Philosophy

Ethics is traditionally a department of philosophy, and that is my reason for discussing it. I hardly think myself that it ought to be included in the domain of philosophy, but to prove this would take as long as to discuss the subject itself, and would be less interesting. As a provisional definition, we may take ethics to consist of general principles which help to determine rules of conduct. It is not the business of ethics to say how a person should act in such and such specific circumstances; that is the province of casuistry. The word “casuistry” has acquired bad connotations, as a result of the Protestant and Jansenist attacks on the Jesuits. But in its old and proper sense it represents a perfectly legitimate study. Take, say, the question: In what circumstances is it right to tell a lie? Some people, unthinkingly, would say: Never! But this answer cannot be seriously defended. Everybody admits that you should lie if you meet a homicidal maniac pursuing a man with a view to murdering him, and he asks you whether the man has passed your way. It is admitted that lying is a legitimate branch of the art of warfare; also that priests may lie to guard the secrets of the confessional, and doctors to protect the professional confidences of their patients. All such questions belong to casuistry in the old sense, and it is evident that they are questions deserving to be asked and answered. But they do not belong to ethics in the sense in which this study has been included in philosophy. It is not the business of ethics to arrive at actual rules of conduct, such as: “Thou shalt not steal”. This is the province of morals. Ethics is expected to provide a basis from which such rules can be deduced. The rules of morals differ according to the age, the race, and the creed of the community concerned, to an extent that is hardly realised by those who have neither travelled nor studied anthropology. Even within a homogeneous community differences of opinion arise. Should a man kill his wife’s lover? The Church says no, the law says no, and common sense says no; yet many people would say yes, and juries often refuse to condemn. These doubtful cases arise when a moral rule is in process of changing. But ethics is concerned with something more general than moral rules, and less subject to change. It is true that, in a given community, an ethic which does not lead to the moral rules accepted by that community is considered immoral. It does not, of course, follow that such an ethic is in fact false, since the moral rules of that community may be undesirable. Some tribes of head-hunters hold that no man should marry until he can bring to the wedding the head of an enemy slain by himself. Those who question this moral rule are held to be encouraging licence and lowering the standard of manliness. Nevertheless, we should not demand of an ethic that it should justify the moral rules of head-hunters. Perhaps the best way to approach the subject of ethics is to ask what is meant when a person says: “You ought to do so-and-so” or “I ought to do so-and-so”. Primarily, a sentence of this sort has an emotional content; it means “this is the act towards which I feel the emotion of approval”. But we do not wish to leave the matter there; we want to find something more objective and systematic and constant than a personal emotion. The ethical teacher says: “You ought to approve acts of such-and-such kinds”. He generally gives reasons for this view, and we have to examine what sorts of reasons are possible. We are here on very ancient ground. Socrates was concerned mainly with ethics; Plato and Aristotle both discussed the subject at length; before their time, Confucius and Buddha had each founded a religion consisting almost entirely of ethical teaching, though in the case of Buddhism there was afterwards a growth of theological doctrine. The views of the ancients on ethics are better worth studying than their views on (say) physical science; the subject has not yet proved amenable to exact reasoning, and we cannot boast that the moderns have as yet rendered their predecessors obsolete. Historically, virtue consisted at first of obedience to authority, whether that of the gods, the government, or custom. Those who disobeyed authority suffered obvious penalties. This is still the view of Hegel, to whom virtue consists in obedience to the State. There are, however, different forms of this theory, and the objections to them are different. In its more primitive form, the theory is unaware that different authorities take different views as to what constitutes virtue, and it therefore universalises the practice of the community in which the theoriser lives. When other ages and nations are found to have different customs, these are condemned as abominations. Let us consider this view first. The view we are now to examine is the theory that there are certain rules of conduct—e.g. the Decalogue—which determine virtue in all situations. The person who keeps all the rules is perfectly virtuous; the person who fails in this is wicked in proportion to the frequency of his failures. There are several objections to this as the basis of ethics. In the first place, the rules can hardly cover the whole field of human conduct; e.g. there is nothing in the Decalogue to show whether we ought to have a gold standard or not. Accordingly those who hold this view regard some questions as “moral issues”, while others have not this character. That means, in practice, that in regard to “moral issues” we ought to act in a certain way, regardless of consequences, while in other matters we ought to consider which course will do the most good. Thus in effect we are driven to adopt two different ethical systems, one where the code has spoken, the other where it is silent. This is unsatisfactory to a philosopher. The second objection to such a view is suggested by the first. We all feel that certain results are desirable, and others undesirable; but a code of conduct which takes no account of circumstances will have sometimes the sort of consequences we think desirable, and sometimes the sort we think undesirable. Take, e.g. the precept “Thou shalt not kill”. All respectable people hold that this does not apply when the State orders a person to kill; on this ground among others, the New York School Board recently refused to sanction the teaching of the Decalogue in schools. A third objection is that it may be asked how the moral rules are known. The usual answer, historically, is that they are known by revelation and tradition. But these are extra-philosophical sources of knowledge. The philosopher cannot but observe that there have been many revelations, and that it is not clear why he should adopt one rather than another. To this it may be replied that conscience is a personal revelation to each individual, and invariably tells him what is right and what is wrong. The difficulty of this view is that conscience changes from age to age. Most people nowadays consider it wrong to burn a man alive for disagreeing with them in metaphysics, but formerly this was held to be a highly meritorious act, provided it was done in the interests of the right metaphysics. No one who has studied the history of moral ideas can regard conscience as invariably right. Thus we are driven to abandon the attempt to define virtue by means of a set of rules of conduct. There is, however, another form of the view that virtue consists in obedience to authority. This may be called “the administrator’s ethic”. A Roman or Anglo-Indian pro-consul would define virtue as obedience to the moral code of the community to which a man happens to belong. No matter how moral codes may differ, a man should always obey that of his own time and place and creed. A Mohammedan, for instance, would not be regarded as wicked for practising polygamy, but an Englishman would, even if he lived in a Mohammedan country. This view makes social conformity the essence of virtue; or, as with Hegel, regards virtue as obedience to the government. The difficulty of such theories is that they make it impossible to apply ethical predicates to authority: we cannot find any meaning for the statement that a custom is good or that the government is bad. The view is appropriate to despots and their willing slaves; it cannot survive in a progressive democracy. We come a little nearer to a correct view when we define right conduct by the motive or state of mind of the agent. According to this theory, acts inspired by certain emotions are good, and those inspired by certain other emotions are bad. Mystics hold this view, and have accordingly a certain contempt for the letter of the law. Broadly speaking, it would be held that acts inspired by love are good, and those inspired by hate are bad. In practice, I hold this view to be right; but philosophically I regard it as deducible from something more fundamental. All the theories we have hitherto considered are opposed to those which judge the rightness or wrongness of conduct by its consequences. Of these the most famous is the utilitarian philosophy, which maintained that happiness is the good, and that we ought to act so as to maximise the balance of happiness over unhappiness in the world. I should not myself regard happiness as an adequate definition of the good, but I should agree that conduct ought to be judged by its consequences. I do not mean, of course, that in every practical exigency of daily life we should attempt to think out the results of this or that line of conduct, because, if we did, the opportunity for action would often be past before our calculations were finished. But I do mean that the received moral code, in so far as it is taught in education and embodied in public opinion or the criminal law, should be carefully examined in each generation, to see whether it still serves to achieve desirable ends, and, if not, in what respects it needs to be amended. The moral code, in short, like the legal code, should adapt itself to changing circumstances, keeping the public good always as its motive. If so, we have to consider in what the public good consists. According to this view, “right conduct” is not an autonomous concept, but means “conduct calculated to produce desirable results”. It will be right, let us say, to act so as to make people happy and intelligent, but wrong to act so as to make them unhappy and stupid. We have to ask ourselves how we can discover what constitutes the ends of right conduct. There is a view, advocated, e.g. by Dr. G. E. Moore, that “good” is an indefinable notion, and that we know a priori certain general propositions about the kinds of things that are good on their own account. Such things as happiness, knowledge, appreciation of beauty, are known to be good, according to Dr. Moore; it is also known that we ought to act so as to create what is good and prevent what is bad. I formerly held this view myself, but I was led to abandon it, partly by Mr. Santayana’s Winds of Doctrine. I now think that good and bad are derivative from desire. I do not mean quite simply that the good is the desired, because men’s desires conflict, and “good” is, to my mind, mainly a social concept, designed to find an issue from this conflict. The conflict, however, is not only between the desires of different men, but between incompatible desires of one man at