Chapter 19: Intuition and Common Sense

1. When Intuitions Conflict

The ethical doctrine known as Intuitionism is perhaps the oldest known to man. It existed as a tacit assumption long before it made any appearance as an explicit philosophical tenet. It is the theory that we know immediately, without consideration of their consequences, what acts are "right" and what acts are "wrong."

When they come to saying how we know this, the Intuitionists give a wide variety of answers. Some say we know it by a special "moral sense" implanted in each of us by God. Some say we know it through the Inner Voice of our "conscience." Some (e.g., Alfred C. Ewing) say we know it by immediate perception, or "direct cognition." Sir David Ross tells us that at least certain acts ("fulfilling a promise . . . effecting a just distribution of good . . . returning services rendered . . . promoting the good of others . . . promoting the virtue or insight of the agent") are "prima facie duties," and that their prima facie rightness is "self-evident . . . just as a mathematical axiom, or the validity of a form of inference, is evident."(1)

Sidgwick defines Intuitionism as the theory that regards "rightness as a quality belonging to actions independently of their conduciveness to any ulterior end." (2)

The presence of that quality is presumably ascertained simply by "looking at" the actions themselves, without considering their consequences. But Sidgwick goes on to point out that "no morality ever existed which did not consider consequences" (3) at least sometimes and to some extent. Prudence (or forethought), for example, has always been considered a virtue. All modern lists of virtues "have included Benevolence, which aims generally at the happiness of others, and therefore necessarily takes into consideration even remote effects of actions." (4)

It is difficult, also, to draw the line between an act and its consequences. A consequence of beating a dog is that it suffers; a consequence of shooting a man is that he dies. Such consequences are usually thought of as part of the act itself. The distinction between an act and its consequences is in part arbitrary. In a sense all inevitable or reasonably foreseeable consequences may be considered as part of the act itself.

I shall not enter here into any lengthy refutation of Intuitionism. That has already been amply supplied by other writers.(5) It is no more rational to judge an act without some consideration of its consequences than it would be to perform the act without some consideration of its consequences. And the moral notions that have seemed equally innate, self-evident, or authoritative to those who held them have varied enormously with different races, nations, periods, and individuals. Cannibalism, slavery, polygamy, incest, prostitution, have all seemed morally acceptable to some tribes or peoples at some time. Our concepts of chastity, decency, propriety, modesty, pornography, are constantly undergoing subtle changes. Our judgments on what constitutes sexual morality and immorality have altered enormously even in our own generation. Even within the Bible itself we find the most direct conflicts between moral injunctions. The Mosaic Law tells us to repay injury with its like: "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot; burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe" (Exod. 21:24-25). But Jesus tells us: "Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also" (Matt. 5:38-39).

I need not go further into the differences and conflicts between the moral "intuitions" that have been regarded as "self-evident" in different times and places. Overwhelming documentation of these can be found in the works of John Locke, Herbert Spencer, W. E. H. Lecky, William Graham Sumner, L. T. Hobhouse, Robert Briffault, etc.

When we decide whether or not to act in accordance with any given moral rule, we do in fact give some consideration to the probable consequences of acting on it or failing to act on it. This is especially true when two established moral rules conflict -- e.g., the rule that we should always tell the truth with the rule that we should not cause avoidable humiliation, distress, or pain to others. There is still no "self-evident" answer to the question whether a doctor should tell his patient that she is dying of cancer.

2. Morals Built into Language

But if there are no moral "intuitions," how have so many philosophers, and so many other intelligent persons, come to think that there are? The reason is that most of our moral judgments seem immediate, seem to be instantaneous and made without consideration of the probable consequences of an act. But this is so because these judgments have been, as it were, built into us by the social traditions and conventions and from our earliest infancy. They are built into the language. From its earliest days an infant hears the words "good baby" or "bad baby," "good doggie" or "bad doggie." Moral judgment is embodied in description, and confused with it. We absorb our moral judgments with our language. They are both parts of our social inheritance. The reason we know that lying is wicked and being mistaken is not necessarily so; that theft is wrong but transfer not necessarily so; that murder is monstrous but killing in self defense is justified, is that these judgments are embodied in the words themselves, by the judgments of our fellows and the generations that have gone before us.

Now no philosopher, to my knowledge, has held or holds that we know the meaning of words -- of black and white, dog and cat, table and chair, high and low -- by intuition. But some philosophers do seem to maintain that we know the meaning of good and bad, right and wrong, by some sort of intuition. They are held to be "indefinable" in some much more mysterious and "nonnatural" way than blue and yellow, up and down, right and left, are indefinable. (6)

Now the ethical tradition in which we have grown up, and the ethical valuations and judgments that go with it, impregnate and color all our thought. We pick them up in the same way as we do our language. Like our language, they condition our thought. They do not do so to quite the same extent as our language (for without the social inheritance of language it is doubtful that the individual could think, in any civilized sense of the term, at all); but our social ethical conventions and valuations condition our individual thought and attitudes to an enormous extent. It is because they are so habitual, immediate, and instantaneous that they are so often mistaken for "intuitions."

A writer like Henry Sidgwick(7) does sometimes confuse them with intuitions. Nevertheless, one of the great contributions that Sidgwick made to ethics was to examine and try to spell out the ethical tradition of his time and place with more care and in more detail than any of his predecessors had done. He did not call it the ethical tradition but the Morality of Common Sense. As he explains in the preface to the second edition of his Methods of Ethics: "The Morality that I examine in Book III is my own morality as much as it is any man's: it is, as I say, the 'Morality of Common Sense,' which I only attempt to represent in so far as I share it; I only place myself outside it either (1) temporarily, for the purpose of impartial criticism, or (2) in so far as I am forced beyond it by a practical consciousness of its incompleteness. I have certainly criticized this morality unsparingly...." (8)

As a Benthamite (i.e., a direct and ad hoc) Utilitarian, Sidgwick sometimes criticizes "common sense" morality too hastily and cavalierly; but he is for the most part far more cautious and respectful in doing so than Bentham was. At one point, indeed, he pays eloquent tribute to it:

If, then, we are to regard the morality of Common Sense as a machinery of rules, habits, and sentiments, roughly and generally but not precisely or completely adapted to the production of the greatest possible happiness for sentient beings generally; and if, on the other hand, we have to accept it as the actually established machinery for attaining this end, which we cannot replace at once by any other, but can only gradually modify; it remains to consider the practical effects of the complex and balanced relation in which a scientific Utilitarian thus seems to stand to the Positive Morality of his age and country.

Generally speaking, he will clearly conform to it, and endeavor to promote its development in others. For, though the imperfection that we find in all the actual conditions of human existence -- we may even say in the universe at large as judged from a human point of view -- is ultimately found even in Morality itself, in so far as this is contemplated as Positive; still, practically, we are much less concerned with correcting and improving than we are with realizing and enforcing it. The Utilitarian must repudiate altogether that temper of rebellion against the established morality as something purely external and conventional, into which the reflective mind is always apt to fall when it is first convinced that its rules are not intrinsically reasonable. He must, of course, also repudiate as superstitious that awe of it as an absolute Divine Code which Intuitional moralists inculcate. Still, he will naturally contemplate it with reverence and wonder as a marvelous product of nature, the result of long centuries of growth, showing in many parts the same fine adaptation of means to complex exigencies as the most elaborate structures of physical organisms exhibit: he will handle it with respectful delicacy as a mechanism, constructed of the fluid element of opinions and dispositions, by the indispensable aid of which the actual quantum of human happiness is continually being produced: a mechanism which no "politicians or philosophers" could create, yet without which the harsher and coarser machinery of Positive Law could not be permanently maintained, and the life of man would become -- as Hobbes forcibly expresses it -- "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." (9)

Sidgwick goes on to say: "Still, as this actual moral order is admittedly imperfect, it will be the Utilitarian's duty to aid in improving it; just as the most orderly, law-abiding, member of a modern civilized society includes the reform of laws in his conception of political duty." (10)

This is all excellent as far as it goes. Still, it is not quite as easy to reform and improve traditional or common-sense (11) morality as Sidgwick and other classical Utilitarians too often seemed to suppose. Certainly I cannot agree, with Sidgwick, that "the only possible method" of modifying or supplementing common-sense morality is that of "pure empirical Hedonism." (12)

It is of cardinal importance that we recognize why we must treat the existing positive moral code not only with as much respect as we do our country's laws but with a great deal more -- with something very close to reverence and awe. This moral code grew up spontaneously, like language, religion, manners, law. It is the product of the experience of immemorial generations, of the interrelations of millions of people and the interplay of millions of minds. The morality of common sense is a sort of common law, with an indefinitely wider jurisdiction than ordinary common law, and based on a practically infinite number of particular cases. We are not required to perform the optimum act -- the specific act that would do most to increase the sum of human happiness -- because we can never know precisely what that act is. But we do know what the traditional moral rules prescribe. These rules crystallize the experience and moral wisdom of the race.

The morality of common sense cannot be put beyond criticism, of course, for then there would be no ethical progress. But this criticism should never be made impatiently, arrogantly, condescendingly, or frivolously (after the fashion of so many philosophers, from Thrasymachus to Bentham, and from Nietzsche to Bertrand Russell and other Logical Positivists), but with great care and caution, and only after every effort has been made to see the possible utility or need of some traditional moral rule whenever such utility or need is not immediately obvious.

3. The Importance of Precedent

We have elsewhere discussed at length the need to be guided in ethics by the utility of general rules, rather than by the estimated consequences of particular acts considered in isolation. Common-sense morality has always implicitly recognized the need of abiding by such general rules. It has also recognized the need of allowing very few exceptions, even when such exceptions would in themselves be harmless, for the reason that such exceptions, once admitted, would tend to become too wide and numerous. The whole social code that restricts the time, place, and circumstances of social intercourse between men and women is based on this principle.(13) Common and statute law embody the same principle: one is supposed to stop at the red light even at a deserted intersection. But this principle is usually ignored or overlooked by hasty critics of common-sense morality.

Another consideration that these critics commonly overlook is the importance of precedent. Precedent is at least as important in ethics as in law. Rules should be changed slowly, individually, after careful thought. An attempt at any sudden "transvaluation of all values" can merely create confusion and chaos.

Precedent is of the first importance in law for the protection of individual rights. The law must be certain -- i.e., not only must the law be reasonably precise but decisions of the courts. must be reasonably predictable, so that people may know when they are acting within their rights, and may embark on a course of action with reasonable assurance that the rules will not be changed in the middle of the game. This is no less true of ethical laws. The standards of right and wrong, of praise and blame, should change only gradually, slowly, piecemeal, so that people can become accustomed to the new rules. This gradualness assures the maximum of social cooperation and even of progress. This is the element of truth in conservatism, in so far as this reflects a philosophy of gradualism. New rules and standards must be tested by a minority before they are adopted by or enforced on everyone.

Let us put this in still another form. Why is devotion to duty important? Because it means following a recognized and established rule. Why is following an established rule important? Because these rules are the product of millions of individual decisions in millions of situations and embody the accumulated experience and wisdom of the race. Because following these established rules has been found to have the consequence in the long run of maximizing human harmony, cooperation, and well-being (or of minimizing human discord and strife). And finally, because it is necessary that we should be able to depend on each other's reactions and responses. If we stopped before each act or decision to make a fresh calculation of the probable consequences of action A, B, C, or N, if we decided to "judge each case on its merits" without regard to any established rule or principle of action, others could not depend on our actions or responses. The primary basis of human cooperation, which is mutual dependence on each of us playing his expected role, would be undermined or destroyed.

In a symphony, every player and instrument has his or its assigned role in carrying the theme or producing the harmony. Any false or untimely note from any instrument, any failure in tempo or synchronization, would spoil the cooperative result. So with the symphony of life.

This brings us to a still further corollary. Even a rather poor ethical rule is better than no rule at all. This is again because we need to know in our daily actions what to expect of each other, because we are obliged to rely on each other's conduct, and must be reasonably able to count in advance on what the action of others is going to be.

Perhaps an analogy with traffic laws will make this clearer. A rule that permits you to turn right at a red light may be better or worse than a rule that forbids you to turn right at a red light. A rule that one must drive on the right side of the road may be better or worse than a rule that one must drive on the left side. But it is much more important that we adopt and abide by even the inferior rule (whichever it is) than that we adopt no rule at all. For in the former case each driver knows what to expect of the other drivers; in the latter case he does not know what to expect, and the number of arguments, snarls, and accidents is bound to increase.

Let us summarize the conclusions at which we have arrived. The existing Common Law and the existing Moral Tradition deserve tremendous respect from each of us because of the process by which they have come into being. The Common Law is the product of the hundreds of thousands of decisions by thousands of judges passing on specific cases, trying not only to settle each of them but to settle it on the basis of established precedents and principles acceptable to both sides. (Scientists and "advanced thinkers" often ridicule the law and lawyers for their "blind" deference to precedents. But this is what gives certainty to the law. This is what allows people to know that they have certain rights that others are bound to respect; to know what it is that they have a right to expect from others and can reasonably depend on from others when they make their own plans.) And what applies to the Common Law applies to the Moral Tradition (or "common-sense" morality, or the moral consensus) multiplied a hundredfold. From the beginning of time, all of us have experienced daily conflicts, disputes, problems of division, precedence, priority, and "fairness," and in seeking to resolve these have sought to do so on the basis of consistent or accepted principles that would also appeal to others. Our "common-sense" morality is the composite product of these immemorial millions of judgments and decisions.

4. "Always Follow the Rule -- Unless"

The practical course to which all this leads is clear. We should abide by the morality of common sense, we should abide by the conventional rules of conduct of our time and place, whatever they happen to be, unless in some particular case we have strong reasons for departing from the rule. We should never refuse to abide by an established moral rule merely because we cannot understand the purpose of it. No single person can be in a position to know all the experiences, decisions, and considerations that have caused a moral rule to take some particular form.

This is the great element of practical truth (though not of "self-evidence") in the injunction of Sir David Ross that we should always abide by what he calls our "prima facie duties" even when we cannot see in some particular case precisely how this will promote our own individual well-being or even the well-being of our community in the long run. Our general maxim should be this: Always follow the established moral rule, always abide by our prima facie duty, unless there is a clear reason for not doing so.

This is little more than the general form of Mark Twain's sarcastic admonition: "When in doubt, tell the truth." When in doubt, follow the established moral rule.

The burden of proof must be upon the exception, or upon the alleged moral innovation. In fact, it should be a large part of the aim of the moral philosopher to discover the reasons for an existing moral rule, or the function that it serves. (14) If each of us were free to change or to ignore the traditional moral code at whatever point it did not suit him, or even at whatever point he did not fully understand the reason for its application, the code would lose all its authority.

There is truth, then, in the conclusion of Hegel: "Virtue is not a troubling oneself about a peculiar and isolated morality of one's own. The striving for a positive morality of one's own is futile, and in its very nature impossible of attainment. In respect of morality the saying of the wisest men of antiquity is the only one which is true, that to be moral is to live in accordance with the moral tradition of one's country." (15)

This, however, overstates the matter. Unless a few had the courage to depart from the prevailing moral code of their country or time in this or that particular, for some carefully considered reason, there would be no moral progress. We must never allow the existing moral code to become petrified and immutable, for then even the reasons behind it would be forgotten, and it would tend to become meaningless. "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." Each of us may and must cooperate in its continuous improvement and perfection.

Fortunately, each of us daily has this opportunity. For the prevailing moral code, or the Morality of Common Sense, when closely examined, consists for the most part of generalities which, when it comes to detailed application, lack a great deal in clarity and precision. Common-Sense Morality prescribes such virtues as Prudence, Temperance, Self-Control, Good Faith, Veracity, Justice, Courage, Benevolence, etc.; but these concepts are often vague, and sometimes even mutually contradictory. They do not tell us, for example, precisely how, where they conflict, we can reconcile the claims of Prudence with the claims of Benevolence, or precisely at what point Courage becomes Foolhardiness. Yet each of us, in his praise and blame, his advice, and above all in his own conduct and in his own decisions, can help to make these ideas more exact. The function of the moral philosopher is constantly to look for some unifying principle that can explain the origin and necessity of most of the traditional virtues and duties, can help to give them a more precise form, and can reconcile them in a more coherent system.(16)

Meanwhile, however, the existing morality seems quite adequate, and is certainly indispensable, for practical guidance for most people in most circumstances. Without a profound general respect for and deference to the traditional moral code, there would be no morality at all, but moral chaos. And in our age this is a far greater danger than that of an imperfect and inflexible code held in superstitious awe.

5. The Moral Contract

Before we leave this consideration of the traditional moral code, a word should be said about one significant element in its nature. The chief function that the common morality serves is to reduce social conflict and to promote social cooperation. And it is important to notice in this morality the role played by tacit agreement.

Since the days of Rousseau, a great deal has been said in political theorizing about the "Social Contract." Now there is no evidence that there ever was an explicit historical social contract. Nevertheless, men have acted, from time immemorial, politically and morally, as if there were a social contract. This has been a tacit, unformulated, unexplicit, but none the less real agreement, an agreement reflected in our actions and in our rules of action. It takes the general form: I will do this if you do that; I will refrain from this if you refrain from that. I will not attack you if you do not attack me. I will respect your person and family and property and other established rights if you respect mine. I will keep my word if you keep yours. I will tell the truth if you do. I will take my place on line and wait my turn if you will do the same. Those who violate these tacitly-agreed-upon rules not only do direct and immediate harm, but also imperil general adherence to the rules. Individual respect for law and general respect for law, individual morality and general social morality, are interdependent. They are, in fact, two names for the same thing.

6. Are Maxims "Self-Evident"?

We come now to a final question. Granted that there are no such things as moral "intuitions" -- or granted, at least, that the word should not be used because of its misleading mystical connotations -- do we have "direct moral cognitions"? Are there any moral "axioms" that are "self-evident"?

Euclidian geometry, and all deductive reasoning, rest on "axioms" or postulates, the truth of which is assumed to be self-evident, or is at least taken for granted. Let us see how this applies to ethical reasoning.

Ethical reasoning, as we have seen in Chapter 15, deals with ends and means. This reasoning may be hypothetical or factual. It may take the hypothetical form: If you want to maximize your own happiness in the long run, then you ought to adopt the rules of conduct that will tend to maximize your happiness in the long run; and those rules are these.... Or it may take the factual form: You want to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory state. You want to maximize your happiness in the long run; therefore you should adopt the rules of action that will tend to maximize your happiness in the long run. Or: We want to achieve the maximum happiness for each of us. Therefore we should adopt for ourselves, and impose (by censure or praise) on each other, the rules of action most likely to achieve the maximum happiness for each of us.

We may say, therefore, that moral rules tend to become self-evident when they tend to become tautologous, or when our goal is self-evident for the reason that we see it to be in fact our goal.

We need not go here into the question of how far this realm of "self-evident morality" extends. Many moral rules -- such as the rule that we should not torture a child -- are self-evident in the sense that no person of normal feelings would ever ask the reason or the justification for the rule. Henry Sidgwick held that "in the principles of prudence, Justice and Rational Benevolence as commonly recognized there is at least a self-evident element, immediately cognizable by abstract intuition.(17) Other ethical writers have contended that this "self-evidence" extends over a much wider field. As a practical matter, however, the ethical philosopher will be well advised to adhere in his reasoning to something like the equivalent of Occam's razor, and not multiply alleged intuitions or direct cognitions unnecessarily, but reduce them to the minimum, or try to get along without them altogether if he can.

Notes

1. The Right and the Good (Oxford University Press, 1930), p. 29.

2. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, p. 85.

3. Loc. cit.

4. Loc. cit.

5. An excellent one is to be found, for example, in Chap. IV of Rashdall's Theory of Good and Evil, all the more effective because patient and conciliatory in tone.

6. A whole literature has grown around this alleged "problem." I shall content myself here with referring the reader only to Santayana's refutation of G. E. Moore and the early Bertrand Russell in Winds of Doctrine (Scribner's, 1913), pp. 138-154.

7. The Methods of Ethics (1874).

8. Ibid., p. xi.

9. Ibid., pp. 435-436.

10. Loc. cit.

11. I have taken over this phrase from Sidgwick because it seems to me a very useful one. We should be careful, however, not to interpret the term "common sense" here as necessarily implying good sense, as it usually does in English usage, but rather as referring to the sense of appropriateness that most of us hold in common -- the existing moral consensus. I should be tempted, in fact, to call this Consensus Morality had not the term used by Sidgwick become so well established.

12. Loc. cit.

13. Cf. Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, p. 89.

14. Cf. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p. 157.

15. "Philosophische Abhandlungen," Werke (1832), I, pp. 399-400. The translation is from F. H. Bradley's Ethical Studies, p. 173.

16. For a more detailed examination of the Morality of Common Sense see Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, particularly Book III, Chap. XI.

17. The Methods of Ethics, p. 356.

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