[This is Chapter 7 of Murphey’s book Emergent Man:]
****************************************************************
There is much that is good and much that is
bad in the various ethical doctrines that have come down through the centuries.
It is possible to write a separate essay on each particular maxim set out by
the many strains of thought. Such an essay could look into the substantive content
of the maxim, to determine whether the rule is intelligently serving the
purposes it ought to serve. Certainly such an examination of moral principles
is important. Much of this book, in fact, will consist of exactly that. At this
point, however, I wish to consider a question that is logically prior to the
question of whether a given set of ethical maxims is good or bad, functional or
destructive. This question asks whether or not we need moral principles at all,
even at their best. Clearly an answer to this will involve a study of the role
that generalizations about the imperatives of human conduct play in human life.
We must seek a mature appreciation of why principles of human conduct are
important to men in the advancement of their creative values and in their
inhibition of those forces that would oppress and lacerate the human being. One
must fully appreciate the need for principles we are to adopt and what
principles we are to reject. I have mentioned that this appreciation is
logically prior to any criticism of moral doctrines as such. In what follows,
then, the question is not What principles are we to hold? but rather Are we to
hold principles?
Though at first blush it may seem trite to do
so, it is sometimes necessary to reaffirm basic truths. It may seem trite to
assert positively that moral principles are fundamental to civilized life, or -- what is the same thing -- to enter upon a
"defense" of morality. This seeming triteness is, however,
superficial. Basic truths are subject to erosion. Though in a sense they may be
immutable as truths, they are not immutable so far as man's acceptance of them
is concerned. Men can adopt the unwise and follow it. The fact that to do so
may lead them into considerable suffering that could have been avoided does not
guarantee that they will avoid the error. Men are not always moving toward a
greater perfection. Not all movement is toward progress. There may be
retrogression, and with the retrogression all of its attend- ant consequences.
In conversation it is sometimes said jokingly,
and not without some justification, that many politicians win elections by
"attacking sin and defending motherhood." The following remarks are not in this same category, even though
their professed object is to defend morality. The fact is that morality per
se is under severe attack and that the defense of morality is
intellectually a minority position that receives little intelligent support.
Ostensibly the defense of morality is a safe pursuit. Intellectually, it is not
popular.
It goes without saying that ethical doctrines
do exist today. There are institutions concerned primarily with ethical
problems. And on a more amorphous, though perhaps more important, level
generation after generation sets up its own orthodoxies and prejudices, and
these melt into something of a moral order. This moral order is in many ways
powerful today, for both the good and the bad ends it serves. I am not to be
understood, therefore, as saying that Americans have no morality. This would be
an oversimplification of an astounding sort and not very sensible.
What I do say is that there are powerful
forces leading us in the direction of amorality, which is to say, toward a lack
of moral principle. I doubt whether it is possible for them ever to succeed
entirely. So long as a man feels some sympathetic concern for his fellow men he will not be without some
guiding principles helping him in his conduct toward them. But there is a lot
of room in between this ultimate residue that man cannot very well escape and a
developed morality that acts firmly and well to discipline human life so as to
make possible its finest achievements. The amorality seeping into contemporary
public thinking can damage the moral machinery in this highly developed sense.
By so doing it can have catastrophic consequences. It is quite doubtful whether
the residue of primordial morality is enough to sustain a civilization. There
is no need for dramatic statement of the potential consequences that can come
from the loss of strong moral guidance. Sober reflection is enough, by itself,
to show the possibilities that might arise from such a loss.
It is too easy to suppose that when older
principles are attacked they are necessarily opposed by new principles that are
offered with a hope and a conviction that they will serve better. This would
involve a replacement of one morality by another. But is this what is taking
place today? It is not easy to see that on the whole a positive set of values
and derivative moral principles is taking shape today to replace the older
values. Rather, there is a profound emptiness behind the several assaults
taking place in the middle of the twentieth century against the doctrines and
attitudes of the past. For example, in the area of "religion" there
is no very substantial secular religion coming in to replace the theologies
that are under attack. And this is true in philosophy and politics and
elsewhere. It is amorality that is being advanced, not a competing morality.
The amorality exists in the prevailing
intellectual temper. Since some study of this ought to be rewarding in helping
us to understand the need for a renewed appreciation of moral problems, we
would do well to review this temper at this point.
The attitude of men about moral statements is
closely tied to their attitude about descriptive statements. If a broad skepticism exists as to man's ability to set
down as true definite statements describing the world in which he lives, this
same skepticism tends to pass over also to moral thinking, and doubt develops
as to whether moral statements have any greater validity. And this is
altogether reasonable, especially since moral statements must presuppose and be
predicated upon a certain understanding of human conditions and causal
relations between those conditions. In this sense they cannot be stronger than
the factual hypotheses they encompass, and if skepticism expresses doubt as to
the factual hypotheses then it also casts doubt on the moral principles founded
on them.
The philosophy of scientific method stresses
the fact that many statements are not strictly provable in the sense that we
can know that they must absolutely correspond with the reality about which they
purport to speak. A successful experiment involving a theory will only verify
it, not prove it.
"Verification" does not prove the truth of the theory. A
second and different experiment might show its falsity even though the first
one did not. The idea is to put the theory to tests by which if it is incorrect
it might be disproved and if it is found by these tests to give rise
satisfactorily to inferences that “check out” with observable facts, then it is
considered verified. It is thought that
a theory that is susceptible to such tests, and then passes them, is
scientifically acceptable, while one that is not susceptible to them or that
does not pass them even if it is susceptible is not given intellectual
credence. The function of this selection process is to weed out nonsense. It is
vital that an enormous body of misleading supposition be avoided by insisting
that each theory be constantly subject to this weeding process.
This greater acceptability to the critical intellectual,
however, does not obviate the presence of uncertainty. The scientist, if he is
a scientist more than in name, must have a strong sense of this tentativeness
and be willing to reconsider his ideas with a mind open to new evidence.
Necessarily, this point of view has had a
significant impact on the great body of modern thought. So far as it goes in
begetting the critical mentality I have described, it is invaluable. It offers
a lack of dogmatism and a corresponding care of scrutiny, together with
functional tests for careful selection from among competing theories, and in
these ways there is great intellectual strength.
Oddly enough, though, this strength has been
surrounded in contemporary thought by a whole raft of anti-rationalistic and
obscurantist thinking, which is based on misunderstandings of the critical
method of science itself. One might say that by definition science and
obscurantism are opposing forces, but the two presently share the same house,
apparently mated together in the minds of many. The function of science is to
explain and to clarify. Obscurantism, on the other hand, fails to explain
anything and deprives thought of all clarity.
It is a mistake of major proportions to think
that the anti-dogmatic attitude of science is in any way consistent with
obscurantism. And yet a great many of our contemporaries make this mistake and
indulge in considerable obscurantism while presuming to be up-to-date
sophisticates. Indeed, both obscurantism and the healthy critical method of
science are mixed in together in the amorphous and inconsistent orthodoxy that
grips serious-minded Americans today. The incommunicative jumble of some modern
poetry, literature and art are a part of the prevailing intellectualism just as
much as is the skeptical clarity of scientific method. When William Faulkner,
for example, writes in a running orgy of nonsense his books are published and
considered literature. The Sound and the Fury is a remarkable piece of
obscurity. And in light of it we must ask ourselves why such a thing is
considered literary in an age of science.
Somehow the idea that different men can hold
opposing ideas and that they are equally respectable as ideas just because we
don't want to be dogmatic about anything is considered to be an intellectually sophisticated attitude.
"Sure you say its morally wrong to plant a bomb on a plane and kill 44
people, but somebody else would think otherwise, and are you really going to
insist dogmatically that you are right and the other person is
wrong?" It is this sort of sophisticated mental and moral disability that
is galloping through the American mind today. One hears it constantly. There is
the sense of the smartness of extreme open-mindedness to the point where ideas
are constantly batted about without the persons involved particularly feeling
the tremendous responsibilities of decision and judgment. This is an opposition
to dogmatism that is carried to the absurd extreme of opposing the full mental
act of drawing conclusions after study. But is this perpetual
"tentativeness" well founded on the true spirit of science? I don’t
believe so. The humility that a critical method involves is altogether
different, when properly conceived, from the Milque-toast idea that is implicit
in the popular question "Who's to judge?," which voices the
tentativeness and indecision. A critical epistemology does not involve a
surrender of the faculty of judgment. Indeed, critical methodology is conceived
in the hope that we might strengthen our capacity for judgment. By being aware
of our limitations we are not throwing in the towel; we are in fact better
preparing the strategy for the continuing struggle. We do not throw ourselves
into perpetual doubt when we resolve to assign truth-value to statements that
pass critical tests and deny it to others. What the sophisticates have
forgotten is that those statements that pass the tests are intellectually
worthy of respect. Things do not melt into a great tortured mass of equally-good-ideas.
A
part of this "relativism," tentativeness, obscurantism, or what have
you, is the logically fallacious and largely unspoken but very powerful premise
that truth is to be judged democratically. This involves the assertion that the
view of a private individual cannot be respected if it runs counter to that put
forth by a much larger number of persons who agree among themselves. This view
discounts as discreditable, without further consideration, an idea that
dissents from the group’s. To some extent, such discounting springs from an
invalid ex- tension of the spirit of "majority rule" from politics to
logic and to some extent it is a part of the built-in defense mechanisms that
all orthodoxies apply in their urge to self-preservation. It ought to be
sufficient to remark that this approach is a form of ad hominem argument
and is therefore logically fallacious as deciding an issue on irrelevant
grounds.
I have referred to William Faulkner's writing
as an example of obscurantism. A better illustration could probably be found in
John Maynard Keynes' General Theory, one of the most influential books
in our century. The popularity of this book goes far to show how contemporary
intellectuals will indulge in the mysticism of obscurity and not revolt against
it. Keynes lacked consistency, did not bother to define his terms with care,
and produced a treatise that is almost impossible to read with an eye to
getting sense from it. I have struggled with it for weeks at a time, doing no
more than trying to discover what Keynes himself meant. And yet this book has
been a bible for years. The important influence of Keynesianism on economics
demonstrates as well as anything else the willingness of modern intellectuals
to accept confused thinking if it is presented in a way that seems at least
superficially to be in line with the temper of science. In this connection, the
reader would do well to read Henry Hazlitt's excellent book The Failure of
the New Economics, which discusses Keynes' General Theory chapter
by chapter, almost paragraph by paragraph.
All of this is related to the discussion of
amorality. The point is that an orthodoxy that cultivates an attitude of
intellectual irresponsibility is closely associated with amorality. Such an
orthodoxy gives exaggerated stress to the tentativeness of all ideas. Since
morality involves an attitude of moral resolve, this obscurantism acts to
weaken moral conviction by undermining this resolve. Indeed, the obscurantist view is sometimes expressed that
one should hardly make a moral judgment at all, in any situation.
This brings us to an
important reflection about morality itself. Even at best -- i. e., even
without indulging obscurantism --, one finds it hard to sustain moral
conviction in light of the knowledge that the human mind and spirit are so
complex that one can rarely appreciate fully the factors present in a given
situation. An honest awareness of one's intellectual fallibility, even though this
awareness is not distorted into obscurantism, tends to weaken moral conviction.
A man who is aware that moral decisions involve a weighing of competing values
and that there is no precise measure by which we can definitely set the bounds
of moral conduct will tend to hesitate. This hesitation is a natural reaction
for a person thinking intelligently about a moral problem.
But at this point the intellectual must stop
and gain a new perspective. It is necessary for him to realize with his fullest
sensibilities that a man must exist not only in the capacity of thinker, but
also in other capacities. A man must have a moral side as well as an
intellectual side. As an actor in a world of real people he exists in a world
that demands moral conviction if
it is to have a steady guide away from the agonies that it is entirely possible for human beings to
visit upon themselves. This calls for
an act of will to superimpose an attitude of moral determination on top of
one's own best judgment and to put one's hesitation in the background quite
consciously and deliberately. The intellectual must resolve to think, to
decide, and to place himself with all his force behind his best understanding.
It is altogether true that he may be wrong and that his error may be destructive.
But at least he has not left mankind to wander in an unguided amoralism. He has
at least taken the side of moral principle, realizing that it is better to be
wrong in the exercise of one's full judgment than it is to abrogate the faculty
of judgment and effectively withdraw ones mind from the processes of historical
evolution.
It is not simply the mentality of contemporary
intellectuals that shows the amorality. It may be seen in other areas as well.
It shows up very strikingly in American politics. In his book Up From
Liberalism William F. Buckley, Jr., quite aptly characterizes the present
period as an "age of modulation."
He speaks of the "developing taboo first on strong opinions, second
on their expression in relentless language." And if this modulation may be
seen anywhere, it may be seen in national politics during the Eisenhower
administration. Little serious public debate has been waged over the most
important public questions. Indeed, the American people as a whole do not seem
to care about these questions. Certainly the Republican Party itself does not
care about them. Mr. Eisenhower's popularity as a Presidential candidate was
immense in 1952 before he returned to the United States to give his speech at
Abilene. The general public did not know where he stood on vital issues. It did
not even know his general philosophy of government, or whether he had one.
These things did not matter. The important thing to Eisenhower supporters was
that "Eisenhower can win." Could we find a better example of
amorality than the Presidential election in 1952? This same spirit ran
throughout the years Eisenhower was in office.
A good example of this exists in the fact that
after the truce in the Korean War there were several hundred American servicemen
who had been prisoners of the Communists who were not repatriated in the
exchange of prisoners. Senator Joe McCarthy and a Capt. Eugene R. Guild of
Glenwood Springs, Colorado, have both spoken vigorously about the continued
captivity of these men as late as 1960, but the American people have "gone
to sleep" on this issue. And yet it is fantastic that a nation with any
pride and conscience should have almost no public discussion of something of
this sort. We have lacked not only a strong sense of indignation and of urgency
to do something about it; we have lacked as well even the slightest sensitivity
to it.
This is just one of hundreds of potential
issues of considerable magnitude. I remark on it because I think it is symbolic,
along with others, of the deeply rooted amorality of contemporary America.
Principles simply aren't considered important.
Nor is justice important to us. To be
"just" one must be willing to look with cold honesty at a given
situation to see what is true about it. Justice is truth applied to moral
problems. And can we say we are "just" in our national thinking on
perhaps the gravest problem facing modern man, Communism? There is a strong tendency among many
Americans to overlook entirely the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union and
of the Communism it professes. One often hears the thought expressed that the
troubles in international affairs are caused by a “lack of understanding
between peoples.” This viewpoint is
willfully and irresponsibly blind to the ideological content of Communism and
to its naked desire to destroy the free society. It is an attempt to simplify
away the factual underpinnings of the present struggle. I think it is not going
too far to say that this mentality is the manifestation of an amoralism that
touches the whole subject of Communism.
We can look into other aspects of life, too,
and see the same development. I think that when the word "morals" is
mentioned most people tend to think of sex, since it is in this connection that
morals are most often discussed. Surely amorality is of growing significance in
sexual matters. The old moral code has been based in large measure on a view
that sex is obscene. It is well that it should give way. But what is replacing
it? To some extent this may be answered by pointing to the writings that have
expressed so well the beauty and religious-poetic significance of the carnality
of sex. Certainly D. H. Lawrence's poem "Tortoise Shout" expresses a
very fine perspective. I have mentioned
earlier the delightful obscenity of his Lady Chatterley's Lover. But there is an important void here. Where in this new perspective is to be found any expression
of the imperative principles that men and women ought to follow in the
discipline of this aspect of their lives? To speak of freedom is surely not
enough. It is necessary, too, to advise human beings as to the limitations they
should follow in order to obtain the fullest expression of sexuality and a
strong family unit based on marriage. There is need for such a morality, though
at this point I will not digress to discuss what it should propose. To do so
now would detract from the observation that the new perspective has not yet
come to the point of making practical moral suggestions. It has expressed a new
religious conception of sex and has opposed the old view, but without itself
facing the problems raised by the need for morality.
Needless to say, this failure either leads
toward or is the product of amorality. It amounts to a lack of principle. And
this tendency is strengthened by the difficulty that is found to be present
when one tries to formulate guiding principles for sexual conduct, a difficulty
stemming from the inability socially to enforce the principles that may be
chosen. The practical carrying-out of morality very often depends on social
enforcement within a moral society. Morality is more than mere intelligent
action; it is a code of intelligent conduct impressed upon the members of a
moral order. And, to speak frankly, the automobile has removed forever the
possibility of a socially policed sex, at least in regard to premarital
relations, even if we were to try to
enforce only such limitations as the new perspective would suggest. The day of
the chaperone is over. The plain fact is that sexual pleasure may be had in
private between two persons who are so inclined merely by going off in an
automobile. This entails a collapse of the social enforceability of sexual
ethics which is of major
importance to moral philosophy. It ought to be obvious that this lack of
enforceability, and the consequent difficulty
in formulating workable principles, help produce amorality.
During the past few pages I have raised several
examples of the decline of moral principle. A book could be devoted solely to
the manifestations of it. But such a study is not within the purposes of this
present essay. The question we are really concerned with here is the question
of "Are we to hold principles?"
So that we would take this question seriously, it has been necessary to
become sensitive to the challenge that has been thrown up to morality. Present
day Americans do not resoundingly answer "yes" to the question.
The answer, of course, must be
"yes." Principles are
essential. We must have them and they must be sound libertarian principles
cementing a social relationship that will make possible emergent life. But as
with all things, the mere answer is not enough. We must appreciate fully the
compulsion of the answer, and the
appreciation must be emotional as well as mental.
When I read Tolstoy's War and Peace, I
was struck by the great problems raised in that book. His novel places flesh
and blood around the issue of morality. To appreciate fully the need for moral principles a person must see what
they mean to human beings in
terms of the joys and agonies of actual life.
War and Peace is a good place to gain this perspective.
Tolstoy himself did not discuss the relation of morality as such to the great
perplexing problem he raised, but he expressed the problem powerfully and it is
a problem to which morality is the only answer.
What is this perplexity of which he
wrote? And how does morality relate to it?
The firing-squad scene best expresses Tolstoy's perplexity. Pierre, one of the book's main characters, has been arrested in Moscow by Napoleon's troops and charged with being an incendiary engaged in burning the city. Pierre is led with a group of prisoners to a garden in which a post has been erected. A French official comes before the prisoners and reads a sentence of death. Tolstoy described the scene that followed:
“Then two couples
of French soldiers came up to the prisoners by the instruction of an officer,
and took the two convicts who stood at the head. The convicts went up to the
post, stopped there, and while the sacks were being brought, they looked dumbly
about them, as a wild beast at bay looks at the approaching hunter. One of them
kept on crossing himself, the other scratched his back and worked his lips into
the semblance of a smile. The soldiers with hurrying fingers bandaged their
eyes, put the sacks over their heads and bound them to the post.
“A dozen sharpshooters, with muskets, stepped
out of the ranks with a fine, regular tread, and halted eight paces from the
post. Pierre turned away not to see
what was coming. There was a sudden bang and rattle that seemed to Pierre
louder than the most terrific clap of thunder, and he looked round. There was a
cloud of smoke, and the French soldiers, with trembling hands and pale faces,
were doing something in it in the pit. The next two were led up . . . .”
As Pierre stands in the line of prisoners waiting to be the sixth man
shot, the perplexity of which I have spoken comes to him:
“Pierre,
breathing hard, looked about him as though asking, ‘What does it mean?’ The same question was written in all the
eyes that met Pierre’s eyes. On all the
faces of the Russians, on the faces of the French soldiers and officers, all
without exception, he read the same dismay, horror, and conflict as he felt in his own heart. ‘But who is it
doing it there really? They are all suffering as I am! Who is it? Who?’ flashed
for one second through Pierre's mind.”
Pierre was to be shot, even though no one
wanted to kill him. Circumstances had carried the war and the French soldiers
and the Russians and Pierre forward to a point at which, though no one wanted
it, Pierre was to die. Tolstoy reflected further on this distorted sort of
reality in the following passage:
“There was one idea all this time in Pierre's
head. It was the question: Who, who was it really that was condemning him to
death? It was not the men who had
questioned him at the first examination; of them not one would or obviously
could do so. It was not Davoust, who
had looked at him in such a human fashion. In another minute Davoust would have
understood that they were doing wrong, but the adjutant who had come in at that
moment had prevented it. And that
adjutant had obviously had no evil intent, but he might have stayed away. Who was it, after all, who was punishing
him, killing him, taking his life --his, Pierre's, with all his memories, his
strivings, his hopes, and his ideas?
Who was doing it? And Pierre
felt that it was no ones doing. It was
discipline, and the concatenation of circum- stances. Some sort of discipline was killing him, Pierre, robbing him of
life, of all, annihilating him.”
Tolstoy had a clear conception of the great
flux of human life. To him historic events were not simple moves ordered by
such a general as Napoleon. There was an immense complexity and it was a
"concatenation of circumstances" more than Napoleon that had brought
things to the point of the firing squad scene. Throughout War and Peace Tolstoy
writes in awe and wonder at the great panorama of human life, which he sets out
in all its breadth while at the
same time being highly sensitive to the microcosm that consists of individual
lives. His perplexity reaches the highest point when he ponders the
cause-and-effect problem, particularly in respect to the conduct and outcome of
battles. To him the "concatenation of circumstances” has a strange and
arbitrary determinism.
To some extent I think this deterministic
conception is nonsense. But there is, just the same, such a potent grain of
truth in it that one must credit Tolstoy with a really remarkable insight. It
is true that there would seem to be much more intelligent determination of what
occurs in human history than Tolstoy was willing to concede. This fact does not diminish, however, the
importance of Tolstoy's perspective of history as being, so to speak, a virtual
"tidal wave." Once human
forces are cultivated and released, they are difficult to turn back. At best,
they can be molded only in the broad picture. Once an army is set on the march
and is engaged in policing and killing, the stage is set for just such scenes
as Tolstoy described. Mistakes can be made, just as was threatened with Pierre
(though I feel obliged to mention in passing for those who have not yet read War
and Peace that Pierre himself soon found that he was not to be executed,
but was only taken along to see his fellow prisoners killed). After things have
reached a certain point in any given instance, there is simply not the
organizational mechanism that is necessary to keep the flux from flowing at
least a bit further along its already chosen path. And so it seems that there
is a determinism, an inexorability, that carries things on even though no one
may desire the result.
Along the same lines, we might consider
whether it was possible to avoid the heinous crimes of the Nazi extermination
camps after a totalitarian philosophy had been bred into the German people for several years and their
sensibilities had been so greatly distorted. Certainly in a technical sense the
answer might be simply that Hitler (or some other Nazi official) could have
ordered that the gas chambers not be used. This technically correct answer,
however, is not very profound. It looks
only to the mechanism of authority and not to the human factors that determine
its use. [Note in 2001: Many
years after this was written I became aware that there is a serious scholarly
literature questioning the six million figure as the number of Jewish deaths
and whether indeed there were extermination camps, although without asserting
that terrible atrocities were not committed.
My example here adequately illustrates the philosophical point I was
making, but the aptness of the illustration turns on whether that literature
has merit.] When two men are rushing at
each other with bayonets, one might say that they could, on approaching one
another, just put down their rifles and spare each other. But the fact is that they will not. Their failure to do so is founded on
deeply-rooted human forces. At such a time, it is literally too late.
In all of this there exists a great lesson as
to the need for moral principles. I have recited these examples so that an
American reading these remarks will at least temporarily set aside his vision
of life as being so thoroughly domesticated and civilized that nothing much can
ever run amuck in it. We are lulled into insensitivity by the optimistic
day-to-day extroversion of our ordinary existence. To see the need for morals
one must be sensitive to the terrible insanities that can overtake human beings
and lead men into the severest kinds of distress. It is this underlying potential for "insanity" that
makes the prior discipline of human conduct so necessary. Ideas and social compulsion must lead men
into a constant embrace of the ways of civilized society. Moral principles are the substance of this
discipline.
It ought to be clear that much of the answer
to Tolstoy's perplexing problem is to be found in such moral control. The discipline of morality is not only
concerned with the present conduct of human beings, it also with establishing,
for the long-term, the prerequisites of continuing civilization and with
avoiding the build-up of forces that will lead to destruction and suffering. By
holding sound ideas today and acting accordingly, we are setting the stage for
peace and liberty in the future as well as guarding ourselves against transgressions that may
occur on an individual scale
today.
In other words, we are by morality providing
today for "preventing the execution of another Pierre twenty-five or fifty
years from now. We are acting while there is still time and while the terrible
contingency is still far off in the realm of possibility. One may pursue moral
principles because he has learned the lessons of history and does not have to
be reminded over and over again by renewed scenes of men being shot at posts in
order to appreciate the need for moral discipline.
A defense of morality is appropriately,
therefore, called "notes on future slaughter." Such moral order as we
may maintain today is our assurance against future slaughter. The
responsibility for such slaughter as occurs during the coming decades is more
on us than on those whose bayonets do the actual disemboweling.
Is it hard, then, to see the vital humanistic
function of moral principles? Morals per se are not opposed to the
fullest expression of the human personality.
They are necessary to it. It is
true enough that moral principles involve inhibition and restraint. But there is no need that these be depraved
and suffocating inhibitions. They ought
rather to be so formulated as to liberate, not deny, in their overall
effect. But, of course, this gets us
into a discussion of the substantive content of morals, which is not to be
taken up in this section of this book. Here, we have been concerned with seeing
-- through Tolstoy's illustration -- the need for the strong influence of sound
ideas long before human disasters can take shape. We have still to look into
what these ideas need to be.
Before closing this brief discussion of morals,
however, I ought to attempt to clarify at least two problems presently very
important in the contemporary feeling about morals. Considerable
misunderstanding of the need for moral principles will be fostered if we do not
understand just what a moral principle is and how it functions. Two points of
view seem to reflect such a lack of understanding. These are closely related,
and the discussion of them can be made together. They are:
. That moral principles that apply in generality are often inept in their application to particular human situations; and
. That a man may morally take short-cuts with
the general rules, not following them
strictly, so long as he acts with intelligence and a sensitive regard
for his fellows.
Both of these raise the question of what
relation general moral principles bear to unique human situations that may
arise with individuals at particular times and places. They both attack the
general nature of moral principles and, finding that generality to be unsatisfactory,
suggest an atomistic course of decision and self-determination. To some extent
they are based on a very fine understanding of the complexity of human needs
and of the subjective lives of people. I believe also they are a reaction
against what are conceived to be unnecessary restraints, and in favoring or
looking with compassion on conduct contrary to the restraints those persons who
express these views have merely failed to suggest --though very significantly
-- the alternative moral principles that would better fit the problems
involved. Perhaps it is not intended to
favor atomistic self-determination in regard to those matters that have
important consequences among men in a social sense; perhaps the failure to
propose a general morality as an alternative is a mere oversight. If so, the oversight is of major importance,
and itself is worthy of comment.
Moral principles are necessarily general and
authoritarian. These qualities are essential to the performance by them of the
guidance function that I have stressed as the core of the need for morals. If
all men were angels, morality may not be needed (to restate in this connection
a famous statement in Federalist Paper No. 51). Morals are ideas as to what should and should not be done in
human conduct, ideas held by men in their social relations so that they become
the mores of the group and become enforceable through the subtle social
pressures that men put on one another. They are coercive in that they are so
enforced. They unite behind a common idea the various responses that men make
as an inseparable part of their free action as individuals; that is to say,
they unite into a consistent pattern the reactions of approval and disapproval
that men might give upon becoming aware of a certain act by another person. If
there is a commonly held moral code, there is bound to be considerable
compulsion, even though of an amorphous sort, thrown behind the principles
making up the code, and this takes the form of a conformity as to certain
fundamentals of human conduct.
The conformist, authoritarian nature of
morality is not objectionable per se.
Instead, the need for a disciplined human society -- which is to say,
the need for civilized conduct as distinguished from the less-than-civilized --
would not be met if this were not its nature. Morality as conformity is a
valuable social cement, assuming the morality is libertarian and the conformity
brings the society into a behavioral expression of that responsibility and
lawfulness that liberty requires. The state, which is vested with the potent
coercive power to impose fines and imprisonment, not to mention capital
punishment, is in truth incapable of handling much more than cases of actual
deviation. The basic substratum of the
respect for rights and of the performance of duty, which keeps deviation from
coming into existence in the first place, exists in the self-discipline that
individuals exert on themselves through their own moral sense and in the
discipline that is imposed by the social order as the social manifestation of
the same morality. Without this moral
cohesion there would be disintegration; the superstructure of institutions
could not hold such a society together. Law itself would face an impossible
task safeguarding persons, property and enforcing contracts.
It is true that to be effective the moral
principles must be widely adhered to and socially enforced. But while this is
so, moral principles ought not to be unreasoned; they must be subject
constantly to examination and discussion. They are not unquestionable
revelations from some source beyond the kin of human understanding. At all
times they should represent the best reasoned ethical thinking possible. The
reasons for this are obvious. The function of morality is so vitally important
that it should receive the best intelligence we can give it. And, too, as men we cannot consciously
surrender our intellect in this matter consistent with our necessary insistence
on our own mind as the ultimate judge of our condition and actions. Here, the underlying values that morality
should express come forward to dictate that morality ought to be the product of
human thought. And this is as it should be. The value of mind is supreme over
and logically prior to decisions about morals.
This recognition that morals are man-made, and
should be so considered, however, doubtless creates a difficult problem in
light of the need that moral principles be authoritarian. Morals cannot be
effective if many men follow diverse courses.
And such diversity would be almost predictable among thinking men if
they were to give free rein to their minds. There would seem in this to be a
contradiction, but it is more apparent than real. The answer is that free
intellect and social conformity are not necessarily divergent. In civilization there is a great deal of
agreement on fundamentals. This is true almost by definition, since without it
there could hardly be a civilization. If the minds of men are in agreement, a
common moral order is certainly not impossible. The underlying agreement on
fundamentals is strongly reenforced, too, by one of the outstanding facts about
human beings: the fact that they tend to aggregate themselves into orthodoxies,
which in turn determine the vast bulk of thinking. It is not surprising, in
this connection, that orthodoxy bolsters morality, or at least offers a way out
of the problem that would exist if men were all to think quite independently
about morals. Both morality and orthodoxy are conservative aspects of
civilization, and just as some radicalism and fresh thinking are needed, so too
do these conservative elements play a necessary role by providing the cohesion
that civilization requires.
What I am saying, therefore, is that the
"fresh thinking" of mankind ought to be applied, as with other
things, to morals, and this fresh thinking ought to be backed up by a morality,
a social conformity, that has taken its shape by absorption of such thinking in
the past. [Note in 2001: The preceding pages describe the need both
for morality as a product of reasoned consideration and for
morality-as-a-socially-enforced-behavioral-cohesion. This poses, then, one of the paradoxes that confound those who
like to think simplistically about such things, since both aspects need to be
accommodated at once, even though they seem to be opposites. In my later writing, I tell of the
importance of John Stuart Mill’s concept (picking up on Coleridge) of a
“clerisy,” an intellectual subculture, to guide a society. Such intellectual leadership is certainly
essential to a free society. It is
within that subculture that the questioning and fresh thinking will most occur,
while the morality-as-conformity-to-norms will be important in the great body
of the society. In saying that the
intellectual subculture should be the seat of rational consideration about
morality, I don’t mean to suggest that the intellectual subculture should
itself be immune from the requirement of moral behavior, since I think the
moral profligacy of the intelligentsia of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries in the West has been a disgrace.
One of the most fateful voids within modern Europe and America, as my
later writing emphasizes, has been the lack of an intellectual culture
appropriate to a free society. When the
literary-artistic subculture turned sharply to the left in the early nineteenth
century and since then has embraced countless anti-bourgeois notions, it abandoned
this role (without ever having fully taken it up).]
Consistent with this, a man who is not
conformist by nature and who is therefore morally self-determining in light of
his own reason ought seriously to consider the sort of exercise he gives his
freedom. His deviation from the prevailing moral principles ought not to be
expressed without strong overriding considerations. There should be an effort
to lend support, if possible, to the principles that prevail. In other words,
the man should hold to a strong intellectual and emotional appreciation of the
need for morality itself. It may be that even with this understanding he will
see that he cannot adhere to the morality of his time, but rather must adopt
other principles to guide his own action. I have no doubt but that this sort of
reaction will be involved in the reexamination of ideas concerning morality.
But I cannot over-emphasize the need for thinking men to be consciously aware
of the moral nature of their own action, and its relation to the cohesion that
is so important. No man is, in this sense, a free agent morally. He is
responsible for his own action and for the precedents he sets in the eyes of
others. It is essential that the individual attempt to mold his own conduct in
such a way that the general run of mankind could adopt the same type of conduct
consistently with a workable, sound moral order. Morality cannot safely be
"individualized" or made subjective in the sense that each man may
judge his own conduct, in light of his own good intentions and knowledge of his
own willingness to act responsibly. Rather, principles of conduct must be put
forward that advise as to overt conduct, so that the social discipline may be
imposed among men without regard to subjective factors. Only in this way can
social control be effected.
And as
I have explained, social control is at the heart of morality and is essential
to its achievement of the civilizing function that rests with it. When one
considers it, the human race is not really very sane, and -- to choose a
commonplace example -- there are many men who would just as soon throw a
cigarette wrapper on the sidewalk, despite the litter it creates, as to carry
it until reaching a trash-can: so little is the innate thoughtful- ness of many
persons. Only moral order can give an outward sanity to the world and preserve
civilization.
Morality, then, is not just
"intelligence" applied to action. It is made up, rather, of general
principles, so formulated as to be workable for general use. I raise this
point in distinct criticism of the philosophy contained in Ayn Rand's Atlas
Shrugged. I have made clear my
thought that her book is a major contribution in religious and moral thought.
But, especially in the field of sex, Ayn Rand has not attempted to formulate
such principles as might well be endorsed for mankind generally. The sexual
ethics shown in the novel are non-existent, or else so individualized as to
lose their function as guiding principles. By this I do not mean to criticize
the spirit of her view toward sex, a view that exalts it to the place it
properly should have, but I do criticize the lack of limitation placed on its
overt expression by the novel's characters, and the book's singular lack of
concern over what these limitations might be.
We cannot afford to let morality disintegrate
through amoralism and a
subjective application of ones feelings of responsibility. If we are to create
the most flourishing civilization, a civilization most conducive to the emergence of men, we must establish a
free society cemented by moral principle. This, and this only, is our assurance
that savage inhumanity will not be the
future of mankind. Pierre's perplexity, "who is it killing me?,” can only
be solved by recourse to moral principle in time to avert the
"concatenation of circumstances" that leads to such tragedy.