Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  Religion and morality, and at certain periods art, have been thought of as having to do with an achieved inwardness, a private personal soul. But parts of human life go on in fashions which, as it might seem unavoidably, neglect the concept of the moral individual. For instance in politics we may banish or curtail this concept in the interests of arguing that it is not the duty of the state to make us good. That is our business. We distinguish the (moral) ego which retires into privacy from the (political) individual who is irreducible and has inalienable rights. We argue about how far religion and art should play political or ‘social’ roles. Should the church be enlivening personal spirituality or defending the poor? Should the artist create his own best work of art or advocate a better society? We fight for freedom of religion, and also against ecclesiastical power. As a political property (individual rights, the bourgeois individual, the role of the individual in history) the concept has a fairly new life, though we may also attach the label retrospectively to any human. Are some individuals more individual than others? More, as we say, ‘full of themselves’? Different art or social forms may exhibit, in the pages of history and literature, more or less of these distinct beings. Classical Greece (as contrasted with Hellenistic Greece) appears as rich in individuals, its literature develops the idea in a modern sense. We may also associate the ultimate liberated fully individual individual with the ‘bourgeois revolution’. Of course whether particular people in the past are remembered or memorable is a matter of chance, and certainly irrespective of merit. Archaeologists, historians and laymen are often more interested in 'the ordinary chaps’ and glad to find evidence which identifies one or another of these. Novels were ‘novel’ because they made much of the histories of obscure individuals.

  Varying concepts of the individual have been influential as axiomatic checks and as ideals; discussion of these may throw light on important differences between moral and political thinking, and the role of 'axioms’ (e.g. assertions of rights) in the awkward relations between the two. Axioms (in my use of this word) are sui generis, unsystematic, may involve acknowledged ‘fictions’, as when it is argued that in liberal politics the most important picture of man is that offered by Hobbes, the self-contained private being who, within external limitations, does what he pleases, and, because he is fundamental, is valuable. Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well: ‘Only the thing I am shall make me be.’ Hobbes’s aggressive selfish individual, and Hume’s everyman who for political purposes ‘must be deemed a knave’, are edifying metaphysical political fictions. We might want to say that political philosophy is about ‘advice to princes’, or politicians, or citizens, whereas moral philosophy is aimed at each particular thinker or moral agent. This would be over-simple, as great philosophers have usually collected morals and (sometimes by implication) politics, together with epistemology and ‘logical foundations’, into one metaphysical internally related package. Yet the distinction deserves to be kept in mind. Moreover philosophy is not science, but aims traditionally at a certain (its own) kind of objective detachment. This detachment, or would-be detachment, was what Marx rejected when he said that he did not want to explain the world, but to change it. The term ‘commitment’ (engagement), which has both political and moral force, for instance in existentialist thinking, expresses this reaction. Hegel’s Phenomenology, or pilgrim’s progress of Geist, may be regarded as a dialectic of history or an allegory of the individual soul. Farther on into the age of the novel Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, neither of whom is usually regarded as a philosopher, felt that their work was addressed, ‘for edification’, to the individual. Linguistic or analytical philosophers who (unlike the great metaphysicians) claim that philosophical accounts of morality can be morally neutral, would classify such thinkers as typical ‘preachers’, whose task is now to be clearly distinguished from that of philosophy. In fact it is difficult for a moral philosopher to say anything of the slightest interest and be ‘neutral’. Thinkers, from preachers through philosophers to scientists, may want to suggest that their ideas both explain and promote some sort of ‘good’ or 'satisfactory’ being; and their arguments are usually addressed to a kind of informed moral sensus communis in their readers.

  Well, what’s wrong, for political purposes, with the Humian man, a relaxed individual, a person of habit and tradition, with a reasonably decent sense of order, but without any lofty moral aspirations? After all, if one appeals to a general notion of human nature, must one not agree that we are on the whole not framed to be particularly good? Besides, a utilitarian might add to the argument, ought we not to be primarily employed in removing the misery of others without bothering about our own virtue? The modern ‘individual’, brought about perhaps by the rise of capitalism, may also claim other inventors, besides Locke, Hume, Kant, (etc.), such as Rousseau, Fielding, Kierkegaard (etc.). He may be described (also with an implication that he is 'finished’) as the Romantic man. It may be said that this person is volatile. The man whom Kierkegaard rated highest is an inward conscientious not unpassionate religious man, a calmly unobtrusively good man. Yet is not this ideal also related, perhaps even causally related, to the demonic or Luciferian individual of Nietzsche, or the authentic heroic man of Heidegger and Sartre? Is there not something (for all his apparent 'ordinariness’) self-assertive about Kierkegaard’s ‘best’ man, and for a true religious ideal should we not turn to the de-individualised individual of Buddhism or mystical Christianity, the ‘empty’ soul of Eckhart, the 'decreated’ person of Simone Weil? The voice that cries nut in the Psalms, and so much affected Saint Augustine, is that of one who, before the divine countenance, 'shrivels like a moth in a flame’. That penitential outcry, with which so innumerably many of us, through the centuries, have identified, is an individual plaint; but is not religious individuality somehow beyond persons? Christ is seen as the guarantor of the irreducible individual, seen in all his particularity by God, and incarnate in a particular man. Yet is Christ himself ‘really there’, is he not hallowed, in the remarkable accounts of him, out of individuality? Is he not described at last and seen (as perhaps other instances are not), as the perfect mystical non-individual? This oddness of the figure of Christ is not the least persuasive argument for the truth of traditional Christian claims. He happened to be understood and celebrated by five geniuses. (An accident?) Such images (occurring also in Buddhism and Hinduism) may serve as inspirations, or at any rate remind ordinary folk of the virtue of humility and that, before God, they are nothing.

  To return to the importance, in our epoch, of such imagines, it could be argued that a dominating figure is that of the demonic individual. Perhaps the individual liberated or created by capitalism had a golden age of integral being and virtuous idealism, reflected in the great art forms of the nineteenth century, but now, it is said, has disintegrated and become unconfident and even corrupt. We see (it may be argued) his demonic descendants in ruthless tyrannical regimes and persons, and, in western democracies, in egoistic materialistic 'go-getters’, in pursuit of money, fame, prestige and sex, who are now our most conspicuous citizens. The strong demonic individual whom we associate with Nietzsche, and (mutatis mutandis) with Fascism, is of course not a new concept. He was a phenomenon recognised by the Greeks, known as the tyrant and his form of government as tyranny. Greek tyrants, as also later ones, were sometimes politically 'good things’, even though they were ruthlessly authoritarian and perhaps, in their private lives, corrupt and vicious. Tyrants’ subjects may even admire and value the egoistic anti-moralism of their leaders. That someone very grand exists who can satisfy every caprice may, while causing scandal, produce a warm feeling, and patriotism too can feed on such images. Neither public cruelty nor riotous private living need make a tyrant unpopular in his lifetime or later. Our best-known, best-loved, monarch is Henry the Eighth. Madame Mao Tse-tung was admired as well as envied for the expensive anti-socialist mode of life for which she was later condemned. Of course the satisfaction felt at the overthrow of tyrants
is a stronger, and better, emotion! That exceptional (for whatever reason) people are often valued and not hated for living lives of exemplary luxury and selfishness is perhaps a general feature of human societies, such people may be felt to live vicarious lives for the rest of us. In this way film stars, pop stars, television personalities, tycoons, and so on may be expected to live with obvious luxury and even disorder. To take a different though similar example, a majority of people in Britain value the Royal Family, and like to see them dressed up and riding in their coaches. They are not envied. Here the advantages of a hereditary monarchy and head of state are evident. We (now) expect them to observe traditional moral standards but the odd one who is out of line does the institution no harm, rather the contrary. They play a popular symbolic role, and a beneficent political role in so far as by being ‘mock tyrants’ they are a protection against real tyrants. At the beginning of Plato’s Republic Thrasymachus suggests that the egoistic all-powerful individual is the highest kind of human being, the happiest and best, whom we all supremely value whether we admit it or not. We would all be like that if we were sufficiently brave and clever. Socrates rapidly dismisses Thrasymachus, but not conclusively enough to satisfy Glaucon and Adeimantus, who then take up the defence of the demonic individual so as to make Socrates explain yet more clearly how it is that the good man is both just and (truly) happy. The persistence of these young persons is an example to us all.

  If we reflect upon ‘human nature’ or wish to use the concept, we may be led to think of 'types’ and of the function of various ‘ideals’. I have mentioned here the demonic man, the mystical man, the Platonic-Kantian traditional good man, and the Hobbesian-Humian political fiction man. (By ‘man’ in such contexts throughout, I mean ‘human person’.) Of course these roughly posited figures interrelate, overlap and are in tension with each other. The demonic man may have virtues such as (especially) courage. Such courage is romantic, ambitious, egoistic, in contrast with pure heroic selfless courage (Wallenberg, Bukosky, Shcharansky, and numberless other heroes of our time). The demonic man comes before us not only in the extremist arguments of Thrasymachus and Nietzsche, but also as an emanation of existentialism. Some would even connect his modern incarnations with Kierkegaard, and he may certainly be seen in Sartre, where he is even at intervals celebrated. (The character Daniel, called ‘archangel’, in Les Chemins de la Liberté.) We should recall how much popular existentialism meant to the post-1945 generation; and also ask why, as a popular philosophy, it has now waned. Thrasymachus argued that the tyrant was the only completely free man, so the ideal free man, and the person we all really wish to be. Hobbes’s imagined sovereign is also the only entirely free being or entity, but his function is precisely to guarantee the necessarily limited freedom of his citizens, whose lives, without his presence, would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. 'The first and fundamental law of nature ... commandeth man to seek peace.’ ‘The liberty of a subject lieth ... only in those things ... which the sovereign has praetermitted.’ The proper object of every man’s will is some good to himself. (Leviathan, Part I, chapters 13 and 15, Part 2, chapters 21 and 25.) Bad government is better than none, and the ‘sovereign’ can of course be a democratic parliament. Meanwhile, remoter from politics, the theoretical picture of the free solitary self-assertive individual was, and is, a support or consolation to many confused and lonely Parolleses who are far from being Nietzschean. The mystical man, ‘decreated’ to use Simone Weil’s term, who has broken the barriers of the ego, is an ever-present religious ideal, a magnetic moral picture. Eckhart, who suffered for telling Christians that God was in, indeed was, the soul, is a thinker for today. Do not seek for God outside your own soul. Or to put it the other way round, the mystical is an ever-present moral ideal, that of extending ordinary decent morals indefinitely in the direction of perfect goodness. The 'ordinary’ good man, aware of the magnetism of good as well as the role of duty, is thus connected to a mystical ideal whether or not he is, in the traditional sense, religious. Kant’s Reason, as well as Imitatio Christi, recognises perfection as a possibility for every person. Kierkegaard makes a drama of what might be better seen as an intelligible continuum when he contrasts the (decent) Ethical with the (holy) Religious. At least the holy man is (often is) unostentatious (‘like a Tax Collector’). One would like to think that it is a matter of experience, rather than of faith or definition, that the mystical man is a good man.

  The purpose of this piece of discussion is to situate the concept of what I call ‘axioms’ in the general argument about morals, connecting it here with a distinction between morals and politics. This distinction can be made fairly clear in many evidently political situations, but can be (properly or improperly) blurred as we find ourselves moving the political model away from its most obvious home in the governing of a state. There are political situations in villages and ‘political’ situations in families. Nor is the idea of the axiomatic role-playing judgment easily classifiable as moral or political. Axioms can be Hobbesian or Kantian in style, and in the latter case can seem like duties, and we look to their public role to see how axiomatic they are. Utilitarian philosophy is axiomatic. Declarations of rights have (or purport or tend to have) an axiomatic status. Rights must be distinguished from duties. ‘A has a right’ is not equivalent to ‘B has a duty’. Rights are simpler, and cruder, than duties. Taking note of the duties of others (which may be complex and private) can take attention away from a basic (axiomatic) fact that someone is being unjustly treated. Assertion of rights is a straightforward way of moral pointing; rights are political flags representing moral ideas in a public political scene. (In family life it may be better to concentrate on one’s duties and leave the question of one’s rights to be taken up by others! It is certainly often more prudent.) Rights function against a background of axioms. I have preferred the word 'axiom’ because of, as I see it, the wider role of this kind of thinking in relation to politics, and to situations deemed political. The ambiguity of ‘right’, usefully clarified and used in particular situations, needs relationship to a wider background of 'axiomatic’ values. The right to be happy is both like and unlike the right to vote. In considering this kind of thinking and argument we are making a place for problems faced by individuals which, as it were, ‘hang in space’ and are not easily assimilated into inwardness, into the continuous daily moral work of the soul fighting its way between appearance and reality and good and evil. In this context, the general idea of axiom can seem like the general idea of duty, but is importantly distinct. There are what we call ‘public duties’ and there are ordinary duties, related to personal conduct, such as truth-telling and benevolence; and there are very difficult duties where what is public or taken for granted is scrutinised in an unusual personal situation. The idea of duty extends into a personal sphere of potentially minute and not publicly explicable detail. Here, where it loses its automatic or semi-public character, it becomes a part of what seems more like personal moral desire or aspiration, of experience and consciousness and the continuous work of Eros. ‘Duty’ is like 'axiom’ in that it can operate as a battle flag or as a barrier, but in its effective use the concept covers an extremely wide and various area. Whereas I want to relate 'axiom’ more narrowly to a kind of political thinking which is, for political ends of convenience and for the moral ends which 'hang around’ political decisions, better thought of as separate from personal morals and not assimilable into that sphere. The distinction is important, and of course debatable, for instance in relation to problems about law. When is a bad law a law, is it always a law? The idea of ‘natural law’ belongs especially in this discussion.

  Such theorising is of course a part of our liberal-democratic conception of a decent state, thought of as the best form of government, though not always immediately possible for reasons which are not necessarily bad reasons. The notion of this state as ‘best’ is always normatively relevant. (This is an axiom.) It is an essential liberal idea that the U
topian concept of a perfect state, even as a distant vision, is radically misleading and damaging. Society, and so the state, cannot be perfected, although perfection is a proper ideal or magnet for the individual as moral agent. We set aside the idea of perfection in the one case, not in the other. In society we adjust unavoidable conflicts in view of certain ends of convenience, and not without a continuous concern with (often various and mutually incompatible) moral ends. To set up such a, as it might seem pessimistic, line of thought as in any way authoritative is of course to adopt a political attitude; one which is by no means arbitrary, which can make appeal to experience and to ‘human nature’, but which cannot claim to be scientifically or otherwise ultimately demonstrable. Here politics rests on values which may be stated in axioms. This attitude was sometimes rhetorically labelled as 'bourgeois’ by people who rightly hated the injustices they saw about them, but wrongly imagined that these could not be altered without some total change, and that another more unified style of government (for instance a one-party state) could easily remove them. This example of casual routine Marxist terminology is now increasingly seen to be empty of content. Liberal political thought posits a certain fundamental distinction between the person as citizen and the person as moral-spiritual individual. We are not as real, whole, persons identical with this fictitious citizen, nor are we essentially divided between the two roles. It is often the case that we obey the law, not only as law-abiding citizens, but also as whole-hearted approving moral agents. On the other hand, if the (liberal) state rightly allows itself to account every man (potentially) a knave, does this amount to a licence to be a knave if one thinks one can get away with it? (Is it all right to cheat the Income Tax authorities? If one can cheat them is it not their fault?) In a democracy we may, because we value, and profit from, general obedience to laws made by democratically elected and removable governments, obey laws which we not only dislike but disapprove of. Here the moral agent opposes the citizen, and a certain degree of moral disapproval may occasion conscientious law-breaking. In dealing with this fairly familiar phenomenon a firm distinction (in practice not always easy to observe) is usually made between violent and non-violent abuse of the law. The acceptance of parliamentary democratic government itself involves a deliberate limitation of our moral aspirations, as when we keep our objections to the government within the law. Decisions about illegality and violence in politics live close to an axiomatic background. We distinguish between what is 'proper in a democratic state, and in a totalitarian state. Violence is not a justifiable political means in a democracy. Terrorism, as defined in liberal political thinking, is not justifiable anywhere.