Chapter 2: The Mystery of Morals

Each of us has grown up in a world in which moral judgments already exist. These judgments are passed every day by everyone on the conduct of everyone else. Each of us not only finds himself approving or disapproving how other people act, but approving or disapproving certain actions, and even certain rules or principles of action, wholly apart from his feelings about those who perform or follow them. So deep does this go that most of us even apply these judgments to our own conduct, and approve or disapprove of our own conduct in so far as we judge it to have conformed to the principles or standards by which we judge others. When we have failed, in our own judgment, to live up to the moral code which we habitually apply to others, we feel "guilty"; our "conscience" bothers us.

Our personal moral standards may not be precisely the same in all respects as those of our friends or neighbors or countrymen, but they are remarkably similar. We find greater differences when we compare "national" standards with those of other countries, and perhaps still greater differences when we compare them with the moral standards of people in the distant past. But in spite of these greater differences, we seem to find, for the most part, a persistent core of similarity, and persistent judgments which condemn such traits as cruelty, cowardice, and treachery, or such actions as lying, theft, or murder.

None of us can remember when we first began to pass judgments of moral approval or disapproval. From infancy we found such judgments being passed upon us by our parents -- "good" baby, "bad" baby -- and from infancy we passed such judgments indiscriminately on persons, animals, and things -- "good" playmate or "bad" playmate, "good" dog or "bad" dog, and even "bad" doorknob if we bumped our head against it. Only gradually did we begin to distinguish approval or disapproval on moral grounds from approval or disapproval on other grounds.

Implicit moral codes probably existed for centuries before they were made explicit -- as in the Decalogue, or the sacred law of Manu, or the code of Hammurabi. And it was long after they had first been made explicit, in speech or writing, in proverbs or commands or laws, that men began to speculate about them, and began consciously to search for a common explanation or rationale.

And then they were faced with a great mystery. How had such a code of morals come into being? Why did it consist of a certain set of commands and not others? Why did it forbid certain actions? Why only these actions? Why did it enjoin or command other actions? And how did men know that certain actions were "right" and others "wrong"?

The first theory was that certain actions were "right" and others "wrong" because God (or the gods) had so decreed. Certain actions were pleasing to God (or the gods) and certain others displeasing. Certain actions would be rewarded by God, here or hereafter, and certain other actions would be punished by God, here or hereafter.

This theory, or faith, held the field for centuries. It is still, probably, the dominant popular theory or faith. But among philosophers, even among the early Christian philosophers, it met with two difficulties. The first was this: Was this moral code, then, merely arbitrary? Were certain actions right and others wrong merely because God had so willed? Or was not the causation, rather, the other way round? God's divine nature could not will what was evil, but only what was good. He could not decree what was wrong, but only what was right. But this argument implied that Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, were independent of, and pre-existent to, God's will.

There was a second difficulty. Even if Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, were determined by God's will, how were we mortals to know God's will? The question was answered simply enough, perhaps, for the ancient Jews: God himself dictated the Ten Commandments -- and hundreds of other laws and judgments -- to Moses on Mount Sinai. God, in fact, wrote the Ten Commandments with his own finger on tablets of stone.

Yet numerous as the commandments and judgments were, they did not clearly distinguish in importance and degree of sinfulness between committing murder and working on the Sabbath day. They have not been and cannot consistently be a guide for Christians. Christians ignore the dietary laws prescribed by the God of Moses. The God of Moses commanded "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe" (Exodus 21:24, 25). But Jesus commanded: "Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also" (Matthew 5:39); "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you" (Matthew 5:44); "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another" (John 13:34).

The problem then remains: How can we, how do we, tell right from wrong? Another answer, still offered by many ethical writers, is that we do so by a special "moral sense" or by direct "intuition." The difficulty here is not only that one man's moral sense or intuition gives different answers than another's, but that a man's moral sense or intuition often fails to provide a clear answer even when he consults it.

A third answer is that our moral code is a product of gradual social evolution, like language, or manners, or the common law, and that, like them, it has grown and evolved to meet the need for peace and order and social cooperation.

A fourth answer is that of simple ethical skepticism or nihilism which affects to regard all moral rules or judgments as the product of baseless superstition. But this nihilism is never consistent and seldom sincere. If one who professed it were knocked down, brutally beaten, and robbed, he would feel something remarkably similar to moral indignation, and he would express his feeling in words very hard to distinguish from those of moral disapproval.

A less violent way to convert the moral nihilist, however, would be simply to ask him to imagine a society in which no moral code existed, or in which it were the exact opposite of the codes we customarily find. We might ask him to imagine how long a society (or the individuals in it) could prosper or even continue to exist in which ill manners, promise-breaking, lying, cheating, stealing, robbing, beating, stabbing, shooting, ingratitude, disloyalty, treachery, violence, and chaos were the rule, and were as highly regarded as, or even more highly regarded than, their opposites -- good manners, promise-keeping, truth-telling, honesty, fairness, loyalty, consideration for others, peace and order, and social cooperation.

Later we shall examine in more detail each of these four answers.

But false theories of ethics, and the number of possible fallacies in ethics, are almost infinite. We can deal only with a few of the major fallacies that have been maintained historically or that are still widely held. It would be unprofitable and uneconomic to explain in detail why each false theory is wrong or inadequate, unless we first tried to find the true foundations of morality and a reasonably satisfactory outline of a system of ethics. If we once find the right answer, it will be much easier to see and to explain why other answers are wrong or, at best, half-truths. Our analysis of errors will then be at once clearer and more economical. And we shall use such analysis of errors to sharpen our positive theory and make it more precise.

Now there are two main methods which we might use to formulate a theory of ethics. The first might be what we may call, for identification rather than accuracy, the inductive or a posteriori method. This would consist in examining what our moral judgments of various acts or characteristics actually are, and then trying to see whether they form a consistent whole, and on what common principle or criterion, if any, they rest. The second would be the a priori or deductive method. This would consist in disregarding existing moral judgments, in asking ourselves whether a moral code would serve any purpose, and if so, what that purpose would be; and then, having framed the purpose, asking ourselves what principle, criterion, or code would accomplish that purpose. In other words, we would try to invent a system of morality, and then test existing moral judgments by the criterion at which we had deductively arrived.

The second was essentially the method of Jeremy Bentham, the first the method of more cautious thinkers. The second, by itself, would be rash and arrogant; the first, by itself, might prove to be too timid. But as practically all fruitful thinking consists of a judicious mixture -- the "inductive-deductive" methods -- we shall find ourselves using now one method and now another.

Let us begin by looking for the Ultimate Moral Criterion.

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