MODERN MORAL PHILOSOPHY opens on a quietly apocalyptic note. Moral philosophers, it is explained, have hitherto failed to answer the questions which they posed satisfactorily, because they have failed to be clear about the questions themselves. In particular they have failed to distinguish between the questions, What kind of actions ought we to perform? and, What kind of things ought to exist for their own sake? The distinction is made at last, or so it is proclaimed, in the preface to G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica. The implication is that the problems will now be solved. The date is 1903.
The answer to the question, What kind of actions ought we to perform? is those “which will cause more good to exist in the universe than any possible kind of alternative. We are thus brought to ask what states of affairs are good, what kind of things ought to exist for their own sake. Moore takes it that the things which ought to exist for their own sake are those which we call intrinsically good. How do we know what is intrinsically good? The answer is that we cannot fail to recognize the property of intrinsic goodness when confronted with it. Propositions concerning what is intrinsically good–as contrasted with what is good only because it is a means to something intrinsically good–are susceptible neither of proof nor of disproof. This is because good is the name of a simple, unanalyzable property, which Moore calls “non-natural” because it cannot be identified with any natural property. Moore holds that good is indefinable, partly in virtue of an analogy which he propounds between good and yellow, and partly by reason of an argument about the consequences of holding good to be definable. But both the analogy and the argument depend in part on the curious sense which he assigns to definition. To define, he holds, is to break up a complex whole into its constituent parts. So the definition of horse will be a statement to the effect that it has four legs, a head, a heart, a liver, etc., all of them arranged in definite relations to one another. (Moore recognizes other senses of definition, but deliberately puts them on one side.) Now if this is what is meant by definition, it is not difficult to agree that good is indefinable, but this sense of definition is so idiosyncratic that nothing has been gained. Moore also tries to reinforce his case by an appeal to what we allegedly must recognize when we hold a given notion “before” our minds. He says that if we consider good and, let us say, pleasant, or any other notion with which we might be tempted to confuse good, we can see that we “have two different notions before our minds.” This technique of holding one’s concepts up to the light, as it were, is reinforced by Moore’s method of calm assertion. More unwarranted and unwarrantable assertions are perhaps made in Principia Ethica than in any other single book of moral philosophy, but they are made with such well-mannered, although slightly browbeating certitude, that it seems almost gross to disagree. But what, then, is Moore’s case?
Moore originally rests his analogy between yellow and good on his notion of definition. “Yellow and good, we say, are not complex: they are nations out of which definitions are composed and with which the power of further defining comes.” Moreover, just as we cannot identify the meaning of yellow with the physical properties of the light which produces the effect of seeing yellow, so we cannot identify the meaning of good with the particular natural properties which are associated with good. It might be the case that anything “good” was pleasant, just as all yellow light is of a certain wavelength, but it does not follow that good means what pleasant means, any more than it follows that yellow means the same as “light of a certain wave length.”
Moore’s one genuine argument is used to show that good cannot be the name of any complex whole. Of any such whole, however defined, we can always significantly ask whether it is itself good. This argument can be deployed not only against the attempt to define good as the name of a complex, but also against the attempt to define it at all. Suppose that I do identify good with pleasant. My mistake can be exhibited by showing that I can always significantly ask of pleasure or of anything pleasant, Is it good? But if good named the same property that pleasant names, to ask, Is what is pleasant good? would be equivalent to asking, Is what is pleasant pleasant?–that is, it would be vacuously tautologous.
Moore frames this argument in order to refute hedonists, whom he conceives to hold two incompatible positions: they hold that pleasure is good, indeed the good, in a significant, nontautological sense; and they claim to demonstrate this by urging that good means nothing other than what pleasant means. But the first position requires that “pleasure is good” be taken to be analytic. Yet it cannot be both. So the hedonist position collapses. But, of course, it only collapses for those hedonists unwise enough to attempt to hold both these positions.
The philosophers whom Moore chiefly criticizes are J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. In the case of Mill, Moore’s criticisms are misdirected, if only because he reads into Mill a definition of good as meaning pleasant, whereas all that Mill at the most says is that pleasure provides us with our only criterion of goodness. It is by now almost a commonplace to recognize that Moore misrepresented Mill; it is a measure of the extent to which contemporary philosophers read Mill, but do not read Spencer, that it goes unrecognized that Moore also misrepresented Spencer. Moore accuses Spencer of having thought that good meant the same as “more evolved.” Spencer’s however was a far more complex, if quite implausible, position. Spencer held, first, that human society has evolved, just as the human species evolved, and indeed that the evolution of species and of society can be placed on a single continuous scale. Secondly, he believed that the higher a society is upon this scale the more ideal its morality; and thirdly, that conduct tends more and more toward the end of preserving life, it being assumed that in life there is, especially as one ascends toward the ideal, more pleasure than pain. As with Mill, Spencer may in unguarded moments have given the impression that he was defining the moral vocabulary. But the real Herbert Spencer is as far from being Moore’s straw man as is the real J. S. Mill.62
To the doctrine that good was the name of a natural property Moore gave the name “the naturalistic fallacy.” For Moore this fallacy is committed in the course of any attempt to treat good as the name of a property identifiable under any other description. Good cannot mean “commanded by God,” any more than it can mean pleasant, and for the same reasons the expression “the naturalistic fallacy” has since been adopted by the adherents of the view that one cannot logically derive an ought from an is; but although this latter doctrine is a consequence of Moore’s, it is not identical with it.
Is good, then, the name of a simple, unanalyzable property? To the doctrine that it is, there are at least two conclusive objections. The first is that we can only use the name of a simple property intelligibly where we are acquainted with some standard example of the property by reference to which we are to recognize whether it is present or absent in other cases. In the case of a simple property like yellow we can use standard examples of the color to recognize other cases of yellow. But how could having learned to recognize a good friend help us to recognize a good watch? Yet if Moore is right, the same simple property is present in both cases. To this, a disciple of Moore might reply that we are confusing the question by our example. A good watch is not “intrinsically” good. But how, then, do we recognize the intrinsically good? The only answer Moore offers is that we just do. Or put this point another way: Moore’s account could only reach the level of intelligibility if it were supplemented by an account of how the meaning of good is learned, and an account of the relation between learning it in connection with some cases, and knowing how to apply it in others.
The second objection is that Moore’s account leaves it entirely unexplained and inexplicable why something’s being good should ever furnish us with a reason for action. The analogy with yellow is as much a difficulty for his thesis at this point as it is an aid to him elsewhere. One can imagine a connoisseur with a special taste for yellow objects to whom something’s being yellow would furnish him with a reason for acquiring it; but something’s being “good” can hardly be supposed to furnish a reason for action only to those with a connoisseur’s interest in goodness. Any account of good that is to be adequate must connect it intimately with ac-tion, and explain why to call something good is always to provide a reason for acting in respect of it in one way rather than another.
That it does connect good with action is the chief virtue of the other seminal moral philosophy of the twentieth century, that of John Dewey. For Dewey the chief trap in all epistemology is the tendency to abstract our knowledge both from the methods by which we acquired it and from the uses to which we may put it. We only acquired whatever knowledge we have now because we had certain purposes, and the point of that knowledge is for us inseparable from our future purposes. All reason is practical reason. Moral knowledge is not a separate branch of knowledge; it is simply the knowledge we have–in physics, biology, history, or what you will–considered in relation to those purposes. To characterize something as good is to say that it will provide us with satisfaction in our purposes. As means or as end? As both, and Dewey is concerned to emphasize what he takes to be the interrelated character of good-as-a-means and good-as-an-end. We are as far as it is possible to be from Moore’s concept of the “intrinsically good” with its sharp separation of means and ends. Dewey concentrates on the agent, while Moore concentrates on the spectator. Dewey almost obliterates the distinction between fact and value, between is and ought, while Moore emphasizes it. Dewey thinks that in making choices we are guided by considerations which we express in statements of an ordinary empirical kind, statements which presuppose the direction of the agent’s purposes and interests, but which do not differ from, which in fact are the statements of our empirical studies. That Dewey has not been more influential, particularly in England, is perhaps explicable by the fact that he so seldom attends explicitly to the problem which has been at the center of Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy in this century, that of the meaning of moral predicates And where Dewey did exert a major influence it was indirectly, in a discussion that stemmed from Moore.
Moore’s immediate heirs were of two kinds. There were those who carried on moral philosophy of the same type as Moore’s, the so-called intuitionists, such as Prichard, Ross, and Carritt. It ought to be emphasized both that these writers did not in fact acquire their views from Moore, but independently, and that the value of their writings is not only a matter of how cogently they presented their own views. Carritt, for example, will be remembered for his power as a critic of utilitarianism (as well as for his writings on aesthetics). This particular succession of writers was ushered in by a text as dramatic in its way as Principia Ethica: a paper by H. A. Prichard in 1912, entitled “Does Moral Philosophy Rest upon a Mistake?” Prichard takes the task which moral philosophy has set itself to be that of providing a reason or justification for holding that something which we take to be our duty is indeed our duty. But he argues that the demand for such a reason or justification is utterly misconceived. In defense of this position he offers in effect two sorts of reason. I may try to justify the view that something is my duty by showing that it is to my interest or would lead to my happiness. But if this is what provides me with a reason, then I am not treating whatever I take my duty to be as a duty at all. For what I do because it is to my interest, I thereby do not do as a duty. Or I may try to justify the view that something is my duty by showing that to perform it would be to produce some good. But–so Prichard says–that something is good does not entail that it is obligatory on me to bring it about. This first kind of argument starts from a list of what Prichard presumably takes to be the only possible types of alleged justification. His second consists in appeals to that of which we are all alleged to be conscious. The apprehension of duty is said to be immediate and unquestionable, and therefore not to be supported by reasons.
Prichard’s outstanding characteristic, and one which he shares with Moore as well as with other intuitionists, is the treatment of good, right, duty, obligatory, and the rest of the moral vocabulary as though it was a coinage of permanently fixed values and simple scrutiny. It is doubtless because of this that the proportion of assertion to argument is so high in Prichard. In other intuitionist writers, such as Sir David Ross, who holds that we have independent intuitions of “rightness” and “goodness,” the standards of argument are much higher. But all intuitionist writers suffer from one difficulty: they are, on their own view, telling us only about what we all know already. That they sometimes disagree about what it is that we all know already only makes them less boring at the cost of making them even less convincing.
The two most powerful critics of intuitionism were R. G. Collingwood and A. J. Ayer. Collingwood, whose attack extended to many other recent writers in ethics, attacked them for their lack of historical sense, for their tendency to treat Plato, Kant, and themselves as contributors to a single discussion with a single subject matter and a permanent and unchanging vocabulary. They are, he says in his Autobiography, like men who translate the Greek word τρι☐ρης by steamship, and when it is pointed out to them that the characteristics which Greek writers assign to the τρι☐ρης are not at all the characteristics of a steamship, they reply that this just shows what odd and mistaken ideas about steamships Greek writers held. We ought rather, according to Collingwood in the Autobiography, to understand moral and other concepts in terms of a developing historical sequence. What this might entail I shall consider later in this chapter.
Ayer’s critique of intuitionism has quite different roots. In Language, Truth, and Logic he revived some of Hume’s positions, but did so in the context of a logical-positivist theory of knowledge. So moral judgments are understood in terms of a threefold classification of judgments: logical, factual, and emotive. In the first class come the truths of logic and mathematics, which are held to be analytic; in the second come the empirically verifiable or falsifiable truths of the sciences and of common-sense knowledge of fact. The third class necessarily appears as a residual category, a rag-bag to which whatever is not logic or science is consigned. Both ethics and theology find themselves in this category, a fact in itself sufficient to make us suspicious of the classification. For on the face of it, statements about the intentions and deeds of an omnipotent being and judgments about duty or about what is good do not obviously belong together. We can, however, easily detach the emotive theory of moral judgment from this dubious classification; all that we need retain from it is the contrast between the factual and the emotive. In this form the most powerful exponent of emotivism has been C. L. Stevenson. Stevenson’s writing exhibits many influences, above all, those of both Moore and Dewey, and his position can perhaps be most easily expounded by returning to Moore.
I said earlier that Moore had two kinds of heirs, the first of whom were the intuitionists. What the intuitionists continue is the philosophical appeal to what we all are alleged to recognize in moral matters. But Moore himself was, above all, anxious to clear up the philosophical confusions over the concept of goodness so that he could proceed to a second task, that of saying which things are, in fact, good. In his chapter on conduct he makes it clear that right action is valuable only as a means to what is good. In his chapter on The Ideal, Moore tells us what is good. “Once the meaning of the question is clearly understood the answer to it, in its main outlines, appears to be so obvious, that it runs the risk of seeming to be a platitude. By far the most valuable things which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.” J. M. Keynes has described for us how this view of the supremacy of personal relationships and of the beautiful broke upon the generation immediately younger than Moore with all the force of a revelation. Almost half a century later Keynes could write: “I see no reason to shift from the fundamental intuitions of Principia Ethica; though they are much too few and too narrow to fit actual experience. That they furnish a justification of experience wholly independent of outside events has become an added comfort, even though one cannot live today secure in the undisturbed individualism which was the extraordinary achievement of the early Edwardian days.” It all depended, of course, on who “one” was and to which social class one belonged. The values which Moore exalts belong to the realm of private rather than public life; and, supremely important as they are, they exclude all the values connected with intellectual inquiry and with work. Moore’s values are those of a protected leisure, though it is in what he excludes rather than in what he does value that the parochial and classbound character of his attitudes appears. It is worth commenting on this feature of Moore’s views simply to emphasize the fact that they are not, as he apparently supposed, beyond controversy. For Moore combines highly controversial moral views with an appeal to the evidence of simple recognition in order to establish them. Keynes, in the memoir, quoted earlier, My Early Beliefs, gives us a penetrating account of the conse-quent behavior of Moore’s disciples. They would compare alternative possible situations and solemnly inquire in which there was most good, inspecting each in turn and comparing them. They would then announce what they “saw.”
In an extremely homogeneous group, like that of Moore’s immediate disciples, the congruence between what different people “see” is likely to be fairly high. But the arrival of D. H. Lawrence on the scene, who reacted against the attitudes of this group with all the passion at his disposal, might have made them aware that if challenged on their valuations, their own position allowed them no use for argument, but only for reinspection and reassertion. Since there is in fact no simple, nonnatural property which good names, the whole process is merely an elaborate game of bluff. And it would not be unfair to remark that what this group did was to invoke Moore’s philosophical theory in order to endow their own expressions of attitude with an authority which those expressions would not otherwise have possessed.
“But if there is no such property as Moore supposes, then all they can be doing is to express their own feelings.” Perhaps in some such reaction to Moore lies one of the seeds of emotivism. Moore himself staked everything on the appeal to objectivity. In an argument which he used in an essay written after Principia Ethica he contended that moral judgments cannot be reports of our feelings, for if they were, two men who uttered apparently contradictory judgments upon a moral issue would not in fact be disagreeing. A man who said, “You ought to do X” would no more be disagreeing with a man who said, “You ought not to do X” than would someone who said, “I stacked my hay yesterday” be disagreeing with someone else who said, “I didn’t stack my hay yesterday.” To which argument Stevenson’s reply was that two men who disagree on a moral question need not be involved in any factual disagreement; they need only be involved in disagreement on the facts of the case; the issue between them at this level can be settled by an empirical inquiry. But they may further disagree in their attitudes; and this disagreement can only be resolved by one party changing his attitude. The primary function of moral words, according to Stevenson, is to redirect the attitudes of others so that they accord more fully with our own. In concentrating on the dynamic function of moral words, Stevenson shows the influence of Dewey, and it is through Stevenson mainly that Dewey influenced later moral philosophers.
Moral words are able to have this dynamic function of which Stevenson speaks because they are emotive. “The emotive meaning of a word is the tendency of a word, arising through the history of its usage to produce (result from) affective responses in people.” Ayer, in his version of the emotive theory, concentrated upon my expression of my own feelings and attitudes; Stevenson, in his, concentrates upon my attempt to influence your feelings and attitudes. As to what the key moral words mean, Stevenson offers two models, stressing in each case that the nature of emotive meaning is such that we cannot hope to arrive at more than a rough approximation. His first model is one in which “This is good” is elucidated as roughly equivalent to “I like this. Do so as well.” In his second model he attends to those expressions which embody what he names “persuasive definitions.” Such expressions have a descriptive meaning, and they associate with that meaning an emotive one; we can thus always analyze them into two component elements. Two men in controversy may, for example, use just in such a way that each associates different descriptive meanings with the emotive element in the meaning of that word.
Stevenson’s view of moral expressions leads to a number of other positions. It follows from his view, for example, that for good and for other evaluative expressions no complete definition in descriptive terms can ever be given. Thus Stevenson agrees with Moore that good cannot function as the name of a natural (empirically descriptive) property. The facts are logically divorced from the evaluations for Stevenson as much as for Moore. Secondly, Stevenson commits himself to the view that philosophical ethics is a morally neutral activity. The doctrines that we hold about the meaning of moral expressions cannot commit us to any particular moral view. Clearly the emotive theory itself, if true, does appear, at least on the surface, to be morally neutral. For presumably we can use emotive words to commend any class of actions whatsoever. Moreover, if Stevenson is right, evaluative disagreement may always be interminable. There is no limit to the possibilities of disagreement, and there is and can be no set of procedures for the resolution of disagreements. It is not surprising that this should be a consequence of Stevenson’s position, since he himself initially laid it down as one of the prerequisites for a successful theory that it should provide for disagreement to be interminable. Finally, on Stevenson’s view, the reasons which we cite to support our evaluative, and more specifically, our moral judgments cannot stand in any logical relationship to the conclusions which we derive from them. They can only be psychological reinforcements. It follows that words like because and therefore do not function as they do in other parts of discourse.
The difficulties which can be raised about emotivism are of several different kinds. The notion of “emotive meaning” is itself not clear. What makes certain statements guides to, or directives of, action is not that they have any meaning over and above a factual or descriptive one. It is that their utterance on a specific occasion has import for, or relevance to, the speaker or hearer’s interests, desires, or needs. “The White House is on fire” does not have any more or less meaning when uttered in a news broadcast in London than it does when uttered as a warning to the President in bed, but its function as a guide to action is quite different. Emotivism, that is, does not attend sufficiently to the distinction between the meaning of a statement which remains constant between different uses, and the variety of uses to which one and the same statement can be put. (Of course, meaning and possible range of use are intimately related; but they are not the same.)
Moreover, not only does Stevenson tend to conflate meaning and use, but, the primary use which he assigns to moral expressions is not, and cannot be, their primary use. For the use to which he attends is the second-person use in which we try to move other people to adopt our own views. Stevenson’s examples all picture a thoroughly unpleasant world in which everyone is always trying to get at everyone else. But in fact one is only in a position to try to convert others to one’s own moral views when one has formed views of one’s own; yet none of those uses of moral language which are necessary to the formation and expression of one’s views with an eye to one’s own actions figure in Stevenson’s initial account.
Finally, one can justifiably complain of the emotive theory not only that it is mistaken, but also that it is opaque. For its proponents seek to elucidate moral expressions in terms of the notions of attitudes and feelings, and it is relevant to ask for further characterization of the attitudes and feelings in question. How, for example, are we to identify these attitudes and feelings so that we may distinguish them from other attitudes and feelings? Emotivist writers are, in fact, largely silent on this point; but the suspicion is strong that they would be compelled to characterize the attitudes and feelings under discussion as just those attitudes and feelings which are given their definitive expression in acts of moral judgment. Yet if this is so, the whole theory is imprisoned in uninformative circularity.
Nonetheless, some of its central features are preserved by its immediate successors. The moral neutrality of philosophical analysis, the logical gap between fact and value, the interminality of disagreement all remain upon the scene. What is altered in later writers is the attention paid to two intimately related topics, the question of the criteria which are employed in calling things, acts, or people good or bad, and the question in the nature of moral reasoning. If I call something good or commend it in some other way, I can always be asked upon what criterion I am relying. If I say that I ought to do something, I can always be asked, And what if you do not? and, On account of what ought you to do it? What is the relation between my answers to these questions and my beliefs as to what is good and as to what I ought to do?
One systematic answer to these questions is to be found in R. M. Hare’s The Language of Morals, and his views are added to and further elucidated in Freedom and Reason. Hare specifies the nature of moral language by means of an initial distinction between prescriptive and descriptive language. Prescriptive language is imperatival, in that it tells us to do this or that. It is itself subdivided into two classes, that comprising imperatives in the ordinary sense, and that comprising properly evaluative expressions. All value judgments are practical, but in different ways. Ought sentences, for example, if they are genuinely evaluative, entail imperatives addressed to anyone in the relevant situation, and anyone here includes the person who utters the sentence. The criterion of uttering the ought sentence sincerely is that, on the relevant occasion and if the speaker can, he does in fact act in obedience to the imperative entailed by the ought which he utters to himself. Good, by contrast, is used to commend; to call X good is to say that it is the kind of X we should choose if we wanted an X. The criteria which I employ in calling something good are criteria which, if I am engaged in genuine evaluations, I have chosen, and which I endorse by my very use of them. Evaluative expressions and moral rules are thus both expressions of the agent’s fundamental choices. But the role of choice in Hare’s prescriptivism is far clearer and far less objectionable than the role of attitudes or feelings was in emotivism. Unlike the latter, it does not preclude the use of argument in morals.
Hare was, in fact, a pioneer in the logical investigation of imperatives. He pointed out that in imperatival discourse, conclusions can follow from premises in a perfectly straightforward way, violating none of the ordinary rules of entailment. Because and therefore carry their usual meanings, and genuine moral argument is possible. But, so Hare further holds, the meaning of evaluative prescriptive expressions is such that no evaluative or prescriptive conclusion can follow from premises which do not include at least one evaluative or prescriptive premise. In other words, Hare reiterates the thesis that no ought follows merely from is. So far as the doctrine of The Language of Morals goes, it seemed to follow that the pattern of moral argument is a transition from a moral major premise and a factual minor premise to a moral conclusion. Wherever I appear to pass from fact to value (“I ought to help this man because he is starving”), there is a gap in the argument, a concealed major premise (“I ought to help the starving”). This major premise itself may figure as the conclusion of some other syllogism, but at some point the chain of reasoning must terminate in a principle which I cannot justify by further argument, but to which I must simply commit myself by choice. Once more it seems to follow, as it did with emotivism, that on matters of ultimate principle, assertion cannot be met by argument but only by counterassertion.
In Freedom and Reason, Hare argued that this was not entailed by his view; that the universalizability of moral judgments provides an argumentative weapon against those who hold unacceptable moral principles. For of a man who holds, for example, that other men ought to be treated in certain unpleasant ways merely because their skins are black, we can always ask, Are you then prepared to allow that you should be treated in the same way if your skin were black? And Hare believes that only a minority, whom he denominates fanatics, would be prepared to accept the consequences of replying Yes to this. This last contention is a question of fact on which I believe that recent social history does not bear Hare out. But I do not want to quarrel with this part of Hare’s view so much as to emphasize that it still remains true on Hare’s view that, as a matter of logic and of the concepts involved, what I call good and what I hold I ought to do depend upon my choice of fundamental evaluations, and that there is no logical limit to what evaluations I may choose. In other words, Hare’s prescriptivism is, in the end, a reissue of the view that behind my moral evaluations there is not and cannot be any greater authority than that of my own choices. To understand evaluative concepts is to understand that our use of these concepts does not of itself commit us to any particular set of moral beliefs. The criteria for true belief in matters of fact are independent of our choices; but our evaluations are governed by no criteria but those which we ourselves choose to impose upon them. This is a repetition of Kant’s view of the moral subject as lawgiver; but it makes him an arbitrary sovereign who is the author of the law that he utters, and who constitutes it law by uttering it in the form of a universal prescription.
An ambiguity in Hare’s whole enterprise, an ambiguity pointed out by Mary Warnock,63 becomes important here. When Hare characterizes evaluation and prescription, is he in fact defining these terms in such a way as to protect his thesis against possible counterexamples? If we produce an example of ought which does not entail a first-person imperative, or an example of good in which the criteria are not a matter of choice, will Hare be able to reply that these are simply nonprescriptive and nonevaluative uses of ought and good? Hare certainly recognizes that there are some nonprescriptive and nonevaluative uses. But if he has simply legislated so that evaluation and prescription shall be what he says they are, why should we assent to his legislation? If he is not legislating, then we must have the class of evaluative and prescriptive expressions delimited for us independently of Hare’s characterization, in a way that Hare himself never delimits it. He seems indeed to rely on an almost intuitive understanding of what is to be included or left out of the class of evaluative expressions.
Why is this important? It is important partly because Philippa Foot64 and Peter Geach65 have challenged Hare with primafacie convincing counterexamples. Philippa Foot’s attention has been concentrated on evaluative expressions connected with the virtues and vices, such as rude and courageous; Geach’s on good and evil. The criteria for the correct application of rude and courageous are, so Mrs. Foot argues, factual. If certain factual conditions are fulfilled, this is sufficient to show that these epithets apply and their application could only be withheld by someone who failed to understand their meaning. So if a man at a concert spits in the face of an acquaintance whom he knows slightly and who has done nothing hostile to him, then he is certainly rude. Equally, if a man with a reasonable prospect of saving the lives of others by sacrificing his own does sacrifice his own life, he is certainly courageous. But in each of these cases, when we show that the necessary and sufficient conditions apply to justify the epithet, we could rewrite what we say so that the necessary and sufficient conditions appear as premises which in virtue of the meaning of rude or courageous entail the conclusion “So he was rude” or “So he was courageous.” But if any conclusions are evaluative, these are. Thus some factual premises do appear to entail evaluative conclusions.
Equally, it is clear that in many cases at least where I call something or someone good, the appropriate criteria are determined by the kind of case it is and are not open to choice. The criteria for calling something “a good X” depend, as Geach has pointed out, on the nature of X. “A good watch,” “a good farmer,” “a good horse,” are cases in point. But what about “a good man”? Here surely, it might be argued, we do use a variety of criteria and we have to choose between them. Here surely, an argument like Hare’s is the convincing one. I do not want to pursue this as yet unfinished argument further; I want rather to inquire what sort of argument it is, and why it arises.
It is important to see that a whole range of interconnected differences of view are involved here. On the one side, it is held that facts can never entail evaluations, that philosophical inquiry is neutral between evaluations, that the only authority which moral views possess is that which we as individual agents give to them. This view is the final conceptualization of the individualism which has had recurrent mention in this history: the individual becomes his own final authority in the most extreme possible sense. On the alternative view, to understand our central evaluative and moral concepts is to recognize that there are certain criteria we cannot but acknowledge. The authority of those standards is one that we have to recognize, but of which we are in no way the originators. Philosophical inquiry, which reveals this, is therefore not morally neutral. And factual premises do on occasion entail evaluative conclusions.
Each view systematically insulates itself from the other by its choice of examples. And neither will allow that the issue between them could be settled by an empirical inquiry into the way in which evaluative concepts are actually used. For each is quite prepared to allow that the ordinary usage in morals may on occasion be confused, or indeed perverted, through the influence of misleading philosophical theory. Perhaps, however, this controversy is one that cannot be settled, and perhaps the reason why it cannot be settled can be seen if we try to place in historical perspective the concepts which generate it. But before we can do that we must consider certain very unsophisticated points which locate this controversy as one not merely for philosophers, but for all contemporary moral agents.
Emotivism and prescriptivism initially alienate us because their explanations of evaluative language in terms of the notions of feelings, liking, choice, and imperatives leave us asking why there should exist any specifically evaluative language over and above the ordinary language of feelings, liking, choice, and imperatives. When I say, “You ought to do this,” or when I say, “This is good,” I want to protest that I say more and other than, “You or anyone else–do this!” or, “I like this. Do so as well.” For if that is what I mean, that is what I could and would say. If that is what I do say, then certainly what I say will have no authority but that which I confer upon it by uttering it. My attitudes and my imperatives have authority for me just because they are mine. But when I invoke words such as ought and good I at least seek to appeal to a standard which has other and more authority. If I use these words to you, I seek to appeal to you in the name of those standards and not in my own name. Yet even though this may be what I seek to do, it does not necessarily follow that I succeed. Under what conditions might I succeed? Under what conditions must I fail?
Suppose a society of the kind which I tried to characterize when I discussed Greek society, in which the form of life presupposes agreement on ends. Here there are agreed criteria for the use of good, not only when we speak of “good horse” and “good farmer” but also when we speak of “good man.” In this society there is a recognized list of virtues, an established set of moral rules, an institutionalized connection between obedience to rules, the practice of virtues, and the attainment of ends. In such a society the contrast between evaluative language and the language of liking or of choice will be quite clear. I may tell you what I like or choose, and I may tell you what you ought to do; but the second makes a claim upon you which the first does not. You may disregard what you ought to do through annoyance or negligence; but you cannot use the moral vocabulary and consistently deny the force of ought, and you cannot remain within the social commerce of the community, and abandon the moral vocabulary.
Is moral criticism in such a society impossible? By no means; but it must proceed by an extension of, and not by a total break with, the established moral vocabulary. Does this mean that the authority of the morality does not extend beyond the community whose social practices are in question? One is tempted to reply, Does the authority of arithmetical rules extend beyond the community in which the practice of counting is established? This is intended as a genuine, and not as a rhetorical question, which deserves a fuller answer; but at the least, to connect rules and social practice in this way is not obviously to give moral rules less of a hold on us than mathematical, except that no society could advance far without the same type of simple counting, whereas there can be wide variations in the social practice to which moral rules are relevant.
In discussing Greek society, I suggested what might happen when such a well-integrated form of moral life broke down. In our society the acids of individualism have for four centuries eaten into our moral structures, for both good and ill. But not only this: we live with the inheritance of not only one, but of a number of well-integrated moralities. Aristotelianism, primitive Christian simplicity, the puritan ethic, the aristocratic ethic of consumption, and the traditions of democracy and socialism have all left their mark upon our moral vocabulary. Within each of these moralities there is a proposed end or ends, a set of rules, a list of virtues. But the ends, the rules, the virtues, differ. For Aristotelianism, to sell all you have and give to the poor would be absurd and meanspirited; for primitive Christianity, the great-souled man is unlikely to pass through that eye of the needle which is the gateway to heaven. A conservative Catholicism would treat obedience to established authority as a virtue; a democratic socialism such as Marx’s labels the same attitude servility and sees it as the worst of vices. For puritanism, thrift is a major virtue, laziness a major vice; for the traditional aristocrat, thrift is a vice; and so on.
It follows that we are liable to find two kinds of people in our society: those who speak from within one of these surviving moralities, and those who stand outside all of them. Between the adherents of rival moralities and between the adherents of one morality and the adherents of none there exists no court of appeal, no impersonal neutral standard. For those who speak from within a given morality, the connection between fact and valuation is established in virtue of the meanings of the words they use. To those who speak from without, those who speak from within appear merely to be uttering imperatives which express their own liking and their private choices. The controversy between emotivism and prescriptivism on the one hand and their critics on the other thus expresses the fundamental moral situation of our own society.
We can in the history of moral philosophy situate certain writers usefully in terms of this account. Kant, for example, stands at the point at which the loss of moral unity means that morality can be specified only in terms of the form of its rules, and not of any end which the rules may serve. Hence his attempt to derive the content of moral rules from their form.
Kant also stands at the point at which moral rules and the goals of human life have become divorced to such a degree that it appears both that the connection between abiding by the rules and achieving the goals is merely a contingent one and that, if this is so, it is intolerable. It is Kant’s grasp of the former point, as well as of the vagueness about goals which had led to the notion of happiness becoming vague and indefinite, that leads him to enjoin us to seek not to be happy, but to be deserving of happiness. It is his grasp of the latter point that leads him to invoke God as a power that will crown virtue with happiness after all. Kant seeks to hold together an earlier and a later view of morals; the tension between them is apparent.
Eighteenth-century English moralists and nineteenth-century utilitarians write from within a society in which individualism has conquered. Hence they present the social order not as a framework within which the individual has to live out his moral life, but as the mere sum of individual wills and interests. A crude moral psychology makes of moral rules instructions as to effective means for gaining the ends of private satisfaction. Hegel, Green, and to a lesser extent, Bradley are not only critics of this view of morals, they try to specify the type of community within which the moral vocabulary, can have a specific and distinctive set of uses. But the philosophical analysis of the necessary form of such community is no substitute for the deed of re-creating it; and their natural successors are the emotivists and the prescriptivists, who give us a false account of what authentic moral discourse was, but a true account of the impoverished meanings which evaluative expressions have come to have in a society where a moral vocabulary is increasingly emptied of content. Marx resembles Hegel and the English idealists in seeing a communal framework as presupposed by morality; unlike them, he sees that it no longer exists; and he proceeds to characterize the whole situation as one in which moralizing can no longer play a genuine role in settling social differences. It can only be an attempt to invoke an authority which no longer exists and to mask the sanctions of social coercion.
All this of course does not entail that the traditional moral vocabulary cannot still be used. It does entail that we cannot expect to find in our society a single set of moral concepts, a shared interpretation of the vocabulary. Conceptual conflict is endemic in our situation, because of the depth of our moral conflicts. Each of us therefore has to choose both with whom we wish to be morally bound and by what ends, rules, and virtues we wish to be guided. These two choices are inextricably linked. In choosing to regard this end or that virtue highly, I make certain moral relationships with some other people, and other moral relationships with others impossible. Speaking from within my own moral vocabulary, I shall find myself bound by the criteria embodied in it. These criteria will be shared with those who speak the same moral language. And I must adopt some moral vocabulary if I am to have any social relationships. For without rules, without the cultivation of virtues, I cannot share ends with anyone else. I am doomed to social solipsism. Yet I must choose for myself with whom I am to be morally bound. I must choose between alternative forms of social and moral practice. Not that I stand morally naked until I have chosen. For our social past determines that each of us has some vocabulary with which to frame and to make his choice. Nor can I look to human nature as a neutral standard, asking which form of social and moral life will give to it the most adequate expression. For each form of life carries with it its own picture of human nature. The choice of a form of life and the choice of a view of human nature go together.
To this view, each side in the contemporary philosophical controversy will reply in its own terms. The emotivists and prescriptivists will stress the role of choice in my account. Their critics will stress the way that the agent must come to the act of choice with an already existing evaluative vocabulary. Each will try by their choice of examples to redefine their opponent’s case away. And the same attempt is already being made in other controversies elsewhere. Indeed, it is a reinforcement for the view that this philosophical controversy is an expression of our social and moral situation that it should have occurred in quite a different context in the arguments that have proceeded in France between Catholic moralists, Stalinists, Marxists, and Sartrian existentialists.
For both Catholics and Stalinists the moral vocabulary is defined in terms of certain alleged facts. Each has their own characteristic list of virtues. For Sartre, by contrast, at least for the Sartre of the immediate postwar period, to live within a readymade moral vocabulary is necessarily an abdication of responsibility, an act of bad faith. Authentic existence is to be found only in a self-conscious awareness of an absolute freedom of choice. Kierkegaard’s view of the act of choice is detached from its theological context, and made by Sartre the basis for political as well as for moral decision. Sartre does not locate the source of the necessity of the act of choice in the moral history of our society, any more than Kierkegaard did. He locates it in the nature of man: a conscious being, être-pour-soi, differs from a thing, être-en-soi, in his freedom and his consciousness of freedom. Hence men’s characteristic experiences of anxiety before the gulf of the unmade future, and their characteristic attempts to pretend that they are not responsible. Thus Sartre locates the basis of his moral view in a metaphysics of human nature, just as much as the Catholic or the Marxist does.
Like Sartre, the prescriptivist and emotivist do not trace the source of the necessity of choice, or of taking up one’s own attitudes, to the moral history of our society. They ascribe it to the nature of moral concepts as such. And in so doing, like Sartre, they try to absolutize their own individualist morality, and that of the age, by means of an appeal to concepts, just as much as their critics try to absolutize their own moralities by means of an appeal to conceptual considerations. But these attempts could only succeed if moral concepts were indeed timeless and unhistorical, and if there were only one available set of moral concepts. One virtue of the history of moral philosophy is that it shows us that this is not true and that moral concepts themselves have a history. To understand this is to be liberated from any false absolutist claims.