Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘A work of art is not necessarily the worse for the fact that all the propositions comprising it are literally false. But to say that many literary works are largely composed of falsehoods is not to say that they are composed of pseudo-propositions. It is, in fact, very rare for a literary artist to produce sentences which have no literal meaning. And where this does occur, the sentences are carefully chosen for their rhythm and balance. If the author writes nonsense, it is because he considers it most suitable for bringing about the effects for which his writing is designed.’

  Ayer seems to have taken to heart the message of the last part of the Tractatus which describes as nonsense and consigns to silence all our utterances except ‘the propositions of natural science’. However, Ayer seems to have misunderstood Wittgenstein in the same way in which numerous thinkers misunderstand Plato. The ‘picturesque’ structure indicates something beyond it; it is not to be taken literally. That is in the nature (or magic) of metaphysics. Ayer’s book, which may now seem to us brilliant and ingenious, but also unsophisticated and dotty, diminishes the human scene to the scale of a logical puzzle. (Ayer himself, in later prefaces, suggests some, not radical, modifications.) Wittgenstein’s silence indicates the area of value. Ayer’s use of the distinction between fact and value deliberately removes value. His ‘explanation’ of truth, his ‘elimination’ of the transcendent, not least his claim that philosophical thought can only concern uses of language, are more suggestive of the reductionist ruthlessness of the followers of Derrida than of the milder reflections of the empiricist tradition. Moreover, if we reflect now upon computer technology, the restriction of truth-capacity to facts and tautologies may have a reinforced plausibility. Some subsequent linguistic philosophers, styling themselves analysts and not preachers, but unhappy with the idea that moral judgments were just expressions of emotion unconnected with rationality, attempted a rescue by describing them, in post-Kantian and less brutal ways, as persuasions or commands. Gilbert Ryle’s book The Concept of Mind (1949), after discussing Descartes and ‘the ghost in the machine’, discusses, with numerous examples, concepts such as emotion, will, imagination. Even if one disagrees with his behaviourist thesis, his lively descriptions may be read as ‘phenomenology’.

  When we think about morality we want to be comforted by our thoughts and are reluctant to admit that we can say nothing about it. Ayer hailed G. E. Moore as another holder of the view that ‘philosophising is an activity of analysis’, but adding that Moore ‘took a rather different view’ of analysis. This is true; indeed Moore is a shameless preacher, not hesitating to tell us, not only what the concept of (moral) good is, but also what things actually are good. He identified something which he called the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ which was the mistake of defining good, and trying to do so by joining fact and value through a definition such as ‘good is happiness’, ‘good is pleasure’, ‘good is obedience to the Church’. Moore charged Bentham and Mill with having made this mistake. However, Moore was reluctant to abandon the idea that good was something (and so a kind of fact). He reintroduced a transcendent good in the form of a simple property of goodness, to be compared in respect of simplicity with yellow, only ‘non-natural’, whose presence in certain places we are able to intuit: an idea which might be held to work more plausibly for beauty, of which perhaps Moore was thinking.

  Principia Ethica (1903) chapter I, sections 6 — 10:

  ‘If I am asked, “What is good?” my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked, “How is good to be defined?” my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it. But disappointing as these answers may appear, they are of the very last importance. To readers who are familiar with philosophic terminology, I can express their importance by saying that they amount to this: That propositions about the good are all of them synthetic and never analytic; and that is plainly no trivial matter. And the same thing may be expressed more popularly, by saying that, if I am right, then nobody can foist upon us such an axiom as that “Pleasure is the only good” or that “The good is the desired” on the pretence that this is “the very meaning of the word”. Let us, then, consider this position. My point is that “good” is a simple notion, just as “yellow” is a simple notion; that just as you cannot, by any manner of means, explain to anyone who does not already know it, what yellow is, so you cannot explain what good is ... “good” has no definition because it is simple and has no parts ... It may be true that all things which are good are also something else, just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact that Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not “other” but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the “naturalistic fallacy” and of it I shall now endeavour to dispose.’

  J. M. Keynes, reflecting in ‘My Early Beliefs’ (Two Memoirs) upon the influence Moore had upon his disciples in Cambridge, says: ‘We classified as aesthetic experience what is really human experience and somehow sterilised it by this mis-classification.‘ By ‘sterilised’ I assume he means separated it from the messiness of ordinary morals and practical life. Keynes also says: ‘It is remarkable how wholly oblivious Moore managed to be of the qualities of the life of action and also of the pattern of life as a whole. He was existing in a timeless ecstasy. His way of translating his own particular emotions of the moment into the language of generalised abstraction is a charming and beautiful comedy.’ The last two sentences may be less than just, but it can indeed be said that Moore was his own (not unendearing) kind of contemplative. So, good is like yellow in being a simple property not definable in terms of its parts, and also (being non-natural) resembles other entities (such as numbers) which do not in the ordinary (natural) sense exist. The comparisons are striking, but on reflection not illuminating. Indeed they bring out rather how very unlike ‘good’ is to other concepts. ‘Yellow’ can be learnt instantly by ostensive showing, whereas ‘learning the meaning of good’ is a more complex matter. Moore confuses the situation further by his firm choice of the highest goodest goods. ‘By far the most valuable things which we know or can imagine are certain states of consciousness which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.’ (VI 113.) His selection is touching, and if modestly offered as just ‘valuable’ or even ‘very valuable’ might well find acceptance. But his choice does indeed seem to omit (to use Keynes’s words) ‘the pattern of life as a whole’; and is so exclusive as almost to amount to a definition of good in terms of aesthetics and friendship: a form of hedonistic utilitarianism. (‘Valuable’ as pleasing to sophisticated persons.) His idea (attractive to Keynes) that ‘states of mind’ are what matter deserves reflection. Later I shall discuss ‘consciousness’ and its ‘quality’ as coming into consideration in moral philosophy. Moore’s confident taking-for-granted of this concept is one of the more interesting aspects of his thought.

  Moore was of course right to deal firmly with Bentham and Mill in so far as they equated good with happiness – an equation uneasily disturbed by Mill’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures. Moore was mainly read as a critic of the utilitarians although his discussions of other thinkers are worth attention. But the distinction between fact and value, which he took to be implied by his objection to definitions of good (quite apart from his temperament), isolated and diminished his concept of good; as this distinction, in its many guises in moral philosophy, tends to do. I discuss this matter in more general terms later on. Wittgenstein, who offered the distinction in a different style in the Tractatus, of course disagreed with Moore’s views and his philosophical tone, but he respected Moore very much, and elicited from his work items worthy to be discussed: a priv
ilege he did not extend to many people. Moore was regarded later by some as a ‘bad influence’ upon the undergraduates of his time. Keynes sees it otherwise. ‘It was this escape from Bentham, joined with the unsurpassable individualism [my italics] of our philosophy, which has served to protect us from the final reductio ad absurdum of Benthamism known as Marxism’. And ‘indeed it is only states of mind that matter, provided we agree to take account of the pattern of life through time, and give up regarding it as a series of independent instantaneous flashes; but the ways in which states of mind can be valuable, and the objects of them, are more various and also much richer than we allowed for’. Not Marx, not Freud: for Keynes and his friends, ‘the atmosphere of Plato’s dialogues’.

  More recent philosophers have attempted to retain some shadow of the old guaranteeing unity by treating morality in a neo-Kantian sense as non-universal reason or sincere authentic free activity. Thus the individual will takes over the transcendent unifying function, operating as a sun-like source of value, conferring sense upon the world and assembling it systematically around the individual as centre. Impersonal intellect looks after facts, personal will creates values. Structuralism, in so far as it offers itself as ‘scientific’, must profess to be morally neutral; but the large and various volume of structuralist writings contains innumerable value judgments. Benthamite utilitarianism, and that perhaps alone, in its original and in its modern (unacknowledged as such) form, is genuinely pluralist, and makes a more thorough rejection of a unified good, since although morality is defined in terms of a single idea, happiness, the natural muddle of the world re-enters the theory through the ambiguity and diversity of the concept. The fundamentalist pluralism of Hobbes has the same axiomatic individualistic basis; whereas modern technology and orthodox Marxism imply, whether as ‘social reality’ or as dolce vita, a more homogeneous idea of happiness. Bentham and Hobbes stand behind political liberalism, repetitively reminding us of the good old unregenerate idea of diverse human satisfactions; and Benthamite values have also of course worked quietly within the Marxist orthodoxy, ignoring the general myth and pointing to individual and various needs. There is here a constant and recurring return to the obvious. Some form of utilitarianism is probably now the most widely and instinctively accepted philosophy of the western world. (Compare Schopenhauer’s ‘compassion’.) What this view lacks, and needs, as some of its critics point out, is a positive conception of virtue. This should not be thought of as a ‘refutation’ of utilitarian insights, which must always travel with us, but rather as a moral light in which to understand and ‘place’ them. These insights retain an axiomatic status which I shall discuss later. J. S. Mill, aware of Coleridge and pointing on to Moore, posed the question when he used an intuited idea of ‘moral quality’ (higher and lower pleasures) to organise and justify the ‘natural’ conception of happiness: thus making, like Moore, a little metaphysical gesture to indicate a problem he could not solve. For a larger enlightenment we turn to a more detailed and imaginative metaphysic. An uncriticised idea of happiness cannot be the sole basis of an ethical theory. Plato’s idea of truth-seeking knowledge and his ambivalent Eros, and Kant’s particularising idea of duty, play in a more effective manner the necessary role of introducing pluralism into unity and thereby revealing the world.

  Historical change is (in part and fundamentally) change of imagery. This is often prompted by scientific discovery. Think how our idea of our home planet has altered, both as we look back over hundreds of years, and over scores of years; Earth, now, as a travelling spaceship, seen from the outside, vulnerable, lonely, precious. Technological progress can deeply affect our sense of ourselves, as Marxists tried to explain. The agency can be mysterious, darkness moving upon darkness. We are at present involved in deep thought-changes, of which the unattractive word ‘demythologisation’ names some. I have been talking about the aesthetic one-making instincts of metaphysicians, and also about that popular explanatory device, the dichotomy between fact and value (or intellect and will) which haunts theologians as well as philosophers. A related distinction, familiar and influential, is that between public and private. This distinction has an obvious beneficent use in liberal political theory and practice. Moral philosophy must however consider the shadows cast by such distinctions upon modes of individual reflection. The Tractatus, here once again functioning as an elegant and prophetic myth, quietly joins the two dichotomies together. Science and ‘ordinary life’ are public and use public, that is significant, language (or in other words, language), whereas morality and religion are private and ineffable. Language, meaning, is and can only be a structure which rests upon actual or possible (‘ordinary’ or scientific) facts. The Tractatus takes reference to the world, projection of fact into language, as fundamental and unsayable, inaccessible to discussion. ‘A picture cannot depict its pictorial form; it displays it.’ (Or: ‘its method of representation’. Seine Form der Abbildung 2. 172.) These ideas can also, having suffered various sea-changes, be seen in structuralism. The second sentence of the Tractatus, ‘The world is the totality of facts, not of things’, resembles a structuralist insight. Structuralism however makes a further metaphysical move from which Wittgenstein wisely abstained. If we cannot see, or say, how language is able to refer to the world (by looking at both and noting correspondences) then it seems a simple philosophical feat and apt use of Occam’s razor to remove the world. Structuralist thought is then also driven to distinguish discreetly between ‘low’, fairly simple though shifting, ‘ordinary’ and technological, self-referring linguistic codes (naively taken to refer to a pre-existent world, and constituting the main being of ordinary proceedings and ordinary folk) and ‘high’, sophisticated, creative, self-aware, uses of language by scientific geniuses, or by philosophers and poets and poetic writers who, in indirect communications, invent concepts and hint at values. One result of this distinction is that literature is required to be linguistically self-conscious, no longer taken in by the ‘referential fallacy’ (looking through the page into another world), and to treat language as an experimental adventure playground where what is important can only be said by poetic or quasi-poetic means. Early structuralism does not seem to have been aware of Wittgenstein. Lacan produced as novel, in 1956, ideas (for instance about ‘inner processes’, and words not being names) which were current in Cambridge before the 1939 war. In general, for those trained in the analytical philosophical tradition, structuralist writings seem singularly lacking in detailed philosophical reflection.

  In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein abandons the metaphysical, pictorial, method of the Tractatus and deals in a more direct and piecemeal way with questions about meaning and ‘mental contents’, taking the problems away from the simple dichotomy made in his earlier book. One of the emotions likely to be aroused by reading the Investigations is a sense of loss, such as is often expressed by Wittgenstein’s imaginary critic, in spite of the philosopher’s assurances that his arguments leave ‘everything as it is’. Philosophical dichotomies and formulations often communicate this ‘reductive’ feeling, the sense that something essential is now missing. The fact — value distinction in ethics seems thus to reduce our familiar world. A metaphysical nightmare is that ‘value’ may turn out in the end to be illusory, or else something small. What we ‘lose’ in the Investigations is some sort of inner thing. As we pursue Wittgenstein’s arguments, and do his ‘exercises’, about ‘following a rule’ and how meaning is not a ‘mental process’, we may (rightly) become convinced (for instance) that we do not need mental samples to recognise chairs, or memory images to have memories. But we may also end up feeling that we cannot now justify the reality or identity of our most important thoughts and most precious awarenesses. We are losing the detail. (Schopenhauer complained that Kant’s philosophy loses us our ‘rich field of perceptions’.) Wittgenstein’s conclusive polemic against certain philosophical mistakes (such as those made by Hume and Russell) about thinking and meaning may seem also t
o damage some necessary sense of the ‘inner life’. (‘Removed’ so firmly by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind.) The later part of the Investigations indicates points at which Wittgenstein himself felt uncertain. (I shall discuss Wittgenstein’s view of ‘mental contents’ at a later stage.) A justifiable criticism, in epistemology or philosophy of mind, of the role of certain kinds of mental events, may have a less proper influence in ethics, tending for instance towards behaviourism or existentialism. It may be considered that if there is nothing ‘in’ the mind except otiose imagery, daydreams, viscous stuff, (etc.), then morality must consist of de facto conduct or acts of will. In ethics it is always of interest to enquire about a philosopher’s motives, I mean in a general, not detailed personal or ‘psychoanalytical’ sense (though speculation of the latter sort can at least be amusing). Kant’s motives may thus be said to be to justify and delineate science and empirical knowledge, and to segregate and purify morality by connecting it with freedom and reason. The two operations are, as in the Tractatus, interdependent. Kant also wanted, ipso facto, to make an intelligible and safe place for (some form of) religious faith, and something like this might also be said, mutatis mutandis, of Tractatus Wittgenstein. There is an instinctive movement of relief involved in the putting-into-safety of something pure. (Metaphysics as magic.) Compare Wittgenstein’s idea that his philosophy involved a ‘throwing-into-the-lumber room of the whole world’. (Culture and Value, p. 9.) Border-lines must be formed which keep out what is irrelevant and messily confusing. We desire to simplify and clarify our thinking and one way to do this is to gather all the value together in one place. If this is done the question of how to redistribute it must arise (as the question of the relation of the mind to the world arises when the philosopher has separated them). Belief in God is one solution, where we picture God both as pure transcendent Goodness, and also as a personal good-making intelligence active here below. Plato gathers value together in its purest form in the Idea (Form) of the Good, and also sees it as distributed into human variety through the working of truthfulness, knowledge and purified spiritual desire (love, Eros). Kant brings value back to the world through conceptions of truth and justice incarnate in particular situations through the operation of practical reason (the recognition of duties). Plato and Kant are religious philosophers, imbued with a characteristically religious certainty about the fundamental and ubiquitous reality of goodness: their real world is the moral world. Kant could still put science ‘in its place’. In our post-Kantian world, where religious faith wanes and truth gains so much of its prestige from scientific method, this is harder to do. Here it may seem a felicitous move to separate fact and value so as to guarantee the purity of value and the accuracy of fact. This compelling picture, taken as a moral guide or background, is in danger of making truth and value part company. ‘Value’ becomes difficult to discuss. The area of fact becomes more extensive and more present to us (television) and seems more real. Scientific views and methods spread from their proper place in science into peripheral areas. All sorts of theorists (including some philosophers) begin to feel that they must eschew value preferences and discussions of value, and offer themselves as neutral scientific workers. Surely, it may be felt, a clear-cut division of fact and value excludes personal prejudice and amputates whole areas of messy sentimental or muddled pseudo-factual thinking.