At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Samuel Clarke presented his version of the ethical position which takes reason as the norm of ethical judgment. This shows that an ethics based on right reason as norm is not at all foreign to British philosophy. Nevertheless, Thomas Hobbes had made a mockery of reason, and it was in opposition to the forces of Leviathan that Clarke wrote:
Some things are in their own nature Good and Reasonable and Fit to be done, such as keeping Faith, and performing equitable Compacts, and the like, and these receive not their obligatory power, from any Law or Authority, but are only declared, confirmed and enforced by penalties, upon such as would not perhaps be governed by right Reason only. Other things are in their own nature absolutely Evil, such as breaking Faith, refusing to perform equitable Compacts, cruelly destroying those who have neither directly nor indirectly given any occasion for any such treatment, and the like; And these cannot by any Law or Authority whatsoever, be made fit and reasonable, or excusable to be practiced. Lastly, other things are in their own nature indifferent.1
This theory of ethical right reason has a long tradition, running from Plato through Greek Stoicism, through classic Roman and medieval writers of the Christian, Islamic and Jewish faiths, through modern European philosophers on the Continent and in England, to twentieth-century ethicians as speculatively diversified as Brand Blanshard, André Lalande, Henry Veatch, and Maurice Mandelbaum.2 My purpose here is not to deal with the history of right reason ethics but to offer a formulation of this theory which may have some contemporary relevance. The point of this preamble is to disabuse people of the notion that this use of reason is confined to one school of philosophy, is the adjunct of some special religious group, or is necessarily associated with natural law ethics. The right reason approach to ethics is probably the theory that is most widespread in the history of ethics.
GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF RIGHT REASON
As I see it, right reason consists in the intelligently appraisable and suitable relation between moral agent and moral action. As such, reason is a ratio or "a : b" relation with a discoverable meaning. If "a" is a husband and "b" is his wife, then the ratio that they constitute implies moral and ethical judgments. This is not a simple notion which can be used automatically and without thought to solve moral problems. As we shall see, the theory can be very complicated when employed by the ethical expert to justify general rules of good living, but it is much less complex as employed by the ordinary moral agent to make his own practical decisions about proposed concrete acts. In the present section we shall deal with right reason in precision from this distinction between the ethical and the moral.
Consider a smoker who is thinking of giving up cigarettes. He has a certain amount of knowledge of himself and some knowledge of the practice of cigarette smoking. He knows that he is alive, that he is able to think things over, and that he can make decisions about what to do and what not to do. He knows that he is married to a wife whom he has promised to cherish, and that he has some young children who are dependent on him physically and mentally. He also knows that he no longer feels well when he rises in the morning. These and other items of personal knowledge make up this man's total conception of himself.
This is what we mean by the "moral agent". He or she is a real person, of course: but known to self or to an ethical observer under the limitations of a given set of cognitions.3 Admittedly, what-the-agent-is may always be imperfectly grasped by human knowers. Yet, we have to live with this imperfection, whether we are subject to it as personal agents or as ethical observers. No person can be expected to do more, or better, than the actual circumstances permit. We cannot expect a primitive to analyze himself psychologically, but we can expect him to think of himself as a man capable of certain actions.
Of course, the foregoing few sentences do not completely describe what a moral agent is; they are a device to get the reader to consider what such a notion would be. Most examples discussed in ethical writings are not sufficiently fleshed out with facts to supply a basis for judgment. Take the famous example of the young man who wonders whether to stay at home to care for his mother or to enlist in the army to defend his country.4 This conflict in apparent duties is not open to solution unless we know more about the case. We know practically nothing about this young man, e.g., whether he is in good health, has finished his education, or has brothers or sisters. A hundred such questions would not exhaust the data required to think reasonably about a given problem or specific type of action.
Right reason requires, first of all, adequate knowledge of who the agent is and of the real surrounding conditions. By the same token, we need to know the character of a proposed action before we can judge that it is suitable or unsuitable. To continue with our earlier example, the act of smoking was unknown to the classic moralists of ancient or medieval times. There is no point to trying to find a text in the bible or in Aristotle that deals with smoking: this is a modern vice. Most people who smoke cigarettes might say that they are fully aware of the kind of action that it is; yet few would understand the physiological and psychic responses to cigarette smoking. Most would know that various health experts have recently warned against the threat to good health posed by the use of cigarettes: but a smaller number would see some connection between this warning and their own lives. On the other side, there is the steady stream of advertising which presents cigarette smoking as the practice of people who are young, sophisticated, beautiful, and able to enjoy the finer things. "What smoking means to me," could be the theme of a long and revealing paper.
In addition to the agent and his proposed act, the third variable in the complexus of right reason is the relationship of fitness or unfitness between these two terms.5 This brings us to the heart of the matter. How does one decide that a certain act is fit to be performed voluntarily? ln order to answer this question we must utilize the distinction between moral and ethical discourse.
RIGHT REASON IN PERSONAL MORAL DECISIONS
Decisions as to one's own proposed (or performed) moral actions may be made without having studied ethics. Of course, ethics may provide a more adequate background for personal decision but, fortunately, one can direct one's life in complete ignorance of moral philosophy. Some sort of general moral convictions are acquired by practically all humans who live beyond infancy. These views are learned from parents, church, school, reading, the advice of others, personal experience and other sources. Sometimes, such a set of notions is popularly called a "philosophy of life."
Our ordinary grasp of such views is not really philosophical in the technical sense. Examples of acquired moral convictions are: "Do unto others what you would have them do to you", or "Always think of yourself first", or "When in doubt always do what is safe", or "Eat, drink, and be merry", or "Respect your elders", and so on. People will often give such maxims as excuses when questioned about moral decisions or actions. These popular rules are not necessarily right, or acceptable to all persons, nor are they always able to withstand the test of rational scrutiny. At any thoughtful or critical point in a person's life, some or all of them may be critically examined by their holder and either retained or rejected.
Taking up again the example of the cigarette smoker, consider that his physician has just told him that if he does not stop smoking he will probably die ten or fifteen years ahead of his expected time. The smoker goes home and thinks it over: should he stop or not? Is it better to enjoy smoking for a life expectancy of twenty-five years, or to stop having this pleasure and live for thirty-five or forty years? If he says, "You only live once," meaning: get all the pleasure that you can out of the one life that you have, then he may decide: I will not stop smoking. To keep the discussion on the moral level, let us stipulate that this man is sincere. He thinks that he is doing the best thing, sticks to his decision, and continues to smoke. As far as he knows, his concrete judgment to keep on smoking is right.
Now, we may well ask what is the nature of the rightness in this judgment. In the definite situation in which the smoker finds himself, there is some sort of relation between the individual smoker and his decision to continue smoking. Note that the action under consideration in this section is not the general practice of smoking, although that is pertinent; rather, it is the particular decision: to stop or not to stop. This man decides not to stop, because he thinks that this decision is suitable or fitting. If he regarded it as unfitting, he would not ordinarily make this decision.
I am inclined to think that a personal judgment as to whether a proposed moral act is fitting or not is made in much the same way that one judges the fit of a suit, or the fit of a nut for a bolt. This is not to say that moral standards are simply technical standards, but that the function of appraisal is similar. If while repairing a machine I try to screw a number two nut on a number three bolt, I can discern the relation of unsuitability by simple inspection. Let us make the case more complicated: say I have a number three bolt but all of my nuts of this size are threaded differently from the bolt. I can force one of these nuts on with a wrench but, in doing so, I strip much of the thread from the bolt. This bad-fitting nut will hold, but only temporarily. What I now have to decide is whether it is better to use this bad-fitting nut temporarily, or to take time off and go to the store for a good-fitting nut.
Suppose I judge that I should use the bad-fitting nut for the present. This practical judgment as described may not be directly moral, although I feel that something that has been given this much thought and time must have some moral value. In any case, many people would dismiss the example as technical and morally trivial. But notice what would develop if my repair was being made on the brakes of a customer's automobile. Am I right in risking the use of a bad fitting nut which may slip off and endanger the driver? I must think over the whole situation and carefully judge whether using this nut is really a suitable decision in the circumstances.
We might introduce the view of another observer who has all the pertinent facts and knows that the use of this bad-fitting nut is quite safe. What this observer would know is that, statistically, this sort of nut will work in all but one of ten thousand instances. This means that there is objective, practical certitude to back up my decision. There is a kind of ideal objectivity to the ratio between this proposed action and the agent in this concrete situation. I myself, however, would ordinarily have to take my decision as to fitness within the limits of my own knowledge and endowments. If there is some expert whom I may consult concerning the use of such nuts, then clearly I should do so. Whether merely technical or also moral, my decision cannot achieve complete objectivity, but if I desire to act as well as I can then I must do my best to approach objectivity as far as this is possible. Many rules, such as the golden rule, are but devices to help the agent to think of how other persons would view his problem, and thereby to remove his decision from pure subjectivity.
Although the term "conscience" is used quite diversely in twentieth-century ethics: the original Latin conscientia meant "with knowledge." To perform an action with knowledge meant to use one's store of moral information in order to form a judgment about what one should or should not do, in a concrete situation. In the thirteenth century, when both ethics and moral theology reached a high state of development in the first universities, conscience was not regarded as a special power or moral sense, nor was it considered a source of religious conviction. Conscience designated the particular practical judgment a man makes for himself when he decides: "This is a good act for me to do, here and now, under this set of circumstances." So used, conscience belongs to the process of personal right reasoning that we have been examining. It is the practical judgment which usually precedes the final decision to act or not to act. Though by no means infallible, moral conscience is one's best available judgment as to what is concretely good or bad in a moral situation. So defined, conscience does not wholly determine the agent's action, for it is quite possible to judge, "This is not a suitable, or right, act for me to do," and then to proceed to do the act. Such a process does not display good intelligence, for it is not very smart to act against one's best judgment, but that is what immoral activity usually involves.
There is no generality to the judgment of conscience; and that is true of the whole process of personal right reason. Suppose I decide: "I should give up smoking today." This is my conscience and no other's. To use this judgment as a base for advising others would be to change the conscience-judgment into a general rule of the form: "Everyone in circumstances similar to mine ought to give up cigarette smoking." So expressed, this is no longer my conscience. The counselling judgment is actually a rule of general moral knowledge; if philosophically established, it can be an ethical judgment. We recall the difference previously indicated between the ethical and the moral.
Personal right reason has no generality, for I can make personal decisions only for myself, and cannot do the actions of another person. Hence, there is no way of teaching this kind of thinking. Ethical writers in the classical tradition spoke of this as the order of prudential judgment. It is not ethics but the personal application of ethical knowledge or of any other kind of universal moral convictions to the moral evaluation and direction of one's own problems in life.6 Even the casuistry of the moral theologians of the Renaissance was not the same as personal moral reasoning. For example, a monk who "solves a case" stemming from a marital problem is dealing with, what is for him, a purely hypothetical difficulty. He is not using personal right reason, but is doing counselling.
The fitness or suitability that is the basis of personal right reason is not general. What is right in this individual moral instance is not expressible in terms of anything else. Such a fit is unique. One may use a variety of words with meanings which are identical or close: good, right, suitable, fitting, and so on, but the concrete ratio between a given agent in a definite situation and his or her proposed action is not open to general description. On this, G.E. Moore was correct in speaking of the naturalistic fallacy;7 he erred only in locating this fallacy in ethics. It is indeed wrong to think that one's own moral judgments can be explained in terms of something else: they cannot, for they are unique and incommunicable. Whenever one generalizes a moral judgment, it is removed from the sphere of individual morality into the sphere of universal ethics. Hence, right reason does function in personal moral reasoning, but on this level, one cannot explain it to another. To this extent, moral intuitionism is sound.
The distinction of act-utilitarianism and rule-utilitarianism8 is helpful, although it is not quite the same thing as our differentiation of the moral and the ethical. Quite probably, pioneer utilitarians like John Stuart Mill did not realize that it is one thing to attempt to justify a particular moral act by looking to its consequences, and another thing entirely to attempt to establish a rule or universal practice in terms of which the action would be judged. It is quite possible for me to think: "I should not bet on this horse race, because I would be risking money needed by my family," while also being convinced that: "Race betting in general is not opposed to the welfare of my community." The possibility of logical conflict between rule and act judgments is an indication of their diversity.
We are beginning to see that it might also help to distinguish act-deontology from rule-deontology. One may believe that God prompts him from within his consciousness to do individual act A, or to omit act B, without regard for considerations of utility. Such a person is like Abraham or Joann of Arc in that they need no rules. For them ethics is but an academic game, for why should they reason if God had done this for them? Another kind of deontological thinker may see his duty in terms of laborious processes of reasoning terminating in general rules of behavior after the fashion of Immanuel Kant. Such a thinker may remain a deontologist, but he will focus on universal maxims rather than individual acts.
This contemporary distinction between rule-judgment and act-judgment can help to clarify the right reason theory. In my view the only possible kind of ethics is rule-ethics.9 Act-utilitarianism seems to attempt to analyze the problems of moral conscience. A person who makes moral judgments about his own acts is not functioning in ethics. Likewise, the person who attempts to judge the individual act of another man, such as Truman's ordering the bombing of Nagasaki, is not doing the work of ethics.
The judgment, "This individual act is fitting", is an act of appraisal which cannot and need not be further explained in itself. One may relate it to other judgments, such as a general rule that, "This kind of act is fitting", but such generality must be established by general right reason.
RULE JUDGMENTS AS NORMS OF ETHICS
My intention is not to argue here, that I intuit a set of ethical rules conveyed to me by God, or by my Church, or by the sanction of social science. What I do propose is both that there are certain general judgments as to what it is suitable for any man to do or avoid, and that the philosophical task of ethics is to set up, examine and revise these general judgments which function as ethical rules.
Right reason here--and this is where it most properly belongs--is the relation of suitability between a universal conception of man as a moral agent and a universal conception of a certain kind of action possible to man. Ethics never offers solutions to personal problems. To see this, let us take first a very general judgment: "It is bad to injure another person, voluntarily." The validity of this judgment is founded on the understanding of the meaning of "injury" and of "person." Of course, we must know also what voluntary means, but that is required for any kind of ethics.
As far as "injury" is concerned, we could use the first definition in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, though any other standard of current usage would do. "Injury. I. Damage or hurt done or suffered; detriment to, or violation of, person, character, feelings, rights, property, or interests, or the value of a thing." Such a definition will forestall questions about whether it is morally good to perform a surgical operation, and so on. An injury consists in a real harm, knowingly and deliberately inflicted; it is the contrary of a real benefit to a person.
It is more difficult to grasp the meaning of "human person," for this requires that one think of a universal; and recent philosophy has tried all sorts of devices to dodge the issue of universals. Besides being a thinking and freely choosing animal, man is the focal point for all sorts of relations to other beings that modify his moral personality. Smoking, for instance, makes life more complicated for man today; so do automobiles, atomic bombs, and visits to the moon. A man who is a medical doctor, for example, has a special status by virtue of his profession. He takes on special rights and obligations: he is permitted to do things that other men are not, and at times he is expected to go out of his way to help others to an extent not required in some other professions. The notion of a moral agent is not transcendental, but varies with various kinds of circumstances, even though these conditions remain specifically universal. What all doctors are expected to do is different, on the one hand, from what all men ought to do, and on the other, from what Doctor X ought to do. To be a man is not simply to exemplify some logical category, but to exist in the cultural context of definite places and times. In a former century surgeons drew blood from their patients on the theory that they were helping them, though today such blood-letting might be deemed an injury. However, understanding the realities behind the terms, one can know that it is unfitting for a person to injure another voluntarily--in much the same way that one knows that a square is never a circle.
How we know this ratio of unsuitability seems to depend on an extrapolation from experience of ourselves. That is to say, I am more immediately aware of my own good than I am of that of another person. Early in life, I learn from personal experience and from the teaching of others that certain things and acts are good for me. These are items on at least three levels: i.e., biological goods, such as life, health and strength; sensory goods, such as enjoyment in the use of physiological functions, the use of the sense powers to satisfy curiosity, the avoidance of pain, and freedom of physical movement; and intellectual goods, such as indefinitely great understanding of reality, freedom of decision, social intercourse with other persons, the conviction of personal accomplishment, and the pursuit of artistic, cultural, and religious ideals. These and other such values are first appreciated in relation to self. I do not see how it could be otherwise, for how could I first know what it means to another person "to be alive" and only later realize that I cherish my own life? Value judgments, I think, are necessarily egocentric at the beginning of axiological awareness, and to this extent, idealistic hedonism is correct.
Initially, however, there is little ethical value in my appreciation of biological, sensory, and intellectual goods-for-me. With the development of a more reflective attitude, which in my opinion comes in the early years of childhood for most people, one begins to make the transfer to a more altruistic viewpoint. Much effort is needed to become convinced that a certain kind of good is just as important to another person as to myself, for we all remain partial victims of the egocentric predicament. Indeed, entire books in contemporary philosophy are devoted to convincing us that other people are personal: it is even more difficult to come to see that my neighbor's life, or freedom, or intellectual integrity, is just as valuable to him or her and to me, as my own is to me.
Here, again, I would stress the issue of nominalism as opposed to realistic universalism, though of course this takes us beyond ethics. I do not understand why a nominalist need be an altruist. If one is fully convinced that all men are discrete individuals, without any common nature, and simply called "men" for the sake of linguistic convention, why should one place the same value on the life of another man as one places upon one's own? To my mind, the most compelling reason why I should not hurt or kill another is because he is the same kind of existent as I--and I do not want to be hurt or killed. It is true that I would not inflict unnecessary pain on a beast: nor would I feel right about destroying anything in nature without reason; but this is far different from my repugnance to inflicting injury on another person. The ratio of man to man is not at all the same as the ratio of man to dog.
This is what Kant was trying to get at with his various formulations of the categorical imperative. These formulae were not intended to provide material knowledge of what is good for oneself. Kant seems to have thought that one knows his duty from an intuitive presentation of inner consciousness. With the categorical imperative, he was arguing that one must extend his thought horizons beyond the confines of subjective interests in order to think ethically. It was in this sense that he wrote:
Humanity itself is a dignity: for man can be used by no one (neither by others nor even by himself) merely as a means but must always be used at the same time as an end. And precisely therein consists his dignity (personality), whereby he raises himself above all other beings in the world, which are not man and can, accordingly, be used--consequently, above all things. Even as he therefore cannot give himself away for a price (which would conflict with the duty of self-esteem), so can he likewise not act counter to the equally necessary self-esteem of others as men, i.e. he is bound to give practical acknowledgment to the dignity of humanity in every other man.10
If "humanity" were but a nominal class or externally imposed name, this passage would make no sense. Kant insists on the ethical importance of realizing that there is "humanity in every other man." It is because he is not a nominalist that Kant can argue to the ethical dignity of all men in the world. He would agree, I am sure, that the ratio of man to man is real and of great significance for the establishment of ethical awareness.
Obviously, the way we understand mankind depends on parts of philosophy that are not ethics. It also depends on our other experiences and on other sciences and disciplines. Let us admit, however, that we have a general, though imperfect, grasp of what it is to be human. This knowledge is always open to improvement, but is enough to enable us to distinguish man as moral agent from beasts, machines, and other agencies. With this information, the ethical philosopher tries to judge that certain kinds of actions are suitable, under certain kinds of circumstances, for the sort of agent that man is. Conversely, he attempts to judge that other practices are unsuitable for any man, in specific circumstances. These broad judgments of fitness or unfitness are capable of explanation in terms of items other than moral good or evil. That is why there is a study known as ethics. It is also the reason why the naturalistic fallacy does not apply to right-reason ethics, though it applies, as I have suggested, to judgments of personal moral reasoning.
Ethical fitness is a real relation. Take the example of a thirty-year old man (M) and a ten-year old boy (B). If M is B's father, there is an existing, understandable, legally demonstrable connection between M and B, such that it is suitable for M to be in charge of, and to support, B. This "father : son" ratio stems neither from some law passed by a state legislature, nor from some command issued by the will of a legislator. That a parent should take care of his offspring is a conclusion from the sum total of human experience and reflective thinking. I would not call it an intuition, for that suggests either that the judgment is too easy, or that it is no judgment at all, being simply a quick vision or instinctive prompting. On the contrary, an elaborate process of reasoning may lead to the personal conviction that parents should care for offspring.
Since this sort of ethical rule is universal (though not in the sense of applying to all humans: for some are not parents), it will appear to suffer some exceptions. In one instance, the father may be physically or mentally unable to care for his child. Whether this be regarded as an exception, or as an instance in which we have a putative parent who is not really a parent in the full sense because unable to function in loco parentis, the matter of terms is not important. We can either say that ethical rules admit of exceptions, or that apparent exceptions do not come under the accepted meaning of the terms. Ethical rules are norms for the instances to which they are understood to apply; for other kinds of actions, they are not norms.
Let us consider the more developed example of a soldier who returns home from war to find that his wife has a new-born son. After a year of providing financial and fatherly support to this child, he discovers that the child was actually fathered by another man. This changes the ratio between the soldier and the child. The normative ethical rule still stands, namely: "parents should care for their children," but the newly discovered fact of non-relationship simply removes this man from the class of fathers. He is no longer under the obligation that he thought he had to care for this child. He may, indeed, continue to do so and may even create for himself an assumed obligation to serve as a proxy father, but this obligation does not arise from the real ratio of father to son. Besides real relations, there are other bases, such as promises, for ethical suitability. It does not seem to me, however, that the ethical validity of an assumed obligation is as meaningful as that based upon a real ratio. For this reason, I recoil at the notion of duties to oneself.
It is sometimes argued that our normative ethical judgments depend wholly on the special cultures in which we live.11 This would mean that, were we living in an African tribe in which the obligation to support children is held to fall on the maternal uncles, we would not recognize the suitability of the father supporting his son. To this, two things should be said. First of all, it is possible to arrange social and family life according to patterns different from those of European-American society. Such shifts in arrangements would mean the assumption of a somewhat different set of duties, based upon a different cultural structure. In fact, some European parents transfer the care of their children to nannies and boarding-schools in a manner that would seem odd to the American parent. Certainly, there are different ways of discharging one's obligation as a parent. Even in an African tribe, however, the father would feel entitled to protest, if he found that his son was being allowed to starve by his wife's brothers. ln the second place, I would risk the charge of ethnocentrism by challenging the rightness of family structures in some primitive societies. Customs are not always ethically approvable; that is one of the reasons why we need ethics. It seems to me that the linkage of real paternity is a relation that is closer and more properly the source of moral obligation than is that of uncle to nephew. This is precisely the sort of suitability that stands out when one reflects on the facts.
Just as the ratio "2 : 8" is more intelligible and meaningful than the ratio of "2 : the color blue", so the father-son relation is more meaningful than the uncle-nephew ratio. I would be in general agreement with the way in which Richard Price explains this reality of moral relations:
The agreement of proportion between certain quantities is real and necessary, and perceived by the understanding. Why should we doubt, whether the agreement of fitness also between certain actions and relations, is real and necessary, and perceived by the same faculty? From the different natures, properties, and positions of different objects result necessarily different relative fitnesses and unfitnesses; different productive powers; different aptitudes to different ends, and agreements and disagreements amongst themselves. What is there absurd or exceptional in saying, likewise, that from the various relations of beings and objects, there result different moral fitnesses and unfitnesses of action; different obligations of conduct; which are equally real and unalterable with the former, and equally independent of our ideas and opinions?12
In the continuation of this passage, Price argues that there is something morally unsuitable in the assignment of eternal misery as a punishment for innocent children.13 I would agree that there is a basic repugnance between innocence and punishment. This is but another example of the type of unfitness observable in the natures of things. It is not an instance of intuiting the evil of a concrete action, as some nominalists have interpreted Price to mean. Rather, it is a case of the intelligent appraisal of two terms with universal meanings (innocence and punishment), and a consequent refusal to judge that the one is compatible with the other. This can be stated as an ethical norm: "Innocence is never a reason for the assigning of punishment."
REASON BASED ON REALITY
To attempt to explain ethical fitness, however, is like trying to teach a person the meaning of equality. The child who looks at a simple equation and asks what "equals" means is not ready for algebra. For several hundred years a good many philosophers have presumed that no relations are real. They have supposed universals to be fictions, and generalization a sort of imaginative exercise. As a consequence, philosophers have had much difficulty in deriving "ought" from "is". However, one is not obliged to take the views of David Hume as the philosophical gospel. His atomic interpretation of sense data has impeded the development of moral philosophy for too long, particularly in English-speaking countries. This was well appreciated by as unlikely a historian as John Dewey, when he wrote:
The sensationalistic theory of the origin and test of thought evoked, by way of reaction, the transcendental theory of a priori ideas. For it failed utterly to account for objective connection, order and regularity in objects observed. Similarly, any doctrine that identifies the mere fact of being liked with the value of the object liked so fails to give direction to conduct when direction is needed that it automatically calls forth the assertion that there are values eternally in Being that are the standards of all judgments and the obligatory ends of all action.14
Dewey, of course, did not want to revert to idealism, but he realized that ethicians have to face the need for an intellectual framework which will enable them to appreciate, as Dewey puts it, "the objective connection, order and regularity in objects observed." This is what Hume refused to see, the operational method that Dewey went on to develop for ethics is but one way of attempting to find a viable middle way between the extremes of nominalism and Platonic realism.
What ethics needs sorely, at the present point, is not deontic logic, game theory, or panegyrics to love. It needs a vision of reality, including man and his whole environment, that will provide a foundation for ethical judgment. In such an ontological-epistemic theory, an important place should be given to the "ratios" or real relations that tie together men and other things, and that provide the tendencies, needs, and satisfactions inherent in a humanized world. These "objective connections", to use Dewey's phrase, make up the ontological foundation for oughtness. Such relations are not mere items of knowledge or deliverances of deductive logic; they constitute the actual dispositions of things, and of the cognitive, affective and volitional sides of the human reality. They give rise to inclinations, exigencies, and aspirations which are more real than any mentally constructed grouping of sense data.
This ontological framework of related realities cannot be grasped simply by sense perception. Intelligence, understanding, and reason are required to know it.15 What is known thus is rational, in the sense of including any number of intelligible "ratios" which give ethical meaning to man's world. The knower, for his part, must be rational, in the sense of being able to reason to universal judgments concerning the "oughts" implied in the structure of reality. From both sides, objective and subjective, reason is the key to normative ethics.
St. Louis University
St. Louis, Missouri
1. Samuel Clarke, Discourse Upon Natural Religion (1705-1706) reprinted in L.A. Selby-Bigge, ed., British Moralists (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), II, 9, pp. 105-84.
2. Although they approach ethics from quite different theoretical bases, these thinkers have advanced, each in his own way, the use of right reason in ethics: Brand Blanshard, Reason and Goodness (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961); for a new appreciation of Lalande, see Italo Bertoni, Il Neo i11uminismo etico di André Lalande (Milano: Marzorati Editore, 1965); Henry B. Veatch, Rational Man (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964); Human Rights. Fact or Fancy? (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); and Maurice Mandelbaum, The Phenomenology of Moral Experience (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1955). On the history of right reason ethics, see Guido Fasso, La legge della raggione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1964); or my History of Ethics (New York: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 87-108.
3. The point to putting the "ethical observer" in the foregoing is to keep open the extension of the example, so that it is not confined to personal knowledge of oneself. See Bourke, "The Ethical Role of the Impartial Observer", Journal of Religious Ethics 6 (1978), 279-91.
4. See Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1946), pp. 40-1, and the comment in John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 176.
5. Thus Mandelbaum (op. cit., p. 181) writes: "all moral judgments . . . constitute a single genus [and the] characteristic which defines that genus is that all moral judgments are grounded in our apprehension of relations of fittingness or unfittingness between the responses of a human being and the demands which inhere in the situation by which he is judged."
6. Possibly one of the greatest mistakes made by both situationists and phenomenologists is their identification of personal moral reasoning with ethics. This is like confusing carpentry with architecture: the works are related but not identical.
7. Principia Ethica (Cambridge, England: The University Press, 1903), chapter I.
8. See Michael D. Bayles, ed., Contemporary Utilitarianism (New York: Doubleday, 1968), where most of the articles use this distinction. In an earlier version of this approach, J.J.C. Smart spoke of "extreme" and "restricted" utilitarianism. His article from the Philosophical Quarterly, VI (1956), 344-54, is reprinted, with some revisions, in Bayles' anthology, pp. 99-115.
9. This opposition of mine to act-ethics is not shared by all Catholic writers on the subject; see R.L. Cunningham, "The Direction of Contemporary Ethics", New Scholasticism, XXIX (1965), 332-48.
10. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, Part II of The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James Ellington (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 127-28.
11. Cf. Duncan MacRae, Jr., "Utilitarian Ethics and Social Change", Ethics, LXXVIII (1968), 188-98.
12. Richard Price, A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, chapter VI in British Moralists, pp. 172-73. See the excellent analysis of Price's argument in A.S. Cua, Reason and Virtue (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1966).
13. No doubt, Price had in mind the Augustinian problem of the punishment of babies who die without baptism. On Augustine's ethics, see G.W. Forell, History of Christian Ethics (Minneapolis: Augsberg Publishing House, 1979), pp. 154-80.
14. This is from Dewey's famous chapter, "The Construction of the Good", in The Quest for Certainty (New York: Putnam's, 1929), p. 261. More recently, Morton White, in Toward Reunion in Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19- 56), has called for a return to a more realistic (he calls it "platonic") theory of universals.
15. See the remarkable French book: Georges Kalinowski, Le Problème de la vérité en morale et en droit (Lyon: Emmanuel Vitte, 1967). This work offers a highly sophisticated version of a Thomistic theory of right reason, developed in terms of a metaphysically grounded axiology. Cf. The Monist, 66 (1983) no. 1, the whole issue is devoted to "Right Reason in Western Ethics", with articles by ten ethicists.