largely a result of the intervention of the Judeo-Christian rel igion s-which is not to say that morality as we think of it rests on those rel igions (as so m any rel igious w riters suppose) . 5 The change may perhaps be described as fol lows : the Greeks were seeking the rational way to l ive , without m aking special mention of the moral w ay to live; t heir solution s do not center on our rel ations to other person s . However, the modern s conceive o f a spec ifically moral way to l i ve t hat is largely a m atter of our rel ations to our fel low human beings . A prevailing egoism in Greek ethics ru ns counter to the altru i s m featured in modern ethics. The early moderns did , however, revive the Greek idea of working out a ration al ethics, independent of the revealed theol­ ogy on w h ich Judeo-Christian ethics, in both ve rsion s , rested . At the same time, they in he rited from the divine law conception of ethics a notion of Duty , or w hat one Ought to do, that was only sketchily present among the Greeks who thought in terms of Virtue ; from the ethics of love, they inherited an idea of morality

[ II ]

LECTURE ONE

as at least partly altruistic, prescribing duties to other humans and possibly even eliminating duties to self or God. Thus, al­ most at once, in reaction to Hobbes, most of them insisted that man has some genuine altruism in his nature, even without the action of divine grace, and that self-interest is neither the stan­ dard nor the motive of morality. .-\t one and the same time, they distinguished the moral and the self-interested and, less explicitly, the moral and the rational ways of life, though with­ out effecting an actual divorce in either case. � ecessarily, then, they were forced to ask, more insistently than either the Greeks or Christians had asked, whether it is rational and/or prudent to be moral. Hence arose their repeated question, ''\Vhat motivates or obligates us to be virtuous? " Plato had indeed asked whether it is rational for a person to be just, but justice for him was a matter, not of the relations between individuals, but of the rela­ tions between parts of an individual's soul. He was not asking or trying to answer the modern question, ''Why should one be moral? " in which being moral is understood to entail not being wholly self-interested. However, the moderns assumed, as Plato would have, that if one is to establish the rationality of being moral, then one must show that being moral is in an individual's own interest, that the virtuous person is the happy one, or, as Shaftesbury put it, that "Virtue is the good and vice the ill of everyone. " 6 This comes out in a famous passage in Joseph Butler's Sermons: Let it be allowed, though virtue or moral rectitude does indeed consist in affection to and pursuit of what is right or good, as such [ which he understood to include benevolence], yet, that when we sit down in a cool hour, we can neither justify to ourselves this or any other pursuit till we are convinced that it will be for our happiness or at least not contrary to it. 7 Once virtue was conceived of wholly, or at least partially, as the avoidance of egoism, the rationality of being moral became both

[ I2 ]

WHAT I S MORA L I TY ?

crucial and difficult to establish; it certainly could not be taken for granted. Butler and later Kant were forced to adopt a postulate to the effect that God will harmonize duty or virtue and happiness or interest, if not in this life, then in a hereafter. Still later, Henry Sidgwick, who took establishing such a harmony as the central problem of his moral philosophy but was even more determined to work out ethics as an independent science, likewise found himself constrained to "borrow a fundamental and indispensable premise [asserting the reconciliation of duty and self-interest] from Theology or some similar source. " 8 We shall return to this question in lecture 3. It should be added that, unlike both ancient and medieval ethics, modern moral philosophy, especially in English-speaking countries, was and still is characterized by a running debate between two schools of thought, both nonegoistic in ethics and, usually, in psychology. One of the first to describe this debate was W. E. H. Lecky in his 1869 classic History of European Morals. The two rival theories of morals are known by many names, and are subdivided into many groups. One of them is generally described as the stoical, the intuitive, the inde­ pendent or the sentimental; the other as the epicurean, the inductive, the utilitarian, or the selfish. The moralists of the former school, to state their opinions in the broadest form, believe that we have a natural power of perceiving that some qualities, such as benevolence, chastity, or veracity, are better than others, and that we ought to cultivate them, and to repress their opposites. In other words, they con­ tend, that by the constitution of our nature, the notion of right carries with it a feeling of obligation; that to say a course of conduct is our duty, is in itself, and apart from all consequences, an intelligible and sufficient reason for prac­ tising it; and that we derive the first principles of our duties from intuition. The moralist of the opposite school denies

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LECTURE O N E

that we have any such natural perception. He maintains that we have by nature absolutely no knowledge of merit and demerit, of the comparative excellence of our feelings and actions, and that we derive these notions solely from an observation of the course of life which is conducive to human happiness. That which makes actions good is, that they increase the happiness or diminish the pains of man­ kind. That which constitutes their demerit is their opposite tendency. To procure "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," is therefore the highest aim of the moralist, the supreme type and expression of virtue. 9 Today, members of the first school of thought are usually called deontologists, those of the second teleologists or utilitarians. Lecky remarks that this great controversy between the deontologists and the utilitarians . . . may be dimly traced in the division between Plato and Aristotle; it appeared more clearly in the division between the Stoics and the Epicureans; but it has only acquired its full distinctness of definition, and the importance of the questions depending on it has only been fully appreciated, in modern times, under the influence of such writers as Cudworth, Clarke, and Butler upon the one side, and Hobbes, Helvetius, and Bentham on the other. 1 0 One may also say, I believe, that the deontological way of think­ ing is the inheritor of the Old Testament divine law conception of ethics, as well as of the Stoics, while the teleological and utilitarian line of thought is the heir of the New Testament ethics of love, much more than of the Epicureans. This becomes clearer if one adds Richard Price, Thomas Reid, and Immanuel Kant to the first school and Richard Cumberland, Lord Shaftesbury, George Berkeley, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume to the second, and especially if one goes on to study Jonathan Edwards and the lesser known controversy between his followers and

W H AT I S M OR A LITY ?

those of Butler and Reid in America. Both sides reject self­ interest or one's own good or happiness as the moral standard for determining what to do or how to live, and both must explain why it is nevertheless rational to be moral. Both lines of thought have taken more and more sophisticated forms, especially after Sidgwick tried to combine them, but the debate continues as lively as it ever was, even though the terms used are usually rather different-all under the rubric of the forms and limits of utilitarianism. 1 1 Having entered the twentieth century with this last remark, I should do something to fill out what I said about it in the intro­ duction. The controversy just described is in the field of norma­ tive or substantive ethics, but the main debates of our century in moral philosophy, at least until recently, have been in the area of metaethics or analytical ethics, with some philosophers (myself, for instance) holding that this was only one of the legitimate and important parts or tasks of moral philosophy and many others holding, during the years roughly between 1930 and 1960, that moral philosophy should be confined to it, eschewing normative ethics, moral psychology , etc., or rather leaving them to others or doing them ·under another hat . Of course, there were yet other philosophers, usually on or influenced by work on the continent of Europe, who opposed the whole movement of so- called ana­ lytical philosophy, e. g. , the existentialists; but some of these, the phenomenologists, were really only plumping for a somewhat different kind of analysis. In any case, analytical or metaethics centered in its heyday on two questions more intensely than moral philosophy ever had before: ( 1 ) What is the meaning or function of ethical terms or judgm ents? (2) What is the logic of moral reasoning? In reply, there were on the one side several kinds of cognitivists, holding that ethical judgments are true or false : the naturalists, the intuitionists (or nonnaturalists), and most recently the descriptivists or neonaturalists; on the other there were various sorts of noncognitivists, especially the emotivists (of whom my former colleague, C. L. Stevenson, was

LECTURE ONE

the most important) and the imperativists or prescriptivists, holding that ethical judgments are not true or false. I shall not trouble you with the details, much as I should like to. There have also been a number of writers, especially recently, who are hard to classify, and some who reject the distinction between metaethics and normative ethics or who simply bypass the ques­ tions mentioned in favor either of normative ethics or of metamoral questions of the sort I shall be dealing with here. Naturally, I have myself taken some small part in the dis­ cussions of the past forty years, both as a commentator and as a contributor. For those who are interested, I may characterize my position, which underlies what is to come in these lectures, as follows: ( 1) I adopt the modern conception of morality as essen­ tially nonegoistic; (2) in metaethics I try to work out an alterna­ tive view to those mentioned, especially to naturalism, in­ tuitionism, and emotivism; and (3) in normative ethics I seek to synthesize deontologism and utilitarianism, much as Sid�vick did. 1 2

THE N ATU RE OF M O R A L ITY When a fellow Athenian came to Socrates and asked a question or made a statement about X (virtue, piety, or whatever), Soc­ rates almost always replied with a question: "\\'hat is this X that you are talking about? We must know just what it is before we can answer your query or be sure that what you say is true. " At this point, then, let us ask what morality is. What is it that so many are attacking and others defending? This question of the nature of morality is now often taken to be the main topic of moral philosophy, and the word morality is central in most recent titles in the field. It is, however, not so easy as one would like to get clear about what morality is. As R. B. Perry wrote, . . . there is something which goes on in the world to which it is appropriate to give the name of "morality. " [ I6

]

W HAT IS MORA LITY ?

Nothing is more familiar; nothing is more obscure in its meaning. 1 3 This obscurity, as he calls it, is due to the ambiguity and vague­ ness of words like moral, morally, and morality; the question "What is morality?" turns, as a result, into questions like " How should we define morality?" or " What should morality be like?" though philosophers have not always realized this. It is not al­ ways clear what 'morality' refers to, and it is not always under­ stood to refer to the same thing, so that its proponents and opponents may not recognize when they arc on the same side of a philosophical argument. Sometimes, for example, we speak of the morality of an ac­ tion, motive, policy, quality of character, or type of conduct, and then we are talking about its rightness or wrongness, good­ ness or badness . Then 'morality' refers to the moral quality of something, and covers immorality as well as its opposite. But sometimes we speak of morality as opposed to immorality, and then 'morality' covers only positive moral qualities like rightness or goodness. Again, we sometimes describe, praise, or criticize the morality of a person or society, and then we may only be describing or criticizing that person's or society's conduct or character. In fact, we sometimes talk as if 'morality' and 'morals' refer only to sexual conduct, plus maybe drug peddling and using. However, these are not the uses of 'morality' that mainly interest me and other moral philosophers . Sometimes when we talk about the morality of an individual or group we do not mean to talk about his, her, or its actual conduct or its moral quality; we mean to be describing or evaluating his, her, or its moral principles or values. We are referring to a code or set of moral beliefs rather than to a pattern or quality of conduct or character-to something a person or society has or subscribes to, rather than something he, she, or it is or does. This is one of the uses of 'morality' that concerns us here. Notice that in this sense, there are many moralities (or ethics): Greek morality, bourgeois morality, my morality, new morality,

LECTURE ONE

professional morality, etc. In this sense, morality is not one thing; different moralities prevail in different times and places, as there are different etiquettes, laws, or religions, and these moralities may change. We can speak of a morality in this sense, but not of 'morality'. We do, however, also speak of morality, as we do of religion, science, art, and law, in the singular, as if it were one unchanging thing. For example, we ask what morality requires of us, what the foundation of morality is, what its prin­ ciples are, and how morality is related to religion. This is the other use of 'morality' that concerns us now. Notice that, both in the plural and the singular uses just described, 'morality' refers to what is moral as versus what is nonmoral, not as versus what is immoral. In the plural use, a morality is contrasted with a reli­ gion, a legal system, or an aesthetic code; in the singular use, with religion, law, or science. Another usage must be mentioned before we go on. \Ve think of immorality as doing what is morally wrong or being morally bad. Likewise, we may think of morality as doing what is morally good. Thus my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary says that we sometimes use 'morality' to designate "the quality or fact of being moral, " or to denote "moral conduct; usually good moral conduct, " as when Jane Austen writes, " \Ve do not look in great cities for our best morality, " or as when \Ve read in Letters of Junius, " Instances . . . of genius and morality united in a lawyer . . . are distinguished by their singularity . " What morality is, in this sense, we shall discu ss in lecture 2 under the heading of what it is to be moral. To go on, then, the question "What is morality?" divides for us into two somewhat distinct, though related, questions: ( 1) What is it that we have or should have in mind when we speak of morality, as it were with a capital 1\1? (2) What do or should we mean when we speak of morality with a small m? Taking the first question, one is tempted to say, as Butler and others, including myself, have on occasion, that morality is an institution of a certain kind, but this begs the question whether morality must or

[ I8 ]

WHAT I S MORA L I TY ?

should take the form of an institution, as law always and religion sometimes does. Again, one might say, nominalistically, as would some social scientists, that 'morality' in its singular use is just a collective name for all of the moralities there are or ever have been. It seems to me more helpful for philosophical pur­ poses, however, to think of morality as something exemplified by or embodied in all of these moralities, i . e. , roughly, as the business or enterprise of having and living by a morality, and I shall try to say what this is. Either way, we may proceed to our second question: what is, or what should we mean by, a morality? It seems natural to reply that a morality or moral value system is some kind of action-guide, some kind of standard for conduct, character formation, and life, something by which, together with the facts or what we believe to be the facts about ourselves, our situation, and the world, we do or may determine how we should act or shape ourselves. However, since other kinds of action- or life-guides exist, e . g . , law, prudence, etiquette, and religion, we must try to see how we may or should distinguish moral from nonmoral ones. Before we do, to avoid being mis­ leading I should observe that, even if they are distinct in nature, a moral and a nonmoral life-guide may overlap. This is certainly true of law and morality, probably also of etiquette (or honor) and morality, and many moralists regard it as true of prudence and morality. I believe that it is true of morality and religion too: they are different kinds of life-guides even though they overlap; this is shown, it seems to me, by the fact that most religions include ceremonial laws as well as moral ones, and by the fact that a religion may, at least in principle, call for a suspension of the ethical-teleological or otherwise-or even for what is im­ moral. Remember the story of Abraham's being commanded to sacrifice Isaac. How then shall we define a moral life-guide? Unfortunately, our usage is ambivalent again at this point; we use the label a morality (or an ethics) in wider and in narrower ways. Sometimes,

LECTURE O N E

in fact, we are willing to call whatever life-guide a person or society may have his, her, or its morality, no matter what that life-guide may be-we even speak of the ethics of immoralism. Then we appear to think that every individual or society has a morality, willy-nilly. In this sense, X has a morality even if X lives wholly by selfish or by aesthetic considerations, or even if X lives by the motto of satisfying every impulse as it comes up, without any control or restraint whatsoever. But sometimes we say that such an X is amoral or nonmoral, meaning that X has an action-guide, but it is not a morality, even if we do not regard X as one of the so-called bad guys. "I wouldn't call that a morality ! " one might exclaim. Thus, for example, Butler remarks that "the Epicurean system of philosophy . . . is . . . by no means the reli­ gious or even moral institution of life, " 1 4 and the anthropologist Colin Turnbull maintains that his African mountain people, the lk, have no morality at all, even though they have some rules, because what actually dominates their lives is self-interest (sur­ vival). 1 5 It also seems clear that those who are attacking or de­ fending morality mean something more limited by it; they are not just debating the merits of having some life-guide or other, but are arguing for or against having a life-guide of a certain sort. One might agree that the usage in question is too wide for our purposes, but still contend that X has a morality proper if and only if X has an honest-to-goodness value system, no matter what that value system is. This would still be a very broad conception of morality. I believe we should accept part of this contention, namely, that one has a morality only if one has some ''values" in the sense of having beliefs about what is right or wrong, good or bad (I do not regard beliefs about what is true or false as "values" or value judgments, as some people do). To have a morality one must make genuine value judgments about things, and not just be for them or against them. Let me explain a bit, leaving a fuller account for another time. It is possible to imagine a person motivated wholly by self-interest or wholly by love of others, who does not see his or her actions or life as right or wrong, good or bad, beautiful or "cool" or whatever-a person [ 20 ]

WHAT IS M ORA LITY?

who does or is what he or she does or is simply out of desire, without making any value judgments about it. We can also imag­ ine a society consisting entirely of such self-lovers or other­ lovers. Such a person or society would have a life-guide of a sort but not a proper value system. He, she, or it would have ends or goals, but not "values", standards, or ideals. And, while we might call the self-loving person or society immoral (but not, I suppose, the other-loving one), I submit that, properly speaking, we should say that both of them are nonmoral in their approach to life. A morality is a value system, and they have no morality, however dedicated or nice they may be, because they do not see things under the aspect of any kind of value, but only under that of desire, intrinsic or extrinsic. They only have desires and aver­ sions; in this sense, they may "value" and "disvalue" things, as we sometimes loosely put it, but they do not really appraise or evaluate them or hold them up to any kind of snuff. They ask only whether or not things are or lead to what they want. What about the other part of the contention? If X has a proper value or normative system, does X have a morality? Not so, because there are different kinds of value or normative systems, e. g. , an aesthetics, a code of etiquette or honor, or a legal system. A person or society may have, and usually does have, more than one such code or scheme, and his, her, or its morality, if there is one, is only one of them. Which one? In reply, some philoso­ phers have suggested defining a morality as any value or nor­ mative system taken by its subscriber to be overriding or ultimate and paramount, whatever its standards are. From this definition, as Philippa Foot has pointed out, . . . it follows that . . . [if] people happened to insist that no one should run round trees left handed, or look at hedge­ hogs in the light of the moon, this might count as a basic mora l prmc1p · · l e. . . . 1 6 Take a less bizarre example: if a person or society were ulti­ mately to judge everything on aesthetic grounds, then their aesthetics ipso facto would become their morality by this defini[ 2I ]

LECT URE ONE

tion. This strikes me as paradoxical, as it does Mrs. Foot. We would, I think, most naturally say that such a society would be amoral or nonmoral, even if not immoral-that it would be with­ out a morality, properly speaking. Moreover, if one defines 'morality' as that value system than which there is no greater, then one cannot sensibly say, as some theologians do, that reli­ gion is beyond morality or mere morality; even if one does not agree with such theologians, it seems best to allow that what they say is at least meaningful. Another similar but more important consideration is that, according to said definition, one cannot sensibly ask, "Why should I be moral?" One can, of course, before one has committed oneself to that principle "with all one's heart, soul, mind, and strength," ask why one should do so, and later, if one has doubt about it, one may ask whether one should continue to do so. One may even ask, as we shall see in lecture 3, while taking a certain principle to be supreme, what the reasons for doing so are, if one is not clear about this. But one cannot clear-headedly ask, "Why should I be moral?" in the sense of asking whether one should be moral or not, for this would be like asking whether one should act on the principle one sees clearly to be supreme. However, people do often ask whether one should be moral or not even when they feel clear about \\·hat morality requires, which is sensible only if they do not mean by 'morality' just any system they see as supreme. If one thinks that "Why should I be moral?" is an open question in this sense, as I and many attackers and defenders of morality do, then one must look for a still narrower definition of morality, a definition which allows a person or society to give more weight in decisions to some other normative system than to a moral one. So far all the conceptions of morality reviewed have been formal in the sense that they have not included anything about the content of a morality . Perhaps, then, we should say that a normative system must have a certain content to be a morality. One might say that a value system is a morality if and only if it takes as proper subjects of its evaluative or normative judgments

[ 22 ]

W H A T IS M ORA LITY ?

the actions, choices, motives, aims, traits, etc. , of persons or rational beings more or less like us. This definition would be partly correct; a system is not a moral one unless it makes judg­ ments about such things rather than about horses, stars, scenes, colors, etc. But the definition is still so formal as to be open to the objections just stated. A plausible, less formal definition would state that moral Gens (I shall use Gens as a neutral term for all sorts of general ethical statements: rules, precepts, principles, ideals, etc. ) are those instructing one person or society of persons how to relate to others. This view, as it stands, rules out of morality all Gens that only tell one how to relate to oneself, except for those that are derivative from Gens about relating to others; but perhaps this objection could be met by some kind of qualification, and, in any case, it can be argued with some plausibility that one actually has no moral duty, except deriva­ tive ones, to oneself, but only to other persons or sentient beings. This is, for example, suggested by the belief that morality can be summed up in a Golden Rule like "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Such a view would certainly rule out of morality Plato's ethics of wisdom, courage, temperance, and jus­ tice, for, as these ·virtues are defined in the Republic, they are the cardinal ones basic to all the others, and yet they contain no talk about how an individual is to relate to others, but only about how the parts of one's soul are to relate to each other or to the Ideas. However, as I observed in my historical sketch, it is not at all clear that Plato was talking about morality in our sense even when he was discussing justice. Ruling out Plato's ethics is not what troubles me about the definition stated; what troubles me is that it does not leave open the question whether we have moral duties to ourselves, as we must if we take seriously Kant's insis­ tence that we are to respect humanity, whether in our own per­ son or in that of another, as an end and not just as a means. Actually, I believe this view of Kant's contains the essence of the definition we are looking for, and I shall take a little time to make this out. What distinguishes a morality from other kinds of

L E CTURE ONE

value systems, it seems to me, is not so much that its Gens and judgments contain an explicit mention of other persons or be­ ings, as that it involves giving certain sorts of reasons for them. After all, etiquette and law also consist, largely at least, of in­ structions about relations between individuals; such instructions are not necessarily moral, and may be aesthetic or prudential. What is important is the kinds of reasons given in a value or normative system for thinking that something is right, wrong, good, beautiful, "cool", or whatever. It is not the words used, for all such words have both moral and nonmoral uses, and other languages have other words. Nor is it the subjects judged about, since nonmoral evaluative judgments may be made about all of them. An aesthetics, I suggest, is characterized by the fact that it rests its value judgments on considerations of certain sorts, e. g. , relations between lines, colors, sounds, etc. ; that is why it is an aesthetics and not a morality. " Black is beautiful" is an aesthetic judgment if supported by one kind of reason, a moral one if by another kind. A code of etiquette rests on reasons of appearance, convenience, social status, etc. ; it may also rest on moral consid­ erations, but this is not what distinguishes it. .\ legal system usually rests on morality in important ways, but this is not what defines it as a legal system; what does is that it also recognizes other kinds of considerations like convenience and efficiency, plus certain formal features like having a government and its power behind it. If all this is correct, then we come out with a narrower concep­ tion of a morality than the others discussed, but one which is more usual, especially among those who are nowadays attacking or defending morality. Unless otherwise indicated, it will be morality in this narrower sense that I shall be thinking about in what follows. Some recent philosophers are opposed to using 'morality' in this sense, while others like me are inclined to hold that 'morality' should be used only in this sense. Still others seem to favor using it both in wider and narrower senses, which is what we actually do, but this strikes me as confusing. Yet others

W HAT IS MORA L I TY ?

regard the whole question of defining morality as merely ter­ minological and therefore trivial, which might be true if we all had our heads clear and always knew what we were talking about. Even if my definition of morality is unsatisfactory, I be­ lieve that it comes close to capturing what modern thinkers about morality have been thinking about. It is, however, still incom­ plete. A morality, if I am right, is a normative system in the sense explained, and it is one that recognizes considerations or reasons of certain sorts (and not others) as grounds for its judgments. A person or society has a morality if and only if he, she, or it subscribes to and judges things in terms of a value system that recognizes or rests on such considerations or reasons. What con­ siderations are these? In morality as I see it, we make judgments of rightness, wrongness, goodness, badness, etc. , about actions, persons, character traits, motives, and the like, and we do so, I believe, because these actions, agents, etc. , have, are intended to have, or are thought to have certain kinds of effects on the lives of persons and/or sentient beings as such. Moreover, we take into considera­ tion not only the effects on ourselves or on the agent in question (always a person or group of persons) but also and perhaps primarily the effects on others who are or are likely to be af­ fected. This consideration of others when they are affected may be direct or indirect, but it must be ultimate or for its own sake, not prudential or instrumental as in ethical egoism, and it must not be merely aesthetic, as it is in the life-guide that W. S. 1\1 augham's hero ends up with in Of Human Bondage. Such a consideration of others is essential to morality, but a considera­ tion of self is not necessarily ruled out by this definition, though it may be ruled out in some moral systems. What sorts of effects does morality, so conceived, take into consideration? 'The answer will vary somewhat from one morality to another. Some moralities or proposed moralities are teleological; in these, ac­ tions, etc . , are judged in terms of the good and evil, benefits and

LECT URE ONE

harms, they bring or are intended to bring about or prevent. The ethics of some moral philosophers are teleological in this sense, especially those of the utilitarians. Mrs. Foot even defines a moral system as one aimed at removing particular dangers and securing certain benefits. 1 7 Some moralities and proposed moralities, however, are deontological, as we saw; in these, ac­ tions, for example, are judged to be right or good, not because they do good or prevent harm, but simply_ because they have certain motives, or because they keep a promise, tell the truth, promote justice, or are intended to do so. To provide for such moralities in our definition we must allow, as "1rs. Foot seems not to, that a morality may consider motives and/or effects like having a promise kept or having the truth communicated, as well as effects in terms of goods and evils. Another way to put this conclusion is to say that a morality is a normative system in which evaluative judgments of some sort are made, more or less consciously, from a certain point of view, namely, from the point of view of a consideration of the effects of actions, motives, traits, etc. , on the lives of persons or sentient beings as such, including the lives of others besides the person acting, being judged, or judging (as the case may be). I propose to call this the moral point of view, because I think this is the point of view we have in mind when we use the expression "'from the moral point of view," as w� frequently do both in philosophy and in ordinary speech, e. g. , when we contrast it with the aesthetic, the economic, the prudential, or the religious points of view. David Hume took a similar position when he argued that what speaks in a moral judgment is a kind of sympathy. The notion of morals implies some sentiment common to all mankind . . . . It also implies some sentiment, so universal and comprehensive as to extend to all mankind . . . . These two requisite circumstances belong alone to the sentiment of humanity here insisted on. 1 8 A little later, as I intimated, Kant put the matter somewhat better by characterizing morality as the business of respecting

WHAT IS MORA LITY ?

persons as ends and not as means or as things, though I would want to add that it involves also some kind of respect for animals, or at least for all conscious sentient beings. Contemporary en­ vironmentalists are right about this, as opposed to Kant. Philosophers are, however, not above reading whodunits, and I can perhaps best indicate to you what I take the moral point of view to be by using something from Agatha Christie. In The A;Jirror Crack'd she has wise old Miss Marple describe the mur­ dered person by comparing her with an Alison Wilde she once knew: Alison Wilde didn't know what people were like. She'd never thought about them. . . . It really comes from being self-centered and I don't mean selfish by that. . . . You can be kind and unselfish and even thoughtful. But if you're like Alison Wilde, you never really know what you may be doing. . . . Alison Wilde never thought of anybody else but herself. . . . She was the sort of person who tells you what they've done and what they've seen and what they've felt and what they've heard. They never mention what any other people said or did. Life is a kind of one-way track­ just their own progress through it. Other people seem to them just like-like wallpaper in a room. . . . I think Heather Hadcock was that kind of a person. . . . People like [her] . . . lack . . . any real consideration for the way their actions may affect other people. She thought always of what an action meant to her, never sparing a thought to what it might mean to somebody else. 1 9 The moral point of view is what Alison Wilde and Heather Hadcock did not have. We have now seen, I hope, what we should understand by a morality. Perhaps we should also say something about having a morality. Here I shall continue to assume that both individuals and societies can have a morality-that a morality may be either personal or social-an assumption I must defend later. When, then, does an individual have a morality in the sense just de-

LECTURE ONE

fined? I wish to say, of course, that a person has a morality only if he or she makes evaluative or normative judgments about his or her life or those of others, and does so, more or less consciously, from the moral point of view. One need not take the moral point of view very consciously, however, though one must take it sincerely insofar as one takes it; one may have a morality and even be morally good without thinking very much about ,.v hat this involves in a self-conscious way, as in the case of David Riesman's tradition- and inner-directed people.2 0 At any rate, to have a morality one must accept, believe in, or subscribe to, and judge by, some moral value system or other, though it need not actually be very systematic. Is this enough, or must one also conform to or live by the system one espouses? Is having a morality just a matter of believing in some moral principles or ideals, or does it include something more? In this matter, I be­ lieve, as an old saying has it, that actions speak louder than words. One does not have to be fully virtuous (or moral in this sense) in order to have a morality. There are, as :\ristotle and St. Paul both recognized, people who are akratic or weak-willed; they have a morality but just cannot get themselves to live by it very steadily. In St. Paul's words, "the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do. " 2 1 Paul certainly had a morality-was he not a saint?-e,·en if he was weak-willed some of the time. In fact, I think he would have had a morality even if he had been weak-willed most of the time, though he would not then have been a saint. On the other hand, I also believe that one cannot be said really to have a morality unless one sometimes acts on it or at least sincerely tries to get oneself to do so. Taking the moral point of view entails not merely judging from that point of view what one should do or be but also having some disposition to live by those judgments, weak though it may be. It follows, I suppose, that a completely wicked person­ Satan perhaps- cannot have a morality. In this sense, :-\ristotle was correct in saying that the really vicious person holds false views about the first principles of conduct.

WHAT IS MORALITY ?

According to Alan Gewirth, "1'i1orality has a unique status. For it purports to set . . . requirements that take precedence over all other modes of guiding action. . . . " 2 2 This is a common and tempting view. We do rather naturally think that we ought to do what morality requires, even when we do not do it. Butler said that, if conscience had power as it has authority, it would rule the world. One can restate this view by saying that having a morality or taking the moral point of view entails giving morality top priority in one's life, in authority if not in power. I once subscribed to it, but now I have doubts. At least, if I was right above, then having a morality or taking the moral point of view does not require one to think that one should be moral no matter what. It leaves this an open question. However, what I still think to be true is that one who really is or means to be moral in the sense of being morally good will actually regard morality as taking precedence over all other considerations whenever it re­ ally conflicts with them. But, as far as I can see now, one can have a morality and yet take its requirements as something one needs to live by only if other things are equal, or only if it is rational to do so. �ow, when does a society have a morality? (By a society I mean an association of individuals like a nation, church, social class, profession, or club. ) To begin with, when some kind of majority of its individual members, including some but not necessarily all of its leaders (as Watergate reminds us), have a morality in the way just described. I shall not try to determine what kind of a majority is needed, or even whether it must be a majority rather than a plurality. We must add, however, that for a society to have a morality, this majority of its members must agree to a considerable extent, though perhaps not completely, about what is morally good, bad, right or wrong. Returning finally to 'morality' in the singular, inclusive, capi­ tal letter sense, we can now say that 'morality' in this sense is the business or enterprise, engaged in by many but perhaps not all persons and societies, of taking the moral point of view and

LECT URE ONE

having a morality in the way just explained. 1\1 y Shorter Oxford English Dictionary somehow missed this point, but there it is.

F U R T H E R Q U E S T IO � S We must now consider some other questions about morality as we have defined it. Has it an object? What forms can or should it take? Is it necessarily social or may and should it be purely personal? What content should it have? \Vhat Gens should it recognize, if any? What is it to be moral? Why should we be moral? What about moral education? Some of these questions will occupy us in lectures 2 and 3. Here let us go on by taking up the question whether morality has an object, and, if so, what it is. A number of recent moral philosophers have felt that it is a useful approach to think of morality as a device for achieving a certain object, end, function, point, purpose, or goal. They agree that morality is or has to do with a certain kind of evalua­ tion, and they agree with what I have said about what kind of evaluation this is, i . e . , about the point of view it involves. But they believe that every kind of evaluation must have an object, and that we must know what its object is to answer questions about its form or content . They also hold that the object of morality, i. e. , of the moral kind of evaluation, must be some­ thing external to morality itself, e. g. , the greatest general happi­ ness, the amelioration of the human predicament, or the removal of particular dangers and the securing of certain benefits. This is an attractive view, but I have doubts about it . Evaluation may be a kind of device or human invention, and, in any case, it must have, or rather use, some criterion or standard of judgment, since evaluation is simply judging things to be right or wrong, good or bad, by some criterion or standard (or set of them), and this criterion or standard may even be something like conducive­ ness to the general welfare. It does not follow, however, that it must have an object or end wholly beyond itself, in the sense of

[ 30 ]

W HAT IS MORALITY ?

being itself simply a way of trying to bring such an external object into existence. In the case of morality or moral evaluation, to say that it must is in effect to say that morality as a form of human activity is merely a means to some other end like the amelioration of the human predicament, and this view is part of what the deontologists in moral philosophy have always objected to. Their insistence that morality is not good only as a means is, it seems to me, correct. At this point, in my opinion, Aristotle was on the right track when he maintained that morality (or whatever he was talking about) is a form of doing (praxis) and not of making (poiesis), and that the end of doing is not something distinct from the action itself, as the end of making is, but is, at least in part, the act itself- doing well is in itself the end. The end of any kind of evaluation is not just to bring something else into existence; at least partly, it is to achieve excellence as judged by the appropriate standard, even if this standard is conducive­ ness to something else (which deontologists, of course, also ques­ tion). The end of morality is, then, at least in part, to achieve goodness or rightness as judged in the light of principles ac­ cepted, more or less consciously, from the moral point of view. If we now ask about the form or forms of morality, as distinct from its content, we cannot answer our questions merely by looking at its object. However, there are some interesting ques­ tions here anyway. In the first place, may or should a morality recognize and give an important role to what I call Gens that purport to be stronger than rules of thumb? Clearly moralities have usually done so; the question is whether they should do so. Many situation ethics buffs would say no, although Joseph Fletcher, who goes as Mr. Situation Ethics in some circles, would not (even though he sometimes talks as if he would), since he does take one (though only one) Gen as basic, indeed as absolute, namely, to love our neighbor or, more accurately, to do what will promote the greatest good or happiness for the greatest number. 2 3 So-called situation ethics is many different kinds of things. In some versions it is not a morality or ethics at all. But it

[ 3I ]

LECTURE ONE

is theoretically possible for one to take the moral point of view and then limit oneself to making particular judgments like "This is the right act in this situation" or "That was a morally good deed, " except maybe for rules of thumb built up by induction from previous particular judgments. This would be a kind of situation ethics, and it would be a morality by the above defini­ tion. I am convinced that it is not a satisfactory form of morality-that one must recognize one or more Gens which are not just rules of thumb, even if they are not absolute either-but I will argue for this conviction only later, when I defend the idea of a positive social morality. For the most part, I shall assume that a moral value system should consist of one or more Gens, but much of what I wish to say will also apply to situation-ethics forms of morality. Our next question is this: is morality essentially social, or may it be a purely private or personal matter? If I was right a little while ago, then morality is essentially social in the sense that its point of view involves a consideration of other persons as such and not just as things. The question now is whether a morality is a value system that only a society can have. Is a morality neces­ sarily a social institution or an organ of society? \Ve often talk as if it were, and I once wrote that it was. In our lives morality certainly hits us first as a social or parental authority or force, as psychologists and social scientists are always pointing out, and those who attack morality are often simply attacking this image of it. Morality has commonly taken the form of a lot of social codes, each prevailing in a certain society, and each being incul­ cated in its young and enforced by social sanctions of praise, blame, and the like. Locke called such a morality "the law of opinion and reputation"; today it is usually called a positive so­ cial morality. What morality is like in such a form is nicely illustrated by the following autobiographical quotation from Harry S Truman: [My mother] was always a woman who did the right thing, and she taught us . . . that, too. We were taught that [ 32 ]

WHAT IS MORAL I TY ?

punishment ahvays followed transgression, and where she was concerned, it always did . . . . In those days . . . peopl e thought more of an honest man than any one thing, and, if a man wasn't honest, he wouldn't stay long in the neighbor­ hood . They would run him out.2 4 Our question is: 1'1ust morality take the form of a positive social morality? A rguing against "the view, widely shared today, that a man's morals are at bottom his own concern and nobody else's," W. D . Walsh writes: The real trouble with it is that it misconceives the whole institution of morality. Those who make moral principles a matter of choice in the way explained assimilate the moral life to the life of artistic expression and appreciation; they take it as if it were primarily of private concern. But the truth is rather that morality is first and foremost a social institution, performing a social role, and only secondarily, if at all, a field for individual self-expression. 1\ilorality is necessary to a community in the sort of way law is: both are devices for checking personal greed for the benefit of the common interest . And just as law in its fun­ damentals must be the same for all citizens, with nothing optional about it, so must morality.2 5 Is Walsh right? Many of the new moralists who are today attack­ ing the idea of a positive social morality emphatically deny what he says. They are not necessarily against morality in toto, but they are opposed to society's having a positive social morality of the sort that obtained in Truman's day . Instead, they contend that morality should take the form of a lot of purely personal moralities, with no one judging others or applying sanctions against them. Can a morality be purely personal in this way? I think so, and I believe that Walsh is simply too dogmatic in his assertion that it cannot be. \Ve have heard in recent years a great many people-black, female, or young- criticizing the moralities of the societies around them. Social dissenters and

LECT ORE ONE

reformers •are always doing that, and often their cnt1c1sm is based on moral grounds. But if it is possible to criticize one's society's morality on moral grounds, then it is possible for one to have a morality of one's own which is not just an internalization of society's. I see no reason, in fact, why an individual cannot come to take the moral point of view and then arrive at a morality wholly at variance with the morality of his society. Of course, one may not be able to do this-I do not think one can-without much dependence on one's society and its culture, but that is another matter. I want to say that if one does come up with such a deviant value system, it may still be a morality, which is not to say that it is a very good system, though it may be. This is why I assumed all along that both individuals and societies can have moralities. Of course, even if morality is an essentially social thing, and the morality of an individual is just an internalization of that of society, an individual can still be said to have a morality. He will have one only in a derivative sense, however, and I am arguing that a person can have a morality that is not derivative in this way. The moralities of Socrates, Jesus, and Martin Luther King would be at least partial examples. The critics of positive social moralities are correct, then, in thinking that morality can take a purely personal form. They also contend, however, that morality should take only such a form, that it is or should be a private, personal matter, none of anybody else's business: "Judge not that ye be not judged. " In an essay about hunting and sportsmanship, :\ldo Leopold, the en­ vironmentalist sage of Sand County, Wisconsin, writes: A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordi­ narily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his con­ duct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own con­ science, rather than by a mob of onlookers . . . the ethics of sportsmanship is not a fixed code, but must be formulated and practiced by the individual, with no referee but the Almighty. 2 6

WHAT IS MORALITY?

Leopold obviously does not think this is true of all ethics, but many new moralists do, except that they want no refereeing by the Almighty either. Are they right in seeking to divest society of its positive social moralities? We must agree, I think, that morality can and should take a personal form to some extent; otherwise there would be no way of judging or revising our social morality on moral grounds. One needs a moral fulcrum to move the world in a moral direction, as any Archimedes knows. The question is: Should morality be a wholly private business? If it were, we would have a society without any social morality or moral code, a society in which there is no moral judging of one person's actions or character by another (at least not out loud), no use on others of so-called moral sanctions like praise, blame, frowning, or ostracism, and no indoctrination of the young in the moral values of anyone at all-in short, no "imposition" of val­ ues, as critics of social morality pejoratively call it, by anyone on anyone. There might still be law, of course, and possibly a good bit of use of force, manipulation, bribery, persuasion, or reason; but for the rest, there would be only people going their own ways, whatever these might be, with maybe some and hopefully many or most of them taking the moral point of view, working out a moral value system of their own, judging themselves by it, and if not too weak-willed, acting on it. Now, it does seem to me that in a· more utopian world, morality should take a purely personal form in this way; ideally, there should be no positive social moralities, with their ap­ paratuses of rules, sanctions, indoctrinations, etc. In such a more ideal world, everyone would have a purely personal moral value system, rationally worked out from the moral point of view, and he or she would genuinely try to live by it. There would be no social morality, although, of course, there would have to be a great deal of agreement between the various personal moralities for the state of affairs to be ideal even then. Our question, how­ ever, is whether, in our very unideal world, morality should be a wholly private matter, as many new morality spokesmen believe.

LECT URE O N E

I think not, just because our actual world is too far from ideal-so far that society's having a positive social morality is necessary, even if it is a necessary evil. In Locke's terms we need "a law of opinion and reputation" (a positive social morality) as well as civil law and divine law. 2 7 As will appear again later, I am not one of those who take a dark view of fundamental human nature; but if one is at all realistic, one must admit that very many of us humans are very often ignorant, weak-willed, preju­ diced, wayward, easily tempted, thoughtless, inconsiderate, careless, unloving, irresponsible, lazy, self-interested, self­ willed, etc. , even when we are not hypocritical, mean, cruel, vicious, or wicked, as we also sometimes are. Furthermore, we are all immature for a rather long time; we all have to act quickly on occasion; we are all subject to pressures of various sorts; and we are all capable of self-deception even when we mean to take the moral point of view. For reasons such as these, society should not leave us wholly to our own consciences; even if we have consciences, and not all of us do, we are too likely to go a,vry in one way or another. Without any external aid or discipline, moreover, our individual consciences may tell us to do very different, and even immoral, things. Society must have a positive social morality of some kind, even if it does not include rules of some of the sorts that new moralists object to. One could argue in reply that a society can always fall back on law when personal morality does not suffice. But law itself re­ quires the support of a social morality if it is to do its job well, unless it is made so powerful and totalitarian as to be intolerable. Besides, it is hard to see how the new moralists in question can justify a society's having a legal system, given the nature of their objections to a positive social morality. Likewise, one could argue that a society can fall back on religion if personal morality is not adequate, but one has only to look at the modern world to see that this resort must also fail unless religion is enforced by an Inquisition; moreover, such a "civil religion," as it used to be called, would be open to the same objections as a positive social morality in the first place.

WHAT IS MORA L I TY ?

There is another reason why a society should have a positive social morality and what goes with it. The considerations just cited are mainly reasons for having one as a device for regulating human conduct, along with law, etiquette, etc. But having a positive social morality is also necessary for educational purposes, as Protagoras saw when he told Socrates that in a good state all men are teachers of virtue, each one according to his ability, just as in Athens all are teachers of Greek. I very much doubt that moral education can get off the ground, given the present facts of human life, in a society in which there are no parental or social rules or values, and no praising, blaming, holding responsible, or sanctioning. In a recent cartoon a father is pointing at a poison­ ous plant and saying to his child, " Don't chew on these leaves, OK?" This is a nice way of having and teaching a rule without seeming to, and I do not mean to belittle it. It does have the virtue of suggesting to the child that it is being asked to give its consent because of a reason which perhaps cannot yet be explained to it. It is, however, a rule, presumably with some teeth, and parents and societies need to have and teach at least some such rules, I believe, if moral education is to succeed. As R. M. Hare has pointed out, trying to teach morality (the moral point of view, etc. ) without teaching any concrete moral Gens is like trying to teach the scientific or historical outlook without teaching any of the findings of science or history. What has to be passed on [in moral education] is not any specific moral principles, but an understanding of what morality is and a readiness to think in a moral way and act accordingly . . . . [ However] it is not possible in practice to pass on the mere form of morality without embodying it in some content; we cannot teach children the abstract idea of a moral principle as such without teaching them some con­ crete moral principles. And naturally we shall choose for this purpose those principles which we think in themselves desirable. This . . . is not indoctrination provided that our aim is that children should in the end come to appraise these

LECTURE ONE

principles for themselves. Just so, one cannot teach the sci­ entific outlook without teaching some science. . . . We can therefore happily start by securing the adherence of our children-if necessary by non-rational methods-to the moral principles which we think best, provided that these are consistent with the form of morality; but we must leave them at liberty later to think out for themselves different principles , subject to the same proviso. 2 8 New moralists are not all opposed to society's having a positive social morality and its attendant machinery; some who oppose having social rules about sex, abortion, or drugs seem to favor having such rules against pollution and other newly discovered forms of wrongdoing. Some maintain, however, that a society has no right to have a positive social morality at all or to use one to educate its members or regulate their lives. They are correct, I have suggested, in this sense: other things being equal, society ought not to have such a morality; its having one needs to be justified. They are wrong, I think, in assuming that it cannot be justified, for other things are not equal. One can say the same about law or etiquette. Society's having a positive social morality is justified if, as I have contended, it is necessary as an organ of moral education and/or as a dike against the waters that threaten the social enterprise. It is sometimes said that life is too compli­ cated for rules, and, of course, there is truth in this, but life is also too complicated for being without them. It should be added, however, that a society is not justified in incorporating Gens (rules, ideals, or whatever) in its positive social morality , unless it sees to it that these Gens are as defensi­ ble from the moral point of view as it is possible to make them. In fact, if a society were to be very careful about this, much of the objection to its having a positive social morality would fade away. It should also be observed that a positive social morality which actually prevails is a social institution in the same strict sense as law, etiquette, government, the family , or a church. In

WHAT IS MORA LITY?

this form a morality is an institution, even though in other forms it is not. In this form it is also a device which, at least in part, has the function of promoting an object external to itself, even if this is not true of all morality. In some views its object is to amelio­ rate the human predicament, or to ensure the stability of society, or to protect basic rights. More neutrally, however, we may say that its object is to bring it about that people are as moral as possible. If it is asked what the object of doing this is, then I can only refer back to my earlier answer and ahead to lecture 3. One more issue must be addressed on the question of the form morality can or should take; it focuses on the difference between what has been called an ethics of virtue and an ethics of duty. Many claim that while the Greeks espoused an ethics of virtue, modern moral thinking has been dominated by an ethics of duty, a difference sometimes thought to be due, at least in part, to the intervention of the J udeo-Christian divine law conception of ethics. This picture is not accurate without qualification, but some modern and especially some recent theologians and philosophers have argued against an ethics of duty in favor of an ethics of virtue. Some of them, in doing so, are also opposed to having a positive social morality, which actually can take either form, just as a personal morality can. Basic to an ethics of duty is the idea that certain actions or types of action are right or obliga� tory; the virtue or moral goodness of an action or agent is deriva­ tive, i. e. , an action or person is virtuous or good if motivated by a concern to do what is right or obligatory. Basic to an ethics of virtue in morality is not the rightness or obligatoriness of what one does, but the goodness of one's character and motives. The basic question is not what one is doing, but what sort of a person one is. Facetiously, an ethics of virtue says, " Don't just do some­ thing, stand there. " Being, not doing, is its chief concern; specif­ ically, the thing to be is morally good or virtuous. But being good or virtuous is not being disposed to do what is right to do, for that equation would imply that duty is the basic concern; it is simply being courageous, benevolent, honest, sincere, loving,

LECT URE O N E

loyal, just, etc. The issue here is a very interesting one, and I shall say something about it in the next lecture, but most of what I wish to say in these lectures is compatible with either the deontic (ethics of duty) or aretaic (ethics of virtue) conception of the form morality should take, and so I shall leave this question open here, though I have tentatively argued in favor of an ethics of duty elsewhere. 2 9

W H A. ·r I S BEI N G MOR A L ?

I N T RO DUCT I O N �

"t was pointed out earlier that we sometimes use the term morality to mean simply being moral. In any case, the central question of morality itself is about being moral, since, if I am right, the object of morality, if it has one, is to be moral. What then is it to be moral? The Greeks would not have asked quite the same question. In the Meno Socrates in­ quires, " What is arete ? " which we translate as "What is virtue?" But it was not just moral virtue in our sense that he had in mind. The Greeks used arete as the Romans used virtus-for any kind of excellence, e.g. , skill in fighting in armor; in fact, Plato and Aristotle would probably have defined arete as whatever disposi­ tion (hexis) it is that enables a thing to function or perform its function (ergon) well. Aristotle did distinguish moral from in­ tellectual, and possibly also but less clearly, from productive (poietic) skills, and so did give us an account of what it is to be moral, which I shall refer to; but, as we saw in my opening historical sketch, he does not use moral (or rather ethike) in our sense. Perhaps not even the Christians asked the same question I am asking. Being somewhat suspicious of the pagan Greek vir­ tues, they were apt to ask, as St . Augustine did, not what virtue is, but what true virtue is, and they tended to answer this ques­ tion in religious and not just in moral terms, by putting the emphasis on obeying or loving God. As James 1 : 2 7 expresses it, though somewhat too narrowly, "Pure religion and undefiled

LECTURE T W O

before God and the Fat her is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. " An article in a slick woman's magazine a few years ago carried the title, "The American Woman: Amoral, Immoral, or � on­ moral?" This title implies that being amoral, being immoral, and being nonmoral are three distinct things. I _doubt this; being amoral seems to me to mean either being immoral or being nonmoral. But these are two different things. Being immoral is like being morally bad or doing what is morally wrong (which are themselves two distinct things, as we shall see). Being non­ moral is more like not having a morality or not taking the moral point of view in one's approach to life. One can be immoral without being nonmoral, as the case of a weak- willed person shows, and one can be nonmoral without being immoral, as is shown by my imagined society of loverboys and girls mentioned in lecture 1 . In any event, the magazine title was forgetting that there is another possiblity-that the American woman 1s moral-and we are presently asking what this means.

PRELI MI N ARY PO l :\.' T S There are many kinds of things that can be said to be or not to be moral: ( 1 ) actions, motives, traits, persons, attitudes, etc. , and (2) judgments, arguments, reasons, problems, points of view, value systems, and life-guides. What being moral means or should mean in connection with the items under (2) is what I tried to explain in lecture 1 . Now my concern is with what being moral is in the case of the things under ( 1 ), especially with what it is for persons to be moral. We must, therefore, first say a little about being a moral agent. A moral agent is any being whose actions, motives, character, life, etc. , are subject to moral judgment. What beings are these? The usual and correct answer is that they are persons or rational beings with natures more or less like ours.

WHAT IS BEIN G MORAL ?

It is usual, and again correct, to define this further by adding that a moral agent must have reason, intentions, desires, pur­ poses, etc. , and also that he or she must be capable of acting voluntarily and of being held responsible, i. e. , a moral agent must have free will in an appropriate sense, though there has been much debate about what this appropriate sense is and whether we or any beings are free in this sense (a debate into which I shall not enter). It follows from this that inanimate things, plants, and most, if not all, nonhuman animals cannot be moral agents or subjects of moral judgment. It does not follow, of course, that they are not moral patients, so to speak. Some­ thing is a moral patient if there are morally right or wrong, good or bad, ways for moral agents to treat it, and there has, especially recently, been much discussion about the range of moral pa­ tiency. Some ecologists seem to want to hold that moral agents must consider what they do not only to other persons, and not only to other animals or sentient beings, but also to plants, rocks, the air, the soil, the ozone layer, the planets, and nature as a whole; furthermore, they must consider what they do to these other things as such or for their own sakes, not just because of the effects it will have on persons and sentient beings. I shall also not enter into this discussion, except to say that I believe only persons and conscious sentient beings, including some animals, to be moral patients as such or for their own sakes. 1 Now, all persons are, of course, moral in the sense of being moral agents, subject to moral judgment, but some are also moral in a more special sense, and our interest here is in what it is to be moral in this more special sense. It follows from what was said a moment ago that being moral in this sense is itself two different, if related, things: first, there is being moral as opposed to being immoral, which means something like doing what is morally right or being morally good (or, in old-fashioned but useful lan­ guage, virtuous); and second, there is being moral as opposed to being nonmoral, which means something more like having a moral value system or taking the moral point of view. It also

LECT URE T W O

follows that one can be moral in either one of these ways without being moral in the other. This is one of the many reasons we shall be finding for being careful when one says that someone or something is moral (or ethical). In general, these two ways of being moral have not been sufficiently distinguished either in moral philosophy or in ordinary thinking. For many purposes they may be lumped together, as they will sometimes be in these lectures; however, to ensure clear thinking and speaking, one must know which of the two ways one is thinking or talking about and when one has both ways in view. We have already in effect discussed being moral as opposed to nonmoral, for being moral in this sense is equivalent to having a morality, which was dealt with in the previous lecture. \Ve come, then, to being moral as opposed to immoral. �ow, whether or not we regard a morality as essentially a social thing, we usually do believe that both societies and individuals may be moral or immoral. It is sometimes thought that there is no room for morality at the level of international relations, but most of us believe, as I do, that a nation may be moral or immoral, or at least that social groups may be, e. g. , a .\fa fia or a \VCTU. In any case, to say that no morality exists at the international level is to say, not so much that nations cannot be moral or immoral in their relations with other nations, as, rather, that nations do not have and/or need not have a morality about such relations (though they may still have an international law). We also be­ lieve, of course, that a nation and its government can be moral or immoral in its relations with its own citizens. What then is it for a society to be moral rather than immoral? I suppose the answer is that it is moral in this sense if and only if some suitable proportion of its members are moral (rather than immoral) in their public and private lives-and again I shall not try to deter­ mine what proportion this is. Of course, its institutions and laws must also be just and/or beneficent, including its positive social morality, out this means that its laws and institutions must be such that the effect of its members interacting with each other in

WHAT IS B E I N G M O RAL?

conformity with them is just or beneficent (i.e. , moral). Thus we are brought to the question: when is an individual moral agent moral rather than immoral? It turns out that this is not a simple matter. For one thing, we sometimes characterize an action or person as "moral" and sometimes as moral. Often the quotation marks are only implicit, and we mean them even though we do not use them. Youthful rebels against the morality of their elders today might say that they avoid the company of moral people, but mean that they avoid the company of "moral" people. Again, an anthropologist writing about the Navajo might say that their moral person is one who follows their customs, but he would mean that the person they call moral (or whatever the word is in Navajo) is one who follows their folkways, not that the person he himself would judge to be moral is one who does so. On the other hand, when Mrs. Foot writes that the moral man is one who loves others, truth, and liberty, 2 she is not referring to the man who is regarded as moral in our society , but to the man who in her own judgment is really moral. She is approving him her­ self. I dwell on this point because many people think that when we say a certain action or person is moral (rather than immoral) we always mean merely that that action or person would be judged to be moral in our society or is moral by the standards of our society. This is not so, however much social scientists may give the impression that it is. When one says that X is "moral," with the quotation marks implicit or explicit, then, of course, what one says may have the meaning alleged. But when one says that X is moral, one is normally believing oneself that X is moral (i. e. , good, right-doing, etc. ) and believing this entails believing not merely that one's society regards X as moral but that X really is moral; if not, one's assertion is either deceiving or, in existen­ tialist language, unauthentic. Someone might rejoin here by saying, "Yes , of course, what I mean when I judge or say that X is moral (good, right, etc. ) is not

LECT URE T W O

that my society approves of it or that it passes my society's standards. I mean that I approve of it or that it meets my stan­ liards. " This is closer, but still mistaken. Of course, when I judge X to be moral (without quotes), I am approving it and I am believing it to meet my standards; also, if I say X is moral, you will understand this. Even so, in judging X to be moral I am not merely judging that I approve, for then I would merely be re­ porting an autobiographical fact, nor that X meets my standards, for then again I would only be reporting a fact about X and me; and, if I say X is moral, you will understand that I am doing more than this. I am judging and saying that X is really moral; I am approving it by my standards, not just reporting facts about it or me, but I am claiming further that X is moral by the true standards of morality, whatever these are. 3

RIGHTN E S S A N D G OO D N E S S What is it, then, for a person to be genuinely moral rather than "moral" ? Even this is a complex matter. To begin with, we must distinguish between moral goodness (virtue) and moral rightness, even though philosophers, theologians, and ordinary discourse often use right and good interchangeably in moral contexts. Very roughly, actions are said to be morally right or obligatory, while other things are said to be morally good: intentions, motives, traits, and persons. It is true that actions are also said to be morally good, as in "That is (or was) a good deed. " But a morally good action and a morally right one are not the same thing. Whether or not an action is morally good depends on its motive, but whether or not it is right depends on what it does; it is morally good if its motive is good, morally right if it does the right thing. Furthermore, one can do the right thing from a bad motive, or the wrong thing from a good motive. For example, answering a mother who asked whether she should lie for her daughter's sake, Dear Abby wrote, "Please, dear, abandon this

WHA T IS BEIN G MORA L ?

dishonest scheme. Regardless of how well-intentioned it is, it is wrong. " 4 If one asks whether or not a person and his actions are morally good, one looks at his intentions or motives; to judge whether his actions are right, one looks at what he does, what his actions bring about, e. g. , whether they keep a promise, tell the truth, or prevent harm. If this is true, then being moral (as contrasted with immoral) may mean being morally good or it may mean doing what is morally right. There are two ways of being moral or ethical and two corresponding ways of being immoral or unethical. A person may, as Aristotle and Kant both say, do what is right without being morally good or virtuous, since he may do it from the wrong motive, e. g. , out of self-interest, or not do it as the good man would do it. Or conversely, a person may be morally good without doing the right thing, perhaps because of ignorance. One can be moral or ethical in the sense of being morally good without being so in the sense of doing what is right, and vice versa. That is why it would be better if we were much more careful in our moral characterizations than we are-if we were to stop using right and good and wrong and bad interchangeably, and to stop using moral and ethical instead of right, good, or virtuous.

With these two ways of being moral before us, it is tempting to ask which way one should go. Should one be morally good, or is it better to be one who does what is right? One of my friends tells me that he and his boyhood companions used to ask, "Which is better, doing the right thing for the wrong reason or doing the wrong thing for the right reason?" There are four things to be said about this. One is that ideally one should do the right thing and do it from the best motive. Another is that a moral agent who is sincerely asking what he should do will never in any particular situation have to choose between doing what is right or even what he believes to be right and acting from the best or right motive; the right thing to do is always the right thing to do. A third thing to say is that an agent is remiss (both doing wrong

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and not being morally good) if he does not work both on his motivations or character and on what it takes to do what is right, e. g. , on the state of his knowledge; one may not choose between these two courses since one can take them both. Well, then, whom should a moral spectator rank higher, a person who does the right thing from bad motives or one who acts from good motives but does the wrong thing? Which person should he or she regard as morally better? In reply, the fourth thing to say is that the question is wrong. The moral spectator actually has two questions here. One is: Which of the two persons is "more right, " i. e. , doing the right thing? To this the obvious answer is the former. The other question is: Which of the two is morally better, i. e. , has the better character? To this again the answer is clear-it is the latter. One can, indeed, pose a third question: Which of the two persons is better to have around? This is an interesting problem, though not a purely moral one. Unless it is qualified, it is like Socrates' problem in the Lesser Hippias: are those who do wrong voluntarily better than those who do so involun­ tarily? One can, however, qualify the question, asking who is better from the point of view of morality, the right-doing or the well-motivated person, to which the answer is probably the latter, because having such people around is likely to result in more right-doing than having people around who only happen to do what is right because it fits in• with their other ends. What, then, about T. S. Eliot's dictum that "the greatest trea­ son" is "to do the right deed for the wrong reason"? 5 This asserts that doing the right act for the wrong reason is not only worse than doing the wrong act for the right reason, which is correct, but even worse than doing the wrong act for the wrong reason. Can this be? Let us assume that in each case the agent is acting deliberately: he sees the respective moral qualities of his acts and reasons and yet does what he does. Is one who sees that his act is right and his reason wrong more reprehensible morally than one who sees that both his act and his reason are wrong? It seems to me that this depends on how bad the reasons are, and that the

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answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no. Let us then further assume that the reasons are equally bad in the two cases, e.g. , that both agents are, and are known to be, acting out of hatred. Then Eliot must have thought that one who sees that a certain act is right and yet does it, not because it is right but because of hate, shows a worse character than one who sees that his act is wrong and does it, not because it is wrong, but also because of hate. This is plausible, though even it can be debated. But Eliot is also committed to judging that the former agent is even worse than the latter would be if he did what was wrong, not out of hatred, but precisely because it was wrong, and this strikes me as false. Eliot might reply that doing something out of hatred is morally worse than doing it because it is wrong, but this is hard to believe, if we are talking in moral terms.

O N BE I N G M O R A LLY GOO D I have been saying that one way of being moral (rather than immoral) is to be morally good, and we may now ask what it is to be morally good. Then, believe it or not, it turns out that there are several ways in which we do and should distinguish two kinds of moral goodness, and may rank one above the other. Thus, for Plato, there were two kinds of (moral?) virtue as fol­ lows: there was the virtue of the person who has full knowledge of the Idea of the Good, and hence of what is good or bad or right or wrong; and there was the virtue of the person who has only true opinion or correct instruction about what is good or bad or right or wrong but does not know why it is true or correct, except perhaps that he has it on good authority. Both kinds of persons are, for him, genuinely virtuous, at least in the Republic, since he believed that they would actually do what is good or right and do it because they see it as good or right. The first kind of virtue-that of the philosopher-king-is, however, in his view higher than the second-that of the warriors and artisans. I

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should add that he thought both kinds of virtue can be realized only in the ideal state, except by luck or divine gift-a kind of luck or divine gift that he presumed to occur oftener among the Greeks, who had had such people among them as Themistocles, Aristides, and Pericles, and of course Socrates, than among the barbarians in outer (non-Greek) space. Incidentally, he also thought that both kinds of virtue could be achieved by \\'omen as well as men (though, to be honest, he was still male chauvinist enough to think they would achieve the first kind of virtue less often). Of greater importance was his belief that even the second kind of virtue entails doing what is actually right or good, not just desiring or intending to do it, since, like Socrates, he held that all of us always desire or intend to do the right or the good, and hence that, if the road to goodness were paved with good intentions, we would all be good and no one could be correctly called vicious. Aristotle, more troubled by the case of the akratic or weak-willed person, was less sure that wrongdoing is always involuntary, but he agreed that a virtuous person always does what is virtuous (just, courageous, temperate, etc. ), besides doing it as the virtuous man would do it. How the virtuous man would do it he spelled out nicely, in a way most later moral philosophers have accepted: First, he must act with knowledge; secondly, he must de­ liberately choose the act, and choose it for its own sake [or for its nobility]; and thirdly, the act must spring from a fixed and permanent disposition of character. 6 The Greeks held, then, that being virtuous entails not just having good motives or intentions but also doing the right thing. Modern views typically differ from Greek views here; perhaps because of the changed ways of thinking introduced by the J udeo-Christian tradition, we tend to believe that being morally good does not entail doing what is actually right (I took this position myself a littler earlier), even if we also believe (as I do) that doing what is actually right involves more than only having

WHAT IS B E IN G MORAL?

a good motive or intention. Today many people go so far as to think that in morality it does not matter much what you do; all that matters, they say, is how you do it. To parody a late ciga­ rette advertisement: for them it's not how wrong you make it, it's how you make it wrong. To my mind the Greek view is too demanding, too much (though not entirely) like the morality that underlies the tragedy of King Oedipus, which holds him guilty of killing his father and marrying his mother even though he does so quite unwittingly (and is not responsible for his not knowing the man was his father and the woman his mother). The moral person must try to do what is right, but it is too much to insist that he has no moral goodness and cannot be morally in the clear so far as character goes unless he actually does the right thing. Of course, as I indicated earlier, the ideal moral person always does the right thing for the right or good reason. But one can be morally good in respect of character, even if one does not succeed in doing the right thing, though not, of course, if one does what one believes or knows to be wrong-and only if one is not responsible for one's failure. To be morally good, it is enough to have good motives or character and no responsibility for one's failures to do the right. It does not follow that only the character or dispositions one manifests in one's life matter-that not what one does but only how one does it is of moral consequence. The how-and-not-what view asserts in effect that morality has no interest in our doing the right thing. But it does matter morally whether or not I fail to keep a promise or to prevent an injury . My failure may not lessen my virtue, but it is still a failure to do what I ought to have done. Hegel was famous partly for insisting on this point-roughly that the road to hell is paved with good intentions-in his criti­ cism of Kant, even though he was grossly misinterpreting Kant. 7 The point is that when a moral agent is faced with the question of what he should do in a certain situation, he must ask what is the right thing to do, not what action would be morally good,

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because what action would be morally good depends on what motives he has and will act with, and this is irrelevant to the question of what is right. It is irrelevant both because in asking what he should do, he is supposed to be proceeding from the moral point of view and from the right or best motives, and because what one ought to do depends on more objective factors about him and the situation he is in, e. g. , on whether or not he will be deceiving or injuring someone. Even in an ethics of virtue, an agent must ask what the good person-one with a certain character or motivation-would do if he knew all the relevant facts, not what his own character or motives are or even what he himself would do if he knew all the relevant facts. It may help if I bring in a traditional philosopher's distinction between what is materially right and what is formally right. .-\n action is materially right if it is the right thing to do, given the actual objective facts, independent of the agent's beliefs and motives. It is the materially right act that the agent is supposed to try to foresee when he asks what he ought to do. .-\n action is formally right if the agent's motivation in doing it is morally good, if the agent is morally good in acting. To bring in one more pair of terms, also traditional, an action is objectively right if it is materially right, and subjectively right if its agent believes it to be objectively or materially right. Notice, however, that one cannot equate formal and subjective rightness, since a person may do what he believes to be right only because of fear or self-interest. Knowing and using these distinctions can help clear up a number of questions both in moral thinking and in thinking about morality. I hope that what I have said will help show, among other things, that we should not use right and good inter­ changeably as much as we do. The point just now, however, is that both the how-not-what view and its opposite, the what-not-how view, give us in­ adequate pictures of morality. �1orality has , as it were, two concerns or objects-that our actions be right (materially or ob­ jectively) and that our characters be good , in which case our

WHAT I S B E I N G MORA L?

actions will also be formally and subjectively right. That is why the ideally moral person is one who both does what is materially right and is morally good. The former is typically morality's concern when we are making prospective judgments about what to do in a situation, the latter when we are making retrospective judgments about ourselves as persons. Both concerns, of course, enter into our making of judgments about others and into our giving of advice to them. Both, however, are central in morality, even though an ethics of duty gives a kind of priority to rightness and an ethics of virtue a kind of priority to goodness. A more modern way of distinguishing and ranking kinds of moral goodness, but one which is similar to Plato's, is captured by David Riesman's well-known distinction, referred to earlier, between persons who are other-directed or tradition-directed, persons who are inner-directed, i. e. , persons who have inter­ nalized the morality of their tradition or peer group and are directed by the superegos thus formed, and persons who are genuinely autonomous or self-directed. Other things being equal, it is natural to think that these three sorts of people have or may have three kinds of moral goodness. At least this is natural if we assume that people of all three kinds are or may be doing what is actually right. It is also plausible to hold that each kind of virtue is higher than the previous one. Not long ago, a member of a German audience asked me whether a moral life can be achieved by reflection on ethics ( I suppose of the sort that we are doing now). My reply was, "One must say no to the question as stated. Reflecting about ethics does not suffice to make one a good person. I f all one does is to reflect about ethics, one will not be a very good person, though one may not be very bad either. To be a good person one must build up virtuous character traits, and one cannot do this by taking thought alone. I do believe, however, that reflecting on ethics can help to make one a better person, and that it is necessary for achieving the highest kind of moral goodness. " That was said more or less off the cuff but, even on further reflection, I believe it to be correct.

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A rather different way of distinguishing and ranking kinds of moral goodness, one which also reflects common or natural ways of thinking, has been suggested by various writers ancient and modern. Aristotle very cryptically distinguishes between natural virtue and moral (ethike) virtue proper. Natural virtue is a dispo­ sition to do what is just, etc. , which one has simply because of one's natural endowment, while virtue proper is an acquired disposition, not merely to do what practical wisdom or right principle requires but to do it because practical wisdom or right principle requires it. To use one of Iris .\1urdoch's titles, one might say that for Aristotle a naturally virtuous person is nice , like Pollyanna and the Loverpersons imagined earlier, while a morally virtuous person is good. Along the same lines, like many others before him, including Dr. Samuel Johnson, Kant iden­ tified virtue proper or moral goodness with a disposition to act from a sense of duty or because of the moral law, but he recog­ nized that there might be a "pathological" though not abnormal disposition like love, which a person might just naturally have or acquire, and which might lead one to do the same things that morality requires, but to do them simply because one \\'ants to. Thus, for example, he contrasted "pathological" love (or senti­ mental love) with practical or moral love in which one acts from a sense of duty . Early in this century, H. A. Prichard made a similar contrast between virtues like natural bravery or kindness and moral goodness. All of these writers, of course, ranked moral goodness or virtue proper above dispositions of the natural or '·'pathological" kind , goodness above niceness. It is, however, only fair (or at least nice) to point out that their ranking has often been ques­ tioned, especially lately. Excepting possibly Aristotle, the writers mentioned are proponents of the ethics of duty, obliga­ tion, or principle. They define moral goodness as a disposition to do what is right or obligatory . Their critics, on the contrary, plump for an ethics of virtue or niceness, finding something deficient or questionable about the person who is benevolent or

WHAT IS B EING MORA L?

courageous out of a sense of duty, and something noble about one who simply wants to help one's neighbor or do something dangerous. Thus they make the notion of niceness (as defined above) basic to that of moral goodness and the notion of moral goodness basic to that of rightness or obligatoriness. In effect, they say, following Aristotle, that what is right or obligatory is what the good man would do, adding, as Aristotle would not, that the good man is the nice man. Of course, they may believe either that niceness is innate or that it is acquired by practice, teaching, or divine gift, as long as they distinguish it from and rank it above dutifulness or what their opponents call moral goodness. Such a view is nicely expressed in Mrs. Foot's anti-Kantian description, cited earlier, of the moral person as one who simply loves liberty, truth, and others, without thinking that he ought to do so. It was also expressed by Gilbert and Sullivan in The Pirates of Penzance, and again in Patience, wherein Patience says, "It's perfectly dreadful to think of the appalling state I must be in! I had no idea that love was a duty. No wonder they all look so unhappy. " In an even earlier attack on Kant, the poet Schiller wrote, perhaps more jokingly than Gilbert would have, Gladly I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure. Hence I am plagued with doubt that I am not a virtuous person . Sure, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely And then with aversion to do what your duty enjoins you. 8 The opposition here is between two conceptions of ideal moral goodness, one that has eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, as it were, and one that has not. With them go two views about the form of morality mentioned earlier, the deontic and the aretaic views. Although I am inclined to favor the Aristotle-Kant-Prichard line which has dominated modern moral philosophy, I shall not debate this matter now since I want here to allow for the possibility of going either way.

LECTURE T W O

One may distinguish two kinds of moral goodness in yet another way, by distinguishing between the person who does or is what is demanded in morality and the person who also does or is what is praised, between the one who goes the first mile and the one who also goes the second or even farther. This distinc­ tion implies that there are or should be in morality two some­ what different areas : an area of ordinary morality, where being good, although not necessarily easy, is yet within the reach of a person without unusual gifts or dedication, and another area of extraordinary morality, where being good requires unusual capacities or unusual motivations-the field for supererogation, as it has come to be called lately, occupied only by the second­ milers, the saints, and the heroes. A morality need not recognize both ways of being morally good; some moralities seem to be content with the first, while others seem to call for nothing short of the best-Longfellow's "Excelsior" can be read either way­ but many moralities have room for both, as Milton's did when he wrote, "They also serve who only stand and wait. " I believe an adequate morality will find a place for both; in fact, I should like to hold that a satisfactory morality will somehO\v provide in its economy for all of the different ways of being moral that have been mentioned. In any case, we should at least distinguish them and reflect on them all in our thinking about both morality and moral education. It is obvious that an ethics of virtue can provide for two areas, one for ordinary virtue or virtues and one for less usual ones; 0. F. Bollnow has brought this out in defending the simple virtues against disparagement in favor of more lofty ones.9 It is less clear that an ethics of duty can find a place for supererogation, since this would seem by definition to be beyond the call of duty, like going the second mile or maybe even the whole distance. It can do so, however, by distinguishing between actions that are strict duties, like keeping promises, and actions that are obligatory in some more ideal sense, like being a good Samaritan, explaining,

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for example, that in the former case the other person has a right while in the latter he does not. A plausible view would be a combination theory that a morality should consist of an ethics of duty for the more ordinary part of its field and an ethics of virtue or personal ideals for the less ordinary part; just such a theory has been proposed by P. F. Strawson. 1 0 However, rather than attempting to resolve this issue here, I shall continue to leave it open. All of this has been about the form or forms of being moral, not about its content, for we have not inquired as yet into what is morally right or who is morally good, or just what one must do or be if one is to be moral (assuming that we continue to use this ambiguous expression). Still on the matter of its form, however, we must notice an interesting ambivalence in our thinking, and perhaps yet another way of distinguishing two kinds of moral goodness. The issue here is precisely whether being moral in the sense of being morally good is a matter of content or of form only- of what versus how . Each morality more or less consciously embodies a view about the form or forms of being moral, as will, I hope, be clear from what has been said. But each morality also is a certain view about the content of being moral, i. e. , a certain view about what is morally right and who is morally good. It would seem, therefore,' that if I espouse a certain morality, then I am bound to hold that an action is right if and only if it conforms to the standards of this morality, and that a person is good if and only if he or she tries to live by its standards. That is, it would appear that, when I judge an action or person to be right or good, I must judge it, him, or her by my moral standards. It may still be true that in saying you and your action are good or right, I do not mean merely that you and it conform to my moral value system, but that, as I argued earlier, I mean something like "You and it conform to the true moral value system. " But it would seem that I can say it only if I believe that you and it conform to my moral standards, for I

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necessarily hold mine to be the correct ones, else I would not be believing them. Otherwise, it would appear, I must limit myself to saying that you and it are "moral. " ;\pparently with this point in mind, Sidgwick wrote that . . . a Utilitarian must hold that it is always wrong for a man knowingly to do anything other than what he believes to be most conducive to Universal Happiness. 1 1 Here, however, he makes one of his few mistakes, for matters are not quite so simple. Using terms that have already been introduced-and, indeed, I borrowed them from Sidgwick him­ self, among others-I shall try to explain. It is true that, whenever I judge an action to be materially or objectively right, then I must judge it by my standards of what is right in this sense. Thus, a utilitarian holds that an action is objectively or materially right if and only if it maximizes the good in the world, and so a utilitarian must judge an action objectively or materially wrong if it does not actually maximize the good (say, universal happiness). (Here I am speaking only of act-utilitarianism, as Sidgwick was. Act-utilitarians hold that an act is materially or objectively right or wrong [morally] if and only if that act itself is conducive to the greatest general balance of good over evil. ) But, although a morality need not do so, we may also recognize such things as formal and subjective rightness and wrongness. \Ve do this in our morality, for example, when a person comes to us for moral advice. We often then say t\vo things during the course of our conversation: ( 1) You ought to do such and such. If you don't do it, you will be making a mistake. This is what I believe you really ought to do; and (2) You should do what you really believe you should do. If you do, I think you are making a mistake­ doing the wrong thing. But if you don't do what you believe to be really right, you will be morally bad. A person must do what he believes to be right. In ( 1) we are talking about what is mate­ rially or objectively right, whereas in (2) we speak of what is subjectively and also formally right, or, better, morally good.

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Thus, a utilitarian need not hold that it is always formally and subjectively wrong (or morally bad) for a person to do what he or she believes not to be conducive to the greatest balance of good over evil in the world, as Sidgwick seems to think; he may hold, instead, that it is always formally and subjectively wrong (or morally bad) for a person to do what he or she believes to be objectively or materially wrong by his or her own moral stan­ dards, which may not be utilitarian at all; and, correspondingly, a utilitarian may hold that an action is formally and subjectively right (or morally good) if the agent believes it to be objectively or materially right, not by utilitarian standards, but by those he or she subscribes to -keeping in mind, of course, that a utilitarian must regard those standards as mistaken if they differ from his. In general, it is necessary to judge the material or objective rightness of an action, whether one's own or that of another, by one's own standards of such rightness. But judging the moral goodness of an action or agent is another matter. One's own morality also has standards about this, as Sidgwick's dictum correctly shows, and so one might simply hold, as we do in our morality, that actions and persons are morally good if and only if they satisfy those standards. But we also judge other people's actions and persons to be morally good if they are or do what they themselves believe to be right or good by their own stan­ dards, even if these are different from ours. Here, then, is a kind of ambivalence in our morality. It involves, in part, judging people in a kind of absolute way, by our own standards, and, in part, judging them in a more relative way, by their own standards. In doing the former, we tie being morally good to a cer­ tain content, namely, that of our own moral principles, but in doing the latter, we make moral goodness a matter of form: a person and his actions are morally good if he does what he be­ lieves to be right by his standards, whatever these are. One's life can have that form no matter what its content. This ambivalence is, I believe, a desirable one in our morality. The alternative would be to take the hard line of not judging

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other persons and their actions in any way on the basis of what they themselves believe to be right. I do not think we should judge others only by their own standards, as some (but not all) relativists contend, but only that we should allow some room for such judgments in the area of moral goodness, though not in that of material or objective rightness. At the same time, I am con­ vinced, we must set some kind of limit to the business of judging others by their own value systems, even in the matter of moral goodness. "If you are a Roman, do as the Romans do" sounds reasonable. But "If you are a Nazi, do as the Nazis do" does not. We cannot go all the way toward allowing that being moral in the .ense of being morally good is equivalent to living by whatever morality one subscribes to, though we should go part of the \vay. Some moralities are just too immoral. We need not always judge people in another culture to be immoral simply because their conduct involves doing things that depart from the standards we regard as correct, but we also need not always give them a moral carte blanche simply because they have different standards. Just how we should draw the line I am not sure.

MO RA L EDUCATIO N In any case, if we do draw a line, we must then-as we should anyway- do our utmost to see to it that our own moral value system is the correct one-that it is as rationally defensible as possible from the moral point of view. This must be part of our goal in moral education. In fact, much of the importance of the distinctions and points made here about being moral arises from their applicability to moral education. They help us to state minimal and maximal or ideal goals for it. Suppose we ask, "Who is the Happy Warrior?" or "Who is the morally educated per­ son?" Part of the answer is surely that the ideal result of moral education as such is a person who is moral both in the respect of being a materially-right doer and in the respect of being morally good in the other ways described, for these, different as they are,

WHAT IS BEING MORAL ?

are still generally compatible with one another. This goal is, of course, utopian, but it must nevertheless be constantly envis­ aged, its parts being discriminated and yet combined to make a whole. It is somewhat tempting to maintain that in moral education, for each of the described pairs of ways of being moral as opposed to immoral, we should aim at the higher one rather than the lower. Why take less when you can have more, especially when the servings are all moral? However, not all the pairs are such that one is better than the other, and, anyway, when they are, the lower one is sometimes necessary as a preparation and sup­ port for the higher, e. g. , ordinary virtue is necessary for supererogatory virtue. In such cases, the situation is not such that we can choose the higher rather than the lower; to do so would be like choosing to be happy rather than to be alive, on the ground that happiness is better than mere life. It must also be remembered that some people are less capable or less motivated than others, through no fault of their own, so that moral educa­ tion must have somewhat different aims in some cases than in others if it is to be realistic. As I now see it, there are the following minimal or realistic aims for moral education as a whole (moral self-education as well as moral education by others): ( 1) to make us moral as versus nonmoral, i. e. , to lead us to take the moral point of view when it is relevant in our decisions and judgments; (2) to make us dis­ posed to live by the principles and judgments we thus arrive at; (3) to foster in us whatever kind and degree of moral goodness or virtue we are capable of; (4) to develop in us the necessary emo­ tional and intellectual abilities, skills, etc. , again to the extent to which we are capable of them; and, in short, (5) to make us as morally autonomous and devoted as we can be. Were our coun­ try to achieve these aims, we would truly have a "land of the noble free, " as one of our hymns claims we have. This is, of course, a philosopher's view. Moral education is more usually conceived of, as it was by Aristophanes and is now

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by the Amish, as a process of socialization or enculturation m which the moral value system of an older generation is passed on to a younger one by some kind of indoctrination. And I do myself hold that something like this typical social scientist's and educator's picture of moral education should be a part of every program of moral education, as I said in lecture 1 . One cannot maintain that it is the whole story, however, unless one believes that the moral value system being passed on is the correct or most defensible one. The older generation is, of course, bound to think this, as Aristophanes did and as the Amish do, if it has a morality at all, for to have a morality entails believing in it. However, as we all know when we stop to reflect, older genera­ tions may have questionable moral value systems . There is much truth, I believe, in the one the West has had (more or less) for some centuries, but I doubt that any of our prevailing moralities of the past or present has been or is correct in all its details . One has only to think of the civil rights movements of recent decades or of the environmentalist movement of today to have such doubts . Moral education must, therefore, have as a goal to bring us, as individuals and as a society, nearer to having and living by the correct or at least the most rationally defensible value system from the moral point of view. This requires at least a moral education of the sort I just described, including the development of moral autonomy, especially an ability to do independent moral thinking, in so far as anyone is capable of it. The usual picture of moral education is essentially conservative, while the philosopher's picture provides for justifiable revision and reform, which certainly seems necessary in the light of modern and espe­ cially recent social and technological developments . This means that moral education should foster a variety of dispositions and abilities other than a disposition to live by the older generation's moral code, and that its method should not be entirely indoctrinating in nature. One can still call it socialization if one likes (though I do not), but then one must recognize that there are very different sorts of socialization, some of which may

WHAT IS B E I N G MORAL ?

result in members of the next generation having rather different moral principles and rules from those of their elders. It does not mean that a society should not have a positive social morality and use it as part of a process of moral education, but it does mean that moral education as a whole should aim, not at conformity, but at making people "noble free" in a moral sense. Given this aim, it cannot , except incidentally or temporarily, be a matter of indoctrination or imposition. 1 2 It follows that moral education includes the fostering, not only of moral virtues like honesty, integrity , and justice, but of non­ moral dispositions like a disposition to know and attend to the relevant facts, an ability to think clearly and logically, and an ability to make and carry out decisions. Moreover, even though I favor a deontic (duty) over an aretaic (virtue) view of morality (while meaning to leave this issue open), I would agree that moral education should also include the cultivation of such dispositions as kindness, sympathy, and love of truth-of what earlier I called niceness . Morality needs all the help it can get from the heart as well as from the head.

T H E CO N T E NT OF B EI N G MO RA L Now at long last we come to the question: What is or should be the content of morality? What Gens should it recognize? What Gens should we live by and teach to the young? What is right and who is good? Questions about the form of morality are metamoral or second-order in a sense, even if they are normative. But questions about content are moral and first-order. Answers to them are material or substantive moral judgments and/or Gens, constituting what is called normative ethics, and they usually consist of one or more basic judgments or Gens plus derivative ones. Right off we must mention situation ethics again, for it has been a subject of much discussion in this cen­ tury, especially among moral theologians. It holds that no Gens

LECT URE T W O

are basic in morality; the basic judgments of morality are all particular ones about what is good or right for a certain person to do in a certain situation (not kind of situation), like "This is the right thing for me to do in this case"; further, it holds all Gens to be, at best, mere rules of thumb generalized on the basis of such particular judgments. In such a view the basic content of morality is or should be a long series of particular judgments (intuitions, decisions, or whatever) made in particular situations . It has no answer to our question except to tell each of u s to look at the situation he or she is in and to intuit or decide what to do, unless one is content to act on rules of thumb built up by others or by oneself on the basis of previous occasions, something situa­ tional moralists often deride. Some so-called situation ethics does not even tell us that we must take the moral point of view in determining what to do, thus leaving us entirely in the dark. That is why it was sometimes held responsible for \Vatergate. However, rather than examining such views, I shall simply as­ sume that the answer to our question of content must come in the form of one or more basic Gens, other than the moral point of view itself, stronger than rules of thumb, though not necessarily absolute. Every morality prevailing in a society or subscribed to by an individual has an answer to our question, though these answers are not all very clear, and they differ notoriously from one another, even about basic Gens. Moral philosophers have usually tried to establish one or more Gens, clearly formulated, as basic, but they too have differed about what these are and how to formulate them (as well as about how to establish them, or whether it is possible to establish them at all). Ever since Hobbes, one of their questions has been about ethical egoism as a be­ lief about the content of morality. Ethical egoism may also be offered as a general theory about how a person can live ration­ ally, e.g., about whether or not one should be moral, where the content of being moral is determined by some nonegoistic crite­ rion; in this form I shall deal with it in lecture 3. As for ethical

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egoism as a theory of the content of the moral life, it holds that the criterion for determining whether an action is morally right or a trait morally good is its conduciveness to the long-term good, happiness, or welfare of the individual agent in question. If I was right in defining morality as I did in lecture 1 , however, such egoism is simply excluded from it. Ethical egoism may, of course, be a morality in one of the broader senses I rejected, but, as Butler said, it just is not a morality proper. In fact, it is very commonly thought that the belief in ego or me-first is the source of all unethical behavior, both immoral and unmoral. This may be too strong a statement, but it is certainly largely correct. At any rate, playing by the rules of egoism is playing a very dif­ ferent kind of a ballgame from morality as morality is usually understood. The main debate in modern and especially recent moral phi­ losophy has, however, been about utilitarianism, which clearly is playing by the rules of morality as I defined it. It holds that the content of being moral-what is morally right or good-is to be determined by seeing what is conducive to the greatest balance of good over evil in the world as a whole, and only in this way. This view has taken many forms over the years, especially lately, and has grown more and more sophisticated. I cannot review these forms here. In favor of utilitarianism is the plausible belief that what is morally good or right must depend on what is or is not for the good of humans and other rational and/or sentient beings. Many people opposed to this view object that it allows the break­ ing of promises and lying to be morally right when doing so is conducive to the greatest general good. This is strictly true of only one kind of utilitarianism, so-called act-utilitarianism, which many utilitarians reject, possibly even Mill. Others object because they believe that the principle of utility must sanction the framing or even the killing of an innocent person, if such acts are necessary for the greatest general good, and more generally that it must sanction the use of any kind of means whatsoever as long as it is conducive to that end. Again, this is true only of

L E CT URE T W O

act-utilitarianism, not of utilitarianisms that emphasize having rules or cultivating traits conducive to the general welfare. Even for these utilitarianisms, however, it is still true that any rule or trait whatsoever is justified if our having it promotes the general welfare, a principle to which many, including myself, object, on the ground that what matters is not merely the total amount of good promoted but also the way it is distributed. How are we to determine what the basic Gens (principles or whatever) of morality are or should be? If I am right, we are to do so by taking the moral point of view, as described earlier, getting as clear as we can about the world and life, thinking as carefully as we can, and then seeing what we come out with. I do not believe that any Gens we come out with can be proved or shown to be a priori or self-evidently true. With this said, I shall end this lecture by sketching my answer to our present question. Although it is my answer, I believe it to be the answer, even though I also admit it may turn out to be unsatisfactory upon further reflection from the moral point of view, else I would not give it. I put it before you for you to think about, hoping that you will agree. Our question breaks up into two subquestions in a way we do not usually recognize in daily life or even in moral philosophy. Earlier I distinguished personal morality and positive social morality, arguing that morality could take either form but should combine them. We must, then, ask: ( 1) \Vhat Gens should we subscribe to in our personal morality? (2) \Vhat Gens should we incorporate into our positive social morality, i. e. , enforce by social sanctions, inculcate into our children, etc. ? And a third question sometimes gets mixed up with the others: (3) What Gens should we enforce by law, e. g. , about abortion or pollution? This was the subject of a lively debate by legal and moral philosophers not long ago, triggered by a lecture by Lord Devlin. It is, however, a question about the content, not of morality, but of law. In any event, the three questions are distinct and may have different answers, i. e. , the three lists of Gens may be different, even if

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they overlap. Only the first two concern us here. In a way, the first is about what it is basically right to do or good to be, while the second is about what it is right or desirable to praise, blame, etc. My reply to the first question is that a satisfactory personal morality, to be used in determining what one should do, at least when the positive social morality of one's society seems defective as well as in criticizing that positive social morality, cannot be purely utilitarian. It must recognize two, and I think only two, basic Gens: ( 1) a Principle of Beneficence, which is roughly what is behind all nonegoistic teleological theories like utilitarianism, and which tells us to do good, prevent harm, and not to do evil; (2) a Principle of Justice or just distribution, which is at least part of what is behind deontological theories of ethics and morality, and which tells us to treat people as equals. These principles are not absolute, since they may come into conflict in some situa­ tions, but I know of no formula for determining which takes precedence when, though I believe a considerable amount of good may outweigh a small inequality of treatment or a consider­ able gain in equality a small amount of good. There are, of course, other problems about living by these two Gens into which we cannot go. Further, more specific, Gens can be de­ rived from them directly or indirectly, e. g. , "Be honest" or "Do not interfere with another's liberty, " but none of them will be absolute either, though they are stronger than rules of thumb since they are established differently. In view of the fact that I am here choosing to leave unresolved the opposition between an ethics of duty and an ethics of virtue, I should observe t_hat my two Gens can be stated either as princi­ ples telling us what actions are materially or objectively right or as Gens (I would say "principles" here also, except that some pro­ ponents of an ethics of virtue object to this term as too deontic, just as they object to "rules") telling us what dispositions are morally good or virtuous. For example, the former can be stated thus: Do what is beneficent; or thus: Be bene volent. Taking these two (or any other comparable Gens) as principles

LECTURE T W O

of personal morality need not involve us in judging others by them, applying moral sanctions (praise, blame, etc.) against oth­ ers' violations of them, or indoctrinating anyone younger with them. Such things are the province of a positive social morality whose content must be determined. What rules of conduct or character should such a morality incorporate and enforce? This must, in my opinion, be determined by appeal to the Principles of Beneficence and Justice. That is, our positive social morality should consist of deontic and/or aretaic Gens (rules, etc. ) which are such that our generally living and judging by them, sanction­ ing them, and inculcating them comes closest in the long run to realizing a state in which people live beneficently and justly. These rules or Gens might include the two basic principles themselves, but they need not; presumably they will include some of the derivative Gens like being honest, respecting liberty, etc. , and they may include others as well. I will not detail them here; however, it seems clear that they must not be very abstract or complex or numerous; and they must of course be defensible on the basis of beneficence and equality, though not necessarily to those who are too ignorant, too lazy, too stupid, or too young. Mill thought that they should include no rules about what one should do in any matter that affects only oneself, and this seems reasonable to me, though it is not easy to find any area of life in which no others are affected or likely to be affected, directly or indirectly. It just may be that no person is an island. Oddly enough, some of those who believe this are also most opposed to our having a positive social morality at all, and especially to its containing any rules about what we do in our private sectors. In any case, I am convinced that such a morality, \Vhich I have argued we should have, ought to be revised on occasion. Should it contain any rules about abortion, abortion on demand, abor­ tion before or after a certain time, or about euthanasia, drugs, extramarital sex, etc. ? Notice again that this is similar but not identical to the question whether the law should do anything about such things; the latter question might, therefore, have a

WHAT IS B E I N G MORAL?

different answer. Our question is whether a posttt ve social morality should do anything about such things, and the answer is that this depends on whether or not putting the weight and the machinery of a positive social morality behind any such rules or ideals is necessary for or very helpful in promoting welfare and/or equality. I believe it is, but I shall not try to formulate the rules. I do think that a positive social morality should recognize supererogation as well as duty; it should not only include Gens about what to praise and what to blame, but there should be kinds of conduct and character that it praises even though it does not blame us for falling short of them. Conversely, there are things it should demand, in the sense that it blames us for not doing them even though it does not praise us for doing them. No doubt, it should also provide for damning with faint praise; cer­ tainly it should recognize certain sorts of excuses, extenuating circumstances, and the like, just as the law does, but perhaps somewhat different ones since its sanctions are different.

WHY BE M OR A L ?

I N T RO D UCT IO N

mow I must make a choice. The first two lectures were, roughly, about the what of morality: what morality is and what it is to be moral. But I have only one more lecture to go and several more topics. In particular, there are the why sorts of questions about morality and being moral, the question of how to become moral, which is the problem of moral education, and that of the postulates or presuppositions of morality. I opt to try to do something about the why questions, but in the course of doing it I shall formulate one of the postu­ lates. On moral education I must be content with what I have said in lecture 2 (and elsewhere). In fact, one can ask several kinds of why questions about or in connection with morality, if one is at all inclined to take part in that sometimes irritating game of ''Why, Daddy?" that children often play with their fathers, though some of them are questions one would hardly expect to occur to a child. Since a morality is a value system and involves making evaluative or normative judg­ ments by its standards or from the moral point of view, one might ask why we should go into the business of making such judgments at all-why we ate, or what good it was to eat, from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. One might, in fact, attack not only morality but all making of value judgments, moral and nonmoral, in one fell swoop. Jim Casey in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath says, "There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue,

LECTURE T H REE

there is just stuff people do," and one might claim more generally that there ain't no beauty, goodness, etc. -that we should simply stop thinking about "all that is true, all that is noble, all that is just and pure, all that is lovable and gracious, whatever is excel­ lent and admirable," as St. Paul exhorted the Philippians to do. I am tempted to go in�.this subject, and will say a little that bears on it, but we must stick to questions that are more specifically about morality. One kind of why question asks "How come?" and, since morality involves making nonprudential and nonaesthetic evalu­ ative and normative judgments about persons and their actions, motives, traits, etc. , one might ask how we came to do this. Genesis suggests the answer is that Satan talked us into it, but there must be more to it than that. Indeed, a better biblical answer is that God planted in us a conscience that just naturally makes value judgments about what we are doing or being. There are also evolutionary and Freudian superego theories, and many others, such as that of Bernard �1andeville, who contended un­ flatteringly that morality is "the political offspring which flattery begot upon pride." 1 My own view is that, even if we might theoretically have gone on in an Eden-like way, without making evaluative judgments, we could not actually have done so, being human as well as rational, and that, once we had embarked on this venture, we inevitably went on to make such judgments about ourselves and our conduct-and to make them from the moral point of view of respect for persons. I really do believe that we cannot help doing this, however this may be explained, and this conviction is basic to what follows. But again, my concern here is not so much about the genesis or origin of our penchant for making moral judgments as about why we should go on making them, and especially why we should act on or live by them. Of course, part of the answer to these questions may be that we just cannot help making or even sometimes honoring such judgments, but again there must be more to it than that.

WH Y B E MORAL?

In the light of what was said before, we may break up our question in the following way. First, there is the question why we should have a morality, which again breaks up into two: ( 1) Why should society have a morality? and (2) Why should an individual have one? Second, there is the question why we should be moral, and it also breaks into two: (3) Why should society' be moral? and (4) Why should an individual be moral? Strictly speaking, then, there are four questions instead of just one. I believe, however, that we can treat the last three as one for present purposes. As for the first, there are two ways in which a society can have a morality. One is by having a positive social morality in the form described earlier; the other is by having the personal moralities of all its members share the same or most of the same basic principles. Why society should have a positive social morality I tried to explain before. That it should have a morality in at least one of the two ways seems clear; as Pro­ tagoras pointed out long ago in a speech attributed to him by Plato, human society could not exist, let alone flourish, without government and a share of justice and reverence. It is true that Mandeville argued early in the eighteenth century that society cannot flourish very much unless it also has a share of "private vices"-that if a society is fully virtuous it must be a very simple one without any luxuries or wealth-but this can be debated, and, in any case, he was agreeing that society must have some public virtues. 2

H I STO R I C A L A N D OT H E R P R E L IM I N A R I E S The main question in the three we are lumping together is: Why should any given individual be moral? It is not: Why should most people, especially others, be moral, or why should I want my society to be moral? It is also not: Why should I confo_rm to the prevailing morality? Nor is it: Why should I be moral most of the time? Rather it is: Why should I be moral always, even if I do

LECT URE T HREE

not want to be and it is against my interest to be, even if being moral involves sacrifice on my part, possibly even self-sacrifice? Now, what is one asking when one asks this? One could be asking what motives (reasons in this sense) there are for being moral, and this is how the question has often been interpreted in the past. It seems to me, however, that one may be asking more; one may be asking for a kind of rational justification of morality or being moral-for a Milton to justify the ways of morality to man. I shall therefore interpret our question as asking whether or not it is rational for anyone to be moral-continuously and genuinely moral. Obviously the answer will not be easy, and I am not sure that any fully satisfactory answer is available. The question is at least as old as Hesiod. The Sophists Callicles and Thrasymachus contended strongly that the answer must be negative. Even if, as I suggested in my historical intro­ duction, they and Plato were not asking quite our question, they were asking a similar one: Is it rational to be just, temperate, etc. ? Plato and Aristotle answered that it is-that having such virtues is necessary for us humans to function well, to flou rish, to achieve eudaimonia (which we translate, none too well, by "happiness"). In Christian moral theology the question took more than one form and received more than one answer. In one form it read, "Why should we do what God commands?" and sometimes the answer was that he would see to it that it was in our interest to obey, either in this life or, in an even longer run, the life to come. Sometimes the answer was that we should obey in order to express our gratitude to God for redeeming and sav­ ing us, but clearly this would not show it to be rational for everyone, and it assumes that gratitude is the proper response to benefit, which is itself a moral position. In a second form the question read, "Why should we love God and our fellowper­ sons?" and the answer can hardly be that we should love them because we will be punished if we do not. The quality of love is not so strained. The gratitude answer 'Could be used, however, and was, but so was another: that we should love because God

WHY B E M O RAL?

loves. But again, this reply would not be persuasive to everyone; furthermore, as just another way of saying that the ideally per­ fect being exists and is one who loves, it fails to answer the question. There may also have been a belief that to love is to flourish, giving a Greek line of thought a very un-Greek cast, as the medievals often did. This would have been one way of find­ ing one' s life by losing it. It might be rejoined here with the support of the lines quoted earlier from T. S. Eliot that perhaps Christianity was not really interested in showing that the Chris­ tian life is rational. And I agree that it was not much concerned to make its way of life seem rational to others in this life, but still it must have believed that such a life would be seen to be rational by everyone in the fullness of time. In modern discussion s the question was understood by some philosophers such as Shaftesbury and Hume as asking what motives (also called "obligations") there are for being virtuous, and by others like Butler and Sidgwick as asking whether being virtuous is in one's own interest. In this century the question and its logic have been clarified and the positions taken have been many and sophisticated. 3 According to some, it is simply im­ moral to ask, "Why should I be moral?"; whether this is so or not depends on the spirit in which it is asked, as I will explain below. According to others, asking it is not wrong but wrong-headed. It is asking, "Ought one to do what one ought to do?" or "Is it moral to be moral?" Or it is asking, "Why should I live by the principles I regard as ultimate and paramount?" Or it is asking whether it is to one's interest to be moral even if being moral is not to one's interest. I agree that all of these questions are sen se­ less but still believe that it is sen sible to ask whether it is rational to be moral by my definition of being moral (roughly, as taking the moral point of view and fully abiding by one's conclusions). This certainly is an open question if being rational is equivalent to being for one's own good, as many assume. Others have con­ tended, in one way or another, that being moral is in one's interest or at least for one's good (or necessary for one's flourish-

LECT URE THREE

ing), and still others that the good man cannot be too good for his own good because there is nothing that counts to him as loss, harm, or self-sacrifice, however much it may seem so to others. As a Salada tea bag line put it, "Good people make their way by the way they're made. " A few of morality's defenders have concluded that being moral does not always pay the individual, and that morality should recognize this and keep quietly to its place, or else go on "bulling it out" anyway, as it has been doing with some, if not complete, success. Its attackers, of course, agree that being moral does not pay us, but conclude that we should "kick the habit," at least whenever it goes against us. There has also been much discus­ sion of what constitutes paying and not paying. I propose to go over the whole matter in my own way, and to present the line of thought, not wholly original, that now seems to me most reasonable. We must not forget that being moral covers both doing what is morally right and being morally good, and that being morally good also covers different things, as we saw in lecture 2 , but, again, we shall here proceed as if we need not take up all these ways of being moral separately or ask in each case whether or not it is rational. First of all, then, something must be said about the spirit in which our question can be asked. It can be asked in an immoral spirit. A recent Oxford philosopher remarked that Pilate asked, "What is truth?" but would not wait for answer, and a cynic might ask, "Why be moral?" in the same way. In fact, there are two kinds of attackers of morality today. The first we may call the lmmoralizers, those who simply see no good reason for hav­ ing a morality or being moral and propose to go their own ways, libertine, prudential, aesthetic, or whatever. The second are the De-moralizers, who want us to de-moralize society much as some educational writers have wanted us to de-school it, i.e. , they propose that we give up not just the business of being moral, but even that of having any morality at all, social or personal. It is hard to give the former a serious reply when they ask, "Why should we be moral?" They are like Pilate; but even if [ 80 ]

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they did stay for an answer, one would find it difficult to begin. Their very way of putting the question expresses their posture, for it is essentially rhetorical. There are, of course, various kinds of selfish considerations that we can present to them, as well as altruistic ones, both of which have been advanced over and over in the past, but these are hardly conclusive. Unless they are good-natured, perhaps the only reply we can make is to use what weapons we have against them, e. g., the law, and especially a positive social morality by which we seek to control them or even to keep them from developing, all in a kind of self-defense. As for the De-moralizers, I can only hope that what I shall say will do something better by way of answering them. There is, however, a third, more Miltonic spirit in which one may ask why we should be moral. This is that of a believer in morality who asks a reason for the faith that is in him. He has no wish to believe in it because it is absurd. He believes that it is not absurd, but he seeks to understand why it is not; he does not want to lead an unexamined life. In my terms, he (or she) takes the moral point of view and means to be moral, but wishes to see that it is rational-or at least how it may be rational-to do so. This is the spirit in which Plato asked whether one should be just and in which I am asking our question. Among the why questions we may ask about morality is this : Why should we believe its principles? What is its foundation or ground? Is it based on reason? According to Alan Gewirth, this is the most important and difficult problem of philosophical ethics.4 In fact, he is just the latest of many who have thought that they can win the game with one grand slam by establishing the principles of morality on rational grounds, either by showing them to be self-evident or by demonstrating them deductively, inductively, or dialectically. They believe they can establish cer­ tain categorical moral principles (Oughts, etc. ) in one of these ways and thus give a conclusive reply to our query why it is rational to accede to them. For one cannot agree on such grounds that something is categorically obligatory or good to do or be while asking if doing or being it is rational. All one can do then is [ 8I ]

LE C T U R E T H R E E

to ask for motives for so doing or being, in a "Try and get me to" posture which we are now purporting not to take. I wish I believed that moral Gens can be rationally justified in some such conclusive way, but, as I said at the outset, I no longer do. It used to be thought easy to show that they cannot be: all one had to do was to show that no such Gens are self-evident or synthetic a priori, and then add that no Oughts can be logically derived from Ises. Lately, however, moral philosophers, like the human beings they are, have sought out many inventions, mak­ ing the matter more complicated. Even so, I doubt that any attempt to give a conclusive rational justification of moral Gens can succeed, though I cannot show this now. I certainly do not believe that my own two principles are self-evident though they do seem to me to be self-evident when I take the moral point of view. But it does not follow that believing in them is not ration­ ally justified, at least from the moral point of view, and I shall therefore simply rely on the general reasonableness of my posi­ tion as a basis for going ahead. For Gewirth and his sisters and his cousins and his aunts, the answer to our question, difficult as it may be, is a one-step endeavor. For me and mine, it must be a two-step affair. The first stage is to take the moral point of view, master the relevant insights, think clearly and logically, all in a cool hour, and see what Gens approve themselves then, i . e. , what Gens it is rational to believe in from the moral point of view; the second is to inquire whether it is rational to act on or live by those Gens. If the moral point of view is what I said it was, then the answer to this query is not necessarily yes. Let us now pretend that the first step has been sufficiently well taken- even though I barely sketched my line of thought about this at the end of lecture 2-and proceed to the second . W H Y B E MO R A L? The question, "Why should I be moral?" is, I said, an open, reasonable one that is not wicked to ask. It is so, however, only if

WHY B E MORAL?

there is a kind of 'should' that is not moral, for it is silly to ask whether I morally should be moral, as has often been pointed out. Is there such a nonmoral 'should'? Of course. "You should go to see your sick aunt1-- She may remember you in her will if you do" is an example. Here the 'should' is prudential. Other 'shoulds' are instrumental or hypothetical in this way, and still others pertain to aesthetics, etiquette, law, or religion. What we need, however, is a 'should' that is not only nonmoral but also in an important way beyond morality, one that puts us in a position to say that we should or should not be moral, one that takes priority over any moral 'should' in case of conflict. Is there such a 'should'? Those who define morality in one of the broader senses reviewed in lecture I deny that there is, but on my definition there can be, and I believe there is. It is a 'should' that means, roughly, "it is rational. " In other words, as I have been assum­ ing, "Why should I be moral?" means "Is it rational to be moral?" "I should" in this sense, as Kant saw, just means "A rational being would. " One might be tempted to object that this cannot be so because one can go on to ask, "Why should I be rational?" But this is a wrong-headed question if one is not merely asking it 'in a "Try and get me to be" spirit, for then, if one asks, "Why should I?" one is requesting reasons and so has already committed oneself to being rational. The next question, of course, is to ask what rational means when we ask, "Is it rational to be moral, just, virtuous, or what­ ever?" As has already been indicated, it has generally been as­ sumed that showing it to be rational to be something equals or entails showing that it is in one's own interest (for one's happi­ ness or good) in the long run. Plato, Butler, Kant, and many others simply took this for granted; some Christian moralists did too, though others did not. On this assumption it becomes im­ possible, it seems to me, ever to prove that it is rational to be moral, for, as I see it, this means that one must show that the nonegoistic conduct and character called for by morality is af­ ways in one's own interest, and never involves any sacrifice, except in the short run. At this point, Butler, Kant, and perhaps

LE C T U R E T H R E E

Sidgwick postulated the existence of a God who guarantees the coincidence of self-interest and being moral. Leslie Stephen, however, concluded that one great difficulty must remain unsolved. Rather, I assert that it is intrinsically insoluble. There is no absolute coinci­ dence between virtue and happiness. I cannot prove that it is always prudent to act rightly or that it is always happiest to be virtuous. My inability to prove those propositions arises, as I hold, from the fact that they are not true. This admission does nothing to diminish our belief in the surpas­ sing importance of morality and of its essential connection with social welfare; and further, it does not diminish the intrinsic motives to virtue, inasmuch as those motives are not really based upon prudence. But I cannot go further. I do not think that any one has really gone further except in words; nor do I see any reason to expect that any one will go further. 5 I agree that one cannot establish the absolute coincidence of virtue and happiness, though I believe, as Stephen and all moralists from Hesiod on have, that much can be done to estab­ lish a large partial coincidence, but I do not agree that one cannot go further. One can, if one can question the assumption that being moral is rational only when it is, in Butler's words, "for our happiness or at least not contrary to it. " Otherwise, one must either simply bull morality through or give it up in favor of (ethical) egoism. Can one question that assumption? I think so, at least if psychological egoism is not true, i. e. , if human beings are capable of being nonegoistic (as Butler, Kant, Sidgwick, and Stephen also assumed). Suppose that one is in a situation in which being moral con­ flicts with self-interest. Even if they do not actually conflict, one may be genuinely convinced on careful reflection that they do. Now, it seems to me that one can ask oneself, in such a case, not only what one is going to do, but what one should do. If one's 'should' here is moral, then of course one already knows the

WHY B E MORAL?

answer. But, similarly, if the 'should' is prudential (self­ interested), then one also knows the answer. Therefore, if one's query makes sense, as I think it does, "Is it rational to . . . " must have a meaning other than "Is it in my interest to. . . . " One must be able to ask, "Why should I be prudential?" as well as "Why should I be moral?" and in both cases be asking what is rational. But then what can rational mean? Suppose again that one is faced with a choice, not necessarily between prudence and morality, and asks what is the rational thing to choose, all things considered: prudence, morality, and whatnot. Then one is asking what one would choose, as far as one can see, if one were completely clear-headed and fully knowl­ edgeable about oneself and everything inv�lved. What could be more rational than such a decision? If I am right, then something is rational for one to choose if one would choose it under those conditions. Rational thus means "would be chosen under such conditions. " And then it is an open question, not only whether being moral is rational, but also whether being prudential or self-interested is. It might be claimed that while this is so, we would in fact all choose the self-interested course over the moral one if we were completely clear-headed and fully knowledgeable about our­ selves, morality, and everything involved. Then it would still not be rational to be moral if this entailed any kind of loss or sacrifice; the rational and the self-interested would still coincide even when the latter differs from the moral. However, if psychological egoism is not true, as I am convinced it is not, then this claim is also not necessarily true; if we have any considerable element of the dove, as Hume called it, i. e. , of the nonegoistic, in us, then it may well be that all, many, or at least some of us would sometimes choose a course of action contrary to our own interest if we were clear-headed. This is all we need to disprove the much-assumed coincidence of the rational and the prudential and to open the way for going further than Stephen, Sidgwick, and their predecessors thought we could. I am disputing the assumption that a course of action or a way

[ 85 ]

LE C T U R E T H R E E

of life, to be rational for me to adopt, must be such as to give me the best or highest score in the long run, or for the time I can reasonably expect to have, in terms of something like pleasure, satisfaction, fulfillment, happiness, flourishing, or achievement of excellence-in short, that it is never rational to pursue a course that involves any sacrifice on one's part or results or may be expected to result in anything less than such a highest score for oneself. This assumption presupposes that it is possible to score pleasure, happiness, or whatever, in some kind of quantitative terms, and there are problems about this, but I shall not press this point. My main worry is about the egoism behind the as­ sumption. I agree that a course of action is irrational for me to take, other things being equal, if it is contrary to my self-interest in the sense of reducing my life-score, but am not convinced that it is therefore irrational. It is not necessarily. irrational if psychological egoism is false. That is why I suggest that a course of action is irrational only if it is such that one would choose to avoid it when choosing under the conditions mentioned above. Two lines of argument need mention here. One agrees that · psychological egoism is false, but still insists that the rational life, in the sense of the life one would choose if . . . , is the life that gives one the best score in some such terms as those described. For brevity, I shall use "if . . . " as short for ''if one were com­ pletely clear-headed and fully and vividly knowledgeable about oneself and the world. " It goes like this: we do have such nonegoistic motives as altruistic impulses, love or respect for others, a sense of duty, or a desire to do what is morally right or to be morally virtuous, and in some of us, at least, such motives are very strong. But acting on these motives brings us enjoy­ ment, etc. ; they are a source of satisfaction equal to or greater than our more selfish motives, and pursuing them, if we have them, is a part of our happiness or flourishing, perhaps even a great part. In this sense at least, losing one's life may be gaining it. 'T'his argument is, in fact, one of the strongest parts of any argument to show that being moral is in one's interest or pays, if

[ 86 ]

WHY B E M O R A L?

one truly understands what interest and paying are. It does, however, still involve thinking in terms of one's getting the best score when one's altruistic and moral satisfactions are added in with the others. That is why Butler contended, in his use of the argument, that benevolence is compatible with self-love as much as any other appetite or desire, and may even contribute more to private interest or happiness than any of the others. A similar line of thought is to argue that being moral is a great good, not just instrumentally, but also and especially intrinsi­ cally. Virtue is its own reward in this sense-so much so that, if one adds in its intrinsic value, along with everything else, includ­ ing possibly its extrinsic disvalues, it may well be that one will find oneself coming out with the best score by being moral. I have no quarrel with such arguments as far as they go, though I doubt they go the whole way. What worries me is the assumption that one can show being moral to be rational only if one can show that it gives one the best score for one's life, all things considered. It would, after all, be paradoxical if the only way to justify a nonegoistic enterprise like morality were by use of an egoistic argument. Besides, I do not believe that being moral will always give one the best score even if one considers the contribution that being moral makes to one's good or happi­ ness, though I agree that this contribution is a great one. I be­ lieve, rather, that morality sometimes requires genuine sacrifice, and may even require self- sacrifice. The lines of argument de­ scribed are still essentially prudential, for all their insistence on the reality of altruism and moral motivation, and it seems to me J. L. Mackie is right in his recent statement that . . . moral reasons and prudential ones will not always coin­ _cide. Rather; the point of . . . morality in the narrow sense, is that it is necessary for the well-being of people in general that they should act to some extent in ways that they cannot see to be (egoistically) prudential and also in ways that in fact are not prudential. 6

LECTURE T H REE

This is the case especially when morality requires what is called the supreme sacrifice, for, in such a case, it is in no way possible to maintain that one wil l always come out with the best score, if one ever does. As F. C. Sharp put it earlier in a more old­ fashioned way: My conclusion is that the possession of strong, deeply rooted interests in our fellows tends to enrich our own life and in so doing enhances greatly its joys and mitigates its inevitable sorrows. It is not true ordinarily that a man would be better off, as far as his own happiness is concerned, if he had no moral nature. If so, possession of the altruistic spirit is usually a blessing to its possessor as well as to the world. But although this connection between virtue and per­ sonal happiness rests upon the very foundations of human life, we are not justified in asserting that it is universal or absolutely necessary. There have been men who if they could have seen the outcome in terms of personal happi­ ness, no matter how keen their scrutiny and how profound their insight, would have found that the balance, as far as they themselves were concerned, was on the wrong side of the ledger; and this will remain the case for as long a time as any living person can look forward to. And yet many of these men, even if they had been provided with the fore­ knowledge, would have made the sacrifice none the less. 7 It might be claimed that even the person who sacrifices his life in the course of duty does, or at least may, still come out with the best score in a sense. For, being who he is, if he does not do so, he will feel guilt and remorse all his life, making his life-score worse than it would be if he had given up his life. This is theoret­ ically possible, but it surely will not be true always, nor for al l cases of sacrifice or even of self-sacrifice. Much depends on what else would happen during the rest of the person's life if he did not give it up. In any case, such a person is not likely to feel over­ whelming guilt and remorse at not sacrificing himself if he be-

[ 88 ]

W H Y B E M ORA L ?

lieves that sacrifice is rational only when it comes out on the right side of the ledger. The point is that if, in order for an individual to be rational, being moral must yield him or her the best score in some long­ run way, then the rationality of genuine sacrifice, supreme or not supreme, cannot be proved, even if one has strong, deeply­ rooted interests in one's fellows. For genuine sacrifice means taking a course of action that makes one's total score in life less than it would be otherwise. It can therefore be rational for a person only if it represents a course that person would choose "on the whole if all the consequences of all the different lines of conduct open to him were accurately foreseen and adequately realized in imagination at the present point of time, " to borrow words Sidgwick used in defining the notion of "a man's future good on the whole. " 8 Sharp saw this and went on to write: . . . those actions are reasonable which would flow from a complete knowledge and perfect realization of the sum total of their consequences . . . . To assert that the right is reason­ able is thus to assert that the moral ideal can maintain its claims upon our allegiance against any and every opposing consideration that can be urged from whatever source; that the course of action which it demands is one that would sti1 1 appeal to us after every fact in the universe had been passed in review. 9 Sharp went on to muddy the waters somewhat, but he was on the right track. It may be thought that I am making a distinction without a difference. Not so. There is a difference between the life that gives one the best score and the life one would prefer given complete knowledge and a perfect realization of what is involved. One might, all things considered, prefer a life that does not yield one the best score, precisely on the ground that it has morality on its side. To give me my best score, a life must include my being around to collect the results, but a life involving self-sacrifice

LECT URE THREE

may not allow me to do this. Nevertheless, I might prefer it if I knew all about myself and the world. Of course, it might be rejoined that "X gives me the best score" just means "X is what I would choose if I fully knew and realized what I was about, " but winning such a Pyrrhic victory is the same as giving up the ship. Well, suppose we agree that "It is rational to be moral" does mean "One would choose to be moral if one were completely clear-headed and logical and fully knowledgeable in a vivid way about oneself and everything that is relevant." .-\re we any farther along than Stephen was? We certainly would be ··jf we could prove that the life one would choose if . . . is a life that includes being moral. Unfortunately, I do not believe that we can prove this either. None of us can know for sure what life he or she would choose if . . . , for none of us \\'ill ever be in such a position. Even less can we know that being moral is part of the life each and everyone of us would choose if. . . . Therefore, we cannot know for certain that being moral is rational either for anyone or for everyone. We are, however, still ahead if we can say more in favor of believing this than we can in favor of believ­ ing that being moral is for the good of everyone in the sense of always giving him or her the better score. I am convinced that \Ve can. In the first place, we can, of course, say for it everything that can be said for the coincidence of being moral with self­ interest, which is a great deal. Here I would stress both of the lines of argument mentioned earlier, i.e., the one that points out how much happiness there is in relating well to others, and the one that centers on the thought that virtue is its own reward. The good life for anyone consists primarily of enjoyments of various kinds and of the achievement of such excellence as one is capable of; the first argument emphasizes the former component, the second the latter. To make the second clearer, I may observe that being moral entails achieving a certain kind of excellence, namely excellence as judged from the moral point of view; that this is a kind of excellence which requires no special ability or gift, as artistic and athletic excellence do (even a person of ordinary

WHY B E M O RAL?

talents can become a very good person); and that it is a peculiarly important sort of excellence just because it is excellence in one's relations to other persons and sentient beings as well as to one­ self. The facts about mental illness show how significant for human life such relations and performing well in them are. In the second place, the view that being good is for one's own good is in trouble if there are problems about dealing in quantita­ tive terms with such things as pleasure, happiness, human flourishing, etc. , whereas the view that being moral is what one would prefer if . . . is not. J. S. Mill saw this when he introduced considerations of quality and preferability into the evaluation of pleasures and kinds of happiness. Third, it seems clear to me, as it has to many all through history, that being moral does often require one to sacrifice something from one's personal score, even if the values of relat­ ing well to others are added in, and hence that a universal coinci­ dence of being moral and achieving the best score can be shown to be false-unless it is posited that there is a hereafter in which God will readjust the balance. This means that, in spite of all that Shaftesbury and others could do or say, one can finally believe that "virtue is the good, and vice the ill of everyone" on rational grounds only if there are rational grounds for such a theological belief. I do not mean to deny that there are, though I do think that such a belief cannot be proved, but I want to suggest that it is in any case more reasonable to believe that human beings are so constituted that they would all choose to be moral if . . . , since this is mainly a belief about human psychol­ ogy, though, of course, a rather optimistic one. Fourth, one may add that there is evidence for this latter belief in the work of some recent psychologists like Erich Fromm, 0. H. Mowrer, and A. H. 1\1 aslow. As Bertrand Russell says, We have wishes which are not purely personal. . . . The sort of life that most of us admire is guided by large, impersonal desires. . . . Our desires are, in fact, more general and less

LECTURE T H REE

purely selfish than many moralists imagine. . . . by the cul­ tivation of large and generous desires . . . men can be brought to act more than they do at present in a manner that is consonant with the general happiness of mankind. 1 0 Fifth, if Sharp is right, as I am sure he is, in saying that there have been people who, even if they had been provided with the foreknowledge to see that the balance, as far as they themselves were concerned, was on the wrong side of the ledger and would remain so, would still prefer to do the moral thing and make the sacrifice, then at least some people are so constituted that they would choose to be moral if. . . . Sixth, I think one can also claim, judging by the case of Socrates and many others, that those \vho have been moral would choose to be so again if they could look back over their actions from the vantage point of perfect hindsight. Finally, there is the matter of self-respect. �1oral philosophers have been making much of its importance lately, but they were anticipated by Aldo Leopold who wrote, 4 4 Voluntary adherence to an ethical code elevates the self-respect of the sportsman, but . . . voluntary disregard of the code degenerates and depraves him. " 1 1 His point is that self-respect presupposes that one sees oneself as moral. What is self-respect? I suggest that it is a con­ viction that one's character and life will be approved by any rational being who contemplates it from the moral point of view. One can claim that having this belief about oneself is a primary human good, as John Rawls does in his widely read and much discussed book, A Theory of Justice, 1 2 but it is not just a good that is to be added in, along with other goods or evils, in determining one's score. Rather, I believe, it is a judgment about oneself that one cannot make if one sees oneself as always looking for the best score for oneself, as never willing to make a genuine sacrifice, how­ ever small. The importance of self-respect is not so much that it improves one's score as that it may lead one to prefer a life in which it is present to one from which it would be absent but

WHY B E MORAL?

which would yield a better score. Why can it do this? I believe it is because we are so constituted that we cannot clear-headedly respect ourselves unless we perceive ourselves as respecting oth­ ers. At any rate, our need for self-respect and its dependence on our being moral are important evidence that we may prefer being moral to having the highest score.

CO N CLU SION Persuasive though all this is, at least to me, none of it constitutes a proof that all of us would choose to be moral if . . . , which is what we need to have if we are to be able to affirm with cer­ tainty, not indeed that morality pays, but that the moral life is the rational life for everyone. Some might not feel satisfied even if this were proved; caught up in the why-asking game, they might think to ask why one should live as one would choose to live if one were fully clear and knowledgeable about all that is relevant, when doing so is not in one's own interest. This, how­ ever, is not a sensible question. Even doing what is in one's own interest is of crucial significance only if it is how one would choose to Iive if. . . . We can safely assert, although we cannot know, that at least some people are so built that they would choose to be moral if they were clear-headed and logical and knew all about them­ selves and the alternative lives open to them. For them, being moral is rational, even if it involves sacrifice. This is an impor­ tant result. We can then infer that for certain kinds of persons it is rational to be moral. But, of course, this leaves open the possi­ bility that for others it is not. Are we left with the conclusion that whether one should be moral or not depends on what kind of a person one is, as some, including myself, have suggested? That is all we can be sure of, and it is important, because no one of us can know with certainty what kind of a person he or she is at any point in time (or only in a Day of Judgment, if there will be one,

LECTURE T H REE

when it will be too late). However, in view of what has been said, it seems to me reasonable to postulate that everyone is so constituted by nature, antecedently to any conditioning he or she may receive, that he or she would choose to live a moral life if the stated conditions were fulfilled. This cannot be proved, and so must remain a postulate, but it also cannot be disproved, and one who would be moral must affirm it. Why then should one be moral? Why is it rational to be moral? Because one would choose to be moral if one clearly knew what one was about. This is an article of moral faith. Being moral is rational if this faith is ra­ tional, i. e., if one would espouse it if one knew what everything is about-a possibility that at least cannot be ruled out. With all this in mind, though r_emembering "11atthew Arnold's warning that morality is only three-fourths of life, I should like to make a plea for a morally educative society, one in which we all genuinely engage in moral education along the lines sketched earlier, avoiding morally counter-educative activities as carefully as we can, and· setting good patterns for those around us, espe­ cially for those who are younger. I should also like to offer these lectures as a small contribution to the creation of such a society.

N OTES

LECT URE ONE

1. T . S. Eliot, The Rock (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. , 1934), p. 3 1 . 2 . George Santayana, Reason in Science (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 192 1), chaps . 8-10. 3. Plato Apology 38A. 4. Elizabeth Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy," re­ printed in J . J . Thomson and G. Dworkin, eds. , Ethics (�ew York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 186-2 10. 5. Santayana, Reason in Science, p. 2 56. 6. Quoted in D. D. Raphael, ed. , British Moralists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 1, p. 188. 7. Ibid . , p. 373. 8. Henry Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: i\1acmillan & Co. , 1907), p. 507-8. 9. W. E. H . Lecky, History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, 1 1th ed. (London: Longmans, Green and Co. , 1894), I , PP · 2 -3. I O . Ibid. , p. I . 1 1 . See, e. g., David Lyons, Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 1 2 . See my Ethics, 2nd ed . (Englewood Cliffs, N .J. : Prentice­ Hall, 1973); Perspectives on Morality : Essays by W. K. Frankena,

NOTE S

1 3. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 2 1. 2 2. 2 3.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

ed. K. E. Goodpaster (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976). R. B. Perry, Realms of Value (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 86. Quoted in Raphael, British Moralists, 1, p. 3 36. Colin Turnbull, The Mountain People (London: Picador, Pan Books, 1974). Philippa Foot, "Modern Moral Philosophy, " reprinted in J. J. Thomson and G. Dworkin, eds. , Ethics (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 19. Philippa Foot, Morality and Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 4. Raphael, British Moralists, 2, p. 80. Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack'd (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), pp. 47-48, 205. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New York: Doubleday & Co. , 1953), chaps. 1, 1 2. Romans 7: 19. Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 1 . Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966), p. 95. Quoted in Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: an Oral Biography of Harry S Truman (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1973), pp. 46-48. W. D. Walsh, Hegelian Ethics (New York: St. 1'1artin's Press, 1969), pp. I 6- 17 · Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballan­ tine Books, 1970), pp. 2 1 2, 2 3 2. Quoted in Raphael, British Moralists, 1, pp. 156-57. R. M. Hare, " Adolescents into Adults," in T. H. B. Hollins, ed. , Aims in Education (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1 964), pp. 6 1 -63 . See my Ethics, pp. 63 -7 3 ; Perspectives on Morality, pp. 14860. I have also argued more fully for a social morality in "Is

NOT E S

Morality a Purely Personal Matter?" , Midwest Studies in Phi­ losophy 3 ( 1978): 1 2 2 -32.

LECTURE TW O

1. I discuss this issue in "Ethics and the Environment," in K. Sayre and K. E. Goodpaster, eds. , Ethics and Problems of the 2 z st Century (:\f otre Dame: University of ::\Jotre Dame Press, I 979), pp. 3 -2 0 . 2. Philippa Foot, "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Im­ peratives, " Philosophical Review 8 1 ( 197 2 ): 3 14. 3. See Perspectives on Morality : Essays by W. K. Frankena, ed. K. E. Goodpaster (::\Jotre Dame: University of ::\Jotre Dame Press, 1976), essay 14. 4. Abigail van Buren, "Dear Abby ," Ann Arbor News, 26 May 1978. 5. T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, 4th ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), p. 44. 6. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 2 , 1 105ab. 7. W. D. Walsh, Hegelian Ethics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1969), chaps. 4, 5. 8. Quoted by H . J . Paton in The Categorical Imperative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 48. 9. 0. F. Bollnow, Einfache Sittlichkeit, 2nd ed. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1957). 10. P. F. Strawson, "Social Morality and Individual Ideal," re­ printed in K. Pahel and M. Schiller, eds. , Readings in Con­ temporary Ethical Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N .J. : PrenticeHall, 1970), pp. 344-59. 1 1. Henry Sid gw ick, Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: Macmil­ lan & Co. , 1907), p. 492. 1 2. See Perspectives on Morality: Essays by W. K. Frankena , ed. K . E. Goodpaster (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), essay 13; R. M. Hare, "Adolescents into

NO TES

Adults, " in T. H. B. Hollins, ed. , Aims in Education (Man­ chester: 1\fanchester University Press, 1964).

LECT URE THREE

1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 1 0.

1 1. 12.

Quoted in D. D. Raphael, British Moralists (Oxford: Claren­ don Press, 1969), 1, p. 234. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Public Benefits, 4th ed. (London: J. Tonson, 1725 ). Cf. K. Pahel and M. Schiller, eds. , Readings in Contemporary Ethical Theory (Englewood Cliffs, :\' .J. : Prentice-Hall, 1970), Section 4. Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago: Un{versity of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. ix, 3, 7. Leslie Stephen, The Science of Ethics (New York: G. P. Put­ nam's Sons, 1882), p. 434. J . L. 1'-'1ackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (:\"ew York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 190. F. C. Sharp, Ethics (New York: Century Co. , 1928), p. 477. Henry Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: "'facmil­ lan & Co. , 1907), pp. 1 1 1- 12. Sharp, Ethics, pp. 482, 484. Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (New York: Henry Holt and Co. , 19 3 5 ), pp. 2 5 2 -5 3. Aldo Leopold, A Sand Coun�y Almanac (New York: Ballan­ tine Books, 1970), p. 232. John Rawls, A Theory ofJustice (Cambridge, .\ lass: Harvard University Press, 197 1 ), pp. 178, 440.