A metaphysics of morals is a theory about the nature of moral judgments. It should tell us what they are, and how and why we should be committed to the moral judgments we make. Historically, the most successful theory of this kind was probably Immanuel Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.

 

Kant thought, as Aristotle had once argued, that human beings are essentially rational animals, and, therefore, if human beings are to be true to their natures, they must behave rationally. But, he also thought that human beings are not bound by their natures to act rationally. They are free to choose. Therefore, although human beings are not bound to behave rationally, they are, qua rational agents, necessarily capable of knowing what is required of them. Moral behaviour, Kant argued, must be essentially just rational behaviour.

 

In the eighteenth century, the term ‘rational’ was understood somewhat more broadly than it is today. A thing could be rational or irrational, depending on the calculability, or lawfulness, of its behaviour. Thus, the universe itself was thought to be a rational, because, as Newton had shown, its behaviour is governed by universal laws. Therefore, Kant argued, if human beings are to behave rationally, they must behave according to laws of social behaviour, and these laws must be ones that would be apparent to all perfectly rational beings. Thus, we have Kant’s categorical imperative, which enjoins us to act only on principles that we could simultaneously will to be universal laws of nature, i.e. laws that would hold for all rational beings. In everyday speak, Kant’s categorical imperative was: Act as you would want any rational person in your specific circumstances to act.

According to Kant, the guiding principle of all morality is this categorical imperative. But Kant himself soon realised that rationality is not itself enough to guarantee morality, and I think that this is now widely accepted. For, the rational choices that people make may be cruel, sadistic, or otherwise inhumane. Arguably, such actions are not ultimately rational, but no one has yet succeeded in showing that the vicious ones never pay in the long run. Whether they could be rationally willed, and, if so, acceptable to all perfectly rational agents, are other matters. Plausibly, a perfectly rational free agent, whether human or not, would not be willing to endorse a principle that could be used viciously against itself. But why would a perfectly rational being not behave abominably to marginally rational beings like ourselves, as we once behaved towards African slaves? 
 
It is said that moral judgments are both synthetic and a priori. They are synthetic, because they are not true just in virtue of the conventions of language. And, they are a priori, because they are supposedly discoverable just by reflection upon them, or on what they would commit us to. At least, this is what Kant believed. For, on Kant’s theory of morality, endorsement of a moral proposition would commit us to willing only those actions that would accord with its directions. But why would we make such a commitment? If we were strongly motivated to behave, as we think upon reflection that an ideally rational being would behave, then, I suppose, we might be willing to make this commitment. But it is hard to believe that we should be so passionate about behaving rationally, that we should be willing to impose upon others the duty of acting in this way too. Is behaving as we believe an ideally rational being would behave in similar circumstances to be elevated to the status of supreme principle of moral behaviour? If so, why?

 

I think that the more we try to rationalise morality, and the more we intellectualise it, the more we denature it. Intuitively, the principal dimensions of morality are those of fairness and unfairness, kindness and cruelty, honesty and dishonesty, caring and uncaring, and perhaps one or two others. These moral dimensions are the basic respects in which the actions of social agents may be judged to be the same or different morally. A good person has an excellent portfolio of moral virtues; a bad one has a poor one. But, as everyone knows, a portfolio is hard to score objectively. 

 

The dimensions of morality are all ordinal quantities. That is, it makes sense to say that one person is fairer, kinder, or more honest or more caring than another, but no obvious sense to say that one is twice as fair, kind, honest or caring. Nor is there any way of deciding which moral dimensions are most important. There is, therefore, no single ordinal scale on which the moral virtues and vices of people can be measured, except perhaps at the extremes. Degrees of excellence in moral character may be like degrees of excellence in universities, which cannot reliably be ranked in the middle ranges. Virtuous people may excel in the virtues of honesty, fairness and kindness (and in most other dimensions of morality), and become recognised as saints. Vicious people may be notably dishonest, unfair and cruel (and perhaps immoral in other ways as well), and be recognised for what they are. But how does rationality add anything to this? 

 

To construct a personal moral theory, as Kant was intent upon doing, we should, plausibly, emphasise the things that matter in character assessment, viz. the moral virtues. So, instead of Kant’s fundamental question, which was:

According to what principles would ideally rational beings behave socially?

perhaps the question that we should be asking is:

What principles of social behaviour would you most wish to see promoted in every society, and how, personally, would you prioritise them?

This would appear to be the basic question we should be asking if our aims are just to develop our own moral positions. But the rationality or otherwise of our actions does not seem to be involved at all. 

In this talk I will argue that the construction of a personal moral theory along these lines is a good start. But, it can only be the beginning of a quest to develop a general moral theory. Because, as I will argue, most important moral principles are social, both in origin and content. First, the discursive agents that have by far the greatest influence on people’s lives in every modern society are not individuals, but big and powerful collectives (governments, corporations, armies, and so on). Individuals are mostly just bit-players on the national or international stage. Moreover, their choices and actions are limited by their social circumstances, and by all of the advertising and propaganda to which they have been subjected. Indeed, the choices that people are actually capable of making effectively are prioritized and restricted by the courses of action that are psychologically, physically, economically and socially available to them.

 

Hence, no theory of morality can be complete if it is limited just to the promotion and ranking of any merely personal virtues. What is needed is a foundation for morality that has much wider scope, which accords not only with our personal values, but incorporates our social ideals, and focuses upon the moral responsibilities of the specialised and collective social agents through which we must ultimately seek to realise these ideals.

Beyond Liberal Humanism

I do not undervalue personal morality. A good society needs people who are honest, fair-minded, and kind to each other, and good to the animals in their care. But we also need people who have good social consciences, and are willing to participate in social projects that are not specifically in their own self-interest. But this aim is not likely to be achieved by a rationalist metaphysic of morals, since the aim of acting perfectly rationally is not a strongly motivating one outside of logic classrooms, and does not have any clear moral implications. What is needed, I think, is a compelling conception of the good society that nearly everyone can enthusiastically share—a vision of what is possible, and ultimately desirable. 

The doctrines of ‘natural’ rights, which were drawn up in the eighteenth century by Thomas Paine, Marquis de Condorcet , Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, and others, were blueprints for the societies (the United States and France) that were eventually founded upon them. These doctrines all expressed the aspirations of the peoples for whom they were written, and the social ideals that they held most strongly. But the emphasis of most of these older doctrines was quite different from the modern ones. For their main concern was to secure freedom from oppression.

 

The French sought freedom from aristocratic rule, and a more equitable society. The Americans sought freedom from the British, and a republic of their own. Consequently, the Enlightenment predecessors of the modern doctrines of human rights were fundamentally revolutionary documents. They did not talk about human dignity, or respect for ones enemies. Nor, with few exceptions, did they attempt to describe in much detail the provisions, opportunities and entitlements that human beings should have, as of right, in any sufficiently prosperous society. That was to look too far ahead. 

The 1940s doctrines, in contrast, were just as much moral declarations as they were political ones. They were not gearing people up to wage wars of independence. They were concerned about the tragedies of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and the terrible Depression from which they had only just emerged. This moral tone was evident in Franklin D Roosevelt’s proposal for a Second Bill of Rights in his State of the Union address of January 1944. Indeed, it is palpable. Here is what he said:

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; 
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
• The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being. America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

 

The Preamble to the Constitution of the French Fifth Republic in 1946 was similarly motivated. And so, presumably, was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was passed nem con in the UN General Assembly in 1948. I think that most people, at this time, were so appalled with the innocent suffering that occurred in the Depression, and the unconscionable treatment that had been meted out to Jewish and other minority groups in Europe in the decades leading up to, and including, World War II, that they felt strongly the need for a new kind of doctrine of human rights. It was felt that what was done to the Jews in Europe’s concentration camps was much worse than the killing and maiming that had occurred in World War II. For these killings were not just acts of war, where one could still have some respect for one’s enemy. They were brutal acts of extermination. They involved treating the inmates of these camps, not as people, but as vermin. The feeling was widespread that human beings deserved better than this. 

The social and moral principles that underscore these modern doctrines are all humanistic. But their humanism is not the same as ‘liberal humanism’, which was the supposedly natural foundation of the revolutionary doctrines of the Enlightenment. The kind of humanism upon which these charters were developed was a social one. It embraced the full spectrum of modern human rights—ranging from the personal and property rights of the earlier tradition through to the provision, wherever necessary, of adequate health, education and welfare services, not only to satisfy basic human needs, but enough to allow all people to live with dignity and respect in their own societies. Liberal humanism, on the other hand, sought only to justify the so-called ‘imprescriptible’ rights and entitlements of the earlier doctrines, which were, supposedly, the rights and entitlements that people are born with, and so, presumably, must have existed, even in the original state of nature.

Even a cursory glance at the Universal Declaration should convince us that human rights are not typical of the moral or political principles that are discussed in Philosophy or Politics departments. The moral principles that dominate discussions in Philosophy are mostly concerned with the outrageous demands of act-utlitarianism (as in trolley problems), or perhaps with truth-telling, abortion, or promise-keeping, but not with how individuals may be treated by the state. In traditional moral philosophy, the state itself is not even considered to be a moral agent. Moral responsibilities for legislation are normally thought to lie with individual members of Parliament or Congress, not with the collective body of parliamentarians—even though so-called ‘conscience votes’ occur, they are likely to be allowed only where religious sensitivities are at stake. Yet, this collective body surely does have moral responsibilities—indeed, very great ones—and often the legislation that is enacted today may well be regarded as morally imperative, or morally indefensible, in years to come.

The theory of human rights should, clearly, be one of the main issues in political philosophy. But, unfortunately, political philosophy lies in a sort of no-man’s land between morals, politics and jurisprudence. Political philosophers have traditionally sought to justify the obligations of individuals to the states in which they live. But rarely do they discuss the human rights doctrines themselves. Questions are asked, such as: whether nation X is in breach of our human rights conventions, or whether nation Y is justified in curtailing some human rights conventions, e.g. freedom of speech, in order to pursue economic development as a priority. But human rights themselves seem to have no natural home in most universities. They are not straightforwardly moral principles, as morality is now conceived. They are not straightforwardly political principles either. Most probably, they would, and probably should, be classified as jurisprudential. 

But Law faculties have seem to have given up on jurisprudence. The main problem with human rights, as I see it, is that no one seems to know what to do with them. They sound like moral principles. And, they seem to stand above the law, as moral principles presumably should. But most philosophers these days are individualists, and find it very difficult to make any sense of them. In the 1790s, Jeremy Bentham said that the natural rights of the French Constitution were nonsense, and that to describe them as ‘imprescriptible’ was nonsense on stilts. But they are not nonsense. Properly conceived, they are just straightforwardly moral principles referring to the moral obligations of states, precisely as the 1946 Preamble to the French Constitution explicitly declares. I call them ‘social moral principles’.

 

 

Pure ethics is, if anything, just the superficial study of personal morality. Applied ethics is concerned with the whole field of morality, personal and social. The specific theory tells us only about the moral responsibilities of a specific class of social agents, viz. those of normal adult individuals. The general theory not only tells us about the moral responsibilities of normal adult individuals, it also includes our basic human rights (which are the moral responsibilities of governments), and the moral responsibilities of all of the many other kinds of social agents in all of the various kinds of human societies in the world.

Social Humanism

‘Social humanism’, which is the name I give to the underlying philosophy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is largely about achieving social equality, which is just one of a number of species of equality discussed in the literature. For social equality to exist in a given society, the people of that society must normally be disposed to treat all others as their social equals, and so have equal concern for them as people, independently of their social status. There are some broader economic conceptions of equality that are based largely on the idea that people should have more or less equal incomes, wealth, or access to resources. But social equality is not to be identified with any of these. It involves equality of concern, treatment and respect, and it provides for real equality of opportunity, which is something that will be discussed presently.

Social equality requires that concern and regard for others should be extended to everyone. But it would require a big social movement to create and maintain such an attitude. For it is not a natural one. Human beings are naturally tribal, and therefore inclined to adopt the hierarchical social structures inherent in tribalism, and to limit their concerns for others to those they see as members of their own tribe. To counter our intuitive tribalism, and to create and maintain social cohesion, it is necessary that we should demand attitudes of social egalitarianism, i.e. a commitment to realising a state of social equality in one’s own society. And this may take some time and effort. 

According to social egalitarianism, there must not only be equality in and before the law, i.e. no arbitrary discrimination in the law itself, and none in its implementation. There must also be equality in and before the set of all accepted social norms of the society, i.e. no arbitrary discrimination in our socially approved customs, and none in our treatment of people who do not abide by these customs. In other words, we must require a kind of social contractual egalitarianism. 

Social egalitarianism also involves the cultivation of democratic attitudes. To achieve this end result, I would not advocate adversarial democracy, i.e. the kind of democracy that pits one group of people in a country against another—in a war of invective and propaganda. On the contrary, I would argue that we need a collaborative democracy, in which people are expected to work together to resolve social problems. Adversarial democracy is often counterproductive of social equality, and just promotes tribalism, as the most recent US and Australian elections have shown. And the most powerful tribes, with the most resources, and (in Australia) best access to the media, must ultimately become the dominant ones. But a society with dominant social tribes cannot possibly be a socially equal one. Creating and maintaining a socially equal society must essentially be a matter of developing a natural willingness to get behind the kinds of social programs (e.g. educational ones) that will provide real equality of opportunity to everyone in society, and insisting upon equality of regard, treatment, and so on. 

A society in which socially egalitarian attitudes prevail may include a few millionaires, or even billionaires. For what is most important is not wealth or income equality, but that there should be equality of respect and concern for people, independently of their wealth or income. It does matter that no one should be so poor, or so downtrodden, that they cannot take advantage of what is on offer, or otherwise participate fully in social life. So, it is vitally important that everyone should pay his or her fair share of taxation, and then cease to regard this money as ‘their money’, as though the government were a corporation, and they were its shareholders. Governments are for everyone, not just for taxpayers. And governments have some important moral duties to perform, viz. to maintain our democratic institutions, our human rights, and do all of the sorts of things that Franklin Roosevelt spoke about in his 1944 address.

To realise socially egalitarian attitudes in Australia, Great Britain and the USA would certainly require huge cultural changes. Legislation alone cannot do it, because the change required is basically a moral one. And, legislation has to follow morality, not prescribe it. Nor can wealth redistribution succeed in bringing about the required changes. To create social egalitarianism the members of a society must somehow become more humanistic in their attitudes. That is, they must, as Rawls suggested, be able and willing to abstract from their own positions and interests, and consider social issues from a purely humanistic point of view. That is, they must be able to operate socially from behind a veil of ignorance concerning their own stations in life, which some people will inevitably find difficult. 

Obviously, capitalism and individualism do not encourage such perspectives. On the contrary, they undermine them. Free market capitalism requires us to take the viewpoint of the individual in all matters, and this is likely to lead to the gross neglect of what are nowadays disparagingly called ‘entitlements’. Socialism requires us to adopt the viewpoint of the producers of goods and services, i.e. the workers and their managements. But, the history of the West since the nineteenth century has demonstrated that the degree of social control required to maintain a socialist regime does not make for a free or democratic society. But we do know, from the examples of Scandinavia and Northern Europe, exactly what is required. A balanced society is one in which people would normally treat each other as social equals, without having to be pressured, or required by law to do so. That is, we need a society with an egalitarian social contract.

Conclusion

For all of these reasons, the general theory of morals requires a new more general foundation than Kant ever dreamed of. Specifically, my foundational question is this: 

According to what principles would you wish the individual or collective agents of every society to behave?

This question, I believe, is the one that we really should be asking. It is clearly a foundational question, but it immediately changes the focus of morality from what behaviour is most rational socially to what behaviour is most desirable socially. So, instead of Kant’s rational idealism, my thesis is one of desirable idealism. 

The consequences of asking the desirability question, instead of Kant’s original one, would be momentous—no less so than were those of Kant’s theory in his day. Here are some of them:

1. Individually, we should have to think of our morals as social behavioural ideals, i.e. laws or customary ways of behaving that we should like to see entrenched in the social contracts of every society.
2. The morality of a society must be seen as the set of laws or customs that most people in that society would wish to see built into every society’s social contract.
3. All effective decision-makers in a society, whether individual or collective, must be social agents, and hence, in principle, also moral agents.
4. The moral obligations, rights, powers and responsibilities of any individual or collective Z must depend on the morally relevant class of agents to which Z belongs:
   • In the case of an individual, it would be basically the same for all normal adult citizens, but special obligations, rights, powers, or responsibilities might attach to the citizen’s station in life.
   • In the case of an organization, it would be dependent upon the role of that organization in society, and the powers and responsibilities that are attached to that role.
5. Moral principles never apply only to particular individuals or organizations, but only to individuals or organizations in virtue of their social positions or roles.
6. A society and its morality must be co-evolving systems.
7. To develop our moral system, we must aim to change the society’s social contract to fit our moral preferences.

I cannot argue for any of these consequences here. The arguments for them are set out in my book on Social Humanism.

 

Kant’s rational idealism, I argued, is radically unsatisfactory. You need more than rationality to found a system of morality. Imagine a society of perfectly rational cats. They are good at geometry, and rational mechanics, and they love torturing mice to death. But how would you go about trying to persuade them that this is wrong? Kant needed humanism to make his own position tenable, as I think he himself later realised, when he supplemented his purely rationalist theory with his humanistic thesis that: Human beings are ends in themselves; and argued that it is always wrong to treat a human being merely as a means to an end. But in my view, the focus should, at the outset, have been on what is socially most desirable, not on what is most rational, given certain objectives, because if you leave the objectives out, you must gloss over the question of what is socially most desirable, which is disastrous. 

Aristotle, I would argue, was wrong about human nature. We human beings have much more complex natures than Aristotle ever imagined. To live together according to our natures in a social environment, we need to accommodate to each other’s desires and values, not just rationally, but also socially, with tolerance and understanding. For, it is not clear that there can ever be a sufficiently broad, fundamentally essentially rational, agreement about what is overall for the best. 

In any case, it would seem to be clear that the essence of human kind is not their rationality, or any other arbitrarily selected social or mental capacities specific to human beings. If we have an essential nature, it is what is written into our genes. So, in all probability we are, by nature, hunter-gathering tribes-people. But we are not socially inflexible beings; i.e. our genetic structures are not highly determinative of our social behaviour. Other social animals (such as ants and bees) have evolved their social structures by the slow processes of genetic selection. But human beings appear to have evolved a unique capacity to create and adapt their manner of social organization to their circumstances. Accordingly, we must be willing to accept that most of the principles that we have adopted for regulating social behaviour are really socially generated—not ones that are encoded in our DNA. And, if they are passed on from generation to generation, then mostly they will be passed on as memes, not genes.

But, if this is so, then our moral principles cannot all be discoverable a priori, as everyone working in the Kantian tradition of moral philosophy strongly believes. There are undoubtedly some primitive moral character judgments derivable from our natural dispositions to admire certain personal virtues (e.g. compassion, honesty, fairness) in people, which are plausibly a priori, and so more or less universal. But the natural virtues would also include some militant ones (e.g. courage, fighting spirit, and loyalty), which are certainly not in need of any encouragement. The problem faced by any nation-wide society, then, is how to break down aggressive tribalism without substituting some other, even more vicious, form of nationalism. 

In the end, if we want world peace and prosperity, I think we will all have to become cosmopolitans, and see ourselves as members of a global federation of human societies, working collaboratively for the wellbeing of all. But this end is probably too remote to be a guide to present behaviour. For the present, we must focus on building a good society with good people. And our required moral principles must refer to the kinds of behaviour that we should demand of the social agents in our society, and be disposed to argue for in every society.