Moral Philosophies Underlying Professional Ethics

Mary Midgley

from TPM online

Wickedness means intentionally doing acts that are wrong.

But can this ever happen?

During this last century, wickedness has been made to look somewhat mythical in our part of the world. Many doubts have been raised about whether such a phenomenon can actually occur at all.

On the one hand, our increasing knowledge of the variety of cultures has made it seem obscure whether any act can be really and objectively wrong. On the other hand, various scientific systems that describe other forms of causation have undermined the idea of free will. They have made it hard to see how our intentions can really be the source of our acts.

During that same century, however, the phenomenon that we call wickedness has certainly not become less striking. Nor has it become any easier to understand. Indeed it presses on us more than ever. For instance, if we think about the Nazi holocaust and other holocausts - for we had better not forget others such as those in Russia and Cambodia and genocides such as that in Rwanda - questions about the meaning of wickedness weigh heavily on us. They do so, too, when we hear of child abuse or of multiple killers, as in the recent story of Dr Harold Shipman, who seems to have killed some 300 people while apparently remaining a normal member of society.

This highly mixed situation has undoubtedly left us confused. Thus, in 1983 the Observer, having run a survey about people's beliefs, reported with some irritation that the idea of wickedness did not seem to have vanished - as apparently, in the authors' view, it ought by now to have done:

British still believe in sin

[...]Most Britons still believe in the concept of sin ... Even 15 per cent of atheists believe in sin ... Most Europeans admit that they sometimes regret having done something wrong ... The rich regret more than the poor ... The rich are less likely to believe in sin than the poor.

The point here is not, of course, just about using the word 'sin'. The mention of regret makes that clear. Nor is it just a matter of religion, as is clear from the mention of atheists. What is being discussed here is something much wider than a rejection of religion. It is a proposed rejection of the whole idea of wrongness. I think it is what a student of mine had in mind when she cried out, in the course of discussion of liberty - "But surely it's always wrong to make moral judgments?"

This position is, of course, difficult to maintain because it is itself a strong moral judgment. But in discussion of problems about the limits of liberty it is often extremely attractive. When, however, we are thinking about topics like the Holocaust this vague 'permissiveness' is not likely to be very helpful. There, the notion of wrongness cannot easily be removed. It lies out in the middle of the landscape, an ugly black rock that can surely not be avoided. What, then, are we to do with it? How can we fit it into the maps by which we understand our lives? How should we think about the people who have done things which we find appalling?

Where can we shelve it?

It does not seem easy to simplify these cases into any tidy form which we can pack away in pigeon holes along with the more straightforward parts of our knowledge. It is hard to do this because we inevitably ask "what is it like to be one of these people?" - people who, for instance, devise death-camps?

From various scientific quarters we have been told that we should view these people from the outside, fatalistically, as helpless mechanisms, merely inert tools or vehicles driven by external causes such as their genes or their cultures. That would put it on the scientific shelf. But if we did this we would have to view ourselves as also tools or vehicles of the same kind. And if we really, seriously believed this - instead of just saying it - it would scarcely be possible for us to get through the day. Life would become impossible, not because our dignity would be offended, but at a much deeper level, because that situation would make all our choices seem meaningless. None of our thoughts could then possibly have any effect.

Alternatively, does another way of simplifying make better sense? Ought we perhaps - as philosophers like Nietzsche and Sartre have suggested - to see these people as indeed acting freely but as being original, autonomous moralists, authentically inventing new values which are in principle no less valid than those that are respected elsewhere?

This suggestion proposes an exciting, romantic idea of individual freedom. But, again, if it is consistently followed through, it seems to make ordinary life impossible. If there can be no basis of agreement on these subjects - if each of us wanders alone in a moral vacuum, spinning values out of our own entrails like spiders, making them up somehow out of our own originality, taking nothing from anybody else and passing nothing on to others - then we have ceased to be social creatures altogether. Most of the occupations that interest us must then evaporate, because they are essentially social. They depend on shared values. And we shall certainly then have no shared vocabulary in which to say what we think about such actions as devising death-camps.

Thus, one way and another, neither of these suggestions seems to be much use to us when we are dealing with serious matters in the world. This is why, in recent discussions about the guilt of General Pinochet, there has not been a rush of letters to the papers claiming either that the general should be respected as an original moralist or that he is merely the helpless vehicle of his genes.

Somehow, neither of these ideas seems to do justice to the situation.

Part-time scepticism

Of course these sceptical proposals do not have to be taken to their logical conclusions in this way. Usually they are not so taken. They are merely thrown out in extreme forms, used casually in bits and pieces where they happen to come in handy, and forgotten where they might make difficulties. In fact they are half-truths, one-sided proposals with a useful aspect which needs to be balanced against their other halves and then integrated into a wider framework.

At present, however, not much of this integration is being done. On the whole, these ideas wander about loose in various forms and combinations of immoralism, relativism, subjectivism and determinism, forms which it is often quite difficult to understand and to distinguish.

It is important to see that these ways of thinking are not just perverse aberrations. They have a positive point. They arise largely out of two central strands of Enlightenment thought. On the one hand - morally - these scepticisms represent an admirable reaction against the gross abuses that long attended the practices of blame and punishment, and that still do so. On the other hand - about knowledge - they express a determination to make human conduct as intelligible scientifically as the rest of the physical world.

Those are both noble aims, which is why the sceptical views in question have suggested many necessary reforms. But even the noblest aims, if they are pursued in isolation, uncritically, without regard for other aspects of life, are liable to drag us off to paradoxical conclusions which do not really make sense.

In the present case, what I think has happened is that these two useful ideas have been extended indefinitely and blurred together to form a kind of indiscriminate, all-purpose scepticism - not in the sense of a readiness to make enquiries, but of a fairly dogmatic profession of disbelief in morality as a whole, a disbelief which saves its owners the trouble of really facing moral questions.

It is rather remarkable that this blending is possible, because the two ideas actually come from quite different directions and are not really compatible. They require opposite notions of free-will. The causal view needs rigid determinism, while the Sartrian one treats the human will as something pure and independent, standing right outside causality. It does not really make much sense to glue them together merely on the general grounds that they both count as enlightened.

All the same, the convenience of doing this has for some time made it a very popular option. It is interesting to see how many students of philosophy - who are supposedly there to enquire into difficulties - will express quite strong views on some moral question and then, as soon as that question began to get awkward, will close the discussion by saying 'Well, it's all just a matter of your own subjective point of view, isn't it…?'

Where to go next?

Obviously, what I have said here on this difficult matter is crude and simple. I have written about it more fully elsewhere, as I shall shortly mention. Here, I am simply trying to suggest that it is worth attending to and thinking about. When our real-life attitudes conflict crassly with each other and with our official opinions, as I have suggested they now do on the topic of wickedness, our life becomes seriously muddled.

The psychology of wrong-doing, and of our attitudes to it, is, I think, a really puzzling subject. It has been neglected, partly because it is disturbing and partly because it has far too often been treated as just an aspect of questions about the status of religion. And, on those questions, many people simply divide themselves into their regular teams and conduct familiar tribal wars.

It is the dominant secular thought of our day that concerns us. In it, there has been a strong and natural revulsion against the great emphasis that the Christian tradition has placed on wrong-doing. In particular, there has been revulsion against the idea of Original Sin - a determination to deny that bad conduct has any roots in our nature. As I've suggested, this is not at all surprising in view of past excesses over punishment. But objecting to those excesses doesn't really force us to turn our backs on the whole alarming topic.

Evil And Evolution

In our age, it does not seem likely that we can really dismiss wickedness as mythical or as some temporary aberration. Instead, we are surely likely to agree, however regretfully, with Kant that, 'out of the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing was ever made'. But to say this is to say that we have - somehow - got standards by which we can judge these things and can observe their crookedness.

How, then, did we acquire those standards? It is surely a really serious and interesting question how, in our evolution, we humans have somehow got into the habit of having - in all our societies - a morality, a system by which some things count as right and others as wrong.

Is this habit indeed some kind of mistake? Are we beings who would actually get on a great deal better without any morality? Nietzsche sometimes suggested that we were so. But usually he did not mean this. He meant by immoralism something much smaller than this - just an opposition to the particular morality prevailing in his day. Nietzsche was an immoralist because he was a moralist. He called for a 'revaluation of all values'. He certainly was not recommending the abandonment of values altogether.

If, however, we do want to look at this larger evolutionary question, then I suggest that the person to consult is Charles Darwin. I find it very strange that, in all the recent excitement about his work, so little attention has been paid to his ideas on this matter. Very simply, Darwin proposed that creatures like us who, by their nature, are riven by strong emotional conflicts, and who have also the intelligence to be aware of those conflicts, absolutely need to develop a morality because they need a priority system by which to resolve them. The need for morality is a corollary of conflicts plus intellect:

Man, from the activity of his mental faculties, cannot avoid reflection…. Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well-developed, or anything like as well-developed, as in man.
The Descent of Man

That (he said) is why we have within us the rudiments of such a priority system and why we have also an intense need to develop those rudiments. We try to shape our moralities in accordance with our deepest wishes so that we can in some degree harmonise our muddled and conflict-ridden emotional constitution, thus finding ourselves a way of life that suits it so far as is possible.

These systems are, therefore, something far deeper than mere social contracts made for convenience. They are not optional. They are a profound attempt - though of course usually an unsuccessful one - to shape our conflict-ridden life in a way that gives priority to the things that we care about most.

If this is right, then we are creatures whose evolved nature absolutely requires that we develop a morality. We need it in order to find our way in the world. The idea that we could live without any distinction between right and wrong is as strange as the idea that we - being creatures subject to gravitation - could live without any idea of up and down. That at least is Darwin's idea and it seems to me to be one that deserves attention.

Suggested Reading
The Descent of Man (Chapter three), Charles Darwin
Wickedness, a Philosophical Essay, Mary Midgley (Routledge, re-issued in May)
Can't We Make Moral Judgments? Mary Midgley (Bristol Press)