Types of ethical theory
by James Martineau
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Excerpt:
Vol. Ii. c;
accurate determination of its form; and (2) that, as if in protest against any identification of morality with mere customariness, the words which begin together part company at the sight of customs that are immoral; and as soon as the evil we condemn ceases to be exceptional,—as soon as we encounter the shock of an established wickedness,—we refuse to give it the name consecrated to the prior usages, and condemn it as an offence. Nor is it to our feeling anything less than monstrous to maintain, that what we call falsehood or selfishness could, by any multiplication or perpetuity, change its character, and in becoming usual, become also moral. It is, therefore, because the sentiments of right and wrong are the characteristics of human nature, that the system of action which they call up receives the name of Mores, or established ways.
Language is the great confessional of the human heart, and betrays, by its abiding record, many a natural feeling which would escape our artificial inspection; and it is better worth interrogating than the mixed product of our spontaneous life and conventional opinion. And the fundamental fact to which we are referring receives further light from another class of terms, in which we characterise it from within instead of from without, and speak of it as it is felt in itself, rather than as it looks in its effects. As a spectator of men on a theatre of character, I speak of their Morals; as an agent, uttering the corresponding consciousness secreted at my own centre, I speak of my Duty. The word, I need not say, expresses that there is something which is due from me,—which I owe,— which I ought to do. Nor perhaps is it insignificant, that the tenses of this verb have lost their distinction, and one alone, and that the past, is made to serve for all; as if to show that obligation escapes the conditions of time, and is less a phenomenon than an essential and eternal reality, which, however manifested at the moment, is not new to it. In any case, the word expresses the sense we have of a debt which others have a right to demand from us, and which we are bound to pay. And here we have another term, still more expressive of the inward feeling characteristic of a moral being: there is, it seems, something that binds,—in Latin, obliges us,—puts a restraint on the direction of our will, yet not an outward restraint upon its power, but an interior restraint from shame and reverence. The same meaning may be found in all the language of law and ethics: within, a binding,—without, a rule of usage. I am aware that these subjective words denoting obligation might be explained away, by the same process of inversion already applied to the notion of customs. It might be said that men, having set up a usage, enforce it upon each separate agent, and tie him down to its observance; and that this external necessity put upon him is all that the word Duty originally expressed. The question involved in this evasion must be reserved for future treatment. At present I will only remark that it is a mere hypothetical artifice, to explain the individual's sense of inner obligation by the social imposition of an outer constraint; that, to our actual consciousness, the authority of duty seems to be independent of what the world may say of us or do to us; and that it is at least as plausible to maintain, that the law we impose on others is the externalisation of that which overawes ourselves, as vice versd. The truth is, I apprehend, that both factors, the felt inner binding on ourselves, and the enacted outer restraint upon our fellows, are parallel and concurrent expressions of the same nature; neither is before or after the other; and so long as we dispute whether it is the individual constitution that makes the world, or the world that makes the individual constitution, the controversy will spin an endless round. The action and reaction are infinite; and the real question is, how is constituted, and with what inspiration is endowed, that humanity which has its unity and completeness, not in the lonely mind, but only in the individuals of a kind, raised by their whole system of relations into types of the nature which they represent.
i. ITS CONTENTS DEVELOPED.
§ 1. Objects of Moral Judgment.
With a view to determine the precise significance of this general fact, let us notice, in the first place, what are the objects on which our moral judgment directs itself; and where,
on the other hand, its sphere terminates. Wlvat is it that we judge?
