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Current General Studies Magazine: "Non-subjective Naturalism" December 2014

Current General Studies Magazine (December 2014)

General Studies - IV (Non-subjective Naturalism)

A common theory, closely akin to those that have just been refuted, is the view that when we say ‘This action is right’, what we mean is that all normal human beings like it or feel approval of it, or have some such attitude to it. Other theories of the same group hold that when we say that an action is right, what we mean is that a majority of mankind have a certain attitude to it, or that all of a certain group or class have a certain attitude to it, or that a majority of a certain group or class have a certain attitude to it. These theories differ from those examined in the last section in leaving open the possibility for real differences of opinion and discussion in ethics. If by saying that an action is right I mean that a majority of human beings like it, another person can contradict me and show that I am wrong by demonstrating that a majority of human beings dislike the action in question. This type of theory was held by the philosopher Hume, who held that actions were right when they aroused in a majority of mankind a sentiment of moral approval.1 (Hume held that actions which have either directly or indirectly pleasant consequences alone aroused this sentiment.)2 This type of theory does provide an outside standard for distinguishing right from wrong actions, and so is not to be regarded as subjective.
The following objections may be made to this type of theory:

There are certainly cases where an individual judges an action to be right, although he knows that the majority of mankind and the majority of every group concerned with it dislike and feel moral disapproval of the action. We saw in an earlier chapter that one of the most characteristic manifestations of individual conscience is to make a moral judgement different from that of the majority of the group to which the individual belongs.
If this view is correct all ethical questions about which there is a difference of opinion are to be settled by the counting of numbers. We can find out whether an action is right only by counting the number of people who like it and the number of people who dislike it, or by some similar counting of the people on each side. Now it is certainly reasonable to give serious consideration to a moral opinion that is widely held, and people often do try to justify their moral approval of an action by arguing that ‘everybody feels the same about it’. Yet most people would admit that a minority is sometimes in the right. Indeed, the history of morals shows that an opinion which later becomes the opinion of the majority of a group, usually begins by being the opinion of a few enthusiasts, for example the view that slavery is wrong. What is more important in this objection is that most people would hold that there are other ways of proving actions right or wrong than by counting heads; most people for example would hold that the consequences of an action have some relevance to its tightness.

This raises the question of naturalism in another form. Most people would agree that ethics deals with ideals or notions of perfection, and the question arises whether an ideal can ever be described in purely natural terms. Professor Broad says that it can and cites as examples a perfect gas or a frictionless fluid.1 For the moralist the question is whether perfect moral actions or ideal human nature can be so described.

All naturalistic theories are, from one point of view, an attempt to do so. Spinoza attempted to define good conduct as conduct appropriate to the characteristic function of the species,2 but naturalists seem to have considerable difficulty in deciding what is the characteristic function of man, and even then there may be different kinds of appropriateness, and moral appropriateness may be incapable of a purely naturalistic explanation.
However, this is a form of naturalism which will have to be considered later when we discuss the moral law as a law of human nature, or when we discuss the moral standard as human perfection.

The most common form of naturalism holds that ethical notions can be explained entirely in terms of psychology, and this may be called psychological naturalism.