A Modern Introduction to Moral Philosophy

Alan Montefiore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000073966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Originally published in 1958, this book shows how a systematic consideration of what exactly may be meant by calling anything 'good', inevitably leads on to the more general and fundamental problem of the relations between value-judgments and statements of fact. It does on to explain some of the difficult and far-reaching issues which this problem involves. The book is intended as an introduction for students interested in finding out the nature and point of modern methods of philosophic analysis when applied to problems of moral philosophy.

1

INTRODUCTION

ACCORDING to its title this book is an introduction to moral philosophy. But it must be admitted straight away that as a title this is neither novel, inspiring nor informative. So before doing anything else I had better try and give some more exact indication of what kind of book it is intended to be. This should provide at least some sort of warning for those who very wisely prefer to read the first chapter of a book in the shop before deciding (usually) not to buy it after all.

The first and most important warning is that it is seriously intended to be an introduction. It is not, therefore, intended for those who are already philosophers, professional or otherwise; and I should make it clear at the outset that any interest that it may have for them will be almost entirely accidental.

The second warning is of almost the opposite sort. For though as an introduction this really is meant for people who do not know any philosophy to start with, it is still bound in places to demand a fairly concentrated attention. In one way, indeed, it would be something of a fraud if it did not. For it would be wrong to give the impression that philosophy is an entirely simple subject. This is not because it is a particularly technical one—though it may admittedly have its own (often exaggerated) technicalities. It is rather because it nearly always involves keeping in mind a great number of points at once, and the ability to follow a sustained and systematic argument, both of which things need a good deal of practice. So an introduction that was so determined to be clear that it succeeded only by giving no idea whatsoever of how complex the subject can be, could not properly be considered as an introduction to philosophy at all.

Still, this warning should not be taken too grimly. It is true that the overall continuity of the argument will mean that skipping may very well lead to confusions. But, on the other hand, I have ended each chapter by trying to sum up its main points. And I have also tried as best I could at no stage to forget that I should not assume any knowledge of philosophy beyond what will have been given already in previous chapters.

There is one other warning to be issued: namely that the sort of philosophy to which this is an introduction is specifically the sort of philosophy that is at present generally practised in this country. There are two main reasons for this apparently parochial restriction. The first lies in the fact that British philosophy is for the most part so very different in style, assumption and method from most philosophy on the continent that it would be impossible to embark on them both at once; and it is after all British philosophy that is most likely to be the more immediately relevant and accessible to the ordinary British reader. Most people, of course, know nothing at all even about British philosophers. Of those that do know something, many know little more than that they are at the moment largely preoccupied with questions of language. It is often thought, too, that this preoccupation leads them to be generally intricate and obscure, and always futile and remote; and that with all their playing with definitions, the present-day philosophers have made their tower not even of real ivory, but rather of dry white bone from which the flesh has long since withered away.

Some philosophers, no doubt, do spend too much of their time in analysing other philosophers’ analyses from towers such as these. But then at any time and in any school of philosophy there are obviously bound to be some who are better or worse, greater or lesser than others. At any rate, in trying to explain and to show something of what this modern British philosophy is like, I shall try also to show how its concern with language can in fact arise out of and involve issues which are entirely serious and anything but remote; how, for instance, our view of the basis of our own principles of value can turn on the answers we give to questions that may seem at first sight to be both technical and irrelevant. I have naturally tried to do this as clearly as I could. But I have also, I admit without apology, deliberately introduced a certain limited number of the commoner and more important terms of professional jargon. I have done this not only because jargon, if not allowed to run wild, can often be a most useful and even necessary device—shorter, more precise than the alternative expressions that may (or may not) be available in ordinary speech and, by reason of its very unfamiliarity, less liable to carry unwanted and misleading associations; but more especially because anyone who may perhaps be stimulated to grapple further with the questions raised in this book, will be helped to make his way about more advanced discussions if he has already met and used some of the commoner tools of the trade. This indeed has been my chief aim; not to provide definitive solutions, but to give to someone who has not done any philosophy before enough of the hang of it to be able to go on with the arguments for himself. For even though he may not himself want to become a philosopher, to have taken part in philosophic discussion is in the end the only effective way to appreciate what philosophy is about.

If, then, philosophy involves a certain sort of systematic discussion, the best way to see what sort of discussion this is, is to start to discuss. The whole of this book, therefore, will grow out of and around the consideration of one particular problem. This brings me to my second reason for sticking to the current British type of philosophy. It is quite simply that this is how philosophical problems most naturally present themselves to me. This in its turn is, of course, very largely due to the accident of where I was first taught to think about these things, at Oxford which is a notorious centre of what is known as linguistic analysis. It would obviously be absurd to pretend that there is nothing but confusion in all other types of philosophy or that this method avoids all really serious difficulties. But it does, I think, provide the best way in which at any rate to start. For it can hardly be seriously denied that whatever else one may wish to discuss, one must at all times try to keep clear the meaning of what is being said; or at the very least, if this is sometimes impossible, to be as clear as one can be about where ambiguities must for the time being remain and the reasons why they must do so. And this is one of the most characteristic interests of modern British philosophy. For it is essentially concerned with problems of meaning; not, I should add, of the sort that can be settled by a hasty definition or two, but the less obvious, far more tricky, far more dangerous kind that are often unnoticed as problems at all but which, once they are looked into, lead on to other problems and to others and to others.

So I shall start out from one particular problem, trying to sketch in by the way just enough of the background to show how it has come to seem natural to tackle the problem from this angle. In doing this I must confess to having made only an occasional attempt to sort out the sources of the various views I put forward. For the most part I would anyhow find it very hard to do so. So much of what is said here has been floating around in the philosophical air that it is not easy to tell in exactly which part of the air one has absorbed what. But in any case in a discussion which is new to the reader in the way that this one must be, continual references to names and journals of which he has never heard would tend to provide little but distraction and irritation. So I must apologise most humbly in advance to all those whose views may be mentioned, but whose names may not.

It follows from this that any small claims to originality on my part would be both dubious and irrelevant. It is, however, only right to say that I should expect a good many philosophers to disagree with some of the arguments that I use, particularly towards the second part of the book. Still, I do not think that this matters very much; (indeed it is hardly avoidable in view of the ways in which philosophers all tend to disagree among themselves). This is not after all intended to be any sort of a survey, but an introduction to philosophy by way of a philosophical discussion; and the reader should be encouraged rather than anything else by the thought that if and when he disagrees with my views on the problems discussed, he has a very reasonable chance of finding himself in the most respectable philosophic company. Of course, I have tried not to make mistakes—though since one cannot hope to be clear unless one is tolerably brief, I have often had to leave out qualifications that for accuracy’s sake ought undoubtedly to have been made. But I have made no particular effort to steer away from controversy. For it is far better to stimulate disagreement than not to stimulate at all.

It now only remains to explain my choice of problem from which to start. The questions that are usually discussed under the heading of moral philosophy are probably linked together by tradition as much as by anything else. But there are two of them, on the answers to which will depend to one degree or another the answers that may be given to nearly all the rest. The first of these concerns the nature of value judgments as compared to other sorts of assertions, and in particular to statements of fact; the second, the existence or non-existence of free will and its bearing on notions of moral responsibility. Properly speaking these are not so much two questions as two groups of questions, and they are not in fact wholly independent of each other. When I was first trying to plan this book I had thought of dividing it into two approximately equal parts, one to each group of questions, with a linking chapter in between. But as I went on I found, inevitably no doubt, that the first part was growing so long that any book of which it were only a half would be of intolerable length. So what was first intended to be the linking chapter turns out to be the last full chapter of the book, in which I try only to show one of the ways in which the problem of value judgments can lead into the problem of free will, and to sketch in the barest of outlines some of the main issues with which this latter problem is bound up; and the book itself is in effect about the first group of problems only.

In these circumstances it could very reasonably be asked whether it may not be somewhat misleading to stick to the original title. For this problem of the nature of value judgments involves on the one hand some prior consideration of certain fundamental and very general issues concerning philosophy as a whole; while it is on the other hand a problem of which the nature of moral value judgments is after all but one aspect. For moral value judgments are by no means the only sort that are made. And I have indeed to admit that it is only in one chapter, and only in one part of that, that the problem of distinguishing moral from other values receives any explicit attention. All this on top of the fact that I have (in this book) little to say about freedom and not even a word about conscience.

But when all this has been admitted, it still seems to me that a discussion about the nature of value judgments can provide as good an introduction as any to moral philosophy. This is partly just because it does involve the incidental discussion of so many wider issues. For it would be a complete mistake to think of moral philosophy as a separate and self-contained subject of its own. A moral philosopher is one who is interested, certainly, in questions about moral judgments, but he must be in the first place a philosopher; and most philosophical problems turn out, if one pushes them far enough, to be involved in most others. It is true, similarly, that any discussion about the nature of value judgments is bound to have a bearing on a wide range of topics, only some of which will in themselves have anything to do with morals. On the other hand, the question of the nature of value judgments is of fundamental importance to moral philosophy. For anything that is true of value judgments in general must ipso facto hold for moral value judgments in particular; and if at the same time there are other implications too, then so much the better—it is a little like receiving a free sample along with the goods that one really went to purchase. As for the problem of marking off moral value judgments from the rest, it can surely only be tackled in the course of a general consideration of evaluation and not right at the outset. Finally, though it is also true, as I have already admitted, that there are very many topics which belong by tradition to moral philosophy but which make no appearance here, I can but repeat that this is intended as an introduction rather than as a survey—an introduction to a certain sort of approach, a certain style of argument, rather than to a certain range of opinions.

So the question for us now is, what is the nature of value judgments—on what may they be based and how do they differ from other sorts of judgments? Or at least this is the question in its most general aspect. In this very general and remote-seeming form, however, it would be very hard to tackle virtually out of the blue. It will be far better to start from one particular instance of the general problem, from the sort of question that might crop up in the course of some quite ordinary argument between people who find that they disagree on some matter of right or wrong, about whether someone or something is good or bad. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred we use these terms without the slightest hesitation, taking it for granted that we all know what each other means. And then, the hundredth time, an unexpectedly obstinate disagreement may suddenly give rise to doubt. You are sure that a certain sort of action is bad; but the man with whom you work is just as sure that it is good. It seems impossible that you should both be right, yet equally impossible for either to show that the other is wrong. Perhaps there has been a misunderstanding, perhaps you are talking at cross purposes, perhaps you do not really understand what each other wants to say. Perhaps even you may each become a little unsure of what you mean yourselves. It is at this sort of moment and in this sort of way that one may come to ask—what does it mean to say that something is good? This at any rate is the question with which we shall begin.

2

ON PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION

WHAT DOES IT mean to say of anything that it is good? It is hard to say at first glance whether this question is absurdly easy or absurdly difficult. Perhaps, in different ways, it is both. For most people would probably reply that they know perfectly well what they mean, but that they find it hard or impossible to express their meaning precisely. In a way there is nothing odd about this. It is notoriously one thing to do something that one knows how to do well, and very much another to explain exactly what it is that one is doing so that somebody else will be able to do it too; this is as true of using words correctly as it is of swimming or walking a tight rope. Indeed people hardly ever find it easy to explain exactly what any given word means. All the same, the word ‘good’ seems to present more of a puzzle than perhaps most of the others that we use. This is the more surprising in that so far from it being a technical term, it is on the contrary one of the commonest and most naturally used in the language.

The trouble is not that there are no suggestions available. It is on the contrary that there are so many that it is hard to see how they can all be compatible with each other. There is admittedly something unfair in pressing someone who is unwilling to commit himself to a definition of ‘good’. When nevertheless, one is so unfair as to press people in this way, one meets again and again with answers such as these. ‘Good’, some say, means quite different things in each different context in which it is used, and perhaps even different things too to each person who uses it; thus for one person it will mean ‘sweet and sparkling’ when applied to cider, but ‘short and clear’ when applied to an argument; to another it may mean ‘rough and still’ and ‘long and subtle’ when applied in the same two contexts. Others will prefer to distinguish two main senses, ‘good as a means’ and ‘good as an end’, where the first can be taken as roughly equivalent to ‘efficient’ and the second has to be left as incapable of further definition. Some say that its meaning is so vague that there is nothing useful that can be said about it beyond that it is employed to show some favourable reaction. Others that in its moral sense at least it has a definite meaning that can be understood, if they put their minds to it, by the great majority of people. Some, again, say something to the effect that anything that contributes to the general happiness is to that degree good; while others restrict themselves to the comment that one man’s meat is another man’s poison and that it is all a matter of taste.

It is possible, of course, that not all these answers, and the many others that are given, are so incompatible as they may sound. The notions of definition and meaning are themselves far from being so clear that we may expect a request for the meaning of a word always to be understood in the same way. Perhaps the most important point to settle whenever we are asked for definitions is whether we are being asked primarily about the usage of words or about the nature of things, because although sometimes roughly the same answer will do as well in either case, this is not always so. An example may help to make the distinction clear. Someone who is not familiar with the word, a child for instance, may ask me “What is ‘green’?”, and I may explain its meaning to him by pointing to different objects which are of that colour, while distinguishing them from others which are not. In this way he may learn to use the word for himself. Later on, however, the same child may be learning to paint and, knowing by now quite well how to use the word, may nevertheless ask me “What is green?”, needing this time to know that it can be obtained by mixing blue and yellow. We may call the second empirical or factual information as opposed to the first which is linguistic. (The word ‘empirical’ means roughly ‘relying on or derived from experience’. Clearly neither it nor the term ‘factual’ are altogether satisfactory for obviously there are facts about the language too. But they are often used to refer to something like ‘non-linguistic experience’ and ‘the facts of the non-linguistic world’ and therefore it is as well to introduce them in those senses here.) Notice how the nature of the information may depend on the circumstances in which it is offered. I might produce the same collection of green things that I showed to the child learning to control his vocabulary, to someone else who simply wanted to know what green things I had available. To such a person I shall evidently be giving empirical or factual information, to someone, moreover, who could not have asked for it correctly unless the word ‘green’ was already at his command.

It is true, of course, that there is often no clear line to be drawn between language and non-linguistic fact. Very naturally our theories and beliefs about the nature of things affect what comes to be the standard way of talking about them. Nevertheless it will often be useful to have a way of showing whether we are talking about language or the things to which we use language to refer.

Thus, while our theories and beliefs about the nature of things certainly affect what comes to be the standard way of talking about them, and while it is also true that it may be often impossible to draw a sharp line between language and non-linguistic fact and silly to attempt to do so, it will nevertheless be useful to have a way of showing which we are talking about. Indeed, if we had no clear method of marking the difference between using a part of our vocabulary in the normal manner on the one hand and talking about that vocabulary on the other, we should be in no position to discuss the problems of the relation between language and non-linguistic fact at all. There are a number of fashionable ways of marking this distinction, but it will be enough to introduce two of them here. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 On Problems of Definition
• 3 On Statements, Synthetic and Analytic
• 4 Whether Value Judgments are Statements and Whether Values are Properties
• 5 The Meaning of ‘Good’
• 6 The Meaning of ‘True’
• 7 “Can I be sincerely mistaken about what is right?”
• 8 Ought’ and Is’ (i)—A Matter of Logic?
• 9 Ought’ and Is’ (ii)—A Recognisable Distinction’
• 10 ‘Liking’ and ‘Approval’
• 11 The Meaning of ‘Moral’, of ‘Value Judgment’ and of ‘Neutral Statement’
• 12 Reasons, Causes and Free Will
• 13 Retrospect
• Appendix. Further Reflections on “The Meaning of ‘True’”
• Bibliography
• Index