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by
Kenan Malik
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October 24 - December 5, 2017
polis was, for Aristotle, a natural phenomenon. Just as it was in the nature of humans to be happy, so it was in the nature of humans to come together in groups capable of supporting and sustaining happiness.
‘Empty are the words of that philosopher who offers no therapy for human suffering,’ wrote Epicurus. ‘For just as there is no use in medical expertise if it does not give therapy for bodily diseases, so too there is no use in philosophy if he does not expel the suffering of the soul.’
‘Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish,’ Epictetus counselled, ‘but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.’24
All moral codes possess two elements: a set of values to pursue and a reason for pursuing those values; or, to put it another way, they both elucidate the means of being good and demonstrate the end to which the means take us.
The aim of human life is self-preservation. Human beings, like all other beings, are driven to stay alive and to repel anything that might injure or destroy them. The consciousness of this drive we call desire. When the drive for self-preservation operates freely we feel pleasure; when it is impeded we feel pain. Our judgements of good and evil, and our moral actions, are determined by our desires and aversions.
Passions can be passive or active. Passive emotions, like fear, jealousy and anger, are generated by external forces. They trap those who have no rational understanding of their emotions and their causes, tossing unenlightened individuals like rudderless ships upon the ocean of their desires. Emotions of which an individual has a rational understanding, Spinoza calls ‘active’.
Like Socrates, Spinoza sees good and evil in terms of knowledge and ignorance. Knowledge is liberating because the more we know about ourselves and about the human condition, the more we are able to recognize that we love or hate or find joy or feel pain as the result, not of free choice, but of chance and history and accidental association and past conditioning. Once we realize that, we can stop blaming others for their actions, for these are absolutely de...
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The importance of Spinoza lies not in his claim that things cannot be otherwise but in his belief that the human condition can be rationally understood and that out of this understanding emerge the tools with which we can transform ourselves.
More than any other moral philosopher before him, more even than Aristotle, Spinoza saw human nature as malleable, and emotions and desires not as given but as transformable. The most significant transformation, for Spinoza, was from being a slave to one’s passions to being an agent of one’s change.
Humanity was an expression not merely of civility but also of civilization.
Hume believed that some virtues are natural in the sense that they are dispositions embedded in human nature.
Other virtues, however, are not natural but artificial, not traits embedded in human nature but behaviours and rules created and developed through human history.
The most important of the artificial virtues is justice.
What began as a purely self-interested concern that the rules of justice be followed becomes over time, largely through the mechanism of sympathy, a moral concern for the welfare of others.
Hume claims that ‘no action can be virtuous, or morally good, unless there be in human nature some motive to produce it, distinct from the sense of its morality’.
Hobbes, Shaftesbury believed, had a blinkered view of human nature. Selfishness was not the only natural passion. Benevolence, generosity, sympathy and gratitude were far more important natural feelings, constituting an ‘affection for virtue’, or moral sense, through which was created a natural harmony between virtue and self-interest and through which humans were naturally led to promote the public good.
Like Hobbes, Rousseau accepted that moral norms had no meaning in the state of nature. Before private property had created inequality, there was no need for the concepts of justice and injustice. These ideas only emerge with society. As society develops, so more complex virtues evolve through the education of simpler moral feelings.
Burke rejected the abstract conception of ‘natural rights’. On the contrary, he argued, an individual possesses only those rights and privileges that prevail in a given community and which allow that community to progress in a harmonious fashion. Status and hierarchy were essential to society.
History, for Burke, was not a process of social change but a means of maintaining social stability, a mechanism for distilling the essence of a people. Morality was not about conscience and choice but about obligation and obedience.
For Marx, what makes communism the ‘good society’ is ‘the creative manifestation of life arising from the free development of all abilities of the whole person’.21 Many people would, of course, snort at the idea of this being any description at all of a communist society. Others might dismiss it as a hopelessly romantic vision. Such criticisms are, however, immaterial to an understanding of Marx and morality. This is how Marx defines a good society, and he does so not in terms of duty or consequence or self-interest or moral sense but in terms of the development of the whole person.
‘All that is solid melts into air,’ Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto of the impact of capitalism, ‘all that is holy is profaned.’
The distinction between human nature and species-being is a distinction between a view of human drives and dispositions as fixed and eternal and a view of the human essence as not simply given by nature but also as shaped by history.
In the premodern world, Marx argued, nature dominates human society and human self-awareness is little developed. Capitalism transforms humanity’s relationship to nature. It raises the productive forces making possible hitherto undreamed-of social development, accomplishing ‘wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals’. But it also separates humanity from nature and human beings from each other.
There is no inherent meaning in the universe. Only we can create meaning.
The most important, and the idea for which Sartre is probably most celebrated, is that of ‘bad faith’. People often try to evade the terrifying realities of the human condition by ordering their lives according to some preordained social role, in essence by turning themselves into objects, in an effort to deny the burden of subjectivity.
Morality, as the anthropologist Ruth Benedict put it, ‘is a convenient term for socially approved habits’.
morality, like truth, is simply that which works,
Moral claims are characterized by an enormous degree of variation and disagreement, disagreement that is often marked by an unusual degree of intractability. The
best explanation for such variation and disagreement, Mackie argues, is not that there exists a realm of objective moral facts to which some cultures have better access than others, but that moral judgements solely ‘reflect adherence to and participation in different ways of life’.
For values to exist there must be a valuator – an agent – to impose a standard on what is otherwise an indifferent universe. Things and beliefs and practices are good only with respect to such agents and their goals.
Moral claims may not be objective in the way that scientific claims are; but does that necessarily mean they cannot be right or wrong?
Better or worse. Not right or wrong.
If everyone thinks that ice cream is bad or Barry Manilow good, then I might privately despair. But if everyone were to believe that truthfulness is bad and torture good, then there would be a tear in the very fabric of society.
The key distinction between moral claims and personal preferences is not psychological but social. A social need is not a fact, nor is it a scientifically objective claim. But it is undeniably more than merely subjective.
From Kantianism to utilitarianism, all such theories use concepts such as ‘morally ought’ and ‘morally right’ but in a way that is devoid of meaning. In the ancient world the terms ‘should’ or ‘ought’ related to good and bad in the context of making things function better, whether ploughs or humans.
‘Any animal whatever,’ Darwin believed, ‘endowed with well-marked social instincts … would inevitably acquire a social sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.’1
Our ancestors, Greene suggests, ‘did not evolve in an environment in which total strangers on opposite sides of the world could save each others’ lives by making relatively modest material sacrifices’.
They evolved, rather, ‘in an environment in which individuals standing face-to-face could save each others’ lives, sometimes only through considerable personal sacrifice’. It makes sense, therefore, ‘that we would have evolved altruistic instincts that direct us to help others in dire need, but mostly when the ones in need are presented in an “up-close-and-personal” way.’
Lewis may discuss ‘Oriental philosophies’ and celebrate the Tao. Yet only from the blinkered perspective of Western monotheism could one suggest that without God there could be no morality.
In the past, Europeans burnt thousands of witches and enslaved millions of people, claiming that God had sanctified such practices. Today few believe this. It is not that God has changed His mind but that humans have.
Belief in God, in other words, does not obviate the need for every believer to make up their own minds about what is right and what is wrong, independently of the Holy Books. There is no getting away from the Euthyphro dilemma.
Questions of morality do not have objective answers in the way that scientific questions do, but neither are they merely expressions of subjective desire or taste.
