Jonathan Rée revives the idea of moral progress

One of the most intriguing questions about morality, it seems to me, is what happens when it changes. What happens, for example, when the subordination of women to men, or their exclusion from higher education or the professions, ceases to seem innocuous or natural, and starts to be regarded as a grotesque abuse? Or when corporal punishment goes out of style, and homosexuality comes to be tolerated or even respected, or when cruelty to animals arouses indignation rather than indifference, and recklessness with natural resources becomes a badge not of magnificence but of monstrous irresponsibility?

There is of course room for disagreement about such alterations of moral opinion. But no one could maintain that they are devoid of discussible intellectual content. No one would claim that – like, say, changing fashions in moustaches or skirt-lengths – they simply reflect the unaccountable gyrations of taste. Indeed it seems probable that moral change, over the long term, involves something like an expansion of horizons, a process of learning, or even – to use a dated word – something you might call progress.

It seems timely, therefore, to turn back to Immanuel Kant’s celebrated treatment of the question “whether the human race is continually improving”. Writing in the 1790s, Kant argued that the “moral tendency” of humanity was, like human knowledge as a whole, destined to carry on getting better till there was no room for further improvement: humanity was imbued, he thought, with a transcendental impulse to refine and clarify its moral opinions as time goes by, or to grow in moral intelligence.

Kant’s faith in moral progress was popular in the nineteenth century (think of Auguste Comte’s Positivism and various branches of Hegelianism), but it is not likely to be promoted with much conviction any more. If you were to show any signs of moral optimism today you would be mocked as the dupe of political boosterism or moral grade-inflation, and friends would try to re-educate you with a catalogue of ferocious wars, futile revolutions and murderous regimes, topped off with some sad sagacity about the destructiveness and deceitfulness of human nature. The old proverb about pride applies to moral optimism as well, or so you would be told: hope comes before a fall.

But pessimists too can be guilty of narcissistic bad faith. If you want to be admired for moral perspicacity, all you need do is cultivate a habit of indignation and dismay: if you can see vice where others find nothing but virtue, or degeneracy where they see improvement, or corruption where they see probity, you can become a Person of Principle at no cost to yourself, while everyone else will look like a tiresome Trimmer, an exasperating Polyanna or an impermeable Pangloss. “Men are fond of murmuring,” as Voltaire once put it; “there is a pleasure in complaining,” he said, and “we delight in viewing only evil and exaggerating it.”

As a matter of fact, moral optimism is not as dead as you might think: it often floats to the surface of contemporary common sense without occasioning much comment. When people want to protest at contemporary horrors – torture, say, or forced marriage, human trafficking, or racial violence – they are likely to condemn them as “Victorian”, “medieval”, “primitive” or “antiquated”, while expressing astonishment that they should still be countenanced in the twenty-first century. The notion that the epochs of past time can function as terms of moral opprobrium, or that the present date constitutes some kind of moral standard, testifies to a stubborn faith in something like Kant’s doctrine of progress.

On the other hand, optimism is not what it used to be. For Kant and his followers, the development of moral knowledge was, like the growth of geometry or arithmetic, simply the gradual articulation of an intuition that had always been present to the mind, if only implicitly. But work on the history of mathematics and the natural sciences since Kant’s time has suggested a rather different perspective: nowadays the growth of knowledge is more likely to be seen – like evolution in the natural world – as the outcome of opportunistic, adventitious and unpredictable adaptation in the face of a barrage of external accidents. Is it possible that moral progress – if there is such a thing – will turn out to conform to the same model?

Throughout the twentieth century, moral philosophers have done their best to push the question of moral change off the intellectual agenda. (The honourable but lonely exception is of course Alasdair MacIntyre.) If you look back to Principia Ethica, which appeared in 1903, you will find G.E. Moore taking it for granted that ethics is concerned with a single unanalysable object called “the good” – a “unique object”, as he says, which is the only thing we can ever really mean when we talk about “goodness”. For Moore, morality, or our intuitive capacity to recognise goodness, was as simple, unanalysable and immutable as the quality itself. There could be no progress in morality as such, apart from throwing out any historical flotsam and jetsam that might have made its way into the clear waters of ethical intuition. “Ethical discussion, hitherto,” he said, “has perhaps consisted chiefly in reasoning of this totally irrelevant kind.” Genuine ethics did not have a history, in Moore’s opinion; only pseudo-ethics did.

Moore’s attitude towards “confusion” illustrates the curiously Platonistic character of much twentieth-century moral philosophy – the assumption that genuine knowledge cannot be a creature of historical circumstance, or conversely that any discourse that is indelibly historical cannot really be knowledge. Moore was obsessed with putting a distance between himself and his nineteenth-century forbears Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and above all Henry Sidgwick. They had all tried to address the question of goodness, but according to Moore, they wandered off down historical byways and consequently “confused it with another question”. They allowed goodness to cohabit with pleasure, they confounded the “desirable” with the “desired”, and they muddled “ends” with “means”. Hence they put themselves on a collision course with what Moore called, rather preposterously, his “result” – namely the discovery that “good means good”, and not anything else. The “untruth” of their doctrines was therefore “self-evident”. Fortunately, Moore could assure us that philosophers would henceforth avoid such howlers: “we may justly pride ourselves,” Moore concluded, “that we have a better chance of answering our question rightly, than Bentham or Mill or Sidgwick or others who have contradicted us.”

Henry Sidgwick, who published his Methods of Ethics in 1874 and saw it through five more editions before his death in 1900, was, from the point of view of twentieth-century moral philosophers, the most eminent of the Victorian moralists. And he was certainly susceptible to the charms of history; indeed he seemed content to wallow in history without making any effort to achieve a once-for-all insight into the ineffable essence of goodness. He confessed that his work amounted to no more than “an examination, at once expository and critical, of the different methods of obtaining reasoned convictions as to what ought to be done which are to be found – either explicit or implicit – in the moral consciousness of mankind generally”.

The three methods he focused on – Psychological Hedonism, Ethical Hedonism, and Intuitionism – were not the only forms of moral argument that had played a part in humanity’s past, or that might become influential in the future; they were simply those that had been most salient in the “moral consciousness” of Europe; and all of them were imperfect and subject to change and development.

In the first edition of Methods, Sidgwick spoke resignedly of a “fundamental contradiction in our apparent intuitions of what is Reasonable in conduct,” concluding that it would never be possible to escape uncertainty in our attempts to reach “reasoned convictions as to what ought to be done”. In the absence of any proof of “cosmic perfection”, he wrote, “the prolonged effort of the human intellect to frame a perfect ideal of rational conduct is … foredoomed to inevitable failure”.

Sidgwick expressed himself less melodramatically in later editions, but he never wavered in his conviction that if you are hoping for certainties in ethics – “conclusions logically inferred from self-evident premises”, rather than “propositions … which … seem to rest on no other grounds than that we have a strong disposition to accept them” – then you are on a hiding to nothing. Ethics, for him, was not an immaculate science but an interminable effort to patch up any failings we may find in received moral standards.

In his autobiography, Sidgwick presented his account of ethics as a product of his own personal history. The education he received up to the age of 17 made him feel trapped by the “apparently external and arbitrary pressure of moral rules”, and when he went to Trinity College Cambridge in 1855 he felt even more oppressed. He was required to mug up a textbook on the Elements of Morality composed ten years before by William Whewell, who was master of Sidgwick’s College, and a professor of moral philosophy who saw it as his duty to drill the junior members of the university in habits of moral uprightness and obedience, as enjoined by the Church of England.

One of the most important events in anyone’s philosophical development is that first experience of intellectual disgust; and in the case of Sidgwick, this energising rite of passage was supplied by Professor Whewell. Sidgwick would never forget the “early aversion” aroused in him by compulsory study of Whewell: the arguments of Elements of Morality struck him as “hopelessly loose” and its principles “doubtful and confused”, or “dogmatic, unreasoned, incoherent”. But he had a happier philosophical awakening in or around 1860 when he came upon the works of Mill. He was of course overawed by the System of Logic, which had come out in 1843; but he must also have been impressed by the furious attack on Whewell that Mill wrote for the Westminster Review in 1852. Mill was worried by what he saw as a relaxation of the sturdy old radicalism of the Westminster – of which he had once been an inspired and conscientious editor – and a new book by Whewell provided him with a perfect pretext for taking his militant radicalism to the conservative enemy.

The book in question was a series of lectures on The History of Moral Philosophy in England. Whewell began by suggesting that “an important school of moralists” had been active in Cambridge University ever since its foundation, always resolute for the notion that “moral rectitude consists in eternal and immutable relations recognisable by the reason of man”. But he went on to explain that this elevated conception of morality had come under attack when Thomas Hobbes argued that moral goodness was nothing in itself, and various followers of John Locke piled in by identifying goodness with some “external object” such as pleasure, utility, or the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The Platonistic “Morality of Principles” was thus being displaced by an Epicurean “Morality of Consequences”. Whewell had no doubt where his professorial duty lay: he needed to restore the dignity and high authority of the Platonistic “internal principle”, and recall the university to its function as an asylum of “solid and substantial truth”.

After assuring his readers that he did not have “the slightest wish to speak in disparagement of Dr Whewell’s labours,” Mill noted that, as professor of moral philosophy at a university, Whewell was barred from pursuing any line of thought that cannot “reconcile itself with orthodoxy”. Consequently the tendency of all his efforts was “to shape the whole of philosophy, physical as well as moral, into a form adapted to serve as a support and a justification for any opinions which happen to be established”.

Whewell’s doctrine of “internal conviction” or “intuition” amounted to a kind of philosophical alchemy, through which the precepts he had absorbed as a child, and the opinions that prevailed at his university, were to be transmuted into self-evident a priori truths or unquestionable “reasons for themselves”.

If Whewell had confined himself, as professors usually do, to providing “bad reasons for common opinions”, then little harm would have been done; but when he used his position to attack Bentham and everyone else who holds that morality may need to be reformed in the light of an “external standard”, he was setting an ambush against progressiveness itself, and against “the only methods of philosophizing from which any improvement in ethical opinions can be looked for”. Those who prided themselves on an unbending commitment to their own moral convictions – their inward intuitions of approval or disgust – gave evidence, Mill thought, not of moral rectitude but of mental infirmity.

“This is the mental infirmity which Bentham’s philosophy tends especially to correct, and Dr Whewell’s to perpetuate,” wrote Mill. “Things which were really believed by all mankind, and for which all were convinced that they had the unequivocal evidence of their senses, have been proved to be false: as that the sun rises and sets. Can immunity from similar error be claimed for the moral feelings? when all experience shows that these feelings are eminently artificial, and the product of culture. … The contest between the morality which appeals to an external standard, and that which grounds itself on internal conviction, is the contest of progressive morality against stationary – of reason and argument against the deification of mere opinion and habit. The doctrine that the existing order of things is the natural order, and that, being natural, all innovation upon it is criminal, is as vicious in morals, as it is now at last admitted to be in physics, and in society and government.”

Whewell was, in effect, perpetuating the empire of unargued prejudice, and his argument “can scarcely be counted as anything more than one of the thousand waves on the dead sea of commonplace”.

In another article in the Westminster, Mill used similar arguments against a work by F.W. Newman which argued against the Socialist project of establishing “Christian villages” based on “common property”. Newman argued that they violated the basic principles of morality and politics, not to mention economics, and that the idea of a communistic sanctuary from private property was no better than “hurtful Quixotism”. Mill himself had reservations about Christian Socialists and their communist villages, but he did not go along with Newman’s argument that they violated the moral duties entailed by “the system of private property”.

“As well might it be said,” he wrote, “if I am a soldier, I am bound to fight against those with whom my government is at war, therefore there ought to be soldiers and war. If there is an established clergy, they are bound to teach the doctrines of their church, therefore there ought to be an established church…. The answer is, that bad as well as good institutions create moral obligations; but to erect these into a moral argument against changing the institutions, is as bad morality as it is bad reasoning.”

Sidgwick was thoroughly persuaded, and in 1867, when he himself was invited to teach moral philosophy at Cambridge, he accepted only on condition that he could include Bentham and Mill amongst his authorities. Nor did he ever abandon his Millite view of “current civilised morality … as merely a stage in a long process of development”.

“We do not find merely change, when we trace the history of morality; we see progress through wider experience, fuller knowledge, more extended and refined sympathies. Thus reflection shows us in the morality of earlier stages an element of what we now agree to regard as confusion and error. Therefore it seems to me reasonable to suppose that similar defects are likely to lurk in our own current and accepted morality; even if observation and analysis of this morality had not led us – as they have in fact led me – to see such defects in it.”

But Sidgwick was careful to explain that the moral progress he hoped for did not involve any notion of “a condition … in which the progress is to terminate and the ‘repose of a mind satisfied’ to be won”. We can try to remedy the defects of existing moral institutions, even if we have no clear idea what perfection might be, nor any definite knowledge of where our reforms might lead, or what further problems they might create or bring to light. “I hope,” Sidgwick said simply, “for progress in ethical conceptions, resulting, as progress in science does, from observation and experiment.”

Sidgwick once said he could not understand how anyone could bear to devote themselves to moral philosophy unless they had some hope of reforming ordinary moral opinions. And as the nineteenth century drew to an end, he allowed himself to speculate about the future of morality, and whether the “truth of the twentieth” might prove to be “more true” than the “truth of the nineteenth century”.

He was not very specific about what he had in mind, but readers of Methods will recall the suggestion that “current morality is faulty … by having too general rigid rules, and not making allowance enough for individual differences”. We will probably be a little astonished by his cool interest in replacing the institution of marriage by “Free Love”, and we will also be impressed by his dislike of ordinary complacency about “the division of mankind into rich and poor”. And in one of his pioneering essays on sociology, he deplored the habit of over-valuing “the old and eminent virtue of charity”, which, he thought, encouraged “indiscriminate almsgiving” of a kind that did more to cheer the giver than to alleviate inequality or help the poor.

Sidgwick died in 1900, at the age of 62, so he was never able to observe the development of morality in the twentieth century; but on the whole he would surely have approved. The practice of judging people as individuals rather than in groups certainly spread, and it became harder to engage in the casual put-downs of women, the disabled, or members of ethnic minorities, that were once part of the currency of “civilised morality”. He would also have welcomed the growing acceptance of collective institutional responsibility for social welfare, regulated, organised, and perhaps provided by the state. And he would have been gratified by the processes of globalisation insofar as they are eroding national boundaries and fostering non-national communities and lines of affiliation that, as he put it, “cut across the boundaries of States”.

On the other hand he would not have been impressed by the efforts of most twentieth-century moral philosophers. If he had lived long enough to read Principia Ethica, he would surely have seen it as a throwback to the conservatism of Whewell, and he might well have reached the same conclusion about the entire mainstream of moral philosophy in the twentieth century, with its implicit presupposition that morality is essentially a single self-subsistent thing, with an immaculate, sovereign and unchanging logic of its own. In short, he would have deplored what you might call the fetishism of morality in twentieth-century moral philosophy.

He could also have found signs of morality-fetishism in popular discourse, with its assumption that immorality is the worst kind of evil – perhaps indeed the only kind – and hence that morality should never be compromised by practical considerations of any other kind. Sidgwick, by contrast, belonged to a tradition for which morality was not the supreme judge of human conduct, but simply one member of a jury that also included jurisprudence and political economy, possibly sociology, and, above all, “politics”, or the discipline that studies “the constitution and action of government”.

Sidgwick would certainly have been appalled by the phrase “political correctness” – an old Stalinist expression which, in the 1980s, embarked on a second career as a device for embarrassing well-intentioned social activists. He might have pointed out that if political correctness is one of the vices that beset practical reasoning, then “moral correctness” or “ethical correctness” should be recognised as equally vicious. Those who find themselves acting not just in their own name but on behalf of some kind of collective entity – a community, a people, a state, or a political movement – may well be obliged to sanction acts of deception, coercion, expropriation, or even violence, that would be proscribed by any plausible moral code. They know that morality is not enough. Classically, such conflicts between intuitions about personal virtue and calculations about a larger good have lent a dimension of tragedy and grandeur to political action; and Sidgwick would have been saddened by attempts to short-circuit them and subject them to a peremptory moral veto.

Exactly a hundred years after Mill’s attack on Whewell, Jean-Paul Sartre launched a similar assault on his old friend Albert Camus. His target was Camus’s book L’homme révolté (The Rebel, published in 1951), which argued that the “prophetic dream of Marx” had led directly to the creation of a “terrorist state”. As editor of the magazine Les Temps modernes, Sartre assigned the book to his colleague Francis Jeanson, who denounced Camus as a self-hating liberal “humanist” who wanted to substitute a lachrymose “red-cross morality” for serious political analysis. Camus wrote a feeble response which appeared alongside Jeanson’s hatchetry in August 1952, and Sartre weighed in by accusing Camus of a monstrous form of racism – the “racism of moral beauty”. Sartre was prepared, up to a point, to acknowledge the horror of the Soviet concentration camps – they were, he said, “a challenge for us all” – but unlike Camus he was not prepared to make common cause with bourgeois Commentators who were seizing on them with glee in order to “give themselves a good conscience”. Sartre was horrified by “the ease with which you handle your indignation,” he told Camus. “Is it my fault if these procedures remind me of the criminal court?” he inquired. “Perhaps you should have been appointed as Chief Prosecutor of the Republic of Beautiful Souls.”

Sartre’s belligerence is appalling; but when he talks about the temptation of casting oneself as “Chief Prosecutor for the Republic of Beautiful Souls” he surely has a point. And Camus, though deeply hurt by the attack, tacitly acknowledged that there was some truth in it. His late book La Chute is a first-person story of a drifter in an Amsterdam bar, who tells us how he fled in disgust from his former existence as a fashionable Parisian lawyer who specialised in the defence of widows, orphans, refugees and anyone else who gave off the sweet odour of victimhood. He had been offered public honours, but turned them down, he recalls, “with a quiet dignity in which I found my true reward”. He began each working day by giving alms to a beggar or two; then he would earn the gratitude of another fragrant victim with a heart-stopping speech in court, and in the evenings he would relax with his elegant literary friends, complacently denouncing “the heartlessness of the ruling class and the hypocrisy of our politicians”.

Gradually he came to be revolted by his own precious sanctity. (“Just think how many crimes have been committed because the perpetrator could not bear to be in the wrong.”) He gave up the glamour of human rights activism in favour of a chastened practice of forgiveness, describing himself as a juge-pénitent, a penitent judge or perhaps a recovering morality-fetishist. “I favour every theory that denies human innocence, and every practice based on the presumption of guilt,” he says: “I am, dear boy, a disenchanted partisan of slavery.” And when he gets to the end he turns to us, his listeners, and enters a gentle plea: “I hope at least,” he says, “that you are a little less pleased with yourself than you were.”

It was of course leftism that provided the context of this famous quarrel; and it seems to me that leftism, together with politics, has been a casualty of the fetishism of morality. Leftism, as I understand it, is a set of political norms that took shape at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a reaction against liberalism. The distinctive message of leftism was that radical eighteenth-century progressives like the French and American revolutionaries had underestimated the gravity of the social problems they faced, because they thought that once they had got rid of slavery, serfdom, aristocracy and the old monarchical state, they need only find equitable ways to share out the national wealth and all manner of things would be well. The leftist response was that social problems arise not so much from the method of distributing wealth as from the means of producing it, and that the transition from feudal to free forms of labour was not going to put an end to social injustice. Before long Marx was able to explain why: the surface appearance of the new mode of production did not correspond to its essence, as he put it in Capital, and the wage-labourer could be said to suffer from slavery just as much as the feudal worker, though of a more cunning and devious kind.

You do not have to be a Marxist to be alarmed at the decline of the left. Socialism may be off the historical agenda, but that is only one element of the leftist project. The other is a critical sense of history. Marxism as a mass movement was in part an attempt to teach the world a lesson in wide-ranging comparative history, and it was built on the conviction that if we lose our sense of history, we damage our sense of politics too, and put our sense of morality in danger. Maybe it is time for moral philosophy to move on – onwards to the nineteenth century, perhaps. I do not know the answer; I simply pose the question.

Jonathan Rée is a freelance writer, historian and philosopher. This essay is based on of a lecture given at the conference “What happened to Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century? Celebrating Alasdair MacIntyre” at University College Dublin, 6-8 March 2009