A Morality of Life for Everyone

Why are you flogging that dead horse again? (The importance and necessity of ethics)

Philosophy is a view of existence, of man, and of man’s relationship to existence. Philosophy matters. Regardless of whether everybody recognises it or not, every single individual has a perspective of the world, of themselves, and of their relationship to reality. Ethics is that branch of philosophy which defines the code of values which guide our choices and actions. Essentially, it asks and attempts to answer the question – “What is the purpose of my life, and how do I go about achieving it?”

Put in these simple terms, it is not hard to appreciate why ethics is vitally relevant to every person on the planet. We all spend every day of our lives making choices. None of us has to do anything. I realise that we do indeed say things like – “I have to get up early tomorrow”, or “I have to do well in this exam”, and even – “I have to go to the shops”. But that is not what we actually mean. What we really mean is – “I have to get up early tomorrow because I need to work. And I need to work because I need the money to pay for all the things required for me to stay alive and be happy”. Every decision and action is conditional. It is motivated by a purpose. Morality refers to the code of values each of us uses to decide on the choices and actions we make. Values define our goals and purposes. Ethics is the discipline which seeks to define and integrate these values.

Please Explain? (Defining the terms)

If morality is all about values, what exactly are values? Values are that which one acts to gain or keep. (NB : Virtues are those actions one takes to acquire one’s values. More on this later.) Before the influence of economics, the ethical lexicon was dominated by the words – good and evil in place of “value”.[1] I define a “good” to mean the same as a “positive” value – that which one acts to gain or keep. Anything termed “evil” would be a negative value, meaning one would avoid or eschew it. In fact, this concords with common sense. “Good” and “Bad/Evil” are evaluative judgements. Something is “good” if it is desirable or favourable, and “bad” if undesirable or unfavourable.

This superficially unremarkable conjunction between “value” and the “good”, masks a very real source of discord in ethical theory. This discord arises due to a conflation of the contexts in which “good” is used. Ethical discourse originated in a strongly theistic climate. Thus, the starting point for many philosophical inquiries into “the good”, was God.[2] God by definition is the ultimate good. This mode of thought treats the good in a metaphysical sense. Things are good in of themselves. That is, they are intrinsically good. They are good purely because of their existence and identity.

This concept of the good is very different to its sense with respect to human life and conduct. Augustine and Aquinas considered metaphysical goodness to consist in – “the value a thing has in itself in the scale of creation”, while moral goodness was dependent upon “the relation in which a thing stands to human need or desire”.[3] Dissolving this critical distinction by applying intrinsic theories of the good to human morality has led to many fractious disputes in ethical philosophy. This is not to say that there is no place for intrinsic theories of good (or value), but one cannot drop the metaphysical premise which sustains such concepts – namely the existence of God.

Confronting the Context-Droppers (Values don’t exist in a vacuum)

I have defined values (or the good) as that which one acts to gain or keep. This lucid definition of values allows one to very easily apprehend an essential corollary question which follows directly from the definition – “Good or valuable to whom?”. If values are that which one acts to gain or keep, then values presuppose a valuer! Somebody is doing the desiring, choosing and pursuing. Let me elucidate it another way. “Good” is a value judgement. Who is doing the judging? It simply makes no sense to speak of values or goods without referral to a subject whom the thing is valuable and good for. As Hamlet remarks -”there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”.[4]

One may wonder why I am belabouring the point. The problem is that very few ethical philosophers these days actually bother defining what they mean by value or good. I have just read two famous contemporary philosophers’ ethical treatises – Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, and Charles Taylor’s epic 600 page long Sources of the Self. In neither will you find a definition of what they mean by the “good” or “values”. This has become an all too common failing. What might motivate a philosopher to separate values or goods from their subjects? In my opinion, the incentive for abstracting values and the good from their contexts, is the freedom it allows one to enumerate various goods without being bound by two vitally important questions. “Good for whom?” is one. The other is “Good for what?”. Let’s take a look at the significance of the second question before examining two ethical theories which are consequences of this “context dropping” fallacy.

“Good for what?” is another way of asking – “What is the purpose?”. If values are that which one acts to gain or keep, then values do not only presuppose a valuer, but also an alternative. The absence of an alternative means that no action is in fact possible. Even more fundamentally, there is no choice available. Something which occurs automatically and cannot be changed, cannot be a value. For example, freedom cannot be a value if the absence or restriction of freedom is not possible. I will put it another way. If one’s freedom is automatic and can never be taken away, freedom can never be a goal or purpose. And if not a purpose, nor can it be a value. Likewise, if there is no alternative to slavery, freedom cannot be a value, as freedom does not exist as an alternative.

Cloaking evil in the gown of obscurity (Two examples of twisted moral precepts)

Utilitarianism is the ethical philosophy developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which advocates the moral principle that an action is moral if its result is to maximise the pleasure for the whole group or community. This single principle is characterised by Bentham’s famous maxim – “The greatest good for the greatest number”. Here, good is identified with pleasure, but the object of any moral action must not be one’s own pleasure, it is to achieve the quantitatively greatest amount of pleasure for the group as a whole. Mill and Bentham both emphasise that the individual must be “disinterested” and “strictly impartial”, meaning that moral actions may not be evaluated with respect to oneself. Accordingly, Mill writes – “All honour to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life, when by such renunciation they contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world”.[5]

Consider the consequences of this moral principle. An action is moral if it increases the quantitative pleasure of the group. If this “sum pleasure” can be increased by murder, theft and slavery, then these actions are defined as moral. An application of this principle would allow nine starving men to eat the tenth; 51% of the people to enslave the other 49%; or the 70 million Germans of Nazi Germany to sacrifice the 600,000 Jews and steal their property.[6] What permits this pernicious “moral” principle to retain a veneer of respectability? Simply, the failure to ask “Good for whom?”. “The good” in Bentham’s slogan is whatever happens to take the fancy of the majority (greatest number). Failing to elicit this definition of “the good”, allows utilitarian ethics to masquerade as a noble and even admirable philosophy.

The second example is Immanuel Kant’s deontological (rule driven) ethics. Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative essentially amounts to the “golden rule” – one should do unto others what one wishes them to do unto oneself. However, this principle fails to answer the question of what we should rightly wish others to do to oneself? Sado-masochists would have a field day with that prescription! Of course, Kant did not leave his moral law open to self-determination, and formulated it as his famous principle of duty. Kant proposed that an action is moral only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it whatsoever (material or spiritual). This means that if one has no desire to be evil, one cannot be good; if one has, one can. Duty is Kant’s standard of virtue. His morality is the morality of absolute selflessness.

Kant’s morality of self-sacrifice is the most inimical ethical philosophy in existence. Inimical to whom you ask? Obviously to man. Kant calls upon each individual to sacrifice their values, goals, desires, happiness and self – but for what? For a superordinate value perhaps? Absolutely not! Kant’s ethical principle treats sacrifice as an end in itself. Kant claims his moral law “takes no account of our desires or the means of satisfying them. Rather it dictates how we ought to act in order to deserve happiness”.[7] But happiness (yours or anyone else’s) is not part of Kantian ethics. Virtue according to Kant consists in “the moral strength of a man’s will in his obedience to duty”, and he goes on to advise that “virtue is its own end”.[8] Thus, Kant divorces virtue from values, and consequently values from morality! To the questions – “Why should I be moral?”, or “What is the purpose of morality?”, Kant would reply – “because it is your duty”. If you want to know why morality is a dirty word today, look no further than Immanuel Kant.

Ethical Dilemmas and Moral Alternatives (“What’s true for you, may not necessarily be true for me”)

There are two dominant perspectives on ethics or morality. One insists that ethics is subjective and relative. Subjective in that it differs for you, me and everyone else. Relative in that it is subject to change based on time and circumstance. The alternate view is that ethics is objective and absolute – the same code applies to everyone, regardless of the time or situation. I hold the latter view, and will propose it shortly. Firstly, let us very briefly review the problem of arriving at a moral philosophy.

David Hume is the main source of the former perspective. In his Treatise on Human Nature Hume correctly identified an important distinction between two types of statements[9]. There are descriptive statements which make declarations about what is or is not. Such statements deal with matters of fact and existence, and can validly be evaluated as true or false, based on whether they are consonant with the facts of reality. Then there are prescriptive statements, which specify what ought or ought not be done. Hume concluded that no amount of true descriptive statements (knowledge of reality) could provide an adequate basis for any prescriptive statement. He is in fact right to suggest that the province of ethics is purely subjective and normative if there is no link between descriptive and prescriptive statements. Or to put it another way – between fact and value.

The other source of moral subjectivism derives from common sense and experience. Values are that which we act to gain or keep. Only individuals can have values. Why? Simply because only individuals actually exist. Groups do not have independent existence. Only a single conscious entity possessed with a single mind of self-directed thought, is capable of making value judgements. Therefore the values we hold are subjective by definition – values are that which we (as individuals) act to gain or keep. If this is the case, you might wonder how values can possibly be objective? This “dilemma” is oft-used to argue against objective values. Fortunately, it is a specious argument. The personal values we hold may be subjective, but the proper or moral values may not be. The values we ought to pursue can be objective – the same for you and for me. And the actions we take to pursue these moral (proper) values are virtues.

A New Morality – A Morality of Life (Putting Man back into Morality)

I believe there is only one tenable solution to the intractable dilemma of relating facts and value, or what is and what ought. That solution lies in the facts of human nature. Human beings are biological organisms, and like any biological organism, require certain values to survive. We need nutrition or food. We need water. We need protection from the vagaries of temperature and environmental change (ie. shelter, clothing and warmth). These needs are all values. Why? Because they are not automatic. We do not live in the Garden of Eden. Life is a process of self-sustaining, and self generated action. To live – is a choice.

Allow me to spell it out. The fundamental alternative is existence (life) or non-existence (death). Only life makes values possible. Rocks do not have values, because rocks do not have to act to live. Life is fundamentally a process of action. But life itself is not sufficient for the existence of values. A tree does not have values. Why? Because as outlined earlier, values presuppose the existence of an alternative, and a conscious entity capable of choosing between alternatives. And interestingly, it may be that every other animal species is precluded from having values on this definition. Values require the existence of not only conscious, but volitional entities. Animals are instinctual creatures. I have not the time to address these questions here, but I would suggest that if an animal isn’t capable of choosing to die (the fundamental alternative), then animals are not volitional creatures.

This brings me to the singular difference of human beings, which makes values and morality not only possible, but essential. Man is the only animal with a volitional consciousness. Every individual must choose to think. Choose to reason. Choose to abstract from concrete objects and perceived reality, form concepts and integrate them. Ideas are not the product of an algorithmic machine. Thought is a conscious, self-directed, volitional process. And the outcomes are not guaranteed. As Ayn Rand put it – “Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires.”[10]

What? No Potatoes Morality? (War Morality – What is it good for?)

Do you see now why the greatest fault in modern philosophy is its relegation of ethics to questions of “mere opinion”? Why the most serious indictment of a philosopher is for them to say that philosophy has no relevance to “ordinary life”, and is above the “common man”? And why the worst criminal in ethical philosophy is Immanuel Kant – who made the biggest strides towards detaching values from morality. Kant’s attack on personal values is an attack on life itself. And Kant is not alone in this endeavour, he has plenty of willing accomplices.

Consider especially the social sciences and humanities, where many anthropologists, sociologists, ecologists, psychologists and historians join their philosophical counterparts in insisting that man has no nature. They chant in chorus with Merleu-Ponty – “it is the nature of man not to have a nature.”[11] Those who deny the existence of human nature, deny the existence of objective morality. They deny that man needs ethics – an integrated, consistent code of values with which to make choices and take action.

The inherent contradiction of their position is exposed by Rand – “Sweep aside those parasites of subsidised classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behaviour. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have granted the lowest insects. They recognise that every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not claim that a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without its sense of smell – but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can survive in any way whatever, man has no identity, no nature, and there’s no practical reason why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind throttled and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue.”[12]

In conclusion, morality is not only objective, it is a metaphysical necessity for man’s survival. The standard of value for man is his own life – that which is required for survival as man qua man. Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it, is the evil. Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are : thinking and productive work[13]. These are man’s primary virtues. Morality is synonymous with “that which is required to live life as man”.

Notes and References

[1] Mortimer J. Adler, The Great Ideas, Encyclopedia Brittanica.
[2] W. T. Stace, The Foundations of Morality. In Reader One of Life, Death and Meaning.
[3] T. Honderich, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford Uni. Press, 1995.
[4] Mortimer J. Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes, Macmillan Publishing Co. 1985.
[5] Mortimer J. Adler, The Great Ideas, Encyclopedia Brittanica.
[6] Harry Binswanger, The Ayn Rand Lexicon, Meridian, 1986.
[7] Mortimer J. Adler, The Great Ideas, Encyclopedia Brittanica.
[8] Mortimer J. Adler, The Great Ideas, Encyclopedia Brittanica.
[9] Magee Bryan, The Great Philosophers, BBC books, 1987.
[10] Harry Binswanger, The Ayn Rand Lexicon, Meridian, 1986.
[11] Mortimer J. Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes, Macmillan Publishing Co. 1985.
[12] Harry Binswanger, The Ayn Rand Lexicon, Meridian, 1986.
[13] Harry Binswanger, The Ayn Rand Lexicon, Meridian, 1986.