CHAPTER II

THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER

§ 3. The orthodox moralist. § 4. The moralist as a naturalist. § 5. Moral insight.

EFINITIONS of ethics, or discussions of the

meaning and function of ethics, are supposed to be (as they often are) as remote from a productive analysis of morality as surveying is from farming; the idea being that it is one thing to plot the field of ethics and quite another thing to say what the field will produce. It is upon the contrary assumption, namely, that a conception of ethics is in itself a description of morality, that I venture to open the discussion with a chapter on the study of ethics and the moral philosopher.

As a formal definition of ethics (to stand in the background) I will propose the following. Morality has been defined as the self-conscious living of life. The study of morality, or ethics, may then be defined as a study of the meaning and value of life. Or, since the study of morality is ever the discussion of a problem, ethics may be defined as a study of the problem of life. Or again—and this is the aspect of the subject to be emphasized here-as a study of the varieties of life and their individual significance.

Such a conception of ethics may at first glance seem so broad as to be meaningless. Yet any narrower conception fails, it seems to me, to reveal the full significance of the subject or to explain why the discussion of moral problems

should be, as it always is, a matter of absorbing interest to every more thoughtful man. The development of the conception will occupy all of the chapters to come. In this chapter I shall indicate its tendency by contrasting it with the orthodox conception of ethics as represented by the orthodox moralist.

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What does "the man on the street" understand by ethics? Or, if I may choose a spokesman nearer home, what is the conception of ethics in the mind of the average undergraduate who has just registered his name for the next term's course? Something like this, I venture. Ethics, as he understands it, is "a study of right conduct". The purpose of the course in ethics is to teach the student "what is right". This means, in the first place, that he expects to derive from the course an exposition of the established principles of morality; principles hardly less established than the principles of physics or the principles of law, and hardly less supported by authority. And then from these principles he expects to derive, or to have authoritatively derived for him, a compendium of rules, a guide to life, which will once for all mark out for him the (straight and narrow) path of duty. Further perhaps, he expects to receive expert solutions of certain nice questions, such as, Is a lie ever justifiable? though he is not quite prepared to substitute the expert solution for his own common sense.

But what he also expects, perhaps above all, is that the teacher will "exercise a moral influence", and that his teaching will also be preaching. He is to "speak as one having authority". If the tone of authority be missing the pupil will suspect the morality. Nay, I have known pupils

who would authoritatively instruct their teacher in this matter. I come here to be influenced, their attitude has seemed to say, and now I find the responsibility imposed upon me. I come for sound doctrine, and I get problems. In other words, I come for edification, and I am compelled to think.

There is a curious difference between ethics and other subjects in the college curriculum. The teacher of other subjects is bound to enlighten his pupils but he is under no obligation to convert. The teacher of ethics must not only convert, he appears to be authorized to mould the character of his pupils. And for the matter of that, after the pattern of his own, which is to serve as an example. And what is more, the average pupil, by no means in this respect a refractory pupil, expects his character to be moulded. And further, he will impose this as an obligation, and bestow the authority, upon any other persons, including his fellow-students, who set out to be moral. In their view the moral is inseparable from the didactic. As a further point of difference I may remark that while professors in other subjects are crowned for discoveries, discoveries in the field of ethics are more likely to be damned.

Such are the implications of the definition which makes ethics a study of right conduct. As a study of right conduct the ethics thus defined is what I have called orthodox ethics, in the sense that it conceives of morality in terms of right and wrong. This view of ethics is by no means confined to the man on the street. The man on the street is only adopting the traditional assumption of the schools. For widely as these may differ with regard to the ethical motive and the spiritual quality of the ideally good man (of which something will be said in the next chapter),

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there seems to be on the part of each school an attempt to show that, in the end, in terms of practical conduct, its own good man will satisfy the requirements of the orthodox standard. As J. S. Mill will show, the utilitarian is in practice as orthodoxly moral as any Kantian rationalist or any intuitionist. Their motives may differ, their practice is the same. So that it seems plausible to say, with Wundt and Leslie Stephen, that men agree generally as to what is moral and differ only as to why it is so; and therefore that the only function of ethics is to find the reasons for what we already know to be right.

§ 4

As against this orthodox conception, I propose now to offer, not so much a definition of ethics (the ending of the term suggests a "science", and it is my purpose to show that there is no such science) as a conception of moral philosophy; and less perhaps a conception than a picture of the moral philosopher, or the moralist. The moralist I will present as a naturalist who studies, not conduct, but persons.

To make the motif of this clearer I will repeat the query put to me several years ago by a clever and quick-witted woman; a thoroughly humane and cultivated person, who, however, as a trained and zealous student of nature, was disposed to take the point of view of natural science on its own word as the final criterion of wisdom and of truth. From previous conversations I had guessed that she found the profession of philosophy rather amusing if also somewhat mystifying. Finally came the question: in a world so full and various with fascinating things, such as glaciers, sea-anemones, and (I forget her third item, but I will in

sert) shovel-headed sharks, how could any really live person be interested in the abstractions of philosophy?

I will admit that the question floored me. It was a question which (after twenty years of teaching philosophy) my Freudian subconscious self preferred not to have raised. Though never a collector myself, and having only the slightest interest in the difference between one rock, one bird, one leaf, or one tree, and another, I had none the less envied the naturalist, or natural scientist, with his collections and his museums. If he were asked what he

was doing in the world he had always something to show for it. He could entertain his friends with items of interest which normal persons could understand and appreciate. I could entertain mine only with-"abstractions". What in the world, then, is the philosopher really studying?

The answer, which came to me only long afterward, I have suggested above: the philosopher studies persons. I am not here proposing an academic definition of philosophy -or at best only one more. It will be sufficient to suggest that all the distinctively philosophical problems-the problems of logic, of psychology, of ethics, of the theory of knowledge, and no less of metaphysics-arise from the fact that there are persons in the world. With no persons in the world there would be no problems for philosophy but only problems for science, to be solved neatly and surely by scientific method. Hence the scientist would prefer to ignore the fact of persons, or at any rate to leave it out of his calculation. As a "modern scientist" in particular, he claims to treat the world impersonally; that is to say, to observe and report the objective facts in the world before him and to say nothing of the fact that it is he who ob