Ethics, Value, and Reality

Aurel Kolnai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351311304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Ethics, Value, and Reality is a collection of essays written after Kolnai settled in England in 1955. These essays from Kolnai's mature years sit atop a remarkable gestation of moral and political thinking. At the heart of his thought is the special role of privilege in a good social order. Kolnai relies heavily on the work of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century value theorists such as Alexius Meinong, Nicolai Hartmann, and Max Scheler. He blends this continental tradition of ethics with British intuitionism and Scottish Enlightenment articulations.

For Kolnai, ethical life cannot be adequately understood except by reference to moral emphasis, and thus, Kolnai can be thought of as a liberal conservative. He acknowledges myriad values, moral and non-moral, and accepts that all can have some claim upon us. Low values as much as high values have a legitimate claim. His is a tolerant conservatism though not for a moment does he forgo the necessity of judgment: a readily graspable hierarchy keeps the respective demands of values in proportion. Kolnai welcomes the call to seriousness, which is the hallmark of existentialism.

The ground of Kolnai's thought is the idea of emotion as cognitive. He saw the typical analytical philosopher's fascination with simplicity of explanation not only thoroughly refuted by the gains in understanding wrought by phenomenological method, with its deference to the richness of phenomena, but sensed in the monistic inclination he dreaded a harbinger of totalitarianism. Never denying his emotionalism, he nonetheless made his points well enough by adopting an analytical approach to philosophy and ethics. This is a major work crossing moral and political philosophy.

1

Erroneous Conscience

1. THE PROBLEM: SUMMARY OF ITS ASPECTS

(a) On the common-sense suppositions that moral judgements are true or false, and that, therefore, conscience can be correct or erroneous, whereas on the other hand it is morally right to follow and wrong to disobey one’s conscience, we seem to be faced with a paradox in ethics. That some kinds of conduct are morally right, while some are wrongful and blameworthy, is presupposed in moral discourse and in conscience itself (‘I am ashamed of having broken my promise’; ‘My patriotic duty commands me to …’); yet if the agent is doing what he in entire ‘good faith’ thinks to be right his conduct cannot very well be immoral, while if he is doing what he thinks to be evil his conduct eo ipso is immoral. The traditional solution of the puzzle is that one ought to follow one’s conscience, whether correct or erroneous—the agent, anyhow, cannot possibly know that his conscience is erroneous, so long as it is his conscience—but that to hold an erroneous conscience denotes, so far as it is not reducible to mere ‘invincible’ ignorance of fact, a moral defect which implies some degree of guilt. From this we may conclude to a general duty for men, but especially for such as hold a dissentient conscience and again for such as find themselves confronted with moral dissent not obviously preposterous, to allow for the possibility that their conscience may be erroneous and to examine loyally the arguments against their moral opinion.

In actual practice, at least in our capacity as appraisers and advisers, if less perhaps as agents, we nearly always take this dualist view, commending a person’s moral insight as well as a person’s conscientious ‘integrity’, and blaming moral misjudgement or lack of percipience as well as the various types of unconscientious behaviour. We expect a man to behave rightly, rather than either merely appraise rightly or merely behave according to his appraisal, and thus we consider ‘sinning against the light’ essentially guilty but also attach a moral disvalue to a person’s following his errant lights. And a conflict between these two apparently disparate points of view would strike us as more shocking, more paradoxical, more in need of a special elucidation, than the tension we continually experience between different moral criteria, all on the same level of intrinsic moral appraisal. We find it natural enough that a man’s morality should be, not worthless indeed but imperfect, in that he, say, displays a strong sense of justice but little human sympathy, or yields to his generous impulses at the expense of justice; but if a man sticks to his conscience, we feel tempted to regard his morality not merely as better than nothing but as perfect, and yet if at the same time he thinks right what we and the like of us think wrong, we again feel tempted to regard his morality as invalid rather than merely imperfect.

(b) Theorists fond of neat system and sturdy simplification may, of course, try to get round the dilemma by applying ‘Occam’s razor’ to either of its terms. I propose to call ‘formalism’ the view that the agent’s acting or not in conformity with his conscience is the only test of his behaving rightly or wrongfully, though apart from that his conduct may be prudent or unwise, and socially useful or harmful. The converse view I propose to call ‘intellectualism’. On this view, subjective ‘good faith’, regardless of what the agent believes to be right or wrong, has no tangible meaning; right conduct depends on true moral knowledge (and, perhaps, on a normal capacity for action) alone, and all wrongful conduct expresses a moral error (or perhaps weakness of will, but never a wilful disregard of what the agent thinks right). I shall argue, in Section 2, against formalism, and in Section 3, more briefly, against intellectualism—endeavouring to show that both Erroneous Conscience and Ineffectual Conscience exist, and that, while distinct from each other, they reveal a certain interdependence.

The point I am chiefly concerned to bring out is that the moral status we feel inclined to concede to erroneous conscience is attributable to it, not by virtue of Conscience representing an inscrutable and unjudgeable supreme principle of ‘formal’ morality regardless of its ‘material’ contents, but inasmuch as that genuine Conscience, however erroneous we may reasonably deem it by reference to a specified province of morality, expresses and presupposes the agent’s general response, assent and submission to the valid intrinsic principles of morality as we know them. Accordingly, in Sections 4 and 5 I shall try to establish a distinction between genuine Erroneous Conscience and the type of comprehensive principles of conduct to which this description no longer applies. Such principles, seeing the eminently ‘conscientious’ attitude (in a technical sense) they may command in those who profess them, seem to pose the problem of Erroneous Conscience in a particularly baffling and paradoxical form, claiming as they do the respect due to consistent devotion of self, while at the same time arousing moral revolt. I shall distinguish, then, Erroneous Conscience proper from what I propose to call Overlain Conscience informed by the agent’s surrender to a ‘non-moral absolute’. I cannot, in the limits of this paper, deal with Dissentient Conscience as such—its argumentative and social aspects, its relation to the moral consensus and traditions of mankind, its possible reformatory and exemplary functions—nor with the interesting topic of supererogatory moral aspirations and of moral obligations experienced with a non-universal, personal or vocational, emphasis.

(c) It is well to bear in mind that—owing to the problematical sui generis status of moral truth and the impossibility of grasping it adequately and especially of applying it to the actual moral governance of conduct except through personal insight, reflection, emphasis and judgement—every conscience is virtually dissentient and we constantly live in the presence of at least mild and marginal forms of what impresses us as erroneous conscience, including often enough our own states of conscience reflected upon at some distance. But it is only in certain conditions that erroneous conscience confronts us with the necessity for a practical decision between conflicting moral claims—tolerance or responsibility, respect for conscience or prevention of a public danger, and similar dilemmas—thus making us more keenly aware of the underlying philosophical problem. Apart from such obvious distinctions as that between a conscientious position with a purely private range of reference and one essentially implying public pretensions, between an explicit or rigid and a doubtful or undecided state of conscience, and between various modes of pro and con attitudes on the spectator’s or the public’s part (e.g. tolerance and admiring respect, or essential contempt for some kind of dissent and the conviction that it calls for coercive measures), it may roughly be said that the classic conflict only arises between contrary positions of conscience: that is, when neither dissentient conscience nor consensual opinion about the controversial point is merely permissive but both are imperative, one being prescriptive and the other prohibitive, or inversely. Even for the philosopher, however, a greater interest may attach to antithetical posisions like ‘Fairness to our adversaries is the mark of high morality.—No it is a detestable weakness, a sign of degeneracy’ than to anything in the way of mere disagreement about degrees or limits.

(d) In the context of Erroneous Conscience, we use the word Conscience chiefly in the sense of sustained moral opinion, i.e. of moral rules which the agent professes as obligatory or moral standards he recognizes as valid. In so far as the agent feels committed ‘in conscience’ to principles not properly or purely moral (for example, religious, political or expressive of whatever particular loyalty or appreciation of value), or again, to some particular standard of conduct he would not conceive of as universally binding (cf. ‘noblesse oblige’, ‘aliis licet, tibi non licet’ or the various forms of vocational ‘ethos’ and of gentlemanly ideals), these are still, more or less in the nature of specified contractual or professional duties, derived from universal moral rules or at any rate referable to universally meaningful moral standards, seen in conjunction with the particular circumstances and previous acts of the agent. However, Conscience primarily and properly means, not moral convictions but moral awareness and self-criticism—remorse, warning, acquittal or approbation—in reference to one’s own conduct: past, present or tentatively planned. Conscience means, further, moral judgement in the shaping of one’s conduct. It is the office of my conscience, not only to enforce my concrete obligations under a permanent and universal body of moral laws it apprehends as binding upon me, but to apply, to specify and to supplement them so as to fit the moral aspect of any actual situation I find myself in; in other words, not only to represent my general knowledge of right and wrong on the one hand and to prod me to do right and to shun wrong on the other, but to tell me what is right or wrong here and now, and thus to inform the morality of my actual conduct.

No doubt, it is easier to discuss correct and erroneous conscience in terms of the agent’s express moral beliefs, which are a more solid, knowable, communicable and arguable thing than is the succession of his single moral decisions or of his single states of moral self-awareness; but in speaking of conscience we should not lose sight of the original and of the full meaning of the word. Morally relevant beliefs are not all morally centred beliefs, and a man’s quasi-moral beliefs, both express and operative, are not all conscience, nor all his conscience. If one who has carried out in strict obedience the monstrously unjust and cruel decrees issued by an authority to which he is subject by a kind of ideal conviction maintains that he has been acting ‘according to his conscience’, this may be a very inaccurate description of the real state of affairs. Again, dissentient conscience, in the full force of the term, amounts to more than a mere unusual moral belief: it may connote a significant moral experience, unknown or repressed in the dominant social ambit of the agent, and open up a valid but hitherto undiscovered or evaded new dimension of moral sensitivity.

2. THE EXISTENCE OF ERRONEOUS CONSCIENCE

(a) On the formalist view, Erroneous Conscience—except in the trivial sense of conscience as moral decision hic et nunc, misinformed as to facts—is logically impossible, seeing that Conscience is the ultimate test of morality, with no standard above it by which it could be verified or falsified. There is one apparently formidable argument in support of this view: the intuitive evidence of the reflection that nothing can be more obviously moral than to intend to do the right thing, and nothing more obviously immoral than to intend, from some non-moral motive, to do a wrongful thing. The argument does prove something, but decisively less than what it purports to prove. It is indeed never morally indifferent, but always highly important, whether the agent believes himself to be acting rightly or wrongfully. But the assumption that the most obviously good or bad feature in the agent’s conduct exhaustively defines its goodness or badness is nothing but a plausible fallacy. It is somewhat like believing that, say, any even number must have more factors than any odd number. In fact, the moral rightness of an action I perform with a wholly satisfied conscience may be greatly impaired by the defects of my conscience, e.g. my failure to understand that even a scoundrel must never be judged unfairly; and the badness of an action I perform with an uneasy or guilty conscience may be slighter than it would otherwise appear if I have a morbidly scrupulous conscience or if my illicit action is inspired by a morally good motive, e.g. compassion or righteous indignation.

In a recent novel about intelligence-service intrigues, I read the sentence: ‘It was obviously Dr Thompson’s duty, as a patriotic British citizen, to announce his discovery to Major Macpherson.’ This sounds so peculiarly silly, not because it is slightly redundant, but because, though in fact it is only a piece of careless writing, as it stands it seems to invite a formalist interpretation: there are two classes of British citizens, patriotic and nonpatriotic; for one of the latter, it would not be a duty to inform Major Macpherson; but the hero, unfortunately for him, happened to belong to the patriotic set, wherefore in his case that duty with its attendant discomforts did arise. This strikes us as preposterous because ‘to be patriotic’ is not a distinctive natural characteristic or a matter of taste, entailing moral obligations when it is present, but is itself a moral obligation of men by reference to their respective countries. It is true, none the less, that if Thompson had had a nonpatriotic or unpatriotic, a defective or erroneous, conscience, his omission to inform the Major would in one sense have been less wrongful, in that he would then have acted ‘in good faith’ as contrasted with prevarication. As it was, this act of disloyalty to his conscience might have marked the beginning in him of a process of moral backsliding; whereas, if he had not been a patriot anyhow, he would have suffered no such moral ‘fall’. And yet, do we, as patriots or even on general moral principles, prefer the ‘integrity’ of a nonpatriotic to the guilty lapse of a patriotic Thompson? Hardly; at least, certainly not a priori and regardless of the possible qualifying circumstances. Our conscience tells us that we ought to be loyal citizens not because we have that kind of conscience but because men, including Thompson and ourselves, ought to be loyal citizens; it tells us that we, including him, ought to obey our consciences, but also that we ought to have the right kind of conscience, which among other things implies a patriotic conscience.

(b) As I have just admitted, Conscience is also reflexive and selfemphasizing. I may have the remorseful feeling that in a certain complex and morally charged situation I did not listen to the voice of my conscience, or warn myself, in view of an impending practical decision, in terms like ‘Well, this course seems to offer great advantages, and something might be said for it on moral grounds; still, in some essential way it would go against your conscience’. But all such modes of conscience are secondary; they presuppose a primary reference to moral categories outside conscience—similarly as my promise to pay £100 to Jones does indeed create my obligation to pay £100 to Jones but does not create my obligation to keep the promises I make. My conscience of yesterday which I am now sorry to have silenced or cheated, or the present one which I am now telling myself to obey, was not or is not a conscience about conscience but a conscience about duties of honesty, loyalty, neighbourly love and the like, and about offences opposed to such duties or virtues. The moral qualities and rules thus referred to are not a function of my conscience but prior to it and constitutive of it, even though my conception of them has been shaped and amplified in a way involving the workings of my conscience. Just as a General whose orders did nothing but enjoin upon his subordinates the duty of obeying his orders would not actually command anything, a conscience demanding only to be always obeyed would in no wise direct the agent’s conduct and would not in fact be conscience at all, but merely a phantom of misguided philosophical lucubration.

Any attempt to save formalism by propounding a weaker variant of it, which would no longer entail an infinite regress, is doomed to failure; for it must either surreptitiously bring in objective moral standards over and above conscience, or lapse into arbitrary naturalism and immoralism, superseding conscience by the agent’s or somebody else’s good pleasure. Thus, if we construe the sovereignty of conscience in the sense that a man behaved rightly in conforming unhesitatingly, from moment to moment, to the random hits and improvised glimpses of his conscience, we no longer imply that right conduct means conduct in conformity to conscience. We have switched to the gratuitous assertion—wholly out of accord with experience and common sense—that conscience finds what is right and what is wrong here and now by a succession of unreflective intuitions and unarguable decrees; or else, abandoning this mystical and unanalysable object of inerrant intuition, we simply mean that what a man ought to do is what he wants to do, and that conscience is nothing but the dominant impulse, craving, fancy or whim of the moment.

Again, if we suggest that the agent should adopt as rule and incarnation of his conscience some extraneous interest, system or authority, serving henceforth that objectified Principle with punctual fidelity and unflinching zeal, we are no longer holding on to a morality of Conscience. For, if the agent chooses to lean on a specified authority for intrinsic moral reasons, his conscience is no longer the definition but merely, as in the common-sense view, the guide and director of his morality, dependent on objective standards of right and wrong which it is meant to represent and to divine, not to supplant or freely to invent; whereas if the agent decides to subordinate his conscience to some outside concern or entity from any vital or historical, morally irrelevant and contingent motives, he will be adjusting his conduct not to his conscience but to something else. A conscience thus put out to lease is not conscience but the evasion of it, except for that specious semblance of conscience which may be discerned in one’s blind obedience to the authority that happens to be in command.

Conscience that cannot hope to be correct, and accordingly cannot fear to be erroneous, is not Conscience in the established and dignified sense of moral self-criticism, judgement and belief—which essentially aspires to truth and tries to escape from error, and in fact expresses the agent’s endeavour to ponder and argue his decisions in universally valid terms and to make his conduct justifiable in the open court of objective morality. Mere ‘conscientiousness’ as a habit of discipline, a descriptive psychological feature opposed to impulsiveness and whimsicality, is indeed one moral requirement and is independent of true or false moral beliefs; but it is only a subordinate aspect of Moral Conscience and anything but a supreme directive principle of conduct. A ‘conscientious’, i.e. painstaking, methodical and devoted, secretary or accountant of a burglars’ association is hardly a better man than a generous and high-principled but somewhat self-willed and unpredictable servant of an estimable philanthropic cause.

(c) Another argument for the existence of Erroneous Conscience lies in the fact that we sometimes feel remorse over such past actions of ours as we performed not against our conscience but with a definitely assenting conscience. True, in regard to some moral mistakes in our past history we may feel shame and annoyance rather than remorse proper; this points to Erroneous Conscience not through any fault of the agent’s but operating guiltlessly in perfect good faith: ‘invincible ignorance’, as traditional language has it. But whether I say ‘What a fool I was to believe that! Alas, I couldn’t help it!’ or ‘Damned fool that I was! I ought to have known better’, my present conscience criticizes not only my past conduct but my past conscience. More, when at grips with a present or recent moral problem of some complexity, I am likely to say in a tone of bemused hesitation, ‘My conscience tells me I’d better do this, and mustn’t do that’—revealing a tinge of reserve and doubt, an admission that my conscience might be mistaken. Indeed, when we feel very certain in a moral matter we rarely invoke our conscience: ‘My conscience tells me I mustn’t forge bank-notes’ is less natural language than, say, ‘My conscience tells me I ought to inform Smith that Brown is plotting against him’. We recognize, then, that we are responsible not only before our conscience but also, within limits, for our conscience; that we are obliged to ‘apply reasonable care’ in shaping our conscience (se faire une conscience) so as to keep it sensitive, enlightened and well informed, and to safeguard it from error.

(d) Finally, Erroneous Conscience exists in virtue of the intimate linkage between our moral judgements and sensibilities on the one hand, our knowledge and interpretation of facts on the other. Of course, owing to a gross error of fact a person may commit grievous ‘material’ wrong without any trace of guilt or erroneous conscience on his part. But sometimes the position is altogether different. Erroneous conscience may lean on intellectual delusion or misconception as a kind of collateral support, or indeed be occasioned by it. In such cases, theoretical error not only causes the agent’s conscie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Aurel Thomas Kolnai (1900-1973)
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Erroneous Conscience
• 2. The Sovereignty of the Object: Notes on Truth and Intellectual Humility
• 3. Deliberation is of Ends
• 4. Morality and Practice I: The Ambiguity of Good
• 5. Morality and Practice II: The Moral Emphasis
• 6. Existence and Ethics
• 7. Moral Consensus
• 8. The Concept of Hierarchy
• 9. Aesthetic and Moral Experience
• 10. Forgiveness Notes
• Bibliography
• Index