Journal of the History of Philosophy

Reason and the Basis of Morality in Burke RODNEY W. KILCUP I. THE CONTINUINGINTERESTin the moral and political ideas of Edmund Burke is testimony to more than the excellence of his eighteenth-century prose. Burke remains significant because he focused on a problem that persists in modern political theory and ethics, namely, reconciling the claims of a relativizing historical understanding with the need for stable ethical principles. What Burke offers us is an argument that appears to harmonize historical and moral understanding by demonstrating that binding moral principles are to be found precisely in the midst of the flux of dynamic historical processes. What emerges seems to combine the best of two worlds, a view that is fully sensitive both to the realities of historical change and to the requirement for an ethics that is free in its essentials from the corrosions of temporality . He advances a hardheaded, pragmatic politics that, precisely through being fully prudent and utilitarian, is informed by timeless moral law. Burke's way of proceeding can be briefly illustrated through a consideration of his view of the virtue of prudence, which he considered "not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but.., the director, the regulator, the standard of them all."' According to Burke, to be prudent means to follow the dictates of the whole of human nature, to accept the prescriptive basis of the legitimacy of government, to bow before the inherited wisdom of the past as it is embodied in the customs and institutions of the nation, and to reform the body politic as cautiously as possible. The primacy of prudence would, then, seem to mean that the ultimate political principle should be a utilitarianism that is informed as fully as possible by an understanding of the interrelations of human nature and public policy in history. Prudence , in short, is a rule derived from history and pragmatically validated. But Burke did not leave it at that. He also commended prudence on the basis that it was the means through which God has chosen to direct the affairs of our temporal life and to which we are thus obliged to conform. Prudence is not merely secular caution . Rather, its rules "are formed upon the known march of the ordinary providence of God. ''2 Prudence is enjoined upon us as a matter of historical wisdom and of pious obedience. These arguments in favor of prudence are not autonomous and independent of one another. In Burke's thought they are continually interwoven, creating a scene in which history is not amoral and morality is not ahistorical. Scholars writing in the past twenty years have been able to show that Burke's statements about the existence of a divine, immutable moral order, far from being ' Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791),in The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, rev. ed., 12vols. (Boston, 1866),4:81. 2Second Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796-97), Works, 5:349. [2711 272 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY merely rhetorical devices, are crucial to his thought. Peter J. Stanlis and Francis P. Canavan have made it clear that Burke firmly believed that the ultimate sanction of any moral rule is its conformity to the will of God and that the divine moral law is both transcendent and immanent within us. 3Burke's injunctions to follow tradition, experience, prescription, expediency, and utility were thus neither absolute nor unrestricted , but were based upon and bound by the "one, great immutable, pre-existent law, prior to all our devices."' The particular concern of this paper is not whether Burke believed that moral conduct is ultimately sanctioned by its conformity to the will of God, a contention that is accepted here. The topic at hand is how Burke perceived the knowability of universal moral principles and the implications of his position. This issue is of considerable importance because opinion about the possibilities of knowing has bearing upon what can be legitimately asserted about that which is known. Although scholars such as Burleigh Wiikins believe that the epistemological question is not decisive for determining the nature of a moral philosophy, s it can be shown that Burke's view of the...