J. L Mackie. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)

In a paragraph 

Morality is not objective – it does not have an independent existence.  As objectivity is fundamental to moral concepts, all morality is in error.  We should create a non-objective morality, as a refined version of existing morality.

Key points

• ‘There are no objective values.’ Objective values are not part of the fabric of the universe. Moral scepticism says that there do not exist entities or relations of a certain kind, objective values or requirements, which many people have believed to exist. This is an ontological thesis, not a linguistic or conceptual one.

• Moral scepticism is supported by (1) The Argument from Relativity (that moralities differ and seem to more reflect ways of life than efforts to find an objective truth); (2) The Argument from Queerness (that there is no place for objective values that are intrinsically action-guiding and motivating in a naturalistic understanding); (3) the problem of how objective values could be consequential or supervenient upon natural features; (4) the epistemological problem of how we know about objective values (on a naturalist view that conscience does not have supernatural powers); and (5) the possibility of explaining patterns of objectification.

• If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe. Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else. It would make a radical difference to our metaphysics if we had to find room for objective values – perhaps something like Plato’s Forms – somewhere in our picture of the world. It would similarly make a difference to our epistemology if it had to explain how such objective values are or can be known.

• This is a second order view, a view about the status of moral values and the nature of moral valuing, about where and how they fit into the world. These first and second order views [normative ethics and metaethics] are not merely distinct but completely independent.

• The distinction between conceptual and factual analysis in ethics can be supported by analogies with other areas. Naïve realism about colours might be a correct analysis of our colour concepts and yet might not be a correct account of the status of colours.

• There are certain kinds of value statements which undoubtedly can be true or false, even if, in the sense I intend, there are no objective values. Evaluations of many sorts are commonly made in relation to agreed and assumed standards.

• The traditional moral concepts of the ordinary man as well as of the main line of western philosophers are concepts of objective value. But the denial of objective values will have to be put forward not as the result of an analytic approach, but as an ‘error theory’, a theory that although most people in making moral judgements implicitly claim, among other things, to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false.

• Morality is not to be discovered but to be made: we have to decide what moral views to adopt, what moral stands to take. The object is to decide what to do, what to support and what to condemn, what principles of conduct to accept and foster as guiding or controlling our own choices.

• A morality in the broad sense would be a general, all-inclusive theory of conduct: the morality to which someone subscribed would be whatever body of principles he allowed ultimately to guide or determine his choices of action. In the narrow sense, a morality is a system of a particular sort of constraints on conduct – ones whose central task is to protect the interests of persons other than the agent and which present themselves to an agent as checks. It is essential not to confuse them as morality in the narrow sense has a tendency to usurp both the name and the function of a general theory of conduct.

• The function of morality is primarily to counteract this limitation of men’s sympathies. We can decide what the content of morality must be by inquiring how this can best be done. Among the factors which contribute to make things go badly in the natural course of events are various limitations – limited resources, limited information, limited intelligence, limited rationality, but above all limited sympathies.

• Utilitarianism aims to be a unitary decision procedure. But to identify morality with something that certainly will not be followed is a sure way of bringing it into contempt.

• Egoism and self-referential altruism would form a central part of the good life. There is at least a prima facie case for each person’s adopting those principles that conventionally belong with whatever relationships he finds himself in.

• I have tried to sketch the outlines of a first order moral system. My hope is that concrete moral issues can be argued out without appeal to any mythical objective values or requirements or obligations or transcendental necessities, but also without appeal to a fictitiously unitary and measurable happiness or to invalid arguments that attempt to establish the general happiness as a peculiarly authoritative end. No doubt my approach could be called, in a very broad sense, a rule utilitarian one, since any specific development of it would be based on some conception of the flourishing of human life, but it would be utilitarianism without its characteristic fictions, and it would be not just a rule-utilitarianism but a rule-right-duty-disposition utilitarianism. It might also be called a rule-right-duty-disposition egoism.

• Moral principles, rules, feelings, and dispositions are the first line of defence, the formulation and authoritative statement of laws are the second, and the enforcement of law is the third.

• In so far as the objectification of moral values and obligations is not only a natural but also a useful fiction, it might be thought dangerous, and in any case unnecessary, to expose it as a fiction. This is disputable. But what is not disputable is that for the changes and political extensions that are now necessary we cannot rely on the past achievements of evolution and social tradition. We have to find principles of equity and ways of making and keeping agreements without which we cannot hold together.

Comments

My comments on the book are in a separate blog post Mackie’ Ethics: Right and Wrong.

Links

J. L Mackie.  Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). Amazon UK. 

Stephen Finlay.  The Error in the Error Theory.  Australasian Journal of Philosophy (2008).

Book reviews on my website:

Stephen Finlay. Confusion of Tongues: A Theory Of Normative Language (2014)

Peter Singer. The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution and Moral Progress. (1981, 2011)

Other essays on my website:

Practical Reason First

The End-Relational Nature of Practical Reason and Morality – Abridged Paper

Notes and Highlighted Material from the Book

Preface

I am concerned in this book with both first and second order topics, with both the content and the status of ethics.

I would particularly like to thank Derek Parfit.

Perhaps the truest teachers of moral philosophy are the outlaws and thieves who, as Locke says, keep faith and rules of justice with one another, but practise these as rules of convenience without which they cannot hold together, with no pretence of receiving them as innate laws of nature. I hope that the explanation of this paradox will become clear in the course of the book.

Part I: The Status of Ethics

1. The Subjectivity of Values

There are no objective values.

The claim that values are not objective, are not part of the fabric of the world, is meant to include not only moral goodness, which might be most naturally equated with moral value,

but also other things that could be more loosely called moral values or disvalues.

Much the same considerations apply to aesthetic and to moral values.

What I am discussing is a second order view, a view about the status of moral values and the nature of moral valuing, about where and how they fit into the world. These first and second order views are not merely distinct but completely independent.  [Interesting that talks about ‘second order questions’ rather than ‘metaethics’]

The present issue is with regard to the objectivity specifically of value, not with regard to the objectivity of those natural, factual, differences on the basis of which differing values are assigned.

First, what I have called moral scepticism is a negative doctrine, not a positive one: it says what there isn’t, not what there is. It says that there do not exist entities or relations of a certain kind, objective values or requirements, which many people have believed to exist.

Secondly, what I have called moral scepticism is an ontological thesis, not a linguistic or conceptual one.

———-

Recent philosophy, biased as it has been towards various kinds of linguistic inquiry, has tended to doubt this, but the distinction between conceptual and factual analysis in ethics can be supported by analogies with other areas.

Naïve realism about colours might be a correct analysis not only of our pre-scientific colour concepts but also of the conventional meanings of colour words, and even of the meanings with which scientifically sophisticated people use them when they are off their guard, and yet it might not be a correct account of the status of colours.

Error could well result from a failure to distinguish factual from conceptual analysis with regard to colours, from taking an account of the meanings of statements as a full account of what there is. There is a similar and in practice even greater risk of error in moral philosophy.

It is by now pretty plain that no simple account of the meanings of first order moral statements will be correct, will cover adequately even the standard, conventional, senses of the main moral terms; I think, none the less, that there is a relatively clear-cut issue about the objectivity of moral values which is in danger of being lost among the complications of meaning.

[Good discussion distinguishing conceptual analysis from truth and that our concepts may not reflect the truth.]

Subjective agreement would give inter-subjective values, but intersubjectivity is not objectivity. Nor is objectivity simply universalizability.

The ontological doctrine of objectivism must be distinguished from descriptivism, a theory about meaning. 

———-

The difficulty of seeing how values could be objective is a fairly strong reason for thinking that they are not so.

It would make a radical difference to our metaphysics if we had to find room for objective values – perhaps something like Plato’s Forms – somewhere in our picture of the world. It would similarly make a difference to our epistemology if it had to explain how such objective values are or can be known. 

If ethics is built on the concept of objective goodness, then egoism as a first order system or method of ethics can be refuted, whereas if it is assumed that goodness is only subjective it cannot. But Sidgwick correctly stresses what a number of other philosophers have missed, that this argument against egoism would require the objectivity specifically of goodness: the objectivity of what ought to be or of what it is rational to do would not be enough.

———-

One way of stating the thesis that there are no objective values is to say that value statements cannot be either true or false.

There are certain kinds of value statements which undoubtedly can be true or false, even if, in the sense I intend, there are no objective values. Evaluations of many sorts are commonly made in relation to agreed and assumed standards.

Given any sufficiently determinate standards, it will be an objective issue, a matter of truth and falsehood, how well any particular specimen measures up to those standards. Comparative judgements in particular will be capable of truth and falsehood.

The subjectivist about values, then, is not denying that there can be objective evaluations relative to standards, and these are as possible in the aesthetic and moral fields as in any of those just mentioned.

Any award of marks, prizes, or the like is unjust if it is at variance with the agreed standards for the contest in question.

The justice or injustice of decisions relative to standards can be a thoroughly objective matter, though there may still be a subjective element in the interpretation or application of standards. But the statement that a certain decision is thus just or unjust will not be objectively prescriptive: in so far as it can be simply true it leaves open the question whether there is any objective requirement to do what is just and to refrain from what is unjust, and equally leaves open the practical decision to act in either way.

The subjectivist may try to make his point by insisting that there is no objective validity about the choice of standards. Yet he would clearly be wrong if he said that the choice of even the most basic standards in any field was completely arbitrary. The appropriateness of standards is neither fully determinate nor totally indeterminate in relation to independently specifiable aims or desires.

Something may be called good simply in so far as it satisfies or is such as to satisfy a certain desire; but the objectivity of such relations of satisfaction does not constitute in our sense an objective value.  

My thesis that there are no objective values is specifically the denial that any such categorically imperative element is objectively valid.

 Let us suppose that we could make explicit the reasoning that supports some evaluative conclusion, where this conclusion has some action-guiding force that is not contingent upon desires or purposes or chosen ends. Then what I am saying is that somewhere in the input to this argument – perhaps in one or more of the premisses, perhaps in some part of the form of the argument – there will be something which cannot be objectively validated.

———-

Hume indeed was on the other side, but he is still a witness to the dominance of the objectivist tradition, since he claims that when we ‘see that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason, this ‘ wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality’.

But this objectivism about values is not only a feature of the philosophical tradition. It has also a firm basis in ordinary thought, and even in the meanings of moral terms. No doubt it was an extravagance for Moore to say that ‘good’ is the name of a non-natural quality, but it would not be so far wrong to say that in moral contexts it is used as if it were the name of a supposed non-natural quality, where the description ‘non-natural’ leaves room for the peculiar evaluative, prescriptive, intrinsically action-guiding aspects of this supposed quality.

 On a naturalist analysis, moral judgements can be practical, but their practicality is wholly relative to desires or possible satisfactions of the person or persons whose actions are to be guided; but moral judgements seem to say more than this. This view leaves out the categorical quality of moral requirements. In fact both naturalist and non-cognitive analyses leave out the apparent authority of ethics, the one by excluding the categorically imperative aspect, the other the claim to objective validity or truth.

 He wants to know whether this course of action would be wrong in itself. Something like this is the everyday objectivist concept of which talk about non-natural qualities is a philosopher’s reconstruction.

———-

Russell: ‘I can only say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, other people’s satisfy me still less.’

Ordinary moral judgements include a claim to objectivity, an assumption that there are objective values in just the sense in which I am concerned to deny this. And I do not think it is going too far to say that this assumption has been incorporated in the basic, conventional, meanings of moral terms. Any analysis of the meanings of moral terms which omits this claim to objective, intrinsic, prescriptivity is to that extent incomplete; and this is true of any non-cognitive analysis, any naturalist one, and any combination of the two.

The traditional moral concepts of the ordinary man as well as of the main line of western philosophers are concepts of objective value. But it is precisely for this reason that linguistic and conceptual analysis is not enough. The claim to objectivity, however ingrained in our language and thought, is not self-validating. It can and should be questioned. But the denial of objective values will have to be put forward not as the result of an analytic approach, but as an ‘error theory’, a theory that although most people in making moral judgements implicitly claim, among other things, to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false.

———-

Traditionally it has been supported by arguments of two main kinds, which I shall call the argument from relativity and the argument from queerness, but these can, as I shall show, be supplemented in several ways.

Radical differences between first order moral judgements make it difficult to treat those judgements as apprehensions of objective truths.

Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect people’s adherence to and participation in different ways of life. The causal connection seems to be mainly that way round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy.

The argument from relativity has some force simply because the actual variations in the moral codes are more readily explained by the hypothesis that they reflect ways of life than by the hypothesis that they express perceptions, most of them seriously inadequate and badly distorted, of objective values.

Even more important, however, and certainly more generally applicable, is the argument from queerness. This has two parts, one metaphysical, the other epistemological. If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe. Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else.

Intuitionism merely makes unpalatably plain what other forms of objectivism wrap up.

Indeed, the best move for the moral objectivist is not to evade this issue, but to look for companions in guilt. For example, Richard Price argues that it is not moral knowledge alone that such an empiricism as those of Locke and Hume is unable to account for.

Plato’s Forms give a dramatic picture of what objective values would have to be. The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding motive; something’s being good both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursue it.

Another way of bringing out this queerness is to ask, about anything that is supposed to have some objective moral quality, how this is linked with its natural features.

It may be thought that the argument from queerness is given an unfair start if we thus relate it to what are admittedly among the wilder products of philosophical fancy – Platonic Forms, non-natural qualities, self-evident relations of fitness, faculties of intuition, and the like.

Aesthetic values are less strongly objectified than moral ones.

Another way of explaining the objectification of moral values is to say that ethics is a system of law from which the legislator has been removed.

———-

The central ethical concepts for Plato and Aristotle also are in a broad sense prescriptive or intrinsically action-guiding, but in concentrating rather on ‘good’ than on ‘ought’ they show that their moral thought is an objectification of the desired and the satisfying rather than of the commanded. Elizabeth Anscombe has argued that modern, non-Aristotelian, concepts of moral obligation, moral duty, of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought’ are survivals outside the framework of thought that made them really intelligible, namely the belief in divine law.

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. There are several different patterns of objectification, all of which have left characteristic traces in our actual moral concepts and moral language.

The objectivist may have recourse to the purpose of God: the true purpose of human life is fixed by what God intended men to do and to be.

———-

I have maintained that there is a real issue about the status of values, including moral values. Moral scepticism, the denial of objective moral values, is not to be confused with any one of several first order normative views, or with any linguistic or conceptual analysis. Indeed, ordinary moral judgements involve a claim to objectivity which both non-cognitive and naturalist analyses fail to capture. Moral scepticism must, therefore, take the form of an error theory, admitting that a belief in objective values is built into ordinary moral thought and language, but holding that this ingrained belief is false. As such, it needs arguments to support it against ‘common sense’. But solid arguments can be found. The considerations that favour moral scepticism are: first, the relativity or variability of some important starting points of moral thinking and their apparent dependence on actual ways of life; secondly, the metaphysical peculiarity of the supposed objective values, in that they would have to be intrinsically action-guiding and motivating; thirdly, the problem of how such values could be consequential or supervenient upon natural features; fourthly, the corresponding epistemological difficulty of accounting for our knowledge of value entities or features and of their links with the features on which they would be consequential; fifthly, the possibility of explaining, in terms of several different patterns of objectification, traces of which remain in moral language and moral concepts, how even if there were no such objective values people not only might have come to suppose that there are but also might persist firmly in that belief.

———-

But what if we can establish this negative conclusion, that there are no objective values? How does it help us to say anything positively about ethics? Does it not at one stroke rule out all normative ethics, laying it down that all affirmative first order judgements are false, since they include, by virtue of the very meanings of their terms, unwarranted claims to objectivity? I shall take up these questions in Chapter 5; but first I want to amplify and reinforce the conclusion of this chapter by some investigations of the meanings and logical connections of moral terms.

2. The Meaning of ‘Good’

Moore had two main reasons for doubting this. First, he thought that those who tried to define ‘good’ and give it a descriptive meaning confused the question of what sorts of things are good with the question of what goodness itself is: the former can no doubt be answered in descriptive, natural, terms; but only an answer to the latter would constitute a definition or analysis of ‘good’. Secondly, he relied on what has been called the ‘open question’ argument. Take some proposed analysis of ‘good’, say ‘conducive to pleasure’: we can surely understand the view of someone who says ‘I admit that such-and-such is conducive to pleasure, but is it good?’

We must hope to find a single general meaning that the word has in both moral and non-moral contexts.

Peter Geach has argued that the key to the difficulties about the meaning of ‘good’ is that it is what he calls a (logically) attributive adjective.

A general definition of ‘good’: such as to satisfy requirements (etc.) of the kind in question.

I conclude that we can give an account of the meaning of ‘good’ which relates its ethical uses to those in other contexts, and which brings together aspects that have been emphasized in opposing philosophical theories. But the outcome of this investigation of meaning is largely negative. The general meaning of ‘good’ does not in itself determine how the word is to be used in ethics, and neither this general meaning nor any special ethical meaning will yield answers to substantive moral questions.

3. Obligations and Reasons

Writers on morality, Hume noted, often move imperceptibly from statements joined by ‘is’ to ones joined by ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’. These, he protests, express some new relation, make some new sort of claim, which needs to be explained: ‘a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others which are entirely different from it.’ This protest has since hardened into a dictum, sometimes called Hume’s Law, that one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.

‘Ought’ and ‘must’ and ‘shall’ and ‘should’ are constantly used in non-moral as well as moral contexts, and as with ‘good’ it is not likely that their moral uses are completely cut off from the others.

A more serious challenge to Hume’s Law is made by John Searle.

But if we say this, we are again speaking within the institution. There would be no great difficulty in constructing an argument parallel to Searle’s, starting, say, with the premiss ‘Smith is starving on Jones’s doorstep’ and ending with ‘Jones ought to give Smith some food.’

Nothing compels us to reinterpret the requirements of an institution, however well established, however thoroughly enshrined in our ordinary ways of thinking and speaking, as objective, intrinsic, requirements of the nature of things.

it is not surprising that widespread, socially diffused, and not obviously artificial institutions

should have helped to produce the notions of what is intrinsically fitting or required by the nature of things. These notions, which in turn contribute significantly to our ordinary concepts of good reasons and of moral obligation, embody very natural errors; but errors none the less.

4. Universalization

The universalizability of moral judgements, then, does not impose any rational constraint on choices of action or defensible patterns of behaviour. And it would be little more than a verbal point that an action-guiding system of thought which violates first stage universalizability, at least, cannot count as a morality, that if ‘ought’ and similar words are used in such a system, it will not be in a fully moral sense. Universalizability, then, poses no threat, not even a threat of limitation, to the moral scepticism.

Part II: The Content of Ethics

5. The Object of Morality

I have argued in Chapter 1 that there are no objective values, and in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 that no substantive moral conclusions or serious constraints on moral views can be derived from either the meanings of moral terms or the logic of moral discourse. What tasks then remain for moral philosophy? One could study the moral views and beliefs of our own society or others. 

Attempt systematically to describe our own moral consciousness or some part of it, such as our ‘sense of justice’, to find some set of principles which were themselves fairly acceptable to us and with which, along with their practical consequences and applications, our ‘intuitive’ (but really subjective) detailed moral judgements would be in ‘reflective equilibrium’.

It must not be confused with the superficially similar but in purpose fundamentally different attempt of thinkers like Sidgwick to advance by way of our various ‘intuitions’ to an objective moral truth, a science of conduct.

If there is no objective moral truth to be discovered, is there nothing left to do but to describe our sense of justice?

———-

At least we can look at the matter in another way. Morality is not to be discovered but to be made: we have to decide what moral views to adopt, what moral stands to take. No doubt the conclusions we reach will reflect and reveal our sense of justice, our moral consciousness – that is, our moral consciousness as it is at the end of the discussion, not necessarily as it was at the beginning. But that is not the object of the exercise: the object is rather to decide what to do, what to support and what to condemn, what principles of conduct to accept and foster as guiding or controlling our own choices and perhaps those of other people as well.

———-

A morality in the broad sense would be a general, all-inclusive theory of conduct: the morality to which someone subscribed would be whatever body of principles he allowed ultimately to guide or determine his choices of action. In the narrow sense, a morality is a system of a particular sort of constraints on conduct – ones whose central task is to protect the interests of persons other than the agent and which present themselves to an agent as checks.

‘I admit that morality requires that I should do such-and-such, but I don’t intend to: for me other considerations here overrule the moral ones.’

It is essential not to confuse them.

The tendency it [morality] has to usurp both the name and the function of a general theory of conduct.

———-

G. J Warnock.  Among the factors which contribute to make things go badly in the natural course of events are various limitations – limited resources, limited information, limited intelligence, limited rationality, but above all limited sympathies.  The function of morality is primarily to counteract this limitation of men’s sympathies. We can decide what the content of morality must be by inquiring how this can best be done.

Protagoras’s thesis is plain: a moral sense, law, and justice are needed to enable men to live together in communities large enough to compete successfully with the wild beasts. Hobbes paints a similar picture, except that the beasts are forgotten and the danger is now the harm that men can do to one another.

What I am now denying is that the best possible content for the device of morality is supplied by the specific moral sense that each agent happens to have acquired.

6. Utilitarianism

A unitary decision procedure.

To identify morality with something that certainly will not be followed is a sure way of bringing it into contempt.  [But what is best to do and what can be reasonably expected are distinct questions.]

Act utilitarianism, then, is not viable as a morality in the broad sense – an all-inclusive theory of conduct.

There are, then, good reasons why such specific rules, rather than a general utilitarian principle, should form the core of morality in the narrow sense.

Austin’s dictum: ‘Our rules would be fashioned on utility; our conduct, on our rules.’

Smart’s science fictional pleasure machine. [Nozick normally cited, is this unfair?]

[The utilitarian sees happiness/welfare as valuable and wants wide morality and to a degree narrow morality to be directed towards this.]

7. Consequentialism and Deontology

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.

Each individual is linked not only to his biological ancestors but also to traditions of activity and information and thought and belief and value; nearly all of what anyone most distinctively and independently is he owes to many others.

8. Elements of a Practical Morality

Egoism and self-referential altruism would form a central part of the good life.

There is at least a prima facie case for each person’s adopting those principles that conventionally belong with whatever relationships he finds himself in.

Also, it is a consequence of the general form I have ascribed to the good life that the notion of rights, both of individuals and of groups, will be valuable and indeed vital.  The most basic distinction is that between a liberty and a claim-right.  Specific rights cannot be determined a priori, on general grounds, and that whatever rights are recognized should not be absolute.

If we reject this unitary notion of happiness, and identify the good for man rather with the partly competitive pursuit of diverse ideals and private goals, then separate ownership of property will be an appropriate instrument for this pursuit.

The appeal, by both parties to a dispute, to supposedly absolute rights is disastrous. It reduces the readiness to negotiate and compromise, and it seems to justify any atrocities.

If the object were simply to maximize what is ordinarily called happiness, paternalism would often be justified.

On an assumption that the normal and proper state of affairs is that people should live as members of various circles, larger and smaller, with different kinds and degrees of cooperation, competition, and conflict in these different circles, the appropriateness of telling the truth becomes disputable.

The real question is whether there is, as Sidgwick, for example, thought, an unresolvable tension between moral reason and the rationality of self-interest.

I have argued that egoism is not immoral, but forms a considerable part of any viable moral system. I have also given abundant reasons why almost everyone should, in his own interest, welcome the fact that there is, and hope that there will continue to be, some system of morality, and why, even if the existing system does not suit him, his aim should be to modify it, at least locally, rather than to destroy it.

The point of morality, and particularly of that branch of it which I have called morality in the narrow sense, is that it is necessary for the well-being of people in general that they should act to some extent in ways that they cannot see to be (egoistically) prudential and also in ways that in fact are not prudential. Morality has the function of checking what would be the natural result of prudence alone.

If we then ask what sort of person it is in one’s own interest to be, what dispositions it is advantageous to have, there is little doubt that it will be ones that can be seen as virtues, as determined at least in the way emphasized in Section 6, as dispositions that harmonize with knowledge, but also more specifically in the light of some conception of the good and with some respect for the way of life of the society in which one lives.

———-

Morality as I have described it is concerned particularly with the well-being of active, intelligent, participants in a partly competitive life, and the constraints summed up as morality in the narrow sense have been introduced (especially in the Hobbesian line of thought and the game theory models in Chapter 5) as necessary limits on competition for the benefit of all the competitors.

The claims of these classes [animals, infants, the ill], lie outside what I must regard as the core of morality. It is only extensions of morality that cover them.

It is the role of dispositions in morality that explains these gratuitous extensions. A humane disposition is a vital part of the core of morality.

———-

This chapter, and indeed the whole of this part of the book, has done no more than sketch the outlines of a first order moral system.

My hope is that concrete moral issues can be argued out without appeal to any mythical objective values or requirements or obligations or transcendental necessities, but also without appeal to a fictitiously unitary and measurable happiness or to invalid arguments that attempt to establish the general happiness as a peculiarly authoritative end. No doubt my approach could be called, in a very broad sense, a rule utilitarian one, since any specific development of it would be based on some conception of the flourishing of human life, but it would be utilitarianism without its characteristic fictions, and it would be not just a rule-utilitarianism but a rule-right-duty-disposition utilitarianism. It might also be called a rule-right-duty-disposition egoism.

III: Frontiers of Ethics

9. Determinism, Responsibility and Choice

What we may call the straight rule of responsibility: an agent is responsible for all and only his intentional actions.

I suggest, then, that the straight rule can on the whole be defended for the ascription of moral responsibility. Most apparent exceptions can be explained away in terms of one or other of these models, and this rule can itself be understood in the light of our account of the nature and point of morality in the narrow sense.

Hard determinism is the view which combines determinism with incompatibilism, and concludes that our judgements about responsibility and the like must be radically revised; soft determinism is the union of determinism with compatibilism. Those who reject determinism usually are, though they need not be, incompatibilists; this combination constitutes voluntarism or the doctrine of free will.

10. Religion, Law and Politics

‘If God is dead, everything is permitted.’ Those who have begun by identifying morality with a body of divine commands naturally conclude that if there were no God, there could be no moral rules or principles. But the arguments of the preceding chapters, especially Chapters 5 and 8, show how there can be a secular morality, not indeed as a system of objective values or prescriptions, but rather as something to be made and maintained, and which there is some real point in making. However, it may still be argued that religion is needed to complete morality, to make it more secure or more satisfactory than it could be on a secular basis alone.

Paley, perhaps, offered the neatest package, defining virtue as ‘the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness’ , which definition, as he says, makes the good of mankind the subject, the will of God the rule, and everlasting happiness the motive of human virtue.

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.

It would also seem to entail that obedience to moral rules is merely prudent but slavish conformity to the arbitrary demands of a capricious tyrant. Realizing this, many religious thinkers have opted for the first alternative . But this seems to have the almost equally surprising consequence that moral distinctions do not depend on God any more than, say, arithmetical ones, hence that ethics is autonomous and can be studied and discussed without reference to religious beliefs.

The picture of God as an arbitrary tyrant is replaced by the belief that he demands of his creatures only that they should live in what will be, for them, the most satisfying way . We can then say that God is good.

The good for man might be more determinate, more unitary, than we have allowed in Chapter 8, and our task might be less that of making or remaking morality than of finding out, with the help of some reliable revelations, what God’s creative will has made appropriate for man and what his prescriptive will requires of us. It therefore matters a lot for moral philosophy whether any such theistic view is correct.

The coherent view outlined is therefore no more than a bare theoretical possibility, and we shall in the end have to fall back on a purely secular morality.

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The view of the status of ethics for which I have argued in the first part of this book is well illustrated by the analogy of law. Most people would agree that laws are made, whether explicitly by legislators, or surreptitiously by judges, or informally by tradition and custom. Law is, as I have maintained that morality also is, a human product  and one of the functions it serves is closely related to that which, in Chapter 5, I have assigned to morality in the narrow sense .

This amounts to saying that all law is positive law: it is law wholly in and by being ‘posited’. The doctrine of natural law is clearly an analogue of objectivism in ethics. The argument of this book therefore has, as a corollary, the rejection of the doctrine of natural law as a philosophical theory. Whether it is, none the less, a useful fiction is a further question.

Whether the law should enforce morality.

Moral principles, rules, feelings, and dispositions are the first line of defence, the formulation and authoritative statement of laws are the second, and the enforcement of law is the third.

Mutual toleration might be easier to achieve if groups could realize that the ideals which determine their moralities in the broad sense are just that, the ideals of those who adhere to them, not objective values which impose requirements on all alike.

An attempt to enforce a morality that enjoys almost universal support on the surface of which some considerable part is insincere.

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The choice of political goals belongs to morality in the broad sense: it goes with views about the good life for man. But since there will always be divergent conceptions of the good, different preferred kinds of life, a good form of society must somehow be a liberal one, it must leave open ways in which different preferences can be realized. Also, as I said in Chapter 8, competition and conflict, as well as cooperation, are inevitable, and are to be welcomed rather than suppressed or denied; a good form of society must be able to accommodate and regulate them, and will neither try nor pretend to eliminate them. But 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.

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In so far as the objectification of moral values and obligations is not only a natural but also a useful fiction, it might be thought dangerous, and in any case unnecessary, to expose it as a fiction. This is disputable. But what is not disputable is that for the changes and political extensions that are now necessary we cannot rely on the past achievements of evolution and social tradition. We have to find principles of equity and ways of making and keeping agreements without which we cannot hold together.

Notes and References

My views on the subject of this chapter were first put forward in ‘A Refutation of Morals, published in the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy 24 (1946), but substantially written in 1941.

An unjustly neglected work which anticipates my stress on objectification is E. Westermarck’s Ethical Relativity (1932).

Balguy brings out very clearly what I call the ‘claim to objectivity’

Concentration on questions of meaning is criticized by P. Singer in ‘The Triviality of the Debate over “Is-ought”’

G.J. Warnock’s The Object of Morality (1971).