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Right and Good: the Contradiction of Morality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
We were led, at the close of the last paper, to the conclusion that the moral judgment lays claim to a knowledge of what is unknowable. It is not merely that our volition is imperfect, that the act of necessity falls short of what we know to be right. This seems bad enough; but the plight in which we actually find ourselves is even worse. The paradox is that we never know, and never can know, in any particular situation, what it is really right to do. We know indeed that it is always right, really and absolutely right, to do what we believe to be right. For a man to act “against his conscience,” after all possible thought has been taken for its enlightenment, we know to be morally wrong. But this knowledge is purely formal and gives no clue to the matter of moral obligation. It tells us what is common alike to any and every case of moral duty; it does not tell us what we ought to do. For the right that we will cannot be merely the rightness of willing it. What I ought to do cannot be merely that I ought to do it. Now our beliefs and judgments as to material rightness, i.e. as to what it is right to do in a concrete situation, are notoriously liable to error. So we seek for a criterion by which to test our variable and fallible judgments, a criterion of what is really right. But the search is doomed to failure; we can only test beliefs by beliefs, our former beliefs by our later, the beliefs of one man or society or age by those of others.
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References
page 583 note 1 On the seriousness for ethics of the problems of the “really” right act and of the dependence of duty on recognition of it, see MrCarritt's, Theory of Morals, esp. pp. 90–94, 140Google Scholar, and his recent paper read to the Aristotelian Society, June 16, 1930, entitled “Thinking makes it so.” He suggests that rightness and wrongness belong not to the bringing about of a certain change, but to the trying to bring about a certain change, while he is aware of the difficulties attendant on this view. See also ProfessorLaird's, article “Concerning Right,” in Mind, 07 1929 (No. 151).Google Scholar Both these writers adopt a position widely different from that advocated in this article
page 583 note 2 e.g. Javert in Les Misérables.
page 584 note 1 Mr. S. B. Ward, in his Ways of Life, recognizing the impossibility of fulfilling the moral demand, relegates morality to the sphere of pure theória. The moral law is the object of the beatific vision, and has no practical significance. From the hopelessness of this impossibility of acting morally, he takes refuge in the cultivation of a sense of humour, provoked by the contrast between the ideal and the practicable. But the situation is too tragic to be thus remedied. Even the fullest measure of humour would have failed to rescue St. Paul “from the body of this death” (Rom. vii. 24). We may say that while Kant reduces, or tends to reduce, religion to morality, Mr. Ward reduces morality to religion.
page 585 note 1 I cannot accept the doctrine held by Professor Prichard, and by many others, that it is possible to know (as distinct from to believe, opine, or think) a particular act to be right. This doctrine involves (a) the view, discussed in the previous article, that an act is right or wrong in entire independence of the agent's motives, and (b) the view, which I regard as equally erroneous, that a particular act, e.g. payment of a certain debt, can be judged right or wrong in isolation from its context. I hold to degrees of Tightness, as also to degrees of truth. Each particular volition is a phase or moment in a train of volitions, which expands to cover the whole of the agent's moral life. Similarly, as regards theoretical knowledge, I cannot believe that any single judgment, even in mathematics, can be, in its isolation, utterly and entirely true. The vera idea, which is “the norm of itself and of the false,” can only be the intuitive vision of the whole reality. All human knowledge, in science or in ethics, is of necessity incomplete.
page 587 note 1 On collision of duties, see Bradley, , Ethical Studies, pp. 224–228.Google Scholar
page 587 note 2 Kant failed to see that science also rests on a reasonable faith. Everywhere in the activity of the human spirit the sphere of reason transcends that of logic and demonstration. See my article on “Logic and Faith” in an earlier number of this Journal (Vol. I., No. 4).Google Scholar This point has been very clearly brought out by Dr. Tennant in his Philosophical Theology, passim.
page 588 note 1 On these antinomies, see Bradley, , Ethical Studies, pp. 230–235, 319–333.Google Scholar
page 589 note 1 See Bradley, loc. cit.
page 589 note 2 The central difficulty is that of the reconciliation of divine predestination and grace with man's freedom and moral responsibility.
page 590 note 1 See Croce, Philosophy of the Practical. His doctrine of economic, as distinct from moral, action is of great value. He includes under the former head both the efficient response here discussed and prudential action or action for the sake of pleasure. My own view is that while both these are non-moral, action for pleasure is on the line of action sub ratione boni. As such it will be discussed in the ensuing paper.
page 592 note 1 Ethical Studies, ch. v. For the recognition of the inadequacy of this formula, pp. 202–206, and ch. vi, on “Ideal Morality,” and also the concluding chapter of this great work.