James Franklin: The Worth of Persons: The Foundation of Ethics. New York: Encounter Books, 2022.

 

Franklin denies that ethics consists of a set of rules of conduct. In this, he departs both from Kant and from God. Neither the categorical imperative nor the Ten Commandments make sense as freestanding rules and, indeed, Franklin observes that Kant himself grounds his moral rule on his claim that human beings have moral dignity: hence his books on the metaphysics of morals. Human beings have dignity insofar as they share with any other rational beings which may exist a rational will, that is, a will which gives a universal (as distinguished from an idiosyncratic) law. This is what Kant means by an “autonomous” will; it wills laws for itself but not only for itself. The categorical imperative restricts individual and collective lawgivers to laws that can be obeyed without contradiction by all rational beings—for example, ‘Thou shalt not murder.’ By so willing, rational beings enter a “kingdom of ends,” a “systematic union of various rational beings” who rule themselves through common laws, laws which “abstract from the personal differences” of those beings. “All rational beings stand under the law in that each of them is to treat himself and all others never merely as means but always at the same time as ends in themselves.” Each member of that kingdom “gives universal laws in it but is also himself subject to these laws.” Each is a “sovereign” within the kingdom. Morality understood as rational autonomy and sovereignty “alone has dignity.” Its dignity inheres in the fact that it depends upon nothing but the rational will—not on success, not on “any subjective disposition or taste” which would “coax” the will to follow it. This “lets the worth of such a cast of mind be cognized as dignity and puts it infinitely above all price.” [1]

Franklin follows Kant in arguing that “the central foundational notion in ethics is the worth or dignity of persons.” He does not restrict worth to rationality alone, however; the worth of persons “supervenes on a number of properties which are not themselves explicitly ethical but which distinguish humans from other entities in the world—rationality, consciousness, the rational will, the unity and diversity of the self, emotional structure and love, individuality.” Supervenience became a key term in analytical philosophy in the twentieth century. ‘B’ is said to “supervene on” ‘A’ if some difference in ‘A’ is necessary for any difference in ‘B’ to be possible. As the saying goes, ‘There cannot be an A-difference without a ‘B’ difference.’ This does not necessarily mean that ‘B’ is entailed by or reducible to ‘A,’ a point Franklin will insist upon. Indeed, to Kantian dignity he adds “the Aristotelian notion of a perfection or excellence” of human beings as an indispensable component of ethics. He understands that combining Kantian with Aristotelian ethics is not something philosophers have usually attempted, in light of Kant’s insistence upon his own departure from Aristotelian “eudaimonism.” 

Ethics surely includes striving for right action. But not fundamentally so. “What we are most disturbed by ethically…is not anything to do with actions, but the terribleness of suffering.” Further, “whenever we ask why some action is right or wrong, we find we are led back to reasons that are not themselves about action but concern the good or evil of those affected by the action”—for example, “gross violations of the right to life.” Such “horror is an emotional as well as a rational reaction,” and a person who lacks the emotion of “compassion” or agapic love in reaction to suffering strikes one as a defective human being. Such emotion does not contradict reason but supports it. “There must be some rational explanation as to why worth gives rise where appropriate to those emotional reaction and an account of when they can be trusted.” But “rules, rights, and virtues…make no sense without reference to worthy” or dignity. Action takes aim, it “is for something”; “the rightness of the action depends heavily on the rightness of the purpose and the value of the outcome.” Although he doesn’t say so, Franklin knows that Kant’s attempt to ground morality on ‘pure’ reason or universalizability, abstracted from ends was refuted by Hegel, only a few decades after Kant had attempted it. [2] 

But Kantian personalism, his idea of human dignity or worth, withstands scrutiny much better. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant contrasts the human being “in the system of nature”—a “being of slight importance” within that system, slightly more valuable than other animals for the work he does and usually able therefore to command a higher price for his services than they—to the human being “regarded as a person, that is, as the subject of a morally practical reason.” This homo noumenon “is exalted above any price,” an “end in himself,” “possess[ing] a dignity, (an absolute inner worth) by which the respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world,” with whom he lives “on a footing of equality.” Such a being is humble with regard to the moral law but ambitious when striving “to equal or surpass others” in performing his duty, in acting in accordance with that law. The law itself, however, comes from his own exercise of his reason, from thinking through the universalizing character of reasoning. [3] Franklin concurs with the dignity or worth of the capacity to reason while admitting that human nature is more than a mere mechanism. That is, he balks at Kant’s strict dualism, using the idea of supervenience to bridge the gap between the natural ‘is’ and the supposedly purely rational ‘ought.’

Franklin considers “three main approaches to ethics,” finding each of them “superficial if they are meant as accounts of foundations” or groundworks of ethics. They are “deontological” accounts (emphasizing rules and duties), “consequentialist” (emphasizing ends or outcomes), and virtue-centered (emphasizing character). Deontological accounts rightly look at the effects of one’s actions on others (in Kant, this is the ‘universalizability’ feature of his doctrine). They get us away from mere self-regard. But the need of another “only has moral significance if the being having the need is of moral worth.” The same goes for consequentialist accounts; their moral weight depends upon a prior assumption of the worth of the person who enjoys or suffers the consequences of a given action. Virtue-centered ethics, “living the ‘good life’ of justice, courage, temperance,” and prudence, “a dominant approach of ancient ethics,” aims at fostering “a right character, which will then issue in right action.” But again, this fostering “only makes sense if the entity possessing the character is itself of ethical worth,” since “virtues are for something outside themselves.” Virtues aim to benefit “a person, who possesses worth.” At a minimum, persons possess life and liberty, neither of which may rightly be abrogated except “for a reason itself strongly based in the worth of person, such as self-protection and the harm of others.” 

Franklin next turns to claims about the foundations of ethics by Darwinists, Calvinists, Humeans, Socratics, and Aristotelians, charging that none of them “incorporate a commitment to worth.” Darwinian ethics (seen in the ‘sociobiology’ of E. O. Wilson and others) regards the foundation of ethics in a way that attempts to substitute scientific thinking for ethical thinking. To say that such and such a behavior, called ethical, has won adherents because it benefits them in the struggle for evolutionary survival may be true or false, but it is ethically irrelevant. “The theory just says, ‘What happens, happens,'” and as such it fails to ask whether those who survive the struggle are worth much of anything.

The theory of divine command, seen in Calvin, “has the same problem as the naturalist theory—lack of an independent moral viewpoint for saying that God has got it right (or wrong).” Franklin cites the Euthyphro, where Socrates asks whether something is good because the gods command it or because it is good, and the gods command it for that reason. Since “the wrongness of murder is an implication of the worth of persons,” if the gods commanded murder, then they would be wrong. The good must be enforced by but not the result of the gods’ arbitrary will. Kant writes, “even the Holy One of the Gospels must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognize Him as such.” It must be said that the Socratic argument applies less well to the God of the Bible than it does to the ‘gods’ of ancient Greece, and not only because the latter are fictitious. Even if they were real, they would still not be Creator-gods, the givers of meaning and the makers of Man. Moreover, if God is Logos, as John’s Gospel says He is, then his commands are not merely arbitrary but reasonable; that is, the divine Person embodies the moral standards according to which He issues His commands. Franklin admits this, falling back to say that if God created human beings to have “inherent worth,” then we can recognize that fact rationally without any but a practical need for God’s commands as means of motivating us to resist the pull of our ‘fallen’ nature.

Hume’s critique of morality—the supposed impossibility of deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’—gives his readers no argument against the idea that persons have worth, contenting itself with assuming that they don’t. For Hume and his followers, there can be no “reasons or ground for our ultimate wishes,” which are established only by customs. In this, they share the moral skepticism of the Darwinists, if for different reasons. Darwinians fail to recognize the ‘is-ought’ distinction; Humeans treat it as a refutation of ethical theory itself. Both explain away ethics as a sort of pseudo-problem, although the Darwinians don’t know that that’s what they’re doing.

According to Franklin, Socrates erroneously replaces virtue with reason, defining virtue as knowledge, evil as ignorance. Socrates thus disagrees with the teaching of Genesis, which locates goodness in innocence—a form of ignorance, namely, ignorance of the distinction between good and evil. “That idea appeals to the class interest of philosophers” by making them the rightful kings of the ignorant. (But not tyrants, a point Franklin overlooks.) It has survived into our modern, egalitarian times in the analytic philosophers’ notion of “symmetry between humans,” which means that “I put my interests on a par with others’ because there is no reason why mine should be preferred to theirs.” But again, “appeals to symmetry are meaningless without establishing what, at the bottom level, symmetry is symmetry of.” If it is symmetry of “interests,” why are those interests good? One still needs “inquiry into what the good of a person is, and what it is about a person that makes their good a reason for action.”

As for Aristotle, Franklin objects to his teleological account of nature as the foundation of ethics. Admittedly, “there is something correct…about seeing virtues as serving a purpose in human life and in giving an account of the virtues as perfection of humans that animals do not have,” but why is “the smooth running of something of a kind” to be deemed good, “without a prior account of why a thing of that kind is valuable”? A fast-running cockroach is a damned good cockroach, but is a cockroach intrinsically good? (Or a man?) To put it more philosophically, Aristotle splits theory and practice too sharply. “The discovery of worth in individuals is as much a function of the ‘speculative reason’ as the discovery of length or mass in physical things.”  To fail to do this, to make ethics primarily a matter of practical reasoning about fitting means to ends, is to fail to distinguish “the good in itself and the good for us.” I may be grateful for “a gift that is an objective good for me,” but I rather admire “a virtue that is an objective good in itself.” “The whole Aristotelian edifice of ‘natural goodness’ rests on the assumption that the organisms for whom things are a good are things worth having on the planet”; “without this assumption, the Aristotelian superstructure is a house of cards.” To make prudential or practical reasoning the foundation of ethics is fundamentally unserious and egocentric.” And if “we then attempt to fill the gap by appealing to some symmetry between myself and others, which would make their flourishing a motive for me, we have gone beyond Aristotelian ethics, as we have implicitly imported a principle of equal (or at least comparable) worth of persons,” an ‘equality principle’ that Aristotle, with his arguments for natural slavery and his praise for the magnanimous or great-souled man, seems to deny.

But does he? On the matter of egocentricity, Franklin ignores the fact that Aristotle follows his Nicomachean Ethics with the Politics. Human beings are by nature political animals, flourishing best when ruling and being ruled in turn. His ethics doesn’t divorce ‘self-regarding’ from ‘other-regarding.’ As to the good of men and cockroaches in relation to the planet, the same holds true. Earth requires reciprocity of species. If any one of them threatens to overrun the earth, ruining the natural foundation for its own existence, then it deserves to be reeled back in. That goes for a plague of locusts or human destruction of ‘the environment.’ Reeling in locusts might rightly be done with less violence than reeling in humans, but that is a matter of means, not a refutation of the foundations of Aristotelian ethics. That is, human beings are political animals and rational animals, their rationality making their political nature possible.

To this, Franklin might reply: very well, Aristotle still doesn’t prove that human beings organized in political communities are things worth having on the planet. According to the Bible, God Himself has had his reservations about us, on occasion. But absent God or any other known superior beings, who, other than human beings, can judge the issue? Speciesism is inevitable. Kant’s own notion of human dignity assumes that rational beings are dignified because, well, they’re rational. That’s just the way they are.

In general, Franklin objects to the lack of tragedy and of remorse in all of these theories. Oddly, he claims that “even Calvinism” regards “the main content of divinely commanded ethics to be Jesus’s rules of love,” ignoring the obvious point that those laws command Jesus to allow Himself to be tortured and killed on the Cross, and that Christians are adjured to imitate His example, if moral push comes to moral shove. This notwithstanding, he prefers Kant’s idea of human dignity and the consequent duty to respect human beings as such to any of its competitors. He excises, however, the duty to treat human beings as ends not means, inasmuch as “there is no use pretending that one’s firing at an enemy soldier is treating him as an end in himself,” especially since “the necessity to survive is also of extreme moral urgency, and that, too, follows from the worth of persons.” And he passes over the categorical imperative in polite silence.

Very well, then, how exactly should one show a foundation for the worth of persons? Here is where “supervenience” comes in. “One of the very few widely agreed principles about ethical foundations is that there is no difference between two things in worth (or ethical properties generally) without a difference in their natural properties.” That is, if worth can be established, it cannot hover above the nature of the beings in which it inheres; their nature limits their worth, defining it without necessarily determining it. In bringing ethics into coordination with human nature, Franklin departs from Kant, who attempts to leave nature behind.

He continues to share in Kant’s search for a metaphysics of morals, chiding the “phobia of metaphysics” that is “widespread in ethical theory,” perhaps most prominently in the work of John Rawls, who in his extraordinarily influence A Theory of Justice attempts to formulate an ethical theory free of any substantial realist claims about the worth of persons.” But “if, as a matter of fact, humans are not equal persons, there is no justice in conducting politics as if they are”; and “if they are not in fact, free there is no point in giving them choices such as votes.” “But whether persons are free and of equal worth are basic metaphysical questions.”

As for the historicist claims of Richard Rorty and many European philosophers, “only humans are subject to historical social and cultural pressures via language, and that is so in virtue of the nature of humans.” Historicism cannot in fact leapfrog over human nature. Franklin commits himself rather “to inquiry into ‘metaphysics’ in the basic sense of distinguishing the morally relevant from the morally irrelevant properties of things.” Metaphysically speaking, then, “what is most central in ethics is not human interests”—which might be explicable in terms of our material nature—but “why humans and their interests should matter in the first place.”

The search for natural human properties upon which ethics can supervene nonetheless does lead to “a serious problem.” Is there any such property or set of properties that “some human beings lack”; if not, it cannot be treated as a universal without leading “prima facie to grossly unequal worth.” Aristotle’s great-souled man gives Franklin the creeps. Does his superiority not justify treating “lesser mortals” as “vermin”?

Well, no, and Aristotle never suggests that it does. This vitiates Franklin’s claim, but does not necessarily wreck his worry that “if one chooses an occurrent property such as rationality or consciousness as the foundation of moral worth one risks denying the moral equality of persons, since humans can differ widely in how currently rational they are,” or how free they are, or how apt to care for themselves they are. Indeed, the same person typically will differ widely in all of those characteristics, over a lifetime. Does ethical conduct not entail protecting the vulnerable, not exploiting them?

Franklin therefore turns away from “occurrent-property” theory to a “capacity” theory. Human begins are, as Jonathan Swift was wont to insist, not rational animals but animals capable of reason. A human being incapacitated by Alzheimer’s Disease can no longer exercise that capacity; it is a loss, there is “something in them that is in a defective state,” whereas no one would call it “a tragedy for a cat to be unable to exercise rationality.” There is “something about being human, inherent to them, something which is now defective in expression.” Their capacity is natural, but their loss is personal.

“The aim of moral life is to transform potency into act, because act is better,” being the fulfillment of potential. “Those who fall short in those respects but are still human lack something important, but what give them moral equality in a more basic sense is their (sadly unrealized) potentiality to realize those properties.” We see this when a woman suffers a miscarriage. She never says, ‘I lost the fetus’ or ‘I lost the tissue.’ She always says, ‘I lost the baby.’ And when adults make horrific moral choices, they kill people who “have lives worth living, but are unable to live them”; their murderers, too, could have had lives worth living but rejected any such way of life.

Franklin thus has moral worth supervening on human nature. Having excised the categorical imperative from Kantianism, and having rejected both utilitarianism and historicism, this leaves him tolerably close to a natural right theory while attempting to avoid Aristotelian teleology. [4] How close? He turns to a fuller account of “the supervenience of worth on natural properties.” The relation between worth and those properties is, he admits, “a difficult one,” as Hume’s is-ought “gap” cannot be closed readily. 

So: “What does an assertion of being ‘good’ add to just being rational, emotive, or whatever natural properties are the grounds of worth?” And how can one “explain what the relation is between supervenient goodness” and those grounding properties? These questions are made more difficult when a philosopher joins with Hume in rejecting natural teleology, which holds that all things aim at the good. Franklin argues that to say, as Aristotle does, that every thing by nature aims at its perfection, and that evil consists in some impediment to that natural aiming, does not explain why a human being’s perfection is “worth more, better than, say, a rock’s perfection. Why, if we need to choose between human happiness and splitting a rock to accommodate us, is it the right moral choice to choose to split the rock? “We need an additional theory of the grading of forms, to explain why some forms such as rationality confer a great deal of worth and others such as rockness a nugatory amount.” Also, does the perfection theory mean that a defective member of a species has “no source of worth” at all? This is a reprise of Franklin’s worries about the great-souled man and natural slavery. “Some supervenience theory is still needed to explain how being a certain way, naturalistically, necessarily results in its being of ethical worth.”

“Entities the same in all natural properties are morally equivalent,” intrinsically, regardless of circumstances such as, for example, market value. Franklin agrees with Hume that natural properties such as rationality, capacity for free action, and individuality are non-ethical. Moral facts are not found in the nonmoral facts. They do nonetheless “necessarily give rise to the supervenient entities or properties,” which are not reducible to their natural foundation or grounding. “It is not true that the supervenient entity is ‘nothing but’ the base.” Good isn’t “identified with a natural property, but is said to arise of necessity from natural properties.” 

How so? The human person may be summarized by its nature as “embodied rationality”—not rationality abstracted from all his other qualities. The foundational features most relevant to worth are those which would be those whose loss would be most “devastating” to the person, leaving him “unable to operate as a human being,” if “still human.” Aristotle is right to find in “purely intellectual rationality”—the ability to understand reasons as distinguished from the calculations that artificial and animal intelligence do have,” as “the uniquely human ability.” “Understanding is essentially entirely unlike rule following, the manipulation of uninterpreted symbols, and the application of statistical algorithms.” Kant is also right in maintaining that rationality in itself doesn’t make us moral, that one needs “a good will,” a commitment to fulfill and defend our nature as rational embodiments; “an exclusive focus on rationality omits the crucial emotional aspects of humanity.” “Actually thinking rationally, as opposed to merely being able to, requires some motivation to translate potentiality into actuality; even extremely rational activities like pure mathematics require passion and commitment to drive them forward.” Plato and Aristotle identify that as erōs. With Kant, Franklin calls this the rational will. Both the classics and the moderns call it practical reason or prudence. For Franklin, not so much natural erotic love as willed agapic love issues from the moral person. With the moderns generally, Franklin separates human nature from the human will, although the human will, supervenient upon nature, rightly should be directed rationally.

Additionally, a “central aspect of rationality” is that “we know who we are.” Human beings naturally exhibit consciousness and personal identity, a “unified self” which is “necessary for agency,” a necessity seen in those suffering such mental disorders as schizophrenia. Memory and imagination make this unity possible. Our interests and experiences can be good, but they are not good “primarily,” as they “do not exist separately except possibly in very disturbed psyches, and the value they have is that of the self of which they are a part (or state). 

“A real human being,” then “is not simple but contains a vastly complex, multifaceted and changing panorama including a representation of itself (mind and body) and a good portion of the surrounding world, and of the past and anticipated future of both self and world,” including “a basic sociality.” “Understanding reasons and choosing to act on them” are “central” to being human; it is the “rational will,” not the rational nature of human beings that gives “a person absolute worth”—as distinct from a human being’s rational nature. That will therefore deserves to enjoy freedom of action “in some sufficiently strong sense” in order “for bodily movements to actually be actions of a person.” Without freedom, no practical reason; without practical reason, no humans; without humans, no persons. Without persons, no agapic love, since erotic love or admiration, in the low sense of physical attraction or the high sense of attraction to a beautiful soul, can motivate “‘trading up’ to anyone who exemplifies those qualities better.” The love Franklin regards as genuinely moral “is directed to an individual, not to a set of qualities or even to an individual just in virtue of a set of qualities.” The latter lends itself to ‘pricing,’ the former “to dignity, in Kantian terms.” Human rationality “enables” human individuality or personhood, without being the same as it. The person’s “absolute worth” inheres in his irreplaceable individuality. “Wipe out a rainforest or zombie and it can be replaced with a copy without a loss. Not with a human.”

Franklin distinguishes worth from obligation. “The worth of humans is a (moral) fact about them, but my obligation to assist or respect them is a relation of me to them.” What bridges the gap between them is Aquinas’ “synderesis” or conscience. In Kantian terms, “the connection of worth to obligation is synthetic a prior (necessary but not conceptual).” For example, “if someone falls in the river near me, it is my responsibility to help him if he appears to need it” and if I can do so,” on the grounds that “a prospective injury which I could easily prevent is a harm to something of great worth.” It is conscience that links the moral worth of the person to the obligation to act in a certain way in a given set of circumstances. Aquinas is also right to claim that one can deduce “principles of obligation from the grounds of worth such as rationality,” thereby generating natural law ethics. I this, Franklin’s “worth-based” ethics and Aristotelian-Thomist naturalist ethics concur. 

This in turn is not the same as motivation. A virtuous man will act to save a fellow human from drowning, if he can, but “that took work in training virtue.” A person might be evil, fully intending evil, as in Satan’s famous prayer in Paradise Lost, “Evil be thou my good.” “Obligation ought to motivate, but it does so only for the virtuous.” Education, including education in practical rationality, “is a right, and failure to be educated is a harm and thus a violation of that right” when such education is available. The refinement of the human soul is something we owe ourselves, and one another. Here as elsewhere, “worth generates obligations.” “The supervenience of worth on rationality, consciousness, and its other bases, is, like any supervenience, obvious to a well-disposed mind that understands the question.”

How do we know the worth of persons? What is the ‘epistemology’ of morals? We know things ethically the way we know some non-ethical things, although not so directly as we know some things by sense perception. The natural properties upon which worth supervenes are known, but not in the same way as “scientific properties like mass, length, and charge.” I once talked with a man who was attempting to claim that all real knowledge is ‘scientific.’ I suggested that his small daughter didn’t know much about him, ‘scientifically’. She probably couldn’t say much about his DNA structure or the other various compounds that compose him. But it would be very odd to say that she didn’t know a lot about him in other ways, especially ways concerning his character. “To understand what it is like to be another human, with a unique life history and experience, point of view and emotions, requires a kind of imaginative sympathy that can be objectively right or wrong but which contrasts with the method of the natural sciences.” We have all known people who were very good at knowing scientifically, not so good at knowing persons, and others who were just the opposite. When it comes to conduct, we trust the latter persons more. “Human communication depends on success being the norm when inferring how other humans are thinking,” inferences drawn by comparing “the conclusions by others with those drawn by our own rationality”—a process animals, “highly cognitive as they are in a way, cannot do.” This is what “makes the social sciences methodologically different from the natural sciences, more hermeneutic” than they. Social scientists who attempt to reduce humanity to the measurable behavior of human persons don’t have the brains they were born with, as it were. But “babies are right. Empathy is at the bottom of ethics, and it is a form of ethical knowledge.” Aristotle knows what babies know, Franklin remarks, in writing “The soul is in a way all things.” This is the foundation of the ‘Socratic turn’ in philosophy, away from untroubled contemplation of the cosmos and toward political philosophy, reasoning with other human persons. Or, as the Bible has it, “Fear of the Lord,” a Person, “is the beginning of wisdom.” Love of the Lord, and of other persons, may ensue. “Before any physical action on behalf of its object,” love “requires a mental action, attention.” God and other persons need to ‘get our attention’ before we can love them and come to know them. 

“So what does love attend to, and respond to?” Love is “on the lookout for anything good in the object of love,” being “keen to recognize any of the bases of worth,” delighting “in any perfection of the beloved, any progress toward being more fully human any toddler’s first steps or first words.” But those bases of worth inhere in a person, an individual, “that is one of the things—perhaps the principal thing—that love responds to.” As knowledge, “love can make mistakes.” We can commit idolatry, loving money, or for that matter knowledge, justice, art, our country’s traditions, universal law, a good will, forgetting that the things we love are “possible objects of love only because of their intimate connection with the bases of the worth of persons.” This is why a Jane Austen novel provides a sounder moral education than, say, Professor Franklin’s book or a Will Morrisey Review of it. “Knowledge of human worth should arise naturally from the attributions of the bases of worth” to other human beings, since “we know the bases of worth in virtue of possessing them, and barring any cognitive defect, we can conclude to the worth that supervenes on them.” That is a philosophically formal description of what Austen’s heroines do, and what her comic minor characters fail to do.

 

 

Notes

1. Immanuel Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Mary Gregor translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 4:433-4:436.
2. G.W.F. Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right. H. B. Nisbet translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Section 135.
3. Immanuel Kant: The Metaphysics of Morals.  Mary Gregor translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 6:435-6:436.
4. Regarding utilitarianism, Franklin writes: “If taken literally, the ideal of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ implies loading the ills of the many onto a single scapegoat if possible, or favoring those with special talents for enjoying a champagne lifestyle. That is because happiness is valued a sa kind of stuff to be calculated with and maximized, in abstraction from the people possessing the happiness. That is, it values experience in abstraction from the experiencer.”

Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.

Roger Scruton: Beauty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

 

Edmund Burke stands at the beginning of modern ‘conservativism’ in England, the late Roger Scruton having been his most distinguished recent heir. Among the things they want to conserve is beauty, and our sense of it. They thus owe us, and themselves, an account of what beauty is, why we should conserve it, why we should continue to think about it and esteem it. ‘Conservatism’ notwithstanding, they offer very different accounts of beauty.

Burke undertakes a psychological inquiry into the passions. To better understand “the sublime” and “the beautiful”—two ideas often confused—we need “an exact theory of our passions,” including “a knowledge of their genuine sources.” “Could this [confusion] admit of any remedy, I imagined it could only be from a diligent examination of our passions in our own breasts; from a careful survey of the properties of things which we find by experience to influence those passions; and from a sober and attentive investigation of the laws of nature, by which those properties are capable of affecting the body, and thus of exciting our passions.” Burke evidently maintains that these ideas originate in the interaction with perceived things (the Greek word, aisthē, means ‘perceptible things’) with the human body, and therewith the passions). Only after these physiological and psychological effects are understood might we deduce rules that “might be applied to the imitative arts, and to whatever else they concern,” as “whatever turns the soul inward on itself, tends to concenter its forces, and to fit it for greater and stronger flights of science.” 

Regarding the sublime and the beautiful, this stronger flight of science (that is, knowledge) brings out standards “of reason and taste.” These standards are likely universal, “the same in all human creatures,” as they are necessary “for the ordinary correspondence of life.” That is reason enables judgment, the passions enable sentiment, and human beings need both to judge and to feel rightly in order to prosper. Taste is “that faculty, or those faculties of the mind which are affected with, or which form a judgment of the works of the imagination and the elegant arts.” Imagination is one of man’s three “natural powers,” the others being the senses and judgment.

Of these, sense is most obviously universal; everyone distinguishes between sweet and sour, light and dark. Pleasures of sense are seldom disputed, since no one says a goose is more beautiful than a swan. Such natural taste can be overridden by an acquired taste, but even if one comes to prefer the taste of tobacco to the taste of sugar, he still knows that sugar is sweet. If you say, quoting the Latin tag, de gustibus non est disputandum, you are right insofar as “no one can strictly answer what pleasure or pain some particular man may find from the Taste of some particular thing,” but that man’s natural taste might have been altered by habits, prejudice, disease. “There is in all men a sufficient remembrance of the original natural causes of pleasure to enable them to bring all things offered to their senses to that standard, and to regulate their feelings and opinions by it.” A drug addict, for example, ruled by his unnatural passion for opium, which is ruining his life, can still perceive that something is wrong with him, remembering himself as he was, before his addiction took hold. In this, Burke disputes the claim of Protagoras, discussed and criticized in two Platonic dialogues, that knowledge is nothing more than perception and that ‘man is the measure of all things,’ i.e., that truth is purely ‘subjective,’ no one’s opinion being more truthful than another’s.

Burke looks not to Protagoras or to Plato but to Locke for his account of the human mind. That is, the ‘conservatism’ of Burke, his esteem traditional standards over the natural-rights standards of the French revolutionaries, nonetheless has its foundation in one of the preeminent natural-rights philosophers. The “ideas, with their annexed pains and pleasures,” are “presented” to the mind by sense. These are what Locke calls “simple ideas” or sense impressions, stamped on the mind, which begins as a tabula rasa. (Locke’s tabula rasa, in its turn, recalls the image of the mind as a block of wax, proposed by Socrates in the Theaetetus.) Still, as in Locke, “the mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order,” a power called imagination. “This power of the imagination is incapable of producing any thing absolutely new”; it isn’t creative in the sense of divine ex nihilo creation. “It can only vary the disposition of those ideas which it has received from the senses.” 

Despite this limitation, the imagination “is the most extensive province of pleasure and pain, as it is the region of our fears and our hopes, and of all our passions that are connected with them; and whatever is calculated to affect the imagination with these commanding ideas, by force of any original natural impression, must have the same power pretty equally over all men.” Locke calls these commanding ideas the complex ideas. When it comes to the operations of the mind, “wit,” which compares sense impressions or simple ideas, discovering and inventing combinations of them, makes men “naturally inclined to belief than to incredulity.” Judgment, which differentiates, requires experience and observation. All nations abound in metaphors and allegories, as Homeric poetry shows us, for the Greeks. Not all nations exercise acute judgment. Further, “the perfect union of with and judgment is one of the rarest things in the world.” 

Where does this leave taste? Taste is natural insofar as it is “the satisfaction in seeing an agreeable figure”—in art, one that accurately imitates what it represents. Differences in taste arise from differences in judgment; you may have attended to the subject more acutely than I have done. I might alter my own taste, rationally, when I initially admire a painting or a song before having experienced some other. My taste didn’t change but my knowledge, and therefore my judgment, did. “So far then as Taste belongs to the imagination, its principle is the same in all men; there is no difference in the manner of their being affected, nor in the causes of the affection”; it is indisputable, ‘perceptions’ in the Latin, Protagorean-sophistic, and indeed Lockean sense. “But in the degree there is a difference, which arises from two causes principally,” “either from a greater degree of natural sensibility”—Plato’s Socrates observes that some wax blocks are made of better stuff than others— or “from a closer and longer attention to the object”—from thinking about it, as Socrates says. Burke concludes that Taste “is not a simple idea,” in Locke’s sense, but “partly made upon of a perception of the primary pleasures of sense, of the secondary pleasures of the imagination and of the conclusions of the reasoning faculty, concerning the various relations of these, and concerning the human passions, manners and action.” As Locke argues, “the senses are the great originals of all our ideas, and consequently of all our pleasures if they are not uncertain and arbitrary.” This makes “the whole ground-work of Taste…common to all,” a “sufficient foundation for a conclusive reasoning on these matters,” even though “sensibility and judgment” vary among people. This universal, natural grounding of taste in the senses can be altered, brought to a condition of insensibility, when judgment falters. There can be “a wrong Taste,” caused by “a defect of judgment.” This is not uncommon. What is exceedingly rare is judgment without sensibility, “naked reason.” It is easier to appreciate Virgil, Burke remarks, than it is to appreciate Aristotle. More typically, taste comes from a blend of sense and judgment; it is not a separate faculty of the mind. “Where disposition, where decorum, where congruity are concerned, in short wherever the best Taste differs from the worst, I am convinced that the understanding operates and nothing else,” that taste “is improved exactly as we improve our judgment, by extending our knowledge, by a steady attention to our object, and by frequent exercise.”

In this, one sees how the Lockean foundation of Burke’s psychology might issue in a political judgment, as for example in his famous sharp critique of the French revolutionaries. The revolutionaries made much of their rationalism, of their “naked reason.” But Robespierre was no Aristotle. What Robespierre took for naked reason, and for natural rights, utterly ignored reason as judgment, reason as knowledge gleaned from experience (in his case, experience in politic or the “frequent exercise” of political responsibility before undertaking the revolution). Burke’s denunciation of the French revolutionaries’ ‘abstract’ reason issues from seeing their utter lack of the practical or prudential reason, the reasoning that attends to the particular measures needed to secure the natural rights discovered by abstract or theoretical reasoning. They lacked the political equivalent of taste, and that led them to the impassioned grotesqueries of the Terror. 

Burke divides the main body of his inquiry into five parts consisting of nineteen, twenty-two, twenty-seven, twenty-five, and seven sections, respectively—one hundred in all. The first part concerns the passions—what we need “an exact theory of” in order to understand the sublime and the beautiful. Part Two concern the sublime, Part Three the beautiful, Part Four the physical causes and effects of the sublime and the beautiful, Part Five the rational basis for judging the sublime and the beautiful.

Burke begins Part One rather as Aristotle famously begins the Metaphysics, citing curiosity as the first of the emotions in “the human mind.” But for Burke the desire to know is “the most superficial of all the affections,” “running from one thing to another, seeking novelty.” “Curiosity blends itself more or less with all our passions”; it is perhaps not too much to suggest that for Burke curiosity is the passions’ slave. At any rate, “the influence of reason in producing our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed.” Deeper but still “simple ideas” (i.e., sense impressions, per Locke), pain and pleasure are “incapable of definition”; unlike Locke, however, he distinguishes pleasure from the mere removal of pain, which he calls delight. More enduring are joy—when we recover our health or escape from some danger—and grief—the emotion we feel when a pleasure ceases and we know it can never be enjoyed again. If ingrained, grief becomes melancholy, which can sometimes become a sort of pleasure, as Robert Burton’s book may have taught him. “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime,” “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling,” since “the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.” Pain and danger are the passions which belong to the desire for self-preservation and, sure enough, Burke joins with Hobbes in calling death as the “king of terrors.”

Pain and pleasure are passions of individuals. There are two kinds of passions which belong to society: sexual passion, aiming at generation or the perpetuation of the species, and feelings of sociability, which extend not only to other human beings but to animals and even the inanimate world, as when we feel ‘at home’ in a landscape, a country, even the cosmos. Pain associated with the society of the sexes is often grief, occasioned by loss, whereas the pains associated with society in general are more often less lasting—the snub, the insult, the annoyance. The pleasures and pains of sexuality are sharper than the others, as “the generation of mankind is a great purpose, and it is requisite that men should be animated to the pursuit of it by some great incentive,” “a very high pleasure,” even if “it is by no means designed to be our constant business.” Being rational, human beings have no one ‘mating season,’ unlike “brutes.”

Brutes have no sense of beauty; they merely mate. Erotic love is a “mixed passion,” compounded of nature and social qualities; beauty is its object. “I call beauty a social quality” because it inspires not only or even always lust but tenderness and affection. Burke places his section on beauty at the center of his account of Section One. Made possible by reason, in pursuing it reason ceases simply to be the slave of a passion but provides a passion with a pervading definition. More generally, human beings are naturally social; indeed, “total and perpetual exclusion from all society” is painful, even if temporary solitude may be pleasurable. “An entire life of solitude contradicts the purpose of our being.” Burke does not immediately say what that purpose is.

The passions binding human society generally, as distinct from sexual passion, “the three principal links” in the chain of society, are sympathy, imitation, and ambition. Sympathy means putting ourselves “into the place of another man,” experiencing either pleasure or pain in so doing. We can take delight in the distresses of others in the sense we are glad we do not suffer those distresses “Terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close,” even when “blended with no small uneasiness”—exemplified by the experience of witnessing a disaster from a distance. A tragic drama consists of “imitated distresses,” giving us delight and even pleasure because we know the calamities portrayed aren’t really happening. “It is absolutely necessary my life should be out of any imminent hazard before I can take delight in the suffering of others real or imaginary.” 

Imitation gives us pleasure not in what others feel but in what they do. “It is by imitation far more than precept that we learn every thing.” Not reason but imitation “forms our manners, our opinions, our lives,” serving as “one of the strongest links of society” and “bringing our nature to perfection.” This suggests that the perfection of human nature is the purpose of human being, and it is indeed in this section that Burke cites Aristotle, not Locke or Hobbes. Ambition is the desire not merely to imitate but to excel. It animates social improvement. Even miserable men take delight in thinking that they are “supreme in misery,” preeminent in sublimity. “The passions which belong to self-preservation,” the passions which “turn on pain and danger” and are “the strongest of all the passions,” especially excite that delight Burke calls the sublime. 

Before turning to a more extensive discussion of the sublime, Burke concludes Part One by explaining why a book on the sublime and the beautiful is needed. First, “the elevation of the mind ought to be the principal end of all our studies”—this may be the contribution of scholarship to our efforts to perfect our nature—but it is “not uncommon to be wrong in theory and right in practice.” “Men often act right from their feelings, who afterwards reason but ill on them from practice.” This notwithstanding, “it is impossible to avoid an attempt at such reasoning, and equally impossible to prevent it having some influence on our practice.” But neither artists nor philosophers nor “those called critics” have adequately explained human feelings. Artists “have been too much occupied in the practice” of art, in the imitation of feelings, fully to understand them; philosophers “have done little, and what they have done”—Locke? Adam Smith?—was “mostly with a view to their own schemes and systems.” Critics “have generally sought [the rule of the arts] among poems, pictures, engravings, statues and buildings,” but “art can never give the rules that make an art.” To reason rightly about the arts and the feelings which animate them, one must inquire into the causes of the sublime and the beautiful.

Scruton diverges from Burke in granting much more importance to human reason. Between Burke and Scruton, as it were, stands the by turns beautiful and sublime figure of Immanuel Kant. 

Scruton begins by folding the sublime into the beautiful. “Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling.” “Judgements of beauty”—and we do indeed judge it, not only experience it—concern “matters of taste.” “Maybe taste has no rational foundation,” and unquestionably “it is in the nature of tastes to differ,” so perhaps we have no universal standards of taste to reason about. Scruton demurs. “Beauty, I argue, is a real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature, and the sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world.” By making the sublime a part of the beautiful, Scruton makes it easier to ‘Kantify’ or ‘rationalize’ (in the non-pejorative sense of the word) as he considers beauty. Insofar as Burke inquires rationally into beauty and sublimity, he enquires into the nature of the passions. Scruton, following Kant in this regard, treats beauty as distinct from psychology; beauty has an integrity of its own, and therefore he engages in ‘aesthetics.’ 

Beauty, he argues, can and must be judged. The associations often made between truth and beauty, or goodness and beauty derive from the assumption that the divine possesses all three of these qualities. Thomas Aquinas inclined to this view, but if he is right, “how can there be dangerous beauties, corrupting beauties, and immoral beauties” or, “if such things are impossible, why are they impossible, and what is it that misleads us into thinking the opposite?” Is it that beauty is “a matter appearance, not of being, and perhaps also that in exploring beauty we are investigating the sentiments of people, rather than the deep structure of the world,” as indeed Burke evidently contends?

Retreating to more readily confirmable ground, Scruton lists six “platitudes” about beauty; that is, rather in the manner of Socrates, he begins with opinions. Beauty pleases us; one thing can be more beautiful than another; beauty is always a reason for attending to the thing that possesses it; beauty is the subject-matter of a judgment, namely, the judgment of taste; the judgment of taste is about the beautiful object, not about the subject’s state of mind; and there are “no second-hand judgments of beauty,” “no way you can argue me into a judgment that I have not made for myself.” “My own judgment waits upon experience,” not ratiocination. 

With respect to the first platitude, while it’s true that beauty pleases us, “the judgment focuses on the object judged, not the subject who judges.” The fact that the sixth platitude, which rules out judgments of beauty based on anyone’s judgment other than one’s own, does not vitiate this point. “The judgment of taste is a genuine judgment, one that is supported by reasons,” non-rational only in the sense that it does not derive from a deductive argument. This leads to a paradox: the judgment of taste is reasonable but the reasons one adduces “do not compel the judgment, and can be rejected without contradiction”; though reasonable, taste is not apodictic. This can be so, thanks to the second platitude, that judgments of aesthetic value “tend to be comparative,” as one looks at or listens to first one thing, then another. In so doing, we cultivate a sense of the beautiful, not a physical sense, a sense or more accurately a sensibility owing not to a Burkean inquiry into underlying emotional causes but nonetheless to a blending of sensual and intellectual perception not unlike Burke’s suggestions on the rational element in our appreciation of the sublime and the beautiful. 

Aisthēsis means sensation. Scruton does not derive the term’s meaning from its etymology, however, proposing that “we consider instead the way in which an object comes before us, in the experience of beauty.” Provisionally, he writes, he will “call something beautiful when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake”—not so much in terms of its function— and “in its presented form.” Here is where Kant comes in. Esteem for functionality implies an “interest.” I like desire or need the object for what it gets me. Judgment in Kant’s sense implies disinterested esteem. “There is a certain kind of disinterested interest, he argued, which is an interest of reason: not an interest of mine, but an interest of reason in me,” an impartial interest. “In the case of the judgment of beauty…I am purely disinterested, abstracting form practical considerations and attending to the object before me with all desires, interests and goals suspended.” While it is true that beauty gives us pleasure, it is a “disinterested pleasure”—pleasure in the object I judge beautiful, regardless of whether it serves my ‘interests.’ As such, it is a rational or “intentional” pleasure, not a mere physical reaction, pleasure in the taste of wine. Such “intentional pleasures” are “fully integrated into the life of the mind,” capable of “being neutralized by argument and amplified by attention” to “the presented form of the object, and constantly renewing itself from that source.” One cannot be argued into an aesthetic judgment, but once you have been presented with an object you consider beautiful, your judgment can be qualified by reasons brought to your attention by another viewer or listener. What Kant means by a judgment of taste is not intended by the judge as “a private opinion” but as “a binding verdict that would be agreed to by all rational beings just so long as they did what I am doing, and put their own interests aside.” This doesn’t mean that the judgment actually is binding, but rather that “I am making a claim,” implying that “seems to imply that others, if they see things aright, would agree with me,” a judgment moreover “for which I can reasonably be asked for a justification.” Scruton concurs with Kant’s view insofar as it finds the experience of beauty to be “the prerogative of rational beings.” “Only creatures like us—with language, self-consciousness, practical reason, and moral judgment—can look on the world in this alert and disinterested way, so as to seize on the presented object and take pleasure in it.” 

“The question we now have to consider,” after considering Kant’s theory, first, “whether this state of mind” of intentional pleasure really does have “any rational ground,” second, “whether it tells us anything about the world in which we live,” and third, “whether its exercise is a part of human fulfillment,” as both Kant and Burke maintain. Important arguments have been raised against each of these possibilities. Evolutionary psychologists point not to presented objects but to the “evolutionary origins” of ‘aesthetic’ states of mind, trying to show that such states give groups or individuals that possess them a better chance to pass on their “genetic inheritance.” Regarding group advantage, art or aesthetics “belong with ritual and festivals,” which promote group cohesion and therefore improved chances of survival. But a ritual or festival might have little or no aesthetic value, as for example the sacrifice of a virgin to the Sun God. As for the individualist theory, that a sense of beauty emerges from sexual selection, this explanation, “even if true, will not enable us to identify what is specific to the sentiment of beauty.” When Platonists argue that this sentiment is “a central component in sexual desire” they mean erōs, a “cosmic force” that manifests itself not only in sexual love but in the movements of the sun and the stars. Thus, “beauty, in a person, prompts desire,” but what we attracted to is only proximately the person in which it inheres. “By contemplating beauty the soul rises from its immersion in merely sensuous and concrete things, and ascends to a higher sphere, where it is not the beautiful boy who is studied, but the form of the beautiful itself, which enters the soul as a true possession in the way that ideas generally reproduce themselves in the souls of those who understand them.” Scruton judges that this takes the rational content of the appreciation of beauty too far, that sexual love for a person can morph “(after a bit of self-discipline) [into] delighted contemplation of an abstract idea.” “That is like saying that the desire for a steak could be satisfied (after a bit of mental exertion) by staring at the picture of a cow.” Scruton’s analogy is imprecise, since the picture of a cow is still a physical object, and the cow itself doesn’t look like a steak, but it is nonetheless a point well taken; it is likely that Plato’s Socrates intends to distinguish physical from intellectual erōs, and to elevate the minds of his interlocutors toward philosophy or love of wisdom, instead of pederasty. The thinking is wishful only if one assumes that Socrates expects most of his interlocutors to go along with him. That is, for Plato’s Socrates, rational contemplation of beauty is not disinterested in Kant’s sense; it is indeed erotic, with noēsis replacing orgasm as the pleasure achieved. Whether this is wishful thinking, or whether Kantian disinterestedness is rather more wishful, is a question one may well consider.

And Scruton himself maintains that “beauty undoubtedly stimulates desire in the moment of arousal.” He argues, however, that “the satisfied lover is as little able to possess the beauty of his beloved as the one who hopelessly observes it from afar.” In contradistinction from both Plato’s Socrates and Kant, he suggests that erotic love is neither capable of abstraction nor of disinterestedness, but rather “a desire for that person” who is beautiful. “This focusing on the individual fills the mind and perceptions of the lover” in a way quite different from an animal’s sexual appetite or the ideas of the two philosophers. Scruton is a ‘personalist,’ not a Platonist or a Kantian. He wants to register “a distinction, familiar to all of us, between an interest in a person’s body and an interest in a person as embodied.” The lover’s kiss “touches the other person in his very self,” the movement “from one self towards another, and a summoning of the other into the surface of his being.” That is why we can speak intelligibly of a “beautiful soul,” not only of a beautiful body, the soul of “one whose moral nature is perceivable, who is not just a moral agent but a moral presence, with the kind of virtue that shows itself to the contemplating gaze.” This is why one can think of the Virgin Mary as beautiful without desiring her sexually. “This thought reaches back to Plato’s original idea: that beauty is not just an invitation to desire, but also a call to renounce it.” In contradistinction to Burke, then, Scruton finds “the connection between sex, beauty and the sacred by reflecting on the distinctively human nature of our interest in those things, and by situating them firmly in the realm of freedom and rational choice,” not in the passions.

Yet there remain Burke’s remarks about the perfection of human nature and of the blending of reason with the passions. We return to his elaboration of the passions caused by the sublime and the beautiful.

The passion caused by the sublime is horrified astonishment, in which the soul’s notions are suspended. These are indeed passions, but although they are not produced by our reasonings they “anticipate” them by ‘getting our attention.’ The less intense effects of the sublime—admiration, reverence, and respect—allow more ‘room’ for such reasonings. One recalls the Bible’s teaching, that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

“Either more openly or latently,” terror causes the sublime. “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” Obscurity, the condition of not knowing, adds to terror; one recalls that God manifests Himself through a cloud, and that bogus authoritarians, whether genuinely dangerous (the Grand Inquisitor, with his “majesty, mystery, and authority”) or comical (the Wizard of Oz, manipulating his ‘special effects’ behind a flimsy curtain), imitate Him. “Those despotic governments, which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of ear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye,” as do some religions. Conversely, clarity “is in some sort an enemy to all enthusiasms whatsoever.” As a rule, paintings and drawings are clearer than words, which is why words move us more. “Poetry, with all its obscurity has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the persons than any other art,” a contention that obviously predates Beethoven and what followed in music. Be that as it may, “knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little,” whereas “all men are as the vulgar in what they do not understand,” such as infinity and eternity. 

“Besides these things which directly suggest the idea of danger, and those which produce a similar effect from a mechanical cause, I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.” Because “the idea of pain” sways us more than even “the highest degree of pleasure,” even if power promises “equal degrees of suffering or enjoyment,” our fear of suffering will prevail when confronted by it. Things less powerful than ourselves bring us pleasure because we can use them for that purpose. Things more powerful than ourselves threaten us because they need not follow our will; we are at their mercy. Power under our control is like a dog; power not under our control is like a wolf. The supreme power of God inspires joy insofar as we trust Him, but always fear and trembling. On the atheist side of the ledger, Lucretius’ cosmos, too, is sublime. Indeed, “before the christian religion had, as it were, humanized the idea of the divinity, and brought it somewhat nearer to us very little was said of the love of God.”

Privation (“Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude and Silence”) can be sublime, if wedded to any extreme; a brief period of solitude or silence, a small degree of emptiness of darkness, won’t worry us. Vastness is “a powerful cause of the sublime,” and infinity “fill[s] the mind with that sort of delightful terror, which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime.” But there is the exception of “the artificial infinite,” such as a rotunda. A circle is infinite in one sense but limited in another; the “great heathen temples” do not evoke the sublime, and classical architecture generally, with its rectangular shapes, does so even less. “There is nothing more prejudicial to the grandeur of buildings, than to abound in angles.” Accordingly, a cross is not sublime; the Cross of Christ is not sublime (perhaps symbolic of the humanizing character of Christianity), although His Passion surely is. Indeed, “no work of art can be great” except insofar “as it deceives,” presenting us with an optical illusion. Only nature can be truly great. The greatness of Stonehenge inheres not in the stones but in “the immense force necessary for such a work.” “When any work seems to have required immense force and labor to effect it, the idea is grand,” which might be why Jesus’ work on the Cross is sublime, the Cross itself not.

In general, extremes evoke sublimity: magnificence (“a great profusion of things which are splendid and valuable in themselves,” whether natural, as the starry sky, or artificial, as the “richness and profusion” of poetry); overpowering light or profound darkness; very bright or very dark colors; the “excessive loudness” of a waterfall or a crowd will “overpower the soul,” suspend its action, and fill it with terror”). “In all things” the sublime “abhors mediocrity.” The classical virtue of moderation removes it. Moderation in souls and in things usually keeps them out of danger; the sublime endangers self-preservation. Raging Achilles died young, wily Odysseus lived long.

Beauty is “that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it,” as distinct from desire and lust, which seeks possession. Love need not excite desire. This seems to anticipate Scruton, but on the contrary, “beauty demands no assistance from our reasoning.” Reasoning, especially mathematical reasoning, registers proportion, “the measure of relative quantity,” it “surely beauty i no idea belonging to mensuration, nor has it any thing to do with calculation and geometry.” Roses, for example, are beautiful, but they are out of proportion to their thin stems, and as to the flower itself, the English rose features no geometric proportions, despite its symmetries. “It is not by the force of long attention and inquiry that we find any object to be beautiful.” The swan’s neck, the peacock’s tail: it isn’t proportion or measure “that creates all beauty which belongs to shape.” We tend to think so because “there is an unfortunate propensity in mankind to make themselves, their views, and their works, the measure of excellence in every thing whatsoever.” But man is most assuredly not the measure of all things. And if we look at the figure of man himself, he “may have legs of equal length, and resembling each other in all respects, and his neck of a just size, and his back quite straight, without having at the same time the least perceivable beauty.” 

Although “the Platonic theory of fitness and aptitude” is mistaken respecting beauty, “I did not by any means intend to say that they were of no value or that they ought to be disregarded in works of art.” They are indeed fit for human use and appreciation. But “whenever the wisdom of our Creator intended that we should be affected with any thing, he did not confide the execution of his design to the languid and precarious operation of our reason,” instead endowing it “with powers and properties that prevent the understanding, and even the will, which seizing upon the senses and imagination, captivate the soul before the understanding is ready either to join with them or to oppose them.” It is the anatomist who discovers the intricate proportions of the human body, “the affection which possesses an ordinary man at the sight of a delicate smooth skin” requires “no investigation” to perceive such beauty. Indeed, “we have need of a strong effort of our reason to disentangle our minds from the allurements of the object to a consideration of that wisdom,” divine wisdom, “which invented so powerful a machine” as the cosmos, or, for that matter, the allurements of a beautiful human body. We appreciate beauty rationally only insofar as it happens to coincide with proportionality, the object’s fitness to the purpose for which it was designed. When coincident, beauty and proportion “operate on the understanding considering them, which approves the work and acquiesces in it.” Such judgment is not a matter of the passions. Burke rather associates the mind not with beauty but with sublimity. Reason, being ‘judgmental,’ tends to invoke fear more than love. “The authority of a father, so useful to our well-being, and so justly venerable upon all accounts, hinders us from having that entire love for him that we have for our mothers, where parental authority is almost melted down into the mother’s fondness and indulgence.” And “we have great love for our grandfathers, in whom this authority is removed a degree from us, and where the weakness of age mellows it into something of a feminine partiality.” The same goes for virtue, whose sternness Burke associates with reason and facing necessities, not beauty.

Neither rational (measurable/proportional) nor useful, beauty is “some quality in bodies, acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses,” “excit[ing] in us the passion of love, or some correspondent affections.” Unlike sublime things, beautiful things are often small: “I am told that in most languages, the objects of love are spoken of under diminutive epithets,” “terms of affection and tenderness.” As mentioned, great size is for the sublime, for what is admired, feared. “There is a wide difference between admiration and love.” Beauty is smooth, ruggedness sublime; beauty is seen in parts “melted into one another, not in angularity. (Poor angularity—neither sublime nor beautiful.) Beauty is delicate, as “an air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty; myrtles and greyhounds are beautiful, oaks and mastiffs sublime. The allure of women consists partly in their delicacy. Beauty dresses in clean, fair colors, unlike the dark or glaring extremes of sublimity. In movement, beauty avoids contortion and suddenness; in sounds, it has nor shrillness harshness, or depth; in taste, it is sweet not sour or cloying.

Can beauty and sublimit be found together? Yes, but only in the sense that black and white, when mingled, make grey. They may soften one another without becoming the same, perhaps as one sometimes sees in married couples. 

Scruton notices that even in Burke’s time nature was becoming less sublime, more beautiful. “The mastery over nature, its conversion into a safe and common home for our species, and the desire to protect the dwindling wilderness, all fed into the impulse to see the natural world as an object of contemplation, rather than as a means to our goals.” The grandeur of landscapes came to seem less threatening than open, freeing. And Kant, for one, noticed that persons who otherwise “seem to live in an aesthetic vacuum, filling their days with utilitarian calculations,” still appreciate nature, if unthreatened by it. Natural beauty thus has more philosophic interest than artful beauty; its appreciation being “common to all human beings,” it enables the philosopher to see human nature more clearly. The term “aesthetic” was intended “to denote a human universal.” In one sense a product of a certain place and time, in another sense aesthetics “is by no means unique to that place and time,” the need “to find solace in the contemplation of beauty” being noticeable in China and Japan, as well. “The experience of natural beauty…contains a reassurance that this world is a right and fitting place to be—a home in which our human powers and prospects find confirmation”; “a world that makes room for such things makes room for you.” The European landscape paintings of Constable “portray a home, a place bent to human uses and bearing in every particular the imprint of human hopes and goals”; they consist of “the free elaboration of nature, in which human beings appear because they too are natural.”

Where does this leave the Burkean sublime? It shares with beauty the power to “lift us out of the ordinary utilitarian thoughts that dominate our practical lives.” The sublime and the beautiful also “involve the kind of disinterested contemplation that Kant was later to identify as the core of the aesthetic experience.” Kant saw in our ability to think about the sublime and to “affirm ourselves against it,” the dignity of human beings, who thereby “affirm our obedience to the moral law, which no natural force could ever vanquish or set aside.” Whether we follow Kant into the moral law as the nature-free categorical imperative, or instead (with Scruton) restrict oneself to appreciating the dignity of human thought, beauty—whether in nature, in persons, in artifacts—cannot easily be separated from human purposes and interests, from “practical reason.” Since natural beauty in its splendor raises imponderable questions (“What purpose does this beauty serve. And if we say that it serves no purpose but itself, then whose purpose is that?”), Scruton draws back, rather in the manner of Socrates in the Theaetetus, to consider a smaller matter, “the place of beauty in ordinary practical reasoning, where purpose is at the forefront of our thinking.” “I will try to show just why aesthetic judgment is a necessary part of doing anything well.” Before following him, his eventual silence regarding natural beauty does suggest that Burke was on to something when he classified nature as a whole as sublime.

English to the core, Scruton judges the best place to begin the contemplation of “everyday beauty” is in the garden, “where leisure, learning and beauty come together, in a liberating experience at home.” Not the utilitarian vegetable garden but the pleasure garden, where “nature is taken up, tamed and made obedient to human visual norms,” provides a suitably limitable, as it were surveyable glimpse at beauty, even as the small polis affords Aristotle a better look at political life than the sprawling empires of his time. A tree in a garden “enters into relation with the people who walk in the garden, belongs with them in a kind of conversation,” taking its place “as an extension of the human world, mediating between the built environment and the world of nature.” “This attempt to match our surroundings to ourselves and ourselves to our surroundings is arguably a human universal,” suggesting “that the judgment of beauty is not just an optional addition to the repertoire of human judgments, but the unavoidable consequence of taking life seriously, and becoming truly conscious of our affairs.” And as people and their gardens and their buildings come together, “a kind of rational discourse emerges, the goal of which is to build a shared environment in which we can all be at home, and which satisfies our need that things look right to everyone.” As Aristotle finds the origins of the political community in the family, its forms of rule anticipating the forms of rule in the city, Scruton finds at least a contributing source of politics in aesthetics, which includes the shared meaning, the shared purposes, that arise from gardening and architecture. In this new, political, home, human begin to “discover through a kind of reasoned dialogue, the goal of which is to secure some measure of agreement in judgments among those who have an interest in the choice”; they establish “a genuine realm of rational life that corresponds to the philosophical idea of the aesthetic.”

And this can go beyond practical reasoning. The practical-aesthetic choices we make with respect to our gardens, our buildings, and the artifacts we place in them “promot[e] self-knowledge,” bringing you “to understand how you yourself fit in to the world of human meanings,” the “self-certainty that comes through building a presence in the world of others.” “Even those who dress so as to stand out and draw attention to themselves do so in order that others should recognize their intention” as they “send recognizable messages to the society of strangers,” whom we move amongst as “the subject-matter of a reasoned judgment,” a judgment of our fittingness, a judgment of beauty. 

With Hegel, artistic beauty came to replace natural beauty as “the core subject-matter of aesthetics.” Hegel’s historicist philosophy looks not to natural beauty but to the sublime conquest of nature by human beings, a new instantiation of the Absolute Spirit which constitutes both nature and man. Scruton associates this with modern individualism, inasmuch as it is individuals who, through his artworks, “announces himself to the world and calls on the gods”—more accurately, the ‘god’ that is ‘History’—for “vindication.” “Art picked up the torch of beauty, ran with it for a while, and then dropped it in the pissoirs of Paris,” where the artistic modernists left it—the sublimity of ‘History’ overcoming the beautiful. 

Aesthetics nonetheless survived, despite the anti-aesthetics of ‘modern art.’ This became clear when those still devoted to beauty and the ‘modernists’ confronted a common enemy: the leveling predilections of mass taste, the preference for the production of “fantasy objects” which offer “surrogate fulfilment to our forbidden desires, thereby permitting them”—what André Malraux called “the arts of satiation.” “The ideal fantasy is perfectly realized, and perfectly unreal—an imaginary object that leaves nothing to the imagination,” as seen preeminently in advertisements “tempting us constantly to realize our dreams, rather than to pursue realities.”

Scruton distinguishes fantasy from imagination. “Imaginary things are pondered, fantasies are acted out.” Imagined scenes “come to us soaked in thought, and in no sense are they surrogates, standing in place of the unobtainable” but rather “deliberately placed at a distance, in a world of their own.” [1] It is the distinction between a film by Ingmar Bergman and a porno flick, a Greek tragedy (where “the murders take place off stage”) and an ‘action’ movie. ” True artists control their subject-matter, in order that our response to it should be their doing, not ours.” The meaning represents itself “as presented,” that is, “as inseparable from form and style.” This is why we can talk about poetry, with greater or lesser intelligence and accuracy, but never convey its full meaning as the poem presents itself to us. And a poem also sounds, untranslatably. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” doesn’t quite mean the same when translated into “Demain et demain et demain.” The tone has shifted.

And obviously so much more for music. “It seems therefore that our best attempts at explaining the beauty of works of abstract art like music and architecture involve linking them by chains of metaphor to human action, life and emotion,” as “figurative uses of language aim not to describe things but to connect them, and the connection is forged in the feeling of the perceivers,” changing “the way things are perceived.” “We understand expressive music by fitting it to other elements in our experience, drawing connections with human life, ‘matching’ the music to other things that have meaning for us.” In this way, music does indeed resonate in souls, connecting “with the moral life,” a connection “which explains why we feel at home with the piece, and elevated by it.” Plato was right to turn his moral and indeed political attention to music, just as parents are right to concern themselves with the kind of music their children are listening to. “In art as in life fittingness is at the heart of aesthetic success. We want things to fit together, in ways that fit to us.” 

Since “the impetus to impose order and meaning on human life, through the experience of something delightful, is the underlying motive of art in all its forms,” and since “our favorite works of art seem to guide us to the truth of the human condition,” “show[ing] us the worthiness of being human,” one must judge art with considerable care, asking if that imposition and that seeming are true to human life, not veering away into fantasy or kitsch. At the same time, artists should never moralize, as “moralizing destroys [the] true moral value” of works of art, “which lies in the ability to open our eyes to others, and to discipline our sympathies towards life as it is.” 

Continuing his search for the causes of the sublime and the beautiful in the passions, Burke concedes that the “great chain of causes, which linking one to another, even to the throne of God himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours.” He can identify the efficient cause, the ‘trigger’ that prompts them, “the immediately sensible qualities of things”: “certain affections of the mind, that cause certain changes in the body; or certain powers and properties in bodies, that work a change in the mind.” The “governing motions” of our passions are often “communicated at a time when we have not capacity to reflect on them”—childhood, for example. This means that many things affect us not by their natural powers but by association with some pleasure or pain. Pain and fear “consist in an unnatural tension of the nerves”—the one physical but affecting the mind, the other mental but affecting the body. This interaction of body and mind, which Burke emphasizes, can lead to complex reactions, as when labor, the surmounting of difficulties, painful in itself, can counteract the melancholy one may feel after prolonged rest. Both the “coarser” and the “finer elements of body and mind need work to keep them fit. The mind, too, needs exercise, and mental exercise sometimes requires pain and fear, “so modified as not to be actually noxious,” as generations of teachers and their students know. 

The senses convey impressions that bring us to the sense of the sublime. Burke pays particular attention to vision. Objects of great size are sublime because “if but one point is observed at once, the eye must traverse the vast space of such bodies with great quickness, and consequently the fine nerves and muscles destined to the motion of that part must be very much strained; and their great sensibility must make them highly affected by this straining.” This is especially so if the large object is more or less featureless, with no details to cause the eye to pause. “The eye or the mind (for in this case there is no difference) in great uniform objects does not readily arrive at their bounds; it has no rest, whilst it contemplates them; the image is much the same every where.” Even a colonnade, with its procession of individual objects, will prove sublime if the pillars themselves are uniform because the repetition of similar impressions (as Burke calls them, following Locke, “ideas”) exhausts eye and mind, even more than one huge block will do. 

We experience the sublime not only by seeing but by not-seeing, by being plunged into darkness. Burke disagrees with Locke’s contention that darkness terrifies us only because it’s associated with tales of ghosts and goblins. It is more that in darkness we cannot see objects that might injure us if we collided with them. He explains the fear of a white boy for a black woman this way not because the boy had any racial prejudice but because in perceiving darkness the iris of the eye is forced to expand, straining the nerves. “Darkness is terrible in its own nature,” having such “mechanical effects.” Nature “restores itself” to equilibrium in such circumstances by looking away from blackness and gazing at colors, allowing the eye to “recover by a compulsive spring.” One can also moderate the naturally terrifying effect of darkness by ‘getting used to it.’ Although “black will always have something melancholy in it, because the sensory will always find the change from it from other colors too violent,” “custom reconciles us to every thing.” The boy can overcome his fear of the harmless black woman by accustoming himself to her.

This may well be another link between Burke’s (mostly) Lockean doctrines and his later critique of the French revolutionaries in the name of “the decent drapery of life,” of custom, prescription, tradition. To base political life on complex ideas derived from the “simple ideas” presented to us by the senses gives a people over to its passions, with murderous and tyrannical results. To, in fact, ‘The Terror.’ Sublimity in politics is a thing to be avoided, at least under most circumstances, except insofar as it can be moderated into sentiments of respect and reverence. Foreign and civil wars are sublime and sometimes just, but always a profound misfortune for any people, including the victors.

If pain and fear animate the sense of the sublime by producing an unnatural tension of the nerves, beauty “acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system”; “the passion called love is produced by this relaxation.” Burke suggests that things sweet to the smell and taste are “probably round” on the microscopic level, their smoothness causing us pleasure. So too with things touched. But even a sweet smell long continued and chocolates consumed steadily will cloy, and a prolonged contact with uniformly smooth things will tire.  Sustained pleasure requires gentle variation; “rocking sets children to sleep better than absolute rest.” 

Homer understands this. He gives the Trojans, “whose fate he has designed to excite our compassion, infinitely more of the amiable social virtues than he has distributed among his Greeks.” He makes the Greeks “far their superiors in the political and military virtues.” And so “we love Priam more than Agamemnon, and Hector more than his conqueror Achilles,” although Priam lacks Agamemnon’s prudence and Hector lacks Achilles courage. “Admiration is the passion which Homer would excite in favor of the Greeks, and he has done it by bestowing on them the virtues which have but little to do with love,”, much to do with fearsomeness and respect. Troy itself—besieged, limited not vast—can only be pitied.

It is only in the final part of his book that Burke considers words, and not in their capacity for framing rational thoughts but strictly in their capacity to excite the passions associated with the sublime and the beautiful, as seen in their use in poetry and in oratory. In those genres, words “affect the mind by raising in it ideas of those things for which custom has approved [the words] to stand.” Words can be “aggregate”—representing those simple “ideas” or sense impressions of things seen in nature (tree, man, castle)—or “simple abstract”—representing one simple idea (red, round, square)—or “compounded abstract”—the arbitrary union of the other two (virtue, honor), words denoting phenomena that are “not real essences.” “Such words are in reality but mere sounds; but they are sounds, which being used on particular occasions, wherein we receive some good, or suffer some evil, or see others affected with good or evil; or which we hear applied to other interesting things or events; and being applied in such a variety of cases that we know readily by habit to what things they belong, they produce in the mind, whenever they are afterwards mentioned, effects similar to those of their occasions.” Burke cites Locke, who cautions that when words are taught before “the particular modes of action to which [words] belong are presented to the mind,” the person attaches them to the pleasure or pain of the one using the words, not to the things themselves. This yields contradiction between principles and practice, interfering with sound deductions drawn from sense impressions. This makes for bombast in speech and in writing, and “it requires in several cases much good sense and experience to be guarded against the force of such language.” Although all spoken words produce sounds and provoke affections in the soul, the compounded abstract words never produce a clear picture in the mind. They should be used and heard with caution. “In reality poetry and rhetoric do not succeed in exact description so well as painting does; their business is to affect rather by sympathy than by imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves.” Although poetry imitates nature “so far as it describes the manners and passions of men which their words can express,” descriptive poetry (for example, James Thompson’s “The Seasons”) substitute sounds for realities, with which the sounds are associated only by custom. 

Words are “much more capable of making deep and lively impressions than any other arts, and even than nature itself in very many cases.” There are three causes of this effect: being social animals, “we take an extraordinary part in the passions of others,” and “no tokens…can express all the circumstances of most passions so fully as words,” especially if the speaker himself is impassioned; second, “many things of a very affecting nature” seldom occur, while “the words which represent them often do” (war, death, famine), and by repetition these words “have an opportunity of making a deep impression and taking root in the mind,” even when their referents “have never been at all presented to the senses of any men but by words” (God, angels, devils, heaven and hell); finally, words can be combined in novel ways, thereby “givi[ing] life and force to the simple object.” Certain languages lend themselves to the evocations of passions more than others. French, and other “very polished languages, such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength”; by contrast, “the oriental tongues, and in general the languages of most unpolished people, have a great force and energy of expression.” It should be noticed that by the oriental languages Burke likely means Hebrew and Arabic, languages of the sublime religions. If Christianity comes to us in Greek, it is the less polished koine. 

Scruton’s account points to the rational dimension of taste without venturing into rationalism. Taste does not change under the pressure of a rational argument, that is, by a deduction drawn from self-evident premises. Taste changes, one hopes for the better, by adducing reasons; I am unlikely appreciate much of English poetry if I don’t know anything about Christian iconography. I may well change my opinion of a given poem once I learn how that iconography ‘works’ in it. The difference between this and logical deduction is that in mathematics, science, and morality, where deductions often rule our judgment (as, for example, in that well-known logical syllogism, the Declaration of Independence), “the search for objectivity,” for understanding the thing before us, “is he search for universally valid results—results that must be accepted by every rational being.” In the judgment of beauty, however, “the search for objectivity is for valid and heightened forms of human experience.” “Criticism is not aiming to show that you must like Hamlet.” Criticism aims at showing “the vision of human life which the play contains, and the forms of belonging which it endorses, and to persuade you of their value.” Criticism does not claim “that this vision of human life is universally available,” but neither does it allow that “no cross-cultural comparisons can be made” between, say, Hamlet and a Japanese Noh play. 

If judgments of taste concerning beauty can be made, by what standards should we make them? Beauty “speaks to us, as virtue speaks to us, of human fulfilment: not of things that we want, but of things that we ought to want, because human nature requires them.” Here, Scruton aligns himself with Burke, and both align with Aristotle. To show this, Scruton compares and contrasts Botticelli’s Venus with Titian’s several Venuses. Botticelli paints “the face of an idealized woman,” a goddess, “outside the reach of human longings,” a woman “beyond the reach of desire as we have known it.” Titian’s Venuses recline before us “very much on earth.” Botticelli’s Venus commends her viewer to the Platonic “ascent of the soul through love”; “she is not erotic” but rather “a vision of heavenly beauty” and “a call to transcendence.” And even Titian’s earthbound Venuses are persons, each an individual “who has taken possession of her surroundings, and is decidedly at home in them.” Botticelli and Titan interest us “in the embodied person” more than in the body of that person. Pornography does something quite different, making the body the object of our attention, denying “the human subject” pervading the body, thereby “negating the moral demand that free beings must treat each other as ends in themselves,” as Kant insists. Again alluding to the Eleatic Stranger’s distinction in Plato’s Sophist, genuinely erotic art speaks to the imagination, pornography to fantasy. “My body is not my property but—to use the theological term—my incarnation”; “I am inextricably mingled with it, and what is done to my body is done to me.” By prostituting your body (and ‘pornography’ means ‘prostitute-writing’), you “harden the soul.” “Art that ‘objectifies’ the body, removing it from the realm of moral relations, can never capture the true beauty of the human form,” and “the case against pornography is the case against the interest that it serves—the interest in seeing people reduced to their bodies, objectified as animals, made thing-like and obscene.” [2] This in no way prevents ‘realism’ in art, including the presentation of things and persons debased. True, The Waste Land “describes the modern city as a soul-less desert: but it does so with images and allusions that affirms what the city denies.” The city may be debased, but T.S. Eliot did not make it so. Pornography makes it so. So does much recent art, which “cultivates a posture of transgression, matching the ugliness of the things it portrays with an ugliness of its own,” repudiating beauty in the name of prodding us toward social reform of some sort. But what can that reform amount to, if art abandons the standard of beauty? The deployment of ugliness for the sake of social reform imitates non-violently the false promise of state-sponsored terror by the tyrants of the last century: just let us break the eggs and we will surely get an omelet out of them. In the event, the omelet never arrived from the kitchen.

“Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people.” Reform, yes, but radical reform, probably not. “The experience of beauty…tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.” Artful desecration of “the few scant beauties” we find in the world is as much a flight from reality as ‘bourgeois sentimentality’ or complacency. The ‘postmodern’ culture “is a loveless culture, which is afraid of beauty” because such a culture “is disturbed by love.” At this point, Scruton’s argument takes a Tocquevillian turn, as he remarks that egalitarian moral sentiments, seen in the claim that aesthetic standards themselves are wrong because ‘my opinion is just as good as yours’ meets with the impossibility of living “as though there are no aesthetic values,” which is what aesthetic ‘values pluralism’ or relativism effectively imposes. “The desire to desecrate is a desire to turn aesthetic judgment against itself, so that it no longer seems like a judgment of us.” What Tocqueville notices, the clamorousness of an egalitarian culture, whereby each person vies for attention in the sea of equals, leads to “stimulus addiction—the hunger to be shocked, gripped, stirred in whatever way might take us straight to the goal of excitement—which arises from the decoupling of sensory interest from rational thought.” In our pursuit of happiness, we come to misidentify happiness, having habituated ourselves to sensations, instead. “My argument implies that the addiction to effect is the enemy not only of art but also of happiness, and that anybody who cares for the future of humanity should study how to revive the ‘aesthetic education’ as Schiller described it, which has the love of beauty as its goal.” It is (to appropriate an old Marxist phrase) no accident that the word kitsch was coined in the last century by an Austrian troubled by the advance of egalitarianism in European life. 

“Kitsch is a mold which settles over the entire works of a living culture, when people prefer the sensuous trappings of belief to the thing truly believed in.” Kitsch embodies the preference for the low to the high. The “kitschification of religion” is idolatry. “Why should God be profaned by idolatry, and why are people tempted by it? Why does God decree the terrible genocidal punishment of the Israelites for what (by modern standards) is the casual peccadillo of dancing before the Golden Calf?” It is because the Israelites attempted to put “a substitute in place of that for which there are no substitutes—the ‘I am that I am’ that is uniquely itself and which must be worshipped for the thing that it is and not as a means to an end that could be achieved in some other way or though some rival deity,” admitting “into the realm of worship the idea of a currency,” whereby one idol can be discarded for another if you’re dissatisfied with the results you’re getting from bowing down before the first one. Idolatry assumes that the ‘god’ works for you. As an American college freshman once complained to his English teacher, “The problem with God in Paradise Lost is that He’s got this holier-than-thou attitude.” As Scruton puts it, “Kitsch is not, in the first instance, an artistic phenomenon, but a disease of faith.”

To flee from kitsch, ‘modern’ art, the anti-representational, anti-mimetic ‘abstract’ art of the twentieth century, turned against beauty itself, the beauty previous artists sought to ‘imitate.’ They instead chose to stride with the ‘cutting edge of History.’ “The paradox, however, is that the relentless pursuit of artistic innovation leads to a cult of nihilism,” as we find ourselves “caught between two forms of sacrilege, the one dealing in sugary dreams”—the “Disneyfication of art,” whereby a cartoon cricket croons us into wishing upon a star instead of praying to God—the “other in savage fantasies.” “Kitsch deprives feeling of its cost and therefore of its reality; desecration augment the cost of feeling and so frightens us away from it.” Both evade “the core of virtue, the origin of meaning and the true theme of high art,” which is self-sacrifice, which occurs wherever real love is. That “the path out of desecration towards the sacred and the sacrificial” is “what beauty teaches us.” 

“Everything I have said about beauty implies that it is rationally founded.” Beauty “challenges us to find meaning in its object to make critical comparisons, and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find.” Beauty takes us beyond “subjective preference” and “transient pleasure.” “For a free being,” a rational being, one who can make choices, “there is right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment just as much as right action” because the judgment of beauty orders he emotions and desires who make it.” The judgment of beauty conduces to what Plato’s Socrates calls a rightly ordered soul. Socrates, in his ironically-intended just regime, banished poets, only to let them back in if they reformed their poetry. Scruton would have us reform ourselves, which may have been what Socrates really wanted.

There may be hope, still. The dust jacket of Beauty features a detail from Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile. I was sitting in an airport, taking a look through the book (given the circumstance, I cannot claim actually to have been reading it), when a three-year-old girl walked over. She gazed at the picture, transfixed, for about thirty seconds—a long time, for her. A smiling mother came to collect her, but not before I had the chance to consider the naturalness of human attraction to beauty.

 

Note

1. On the distinction between images and phantasms, also see Plato: Sophist 236b and following.
2. See Harry M. Clor: Obscenity and Public Morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Peter Singer: The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

 

“Ethics is inescapable” because human beings “find it impossible to prevent ourselves inwardly classifying actions as right or wrong,” no matter how hard some of us may try. This admitted, problems remain in “understanding the nature and origin” of ethical standards. Objective or subjective? Natural or conventional? Universal or ‘relative’ (to individuals, families, civil societies, regimes)? 

Singer rejects God as the origin of ethical standards. If I say murder is wrong “only because God” said it is, the “God might just as easily have said: ‘Thou shalt kill.'” And if He did, “Would killing then have been right?” If you concur, that “makes morality too arbitrary; but to deny that it would have been right is to assume that there are standards of right and wrong independent of God’s will.” And if you say God is good, I reply that this “implies a standard of goodness that is independent of God’s decision.” Ah, but not so fast, Professor Singer. If one says God is good, and God is God—that is, the ultimate cause of all things, beyond human conventions, human nature and the whole of His creation—then His command is good. His will issues from His goodness and His goodness inheres in His being. Another way of putting this is to observe that every set of ethics has some source of what ‘the good’ is. It might be God, nature, ‘history,’ custom, but whatever it is, it is. If God is God, then if He’d said ‘Thou shalt kill,’ that would indeed have made it right. Indeed, He did indeed sentence all human beings to death.

But Singer wants to philosophize about ethics, to address ethical questions with reasonings ‘unaided’ by divine revelation, not to engage seriously in theology. More specifically, he wants to philosophize about the ethical claims made by the entomologist E. O. Wilson on behalf of ‘sociobiology,’ a subsection of biology that attempts to show the biological bases of human societies, in contradiction to the claim that human societies are entirely conventional. Against this, Singer proposes a rationalist ethics founded on historicist premises. His enterprise overlaps with Wilson’s insofar as both endorse evolutionism, the principal means of ‘historicizing’ nature. In order to do that, he needs (so to speak) to clear God and His revelation out of the way, however implausibly. So, then, what will his rationalist ethics be, and how will it answer the challenge of a biologist who denies that reason amounts to much when it comes to ethics?

Wilson rejects social contract theory, which holds that “our rules of right and wrong sprang from some distant Foundation Day on which previously independent rational human beings came together to hammer out a basis for setting up the first human society.” Supposedly, “we now know that we have lived in groups longer than we have been rational human beings.” This assumes that we were not social and rational at the same time, but Singer is willing to walk with Wilson this far, presumably on the further assumption that ‘we’ began as sub-rational but social hominids. (If ‘we’ began that way, then ‘we’ were not ‘us,’ yet, not real human beings, but again let that pass.)

“So what does sociobiology offer us in place of the historical myth of the social contract?” Since sociobiology accepts the survival of the fittest as the driving force of evolution, it must explain certain forms of social behavior that have endured and even advanced over time as fitter than others. The most obvious problem is altruism. Genes are passed from two individuals to one; only “if a gene leads individuals,” not groups or the species as a whole, “to have some feature which enhances their prospect of surviving and producing, that gene will itself survive into the next generation.” Would this not make individuals with ‘selfish’ genes much more likely to survive than individuals with unselfish, altruistic, especially self-sacrificing genes? (Not necessarily, one might think, inasmuch as heroes who survive their battles might be more attractive mates than cowards who survive those battles, but neither Wilson nor Singer takes that line.)

Sociobiologists explain altruism in natural-selection terms by examining kin altruism and reciprocal altruism. Kin altruism is seen in the fact that parents rate the protection and flourishing of their children higher than the protection and flourishing of other people’s children. (No doubt professors Wilson and Singer have seen this in the parents of their students.) Kin altruism is limited to the love of one’s own. A “genetically based tendency to help one’s relatives” makes evolutionary sense if parental self-sacrifice, and a lesser but still noticeable degree of self-sacrifice on behalf of more distant relatives, protects more individuals than the family loses as a result of self-sacrificial protective behavior. This doesn’t mean that kin altruism is rational or even intentional, only that animals “act roughly as if they were aware of these relationships.” 

Reciprocal altruism, too, may well have evolutionary benefits. We see it in apes, who groom one another, relieving not only kin but members of their small societies of parasites. This gives an advantage to a group that engages in reciprocal grooming “over other groups who do not have any way of ridding themselves of parasites.” In periods of extraordinary stress on all the groups, the healthier and stronger group will more likely survive and prosper. Admittedly, “a group would have to keep itself distinct from other groups for group altruism to work”; indeed, it “would work best when coupled with a degree of hostility to outsiders,” which is exactly what we see in many kinds of social animals. 

Why does any of this matter ethically? For starters, biological evidence shows that Hobbes was wrong about the state of nature as simply a condition of the war of all against all. Human social nature derives from pre-human ancestors. So does logos, or at least the potential for it; apes can learn words in sign language, and dogs can reason (the latter claim awaits a definition of ‘reason’). Although anthropologists correctly observe that ethical codes vary widely from one human society to the next, sociobiologists rejoin that “there are common elements underlying this diversity.” Kinship altruism in the form of mothers caring for children and fathers supporting and protecting families are universal, and attempts to abolish the family, Marxist or other, have failed. Such behavior means that human beings “are led by bonds of natural affection to do what would otherwise fall on the community itself and either would not be done at all or would require labor unmotivated by natural impulses”—an “expensive and impersonal bureaucracy,” in the instance of the modern state. And “the bond of reciprocity is almost as universal” among human beings as the kinship bond, also for reasons evolution can explain. I trust those who help me, and those who help me trust me if I reciprocate; such bonds strengthen the society in which we live, giving it an advantage over any society that fails to establish such bonds. Individuals who violate the bond of mutual trust and (in speaking, reasoning humans) “the concept of fairness” or justice that arises from it will incur revenge, and “personal resentment becomes moral indignation when it is shared by other members of a group and brought under a general principle.” Tribal blood feuds give way to impartial judicature—the theme of a Greek tragedy or two. And logos not only enables human beings to judge impartially but to honor and dishonor their fellows. “If I can talk…I can tell everyone else in the group what sort of person you are.” 

Some of this isn’t altruism but “enlightened self-interest.” But some of it really is altruistic, “behavior which benefits others at some material cost to oneself” and “motivated by the desire to benefit others.” Still, “if one is more likely to be selected as a partner if one has genuine concern for others”—the ‘heroism’ example mentioned earlier, but not only heroism—then “there is an evolutionary advantage in having genuine concern for others,” although of course human beings will still need to separate false altruists from true, a task their ability to speak and to reason will sharpen on both sides of the ethical divide. 

Finally, altruism in families and in social groups can rise to the level of political societies. “The group bias of our ethics in respect to loyalty to the group as a whole shows itself in the high praise we give to patriotism.” Some, including Diogenes the Cynic and some of the Stoics deprecate patriotism as “group selfishness,” avowing loyalty to “the world community.” “Yet patriotism has proved difficult to dislodge from its high place among the conventionally accepted virtues,” which may or may not (sociobiologists allow) mean it has a biological basis. 

Singer cautions that “no ethical conclusions flow from these speculations” about “the origins of human ethics.” ‘Universal’ doesn’t mean ‘good’ and biological fact does not justify itself. There are many biological facts, many ills that flesh is heir to, that we seek to remediate or eliminate. He turns to an examination of Wilson’s claim that “sociobiological theories have great significance for ethics.” 

Wilson argues that human self-knowledge “is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain.” Philosophers in fact “consult” their own emotions when they “wish to intuit the standards of good and evil.” In Singer’s paraphrase, “only by interpreting the activity of the emotive centers as a biological adaptation can the meaning of the [ethical] canons be deciphered,” according to sociobiologists. These standards do change as human societies change—a family hut calls for different behaviors than an urban apartment complex—and thus “no single set of moral standards is applicable either to all human populations” or even “to all the different age and sex groups within each population.” Wilson derives three moral conclusions from this mixture of biology and varying social circumstances: the natural law teaching about sexual behavior is wrong because reproduction isn’t “the primary role of sexual activity” and thus homosexuality and the use of contraceptives are licit; attempt to reform behaviors that are really natural (families, for example) will come at the cost of heavy regulation and cost; and a future sociobiologically-based ethics will promote the survival of the species by the preservation of human genes, diversity of the gene pool to avoid the ill effects of inbreeding, and promotion of the universal human rights, which supports the group membership human survival requires. Sociobiology can assist in the achievement of these ruling principles and practices by advancing “new knowledge about the consequences of our actions” (especially their evolutionary consequences), by undermining ethical beliefs that are unnatural, and possibly by “provid[ing] us with a new set of ethical premises or a reinterpretation of old ethical premises” that will replace evolutionarily harmful prejudices.

Singer demurs. “Philosophers working in ethics take little notice of genetics or evolutionary theory,” and rightly so, inasmuch as “the important philosophical questions—like ‘What is good?’—have to be answered before we can use information about the consequences of our actions in deciding what we ought to do.” “Information about the consequences of our actions does not tell us which consequences to value.” Is the human good utility? Liberty? Happiness? Or is Kant right in holding that morality has nothing to do with consequences at all? As an ethical ‘consequentialist’ himself, Singer rejects Kant’s categorical imperative and admits the need for gathering “the best information available” when one considers the means to achieve moral ends. But that doesn’t justify sociobiology’s “dramatic claims about explaining ethics ‘at all depths’ or fashioning a biology of ethics which will do away with the need for ethical philosophers.” (Perish that thought.) 

If biology could discover a natural law undergirding ethics, that would have “an important effect” on philosophy. But “natural law systems of ethics are not widely held outside religious, and especially Roman Catholic circles,” and even if, say, homosexuality could be proved to be unnatural, “obviously there are many things, from curing diseases to using saccharin, that are unnatural but not therefore wrong.” Moreover, “far from justifying principles that are shown to be ‘natural,’ a biological explanation is often a way of debunking the lofty status of what seemed a self-evident moral law.” [1] Singer will return to the latter claim, which is based upon Hume’s distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought,’ but one might well linger on the slap at religion. Surely no philosopher could claim that ‘widely held’ claims somehow refute claims not widely held, simply because majority rule ought to prevail? Where would that leave ethical philosophers, whose direct influence on public opinion seems slight? 

Concerning the pretension that science might itself provide a new or substantially reformed set of ethical principles, Singer appeals to Hume’s critique of what he calls “the naturalistic fallacy,” the attempt to “defin[e] values in terms of facts.” I can’t “convince people that, say, the survival of the human gene pool is a cardinal value” unless I give them a reason for thinking that it is. Science can’t tell me that. “Facts, by themselves, do not provide us reasons for actions,” although they do “tell me what my options are.” “No science is ever going to discover ethical premises inherent in our biological nature, because ethical premises are not the kind of thing discovered by scientific investigation.” Such premises are chosen, not discovered. “I, and not my genes, am making the decision.” “The mistake made by sociobiologists who think that their explanation of ethics can tell us what we ought to do parallels that of anthropologists who thought that the diversity of morals between societies implies that people ought to follow the moral code of their own society” or, one might add, that no moral code has any basis other than in what anthropologists call ‘culture.’

If so, then on what basis do I choose? It is undoubtedly true that modern science, which describes nature as non-teleological, can find no ethical commands in nature. But even if it cannot find commands in nature might nature not still provide moral guidance? If philosophic inquiry into ethics seeks the good for human beings, would human nature not indicate that good, even as it would tell us what the good is for a dog or for a plant? That is, if I say, ‘Good dog!’ I might mean that the dog is following my command; I would be commanding the dog in a way that might or might be naturally good for the dog. But I might rather be saying that the dog is a good specimen of a dog—healthy, evidently contented under ordinary conditions. Whether the dog ‘wants’ to be healthy and contented is irrelevant to determining whether it is a good dog, although I suppose one might argue that a dog that sought illness and discontent would be one sick puppy. 

Singer makes a further argument about ethical choice itself. “Our ability to be a participant in a decision-making process, to reflect and to choose, is as much a fact about human nature as the effect of the limbic system on our emotions.” This does not imply that we “believe in a mysterious entity known as ‘I’ or ‘the self’ or ‘the will.'” Even if we had “a complete causal account of our behavior,” if “an observer could predict how we would choose,” we nonetheless “would be making genuine choices” because “the distinction between the standpoint of the observer and the standpoint of the participant is ineliminable.” That does not, however, authorize Heidegger and other ‘existentialist’ philosophers to claim that “our choice of ultimate values is simply a commitment, a ‘leap of faith,’ which is beyond any rational assessment, and thus ultimately arbitrary.” Otherwise, Heidegger’s leap of faith to Nazism would be no less justifiable than Sartre’s leap of faith when he resisted the Nazis or (one might well add) that Sartre’s leap of faith to socialist fellow-traveling with French Communism was as justifiable as some other existentialist’s leap of faith in opposing Communism. Leaps of faith might contradict one another, a point which brings the principle of noncontradiction, and therefore reasoning, into the picture. “Unless there is a rational component to ethics that we can use to defend at least one of our fundamental ethical principles, the free use of biological and cultural explanations would leave us in a state of deep moral subjectivism.” Whereas “Wilson’s statements about ethics leave him with no escape from ethical subjectivism, once the impossibility of deriving ethics from biology has been admitted,” it may be that ethical judgments do (might we say, ‘in fact’?) have “a rational component.” “The fact that we choose our ethical premises does not in itself imply that the choice is arbitrary.” 

Unfortunately, Singer does not define reason as thought guided by the principle of noncontradiction. Instead, he defines it as a set of thoughts leading to unpredictable consequences—a process exemplified by the way counting leads to arithmetic. Nature ‘counts,’ in the other sense of the word: “Ethics starts with social animals prompted by their genes to help, and to refrain from injuring, selected other animals. On this base we must now superimpose the capacity to reason.” Kin and reciprocal altruism, discovered to be natural in human beings, becomes refined as language develops and “consciousness” strengthens and is refined. This brings “tremendous advantages in the evolutionary competition for survival” but it also, and crucially, brings with it “something which has not existed, so far as we can tell in any non-human society: the transformation of our evolved, genetically-based social practices into a system of rules and precepts guiding our conduct toward one another, supported by widely shared judgments of approval for those who do as the rules and precepts require, and disapproval for those who do not”—a “system of ethics or morality,” a standard “acceptable to the group as a whole.” Singer carefully refrains from saying that this acceptance itself makes the system right. Indeed, there can be “oppressive customs.” The “readiness with which we bring particular events under a general rule may be the most important difference between human and animal nature.” This suggests that reason, like emotions, is natural to human beings, and it further suggests, although Singer doesn’t say so, that there is such a thing as natural right, even if there is no natural law in the sense of a cosmic order from which human beings ought to take their ethical bearings. 

Socrates shows how ethical reasoning can progress beyond custom. “By the standards of customary morality Socrates was corrupting the youth.” Guilty as charged. “Customary morality cannot stand the scrutiny of rational inquiry which questions the customary standards themselves,” assuming that the customary standards are self-contradictory. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates says, because such a life coherently seeks the good only by accident, and therefore seldom finds or even seeks coherence. “Few of us examine our lives in the Socratic manner.” Socratic questioning requires “a leap into the unknown,” but—and here it differs from existentialism—ever-reasoning Socrates looks before he leaps. This is why Singer defines reason as a set of thoughts leading to unpredictable consequences. He wants to preserve the freedom that choice implies, to allow choice to remain invulnerable to prediction, while also keeping it reasonable. Here is where a historicist or quasi-historicist element enters into his theory. “Reasoning is inherently expansionist” in the sense that “it seeks universal application,” gaining territory, so to speak, from unexamined moral customs from one generation to the next, so long as there is no substantial interruption in the process of transition between generations. Reasoning, then, is ‘evolutionary’ in its own way, whether or not it follows the path of Hegelian dialectic. “Once the limits [of conventional beliefs] become the subject of rational inquiry and are found wanting, custom has to retreat and reasoning can operate within broader bounds, which then in turn will eventually be questioned.” This amounts to a more ambitious form of Socratism, an earnest Socratism, or a more modest form of Hegelianism, one that does not claim to have arrived at the end of ethical reasoning. 

It is reminiscent also of Adam Smith’s impartial spectator. [2] “We can progress toward rational settlement of disputes over ethics by making the element of disinterestedness inherent in the idea of justifying one’s conduct to society as a whole, and extending this into the principle that to be ethical, a decision must give equal weight to the interests of all affected by it,” “disregard[ing] my knowledge of whether I gain or lose by the action I am contemplating.” In this formulation, the problem lies in “interests.” To count ethically, must they not be exclusively good interests—begging the question of natural right, once again.

Singer emphasizes the social character of his ethical system, resisting the notion that “values” (as he calls them, deciding the question in advance) have “objective” standing, by which he means “something in the universe, existing entirely independently of us and of our aims, desires, and interests, which provides us with reasons for acting in certain ways”—whether divine or natural. As to God, He exists independently, all right, but according to the Bible has linked Himself to us first by the act of creation and then by his continued love for us, seen in His care for our well-being. As to nature, if ethical reasoning is part of human nature, and human nature part of nature as a whole, then there must be ethics “built into the very nature of things,” the things that include human beings, that produced human beings, that continue to support human beings (at least for now). Singer is right to say that “values” are “inherently practical,” but the fact that practical reasoning differs from theoretical reasoning does not preclude any connection between the discoveries of practical reasoning and the discoveries of theoretical reasoning. The theoretical discovery of human sociality, for example, evidently “requires me to take a perspective from which my own interests count no more, simply because they are my own, than the similar interests of others.” The nature of things other than human beings would presumably continue to exist if human beings perished, but it would be a somewhat different nature. Would that nature not continue to have the potential to produce human beings, if the right ‘local’ conditions prevailed? This is what Leo Strauss may mean when he writes that the earth provides a “home” for man.

Singer contents himself by adjuring us to “cling to the simpler idea that ethics evolved out of our social instincts and our capacity to reason,” and that the result of that evolution is “the principle of equal consideration of interests,” which depends upon “nothing but the fact that we have interests, and the fact that we are rational enough to take a broader point of view from which our own interests are no more important than the interests of others.” This indicates the influence of democracy or egalitarianism on Singer’s thought, suggesting that his thought inclines in the direction of the regime in which he has lived. Singer recognizes that his thought is democratic, while insisting that democracy is an innate property of reason itself, that “the feeling of need for consistency” or avoidance of self-contradiction universalizes conduct, if left to work itself out unimpeded by force or fraud. 

“Where does this process end?” he quite reasonably asks. It ends not only with liberty and equality but fraternity. The French revolutionaries were right. And so, for example, “there can be no brotherhood when some nations indulge in previously unheard-of luxuries, while others struggle to stave off famine,” or if the more complex animals are not seen to have rights (“from an impartial point of view, the pleasures and pains of non-human animals are no less significant because the animals are not members of the species Homo sapiens“). To claim otherwise is to commit the sin of ‘speciesism.’ This consideration does not extend to plants, however, as they lack sentience; “there is nothing we can do that matters to them.” In his own egalitarian way, Singer respects the Aristotelian definition of distributive justice: equal things to equals. We may kill and eat oysters and insects, but not cows or deer, which are our equals when it comes to feeling, and fearing, pain. The universalizing process of rational thought ends with rationally perceived distinctions among beings.

Hume would say that such concerns are impotent, that reason is “the slave of the passions.” Speciesism or no speciesism, I am unlikely to forgo filet mignon, topped with mushrooms, my taste clarified by sips of a good Cabernet and topped off with a slice of chocolate mousse cake. Singer prudently takes on a lesser challenge: “the growth of modern contraceptive techniques is a splendid example of the use of reason to overcome the normal consequences of our evolved behavior,” showing “that reason can master our genes.” That is, “there is no reason to believe that we always do what is in our own interest,” defined as satisfying our emotions. “We can therefore go on to consider with an open mind the possibility of rational based altruism,” although the use of contraceptives may not always be the best example of that. “Once reason is admitted to have a role to play in ethics, however, there is nothing at all surprising in the fact that, despite immense cultural differences, outstanding thinkers in different periods and places should extrapolate beyond more limited forms of altruism to what is essentially the same fundamental principle of an impartial ethic.” Doing unto others what you would have others do unto you: God and His revelation are looking better and better.

How, then, do we explain the fact that so many of us act as if the reasons for taking “an objective point of view” do not apply to them? Because Hume wasn’t entirely wrong to say reason is the slave of the passions. “Alone and unaided, reason cannot give rise to action,” as “there must be some desire, some want or aversion, some pro or con feeling with which reason can combine to generate an action.” That might lead to Socrates’ proposed alliance between logos and thumos, ruling the appetites and thereby achieving justice within the soul and the city. But Singer takes the ‘modern’ stance; reason is the slave (Hume) or the scout (Hobbes) of the passions, “a tool for obtaining what one wants.” Nonetheless, “tools have a way of influencing the purpose for which they are used,” as seen in the automobile, invented for transportation from one place to another but also used for recreational driving and exploration. “In the case of ethical reasoning, we begin to reason impartially in order to justify our conduct to others, and then discover that we prefer to act in accordance with the conclusions of impartial reasoning.” There is human nature, but it evolves because we ‘feel better’ if we act consistently. (Well, unless we are Walt Whitman, untroubled by ‘cognitive dissonance,’ otherwise known as self-contradiction.) Socrates would tell Walt that his soul is wrongly ordered and insofar as wrongly ordered, unnatural. Singer cannot bring himself to say such a thing, only going so far as to suggest that Walt would feel better about himself if he gave logical self-examination a good try. Indeed, “the lives of those who have nothing to do but enjoy themselves are much less happy than we would expect them to be if human nature were suited to the unalloyed pursuit of personal pleasure…. Perhaps the boredom and loss of interest in life observable in many of those with no purposes beyond their own pleasure are the result of neglecting this aspect of our nature.” Perhaps so, perhaps so.

Singer concludes by giving sociobiology its due. “It enables us to see ethics as a mode of human reasoning which develops in a group context, building on more limited, biologically based forms of altruism”—evidently by deploying the equally natural human capacity to reason. “The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings,” and “the fact that our ethical judgments are not dictated to us by an external authority does not mean that any ethical judgment is as good as any other,” as we choose “what we are going to do,” even as “we do not choose the way the world is.” It then transpires that “emphasizing the rational element in ethical choice…narrows the gap between facts and values,” as “facts may be relevant” to ethical reasoning, even if they do not determine it. But of course even as Singer resists the thought, the fact of human nature does indeed turn out to be the basis of such reasonable choice.

Another Aristotelian notion occurs to him in the last chapter. What ought to be the ethical code not only of individuals but for human society? The ‘impartial spectator’ standard is important but too abstract to give the specific ethical guidance we need as individuals and as members of civil societies. At the same time, any guidance should remain cognizant of “the realities of human nature.” “Just as city life does not fit into the abstract rational patterns of town planners, so a code of ethics for human beings will not fit the abstract imperative of impartial reason,” as “we cannot pretend that human nature is so fluid that moral educators can make it flow wherever they wish.” On the other hand, although “human nature is not free-flowing…its course is not eternally fixed.” The impartial spectator needs allies among the emotions, and these should be “rules” or (in civil societies) laws designed to foster family bonds, to encourage reciprocity, and to discourage cheating. Such an “ethic of rules builds on our feelings for others as individuals rather than on an impersonal concern for all,” a concern which remains the standard but cannot be said to be self-enforcing. Such rules shore us up, especially when under stress. Singer quotes the American foreign-policy expert Chester Bowles: the Bay of Pigs fiasco showed “how far astray a man as brilliant and well intentioned as Kennedy can go who lacks a basic moral reference point.” “A social code of ethics needs moral rules for several reasons: to limit our obligations, to make them more personal, to educate the young, to reduce the need for intricate calculations of gains and losses, to control the temptation to bend ethical calculations in our own favor, and to build the commitment to truthfulness which is essential for communication.”

Singer also appreciates the opposite point about rules or laws: just as they helpfully stiffen our adherence to the abstract standard of right, so they can stiffen us too much. The well-known example Socrates mentions in the Republic is entirely valid. Lying is usually wrong, but if an enraged man demands to know where you keep your weapons, you’ll do well to mislead him. “The rules of ethics are not moral absolutes or unchallengeable intuitions” because “human nature and human life are too complex for that.” Here is where Singer should recall Aristotle’s emphasis on prudential reasoning as indispensable for ethics. Prudence or practical reason takes account of the circumstances of time and place. It may ‘tell’ us to violate a law but never the ‘spirit’ of the law, the purpose of the law as set down in observance of the abstract ethical standard or set of standards. 

In sum, “ethics is a morass, but a morass with a definite and explicable shape.” 

 

Notes

1. Singer adds that in addition to biology, historical study can also debunk “accepted ethical practices,” which may be as much “relics of our culture history” as “relics of our evolutionary history.”
2. Oddly, Singer associates the opposite principle to Smith—the principle of egoism, that everything should follow his self-interest. This confuses Smith’s theory of moral sentiments with his theory of economics and its attendant law of unintended (often good) consequences that result from motives that are anything but good, on Smith’s own terms as well as by Singer’s.