***
"The prevalence of this tendency to obiectify values — and not only moral ones — is confirmed by a pattern of thinking that we find in existentialists and those influenced by them. The denial of obiective values can carry with it an extreme emotional reaction, a feeling that nothing matters at all, that life has lost its purpose. Of course this does not follow; the lack of objective values s not a good reason for abandoning subjective concern or for ceasing to want anything. But the abpndonment of a belief in objective values can cause, at least temporarily, a decay of subjective concern and sense of purpose. That it does so is evidence that the people in whom this reaction occurs have been tending to objectify their concerns and purposes, have been giving them a fictitious external authority. A claim to objectivity has been so strongly associated with their subjective concerns and purposes that the collapse of the former seems to undermine the latter as well...
Yet at the end [Bertrand Russell] admits:
Certainly there seems to be something more. Suppose, for example, that some one were to advocate the introduction of bullfighting in this country. In opposing the proposal, I should feel, not only that I was expressing my desires, but that my desires in the matter are right, whatever that may mean. As a matter of argument, I can, 1 think, show that I am not guilty of any logical inconsistency in holding to the above interpretation of ethics and at the same time expressing strong ethical preferences. But in feeling I am not satisfied.
But he concludes, reasonably enough, with the remark: 'I can only say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, other people's satisfy me still less.'...
'Moral sense' or 'intuition' is an initially more plausible description of what supplies many of our basic moral judgments than 'reason'...
As Cudworth and Clarke and Price, for example, show, even those who still admit divine commands, or the positive law of God, may believe moral values to have an independent objective but still action-guiding authority. Responding to Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma, they believe that God commands what he commands because it is in itself good or right, not that it is good or right merely because and in that he commands it. Otherwise God himself could not be called good. Price asks, ‘What can be more preposterous, than to make the Deity nothing but will; and to exalt this on the ruins of his attributes?’ The apparent objectivity of moral value is a widespread phenomenon which has more than one source: the persistence of a belief in something like divine law when the belief in the divine legislator has faded out is only one factor among others...
It is curious that so much interest has been concentrated on the word ‘ought’, which is a relatively weak modal auxiliary. Anyone who really means business uses ‘must’ or ‘shall’ rather than ‘ought’ (or ‘should’) in his moral pronouncements. The Ten Commandments are not given in English in the form 'You ought not to have any other gods before me ... You ought not to kill...’ and we should get a rather different message if they were...
The thorough-going Nazi, the hard-core fanatic, is the man who will sincerely prescribe that he himself and his family should be exterminated if it turns out that they are Jews by descent. He is prepared to follow the second as well as the first stage of universalization, but not the third: his attachment to the Aryan ideal is so strong and inflexible that he will give no weight to interests which are incompatible with that ideal, and which would be valued in the light of other ideals which he neither shares nor respects. The ordinary run of Nazis, as distinct from these fanatics, are merely thoughtless and insensitive: they have failed to carry out the second stage of universalization, for example, to consider seriously what it would be like if they themselves were Jews; but, if they did this, their adherence to Nazism would be undermined.
The position of Hare’s liberal reveals one of the above-mentioned indeterminacies. Can the liberal, if he is to give equal weight to all ideals, have any ideals of his own other than this liberal one itself — the second order ideal of weighting all first order ideals equally? If he has some first order ideals, we must distinguish him in his role as a participant in this first order conflict from him in his role as a third stage universalizer, giving equal weight to all actually-held ideals, and looking upon himself qua participant as one among many...
Thinking in standard moral terms, seriously prescriptive and genuinely universalizable in this first way, carries such a willingness with it. But the (supposed) truth of this logical thesis does not compel anyone to think this way, even under penalty of illogicality. For one can with complete consistency refrain from using moral language at all, or again one can use moral terms with only part and not the whole their standard moral force. The fact that the word ‘atom’, used in nineteenth-century physics, had as part of its meaning ‘indivisible particle of matter’ did not in itself, even in the nineteenth century, compel anyone to believe that there are indivisible material particles. One could either refrain from using the term ‘atom’ in affirmative statements or, as physicists have subsequently done, use the term with other parts of its meaning only, dropping the requirement of indivisibility. A logical or semantic truth is no real constraint on belief; nor, analogously, can one be any real constraint upon action or prescription or evaluation or choice of policy.
[Ed: One for the etymological fallacy people and strong proponents of Sapir-Whorf]
... The contrast between Protagoras and Hobbes points at least to a change in the scale of the problem. Protagoras was looking for the ordering principles of a city, a polis, and in Greece a polis could be pretty small: his problem was how men could form social units large enouugh to compete with the wild beasts. But for Hobbes the problem was how to maintain a stable nation state. Today the scale has changed again: we can no longer share Hobbes’s assumption that it is only civil wars that are really a menace, that international wars do relatively little harm. Warnock thinks it is slightly improper for a philosopher to take any account at all of contingent empirical facts about the human predicament; but we might argue that, given this general approach, he should have taken more account of them, not less...
Technological advances of many kinds have put greatly increased powers into the hands of some men and some organizations. These include powers to do harm; for example, to wage nuclear war. Also, powers to do at least apparent good. As Belloc said:
Of old, when folk were sick and sorely tried
The doctors gave them physic, and they died;
But here’s a happier age, for now we know
Both how to make men sick and keep them so.
... It is tempting to speak of all these as increased powers that mankind (or ‘Man’) now has and may use in one way or another or refrain from using. But this is utterly misleading. Mankind is not an agent; it has no unity of decision; it is therefore not confronted with any choices. Our game theory examples have made even plainer what should have been plain enough without them, that a plurality of interacting rational agents does not in general constitute a rational agent, and that the resultant of a number of choices is not in general a choice. These powers are scattered about: they are possessed, and may be exercised, by some men or groups of men or organizations, not by Man...
At the beginning of this chapter I said that morality is not to be discovered but to be made; we cannot brush this aside by adding ‘but it has been made already, long ago’. It may well need to be in part remade. Of course only in part. Nothing has altered or will alter the importance of being able to make and keep and rely on others keeping agreements. Hobbes’s third law of nature, that men perform their covenants made, is an eternal and immutable fragment of morality. But some more specific obligations traditionally attached to status, not created by contract, are dispensable; patriotism, for example, may have outlived its usefulness.
[Ed: I think I've figured out his Jedi Mind Trick: assuming the flourishing of mankind to be an objective good.]
... There is even a problem about the distribution of happinese within the life of one person. A period of misery followed by one of happiness seems preferable to a period of happiness followed by one of misery, even if the quantities of misery and happiness are respectively equal. However, it could be argued that order as such is indifferent; what makes the difference here is that when one is unhappy the anticipation of future happines is itself pleasant, whereas the recollection of past happiness is not (but is even, according to Tennyson and Dante, ‘sorrow’s crown of sorrow’) while the reverse holds for the anticipation and recollection of misery when one is happy. One can enjoy troubles when they are over. When we take into account these joys and sorrows of anticipation and recollection, the aggregate of happiness is greater when the order is right, even if the quantities of misery and happiness were otherwise equal...
All real societies, and all those which it is of direct practical use to consider, are ones whose members have to a great extent divergent and conflicting purposes. And we must expect that their actions will consist largely of the pursuit of these divergent and conflicting purposes, and consequently will not only not be motivated by a desire for the general happiness but also will commonly fail the proposed test of being such as to maximize the general happiness.
Act utilitarianism is by no means the only moral theory that displays this extreme of impracticality. The biblical commandment ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,’ though it has its roots in a mistranslation of a much more realistic rule, is often taken as prescribing a universal and equal concern for all men. So interpreted, it is, as Mill says, effectively equivalent to the utilitarian principle. And it is similarly impracticable. People simply are not going to put the interests of all their ‘neighbours’ on an equal footing with their own interests and specific purposes and with the interests of those who are literally near to them. Such universal concern will not be the actual motive of their choices, nor will they act as if it were.
[Ed:
"There does seem to be an interesting difference, though. between the Hebrew and Christian teachings on love of one’s neighbour, mainly due to early mistranslations. As the linguist Edward Ullendorff has argued. the correct translation from the Hebrew Bible, Leviticus 19: IX, is ‘thou shalt love thy neighbour, for he is as thou’, whereas the Christian Gospels, apparently following what would appear to be a Septuagint mistranslation, speaks of the command ‘thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ " - Compassion and Remorse / Steven Tudor]
... To put forward as a morality in the broad sense something which, even if it were admirable, would be an utterly impossible ideal is likely to do, and surely has in fact done, more harm than good. It encourages the treatment of moral principles not as guides to action but as a fantasy which accompanies actions with which it is quite incompatible. It is a commonplace that religious morality often has little effect on the lives of believers. It is equally true, though not so frequently pointed out, that utilitarian morality is often treated as a topic of purely academic discussion, and is not taken any more seriously as a practical guide. In both cases the mistake is the same. To identify morality with something that certainly will not be followed is a sure way of bringing it into contempt practical contempt, which combines all too readily with theoretical respect.
But why, it may be asked, are such moralities of universal concern impracticable? Primarily because a large element of selfishness — or, in an older terminology, self-love — is a quite ineradicable part of human nature. Equally, if we distinguish as Butler did the particular passions and affections from self-love, we must admit that they are inevitably the major part of human motivation, and the actions which express and realize them cannot be expected in general to tend towards the general happiness. Even what we recognize as unselfishness or benevolence is equally incompatible with universal concern. It takes the form of what Broad called self-referential altruism — concern for others, but for others who have some special connection with oneself; children, parents, friends, workmates, neighbours in the literal, not the metaphorically extended, sense. Wider affections than these usually centre upon devotion to some special cause — religious, political, revolutionary, nationalist — not upon the welfare of human beings, let alone sentient beings, in general. It is much easier, and commoner, to display a self-sacrificing love for some of one’s fellow men if one can combine this with hostility to others...
But could not human nature be changed? I do not know. Of course, given the techniques of mass persuasion adolescents can be turned into Red Guards or Hitler Youth or pop fans, but in each of these we have only fairly superficial redirection of what are basically the same motives. It is far more doubtful whether any agency could effect the far more fundamental changes that would be needed to make practicable a morality of universal concern. Certainly no ordinary processes of education can bring them about.
Besides, if such changes could be effected, they might well prove self-defeating. Thus Bernard Williams has argued that in becoming capable of acting out of universal concern, people would have to be stripped of the motives on which most of what is of value in human life is based — close affections, private pursuits, and many kinds of competition and struggle. Even if our ultimate goal were the utilitarian one of maximizing the general happiness, the cultivation of such changes in human nature as would make an act utilitarian morality practicable might not be the most sensible way of pursuing it. But in any case this is at most a remote possibility, and has little relevance to our present choice of a first order moral system. For the present our terms of reference can be summed up in words close to those of Rousseau: we are to take men as they are and moral laws as they might be.
It may be objected that if we trim down moral demands to fit present human capacity, we bring morality into contempt in another way. But I do not mean that moral demands are to be so minimal that they are likely to be fulfilled by most people pretty well at once. We may well advocate moral principles that are in conflict with established habits of thought and behaviour, (hat prescribe a degree of respect for the claims of others — and of distant others — which can flourish only by overcoming
ingrained selfishness and limitations of generosity that are authorized by the existing law and the real conventional morality (as contrasted with the fantasy moralities of utilitarianism and neighbourly love). All I am insisting upon is that we should advocate practicable reforms, that we should look for rules or principles of conduct that can fit in with the relatively permanent tendencies of human motives and thought...
The problem for any attempted proof of the principle of utility, any considerations that are intended to determine the intellect in the way Mill wants, is to make the transition from individualistic hedonism (psychological or ethical) to universalistic hedonism...
Once the disputants start using the concept of something objectively good, the transition from egoism to utilitarianism can be effected; but as long as the egoist is content to speak in terms only of what is objectively right (or rational), he can claim that it is right (or rational) for each to seek his own happiness, and he cannot be dislodged from that position and pushed into utilitarianism. What I have suggested is that Mill was thinking implicitly along the lines that Sidgwick makes explicit, that he was in effect relying on a notion of the intrinsically desirable, the introduction of which would make cogent such an argument as he was trying to present...
Mill’s proof requires a further stage. He has to show not merely that the general happiness is desirable (for everyone) but also that nothing else is so. His argument for this rests on the claim that nothing but happiness is desired. But this seems patently false. There are, as Butler said, particular passions as well as self-love, and self-love could hardly operate unless there were particular passions. Mill gets round this difficulty by arguing that everything that is desired is desired either as a means to happiness or as a part of happiness. But in this way he scores only a verbal success which is really fatal to his main argument. He is in effect emptying the word ‘happiness’ of all specific content: it is no longer the name of a distinct condition, a state of an individual person made up, perhaps, of recognizable feelings of pleasure or well-being that outweigh contrasting feelings of pain or distress, but a name for whatever anyone wants. But if happiness thus ceases to be any distinctive sort of thing, the suggestion, in my interpretation of Mill’s earlier argument, that our desire for our own happiness is evidence for its intrinsic goodness, collapses. We cannot be recognizing the intrinsic, objective, goodness of happiness if there is no specific thing or condition, happiness, to be objectively good. If ‘each person’s happiness’ is only shorthand for ‘anything and everything that each person desires or aims at’, we are left with nothing whose intrinsic desirability could be indicated by the widespread occurrence of a desire for it...
Though we admit that the way to hell may be paved with good intentions we are very sure that the way to heaven is not paved with bad ones. Consider two people who together plant a bomb in a railway station, knowing (or believing firmly and with good season) that this will both promote some intrinsically defensible political cause and do damage to property, inconvenience many travellers, and endanger some lives. There is a sense in which each of them ‘intends’ both these results: each acts with the full expectation that what he is doing will bring both results about But suppose that one of the two has the promotion of this political cause as his chosen end and accepts the foreseen harm as an unavoidable accompaniment of this, while for the other the foreseen harm is itself his chosen end, and the promotion of the political cause merely incidental; are we not inclined to view the two rather differently?...
It is a more difficult question whether a similar distinction should be drawn between a means on the one hand and either side effect or a further consequence on the other — we can call either of them a second effect... For example, a man defending himself against an attacker may do something which has two effects: the saving of his own life and the death of the attacker. Aquinas says that if he intends the former, his action is right, provided that he does not use more force than is needed for this. But unless he is acting with public authority for the common good, a man is not permitted to kill another; so if a man who lacks this authority intends the death of his attacker and kills him, his action will be wrong, even though his ultimate aim was to save his own life and the killing of the attacker was a means to this. A well-known modern example is that it is held that a doctor may give pain-killing drugs to a patient who would otherwise die in agony, although as a side effect his death is accelerated; but he must not give a drug that will kill the patient as a way of preventing further pain...
Even under duress, I can refuse to kill an innocent person, though I know that others will die as a result of my refusal, for this too will be a second effect...
Moral philosophy appears as a poor relation of law...
It seems absurd to say that I must not use someone’s death as a means to some end
— say, the saving of many other lives — and yet that I may use as a means to that end something which will inevitably, and to my certain knowledge, carry his death with it. To lay stress on such artificial distinctions is not merely implausible but also morally corrupting. Anscombe has herself said that, while the rejection of the principle of double effect has been the corruption of non-Catholic moral thought, its abuse has been the corruption of Catholic thought...
Rival social and political ideals offer different ways in which cooperation, competition, and conflict may be institutionalized and regulated, but every real alternative includes some combination of all three of them
.
This would be obvious if it were not that moralists in both the Christian and the humanist traditions have fostered an opposite view, that the good life for man is one of universal brotherly love and seffless pursuit of the general happiness. I have already argued, in Chapter 6, that this is quite impracticable; I would now add that it has little plausibility even as an ideal...
[Fitzjames Stephen] contrasts ‘The man who works from himself outwards, and who acts with a view to his own advantage and the advantage of those who are connected with himself in definite, assignable ways’ with ‘a man who has a disinterested love for the human race’ — which Stephen suspects to be ‘little, if anything, more than a fanatical attachment to some favourite theory about the means by which an indefinite number of unknown persons ... may be brought into a state which the theorist calls happiness’ — and ‘who is capable of making his love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against men in particular’.
The alternative to universalism is not an extreme individualism. Any possible, and certainly any desirable, Ituman life is social. We can see each individual as located in a number of circles — smaller and larger, but sometimes intersecting, not all concentric — and so united with others in a variety of ways. Within any circle, large or small, we must expect and accept not only some cooperation but also some competition and conflict, but different kinds and degrees of these in circles of different size...
Kant, having argued that there can be no sound speculative proof of the existence of God, thought that there is a cogent moral argument for this conclusion, that since God is needed to ensure the ultimate union of virtue and happiness, his existence can be established as a necessary presupposition of moral thought. But any such argument is back to front. What it is reasonable or rational to do may depend upon the facts, but the facts cannot depend upon what it is reasonable or rational to do. Equally, in our basic order of inference we must derive conclusions about what it is reasonable to do from what we believe the facts to be, and not the other way round. (Admittedly, if we had an authoritative ruling about what it was rational to do, we might infer from this what the facts must be, as seen by the giver of this ruling. But in the present context such a ruling would have to be a divine revelation, and it would be circular to rely on a supposed revelation in what is meant to be a proof of God’s existence.) If the assertion of the existence of God is a factual claim, it cannot be given its sole or basic warrant by the desire to reconcile the two primary judgements that we are inclined to make in the sphere of practical reason...
The rationality of morality (in the narrow sense) consists in the fact, brought out variously by Protagoras and Hobbes and Hume and Warnock, that men need moral rules and principles and dispositions if they are to live together and flourish in communities, and that evolution and social tradition have given them a fairly strong tendency to think in the required ways. The rationality of prudence consists in the fact that a man is more likely to flourish if he has, at any one time, some concern for the welfare of later phases of this same human being, and that evolution, social tradition, and individual experience and training have encouraged and ‘reinforced’ this egoistic prudential concern. Both these contrast with the more basic rationality of the hypothetical imperative, rationality in the sense in which it is rational to do whatever will satisfy one’s own present desires; but all three cooperate in some measure. Once we understand these three sorts of rationality we can tolerate their partial discrepancies; we can see how they arise — what makes each of the three patterns rational — in the actual world, and we have no need to postulate another world to make the first two coincide more completely.
Another problem is thrown up by our discussion of absolutism in Chapter 7. On our view of morality we can defend only nearly absolute principles. But a theist can believe that strictly absolute variants of these are commanded by God, and that we both must and can safely obey them even when from the point of view of human reason the case against doing so seems overwhelming: we can rely on God to avert or somehow put right the disastrous consequences of a ‘moral’ choice. But though a theist can believe this, it would gratuitous for him to do so without a reliable and explicit revelation of such absolute commands. If he had to work by inference from general assumptions, he could not reasonably ascribe to God any more complete an absolutism than a secular moralist could construct using the same empirical data. And unless it can be shown independently that there is some merit in an unqualified absolutism, it is no advantage for theism that it makes it barely possible to hold such a view...
Political and economic problems are genuinely complicated: there is no single change or small number of changes, however radical or catastrophic, which would put everything right. It is simply an error, though no doubt an attractive and inspiring one, to suppose that there is some one evil — capitalism, say, or colonialism — the destruction of which would make everything in the garden lovely. No doubt there are extreme forms of injustice and exploitation which, if they persist, will give rise to disastrous civil, international, and inter-racial wars. But there is more than one kind of exploitation, and the very means used to remove one can themselves turn into another."
--- Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong / J.L. Mackie
