THE MORAL RESOURCES PROVIDE A PRACTICAL CRITERIA TO EVALUATE THE MORALITY OF ACTIONS AND ALTERNATIVES
1. LACK OF EXTERNAL AUTHORITY DOES NOT RESULT IN NIHILISM
Jonathan Glover, Philosopher, 1999
HUMANITY: A MORAL HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY, 17
He [Nietzsche] believed in unrestrained self-creation, perhaps thinking that only an external authority could provide a basis for restraint, but this assumption is false. My caring about the sort of person I am motivates the project of self-creation. Why should not my caring about other people set limits to it? The Nietzschean nightmare does not follow from Nietzschean premises, but a troubling question remains. Perhaps there are people, either indivduals or whole groups, whose projects of self-creation are close to that of Nietzsche’s ‘noble soul’. And perhaps they do not have countervailing values which restrain their ruthless projects. Does the fading of the moral law mean that we have nothing to say to a Nietzschean amoralist?
2. HUMAN RESPONSES ACT AS RESTRAINTS ON IMMORAL ACTS
Jonathan Glover, Philosopher, 1999
HUMANITY: A MORAL HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY, pg 22
Other moral resources, to be looked at first, are the ‘human responses’. Two of these human responses, in particular, are important restraints. One is the tendency to respond to people with certain kinds of respect. This may be bound up with ideas about their dignity of about their having a certain status, either as members of our community or just as fellow human beings. The other human response is sympathy: caring about the miseries and the happiness of other, and perhaps feeling a degree of identification with them.
3. ‘MORAL IDENTITY’ RESTRAINS WHAT ACT WE FIND MORALLY PERMISSIBLE
Jonathan Glover, Philosopher, 1999
HUMANITY: A MORAL HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY pg. 22
We have distinctive psychological responses to different things people do: acts of cruelty may arouse our revulsion; we may respond to some mean swindle with contempt; courage or generosity may win our respect or admiration. These responses to others are linked to our sense of our own ‘moral identity’. Many people have their own, often very un-Nietzschean, projects of self creation. We have a conception of what we are like, and of the kind of person we want to be, which may limit what we are prepared to do to others.
4. REJECTING THE RESTRAINTS OF THE MORAL RESOURCES CREATES DISHARMONY
Jonathan Glover, Philosopher, 1999
HUMANITY: A MORAL HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY, 27
Most of us have to some degree the human responses of respect and sympathy. Most of us do care, at least a little, about what sort of person we are. These dispositions all conflict with ruthless selfishness, greatly raising its psychological cost. This is, of course ‘only’ an empirical point. People look to philosophy for the knockdown argument and the decisive refutation, but ethics, being bound up with people, cannot escape soft-edged psychology, all dispositions and tendencies rather than hard universal laws. The Socratic argument would have no force for a ‘natural’, ruthless amoralist, in whom moral resources were non-existent, but for the rest of us it contains an important truth. The psychological conflict generated by trampling on others will be often (though not always) unacceptably great.
THE MORAL RESOURCES OFFER A MORE HUMANIZED ETHICAL THEORY
1. MORALS WITHOUT EXTERNAL SUPPORT REQUIRE THE CREATION OF NEW FOUNDATIONS
Jonathan Glover, Philosopher, 1999
HUMANITY: A MORAL HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY, 406
Not all skeptics about a non-human moral law see much to admire in Nietzschean amoralism. The alternative is to keep ethics afloat without external support. If there is not external moral law, morality needs to be humanized, to be rooted in human needs and human values.
2. THE MORAL RESOURCES DEVELOP ETHICS BASED IN HUMAN PYSCHOLOGY
Jonathan Glover, Philosopher, 1999
HUMANITY: A MORAL HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY, 206
The moral resources give some hope of opposing atrocities with a strategy which fits human psychology. The sense of moral identity and the human responses are parts of our psychology, independent of any external metaphysics. The sense of moral identity is important, but in the prevention of atrocities it is reliable only when it is rooted in the human responses. At the core of humanized ethics are the human responses.
3. ETHICS’ BEST HOPE IS TO ‘WORK WITH THE GRAIN OF HUMAN NATURE’
Jonathan Glover, Philosopher, 1999
HUMANITY: A MORAL HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY, 409
There are features of our time which make it particularly important to build up moral defenses against barbarism. Most obviously, there is the way technology hugely increases the scale of atrocities. But there is the increasing awareness of the fading of the moral law. As authority-based morality retreats, it can be replaced by a morality which is deliberately created. The best hope of this is to work with the grain of human nature, making use of the resources of moral identity and the human responses.
TRADITIONAL ETHICAL THEORIES PROVIDE ADEQUATE RESTRAINTS
1. THE MORAL RESOURCES ARE EASILY ERODED
Jonathan Glover, Philosopher, 1999
HUMANITY: A MORAL HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY, 28
Self-interested calculation finds the structure of rewards and penalties very different in dealings with members of a different community. There are far weaker social pressures against hostile treatment of members of other groups. And in war the pressures often support group hostility. The moral resources also have less power. Claims to be treated with respect are often linked to standing within a group. The claim of an outsider may be minimal. Sympathy has similar limitations. They sympathies which really engage us are often stubbornly limited and local. I may move mountains for my child, but perhaps I will not cross the street to be a good Samaritan to a stranger. Sympathy may hardly extend to those outside a particular community.
2. DEONTOLOGY PROVIDES PRESCPRITIVE POTENTIAL FOR ETHICAL DECISION MAKING
Immanuel Kant, philosopher, 1993.
GROUNDING FOR THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS, p. 7
A good will is good not because of what it effects or accomplishes, nor because of its fitness to attain some proposed end; it is good only through its willing, i.e., it is good in itself. When it is considered in itself, then it is to be esteemed very much higher than anything which it might ever bring about merely in order to favor some inclination, or even the sum total of all inclinations. Even if, by some especially unfortunate fate or by the niggardly provision of stepmotherly nature, this will should be wholly lacking in the power to accomplish its purpose; if with the greatest effort it should yet achieve nothing, and only the good will should remain (not, to be sure, as a mere wish but as the summoning of all the means in our power), yet would it, like a jewel, still shine by its own light as something which has its full value in itself.
3. THE DEONTOLOGICAL APPROACH ENSURES THE PROMOTION OF MORAL VALUES
Philip Pettit, Professor of Social and Political Theory at Australian National University, 1995.
A COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, p. 31
Many will say that for someone who prizes liberty above all else, the right institutions are not those that promote liberty, and are not therefore those that would ban the minority group, but rather are the institutions that would testify suitably to the value of liberty. They are the institutions that would promote liberty, but only by means that do not themselves involve interference with liberty. They are the institutions, in a word, that would honour liberty rather than promote it. To honour liberty under ideal conditions – under conditions where there are no recalcitrant agents like the minority fanatics – will be to promote it there. But in the real world where other agents and agencies are bent on undermining liberty, honouring the value may mean failing to promote it: heroically failing to promote it, as it were.
4. UTILITARIANISM PROVIDES A COHERENT BASIS FOR MORALITY
Jonathan Glover, Philosopher, 1990
UTILITARIANISM AND ITS CRITICS, 1
Part of the attraction of utilitarianism is that it claims to replace arbitrary-seeming rules by a morality with a single coherent basis. Acts should be judged as right or wrong according to their consequences. Happiness is the only thing that is good in itself. Unhappiness is the only thing that is bad in itself. Everything else is only good or bad according to its tendency to produce happiness or unhappiness.
5. UTILITARIANISM IS GROUNDED CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE; NOT BRITTLE CONJECTURE
Jonathan Glover, Philosopher, 1990
UTILITARIANISM AND ITS CRITICS, 2
Utilitarianism appeals to the value many of us place on conscious experience. Some of us think that, in a universe without consciousness, it would not matter what happened. Unseen sunsets, however beautiful, are of no value at all. Things only matter because of their place in the lives of conscious beings.
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