The Object of Morality

G.J. Warnock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000076998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The central issue is that of identifying and understanding the fundamental principles of morality but the book also discusses the place of rules in moral thought, the nature of obligation, the relation between morality and religion and that of being moral and rational.

1. Some Options in Ethics

It is not at all clear that what I attempt to do in this book can reasonably – that is, with any prospect of even limited success -be attempted. That being so, I had better begin by saying something very general about what it is that I attempt to do, and about some of the objections of principle – which I hope, and take, to be less than conclusive – that might well be urged against such an enterprise.

Let us begin with an objection, or at any rate a difficulty, that might be urged against moral philosophy in any form. How, it may be asked, is the subject-matter supposed to be identified? It is natural, and no doubt correct so far as it goes, to say that the concern of the moral philosopher is with the understanding and elucidation of ‘moral concepts’, or of ‘the concepts of morality’; some would say, meaning the same thing, that his business is with ‘the language of morals’. But that is by no means an unproblematic answer to the question.

In the first place, is ‘morality’ clearly and sharply bounded? If one considers, for instance, good and bad qualities of character, is it always quite clear which are, and which are not, moral qualities? When one considers that a particular act, or a particular way of behaving, is, for instance, wrong, may one not quite often be uncertain whether or not it is morally wrong? It is clear enough that there are good things to do that are not morally good, and bad things to do that are not morally bad but, for instance, bad policy or bad manners; but how clear is it where, or why, the line is to be drawn?

I suggest that, while there is indeed some difficulty here, it would be a mistake to become paralysed by it at this early stage. I think it is true that – except perhaps for some of those for whom morality is essentially linked to a religion – morality does, so to speak, shade off into other things, with a disputable area round it rather than a tidy frontier. But in fact this is not uncommon, and not necessarily fatal. Even subjects not commonly thought of as being afflicted in this way, like the philosphy of mathematics or the philosophy of science, are actually thus afflicted to some extent: mathematics shades off into mathematical logic, and though philosophers of science seem often, not necessarily wrongly, to simplify their problems by talking almost exclusively about physics, it is certainly not clear where ‘science’ stops and something else begins. (Is history a science?) What matters really is that some cases should be clear, not that all should be; physics anyway is science, even if history may or may not be, and trigonometry is mathematics, even if set-theory might be logic. Similarly, it seems not impossibly bold or naive to make the supposition that some questions are, pretty uncontroversially, to be properly regarded as questions of morality, even if a good many neither clearly are, nor clearly are not.

Next, some philosophers, I think, regard moral philosophy pessimistically, or even with distaste, from a feeling that moral concepts are disagreeably woolly, or vague, or indeterminate; so that discussion of those concepts gives no scope for sharp-edged argument and definite conclusions, but is drearily condemned to being, in a sense, a matter of opinion – some look at these things in one way, others in other ways, and there is no hope of deciding that anyone is right or wrong. I think that this too is true to some extent, and I fully sympathize with the distaste which that thought arouses in some people. But the question, to what extent it is true, is itself worth considering and ought not to be prejudged; and also, if moral concepts are somehow vague or indeterminate in the way suggested, it would be a quite proper object of philosophical argument really to establish that that is so, and perhaps to try to reach some understanding of why it should be so.

In any case, the preliminary issue that I want chiefly to consider here is a different one. I want to consider the idea that the subject-matter of Ethics is, so to speak, inherently shifting and unstable because of the phenomenon of social and historical change. It is sometimes said, with obvious plausibility, that many writers on this subject have taken an excessively static, sometimes even absurdly parochial, view of their problems – assuming, as it were, that there is a fixed moral landscape, standing still to be sketched or mapped out with timeless finality; whereas in fact what confronts one is rather a Heraclitean flux, a spectacle of constant change and almost limitless diversity. Hegel, for instance, ever conscious of the march of History, has recently been commended on the ground that he was ‘able to appreciate that there is no single set of concepts which constitutes the concepts of ethics, no language immediately available which is the language of morals’;¹ and other philosophers have been reproved for writing as if ‘there is a part of language waiting to be philosophically investigated which deserves the title‘the language of morals’ – whereas ‘in fact, of course, moral concepts change as social life changes’.² Perhaps the whole idea of the philosophy of morals is no less an unhistorical illusion than were old-fashioned notions of, say, the theory of the state.

There is certainly something strongly tempting in this, and no doubt something right. It is both easy and sometimes absurd to lapse into parochialism (spatial or temporal) on moral matters, and solemnly to treat as eternal verities what happen merely to be idées reçues of one’s own community or circle, or even of one’s own age-group. But I think too that the victories of an excessive relativism are often much too easily won. While acknowledging, as obviously one must, the phenomenon of change and diversity, one should also give some thought to the question: what changes? What exactly is it of which we must not take too static a view?

What changes, then? Well, it is uncontroversially obvious that views change. On questions of what is right or wrong in human conduct, good or bad, admirable or otherwise, in human character, one’s own views change from time to time; the orthodoxies of one’s own circle or society on these matters are apt not to be the same at one date as at another; and of course, if one brings in other societies and other ages, this diversity increases almost without assignable limit. Even a very sketchy acquaintance with history and anthropology may make one hesitate to assume that there is any way of behaving, considered, say, wrong at one time and place, which has not been considered unobjectionable, or even virtuous, at another. Deliberate killing, for instance, one might take to be an extreme case of, surely, undesirable conduct; but there have certainly been societies in which the deliberate, unprovoked killing of strangers was regarded as not merely unobjectionable, but positively meritorious.

¹ W. H. Walsh, Hegelian Ethics (Macmillan, 1969), p. 79.

² Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (The Macmillan Company, 1966), p.1.

However, it is plainly absurd, though it is sometimes done, to present this nearly limitless diversity as if it were a bald, brute, irreducible fact, insusceptible of explanation, as perhaps are, for instance, some differences of aesthetic taste. For it is really quite obvious that these differences of view, with their consequent differences of prevalent modes of behaviour, are at least in large part consequences of other differences – of, for instance, differences in belief about the natural consequences of actions, or, perhaps even more importantly, the supernatural consequences. A propensity to decapitate strangers is not really surprising in one who is convinced, however absurdly, that a regular supply of severed heads is a necessary condition of the survival and prosperity of his tribe; and at a less exotic level, it is clear that at least some differences about, for instance, sexual morals are the result of divergent beliefs about the consequences, social or psychological, of various sorts of sexual behaviour – beliefs incidentally which, in many cases, are very far from being able to claim the dignity of knowledge. Then it is also plainly relevant that what, in human character and conduct, is needed for success, and even for survival, varies very widely in different social and physical conditions. Men living in, say, a prosperous commercial society in conditions of settled peace may not greatly esteem, because they will not encounter the need for, those traits and qualities of character that are most highly valued by, say, horse-breeding nomads, or jungle-dwellers, or sea-going brigands. So that consciousness, which indeed it is desirable to have, of the huge diversity of views that have been held as to good and bad, right and wrong, in human character and conduct, should be tempered by recognition that there is no reason to suppose that the basis of such views is correspondingly diversified. People who hold very different beliefs, particularly perhaps supernatural beliefs, and who live their lives in very different conditions and in the face of very different demands, would quite naturally arrive, on the very same basis of appraisal, at wholly different practical conclusions.

Next, it is worth observing that, however widely forms of life, conditions of life, and views about life change, it does not actually follow that ‘moral concepts change’. This is for the quite general reason that, as indeed is obvious, very different views may be held and formulated with the help of exactly the same concepts. It does not follow that one whose moral views are very different from mine does not employ the very same set of moral concepts that I do, or that, if I change my views, I change my concepts as well. That is to say: really to show that moral concepts change, it is not enough simply to point to the various sorts of change and diveristy which we have already, quite uncontroversially, conceded do occur. For it would be entirely possible to say, in all sorts of different settings and societies, all sorts of different, even irreconcilably different things, in ‘the language of morals’, if there were such a thing. Nothing that we have yet said establishes that there is not.

There is, however, certainly more to be said. It is a reasonable objection that the point just made is a hollow one, since, even if, as conditions, beliefs, and (consequently) views change, concepts do not necessarily change as well, yet they do change in fact. That may not have to be true, but surely it is true; as one would expect. For the concepts people use are not timelessly, independently part of the furniture of the universe; they emerge and evolve, change and sometimes decay, in human thought and speech and action, and cannot but be intimately related to what people find occasion to say and do, and to what in general they think about what they say things about. One would expect communities to evolve, no doubt imperfectly and often obscurely, such concepts as they need; and this surely, communities differing so widely as they do and have done, is likely to come about in very different ways. And of course we find this to be true. Languages are not immutable; nor, particularly in the field of comment on human character and conduct, are different languages always exactly inter-translatable, at any rate word for word. So surely it has to be allowed that not only do conditions, needs, beliefs, and views differ from time to time and place to place, but that concepts in fact differ as well.

Well, so they do, and of course it is as well to be aware of that. But have we said, in saying this, that moral concepts change, and consequently that there is no such thing as ‘the language of morals … waiting to be philosophically investigated’? Not necessarily. Of course, if ‘moral concepts’ are all those concepts which, in any society and at any time, have been employed in characterization, commendation, and condemnation, in praise or dispraise, of human character and conduct, then, since there is undoubtedly very great diversity in such concepts, ‘moral concepts’ must emerge as a highly diversified, historically variable set. But in fact we do not have to say this; and I want now to mention two different, indeed contrasting ways in which that conclusion can still be resisted.

What some philosophers seem to me to have held about this, often without explicitly saying so, is that (what they mean by) the language of morals is something of a very high degree of generality – a generality great enough to enable it, without itself changing, to accommodate a vast range of change and difference in other respects. The Naga head-hunter’s way of life, his beliefs and opinions, differ widely, no doubt, from those of the Viking and the Victorian bishop; Greek diverges from English in the denomination of ‘virtues’; and so on. However, in each case, it can be said, some people are regarded as good and others as bad; some acts as right, others as wrong; some things as what ought to be done, others as what ought not. Although the actual application of these very general notions has been no doubt, for all sorts of reasons, widely divergent from time to time and from place to place, the notions themselves have been standard, common property; they have not changed. Thus, if we take ‘the language of morals’ to consist essentially of such very general, non-specific terms – ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘ought’, and perhaps a few more – we have something that there is reason to regard as floating stably in the Heraclitean flux, and to be recognized as persisting through all the diversities paraded by Hegel and the historians and anthropologists. Moral philosophy, it might be said, is concerned with the ‘logic’ or ‘analysis’ of these words and their synonyms. Though what is commended or condemned may vary very widely – though what are taken to be grounds for such judgements may be endlessly various — though specific vocabularies of judgement may be highly diverse and not, or not easily, inter-translatable – yet talk of good and bad, right and wrong, of ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’, in one form or another can be taken to be universal, a quite general feature of any human community at all.

But one might also, starting from just the same point, proceed in what is, in a sense, quite the opposite direction. If – one might say – on the strength of noting the various sorts of changes which, it is admitted, do occur, one concludes that ‘moral concepts change’, one is tacitly making an unargued, and perhaps unplausible, assumption. Namely, one is making the assumption that all the concepts, by means of which people have ever commented appraisingly on human character and conduct, have an equally good right to be called moral concepts: since those concepts admittedly change, moral concepts change. But is this reasonable? Suppose that, for instance, being struck by the vastly different character of the carvings of some primitive tribe and of contemporary sculptors, I were to conclude that ‘of course, aesthetic concepts change’; it is clear that such a conclusion would be risky at best, and might be quite unwarranted. The reason for this is plain. It is that it might very well be the case that those primitive carvers were not really guided by aesthetic concepts at all. Perhaps their products were made for magical uses, or had some religious or ceremonial significance; perhaps they were in no sense ‘artists’ in the modern manner, and possibly had simply no aesthetic concepts whatever. Somewhat similarly: if, noting that A’s views, even A’s concepts, differ from B’s at some other date, you are to conclude on that ground that moral concepts change, you have first to suppose that both A and B do have moral concepts. Otherwise, though you can of course say that concepts change, you have shown no reason for supposing that moral concepts do. You would not persuade me that, for instance, cricket changes, by citing some medieval game which was not cricket at all.

The suggestion here is, then, not that ‘moral concepts’ are so very general that one can reasonably take them to be spatially and temporally ubiquitous, but on the contrary that they are of some comparatively determinate, special sort, and do not change for that reason – for the reason, namely, that concepts not of that sort are, not different moral concepts, but not moral concepts at all. It is obvious enough that this suggestion raises a question -namely, have we a way of identifying certain concepts as moral concepts (certain views as moral views, and so on) such that it is possible for us intelligibly to say of some person that, while doubtless he does have ways of appraising human character and conduct, he does not really employ moral concepts at all? One hesitates here before the spectre of mere arbitrariness, of uninteresting linguistic stipulation; nevertheless, it seems to me that we do have such a way, though doubtless it is not a simple matter to say what it is. The word ‘moral’ is intelligibly used in such a way. If we have, for instance, an individual whose views about good and bad, right and wrong, turn out to derive from a mixture of religious taboos and of passionate, exclusive devotion to the martial glory of his tribe, it seems to me that we could intelligibly say: This man does not see anything as a moral problem; he has no moral concepts at all; morality involves a way of looking at things which, it appears, simply never occurs to him. If he says that one of his fellow-tribesmen is a good man, because he is careful about religious taboos and has dozens of scalps hanging from his tent-pole, we could reasonably say that that is not a moral judgement. And it ought to be particularly observed that, in saying such things, one would not necessarily be begging any questions to the prejudice of the tribesman. For if to make moral judgements is to make judgements of some comparatively determinate sort – for instance, on some comparatively determinate basis – we do not, in saying whether or not someone makes such judgements, yet say anything at all as to whether or not he should do so....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Some Options in Ethics
• 2 The Human Predicament
• 3 Utility
• 4 Rules
• 5 Moral Rules
• 6 Moral Virtues
• 7 Obligations
• 8 Marginal Comments
• 9 Morals and Rationality
• Index