Philosophy 433 History of
Ethics Darwall Winter
2004
FINALE
I The modern problematic.
This course was a study in the beginnings of modern ethical philosophy. Starting simultaneously with the rise of
modern science, together the attendant demise of an Aristotelian teleological
metaphysics of nature, and the rise of the liberal state, dedicated to the
possibility of a peaceable framework for reasonable cooperation that tolerates substantial
and significant differences in matters of religion and fundamental value, philosophers
in
II
Three responses to the problematic. One way of trying
to understand the range of their diverse responses to this modern philosophical
problematic is to group them into three main categories:
A. Those who defend morality as a set of
mutually advantageous conventions, and who see the fundamental motive
underlying morality as self-interest.
This category would include Hobbes and Hume's theory of the artificial
virtues.
B. Those who defend
morality as a system of evaluation centrally connected to impartial concern for
the welfare of all, to utility and universal benevolence. Although there are great differences within
this category, it includes Hutcheson, Bentham, and, broadly speaking, Hume.
C. Those who defend morality as deeply related
to a kind of freedom or autonomy that can be realized only by rational agents
(perhaps within some social whole). In
this category we could place
Finally, we
have Nietzsche who gets a category all by himself. While perhaps not the very first, Nietzsche
was the most psychological and philosophically penetrating representative of a
strain of thought we might call antimoralist. The concepts structuring moral thought--right
and wrong, virtue and vice, good and evil--he argued are naked in their
unattractiveness when we understand their true origins and sustaining
causes--the envy and hatred of the weak.
The emperor has no clothes.
III The problematic, more
specifically. Let us recall these major trends in more depth. In some ways what unites them is this. We begin with some rough agreement in common
sense views about what kinds of conduct, broadly speaking, are right and wrong,
what kinds of character and motive are virtuous and vicious. Of course, there are differences. So Hume is notoriously critical of such
traditional Christian virtues as humility, and Hobbes believes it is always
wrong to revolt against the established political order. But, by and large, the interesting philosophical
disagreements occur less within our writers' moral understandings, and much more
within their philosophical accounts of what we should understand morality to
be. Thus, Hobbes includes within his
extensive list of laws of nature many precepts that could only be considered
good, earnest moral advice, precepts that are surely part of ordinary moral
common sense, even if his philosophical explanation of what these precepts
derive from is profoundly different from anything contemplated in common sense.
We might
put the common moral sense this way.
There are just certain things one should and should not do. [Obviously, I don't mean to say that the
common sense includes the idea that certain things are right or wrong
regardless of consequences.] And there
are certain kinds of character that are morally admirable,
and others that are rightly censured. Again,
there is broad agreement about both of these, although there will be
differences in detail.
The
philosophical challenge with which the moderns were faced was how to provide a
philosophically adequate understanding of these common sense views, once the Aristotelianized Christian (Scholastic) view of morality is
given up. Once we abandon the view that
every natural being has a proper end or telos, as
part of its very essence, and that for rational beings this involves the
capacity to be guided by prescriptions (laws), being guided by which is
essential to our achieving our distinctive (God-given) end, many questions can
then be asked:
(a) Granted we agree that various forms of
conduct are right, other wrong, and various kinds of character are virtuous,
other vicious, but in what do these respective moral features consist? What makes it the case that stealing, for no
good purpose, is wrong, or that malevolence is vicious? And
(b) How do we know these things?
And finally,
(c) Does our understanding of these things enable
us to see why, if something is wrong, it is something we ought not to do (in
any sense other than the truistic one that anything we agree is morally wrong
is something we will agree we morally ought not to do)? And likewise for character.
This
question is the one that keeps getting asked in our period with the concept of obligation. Does our understanding of morality enable us
to explain our common sense that morality obligates.
IV
The artificial solution. The power and perennial interest of Hobbes's
philosophy surely derives from the fact that he keeps this question directly
before his attention. Despite his
official view that the concept of obligation must be reserved to a state that
derives from transferring a right, what is most interesting in his thought is
the idea that the obligatoriness of morality can
derive from the way in which an agent finds (rationally) compelling a rational
understanding of the only means available to an end he cannot give up. Self-preservation is such an end, Hobbes
thinks. And once we see that we can
achieve this only by undertaking and complying with conventions (suitably
backed by sanctions), we will see that we must be moral. Morality, then, derives its force from
instrumental rationality--it is our only hope of achieving our ends.
V The sentimental solution.
Hume agreed with this as a very important insight about justice, or what he
called the artificial virtues. Part of
morality can be understood as conventions adopted, and complied with, for
mutual advantage. We can fully
understand the underlying motivation behind such arrangements by looking no
farther than the agent's own interests, and her desire
to realize her own ends (and, he would add, her desire for those to whom she is
close to realize theirs). But Hume
thought this was only part of the picture, indeed only part of the picture of
what is so deeply attractive to us about justice. The "natural obligation" to justice
can be accounted for in this way, but not the "moral
obligation." Justice attracts us, not
just when we view it from the standpoint of our own individual interests, but
also when
we view it distinterestedly or impartially.
This second
idea was common to a proto-utilitarian, and later utilitarian, tradition that
ran through Hutcheson, Hume, and Bentham.
In some form or other, the idea of evaluation through impartial
sentiment, and of utility, or the happiness of all (well, not really all for
Hume), runs through all of these writers.
For all the importance of these similarities, however, we have also
noticed fascinating differences in the way these common themes are played out
in each thinker. Since one of the study
question asks you to recall these, I will not discuss them further here, except
to exhibit how Bentham's thought brings explicitly to the fore the modern
concern with finding a conception of moral justification that will provide a
framework for reasonable cooperation among people who may have deep and
irresolvable differences on matters of religion, fundamental values, and, as we
often say in a trivializing way these days, "lifestyle". Thus, Bentham's argument for the principle of
utility emphasizes that it can function as an "external standard" in
a public moral debate that meets certain liberal constraints.
VI
The rational autonomy solution. If we think of the first two categories as
trying to anchor morality in a substantive concern, by showing that morality
can help realize this concern--the first, in the agent's concern for his own
welfare, to realize his own ends, the second, in a disinterested concern for
the interests of all--it is a distinctive mark of the third category of writers
that they downplay both of these thoughts, and, in at least one case (Kant),
utterly reject it. To put the point in
Kant's terms, morality is a formal concern rather than a material one. The demands of morality are forced on us by
the very logic of our situation as rational agents. As agents we seek to guide ourselves by reasons
and the fundamental principle of morality, the Categorical Imperative, is
anchored in this project.
This theme
is hinted at in different, and less well developed
ways, in
VII Ideology? Finally, we have Nietzsche's thesis that all
of these attempts to ground morality philosophically are but vain efforts to
support something whose real sources include some of the darkest emotions in
the human psyche--a self-deceiving envy and hatred that will not be recognized
for what it really is, and that insinuates itself as an impersonal or objective,
"moral" feeling or judgment.
I will leave you to consider whether this is so.