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What should we be
and do?
A fragment
Henry Hardy
Man should be and do
something.
J. G. Fichte [1]
Monsters and madmen,
barbarians and fanatics are excluded from the list because they are
regarded as falling, in some sense, outside the pale of normal
humanity;
to this degree the notion of natural law, in however weakened and
empirical a guise, still operates, and is, indeed, the last, but I
think
unbreakable, defence against unbridled romanticism.
ISAIAH BERLIN
is known as a cultural luminary better than he is understood as a
thinker. For some reason that I do not fully understand his ideas have
not yet become part of the general intellectual furniture of our time
in the way that they deserve. I don’t believe that this will remain the
case indefinitely, but for the time being there is an expository need
that sits oddly beside the exemplary clarity of his own writings. I am
often asked by people who are aware of his reputation, but cannot give
any account of his thought, just what his intellectual contribution is
– in particular what his own positive beliefs are. Being his editor
does not by itself qualify me to answer that question, but naturally my
work has led me to form a view. Indeed it is largely because I find his
ideas of absorbing interest, and wish to understand them better, that I
have found my editorial role rewarding.
The working view I have arrived at is very much a view from the inside,
in the sense that it is not in general informed by a full awareness of
the contributions of predecessors (including those about whom Berlin
writes) or contemporaries, and to that degree it cannot be offered as a
balanced, contextualised account: despite philosophical qualifications
my life has not been spent in philosophical teaching or research, so
that I am by no means an expert. Nevertheless, there is a sense in
which
it is worth having a perspective uncontaminated by preconceptions
derived from elsewhere: such a perspective is a luxury not easily
available to professionals in Berlin’s fields of activity, and it may
from time to time allow insights that might escape the better-informed,
rather as children sometimes ask philosophical questions that adults
have forgotten to be puzzled by.
There is another charge which may be levelled against what I say. I
admit to a strong taste for simplification and generalisation: indeed
the latter, at least, seems to me one of the main motors of
philosophical investigation. Paradoxically, however, it may be that one
of the deepest fruits of the search for generalisation about human
affairs is that most such generalisations are over-simplifications,
disastrous if pressed too far. It is certainly one of Berlin’s greatest
strengths to recognise, insist on and revel in the complexity and
untidiness of human life, its irreducibility to a simple list of
general
truths. That is one reason why, despite the clarity of his writing,
there are so often qualifications and asides of one kind or another,
preventing the emergence of a viewpoint that can be briefly stated
without vast suppression of subtlety and of sensitivity to the rich
texture of reality. Nevertheless, for Berlin too, I contend, there is
in
the background, as one of the instincts which drive his work, a search
for structure and generality where it may legitimately be found; and
there is in any case a role for the plain statement of the general
principles that seem to form the hinterland of much of his thought,
even
if, when the final account is drawn up, none of them can be accepted in
a straightforward form. [3]
Two large assumptions must be made before the reflections that follow
have any point: first, that the question of how we should live is of
consuming importance; secondly, that light can be thrown upon this
question by rational reflection. Both these propositions might seem
very
obvious, but they are not beyond challenge – in the one case, for
example, by opportunists or nihilists, in the other by irrationalists
or
subjectivists – and it is as well to make them explicit. The ultimate
usefulness of moral philosophy in general, and thus by indirection of
any particular discussion conducted under its banner, is to be judged
by
its capacity to guide the conduct of life; and however imperfect the
deliverances of reason, they are not negligible, and should therefore
be
consulted so long as they are not offered a jurisdiction that exceeds
their reach. If this seems a virtually empty remark at this stage, I
hope that some of what is said below may make it less so.
The nature of human values
In order to provide a rough framework for exposition
and discussion, it may be useful to subdivide, somewhat crudely, the
range of possible views about how fixed human nature is, especially in
the moral sphere, into three broad categories, one at each extreme, and
one that unites features of both the others. These categories may be
labelled respectively ‘monism’, ‘relativism’ and ‘pluralism’.
By monism I mean the view that man has a single, comprehensive moral
character, which can in principle be completely discovered, and in the
light of which all moral problems, individual and collective, can in
principle be solved, uniquely and unambiguously. The qualifications
introduced by ‘in principle’ are of course crucial, since any moral
theory, however monist in tendency, has to accommodate the undisputed
existence of moral disagreement, even among those who accept monist
premisses. But for the monist such differences are to be laid at the
door of human ignorance and imperfection: they are not seen as endemic,
ineradicable features of the human moral predicament as such.
According to full-blooded relativism the human species, morally at any
rate, is generically a tabula rasa:
values are an individual, variable matter, subjectively validated, and
not binding on anyone other than those who freely adopt them – and not
even on them if they change their mind. In effect they have the status
of matters of taste. Relativism can embrace more than one view of the
origin of values: they may be acquired from one’s social, cultural,
economic, historical environment; they may be freely invented, as the
romantics held; or these sources may be combined in various different
ways. But whatever the source of values may be, they are seen as
relative to the individual, or perhaps to his culture or some other
grouping of which he is a member. This view naturally raises difficult
if not insuperable problems about rational moral agreement and
justified
moral enforcement, quite apart from its vast intrinsic implausibility.
As a result relativism tends to be offered in various modified forms,
incorporating elements of non-relativist conceptions of morality. But
for present purposes I have stated it in a stark, uncompromising form,
to keep as clear as possible the features which distinguish it from the
other two members of the threesome I am seeking to characterise.
Pluralism combines elements from both monism and relativism, but in the
latter case with a twist that makes a vital difference. The monist
element is the assertion that there is a central moral core shared by
all men, or at least all those we have so far encountered. This core is
universal not as a matter of principle, but as a matter of empirical
fact. Beyond the core there is variety, but (here is the twist) not a
free-for-all as in crude relativism: the core, as well as making
certain
minimum requirements, restricts the range of additional values which
can
be adopted, since these must not be incompatible with the core values.
Finally, behaviour governed by principles that lie beyond the ‘horizon’
of what the core allows is rightly regarded as pathological.
In a word, monism sees morality as fixed across the board; relativism
as subject to unrestricted variation; pluralism as comprising a
constant
core that governs the variability of an open-ended periphery. Again,
these are crude characterisations that deliberately omit to mention the
various devices deployed by all three theories to meet the many
objections that can be urged against them.
The contents of the core
Before we ask in more detail what exactly the common moral core may
contain – what those values are that may plausibly be said to belong to
the whole of humanity – there is an important methodological question
to
be side-stepped. This is the familiar problem of the derivation of an
‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Even if all human beings bar one agreed on a
moral
rule, it would still be open to the remaining person to reject it,
since
a moral obligation can never be simply read off from a list of facts,
however long, even a list of facts about the moral sentiments of
humans,
unless we add a non-empirical catalyst that allows us to extract an
obligation. Indeed, on some views of morality, the disconnectedness
from
facts is even greater: if moral duties are derived from authority,
especially revealed authority, facts other than those needed to
establish what the authority requires may be of no relevance.
This is a long-standing and intractable problem in moral philosophy.
Fortunately, though, it can for our purposes be left on one side: not
because it is unimportant, but because the moral claims that we shall
be
examining are neutral with respect to any particular solution of the
problem. Actual moral behaviour, individual and social, has through the
history of mankind occurred without reference to this problem – without
awareness of it, on the whole – and so without any sense of inhibition
based on the difficulty of finding a solution. Tradition and moral
consensus have always been effective forces in forming and enforcing
moral injunctions, whatever the theoretical questions that may be
raised
about the justification of their authority. It is possible, then, to
examine the traditions, and the content and sources of moral consensus,
while leaving open philosophical questions about the general
justification of moral sanctions.
The crucial starting-point for such an examination is the nature of
man. Just as there are certain common non-moral universals, such as the
need for food, warmth, shelter, security – and more controversially
social identity, a sense of belonging, and other less obviously
biological requirements – so, and relatedly, there are moral universals
– that is, moral principles accepted wherever and whenever men seek to
codify socially acceptable behaviour, or even when they don’t, since
such principles can be implicit in social practice without being
overtly
verbalised. The universality of such principles may be thought weaker
than that of biological needs, and the analogy between the two sorts of
universality accordingly specious. But this would be a mistake. Moral
universals are often if not always in an obvious sense biologically
based: one does not need to accept an evolutionary view of the origin
of
morality to perceive that moral rules are related, more or less
intimately, to the biological interests of those who espouse them.
Despite the biological connection, its indirectness makes it more
difficult to achieve an agreed list of moral universals than to draw up
a list of universal biological needs (itself perhaps not a
straightforward matter). In addition, the fact that moral rules are
often mediated, and modified, by that cultural variation which is
itself
part of human nature makes the discernment of common ground less
straightforward. But however difficult it may be to delimit the
territory of moral agreement exactly, and though it may in principle
never be exhaustively specifiable, since it is a matter of the
variable,
open-ended, empirical nature of man, the task should not be shirked ...
Notes
Some central elements are relatively secure: e.g.
the ban on gratuitous/indefensible [to be defined] killing or
infliction
of suffering. Other candidates:
Required:
Equal treatment of cases not relevantly [to be
defined] different
Recommended:
Sense of group identity, cultural membership
Excluded:
Retrospective legislation (except in extremis, e.g. Nuremberg)
[add from Jay?]
[1]
‘Der Mensch soll etwas seyn und thun’: Johann Gottlieb
Fichte’s Sämmtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin, 1845–6),
vol. 6, p. 383. [back]
[2] ‘Three Turning-Points
in the History of Political Thought’, unpublished TS. [back]
[3] The attempt to simplify may sometimes
be self-defeating, if summary displaces subtlety rather than
encapsulating it, so that the attempted mirror of reality becomes too
cracked to do its work. But vagueness and imprecision can at times have
sources other than fidelity to the complex nature of truth, and one
should not be shy of attempting, in Popperian spirit, bold theses whose
points of vulnerability to counter-arguments and counter-evidence are
unambiguously revealed. [back]
[unfinished]
© Henry Hardy 2004
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