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Can there be such a thing as moral science, or a science of morality? And if so, what sense has the word science in such a connection? In the middle of the last century such a question would probably have seemed superfluous. Utilitarians, Comtists, and not a few “evolutionists” would all have claimed to be moralists, with this advantage over the metaphysical or theological moralists of an earlier day that their own moral doctrines were “scientific” (which meant apparently that they formed an integral part of a wider view of things for which the principles of the natural sciences provided the foundations).
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1939
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page 24 note 1 Thus the consistency with itself of an astrological system would not entitle astrology to be considered a science. Yet it is quite conceivable that the astrologer's initial postulates should be mutually compatible and that his inferences should be drawn from them with logical correctness.
page 27 note 1 I know that the “analysts” seem commonly to hold that “verification” may be effected in two different ways: (1) By observation of sensa, and (2) by introspection. But the admission of introspection as a method of verification—though indispensable in fact—seems to me a fatal weak point in the theory, since if there is one way of ascertaining the truth of a statement other than the inspection of sensa, and radically different from it, there seems to be no antecedent reason why there may not be a plurality of such ways, in which case it will be possible to “verify” statements which cannot be shown to be true either by examination of sensa or by introspection. I suspect, indeed, that the “analyst” only consents to recognize introspection because he is not alive to the radical difference between it and all examination of sensa, imagining both to be ways of inspecting objects presented to our notice. If so, I am sure that he is mistaken about the whole nature of what is called introspection. My awareness of pain or anger, while I am feeling them, is emphatically not observation of what lies in the field of objects attended to; it is awareness of an attitude on the part of the subject who is attending to them. James Ward long ago used to complain of the mischief wrought in psychology by extreme “presentativism,” but his warnings seem to me never to have borne all the fruit they should.(It is not strictly relevant, perhaps, to add that in my own opinion it is a complete mistake to describe even the process by which we “verify” a statement about the “world outside” as inspection of our own sensa in the sense in which that word is employed by those who make prominent use of it. I mean that what we try to inspect, and succeed in inspecting whenever we really “verify” such statements, is never “private” to ourselves, but always a “public” fact.)
page 28 note 1 Such a profession reminds me, for one, of Morris Finsbury's explanation that when he referred to “Dent” Pitman he was only using an “expletive,” a statement which was naturally not credited by the interlocutor.
page 29 note 1 To take a particular illustration, I happen just to have re-read John Grote's Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy. I have found myself often agreeing with the “ethical” propositions of the writer, sometimes dissenting from them, but only rarely perplexed by a sentence which appeared to make no assertion, true, or false. And in these rare cases I seemed always to hav reason to believe that my perplexity was due merely to some failure in the author to put his thought into unambiguous language. It is possible, of course, both that I may have mistakenly thought some of his assertions true when they were actually false (or vice versa), and that I may have thought his meaning ambiguous where it is not really so, but is it credible that through a work of 35° pages I should have been deluded into the fancy that there was meaning, true or false, when in fact there was none at all? If it is credible, then it is equally credible that the writings of the logical analysts themselves may equally have imposed on me in the same way, and that I am deluding myself into the notion that I disagree with them, when there is really no asserted meaning to be agreed or disagreed with. They also, perhaps, are only making noises which evoke certain emotive dispositions in me?
page 31 note 1 Cf. John Grote's comment on the suggestion that by calling action conducive to happiness right or good, philosophers have intended merely to convey praise and incite their readers to the performance of such action: “I am disposed to think that Mr. Mill would agree with me that such is not the way in which the human race could act; that language could not be made by contrivance to give the notion that action was valuable for one reason, while the men who made the language had in their minds all the time the notion that it was really valuable for another reason; could not in fact be employed to conceal or disguise the thoughts of the whole human race” (op. cit., 272).
page 36 note 1 E.g. it would not be enough to say, “If you had gone to India, you would never have written books about Plato,” since if I had gone there, and wanted to write books still, I should probably have wanted to write them about something different.
page 39 note 1 I am thinking particularly of the unguarded language sometimes used in the Fundamental Principles about the ease with which the plain man can satisfy himself of the path of duty by merely applying the test of “universalizing his maxim.” Kant over-simplifies there by Considering only cases where there is already a known “middle axiom” provided by the current moral code, and the problem is whether I am free to disregard that “axiom” in the present case. Unconsciously he presupposes his “person in doubt” to know already that, generally speaking, it is wrong to violate the current precept, and it therefore becomes easy to show that to violate it would be to put “inclination” in the place of principle, and must therefore be immoral. It is easy enough to convict a man who ahready grants that it is a duty to make no lying promises of want of principle if he proposes to make such a promise in order to suit his convenience. It would be quite another matter to deduce from the general principle of duty that there is a duty to make promises. It is inconsistent to maintain that promises ought to be kept but that I am dispensed from keeping them when it is inconvenient to me to do so. But it is not obviously unprincipled to lay it down as a rule for every one's conduct that a verbal undertaking not substantiated by a guarantee of performance is not binding. The language of the Critique of Practical Reason about the use of the Kantian principle as an “acid test” of purity of motive is more guarded.
page 39 note 1 Cf. the words of Grote, John (Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy, 269–70)Google Scholar, “Simply a priori ethics have no application, and therefore no significance and no value. Simply a posteriori ethics do not seem to me to be ethics at all.” I should agree wholly with this dictum, provided that it is borne In mind that what can be called “a priori” is, in fact, not the whole body of ethics but only the “fundamental principle” (or principles), and that the principle has “applications,” though the applications are not indicated by the formula which expresses the principle, but have to be found in the concrete situations of human life as we live it. And as regards the “fundamental principle,” Grote, was right in adding (op. cit., 276)Google Scholar that Mill's moral doctrine is as much a priori, and as little “inductive,” as Kant's.
page 41 note 1 Though it may be a question whether Kant really meant what his language has been held to imply. His illustrations may be intended not as deductions of specific rules of duty from the general principle, but merely as evidence that these rules, taken to be already known, will all fall under the principle. Since he is professedly presupposing as the basis of his whole reasoning the “common notion of morality,” he may fairly be assumed to have taken it for granted that his reader would not need to learn for the first time from him that a man must not defraud, steal, commit murder or adultery. Has a “metaphysic of morals” to prove these things any more than a “metaphysic of nature” to prove that an unsupported heavy body will fall?
page 43 note 1 Is Thomas of Canterbury a genuine martyr in Mr. T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral? He certainly presents himself voluntarily to the murderers—his intention is to lay down his life if they attempt it. But whether the martyrdom is wholly genuine depends on the more subtle question whether he has wholly escaped the insidious suggestions of the “Fourth Tempter.”
page 44 note 1 Grote, J., An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy, 201–2.Google Scholar
page 45 note 1 Ibid. 277. I speak of the development as a reductio ad absurdum because, of course, Mill and the other nineteenth-century writers who plumed themselves upon being “inductive” moralists and supposed themselves to be doing for moral studies what Bacon was fancied to have done for natural science, took it for granted that there is such a thing as moral truth and that devotion to the methods of “observation and experiment” would enable them to get that truth in a scientific form; their positivism or semi-positivism was only important to them as the supposed one method of attaining this truth. But the later more consistent development of “positivist” methodology leads direct to the conclusion that they were deluding themselves, because if the positivist principles are sound, there is nothing in morals to be scientific about.