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Moral Talking and Moral Living
Solace For Obsessionals
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
People unacquainted with moral philosophy suppose that its business is to tell us the difference between right and wrong. Many moral philosophers, unfortunately, seem to agree with them, to the extent, at any rate, of taking it for granted that there is some one divison of actions into two classes, which division is of some especial or even unique significance. Actions, they have supposed, are either right or wrong. If they are right, then they must and ought to be done, and to do them is our duty. If they are wrong, then they must not and ought not to be done, and it is our duty not to do them. If we do what is right, and do this because it is right, and not just because it suits us, then we have performed a morally good action, and we deserve praise or commendation. If we have done something which is wrong, then we have performed a morally bad action, and deserveblame, and possibly punishment. Finally, a man manifests his moral goodness by performing, from a sense of duty, those actions which belong to the first class, and omitting those which belong to the second class; since there are no other ways in which actions may be classified morally, he has ample oppo tunity for exercising his talents, and the morally good man, or the conscientious man, or the dutiful man, becomes the archetype of what a man ought to be.
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page 319 note 1 There can also be a performative use of ‘duty’. If the sergeant says to two new recruits ‘It is your duty to clean the latrines and yours to peel potatoes’ it would seem that he is not making statements about what their duties in fact are, but actually using the phrase ‘It is your duty ….’ as a means of allocating duties. It was not Private A's duty to peel the potatoes before the sergeant said that it was. This use of ‘It is your duty ….’ is hence performative, and means something like ‘I hereby allocate you the task of ….;’. Such a use cannot account for many cases, for ‘duty’, in this sense, can only be used by people who are entitled to allocate people tasks, in speaking to the people over whom they have this authority. Normally,however, I am not entitled to allocate tasks to the people to whom I make moral pronouncements.
There are also two theories which, if they are true, would mean that the whole of morality is quite properly comprehended under doing one's duty. If there is a God, who allocates tasks to his creatures, he may have allocated to them the task of caring for the whole of mankind, etc. In this case, it would be a true statement,
not a false one, that benevolence is a duty, for God will charge each man with the care of every other and the whole of morality will consist in obeying his commands, and performing those tasks he has allocated to us; hence those who believe that this is so are not speaking improperly when they say things are duties which are not tasks allocated to us by any man or group of men. It is perhaps from hence that there arises, in the minds of many religious people, the feeling that there is some inconsistency between maintaining that there is no God, but that men do have duties; at least, if there is no God, our duties are more restricted than these people suppose them to be.
page 323 page 1 I once tried to prove {Philosophy, October,1957) that we couldn't have a duty to I believe in God. Would the arguments I used have shown that it was not the case that we ought to believe in God ?Google Scholar