An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy

by Scruton, Roger

  The virtues that inspire our admiration are also the qualities which preserve society, whether from external threat or from internal decay: courage and resolution in the face of danger; loyalty and decency in private life; justice and charity in the public sphere. At different periods and in different conditions the emphasis shifts - virtue is malleable, and shaped by material, spiritual and religious circumstances. Nevertheless, the constancy of the objects of human admiration is more significant than the local variations. The antique virtues of courage, prudence, wisdom, temperance and justice, amplified by Christian charity and pagan loyalty, still form the core idea of human excellence. It is these qualities that we admire, that we wish for in those we love, and hope to be credited with ourselves.

  Such qualities require a social setting. They are not solipsistic achievements like the muscles of the body-builder, or the mortification of the anchorite. Only in the context of human admiration and contempt does the virtuous character emerge, and only in the condition of society is virtue properly exercised and rightly understood. But this social setting is also an emotional setting, and emotions are reactions not to the world as it is in itself, but to the world as it is understood. The world is understood differently by people and animals. Our world, unlike theirs, contains rights, obligations and duties; it is a world of self-conscious subjects, in which events are divided into the free and the unfree, those which have reasons, and those which are merely caused, those which stem from a rational subject, and those which erupt in the stream of objects with no conscious design. Thinking of the world in this way, we respond to it with emotions that lie beyond the repertoire of other animals: indignation, resentment and envy; admiration, commitment and erotic love - all of which involve the thought of the other as a free subject, with rights and duties and a self-conscious vision of his past and future. Only moral beings can feel these emotions, and in feeling them they situate themselves in some way outside the natural order, standing back from it in judgement.

  The sympathies of moral beings are also marked by this detachment from the natural order. A horse will run when the herd runs; a hound excited by a scent will communicate his excitement to his fellows; a partridge will throw herself between her brood and the fox that threatens them. The casual observer might see these actions as expressing sympathy - as animated by a feeling which in some way takes account of the feelings and interests of others. But they lack a crucial ingredient, which is the thought of what the other is feeling. In none of the cases that I have mentioned (and they form three archetypes of animal ‘sympathy’) do we need to invoke this very special thought in order to explain the animal’s behaviour. It is a thought which is peculiar to moral beings, involving a recognition of the distinction between self and other, and of the other as feeling what I might have felt. Even the dog who is distressed by his master’s sickness lacks this thought. His emotion is not compassion, but anxiety, as the source of his borrowed life runs thin.

  Two of our sympathetic feelings are of great moral importance: pity towards those who suffer, and pleasure in another’s joy. Both feelings are held to be part of human virtue. Pitiless people and joyless people alike awaken our disapproval. True, Nietzsche mounted an assault on pity, and on the ‘herd morality’ which he supposed to be contained in it. But most people remain unpersuaded, and rightly so. For pity and good cheer are complementary. You cannot rejoice in the joys of others, without suffering their pains, and all pleasure requires the sympathy of others if it is to translate itself into joy. It seems to me, indeed, that there is something deeply contradictory in a philosophy that advocates joyful wisdom, while slandering pity as the enemy of the higher life.

  Indeed, whether we look at these emotions from the point of view of the individual, or from that of society, we cannot fail to see them as indispensable parts of human goodness. Sympathy awakens sympathy: it draws us to itself, and forms the bond of goodwill from which our social affections grow. Pitiless and joyless people are also affectionless; if they love, it is with a hard, dogged love that threatens to destroy what it cherishes. We avoid them as unnatural, and also dangerous. The anger of a pitiless person is to be feared; as is the friendship of a joyless one. It is not the pitiless and the joyless who sustain the social order: on the contrary, they are parasites, who depend on the overspill of sympathy which misleads us into forgiving them. Nietzsche condemned pity for favouring the weak and the degenerate. In fact, pity is a necessary part of any society which is able to heal itself, and to overcome disaster. It is indispensable in war as in peace, since it causes people to stand side by side with strangers in their shared misfortune, and arouses them to anger and revenge against the common enemy.

  There is another component in our moral thinking, in addition to the moral law, and the sympathy which extends the scope of it - the component which I shall call, borrowing from Roman usage, piety, meaning the respect for sacred things. Pietas requires that we honour our parents and ancestors, the household deities, the laws and the civil order, that we keep the appointed festivals and public ceremonies - and all this out of a sense of the sacred given-ness of these things, which are not our invention, and to which we owe an unfathomable debt of gratitude. It seems to me that, beneath all moral sentiment, there lies a deep layer of pious feeling. It is a feeling which does not depend explicitly on religious belief, and which no moral being can really escape, however little he may overtly acknowledge it. Utilitarians may regard pious feelings as the mere residue of moral thinking; but, as the argument of the last two chapters implies, they are not a residue at all. Put in simple terms, piety means the deep down recognition of our frailty and dependence, the acknowledgement that the burden we inherit cannot be sustained unaided, the disposition to give thanks for our existence and reverence to the world on which we depend, and the sense of the unfathomable mystery which surrounds our coming to be and our passing away. All these feelings come together in our humility before the works of nature, and this humility is the fertile soil in which the seeds of morality are planted. The three forms of moral life that I have described - respect for persons, the pursuit of virtue and natural sympathy - all depend, in the last analysis, on piety. For piety instils the readiness to be guided and instructed, and the knowledge of our own littleness which make the gift of moral conduct - whereby we are lifted from our solitude - so obviously desirable.

  Piety is rational, in the sense that we all have reason to feel it. It is also a vital asset of society, since it forestalls the desecration of established things. Nevertheless, piety is not, in any clear sense, amenable to reason. Indeed, it marks out another place where reasoning comes to an end. The same is true, it seems to me, of many moral attitudes and feelings: while it is supremely rational to possess them, they are not themselves amenable to reason, and the attempt to make them so produces the kind of ludicrous caricature of morality that we witness in utilitarianism.

  This does not mean that we must simply accept one another’s prejudices. On the contrary, morality fails of its purpose, if people cannot reach agreement, and amend their views and feelings in the light of experience, with a view to accommodating others. It means, rather, that we should not expect a ‘decision procedure’ which will settle moral questions finally and unambiguously. In these areas the task of reason is to clarify our intuitions, to recognize the nature and extent of our commitments, and to search for the points of agreement which will provide a fulcrum on which our prejudices may be turned.

  It may be that, if we knew all the facts, the natural operation of sympathy would lead us to agree in our judgements: so thought Hume. But the historical character of our passions and pieties means that they come into existence fatally entangled in the circumstances that produced them, and can be converted into universal laws only by severing them from their roots, and draining them of vital force.

  It is nevertheless true that, since the Enlightenment, moral thought has shied away from piety and invested its greatest energy in those abstract legal ideas as
sociated with the respect for persons. This has happened for many reasons, and it is not my purpose to examine them. But it is not unreasonable to believe that spoliation, over-production and the destruction of the environment all spring from a single source, which is the loss of piety. However deep it may be concealed within our psyche, piety is by no means a redundant part of the moral consciousness but, on the contrary, the source of our most valuable social emotions. It is piety, and not reason, that implants in us the respect for the world, for its past and its future, and which impedes us from pillaging all we can before the light of consciousness fails in us.

  It is piety, too, which causes us to exalt the human form in life and art. Perhaps there are moral beings who are not humans: angels, devils and divinities, if they exist. But we have no direct experience of them. We have no clear image of morality save the image of the human form; such doubts as we feel about the elephant, the dolphin and the chimpanzee are too insecure to revise the overwhelming authority, for us, of the human face and gesture:For Mercy has a human heart,

  Pity a human face,

  And Love the human form divine,

  And Peace, the human dress.

  Blake’s words flow from the fount of reverence that springs in all of us, and which causes us not merely to cherish the works of unblemished nature, but to look on the human being as somehow exalted above them. I do not mean that all humans are admirable or lovable: far from it. But they are all in some way untouchable. An air of sacred prohibition surrounds humanity, since the ‘human form divine’ is our only image of the subject - the being who stands above the world of objects, in an attitude of judgement.

  It follows from what I have said that there will be four separate sources of moral argument: personality, with its associated moral law; the ethic of virtue; sympathy; and finally piety. Most of our moral difficulties and ‘hard cases’ derive from the areas where these four kinds of thinking deliver conflicting results.

  We do not need to accept Kant’s sublime derivation of the categorical imperative, in order to recognize that human beings tend spontaneously to agree concerning the morality of interpersonal relations. As soon as we set our own interests aside, and look on human relations with the eye of the impartial judge, we find ourselves agreeing over the rights and wrongs in any conflict. Whatever their philosophical basis, the following principles of practical reasoning are accepted by all reasonable people:

  1. Considerations which justify or impugn one person will, in identical circumstances, justify or impugn another. (The principle of moral equality.)

  2. Rights are to be respected.

  3. Obligations are to be fulfilled.

  4. Agreements are to be honoured.

  5. Disputes are to be settled by rational argument and not by force.

  6. Persons who do not respect the rights of others, forfeit rights of their own.

  Long before Kant’s categorical imperative philosophers wrote of such principles as defining the ‘natural law’ - the law which lies above all actual legal systems, and provides the test of their validity. Some of the principles have been explicitly incorporated into international law - notably the fourth (pacta sunt servanda). They provide us with the calculus of rights and duties with which our day to day relations with strangers must be conducted, if we are to live by negotiation and not by force or fraud.

  We should see the above principles as ‘procedural’ (or ‘formal’, to use Kant’s idiom), rather than ‘substantive’. They do not tell us what our rights and duties are, but only what it means, to describe an interest as a right, and a decision as a duty. Nevertheless, once this procedure is in place - once human beings are in the habit of settling their disputes by an assignment of rights, responsibilities and duties - it cannot be an open question what our rights and duties are. We will be constrained to settle questions in a manner on which all can agree, and — just as in the common law, which is no more than an extended application of this kind of reasoning - we will tend to agree, just as long as we look on all conflict as though it were the conflict of others, and observe it with the eye of an impartial judge. Why this should be so is a deep question, to which Hume and Kant gave conflicting answers. But that it is so is surely evident.

  Although rational beings, adopting the standpoint of the impartial judge, will tend to endorse the principles given above, it does not follow that they will act on them when their interests tend in some other direction. But there are settled dispositions of character which will ensure that people overcome the temptations posed by greed, self-interest and fear. It is reasonable to admire and cultivate these dispositions, therefore, which owe their reasonableness to the same considerations as justify the moral law. Only the just person will act on the impartial verdict when his own interests conflict with it; only the courageous person will uphold the moral law when others jeer at it; only the temperate person will place rights and duties above the call of appetite. And so on. In short, the traditional virtues provide a source of moral reasoning which endorses the calculus of rights and duties. Whatever reasons we have for accepting the moral law, are reasons for cultivating the virtues.

  To the traditional virtues, which prepare us for membership of a moral community, we must add the wider and more flexible virtues which stem from sympathy. Christian charity (caritas, or fellow-feeling) is pre-eminent among these wider virtues. Philosophically speaking, charity is the disposition to put yourself in another’s shoes, and to be motivated on his behalf. It is the disposition to feel pain at his suffering, and joy at his joy.

  This too is a reasonable motive, for without it the moral community would be deprived of its most vital source of strength, and the individual of the most important reward attached to membership — the pleasure of giving and receiving in reciprocal concern.

  It is here, however, that a potential clash arises, between utilitarian ways of thinking and the calculus of rights. The charitable instinct identifies with joy and suffering wherever it finds them and, faced with the bewildering extent of these emotions, finds itself compelled to reason in a utilitarian way. Charity hopes to maximize joy and minimize suffering in general, just as each person spontaneously acts to maximize joy and minimize suffering in himself. To think in this way, however, is to enter into inevitable conflict with the more sophisticated pattern of reasoning that underpins the moral community. I cannot treat persons as the subject-matter of a utilitarian calculation. I cannot inflict deliberate pain on John in order to relieve the twofold suffering of Elizabeth and Mary, without consulting the rights and duties of the parties. We ascribe rights to people precisely because their freedom and their membership of the moral community forbid us from invading their space.

  In short, even if utilitarian reasoning is a natural expression of the sympathy on which the moral life depends, reason demands that it be applied only selectively and within the framework established by the moral law. Questions of right, duty and responsibility must be settled first; only then does the utilitarian calculus apply. A few examples will make this clear. Suppose John is suffering from kidney failure, and only one other person, Henry, is of the same blood-group.

  With one of Henry’s kidneys, John could lead a healthy and normal life, while Henry’s life would not be significantly impaired. This utilitarian calculation is entirely irrelevant, when faced with the question whether we ought to compel Henry to release one of his kidneys. For that is something we have no right to do, and all reasoning stops once this moral truth is recognized.

  Suppose Elizabeth and Jane are both suffering from a rare disease, and William, Jane’s husband, has obtained at great expense a quantity of the only drug that will cure it. By administering the whole quantity to Jane he ensures a 90 per cent chance of her survival; by dividing it between Jane and Elizabeth, he will provide a 60 per cent chance of recovery to both. Again, the utilitarian calculation, which might seem to favour division, is irrelevant. For William has a special responsibility towards his wife, which must be discharged befo
re the welfare of any stranger can be taken into account.

  Suppose that Alfred is driving a lorry, for the maintenance of which he is not responsible, and discovers that the brakes have failed. If he swerves to the right he kills a man at a bus-stop; if he takes no action he will run down two pedestrians at a crossing, while if he swerves to the left he will drive into a crowd of children. Here, surely, the utilitarian calculus applies, and Alfred would be blamed for not applying it. By swerving to the right he absolves himself of all responsibility for the death of the victim, while at the same time minimizing the human cost of the disaster. The brake-failure is not an action of Alfred’s, but a misfortune that afflicts him. His principal duty, in such a case, is to minimize the suffering that results from it.

  Such examples show the true goal of utilitarian thinking, which is not to replace or compete with the moral law, but to guide us when the moral law is silent, and when only sympathy speaks. Hence utilitarian reasoning is of the first importance in our dealings with animals - in particular with those animals to which we have no special duty of care. We should not imagine, however, that the utilitarian calculus could ever achieve the mathematical precision which Bentham and his followers have wished for. There is no formula for measuring the value of a life, the seriousness of a creature’s suffering, or the extent of its happiness or joy. To reason in a utilitarian way is to reason as Alfred does in my example: through numbers when these are suggested (as here, where Alfred must count the numbers of threatened lives); but otherwise through an assessment of the moral Gestalt, asking whether ‘things in general would be better if