1. What is ethics?

JUST WHAT SORT of enterprise is ethics? Is it the wearisome one of telling people what they ought or ought not to do? Or perhaps the gratuitous, even presumptuous, one of lecturing them on what the good life for man must needs consist in? Surely no one but a fool would let himself in for any such undertaking as this. Even the professors of ethics nowadays have had the wit to avoid any semblance of preaching. They would not for a minute consider it their business to instruct students in such time-honored themes as “the difference between right and wrong,” “the good life for man,” or the obligation of being “for God, for country, and for Yale.” No, theirs, they would claim, is the more modest, and, if you will, the more properly philosophical, task of clarifying the meanings and uses of characteristic words and phrases that occur in the language of morals and ethics. Thus a statement to the effect that one ought to pay one’s debts turns out to be an assertion of a different sort from either “v = gt” or “Jack Sprat could eat no fat.” It isn’t like a straightforward statement of fact, and it isn’t like a law of nature either. Is it, then, more on the order of an explicit or implicit command to someone to do something? Or maybe it is an assertion of the existence of a somewhat mysterious, non-natural property of obligatoriness which is held to attach to such courses of action as paying your debts or speaking the truth.

With these and like questions as to the language of morals, the current academic study of ethics seems largely to concern itself. This may be all to the good. To keep professors occupied with mere questions of language, as distinct from questions of substance, could actually be very much in the public interest, many people might say. The only trouble is that to most people it must seem that ethics has to do with more than just the meanings of words and uses of language. Indeed, to the student who naïvely and ingenuously turns his attention to the study of ethics, it must surely seem that what he is seeking to find out is not so much was the word “good” means, as what the good life is, not whether the verb “ought” is more properly used in an imperative or an indicative sense, as whether he himself ought to do this or that. After all, for a man wanting to learn to drive a car, it would be a rather frustrating experience if his instructor consistently refused to tell him what to do, confining his remarks entirely to an analysis of the language used in the drivers’ manuals and refraining from any comment as to whether the actual instructions of the manuals were to be followed or not.

Very well, then, if one feels that ethics has more to do than merely analyze the language of moral discourse, does that mean that in one’s own discourses on ethics he will have to let himself in for edifying disquisitions on the good life, or perhaps for neat, well-packaged instructions on how to be good, in ten easy lessons? It is hard to imagine anything sillier, or more pretentious.

2. Why not consider ethics an art of living?

The comparison with learning to drive a car may prove to be unexpectedly apposite for an understanding of ethics. For what about such things as learning to live or learning how to be human? Are not these things that we have to learn how to do, just as we have to learn how to drive or to lay bricks or to keep accounts or to butcher hogs? It’s true that words are somewhat ambiguous and misleading in this connection. Thus it will no doubt be remarked that as long as one remains alive, one does live; and if one belongs to the species “man” one can’t very well help being a human being. In this sense, living or being human are not so much things that we learn how to do, as things that we either are or are not.

At the same time, it certainly makes sense to speak of living well, as contrasted with making a mess of one’s life. Who is there who is not concerned, in some way or other and however he may express it, with some such thing as getting something out of life, achieving happiness, making the proper adjustment to life, being successful, or perhaps just simply getting along, or maybe even “living it up”? Moreover, whatever form this concern with our own lives may take, we surely recognize that in this enterprise of living we may, and probably will, make mistakes. But still we can always learn. Indeed, the very fact that we see that we do make mistakes means that we have thereby come to have at least some notion of what not making mistakes would be like. In other words, experience would seem to be a teacher in life, just as it is in business or in medicine or in driving a car.

Why not, then, suppose that from experience in life there can be developed something like an art of living, just as from human experience of various kinds there have developed the various arts of medicine, of managing property, of building bridges, of walking tightropes, and of driving cars? Carrying the analogy still further, just as no one is born a good doctor or bricklayer or orator or radio technician, but must first learn the requisite art or technique, so why not say that no one is born a good man, that one must first learn the art of living? Living well, in other words, is like driving well or trying a case well or performing an appendectomy well: it’s an art or technique that one must master, a skill that one must acquire before one can do it well, or perhaps even do it at all.

3. But is living something that one can learn how to do?

At this point the reader may be saying to himself: “The whole idea of morals or ethics being an art comparable to the arts of medicine and engineering is simply preposterous. For unlike any of the genuine arts or techniques, any pretended art of living—supposing that it is legitimate even to use such a term—can be only a matter of opinion, and not a matter of knowledge. That it is better to perform a surgical operation in one way rather than another, or that it is better to construct a bridge using certain types of materials rather than others—these are judgments that can be put to the test and shown to be correct or incorrect. But how is one to test a judgment to the effect that the way of life in the so-called Free World is better than that in the Communist world? How could one ever establish objectively the correctness of a judgment to the effect that being honest with oneself is better than fooling or deluding oneself?”

4. The groves of academe: the divorce between learning and living

Supposing this to be the judgment of the reader, there is no denying the countless cold, hard facts that would seem to warrant even harsher judgments. Chief among these is the arresting and embarrassing fact of modern science and scholarship itself. For let’s face it: modern learning does not have anything to do with living, or being learned with being human. That is to say, if there were such a thing as.a genuine art of living, would not this mean that there would have to be a legitimate and recognized body of knowledge underlying such an art and making it possible? But where is one to find any such body of knowledge that could correspond to the art of living, in the way in which, say, modern physics corresponds to modern engineering? Suppose that one were to thumb through the voluminous printed course offerings of a modern college or university. Where would one find a course on how to live? And if one did find such a course, the conclusions one would draw would not be very complimentary to any department or school that presumed to dispense knowledge on any such topic as that.

Or look at the matter in this way, this time not with respect to areas of scientific and scholarly knowledge, but with respect to the scientists and scholars themselves: Is there any noticeable, to say nothing of any proper, correlation between what a man knows and what he is, that is, his character as a human being? Take modern physics again: does a man’s skill and competence as a physicist have the slightest bearing on the kind of person he is? May a man not be a brilliant physicist and at the same time be mean and envious, or vain and conceited, or a false friend, or a Jew-baiter? I remember from student days in Heidelberg, just at the outset of the Nazi regime, hearing students talk of a distinguished professor of physics at the University who used to open his lectures with the threatening question: “Is there a Jew anywhere in the room?”

Nor need one imagine that the situation is so far different in the humanities from what it is in the sciences. There, too, the facts seem equally inescapable. A man may be an exceedingly estimable person in every way—a good companion, a loyal friend, a responsible citizen, a conscientious worker—and still be only a very mediocre Chaucerian scholar. And vice versa, no matter what a man’s particular area of scholarly competence may be, whether in mediaeval history, or English literature, or musicology or what not—any and all such erudition seems to have no very direct bearing on the man’s own worth and excellence as a human being.

The patent irrelevance of learning to life has become the occasion of some of the most pointed and amusing existentialist satire.

Such an abstract thinker, one who neglects to take into account the relationship between his abstract thought and his own existence as an individual, not careful to clarify this relationship to himself, makes a comical impression upon the mind even if he is ever so distinguished, because he is in process of ceasing to be a human being . . . such an abstract thinker is a duplex being: a fantastic creature who moves in the pure being of abstract thought, and on the other hand, a sometimes pitiful professorial figure which the former deposits, about as when one sets down a walking stick. When one reads the story of such a thinker’s life (for his writings are perhaps excellent), one trembles to think of what it means to be a man. If a lace-maker were to produce ever so beautiful laces, it nevertheless makes one sad to contemplate such a poor stunted creature. And so it is a comical sight to see a thinker who in spite of all pretensions, personally existed like a nincompoop; who did indeed marry, but without knowing love or its power, and whose marriage must therefore have been as impersonal as his thought; whose personal life was devoid of pathos or pathological struggles, concerned only with the question of which university offered the best livelihood.¹

5. Is it not a paradox that “learning” seems never to be
learning how to live?

The same point can be brought home even more forcibly when approached from a slightly different angle. In the case of those of us who have gone in for scientific or scholarly careers, suppose we simply ask ourselves, why pursue learning? C. P. Snow has one of his characters face up to this question, and his answer not only has the ring of truth; it is also exceedingly revealing:

What had I told Audrey were the reasons why men did science? I should still say much the same, except that nowadays I should allow more for accident; many men become scientists because it happens to be convenient and they may as well do it as anything else. But the real urgent drives remain: there seemed to be three kinds. Three kinds of reason to give to oneself, that is. One can do science because one believes that practically and effectively it benefits the world. A great many scientists have had this as their chief conscious reason: for me it never was and at thirty it seemed more foolish than ten years before. . . .

One can do science because it represents the truth. That or something like it, was the reason I had given in the past. So far as I had a conscious justification, it would always have been this. Yet it was not good enough, I thought, watching a red-sailed boat running between an island and the shore. Science was true in its own field; it was perfect within its restrictions. One selected one’s data—set one’s puzzle for oneself, as it were—and in the end solved the puzzle by showing how they fitted other data of the same kind. We know enough of the process now to see the quality of the results it can give us; we know, too, those sides of experience it can never touch. However much longer science is done, since it sets its own limits before it can begin, those limits must remain. It is rather as though one was avidly interested in all the countryside between this town and the next: one goes to science for an answer, and is given a road between the two. To think of this as the truth, to think of “the truth” at all as a unique ideal, seemed to me mentally naive to a degree. . . .

One can also do science because one enjoys it. Naturally anyone who believes wholeheartedly, either in its use or its truth, will at the same time enjoy it. Constantine, for example, gains more simple hedonistic enjoyment from research than most men from their chosen pleasures; and though he is the most devoted scientist I know, there are many men to whom enjoyment comes as a consequence of faith. But I think it is also possible to enjoy science without believing overmuch in its use, or having any views upon the value of its truths. Many people like unravelling puzzles. Scientific puzzles are very good ones, with reasonable prizes. So that either without examining the functions of science, being indifferent to them or taking them for granted, a number of men go in for research as they would for law; living by it, obeying its rules, and thoroughly enjoying the problem-solving process. That is a perfectly valid pleasure; among them you can find some of the most effective of scientists.²

In the context of our present investigation, the interesting thing about these reasons for doing science, or, more generally, for devoting one’s life to scientific and scholarly research, lies not so much in what such reasons explicitly affirm, as in what they fail to mention or even hint it. Isn’t it significant that none of the reasons here given for the pursuit of knowledge has anything to do with what knowledge can do for the person or character of the knower himself? After all, one’s life as a scientist can be of the greatest benefit to mankind, it can even be a life devoted to the pursuit of truth for its own sake, yes, it can be a life taken up with doing precisely what one most enjoys doing; and yet none of these activities or achievements in a life of science and learning provides any guarantee that the one who lives such a life will be anything but pompous and foolish, perhaps dull and drab, a mere “hollow man,” in fact. Why, then, shouldn’t one seek knowledge precisely for the reason that through such knowledge one may learn how to avoid being a hollow man? Perhaps such knowledge will help him discover what Pope once felicitously termed “that secret to each fool that he’s an ass.” But somehow, modern scientific and scholarly knowledge does not seem to lend itself to any such enterprise.

Why shouldn’t it, though? For it has not always been so with knowledge. On the contrary, in the case of Socrates, for example, the pursuit of knowledge was for no other purpose than that of finding out how to live. “Know thyself” was the inscription from the Oracle of Delphi which Socrates took as the motto of his own quest for knowledge. In fact, as is well known, he completely gave over his own earlier interest in the cosmos and devoted himself entirely to this pursuit of a knowledge which he called self-knowledge. Not only that, but he constantly exhorted his fellow Athenians that they turn from their customary pursuits and occupy themselves with themselves and with the good of their own souls:

. . . and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting any one whom I meet and saying to him after my manner: You, my friend—a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens,—are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all?

. . . I say again that daily to discourse about virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living. . . .³

Moreover, when one stops to think about it, it appears that nearly all of the great world religions have likewise had for their central concern the disclosure to men of what one might designate quite simply as the way to live, the very word “way” being itself peculiarly significant and recurrent in this connection. Did not Christ declare, “I am the way, the truth and the life?” And likewise, in both Taoism and Confucianism the central preoccupation is with the Tao or the “way.” In Buddhism, it is the “path,” the noble eightfold path.

6. Is there no escaping this paradox?

What are we to make of all this? Are we to say that the whole of modern academic learning has somehow taken a wrong turning, that instead of being concerned with finding for us and demonstrating to us the way we should live, it has let itself be beguiled into pursuing a type of knowledge that has no relevance to us as human beings, or, better, no relevance to the knower, i.e., to the scientist and scholar himself? Or must we say that it is Socrates who was mistaken, rather than our modern scholars and scientists, that the entire Socratic quest for a knowledge which, to use a theological term, would be a “saving” knowledge, which would actually provide the knower himself with a vision of the way, the truth, and the life—that this Socratic quest was both misdirected and hopeless? Perhaps Socrates’ mistake consisted precisely in his assumption that self-knowledge in his sense could actually be a matter of knowledge, that it would be possible for human beings through investigation and reflection to discover the way in which they should live. Continuing in the same vein, we might further remark that such a thing as the “way” might be revealed to a man in a religious context, as something that he might take on faith; but that it is anything that one can know in any of the usual senses of “know”—this would seem to be quite out of the question, to judge from the example of present-day academic knowledge.

7. A currently acceptable and dangerously uncritical way out:
a knowledge of behavior

However, there is another facet to this whole question of the possibility of genuine ethical or moral knowledge, on which modern science and technology can perhaps shed a certain light. It will be remembered that at the outset of our discussion, the suggestion was thrown out that perhaps morals and ethics might be understood on the analogy of the various arts and techniques, that just as one has to learn how to walk or to read or to lay brick, so also one has to learn how to live and to be human. But no sooner do we reflect a little on the example of modern technology, than it begins to look as if the application of scientific knowledge were the very last thing that could serve as a model for the sort of thing which we want to call moral or ethical knowledge.

If such moral or ethical knowledge must needs involve a knowledge of oneself, in Socrates’ sense—a “relating of one’s abstract thought to one’s own existence as an individual,” to paraphrase the earlier quoted phrase from Kierkegaard⁴—surely this is something that modern technology never does, and is in principle incapable of doing. True, if we take loosely enough the somewhat fatuous phrase, “the relevance of knowledge to life,” there is no doubt that modern technology provides a truly amazing example of the relevance of knowledge to life. For just think of the human needs and the human wants that can now be fulfilled in modern industrial society and that were simply incapable of being fulfilled in anything like the same degree or with anything like the same expertness in other ages of the world’s history.

Yet what is needed for ethics is knowledge not of how to control nature, but of how to control oneself.

But interestingly enough, no sooner does one, in the spirit of modern technology, begin to address oneself to the task of controlling the human self, than one tends to turn the human self into just one more object among others in the natural world; and before one is through, one will be devising schemes for manipulating and controlling human selves, much as one manipulates and controls rats, fruit flies, and coal tar products. Not only do human selves cease to be selves in such a context, being treated as no more than just so many natural objects, but also—and this is even more serious, so far as ethics is concerned—the original enterprise of controlling oneself is lost sight of completely, and our would-be expert in how to live turns out to be not a master of his own life, but only a master in conditioning and controlling the lives of others.

We have but to turn to Gabriel Marcel to read a very revealing account of how all of us tend to view our fellow human beings, once we fall into the current habit of considering ways and means of applying modern scientific knowledge to the conduct of life, after the manner of modern technology.

The characteristic feature of our age seems to me to be what might be called the misplacement of the idea of function, taking function in its current sense which includes both the vital and the social functions.

The individual tends to appear both to himself and to others as an agglomeration of functions. As a result of deep historical causes, which can as yet be understood only in part, he has been led to see himself more and more as a mere assemblage of functions, the hierarchial interrelation of which seems to him questionable or at least subject to conflicting interpretations.

Marcel then goes on to mention first the so-called vital functions, after this the social functions—“those of the consumer, the producer, the citizen, etc.”—, and finally the psychological functions. He then continues:

So far we are still dealing only with abstractions, but nothing is easier than to find concrete illustrations in this field.

Travelling on the Underground, I often wonder with a kind of dread what can be the inward reality of the life of this or that man employed on the railway—the man who opens the doors, for instance, or the one who punches the tickets. Surely everything both within him and outside him conspires to identify this man with his functions—meaning not only with his functions as worker, as trade union member or as voter, but with his vital functions as well. The rather horrible expression ‘time table’ perfectly describes his life. So many hours for each function. Sleep too is a function which must be discharged so that the other functions may be exercised in their turn. The same with pleasure, with relaxation; it is logical that the weekly allowance of recreation should be determined by an expert on hygiene; recreation is a psycho-organic function which must not be neglected any more than, for instance, the function of sex. We need go no further; this sketch is sufficient to suggest the emergence of a kind of vital schedule; the details will vary with the country, the climate, the profession, etc., but what matters is that there is a schedule.

It is true that certain disorderly elements—sickness, accidents of every sort—will break in on the smooth working of the system. It is therefore natural that the individual should be overhauled at regular intervals like a watch (this is often done in America). The hospital plays the part of the inspection bench or the repair shop. . . .

As for death, it becomes, objectively and functionally, the scrapping of what has ceased to be of use and must be written off as total loss.⁵

Such a tendency to disintegrate one’s fellow man into a mere assemblage of functions seems to be the inevitable accompaniment of our efforts to apply our scientific knowledge in the management of men’s lives. But it must not be supposed that such a pulverization and disintegration must necessarily lead to the individual’s unhappiness. On the contrary, Marcel’s “man in the underground” may well be the most contented and self-satisfied of men, perhaps even distressingly so. For as Huxley has dourly observed:

There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays); it is demonstrably inefficient—and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and school-teachers. But their methods are still crude and unscientific.⁶

8. Must we abandon the hope that ethics can be an art or a science?

But enough of this. What more is needed to show the folly and futility of trying to regard ethics as an art of living? So far from morals and ethics being in any way like the arts, it would now seem that the very idea of applying knowledge to life, in the manner of art or technology, would be absolutely ruinous to ethics. Instead of human beings leading examined lives as was envisaged by Socrates, any so-called art of living seems to lead to a situation in which human beings would become like so many cattle, herded and tended by various behavioral engineers and experts on living.

Why say more? Why not just acknowledge that there is no use pretending to any so-called moral or ethical knowledge? Socrates’ project of an ethical knowledge that would be a self-knowledge seems completely out of line with our modern conception of knowledge, as this manifests itself in present-day science and scholarship. And as for the project of an art of living or an art of being human, comparable to the other arts and techniques, this would appear to be not merely futile, when viewed in the light of modern technology, but actually dangerous and wrong-headed.

Besides, isn’t it a truism nowadays that morals and ethics are relative matters, that is to say, matters of opinion, not of knowledge? Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that ethical relativism has become almost a sine qua non of the educated man, a sort of badge of the modern intellectual. One can still, perhaps, venture with impunity to admire examples of courage or integrity or decency, but one can hardly stand up and claim to know what is right and what is wrong without being laughed out of court, or at least out of a cocktail party.

9. Back to Methuselah and down with relativism

Perhaps there are worse fates. At any rate, I must assert unequivocally that I for one think that it is possible for men to know what is right and what is wrong. I would even go so far as to say that to assert anything else can only lead one into a quite untenable, even if often unnoticed, inconsistency. Ethical relativism, in other words, is, I believe, not just an indefensible position in philosophy; it is untenable in life itself.

To the end, however, of bringing off a full-dress refutation of ethical relativism, we should perhaps first take time to consider briefly just what the sources are of such an attitude toward ethics. If I mistake not, these sources are two, the one involving what might be called factual considerations, the other logical or linguistic considerations.

The so-called factual considerations are in a way so obvious in this day of higher education and academic sophistication as scarcely to deserve mention: it is a fact that men’s moral and ethical judgments do seem to be relative to their civilization, their culture, their social class, their physical environment, yes, even to the biological and psychological dispositions of the individuals themselves. Nor is this fact attested to merely by the data of anthropology and sociology. In addition, countless psychological tests have been devised, the results of which appear to confirm unquestionably the relativity of men’s value judgments.

Despite this impressive array of seemingly incontrovertible evidence, there is at least one respect in which this evidence is not conclusive. The mere fact of diversity in human moral standards does not in principle preclude the possibility of at least some of these standards being correct and others incorrect. For instance, consider a somewhat analogous situation in the modern natural sciences. It would not be difficult to show that in the course of the world’s history theories of the physical universe have been almost as many and as varied and as relative as systems of morals and ethics. The ancient Egyptians doubtless gave entirely different explanations of physical change from those offered by contemporary physicists. And for all I know the astronomy of the ancient Babylonians was as different from that of the Chinese in the Ming dynasty as the Ptolemaic astronomy of medieval Europe is different from the astronomy of the present-day Einsteinian universe. Yet no one would conclude from such evidence that there is no basis in fact for a real science of physics or astronomy. Why, then, from the mere diversity of moral codes and systems of ethics, do we tend to conclude that morals and ethics cannot be genuine arts or sciences having a real basis in fact?

One might reply to this that while in former times theories of the physical universe were no doubt a relative matter, being mere idle speculations, determined by the peculiar prejudices of the age, the class, the culture, or the particular astronomer or physicist, in the modern period all this has changed: scientific theories now have a truly objective basis, as witness the extraordinary unanimity of scientists the world over. That is to say, no matter what the culture or the country or the economic system in which the modern scientist lives, he can still, as a scientist, understand and appreciate the achievements of other scientists everywhere.

This fact of comparative unanimity among scientists at present might provide at least some ground for supposing that science had at last been put on an objective basis, while morals or ethics had not; but even so, such evidence is still not really conclusive. To suppose that it was would be tantamount to holding that the determination of truth in science is no more than an affair of counting noses among scientists. And one could then go on to argue that since a plebiscite among moralists would yield nothing like the impressive results of a plebiscite among scientists, the palm of knowledge would have to be accorded to science, whereas ethics could claim to be no more than a matter of opinion.

10. The logical difficulties of claiming a factual knowledge in
matters of ethics

The mere fact of diversity in moral and ethical opinion does not suffice to prove the impossibility in principle of moral and ethical knowledge: the whole world might be wrong and a single individual right. However, the case for ethical relativism need not rest on mere factual considerations; on the contrary, there are any number of considerations of a very different sort that lie ready at hand for the defense of such relativism. For it has become almost a dogma of the current intellectual scene to suppose that a radical distinction must always be drawn between facts and values, between “is” and “ought,” between the real and the ideal. Since ethics by definition must presumably concern itself with values, as contrasted with facts, the conclusion seems inescapable that ethics is without objective or factual basis. Indeed, given these presuppositions, ethics has nothing to do with the real order, but only with the ideal—with what ought to be, rather than with what is.

In further confirmation of this conclusion, one has only to consider the logical difficulty, not to say impossibility, of ever establishing a normative or ethical judgment. For so far as empirical evidence goes, this is always evidence of what is so, of what actually is the case. But the ideal, or that which only ought to be, is in principle never observable. Even if it be supposed that in a given instance the ideal has not remained a mere ideal, but has actually been realized, it would still seem that its character of being ideal would be something quite above and apart from its actual properties.

For is it not true that scientific descriptions of actual things and events in the real world never seem to take account of whether these natural happenings are right or wrong, good or bad? Thus that water flows down hill may be taken to be a fact of the natural world. But that it is right or wrong, or good or bad, that water should behave in this way—any such consideration of a moral or ethical nature seems not only irrelevant in this connection, but downright silly.

For that matter, even the social sciences and sciences dealing with human behavior usually pride themselves on being scrupulous in their objectivity; and this is interpreted to mean that they refrain from any and all value judgments. An economist may study the phenomenon of slave labor, pointing out the various consequences of employing this means of production, and whether and under what circumstances such forced labor might or might not contribute to greater national productivity. But as to whether human slavery is right or wrong, morally defensible or indefensible—on this subject, while it might be hoped that as a human being the economist would have his private opinion, as an economist he can only protest that he has no objective knowledge one way or the other. Likewise, in anthropology, sociology, and psychology, the distinction is constantly being made between describing human behavior in one’s role as a scientist and passing judgment upon such behavior in one’s role as a person or as a citizen, the former being in the nature of objectively verifiable knowledge, whereas the latter is held to be no more than mere personal, private opinion.

One may deplore this ethical neutrality of modern science and complain that it has the effect of making scientists pander alike to dictators and to democracies. Be this as it may, how is one to get round the fact that value judgments do seem to be of a very different logical type from factual judgments? There is no way in which they can be objectively tested and verified. Nor does it seem possible even to make it intelligible just how the values which are ascribed to things can actually inhere in the things to which they are ascribed. Things are what they are objectively and in fact, but the values which they are said to have, they apparently can have only in the minds of the persons who judge them to be valuable.

Little wonder, then, that the moral or ethical dimension of things is not amenable to scientific investigation or verification. Be the facts what they may, one can neither find values in them nor infer values from them. And as for what is so being tantamount to what ought to be so, the “is” never provides the slightest clue as to any kind of an “ought.” The two belong to logically quite different orders, and never the twain shall meet.

11. The refutation of relativism

Must all ethics, then, be written off as a hollow sham? Perhaps not. For the traditional disciplines of philosophy have a way of outdoing even old soldiers: they not only “never die”; they don’t even “fade away.” And so it may well prove to be with ethics.

Isn’t there, indeed, some way in which the current criticisms of ethics can be met and answered, so as to rehabilitate the subject once more and make it a respectable scientific discipline? To this end, let us again remind ourselves of just what the thrust of these criticisms was. Briefly, it was to the effect that ethical judgments are ultimately without any basis in fact. Hence any and all human convictions as to what is right or wrong, good or bad, cannot possibly be other than relative and arbitrary.

Very well; but let us consider for a moment what would be the probable consequences of such a relativistic destruction of ethics. Offhand, it might be supposed that no sooner had men become convinced that morals and ethics were without foundation and that their various prohibitions and prescriptions were no longer binding, than the lid would be off and all hell would break loose. Certainly it is not hard to imagine how, at least with certain individuals, this might be the consequence of ethical relativism. For example, take a teen-age youth with normal sex impulses, whose strict upbringing had led him to believe that sex relations outside marriage are evil and wrong. Comes now an up-to-date moral philosopher who succeeds in convincing the young man that all such moral restraints stem merely from his Puritan upbringing and hence are quite without justification; indeed, they are but relative to this old-fashioned and now outmoded religious culture. Is it hard to imagine what effects such new-found convictions will have upon our young friend’s consequent behavior?

One has only to reflect a bit, however, to realize that an excited casting off of all restraints is not a necessary or inevitable consequence of becoming convinced of the truth of ethical relativism. If it is true that all moral norms and standards of value are relative and, in this sense, arbitrary, it follows that no one set of values is superior to any other: all are equally good, or equally worthless, however one may prefer to express it. But viewed in this light, lust begins to appear as having really no more to recommend it than chastity, nor drunkenness than sobriety, nor prodigality than thrift. More generally, indeed, it begins to look as if a complete freedom from all the lets and hindrances of social convention would not really be any better than obedience and conformity. Accordingly, the wearied moral skeptic, who decides that it is less trouble after all simply to go along with everyone else and abide by the moral standards of the community, is being just as consistent—or inconsistent—in his ethical relativism as is the rebellious and hot-blooded youth whose impulsive reaction to relativism is to regard it as a free passport to wine, women, and song.

Nor are these the only variants on the possible consequences of ethical relativism. One has but to look at that very readable and plausible little book of the American anthropologist, Dr. Ruth Benedict. Entitled Patterns of Culture, the book attempts to exploit some of the wealth of modern anthropological research in support of a thesis of thoroughgoing ethical relativism. After all, Dr. Benedict argues, different human cultures, with their widely varying patterns, are to be regarded as “travelling along different roads in pursuit of different ends, and these ends and these means in one society cannot be judged in terms of those of another society, because essentially they are incommensurable.”⁷

What may we suppose to be the consequences of such a recognition of relativism in the eyes of Professor Benedict? Oddly enough, as she views the matter, ethical relativism offers to human beings neither an invitation to license nor the tired counsels of skeptical pessimism; instead, it provides an impressive object lesson in tolerance.

The truth of the matter is rather that the possible human institutions and motives are legion, on every plane of cultural simplicity or complexity, and that wisdom consists in a greatly increased tolerance toward their divergencies. No man can thoroughly participate in any culture unless he has been brought up and has lived according to its forms, but he can grant to other cultures the same significance to their participants which he recognizes in his own.⁸

And in her final chapter Professor Benedict seems to turn moralist herself, sternly lecturing her readers that: “Just as we are handicapped in dealing with ethical problems so long as we hold to an absolute definition of morality,^* so we are handicapped in dealing with human society so long as we identify our local normalities with the inevitable necessities of existence.”⁹ And so on, right up to the final eloquence of her concluding sentences:

The recognition of cultural relativity carries with it its own values, which need not be those of the absolutist philosophies. It challenges customary opinions and causes those who have been bred to them acute discomfort. It rouses pessimism because it throws old formulae into confusion, not because it contains anything intrinsically difficult. As soon as the new opinion is embraced as customary belief, it will be another trusted bulwark of the good life. We shall arrive then at a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as new bases for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence.¹⁰

While we are still bathing in the gentle warmth of such noble anthropological sentiments, it may be instructive to turn right around and expose ourselves to some rather more hard and gusty utterances of that late great master of cynicism and bombast, Benito Mussolini. Indeed, Mussolini’s words (written in 1921) might also serve as an ironic commentary on Professor Benedict’s preaching of tolerance on the text of relativism:

In Germany relativism is an exceedingly daring and subversive theoretical construction (perhaps Germany’s philosophical revenge which may herald the military revenge). In Italy, relativism is simply a fact. . . . Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition. . . . If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be the bearers of an objective, immortal truth . . . then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. . . . From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.¹¹

But why bother with further examples? These suffice to indicate that however plausible and even unanswerable the evidence would appear to be in support of a purely relativistic attitude in ethics, yet as soon as one asks what meaning and import such an attitude would have for one’s own life and conduct, the answers turn out to be perplexingly confused and ambiguous. For one person, relativism means rebellion and libertinism; for another, conservatism and conformity. For one, it implies a greater tolerance and understanding of one’s fellow men; for another, it justifies the most ruthless intolerance and the arbitrary imposing of one’s own will upon others.

To make matters even worse, the consequences of such relativism are not only ambiguous, but also on closer scrutiny each of them turns out to involve a curious internal inconsistency. To return for a moment to Professor Benedict, is it not strange that having begun by proclaiming the utter relativity of all standards of value, she ends by preaching the gospel of tolerance? Presumably, if Professor Benedict is to remain faithful to her own principles, she must recognize that the value of tolerance is strictly relative to the particular cultural background which happens to have been her own. But suppose someone from a different cultural background has been brought up to believe that tolerance is not a virtue, but rather a sign of folly and weakness, the wise and courageous course being one of strict intolerance toward all divergencies from one’s own cultural norm. What could Miss Benedict say to this? She could hardly disagree with such an advocate of intolerance, or criticize him for being mistaken, for this would be tantamount to judging the values of one society in terms of those of another. In fact, any such criticism would reflect that very spirit of intolerance toward peoples of other societies and cultures which Miss Benedict herself has made such a point of condemning. On the other hand, Miss Benedict could no more agree with such a hypothetical advocate of intolerance than she could disagree. For to agree would mean that she was conceding the superiority of the values of intolerance over those of tolerance—a stand which would doubtless convict her not merely of inconsistency, but of hypocrisy.

The predicament in which we have sought to place Professor Benedict is really not one of her own making, but is—in part at least—an inescapable predicament of anyone and everyone who would be a relativist in matters of ethics. For we might as well come right out now and unmask the battery from which we have been bombarding the various positions of relativism. As we see it, ethical relativism in any form is a radically inconsistent and thoroughly untenable position to try to hold in philosophy.

It is important to fix the precise nature of the inconsistency of such relativism. Unlike what might be called general relativism, or out-and-out philosophical skepticism, ethical relativism is not inconsistent in its very statement and formulation. When general philosophical skepticism is reduced to its simplest and crudest terms, the skeptic’s position comes down to assertions of this sort: “I know that no one knows anything” or “The truth is that truth is unattainable.” Assertions such as this are manifest self-contradictions.^* That is why it may quite justly be said that any position of thorough-going relativism or skepticism in philosophy is untenable even in theory: the position cannot even be formulated and stated without contradiction.

On the other hand, when the relativism in question is simply a relativism in regard to matters of ethics and not in regard to human knowledge generally, there does not seem to be the same inconsistency. For one can perfectly well assert without any manifest contradiction such things as “I know that, when it comes to questions of ethics, no one knows anything”; or “The truth is that truth about values or about distinctions between right and wrong and good and evil, etc., is unattainable.” Here, obviously, there is no logical inconsistency, i.e., no inconsistency in the very formulation of the position of ethical relativism itself.

But although there is no logical inconsistency, there is what one might call a practical inconsistency. Take the case of any convinced ethical relativist like Professor Benedict or the teenage youth or Mussolini. If the foregoing analysis be correct, there is no inconsistency involved in his merely holding or subscribing to a position of relativism as such. The only trouble is that no human being can stop with just having convictions, he also has to live and to act. But to act is to choose and to choose is to manifest some sort of preference for one course of action over another. However, to manifest any such human preference means that, consciously or unconsciously, implicitly or explicitly, one has made a judgment of value as to which course of action is the better or the wiser or the more suitable or preferable. But what kind of a standard of value could the ethical relativist employ in making such judgments? The whole point of his relativism lies precisely in the fact that he intends to challenge the validity of any and every standard of value. On what possible basis, then, can the relativist act and choose and manifest his preference for doing one thing rather than another?

Caught up in such a predicament, the relativist no doubt may try to reason his way out in some such manner as this. He may try to employ his very relativism and skepticism in regard to all standards of value as if it were itself a kind of standard of value. Thus we can imagine him saying to himself, in effect: “Since all standards of value are utterly without foundation, since no way of life or course of action is really superior to any other, then the sensible thing for me to do is

(1) to cultivate an attitude of greater tolerance toward the various modes of life and patterns of behavior that men have chosen for themselves (Miss Benedict), or

(2) to create my own set of values and attempt to enforce them with all the energy of which I am capable (Mussolini), or

(3) to throw off all moral standards and norms of conduct and simply follow the lead of my impulses and inclinations (the liberated youth), or

(4) to go along with the crowd and merely abide by the standards of the community of which I am a member, this being the line of least resistance and the one least likely to get me into trouble and difficulty (the cynical skeptic).”

But unhappily, assuming that the relativist does reason in some such way as this, it is obvious that the reasoning will not bear scrutiny even for an instant. For the fallacy is only too transparent in the attempted inference from the utter relativity of all moral norms and standards of value to a course of action which the relativist considers to be the wisest and most sensible for him to follow under the circumstances. For “wiser” and “more sensible” in this connection are but synonyms for “better” or “preferable.” Hence, put in its baldest form, the relativist’s reasoning amounts to no more than a glaring non sequitur: “Since no course of action is really better or superior to any other, I conclude that the better course of action for me to follow would be thus and so.”

Little wonder that under these circumstances the practical consequences of ethical relativism should be as various and as conflicting as those exemplified by Miss Benedict and Signor Mussolini. Indeed, in the light of the analysis we have just carried out, we can now see that no matter what practical implications one seeks to derive from such relativism, they are bound to involve one in an inconsistency, there being no possible way in which the very denial of all standards of better and worse can itself be transformed into a kind of standard of better and worse. Nor is there any way in which the relativist can avoid the practical inconsistency of his position. For however convinced he may be of the relativity of all norms and standards of choice, he must nonetheless act and make choices himself. Indeed, even if per impossibile he were to try to evade ever having to make any sort of a choice, his policy of evasion would itself be the result of a kind of choice and would involve at least an implicit judgment to the effect that such a course of evasion was the best one or the least bad one for him to pursue under the circumstances.

One is almost tempted to suggest that there is no other way for an ethical relativist to escape the inconsistency of his position than by having the good fortune to be struck dead, or to be rendered non compos mentis, immediately upon becoming convinced of the truth of relativism, and before he has had a chance to make so much as a single choice or decision on the basis of his new-found convictions. Such, however, would seem to be a cruel fate to wish even upon an ethical relativist, and surely a high price to pay merely for consistency. Wouldn’t it be easier for him to forgo his relativism altogether?

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*A remark might be made in passing on Professor Benedict’s use of the word “absolute,” in speaking of an “absolute definition of morality.” It is not unusual for ethical relativists to label their opponents “absolutists,” the implication being that claims to absolutism in knowledge are about as fantastic and old-fashioned as claims to absolutism in monarchy. Nor is there any doubt that, linguistically, when one searches for a word that one can conveniently oppose to “relative,” the only word that readily comes to mind is “absolute.” And yet it is interesting that, so far as scientific knowledge is concerned, no one nowadays would venture to say that such knowledge was a purely relative matter. But does anyone for this reason consider that scientific knowledge is an absolute knowledge, or that scientists themselves are absolutists? And if scientists can enjoy an immunity from the dilemma of relativism or absolutism, why may not moral philosophers as well?

*I am disregarding here the so-called type difficulties which have led some modern logicians to regard such statements as being not so much self-contradictory as improperly formed and hence are not proper statements at all.