A Study in Moral Theory (Routledge Revivals)

John Laird

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317911470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

First published in 1926, this study addresses the theory of morality using four overarching approaches: analytical, psychological, theoretical, and finally, philosophical. Within these methodologies, chapters explore such areas as the character of moral enquiry, the knowledge of good and evil, freedom and self-determination and moral philosophy. This is an interesting reissue, which will be of particular value to students researching the philosophy of ethics and morality.

Chapter I
Introduction

A Study in Moral Theory

IT is notorious that of all the subjects men are moved to write about, Ethics has been one of the first and chief since the days when writing began. This circumstance itself prompts many reflections, some of them pleasant, others not so pleasant. It is gratifying, on the whole, to remember that these discussions, even if they are bookish, indicate a persistent and a very general interest in moral matters. Curiosity, inquisitiveness even, and a reflective bent of the mind are very general attributes of human nature. Most of us believe that they ought to be cultivated; and we should consider ourselves very sadly placed if we did not, or could not, reflect upon the values of things, the aim of the business of living, the excellence of that which we are minded to do. We suppose also (rashly, perhaps, but still not wholly without reason) that there are the seeds of hope and a certain nurture for it in this affair. Something should be learned from so much scrutiny and debate, something effective for our improvement in so far as this improvement may be attained. It might be otherwise, indeed, if these voluminous discussions were the work of sectaries or cloistered persons protesting shrilly from behind learned walls. This, however, is not the fact. Moral problems confront us every hour; and if we do not reflect upon them every day, we reflect at least very often. Moral discussions are mirrored in literature of every species; and in the mirror they may be signals, not simple images.

The cynics, on the other hand, have another construction to offer We may say, if we choose, that it is biased, but we cannot call it baseless. Indeed, we have the right to ignore these cynics when they say that moralizing is just a way of taking ourselves far too seriously, an excuse for meddling, a cloak for the vice of exhortation. Such criticisms, if they are pertinent at all, are themselves moral criticisms, and the makers of them are the companions of their opponents, smeared, if we care to put it so, with the same wallow. Much shrewder criticism, however, is possible here, with never a trace of self-stultifying. It is very reasonable to argue that the subjects most discussed are precisely those that are inconclusive. Prone as we are to discussion, we have also a certain prudence; and the fear of ridicule is enough in itself to forbid any large number of chatterers and dabblers from airing their opinions where established evidence and rigorous expert mastery are ready to rebuke them. There are circle squarers and believers in a flat earth, but not very many. When a subject is known to be inconclusive, however, and at the same time excites general interest, we expect and find a great cloud of counsellors. Freedom, immortality, the standards of duty, and the ideal of human society are precisely in this position. There is nothing to prevent anyone from writing about them, and therefore many do. In a word, argument abounds; and proof (we are told) is always absent.

So stated, this accusation is probably not inaccurate and certainly it is pertinent. The sting of it, however, may perhaps be drawn.

In the first place, a certain degree of inconclusiveness need not imply futility. Indeed, there may be bigotry and intellectual rudeness in demanding conclusiveness where it is not to be had. Certainly we have every reason to be proud of the human intellect for devising conclusive arguments in mathematics, in logic, and in other places where it is admitted that such arguments are to be found. This is worth a hecatomb. What is more, even when this degree of conclusiveness is not to be expected (as in the more advanced of the experimental sciences), we may rightly venerate the luminous insight and the fruitful sagacity that have divined methods and principles which, if they are not wholly conclusive, have delivered us at least from aimlessness and from the stumbling that is incident to those who profess to walk by the light of nature. If moralists, then, were to emulate this sagacity, the rest of the world should, and probably would, admire them unstintedly. If, on the other hand, their art or their science is very slow to lend itself to conquests of this species, being too sinuous, too varied, too stubborn for any single plan or formula (at any rate so far as we can see), it is not, even then, to be inferred that reflection upon it is either useless or avoidable. The subject is not more elusive than our lives are, and even in our gropings we may learn.

In the second place, it is a fallacy to suppose that discussions must be worthless in which all and sundry are entitled to an opinion. If it were claimed, indeed, that any opinion is as good as any other upon these matters, that there is no such thing as delicate observation, subtle analysis, or orderly criticism of our ideas concerning them, then indeed we might expect futility, and we should have to do so unless we suspected revelation. For men certainly differ in their discernment, their persistence in sifting their ideas, their capacity for stating and appreciating what (as we say) they really mean; and these are the qualities which give substance and worth to an opinion. What may reasonably be claimed, however, is not this absurdity, but something entirely different. The sounder claim is, firstly, that every one of us has moral experience which, being what we are, we all do reflect upon—some more than others, but all in considerable measure; and, secondly, that there is a certain appreciable equality between all moral beings in this particular, since each has sufficient moral experience to yield the basis of an opinion that counts, and since each is capable of a degree of reflection that entitles his opinion to consideration.

Quite plainly, these contentions omit a great deal, at any rate in their first intention. They would be indisputable only if the basis of any man's moral opinions were his own personal moral experience, that which he himself has been called upon to do or to suffer when conscience and duty enter. That, however, is not the whole of the evidence. Indeed, it may plausibly be represented as a very small portion of the evidence. To inform ourselves properly of moral issues, it may be urged, we should explore the whole territory of human (if not of divine) endeavour and consider the development of all standards, the structure, growth, and aims of societies, and everything else that may be relevant to conduct, such as our command over nature, the sciences of medicine and politics, the laws of economics, the lessons (if there are any) that come from theology and metaphysics. It is not Puritan individualism (so the argument runs), but the older ideals of the Greeks, that are truly relevant. To discover the use of our faculties that is fitting and excellent we must investigate the whole diameter of out collective capacities and ideals, drawing freely upon history, biology, statecraft, psychology, and sociology. These sciences, in their turn, may not be conclusive, but they do require expert knowledge, and opinions which are ill-informed concerning them are not worth a hearing.

There is truth in this, much truth, and all of it chastening and salutary; yet the claims of moral philosophy in the personal, individualistic, traditionally Protestant vein should not be set aside on this account. Morality, if there is such a thing, is binding upon individual men and women. It is not a thing these individuals can renounce or delegate to experts, governments, or the trend of the times. In short, look at it as we may, it is hard to resist the conclusion that without his own personal experience no one is fitted to judge of these matters; and that, when all is said, the cardinal principles of ethics ought to reveal themselves when there is resolute analysis of anyone's personal experience. If so, this personal analysis and these personal reflections are emphatically worth a hearing. Indeed, they are always indispensable, and they may very well be decisive.

On the whole, then, I think we should conclude that the cynic's objections are not well founded. To interpret the value of life as we see it, to form opinions on duty, on conscience, on the meaning of what (as we believe) we ought to do, is something we may not avoid, and a thing which, if it is sincere, is very unlikely to be worthless. So far from deploring this immense volume of expression upon moral questions, we should, on the contrary, welcome it; and this in any form in which the opinion appears. It is a commonplace, and justly so, that the best reflections upon moral questions are to be found, not, for the most part, in the pages of professed or professional moralists (although much maybe learned from the best of these), but in poetry, the drama, the novel, or in the biographies of surgeons, of priests, of administrators, or of plain people. That is as it should be; and those philosophers who, like Aristotle, have busied themselves with the opinions of the many as well as with the opinions of the wise, have treated their subject as it ought to be treated.

I have tried to explain why I think this should be so, but since the mere mention of " common sense " and of the " plain man " is open to the most various constructions, I could not be pardoned if I did not try to prevent some of the more palpable misconstructions. Common sense, I suppose, means the body of current opinion within a given community at a given time. Hence it is neither sacrosanct nor likely to be more than a rough approximation to anything that is true. It cannot be sacrosanct because we know as a matter of history that current opinion on every matter is better or worse informed in different communities at different times; and even if we consider ourselves better informed than any other people in any age we could not surely have the effrontery to argue that our current opinions are incapable of improvement. Again, it seems plain that within any given community the current general opinion is not likely to be the best-informed opinion on any given topic. From the nature of the case this current, general opinion cannot be expert opinion, unless it is supposed that in some matters every one is an expert and as good as any other expert.

In many ways, therefore, the hardest things that are said of common sense ate among the most just- Since most of us are prejudiced, slovenly in our thinking, vague guessers with very little appreciation of the essentials of accuracy, or of the meaning of adequate proof, it is unlikely that the current opinion on any topic is anywhere near the best. To expect very much from it is to expect miracles from compulsory school education. The usual opinion is an opinion that is led, not an opinion that leads, and by the time an idea is generally grasped it is almost certain to be antiquated. If not, it is grasped only in the way in which jaded people pick up blatant discoveries from a newspaper. And there is usually very great disingenuousness in the appeal to common sense. If we really knew the honest opinion of most of our neighbours, and could discriminate that in it which is truly theirs, not simply accepted from indolence or imposed by hearsay, we might, to be sure, have some respect for it. In general, however, there is no such inventory and nothing of this discrimination. What a man sets forth as the opinion of " common sense " is usually his own opinion, combined with the belief that in expressing it he is sheltering himself behind the herd. He presumes general agreement without any sufficient evidence, and in suggesting that his opponent is eccentric reveals his own calibre by assuming that he has said a hard thing about him. In a word, the man is lazy and a coward.

All this is true, but it is not all the truth. The necessary corrective is careful discrimination between those matters in which current opinion is likely to be important and those in which it is not. Of the former we may say that if there are any matters on which the generality of mankind have first-hand experience, and on which they have to think for themselves, it is extremely probable that the general opinion is well worth considering in so far as it may be ascertained. For this there are many reasons. However loose, and slipshod, and disingenuous our ordinary thinking may be, it is at the least extremely unlikely that any opinions widely held and widely followed are hopelessly astray. The test of practice is too stern for this, the pressure of actuality far too considerable. What commonly happens, indeed, is that the prevailing opinions are bewildered and untidy fusions of blurred but cardinal elements; and the besetting sin of most theorists upon these general topics is that although they take a little longer to contradict themselves than other people, they are, on the whole, more likely to omit essential points. A thinker, therefore, who ignores current opinion does so at his peril. He may, indeed, be a better thinker than his fellows, more apt in logical reflection or in the expression of it, but he is likely to forget some of the massive stubborn wisdom that is at least half-articulated in the body of current beliefs.

For the reasons already given, I think it is a mistake to suppose, as many do, that the whole of a moralist's business is to clarify common opinion, and to compel it to become systematic by a sort of Socratic self-examination. This is because there may be a great deal of relevant knowledge (derived, say, from history and from the sciences) which could not possibly be elicited from the resources of self-reflection upon first-hand experience; and a moralist who would ape the son of Sophroniscus in these modern days should at least go to school with many famous sages before he begins to set these limpid, direct, ingenuous, leading questions. Yet it is not too much to say that the principal evidence in these enquiries is, and must always be, the analysis of that moral experience which comes to everyone by the mere fact of responsible behaviour. It is possible, indeed, that a trained observer may be a better interpreter of man's actions and of the ends that humanity pursues than most of the other actors, and even that such an one should be a shrewder judge of others than of himself. As Francis Bacon said: " The calling of a man's self to a strict account is a medicine sometimes too piercing and corrosive; reading good books of morality is a little flat and dead; observing our faults in others is sometimes improper for our case; but the best receipt (best, I say, to work and best to take) is the admonition of a friend." ¹ On the whole, however, it is the examined life that instructs us here, and its principles are elicited from individual searchings of the heart and of the conscience. For this there is a reason entirely sufficient. When a man finds himself faced with a moral alternative he knows that he is faced with a problem that in principle is general. To have moral experience at all is therefore to encounter some principle, and every moral act implies the use of principle and some knowledge of it. Since every responsible being has to train himself in moral matters, he has therefore to train himself in moral principles. Accordingly, in his degree he is a moralist and an expert. In short, anyone who takes account of his actions should also take account of his principles.

These observations indicate, and in a measure may serve to defend, the general standpoint occupied by this study. We have the right, indeed, to hope, and we may be wise to expect, highly important results, say, from the present ferment in the social sciences and in psychology, or from the liberating ideas now current in biology. Nevertheless, anyone who is tempted to look for a new, an alien, and an utterly unexpected ethic to arise from these sources is not even, I believe, " legitimately tempted," if I may be pardoned for using Lord Haldane's phrase. However profoundly these mechanical, medical, and psychical discoveries may properly alter our outlook upon life, and the mode in which we set out to regulate it, it is scarcely to be supposed that they can do more than modulate the essentials of moral theory. For, as we have seen, if moral experience is truly what it claims to be, it must show, and must have shown itself (not too dimly), in all who assume moral responsibility—that is to say, in nearly all of us and for many ages past. The cardinal features of the moral domain present themselves, quite plainly, whenever a man is aware that he has a duty to do; and therefore these cardinal features are relatively little at the mercy of fresh discoveries in science, or of new and strange problems arising out of the means which civilization affords for the instruction of our lives. The ultimate problems in morals, in a word, have presented themselves in the same essential fashion to a great multitude for a great while, however true it may be that the entanglements of living have perplexed, or the haze of local conditions has obscured, them.

The need for continuous discussion of these topics (apart from the fact that the dead speak only in the living, and are apt to make living minds a prey to their own corruption if living mouths are content to repeat dead words) is precisely the necessity for mastering principles (irrespective of their antiquity) in our own time, and for applying them to the needs of our own generation. Hence, while we should not strain after novelty, we dare not avoid dealing with much that is new. It is unlikely, however, that each generation, simply because it comes fresh to its problems, should consider itself bound to inaugurate a latter-day revolution in its principal findings. One of the signal advantages of philosophy, indeed, and one of the strongest reasons why moral science should still be accounted moral philosophy, is precisely that philosophers have usually been trained to keep their heads, in a measure at least, during all the whirling vicissitudes of the fashion in ideas.

Let us proceed, then (if the reader cares to put it so, in the good old-fashioned way), to consider the anatomy of fundamental moral conceptions.

¹ Bacon's Essays: " Of friendship."

Chapter II
The Character of Moral Enquiry

OUR thinking is always an attempt to solve a problem. It is an endeavour to find an answer to the questions which some theme presents, to give a reason for the things which have a reason.

The problem which moral enquiry has to consider is a certain pertinent, inescapable question that is set by the fact of action. This question is whether any given action is what it ought to be. In other words, moral theory is concerned with the reasons that justify action; or else that condemn it. What is asked is whether there are any such reasons, and, if so, how and in what degree they justify.

Accordingly, one of the first things we have to do in this enquiry is to distinguish reasons which justify (or, at any rate, reasons of the kind which might conceivably justify), from reasons of every other sort. The essential contrast here is between reasons that are simply explanatory and reasons that justify or condemn. This contrast applies very sharply to actions. If, for example, we could show how an action came about, or the causes that sustain it in its present character, we should have answered certain relevant questions that might be asked about it; and therefore we should have explained it in these respects. We should not, however, have even begun to justify it. To justify it we should have to show, not that it is of a certain kind, or that it has come about in a certain way, but that it ought to be of this kind.

This distinction, I repeat, is entirely plain and quite fundamental. It is not even abstruse. When we speak, as Mr. Kipling does, of things for which there are " plenty of reasons but not a single excuse," we all recognize, and readily, what is meant, and we know that the difference is profound. Similarly, we all distinguish between a defence and an explanation, although sometimes, to be sure, we may be temporarily puzzled by spurious sagacities like Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. It would be permissible, therefore, to leave the distinction as it stands. Yet it is so momentous and so often forgotten that the leisurely survey of a few illustrations need not be dilatory, and may even repay. If we select instances in which the distinction may easily be clouded over by inadvertence, so much the better.

Let us consider, then, the account of President Wilson's actions at the Versailles Conference that Mr. Keynes gives us in his Economic Consequences of the Peace, and let us assume, purely for the argument's sake, that Mr. Keynes described in that work, not only what he thought he saw, but what actually was before his very penetrating eyes. His story, we may say, is in effect that the late President, having at the time a prestige, power, and moral opportunity unequalled in the world before, nevertheless let the opportunity slip for reasons readily explicable, but not of the type that justify. Insensitive to the nuances of hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• PREFACE
• Contents
• CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER II THE CHARACTER OF MORAL ENQUIRY
• CHAPTER III OF IMPERATIVES AND OF THEIR JUSTIFICATON
• CHAPTER IV THE APPLICATION TO PRACTICE
• CHAPTER V THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL
• CHAPTER VI THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MORAL ACTION
• CHAPTER VII CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS REGULATION
• CHAPTER VIII FREEDOM
• CHAPTER IX A SURVEY CONCERNING IMPERATIVES
• CHAPTER X SELF AND OTHERS
• CHAPTER XI THE ETHICS OF COLLECTIVE ACTION
• CHAPTER XII MORAL PHILOSOPHY
• APPENDICES
• INDEX