Social Humanism

A New Metaphysics

Brian Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136276866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Humanismus in der Philosophie

In this book, Ellis argues that moral and political objectives are not independent of one other, and so must be pursued in tandem. Social humanism is a moral and political philosophy that does just this. As a political philosophy, it justifies the implementation and maintenance of many of the characteristic social policies of welfare states. As a moral philosophy, it provides the foundation required for most human rights legislation.

To this end, Ellis elaborates on the theory of social humanism and the need to reconsider the metaphysical foundations of morals. He develops the theory of social idealism as a meta-theory for both morals and social policy, exploring the global consequences of this new approach.

Part I
Social Humanism

Introduction to Social Humanism

Humanism is the principle of unconditional equality of concern for the dignity and wellbeing of all people, independently of their natural characteristics and their social, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Liberal humanism is a moral and political philosophy that seeks to promote the dignity and wellbeing of people everywhere, which is called ‘liberal’ to stress its commitment to secular liberal democratic values. Morally, liberal humanism requires us to behave with honesty, compassion, and fairness towards others and to respect their rights to liberty. Politically, it requires the development and maintenance of a secular liberal democratic state. Social humanism is also both a moral and a political philosophy. Like liberal humanism, it requires the development and maintenance of a secular liberal democratic state. But it also accepts the existence of a number of positive human rights¹ and answers the question of what the society owes to its members, above and beyond the liberal conservative agenda of protection from threats to life, limb, and property. In answering this question, social humanism is fit to serve not only as the theoretical foundation for a liberal democratic state, but also for the existence and nature of the whole spread of human rights.

As a moral philosophy, I will argue that social humanism is founded on social idealism and seeks to answer the question of what the members of the various classes of individual social agents owe to each other and to the society, and conversely, what society owes to them. To do this, it is necessary to consider two kinds of social ideals: ideals of society, and ideals of social behaviour. My ideal of society would be something like this: A good society is one that is populated by healthy, well-educated, productive, and basically moral and competent people, with well-developed individual and social consciences, whose overall quality of life is as good as it can be, given the society’s resources and international obligations. The political question, then, must be how best to build such a society and a population that has all of the required qualities and attitudes. The moral question is this: What qualities and attitudes would you require of people in your ideal society? Are they anything more than those moral qualities and attitudes that we are able to discover in ourselves just by introspection? If not, then our moral theory is independent of our political theory, unless our political theory actually requires us to act immorally. But my answer is yes. I think there are social requirements on morality as well as intuitive individualistic ones. The additional moral question must therefore be asked: What do we, given our respective social roles, owe to other social agents and to the society as a whole? Accordingly, I shall have quite a lot to say about what I call ‘social moral principles’, i.e. moral principles that are socially derived.

Politically, social humanism is the philosophy of the welfare state. It legitimizes welfare-statism in the way that political individualism sought to legitimize laissez faire capitalism. But social humanism differs from the liberal humanist tradition in both its theoretical structure and its development of the idea that morals are fundamentally concerned with what we should wish to see included in the society’s social contract. Liberal humanism is the form of humanistic thought that emerged and gained wide currency in the Enlightenment. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man was probably the most influential humanist manifesto of the time. But Enlightenment political philosophy was fundamentally liberationist. The American settlers sought liberation from Britain. The French revolutionaries sought liberation from their aristocratic rulers. So freedom and autonomy were among the dominant values of the era, and these values were naturally incorporated into Thomas Paine’s writings and into the constitutions of these newly emerging societies. These aims are certainly compatible with social humanism. But social humanism is also fundamentally concerned with the promotion of social equality and human and animal wellbeing. It does not see itself as just a liberation philosophy; it is much more constructive than that. The role for government that is envisaged by social humanists is not only to protect the society and its institutions from corruption, but also to ensure that adequate provision is made for the safety, shelter, health, welfare, and education of its citizens, in so far as this is possible.

Chapter 1 begins with an analysis of moral principles. For, these are the principles of social behaviour that we must seek to establish in the social contracts of our own societies. What most people understand by ‘moral’ principles is that they are principles of social behaviour to which all responsible human beings should adhere. ‘Responsible’ human beings are traditionally considered to be people who are mature enough to ‘know the difference between right and wrong’ and are free to choose between them. That is, they are supposed to know roughly what things, according to the laws and customs of their society, they are allowed to do and are free to choose whether to do them. So defined, the class of responsible human beings is a very broad one that includes most adult citizens in most modern societies. I see no good reason to change this definition; it is readily understood and normally presupposed by writers in the field. The accepted moral principles of a society must therefore be just the laws or customs that most adult citizens of that society believe they should ideally act on or be bound by.

There are two kinds of moral principles that may be included in a society’s social contract. Firstly, there are individualistic moral principles, the justifications for which are not culturally dependent, and, secondly, there are the ‘social moral principles’ required for the maintenance of a good society. The individualistic principles are all concerned with our natural human virtues and vices. They are prima facie moral obligations to act on these virtues wherever we can and to refrain from acting contrary to them. The natural human virtues include those of honesty, compassion, and fair-mindedness. We are all well aware of what is involved in being virtuous in these ways, and, normally, we are able to recognize such actions when they occur. We act honestly when we tell the truth and are true to our word. We act compassionately when we come to the aid of someone in distress, show sympathy for them, or offer to help them in whatever ways we can. We act fairly when we distribute goods intended for a group equally, where there is no good case for doing otherwise, or according to need or desert, where there is. Or, we share the blame for that which we are all equally guilty. But difficulties arise in at least two kinds of cases: (a) when the requirement that we should act virtuously with respect to one group or people requires that we should cause harm to another, or (b) where it is unclear who is deserving of equal/proportionate consideration and therefore of equal/proportionate treatment.

Difficulties of the first of these two kinds may not have any obvious solutions, because there is no clear way of measuring goods and harms on the same scale. Where there is no wrongdoing or threat of wrongdoing, the rule of thumb is that we should minimize harm. But it is easy enough to think of plausible exceptions to this rule, e.g. where there is wrongdoing on all sides, or the wrongdoing fairly trivial, or the good very great. These are among the well-known difficulties that must be faced by those who wish to defend any form of act-utilitarianism. However, these difficulties do not impugn the most elementary principles of greatest good or least harm. These are sub-act-utilitarian principles. They aim simply to increase good in the world and reduce harm. But, unlike the principle of act-utilitarianism, they are not intended to apply in conflict cases. They are important principles, because they are (a) the ones to which we naturally appeal in our treatment of animals, and (b) the principles that carry no cultural baggage and should, in principle, be defensible in any society. We will discuss them further in Chapter 1. The form of utilitarianism defended in this book does not require that these problems of act-utilitarianism be resolvable analytically. Indeed, it is my belief that they cannot be, and that conflict cases normally require social or political resolution. The second difficulty, viz. that involving the question of which classes of people are deserving of equal consideration, is not so intractable. On the contrary, the issue is one on which considerable progress can be made. For, there is a sound trans-cultural argument from a basically humanistic perspective for a way of defining the relevant equivalence classes. This principle, which I call that of ‘social contractual egalitarianism’, will be argued for in Chapter 2.

Humanism proves to be a powerful position from which to develop a moral theory. Firstly, the theory of social idealism (see Chapter 4) demands some form of social contractual utilitarianism for the development of a moral theory. The required theories could differ from one another in the identities of the goods that are to be maximized. But almost every plausible candidate for such a good is one that is basically compatible with the theory of humanism. My preferred candidate would be to aim to maximize human wellbeing and to increase animal wellbeing as much as possible compatibly with this aim. Secondly, the prima facie moral principles of greatest good and least harm, which are pre-cultural in nature and directly relevant to our treatment of animals, are clearly compatible with this aim. Thirdly, the principle of social contractual egalitarianism provides a sound basis for a theory of social equality, and hence for determining the relevant classes of individuals, who are prima facie deserving of equal consideration.

However, the provision of social equality evidently requires more than just adherence to the principle of social contractual egalitarianism. What seems to be needed is a program that aims to provide not only formal, but also practical, equality of opportunity. The theory of social humanism provides a sound basis for the development of such a program. But the precise form that it should take is fairly clearly one that will require a social solution. Hence, the principle of equality of opportunity must be considered to be fundamentally a social principle. And, if it should become entrenched in a given society and elevated to the status of a social ideal, then it would become a social moral principle of that society. Social issues of this kind probably cannot be settled rationally. If there is a way of doing this, then I am certainly not alone in not knowing what it is. Normally, disputes arising from conflicting basic values ultimately have to be resolved by the slow processes of historical settlement. A parliament, president, judge, or someone else in a position of authority has to make a decision to the best of his or her ability, trying to balance goods against harms, and wait to see how it works out. If it is successful, then opposition to it will gradually diminish, and public opinion will settle down in its favour. If the times suit the settlement that has been reached, then the resolution of the dispute may come to be seen as definitive, and public opinion in favour of the resolution may harden to the point that opposition to it becomes difficult or even unthinkable. At this point, the position taken becomes accepted with all of the force of a deeply held moral conviction. Indeed, I believe that many of the moral principles of our own society have this kind of origin. They are what I call ‘social moral principles’. I do not decry them for this reason. They are accepted as moral principles, they function as moral principles, and the issues they resolved needed to be settled for the good of the society, and hence for the good of its members.

The concepts of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and of the right to property are considered by a great many people in America (and elsewhere) to be primary moral values, capable of outweighing any considerations of compassion or justice. The trade-off favouring the concept of negative liberty over that of social egalitarianism was, at the time of the American War of Independence, utterly irresistible, and in the minds of many people it remains so today. It was irresistible at the time, because those most disadvantaged were the slaves, the Native Americans, and the landless poor, who had no significant voice. The settlers, who had made their homes in this incredibly wealthy land, and the newly arrived immigrants, who hoped to be able to profit from all this bounty in the same way, were naturally strongly in favour of this stance. But the concepts of freedom and property that prevailed in the eighteenth century are not as favourable to Americans today as they were to the settler society of that earlier time. And the concepts that have to some extent replaced the original ones (viz. those of the Murdoch press and the Republican Party) are, at the time of writing, proving to be highly destructive of America’s own economic and social systems.

Social moral systems, and the values to which they give rise, must therefore be treated with caution. They need, from time to time, to be re-examined. The same holds for the social moral principles and values of other countries. The American social moral framework is not an ancient one; at least it belongs to the current era. But the social moral frameworks of many other cultures belong to much earlier, and frequently much more violent, times. My strategy for dealing with this problem is to focus on, and give priority to, the core humanistic moral principles that should theoretically be binding on all human beings, and thus rule out the most brutal and immoral of the practices that disgrace humankind. But thereafter we must be tolerant of differences. The social moral principles of different societies are bound to reflect different social and cultural histories, and, if we haven’t thoroughly re-examined our own, we have no good reason to think that our own are immune from criticism.

In Chapter 2, I develop the theories of liberty and equality for social humanists. Specifically, I argue for an ideal form of social equality, which, though unachievable, is certainly a worthy goal. If we can come anywhere near to achieving this goal, then that will be very worthwhile. As a social humanist would define it, social equality requires equality of respect for everyone. It does not require equality of wealth, income, or social status. It demands only that everyone should have attitudes of equal and unconditional concern for the wellbeing and dignity of all others, i.e. a concern for others that does not depend on whether they deserve it. For many societies, the difficulties in the way of building a socially egalitarian society would be very great, and such societies would need to prepare the ground to make this possible. Specifically, they would need at least: (a) an education system that is geared towards giving all children the best opportunity possible to develop and exploit their natural talents, and to make the best lives for themselves that they are capable of; and (b) a health and social welfare system that would increase the range of social choices that socially disadvantaged people are practically able to make. For, without these two conditions being satisfied, a state in which a high degree of social equality exists probably cannot be achieved.

But, let us suppose that the amount of social inequality that exists in a given society is not so crippling that socially biased attitudes could not possibly be tackled effectively. In such a society, there is an obvious and plausibly viable strategy for rooting out these socially biased attitudes and thereafter maintaining a high degree of social equality. Everyone is familiar with the conception of equality before the law, and most advanced countries pride themselves on having such procedures firmly entrenched in their statutes. Most philosophers are also familiar with the conception of equality in the law, which is having laws that do not discriminate between people on the basis of gender, sexual preference, race, ethnic origin, and so on. But even if we have equality both in and before the law, this may still not be enough to guarantee social equality. For, many of the most discriminatory practices may not be illegal. These discriminatory practices may well be just the remnants of traditional or tribal practices that no one has had the courage to tackle legally. So, what is needed is something stronger than equality in and before the law. What is required, ultimately, is equality in and before the social contract. This is the aim of social contractual egalitarianism. However, traditional cultures do not die overnight. Nor can they be effectively suppressed. They just have to wither away.

The theory of social contractual egalitarianism has obvious implications for the theory of cosmopolitanism. If every society in the world were socially contractually egalitarian, it would, by most definitions, be a cosmopolitan world. The theory of social contractual egalitarianism thus provides a series of stepping stones to cosmopolitanism. We do not have to try to defend or embrace cosmopolitan principles of human kindness or fair-mindedness in our daily lives. Without a global social structure to allocate moral responsibilities, that would, in any case, be impossible.² What we can do, and what we should do, is adopt measures that would result in the principle of social contractual egalitarianism being established in our own social contract, and then work towards creating the conditions that would make it possible for other societies to do likewise.

In the final chapter of this book (in Part IV), I consider some of the global moral issues of social humanism. It is convenient to delay these considerations until then, however, because of the strong relevance of social idealism to what I have to say. The theory of social idealism will be developed in Part III.

1 The Ideals of Social Humanism

1.1 INTRODUCTION

Humanists have an unconditional concern for the wellbeing and dignity of humankind. They are fundamentally concerned with increasing the overall quality of people’s lives, regardless of their behaviour, and to treat people with respect. They seek to do so by promoting the development of people’s natural talents and inculcating attitudes of mutual respect and tolerance. Their central idea is that every person should be treated with equal concern for their good.

There are two main sources of these humanistic attitudes. The first of these is that human beings are compassionate beings. That is, ...