I feel that we never do justice to the value of our vulgar qualities; if they were not so dependable, no history would be made at all, because our purely intellectual efforts are incurably controversial and shift with every breeze
–Musil, The Man Without Qualities
1. Two Enlightenment theories about the nature of morality
Our attempts to think rationally about the nature of morality are dominated, even today, by theoretical models originating in the Eighteenth Century. The two most important of these are Utilitarianism and Kantianism. Both theories assume it to be the business of philosophical theories of morals to be, at one and the same time, both descriptive and normative: both to explain what moral notions mean, and, at the same time and by the same theoretical means, to offer rationally grounded knowledge of what specific courses of action are morally right or wrong, and why. Eschewing the normal tendency of philosophers to consider the two theories as offering alternative views of Rightness, I prefer to start here with what they make of Wrongness, since I consider this offers a shorter route to the heart of the various conflicts between them, and between each of them and certain aspects of our ordinary ways of thinking about morality.
Utilitarianism and Kantianism differ sharply in the account they give of why it is sometimes morally wrong for an agent A to adopt a certain course of action C. According to the Utilitarian, what makes it wrong for A to adopt C can only be that C contributes less to the total sum of human happiness than some other course of action C1, that A might adopt instead.
Kant’s position is both more complex and more layered than this. On the level most accessible to an initial reading of the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals1, what makes it wrong, according to Kant, for A to adopt C, is that doing so entails willing contradictory ends. English commentators have long wrangled over the question of what “contradictory” could mean here.
What Kant says is that, as long as A is concerned only with his own conduct, he can with perfect consistency choose to adopt C, and may gain, or at least not lose, by so doing. What makes C wrong, according to Kant, is that, should A rise above this purely private concern with the direction of his own life, and consider himself, rather, in the light of a “universal legislator”, proposing C as a course to be pursued by any rational being in his present circumstances, he will find that “his will is in contradiction with itself”.
That form of words suggests that when Kant speaks of contradiction in this context, he is not (pace the late Professor R.M. Hare) speaking of logical contradiction: the sort of contradiction exhibited by two statements that cannot both be true. A will “is in contradiction with itself” when it pursues goals that, on practical terms, conflict with one another; as, for instance, when someone “wills”, as Kant would put it, both to give up smoking and to lose weight. And Kant’s treatment of the examples he offers in the Groundwork confirms this impression. What makes it wrong to raise money on a false promise is, according to Kant, that while an agent A may consistently pursue this strategy if his own benefit is all that he has in mind, his situation changes the moment he considers enacting the “maxim of his action” as “ a law for all rational beings.” For since the proposed “law” will presumably “command” – another of Kant’s favourite terms — that anyone who finds himself in need of money should attempt to raise it on a false promise, any endeavour by any large number of “rational beings” to follow it will rapidly lead to the collapse of credit! Hence the will of the False Promiser A, perfectly consistent as long as he wills only his own private profit, lapses into inconsistency as soon as he puts on the hat of the Kantian Universal Legislator: for now he is willing, on the one hand (as a private person) that he should profit from a given act of false promising, while on the other hand also willing (as a Universal Legislator) that the institution of credit should collapse, and thus that no-one, himself included, should be able to profit from promising, false or otherwise.
Why should this be supposed, though, to throw any light on the nature of morality? Many English-speaking commentators have argued that the only way to answer that question is to take Kant to be saying that, as a matter of fact, any act of false promising tends to bring closer the collapse of credit, and should therefore be avoided for that reason. There are at least three reasons, it seems to me, for resisting that interpretation, in ascending order of force. First, it turns Kant into a covert utilitarian. Second, if that were Kant’s point, it could be made, and very simply, without invoking the notions of ‘will’ and ‘contradiction’ at all. Third, it is simply false that successful attempts to raise money by false promising, which are, in any case, of daily occurrence, have the slightest practical tendency to bring about a general collapse of credit.
It seems clear, in short, that, for Kant, everything of importance in the argument turns on the very odd kind of conflict of ends on which he has put his finger: the sort that arises between the goals of a private agent who adopts a certain strategy, and the goals he acquires when he attempts to “legislate” that strategy as a rule for any agent whatsoever, in similar circumstances, to follow.
But why, to put the question again, should this very odd species of contradiction be supposed to have anything important to do with the nature of morality? A main strength of utilitarianism is that it appeals to one of our basic moral intuitions: that, other things being equal, it is right to act in such a way as to promote the welfare of others and wrong to act in such a way as to increase their suffering. Does any intuition as basic as that animate Kant’s theorising about morality?
Kant’s theorising is, I think, built upon just such an intuitive foundation, and one can grasp what it is if one looks a little more closely at the relationships between what I described earlier as the various ‘layers’ of his theory. Kant’s theory is designed to uncover a single general rational principle, from which all the specific commands of morality can be shown to follow, much as all the theorems of Euclidian geometry can be shown to follow from a simple set of axioms and postulates. He calls that principle — for a further set of reasons that need not detain us — the Categorical Imperative. But he does not offer a single formulation of the Categorical Imperative. He offers three ways of putting it, which are supposed to be equivalent, to ‘come to the same thing’ if not in terms of their meaning, then at least in terms of their practical effect.
The first of these formulae runs (in Paton’s translation): Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. This is the formula whose interpretation has so far concerned us. The third formula, however, significantly shifts the focus of a theory as a whole. It reads: Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.
This formula does, it seems to me, connect Kant’s theorising back to one of our basic – that is to say, pre-theoretical – intuitions about morality. It is usual to hear people with whom others have played, morally speaking, fast and loose, say that the experience has left them feeling ‘used’. And if they feel, in this sense, ‘used’ by institutions of which they have regarded themselves as loyal members, they are also apt to say that the experience has left them feeling that they no longer ‘belong’ to those institutions, but that their former sense of belonging was an illusion for which they have paid dearly. Being treated as a mere instrument, a mere tool, by others, corrodes, it seems, our sense of belonging to a human community. The sense of belonging to a community depends, after all, on the belief that there exists a community to which to belong. And the existence of a community, in a sense sufficient to support feelings of belonging, of duty to the community, and so on, on the part of each individual member, depends on the existence of what one might term reciprocal relationships of intrinsic value. Each member of the community must feel, in other words that he or she is, to other members of the community, an object of intrinsic, and not merely of instrumental value. A tool does not stand in relationships of community, after all, with the hand that wields it. Its value lies solely in the use that can be made of it, relative to the purposes of its user, and once its capacity to serve those purposes ends, so too does its value, except perhaps as an amusing curiosity.
The connection between ordinary, un-theoretical moral concerns, and the odd species of contradiction — between the goals one seeks as a private person and those one finds oneself pursuing as a universal legislator — which Kant seems to wish to take as definitive of the difference between right and wrong, now seems clear enough. A course of action, which can only be pursued at the cost of treating other rational agents merely as means, will recommend itself, for obvious reasons, only to those who stand to profit from it. Hence, while it is perfectly consistent for a given individual to “will” that he himself should adopt the general strategy implicit in such a course of action (say, the strategy of obtaining money on false pretences) for his own benefit; it is hardly consistent with those modest aims for him also to “will”, this time in the more grandiose role of a Kantian “universal legislator’, that everyone should adopt such a strategy, since to will that is to will that he himself should stand open to the risk of finding himself numbered among the tools rather than among the tool-wielders, and so of losing, rather than profiting, by the operation of the strategy in question. The Formula of the End in Itself (to use Paton’s label) is the basic, the most theoretically fundamental of the Kant’s formulations of the Categorical Imperative: the one which takes us to the heart of his thinking concerning the nature of morality. The role of Formula of Universal Law is simply to provide a test by which anyone can discover for himself whether a given strategy does or does not involve treating others merely as means to an end.
But that gives us a Kantian account of what makes a course of action wrong which vies in intuitive plausibility with the utilitarian contention that to act wrongly is to choose a course of action less productive of general human happiness than something else one might have decided to do. If we have him right, what the Kantian is saying is that what makes it wrong fro an agent A to choose a course of action C is that C involves treating others merely as means to an end.
2. Teleology versus Deontology
What we have done, in effect, is to tie Kant’s rather high-flown moral theorising back to ordinary moral intuition, by taking the Formula of the End in Itself as the basic, the bottom level in his argument. This is a move unfamiliar to the mainstream of analytic philosophy, which is why I had, originally, to work it out for myself2, but not (as I discovered later) quite as unfamiliar to Kant scholars.
One of its merits is that it gives a new twist to the long-running debate between teleologists and deontologists in moral theory. A ‘teleological’ moral theory (from Gk. telos: purpose) is supposed to be one that makes the rightness of an action depend upon its consequences. ‘Deontology’, a word originally given currency, and very possibly invented by, Jeremy Bentham, is defined by the OED as “the science of duty; the branch of knowledge dealing with moral obligations” (from GK deon; roughly, ‘that which is binding’). In philosophical debate, a deontological theory is commonly taken to be one that ascribes rightness or wrongness not to the consequences of an act, but to the intrinsic nature of the act itself: the kind of act it is. What matters for morals, the deontologist claims, is the nature of what is done, not the rewards or losses, for the actor or anyone else, that the act brings in its train.
Kant is usually taken to offer the best example of a deontological theory. Kantians dislike utilitarianism because, they argue, to a utilitarian, seemingly, nothing is forbidden: lying, cheating or murder may be morally just fine if the circumstances of the act make it overwhelmingly probable that it will assist, rather than hinder, the achievement of a greater global total of human happiness. Utilitarians hotly dispute this charge, and offer elaborations of their theory (rule-utilitarianism is an instance) that, they claim, remove the appearance of justifying just anything at all, that might indeed appear to infect cruder, less cautious formulations of the theory. Still, suspicions remain, ingenious elaboration in philosophy having generally the tendency, as Doctor Johnson said of Bishop Berkeley, to “perswade without convincing.”
Utilitarians dislike Kantianism for the contrary perceived vice of moral rigorism: the claim that what is morally wrong, just because wrongness depends on the nature of the act, not on its consequences, is always and without exception morally wrong. Kant, notoriously, regards lying as wrong even when the lie is told to a potential murderer with the aim of protecting his victim, and even if the lie achieves that aim. Utilitarian readers of Kant, like J.J.C.Smart, frequently like to characterise rigorism of this kind as “rule-worship”. That would be fair enough if Kant’s claim were that the work of moral reason consists in establishing “rules” – presumably “universal prescriptions” of the type taken by Hare to be characteristic of moral discourse; e.g., “One ought always to pay back money which one has promised to pay back.”3 For then the utilitarian would have a point: that there seems no intuitively compelling reason why fidelity to this rule should be taken automatically to override compelling utilitarian reasons for disobeying it in a particular case. Rules, as such, are, after all, merely the outcome of human conventions, especially if one supposes, as Hare does, that the only reason one has for feeling bound by a moral principle is that one has freely chosen to abide by it!
But if our reading of Kant is correct, the trouble, morally speaking, with failing to keep a promise is not that it involves breaking a rule, and certainly not that it involves breaking a rule whose moral weight as such derives solely from the fact that those who abide by it have freely chosen to do so. What is wrong with false promising, according to (our) Kant, is that it involves treating others merely as means to an end. That is certainly a feature intrinsic to the nature of the act, which it does not lose if one decides to act in that way anyway, for utilitarian or other reasons. And it is a feature of the act which we are inclined to recognise, theorising apart, as morally significant. For, theorising apart, we do feel it, intuitively, to be morally wrong to use other people simply as means to our ends, however ‘noble’ those ends may be, or appear to us to be. So Kant is left, at least on the present interpretation, with a type of deontological theory which ascribes moral characteristics – rightness or wrongness – to the intrinsic character of acts, rather than to their consequences, without falling into “rule-worship,” and in a way which is likely to command a degree of unwilling assent even from those who keenly feel the force of utilitarian objections to any deontological account of morals
3. Some reasons for discontent with both types of theory
University courses on moral philosophy frequently give the impression that, unless one is to give up any attempt to think rationally about morality, intellectually adequate reasons must be found for choosing either a teleological or a deontological account of morality. The suggestion is that one must opt for one or the other, since between them, the two types of theory sketch out the only possible alternatives for anyone committed to serious thought about the nature of the moral life, and since, plainly, one cannot have both. In addition to the grounds of dispute between them – which of course remain, at least prima facie, subject to further argument, reasons for rejecting each on grounds peculiar to it – there seem to me to be at least three reasons, common to both, why one should hesitate before lightly accepting either as offering an adequate account of the nature of morality. They are:
i. Intellectualism. Both suggest that moral thinking involves, or if it does not, should involve, a process of elaborately abstract reasoning, aimed at determining either the consequences or the consistency, in an abstruse sense, of the agent’s goals. Kant has no hesitation in deriding as mere personal inclination, having nothing moral about it, the honesty of a butcher who automatically gives fair weight to his customers without particularly thinking about it, merely because he likes them and does not wish to cheat them. And most utilitarians, while they might approve the butcher’s actions as conducive to the general Good, would disapprove of their automatism. The fact remains that most of the actions which we ordinarily take as manifesting a sound moral sense are performed as automatically as the butcher’s, without the slightest reference to either of the great Enlightenment rational reconstructions of morality.
ii. Universalism. Both take moral demands to arise uniquely from a relationship between the individual moral agent and the totality of mankind, or of “rational beings.” Both thus conflict with our ordinary presumption that moral demands very frequently originate in relationships, either between individual moral agents, or between groups of moral agents defined at levels far below that of mankind as a whole.
iii Obscurity of motivation. Both theories excavate a yawning logical gulf between the demands of morality and the interests of the moral agent. For Kant, it is, as he admits, simply inexplicable why the goal of making one’s will consistent with that of an Universal Legislator should possess the slightest interest for actual moral agents. For the utilitarian, also, it remains unclear why the individual moral agent should be interested in the global maximisation of happiness, rather than simply in maximising his own happiness and that of those nearest and dearest to him.
4. Which predicates are “central to the moral life”? The surprising exclusion of trust and trustworthy.
The dominance retained by Kantianism and Utilitarianism in the work of academic moral philosophers has led, among other things, to the presumption that only the predicates ought (or right) and good are truly fundamental, or central, to the moral life, a presumption manifested in the title of a book by Sir W.D. Ross, read by every undergraduate in the subject fifty years ago, and perhaps still read: The Right and the Good. The meaning and ‘logic’ of each has been exhaustively interrogated by a long list of twentieth century English-speaking philosophers, from G.E. Moore to R.M.Hare.
It is not obvious, however, that, the exigencies of ‘mainstream’ theory apart, these are the only terms upon which, in ordinary moral discourse, ultimate weight is placed. Among the more obvious exclusions, because of their importance in everyday moral reasoning, stand trust and trustworthy. In any event, it seems a pity that the logic of these notions, in particular, has not been more closely examined by philosophers, because, the moment one does subject them to even the most casual scrutiny, one finds oneself led in directions which threaten the dominance of the two great theoretical legacies of the Enlightenment.
5. The logic of trusting and being trustworthy
First of all, far from the trustworthiness of the morally upright recipient of trust being a matter of his or her ability to carry out a process of abstruse moral calculation, the trustworthy person is valued, in circumstances in which it behoves him (or her) to discharge in the trust reposed in him (or her), precisely for his or her refusal to calculate. The trustworthy person precisely doesn’t bother his or her head with abstruse calculations of deontic consistency or global welfare, he or she just gets on with what he or she is trusted to do, and does it.
Second, the logic of trusting and being trustworthy seems intrinsically inhospitable to the universalism of the grander forms of Enlightenment moral theory. Where the Utilitarian founds his moral decisions on the supposed relationship in which his acts stand, given their presumed consequences, to the global sum of human happiness; where the Kantian bases his upon their capacity to serve as laws for the ideal community of all Rational Beings; the Trustworthy Person confines himself to the mundane thought that some specific person or persons trust him to do C. Like Kant’s despised Honest Butcher, in other words, whose moral thinking never extends to the ideal community of all Rational Beings, but only to his customers, the Trustworthy Person remains an obstinate particularist. Nor need this surprise us. Relationships of trust are not, and could hardly intelligibly be regarded as, relationships between the individual moral agent and the global totality of humanity, or of “rational agents”. Relationships of trust arise between individuals, or between individuals and specifically defined groups.
Third, not only the Trustworthy Person, but the Trusting Person must, in a certain sense, eschew calculation, if the latter is to be said, in the ordinary sense of the term, to trust. If B’s expectation that A will do C reposes on some calculation regarding A’s private interests (as, for example, that A’s will be led to do C by panic at the thought of the consequences that B will unleash upon him in the event of non-compliance), then, manifestly, B cannot be said either to trust A, or to regard him as trustworthy, but merely to possess contingent reasons for predicting that A will prove a compliant tool. For B to trust A to do C, in the normal sense we attach to the word, is, precisely, for B to be ready to leave the matter in A’s hands, not because he imagines himself to have some ‘hold’, as we say, over A, but because he takes A to have enough of a hold over himself – enough power over his own, purely personal desires and impulses, that is to say – to be capable of occupying a position of trust.
6. Why should anyone neglect the satisfaction of his private interests in order to prove himself worthy of trust?
But doesn’t that raise the question of the motivation of virtuous action in a form even more acute than those in which it is raised by utilitarianism and by Kantianism? Why, when it comes down to it, should the Trustworthy Person. A, be willing to override his personal desires and interests in order to do C, merely because C is what someone, B, trusts him to do? Isn’t anyone who discharges honestly the responsibilities of a position of trust, when it would be more profitable, or just more fun, to do otherwise, simply allowing others to make a fool of him, or her?
This question is in fact easier to answer in the case of trust, it seems to me, than in the other two cases. In all functioning human societies, some degree of automatic trust between strangers – trust extended without anything very much in the way either of guarantees or of empirical warrant — is automatic. Now imagine (perhaps per impossibile) a certain number of people, all strangers to one another, suddenly thrown together, not so much in a society as in a pre-societal or extra-societal state of affairs – the Trustless Order of Things (TNT) – in which this condition is not met. In the Trustless Order of Things one can presume, prima facie, no restraint whatsoever on the behaviour of others. The elderly lady one approaches to ask for help or directions may, as likely as not, produce with lightning speed a rapier from her walking stick, run one through and rob one. In consequence, any prudent participant in the TNA must consider it extremely unsafe even to approach any other participant.
How can participants hope to extricate themselves from this predicament? Only, it seems to me, by establishing a relationship of trust between two or more participants: a Community of Trust (CT). The establishment of such relationships, must, plainly, involve the exchange of assurances (which, in the nature of things, must simply be accepted, with neither guarantee nor empirical warrant) to the effect that no participant will pursue his private ends in ways that ride roughshod over the interests of other participants. Provided each participant possesses the strength of character to observe that self-denying ordinance — that is, to face down any temptation, however pressing, to betray the trust of the other participants for purely private ends — then the participant is any given CT will have successfully transcended the terms of the TNT.
The trust-based security created by a CT in turn offers participants two further types of advantage. On the one hand, it creates a safe space within which participants can initiate co-operative activities aimed at maximising the satisfactions of each participant’s private interests.
On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, it allows participants to relax their guard against one another sufficiently to permit the formation of the kind of relationships that expand the range of possible types of private interest available to each participant. Some private interests (or appetites, or desires) are essentially egoistic. Examples would include the desire for food or drink, or rest. Such a desire is egoistic because its object, as a former teacher of mine, Austin Duncan-Jones, liked to put it, is merely some future state of the agent’s own psycho-physical being. Hence it is possible for an agent A, animated by such a desire, to specify what is desired without mentioning any other agent B. The entire transaction, from the inception of the desire to its satisfaction, takes place, as one might put it, inside the skin of a single, isolated agent.
Philosophical moralists have often taken it for granted that all desires, and for that matter all interests, per se, are egoistic in this sense. But that seems simply at odds with the facts. There are a multitude of desires whose object, for a given agent A, can be specified only at the cost, nor merely of mentioning other agents, but of mentioning specific types of relationship between A and others. Obvious examples include the desire for friends, the desire for domestic affection, the desire to have children , to see them flourish and to be loved and respected by them, the desire to see other people one loves happy and successful, the desire to do useful work and to have one’s work respected by others, and so on. Call these desires non-egoistic, since, manifestly, no such desire cannot be satisfied solely by means of transactions that begin and end within the skin of an individual agent, A.
The development of non-egoistic desires presupposes the possibility of relationship. Hence non-egoistic desires cannot develop in the Trustless Order of Things. For it to be possible for A to develop them, then, A must, it seems, be a participant in a CT. And hence even to possess non-egoistic desires, A must be capable of meeting the logical preconditions of CT- membership. That is, A must be capable of sufficient self-control to avoid betraying the trust of others for the sake of satisfying some private interest of his, egoistic or non-egoistic as the case may be. Of course, real human relationships are generally flexible enough for minor betrayals of trust to be tolerated. But the effect of a major betrayal may be to expel A from a relationship in terms of which he has come to formulate non-egoistic desires whose satisfaction means a great deal to him, or her: “gives meaning to his or her life”, as we say. And the effect of self-expulsion from the relationship is not merely that the desires in question become harder to satisfy, or even that they become, in practical terms, unsatisfiable. The result is that they cease to be characterisable as goals which it is intelligible for A to pursue. A’s desire to be regarded with respect and gratitude for his work with Save the Children, for instance, becomes not merely harder to achieve, but meaningless – empty, vacuous – once his unfortunate yielding to the temptation to cover some pressing private debts by dipping into the charity’s funds has been made public in court and in the Press.
We seem thus to have before us an unexpected answer to the question, Why should anyone neglect the satisfaction of his private interests in order to prove himself worthy of trust? That answer is that being required to neglect the satisfaction of private interests under certain circumstances defined by relationships of trust is the price one pays, not for improved means of satisfying, but merely for having, a large sub-category of one’s private interests, namely, virtually all the non-egoistic ones.4
7. Conclusion: the teleology/deontology distinction re-examined
From the start of the Eighteenth Century, in response to writers like Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville, who argued that all human action is intrinsically selfish, inspired nor by love or moral virtue, but by greed and fear, a wide span of philosophical authors, of whom the best-known nowadays is Bishop Joseph Butler, struggled to find arguments for the conclusion that there is no contradiction between self-interest and the observance of moral restraint. The novelist Henry Fielding had a short way with Butlerian moral complacency of this type:
There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and conformable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.5
We can see now, perhaps, why, although this epigram of Fielding’s is entirely sound, it is not quite the last word. There is a connection between morality and interest, but it does not take the form of a connection between morality and the satisfaction of interest. Rather, it is a connection (and not just a contingent connection, but a conceptual one) between moral restraint and the constitution of one major category of human interests, namely, non-egoistic ones. (This is, indeed, something, as I have argued elsewhere, that Fielding saw clearly enough, as, for that matter did Lawrence Sterne. Sometimes the thought of writers is sharper than that of their philosophical contemporaries.6)
But that, if it is the right way to understand the interplay of morality and interest, has consequences for the both the Enlightenment models that, even now, continue to dominate formal philosophical thinking about morals. One effect of that dominance, as I have suggested, is to make the choice between the deontic and the teleological seem exclusive.
The morality of trust and trustworthiness, however, seems, however, to pass between the horns of this supposed dilemma. Certainly trust is, on the face of it, a deontic concept, in the sense that the basic principle underlying trusting relationships, namely, that trust cannot be bartered against interest-satisfaction, operates indifferently, whether the interests involved are those of the agent or those of humanity at large. At the same time, however, trust is a teleological concept, in the sense that the moral machinery of trust serves a general purpose in the life of a human community, namely, that of securing the preconditions for the bare existence of relationship and of non-egoistic interests.
That being admitted, it follows that neither the kind of deontology nor the kind of teleology represented by the morality of trust will support the subordinate consequences normally thought, by moral philosophers, to follow from each type of view. Thus it does not follow, as Kantians suppose, that a deontic moral outlook must abstract entirely from all considerations of interest and desire on the part of moral agents. It does not follow, as Kant would have it, in other words, that an honest butcher who gives fair weight merely because he likes his customers and does not wish to defraud them, is not acting morally at all, but merely doing as he pleases. It does not follow because the account of trust we have offered here forges precisely the essential connection between morality, relationship and (non-egoistic) desire that Kant is at pains to break.
Nor will the version of teleology represented by the morality of trust give the utilitarian what he, in turn, hopes to get out of a teleological style of moral theorising. The morality of trust is indeed (in a sense) teleological in character. But, as we have seen, that does not mean that moral considerations originating in relationships of trust can be freely bartered (or as Davidson would put it, treated as “up for grabs”) against considerations of interest-satisfaction.
I turn, finally, to two of the remoter, but nonetheless important, consequences for our everyday moral thinking of the dominance of the two great Enlightenment templates for its rational reconstruction. Both models suggest that serious moral thought must involve abstruse calculation of one sort or another, and that, in turn, seems to imply the consequence (implausible to anyone who has passed his life among them) that only intellectuals, or ‘the learned,’ can be truly moral. Of course many quite ordinary, trustworthy people, every day of the week, neglect their own interests for the sake of discharging duties of trust, not as the outcome of any complex, theoretically elaborated process of reflection, but simply because their non-egoistic interests commit them to the relationships from which the duties of trust in question emerge. The restoration of moral credit to such decisions is not the least of the consequences which I hope follow from what I have argued here.
Finally, universalism: the idea that justifications of action framed in terms of the widest imaginable human community — “mankind”, “the race”, the nation, the community of believers, the totality of rational or sentient beings — automatically trump, morally speaking, all and any obligations arising from more narrowly specified relationships. One thing that should make us cautious about “idealism” of this type, involving appeals – often notional to the point of vacuity – to universality in morals, is that it has afforded an essential launching-pad for all of the various totalitarian and absolutist political movements which made the past century, in both Europe and the world, bloodier and more tyrannous than any since – perhaps — the Fourteenth. To some considerable extent, the blind faith of so many in the moral authority of universalism has owed its power to the perceived intellectual authority of the two great Enlightenment models of moral rationality. If what I have said here serves to weaken that intellectual authority a little, that, also, will be all to the good.
Ringmer, East Sussex
July 4, 2011
- H.J. Paton, The Moral Law, or Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals: A new translation, with analysis and notes, London: Hutchinson (1948) ↩︎
- Bernard Harrison, “Kant and the Sincere Fanatic”, in S.C. Brown, ed., Philosophers of the Enlightenment, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Volume XII, 1977-78, Sussex: The Harvester Press/ NY: The Humanities Press (1979), 226-261 ↩︎
- R.M.Hare, The Language of Morals, Oxford: The Clarendon Press (1952), p. 155 ↩︎
- A fuller development of these ideas will be found in two other essays of mine: “Morality and Interest”, PHILOSOPHY, v.64, no.249, July 1989, 303-322; and “Moral Judgment, Action and Emotion”, PHILOSOPHY, v.59, no.229, July 1984, 295-321 ↩︎
- Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, Book XV, Chapter 1 ↩︎
- For more on this point, see, on Fielding, my little book, Henry Fielding’s ‘Tom Jones’: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher, ‘Text and Context’ series, eds. A.K. Thorlby and Arnold Kettle, London: Chatto & Windus/Sussex University Press (1975), particularly Chapter 7, on Fielding’s novel Jonathan Wild; and on Sterne, my “Sterne and Sentimentalism”, in Leona Toker, ed., Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy, NY: Garland (1994), 63-100. ↩︎