Human Character and Morality

Reflections on the History of Ideas

Stephen D. Hudson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367511753
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000079852
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Originally published in 1986, this book explores the animating qualities of human character and moral thought and discusses how they place constraints on the adequacy of moral theories. It evaluates some of the major theories in the history of ethics, notably the moral thoughts of Sidgwick, Kant, Aristotle and Hume. The book examines questions of fundamental importance to all of us and broadens the scope and wisdom of analytical philosophy by conveying the excitement of original philosophical research.

Notes

I What is Morality all About?

1 Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 29.

2 Ibid., 54.

3 Ibid., 55.

4 Here I do not mean to imply that the Direct View cannot apply as well to large slices of life, as, for example, when one asks oneself what he should be doing in the next several years. General rules of direction and revisable strategies certainly can play a role in deliberative contexts.

5 To be sure, Kant’s theory is radically different from Martineau’s, and seems more sympathetic, in one sense, to the posture of theorists who support the Direct View. For if you read Kant as attempting to provide a decision procedure for appraising the moral quality of any act, he certainly appears to have one foot, perhaps both feet, in the Direct camp. Nevertheless, it is clear that Kant believed that we arrive at adequate procedures for the appraisal of acts by first providing a theory about the nature of moral agency, and proceed from it to substantive rules and principles that govern conduct. And that first task is a necessary first task. Kant attempts to derive the Categorical Imperative, the principle that grounds all moral principles of conduct, from the notion of a type of agency: that exemplified by the person of good will.

II Sidgwick: The Direct View

1 My understanding and treatment of Sidgwick is greatly indebted to J. B. Schneewind’s definitive study in his Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1977).

2 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962 reprint of seventh edn), 26, 32, 37.

3 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, first edn, my emphasis, 25–26.

4 See, e.g., Bernard Williams, ‘Ethical Consistency,’ in Problems of the Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 175f.; Herbert Morris, ‘Persons and Punishment,’ The Monist, 52 (1968), 498–499; Ruth Barcan Marcus, ‘Moral Dilemmas and Consistency,’ Journal of Philosophy, 78 (1980), 121–136.

5 Ibid., 175f.

6 For a rationalist resolution that opts for the last candidate, see Alan Donagan’s most interesting piece, ‘Consistency in Rationalist Moral Systems,’ Journal of Philosophy, 81 (1984), 291–309. I discuss several of Donagan’s arguments below.

7 We may be fortunate to live in a world where it just so happens that things will work out satisfactorily often enough if you employ the agglomeration principle in such judgements, but that hardly establishes its reliability as a principle of inference.

8 For further details see the discussion in Chapter X.

9 Alan Donagan, ‘Consistency in Rationalist Moral Systems,’ Journal of Philosophy, 81 (1984), 291–309.

10 Ibid., 306.

11 If he insists that design coordination in these cases can be gained only dialectically, as they occur and need be addressed, what can ground his confidence that all conflicts will disappear?

12 My suspicion is that this emphasis on the rule of law is a somewhat misguided rationalist extension of a principle that is quite appropriate and needed where it was first put to work. We want our judiciary to have very limited discretion; we do not want personal judgements, as such, to function as law. A judicial system which permits much unbridled and unprincipled judicial discretion – a system found all too often in, for example, the history of Europe – is too unreliable and inequitable. Hence there was a strong rationale for demanding public procedures that severely curtailed the power of the judiciary. But it seems to me that rationalists have tended to use this perfectly apt political principle as an epistemological model for the representation of moral knowledge: all such knowledge must be replicable through a codification of laws and procedures which are more adequate, ceteris paribus, to the extent that good judgement is eliminated from the scene and the correct results can be generated mechanically. The codification represents the rationalist’s means of surmounting the traditional understanding of the connection between practical wisdom and experience: any gaps thought to be created by inexperience are closed by the system of laws and procedures.

III Moral Virtues and the Direct View

1 See, e.g., William Frankena, Ethics, 2nd edn (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 62–70, and ‘Pritchard and the Ethics of Virtue,’ The Monist, 54 (1970), 1–17; G.E.M. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy,’ Philosophy, 33 (1958), 1–19; Myles Burnyeat, ‘Virtues in Action,’ in The Philosophy of Socrates, ed. G. Vlastos (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 209–234; Stephen Hudson, ‘Taking Virtues Seriously,’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 59 (1981), 189–202; Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

2 The first criticism of this tendency was made by J. O. Urmson in his ‘Saints and Heroes,’ in Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. A. I. Melden (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958), 198–216.

3 See: Joel Feinberg, ‘Supererogation and Rules,’ International Journal of Ethics, 71 (1961), 276–288; Roderick Chisholm, ‘Supererogation and Offence: A Conceptual Scheme for Ethics,’ Ratio, 5 (1963), 1–14.

4 Feinberg, ibid., 1–4; Richard Brandt, ‘The Concepts of Obligation and Duty,’ Mind, 73 (1964); C. H. Whiteley, On Duties,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 53 (1952–53); H.L. A. Hart, ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?,’ Philosophical Review, 64 (1955), 175–191.

5 W. D. Ross, Foundations of Ethics (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 146.

6 W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), 16–47.

7 For example, in The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, he writes:

The categorical imperative, inasmuch as it asserts an obligation with regard to certain actions, is a morally practical law. But, because obligation includes, not only practical necessity (of the sort that a law in general asserts), but also constraint, the imperative mentioned is a law of either command or of prohibition, according to whether the performance or the nonperformance is represented as a duty. An action that is neither commanded nor prohibited is merely allowed, because with respect to it there is no law that limits freedom (competence) and, therefore, also no duty. Such an action is called morally indifferent (indijferens, adiaphoron, res merae facultatis). ...

A conflict of duties (collisio officiorum s. obligationum) would be a relationship between duties by virtue of which one would (wholly or partially) cancel the other. Because, however, duty and obligation are in general concepts that express the objective practical necessity of certain actions and because two mutually opposing rules cannot be necessary at the same time, then, if it is a duty to act according to one of them, it is not only not a duty but contrary to duty to act according to the other. It follows, therefore, that a conflict of duties and obligations is inconceivable (obligationes non colliduntur). [223-224]

8 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 47–48. Mill proceeds to warn that writers who fail to make this distinction will tend ‘to merge all morality into justice.’
For two helpful discussions in the secondary literature, see: David Lyons, ‘Human Rights and the General Welfare,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6 (1977), 113–129; Jonathan Harrison, ‘The Expedient, the Right, and the Just in Mill’s Utilitarianism,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supp. Vol., 1 (1974), 93–107.

9 For an excellent summary of the various ways in which Kant attempts to draw the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties, and the numerous resulting problems, see: Paul Eisenberg, ‘From the Forbidden to the Supererogatory: The Basic Ethical Categories in Kant’s Tugendlehre,’ American Philosophical Quarterly, 3 (1966), 255–269; Thomas E. Hill, Jr., ‘Kant on Imperfect Duty and Supererogation,’ Kant-Studien, 62 (1971), 55–76.

10 Samuel Pufendorf, De Jure Naturae Et Gentium Libri Octo, tr. Oldfather and Oldfather (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934 reprint of 1688 edn), 118. Cf. 302–305, 314–315, 627–629.

11 This case is discussed by Michael Stocker in his ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories,’ Journal of Philosophy, 63 (1976), 453–466. See also Lawrence Blum, Friendship, Altruism and Morality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), and Bernard Williams, ‘Persons, Character and Morality,’ in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1–19.

12 Marcia Baron, in a most interesting defense of Kant from his modern foes, recognizes this point but attempts to deflect it by insisting that the Kantian notion of duty encompasses acts that one morally ought to do, and such acts can be of one of two sorts: either morally required or morally recommended. Hence Baron regards these acts of friendship as morally recommended, though not morally required: see her ‘The Alleged Repugnance of Acting From Duty,’ Journal of Philosophy, 81 (1984), 199–201.
The idea that duty is a concept specified by considerations that an act is morally required and/or that it is morally recommended puzzles me. If duty is construed in the Kantian fashion of what one ought to do being the (philosophical) definition of ‘duty,’ I have no complaints but that it obscures the nature of the moral phenomena it encompasses. (Unless one equivocates: see notes 14 and 15 below.) But Kant made all acts Baron recognizes as morally recommended but not required into imperfect duties. And the reason for this lies, in part, in the fact that he held that the fact that an act is morally required entails that it would be wrong to fail to do it, and, that an act is not required entails that it is not wrong to fail to do it. But Baron cannot, I think, concur. For if there are cases where morality recommends something and does not require it (e.g., the case at hand), she tells us that one ought to do it and to fail to do it would be wrong. But now, if Kant’s conception is brought to bear on the case at hand, the act is not morally required and hence is not wrong to fail to do, but is morally recommended and hence is wrong to fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• I What is Morality all About?
• II Sidgwick: The Direct View
• III Moral Virtues and the Direct View
• IV Aristotle: The Indirect View
• V Further Reflections on Acts and Agents
• VI Hume and the Indirect View
• VII The Dualism of Humean Virtues
• VIII Moral Points of View
• IX Reflections on the Nature of the Beast
• X Epilogue: Morality and Human Character
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index