A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (17 page)

What is this ‘reason’ that has or should have governance over the affections? Shaftesbury’s answer to this question is not clear, but his awareness of the need for an answer, and the terms in which he posed the question, were to provide the structure of moral philosophy as it developed to its culmination in Kant. The principal operation of reason in this respect is connected with ‘conscience’. Shaftesbury argued that no morality could be founded in religious obedience, or piety. On the contrary, a person is motivated to such obedience only because conscience tells him that the divine being is worthy of it. Shaftesbury wavered between seeing the origin of conscience in reason, and seeing it in a specific moral feeling. This feeling he also regarded as natural, being a kind of internal reflection of our social sense. It is because we are social beings that we acquire the sense of right and wrong. Conscience therefore reflects the nature not of this or that particular human agent, but rather of our common humanity. The dispositions of the virtuous are the fulfilment of this common nature, and must therefore form themselves in harmony with it. The principle of harmony is sympathy, which is the ability to feel the sufferings and joys of each individual as a part of some greater whole.

This shift in emphasis from reason to sympathy as the ruling principle in moral thought was characteristic. It shows Shaftesbury’s reluctance to carry his arguments through, or fully to define his terms. It also shows his awareness of the complexity of the moral and emotional life of human beings. This awareness was to gain strength and vitality in subsequent thinkers. Shaftesbury had perceived two important truths: first, morality is both peculiar to rational beings and also integral to their entire nature; secondly, morality has an intimate relation to the emotions, at the heart of which lies man’s perception of his nature as a social being. To which sphere, then, should morality be assigned: the rational or the emotional? Shaftesbury’s hesitation is in part an expression of a tardy perception that the distinction between these is as unclear as the definition of either, and that no advance in the ‘moral sciences’ will be possible without a clearer account of how reason and emotion interact.

As Kant was later to perceive, Shaftesbury’s problems arose in the course of an attempt to recapture and delimit the conception of ‘practical reason’ which had troubled Aristotle. But it was not until Kant that this notion was once again fully to come into the foreground of moral thought. The intervening period, which led from Shaftesbury to Hume, was characterised by further attempts to explore the structure of the ‘human nature’ from which morality derives. The most interesting of these attempts were those of Hutcheson (1694-1746), Butler (16921752) and Adam Smith (1723-1790), to the first two of which I shall devote the remainder of this chapter.

Francis Hutcheson’s
Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil
was published in 1725. It shows everywhere the influence of Shaftesbury, adopting a neo-Aristotelian view of human virtue, and directing many of its individual arguments against the seventeenth-century moral sceptics (such as Hobbes and Mandeville) whose writings had equally called forth the opprobrium of Shaftesbury. Nevertheless it is marked by certain important original features. Hutcheson saw in ethics the basis of a new epistemological problem. Putting the point in terms of Lockean empiricism, he notes that, since our language contains terms like ‘moral good’ and ‘moral evil’, we ought to be able to locate the ideas which such words stand for, and the qualities in objects which those ideas represent. We must ask ourselves what foundation there is in nature for this distinction of words. As he recognised, such a question generates a problem of epistemology which for the empiricist is particularly acute. What is the experience, or set of experiences, from which our moral ideas derive? If we can say nothing about those experiences, then we have a problem not just about the truth or falsehood of moral judgements, but about their very meaningfulness.

Hutcheson began from the distinction between self-interest and morality. He argued that Shaftesbury’s view—that self-interest alone suffices to persuade the reasonable person to virtue—is fallacious. Shaftesbury had ignored the completely different character of the motives of morality and self-interest, and the different manner in which we are affected when we perceive the moral and the non-moral reality of things. Hutcheson now faced a question: how do we know that some action, or character, is morally good, if this is not revealed to us by the calculations of self-interest? He felt that he could not derive an answer by referring merely to ordinary capacities of sense-perception: goodness is not, as one might say, a ‘perceivable property’ of the world, in the way that redness is. For one thing, as Shaftesbury had also observed, only rational beings have moral views. Yet there is nothing absurd in supposing that a non-rational being should have all the sensory capacities—sight, touch, hearing, etc.—which characterise us. On the other hand, Hutcheson was reluctant to allow that reason alone could determine what is good or bad. He anticipated Hume’s view that reason can deliver to us no more than the relations among ideas. Hence it provides no insight into the ends of our conduct, however useful it might be in calculating the means to them. Moreover, Hutcheson was thoroughly persuaded not only of the falsehood of rationalist metaphysics, but also of the falsehood of an implication contained in it. This implication is almost explicit in the ethics of Spinoza (whose ‘systematic’ approach to ethics Hutcheson nevertheless sought to emulate). It seems that, on the rationalist view, the ordinary unthinking person could only have confused and indefinite moral convictions, and that it is an unlikely accident if the opinions of the normal active majority happen to coincide. This consequence of rationalism was rejected by all the British moralists as palpably absurd.

Hutcheson, despite his empiricist bias and the consequent emphasis on the question ‘How do I know?’, shared with other eighteenth-century naturalists the view that there is a common body of moral knowledge, and that it is available to everyone whatever the state of their education. It is part of human nature to acquire and exercise this body of moral knowledge. How then is it acquired? Hutcheson’s answer is that we each possess a moral sense, which compellingly delivers to us, through experience, the moral ideas that prompt our actions. Hence these ideas are intelligible in the manner of all ideas—by virtue of an intrinsic connection with the experience from which they derive. This postulation of a moral ‘sense’ explains various facts which would otherwise be mysterious. First, it explains why moral opinions are common to people of all periods and cultures, local variations being explicable not as fundamental differences of outlook but as reflections of the varying circumstances with which the common moral outlook is combined. Secondly, it explains why these opinions are aroused in us spontaneously upon the perception of good or evil acts. They are aroused, as it were, against our will: faced with an outrageous act I am stirred to indignation. This is not something I
do
but something that
happens
to me. (‘Passivity’ is a feature of sensory perception made prominent by Berkeley and later by Hume.) Moreover it seems that the moral sense cannot be overcome by self-interest or passion: it always tells me what is right or wrong, much as my eyes always tell me what is there, whatever my individual desires, projects or emotions.

It is clear that the moral-sense theory is able to reconcile the objectivity of moral judgement with empiricist conceptions of meaning. Nevertheless it leaves many questions unanswered. For example, it seems odd to speak of a ‘sense’, when there is no particular organ involved in the perception. Moreover, the problem remains of explaining why only rational beings—beings with certain non-sensory powers—are capable of exercising moral judgement. What is it about a dog that makes it impossible for it to perceive these apparently evident properties of the actions which we call right and wrong? Moreover, how is it that we can engage in and be persuaded by moral argument? We do not argue someone into perceiving the colour of a thing, nor would we try to do so. What is the force, then, of referring to a ‘sense’ when the rational capacities seem so integral to its exercise?

Hutcheson did not address himself to all those problems: nevertheless, he rightly felt that the moral sense could not be taken as a brute capacity—like the capacity to hear, for example—which we might have lacked while being in every other respect rational. He recognised that the moral sense has a further basis in rational nature, and its fundamental working can be understood only in terms of that basis. Hence Hutcheson, like Shaftesbury, had recourse to a general theory of benevolence. He argued that the disposition of human beings to feel pained at each other’s sufferings and to rejoice at each other’s delights is, in so far as it exists, the motivating force behind both the perception of moral qualities and the actions which are precipitated by it. The disposition to sympathise in these and all the many other ways with which we are familiar is part of what later philosophers were to call the ‘social’ nature of humankind. The British empiricists deserve credit for this, if for no other thing, that they so described the moral life as to make it clear that there could be no moral theory, whether sceptical or otherwise, that treated the individual as an isolated unit, in only accidental relation to his fellows. The concepts of ‘sympathy’ and benevolence became basic to moral theory, until Kant suddenly swept them aside in a theory of ethics that made not only these, but every other variety of emotion, utterly irrelevant.

It is at this point that the moral-sense theory becomes unsatisfactory, however. Benevolence may be a natural disposition, but it is not clear how it can provide the foundation of a
sense.
There are no objects, states of affairs or whatever which it is proper to benevolence to perceive, even though it may be proper to benevolence to act on them. At least, if we do say that there is a perception of right and wrong and it is benevolence which leads us to it, we also need to meet Hume’s later charge that this, which we interpret as a ‘perception’, is but another example of the mind’s capacity to ‘spread itself upon objects’. There is neither right nor wrong in the world, but only a collective hallucination born of good will. It does not really alter this fact that by nature we all agree on what is right or wrong. That only shows that our sympathies are naturally in tune. It does nothing to persuade those who are out of tune with the spirit of benevolence that there is a respect in which they perceive the world wrongly.

The moral-sense theory waned, was revived, waned again, and still continues its spasmodic life, under the guise of ethical ‘intuitionism’. But the immediate contemporary of Hutcheson, and the philosopher who did most to gather together the insights of Lockean moral philosophy into a system, was not persuaded by it. Bishop Butler, whose
Sermons
first appeared in 1726, kept closer to Shaftesbury’s strategy. That is to say, he put aside questions of moral epistemology and of the meaning of moral terms in favour of a description of human nature which would show, in Aristotelian fashion, not that the evil perceive things wrongly, but rather that they act and feel against nature. Hence, however we answer such questions as ‘To what idea does the word “right” refer?’ or ‘Is there an objective property of things which constitutes their moral value?’, we shall be in a position to argue that there is as much reason to act in accordance with the precepts of morality as there is to act in accordance with any other part of ourselves which is essential to the harmonious functioning of our nature. It was from reflections inspired by this thought— and in particular from those delivered by Butler—that much of the modern philosophy of mind was born. If Butler is admired now it is as much because of his acute understanding of the peculiar philosophical problems posed by the nature of appetite, will and emotion, as on account of his answers to the questions of morality.

Butler argued against a certain species of hedonism. According to this theory, no one does anything unless prompted by desire. Since the satisfaction of desire is pleasure, the ultimate end of all action is pleasure. It does not matter that the original desire was to do good: the fulfilment of the action lies in the pleasure that accompanies its success. Hence it is this pleasure that is
really
wanted. Butler felt that this thought, or some variant of it, lay behind most moral scepticism, as well as behind many accepted accounts of the nature of emotion. Since he also thought that it makes morality either impossible, or at best no more natural or respectable than its opposite, he was led to explore the nature of motivation, in order to refute hedonism in this and every other form. At the same time he developed a subtle and in many ways persuasive theory of rational agency.

First, Butler argued that hedonism rests in a fallacy. Even if it were true that whenever I act, I act from a desire, and true that pleasure is the natural or even essential consequence of the satisfaction of desire, it does not follow that my desire is always for pleasure. On the contrary, Butler argued, pleasure presupposes the existence of desire, and is obtained not because we pursue it, but because we pursue something else. The pleasure of drinking wine comes through the satisfaction of the desire for wine. Had it been pleasure alone that we sought, then the wine would have been replaceable as a means to it. I might have said, to someone who asked for a glass of wine, ‘Take this, it will do just as well,’ and thereupon handed them some other object—a book, a pistol, a plate of fish—the possession of which brings pleasure. To put the point succinctly, hedonism overlooks the specific nature of the objects of our appetites and passions.

Moreover, Butler argued, hedonism rests on an over-simple view of the nature of desire. It assimilates all desires to those of immediate impulse. It fails to distinguish the desires which are peculiar to reason from those which have their basis in animal nature. A rational being can reflect on his predicament and see that the satisfaction of this or that desire might conflict with his long-term interests, bringing discomfort, restlessness, debility or grief. A modern philosopher might speak here of the rational being’s capacity for ‘second-order’ or ‘longterm’ desires. Some of my desires involve, as part of their object, that I should or should not act on some other short-term, or first-order desire. Butler spoke in this connection of ‘cool self-love’; meaning the general capacity to step outside the sphere of present impulse and reflect on one’s existence as it extends through time, to see what kind of disposition or character it would be most satisfactory to acquire, and so to act accordingly, encouraging some appetites and discouraging others, in the interest of one’s ultimate well-being.