We have all learned to become sensitive to the physical environment. We know that we depend upon it, that it is fragile, and that we have the power to ruin int, thereby ruining our own lives, or more probably those of our descendants. Perhaps fewer of us are sensitive to what we might call the moral or ethical environment. This is the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live. It determines what we find acceptable or unacceptable, admirable or contemptible. It determines our conception of when things are going well and when they are going badly. It determines our conception of what is due to us, and what is due from us, as we relate to others. It shapes our emotional responses, determining what is a cause of pride or shame, or anger or gratitude, or what can be forgiven and what cannot. It gives us our standards — our standards of behavior.


We are much more nervous talking about our good: it seems moralistic, or undemocratic, or elitist. Similarly, we are nervous talking about duty. The Victorian ideal of a life devoted to duty, or a calling, is substantially lost to us. So a greater proportion of our moral energy goes to protecting claims against each other, and that includes protecting the state of our soul as purely private, purely our own business.


Human beings are ethical animals. I do not mean that we naturally behave particularly well, nor that we are endlessly telling each other what to do. But we grade and evaluate, and compare and admire, and claim and justify. We do not just “prefer” this or that, in isolation. We prefer that our preferences are shared; we turn them into demands on each other.


We do not like being told what to do. We want to enjoy our lives, and we want to enjoy them with a good conscience. People who disturb that equilibrium are uncomfortable, so moralists are often uninvited guests at the feast, and we have a multitude of defenses against them.


For many people, ethics is not only tied up with religion, but is completely settled by it. Such people do not need to think too much about ethics, because there is an authoritative code of instructions, a handbook of how to live. It is the word of Heaven, or the will of a Being greater than ourselves. Obedience to the divine will is meritorious, and brings reward; disobedience is lethally punished.


If God is dead, everything is permitted? Without a lawgiver, how can there be a law?


Things are usually supposed to get better in the New Testament, with its admirable emphasis on love, forgiveness, and meekness. Yet the overall story of “atonement” and “redemption” is morally dubious, suggesting as it does that justice can be satisfied by the sacrifice of an innocent for the sins of the guilty — the doctrine of the scapegoat.


The Bible can be read as giving us a carte blanche for harsh attitudes to children, the mentally handicapped, animals, the environment, the divorced, unbelievers, people with various sexual habits, and elderly women. It encourages harsh attitude to ourselves, as fallen creatures endlessly polluted by sin, and hatred of ourselves inevitably brings hatred of others.


To go in for a religious cost-benefit analysis is to have “one thought too many.”


The detour through an external god, then, seems worse than irrelevant. It seems to distort the very idea of a standard of conduct. It encourages us to act in accordance with a rule, but only because of fear of punishment or some other incentive; whereas what we really want is for people to act out of respect for a rule. This is what true virtue requires.


Myth, in this sense, is not to be despised. It gives us symbolism and examples that engage our imaginations. It is the depository for humanity’s endless attempts to struggle with death, desire, happiness, and good and evil. When an exile reminisces, she will remember the songs and poems and folktales of the homeland rather than its laws or its constitution.


We do not just fear science, or want to take other people’s land, but we have examples in which God punishes the desire for knowledge, or command us to occupy the territory. We have God’s authority for dominating nature, or for regarding them — others different from ourselves — as inferior, or even criminal.


The rules may be made in different ways by different people at different times. In which case, it seems to follow that there is no one truth. There are only the different truths of different communities. This is the idea of relativism.


Every society that is recognizably human will need some institution of property (some distinction between “mine” and “yours”), some norm of governing truth-telling, some conception of promise-giving, some standards restraining violence and killing. It will need some devices for regulating sexual expression, some sense of what is appropriate by way of treating strangers, or minorities, or children, or the aged, or the handicapped. It will need some sense of how to distribute resources, and how to treat those who have none. In other words, across the whole spectrum of life, it will need some sense of what is expected and what is out of line. For human beings, there is no living without standards of living.


Here we have a clash. One the one hand there is the relativist thought that “If they do it that way, it’s OK for them and in any event none of my business.” On the other there is the strong feeling most of us have that these things just should not happen, and we should not stand idly by while they do. We have only perverted or failed solutions to the problems of which standards to implement, if the standards end up like that.


He was present at a high-powered ethics institute which had put on a forum in which representatives of the great religions held a panel debate. First the Buddhist talked of the ways to calm, the mastery of desire, the path of enlightenment, and the panelists all said, “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.” Then the Hindu talked of the cycles of suffering and birth and rebirth, the teachings of Krishna and the way to release, and they all said, “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.” And so on, until the Catholic priest talked of the message of Jesus Christ, the promise of salvation, and the way to life eternal, and they all said, “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.” And he thumped the table and shouted, “No! It’s not a question of if it works for me! It’s the true word of the living God, and if you don’t believe it you’re all damned to hell!”

And they all said, “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.”


After al, it is typically only the oppressors who are spokespersons for their culture or their ways of doing it. It is not the slaves who value slavery, or the women who value the fact that they may not take employment, or the young girls who value disfigurement. It is the brahmins, mullahs, priests, and elders who hold themselves to be spokesmen for their culture. What the rest think about it all too often goes unrecorded. Just as victors write the history, so it is those on top who write their justification for the top being where it is. Those on the bottom don’t get to say anything.


Relativism taken to its limit becomes subjectivism: not the view that each culture or society has its own truth, but that each individual has his or her won truth. And who is to say which is right?


Ethics has no subject matter. This kind of thought has a potent philosophical backing. We suppose that the world is exhausted by what is the case. A creating event only has to make the physical world, and everything else, including humanity, rolls out. But the physical world contains only is and not ought. So there is no fact making ethical commitments true. Nor could we detect any such fact. We can have no senses (ears, eyes, touch) for responding to ethical facts, and no instruments for detecting their truth. We respond only to what is true, never to what ought to be true. Thus nihilism, or the doctrine that there are no values, grips us, as well as skepticism, the doctrine that even if there was, we would have no way of knowing about them.


We are pretty selfish animals. Perhaps it is worse than that: perhaps we are totally selfish animals. Perhaps concern for others, or concern for principle, is a sham. Perhaps ethics needs unmasking. It is just the whistle on the engine, not the steam that moves it.


The idea of the Greek Stoics that all ambition is due to fear of death: if a man wants statue raised to himself, it is because unconsciously he is afraid of dying, but of course he is not likely to realize that.


Everyone likes to have the words of ethics on their side.


Adler listened to the description, and unhesitatingly pronounced castration anxiety, father jealousy, desire to sleep with the mother, or what ever it was.


First, itinerant workers who earn reasonable money tend to be “showy,” carrying flashy jewellery and large bankrolls, going in for high-stake poker games, and the like. Rooted peasants who could easily afford it never do so. Second, people deplore the taste of others who are just a little beneath them in wealth and social status, more than they deplore the taste of those a long way beneath them. Third, an aristocrat will prefer an able-bodied man as a butler or footman, rather than a female or someone handicapped who could do the job equally well. Fourth, a well-kept lawn or park is a good thing round a nice house.

People have a need for wasteful display in order to manifest their status. The itinerant has to display this status on his person, and hence the flashy appearance. We need to shout that we are not like those just beneath us on the social ladder, for whom we might be mistaken, more than we need to shout that we are not like those a long way beneath us, for whom we won’t be mistaken.


“That is all very well if we think of someone’s self-interest only in terms of money, or career, or even health. Certainly, people sacrifice these to other concerns. But then we just have agents whose real interest or full self-interest includes these other things: the revenge or the rain forest or the Third-World debt. They are still just as self-interested as anyone else.” The reason this is a trick is that it empties the view of all content. It kidnaps the word “self-interest for whatever the agent is concerned about. But just for that reason it loses any predictive or explanatory force.


And suppose that on receiving this news the first person is irritated and angry, not so much as the directors of the charity, but at the person bringing the news; whereas the second person is indignant at the directors themselves. Then we can reasonably suggest that the first person prized his own peace of mind or reputation for generosity more then he cared about the starving poor; whereas the second person has a more genuine concern for what goes on in the world, not for whether he is comfortable or how he stands in the eyes of others.


We should not abuse other people’s trust in us, and a deliberate, manipulative, barefaced lie may well do that. But there are other cases. There are white lies, socially expected and condoned. There are lies told to people who shouldn’t be asking, because it is none of their business and they have no right to the truth. There are desperate lies, told because telling the truth will be catastrophic (the classic is lying to the mad axeman who asks you where your children are sleeping). There are lies told in the service of a greater truth. There are lies we perhaps in desperation tell ourselves, and come to believe, before we tell others.

Some philosophers, most notoriously Kant, have grasped the nettle and forbidden even such lies. It was central to Kant’s moral scheme that the prohibition remained simple and absolute: no exceptions.


I do not think it is easy to find a stable attitude to the stringency of the prohibition on lying, or still more to the duty of charity. But I do think something has gone wrong if extreme demands are placed squarely in the center of ethics. The center of ethics must be occupied by things we can reasonably demand of each other. The absoluteness of the fanatic, or the hair shirt of the saint, lie on the outer shores. Not wanting to follow them there, or even not able to do so, we still have plenty of standards left to uphold. We should still want to respond to the reasonable demands of decency. We may not be able to solve all the world’s problems, but we should do our best with the ones we can solve.So the right reaction is to look for moral principles that are not impractical, and not limitless in their demands. Adhering to anything more stringent might be saintly, and admirable, but it is not demanded of us. In the standard phrase, it is above and beyond the call of duty.


Controlling peoples’ sense of shame and guilt and sin is an instrument of power. It works best if the pawns, the individual clerics, do not realize that, either consciously or unconsciously.


So a critic might now suggest that ethics as an institution is a system whose real function is other than it seems. A feminist might see it as an instrument of patriarchal oppression. A Marxist can see it as an instrument of class oppression. A Nietzschean may see it as a lie with which the feeble and timid console themselves for their inability to seize life as it should be seized. A modern French philosopher can see it as a diffuse exercise of power and control. In any event, it stands unmasked.


The reason is implicit in what we have already said: for human beings, there is no living without standards of living. This means that ethics is not Ethics: it is not an “institution” or organization with sinister hidden purposes that might be better unmasked. It is not the creature of some concealed conspiracy by “them”: Society, or The System, or The Patriarchy. There are indeed institutions, such as the Church or State, that may seek to control our standards, and their nature and function may need to be queried. But that will mean at most a different ethic. It does not and cannot the end of ethics.


Its point will be something like this. By giving promises we give each other confidence in what we are going to do, thus enabling joint enterprises to go forward. That is a point we can be proud of; without something serving that point, flexible plans for coordinated action become impossible.


Again, even when we live benevolent, admired lives according to the standards of our times, we can fear that had things been tougher we would have joined the fallen. If we are good, it may be because we were never tempted enough, or frightened enough, or put in desperate enough need. We can also fear the restless evil in the human heart. We know that neither success nor suffering ennobles people. In such a mood, we can be overwhelmed just by the relentless human capacity for making life horrible for others. The right reaction is not to succumb to the mood, but to reflect that the cure lies in our own hands.


If “interfering with nature” is “playing God” and therefore wrong, then we have always played God. We play God when we put up an umbrella, interfering with the natural tendency of rain to wet our heads. The charge of playing God has no independent force. That is, people only raise it when the interference in question upsets them.


A good first philosophical question to ask might be whether this black and white may be an illusion. It may be the result of a moral lens that imposes its black and white on a landscape of different shades of grey. After all, the biological fact is that foetal development is gradual.


Indeed, one of the moral signatures of a society will be the extent to which the law allows liberty to do, feel, or think the wrong things. So even if we feel that there is at least a category of abortions that ought not to be performed, the question of criminalization remains open. They wouldn’t be performed in an ideal world, but it is not the function of law to forbid and punish every departure from an ideal world. Even people who disapprove of alcohol may be aware that it was a very bad idea indeed to criminalize it, as was done in America in the 1920s.


A foetus is a potential person, certainly. But “potential” is a dangerous word. A yellow flower is a sort of flower. But an acorn is a potential oak-tree without itself being an oak tree. My car is potential scrap, but it is not scrap, and its being potential scrap does not justify anybody in treating it as scrap.


A bad argument to watch out for now has the form: “If there is no principled place to draw a line, then we must draw it here — at the very moment of conception”; or, if you stand on the woman’s right to control her body, we should draw it only there — at the moment of birth. The idea is that anywhere else involves a “slippery slope.” If you say that abortion is the killing of a person after 5 months, why not 4 months and 3 weeks? 6 months?


Another is to insist on the vanishing of time: death is just the same for one who died yesterday as for those who died centuries ago. This is the only way to make sense of “eternity”: death has no duration at all, for the subject.


The peril here is the vice of abstraction, or “the fine and subtle net of abstract ideas which has so miserably perplexed and entangled the minds of men.” It is much easier to lament the hollow nature and the inconsistencies of desires if we stay out of focus, keeping the terms of discussion wholly abstract. Thus, it sounds miserable if the satisfaction of desire is fleeting, and desire itself is changeable and apt to give rise only to further dissatisfactions. But is it really something to mope about? Thinking concretely, suppose we desire a good dinner, and enjoy it. Should it poison the enjoyment to reflect that it is fleeting (we won’t enjoy this dinner forever), or that the desire for a good dinner is changeable (soon we won’t feel hungry), or only temporarily satisfied (we will want dinner again tomorrow)? It is not as if things would be better if we always wanted a dinner, or if having got a dinner once we never wanted one again, or if the one dinner went on for a whole lifetime. None of those things seem remotely desirable, so why make a fuss about it not being like that?


The achievement of wealth often brings either the demand for more, or the inability to enjoy what we have. Our well-being can certainly be destroyed by poverty, but the briefest look at the lives of the rich does not suggest that well-being is increased without end by further riches. Many people in the world are much richer than any people used to be, but are they happier? Relevant social measures, such as suicide rates, certainly do not suggest so.


Love itself is a kind of death — the lover is penetrated or stricken. In this tradition, the languors of love, and especially the orgasm (in French, “a little death”), are symbols for a real death.


Perhaps we put ourselves in the position of the judge: each of us can ask whether life has meaning to me, here and now. The answer then depends. Life is a stream of lived events within which there is often plenty of meaning — for ourselves, and those around us. The architect Le Corbusier said that God lies in the details, and the same is true of meaning in life to us, here, now. The smile of her child means the earth to her mother, the touch means bliss for the lover, the turn of the phrase means happiness for the writer. Meaning comes with absorption and enjoyment, the flow of details that matter to us. The problem with life is then that it has too much meaning. In other moods, however, everything goes leaden. Like Hamlet, we are determined to skulk at the edge of the carnival, seeing nothing but the skull beneath the skin. It is sad when we become like that, and once more we need a tonic more than an argument. The only good argument is that it is no way to make yourself useful or agreeable to yourself or others.


Bentham’s ambition of a “felicific calculus” — a scientific way of measuring what matters in decisions — was inherited by economics. But it is the nature of pleasures to resist measurement: the subjective intensities of different pleasures seem incomparable, even in one person, and across persons and times the problem is worse. A more tractable alternative is to try to measure how much people want things, and then to measure how well life is going by seeing how many of their desires are satisfied. However, one need not be very high-minded to reject this measure as well. A life of continuous gratification of desire may be better, other things being equal, than on where the same desires were not gratified. But what if the desires are trashy, stoked up by false promises and allurements, motivated by vanity and self-esteem? What if their gratification turns to ashes? Do things go better when people gratify trivial desires that were induced in the first place by playing on their fears or fantasies? What about the gratifications of the gambler or the drug addict?

This introduces the Aristotelian alternative to Bentham. For Aristotle, a long succession even of pleasurable inner sensations cannot make up genuine happiness, or eudaimonia. “Inner sensations” could be generated or sustained by living in a fool’s paradise. A person might be happy, in this sense, when her desires are unfulfilled, but she doesn’t realize it, or her pleasure derives from misunderstanding or deception. Her partner deceives her, but she doesn’t know it; her children fail, but she is told they succeed; she believes she has the admiration of others, but they laugh at her behind her back. She happily expects Paradise, but there is no Paradise. If someone dies like this, then Bentham would sum up her life as happy. But in Aristotle’s sense, she did not die happy.

Hers has not been an enviable or admirable life. It is not one we would wish for ourselves. When we have been ignorant or deceived, the Aristotelian verdict, looking back, would be that we thought we were happy when we were not. We had the illusion of happiness. True happiness in this sense requires some correct relationship with our world. It cannot be gained by stoking up sensations within. In the same way, a succession of pleasures, a life of endless release of endorphins, perhaps through some chemical stimulation, would not be a life of Aristotelian happiness. It is not one we could admire or envy or wish for those whose happiness we care about.


Utilitarianism is consequentialist, or in other words, forward-looking. It looks to the effects or consequences of actions in order to assess them. In this it contrasts with deontological ethics. For consequentialism, an action that might be thought wrong, or undutiful, or unjust, or a trespass against someone’s rights, might apparently be whitewashed or justified by its consequences, if it can be shown to be conducive to the general good. Utilitarianism fits better with the “gradualist” approach to ethical issues, illustrated above in the case of abortion. It deals with value — with things being good or bad, or better or worse — as the greatest happiness of the greatest number increases or diminishes.

Deontological notions of justice, rights, duties, fit into a moralistic climate, where things just are right and wrong, permissible or punishable. These are the words of law, as much as words of ethics. Utilitarianism by contrast gives us the language of social good.


In a sufficient emergency, even quite basic civil liberties properly go to the wall. In an emergency, for instance, to get the spectators out of the threatened stadium, a referee might properly give a false call to terminate the game. But emergencies are rare, and it requires judgment to known when one is upon us. Emergencies permit exceptions, because the old stabilities and certainties can be reborn as soon as the emergency is over.


Some people stress that utilitarianism “does not take seriously the separateness of persons” — the idea being that it subordinates the rights of the individual to solidarity with the general welfare. It is too deaf, according to these critics, to the plaintive cry coming from a particular individual whose concerns have been sacrificed to the general good. This charge is particularly ironic given that utilitarianism started with the ambition of breaking down the separateness of persons — the separateness that gives a person no concern for us apart from me.


It is not difficult to hear the cries of a (largely male) mandarin class defending itself in a lot of this. An ethic of care and benevolence, which is essentially what utilitarianism is, give less scope to a kind of moral philosophy modeled upon law, with its hidden and complex structures and formulae known only to the initiates. And utilitarianism, particularly in its indirect forms, has one enormous advantage. It at least explains how to judge whether particular rights, or rules, or even virtues of conduct, get to be on the list of rights, rules, or virtues. They are there because they serve the common good. Other philosophies, lacking such a sensible and down-to-earth answer, must either duck the question or struggle to find different answers.


It is much easier to say what has to be avoided than what has to be achieved. A political order cannot do everything: it cannot guarantee a life free from depression or disease or disappointment. It it can give freedom from violence, discrimination, arbitrary arrest, inhuman or degrading punishment, unfair trials, or other evils. It can guarantee that you have the protection of the laws if you speak your mind (on some things) or peacefully demonstrate (sometimes). In this view, the moral or political or social order sets the scene. It can’t help what people make of the scene. Whether people can go on to achieve the life of eudaimonia is up to them. It is not the job of a moral philosophy, and more than that of a constitution or a government, to make people happy, but only to set a stage within which they can be happy.

This conception of the role of the political order is characteristic of liberalism. It is often said that its eyes are fixed on “negative liberty” — people are to be free from various evil. This is contrasted with a more goal-driven or idealistic politics in which the aim is to enable people to do various good things or to become or be something desirable — positive liberty.


Freedom is a dangerous word, just because it is an aspirational one. The politics appropriate for societies of free individuals are above all democratic. The enemy here would be any elitism, or paternalism, supposing that some particular kinds of people, through superior reason or knowledge or wisdom, are best fitted to govern the rest, since they know peoples’ interests (their real interests) better than the people themselves do. The elitist doctrine is that the freedom of the ignorant and those with no self-control is just frightening and useless license. The most celebrated account of the elitist image is due to Plato’s Republic. In the argument of that book, government should be in the hands of disinterested and selfless rulers or guardians who have been rigorously educated into wisdom. The mob has no right or self-determination. It is there to be governed; it is not allowed to find its own way of life or make its own mistakes.


Unifying Pessimisms, but any moderately sober reflection on human life and human societies, suggest that we are creatures easily swayed, constantly infected by the opinions of others, lacking critical self-understanding, easily gripped by fantastical hopes and ambitions. Our capacity for self-government is spasmodic, and even while we preen ourselves on our critical and independent, free and rational decisions, we are the slaves of fashion and opinion and social and cultural forces of which we are ignorant. It would often be good, and no signal or disrespect to ourselves, if those who know better could rescue us from our worst follies.


Plato himself perfectly well knew this about the real world. The guardians of his imagined world can only merit their role by an impracticable process of the most rigorous education. Plato does not provide any consoling myth at all for the jumped-up dictator who claims to know what is best for the people. Democratic politicians may be bad enough, but those sheltering behind a claim to know what is best for us are apt to be a lot worse.


Even in democracies, however, there are fascinating relics of the Platonic image of the guardians. The democratic US has its process of “judicial review,” whereby the legal mandarins of the Supreme Court oversee and strike out democratically voted legislation. This is done in the name of the Constitution, this being a document to whose meaning the legal mandarins alone have privileged access. The parallel with a priesthood and its private access to the truth of the sacred texts is lost on many.


It says, for example, that everyone has a right to realization of “the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.” This opens the door to just the inflation described: it is not too difficult to argue that dignity and free development requires a whole flood of freedoms from this, that, or the other obstacle, right down to such ludicrous rights as freedom from failure to get a job through being unable to perform it.


But the language of natural rights need not be taken to raise them. It need not imply some pre-social state of nature in which, surprisingly, people nevertheless had rights of different kinds. It may be intended not as description of a never-never land, but as prescription of an order that any society should uphold.


We are pretty plastic and adaptive, and as we have already seen, different conceptions of flourishing abound. Many think we flourish in the rich and liberal Western democracies of today. But some would say, for instance, that we can only really flourish in egalitarian societies where there are strict controls on the amount of property any one person or any one class can control. Others would say that we can only flourish under the umbrella of a strong social order, cemented by common adherence to a particular religious tradition.


When pre-nuptial contracts specify a right to have half of the washing up done, or the housework, or a right to shared child-caring duties, and sex no more than 4 and no less than 3 times a week, we should not be optimistic about the ensuring marriage. It is not that any of these things are bad — they may be desirable — but demanding them as a right implies that me has not been taken over by we.


This was in fact the essence of Marx’s later criticism of “bourgeois” or egoistic rights. For Marx, as for many social thinkers, the notion of a “right” is centered in a morality that is atomistic and individualistic, concentrating on the demands of the single person, and forgetting the general good of the society within which the individual is necessarily situated.

Yet for other liberal thinkers, this is exactly what is good about it. Rights, they argue, protect us against the encroachments of the society. Even if insisting on rights can be egoistic, and shrill, and sometimes insensitive, still, we need the notion. We need it to describe our dependencies and our need for protection from the predations of others, including the others in their collective or political guise.


Before the 18th century, many moral philosophers thought that we could. They thought that fundamental principles of ethics could be seen to be true by the “natural light of reason.” The principles had the same kind of certainty as arithmetic or geometry; you could see from your armchair that they had to be true. They were innate, or “self-evident.”


In other words, human reason has a limited domain. It includes mathematics and logic, for if we try to disobey their laws, thought itself becomes impossible. We are left with no ideas at all. And we can talk of the reasonable, or scientific, approach to understanding the world. But when it comes to ethics we are in the domain of preference and choice. And here, reason is silent. The heart, or what Hume called passion or sentiment, rules everything.


First, it takes education to instill into the subject the sense of respect and self-respect which will turn a profit made by selling his soul into a loss. A sufficiently barefaced villain just won’t care. Second, it takes a secure and stable political and social system to generate bad effects on the villain, such as loss due to discovery, or loss of reputation. When things are in flux, the villain will be able to cheat and move on. Third, it takes a culture of politics properly to identify a lapse from virtue in any case.


The core of morality, then, lies not in what we do, but in our motives in doing it: “When moral worth is at issue, what counts is not actions, which one sees, but those inner principles of action that one does not see.”


When a man denominates another his enemy, his rival, his antagonist, his adversary, he is understood to speak the language of self-love, and to express sentiments peculiar to himself, and arising from his particular circumstances and situation. But when he bestows on any man the epithets of vicious or odious or depraved, he then speaks another language, and expresses sentiments in which, he expects, all his audience are to concur with him. He must therefore depart from his private and particular situation, and must choose a point of view common to him with others.