The Foundations of Morality

1. Religion and Moral Decline

Like many another writer, Herbert Spencer wrote his own first book on morals, The Data of Ethics, under a sense of urgency. In the preface to that volume, in June 1879, he told his readers that he was departing from the order originally set down for the volumes in his “System of Synthetic Philosophy” because: “Hints, repeated of late years with increasing frequency and distinctness, have shown me that health may permanently fail, even if life does not end, before I reach the last part of the task I have marked out for myself.”

“This last part of the task it is,” he continued, “to which I regard all the preceding parts as subsidiary.” And he went on to say that ever since his first essay in 1842, on The Proper Sphere of Government, “my ultimate purpose, lying behind all proximate purposes, has been that of finding for the principles of right and wrong, in conduct at large, a scientific basis.”

Moreover, he regarded the establishment of rules of right conduct on a scientific basis as “a pressing need. Now that moral injunctions are losing the authority given by their supposed sacred origin, the secularization of morals is becoming imperative. Few things can happen more disastrous than the decay and death of a regulative system no longer fit, before another and fitter regulative system has grown up to replace it. Most of those who reject the current creed appear to assume that the controlling agency furnished by it may safely be thrown aside, and the vacancy left unfilled by any other controlling agency. Meanwhile, those who defend the current creed allege that in the absence of the guidance it yields, no guidance can exist: divine commandments they think the only possible guides.”

Now the contemporary decline in morality is at least in part the result of the decline in religion. There are probably millions of people who believe, with Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s novel, that under atheism “everything is permissible.” And many would even say, with his half-brother Smerdyakov, who took him with tragic literalness, that “If there’s no everlasting God, there’s no such thing as virtue, and there’s no need of it.” Marxism is not only belligerently atheistic, but seeks to destroy religion precisely because it believes it to be “the opium of the people”—i.e., because it supports a “bourgeois” morality that deprecates the systematic deceit, lying, treachery, lawlessness, confiscation, violence, civil war, and murder that the Communists regard as necessary for the overthrow or conquest of capitalism.

How far religious faith may be a necessary basis of ethics we shall examine at a later point. Here I wish merely to point out that historically at least a large part of ethical rules and customs have always had a secular basis. And this is true not only of moral customs but of philosophical ethics. It is merely necessary to mention the names of such pre-Christian moralists as Confucius, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Democritus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics and Epicureans, to recall the extent to which this is true. Even the churchmen of the Middle Ages, as represented pre-eminently by Thomas Aquinas, were indebted for more of their ethical theory to Aristotle than to Augustine.

2. A Practical Problem

But granted that moral custom and moral theory can have an autonomous or partly autonomous base apart from any specific religious faith, what is this base, and how is it to be found? This is the central problem of philosophic ethics. As Schopenhauer has summed it up: “To preach morality is easy, to give it a foundation is hard.”

It is so very hard, indeed, as to seem almost hopeless. This sense of near hopelessness has received eloquent expression from one of the great ethical leaders of our century, Albert Schweitzer:

It would seem enormously presumptuous, after this list of great names, for anyone to write still another book on ethics, if it were not for two considerations: first, ethics is primarily a practical problem; and secondly, it is a problem that has not yet been satisfactorily solved.

It is no disparagement of ethics to recognize frankly that the problems it poses are primarily practical. If they were not practical we would be under no obligation to solve them. Even Kant, one of the most purely theoretical of theoreticians, recognized the essentially practical nature of ethical thinking in the very title of his chief work on ethics: Critique of Practical Reason. If we lose sight of this practical goal, the first danger is that we may lose ourselves in unanswerable questions such as: What are we here for? What is the purpose of the existence of the universe? What is the ultimate destiny of mankind? The second danger is that we may fall into mere triviality and dilettantism, and end up with some such conclusion as that of C. D. Broad:

Such an attitude tends toward sterility. It leads one to select the wrong problems as the most important, and it gives no standard for testing the usefulness of a conclusion. It is because so many ethical writers have taken a similar attitude that they have been so often lost in purely verbal problems and so often satisfied with merely rhetorical solutions. One can imagine how little progress would have been made in law reform, jurisprudence, or economics if they had been thought of as posing purely theoretical problems that were merely “good fun for those people who like that sort of thing.”

But the progress of philosophical ethics has not been disappointing merely because so many writers have lost sight of its ultimately practical aims. It has been retarded also by the over-hastiness of some leading writers to be “original”—to make over ethics entirely at one stroke; to be new Lawgivers, competing with Moses; to “transvalue all values” with Nietzsche; or to seize, like Bentham, on some single, oversimplified test, like Pleasure-and-Pain, or the Greatest Happiness, and to begin applying it in much too direct and sweeping a manner to all traditional ethical judgments, dismissing with short shrift all those that do not immediately seem to conform with the New Revelation.

3. Is It a Science?

We are likely to make more solid progress, I think, if we are not at the beginning too hasty or too ambitious. I shall not undertake in this book a lengthy discussion of the vexed question whether ethics is or can be a “science.” It is enough to point out here that the word “science” is used today with a wide range of meanings, and that the struggle to apply it to every branch of inquiry or study, or to every theory, is chiefly a struggle for prestige, and an attempt to ascribe precision and certainty to one’s conclusions. I will content myself here with pointing out that ethics is not a science in the sense in which that word is applied to the physical sciences—to the determination of matters of objective fact, or to the establishment of scientific laws which enable us to make exact predictions. But ethics is entitled to be called a science if we mean by this a systematic inquiry conducted by rational rules. It is not a mere chaos. It is not just a matter of opinion, in which one person’s opinion is as good as another’s, or in which one statement is as true or as false or as “meaningless” or as unverifiable as another; in which neither rational induction nor deduction nor the principles of investigation or logic play any part. If by science, in short, we mean simply rational inquiry aiming to arrive at a unified and systematized body of deductions and conclusions, then ethics is a science.

Ethics bears the same relation to psychology and praxeology (the general theory of human action) as medicine bears to physiology and pathology and as engineering bears to physics and mechanics. It is of little importance whether we call medicine, engineering or ethics an applied science, a normative science, or a scientific art. The function of each is to deal in a systematic way with a class of problems that need to be solved.

Whether ethics is or is not to be called a science is, as I have hinted above, largely a semantic problem, a struggle to raise or lower its prestige and the seriousness with which it should be taken. But the answer we give has important practical consequences. Those who insist on its right to the title, and use the word “science” in its narrower sense, are likely not only to claim for their conclusions an unchallengeable inflexibility and certainty, but to follow pseudo-scientific methods in an effort to imitate physics. Those who deny ethics the title in any form are likely to conclude (or have already concluded) either that ethical problems are meaningless and unanswerable and that “might is right,” or, on the other hand, that they already know all the answers by “intuition,” or a “moral sense,” or direct revelation from God.

What is the aim of this science? What is the task before us? What are the questions we are trying to answer?

Let us begin with the more modest aims and move on to the more ambitious. Our most modest aim is to find out what our unwritten moral code actually is, what our traditional, “spontaneous,” or “common sense” moral judgments actually are. Our next aim must be to ask to what extent these judgments form a consistent whole. Wherever they are inconsistent, or apparently so, we must look for some principle or criterion that would harmonize them or decide between them. After twenty-five hundred years and thousands of books, it is enormously probable that no completely “original” theory of ethics is possible. Probably all the leading major principles have been at least suggested. Progress in ethics is likely to consist, rather, in more definiteness, precision, and clarification, in harmonization, in more generality and unification.

A “system” of ethics, therefore, would mean a code, or a set of principles, that formed a consistent, coherent, and integrated whole. But in order to arrive at this coherence, we must seek the ultimate criterion by which acts or rules of action have been or should be tested. We shall be inevitably led to this merely by trying to make explicit what was merely implicit, by trying to make consistent, rules that were inconsistent, by trying to make definite or precise, rules or judgments that were vague or loose, by trying to unify what was separate and to complete what was partial.

And when and if we find this basic moral criterion, this test of right and wrong, we may indeed find ourselves obliged to revise at least some of our former moral judgments, and to revalue at least some of our former values.