An Introduction to Philosophy by George Stuart Fullerton (bookreader TXT) 📖

The interesting thing to notice is that this view of ethics is very closely akin to that adapted unconsciously by the majority of the persons we meet who have not interested themselves much in ethics as a science.

By the time that we have reached years of discretion we are all in possession of a considerable number of moral maxims. We consider it wrong to steal, to lie, to injure our neighbor. Such maxims lie in our minds side by side, and we do not commonly think of criticising them. But now and then we face a situation in which one maxim seems to urge one course of action and another maxim a contrary one. Shall we tell the truth and the whole truth, when so doing will bring grave misfortune upon an innocent person? And now and then we are brought to the realization that all men do not admit the validity of all our maxims. Judgments differ as to what is right and what is wrong. Who shall be the arbiter? Not infrequently a rough decision is arrived at in the assumption that we have only to interrogate "conscience"—in the assumption, in other words, that we carry a watch which can be counted upon to give the correct time, even if the timepieces of our neighbors are not to be depended upon.

The common sense ethics cannot be regarded as very systematic and consistent, or as very profound. It is a collection of working rules, of practical maxims; and, although it is impossible to overestimate its value as a guide to life, its deficiencies, when it is looked at critically, become evident, I think, even to thoughtful persons who are not scientific at all.

Many writers on ethics have simply tried to turn this collection of working rules into a science, somewhat as Dr. Whewell has done. This is the peculiar weakness of those who have been called the "intuitionalists"—though I must warn the reader against assuming that this term has but the one meaning, and that all those to whom it has been applied should be placed in the same class. Here it is used to indicate those who maintain that we are directly aware of the validity of certain moral principles, must accept them as ultimate, and need only concern ourselves with the problem of their application.

72. ETHICS AND PHILOSOPHY.—When John Locke maintained that there are no "innate practical principles," or innate moral maxims, he pointed in evidence to the "enormities practiced without remorse" in different ages and by different peoples. The list he draws up is a curious and an interesting one.[4]

In our day it has pretty generally come to be recognized by thoughtful men that a man's judgments as to right and wrong reflect the phase of civilization, or the lack of it, which he represents, and that their significance cannot be understood when we consider them apart from their historic setting. This means that no man's conscience is set up as an ultimate standard, but that every man's conscience is regarded as furnishing material which the science of ethics must take into account.

May we, broadening the basis upon which we are to build, and studying the manners, customs, and moral judgments of all sorts and conditions of men, develop an empirical science of ethics which will be independent of philosophy?

It does not seem that we can do this. We are concerned with psychological phenomena, and their nature and significance are by no means beyond dispute. For example, there is the feeling of moral obligation, of which ethics has so much to say. What is this feeling, and what is its authority? Is it a thing to be explained? Can it impel a man, let us say, a bigot, to do wrong? And what can we mean by credit and discredit, by responsibility and free choice, and other concepts of the sort? All this must remain very vague to one who has not submitted his ethical concepts to reflective analysis of the sort that we have a right to call philosophical.

Furthermore, it does not seem possible to decide what a man should or should not do, without taking into consideration the circumstances in which he is placed. The same act may be regarded as benevolent or the reverse according to its context. If we will but grant the validity of the premises from which the medieval churchman reasoned, we may well ask whether, in laying hands violently upon those who dared to form independent judgments in matters of religion, he was not conscientiously doing his best for his fellow-man. He tried by all means to save some, and to what he regarded as a most dangerous malady he applied a drastic remedy. By what standard shall we judge him?

There can be no doubt that our doctrine of the whole duty of man must be conditioned by our view of the nature of the world in which man lives and of man's place in the world. Has ethics nothing to do with religion? If we do not believe in God, and if we think that man's life ends with the death of the body, it is quite possible that we shall set for him an ethical standard which we should have to modify if we adopted other beliefs. The relation of ethics to religion is a problem that the student of ethics can scarcely set aside. It seems, then, that the study of ethics necessarily carries us back to world problems which cannot be approached except by the path of philosophical reflection. We shall see in Chapter XX that the theistic problem certainly belongs to this class.

It is worthy of our consideration that the vast majority of writers on ethics have felt strongly that their science runs out into metaphysics. We can scarcely afford to treat their testimony lightly. Certainly it is not possible for one who has no knowledge of philosophy to understand the significance of the ethical systems which have appeared in the past. The history of ethics may be looked upon as a part of the history of philosophy. Only on the basis of some general view as to nature and man have men decided what man ought to do. As we have seen above, this appears sufficiently reasonable.

73. AESTHETICS.—Of aesthetics, or the science of the beautiful, I shall say little. There is somewhat the same reason for including it among the philosophical sciences that there is for including ethics.

Those who have paid little attention to science or to philosophy are apt to dogmatize about what is and what is not beautiful just as they dogmatize about what is and what is not right. They say unhesitatingly; This object is beautiful, and that one is ugly. It is as if they said: This one is round, and that one square.

Often it quite escapes their attention that what they now regard as beautiful struck them as unattractive a short time before; and will, perhaps, when the ceaseless change of the fashions has driven it out of vogue, seem strange and unattractive once more. Nor do they reflect upon the fact that others, who seem to have as good a right to an opinion as they, do not agree with them in their judgments; nor upon the further fact that the standard of beauty is a thing that has varied from age to age, differs widely in different countries, and presents minor variations in different classes even in the same community.

The dogmatic utterances of those who are keenly susceptible to the aesthetic aspects of things but are not given to reflection stand in striking contrast to the epitome of the popular wisdom expressed in the skeptical adage that there is no disputing about tastes.

We cannot interpret this adage broadly and take it literally, for then we should have to admit that men's judgments as to the beautiful cannot constitute the material of a science at all, and that there can be no such thing as progress in the fine arts. The notion of progress implies a standard, and an approximation to an ideal. Few would dare to deny that there has been progress in such arts as painting and music; and when one has admitted so much as this, one has virtually admitted that a science of aesthetics is, at least, possible.

The science studies the facts of the aesthetic life as ethics studies the facts of the moral life. It can take no man's taste as furnishing a standard: it must take every man's taste as a fact of significance. It is driven to reflective analysis—to such questions as, what is beauty? and what is meant by aesthetic progress? It deals with elusive psychological facts the significance of which is not easily grasped. It is a philosophical science, and is by no means in a position to follow a beaten path, dispensing with a reflective analysis of its materials.

[1] Preface.

[2] section 269.

[3] section 376.

[4] "Essay concerning Human Understanding," Book I, Chapter III.

74. WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?—The reader has probably already remarked that in some of the preceding chapters the adjectives "metaphysical" and "philosophical" have been used as if they were interchangeable, in certain connections, at least. This is justified by common usage; and in the present chapter I shall be expected by no one, I think, to prove that metaphysics is a philosophical discipline. My task will rather be to show how far the words "metaphysics" and "philosophy" have a different meaning.

In Chapters III to XI, I have given a general view of the problems which present themselves to reflective thought, and I have indicated that they are not problems which can conveniently be distributed among the several special sciences. Is there an external world? What is it? What are space and time? What is the mind? How are mind and body related? How do we know that there are other minds than ours? etc. These have been presented as philosophical problems; and when we turn back to the history of speculative thought we find that they are just the problems with which the men whom we agree to call philosophers have chiefly occupied themselves.

But when we turn to our treatises on metaphysics, we also find that these are the problems there discussed. Such treatises differ much among themselves, and the problems are not presented in the same form or in the same order; but one who can look beneath the surface will find that the authors are busied with much the same thing—with some or all of the problems above mentioned.

How, then, does metaphysics differ from philosophy? The difference becomes clear to us when we realize that the word philosophy has a broader and looser signification, and that metaphysics is, so to speak, the core, the citadel, of philosophy.

We have seen (Chapter II) that the world and the mind, as they seem to be presented in the experience of the plain man, do not stand forth with such clearness and distinctness that he is able to answer intelligently the questions we wish to ask him regarding their nature. It is not merely that his information is limited; it is vague and indefinite as well. And we have seen, too, that, however the special sciences may increase and systematize his information, they do not clear away such vagueness. The man still uses such concepts as "inner" and "outer," "reality," "the mind," "space," and "time," with no very definite notion of what they mean.

Now, the attempt to clear away this vagueness by the systematic analysis of such concepts—in other words, the attempt to make a thorough analysis of our experience—is metaphysics. The metaphysician strives to limit his task as well as he may, and to avoid unnecessary excursions into the fields occupied by the special sciences, even those which lie nearest to his own, such as psychology and ethics. There is a sense in which he may be said to be working in the field of a special science, though he is using as the material for his investigations concepts which are employed in many sciences; but it is clear that his discipline is not a special science in the same sense in which geometry and physics are special sciences.

Nevertheless, the special sciences stand, as we have already seen in the case of several of them, very near