Foreword

A FEW YEARS AGO there was published in this country an arresting book entitled Irrational Man. The aim of the author, Mr. William Barrett, was not to show that human beings are in fact irrational much of the time, perhaps most of the time. Every one has been so acutely aware of this for so long that it scarcely needs writing a book about. Instead, Mr. Barrett’s purpose was to show that man has no alternative but to be irrational, since the situation in which human beings find themselves is essentially meaningless and absurd. To be rational presupposes that one can find some sense and meaning in things. But if things have no sense or meaning, what then?

The intent of the present essay is in no wise polemical, particularly not toward Mr. Barrett. But we are entitled to ask, before we settle for irrationality: “What does the alternative of trying to live rationally and intelligently really mean? What is it like to be rational?” In order to answer such a question one need not fall back on his own untutored experience; even if he is happy enough (or presumptuous enough) to draw on his own experience, it will scarcely be an original or novel experience. All of us who are products of Western culture have, either consciously or unconsciously, been to school to the Greeks, to Socrates, to Plato, and to Aristotle.

What follows, therefore, is an account of the ethics of rational man, an ethics that owes its inspiration and articulation largely to the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. But this book is no scholarly treatise. Modern academic scholars in the field of Greek philosophy may be horrified at the cavalier way in which notions vaguely reminiscent of the Stagirite are here scrambled and twisted, pruned and amplified. For this the author makes no apology. His purpose has been not to expound Aristotle but to use him in a modern effort to set forth and justify a rational system of ethics. Anyone who has read Aristotle’s Ethics must have asked himself how those insights and ethical counsels that were so relevant to fourth-century Athens would apply in the cultural and moral situation of the present day. What would the precepts of Aristotle—or of Socrates and Plato—mean, how would they apply, what would they entail if one sought to live by them today?

With an objective that is thus practical and even personal, it becomes possible to explain, and perhaps to justify, certain other sins of omission and commission in what follows. From the standpoint of contemporary academic ethics this book is hopelessly out of step and out of fashion. To point the contrast we may quote the opening paragraphs of one of the more significant treatises on ethics to appear in the last few years:

This book deals not with the whole of ethics, but with a narrowly specialized part of it. Its first object is to clarify the meaning of the ethical terms—such terms as “good,” “right,” “just,” “ought,” and so on. Its second object is to characterize the general methods by which ethical judgments can be proved or supported.

Such a study is related to normative (or “evaluative”) ethics in much the same way that conceptual analysis and scientific method are related to the sciences. One would not expect a book on scientific method to do the work of science itself; and one must not expect to find here any conclusions about what conduct is right or wrong. The purpose of an analytic or methodological study, whether of science or of ethics, is always indirect. It hopes to send others to their tasks with clearer heads and less wasteful habits of investigation. This necessitates a continual scrutiny of what these others are doing, or else analysis of meanings and methods will proceed in a vacuum; but it does not require the analyst, as such, to participate in the inquiry that he analyzes. In ethics any direct participation of this sort might have its dangers. It might deprive the analysis of its detachment and distort a relatively neutral study into a plea for some special code of morals. So although normative questions constitute by far the most important branch of ethics, pervading all of common-sense life, and occupying most of the professional attention of legislators, editorialists, didactic novelists, clergymen, and moral philosophers, these questions must here be left unanswered. The present volume has the limited task of sharpening the tools which others employ.^*

This book, however, does not attempt to sharpen any tools. It does not profess to stand outside ethics and merely to analyze its meanings and methods. Instead, it attempts precisely that “direct participation” in ethics which Mr. Stevenson warns “might have its dangers.” It is true that the job that is here being undertaken may be such as to “deprive the analysis of its detachment.” Still, one wonders whether, when the house is burning or the ship sinking, detachment is quite the proper attitude. I am even willing to admit that what follows will in a sense involve “a plea for some special code of ethics.” But I would not like to admit that a special plea must necessarily involve special pleading.

I am not sure that the analogy really holds between what has come to be known as the philosophy or logic of science, involving analysis of the concepts and methods used in the sciences (as distinct from the sciences themselves), and what might be called the philosophy or logic or perhaps meta-ethics of ethics, involving the study of the logic and language of morals or ethics (as distinct from morals or ethics themselves).

I wonder too whether there may not be something slightly self-righteous in the usual pose of the contemporary ethical philosopher, who modestly claims to confine his attention entirely to questions of the language or logic of ethics, leaving all substantive ethical questions to “legislators, editorialists, didactic novelists, clergymen, and moral philosophers.” It must be very reassuring to the complacency of the present-day professor of ethics to proclaim it beneath his scientific calling to give practical advice in the manner of an editorial writer or a clergyman. As for the philosophers of science, they show respect, not to say veneration, for the scientists. But the philosophers of ethics tend to regard anyone playing the role of moralist as no better than a “phony.” As a result, that branch of ethics which in the foregoing quotation is dubbed “the most important” is the part which is most neglected in today’s academic world. Professors no longer profess it and students no longer study it.

Let it then be frankly acknowledged that this book will have to do with just such normative questions as the currently regnant intelligentsia has come to regard as not philosophically respectable. The reader need not be surprised if he fails to find here the kind of scholastic discussion that tends to divide—and, one is tempted to add, to conquer—latter-day professors of ethics in this country. Not that such discussions are not needed. But even if I had the competence for the undertaking, I should scarcely have the will for it. As a professor, one may relish controversy with other professors; as a teacher, one may needle and cajole one’s students; but as a human being one feels a responsibility to engage in frank and open discussion with other human beings about those moral and ethical questions that have plagued thoughtful men of all ages. In what follows, therefore, my concern will be to consider philosophical difficulties and perplexities in common human terms, rather than in the technical terms of academic controversy.

Political and social questions are not dealt with in this book. It is the individual’s responsibility to himself, not his responsibility to society, that is here being investigated. This omission is deliberate, and not merely for reasons of economy, but also for the sake of a much needed redressing of the balance. Nowadays most of us seem to have fallen into the habit of gauging a man’s worth solely in terms of the contribution he makes to the community. We take it for granted that a big business executive is more important than a laborer, a famous surgeon than an ordinary housewife, a brilliant physicist than a laboratory assistant. But would we not all agree that however distinguished a public official or man of affairs may be, however signal his contributions to science or to the national economy, yet, considered just as a person, as a human being, our man of distinction may turn out to be far from admirable? There is no necessary correlation between a man’s contribution to society and his worth as an individual. This book is concerned with a man’s worth in himself, regardless of any utilitarian estimate that may be placed upon him in virtue of his services to the leviathan of modern society.

Nor does this book deal with religion or the relation of religion to ethics. It is not just in the popular mind that morals seem to be inseparably bound up with religious prohibitions and sanctions. Even in the academic mind, it passes almost for a truism that when one moves from theories about ethics to actual ethical convictions, the latter can be little more than matters of faith and belief, not matters of evidence and knowledge. But this book professes to be through and through a book of philosophy; therefore its argument must rely not on any appeals to revelation, but solely on what used to be known as the natural light of reason.

I believe that ethics can be based on evidence and that it is a matter of knowledge; but I do not claim that this is the whole story. However it may have been with a philosopher like Aristotle, most of us ordinary mortals cannot even know the good life, much less practice it, without some aid from a source outside ourselves. Such an association of ethics with religion is, I believe, entirely compatible with the sort of Aristotelian ethics presented here. But it is not this side of the story that I propose to tell. I wish to set forth a book simply on ethics, ethics without religion, if you will.

H.B.V.

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* Charles L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944, p. 1.