Humans thrive in conditions that morality condemns. The peace and prosperity of one generation stand on the injustices of earlier generations; the delicate sensibilities of liberal societies are fruits of war and empire. The same is true of individuals. Gentleness flourishes in sheltered lives; an instinctive trust in others is rarely strong in people who have struggled against the odds. The qualities we say we value above all others cannot withstand ordinary life. Happily, we do not value them as much as we say we do. Much that we admire comes from things we judge to be evil or wrong. This is true of morality itself.
Machiavelli’s The Prince has long been condemned for preaching immorality. It teaches that anyone who tries to be honourable in the struggle for power will surely come to grief: winning and keeping power requires virtu, boldness and a talent for dissimulation. (Machiavelli’s teaching is scandalous even today, when everyone wants to be a prince.) Hobbes’s Leviathan was attacked for observing that, in war, force and fraud are virtues. The lesson of Bernard de Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees is that prosperity is driven by vice – by greed, vanity and envy. If Nietzsche still has the power to shock, it is because he showed that some of the virtues we most admire are sublimations of motives – such as cruelty and resentment – we most strongly condemn.
In these writers a forbidden truth is made plain. It is not only that the good life has very little to do with ‘morality’. It flourishes only because of ‘immorality’.
Moral philosophers have always evaded this truth. Aristotle began the evasion when he presented his doctrine of the Mean, which says that the virtues wax and wane together. Courage and prudence, justice and sympathy – all are highly developed in the best man. (Let us not forget that Aristotle speaks only of males.) But, as even Aristotle must have noticed, virtues can be rivals: a rigorous sense of justice can drive out sympathy. Worse, ‘virtue’ may depend on ‘vice’; courage often goes with a certain recklessness. Where vice and virtue are concerned, human beings are not all of one piece.
Moral philosophy is very largely a branch of fiction. Despite this, a philosopher has yet to write a great novel. The fact should not be surprising. In philosophy the truth about human life is of no interest.