Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  (See The Essential Frankfurt School Reader,

  ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt.)

  The ‘rending of the veil’, the ‘fearlessly passive’ trust of ‘experience’, these phrases express a deep, and indeed familiar, moral and moral-religious insight; and the last sentence separates the writer from the prime tenets of Marxist theory and practice.

  Political and also legal axiomatic thinking can be important in the various group situations which I mentioned above; but where do such situations end? The church synod, the parish council, the college meeting, the local dramatic society, the family conference, the family row, parents and children? Appeal to separated ‘abstract’ axioms or rules may have their place in all of these. Then someone will say, surely they have their place everywhere? Is one not now simply referring to the concept of duty? Even if axiomatic rulings are not the deep centre of morality they are its effective crystallisation. Let us look at some cases. Strict Protestants who live with a sense of close literal communication with a personal God may be seen by the outsider as, or may feel themselves to be, living with very definite and general rules. ‘Do not lie’ means do not lie. Such people help us to understand the character of Jeanie Deans in Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian, or of Isabella in Measure for Measure. But the place of rules in such lives is unlike the place of axioms in law or politics. If a rule goes deep enough, is surrounded by enough felt or reflective moral or spiritual ‘tissue’, it is not really a rule, for this service is perfect freedom; and yet, given the frailty of human nature, one is perhaps wise to regard it as, and likely sometimes to feel it as, a rule; whereas axioms are effective through being impersonal and abstract. The internalisation of a rule from the nursery onward is accompanied by the growth of a world. The progressive result for an individual of not lying is that he lives in a particular sort of scene, his patterns of cognition and sensibility are different from those (most of us) who are less careful in this respect. We are perhaps too ready to associate strict morals with rigid and intolerant attitudes, perhaps because we notice the strictness when it is associated with censure. Kant tells us that we ought to tell the truth even to a would-be murderer who asks the whereabouts (which we know) of his intended victim. Kant explains this in an article ‘On a supposed duty to lie from altruistic motives’ written in reply to Benjamin Constant who had objected to Kant’s (already expressed) view that truthfulness is an unconditional duty which holds in all circumstances. Constant says that ‘The moral principle “It is a duty to tell the truth” would make society impossible if it were taken singly and unconditionally’. He goes on to say that it is only our duty to tell the truth to those who have a right to the truth, which a violent man would not have. (Schopenhauer agrees.) Kant replies that all men, as rational beings, have this right, one should address the reason of the would-be murderer, and any lie harms another person, if not some individual then mankind generally, since it damages our sense of moral law. He adds that if you lie you are morally and also legally responsible for the results, which may be the reverse of your intention: a problem explored in a short story by Sartre called Le Mur. In such extreme situations most of us would probably side with Constant, while also regarding ‘Do not lie’ as a very important prima facie rule and one which, among human obligations, stands out with a certain clarity. We may note that both Jeanie Deans and Isabella are saved by their authors from what appeared to be the terrible consequences of their truthful intransigence. Those who (again probably most of us) justify some social lying on utilitarian grounds should certainly reflect that habitual lying of any kind can breed a more general indifference to truth. We might compare this case with that of malicious mockery which is tolerated in polite society, and recall here the stern remarks made about laughter by Plato in the Republic and the Laws. Malicious merriment, apparently harmless, can foster more general and sinister spiritual ills: cynicism, cruelty, hatred. The person who regularly refrains from joining in spiteful gossip may be said to ‘make it a rule’ not to; or we may discern in him an instinctive fastidious dislike of, a shrinking from, such conduct. (It is at the least ‘bad form’.) Certainly such a person lives ‘in a different world’ and sees other people with a difference. The seen world, strengthening the more virtuous desires, reinforces the rule, scarcely now properly called a rule. Of course a vote against malicious laughter is not a vote against laughter, although the border-line involved may sometimes be unclear. Plato’s remarks seem less tiresomely puritanical if we also recall the amazingly open happy sunny (Platonic metaphor) atmosphere of the dialogues and how full they are of wit and jokes.

  A difference between what I have called, in a political and natural law context, ‘axioms’, and the ordinary idea of duty (as ‘rules’), is that duty merges into, is organically connected with, the hurly-burly of reason-feeling, rule-desire, whereas ‘axioms’ do not and are not. One could also say that duty recedes into the most private part of personal morality, whereas axioms are instruments of the public scene. Distinctions in philosophy invite attack by regiments of border-line cases. Of course axioms are adopted and employed by individuals who previously and privately, instinctively or reflectively, judged them. The axiom ‘in use’ lacks the personal particularity of duty, though it may be a man’s duty to give public support to an axiomatic formulation. The essential separateness of certain axiomatic values in the area of political thought and political argument and rhetoric is a special and not a general case of a moral pattern. The separateness is to do with the difference between political morality and private morals, and the rough-and-ready unavoidably clumsy and pragmatic nature of the former. Here, moving away from the ‘morals and politics’ question, though perhaps also throwing light upon it, I want to go on reflecting about the relation of rules to moral cognition. It is said, as a generalisation about moral development, that we learn ‘external rules’ as a child and then internalise them as values. Or, ‘heteronomous subjection’ may be followed by ‘autonomous rejection’, as Tillich suggests has been the fate of the concept of God in the modern world, now felt as an ‘external rule’ suitable for the nursery. Acceptance and rejection, with appropriate ordering or reordering of the cosmos, may be instinctive or reflective. Moral order is usually not all that orderly, and particular rules, whether learnt in childhood or not, may remain, not fully internalised or integrated with other values, as barriers to certain kinds of conduct. A religious upbringing may leave obstinate traces in a life which, for better or worse, has become remote from such influences. An effect of religion is, often, to make morality attractive, though it can also make it repulsive. Isolated summaries or reminders may appear, pieces of ‘abstract morality’ out of key with the customary more integrated ‘moral world’. Kant’s distinction between phenomenal and noumenal lives with Kant’s common-sense conviction of the familiarity and obviousness of a sense of duty, and his strong religious sense of the presence of a spiritual reality. Strictly speaking, and evident in the work of neo-Kantians who lack Kant’s religious metaphysic and his common-sense, a sharp distinction between fact and value tends to make all morality ‘abstract’ in relation to an alien world into which no value has been allowed to seep. Socrates’s daemon who only told him what not to do may also be seen as an abstract mentor, interfering from elsewhere, although no doubt he was not his only mentor. The voice of duty, announcing the absolute character of certain particular requirements, and their relation to a larger more general world, is often foreign and unwelcome to frail mortals. The concept is both familiar and obvious, and also on reflection vast and ambiguous. In Kant (in the Grundlegung) we may see a kind of Protestant (for instance) ethic which envisages the crystallisation out of a mediocre or bad society of a good society guided by very general or rigid rules. Such people would, ideally, live out in the open an unselfish life of moral lucidity and simplicity, and as I said earlier such people exist. There are small ‘good societies’ of this kind, just as there are others whose rigid morality issues in intolerance and
moral conceit. Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter depicts the cruelty of such a society, but we may try to observe its merits too. We cannot win all the tricks in the game of morality.

  Strictly speaking of course Kant’s universal Reason might, while not shedding its universality, offer us rules or maxims of much greater complexity by introducing detailed provisos and specifying particular circumstances. As for instance, ‘Always lie to a violent person who, if told the truth, could cause immediate unjustified harm to an innocent person’, and so on into more and more detailed cases. Kant would doubtless worry about the inclusion of too much detail because of the danger of self-regarding (heteronomous) specifications creeping in. The end case would consist in the inclusion of one’s own character and preferences in the maxim. Of course we readily excuse ourselves as a special case, and unable to resist certain temptations. On the other hand, an aspect of civilised society is the concept of personal character (especially having reference to childhood and environment) as a mitigating circumstance. How far this is carried in particular cases is a moral, and also a legal, problem. (A place where natural law might ‘get in’.) Schopenhauer in rejecting Kant’s ‘duty’ as the external heteronomous voice .of a postulated God, appears as a theological demythologiser. He refers us away from (what he sees as) this unreflecting undiscriminating narrow-minded voice to the intelligent compassion of the Buddha nature which stirs within each bosom an unselfish concern for other people and a tender and respectful interest in the diversity of the world. Kant’s ‘universal reason’ was a regulative not constitutive idea, its operation was in practice limited by the alien contingent stuff of the phenomenal psyche. It is Hegel’s ‘reason’, with its tempting dream of a potential totality, which retains a philosophical influence. Few non-Hegelian philosophers would now argue in terms of a single faculty of reason. Highly rational people often disagree and it seems better to make use of the ordinary flexible concept of rationality, rather than to define reason as a single system. Even science no longer looks like a single system. But having in mind ‘ordinary rationality’ is it plausible to suggest that morality consists of rational rules? On the one hand, we are influenced in many situations by very general rules felt as external. On the other hand a ̒sense of duty’ may exist at any level of generality in the form of a special kind of certainty about the absolute importance of morals, and so of particular moral acts. Schopenhauer’s dismissal fails to regard this distinction. The idea of a network of ordinary duties is an extremely important aspect of morals, it goes with a sense of being always on duty, a conscript not a gentleman volunteer. The actual functioning of this duty-sense is another matter. Also it would be difficult to assert that everyone ‘ought’ to recognise the concept of duty and the net of duties, on pain of being called (in some sense) morally defective! It is clearly (in my view) inadequate to define morality solely in terms of duty, and without reference to quality of consciousness. It is less clear that one can discuss the phenomenon of morality as a whole without giving an essential place to this ubiquitous command. However, a saint has no duties, God has no duties, and good as well as bad people are moral eccentrics. Certainly the idea of moral rules was not invented by Kant, it is one of the most primitive of moral conceptions. A ‘sense of duty’ may be a sensibility to general rules or an active creation or discovery of detailed ones. Reason seems to dart from the outside into specific situations with an eagle glance which sets all in order. Here the fact-value distinction seems especially out of place. Do we really think there are specifiable sets of neutral facts which in the light of reason give a moral direction? Is it not rather that the prime situation is already to a considerable extent ‘read’ (or worked upon) when the problem arises? It is certainly often worth saying: Look at the facts! This is a way, a way, of directing attention. But what we look at, and attempt to clarify and know, are matters in which value already inheres. In deciding what the initial data are we are working with values. Value goes right down to the bottom of the cognitive situation. Of course we can say, ‘Let us establish the facts here’, and such an exercise may bring moral enlightenment, but is unlikely to constitute the whole of the situation, even in cases where ‘neutral facts’ are easily discerned and agreed upon. (‘You promised’, or ̒̕̕̕He’s your father!’ may or may not end a debate.) These are of course considerations which belong to my general argument. I introduce them here with relevance to the idea of axioms, which I suggested had a special role in politics to be distinguished from the larger ambiguity of moral rules in general. The concept of duty is, as I said just now, of the greatest importance as a formulation of our sense of the absolute nature of moral obligation. It represents a kind of certainty, and this concept I shall be discussing shortly. A part of ‘duty’, but a part only, consists of the ability to act against our natural inclinations, a situation especially interesting to Kant who attaches to it the moral emotion of respect for the law. We are reminded. The whole of morality involves the discipline of desire which leads to instinctive good action. This slow discipline, this gradual shift of inclination, is less visible, and indeed less interesting, than the dramatic head-on encounters between duty and interest, or duty and passion, which can be so effectively displayed and explored in literature.

  How abstract is ‘abstract morality’ (rules) even in what might seem like clear cases? A child is not told ‘do not lie’ in a vacuum. He is living in a moral world, primarily that of his family, where all his antennae are active and he is likely to be learning language, self-control and morality all in one. If we consider how much a child learns before the age of six, we may also reflect upon how much of this consists of learning morals. Rules are instantly interpreted in relation to the understood life of the community and its spokesmen, and together with this comes the apprehended difference between appearance and reality. If we think of such cases, in childhood and beyond, we see how appropriate it is to speak of knowledge, of cognitive activity, rather than to use weaker words such as feeling or attitude. As moral agents we have to try to understand the world and thereby to construct ‘our world’. Since morality is compulsory (we cannot avoid moral choices) some form of moral cognition is compulsory and we have to set up at least the forms of a distinction between what is real and what is not. Bad conduct has its cognate illusions and fantasies. ‘Our world’ is at best likely to contain large fantasy areas. The idea of truth, not always easily evaded, is active in the training of desire and tends to deepen and strengthen our conception of virtue; whereas would-be neutral descriptions in terms of feelings or moods are themselves morally persuasive and suggestive of a picture. In fact, to speak with the implied seriousness about knowledge or its failure, reality and appearance, accords very much better with our actual experience of morality and the ordinary understanding of it. These are considerations which must be fundamentally important in education, where a good teacher teaches accuracy and truth. The importance of getting things right. People who imagine themselves to be relativists, emotivists, existentialists, or determinists have been persuaded by a theory. Cynicism, which may be bred too from a superficial acquaintance with such theories, is often, at first, an affectation, though it can later be a deadly disease. Innumerable metaphors suggest that virtue is knowledge: as when we speak of insight, lucidity, clarity, enlightenment, vision. The child, to return to him, who is led by his observations to conclude that ‘Do not lie’ is part of an espionage system directed against himself, since the prohibition obviously means nothing to his elders, is being misled concerning the crucial position of truth in human life. We learn language in contexts where our vocabulary is increased and (ideally) refined in the everyday processes of living and learning. We learn moral concepts. Not only ‘true’ and ‘good’, but the vast numbers of secondary more specialised moral terms, are for us instruments of discrimination and mentors of desire. I mean words like ‘generous’, ‘gentle’, ‘reckless’, ‘envious’, ‘honest’, and so on and so on. These are concepts which in turn throw light on other
concepts as when we distinguish sympathetic curiosity from impertinent curiosity and a tender smile from a mocking smile. This is the very texture of being and consciousness woven and working from moment to moment in language. ‘Do not lie’ is clear, general and universal, an understanding and exercise of truthfulness is the required task. Roughly, moral rules are tasks set to individuals, whereas axiomatic statements about rights (etc.) are public banners flown for complex reasons which may be partly, even grossly, pragmatic. Of course politicians and statesmen are ordinary moral agents, and we are moved to claim the rights of others by our own general moral understanding and sensibility; and of course we can construct a series from ‘one person, one vote’ to the nursery situation of ‘Why can’t he have an apple too?’ But the existence of a series does not legislate for its two ends. Liberal political thinking cannot dispense with the inflexibility of axiomatic morality and the particular kind of exploratory and persuasive language which it generates. The claim to a human right is designed to remain in place whatever the situation, and this is not the case with (most understandings of) ‘Do not lie’. We do not ‘live’ the world of politics in the way we ‘live’ our private lives, and this idea puts a limit (not always easy to determine) upon what the ‘world of politics’ properly is. We ‘cut off the road to an explanation’ in order to safeguard the purity of the value, and remove it from vulnerability to certain kinds of argument.