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Morality and Ignorance of Fact
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
A good deal of moral criticism employed in everyday life associates, in a variety of ways and in varying degrees of complexity, selfish behaviour and attitudes with a deficiency in what Dr Leavis calls ‘ethical sensibility’. A primitive ethical sensibility is a species of ignorance; it is to be unperceptive, muddled, superficial, undiscriminating and slipshod in one's understanding and appreciation of the nature and quality of one's own and other people's experience. It might involve, for example, being afflicted with sentimentalism; perceiving people through a distorting medium of stereotypes or impressionistically; being dominated by wishful thinking in the Freudian sense; holding beliefs on the basis of hearsay, authority, or because it suits one to hold them; being immersed in situations and relationships whose continued existence requires self-deception; having the sense of one's own worth be wholly dependent upon the opinions of others. A developed ethical sensibility, on the other hand, includes what Professor Peters and others believe to be among the defining characteristics of rationality—impartiality; a caring for clarity, evidence, relevance, consistency and sincerity; a willingness to question authorities, tradition and one's own motives; refusing to be tempted by the cosiness of easy certainties and the stock response. The content of such a sensibility will, of course, depend upon the context in which reason is employed, and attempts to describe the content must take the form of a detailed discussion of particular cases.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1975
References
1 Peters, R. S., ‘Reason and Passion’, in Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. 4, 1969–1970 (London, 1971).Google Scholar Cf. also Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (Routledge, 1970)Google Scholar: ‘The chief enemy of excellence in morality and (also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one’ (p. 59.and passim).
2 That is, someone who does not care about the good of anyone other than himself or the group of which he is a member if it is not to the advantage of himself or his group. He does not, however, say that people who are concerned with the good of those with whom they have ties such as love and affection and general fellow-feeling are either ignorant or are deceiving themselves about where their best interests lie. One can be an egoist without being a cynic or failing to realize that many people have good reason for not living selfish lives.
3 If I denied that it was possible it would be hard to escape the objection that I was merely defining egocentricity in terms of a primitive ethical sensibility.
4 The question of whether morality can be grounded on wants is still a controversial one. As space prevents further consideration of the question here, my argument unavoidably begs it to some extent.
5 A ceteris paribus clause must be inserted here in order to take account of the numerous ways in which people can take evasive action when faced by matters that they do not like. I shall say something about this below.
6 Philosophical Investigations, Part I, §500.
7 There are others, of course. A recent one is the ‘emotive’ theory of ethics.
8 Oxford, 1963.
9 These forms of argument can sometimes, of course, be effectively employed. This is so in cases in which the persons concerned already recognize that others have legitimate claims upon them. The arguments can be used here to show the relevance of these claims in circumstances in which their relevance has not been noticed, and, also, to remind self-deceivers of their moral commitments. If space permitted I would argue that any attempt to employ these arguments against people who do not already recognize that others have legitimate claims upon them is bound to fail. Cf. on this Warnock, G. J., Contemporary Moral Philosophy (London, 1967), pp. 45–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 Sartre, J. P., Portrait of the Anti-Semite, tr. de Mauny, E. (London, 1948), pp. 13–16.Google Scholar
11 Cf. Bettelheim, B. and Janowitz, M., Social Change and Prejudice (New York, 1964), Ch. III.Google Scholar
12 Cf. Kant, , Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, tr. Paton, H. J. (London, 1948), p. 63.Google Scholar