On Political Means and Social Ends 9781474469302

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On Political Means and Social Ends

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Other books by Ted Honderich published by Edinburgh University Press After the Terror (2002; paperback 2003) On Consciousness (forthcoming) On Freedom (forthcoming)

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On Political Means and Social Ends

Ted Honderich

Edinburgh University Press

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 C Ted Honderich, 2003

Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 11/13 Sabon and Futura by TechBooks India, and printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1840 6 (hardback) The right of Ted Honderich to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

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Introduction

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John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and a Question about Liberalism

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1 2 3 4 5 6 2.

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The Very Words Harm to Others The Interests of Others Free Speech and Morality-Dependent Harm Moral Rights, and a Hodgepodge Conclusion, Liberalism

5 8 10 12 15 19

Conservatism, its Distinctions, and its Rationale

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1 2 3 4 5

25 29 33 37 42

Against Change and Theory? Human Nature, Economics, the New Right For Freedom, Democracy, and the Organic Society? Equality, Rationale Again, and Desert The Upshot

Trying to Save Marx’s Theory of History, by Teleology, and Failing

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

46 49 50 52 54 57 58 60 63

Historical Materialism Naturally Understood Traditional Objection Historical Materialism Teleologically Understood Facts Explaining Events and Things Dispositions Explaining Events Another Disposition as Explanatory The Truth about Teleology: Explanation-Claims Differences between the Two Views Conclusions on Marx

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vi 4.

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Categories of Great Desire Unsatisfactory Principles of Well-Being The Proper Principle Policies, Equality-Practices Humanity and Equality

71 75 77 79 82 84 86 87 92 95 99 103

Consequentialism, Moralities of Concern, and Selfishness

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1 2 3 4 5 6

112 114 119 122 124

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8.

An Imagined Assembly and its Principles The Justificatory Use of the Basic Proposition in the Contract Argument A Very Ordinary Argument as against the Contract Argument Sad Conclusions The Expository Use of the Basic Proposition Explanatory Uses of the Basic Proposition Summary

The Principle of Humanity 1 2 3 4 5

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The Contract Argument in a Theory of Justice

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Two Groups of Reasons for the Rightness of Actions Traditional Conceptions of the Two Groups of Reasons Moralities of Concern Reasons of the First Group – Understanding Them An Argument for Reasons of the First Group? An Argument against the Reasons Understood as not Involving Satisfaction A View of Most of the Reasons Understood as Involving Satisfaction

125 128

Hierarchic Democracy and the Necessity of Mass Civil Disobedience and Non-Co-operation

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1 2 3 4 5

135 138 142 146 152

Ordinary and Pluralist Conceptions of Liberal Democracy The Hierarchic Conception Hierarchic Democracy and Humanity Mass Civil Disobedience and Non-Co-operation Conclusion

After the Terror : A Book and Further Thoughts

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156 158

Great Goods Bad Lives, Good Lives

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Contents 3 4 5 6 7

The Principle of Humanity Propositions Alternatives to the Principle of Humanity The Undeniability of the Principle of Humanity The Propositions Again

vii 160 161 163 166 169

Acknowledgements

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Index

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Introduction

This book, you can say, is about liberalism’s founding document, about conservatism, the basis or anyway one basis of Marxism, and a liberal social contract theory. Also a radical politics, the morals under it, facts of life and death in our societies, our democracy as it is, civil disobedience, and such terrorism as that of the Palestinians against Israel. You can better say the book is about a suspicion about liberalism, an aversion to conservatism, a radical politics and morality celebrated as human, accusation and guilt with respect to life and death in our societies, disrespect for our democracy, the need for civil disobedience, what is to be said for and against terrorism, and, in passing, the moral right of Palestinians to their terrorism against the violation of their lives and homeland by neo-Zionism since 1967. You can say those two things in summary of the book, but better is needed. There could be good books of history with those subjects, or those subjects and those accompanying sentiments and commitments. Also good books of economics or another social science, or literature, journalism, personal reflection or whatever. Of what sort is the book you have opened? Political theory is sometimes said to be systematic reflection on governments and what they ought to be and do. Political theory may engage in this reflection by way of the history of political thought – such great thinkers as Mill and Marx – or by way of the analysis of such ideas as those of democracy or terrorism. Perhaps it can proceed by other means. Political science as distinct from political theory is closer to the particular facts of politics and limited generalisations about the facts, and does indeed aspire to be a science. So what is the sort of thing that this book aspires to be, which is political philosophy? Nothing very different from political theory and maybe political science, certainly, if you were to define political

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philosophy weakly, say as evaluation and study of government and social organisation. There is a good move you can make if you want to distinguish political philosophy and things in it from the adjacent endeavours and the same things in them – or if you want to distinguish the inclination or impulse to political philosophy from different inclinations or impulses side-by-side in a single endeavour. The good move is to begin with philosophy itself, all of philosophy, encompassing not only political and moral philosophy, but also epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and so on. What sets this great and endless endeavour apart from other disciplines of the same size? What sets it apart from science, history, literature and religion? For that matter, what sets it apart from business and politics? Or business-ridden politics? No easy question either, but the answer in brief is logic. I hasten to say that the logic in question is not formal logic, which is one lowly part of philosophy and a poor relative to mathematics. Nor, of course, is the logic in question quite so attainable and manageable as what is offered to us under the name of critical thinking or informal logic. This useful instruction and endeavour is closer than formal logic, though, to the logic that is the nature of all decent and halfdecent philosophy. What this logic amounts to is slow and good understanding of claims about large matters and of the arguments and evidence offered in defence of them. It is an understanding that is clear, consistent and as complete or worked-out as life or a part of it or an occasion of it allows. If the understanding of the large claims and arguments is clear, consistent and complete, it will certainly consist importantly in valid reasoning from true or anyway good premises. This way of going on is not made clearer by adding something else, but it does need to be added that good judgement gets into it, including good factual judgement about the world. Do you object that all this is as much a characterisation of science? In fact it is not. Science and everything in life that is worth attention does indeed aspire to this logic. But science, to speak only of it, also aspires to something else, the empiricism that is closer attention to the physical world and the ways of existing and behaving of what is in it. So it does not have quite enough time to do well what philosophy concentrates on trying to do well. We need both these concentrations and no doubt others. Conceivably even religion, or anyway naturalistic religion. Presumably politics itself. But let us not pursue this elevated line of respect and

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peace-making. Let us turn instead to a question that arises about political philosophy as we have now conceived it. What political philosophy comes to, we have concluded, is a kind of logic about governments and societies. That is what distinguishes it from political science and also, less efficiently and successfully, from political theory. But as you have gathered already, this political philosophy, as used to be said, is not value-free. Far from it. This book of it is against conservatism and at least cool about liberalism, for a start. Can there really be commitment or morals as well as the logic of all philosophy in this political philosophy? Political philosophy is indeed a part, a larger part than often supposed, of moral philosophy. Can the two things really go together with the logic of philosophy? Go together with that kind of fact? Can the value have logic in it? It seems to me that it is possible. That is not the ecumenical idea that all the commitments and morality in political philosophy can go together with the logic to which it aspires. I doubt that that is true of the morality of relationship, which is looked at in a chapter that follows. In saying that logic and morals can go together, I speak bravely of this book, and in particular one moral principle. The principle comes out of our shared human nature, and, importantly for this reason, does at least consort with the very nature of philosophy. The principle is to be found in Chapter 5, and much of its defence is in Chapter 6. It is, in my view, the best summation of a morality that preceded it, and has been with us from the beginning, and will be with us at the end. All of the essays in this book, almost all of them first published in philosophical journals, have been revised. In a few cases they have been very much revised. The first one is a boisterous shadow of its previous self, or rather selves. Elsewhere a couple of mistakes have been corrected, and a couple of obscurities removed, a bad one in the chapter on democracy and civil disobedience. In all cases the essays are more readable than they were in the confines of the philosophical journals. For at least that reason, their titles have mostly been changed. See the Acknowledgements note at the back of the book for their histories. The revising of this book was finished when the second war against Iraq was going forward, in the spring of 2003. My country joined the United States in what a definition in the last chapter of the book gives us some good reason to call state-terrorism. The book would have been less temperate if it had not only been improved in this spring but written in it.

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Chapter One

John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and a Question about Liberalism

This essay considers the issue of whether there is clear sense in John Stuart Mill’s work On Liberty. What does this foundation of liberalism come to? Is it firm and true? More particularly, what is the one very simple principle of individual liberty that Mill promises to announce? If it has to do with causing harm to someone else, what is the harm that an individual must not do if he or she is to be left alone by society and the state? How much does the liberty in question have to do with free speech and individuality, to which On Liberty is the most resolute of paeans? How much does it have to do with not giving offence to somebody else’s morality? Does an individual’s being left alone by the state and society depend instead on his or her respect for the rights of others? What sort of rights then? What do they have to do with the Greatest Happiness Principle of Utilitarianism? And do these various questions in fact leave a lot out? The paper gives answers, not indefinite ones, and raises a general question about liberalism that will get more attention later in this book. Unlike almost all of what follows, however, the paper’s several aims include the scholarly one of getting straight what somebody wrote. Mill’s essay is renowned. It is a work so established that a decent academic bookstore, in this day and age, may carry three or four editions. It is the founding document of the tradition of liberalism, certainly liberalism of the English and American kind. As you read through the following fifteen passages from it, Mill’s sentences, you may also wonder if it is a mess. It is my own response to that idea1 that prompts me to begin by putting the evidence of so much of the essay before you. Maybe it is no bad thing, either, where there has

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been endless dispute about the understanding of a thing, to have it served up on a plate straightaway.

1

The Very Words

1. The subject of this essay is . . . civil or social liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.2 2. The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. 3. . . . I forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. Those interests, I contend, authorise the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control only in respect to those actions of each which concern the interest of other people. 4. A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury. The latter case, it is true, requires a much more cautious exercise of compulsion than the former. To make anyone answerable for doing evil to others is the rule; to make him answerable for not preventing evil is, comparatively speaking, the exception. Yet there are many cases clear enough and grave enough to justify that exception. 5. . . . there is a sphere of action in which society, as distinguished from the individual, has, if any, only an indirect interest;

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comprehending all that portion of a person’s life and conduct which affects only himself, or if it also affects others, only with their free, voluntary and undeceived consent and participation. When I say only himself, I mean directly, and in the first instance; for whatever affects himself, may affect others through himself; and the objection which may be grounded on this contingency will receive consideration in the sequel. 6. . . . the appropriate region of human liberty . . . compromises, first, the inward domain of consciousness, demanding liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense, liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral or theological. The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it. Secondly, the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character . . . without impediment from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them . . . Thirdly, from this liberty of each individual, follows the liberty, within the same limits, of combination among individuals. 7. What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself? . . . everyone who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit, and the fact of living in society renders it indispensable that each should be found to observe a certain line of conduct towards the rest. This conduct consists . . . in not injuring the interests of another; or rather certain interests, which, either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights; and secondly in each person’s bearing his share . . . of the labours and sacrifices incurred for defending the society or its members from injury and molestation. 8. As soon as any part of a person’s conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion. But there is no room for entertaining any such question when a person’s conduct affects the interests of no persons besides himself. 9. . . . the inconveniences which are strictly inseparable from the unfavourable judgement of others, are the only ones to which a person should ever be subjected for that portion of his conduct and

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character which concerns his own good, but which does not affect the interest of others in their relations with him. Acts injurious to others require a totally different treatment. Encroachments on their rights . . . are fit objects of moral reprobation, and, in grave cases, of moral retribution and punishment. 10. The distinction here pointed out between the part of a person’s life which concerns only himself, and that which concerns others, many persons will refuse to admit. . . . No person is an entirely isolated being. . . . I fully admit that the mischief which a person does to himself may seriously affect . . . those nearly connected with him, and, in a minor degree, society at large. When, by conduct of this sort, a person is led to violate a distinct and assignable obligation to any other person or persons, the case is taken out of the selfregarding class. . . . Whenever, in short, there is a definite damage, or a definite risk of damage, either to an individual or the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty, and placed in that of morality or law. 11. There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage to their feelings; as a religious bigot, when charged with disregarding the religious feelings of others, has been known to retort that they disregard his feelings, by persisting in their abominable worship or creed. But there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it. 12. . . . it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities. . . . Suppose . . . that in a people, of whom the majority were Mussulmans, that a majority should insist on not permitting pork to be eaten within the limits of the country. . . . Would it be a legitimate exercise of the moral authority of public opinion? 13. . . . two maxims . . . together form the entire doctrine of this essay . . . The maxims are, first, that the individual is not accountable to society for his actions in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself. . . . Secondly, that for such actions as are prejudicial to the interests of others, the individual is accountable, and may be subjected either to social or to legal punishment, if society is of the opinion that the one or the other is requisite for its protection.

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14. The reason for not interfering, unless for the sake of others, with a person’s voluntary acts, is consideration for his liberty. His voluntary choice is evidence that what he so chooses is desirable, or at least endurable, to him, and his good is on the whole best provided for him by allowing him to take his own means of pursuing it. 15. I have reserved for the last a large class of questions . . . which, though clearly connected with the subject of this essay, do not, in strictness, belong to it. These are cases in which . . . the question is not about restraining the actions of individuals, but about helping them; it is asked whether the government should do, or cause to be done, something for their benefit, instead of leaving it to be done by themselves, individually or in voluntary combination. . . . to secure as much of the advantages of centralized power and intelligence as can be had without turning into government channels too great a proportion of the general activity, is one of the most difficult and complicated questions in the art of government. . . . . . . the practical principle . . . may be conveyed in these words: the greatest dissemination of power consistent with efficiency; but the greatest possible centralisation of information, and diffusion of it from the centre.

2

Harm to Others

These fifteen passages are in the sequence in which Mill produces them, but seemingly not in a good or logical order. Still, do Mill’s passages 1, 2 and 15 make it clear enough what he is up to? You may say it is the endeavour of arguing what laws the state or government is right to enact in order to force people to act and live in certain ways, and what moral or social as against legal pressures the society in question is right to bring to bear on them for the same purpose. Mill is looking into the questions of to what extent a state and society can restrict the liberty or freedom of its members. He is establishing to what extent a state and society can interfere in that freedom of individuals that consists in their voluntariness, their being able to do what they want. He is establishing, more particularly, to what extent a state and society can compel or coerce or go against the wills of individuals, as distinct from taking action to help or benefit individuals or improve their lives by providing health care, old-age pensions, and so on. That is not quite right, or at any rate it is very misleading. It mistakenly assumes, as Mill seems to assume, that the two things,

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restrictions on liberty and help or benefit, can be separated. But of course help to members of a society by the state will involve coercion by the state, if only in the form of income-tax laws to raise the money for the help. In fact Mill’s real concern, as passages 2 and 15 in particular make clear, is what liberty or freedom there ought to be on the prior assumption that there will be no significant governmental limits on individual liberty in order to help individuals – the same or other individuals – by way of anything like a welfare system or National Health Service. That is, his concern is not all possible restraints on liberty, but the possible restraints that are left after other possible restraints, of much importance in other political philosophies, are ruled out by an assumption or fiat. With respect to a large category of freedoms – freedoms from kinds of taxation and the like – he does not open the question of whether they are to be significantly limited. He assumes freedoms of this kind are something like sacrosanct. That is not to say his remaining questions are not of importance, or that his assumption has not been shared to a greater or lesser extent in the tradition of liberalism. From passage 2 you might suppose there is no doubt about Mill’s answer to the questions, his principle of liberty. It is that the state and society may intervene in the life of an individual against his will, either by the force of law or public opinion, if and only if by his action he causes harm or the risk of it to someone else (other than a fully-consenting partner) or to the public. Harm to himself or to consenting or combining partners is not enough for intervention. Nor is any unharmful ‘immorality’ in which he may indulge. If he is doing wrong without doing harm to others, or going against his own good, he is to be left at liberty to do so. To this first understanding of Mill’s principle, you need to add from the widening passage 4, importantly, that the harm in question can be done by omission as well as commission. This is what is still most commonly reported, by casual readers and certainly by politicians of lesser education, as Mill’s principle of liberty.3 It had better not be, since it is fatally vague in its main term, harm. So too in talk of things from which other people need protection, evil, prejudicial effects, injury, damage, mischief, and the like. What is to count as harm? Consider the matter of an individual’s not making any effort to contribute anything to himself or to society, but, as his detractors say, living off society. Remember that one can do harm by omission. It is plain that until harm is defined, it is uncertain whether

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the given principle of liberty allows us to interfere with him, make him work. It is plain, further, that this principle is in general unclear. There are other proofs, as indeed they are, of the uselessness of this first understanding of Mill. Until more is said, a homosexual teacher’s advocating the gay life to children may or may not be a case of harming them. A union’s demanding equal pay for all of a group of its members may or may not be a harm to more diligent workers in the group. Also, it is possible and arguable that any real self-harm will also in effect be a harm to others – by way of making a self-harming individual less able to rescue or sustain others, maybe keep her own children from harm. In fairness to Mill it needs to be added that he himself reports more or less this very problem. He does not think his own talk of harm and the like is sufficiently explicit. Look at passage 5, a page or two after it was announced, in passage 2, that a man’s harming himself and consenting partners is not ground for legal or social interference. In passage 5 Mill in effect allows that we may indeed think about understanding ‘harm’ in such a way as to make it include a great deal, the secondary or indirect effects on others of self-harm. If so, a lot of state and social interference will be justified. Does Mill intend this? We may rightly object that the principle is unclear. But he promises in 5 to clear things up ‘in the sequel’ – that is, later in his essay. In effect he promises to clarify his principle of liberty. As I have said, Mill’s essay has commonly been reported by sympathetic readers, even the likes of English judges, as advancing the vague and useless principle – no interference with someone except on account of harm to others. Is this to be explained by no more than ordinary human frailty, ordinary intellectual frailty? Just the fact that we are not all close readers and clear thinkers? Or rather, does it have to do with the nature of a political tradition? Is there a special uncertainty in one political tradition? Is there a kind of inclination or willingness for writers in it to leave things indeterminate or a little vague, and for readers in the tradition to accept this? It is a question that will arise again as this small inquiry into the understanding of Mill’s essay and the political tradition of liberalism proceeds.

3

The Interests of Others

To go forward, it is in passage 10 and thereabouts in the essay that Mill makes good his promise to clear things up, clarify his principle.

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We have it from 10 that a person may affect others for the worse, harm them, in two ways. He may do so, maybe by omission, without thereby failing in or violating a distinct and assignable obligation to them. Or, he may harm another or others and thereby indeed fail in or violate a distinct and assignable obligation to them. Passage 10 has been brought together, and indeed does go together, with passages 8, 9 and 13. There we have it, in short, that an individual is to be left to himself in affecting others adversely – if he is not going against the interests or rights of others. In general, for someone to have an interest in something or a right to it is for them to have a claim to it – which is to say a claim that has some kind of support or legitimacy. To have a right to something in one particular sense is to be able to call on the support of the law of the land to get or keep the thing in question. To have a right in a second sense is to be able to call on the support of customary or established morality of the society. Similar remarks are to be made about distinct and assignable obligations. Mill’s sentences and these facts have led, unfortunately, to the conclusion that Mill’s principle of liberty is as follows. The state can intervene in the life of an individual against his will if and only if (1) he offends against the established legal interests or rights of someone else or the public, or, what comes to the same thing, violates his legal obligation to them, or (2) he offends against interests or rights accorded to someone else by customary or established morality in the society. Neither other harm caused by an individual to them, or other immorality, or his own good, justifies and permits intervention by the state and society.4 This second understanding of Mill’s essay, if not so common as the one merely in terms of harm, has been accorded much respect, notably by political theorists.5 This is lamentable, nearly absurd. Mill’s object in his essay, as you will not need reminding, is to settle two things: what laws limiting individual liberty there ought to be, on a certain prior assumption about the possible laws, and what social pressures of the same sort there ought to be. To those questions, the worst of answers are: the laws that exist and the social pressures that there are. In saying so I do not indulge at all in moral superiority about a particular body of laws or a particular society’s attitudes, or in any resistance whatever to conservatism as often understood, or the like. The point is not political at all. Rather, the point is that the given understanding of Mill’s essay provides no answer at all to the questions he sets himself. This is so because patently there exist

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many different bodies of law and different sets of attitudes, about as many as there are societies and states. On Liberty was to tell us which of these, if any, is right. What it does, on the given understanding, is to bless all of them. The given understanding, as they say, is entirely relativistic. Do you have the idea that perhaps Mill is to be taken as declaring, in answer to the question of what body of law and what social attitudes there ought to be, that the English ones are right? That all the world and England’s future should run on the model of the England in which he was writing? No reading of Mill’s damnation of a relevant and main side of that society early in his essay can save the idea. He speaks of the ‘tyranny’ of prevailing opinion and feeling in England, an ascendant class and the yoke it puts on thought and expression, and so on.6 Further, such an answer, a piece of pointing at a nation at a time, would be no articulated answer to his questions. There is more to be said against this second understanding of the essay, but life is short. There is another more natural and more arguable understanding of Mill’s talk of interests, rights and obligations. Before coming to it, however, it will be useful to put aside a couple of things.

4

Free Speech and Morality-Dependent Harm

Passage 5 in the essay is followed immediately by 6. The latter is actually the continuation of the former. Each of them certainly purports to be a general statement of Mill’s principle. Passage 6, although it does not touch on the matter of consenting partners, is the more explicit. This has led occasional writers on the essay to a certain supposition. It is that Mill’s principle of liberty is simply that the state and society cannot intervene in the lives of individuals to curtail in any way either freedom of thought and expression or freedom in ‘tastes and pursuits’, what he elsewhere calls ‘experiments of living’.7 Sometimes the latter have been taken to include kinds of private sexual activity, behind closed doors. Whatever is to be thought of the basis or recommendation of this third proposal, it cannot conceivably be all of Mill’s principle of liberty. This is made obvious by a moment’s reflection. Did Mill intend to exclude the state and society only from interfering with your thinking, speaking, and experiments of living? Obviously not. He wished also to exclude the state and society from interfering

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with your going for a walk, didn’t he? He wished, rightly, despite his perfervid concern with persons of genius and the like, to exclude the state and society from ordinary life that has nothing to do with reflection, expression of opinions, and experiments of living. It cannot be true, even, despite the attention that Mill gives to free speech, that thinking, speaking, and experiments in living are a large part of what Mill intended to protect from state and social interference. There is all of manufacturing and commercial activity for a start, not to mention home-life, work, public activities of various sorts, travel, and so on. To move towards another thing to be put aside quickly, a fourth proposal, it has to do with passages 11 and 12. From passage 11 we learn that a religious bigot’s feelings should not carry the day against the feelings of ordinary people. Mill reaches or states this conclusion by way of the curious analogy of the thief and the right owner of the purse. The bigot has the role of the thief. Do ordinary people stand in analogy to the purse-owner because their interests or rights are or will be violated? This thought brings the passage into line with the second understanding of the essay already rejected, and also another one to be considered. Passage 12, although it contents itself with asking a rhetorical question, is definite enough in its context. A majority of Muslims in a society, with their strong feelings against eating pork, should not have the liberty of preventing others in the society from eating it. In the following pages of the essay, Mill goes on to discuss various other things that are or would be wrong: Roman Catholics prohibiting Protestant worship, puritanical Calvinists and Methodists getting their way about music and dancing, American democrats getting everybody to dress the same, a Socialist majority somewhere limiting people to a small amount of private property, workers securing equal wages, people or whoever else restricting the free market and free trade, Prohibitionists stopping drinking, and Sabbatarians passing laws to keep Sunday a day for only church-going. It is pretty clear from this mixed bag that Mill’s principle of liberty is such that for some reason or other people are to be at liberty to engage in many activities and practices, such as eating pork, Protestant worship, and getting unequal pay and private property, even if this upsets or outrages the feelings of others. But the mixed bag has also contributed to a philosopher’s idea that is part of two several-sided claims as to how Mill’s principle is to be understood.8 This fourth idea is that if a first individual or group causes harm to a second, but the harm, whatever it is, is also owed to the second

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individual’s moral belief that the action was wrong, the harm is irrelevant to any judgement about intervention by the state and society in the first’s action. You don’t have to think about that harm at all in figuring out whether there can and should be intervention. Such morality-dependent harm, whatever its magnitude, can never count at all towards interfering with the liberty of the first individual or group. Against this understanding of Mill, for a start, there is the fact that he never so much as mentions the given idea. There is no evidence whatsoever that he had it. He writes, as you have read in passage 11, that ‘there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it’. That is not a way of saying that you know in advance that harm owed to the feeling of the second person counts for literally nothing, that you don’t have to think about it at all. Are we to suppose Mill thinks, and are we to contemplate, that you don’t have to worry if the second person will kill herself because of the combination of her own moral feelings and what has been done by the first person? It is obvious, on the contrary, that Mill takes the feelings and claims of the bigots, Muslims, socialists and so on to be outweighed by those of the other parties to the disputes. There is little doubt he would contemplate or support intervention in related cases, maybe lies about genocidal massacres. It is notable that he does more than contemplate and indeed asserts the propriety of intervention in something similar, violations of public decency and good manners, say public sexual intercourse.9 This understanding of Mill depends in part on thinking that some or many moral beliefs will be ‘false’ for Mill, which is to say other than utilitarian, and so can be put entirely out of consideration – in the way that someone engaged in a factual or scientific inquiry, or in mathematics, of course puts aside literally false propositions and gives them no weight. This ignores both the fact that moral beliefs are not true or false literally speaking, and that, even if they were, going against them could be bound up with dissatisfaction, distress or worse. Fortunately, life is short, and so we need not go further with this.10 It is mentioned, really, for an ulterior purpose of mine. Liberalism consists importantly in discussion of such texts as On Liberty.11 It consists pretty importantly in philosophical discussion of them – in moral and political philosophy in relation to them. Is liberalism so peculiarly inexplicit or uncertain in its commitment as to tolerate seemingly wilful invention, and self-indulgent speculation

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of a philosophical kind? Is it different from other political moralities, say the political morality of Conservatism in England and America, or the political morality of the Left in its several parts?

5

Moral Rights, and a Hodgepodge

Let us go back to Mill’s passages having to do with interests, rights and obligations – 10, 8, 9, and 13. Maybe 11 too, about the right owner of the purse. It was remarked by me that what it is for someone to have an interest in or a right to something, and for somebody else to have a distinct and assignable obligation with respect to the thing, is for the first person to have a claim that has some kind of support. Two kinds of support were mentioned – the law of the land and customary or established morality in a society. There is also another kind of support or legitimacy. Few things are commoner, in this neighbourhood, than someone’s asserting that an individual or a group has a right to something when they do not have a right either in law or in their society’s customary or established morality. Further, the asserter of the right knows the individual or group lacks rights of the two kinds. My newspaper is sometimes concerned with child-labour in what it takes, correctly, to be primitive or otherwise objectionable societies. Children, it says, have a right to their childhood, a right not to be treated that way. So too is a right to food asserted on behalf of people starving to death. Nor is this kind of right something that turns up in only one part of the political or moral spectrum. A farmer is said to have had a right to defend his lonely farmhouse, in effect to shoot a burglar in the back. Peoples are said to have rights to their homeland and tradition, in effect a right to ethnic cleansing. What is meant here, when someone asserts a right of someone to something, is that they ought to have the thing – and that this judgement has the support of a moral principle or the like. This principle may be a known thing, despite not being written into or being a reality in any society’s customary or established morality. It may be what is now called a principle of human rights. Or it may be a principle without wider support but advocated with confidence by whoever is asserting the right of someone to something. Time could usefully be spent on looking into and clarifying and elaborating this fact about talk of rights, but the fact itself is a plain one. It is also plain that Mill’s passages 10, 8, 9, 13 and maybe 11 can be regarded in just this way. He can easily be taken as speaking

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of such interests. Surely he must be taken to be speaking of such interests, incidentally, in referring to ‘the permanent interests of man as a progressive being’ in passage 3? – of which you will be hearing some more. What we come to, then, is a fifth understanding of Mill’s principle of liberty, which makes it into this: the state and society can interfere in the life of an individual if and only if he violates certain moral rights of someone else or the public – neither legal nor customary or established moral rights. This is perhaps the best understanding of the passages in question. There is also something else to say for this understanding, which is passage 7. In it, incidentally, Mill gives the distinct impression that he is getting around to giving us what is to be taken as the summative or canonical form of his principle. The passage is the beginning of a chapter of his essay called ‘Of the Limits of the Authority of Society over the Individual’. What 7 comes to, putting aside the bit at the end about national defence, is this: the state and society can interfere in the life of someone if and only if he injures what ought to be the legal or the customary or established moral rights of somebody else. That is explicit and it comes to just what we are considering by way of the other notion of rights – that is, that the state and society can interfere with an individual if and only if he offends against certain moral rights of someone else or the public – maybe rights advocated by one person, rights resting on a principle advocated only by that person.12 It would perhaps be unkind to belabour Mill for this nullity – certainly it is a nullity, of no use at all as a principle of liberty until we are told what these moral rights of mine are that you are not to violate without facing state and social intervention against you. It is of no use whatever to be told that we are not to injure what ought to be another’s legal rights if we are not told what those claims are. It would perhaps be unkind to assign the nullity to Mill, despite his words in passages 10, 8, 9, 13 and maybe 11. It would perhaps be unkind since he does glance at the essential question in another passage – 3. What the passage says is that he gives some or other utilitarian answer to all ethical questions, including the question before us of what moral rights an individual possesses, what legal and customary rights he ought to have. The answer to the question is a principle of utility – some such principle. Jeremy Bentham’s well-known statements of the Principle of Utility or the Greatest Happiness Principle are tolerably clear. One is that the principle is the one ‘which approves or disapproves of every

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action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish . . . happiness . . . 13 Another is that an action ‘may be said to be conformable to the principle of utility, or, for shortness sake, to utility . . . when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it.’14 This is one of a number of very different consequentialist principles in morality, the principle of simple maximising of consequences of satisfaction to which Bentham’s ‘felicific calculus’ is attached. The principle can be brought up to date as follows. An action, policy, society or whatever is the right one when according to the best information and judgement it is the one, compared with all the other possibilities, that will produce the greatest total balance of satisfaction over dissatisfaction, taking into account everyone affected and making no special differences between them. Needless to say, despite the fact that this principle remains the principal contribution to morality by English philosophy, it involves questions of further clarification. It is open to a conclusive objection having to do with justice. To be very brief, this principle carries the possibility of lying about and punishing a wholly innocent man to get a needed result of preventing offences.15 It also carries the possibility of sanctioning a very happy society with some slaves in it. But that is not what is most relevant now. What is most relevant now is that the principle is tolerably clear as it stands. Mill, as all know who know anything about him, could not tolerate such clear maximising, such deciding between right and wrong just by judging and comparing total amounts of satisfaction in a plain sense. This had nothing to do with the objection from injustice or inhumanity, the problem about the innocent many and the slaves. In his essay Utilitarianism he embraced a principle of utility that compares actions and the like not only in terms of anticipated quantities of satisfaction but also what he called qualities of satisfaction.16 You get the general idea, some general idea or other, when you hear that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. Also when you gather that the pleasure of poetry is higher-quality than the pleasure of pornography. It should be as widely known to all who know something about Mill that he provided no real answer at all to the inevitable question of how little higher-quality satisfaction is to be regarded as equivalent to how much more lower-quality satisfaction. Certainly no answer is given by his advice to go and ask the only competent judges, those who have experienced both the higher-quality and

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the lower-quality satisfaction. To give this advice is to fail in his philosophical obligation. The indeterminacy and obscurity imposed on the real Principle of Utility has rightly led subsequent thinkers of a utilitarian cast, including a good many economists, to ignore Mill’s principle, so-called, and in effect to contemplate Bentham’s principle in one form or another. Yet more reason for uncertainty about Mill’s principle of utility is supplied by his further thinking in On Liberty. See passage 3. He lets us know that he judges things by utility – presumably happiness or satisfaction – but ‘utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being’. What this comes to is terminally obscure. It is easy to say that Mill’s fundamental ethical principle is somehow to the effect that we are to maximise satisfaction of a kind that serves an end having to do with individuality, diversity, talents, development, creativity, non-conformity, self-perfection, higher faculties, persons of genius and so on.17 This high-minded hodgepodge is useless. Does it give one a society of an elite, or one of egalitarian opportunity, or what? A society of what liberties? Where do ordinary people end up? To ask is not necessarily to worry about them, but just to want to know. It has often been said that On Liberty is inconsistent because Mill’s commitment to utility conflicts with his commitment, whatever it is, to individual liberties.18 If Mill were committed to what there is indeed reason to call the real Principle of Utility, he might indeed be committed to something inconsistent with his commitment to some liberties and his denial of others. There is no such constraint put on him by the principle of ‘utility . . . grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being’ – passage 3. It was remarked earlier that it would be unkind to assign a nullity to Mill – the fifth principle that the state and society can intervene if an individual violates some moral rights or other, with these being left entirely unclear. Would it be unkind to assign to Mill the sixth principle – that there can be intervention if an individual violates moral rights based on some principle having to do with utility, quality as well as quantity of satisfaction, man as a progressive being, individuality, diversity, development, creativity, and so on? Well, unkind or not, it is necessary. No doubt, given the general obscurity, it would be better to say that Mill’s principle of liberty is that there can be intervention if an individual violates moral rights supported not by a principle of utility, or indeed any principle, but by an attitude or a collection of attitudes having to do with utility, quality as well as quantity of satisfaction, man as a progressive being, individuality, diversity and so on.

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This sixth principle is close to a nullity. If it is not so uninformative as the fifth principle – that we are to guide ourselves by some moral rights or other left wholly unidentified and uncharacterised – it can give no real guidance with respect to individual freedom. You get an impression of a sort of life and society Mill favours, with a lot of room for individualistic characters financially and otherwise able to carry out their experiments of living and enlarge their personalities, but no clear principle that sums it all up, or begins to tell us about the satisfactions of those doing ordinary jobs or raising children. We do not really know why Mill makes particular recommendations and does not make others. We are about as far away as conceivable from that ‘one very simple principle’ promised in passage 2. So there is the fact that Mill’s essay leaves itself open to the six different interpretations at which we have glanced – if several are hopeless after a little reflection, what he actually says in his essay has allowed them all to come into existence.19 And there is the fact that the sixth and best interpretation is itself a congeries of stuff. It certainly does inspire persons sympathetic to Mill’s attitudes but it can do no more than that. On Liberty, judged in an ordinary philosophical way, indeed in an ordinarily intelligent and critical way, is indeed a mess. Nothing can save it from that judgement. To say, for example, that Mill is not to be regarded as a Utilitarian with inconsistent commitments to individual liberty, but rather a consistent liberal, takes us nowhere.20 If liberalism is ostensively defined as the congeries of stuff in On Liberty, then we cannot know what liberalism is.

6

Conclusion, Liberalism

Just before passage 2 quoted at the beginning, Mill speaks of the need for a principle of liberty, as follows: There is, in fact, no recognized principle by which the propriety or impropriety of government influence is customarily tested. People decide according to their personal preferences. . . . . . . men range themselves on the one or the other side in any particular case according to the general direction of their sentiments . . . but very rarely on account of any opinion to which they consistently adhere as to what things are fit to be done by a government. And it seems to me that in consequence of this absence of a rule or principle, one

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side is at present as often wrong as the other; the interference of government is, with about equal frequency, improperly invoked and improperly condemned.21 Mill entirely understates the need for consistency, the consistency that can only be provided by an explicit and summative principle and then elaboration of it that is both guided by it and gives further content to it. It is not only that judgements and activities, from some point of view, say Mill’s, will sometimes be right and sometimes be wrong if there is no principle and if there is inconsistency in its place. That is the least of it. It is more important that an explicit and summative principle secures fairness – the minimal but first kind that is the treating of like cases alike. But that is not all. Such a principle is needed for any morality worth the name, and in particular any political morality. We are all self-interested. We are all more than capable of self-deception, which is to say we take care to keep a question open by avoiding evidence and the like. The result of self-interest and self-deception is that we escape our reasonable natures – our human existence as a reason-giving species – if we do not try to restrain ourselves by the consistency of a principle that is not factitious but has a foundation in our nature.22 Had Mill actually stated an arguable principle, he might well have discovered that its support of freedom of thought and experiments in living carried with it support for other things. He might have had to change his mind about things. He might have had to alter or develop his enlightened views of women’s rights, or joined to them something about a right to work or equal pay. He might not have been able to approve of the infringing of liberty that consists in laws against marriage unless the parties can prove they have the means of supporting a family.23 He might have had imposed on him what is in fact obvious, that you cannot treat of the whole and real subject of individual liberty by assuming or deciding in advance that no citizen is to have any freedom of his significantly infringed in order that a society and its government should help other citizens in distress or indeed him himself. On Liberty is indeed something like a founding document of the tradition of liberalism. But are the shortcomings of the essay not those of its tradition but of Mill himself? Well, there is reason to think that the fault is in liberalism itself, the conflicting attitudes in it, and not in the author of On Liberty, not in his philosophical or conceptual or intellectual shortcomings. This is established by

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another work of his, a paradigm of clarity and cogency, A System of Logic. Nor, by the way, is this excusing of Mill as philosopher put in question by his ‘proof’ of his principle of utility. Its notoriety has been owed to the mistake of taking it for a deductive proof.24 Mill was the greatest British philosopher of the nineteenth century.25 Shall we then suspect that liberalism is a political morality never really achieved, that it fails to come up to the level of our reasonable human natures? That it is not vicious, and a matter of good intentions, better intentions than are to be found in another political tradition that may come to mind, but good intentions not carried forward in consistency into an explicit political morality? Does liberalism arise out of a generalised concern for people that then encounters the wants of a better-off class and its philosophers? Does it begin by recognising the need for a general principle – not necessarily the Principle of Utility certainly – and then allow self-interest and self-deception to frustrate or divert it? Does it fail to achieve moral consistency? Does it bumble instead?26

Notes 1. My response in ‘The Worth of J. S. Mill On Liberty’, Political Studies, 1974, was different. It also appears in ‘On Liberty and Morality-Dependent Harms’, Political Studies, 1982. 2. All page references are to J. Gray and G. W. Smith (eds), J. S. Mill On Liberty in Focus (Routledge, 1991). The pages for the initial fifteen passages are as follows: 1:23, 2:30, 3:31, 4:32, 5:32, 6:33, 7:90, 8:90, 9:93, 10:94, 11:98–9, 12:99–100, 13:108, 14:116, 15:122–7. 3. It is unfortunate that it is also offered as the best summary of On Liberty in overviews of Mill’s philosophy in good reference books. See, e.g. ‘John Stuart Mill’ in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1995), ed. Ted Honderich. 4. The understanding was offered by J. C. Rees in ‘A Re-Reading of Mill On Liberty’, in Political Studies, 1960. 5. See discussion of the Rees article in J. Gray and G. W. Smith (eds), J. S. Mill On Liberty in Focus (Routledge, 1991). 6. pp. 26–30. 7. p. 72. 8. See Richard Wollheim, ‘The Limits of State Action’, Man and Society, 1963, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Limits of State Action’, Social Research, 1973. See also C. L. Ten, Mill on Liberty (Clarendon, 1980). Cf. Wollheim, ‘John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin: The Ends of Life and the Preliminaries of Morality’, in A. Ryan (ed.), The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (Oxford University Press, 1979), and in Gray and Smith (see Note 5). Prof. Ten’s paper ‘Mill’s Defence of Liberty’ is also in this collection.

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9. p. 112 10. For a good deal more on this fourth view of the essay, see the second of my two articles mentioned above – ‘On Liberty’ and MoralityDependent Harms’, Political Studies, 1982. 11. See D. J. Manning, Liberalism (Dent, 1976). 12. You will gather I am not much troubled by Mill’s disavowal of ‘abstract right’ in passage 3, which probably is not about rights but rather about what is right, or his carry-on about Lord Stanley’s ‘social rights’ on pp. 103–4. In neither place is he referring to ordinary moral rights as in this fifth understanding of his principle. 13. Mary Warnock (ed.), Utilitarianism (Fontana Library, no pub. year in book), p. 34. 14. Ibid., p. 35. 15. T. Honderich, Punishment, the Supposed Justifications, 4th edn (Polity Press, 1991), Chap. 3. 16. Utilitarianism, pp. 257–62 (see Note 13). 17. Chap. 3. 18. Cf. Gray and Smith (See Note 5). 19. There are more interpretations than (1) to (6), of course. 7. One I have not myself mastered tries to make On Liberty consistent with itself and with Mill’s Utilitarianism by taking a view of Mill’s view of morality and how it stands to other things. See Alan Ryan, ‘John Stuart Mill’s Art of Living’, in Gray and Smith (See Note 3). 8. There have also been attempts to take Mill’s utilitarianism as what is sometimes called rule-utilitarianism, and hence to bring it into harmony with his views in On Liberty and to bring those views into clarity and good order. (Cf. Jonathan Riley, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to On Liberty (Routledge, 1998). To my mind, vagueness and confusion in and about rule-utilitarianism gets in the way of this. By way of a plain formulation, rule-utilitarianism is this: the right action is one that is according to a rule whose existence is justified by the Principle of Utility, even if in this instance the action is not in accord with that principle. Rule-utilitarianism is taken, for example, to commit you to truth-telling or promise-keeping in situations where doing so will go against utility and may be disastrous. The doctrine is ambiguous between an actual Utilitarianism, which certainly does allow for a reliance on good rules, and a doctrine that has in it some value entirely different from the maximisation of satisfaction. This additional thing, sometimes disdained by critics as rule-worship, has never been adequately explained. Surely it makes for inconsistency? If we depend on rule-utilitarianism to give consistent sense to On Liberty, we are in trouble indeed. 9. You can try to look at On Liberty for materials that go with and fill out a real Utilitarian principle of liberty. See, if you have time on your hands, the first paper mentioned in note 1 – ‘The Worth of J. S. Mill On Liberty’. But it is wrong in its final implication that this makes some real sense of the essay. 20. Cf. John Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, 2nd edn (Routledge, 1996); C. L. Ten, Mill on Liberty (Clarendon, 1980).

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21. p. 30. 22. See T. Honderich, After the Terror (Edinburgh University Press, 2002), Chap. 2. 23. pp. 121–2. 24. Roger Crisp, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Mill on Utilitarianism (Routledge, 1997). 25. Cf. Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Macmillan, 1970) and John Skorupski, John Stuart Mill (Routledge, 1991). 26. The questions will come up again in Chapters 4 and 5 in connection with the largest work of liberalism of the twentieth century, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice.

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Chapter Two

Conservatism, its Distinctions, and its Rationale

The Labour Party in Britain, by which is meant the old Labour Party, as against the thing put in its place and known as New Labour, did not often overcome its electoral and other adversaries. It did not often overcome the press free to print all the opinions of its owners. Sometimes there was hope for the party before an election, and at such a time the book Conservatism was written. The idea was that it might help a bit by saying what conservatism really is – what things set it apart and what they all rest on. Still, the book was not propaganda. In particular, it was not biased or misleading information used to do down a tradition or party. It was restrained by that scepticism, including self-scepticism, that is part of even half-decent philosophy. This paper, read to various university audiences, is a summary of it. If it is in a way light-hearted, too light-hearted as it seems now, it is wholly serious in its judgements, as was the book.1 My subject certainly includes the tradition of conservatism in the politics of Britain, America, Canada and the like. This tradition began as a reaction to the French Revolution; took doctrinal shape later; became the ideology of the Conservative Party in Britain and at bottom the ideology of the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States, issued in the New Right or Libertarianism in the 1980s; and then became a cuckoo in the nest of Britain’s Labour Party, until then a socialist party. I hope and suspect that this tradition is enough like other conservative political traditions so that my subject is also Conservatism in general, including the kinds on the continent of Europe and elsewhere. You will of course gather that this tradition, as understood by me, is not restricted to political parties that call themselves

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‘conservative’. It includes some ‘Christian democrats’. Also, it can turn up and take over parties, of whatever name, that have a political past of a different character, maybe what some call an unrealistic one, or one in need of what may be called reform. Parties change. Also, and importantly, a party can have in it more than one tradition. It can itself be a struggle between traditions, usually an unequal struggle. Something like this is true of the main American political parties. Certainly it is true of the New Labour Party in Britain. Finally, it is awfully clear that a tradition can be part of a tradition of another name, maybe a reality under the verbiage. Liberalism comes to mind. About conservatism, there are two main questions. One is the question of the nature of this tradition. What really distinguishes it, particularly from the Left in politics?2 The second is the question of its rationale. What is its underlying principle or commitment, perhaps moral but perhaps not, which explains why the tradition is what it is; explains why it has its distinctive features?

1

Against Change and Theory?

It is remarkable that those who write in defence of this politics still say that conservatism is distinguished bv opposition to change – social, economic and political change. It is identified by its intention to keep things the same. That cannot possibly be right. It cannot be that a great political tradition is distinguished by a wholly irrational commitment. Certainly it would be irrational to be disposed to keep things the same, however things were, however bad they were. It would be as irrational as seeking significant, social, economic or political change just for the sake of change. What explains the persistent mistake of supposing that conservatism is definable as opposition to change? Certainly a large part of the story is that conservatives often enough find themselves living in circumstances where for a certain reason they are indeed opposed to change. But their reason must be that change would somehow be of a certain kind, not just that it would be change. What may also explain the mistake of taking conservatism to be against change in itself is that it is run together and confused with something else, sometimes intentionally, by conservatives for their own purposes. Many of us, whatever our politics, and including liberals, socialists and the remaining communists, have a certain strain in our personalities or characters. We like things to

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be familiar, first of all at home. No doubt votes have been got by associating conservatism with this inclination or desire of ours. But it is not to be confused with the political tradition of conservatism. That is plainly a mistake. Edmund Burke, the greatest of conservative writers, the author of Reflections on the Revolution in France, and the great English hammer of that revolution, was perhaps aware that his politics would be dismal if it really were opposition to all change. At any rate, he wrote of a ‘manifest marked distinction’ between two kinds of alteration, and complained that his adversaries always confounded it. The first he called change and the second reform. Only the first was to be opposed. We need to put aside what is of no use to us in what he wrote, which is that change is bad in some unexplained way and reform good. His distinction then comes to this: change is fundamental alteration and reform is somehow lesser alteration.3 That is no help to him or us, since we must say again that it would in fact be inane to be opposed to any fundamental alteration, no matter how bad things were. Conservatism is not inane. Further, as needs to be added, it has in fact very often advocated both change and fundamental change. To have lived in England after 1979, under Thatcher, is to know the fact. To have worked in an English university is to know a detail of it. Conservatives have as often described themselves as against certain ways of thinking and feeling about society and its future, and in favour of other ways. What marks them off from other political traditions, they say, is that they are against theory. Also ideology, abstractions, rationalism, moral systems, talk of non-legal rights and a good deal else. What they are in favour of is going by the test of time, and also empiricism, common sense, instinct, intimations, and the wisdom of a governing class. Burke had no love of theory, ideology and the like, and, as he wrote in a famous piece of English, no high estimate of persons who go in for it. Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the English oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.4 Let us chink a little. Let us first consider factual as against moral issues, and in particular this thought: conservatives are

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distinguished by relying on the test of time and eschewing theory. More particularly, let us consider a conservative belief about certain incentives, as they are called, which have long persisted without any break in a society, and the socio-economic inequality that has gone with them. The belief is that the incentives and the inequality are needed if the society in question is to continue to prosper. Conservatives have the idea that this belief of theirs is owed to historical experience rather than theory. This idea goes with another conservative idea, about the Socialist belief that the society does not need such incentives and such inequality if it is to prosper. This belief, say conservatives, is just a matter of theory. Is the Conservative belief that the incentives are needed for prosperity a matter of historical experience, and is the socialist belief that they are not needed for it just theory? Well, let us suppose, as seems most relevant, that to theorise is to go beyond the record of the actual facts and to suppose that something would be the case if something else were also the case. Do conservatives engage in such theorising in the society we have in mind, where for a long time there have been certain incentives and also a certain prosperity? Do they theorise in this sense when they say that the incentives are necessary to the prosperity? Despite what they say, it is obvious that they do. They suppose that if something else were the case – if the society did not have the incentives – it would not have the prosperity. The Conservatives are exactly as theoretical as the socialists. Both engage in what philosophers like to call counterfactual reasoning. Can we find some other sense in which conservative factual beliefs are not theoretical? Well, suppose differently that a society’s past has included periods of incentive together with prosperity, and periods of lesser incentive together with lesser prosperity. Then in a sense and to some extent the conservative belief about incentives is not theoretical: it has in fact been tested. But of course the opposite Socialist belief is untheoretical in the same way: it too has in fact been tested. We are here supposing – for the sake of argument – that the Socialist belief has been proved false, but that is nothing to the point. Like it or not, we are not at the moment concerned about possession of truth, but involvement in theory. Another untheoretical belief socialists may have, of course, is that greater incentives at one end of society have gone with greater deprivation at the other end, a certain distribution of prosperity. Is that both tested and true? Let us now spend a little time on conservative claims about their moral or evaluative, as against their factual, beliefs, and also

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the question of a rationale of their politics. Friedrich Hayek, an economist and a founder of the New Right, instructed us that ideas of ‘social justice’, by which he meant moral principles for the distribution of goods in societies, are absurd. This is so in particular, he said, because they set out to distribute the goods in accordance with the moral merit of individuals, but the moral merit of each individual is undiscoverable.5 I do not know where our instructor spent the twentieth century. He must have found some safe house into which few persons from the outside world intruded. There have never been any developed principles of distributive justice, at any rate of the kind to which he is opposed, that have been based on moral merit. Most of them have been based on a consideration of individual need, which precisely does not have to do with individuals having different degrees of moral merit. But that is not the main point. Can it be, as seems to be suggested by Hayek, that conservatism is distinguished by having, or being informed by, no general answer of whatever character to the question of how goods in a society ought to be distributed among its members? That would be for it to lack the most likely kind of rationale. Can it be that it does not have and is not informed by any such general principle or commitment? Can it be, to persist with Hayek, that conservatism makes no response to the distribution question but a certain curiously indeterminate one – that goods are to be distributed in whatever way they are distributed by the mechanism of a market? That must be doubtful, as a moment’s reflection indicates. Suppose that the market persists, but begins to function oddly. It begins to function very oddly. There is the result that inheritors, capitalists, entrepreneurs, risk-takers and other persons valued by Conservatives really do consistently lose money. Gentlemen’s clubs must be mortgaged, Chambers of Commerce decline sadly, and hitherto rising families can no longer send their children to the better schools. However, unenterprising and unfamilied persons less prized by conservative governments, including members of communes and encampments of left-over hippies, do very well indeed, by expending no more effort than now. They do not try hard, and mainly take drugs, but they do bid successfully for the newly privatised National Parks, including Stonehenge, from which they then seek to make no profit. Are we to think – can we think for a moment – that conservatives will happily accept, having got over the shock, that society is still in

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good order, since goods are still being distributed by the mechanism of a market? But let me not obscure a fact by an agreeable fantasy. It is near to certain that conservatism has some general answer or makes some general response to the question of distributive justice. It is perhaps imaginable that a large political tradition lacks such a thing, but wholly unlikely. The very existence of such a tradition, whatever the facts of its historical development and the inevitable diversity within in, might be supposed to depend on such an answer or response. It is near to certain that if a market does in fact distribute goods in a way supported and defended by a political tradition, then that is the way called for by some general principle of distribution favoured by the tradition. This principle will specify a recognisable end, not a means. I do indeed propose to you the assumption that conservatism does rest on and is informed by a general principle, whether or not a recognisably moral one. The assumption, if not to be taken to be necessarily true, is as reasonable as similar assumptions about other traditions, institutions, organisations and the like. We rightly accept that a nation as a whole, in its dealings with other nations, pursues an overall end. So with a church, a bank, and an army. In each case, the end explains different features or properties of the thing in question. It makes sense of what would otherwise be a kind of mystery; an accidental or coincidental bundle of intentions.

2

Human Nature, Economics, the New Right

Having found in the matters of change and theory no distinctions of the tradition of conservatism, let alone a rationale, do we do better when we turn to a third of seven subjects, the matter of human nature? A great deal is said here by conservatives – many conceptions of human nature are used as premises for conclusions of various kinds. Each of these, by rough description, is a conception of an attribute or attributes of our species taken as relevant to social, economic or political life. Let us put aside the idea that we are all in some deep way religious, and similiar light ideas. Another of those, by the way, which may come as some surprise, is that we all have spiritual natures of such a kind that it would be a good idea if the game of cricket were to be compulsory, in all places.6 The fundamental idea is that we have low natures. In this connection many past conservatives have directed us

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to the doctrine of Original Sin, the unhappy episode in the Garden of Eden or Adam’s Fall. Some others say things went wrong more recently, in the 1960s, with the hippies. At any rate we are to see that we are morally imperfect. What does this come to? Roughly speaking, as it seems to me, there are two possibilities – that we are monstrous or that we are self-concerned. Conservative writers have often enough taken the first option. They have said that we are absolutely blind to the interests of others; creatures of greed, lust, treachery, envy and deception, always one step away from careless sloth or mindless anarchy. If the tradition of conservatism really did embrace this parody, it would be distinguished by the fact but also in a way absurd. Suppose then that we take the second option. Suppose that conservatism is more moderate and takes us to be first concerned with our own interests and the interests of those close to us, rather than altruistic or governed by any general moral principle. It seems to me that conservatives are not effectively marked off by such a belief, enraged as they may be on occasion by burglars, tax collectors, socialists, and some others. The difference between this moderate judgement and the Left’s general estimate of humanity is surely not significant. Conservatives are more distinguished by certain doctrines and arguments which they base upon or derive from a view of human nature as self-interested. One is something at which we have already glanced in connection with theory. Put in different form, it is the following argument. (1) Economic well-being in a society is desirable, (2) we ought not to be in any way compelled or socially persuaded to contribute to this economic well-being, (3) if we are not, we will only contribute out of altruism or self-concern, (4) we are in fact primarily not altruistic but self-concerned, (5) incentives thus being necessary to economic well-being, they are desirable, and the inevitable inequality which goes with them is to be accepted. Put differently again and more succinctly, in order to have economic well-being we need a society in which business profits and rewards are great. One thing that is notable about this conservative argument is that its goal, so to speak, is left obscure. What is the economic wellbeing for which we are said to need the incentives? Clearly the goal is not and could not be just some economic total, say Gross National Product, which says nothing about how the well-being is

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to be distributed among individuals. Could it be that the goal is that of everybody being better-off? No one who lived in England after the beginning of Thatcherism in 1979, and was not engaged in a speech to ignorant rural voters, said that. Even if it were true, however, that the goal of conservatism was everybody better-off, that would not greatly help us to understand conservatism. This is so for the reason that there are many different distributions where everybody is better-off. There is one where vegetarians are tremendously better-off, one where recent immigrants are, one where stock-brokers are, and so on. My proposal, however, is that we do find some distinctions of conservatism in this neighbourhood. There is a first distinction of conservatism in its being covert or inexplicit about just the goal of its favoured incentives. This is a bit of theory it does not do. We find a second distinction in its resistance to what in the second step of the argument was called social persuasion – perhaps educating or persuading individuals to contribute freely to their societies. There is a third distinction of conservatism in its closely related coolness about altruism, which, despite what has been said so far, is on the part of conservatives not only a matter of factual belief, but an attitude to what is to some extent alterable. There is a fourth distinction in the demand for what can be better described as extrinsic incentives, say profits, high salaries, executive bonuses, large pensions, or free company cars. It gives little recognition to intrinsic incentives, some of them having to do with the satisfaction of work itself, others with the independence and power that go with different jobs. There is a fifth distinction indirectly related to these matters and to be mentioned only in passing. It is that the conservative view of human nature gives greater effect to notions of free will as against determinism than other political traditions. Punishment and what is said of its justification will come to mind.7 Do we, in any of this, find the rationale of the political tradition we are considering? That is, do we get an answer to the question of why conservatism has these five features? Above all because the goal of the incentive system is left unspecified, it is my suggestion that we do not. Perhaps you will think that that suggestion as to inexplicitness can be resisted by looking at the most celebrated piece of political philosophy of the New Right. It is Robert Nozick’s book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. What we are said to be offered is indeed a

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conception of the just society. That society, we have it, is one where the distribution of goods has a certain history, or one of two possible histories. If the society has had the first possible history, all present goods in the society fall into two categories. They are possessed by persons who have mixed their labour with them, or with raw materials, and have also satisfied some other requirements. Or they are possessed by persons to whom they have come by way of voluntary transactions, certain sales or gifts, which transactions began with the possession of the goods in question by someone who mixed his or her labour and satisfied the further requirements. If the society has had the second possible history, goods at some stage got into the wrong hands, according to the principles just mentioned, but things have since then been rectified. Nozick gives a reluctant summary of this political philosophy, a reduction of it to a maxim, a maxim on the model of such familiar ones as ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’. His maxim is: From each according to what he chooses to do, to each according to what he makes for himself (perhaps with the contracted aid of others) and what others choose to do for him and choose to give him of what they’ve been given previously (under this maxim) and haven’t yet expended or transferred. He boils this down into: From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.8 Nozick is to be commended for assuming, as evidently he does, that conservatism does have at its base a general principle or rationale. It is a pity that he is so rare among conservatives in this respect. However, does what he says make explicit such a principle or rationale? Or does what he says in fact go some way towards supporting the idea that Conservatism keeps its ruling idea to itself? His words are not so explicit as might be supposed at first reading. They are best regarded as recommending certain freedoms supported by conservatives, having to do with private property and a market, and as also having to do with what we shall call social and civil freedoms. We shall be looking at these in a moment. It is very clear indeed that he does not tell us the ground or basis for his preference among these things. His maxim lacks definiteness of precisely the kind that is needed. It tells us that certain freedoms are to exist, and others not, but gives no foundation for this.

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For Freedom, Democracy, and the Organic Society?

Let us turn to this subject of freedom. Every major political tradition lays claim to being the tradition of freedom, or anyway the freedom that matters. Indeed every political tradition is a tradition of freedom, and could not be otherwise. When in power, it does increase freedom – some freedom or other. This is so since all legislation enables some people to do or to have something. If we restrict ourselves for a while to non-political freedoms, what will rightly come to mind first in connection with conservatism is indeed freedom to acquire and hold private property. I shall here pass by a certain wrangle and take this type or sort of freedom, in all its kinds and degrees, to be a power on the part of individuals rather than just the absence of certain constraints. The distinction seems unimportant, at any rate in more or less serious argument. All kinds and degrees of property freedom, as we can call it, involve three things. One is the class of persons entitled to own things. Here, we can say that the kind of property freedom favoured by conservatives is now not much different from others. A second thing is the class of items, not necessarily material, that can be privately owned. Conservative property freedom is distinctive in this regard. The New Right in Britain, for much of its life, was near to being mainly identified by its credal commitment to privatisation. We were to have private enterprise with respect to what previously were public utilities and services, including such essential industries as energy and trains, to say nothing of jails, swimming pools, weather forecasting, telephone tapping and rat-catching. We were to contemplate privatising the whale to save it from extinction. The whale escaped, but we got a lot of this, notably with the trains and the energy industries. New Labour carried on the impulse, with concealing labels attached to it. A third part of any kind of property freedom has to do with the relations of the owners and also others to the owned things. What legal rights does the owner have over what he owns? In particular, can he bequeath it without or with little taxation? To what extent is his management of it subject to restraint by government? And so on. Here too conservative property freedom is distinctive. What it involves is greater rights to the class of owners, fewer to the government and other individuals.

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It is not controversial that conservative property freedom, as against any other sort, is in sum larger. Further, it is more to the benefit of what can be called entrepreneurial or efficiently acquisitive persons, and to those persons who already are owners, and to these whom these two categories choose to benefit, above all their children. In its commitment to an enlarged property freedom we have a sixth and indelible mark of conservatism. In its related commitment to a market or what can be called market freedom we have a seventh. That is not all there is to be said of non-political freedoms, however. Two other kinds are social and civil freedoms. Social freedoms include freedom from poverty, freedom to work, freedom to develop oneself by way of education, freedom from racial and other kinds of discrimination. Civil freedoms include those involved in equality before the law, and also freedom of speech and freedom of organisation, the latter having importantly to do with trade unions. There can be no serious doubt that conservatism is also distinguished by its opposition to or its want of enthusiasm for social and civil freedoms. Various arguments for their preferred large property and market freedom and against large social and civil freedoms are advanced by conservatives. Shall we here find their rationale? One argument has to do with incentives in the form of private property as a means to the unspecified goal of ‘economic well-being’. I shall not say more of that for the moment. A second argument is to the effect that greater property and market freedoms preserve political freedoms. Professor Hayek and other Austrians who proposed to safeguard England let us know that it is only unrestrained free enterprise that will save us from serfdom and totalitarianism.9 Let me say about this that there seems no historical evidence linking lesser property and market freedoms with totalitarianism, and precious little hope of finding any. However, there is a better version of the argument about political freedoms. It is that greater property and market freedoms are necessary to one of the various alternatives to totalitarianism: the society that has specifically conservative political freedoms. When we look at the matter of government, in a moment, we shall glance back at this. A third argument for conservative property and market freedom is the one taken over by Nozick from John Locke in the seventeenth century, and is to the effect that individuals come to have specifically conservative property rights by mixing their labour with things under certain conditions. Two questions arise here. One is that of why Locke’s famous argument should be thought to justify exactly

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conservative as against lesser property rights. I think no answer is forthcoming. A second is what the famous argument in itself comes to. That is not easy to say. Does it justify private property as deserved? Might we here be in sight of the general rationale of conservatism? Consider now a different subject, conservatism and government. Two claims made here by conservatives about themselves are that they are constitutionalists and against revolution. Surely the truth is that they are in favour of sticking to some constitutions but not others, and in favour of some revolutions but not others. The situation here is very like the situation with the supposition that they are against change. Better can be said about conservatism and government. In the early nineteenth century Fisher Ames of Massachusetts let his fellow Americans know that ‘our disease is democracy. It is not the skin that festers – our very bones are carious, and their marrow blackens with gangrene.’10 The disease, I take it, to define democracy, was the form of government such that in virtue of certain features all of the people choose and then influence those who govern a nation and control its external relations. Since then, if conservatism has had to come to terms with history, it has never been democratic by first choice or in favour of more democracy. It has opposed each and every increment. Here we have a ninth distinction of Conservatism. Another and a predictable one is support, for a government which secures or protects conservative property and market freedom. Burke once delivered himself of the opinion about property that the state exists only for its conservation.11 A further distinction, although harder to make clear, is an inclination to have government in the hands of what he called a ‘true natural aristocracy’.12 The inclination has persisted among conservatives, although latterly there has been a tendency to identify these superior persons as those who have proved their excellence by being good at making money, or at any rate moving it around. Finally there are the distinctions that conservatism is, by certain comparisons but not all, inclined to what can be named, if a bit dangerously, authoritarian government, and, as might be expected, that it is inclined to a foreign policy which reflects its strong commitment to private property and market, or, if you will, capitalism. Here, then, we have more of the nature of Conservatism. We might sum up by saying that it favours limited political freedoms. But why is it that this political tradition has these particular distinctions with

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respect to matters of government? What unites them, and what unites them with the distinctions noticed previously? To ask again; what is the rationale of conservatism? We are not supplied with that. Nor, indeed, are we given much noticeable argument for less democracy and the like. To glance back at conservative property and market freedoms, we are not in fact given an argument for them when it is said they are somehow necessary to the limited political freedoms. Before we move to conclusions, two subjects remain, the first being society. Conservatives have been prone to effusions about it, often inspired by Burke, to whom we owe the following renowned lines: Society is indeed a contract. . . . It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract, of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society . . . 13 This is a mingling of several themes and intimations, but here and elsewhere Burke conveys that a society is a kind of great natural and yet spiritual growth. Let me also quote a very recent expression of this theme of what can be called the organic society, by Lord Quinton, the finest of Conservative thinkers in the twentieth century. Society, he writes, is ‘a unitary, natural growth, an organized, living whole, not a mechanical aggregate. It is not composed of bare abstract individuals but of social beings, related to one another within a texture of inherited customs and institutions which endow them with their specific social nature.’14 One can struggle to bring this sort of thing, much of it owing something to the deep thinking of Hegel, and much of it more vaporous than Lord Quinton’s book, into what we surely require, which is literalness. Here are some more or less literal propositions. Society is a thing which is more than the sum of its parts. Society is a somehow personal or spiritual entity in various ways mundane. Society is a large creation of God. A society is or should be a thing which has grown rather than been constructed. Societies should be natural in the sense of having a certain system of inheritance. I do not myself find in all of this much distinction of conservatism beyond what we already have. This is so partly because of the obscurity and variation, partly because such things as the defence and indeed the celebration of private property are part of this paean to society, partly because some of what is suggested is untrue of

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conservatism, and partly because social mysticism, as we might call it, turns up in other political traditions. What does seem to be distinctive of conservatism, in connection with society, is plainer. To state it too briefly, conservatism in its feelings is inclined towards what can be called the dominant racial and culture group in a society or several such groups, and, if it is safe to be brief, has a want of sympathy for lesser groups and indeed some prejudice against them. One can add, perhaps, a particular kind of condescension to the mass and its culture.

4

Equality, Rationale Again, and Desert

Finally, equality. Given what has been said already, it will come as no surprise to hear or be reminded that conservatism is not keen on it. That is not to say that it is opposed to all talk of equality. Partly because it has had to accommodate itself to history, it speaks of itself, and rightly, as supporting certain weak maxims of equality. These, all of them in limited forms, are equality of respect, equality of political rights, equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and formal equality – this last being the maxim that like Cases are to be treated alike. It is also ready to tolerate principles about equality in a theory of justice of which many know, that of John Rawls, since on certain assumptions they allow for an unlimited incentive system.15 Still, conservatism is indeed distinguished by a rooted opposition to what is more important and has been called equality of results. Rightly or wrongly, but certainly for good reason, this has been taken as fundamental to the Left in politics. If a quick statement of the principle is tolerable, it is that a society should seek to secure, so far as is practicable, lives of equal satisfaction for all its members by the means, so far as is practicable, of equal incomes, equal political freedoms and so on.16 This principle of equality of results has been lambasted by conservatives. The first of three principal arguments offered against it is that equality of results is inconsistent with freedom or liberty. Here again we come upon a tubful of propositions, to which I cannot now do justice. Let me say just that it appears to be silly to suppose there is a simple opposition between equality and freedom. It is impossible to separate the subjects. Equality of results is in fact about social, civil and other freedoms. It is also impossible for either conservatives or their opponents to claim that their side is more virtuous with respect to freedom. It is true that achieving equality of results would

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diminish property freedom. It is as true that achieving this equality would increase social and civil freedoms. That is one thing. Another, as you will anticipate, is that conservatives do not explain their preference for their chosen array of freedoms or equalities, one centred on extensive property freedom, as against the opposing array of freedoms or equalities, with social freedoms to the fore. An effective summation of what underlies and unites the conservative array would give us what have been seeking, the rationale of conservatism. But pause again for a while. The matter of a rationale is perhaps not entirely simple. Might it be reasonable to say that we do have the rationale of conservatism in what we have just seen, its elevation of the economic freedoms over social and civil freedoms? Should that have been said, as it might have been, at an earlier stage of our reflections?17 Might we embrace the proposition that conservatism is the politics whose fundamental principle is that its chosen economic freedoms ought to be pursued or defended at the expense of social and civil freedoms? This preference casts some light on our subject, but only in the way that light is cast by what we have been calling distinctions. The preference rears up a large question. Why are the given economic freedoms to be favoured over the social and civil freedoms? It is undeniable that they are all freedoms. What is the difference between them? What is properly called a rationale would seek to justify or explain the conservative distinction between freedoms. But linger longer. Did some member of the New Right, having been subjected to a little moral philosophy while not running for office in the Conservative Students Association, perceive that the difference between conservative freedoms and other freedoms is just that the first are good and the second bad? Did he announce, that is, that conservative freedoms are to be defended not by any argument that they serve some end which is not served by the other freedoms, but that they are intrinsically good, or goods-in-themselves? This reply, if in a sense possible, is as underwhelming as any arbitrary dubbing of something not hitherto taken as selfrecommending as a good-in-itself. We would do no justice to conservatism by identifying it with this strategy of last resort. We would open it to the easy retort from the Left, precisely as persuasive or unpersuasive, that the social and civil freedoms are goods-inthemselves. We would assign to conservatism something that carries no conviction. To say the least, we would assign to it something that would raise the suspicion that something else substantial lay

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behind what would seem as close to subterfuge as to stratagem. Further, it is the habit of conservatives to speak as if their chosen freedoms have some unrevealed great and good effect or end. We have been considering a first objection to equality of results, that it is inconsistent with freedom or liberty. A second principal argument offered against it is that equality of results would in some sense do more harm than good with respect to a society’s income and wealth. Here we again find ourselves back with the matter of incentives. To deal with one form of the argument quickly, it was false and proved false by the government’s own statistics that as the rich got richer, in the Britain of the New Right, the poor got less poor. This one historical episode, to my mind, falsifies the general argument that everybody benefits when a society moves further away from the given principle of equality. Let me, however, add a fact as sombre as any I can think of with respect to Britain since the seeming demise of the New Right and the rise of conservatism in the New Labour Party under Blair. It remains true, as these words are written in 2003, about six years after the first election of New Labour, that the rich are still getting richer and the poor are still getting poorer. Less of equality of results is still not benefiting everybody, to put the point too mildly and too respectfully. No possibility of light relief here. A third argument by conservatives against equality of results, as it may surprise you to hear, seems to me cogent. It is that the principle, as it is stated, is untenable for a simple reason. It is that there is nothing to be said for a state of affairs, taken strictly as such, where people are in fact equal. There is nothing to be said for the fact by itself of their having the same amounts of something. There is nothing to be said for the absence of what can be called mere differentials. One way of seeing this is by supposing, first, that we can quantify satisfaction. Suppose we can do so in terms of new and useful units, called Benthams. In one possible state of affairs, each member of a society gets a balance of 5,000 Benthams over the course of his or her life. In the other possible state of affairs, some get 5,000 and some get 10,000. Those that get 5,000, by the way, may get that balance partly as a result of being made a bit unhappy by their awareness of the better condition of the others. Still, taking everything into account, they do get 5,000. Equality of results, which has to do only with securing an equality of satisfaction, commits us to the first state of affairs. In the second, however, some people are better-off and no one is worse-off. Surely it is the better state of affairs.

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More is to be said about the Left and equality.18 But with what has now been said of conservatism and equality we complete an answer to the question of the nature of conservatism. It is the political tradition distinguished from others by having all and only the eighteen distinctions that have been specified, perhaps above all its support for a certain property and market freedom and its opposition to equality of results. We began with some intuitive conception of the tradition, in my case having to do with such indubitable instances as the British Conservative Party, and we have now arrived at what might be called an analytic definition of the tradition. Nothing that has been said, incidentally, conflicts with the plain fact that the tradition as defined has diversity in it. Certainly it has. A conservative, I would say, is someone who has a considerable number of the distinctions of the tradition, including the one having to do with private property. As for the other question, to which we now give fuller consideration, what principle or commitment or set of them underlies conservatism, and gives unity to its various features? The question presupposes that it has a rationale, and, as you will have gathered, most conservatives are not keen on the idea. Let us spend a few moments longer. There must surely be such a thing, it was said earlier,19 since it is near to impossible to think that conservatism has no overall intention. That is a first reason, but there are other related ones for thinking conservatism has a rationale. A second is that conservative laws, policies, practices and governments are in general recognisable by friend and foe. They are readily recognisable, surely, by being in accord with some fundamental idea had by conservatives of how things are to be, an idea of what goal is to be served by society’s laws and institutions. Could it possibly be that the identification of conservative laws is owed only to the sizeable collection of distinctions we have brought together? Could it be that we have to make our way through a mixed list of marks of identity, eighteen by my method of counting, in order to recognise a new law as conservative? That is very unlikely, but we can leave unargued this matter of policy-identification, as it might be called. There are other reasons for supposing that there does exist a rationale of conservatism. A third is that we rightly expect that there must be some best summation of conservatism’s commitments, a summation not too extended or variegated, not too remote from what was earlier called

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a maxim. That there is some summation of anything which is the best one is a necessary truth. That this summation is not only brief but also enlightening is not far from a necessary truth. The fourth reason has to do with the fact that we have recurrently failed to find what is supposed to justify or explain this or that particular commitment – say this sort of government rather than that, or this freedom rather than that. It would be remarkable if the justification or explanation in each case was different, peculiar to that commitment. It would be stunning if each of the distinctions of conservatism was a value-on-its-own, had its own peculiar recommendation having nothing to do with the recommendations of other distinctions. Conservatism is not a ragbag. Still, the very best argument for a rationale is the ending of one. You may recall that when private property was being considered, there was mentioned Locke’s argument that it is justified by the fact that we mix our labour with things under certain conditions, and it was remarked that the argument might be thought to be about desert. To say I rightly own something because I have mixed my labour with something is perhaps to say I rightly own it because I deserve to do so for my efforts. More generally, is it not possible that a system of conservative property freedom is to be seen as the system which really allows individuals to get what they deserve, their rewards? Still more generally, is it not possible to see all the distinctions of conservatism as underpinned by a principle of desert? Does this not work with their coolness about encouraging social altruism, their insistence on external incentives, opposition to social freedoms, favouring of a true natural aristocracy, rooted opposition to equality of results? It once seemed to me,20 I confess, that the rationale of conservatism is what it is easy enough to call the principle of desert and easy enough to express in this way: Each individual is to get what he or she deserves on account of personal qualities or actions and activities. But there are three grave obstacles in the way of supposing that this is the blissful dawn; that we here have found what we have been looking for. The first and simplest is that it is possible to say of a great deal of what can be recommended that it is deserved. This is a fact about the usage or concept. Above all, a great deal of what is recommended by the Left can be said to be deserved, and often has been. For a start it can in fact be said that we deserve what is provided for us by enlarged social freedoms. Each of us, on one or another of several grounds, deserves to have a job.

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The second obstacle is that not all of what conservatives want to and do recommend can be said to be deserved. By no means all of the beneficiaries of a conservative system of private property can be said to be deserving. There is nothing about inheriting property that makes one into an entrepreneurial or efficiently acquisitive person. It does not much matter that it can be said to be the desert of a father to leave his profits to whom he chooses. That will not convert his languorous daughter into a member of the class of the deserving. There is more to be said along the same lines about windfall profits and about distinctions of conservatism not having to do with private property. We have so far assumed that there is something that can be called a general principle of desert. Indeed we seemed to have it stated. But is there a general and effective proposition? The third obstacle to clarifying conservatism by talk of desert is the suspicion that there really is no such thing as a general and effective principle. In my case this is a conviction. This is not the time to survey all the candidates for a principle of desert. Let me make just three remarks. To say something of the form A deserves X very often means that it is right that A has X. But then the supposed premise for the intended conclusion is already the conclusion. Is talk of A’s deserving X for doing or being Y talk of some factual relation between Y and X? What is the relation? If a good one is found that suits talk of punishment – that is, where X is a penalty – it will certainly not fit when we are concerned with income and wealth. It is notable, thirdly, that the one recent book on desert, by a moral philosopher with no noticeable political axe to grind, concludes that there is no single generic principle of desert.21

5

The Upshot

The conclusion that conservatism does not rest on a principle of desert is not my final one. To come towards that conclusion, which is partly a matter of comparison, let us return to some unfinished business. That is the business of equality and egalitarianism or the Left in politics. What was said a little way back was that equality of results, being the principle that we are to come as close as is practicable to lives of equal satisfaction for all, is unacceptable and in fact irrational. What has been added by a conservative or two is that since this is so, it is

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the Left that is the part of the political spectrum that has no rationale. Or, if it has, that rationale is no more than envy. As it seems to me, there is another principle pertaining to equality. It has a better claim to be called the Principle of Equality. It has a still better claim, as I have come to think belatedly, to have the name of being the Principle of Humanity. But in any case it is the rationale of the Left. In essence it is this: We are to seek by rational means to make well-off those who are badly-off. Much has to be said of it obviously. A definition of the badly-off is needed, as well as clarification of the effective means to the end.22 Let me now say about it only two things. It escapes the objection to the principle of equal results since its goal, whatever is to be said of its means, is to reduce or end frustration and distress, and put well-being in its place. It is therefore not aimed at what might be called just a relational state of affairs. Secondly, it is indubitably a moral principle. There are saints among us, but they are not many, and uncomfortable questions arise about them. For the rest, we are to a rather too noticeable extent self-interested. This nearly universal fact has within it the self-interest of the Left and those it favours. What, used to be called the working class, if it had more possessions, would count as selfish. What is also true of the Left, as it seems to me, is that it can justify itself. Its self-interest is in accord with a moral principle, that of Humanity or Equality, which might even be thought to overcome all others. The nearly universal fact of self-interest also has within it the selfinterest, the selfishness, of conservatives. Many have admitted it. The American Russell Kirk is typical in admitting selfishness but adding a word of self-defence, anticipated above, which allows for a certain complacency. ‘Conservatism has its vice, and that vice is selfishness. . . . Radicalism, too, has its vice, and that vice is envy.’23 The selfishness is clear enough. The conclusion to which we come, however, is not that conservatives are selfish. It is that they are nothing else. Their selfishness is the rationale of their politics, and they have no other rationale. They stand without the support of any recognisably moral principle. Their self-interest is the best and all that can be said in explanation of their various distinctions. I leave it to you to look at them again in the light of this proposal. Do they try to conceal this not only from others but also from themselves? Of course. Self-deception is almost as wide a fact of life as self-interest. In the tradition of conservatism, and the career of the

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New Labour Party, good care is taken by the people in question to keep open the question of whether all that can be said in summary of their politics is that it is self-interested. This is done, as always, by keeping away from places of evidence, places where you may run into something that produces what you do not want, one of two answers to a question. Hence, in New Labour, there is what it is only accurate to call the bumble of the Third Way. This new thinking, a congeries of stuff tending in every item to self-contradiction, enables its proponents to avoid the question of their rationale. Similarly, with privatisation, good care is taken not to get clear about efficiency and tests for it. This does the service of keeping open the relation of the privatisation of the public services to the fact of conservative self-interest. So too with the care taken not actually to examine yet larger assumptions about the effects on a society of its being shaped by the attitudes of businessmen of no great breadth of knowledge, judgement or feeling. Is the answer of self-interest given to the question of the rationale of conservatism outrageous? I suppose it is. In any case, that will be pretended, since it is a grim answer that must be heard as a moral accusation. Is the answer true? It seems to me so, for reasons you have heard. It is also in accord with the idea that morality in its fundamental and critical form is exactly a response on the part of the weaker to the stronger, fortunately a response whose logic sometimes attracts others. But I stop there.

Notes 1. Conservatism (Hamish Hamilton & Westview, 1990: Penguin, 1991) has in it fuller consideration of the subjects touched on here. With respect to the idea that what is said applies to conservatism generally, including the European continental kinds, I am encouraged by, for example, Noel O’Sullivan’s excellent Conservatism (Dent, 1975). 2. The term ‘Left’ is clear enough, of course, despite the wishes of some to the contrary, but for a further understanding see Chapter 5, especially pp. 103–4, 108. 3. Letter to a Noble Lord, in L. I. Bredvold and R. G. Ross (eds), The Philosophy of Edmund Burke (University of Michigan Press, 1960), p. 23. 4. Conor Cruise O’Brien (ed.), Reflections on the Revolution in France (Penguin, 1968), p. 181. 5. Economic Freedom and Representative Government (Institute of Economic Affairs, 1963), p. 13. 6. Lincoln Allison, Right Principles: A Conservative Philosophy of Politics (Blackwell, 1984), p. 170.

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7. For more on this, see How Free Are You? (2nd edn, Oxford University Press, 2002) and ‘Determinism and Politics’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1982. The latter paper is also reprinted in On Freedom (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). 8. Anarchy, State and Utopia (Blackwell, 1974), p. 160. 9. The Road to Serfdom (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976). 10. Quoted by Lincoln Rossiter, Conservatism in America (Knopf, 1982), p. 116. 11. Quoted in Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality (Open University Press, 1986), p. 55. 12. Appeal from the Old Whigs to the New, excerpt, in Robert Kirk (ed.), The Portable Conservative Reader (Viking Penguin, 1982). 13. Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp. 194–5 (see Note 4). 14. Anthony Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection (Faber, 1978), p. 16. 15. A Theory of Justice (Oxford University Press, 1972). 16. Richard Tawney, Equality (Allen & Unwin, 1931), pp. 48–9, 45–7, 57. 17. See above, pp. 34–5. 18. See Chap. 6. 19. See above, p. 29. 20. T. Honderich, A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience, and LifeHopes (Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 607 ft. 21. George Sher, Desert (Princeton University Press, 1987). 22. See Chap. 6. 23. The Portable Conservative Reader, p. xxiii (see Note 12).

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Chapter Three

Trying to Save Marx’s Theory of History, by Teleology, and Failing

Marx stands among the few great moralists as the one who saw clearly and responded fully to the wretchedness of those who are the victims of our societies. He saw too the fact that our ordinary morality and much else serves the ends of we who make the victims. He had the great moral hope of a human history that would replace our history. He also changed the world, perhaps not only for a time. Entering into all these facts is his philosophy of history. It is a materialism, a philosophy that explains all else by way of underlying material facts. This philosophy faces a large objection and thus is in need of defence. It has got one, and this paper examines it. The defence makes use of what used to be called the idea that things are explained by their goals or final causes. The defence and the examination of it are not the sort of things that usually turn up in political philosophy. Perhaps political philosophy would be better if more got into it from the rest of philosophy – say metaphysics and the philosophy of science. Or perhaps it wouldn’t.

1

Historical Materialism Naturally Understood

Marx’s philosophy of history can be argued to have to do with what he calls productive forces, relations of production, and superstructure. The productive forces may be taken to consist in labour power and means of production, the labour power including not only the physical strength of men but also such skills and knowledge as are used in production, and the means of production including raw materials, tools, and machinery. The relations of production consist in some men having kinds of control over productive forces, but also in relations between men which presuppose the given relations

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of control over productive forces. Relations of production, such as those between factory-owner and factory and between employer and employee, in fact constitute the economic or class structure of a society. One of these is our capitalist or bourgeois class structure. The superstructure may be taken to consist in the non-economic institutions and practices of a society, principally law, government, religion and customary morality. On another view the superstructure also includes ideology, philosophy and indeed virtually all of culture in so far as it is not a matter of productive forces and relations of production. Marx’s historical materialism, at bottom, can be argued to amount to three beliefs. The first is that 1. productive forces tend to develop throughout history. The second is that these forces have explanatory primacy with respect to the relations of production, which is to say that 2. the forces explain relations much more than the relations explain forces. In connection with the second belief assigned to Marx, he does say that ‘men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces’,1 that ‘a change in men’s productive forces necessarily brings about a change in their relations of production’,2 and that ‘the multitude of productive forces accessible to men determines the nature of society’.3 He also says that ‘social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production . . . they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill [gives you] society with the industrial capitalist.’4 The last two quotations may also be taken to bear on the third belief ascribed to Marx, the third component of historical materialism. It is that relations of production have explanatory primacy with respect to the superstructure: 3. relations explain the superstructure much more than the superstructure explains relations. In connection with this third belief assigned to Marx, he does say various things. ‘This Code Napoleon . . . has not created modern bourgeois society. On the contrary, bourgeois society . . . merely finds its legal expression in this Code.’5 ‘Every form of production creates its own legal relations, forms of government, etc.’6 The economic relations ‘and consequently the social, moral and political

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state of nations [change] with the change in the material powers of production’.7 ‘The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’8 So, with respect to both the second and third beliefs, we do have statements of these forms: Y independently of men’s wills corresponds to X, X necessarily brings about or determines Y, Y is bound up with X, in acquiring X men change Y, X gives you Y, X finds its expression in Y, X creates Y, changes in Y go with changes in X, X conditions Y. Clearly, usages of these various forms may be taken to suggest several different things. It is natural enough, nonetheless, and the custom of some who eschew indeterminate ideas about dialectical connection, to take Marx’s words to suggest not merely beliefs 2 and 3, but those beliefs taken as standard causal claims, however complex. That is, 2 is taken to be to the effect that: 2A. it is predominantly the forces that are causal in the standard way with respect to the relations, rather than the other way on. And 3 is regarded as the belief that: 3A. it is predominantly the relations that are causal in the standard way with respect to superstructure, rather than the other way on. But what do these things come to? In fact, the possible understandings of these particular standard causal claims are many. To my knowledge they have not been made clear. One very strong understanding, to speak of forces and relations, would be that: 2B. forces by themselves comprise actually sufficient sets of conditions – causal circumstances – for relations, and it is never or not nearly so often the case that relations by themselves comprise causal circumstances for forces.9 That is, with respect to each of very many relations there exists a causal circumstance which necessitates it, and which consists only of forces. It is not true of any or of nearly so many forces that they are owed in this way to relations. To say in this way that forces comprise causal circumstances for relations, presumably, would not necessarily be to say that men’s desires and beliefs (other than beliefs which enter into productive forces) do not have any part in the explanation of relations. To leave them out entirely would be absurd. The given desires and beliefs could be taken as occurring in the causal

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sequence or causal chain linking a causal circumstance, constituted by forces, and the effect, a relation of production. This might be argued to be consistent with what Marx maintains, that the relations are ‘independent’ of men’s ‘wills’, desires, beliefs and so on.10 This strong understanding 2B of Marx’s second belief gives us a falsehood. My control of my personal physical strength, which presumably is a fundamental productive relation, is not necessitated by a causal circumstance, however connected with it, that is comprised of productive forces alone. It is nearly as evidently true that the ownership of factories cannot be traced to a causal circumstance that consists wholly in productive forces. A weaker and imprecise understanding of Marx’s second belief is that: 2C. each of some large number of relations has in its background a causal circumstance whose elements include productive forces as a principal subset, somehow defined, and the situation is different with forces taken as effects. Fewer forces are such that each has in its causal background a circumstance such that relations are a principal subset, as defined, of the contained elements. Evidently more complex weaker understandings of 2A are possible. They will concern forces-circumstances for relations and relationscircumstances for forces, such that the contained forces and relations have many different degrees of significance. The burden of these understandings will be that it is possible to judge that on balance forces have a principal causal role with respect to relations, and a greater one than relations have with respect to forces. These weaker understandings, and others like them, remain imprecise and schematic, and they presuppose various things not easily come by, such as something like effective principles of counting for particular forces, relations, elements in causal circumstances, and so on. The same things are true of counterpart causal understandings of Marx’s third belief, that relations have explanatory primacy with respect to superstructures. I shall refer to the counterpart of 2C as 3C.

2

Traditional Objection

The weaker understandings of the second and third beliefs, however, may be taken as clear enough, or potentially clear enough, to

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give rise to a traditional difficulty. Perhaps it has been the traditional difficulty about historical materialism raised by those who allow it to have a decent clarity. Did not each of many facts of capitalism, taken as a set of relations of production, make a great contribution to productive forces? Have not many facts of law, religion, race, and government – notably Communist government – made great contributions to restricting or altering relations of production? Has Marx’s philosophy itself not done so? Is there not much more to say along these lines? Evidently so. It is arguable, against Marx, that relations greatly affect forces and that superstructures greatly affect relations, and, to come to the crux, in each case enough to put 2C and the like and 3C and the like at least into question. Such beliefs as 2C and 3C are uncertain at the very best. If historians have research programmes, then it is far from settled that these beliefs will give them good research programmes. They are insufficiently promising. So much for the objection. What I want to do is to consider one satisfactorily articulated attempt to meet it, one attempt to save Marx.

3

Historical Materialism Teleologically Understood

G. A. Cohen in his admirable book and in subsequent articles makes the attempt to save Marx, and commands great respect for his effort.11 He has given some definition to historical materialism, something that perhaps was missing before. Allen Wood, despite much originality and different emphases, follows his lead, arguing in the same cause and by way of the same general idea.12 That idea is to abandon any standard causal understanding of Marx’s beliefs, such as the understandings 2C and 3C, and of course vagaries about dialectical relationship,13 and to substitute an understanding in terms of what has been called teleological or functional or consequence explanation, related to what was originally called explanation by final causes.14 The joy of the enterprise, if it is successful, is that the supposed explanatory primacies as newly understood are brought into consistency with exactly the contentions – the facts as one can say without chancing one’s arm – that relations greatly affect forces and superstructures greatly affect relations. That is, Marx’s beliefs 2 and 3 are brought into consistency with the given facts. Indeed, the supposed primacies as now understood are taken to entail the very contentions

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that relations greatly affect forces, and superstructures greatly affect relations. It can be said, in fact, that the primacies as now understood include those contentions. At once we have the forces explaining the relations, and having explanatory primacy with respect to them, and also the relations greatly affecting the forces – indeed the relations having ‘massive control’ of the forces.15 So with relations and superstructures. Relations have explanatory primacy with respect to superstructure, but the latter has ‘regulation’ of the relations.16 The explanatory primacy of the forces over the relations is taken to be expressed in an explanation, so called, which in one form is this: 2D. the relations are as they are because they bring about an efficient use of productive forces.17 The explanatory primacy of the relations over superstructure is taken to be expressed in such claims as this: 3D. superstructures are as they are because, being so, they consolidate relations. Certainly there are more familiar claims of the same form as 2D and 3D. Here are a few. Birds have hollow bones in order to fly better. We perspire since perspiring reduces bodily temperature. A rain-dance was performed yesterday since that reinforces tribal identity. Shoe factories grow in size because that gives rise to economies in production. These are taken to be complete explanations, but I shall call them explanation-claims. Certainly they are well formed, contentful, and may be true. At least some are true. But what do they come to? With respect to 2D, on which I shall concentrate, it appears to be supposed that we could have the efficient use of the forces explaining the relations, and having explanatory primacy with respect to them, if the relations could somehow be explained by way of their effect on the forces. Let us for a time consider the last bit, the logical antecedent. Can the relations be explained by precisely their effect on the forces? It is rightly allowed that they cannot, that effects by themselves cannot provide explanations of the relevant kind of what causes them. It is rightly allowed that the given explanation-claim 2D cannot come to this: efficient use of the forces is the effect of relations, which explains the relations. The long-running objection to teleological explanation that comes to mind immediately, that it

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purports to explain causes by their effects, is accepted. It cannot be that the full answer to why a cause occurred is that its effect occurred. Think of any old example of cause and effect. What is said instead suggests three alternative understandings of explanation-claims, 2D in particular. I shall consider these understandings in turn. Each can be seen as taking a departure from what is rightly allowed, that it is impossible to explain events and things by their effects, with no more said.

4

Facts Explaining Events and Things

The first understanding can conveniently be indicated by way of F-type events, which are changes of a certain type in productive forces, and R-type events, which are changes of a certain type in productive relations. The ‘explanation’ that an R-type event occurred at the time t1 because it gave rise to an F-type event may be understood as something that can be conveyed by this: 2E. The fact that an R-type event at t1 would have an F-type event as an effect at t1 or after explains the occurrence of an R-type event at t1 or after.18 The explanation has to do in part with a mere possibility. If the R-type event occurs after t1, its explanation nonetheless has to do with a merely possible R-type event at t1. Let us concentrate instead, however, on the fact that a fact is given in explanation of an event. To give the explanation, it may be said, as in the case of any relevant explanation, is to answer a question of why a certain empirical proposition is true.19 However, what that must come to is that we are answering a question about why an R-type event occurs. It needs to be kept in mind, certainly, that we are not concerned to know only what logical relations obtain between our empirical proposition and others. Nor are we concerned, of course, to give what might be called an explanation of the existence of the proposition. That enterprise would have to do with inquiry into the status of abstract objects and criteria of individuation. Our sole concern, although it can be described by way of the notion of a proposition, is to answer the question of why an R-type event occurs. That, of course, is truistic. Can this be done by citing a fact? Certainly it can be, but it is also essential to see what that comes to. A fact need not but may reasonably be taken to be a true proposition, and certainly true propositions explain events. They do so partly in virtue of being true. In the relevant sense, false propositions explain nothing, although they have

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obvious uses in inquiry. But facts in the sense of true propositions then explain events in virtue of that of which they are true. Just as to explain an empirical proposition is to explain that of which it is true, so to offer a true empirical proposition p, conditional or otherwise, in explanation of another proposition, q, is to offer that of which p is true, which is to say a thing, property, or event, or a set or system of such, however particularly or generally conceived. We need not attempt to defend any particular ontology, any categorisation of what has spatio-temporal existence. The different understanding I have in mind of explanation-claims, which understanding need not but can be taken as conveyed by 2E, is otherwise. It thus is an understanding which makes such claims into non-starters in so far as explanation is concerned. To see the understanding is to want no more of it. That is, it is impossible to take seriously any supposed explanation of a thing, property, event or the like which offers a fact as explanans or explainer and does not suppose that the explanans has essentially to do with another thing, property, or event, or some set or system, or whatever, of such. It will be very worth remembering that this non-starter has been put aside. To linger a moment longer on the point, let us recall Marx’s line quoted above about the steam-mill and the industrial capitalist. It is that ‘the steam-mill [gives you] society with the industrial capitalist’. We are currently understanding this in such a way that it involves the industrial capitalist’s being somehow explained by way of his effect on the steam-mill. Whatever else is true, it cannot conceivably be that the fact of the industrial capitalist is an explanation of the use of the steam-mill if the reference to a fact is not at bottom a reference to a thing, property, event or the like – in this case persons and a good deal more. The futile understanding of explanation-claims is not to be fastened on our authors unhesitantly, although it is suggested by certain of their lines and may have entered into their thinking.20 For Cohen, as remarked above about 2E, a mere possibility is explanatory. Wood has it about an explanandum or thing to be explained that: Teleological explanations work by tracing the explanandum to a persistent tendency of some system to which it belongs. The tendency, however, does not function in the explanation like an agent or efficient cause, bringing about the explanandum in accordance with some law. The tendency is rather more analogous to the causal law itself . . . 21

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To take another instance, we are directed by Cohen to ‘dispositions considered in abstraction from their bases’, say the disposition of salt to dissolve ‘considered in abstraction from’ its chemical composition, that ordinary property of the salt.22 A disposition in this sense, further, is described as a causally-relevant property of a thing. It is obscure what such a disposition can be – not physical properties of the salt and yet causally effective – but one line of speculation suggests itself. To assert that a thing has a disposition – to say that salt is soluble – is evidently to assert a certain conditional proposition, roughly to the effect that if certain conditions obtain, the salt will dissolve. Exactly what proposition has been a matter of controversy. However, putting that aside, some philosophers hold the view that to ascribe a disposition to something is to do no more than assert the conditional. Others hold the view, as I do myself, that it is also to assert that the thing has some or other non-dispositional property, which of course may not be known. In the case of the salt and its solubility, it is chemical composition. Is the disposition ‘considered in abstraction’ of the salt to dissolve to be identified with a certain fact, and that in turn with a conditional proposition and no more than that? If so we have something that precisely cannot be causal, something which precisely cannot be a causally-relevant feature.23

5

Dispositions Explaining Events

The second understanding of explanation-claims, prefigured in what has been said, can also be put on 2E. It can most conveniently be stated, however, in terms of both things and events. It is consonant with the linguistic practice, which is uncommon but certainly exists in connection with causal explanations, of mentioning a certain effect in answering a question of why something happened.24 The mentioned effect directs attention to what can be inferred from it, a causal property. Someone says, for example, in answer to the question of why the television set was unusually warm yesterday, that it blew up today, from which answer some malfunction can be inferred, a malfunction which explains why the set was unusually warm yesterday. The second understanding of explanation-claims, which certainly have something to do with effects, is related to this uncommon practice in connection with standard causal explanations. In explanation-claims too the mentioned effects direct us to causes. The explanation-claim that production relation r came into

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existence because of its effect on the development of productive force f is to be understood in this way: 2F. r’s causal disposition or tendency or propensity or power to contribute to the development of f explains the occurrence of r.25 In line with what was said above, let us take it that a disposition is a property of a thing such that when that property comes into conjunction with other conditions, events or whatever, the resulting whole constitutes a causal circumstance for the given effect. The brittleness of the wineglass, its disposition to shatter when struck, is precisely that property of the glass, at bottom its molecular structure, which is such that when it is conjoined with at least the event of the glass’s being struck, the resulting whole forms a circumstance which has the shattering of the glass as effect. There is no mystery here and no need to be mesmerised by talk of unactualised possibilities or whatever. The disposition is as actual as anything ever is, and of course must be so if it is to enter into a relevant explanation of the given effect. It would be misleading to call it simply a cause, partly since it can exist in the absence of the relevant effect, in the situation where the rest of the relevant causal circumstance is lacking. This is not to say it is not a property of a thing. What prompts the several descriptions of it, ‘disposition’ and so on, is (i) that it is typically a persistent or standing property, and (ii) there are occasions when the rest of the relevant causal circumstance exists. To return to 2F and to come to a first crux, can r’s disposition in the given sense, its disposition to give rise to the development of f, or as we can simply say, r’s disposition to cause the development of f, explain the occurrence of r? Well, clearly enough r’s dispositional property cannot be the explanation or part of the explanation of that property of r which is the given dispositional property. The answer to the question of why something exists, whatever other constraints there may be on the answer, cannot be that the thing exists. It would be alarmingly unkind to Marx, in this enterprise of giving him a hand, to encumber him with reflections to the contrary somehow analogous to certain theological conceptions of God as causa sui, somehow cause of himself. What needs to be added to complete the objection is that it is precisely r’s causal disposition with respect to f that we are somehow attempting to bring into an account of the explanatory primacy of f. Put differently, we wish to bring an explanation of r into a story of the explanatoriness of f, and more particularly what we want to bring

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in is the causal disposition of r. But, to repeat, the causal disposition of r is precisely what cannot be explained by the causal disposition of r. The given account, whether or not it gives such primacy to f – I turn to that question in a moment – founders absolutely on the fact that in the relevant sense nothing explains itself. Having rightly abandoned the idea that an effect explains a cause, we appear to have gone on to an idea as remarkably unwinning, that something explains itself. To speak loosely, again remembering Marx’s line about the steammill and the industrial capitalist, whatever explains an aspect of the rise of the industrial capitalist, it cannot be that aspect of the rise of the industrial capitalist. There is a second crux, a difficulty as fundamental which I have been putting off. Suppose that r’s disposition to affect f did somehow explain that disposition. What about the main enterprise, which is the assigning of explanatory primacy to f? The belief in the explanatory primacy of forces, to recall, was that forces explain relations more than relations explain forces. That requires that some forces do indeed explain relations. But obviously one cannot get f explanatory of r by taking r’s disposition to affect f. We there have r in the causal role, and f as effect. As already rightly granted, we cannot have effect explaining cause. What was rightly given up, when r was being thought of as explanatory, has reappeared fatally when f is thought of as explanatory. The steam-mill, if taken as effect of the rise of the industrial capitalist, cannot conceivably explain the rise of the industrial capitalist. Certainly someone may want to say something further about r and f, which might make it very understandable that f has explanatory primacy in a certain precise if weak sense, so far unconsidered. If the development of f were the goal or end of men, and r was their means to that goal, we would have a sense in which the development of f had explanatory primacy: it would have explanatory primacy over r. That is to say, simply, that f would stand to r as men’s end to men’s means. But we do not have men’s relevant judgements and desires on the scene. They are no part of the account we are considering, which has to do only with productive forces and relations of production. We shall look at men’s purposes and the like in due course. What we have now is that the second understanding 2F of a given explanation-claim fails to give explanatory primacy to f, since we cannot have f explanatory at all. The two objections to this second understanding can be specified by way of this summary of the teleological view provided by Cohen:

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‘Central Marxian explanations are functional, which means, very roughly, that the character of what is explained is determined by its effect on what explains it.’26 Relation r’s being as it is is explained by its effect on what explains it, f. The first objection pertains to my ‘explained’ and the second to my ‘explains’. The first pertains to ‘determined’ in the quoted sentence and the second to ‘explained’ and ‘explains’.

6

Another Disposition as Explanatory

The third understanding of explanation-claims also makes use of the idea of a disposition, but different use. It might be thought to be an attempt to deal with the second objection just noticed. We have it that: 2G. The property of a set of productive forces which explains the nature of the economic structure [relations of production] embracing them is their disposition to develop within a structure of that nature.27 What we have here, with respect to a certain productive force f, is that f’s disposition to be developed, which development is also owed to relation r, is the explanation of r. Let us suppose that again we have a disposition as relevantly understood, despite the occurrence of the passive voice. The disposition we have is a property, different only in that the relevant effect is bound up with what has the property, as in the case of the wineglass. (The glass has a property such that when it is conjoined with something else, we get the breaking of the glass.) The force f has a property such that when that property is conjoined with something else, r, the resulting whole is a causal circumstance for the development of f. Can the fact that a property of f, taken in conjunction with at least r, constitutes a causal circumstance for the development of f, be an explanation of r? It cannot. We have r entering into the explanation of r, and that will not do. What we are considering, to repeat, is f; and a property pf of f; and r; and df, the development of f. The claim is that the fact that pf and r would constitute a causal circumstance for df is the explanation of r. It won’t do. Very roughly we cannot have it that the steam-mill together with the rise of the industrial capitalist, and a certain effect, explains the rise of the industrial capitalist. As might be expected, there is also a difficulty about the supposed explanatory primacy of f. Necessarily it is not the same as with the

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second understanding of the explanation-claim in question, but it is great. We are supposed to have both f and r entering into the explanation of r. What is the consequence for the supposed primacy of f? I shall not pursue the question but only remark that it does not follow, from the fact of the match’s disposition to light when struck, that the match has a greater role than the striking with respect to the lighting. Supposing the steam-mill and the rise of the capitalist explains the rise of the capitalist, it does not follow that the steam-mill has the greater role. Nor, finally, with respect to the third understanding of explanation-claims, is the situation with respect to f and r helped by recourse to the unexplained metaphors that f ‘dictates’, ‘selects’, or ‘decides’ r, that r is ‘in the service of f or a ‘response’ to f.28 These metaphors might have been mentioned in connection with the previous two understandings of the explanation-claim, with as little benefit. It will take a lot of digging to resurrect entelechies.

7

The Truth about Teleology: Explanation-Claims

It remains true that explanation-claims are well formed and contentful, and are sometimes true. Does that give us ‘a prima facie case for the existence of a distinctive explanatory procedure, by which is meant something other than a standard causal explanation,29 something we have been unable to find? If so, it is all that it gives us. However, any such prima facie case seems defeated by what else can be said of explanation-claims. There is a wholly better account of them. Birds have hollow bones because that enables them to fly better. What that comes to is best described as the claim that there is or exists an explanation of birds’ hollow bones, and that the explanation has as an essential part the fact that hollow bones have a causal role with respect to better flight. Shoe factories grow in size because that gives rise to economies in production. It asserts that there is an explanation of their growth, which explanation has as an essential part the fact that growth in size has a causal role with respect to economies in production. In general, explanation-claims are claims to the effect that there do exist certain explanations, and that these explanations essentially include a causal connection indicated in the given explanation-claim. They are assertions of the existence of answers to why-questions,

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which answers have a certain feature. Certainly to claim the existence of an explanation is not to give it. Explanation-claims are not themselves explanations. With respect to the hollow bones of the birds, the explanation is some form of the Darwinian one, in terms of chance variation, so called, and natural selection. In absolute brevity, the explanation is along these lines: some biological species had hollow bones and some didn’t; given the environment, hollow bones were a causally necessary condition of better flight and its profits; the species with hollow bones persisted. With respect to the shoe factories, there is also the possibility of a Darwinian explanation. By ‘chance variation’, something independent of the judgements and desires of factory-owners, some factories grow in size and others don’t; growth is a causally necessary condition of economies in production and their benefit; the larger factories persist. Also, of course, there is the explanation which has precisely to do with the judgements and desires of factory-owners, a purposive explanation. In one form, again in absolute brevity, it is this: growth is a necessary condition of economies in production; this is causally relevant to men’s judgements that growth does have that property; economies are desired; factory-owners act on their judgements and desires. In saying explanation-claims are best described as assertions that certain explanations do exist, I have in mind two categories of such claims. Explanation-claims may be made in ignorance of the explanations asserted to exist, save that the explanations have the feature of mentioning a particular causal connection. They then carry no further implication as to what those explanations are. The second category, as common, is of claims where the explanation is partly or wholly known. The kettle is switched on because that will make the water boil. Here, evidently, there is implied a certain explanation in terms of judgement and desire. We perspire because that reduces bodily temperature. Again an explanation is implied, but not a purposive one, in terms of judgement and desire. Explanation-claims of the second category have rightly led to excellent accounts of them, by Mackie and Nagel, as condensations of explanations and as telescoped explanations.30 Both purposive and Darwinian explanations, and perhaps others, are the sorts in question with respect to the explanation-claims that 2D relations of production are as they are because, being so, they encourage the development of the forces, and 3D superstructures

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are as they are because, being so, they consolidate relations. What we have with respect to relations is the explanation (Er) that men, having certain desires, acted on the fact that changes in relations of production were a necessary condition of the fuller utilisation of new forces of production; they changed the relations. There is reason to think that this purposive explanation is more important than a Darwinian one, and also that a purposive explanation is more important in the matter of superstructures. In one form it is this: (Es) a certain social class, seeing that a certain superstructure is necessary to productive relations that benefit it, defends that superstructure. I shall say no more, partly for the reason that Cohen says a good deal, of great interest. That he does so, given that he takes himself already to have provided explanations just in terms of forces, relations, and super-structure, with nothing said of men’s desires, and so on, may of course be surprising. In fact he does offer a well-judged variant of what has often been disdained, a ‘conspiracy theory’ of an ascendant class’s use of a society’s superstructure. This he regards as an ‘elaboration’ of an already existing explanation.

8

Differences between the Two Views

Given Cohen’s own consideration of what I have called the relevant explanations, as against explanation-claims, it will be as well to set out clearly the difference between the teleological and the other position, my own. The difference is not terminological, or one of emphasis or degree, and it decisively affects the ruling idea of Marx’s philosophy. 1. To repeat, it is supposed by the teleological party that explanation-claims, claims of the form X exists because X gives rise to Y, without any addition or further information, are themselves explanations. They are not even compressed.31 A full answer to the question of why a relation of production obtains is given by a proposition which mentions only that relation and forces of production. The fundamental argument for this – a lesser one will be mentioned below – consists in the attempt to make clear the supposed explanations. The argument consists in one or another of the three understandings of the claims, discussed above. Certainly if any understanding did provide anything like an adequate explanation, that would do the trick. None does. If any did, further, Marx would be preserved from the traditional objection that relations greatly affect forces and superstructures greatly affect relations. His ruling idea,

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the exclusion of men’s relevant judgements and desires from the explanations of relations and superstructures, would also be preserved. The opposed position is that explanation-claims are not explanations, despite the implications they often have, but rather are claims that certain explanations are to be had. What is misleadingly called the explanans in an explanation-claim is in fact not anything like the whole of the relevant explanans. Relation r is as it is because it has a disposition to encourage the growth of force f. The dispositional property of the relation does not by itself come close to explaining that relation. It cannot, since there is no understanding that makes it do so, and there is an alternative account of explanation-claims in which it is otherwise. The occurrence of ‘because’, certainly, does not make the property the relevant explanans. It no more does so than the occurrence of ‘because’ in ‘He must be better because he’s been running on the heath’ makes his running explanans of his being better. ‘Because’ has many roles. 2. As remarked above, Cohen speaks of what I have called explanations as ‘elaborations’. That is, they are answers to the question of how it comes to be that propositions of the form X exists because X gives rise to Y are what he takes them to be, explanations of X. In aid of Marx, poor Darwin is demoted to being a supplier of merely an elaboration of such teleological explanations, so called, as the one about the birds, that they have hollow bones because that enables them to fly better. The contrary view, that so-called teleological explanations are claims that explanations exist, has the wholly satisfactory consequence that Darwin’s provision of a so-called elaboration was in fact the provision of an explanation where there had been none before. What Darwin did was not embroidery. 3. In consonance with the view that explanation-claims are themselves explanations, it is taken to be possible to confirm them without having any recourse whatever to an elaboration so called. If we find that shoe factories grow in size just when growth would issue in economies in production, and not otherwise, we have some confirmation of the proposition that they grow in size because that issues in economies in production, understood in one of the three ways as a ‘teleological explanation’. This possibility of confirmation is the lesser argument for the view, anticipated above. My contrary view certainly allows that explanation-claims can be confirmed, roughly by facts of the kinds just mentioned. However, what is confirmed is evidently that explanations of a certain kind exist. If I arrive from planet Alpha Poona, and fail to get an idea

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of the judgements and desires of the owners of shoe factories, or of any other explanation of the growth of shoe factories, but do notice that they always and only grow when the effect is economies in production, I can reasonably enough come to the judgement that there is an explanation involving precisely that fact. We cannot suppose, for reasons already given, and we need not suppose, since there is a good alternative, that I take as confirmed a claim of the form X exists because X gives rise to Y understood in one of the three ways. What I confirm is predictive, and may be lawlike, which accords perfectly well with the alternative view. 4. It is said by Cohen, seemingly not consistently with the view that explanation-claims are themselves uncompressed explanations, and that what remains is only the question of how it is that they explain as they do, that Darwin gave a fuller explanation of what is given in the claim about the birds, a more complete form of the explanation given there.32 My difference with this should now be clear. Someone, perhaps Darwin, may have contemplated and indeed confirmed the relevant explanation-claim. What Darwin principally gave was something different, an explanation where there was none before. (It needs adding that there would be a difficulty about ascribing to Marx an explanation of productive relations, say, that is incomplete if it does not include men’s purposes. To ascribe such an explanation to him may seem to run against his fundamental view, mentioned above, of the irrelevance of men’s ‘will’ and ‘consciousness’. Indeed, there is much the same difficulty about ascribing to Marx an ‘elaboration’ [of an explanation] which brings in men’s purposes.) 5. It is said that Darwinian theory acknowledges the explanatory relevance of dispositional features or functional facts. They are essential elements in the theory. The same is true of Lamarckian theory. The same might be said of theories or explanations of phenomena in terms of judgement and desire. Here, of course, there is no disagreement. To allow that an explanation includes a dispositional feature or functional fact is merely to allow that it includes a certain causal connection. This is not to allow that the given explanation includes a claim of the form X exists because X gives rise to Y understood in one of the three ways. However, it is also said that Darwin’s theory entails that animals have the useful equipment they have because of its usefulness.33 That is, the theory entails a claim of the form just mentioned, understood in one of the three ways. That is not so. Neither the Darwinian explanation sketched above, nor any purposive explanation, entails

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any such thing. There is no want of distinction, certainly, between the claim that hollow bones affect flight and the claim, however understood, that birds have hollow bones because that enables them to fly better.

9

Conclusions on Marx

Let us return to Marx, and retrace our steps. He is taken to assert that (2) forces explain relations far more than relations explain forces, and (3) relations explain superstructures far more than superstructures explain relations. There are a number of standard causal understandings of these primacy beliefs. It is clear, however, that any of them faces a great objection, that relations greatly affect forces and superstructures greatly affect relations. To accommodate the objection, an attempt is made to understand the primacy beliefs not in any standard causal way but in terms of teleology. The beliefs are taken in this way: (2D) relations are as they are because they encourage the development of forces, and (3D) superstructures are as they are because they consolidate relations. However, no understanding of these explanation-claims turns them into explanations. Such explanation-claims, correctly understood, assert the existence of certain standard causal explanations, either (Er, Es) of purposive kinds, rooted in judgement and desire, or Darwinian kinds. Do such standard causal explanations as Er and Es, which may be taken as implied by the given explanation-claims, in fact give us the primacy of forces over relations and relations over superstructures? If we accept such standard causal explanations, can we suppose that forces explain relations more than the other way on, and relations explain superstructures more than the other way on? The explanation Er mentioned above is perhaps best expanded in this way: Men have desires whose satisfaction depends on material goods; they judge that productive forces will give rise to these goods; they judge that certain productive relations are causal conditions of the forces, which judgement is owed to the fact that the relations are indeed such causal conditions of the forces; men thus pursue or defend relations of production. The explanation Es of superstructures can be expanded in a related way. Men have desires whose satisfaction depends on certain relations of production; they judge that certain superstructural facts are causal conditions of the relations, which judgement is owed to

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the superstructural facts really being causal conditions of the relations; men change or defend superstructural facts. No doubt there are many variants of these explanations. I shall not pursue the question just stated, about the primacy of forces and relations. (It is best seen, perhaps, as the question of how these explanations stand to our earlier propositions 2C and 3C.) Evidently the question is now pretty pointless. Once desires and judgements are on the scene in the given essential and fundamental way, we have left behind Marx’s fundamental line about the irrelevance of consciousness. We have left it behind, let it be noted, by way of reflection on the very explanation-claims that were to put us on it. It matters little whether or not the given explanations can be construed in such a way that forces have a greater role than relations, and relations a greater role than superstructures. Certainly it is true, for what it is worth, that in the given explanations we have it that relations and forces are related as means to end, as are superstructural facts and relations. My own view of Marx, for what it is worth, is that he has a just claim to great fame on the ground alone of having produced, in whatever way, the proposition that superstructural facts are indeed some men’s means to the end of productive relations. That is untouched by all I have said. My main concern has been with teleological historical materialism, taken as consisting in the three beliefs 1, 2, and 3, with the second and third understood in one of the three teleological ways. If I am right, teleological historical materialism is hopeless. There is actually more hope for historical materialism ordinarily understood, as sketched at the beginning. The question of whether teleological historical materialism, whether or not a winner, can be assigned to Marx, is not one I have much inquired into. I have not asked if the actual quotations from Marx at the beginning of this essay about the Code Napoleon and so on can be taken to support the project of turning him into a teleologist. But I cannot resist saying that it is hard to take his lines as evidence in favour. To look back at them is to see that none is evidence for, and that arguably most are evidence against. It may be pretty hard, too, to fit several of his own letters to the idea that he had in mind anything whatever like teleological historical materialism.34 They show he was keener on Darwinian as against purposive explanation, of course, but their interest for us is in what they imply and say of teleology. The letters are to Engels and Lassalle and they contain these passages:

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During my time of trial [nursing his wife through a severe illness], these last four weeks, I have read all sorts of things. Among others Darwin’s book on Natural Selection. Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view. (19 December 1860) Darwin’s book is very important and serves as a basis in natural sciences for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course. Despite all deficiencies, not only is the death-blow dealt here for the first time to ‘teleology’ in the natural sciences but their rational meaning is empirically explained. (16 January 1861) There is another question that has not been considered here. Marx was the first to see and to say, in important senses of those verbs, that we have made for ourselves a world of viciousness. It has in it those who are wretched and those who are distressed in other ways. It has in it those of us who by our exploitation give rise to the wretchedness and other distress. Marx saw too, in particular, that we exploiters have a morality of self-deception, a morality that hides our acts and omissions from us. He saw as well that those of us with the good lives are not inclined to be argued out of them. For a time, at great cost, perhaps too great cost, the world was changed by revolution in the direction of a more human one, and this was in a way his doing. Are these achievements put in doubt by the objection, still standing, to his philosophy of history? That question, as I say, has not been considered here. To my mind, it needs no consideration. The achievements are untouched by the philosophy of history. It entered into them, but they certainly do not depend on it. It was a pity, to speak for myself, to have been distracted from them by it.

Notes 1. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971, Preface. 2. Poverty of Philosophy, Foreign Languages Publishing House, undated, p. 137. 3. German Ideology, Progress Publishers, 1956, p. 41. 4. Poverty of Philosophy, p. 122 (see Note 2). 5. ‘The Trial of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats’, in Marx and Engels, Articles from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Progress Publishers, 1972, p. 232. 6. Grundrisse, Penguin, 1973, p. 88.

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7. Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 3, Lawrence & Wishart, 1972, p. 430. 8. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, preface (see Note 1). 9. A general view of causation, although not one presupposed by the present essay, is given in my A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience, and Life-Hopes (Oxford University Press, 1989), Chap. 1, which chapter also appears in Mind and Brain (Oxford University Press, 1990). A brief version of the view is given in Chap. 2 of How Free Are You? (Oxford University Press, 2002). 10. For related reflections, see below. 11. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 1978. The article I shall be concerned with is ‘Functional Explanation, Consequence Explanation, and Marxism’, Inquiry, (1982). Another recent book, William H. Shaw’s Marx’s Theory of History (Stanford University Press, 1978), takes historical materialism to be ‘slightly teleological’ (p. 62) but does not develop the view. 12. Karl Marx, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. 13. I do not suppose that all talk of dialectical connection is vague. See Karl Marx, ibid., Chaps 13–15. 14. It is a main burden of Cohen’s ‘Functional Explanation, Consequence Explanation, and Marxism’ (see Note 11) that the supposed sort of explanation he defends, and which in his book he called functional explanation, may not be identical with what others call functional explanation. My only concern is with the supposed sort of explanation he defends. 15. ‘Functional Explanation’, p. 33 (see Note 11). 16. Ibid. 17. ‘. . . central Marxian explanations are functional, which means, very roughly, that the character of what is explained is determined by its effect on what explains it’ (Karl Marx’s Theory of History, p. 278 (see Note 11)). ‘We hold that the character of the forces functionally explains the character of the relations. . . . The favoured explanations take this form: the production relations are of kind R at time t because relations of kind R are suitable to the use and development of the productive forces at t, given the level of development of the latter at t’ (ibid., p. 160). 18. Ibid., pp. 258–64. I have simplified considerably, but not in such a way as to affect the main point. See also ‘Functional Explanation, Consequence Explanation, and Marxism’, pp. 30 and 35 (see Note 11). 19. Cohen speaks of answering a question of why an empirical sentence is true (Karl Marx’s Theory of History, p. 251 (see Note 11)). 20. Ibid., pp. 259–60, 261, 262, 263, and 266. Wood, p. 107 (see Note 12). 21. Karl Marx, p. 107 (see Note 12). 22. ‘Functional Explanation’, p. 49 (see Note 11). 23. Two examples are given of ‘dispositions considered in abstraction’ which supposedly are causally-relevant features. ‘Suppose, for example, that someone wants to drop something soluble into water, and chooses salt for that reason. Then it enters the water because it is soluble, and not because of the chemical basis of that feature’ (ibid., p. 49). What is causally-relevant there, however, is the thought or mental event that a certain conditional proposition is true, which is

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24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

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no disposition of any kind of the salt. The salt might have gone into the water without its in fact having a disposition in any sense. ‘Or consider a device so constructed that it determines whether things are soluble without chemical analysis (perhaps by breaking off a bit of a thing and registering whether it dissolves) and drops them in water when they are’ (ibid.). What is causally-relevant there, however, is the chemical composition of the broken-off bit of salt, in virtue of which it dissolves. In neither example do we have an instance of what we cannot have, something’s being caused by a ‘disposition considered in abstraction’ as such things have been understood. Karl Marx’s Theory of History, pp. 261–2 (see Note 11). Ibid., pp. 161, 258–67, and 281. Karl Marx pp. x and 104–10 (see Note 12). (This view, certainly, can be expressed by way of a use of the term ‘fact’ different from the one where a fact is a true proposition. Cohen writes of ‘the dispositional property (the fact that . . . )’, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, p. 267 (see Note 11).) On another point: Wood defends so-called teleological explanations but contemplates that they can be ‘reduced’ to standard causal explanations (Karl Marx’s theory of History, p. 107). He does not explore the unhappy consequence of this for Marx: Er and Es below. Karl Marx’s Theory of History, p. 278 (see Note 11). Ibid., p. 161. Ibid., pp. 204, 162, 226, 292. Ibid., p. 250. J. L. Mackie, The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation, Oxford University Press, 1974, p. 283. Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, p. 401. Mackie also considers explanation-claims as giving ‘a surface teleological account’. They are neither what he calls explanatory cause statements nor producing cause statements. This is close to my first category. Karl Marx’s Theory of History, p. 250 (see Note 11); Karl Marx, p. 107 (see Note 12). ‘Functional Explanation’, pp. 286, 271 (see Note 12). Ibid., pp. 285, 269. Cf. Karl Marx, p. 105 (see Note 12). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence: 1846–1895, International Publishers, 1936, pp. 26 and 125. Karl Marx, p. 109 (see Note 12), does try to accommodate Marx’s remark about teleology, by taking it to refer to reliance on ideas of God’s purposes.

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Chapter Four

The Contract Argument in a Theory of Justice

There can be no doubt as to what new book of political philosophy has had most readers and been most esteemed in the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is A Theory of Justice by John Rawls of Harvard University. It is a culmination, perhaps the culmination, of the tradition of liberalism. The book advances a particular argument for what it takes to be the principles of liberalism, principles about liberty, opportunity and equality. The argument supposes that the right principles for our societies, whatever they are, are the ones that would be in a social contract made by imaginable people. This contract argument is the subject of this paper. The success or failure of the argument casts a light on liberalism. So must the degree to which the reasoning is clear. Clear reasoning at least gives promise of an explicit conclusion, in this case an explicit politics and political philosophy.

1

An Imagined Assembly and its Principles

Let us imagine some people agreeing on the nature of their coming society. We shall not engage in the speculation, rightly dismissed by David Hume in his essay on the social contract, that they did once exist, or in the bizarre supposition that we ourselves have inherited obligations across generations from such actual founders of our own societies. We shall not suppose, either, that our imagined people in their activity serve as a representation of some enterprise of agreement into which we ourselves actually enter, if tacitly, by living in a society. None of these things is in question. We merely conceive of people of a certain kind agreeing on a society.

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In so doing we begin on a course of reflection urged upon us by Professor Rawls and, according to him, a line of philosophers before him.1 It will be simplest, in considering this course of reflection, to restrict ourselves to what is certainly its fullest expression, that one provided in A Theory of Justice. Our imagined people are self-interested, equal to one another in their freedom to advance conceptions and principles for consideration, and rational. That they are rational is no more than that they choose the best means to their ends, these ends being the possession of ‘primary goods’, and that they do not suffer from envy. They also know or believe certain things but not others. They are said to know the general facts of human psychology, society, politics and economics. None of them, however, knows anything of his or her own future in the society to come. None knows in advance what his or her own natural assets and abilities will be, or economic and social place, or even gender, personal psychology or conception of what is good. It is argued that our imagined or hypothetical assembly would agree on two principles, the second with two parts, as the basis of their coming society. The first principle is that each member of the coming society is to have a right to the greatest amount of liberties that is consistent with each other member having the same. The liberties include political rights, freedom of expression, freedom of the person, and the right to hold private property. The first principle, that of Liberty, has priority over the second. That is to say that it is to be satisfied first if both cannot be satisfied together, and there are to be no departures from it in the interest of a benefit in economic or social goods or their distribution. These latter things are the subject of the second principle. It, the Principle of Difference, specifies allowable socio-economic differences or inequalities between classes. The first part of the Difference Principle is that ‘social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are . . . to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged . . . ’2 What is intended appears to amount to two conditional propositions. The first is that if one class in a society is better-off than others, this must have the effect that the worst-off class in the society is better off than it would be without the inequality. This states a necessary condition of an inequality, a necessary condition of the relative positions of the classes. Secondly, if a worst-off class is better-off as an effect of another class’s being in a still better position, the latter class must be in its still better position. This states a sufficient condition of the same inequality.

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No inequality is allowable, then, that does not improve the lot of the worst-off. Indeed, if a departure from a state of absolute equality were not to make everyone better off, including a worst-off class left behind on the old level of equality, the departure would not be acceptable. On the other hand, any inequality is allowable that does improve the lot of a worst-off class. It is a logical possibility, therefore, that the principle be satisfied in a society of no social and economic inequality, in a society of overwhelming inequality, or in any society in between. The principle leads to a particular society only when it is conjoined with special propositions about that society. It is a ready assumption that some inequality will be required in any society if all of its members, including some who have a lesser amount of social and economic goods, are to be as well off as they can be. Any alternative, a society with less or no inequality, will be a society in which everyone, including the individuals just mentioned, will be worse off. The assumption depends essentially but not wholly on the proposition that favourable inequalities are incentives necessary for a higher production of goods. So much for the first part of the Difference Principle. In its second part, it is to the effect that all members of the society are to have a considerable and equal opportunity to gain any allowable positions of favourable inequality. This second part of the Difference Principle has priority over its first part. The society will not improve the lot of a worst-off class if this can be done only by giving some members an unequal right to secure positions of favourable economic and social inequality. As for priority generally, then, the principle of Liberty ranks first – traditional rights, such as the right to vote and the right to hold private property, come before progress toward equal opportunity and the reduction of poverty. The second part of the Difference Principle ranks second – equal opportunity to become rich, for example, comes before the reduction of the poverty of a worst-off class. The first part of the Difference principle, having to do with a worst-off class, ranks last. There are problems raised by all of this. There are, certainly, reasons for doubting the truth and even the persuasiveness of what I shall call the basic proposition before us. It appears to be basic to the doctrine we are considering and is certainly so regarded by those who propound the doctrine. In summary form, it is that the imagined people, people in what is called the Original Position, having the qualities they have and in their prescribed ignorance and belief,

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would in fact choose the principles of which you have just heard and their ranking. What I should like mainly to consider, however, is something as fundamental as the truth of the basic proposition. This is its supposed use.3 Supposing it to be true, what else can be said for it? It is taken to have three uses.

2

The Justificatory Use of the Basic Proposition in the Contract Argument

The basic proposition is thought to enter fundamentally and of course essentially or crucially into an argument for the two principles. It is not that this proposition, that the members of the imagined assembly would agree on the principles, is taken to support the conclusion that these would be the correct principles for their coming society, which society we can also imagine. You may like the sound of that argument, but it is not our concern. The basic proposition is thought to enter into an argument for the superiority of the principles for our own actual societies.4 Our own societies are acceptable to the extent that they are informed by these principles rather than others, and this is a conclusion thought to be supported by the basic proposition. More precisely, the two principles are morally superior within the class of principles that have to do with the amount and distribution of goods. The two principles provide the correct answer to what is named the question of distribution or justice. The other part of the argument for the two principles is that the situation in which they allegedly would be chosen, the Original Position, would be a fair one.5 That is to say or to make the evaluation that no one in the imagined assembly would be under any disadvantage, or, more explicitly, under any wrongful disadvantage. What is important is not the truth that none of them would be under any disadvantage, which truth is indeed a matter of fact, but that none of them would be under any disadvantage of which we disapprove. A horse-race illustrates the distinction. None of the horses is at a disadvantage, in the sense of improper disadvantage, because some of the horses carry more weight and thus, factually speaking, have a disadvantage. What is important to the argument is that it is indeed the conditions or the circumstances that would be fair, as distinct from the principles chosen, of which the same might be said. The conditions in question are of course those already mentioned, including the ignorance of the members of the imagined assembly as to their

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individual futures. The conditions secure, of course, that members of the assembly would be prevented from discriminating against any group in the society to come. The whole argument before us, then, is taken to consist in the following things: 1. the proposition that a certain choosing-circumstance would be a fair one, 2. the basic proposition, that people in that circumstance would choose the two principles, 3. the conclusion that the two principles have a recommendation. The argument, in so far as the terms are useful, appears to consist of an evaluative and a factual premise. It is, then, of a standard if problematic kind. The evaluative premise, that a certain situation of choosing would be a fair one, however much we may be inclined to accept it, is in a certain sense unsupported.6 We thus have an argument of precisely the kind that generally has led philosophers and others to say that evaluative conclusions are without ‘justification’. Hence, what might be called the first and traditional enterprise of moral philosophy is in no way advanced by the argument that includes the basic proposition. These are conclusions about the argument for the two principles as we are given it, and as I have just sketched it. In what follows I shall give a more explicit statement of the argument. As will be apparent, the same judgements will be in place with respect to the more explicit argument. Perhaps, however, no justification of the kind traditionally pursued is possible. It may be that in reflection of this kind we have only lesser possibilities, one of which is to begin with the plain assertion of an evaluative premise. It may even be that this is no worse than beginning from unquestioned ‘axioms’ in other kinds of inquiry. Let us take up this point of view. That is, let us agree to have an evaluative premise whose credentials are simply accepted.7 Both the evaluative and the factual premise get their detail or indeed their identity from the specification of the imagined assembly. That assembly, to recall, is such that its members have certain features: a. Each of them can and does pursue his own interest. b. Each has an equal ability and opportunity to do this. c. Each makes a rational choice, one that does in fact serve his ends and does not proceed from envy. The latter, envy, is taken to be a willingness to have one’s own position

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worsened in order to worsen the position of another person who is better off. d. Each is ignorant of any natural capabilities or attributes he or she will have in the society to come, his or her attitudes and moral outlook, wealth or poverty, social position. None knows his or her future race, colour, religion, politics, culture, income or social standing. e. Each person has general beliefs about human psychology and about society, politics and economics. (We are invited to take these beliefs as being true, as being knowledge.) Principally, they are beliefs about the paramount importance of liberty in societies and presumably the necessity of inequality to general well-being. The latter belief has to do with the familiar doctrine about an incentive system. An assembly of people satisfying all these conditions would choose the two principles. That is the basic proposition or factual premise. This choice would have issued from a fair choosingsituation. That is the evaluative premise. To come now to my first main objection, it is entirely clear that our acceptance of the latter thing, assuming that we do accept it, does not come out of thin air. What it comes out of, partly, is a set of moral convictions. As seems plain from a number of passages, Rawls is aware of this fact despite not stating it so plainly and giving it the prominence and repetition that he accords to other facts of the theory.8 What are the convictions? There can be no mystery about that. If we do accept that the choosing-situation would be fair, we believe a number of things, of which the following are the main ones: A. Each and every member of a society, each and every member of an actual society, has a right to goods. B. Each member has an equal right to such goods, or, at any rate, we must pay attention to considerations of equality. C. Steps must be taken to realise these rights, but a man should not be worse off simply in order to lower the standing of someone else. D. The rights in question do not depend on certain things, which are to be regarded as irrelevant. These include race, colour, religion and much else. Certain facts about members of our societies ought to be irrelevant, and these are precisely such facts as those about their futures that the members of the imagined assembly are denied.

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If our acceptance that the imagined situation would be fair must come out of these convictions, there is also something else from which it derives. We think, presumably, that the entire speculation is in another way acceptable. A fair choosing-situation obviously, is one in which the people in question are not misled and do not have false beliefs. Our acceptance of the imagined situation as fair then, to put the matter briskly, must derive from beliefs that we have pertaining to incentive systems and the important place of liberty in societies. E. Incentive systems can benefit everybody, the traditional liberties are of great value, and so on. It is the work of a minute, I think, to put to rest any doubt about the claim that our acceptance of the imagined choosing-situation as fair does depend on the given convictions and beliefs that are given effect or expression by the conditions that define the choosingsituation. Suppose that we did believe some benighted proposition contrary to A. That is, suppose we believed that some members of societies do not have any right to goods. If we did actually believe this, we would not approve as fair a choosing-situation of such a kind that it gave rise to a society where every member had such a right. Suppose that we sincerely believed with racists, contrary to D, that a man should be paid more simply because he is white-skinned. Suppose that we believed, contrary to E, with some socialists and of course communists, that it is just a mistake to give more importance to traditional liberties than to the reduction of poverty. We would then not approve of a choosing-situation which, in a word, does not reflect these beliefs. We would not regard it as a fair one. The entire argument before us, then, to make it explicit, really consists in: 1. some moral convictions and some beliefs, that lead us to accept 2. that a certain imagined situation for choosing principles would be fair; 3. the basic proposition that people in such a situation would choose two principles; and 4. the conclusion that the principles have a recommendation. We can call this the Contract Argument for the principles. Some may be inclined to think, at first, that the first premise is not logically distinct from the second. The truth is otherwise. One part of the second premise, about fairness, is to the effect that a choosingsituation in which people could not allow the colour of a man’s

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skin to determine his liberties would be in that respect fair. This is evidently distinct from the conviction that a man’s skin-colour ought to be irrelevant to his liberties. Some may think, secondly, that to set out the argument in the four steps is to set it out uneconomically. They may feel that it can be set out more efficiently as it was before, consisting in the assertion that a certain choosing-situation would be a fair one, the assertion that people in that situation would choose the two principles, and the conclusion that the principles have a recommendation. Several things might be pointed out here. The most important is that what appears in the first part of the four-part argument must in fact occur in any expression of the argument that is complete. It is plain enough where it does occur in the three-part argument. It occurs in the initial premise, that a certain choosing-situation would be a fair one, one in which no one is at a wrongful disadvantage. To assert this premise, plainly, is partly to assert that the choosingsituation is in accord with certain convictions. The situation, for example, is in accord with the conviction that skin-colour ought to be irrelevant to certain things. In what follows, then, the four-part form of the Contract Argument is what will be considered. What is to be said for this form, in general, is simply that it is explicit. All that I shall have to say of the argument in this form, evidently, will be relevant to other forms of it.

3

A Very Ordinary Argument as against the Contract Argument

Put all this aside for a while. Forget about Rawls entirely and consider a different kind of reflection on societies and principles, a different way of trying to arrive at principles for the governance of one’s actual society, a different way of getting an answer to the question of distribution or justice. We begin with our convictions and beliefs. Suppose the first one is that each member of a society is to be regarded as having a right to goods of one kind and another, and that steps are to be taken to secure this right. Suppose, as it happens, that our convictions and beliefs are precisely those itemised a little way back – A to E. Having got them straight, we can do a certain thing – we can advance directly to the judgement that the best answer to the question of justice amounts to the two principles of justice of which we

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know. The principles, of course, just as in the case of the Contract Argument, are in good part no more than generalisations or summations or adjustments of the convictions. Nothing is more common that summing up particular things in a general way – and perhaps amending a thing in order to make it fit in with a good general proposition. What we will have done is engage in what we shall call an Ordinary Argument for the two principles. The principles are in accordance with our convictions and beliefs. In the case of the Ordinary Argument the fact of generalisation or summation is clear. What we do is make a judgement as to what the convictions and beliefs come to. In the case of the Contract Argument, given a bit of reflection, it is as clear despite the considerable differences that just the same thing is happening. In the case of the Contract Argument we make a judgement of what general principles would issue from an assembly that does not have all of our convictions and beliefs but is guaranteeed to act as if it did. They do actually have our supposed beliefs about incentive systems, the importance of liberty and so on. For the rest, their natures and situation are such that they act as if they believed that each member of a society has a right to goods, and an equal right, and in particular that there should be a concern for the badly-off, that racism is wrong, and so on. In a sentence, I can indeed see what a collection of convictions comes to by asking what general judgement would be made by people who lack the convictions but by their natures and situation have no choice but to act as if they had the convictions. That this is an exceedingly odd way for me to proceed, even baffling, does not take away from the fact that it is a way of seeing what the collection of convictions comes to. Given this, the first thing that I wish to urge about the two arguments is that the Ordinary Argument is as good as the Contract Argument in giving support to the two principles. From what has been said so far, of course, it is less than clear that either argument is much good or anyway very good. There is an impressive gap, or rather, nothing so clear as a gap, between the premise or the premise-set and the shared conclusion. Even a good generalisation or summary is usually not a necessary one. It is arguable or clear, of course, that many principles could not get support from either the premise of the Ordinary Argument or the premises of the Contract Argument. Racist principles, and principles of discrimination generally, are in this group. However, there are more left over than only the Principles of Liberty and Difference.

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Can the Contract Argument be improved? In A Theory of Justice a good deal of effort is put into arguing for the truth of the basic proposition – that the assembly would choose the two principles. The argument, in one important part, is that each member of the assembly, in comparing different conceptions or sets of principles, would realise that all of them, save total equality, would have within it the possibility of different upshots for the member in his future life in the society. He might be among the rich or among the poor, for example. He would, it is suggested do what is called maximin: that is, to choose the conception whose worst possible upshot for him would be more acceptable than the worst possible upshots of other conceptions. Each member of the assembly would, as a result, be led to favour the Principle of Difference. What this amounts to, obviously, is a further or an enlarged characterisation of the assembly. There is another essential matter to be kept in mind about this procedure. It must also be supposed, to keep the whole doctrine standing, that the enlarged conception persists as a conception of a fair choosing-situation. So we must then have convictions and beliefs that issue in a further judgement about fairness. We must, in short, have a commitment to the maximin principle. I have suggested that at first sight, or in its first presentation, the Contract Argument is no better than the Ordinary Argument in producing the two principles of justice as conclusion. We may now grant, however, that the Contract Argument can be strengthened. This is done by characterising the imagined assembly more fully and adding the commitment just mentioned. If the Contract Argument can be strengthened in this way, however, to come to my principal point here, it is necessarily true that the Ordinary Argument can be strengthened to the same extent. One adds one’s strengthening conviction to the premise of the Ordinary Argument. We add the conviction that we should always choose the policy whose worst upshot will be best. In general, whatever is done to the Contract Argument can have a counterpart with respect to the Ordinary Argument. The latter will remain as good, bad or indifferent as the former.9

4

Sad Conclusions

Something follows from all this. What follows, I take it, is the conclusion that the actual grounds implicit in the Contract Argument, however adumbrated, are identical with the grounds in some version of the Ordinary Argument. All that gives support to the conclusion

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in the Contract Argument is the first premise, a certain collection of convictions and beliefs. All that gives support to the conclusion is that which supports the conclusion in the Ordinary Argument. So what we have called the basic proposition in the Contract Argument is logically irrelevant to it. It does no work in the argument. It can be left out without loss. So too is the proposition that the imagined choosing-situation would be a fair one. It too is logically irrelevant. The Contract Argument is the Ordinary Argument with two entirely superfluous parts. What is taken to be the foundation of the Contract Argument is in fact no part of the structure. Reflection on the basic proposition, so-called, let alone prolonged reflection, is idle. It is worth noticing, perhaps, in partial explanation of the error of thinking that the basic proposition has some logical use, that something very like it does have logical utility when it turns up in other speculations about a social contract, those mentioned in the first paragraph of this essay, having to do with the grounds of political obligation. Suppose that somehow we – we actual persons – do tacitly commit ourselves to our societies and their principles. Suppose as well that others know that each of us has done this and continues to do so. We may, then and afterwards, have convictions that lead us to think the principles are good ones. Thus there is that reason for going along with them. However, our observance of the principles also has this quite different thing to be said for it: we understood or promised it. This proposition, one that is related to the basic proposition in the doctrine we are considering, provides an independent argument of some strength or other for our observance. At any rate the proposition would do so if it were true. But plainly it is an error to think that there is any actual undertaking or promising by us involved in the Contract Argument as stated. It is a confusion to run together the basic proposition with something related to it in entirely different speculations about an actual social contract. Let me anticipate one objection to what has been claimed about the Contract Argument. The people in the imagined assembly, we have granted, would agree on the principles. The objection, which is not helped by being made explicit, is that some recommendation attaches to the principles simply because they would be agreed upon by the imagined people. What recommendation is it? We must not drift into thinking, obviously, that any person has ever made such an agreement. The social contract, in its traditional form, is dead and buried. It remains so if

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we grant, as we are urged, that ‘we’ would agree to the principles if we were as the people in the Original Position are.10 We are different, have never been there, and have made no agreement. If we stick firmly to the supposition, that imagined people would agree on the principles, there is still no recommendation in the bare fact of agreement. Suppose we imagine an assembly made up of people who know that the coming society will have in it weak and powerful members. Moreover, and more importantly, each person in the assembly knows where he will turn up; whether he or she will be weak or strong. Suppose, since those who will be weak are fearful of doing otherwise, that the assembly comes to agree on principles that will favour those who will be powerful. We will not suppose, obviously, that the fact that there would be agreement would recommend the principles. The mere fact of agreement in an imagined assembly is by itself of no relevance to us. What confers relevance, if no more, on an agreement, are the conditions under which it is made. The recommendation of the agreed principles, in that case, rests on the conditions, and on the convictions that support them. What we have is the Contract Argument as sketched. That is not all. Talk of agreement in the imagined assembly, like talk of an assembly at all, is quite otiose for a reason so far unmentioned. What we are contemplating, if we are following the instructions, is an assembly of identical persons, or persons whose identical qualities alone are relevant. If we were to set about assigning them other qualities, perhaps different and compensating knowledges or capabilities of judgement, we would be departing from our instructions. Certainly it is not suggested that we are to do this. If we were to attempt it, the truth of the basic proposition would become still more uncertain than it is if we follow our instructions. Who knows what a mixed assembly would choose? What we do, then, is imagine identical persons. In this case, all talk of agreement is otiose. We might as well have imagined a single individual and not an assembly.11 For this reason alone, an elaborated theory of the kind we are considering verges on the ridiculous.12

5

The Expository Use of the Basic Proposition

There can be no doubt whatever that the basic proposition is taken and stated to be essential to an argument for the two principles. At the same time, with some inconsistency, there is envisaged a related lesser use or indeed family of uses for the basic proposition. The

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basic proposition, containing as it does a conception of an imagined assembly, is taken to be an expository or an analytic device, and a summation that brings out essential features, and something that makes vivid and helps one to extract consequences.13 Of what or for what is it these three things? Clearly enough, to take the first one, it is a device for expounding or analysing the convictions and beliefs that comprise the first premise of the explicit Contract Argument. The basic proposition has this and the other mentioned virtues with respect to the convictions and beliefs. Let us consider these virtues in turn. The nature of the expository or analytic device is simple. What we do, with respect to a number of things that we believe ought not to happen, is to think of a situation where they cannot happen. That is the Original Position. Thereafter, in a sense, we see what principles follow. By way of example, we may have the conviction that a woman’s ill-health ought not to be allowed to deprive her of a right to goods. We then conceive of an assembly each of whose members is coming to a judgement about the future distribution of goods and is absolutely constrained by the chance of being an unhealthy woman. 1. A good expository or analytic device is presumably one that makes things clearer. Does the conviction that a woman’s ill-health should not deprive her of goods become clearer when we imagine an assembly of persons who cannot, in a certain sense, allow that a woman’s ill-health deprives her of goods? It is patently obvious that it does not. The Ordinary Argument, considered from this point of view, is on a par with the Contract Argument. The conviction as it turns up in the premise of the Ordinary Argument is as clear on its own as the conviction plus the bit of imagining in the Contract Argument. The basic proposition in the Contract Argument adds nothing. It is, from this point of view, of no use. 2. Is it that the conception we are offered is a summation that brings out the essential features of the convictions and beliefs? This contention also fails. What we have called the basic proposition can be expressed more or less fully, more or less efficiently. It can be got into a sentence, as we have seen, and it can have its expression spread over paragraphs or pages. The whole thing turns on the amount and kind of description one gives of the imagined assembly. It is obvious that whatever description is given to the assembly, an analogous statement can be given of our convictions and beliefs. We can give, in the premise of the Ordinary Argument, a representation of our convictions and beliefs that is equally terse, organised, developed

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or ramified. The basic proposition and its conception are irrelevant to this matter of abbreviation and theoretical efficiency. 3. What is ‘vivid’ is sometimes what is, in a sense, effective. Are we to understand that the basic proposition, with its contained conception, does something like enforce on us the content of our conviction? Do we come to have a livelier awareness of the content of our convictions? If we do have a conviction that ill-health or shrewdness or whatever ought to be irrelevant from a certain point of view, then in rationality we are in favour of a circumstance where they could not possibly count in the given way. It may be granted, perhaps, that for some of us the basic proposition has some small use in this respect. It shares its virtue with other explications of the conviction, explications that do not involve imagined assemblies. Roughly speaking, it has the same function as pointing out to someone who has the relevant conviction that he supports a social and economic system that will in fact secure the irrelevance to certain things of illhealth, shrewdness or whatever. It will be obvious that the Ordinary Argument can be made explicit in this way. Can it be, simply, that in the conception of the Original Position we get a picture of people, that we are reminded that we are dealing with human desires and vulnerabilities, and not with principles that do not touch on life? Is this the ‘vividness’ of the conception? This is a virtue, but again it is a virtue that can be had by the Ordinary Argument. Indeed, it is surely plain that a presentation of the Ordinary Argument can have this virtue to a greater extent. The human relevance of moral convictions, after all, can surely be conveyed better through attention to human existence in its actuality, as distinct from attention to an imagined assembly. To turn to the remaining matter of consequences of our convictions, and the chance that we shall miss them: is the conception of the imagined assembly of use? There seems no reason for thinking that when accepted moral prohibitions are shuffled into a conception of impossibilities, their consequences are less likely to escape us. We are no less likely to make mistakes about the correct summative principles. In general, it is hardly likely that there can be a significant difference in any of these respects, or in others like them, between a statement of convictions and beliefs and something that includes a conception of an imagined assembly, given that the statement and the conception are at the same level of particularity and what-not. The Contract and Ordinary Arguments are, to say the least, on a par. The basic proposition contributes nothing to what might be called the non-logical virtue of the Contract Argument.

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Explanatory Uses of the Basic Proposition

Finally, the basic proposition is thought to provide an explanation of two things. The first is the particular conception of justice with which we have been concerned, the Principles of Liberty and Difference.14 They, like other principles of justice, are taken to have a certain character or certain features. They have the character of being resolutions of a problem in rational choice. They are principles that govern the conflicting claims of people for goods. They are principles that must be agreeable to all parties. They are public principles. The first characterisation, unless it is to be understood in some extraordinary way, is unexceptionable. No doubt all principles and a good deal more of moral and political philosophy can be seen as ‘resolutions of a problem in rational choice’. I take that to mean, simply, that these things are the product of considerations of various kinds, often conflicting ones. Hence, a certain theory is relevant to them. The third characterisation, to turn to that, appears doubtful. Perhaps what is intended is not that any principles of justices or distribution must be agreeable to all parties, but that acceptable or justifiable ones must be. Even that is in need of attention. How is it that these four features of acceptable principles of justice, and in particular the Principles of Liberty and Difference, are explained by the basic proposition? The people in the imagined assembly, certainly, would be engaged in an enterprise related to these features. They would be making rational choices. They would be choosing principles to govern claims and agreeing on principles. They would be choosing principles that would be public in their society to come. But it seems to me a curious suggestion that the given features of principles of justice have light thrown on them by the proposition that they would be chosen in a situation about which related things can be said. No one could think, certainly, that the given features of the principles are features discovered by way of the imagined assembly. Nor, surely, are the features clarified or brought into clearer view by the piece of imagining. Before considering the second explanatory role assigned to the basic proposition, let us set aside something different. The two principles of justice themselves may be taken to be an explanation, in a certain sense, of something. There is thought to exist, as we have seen, a relation between the two principles and our ordinary convictions about justice. While the principles are to be used to adjust and correct some of our ordinary convictions about justice, it is also true

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that the principles derive from the convictions. Indeed, the Principles of Liberty and Difference account for, characterise, give coherence to, and match our ordinary convictions about such things as the irrelevance of skin colour.15 Let us leave untouched this question of whether the principles ‘explain’ our convictions. The proposition that they do is obviously to be distinguished from something else. Here, the explanans or explanation is different although the explanandum or thing to be explained is pretty much the same. What is to be explained is our having the sense of justice we have, our making the moral judgements we do make, and our having the moral convictions we do have. What is to be explained is our having a sense of justice that is thought to be bound up with a commitment to the two principles and our making moral judgements and having convictions that derive from the same commitment. It is not that an explanation is being essayed of our having a sense of justice of some kind or other and our making moral judgements and having convictions of some kind or other. That we do have the sense of justice we are alleged to have, and judge and feel as we are alleged to do, are to be explained partly by the conception of the Original Position. The other part of the intended explanation, clearly enough, has to do with the choice made by the people in the Original Position of the two principles. They choose our principles. In short, therefore, it is the basic proposition that explains our sense of justice and our judgements.16 This is remarkable. How can it be that our having certain principles of justice and their concomitants are explained by the proposition that people in a particular circumstance, peculiar in that it is a circumstance of a certain ignorance, would choose our principles? Presumably we would have an explanation, or something like it, if our existence in our societies was relevantly like the circumstance of the imagined people. But of course, the principal point about the imagined assembly is that its circumstance is unlike the circumstance of ordinary life. That, indeed, is the bottom fact about the assembly: its members cannot be led astray by a knowledge of their own (future) positions in society. The proposition that the assembly would choose the principles might well lead one to think that we, in our different circumstance, would not have a sense of justice and make judgements in line with the two principles. One might attempt an argument to the effect that certain situations in which we find ourselves are somewhat like the imagined situation of the choosers. There are situations in ordinary life that have the important feature that they do not allow for predictions by

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individuals as to their futures. No such argument is offered. If one gave a convincing account of such situations, and showed their importance in giving rise to our sense of justice and our judgements, it would anyway very likely be otiose to introduce the imagined assembly and the basic proposition.

7

Summary

We have seen that the basic proposition is thought to provide an argument, or part of one, for the two principles of justice. It is thought, secondly, to illustrate, sum up or make vivid in a unique way the argument for the two principles. It is thought, thirdly, to explain features of the principles, and also to explain our ordinary morality. It fails in each of these things. There may be something else to be said for the principles, and we will return to that question,17 but the conception of an imagined contract remains as otiose as it first was when it arose out of speculations about an actual contract. At bottom, in my view, it is muddle. Maybe good-intentioned, but muddle.

Notes 1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford University Press, 1972). With respect to the philosophical tradition in question, see especially pp. 11– 12. This essay is limited to Rawls’s principal book, A Theory of Justice, rather than any of his subsequent writings. 2. p. 302. 3. What I have to say pertains as much to a ‘basic proposition’ when it is thought to issue in fundamental principles other than those of Rawls. It also pertains to many other propositions used by Rawls. These concern people making agreements in different conditions from those obtaining in the Original Position. See pp. 193–201, 333, 378, 437. 4. pp. 17, 21, 42, 167, 577–87. Here and elsewhere I pass by ancillary doctrines. See, in this case, for a summary, pp. 579–80. 5. pp. 12, 120. Cf. pp. 15, l8, 120, 121, 521. 6. For a relevant discussion that nonetheless does not affect the point, see pp. 577–87. 7. Seeming suggestions in Rawls (pp. 17, 44 and elsewhere) that evaluation is somehow avoided in the basis of his argument are of course misleading. 8. pp. 14–21, 587. 9. I have left out, incidentally, some formal conditions on principles that might be taken to be part of the first premise of the Contract Argument, and also some practical considerations. Both can evidently also go into the Ordinary Argument. See, e.g., pp. 146, 175.

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10. p. 13. 11. Rawls, in passing and perhaps implicitly, grants the point, p. 139. 12. A second objection to my fundamental criticism would have to do with a view of the Contract Argument as other than a plain matter of premises and conclusion. See pp. 21, 48–9, 579. One can, however, take the same view of the Ordinary Argument. 13. pp. 21, 189, 138, 18. I do not consider something akin to an expository use, having to do with the ‘explication’ of moral language. See p. 111. I do not consider either various ‘Kantian interpretations’ of the justificatory and expository uses of the basic proposition. See pp. 252, 180, 516. One can obviously have, for what they are worth, ‘Kantian interpretations’ of the Ordinary Argument. 14. pp. 16, 50–1. 15. pp. ix, 39, 47, 51, 319, 579–80. 16. p. 120, cf. p. 28. A quite different kind of explanation is also given by Rawls in Chap. 8, one that has nothing to do with the basic proposition. 17. There can be hopeless arguments for good conclusions, as there can be useless evidence for what nevertheless are facts. For a consideration of the worth of the principles, see the following paper here, and Chap. 4, section 6 of my book on political violence, now to come out in another edition under the title Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy (Pluto Press, 2003).

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Chapter Five

The Principle of Humanity

The fundamental question to which liberalism, conservatism and other such things give answers or should give answers, and arguments for them, is sometimes called the question of justice. It is the question not of what laws there are, but of what laws there ought to be, how societies ought to be. Better, it is the question of who ought to have what. An answer needs first to decide on a prior question. Of what ought who to have what shares or amounts? My answers are given in this paper. The first, to the prior question, has to do with our great desires, and the wretchedness or other distress of having them unfulfilled. Other answers have to do with bad answers to the main question, and then the right one. Morality has a majesty. Despite ourselves, and yet to ourselves, it stands over the rest of our existence, in particular over our self-interest in its various forms. To my mind it is the Principle of Humanity above all that has that majesty. Every political philosophy, ideology, hope of a people, political movement and party creed should begin from a response to the question of what well-being there ought to be, and, whether as means or end, what distress. Evidently an amount of distress can sometimes be a means, a price that ought to be paid in order to avoid more of it. Some say, differently, in connection with punishment in particular, that others deserve distress: it is to be imposed not as a means to what will then happen, but merely for what has already happened. Also, it may indeed be that to pursue the largest possible amount of well-being for a society and the least of distress would sometimes be to arrive at an unjust or iniquitous sharing of it. Further, it may be true of

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well-being and distress, as commonly it is taken to be of wealth and income, that the totals are less important than who has it, those who struggle and those who do not, those who produce and those who do not, the inheritors and the unlucky, and so on. Whatever propositions or complications there are along these lines, it must be that every political philosophy and the like should proceed from an explicit response to the question of the distribution of well-being and distress: who is to have what amounts? Answering takes less time than answering another still larger question, that of actions, campaigns, policies, tactics and institutions – of how to secure and to hang on to the proper distribution. Still, there is the requirement of rationality that the end be given before means are considered, and therefore the question of distribution comes first. This essay considers it, and what seems to be the proper and true response to it.

1

Categories of Great Desire

For a start, we need to give greater content to the fundamental ideas of well-being and distress. They are to be understood as two kinds of human experience: those in which desires are satisfied and those in which desires are frustrated. They can in fact be identified with the relatively clear ideas of satisfaction and frustration, clear because of their connection with action. There is that test of whether someone is satisfied or not. In a different and secondary usage of a familiar kind, we may speak of degrees of well-being or satisfaction some of which are in fact distress or frustration, but that will not be our usual procedure. Desires are to be conceived in so large a way as to include needs, passions, wants, commitments, loyalties and felt obligations, lifeplans, and more. They then include what in a more restricted sense of the word are not or might not be desires: certain feelings for others, keeping faith, a determination to preserve one’s integrity, being willing to pay a high price to achieve excellence, and so on. Let us proceed in a way which has not enough familiarity, by quickly specifying general categories of desire, in this case six. They have to do with subsistence, further material goods, freedom, respect, personal relations, and culture.1 It is not in dispute, despite the existence of those who give up their lives for various ends, that the primary desire is for subsistence, one’s own and that of some other persons, often one’s partner

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and children. This is the desire for that minimum of food, shelter, strength, and perhaps satisfactory activity which will sustain a lifetime. A lifetime is to be understood more in terms of an average life-expectancy of seventy-seven years rather than, say, forty. The desire is primary in that there is a wide if limited generalisation to the effect that people, if they must choose, choose to realise this desire rather than any other. With respect to the desires to follow, no serious ranking or ordering is intended. The second category, for further material goods, can briefly be described as one realised in much of the rich world and frustrated in much of the poor world. It includes desires for income and wealth, unimportant as ends and important as certain means. They are means to the other further material goods: relief from pain, help with disability, a home and a tolerable wider environment, food and drink above the level of subsistence, adequate medical care, material support of several kinds in adversity and misfortune, means of travel and communication, and a good deal more. The category includes items in a small way denigrated only by those who possess them, consumer goods. Thirdly, we desire freedom and power in several settings. Most important are political and other rights in a self-determining homeland. It would be contentious, in the present discussion, quickly to identify these rights with those realised to some extent in Western or liberal democratic states. The question is difficult, but what I have in mind are political and other rights denied by occupying forces, tyrannies, imperialisms, totalitarianisms, imperalisms and hegemonies. We also desire degrees of freedom and power in lesser contexts. Work is perhaps foremost here. There is also the pursuit of one’s individual form of private life. Respect and self-respect, which perhaps are less separable than has sometimes been supposed,2 constitute the fourth category. We desire standing as individuals, and some standing as groups. The means to this standing are in part the possibilities of achievement, at bottom work. The means are in another part the attitudes of others. It is not enough to have work, and some limited recognition of personal achievements and virtues, if one is the victim of racism, severe class-condescension, denigration for disability, or any other denial of common humanity. Fifthly, there is the desire for personal and wider human relationships. What comes first here are needs, commitments, and many feelings having to do with the family. There are counterparts in other personal connections. More widely, there are desires having

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to do with community and fraternity. We want to live lives which give a large place to connection with a few others, a connection of intimacy, protection, support, identity of hope, and many like things. This connection with a few others needs the supplement of association with larger groups, notably one’s society. We desire, finally, the goods of culture. We pursue knowledge, awareness and judgement, and the means to these, of which the principal one is education. No one chooses a general ignorance or incompetence. We want, as well, the experience of art or the lesser but real satisfaction of entertainment. Religion enters here as well, and also other greater or smaller traditions of races, peoples, nations, regions, and places. These six categories are indeed under-described: what has been said of them catches very little of the richness and wretchedness of human experience. They are given, however, not in the illusion that they do more than fix attention on the real subject of our inquiry. That subject is not caught hold of by way of silent assumption, by any such generic notion as satisfaction or happiness or indeed well-being or distress, taken by itself, or by any abstract account of experience in terms, say, of preference under conditions of risk. Certainly the categories make evident the interdependence of our desires. The first, for subsistence, is necessary to the rest. Kinds of freedom are essential to respect and self-respect, and to certain of the goods of culture. Respect and self-respect themselves play a role in the achievement of the goods of culture. Categories so related do not thereby fail to be categories. Our question is this: what is to be the distribution of this wellbeing and distress, or who is to have what amounts? The question presupposes that we can characterise possible lifetimes in terms of well-being and distress as these have now been conceived. Taken naturally, the question presupposes that we can so characterise possible lifetimes in what I shall call a cardinal rather than an ordinal way, which is sometimes doubted. The question presupposes an impossibility if all we can sensibly say about a pair of possible lifetimes is that one would be of greater or lesser satisfaction and frustration than another. There may be a temptation to transfer scepticisms or resistances from other inquiries to our own, and so to suppose this is all we can say. It seems evident on reflection, that it is not. Consider three possible lifetimes: one cut greatly short since the person fails to come up to the level of subsistence: one where the person comes up to that level and also satisfies the desires of two other categories, perhaps those for further material goods and personal

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relations; and one involving satisfaction of all six categories of desire; subsistence, further material goods, freedom, respect, personal relations, culture. Are we restricted to saying, with good sense, only that the first possible lifetime involves less well-being than the second and third, and the second less than the third? It is essential to see how much less we would have to say than we can rightly say, how trivial rather than rightly substantial our judgement of the three lifetimes would be, if this were so. If we were so restricted, we could reasonably suppose, as rightly we do not, that there was nothing much to choose between the three, and no significant necessity of action, since the differences between the three were insignificant. The three lifetimes might be related in the way of three payments, of $5000.00, $5000.01, and £5000.02, considered only in terms of purchasing power. Again, if we could with good sense make only the ordinal judgement, we should have no reason whatever for thinking it a bad policy to concentrate entirely on aid to the second person. This would in fact be reasonable on the supposition that only a lifetime of the third kind was in fact tolerable, and there was no possibility of making the first life better than the second. Other absurd consequences, all conflicting with what evidently is our situation of judgement, also follow from the supposition that we can characterise lifetimes only ordinally in terms of well-being and distress. At this juncture it is possible to make a certain mistake, that of identifying judgements of amount, which are essentially cardinal, with judgements only of number. We are all of us in possession of an effective system of non-numerical classification of amounts of distress and well-being. In judging a life to be one of wretchedness, we plainly are not only judging it to be of less well-being than a tolerable life or one of abundance. We are judging amount of frustration, and the ordinal proposition is an entailment of small interest. A life in which only the first category of desires is satisfied is one of great frustration, as distinct merely from being a life of greater frustration than others. In fact we have a developed conceptual system for such judgement of possible lifetimes, as of much else that engages our attention. To mention only a few other general conceptions, a possible lifetime may be one of wretchedness, subsistence, pain, being crippled, deprivation, poverty, fear, sorrow, tolerableness, security, satisfaction, fullness, indulgence, or satiety. That there is a vagueness about these essentially cardinal descriptions, and that we may have recourse to a criterion of action to fix amounts of well-being and distress, does not at all establish that

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all that can sensibly be said about the wretched life of a parent whose children are starving, or the life of a brother or sister dying of AIDs, is that it is a life of lesser well-being than the lives of people we know better. The question of well-being, then, does not presuppose what cannot be done. It presupposes, moreover, what is done all the time, in particular by governments in the allocation of resources. The decisions in question are not ordinal and are not dependent on certain small if increasing aids of quantification. That there is a large need for old-age pensions as against a small one for certain roads is not merely the judgement that the first is greater, or has a higher place in an ordinal sequence. It is less important, but true, that we can to an extent reasonably assign numerical values to possible lifetimes. As remarked, no serious ranking was intended in the listing of the five categories of desire other than subsistence. They can reasonably enough be taken as of equal value. There is no error, and some use, in assigning +1 and −1 to the full satisfaction and full frustration of each of these categories of desire. Greater values, +2 and −2 at least, can reasonably be assigned to the first category. This assignment is not made useless by the existence of some individuals who place different values on, say, art and personal relations, and forego the latter for the former. It is a recommendation of fixing attention on the categories of well-being and distress, rather than proceeding in terms of silent assumption, or only generic notions, or preference-systems, that it becomes plain that another problem is not serious. I have in mind interpersonal comparison. It would indeed be absurd to assume of a rich man and a poor, each preferring to have another £100, that their satisfaction in having it would be identical. Here and in some other contexts, it is mistaken to assume that satisfaction is, so to speak, uniform. However, who will maintain that we cannot usefully inquire into the distribution of well-being since, say, the miserablenesses of two physically-like persons, both having only and exactly the same means to the satisfaction of the subsistence-desire, may be so different as to make the enterprise pointless? Who will maintain that there may be nothing to choose or not enough, in terms of ‘intensity of experience’, between the life of a weak child who is satisfying only the subsistence desire and the life of a lad satisfied or more or less sure to be satisfied in all of the six categories? Still, the assumption of interpersonal comparability, in connection with well-being and distress, is precisely that: an assumption taken

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to be defensible and made for a further purpose, in this case inquiry. What is to follow here does not depend on the assumption’s being taken as an exceptionless general truth.3 Such assumptions are ordinary and essential, and we can be justified in acting on them. For example, some minority of people will have their lives worsened, for whatever reason, by being entitled to an old-age pension. This does not put in question the propriety of acting on a certain assumption about need which is close enough to true. Nor, given our resources, would it be right to invest heavily in a procedure for finding the exceptions in order to deny them pensions. To come to the end of these defences, it is true that the characterisation of the six categories of desire is a matter of decision as well as perception of fact. This is as it must be. The characterisation might properly be said to be arbitrary if it denied that any other categorial description of desires was possible. It does not. What is important is that it be clear and arguable, which I take it to be, and that it be useful, which I trust it will be seen to be. There is in fact no great disagreement, at a certain level of generality, about the goods of human life.

2

Unsatisfactory Principles of Well-Being

We might linger over many things, and hence fail to come to our question. Not to linger, but rather to come to it, what are we to aim at in terms of lives of well-being and distress? The most developed answers of a traditional kind are principles of utility, all of which can be stated in terms of the given conception of well-being. On the fundamental one, we must secure the distribution which produces the best balance of well-being over distress. The Utilitarians did not suppose this could have a certain consequence, where the policy producing the best total was such that the well-being went mostly to one minority, class, race, or group, and the distress mostly to another. They did not proceed, either, by thinking of a total population as an entity, a singular possessor of experience, and of its balance of well-being as being decisive. It has long been argued, none the less, as already noted, that Utilitarianism may favour majorities at the expense of minorities, or some minorities at the expense of others. Utilitarianism has been defended against this by being said to be implicitly egalitarian. I shall not pursue the argument, which has mainly to do with the utility of justice and considerations of decreasing marginal utility. If there were no more than some considerable doubt about the consequences of utilitarian principles, it would be

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a good idea to take up something else, about which there is not a doubt. It is not as if we knew in advance that there is some special virtue in utilitarian principles, not having to do with equality, which cannot be preserved in a more explicit principle. There is a further consideration. Even if the fundamental principle of utility, say, by way of various true minor premises, did preserve what we want of equality, it would still be unsatisfactory. This has to do with the fact that general answers to the question of wellbeing cannot be regarded as fully articulated major premises to be connected by tight reasoning with conclusions about particular political, social, and economic policies. In this world as it is, what may be called the merely logical properties of these general answers are not of the first importance. This is so because there is enough complexity in our situation that the best that can be done is to make judgements directed or guided, as distinct from strictly entailed, by an answer to the question of well-being. An answer can only be a kind of directive. If all possible precision is important, so is force and emphasis. Principles of utility, as expressed, do not give a good place, let alone prominence, to their supposed egalitarian content. A good flag is not of uncertain colour. Perhaps understandably, there are no developed answers to the question of well-being in terms of desert or retribution. The question, of course, is wider than that of punishment, or punishment and reward. However, I shall in what follows have something to say of retribution as a maxim of justice. There are doctrines, primarily about what were called actions, tactics, institutions and so on, which bear on the question of well-being, and do have about them some tang of an idea of desert. One, so expressed as to make its bearing clear, is that there ought to be that distribution of well-being which results from a certain principle of liberty, as it is called, about the firstownership and the transfer of certain fundamental means to wellbeing, notably material goods and labour.4 First-ownership should involve a man’s mixing his labour with something and in a way not worsening the situation of others, and any transfer should at least in a very weak sense be voluntary. The doctrine is badly summed up in the maxim ‘From each as he chooses, to each as he is chosen.’ The tendency of this doctrine, in terms of distribution of well-being, is not entirely clear. Just the actual distribution which now exists is not favoured, since it is in part the result of social and hence governmental interference in what is defined as liberty. The defence made for the favoured distribution is in terms of certain desires in but one of the categories of well-being,

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the one having to do with freedoms. I shall not discuss the doctrine, but something more of relevance to it will be said. Are there any developed egalitarian answers to our question? There is nothing to which so much attention has been given as to principles of utility. What will come to mind, although its description as egalitarian can be disputed, and will be here, is that there should be an equal distribution of well-being and distress, perhaps that each individual should have the same balance of well-being over distress. No doubt this has been proposed by some egalitarians, but, if it is not confused with anything else, as it can be, it is unacceptable.5 The short but sound argument against this – against what can be called the Principle of Any Equality – is that an inequality of satisfaction is preferable to an equality of frustration, an inequality at high levels of satisfaction preferable to an equality at a lower level. Nor can we take up the Principle of Greatest Equal Well-Being, which is open to the same kind of objection. It is that we should pursue that particular equal distribution in which people have more well-being than in any other equal distribution. Some will be inclined to say a word in defence of the mentioned equalities as against the inequalities, or at any rate the second equality. They may say that inequality is inimical to self-respect, and hence that an inequality at high levels of satisfaction is not preferable to an equality at a lower level. The reply must be that while there may be a loss of self-respect on the part of those who are least well-off, given the inequality, they remain better off than under the alternative equality. Our subject matter is well-being, in all of its categories, and not anything else. It is not to the point that an inequality of material goods, at high levels, may not be preferable to an equality of material goods at a lower level, precisely for such reasons as selfrespect. There is also an answer said to be of an egalitarian kind given to our question by Rawls.6 It is that well-being and distress in a society are to be distributed primarily according to one consideration, then according to a second, and then according to a third. When there is a conflict, as there will be, the first wins over the second and third, the second over the third. The first is the Principle of Liberty: each person to have that maximum of rights to liberty consistent with everyone having the same. The second is the second part of what is called the Difference Principle, that there is to be an equal opportunity to get into any superior positions of socio-economic superiority or difference, as defined by such goods as income and wealth, power and standing. The third consideration is the first part of the Difference Principle,

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that socio-economic goods are to be distributed in the particular way that leaves the worst-off in such goods better off than they would be given any other distribution. This view is much elaborated and yet for several reasons may be thought to remain indeterminate. There is remarkably little discussion of the given liberties, but, ‘roughly speaking’, they are ‘political liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office) together with freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person along with the right to hold (personal) property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law’.7 Presumably also included are other rights before the law. It is not easy to judge the effect of this first-priority principle on the distribution of well-being and distress. This has much to do with the fact that what are in question are indeed rights rather than powers. There has been a long history of argument to the effect that mere rights, unsupported by economic and other resources, are of a limited and uncertain value. Nor is it, of course, that the second part of the Difference Principle guarantees anything like an economic quality. Conjoined with certain propositions about the need for the incentives of socio-economic inequality, it may issue in striking inequality. Consider then the following description: ‘distribution of well-being and distress considerably determined by an equal distribution of rights supported by one or another distribution of socio-economic resources’. The description may be thought to pick out nothing definite. It is worth adding that the absence of a specification of ‘the right to hold (personal) property’ makes by itself for an indeterminateness of considerable consequence.8

3

The Proper Principle

The proper response to the question of well-being is at bottom a simple one which has been undeveloped despite being presupposed by many doctrines about tactics and institutions, and which in fact fails to get expression in Rawls’s theory of justice. For the reason given in connection with liberties, and others, it is not clear that it is consistent with that theory, even if the theory can be taken out of its given context, which is single society. The principle is that we should have actually effective policies whose end is to make well-off those who are badly-off – get them out of distress and into well-being. The principle, which will be more

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fully stated in due course and which for a reason to which I shall come will be given the new name of being the Principle of Humanity rather than the Principle of Equality, has to do directly with wellbeing rather than socio-economic goods. Like other responses to the question of well-being, including the utilitarian, it would have little force if construed in a merely ordinal way. It is not to be confused with the ‘negative utilitarian principle’ that we should as far as possible reduce the numbers of badly-off, which was so taken as absurdly to justify ending their lives. The population to which the principle applies is that of persons generally, as distinct from persons within a given society or nation. Several future generations must be included, those about which we can make more or less rational predictions. The limitation to such foreseeable generations is essential if the principle is to be at all practical. Needless to say, taking account of the future raises difficulty. It would be wrong to give great weight to any vision of future Utopia, or, for that matter, future ruin. What is obviously necessary is that we follow certain rules, of which a principal one is that a lesser probability of greater distress is to count for only as much as a greater probability of lesser distress. Another is that in general we must assign lesser probabilities to events in the distant as against the nearer future. The upshot is that future generations will count for less. There is the necessity of reflecting on the restriction of the principle to one species. We should be taken aback by the thought that within a century or two much of our present use of animals may quite generally be regarded with moral disgust. Whether or not this comes about, it seems evident that the lives of animals call for greater regard than we give them. Still, as you will guess, I do not propose that we take the Principle of Humanity to cover more than the human species. One better reason is that other animals have very greatly different capabilities of well-being and distress. What is clearly true, however, is that animals and their distress and well-being must put some constraint on the operation of the Principle of Humanity. I shall not attempt to discuss it here. Taking people generally, of several generations, who are to be taken as the badly-off? Certainly to be included are (a) those persons who fail to satisfy even their subsistence desires, and therefore not only desires for further material goods but also to some extent desires in all categories. The latter is necessarily true if, as seems necessary, we take the desires for respect, personal relations, freedom, and culture

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to be desires for a lifetime’s satisfactions of them. The people in question will include individuals of various life-spans, certainly. What they have in common, in terms of length of life, is that they die at one or another premature age. Also to be included are (b) those who subsist but lack further material goods, and hence are certain to be frustrated in other ways as well, notably with respect to freedom. It also seems to me necessary that we include others in the badly-off. This comes about partly as a consequence of having to pay attention, in a way, to the subject of tactics and institutions. It is not to be supposed, given certain political, psychological, and other realities, that there will or can be a total or even an effective concentration on groups (a) and (b). It seems in accord with the impulse of the Principle of Humanity, taking it to be a principle which has to do with the possible, in a realistic sense, to bring in other groups. It would be unrealistic and mistaken, given the principle, to object to the endeavours of individuals who choose to concentrate on (c) people badly-off in that they lack the great satisfactions of freedom, say freedom in a homeland. So with concentration on (d) those who lack respect. The same may apply to endeavours in connection with (e) people who subsist but have a minimal degree of satisfaction in all the other categories. So I take it in what follows that the badly-off or those in degrees of distress, in terms of the population of all persons, are to be understood to be members of the groups (a) to (e). The better-off, those enjoying degrees of well-being, are the remainder of all persons. It is not inconsistent with the Principle of Humanity, however, to concern oneself with a single nation, indeed one of the nations of the rich world. Again there are relevant political, psychological, and other realities. There are members of group (a) here. Their existence cannot be overlooked. There are also members of (b), including many of the unemployed, and of (c), (d) and (e). Other groups in the rich societies will come to mind. Here a large majority of people are considerably satisfied in all the six categories, more than minimally satisfied. We make distinctions within this large group. By way of one very general one, there are the poorlypaid and the better-paid. The poorly-paid are not well-satisfied in terms of further material goods, and hence in certain ways and degrees not well-satisfied in freedom and respect. Ought they not to have been included, from the point of view of the Principle of Humanity, as a group who are badly-off? The question is not one to be answered just by discovery, so to speak. We are specifying a

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principle, and the answer given specifies it further. The principle is to be so understood that this group does not count as badly-off. This is not to say that it cannot defensibly make demands of the better-paid, under certain assumptions and by way of different and lesser considerations. Before considering a bit further the poorly-paid and the betterpaid, in connection with the specific policies mentioned in the initial statement of the Principle of Humanity, we need to give further attention to the badly-off as defined by the six categories. The principle is about them and not necessarily about the worst-off in those categories. To proceed quickly, if too abstractly, consider a situation where, say, 999 similar-sized groups of people are very badly-off indeed, and one similarly-sized group is trivially worse-off. Consider a choice between a programme which trivially improves the lot of the single group, and a programme which does not help the single group but very greatly improves the lot of the 999. It is hard to resist the unhappy inclination to prefer the second policy. It may be that conflicts between the claims of the badly-off and the worst-off do not often occur. In any case, I shall not now say much of how to reach a precise formulation of what seems forced upon us: in part that a large gain for many, say an escape from mere subsistence, may outweigh the abandoning of a few in yet greater distress. We do not actually have a guide until we supply definitions for ‘a large gain’, ‘many’, and so on. Are we in this neighbourhood forced to proceed in a piecemeal way, sometimes called intuitionist, deciding situations as they come up, sometimes being more moved by the situation of many rather than fewer, sometimes not? This sort of procedure is common, and primitive judgements of the kind must occur somewhere in any evaluate system, but it is not satisfactory here. We can instead construct a certain rule, or at any rate a set of rules for manageably limited problems: a fundamental one would be that of income. Such a rule can serve purposes of an ordinary decisionspecifying principle expressed in general terms. It can reflect our convictions, ensure consistency, and allow for its own revision in the event of conflicting and recalcitrant consequences. In short, it will guide action. To construct it we produce a range of paradigmatic possible choice-situations, and give the choice to be made in each, in some in favour of the worst-off and in others in favour of the badly-off. In any actual choice-situation we decide which paradigm is most applicable, and choose accordingly. Such a rule, which has many analogues, can give us what is as satisfactory as a guide of the ordinary kind, expressed in general terms.

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It may be rightly anticipated that the proposed response to the question of well-being is not a complete answer to it. It has nothing to say of groups of the better-off taken by themselves, say the poorly-paid and the better-paid in rich societies, and their cardinal or ordinal positions. If it were to come about that there were no more of the badly-off, as defined, the principle would have no further use, or rather it would instruct us only to see that no badly-off came into existence. That the principle has nothing to say of any distributions of wellbeing, if there are any, that do not affect the badly-off, is a matter of moral concentration. It is a matter of concentration on one human reality, a reality not about to disappear. There is no serious embarrassment in the breadth of the principle, in its being an incomplete answer to the question of well-being. An incomplete answer is not an irrelevant answer. It may be, as in this case, that answer which is taken to be most significant. The conviction here, put quickly, is that what has priority over any other principle for the distribution of things among the better-off is a principle about famine and miserableness and the other kinds of distress.

4

Policies, Equality-Practices

The initial statement of the Principle of Humanity was that we are to have actually effective policies whose end is to make better-off those who are badly-off. What are those policies? There is the policy to be considered, first, of helping the badly-off without at all affecting the well-being of the better-off. If the pie of well-being can be enlarged by a method which does not at all lessen the shares of the better-off, that is to be done. We must act, if we can, on the familiar instruction to raise up those below rather than drag down those above, to level-up rather than level-down. But could we act effectively by only this policy? Could we, for example, simply increase the various material and other goods, the means to well-being? Alternatively, could we transfer sufficient material goods from the better-off without reducing their well-being? The first idea supposes that we are in something like a circumstance of realisable abundance or plenitude. The supposition is sufficiently uncertain as to make a reliance on it impossible. The second idea is a reasonable one. The better-off waste a great deal. Indeed we waste mountains of means to well-being. Still, it is unclear that we can rely on this alone. We need more than the first policy.

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The second possibility to be considered, then, is precisely a policy of transfer of the means of well-being from the better-off to the badly-off, in the knowledge that this will reduce the well-being of the better-off. It is maintained by many, of course, that there is a serious question as to what extent we can do this. It is maintained, as it has been for long, that policies which greatly or considerably reduce the means of the better-off will in fact fail to be effective transfer-policies. It is also maintained, differently and extremely, that to subtract anything from the means of the better-off will be ineffective. Both claims rest on what is taken to be a fundamental fact of human existence, which is an incentive system’s connection with the total pies of means and of well-being, and hence the wellbeing of the badly-off. The need of the poor is that the rich be rich. The extreme view, that to subtract any significant amount of the means of the better-off in the world today would necessarily worsen the situation of the badly-off, is of course false. There is only the question of what extent of taking means from the better-off will in fact be successful transfer-policies. What extent of taking from the rich will help the poor? Of the inequalities in means, what fraction of them are in fact not necessary inequalities: those of which it is true that they are needed, given attitudes as they are or can become, in order to serve an end of the badly-off? Something related to this is certainly important enough to stand on its own as a policy, the third one. Necessary and unnecessary inequalities in means are in a way relative. That is, a favourable inequality’s being necessary is a matter of the attitudes of the person favoured by it. An inequality’s being necessary is a matter of its being a necessary incentive, and the latter is a matter of the person’s attitudes. He might change, and become less demanding about payment for using his abilities. There is the possibility of practices, not necessarily coercive ones, directed to changing attitudes, so that what are now necessary inequalities cease to be such and can become the subject of effective transfers. A fourth policy is implicit in what has been said of our fundamental desires, the first and third above all, those for a decent length of life and for freedoms of various kinds. It is also implicit in the policies we already have – policies, in a word, for reducing misery and the like. What the fourth policy comes to, then, is that we of course must strive not to act in a positive way to give rise to misery and the like – we must strive not to attack lives ourselves. So the policy is a prohibition on wounding, killing, torture, sexual violation, threat, intimidation and other violence and near-violence against individuals.

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Since this policy cannot possibly be an absolute one, cannot possibly rule out all uses of force by societies against individuals, or rule out an individual’s right to try to save his own life by force, the definition of the policy cannot conceivably be easy. It will be clear that it cannot be a prohibition on all terrorism and state-terrorism. It is a policy about which to think more fully not at this moment but only at the end of such an inquiry as is being taken forward in this book. A fifth possible policy of the Principle of Humanity, important to some, has to do with envy. It is claimed that some of the distress of the badly-off is owing to their envy of the better-off, and that this can and should change. We can take it that envy is a feeling owed to relative positions of the envious and the better-off, not to the absolute position of either. That is, the envious would persist in that particular part of their unhappiness owed to envy if both they and the better-off went the same distance up (or down) a scale of well-being. Perhaps, since envy also has to do with the means to well-being, the envious would feel in a way better if certain goods or means to the well-being of the better-off were destroyed, as distinct from transferred to the envious. We can, it is supposed, increase the well-being of the badly-off by putting an end to their envy. This fourth policy is related to the first. Both would help the badly-off without affecting at all the well-being of the better-off. There is a sixth and related possibility, which has to do with condescending pride, to give it a mild name, on the part of the better-off. There is satisfaction owed to relative position, to the fact that others have less of well-being or the means to it. This, like envy, is not a matter of absolute level. Condescending pride perhaps may be said to make some contribution to the situation of the badly-off, partly but not wholly by way of giving rise to envy or reinforcing it. An alteration of this pride, then, would somewhat improve the lot of the badly-off. Of these six possibilities of improving the lot of the badly-off, the fifth and sixth are not of great significance. It is to be kept in mind that they have to do with one element in one category of well-being, that of respect. The first, at least in part, and the second, third and fourth, are in my view policies that can reasonably be included in the Principle of Humanity. To say more of the second, about means-transfers that do reduce the well-being of the better-off, should we take it that the Principle of Humanity says nothing, in connection with transferring means and well-being from the better-off, of particular groups of the better-off? Thinking so would not be in accord with the spirit of egalitarianism. It must be that means are to be transferred first from those of the

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better-off who are better placed than others of the better-off. In terms of the rich societies and the general distinction, effective transfer begins with the better-paid rather than the poorly-paid. What limit is there to the transfer of the means of well-being from the betteroff? There is room for choice, but evidently distress must not be increased by the transfer of means. Transfer is not punishment. It is essential to remain clear about the goal of the Principle of Humanity. Despite certain possibilities of self-deception and propaganda, the goal is not to lower the absolute well-being of the betteroff. The goal is not to level down. That may happen, although the connection between well-being and what we have called the means to it – about which connection not enough has been said – is far from simple. It would be consistent with the spirit of egalitarianism to act only on the first of the five policies if it were anything like sufficient itself, rather than the second. To act on the second possibility is then not at all necessarily to be moved by a questionable or base impulse. It is to be moved by the greatest of concerns, that of improving the lot of the badly-off by an effective method. The project remains sufficiently human and proper when the active parties are the would-be beneficiaries. That this method may have the side-effect of reducing the absolute well-being of the better-off is another fact, consistent with the high moral standing of egalitarianism. A second and related point is that if we act on the second policy our goal is not that of changing the relative positions of the well-off and the badly-off. In particular it is mistaken somehow to identify or associate the end with envy. The goal of the enterprise is not to approximate to or secure an equality, a certain relationship. Certainly to transfer goods is to do something which has the side-effect of tending to equalise both goods and well-being. The hitherto badlyoff in well-being will have more of both, and the hitherto better-off will have less of goods and perhaps of well-being. If the goal of the Principle of Humanity were achieved, there would exist as a second side-effect the equality, so to speak, of all people being other than badly-off. Still, none of this is the end of the enterprise. It remains true, more important, that changing the relative positions of the better-off and the badly-off is not the goal when particular campaigns or practices have the specific aim of producing an equality of goods, or of approximations to one, as a means to the end of the Principle of Humanity. Such campaigns or practices in certain contexts are the most effective ones. One person one vote is an example. Others, involving material goods, make the correct assumption that a given group of people are in the same need, or

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roughly equal in their capability to secure well-being from identical shares of resources. Variants of this consideration, that the goal of the Principle of Humanity is not relative, and of the previous consideration, that the goal is not the dragging down of the better-off, apply to the stipulation that in transferring goods from the betteroff, the first to be affected should be those best placed, including the better-paid rather than the poorly-paid in the rich societies. The Principle of Humanity can now be more fully stated, as follows: Our end must be to make well-off those who are badly off, by way of certain policies: (1) increasing means to well-being and, more surely, transferring means from the better-off that will not affect their well-being, (2) transferring means from the better-off that will affect their well-being, those at the higher levels to be affected first, and observing a certain limit, (3) reducing the necessity of inequalities, and (4) allowing only what can be called, without definition for now, necessary violence. Further, these policies are to be pursued in part by way of practices of equality.

5

Humanity and Equality

The Principle of Humanity, in earlier versions of this essay and earlier editions of this book, was spoken of, rather, as the Principle of Equality. What is more, arguments were advanced for that name. The matter is larger than a merely terminological one. A proper sense of any principle is or should be conveyed by what it is called. It was my idea, in the past, that a proper sense of the thing was given by speaking of it as the Principle of Equality. My reasons were as follows. The first consisted in several facts mentioned above. These are the two side-effects of concern for the badly-off, these being equalisations or a tendency to them. A second reason, more important, was the noted fact that in many situations and contexts, involving similar need and capability, the most reasonable way of helping the badly-off in well-being is by aiming at an equality of material goods and so on. This is not always true, and that it is not always true is important. Still, it is true enough to go a good way by itself toward making the principle’s name natural. There was also the third reason that the principle has an excellent claim to be regarded as the principle which has most directed

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egalitarian struggles throughout history, although these are not too easily defined. It is mistaken to suppose instead that these struggles have been informed by, say, the Principle of Any Equality, or the Principle of Greatest Equal Well-Being. These latter principles, as explained, are concerned with relative position, and may have the consequence that the position of the better-off in well-being must be reduced even if this does not improve the absolute position of the poorer-off. These principles may also have the consequence, perhaps intimately connected with the previous one, that certain means to well-being are to be destroyed. These would be means of value to the better-off but for some reason of no use to the poorer-off. By way of brief support for the proposition that egalitarianism has in fact been informed by the Principle of Humanity rather than these others, let us take egalitarianism to have consisted in struggles identified by demands for (a) giving ‘to each according to their needs’ or ‘equality of welfare’, (b) ‘equality of opportunity’, and (c) ‘equal respect for all’. Were the struggles so identified aimed at equality of well-being, any equality of it, with the possible consequences just mentioned? Were they instead aimed at helping the badly-off? The answer is plain enough. It is plain despite the fact that egalitarianism, like all other human endeavours and traditions, has often enough fallen into confusion, excess, and absurdity. Those who have been concerned to satisfy the needs and wants of the impoverished and the degraded have not been aiming at a relationship – an equality, any equality. One may be led into supposing so by the truth that they have often had the subordinate aims of which we know, equalities of means to well-being. But there is no reason, to repeat, to confuse their means and their end. They have not had an end which might have been served by destroying food, say, or trying to make sickness or poverty or disdain universal. They have not sought to have everyone equally in need. Nor is it really arguable that they have had the end of the Principle of Greatest Equal Well-Being. Those who have struggled for equality of opportunity have been motivated by the vision of full lives for those who have not had them because of want of education or the like. Whatever they have demanded about the distribution of educational resources they have in the relevant sense not been levellers. They have not sought an equality of ignorance, or poor education for everyone. Much the same can be said of those who have been moved by the demand for respect. My fourth reason for the name the ‘Principle of Equality’ seemed the strongest. It has to do with the second reason but certainly is

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distinct. To use any other name, including the ‘Principle of Humanity’, would make it more likely, to say the least, that the principal means to the principle’s end would not get a proper attention. The principal means to the end of helping the badly-off was the means of securing certain equalities of material goods and so on. This, part of the second policy mentioned above, seemed to me fundamental. It was something passed by or resisted. It seemed to me of fundamental importance that the fundamental moral principle, by its name, should convey the essential means to its end, a means which commonly is ignored or obstructed. Well, I think differently now. The overwhelming reason, as perhaps you will anticipate, is that the great end of the principle, its raison d’ˆetre so to speak, should not be lost sight of. It sums up a morality of humanity, fellow-feeling or generosity. That is its nature, a concern and determination having to do with people in distress, people with bad lives. Not to have this salient is no service to thinking about the matter. Also, it leaves some of us unclear about the moral imperative of the thing, and enables others of us to avoid it. To repeat something said in another connection, a good flag is not of uncertain colour. That does not substract any of the principle’s concerns with equality or put into question that it has been fundamental and central to egalitarianism. It must not distract us, either, from the campaigns for equalities of various kinds that are essential. In that connection, it is worth looking at the relation of the Principle of Humanity to familiar principles, rules, maxims, and propositions mentioning equality. If we accept the principle, it follows that some of these are to be accepted, others amended or rejected, rejected. To specify these consequences is to give further content to the principle. It is in part through its own corollaries that so general a principle becomes clearer. My other intention in surveying these consequences is to argue that independently of the Principle of Humanity we or anyway many of us are in fact committed to moving toward or inclined to many of them. It appears that we favour or will come to favour things in accord with the principle and not those that conflict with it. Hence my second intention is to provide one basic argument for the principle, that increasingly it reflects ordinary enlightened convictions and feelings.9 1. The day has passed when it could be said that the Principle of Formal Equality, fundamentally that like cases should be treated alike, is the only acceptable upshot of egalitarian reflection. Still, not long ago it was regularly supposed that what egalitarianism comes to is only this, to put it a bit more fully, that no one shall be held

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to have a claim to better treatment in advance of general grounds being produced. The principle can be realised in a racist society, or indeed in any society which follows rules of any kind. It amounts to an injunction to consistency. The Principle of Formal Equality is consistent with the Principle of Humanity, but cannot be said to amplify it, or to be a consequence or corollary of it. 2. There are a number of what can be called elitist maxims of equality. One, as the phrase is sometimes understood, is ‘to each according to his ability’. A second one, again as sometimes understood, is ‘to each according to his capacity to develop’. Others, more likely to go unstated, are ‘to each according to his race’, or ‘his colour’ or ‘his nationality’. There is the possibility of taking the second maxim differently, in such a way that it may be in accord with the Principle of Humanity. Truly elitist maxims conflict with the principle, and they also conflict with ordinary and growing attitudes and indeed with rising institutions. 3. What of the principle of retributive justice: to each according to his desert? To speak of punishment, it is essential to distinguish between its rules and the principle of retribution. If some people defend the rules, such as the rule that only the guilty are to be punished, by referring to desert, others do so as reasonably by referring to prevention, perhaps deterrence. If we now ask the question of what goals might be served by deterrence, one is obviously the goal of the Principle of Humanity. Certain rules of punishment, then, are in accord with, or indeed follow from, the Principle of Humanity. There is conflict of a kind between the Principle of Humanity and the principle of retribution, but there is room for a good deal of reflection on the latter. It is arguable that the principle, on full inquiry, reduces very roughly to this: a man is to have a penalty which (a) exactly satisfies the grievance-desire to which he has given rise; (b) will be in accordance with certain rules of equal treatment; and (c) will cost him less distress than it would someone else who had to undergo it.10 Given this view, it is possible to argue that the principle of desert is something whose materials testify to the correctness of the egalitarian’s conviction that the fundamental thing is the reduction of distress. It can be argued in any case that ordinary enlightened attitudes about the rules of punishment and about retribution go in the direction of the Principle of Humanity. Particular rules which cannot be seen as serving a tolerable deterrent end are at least suspect. It is not too much to say that the principle of retribution, despite the materials in it, is in decline.

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3. ‘To and from each according to his voluntary consents and agreements.’ This principle, if taken in some ways, including one which makes it a partial summary of a doctrine mentioned above, does fight with the Principle of Humanity. The central point is that voluntary agreements under a certain loose definition of voluntariness may be agreements which precisely defeat the aim of the Principle of Humanity. They may indeed serve to reduce the well-being of the badly-off. Under other restricted understandings of the quoted principle it is in accord with the Principle of Humanity. It is a part of well-being to have certain agreements protected. If the principle is taken in the first ways, so as to defend distributions of well-being that result from minimally voluntary agreements, as when a man agrees to work for a certain wage when the only alternative is deprivation for his children, there is declining support for it. 4. There are a number of what can be called weak principles and rules of equality. One is to the effect that we are to pay an equal respect to everyone. No one is to be ignored. Others specify certain absolutely minimal ways in which all people are to be treated. Their ‘basic’ needs, perhaps what we have identified as subsistencedesires, are to be satisfied. It will be evident that the Principle of Humanity conflicts with such principles, if going far beyond them is taken for conflict. These and other weak principles are no longer ordinarily regarded as sufficient. It is thought by very many that individuals have rights which go well beyond them. There has been a change in attitudes which supports the Principle of Humanity. 5. There is the matter of equal liberties, with liberties taken in some such way as in connection with Rawls. We have the proposition then that all are to be equal in roughly the legal, political, and intellectual rights defended in Britain and America. As already suggested, equal rights conjoined with unequal socio-economic powers are of limited value, to say the least. It is clear, however, that the Principle of Humanity is at least in accord with equal distributions of rights supported by like distributions of power. There is a change of attitudes in this direction. 6. It is said that those who make equal efforts are to be equally rewarded, and still more than those who make lesser efforts. Or, differently, those who not merely try but also succeed are to be rewarded in one way, and those who do not succeed, whether or not they try, are to be less well rewarded. Another related rule has to do with contribution, with or without effort or work. The first two rules, but hardly the third, are sometimes in accordance with the idea that we should have any favourable inequalities of goods

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and well-being which in fact are necessary to the end of the Principle of Humanity. There is the difficulty that it is far from easy to establish that those who carry forward certain jobs, and hence make larger contributions to the total means of well-being, would not do so without the rewards they are getting. Many jobs and careers bring great satisfaction. It is not surprising that many egalitarians are sceptical about arguments to the effect that company directors, say, must be paid more because of ‘the burden of responsibility’ which they carry. It may seem that in general this responsibility is not merely bearable but desirable, the proof being that it is much sought after. Also, to look back to the third of our policies in connection with the Principle of Humanity, it is to be kept in mind that the principle has the consequence that we should attempt to reduce what is necessary in the way of certain incentives for the given end. It is not possible to say that there now exists some ordinary support for only those rules of effort and productivity which in fact are consonant with the Principle of Humanity. Perhaps there is movement in that direction. Something of the same sort can be said of the desirability of changing incentive-demands. 7. The Principle of Humanity has informed egalitarian progress, and the latter has included the struggle for equality of opportunity. Still, there is more to be said about the latter, of relevance to a new and more perceptive egalitarian demand. Opportunity may be taken to consist in the use of certain resources, including abilities of other people. If we are to improve the lot of the badly-off, then we shall not always proceed most efficiently by securing equality of opportunity. We shall do so by securing a certain inequality. If we regard well-being as in part a function of opportunity on the one hand and the innate capabilities of individuals on the other, and it is the case that some individuals are less capable than others, we shall sometimes do best by securing that they have more opportunity. The Principle of Humanity does not derive from a view of life as simply a curious race where all attention is given to an equal start and no attention to some being lame. There seems little doubt that ordinary moral attitudes are changing in this direction. That is, there is movement toward proper inequalities of opportunity. We are now familiar with the idea of using more resources for the less able in education. There is also reverse discrimination. 8. If there are circumstances where capabilities and needs are unequal, there are also other circumstances, already emphasised, where given people are roughly equal in a certain capability or need.

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Here the Principle of Humanity requires that there be a rule of equal distribution of material and other goods. There are many such rules, guiding many practices. The rules have an insufficient acceptance. 9. Finally, there is the maxim ‘To each according to his needs’, with needs fully conceived. The maxim may be supplemented by another, ‘from each according to his ability’, understood in a certain way. Given narrow views of needs, noted above, the first rule falls short of being a version of the Principle of Humanity. Under another reading, the maxim is in fact tantamount to the principle. It is unique among maxims about equality, and cannot be regarded as merely one among many. So much for a survey of the consequences of the Principle of Humanity for maxims and other thoughts having to do with equality. There is another possible survey, more difficult but capable of shedding at least as much light on the Principle of Humanity. It takes us in the direction of the question of tactics and institutions mentioned at the beginning, and is of the general political consequences of the Principle of Humanity – political consequences traditionally conceived. If that principle is the principle of the Left, or the Right, or the Centre, then it is the principle of the Left.11 Indeed, the Left in politics is best defined by way of it. It is some parties of the Left, further, that have actually done most for progress toward realisation of the principle. Certainly the principle has sometimes been espoused by the Right and the Centre, but typically in conjunction with contradictory or conflicting impulses, among them the impulse to believe that great inequalities in distribution of the means to well-being are required to protect the grim state of the badly-off from being even more grim. The New Labour Party in Britain is an outstanding example, to me an awful one. Still, there can be disagreement about the political consequences of the Principle of Humanity. More should be said about self-deception in political philosophy, and also the pretence of self-deception, perhaps not only on the Right. The Principle of Humanity, secondly, at this time as at most times, is the principle not of conservation but of change. That of course is not the same as saying that it is the principle of the Left. The principle, thirdly, may or may not be the principle of democracy, by which is meant what we now call democracy – once known to others as bourgeois democracy, with some reason. The question is not easy, and certainly not one which allows for brevity. There evidently are many circumstances where the Principle of Humanity issues in democracy. The difficulty is that certain non-democracies can also

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be seen as in accord with the principle. Their far greater approximation to economic equality is of great importance. The principle, fourthly, has sometimes issued in revolution and it has indeed been behind acts and campaigns of terrorism. It has had to do, fifthly, with provision for free and equal expression of opinion. With the aid of certain suppositions it does provide an argument for some violence. With the aid of other suppositions it provides a more certain argument for free expression. It will be as well to say a word more on terrorism, and in particular on what can be called terrorism for humanity. What it is, by one rough understanding, is terrorism on behalf of humanity, on behalf of people in general who are in distress, all of them. What it is, by another rough understanding, is terrorism out of humanity, terrorism that at least may be owed to that disposition of some of us that is our humanity, generosity or fellow-feeling. Terrorism for humanity, by a third and best understanding, is terrorism directed to the end of the Principle of Humanity or a related end. It is terrorism more or less directed to the end of the Principle of Humanity – reducing wretchedness and other forms of distress. It gets its end from that morality of which I take the Principle of Humanity to be the best statement. You will not need assuring, I hope, that terrorism for humanity so understood is already right – that it is morally defensible by definition. That is no part of the idea.12 The Principle of Humanity is not the only conceivable formulation of the morality in question, and it requires enlargement in several ways. But surely it is the proper and true response to the question of well-being. It is, to my mind, the best formulation of the greatest of moralities. That is not so controversial a conclusion as some may too quickly suppose. There remains the other large question, that of tactics and institutions, to which we have latterly approached a bit more closely. There is more room for dispute here. Certainly some ‘egalitarian’ means to the end of making better-off those who are badly-off are ill-judged. But support for the Principle of Humanity is not to be identified with support for them. Nor should opposition to them give rise to opposition to it.

Notes 1. Systematic accounts of human goods, basic values and things which it is rational to desire for their own sake are not popular and have been attempted by few philosophers, for whatever reason. See W. K. Frankena,

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2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

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Ethics (Prentice Hall, 1973), p. 71ff.; Morris Ginsberg, On the Diversity of Morals (Prentice Hall, 1956), Chaps 7, 8; John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Basic Books, 1980), Chaps 3, 4. There is a further statement of my six goods at the beginning of Chap. 8. See also my After the Terror (Edinburgh University Press, 2002), Chaps 1, 2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 440ff., gives a satisfactory account, and defines self-respect as the most important primary good. There is an excellent discussion of forms of the assumption in Amartya Sen, Collective Choice and Social Welfare (Oxford University Press, 1970), Chap. 7. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford University Press, 1974), esp. Chap. 7, section 1. D. A. Lloyd-Thomas, ‘The Ones in Darkness’, Philosophy (1979), rightly notices a mistaken line of mine in favour of this, the Principle of Any Equality, and a correct one against in Three Essays on Political Violence (Blackwell, 1976), p. 41, p. 10. His main contention, that in so far as there is a connection at all between serious need and equality, it holds doubtfully between need and the Principle of Formal Equality, noticed below, seems to me mistaken. Need, as explained in this essay, is bound up with the Principle of Humanity. A Theory of Justice (see Note 2). Ibid., p. 61. More light is shed in Rawls’s later book Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1993), on which I have found it hard to get a grasp. Rawls’s theory of justice is a kind of culmination of liberal thinking, and more is said of it, particularly his argument for his principles and an ensuring obligation we have to obey the law, in my forthcoming revised edition Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy (Pluto Press, 2004). There is another argument, more basic, to the effect that it is the human nature of each of us to put our personal demands for satisfaction of our great desires ahead of the demands of others for the satisfaction of their secondary rather than great desires, and that consistency then commits us to the Principle of Humanity. See After the Terror, Chap. 2. There is also the argument for the principle that consists in the strength of its kind of thing, and the weakness or worse of other kinds of thing. See Essay 6 below on kinds of moralities. See my Punishment, The Supposed Justifications (Penguin, 1976) and also A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and Life-Hopes (Oxford University Press, 1988), Chap. 10. For a full discussion see my ‘Determinism and Politics’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1982. [To be reprinted in On Freedom (Edinburgh University Press, 2004).] See Chap. 8 below, and also Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy.

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Chapter Six

Consequentialism, Moralities of Concern, and Selfishness

The Principle of Humanity is certainly not unique. Whatever it really goes with, it has in fact been put together with some moral reasons and principles that are familiar, most of them less general and worked-out. The reasons of this group for the rightness of actions, political actions to the fore, have been spoken of as consequentialist, sometimes in sceptical or superior tones. They have been contrasted with reasons that are deontological, or, to speak more safely, non-consequentialist. The members of any real group of things, despite differences between them, share a strength or weakness. The first defence of any particular moral reason, if not its last defence, is the defence of its sort of thing. The paper that follows begins with two lists of reasons, the second being of those generally spoken of as consequentialist. Should all of the latter be on a list together? Is there a better way of classifying them? Do most but not all of these reasons have to do with moralities of concern? Are these the very stuff of morality, whatever else has got into it, something different from the thinkings of individuals and groups too taken up with themselves? What is to be said of the non-consequentialist reasons? My answers have not raised up the fallen world of moral philosophy. Should they have? Will something like them do so one day?

1

Two Groups of Reasons for the Rightness of Actions

Here are some kinds of reasons for taking an action to have been the morally right one, the one that had to be done.

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1. It was done out of a good intention or a pure good will on the part of the agent, or was owed to a virtue of hers. 2. It issued from the agent’s moral perception or intuition with respect to a situation, not the application of a general principle or a calculation of the consequences of possible actions. 3. Although it would give rise to distress or worse, the action was one of integrity, autonomy, or self-concern, perhaps in accord with the agent’s aversion to killing by her own hand, or true to her life-hope to achieve a success on her own. 4. It did not violate the agent’s natural, unique, or established relationship with someone, say her child, loyal friend, or benefactor. 5. It was true to the agent’s identification with or first concern for her own people, kind, class or group, perhaps within a homeland or society. 6. Despite being likely to have bad or awful consequences, even overwhelming, the action was in accord with a moral rule or law such as those against torture, lying, and promise-breaking. 7. It respected the constraint of someone’s moral or legal right, perhaps to a piece of private property, a job, or a pension. Here is a second group of reasons for taking an action to have been morally right; what had to be done. 8. It gave some people the chance of lives of decent length, say about seventy-seven years, or saved the life of someone, or saved someone from injury. 9. It made someone feel better, or gave them the means to grow, or a job, or hope, or self-respect, or a decent life. 10. It treated everyone the same, taking into account only their human needs. 11. It compensated someone for a loss, deprivation, or injury, or gave them help with a physical disability. 12. It secured, from among the possible distributions of goods in a society that would satisfy the reward-demands of producers, the particular distribution that would give most goods to the people with least. 13. It was likely to alleviate the condition of someone badlyoff in terms of the satisfaction of fundamental human

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desires rather than improve the condition of someone already well-off in this way. 14. It gave rise to or contributed to a more equal distribution of incomes, freedoms, opportunities, other particular goods, or well-being. 15. It was, of the possible actions, the one likely to produce the greatest balance of happiness or the smallest balance of unhappiness.

2

Traditional Conceptions of the Two Groups of Reasons

The first group of seven kinds of reasons is a mixed bag.1 Also, the reasons can be taken in different ways. Further, several particular ones assigned to different kinds might instead be put together in a new kind, and several particular reasons might be taken as inclusive of others or maybe as being the same reason. It is also true that several may conflict. None of this will affect my inquiry. If the first group of kinds of reasons is a mixed bag, they are not in the bag by chance. They can all be taken and have been taken in such a distinctive way as to share a certain nature. They may then be labelled as non-consequentialist or deontological reasons. There are also conflicts and other relations within the second group of reasons, but it is also possible to take these reasons in a distinctive way, as sharing a nature, and hence to label them consequentialist or teleological reasons.2 The two lists of reasons give us definite subject-matters. Not all discussions in this neighbourhood of moral philosophy have had this advantage. Also, the second list reduces the prominence given to Utilitarianism in recent discussions of this group of reasons. It figures only in reason 15. To my mind the attention of opponents of these reasons to Utilitarianism has greatly distorted understanding of them. This has to do with the fundamental objection to Utilitarianism, the fact that it sanctions victimisation, injustice, and the like, as moral philosophers have long recognised. It justifies the punishment of a wholly innocent man when that maximises happiness or minimises unhappiness. It justifies a slave-class in a society when that produces the best total of happiness. To come to a critical overview of the two groups of reasons, which is my aim in this paper, it is not enough to take them in an unreflective way to have different natures, to have just a sense of their

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different natures. What are these natures? What articulated conceptions are we to have of the two groups of reasons? What really is the general difference between them? Shall we conceive of the first group, taken in the distinctive way, as not being about the consequences of an action? And the second as being only about the consequences of an action? Many philosophers still have the habit of doing so.3 But these two traditional conceptions, which may be called the wholly non-consequential conception and the wholly consequential conception, are definitely inadequate. That is to say that neither covers all the reasons in just one of the two groups. This inadequacy can be shown quickly. Consider reason 4 in the first group, about an agent’s close relationships. Consider in particular a woman who makes the life of her own child better when she could instead improve the life of another far less fortunate child. Her reason, as she somehow expresses it, is to the effect that she is benefitting her child. It is impossible, despite the theory of some philosophers to the contrary, to take the reason as not being at all about the consequences of her action. So it fails to fall under what we are contemplating as a conception of the first group of reasons, the purely non-consequential conception. There is the same upshot with reasons of all the kinds 3–7. Shall we then conceive of the first group of reasons as being about not only the consequences of an action? We can call this the partly non-consequential conception. Consider the woman again. We are now contemplating the idea that her reason has a part that does not have to do with the consequences of her action. We can register this idea by an emphasis in stating her reason. She is benefiting her child. Or we could go further and expand her reason. We could say she is benefiting the child with whom she has a natural relationship, or to whom she has a unique obligation. There are problems about this. For a start, any version whatever of her reason can be reformulated in a certain way. Thus we say that her reason is that her action has the consequence that the child with whom she has a natural relationship is benefited, or that her action has the consequence that the child with whom she has a special obligation is benefited. Nor can the causal prefixes be put aside as somehow adding no relevant fact – as some suppose the prefix ‘It is true that’ adds nothing to a proposition. What makes the causal reformulations possible, it seems, is a certain fact. It is that it is part of the resulting state of affairs that the benefit goes to the child with whom she has a natural relationship or to whom a unique obligation. This seems as unquestionable as, say,

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that it is part of the state of affairs that a person is benefited. So the partly non-consequentialist conception, which now appears to be misnamed, fails. In fact the reasons of the first group seem to be not partly but entirely about consequences. And there is the upshot that we thus have no distinction between the two groups of reasons. Will someone resist this by saying that it wasn’t her action, the one we are talking about, that made the child her child? And that the consequence of her action precisely conceived is to be taken just as a benefiting, say a feeding, or, better, a property of something’s being benefited, say being fed ? There is a lot to be said for this precision, a focusing on properties or events as effects, not states of affairs.4 If we are precise in this way, we can certainly say that a part of her reason did not have to do with consequences. But then, again, there will be no relevant distinction between this reason and a related wholly consequential reason, where someone benefits a child to whom they are unrelated. This is so because the latter reason will also have a part that does not have to do with the consequence of the action. It cannot fail to be a part of the latter reason that what is benefited is a person or indeed a child. So this precise understanding of the partly non-consequential conception makes it cover reasons of the second group. Again we have no distinction, but a wholly inadequate conception instead. There is the same story, although I will not spell it out, with all of the reasons 3–7. So the partly non-consequential conception of the first group of reasons fails or at least faces serious difficulties. Consider the second group of reasons and the traditional idea that they fall under the wholly consequential conception – that they are reasons about only the consequences of an action. We can doubt this already, by way of the precise idea of effects. But that is not all. In particular, consider 11, which justifies an action by the fact that it will benefit someone for a loss or the like in the past. This evidently does not have to do only with consequences of the action. It also has to do with the person’s previous life.5 What of 13, alleviating the condition of someone badly-off in terms of fundamental human desires rather than improving the condition of someone better-off? It is again plain that the antecedent state of the person is part of the reason. So with 12, about people with least goods, owed to Rawls, and some other reasons in the group. Thus the consequential conception of the second group of reasons fails or at least faces serious difficulties. There are the same difficulties with what is a kind of elaboration of the wholly consequential conception of the second group of reasons.

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One philosopher who has been much concerned with the two groups of reasons takes it up. He may be taken to characterise reasons of the second group, or rather the related theories, which comes to the same thing, in a certain way. . . . we may think of a consequentialist theory . . . as coming in two parts. First, it gives some principle for ranking overall states of affairs from best to worst from an impersonal standpoint, and then it says that the right act . . . is the one that will produce the highest-ranked state of affairs. . . . Obviously, there can be as many different theories of this type as there are criteria for ranking overall outcomes.6 That is to say that reasons of the second group involve ranking the outcomes or consequences of possible actions in some way or other, in terms of happiness produced or whatever else, and also involve a rule specifying the right action as the one producing the best outcome, say the most happiness. Plainly this elaborated conception is inadequate in running afoul of the fact that some reasons of the second group have to do not only with consequences of actions but also with antecedent facts. Shall we now try to pile on epicycles, try to refine the partly nonconsequential and the wholly consequential conceptions so as to make them adequate? This would be the endeavour of saying more about the causal relations of actions to other things, but, so to speak, without looking into the very nature of the terms of those relations. I am not the first to think this would be pointless, and hence to take as misleading the persistent labels ‘Non-Consequentialism’ and ‘Consequentialism’.7 In my view there is something more promising to think about. If we want to inquire into the relative worths of the two groups of reasons, we not only want adequate conceptions, conceptions true of just the right things, but conceptions that are enlightening. That is, we want conceptions that display the supposed general recommendations or creditable general natures of the two groups of reasons, the grounds for sympathy with them. Suppose we can somehow refine or enlarge the two causal conceptions, so that they nevertheless remain of the same kind, somehow having to do with causal relations, the categories of non-consequences and consequences, but so that each is clearly true of all the reasons of only one group. This will not help us much. It will not give us enlightening conceptions. This is so, to put the matter one way, because the new causal conceptions, like the old ones, will almost certainly be true of many reasons so far uncontemplated, and, crucially, certain unwelcome

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or intolerable reasons. They will licence including these reasons in one or the other of the two groups. Take the following reason: 16. The action was in accordance with the folk-law that because it is midsummer day the life of a maiden must be sacrificed. That, understood in a certain natural way, will go into the first group. It could accompany or be included in 6, about supposed moral laws, of which there are a lot, not all of them benign. So will a lot of terrible reasons actually held by people today, some of them having to do with races or ethnic groups. Or take the following reason having to do with personal integrity, which will go into 3 in the first group: 17. The torturing was true to the agent’s deep commitment to a political movement or regime, not just done as part of a policeman’s job. And take three other reasons: 18. The action was the one most likely to increase the amount of the colour mauve, taken as an intrinsic good, and hence not as a means to well-being, or to fairness, or to anything else whatever. 19. The action gave someone what she deserved – a penalty or distress, a reward or satisfaction, or some other fitting return – for her action or activity. 20. The action, although it was likely to improve lives less than another, had as a likely consequence more actions in the future arising from a good intention, a pure good will, or a virtuous disposition. These will go into the second group according to a causal conception.8 So will certain counterparts of 20, similar reasons derived in the same way from the other reasons in the first group. But sympathisers with each group of reasons will reasonably resist the proposed additions to their group. Perhaps mere taxonomists of some sort might not mind the additions, but my concern is with the two groups of reasons taken as advanced for our real moral consideration. It is not clear to me what general ground could be given by sympathisers with the first group of reasons for resisting the inclusion of 16 and 17. But sympathisers with the second group will resist 18, about mauve, on roughly the ground that the action in question would not improve lives at all. They will also resist 20, about more morally-motivated actions in the future, on roughly the ground that such actions may not improve lives. They will resist 19 on roughly

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the ground that lives will not be improved at all, but worsened, in the cases where what is said to be deserved is a penalty or distress. Reasons of retribution and the Retribution Theory of punishment do not fit into and have never been taken as fitting into the moralities of sympathisers with the second group of reasons. Indeed, these sympathisers will wish to consign retribution to the first group of reasons. It can be said to consort with 6 and 7, about rules and rights. Also, reasons of retribution will actually be accepted by some sympathisers with the first group of reasons.9 The plain fact is that sympathisers with each group of reasons have some conception of it, an enlightening conception, which cannot possibly be caught by the generality of talk of just causation – talk of just non-consequences and consequences. What they are sympathising with are what they regard as good or at least contemplatable reasons. You are very unlikely to be able to distinguish good from bad consequences by sticking to thinking about causation itself. So with non-consequences. More might be said about the unenlighteningness of the traditional conceptions of our two groups of reasons and of other related conceptions of them, some of which concentrate on or start from the first group rather than the second.10 But, to come instead to a main contention of mine, implied in what has been said of the need for enlightening characterizations, there is a large fact about the two groups of reasons that so far has been overlooked.

3

Moralities of Concern

The second group of reasons, to recall a few of the descriptions already used, has to do with longer lives, stopping distress, giving hope, improving lives, alleviating the condition of the badly-off, treating everyone the same, securing equality of liberty or whatever, compensating someone, helping those with least, increasing happiness and decreasing unhappiness. We might also say, as others have, that the reasons of the second group have to do with wellbeing, preferences, utility, interests, or choices.11 It is best to persist in what, despite its great generality, is the strongest and perhaps the most traditional characterization of these reasons. They have to do with the satisfaction and frustration of desires. All the reasons, to speak in this general way, indeed too general way, recommend an action by the fact that it is likely somehow to reduce frustration or increase satisfaction – usually taking into

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account the time before the action as well as after. Such a fact about an action is one whose moral relevance and force is uniquely indisputable. Nothing else, save perhaps certain facts having to do with very simple kinds of fairness, has the same dominance. It is mainly this character of the second group of reasons which is the ground for rejecting the inclusion of 18–20, about mauve, penalties, and more morally-motivated actions in the future. Talk of satisfaction and frustration in general needs more clarification than can be given here. Certainly a desire of mine is not satisfied in the relevant sense just if the proposition I desired to be true becomes true, but unknown to me. Nor is the desire satisfied if no more is the case than that I know that the proposition has become true. Satisfaction is not merely a cognitive fact, but involves emotion and conation – and a valuable behavioral criterion. So satisfaction in the right sense is not something different in kind from truth-based happiness. Related things are to be said about frustration, which will turn out of be more important than satisfaction. None of this implies, by the way, that all we should value or aim at in our lives is happiness or other states of feeling. There is the question of what satisfactions and frustrations are to be counted in by the moralities from which the reasons of the second group come. The answer is that all satisfactions and frustrations without exception, of whatever kind, ought to be included. None of these moralities needs to weaken itself by placing any sociallyconcerned or even widely agreed limitation, let alone any highminded or delicate one, on the satisfactions or frustrations to be considered. That would be a limitation very likely to have less moral relevance and force than satisfaction and frustration in themselves. This is not to say that these moralities cannot organise themselves in one way or another, say by using fundamental categories of satisfaction and frustration, perhaps defined by length of life, freedom and power, respect and self-respect, and so on. Nor, of course, does the inclusion of all satisfactions and frustrations mean that the moralities in question will take the fact that an action will satisfy or frustrate some one desire as being itself a sufficient reason for the action. Each action will be judged in relation to the satisfaction or frustration of other desires affected by it. Thus the fact that an action will satisfy or frustrate some single desire will often be overborne by the fact that it will frustrate or satisfy other desires, then or later. That does not take away from the indisputable moral dominance of satisfaction and frustration.

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There is something else quite as important about all the reasons of the second group except for the Utilitarian reason 15, that an action was likely to produce the greatest balance of happiness or the smallest balance of unhappiness. All the other reasons, 8–14, give a general priority to reducing frustration as against increasing satisfaction, and of course to reducing greater as against lesser frustrations, and to increasing lesser as against greater satisfactions. All of the moralities in question except the Utilitarian one, if faced with choosing between saving people from distress, when the alternative is a large increase in well-being for people already well-off, would choose the first option. This is to describe reasons 8–14 in a very general way, of course. The moralities in question will necessarily include particular decisions and rules giving further expression to this commitment. I shall henceforth refer to it, however, just as the commitment to giving priority to reducing frustration. The commitment is explicit in 8, about saving life and so on, and 9, about making someone feel better and so on, and 11, about compensation and the like, and 12, about a distribution that favours those who have least goods. It is both explicit and generally stated in 13, about alleviating the condition of someone badly-off. This reason derives from the Principle of Humanity.12 The principle, as you have heard, is that we should have actually effective policies to remove people from a defined class of the badly-off. The priority given to reducing frustration also enters into the reasons in 10, 12, and 14, all having to do with equality, although it is not made explicit. The various egalitarian moralities in question are all of them fundamentally concerned with raising up those below rather than bringing down those above. Despite what has sometimes been said in opposition to these egalitarianisms, it is impossible to suppose that they would take their goals to be perfectly achieved if they attained an equality of educational opportunity owed to there being no schools at all, or an equality in liberty that involved minimal liberty when more was possible, or equal low incomes for all rather than equal higher ones for all. To return to the Utilitarian reason 15 for a moment, after which we will no longer be concerned with it, the same concern can be argued to have entered into Utilitarianism as a principal motive, perhaps the principal motive – despite the disastrous failure to express it in the classical Principle of Utility. The failure, as already remarked, opens Utilitarianism to the fundamental objection that it sanctions victimisation, injustice, indeed suffering, as a means to the greatest

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balance of happiness, usually a greater balance produced by making the already happy still happier. In sum, reasons of the second group have to do with satisfaction and frustration, and 8–14 give priority to the reducing of frustration. It is not easy to find a label or characterisation for 8–14 and the associated moralities, one that conveys the fact of priority. Without supposing that I have yet found any recommendation of them, I shall call them moralities of concern, and also speak sometimes of reasons of concern.13

4

Reasons of the First Group – Understanding Them

What is to be said of the first group of reasons? We have concluded so far only that the traditional conceptions of them are not adequate and enlightening. It has seemed that reasons of kinds 1 and 2, about good intentions and the like and moral perception and the like, can be taken as not having to do with satisfaction or frustration at all, including the agent’s. This has often been insisted upon. Certainly the agent with the good intention or the moral perception may have in mind that her action will give rise to certain satisfactions. But, we have been told, the given reason for the rightness of the action is not these satisfactions. We are to understand that someone else can both accept such a reason for the rightness of an agent’s prospective action and believe that the action will in fact not give rise to the satisfactions. With such a reason it is the intention or the perception alone that recommends the action. What of reasons of kind 3, having to do with an agent’s preserving her integrity or the like? It has seemed possible to think of these reasons in the same way as with 1 and 2. That is, the recommendation of preserving one’s integrity does not have to do with satisfactions or frustrations. On the other hand, it seems possible to think of reasons of kind 3 differently, as having to do with preserving self-respect, where self-respect is a satisfaction to the agent and its loss a frustration. I do this action rather than that mainly because the result of doing that would be the distress of my being unable to live with myself. With the remaining reasons of this group, 4–7, it is difficult to suppose they do not have to do with satisfaction and frustration. It has been done, no doubt, but it is difficult. With respect to 4, about close relationships, and in particular the case of the woman again,

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her concern is surely for the satisfaction of her child. So with 5, about one’s own people or nation or the like. With respect to 6, about moral rules or laws, what must surely come to mind are the pains of being deceived, the hurt of being let down by a promise-maker, the agony of torture, and so on. Something of the same sort is surely true with 7, about rights. What we have then is that some of the reasons of the first group have seemed not to have to do with satisfaction or frustration at all, and some, under a certain natural understanding, do have to do with it. We can leave it unsettled whether reasons of kind 3, about integrity and so on, go into the first sub-group or the second, or, by way of two different understandings of them, into both. If you wish, leave open the same possibilities with 4–7. But there remains a salient fact about the first group of reasons. It is that those of them so understood that they do involve satisfaction and frustration do not involve giving a strict priority to reducing frustration. Consider 3, about integrity and the like. Someone who uses such a reason to defend an action does of course have the intention of defending the action against the consideration that another action would reduce frustration. In particular, to speak of a central case, there is the intention of defending the action when on the whole it gives rise to frustration and another action on the whole would give rise to satisfaction. The reason in question, which is advanced against reasons of the second group, would of course lose its point if understood otherwise. The same is true of all the remaining reasons of the first group, 4–7, and is given natural expression in several of them. In sum, reasons of the first group either do not have to do with satisfaction or frustration at all; or they do not give strict priority to reducing frustration. I do not mean, of course, that the moralities in question never take the reducing of frustration as decisive. Certainly the mother in 4 is not likely to choose any degree of satisfaction for her child as against any degree of frustration for another. What is nevertheless true of reasons 3–7 of the first group is that they do not involve a commitment to reducing frustration, and often go against such a thing. They are not associated with moralities of concern. There remains the possibility of coming to a positive rather than a negative characterisation of them, and also an enlightening one. In particular 3 and 4, about integrity and the like and close relations, have sometimes been called agent-relative moralities. Before taking a closer look at the first group of reasons, let me put in a traditional reminder. We have it that reasons 3–7 can be taken as

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having to do with satisfaction and frustration, but not with the priority of reducing frustration. That is not the only thing to be said about satisfaction and frustration, and priority, in connection with these reasons. Consider 6, the reason for an action that it was according to a moral rule or law such as those against lying, promise-breaking, and torture. Those three subject-matters will also fall under certain prohibitions in moralities of concern. They will fall under prohibitions derived from the main principles of those moralities. To speak of the morality that I advocate, based on the Principle of Humanity, it has in it a rule, in practice as good as absolute, against torture. It also contains severe rules against lying and promise-breaking. The situation is the same with 4 and in particular the mother and child. Certainly moralities of concern, consistently with what has been said of the strict priority to reduce frustration, will not only allow agents to give a certain precedence to the satisfactions and frustrations of certain other individuals, but will actually place an obligation on agents in this regard. These moralities will allow for and call for what can be named, perhaps irritatingly to philosophers of a certain sensibility, a division of moral labour. Each of us is likely by nature and situation to be well-placed, perhaps uniquely wellplaced, to act on a morality of concern with respect to a few other individuals or a group, or indeed one people. There is the general conclusion, then, about reasons 3–7 as we have understood them, that to reject them would certainly not leave nothing in their place.14

5

An Argument for Reasons of the First Group?

Let us now look more closely at the first group of reasons. Is there a general argument in favour of them? Is there a promise of an argument for them overlooked by their proponents or perhaps assumed but not articulated? Reasons of kind 1, about a good intention, a good will, or a virtue, are offered by philosophers as, and we are taking them as, reasons for the rightness of an action. In fact there is everything to be said for taking them differently, as reasons, or the ordinary reasons, or indeed the only possible sort of reasons, for something else. That is moral approval of the agent with respect to that particular action, or, as we can as well say, crediting her with responsibility for it. Also, of course, that an agent did not act out of a good intention or the like is a reason for morally disapproving of the agent with respect to the action, holding her morally responsible for it. In fact, this is

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how the reasons in 1 would naturally be taken if they had not been introduced as being reasons for the rightness of actions. It is also possible to take them as reasons among others for approving of the agent morally in a more general way, not having to do only with the action but rather with respect to a longer period of time or even her whole life – approving of her as a good, human, or decent person. Can it be supposed that the issue of the rightness of actions must be regarded as identical with or somehow reducible to either of the two issues of moral approval of agents, more likely the first? That there is some kind of conceptual reason or reason of logic for doing this, as distinct from a general moral inclination? And hence that the reasons in 1, although not best described as reasons for the rightness of an action, have everything to be said for them as just such things? Might something of the same sort be true with other reasons of the first group, above all those in 3 having to do with integrity and the like? Presumably any such argument must fail. The first issue, the rightness of actions, is not conceptually or logically identical with or reducible to the others. Admittedly there is a logical connection between right actions and the first and fundamental kind of moral approval of agents. Right actions, to speak generally, are necessarily those done by agents who: earn this moral approval; and are agents of the best available knowledge and judgement. But this logical connection casts no doubt on the fact an action obviously can be held wrong while the agent is morally approved of, and an action can be held right while the agent is morally disapproved of.15 Obvious cases of the first sort will involve honest or honourable mistakes by the agents as to the likely consequences of their actions. There is no possibility, then, of moving from reasons for moral approval to a conclusion about the rightness of action.

6

An Argument against the Reasons Understood as not Involving Satisfaction

As remarked, it has seemed that reasons 1 and 2 in the first group, about good intentions and so on, and moral perception and so on, can be taken as not having to do with satisfaction or frustration at all, including satisfaction or frustration of the agent. It has seemed that 3, about integrity or the like, can also be taken in this way. We allowed the same thing to be a remote possibility with the remaining

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reasons of the first group. Is there a general argument against these reasons so understood? Is there anything that stands in the way of their actually being significant reasons for the rightness of action? Let us detach for a moment from our particular subject and indeed from moral philosophy. What is a reason for an action? I am not talking about a reason for the rightness of an action. Rather, the question is one from the philosophy of mind: What is a reason of whatever kind for an action? In what can be called the primary sense of the term, a reason for an action is what it is in the agent, a mental state or event, that actually gives rise to the action. Speaking very generally indeed, such a mental state or event consists in a propositional content and a desire – a thought of something, and a desire with respect to that thing. A reason for action in this primary sense is something had or experienced. A reason for action in a secondary sense is something given to another person or oneself. It is, in brief, linguistic rather than mental. It is evidently to be understood in much the same way as a primary reason. A reason in the secondary sense is a propositional content and a representation having to do with desire. In short, what I do in giving a reason for action is to represent something as desirable.16 This view, while rightly the subject of elaboration of various kinds, is and always has been taken as truistic in the philosophy of mind, for good reason. It is a ruling idea owed to the most fundamental of our beliefs about ourselves, that it is wanting something that gives rise to our actions.17 To return now to moral philosophy, what are reasons for the rightness of actions? What is the general nature, that is, of claims such as 1–20 if they are given as reasons for the rightness of actions? So far we have not reflected on that question. One part of the answer, obviously, is that necessarily they are in a certain relation to reasons for action in the secondary sense. Each of them is something that could be given to someone as a reason for an action. What I do in saying of a certain possible action that it would be right since it would make someone feel better is necessarily to give a reason for the action. What I do in saying of a past action that it was right – as in the case of 1–20 – is to give a reason for present or future actions of the same kind. Again this is truistic. The fact in question is bound up with the general truths that the point of morality is the guidance of action, and that its subject-matter is that of how things ought to be in so far as we can affect them. What is to be taken from this lightest of sketches, firstly, is that a reason for action in either the primary or the secondary sense necessarily involves a propositional content and a desire – if anything

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purports to be a reason for action, and in particular does not involve desire, it is not what it purports to be. Secondly, anything that is a reason for the rightness of action is itself a possible reason for action – anything that purports to be a reason for the rightness of action, and that is not a possible reason for action, is not what it purports to be. A certain general conclusion follows. To repeat, it has seemed that reasons 1 and 2, about a good intention or the like and moral perception or the like, do not have to do in any way with satisfaction or frustration, and in particular any satisfaction of the agent. It has seemed that 3, about integrity or the like, can also be understood in this way. We allowed the same possibility with other reasons of the first group. But if these various reasons do not have to do with satisfaction or frustration, they clearly do not have to do with desire. And if they do not have to do with desire they cannot be reasons for action and hence cannot in fact be reasons for the rightness of actions. The large conclusion, again, is that if these supposed reasons for the rightness of an action are understood as not having to do with satisfaction or frustration, this actually precludes them from being what they are supposed to be. It may be useful to state the argument even more generally, as follows. Anything that is a reason for the rightness of an action must possibly be motivating; some so-called reasons for the rightness of an action include no reference to any desire, and hence cannot possibly be motivating; hence they cannot really be reasons for the rightness of an action. It may also be useful to approach the conclusion by way of 18, about mauve, which is unfamiliar and without confusing associations. If we exclude from our minds any thought of mauve’s being satisfactory, to the agent or anyone else, we have no reason at all, and hence no reason for the rightness of an action. The same is true, by parity of reasoning, with all the reasons of the first group if they are taken in the satisfaction-excluding way. So the option of taking reasons 3–7 in the satisfaction-excluding way turns out not to exist. If they are reasons for the rightness of an action at all, they have to be understood in the other way, as having to do with satisfaction. What is to be said of 1 and 2, about good intentions and moral perception, where some have in fact gone so far as to insist that they are not understandable in terms of satisfaction? The short answer is that despite protestation they can only be understood in this way. It seems indisputable that they have been and can be reasons for the rightness of actions, and hence are motivating. The truth must be

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along the lines that to give a reason from 1 or 2 is in fact to depend on satisfactions associated with the action. Very likely it is to depend on satisfactions and frustrations involved in reasons 3–7 – it is to give such reasons in a tacit way. Such a thing is familiar outside of morality. We value something for its dispositional character, which is tacitly to value it for its effects.

7

A View of Most of the Reasons Understood as Involving Satisfaction

Consider the reasons in 3–7 understood in the satisfaction-involving way. Thus taken, they recommend actions by way of satisfactions and frustrations, but do not give a strict priority to reducing frustration. Thus the reasons in 3 may take an agent’s own satisfactions in an action to count for more than the frustrations of someone else. The reasons in 4 may do this for an individual closely related to the agent, say her child. The reasons in 5 may do so for other persons, say her people or nation. Relatedly, one reason in 6 may not only place a bar on torture, as moralities of concern may also do, but in addition go further and somehow exclude from any consideration the situation of others than the agent and the immediate victim. It may be that such a reason against torture would prohibit it even in the case where it could be known without doubt that it would prevent more torture of other victims. The reasons in 7, finally, may put the satisfaction of rights-holders above the frustration of others. Do these propositions support a certain judgement that only deference or delicacy can keep from coming to mind? It has to do with selfishness, taken in the ordinary way as too great a concern for one’s own satisfactions and frustrations, too little for those of others. The judgement is that the reasons in question, whatever else they may be, are reasons of selfishness. They are reasons of selfishness, more precisely, since they depart from giving a strict priority to frustration, in favour of the agent or related persons, and if, as is common enough, they are advanced by the agent; or they are advanced by persons whose circumstances are like those of the agent; or they are advanced by those who in fact are the related persons.18 The second case is exemplified when, to think of reason 7, the holder of a piece of private property defends a claim of someone else, the agent, to the agent’s piece of private property. Moral philosophers seem to have supposed that since reasons 3–7 are reasonably presented as reasons for the rightness of actions, and

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do seem to be such reasons, and thus do seem to be within the general category of moral reasons, they are unlikely also to be reasons of selfishness or cannot also be such reasons. This supposition seems to have been supported by another, that there is some test for being a moral reason, and that this test is passed by the reasons in question. One test that may be thought of is impartiality or consistency. To revert to 4, this impartiality is exemplified by the mother who not only favours her own child, but allows that other mothers have as much reason to favour their children. It is as much exemplified by 3 and in particular the reason having to do with one’s own integrity, and by 5 and in particular the reason having to do with the agent’s own people. In each case, others are allowed to have the same reason for the rightness of their actions. So with 6 and 7. Consistency has of course entered into definitions of moral judgements and morality. It is necessary but it could not possibly be sufficient by itself for regarding something as a moral reason or in particular no more than a reason for the rightness of an action. This is clear from just the fact that factual or inductive reasons have the same character. Suppose I think that putting something on my table will make it collapse, and give as my reason that the thing weighs 1,000 pounds. I accept, as I must, that another thing of a like weight will make a like table sag. Indeed some reasons of selfishness satisfy the test of impartiality. If I defend putting myself first, I may grant that in consistency you too can do so. What is the relation between moral reasons and selfish reasons, or, better, the relation between reasons as moral and reasons as selfish? Consider the following ordered list of reasons for the rightness of actions, some of them now familiar. An action (i) satisfied a starving woman’s need for food, (ii) cured a child of a disease, (iii) gave someone a fair share of something, (iv) was in the fullest accord with the agent’s own rights, (v) preserved an agent’s integrity, maybe as an egalitarian, (vi) advanced one’s socially useful career, (vii) preserved the dignity of one’s family, (viii) gave one’s son a somewhat unfair advantage in an examination, (ix) caused hatred of someone who injured the agent, (x) allowed someone to suffer agony or die in order to avoid some bearable loss to oneself, (xi) violated the land of an entire people and took savage steps to drive them out of it. I have arranged the reasons (i)–(xi) roughly in descending order, or rather, as it turns out, roughly in two descending orders. As you go down the list, as seems evident, the reasons become less moral and more selfish. Several reasons at the top of the list are paradigmatic reasons for the rightness of an action. Several reasons

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at the bottom of the list are, to say the least, paradigmatic reasons of selfishness. That is the first thing of importance about the list. The proposition that the reasons taken in descending order are less moral and more selfish need not be owed to a prior definition of morality. Rather, it can be owed to particular convictions, intuitions, or responses with respect to the reasons – convictions and the like that must guide any attempt to define morality. Also, and quite as important, the proposition need not be owed at all to an articulated morality of concern, or even an informed sympathy with such moralities. We do not need a moral theory in order to make the given responses to such a list of reasons. We need what we have, particular convictions. There need be no circularity or question-begging in the imputations of selfishness. There is a second thing of importance suggested by such a list, connected with the first. The reasons are also roughly in a descending order with respect to giving priority to reducing frustration. Those at the top will be taken as clearly coming from moralities of concern. Those at the bottom are nothing of the sort. Those in the middle, (iv)–(viii), involve a compromise. What is suggested by this, since as the reasons do also fall into a descending order from paradigmatically moral to viciously selfish, is that morality is bound up with the priority of reducing frustration. A third thing illustrated by such a list, the main thing for present purposes, is that it is a mistake to regard all reasons as falling into exclusive categories, the moral and the selfish. This is just to overlook the common fact of mixed motivation. Some reasons are both moral and selfish. Reasons are in different degrees moral and selfish. Arguably this is true of (iv)–(viii). And, to come to my main conclusion here, it seems that an ordinarily reflective person unused to recent moral philosophy would also say exactly this of what is our main concern, our original reasons 3–7 – about integrity and the like, relationships, identification or membership, certain moral rules, and rights. Such a person would say that they partake of both morality and selfishness. They are instances of mixed motivation. Given this, what is to be said of reasons 3–7? Let me limit myself to one thing. The dispute between sympathisers with these reasons and sympathisers with the reasons of concern 8–14 of the second group is best seen in a certain light. It is not best seen, so to speak, as a dispute or difference internal to morality. It is in fact a kind of moderated continuation of another dispute. This is the ancient dispute between those described as altruists and egoists, or moralists and amoralists. Defenders of reasons 3–7 understood in the way we

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have been considering do in fact stand in a relation, not a distant relation, with traditional egoists or amoralists. There is another connection between selfishness and the reasons 3–7 understood in the satisfaction-involving way. It has to do with what was noticed earlier, impartiality or consistency. Consider 4 again and in particular the mother and her child. She allows, we suppose, that another mother has a like reason. What if they meet, in a situation where there is food for only one child, and each mother demands it for her child? We can contemplate the same situation of conflict with respect to 3 and in particular personal integrity. Each of the preservation of my integrity and the preservation of your integrity depends on the possession of some one thing. So with 5 and 7, say about one’s own people and legal rights, and, although imagination is required, with 6 and torture. To stick to the mothers, each of them seems to have two choices. Her first choice is to seek to find some new reason for the rightness of her action in demanding the food. Very likely, if she seeks a new reason, she will come to what was earlier called a reason of concern. She will at least approach a morality of concern. Her child, she says, is more hungry or less nourished. Her second choice is to persist in her demand and, crucially, to refuse to allow that the other mother has a reason to favour her child. But then, in her inconsistency, she doesn’t have one either. She cannot claim to have a reason for the rightness of her action. The moral of the story seems to be that in situations of conflict reasons 3–7 are likely to be abandoned in favour of a reason of concern, or the agent must give up attempting to justify her action. If she takes the latter course, her position is one of pure amorality or pure selfishness. We can draw a related moral, of course, without imagining actual conflict. Thinking critically about one’s own reasons of the kinds 3–7 is enough for this.19 I end here with a comparison.20 It was said earlier that moralities of concern, despite giving a strict priority to reducing distress, can have in them rules that are counterparts of those involved in reasons 3–7, including a rule against torture.21 Thus they can include rules that allow agents in a way to have a regard for themselves and persons to whom they are especially related. Supporters of the Principle of Humanity, say, can defend those self-regarding actions of the two kinds that are in accord with their principle. They, and supporters of fairness or justice generally, can certainly go further in this regard than Utilitarians. Is there then less difference than may be supposed

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between moralities of concern and the ones involved in the first group of reasons we have been considering? In a way that is clearly true. But there remains a difference. The moralities of concern are in a certain sense principled. That is, each sets a specific limit to self-regarding actions, a limit fixed by its own fundamental principle. That is something that is not done by the other moralities with which we have been concerned. It is for this reason that the moralities of concern are not open to the judgement of selfishness.

Notes 1. For advocacy of or sympathy with reasons of the first group, see Bernard Williams, ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, in Williams and J. J. C. Smart, Utilitarianism For and Against (Cambridge University Press, 1973); Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981); Amartya Sen and Williams (eds), Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 1982), especially the Introduction; Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Fontana, 1985); Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford University Press, 1982); Scheffler (ed.), Consequentialism and its Critics (Oxford University Press, 1988) and in particular the included papers by Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, and Philippa Foot; Scheffler, Human Morality (Oxford University Press, 1992); John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason,’ The Monist 62, 1979; David Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth (Blackwell, 1987). 2. For advocacy of or sympathy with reasons of the second group, see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971); articles by Derek Parfit, Peter Railton, T. M. Scanlon, and Scheffler in Consequentialism and its Critics (see Note 1); articles by R. M. Hare, John C. Harsanyi, and J. A. Mirrlees in Utilitarianism and Beyond (see Note 1); Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford University Press, 1989); ‘The Principle of Humanity’ above (Essay 5). However, the latter egalitarian morality has not been adequately worked out in personal as distinct from social or political terms. 3. For example, Kagan, The Limits of Morality, p. xi (see Note 2); Anne Maclean, The Elimination of Morality (Routledge, 1993), p. 81; Philip Pettit, ‘Consequentialism,’ in Companion to Ethics (Blackwell, 1991), ed. Peter Singer, p. 231. 4. See the discussion of the nature of effects and causes in my A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience, and Life-Hopes (Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 14–16, or Mind and Brain (Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 14–16. 5. This strong point is owed to James Griffin, ‘Consequentialism’, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1995), ed. Ted Honderich. I disagree, however, with Griffin’s wide use of ‘consequences’, such that they are not confined to what follows an action.

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6. Scheffler, Consequentialism and its Critics, p. 1 (see Note 1). Cf. Sen and Williams (eds), Utilitarianism and Beyond, pp. 11–14 (see Note 1). 7. See for example Roger Crisp, ‘Deontological Ethics’, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (see Note 1). 8. It needs to be kept in mind, with respect to 19 and its going into the second group, that we are contemplating a clarified or supplemented version of the wholly consequential conception of the second group, one that does allow that reasons of the group have to do not only with consequences of actions but also antecedents – a version that escapes the earlier objections, based on 11 and 12, to the unrevised wholly consequential conception. 9. The situation is complicated, but not much affected, if the attempt to justify punishment by retribution must be regarded, unusually, as resting on the satisfaction of retributive or grievance desires had by victims of offences and others. See my Punishment, The Supposed Justifications (Polity Press, 1989). 10. Williams’s ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’ (see Note 1), important for the whole subject of consequentialism, includes a good discussion in its second section. For brisk criticisms of the adequacy of other conceptions than the traditional ones, see Crisp, ‘Deontological Ethics’ (see Note 1). 11. Cf. Sen and Williams, Utilitarianism and Beyond, pp. 3–4 (see Note 1). 12. ‘The Principle of Humanity’ (see Note 2). 13. Sen and Williams speak of such moralities as involving a ‘drastic obliteration of useful information’ (Utilitarianism and Beyond, p. 5 (see Note 1)). They have in mind other ways of comparing people, those indicated in the first group of reasons. Sympathisers with 8–14, of course, in so far as their fundamental principles are concerned, regard this ‘drastic obliteration’ as precisely the great moral strength of their principles. However, the fundamental principles also give a qualified role to other ways of comparing people. See the last two paragraphs of this section and Note 14. 14. As will be understood, I do not agree with Williams (Moral Luck, pp. 51–3 (see Note 1)) that there are large problems in the way of combining, say, the Principle of Humanity, with injunctions related to 3–7. On the contrary, the principle has one source in such injunctions. Nor do I agree that supporters of such general principles of justice or fairness, or Utilitarians, are at all committed, by their principled support of moral rules, to support something else, a moral elite that arranges for ordinary people to abide by the rules unthinkingly. One form of this would be the ‘Government House utilitarianism’ referred to by Sen and Williams, Utilitarianism and Beyond, p. 16 (see Note 1). 15. The matter is more fully discussed in my A Theory of Determinism, sections 7.6, 7.7 or The Consequences of Determinism (Oxford University Press, 1990), sections 1.6, 1.7. For a rapid dismissal of the distinction between ‘judging the act and judging the agent’, see Williams, Moral Luck, p. 53 (see Note 1). (Cf. p. 84.) The dismissal rests, I take it, on refusing to distinguish between a good man’s dispositions and his

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16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

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deliberations – in effect, refusing to judge a good man’s deliberations as mistaken. No reason is given for this. A reason for an action in a third sense, used elsewhere in this paper but not relevant here, is simply the thing thought of or represented either in a primary or, in a way, a secondary reason – in short, a property of an action. I am aware that what is a truism in the philosophy of mind has also been subjected to interesting examination in moral philosophy. That examination is one of several things that must go unexamined in this overview of the two groups of reasons. See Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford University Press, 1970); John McDowell, ‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?’, Supplementary Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 52, 1978; Philippa Foot, ‘Reasons for Actions and Desires,’ Supplementary Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 61, 1972. The suspicion of selfishness is clearly not the suspicion that agents who act on these reasons are ‘morally self-indulgent’, where this is to be taken up with a self-image, engaged in a kind of self-esteem. The latter suspicion, more easily dealt with, is considered by Williams. See ‘Utilitarianism and Moral Self-Indulgence’ in Moral Luck (see Note 1). Cf. Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 63. In Human Morality (see Note 1), Scheffler considers relations between ‘self-interest’ and reasons of the first group, and touches on the matter of the politics and political philosophy associated with them. For the use of some of these reasons in one political tradition, see my Conservatism (Westview, 1991). See, for example, R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford University Press, 1952), Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 1963), and Moral Thinking (Oxford University Press, 1981). There is more on consequentialism, for it and against the opposed moralities, in Chap. 8. See above, pp. 123–4.

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Chapter Seven

Hierarchic Democracy and the Necessity of Mass Civil Disobedience and Non-Co-operation

A large majority of our politician-moralists give the appearance of believing they are on firm ground when they take our democracy as a premise for conclusions of one kind and another. The conclusions tacitly include a common one about their own worth to us all, as distinct from the worth of unelected persons. Other conclusions may have to do with the wars into which they lead us. It is left unclear by these worthies and their sincerity what our democracy comes to. This paper first considers answers to the question, and in particular an unreflective and then a somewhat more enlightening conception of the liberal democracies. It then comes, of necessity, by way of inescapable economic facts, to the answer in terms of Hierarchic Democracy – and to how this kind of government stands in terms of the morality of humanity, generosity or comradeship of which you have heard. The policies of our hierarchic democracies are not the policies of humanity. What remains is the question of what to do. By what means can we seek to have our societies rise up out of their indecency? Certainly we need to do more than vote. The American Henry David Thoreau was one who saw and said that. He should give sight to and be heard by his countrymen and women, and us.

1

Ordinary and Pluralist Conceptions of Liberal Democracy

Suppose we make a list of what we take to be the democracies, the societies and states sometimes called the liberal democracies to distinguish them from other actual and possible democracies.

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The liberal democracies will include, certainly, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Japan. Suppose we then try to conceive of or understand them in a general way. We may arrive at what can be called the Ordinary Conception of liberal democracy. It boils down into three propositions. 1. The people, legitimately influenced before and during an election, choose representatives who promise certain policies, and afterwards the people legitimately influence the elected representatives and in particular the government. 2. There is universal suffrage in the election – the equality of one person, one vote – and approximate equality in both the influencing of the people before and during the election and their subsequent influencing of the elected representatives. 3. The society’s actual policies are chosen by the representatives and in particular the government in accord with their promises, by voting among themselves, and the policies do take effect. The Ordinary Conception is no good.1 For a start there is the hard and consequential electoral fact that in liberal democracies it is typically not the people who vote and thereby choose the representatives, but only about half the people. The half who vote are those for whom it is easier to vote, and they are certainly not themselves representative of the whole electorate. If more people voted, the outcome would at least usually be different. There is also the fact, partly having to do with governmental structure, say an upper house and its powers, and perhaps a Supreme Court, that the society’s actual policies can rarely be regarded as just the policies promised by the elected representatives. Also, an impressionable leader of a democratic government, after listening to his conscience or more likely becoming the victim of some sense of supposed historical reality, may take it into his head after an election to go to war. He may do so without having been anything like open to and subject to the influence of the people. This was so with Blair in the case of joining the American war against Iraq in 2003. A third fact is that the choosing of representatives by means of the election is far better seen as made not by individuals, as the Ordinary Conception supposes, but by groups of individuals with a common interest – interest-groups. So with the two kinds of influencing, first of the voters before and during the election and then of the representatives afterwards. This is also better seen as

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done by interest-groups. The fact of interest-groups is fundamental to all outcomes of the democratic process. Indeed the first two facts, about who actually votes and about actual policies being different from promised policies, are better described in terms of interest-groups and a history of them. Such a criticism of the Ordinary Conception is not unusual. If you remain inclined to go on thinking about individuals rather than groups of them, several simple reminders may give you pause. One is that understanding and explaining anything whatever is typically served by generalisation, the use of general categories. No one dreams of explaining brain function only in terms of single neurons, or of characterising a Trollope novel sentence by sentence – or of writing a history of a war in terms of individual soldiers and pilots as against regiments, divisions, airforces, and armies. The second reminder has to do with organisation. Interest-groups need not be organised, but some are well organised and many are to some extent. A collection of individuals with a common interest or purpose achieves more when somehow organised. Fully to explain some outcome, you may really have to attend to facts of organisation and hence groups. What can be called the Pluralist Conception of the liberal democracies also boils down into three propositions.2 1. Interest-groups legitimately influence the choosing, and do the choosing, of representatives who promise policies, and after the election legitimately influence them and in particular the government. 2. There is universal suffrage, and there is approximate equality among the interest-groups in influencing the election and then the representatives. 3. Actual social policies are chosen by the representatives, to some degree mindful of their promises, and the policies take effect to a considerable degree. This conception is like the Ordinary Conception in sharing a feature with pretty well all conceptions of liberal democracy. Almost all conceivers or definers of liberal democracy introduce into it an idea of equality at various points, including the influencing of voters and then of representatives. One reason is etymology, usage, and political tradition, all of which associate democracy with equality. Another reason is that democracies involve more political equality than dictatorships and oligarchies. A third is that the definers of democracy want the kind of government they are conceiving to be true to or defendable by certain general principles about

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equality. They take equalities to be essential to the defence of liberal democracy. Those who favour something like the Pluralist Conception of liberal democracy, however, like those who favour the Ordinary Conception, are also under a certain pressure – the real world. For one thing, the owners and other officers of mass communication organisations, like Rupert Murdoch, have more influence on elections and on what happens subsequently than, say, London shop owners or bus drivers, let alone London beggars. That is to say, of course, that the mass communicators have more legitimate influence, influence owed to activities in accord with the rule of law. So those who favour something like the Pluralist Conception cannot take the liberal democracies to involve any plain or downright equality. What they say instead, in a variety of ways, is what is said in the second and vague proposition of the Pluralist conception – there is approximate equality among the interest-groups. Is the Pluralist Conception better than the Ordinary Conception? Above all, is it better at explaining how a society comes to have its actual policies? Not much. The conception is vague, and hence far from really explanatory. It is vague about more than equality. It is vague about what we are to count as the interest-groups. All that we have so far is that the voters and influencers divide into such groups, each with a common interest. We do not know what they are, let alone what degrees of power or influence they have. Are we to think of men as against women such a group? Property-owners? Businessmen? Farmers? Religious fundamentalists? People in a geographical region? Mass communicators? Radicals? Americans of divided loyalty, including a loyalty to Israel? All is uncertainty here – and that is not the only problem, or the greatest. Let us try again.

2

The Hierarchic Conception

In the liberal democracies, there are great differences between tenths of population ranked in terms of wealth. In the United States, the one-tenth of the population that is richest has about 71 per cent of the society’s personal wealth. The bottom four-tenths have a fraction of 1 per cent. The bottom tenth has effectively none at all. So the best-off tenth has thousands of times the wealth of the worstoff tenth. The figures are not greatly less extreme for at least most of the other liberal democracies mentioned at the start – Britain

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and so on. As for income, the best-paid tenth in the United States has about 30 per cent and the worst-off tenth has considerably less than 2 per cent. Again there are related figures for the other liberal democracies.3 We might well proceed simply in terms of these figures for wealth and income, but we can also think about something else. It is partly a job for economists, and a job they seem not to have done, but obviously amounts and percentages of wealth and income can be combined into a single summative measure. Thus we get a new ranking in terms of what can be called economic power. Without further ado, let me offer a proposition that is certainly an underestimate, almost certainly a grotesque underestimate. It is that the top tenth of population in terms of wealth in the liberal democracies has at least thirty times the economic power of the bottom tenth. Economic power correlates with fundamental things. That is why it is important. The thing relevant now is political power, understood as power legitimately to influence and to enter into the process that issues in a society’s actual policies. How strong is this correlation in ordinary circumstances? That will depend on what determinants of political power cluster together with economic power. At least most do, partly because at least most of these determinants of political power can be bought. Let me mention just two different ones: knowledge itself as against confusion and ignorance, and constraints on the range of promised policies really on offer in an election, whatever wider range the law or the constitution may allow. Without further ado, let me offer another proposition about the top and bottom tenths of population in terms of economic power. It is that in ordinary circumstances the top tenth has at least fifteen times the political power of the bottom tenth. The tenths in between have corresponding political powers. There is this hierarchy in political power, determined or pretty well determined by a hierarchy in economic power. This is fast political science, following on the fast economics. For several reasons it seems to me no apology whatever is needed. It is the economists and political scientists who have to catch up, not we who have to slow down. The liberal democracies determine or largely determine real life and real death, in their own societies and elsewhere. In thinking about them, it is a moral failure not to engage in impressionistic if well-based quantitative judgements when other superior judgements have not been made. It is not loose thinking, but necessary thinking. It is worth keeping in mind, too, that the 15 to 1 ratio is also almost certainly a grotesque underestimate. I offer

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it not because it is near the truth in its implication that the ratio is near to 15 to 1, but because it is indisputable. Certainly more can be said and questions can be answered. Could it be that voters and influencers in the top tenth have in the end somewhat less than fifteen times the political power of the voters and influencers in the bottom tenth because the members of each tenth are also members of other interest-groups? The truth is almost certainly the opposite. Members of the top tenth are more likely to be members of other groups that are more rather than less influential. They are more likely to be members of more influential rather than less influential social and racial groups, for example. So with geographical groups, occupational groups, groups in terms of degrees of access to politicians, groups with degrees of access to the media and of legitimation or certification by it, and so on. To think in contrast of the bottom economic tenth, its members are likely to be members of no other interest-group of significant influence. The Pluralist Conception of the liberal democracies, as we saw, is vague about both equality and interest-groups. This can now be remedied, by taking a reasoned decision as to what are the dominant interest-groups in ordinary circumstances, what interestgroups dominate in the process that issues in actual social policies. I happen to be no Marxist, or ex-Marxist, or market-Marxist either. You need not be any of them to conclude that the dominant interestgroups are best thought of as exactly all the ten tenths of population in terms of economic power. We thus come to a third conception of the liberal democracies, one that is a lot clearer about equality. 1. Interest-groups legitimately influence the choosing, and do the choosing, of representatives who promise policies, and, after the election, legitimately influence them and in particular the government. 2. There is universal suffrage, but gross inequality among the interest- groups in the influencing and choosing, with the best-off interest-group or tenth of population having at least fifteen times the political power of the worst-off. 3. Actual social policies are chosen by the representatives, to some degree mindful of their promises, and the policies are somewhat effective. That is the Hierarchic Conception of the liberal democracies. Or, as we can say, referring not to the tokens or particular systems but to the type, that is Hierarchic Democracy. It assigns an explanatory dominance to the hierarchy of interest-groups identified by economic power, or of course the lack of it. This idea is not well expressed by

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saying that the upper tenth or the upper tenths have more political power, which is of course true. It is that all the ten interest-groups, including the ones at the bottom with small or insignificant amounts of power or none explain the process that issues in a society’s actual policies. That is, they are most explanatory of the policies. It is all these groups, rich to poor, not other groups we can think about, men or farmers or whatever, that are important. You can almost always explain actual policies on the basis of these groups alone. I will not try to be precise about or make a quantifying guess about, say, how often the top two or three interest-groups get their way. This and related things remain vague. As you have heard, we should and indeed must not fail to see and say truth because of the difficulty of being precise on all matters. There is no need whatever, in thinking of the liberal democracies and the lives in them and outside of them, to be restrained by a punctiliousness of economists and political scientists in general. There is an obligation not to be restrained. Do you feel that it is somehow tolerable that one citizen should have at least fifteen times the political power of another? That a kind of realism makes it tolerable? That that’s the way things are is a reason for things being somehow acceptable? Maybe that the inequality is not properly described as gross inequality? Well, British history several centuries ago had in it the reform of the electoral systems for the reason that it was intolerable that some citizens had two votes and the rest one. The inequality of 2 to 1 was not acceptable. There have been very many changes in democracy, increases in democracy, that were fought for and finally accepted as necessary despite being changes to inequalities not near to the inequality of 15 to 1 in political power. Further, it is now thought to be more or less the principal recommendation of our liberal democracies that each citizen is equal to every other with respect to voting. One person, one vote. Well then, how could it possibly be somehow tolerable that one citizen should have at least fifteen times less power to decide the nature of his or her society than another? If that is not gross inequality, intolerable equality, what is? The remarkable thing here is not the insistence that an inequality of at least 15 to 1, and quite possibly 150 to 1, is gross inequality. What is remarkable is the extent to which conventions of thinking, what was in the recent past called an ideology, can impede judgement on a matter that is perfectly clear. If a family, or a club, or a university department, or a committee, or a board of directors, or a

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government, or the states or provinces in a federation, or the nations in an international organisation – if any of these were faced with the proposal that there be a disparity of at least 15 to 1 in powers, they would of course regard the proposal as absurd. There is no reason for taking Hierarchic Democracy as less absurd.

3

Hierarchic Democracy and Humanity

Consider now Hierarchic Democracy’s actual policies, and, more important, the contribution of those policies to the satisfaction and frustration of fundamental human desires, desires not only of its own citizens but also of people elsewhere. A sketch of our fundamental desires, to my mind six in number, will perhaps bear repeating. We all want to live; to have lives of decent length. We want them for ourselves and for those close to us, first of all our children. In the hierarchic democracies, and mainly because of those systems of government, the lives of the poor are shortened, by something like six or seven years. This fact comes together with another one more awful, that the hierarchic democracies in the economically developed world continue to have a large role in securing cut-off lives for people elsewhere, say parts of Africa. The life expectancy for the people in a number of African countries is not about seventy-seven, as in Britain and the United States and similar liberal democracies, but about forty. It is as if some of our fellow humans were a different species.4 We all want not only the means that make for lives of decent length, but the further means that make for a certain quality of material life. The hierarchic democracies in the developed world deliver, for some of their citizens, only food and drink for something like subsistence. They deliver wretched rooms, if rooms at all, and grim environments, chronic bad health, no means of travel, hardly anything to sweeten life. Our hierarchic democracies, too, continue to be more than implicated in the grisly or terrible deprivations of this kind suffered by other societies; say river blindness or child labour. We all want freedom and power, of various kinds. To speak of political freedom, what the hierarchic democracies give to their own citizens is indeed gross inequality. That is the nature of these political systems. If we need to remember that this inequality is better than dictatorship or oligarchy, we also need to remember that it is appallingly inferior to other possible systems of democracy. As for

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the contribution of our own hierarchic democracies, say the United States and Britain, to freedom and power in many other societies, two policies are followed. Our governments seek to advance Hierarchic Democracy where that suits the interests they serve, and they support dictatorship and oligarchy where that does so. Latin America was invaded by the United States about 100 times in the twentieth century.5 As these words are being revised, the United States and Britain are carrying on a war in Iraq for a mess of reasons, as the rest of the world outside of America sees, the clearest of which reasons would indubitably justify war by the civilised world on neo-Zionist Israel for its violation of Palestine. We all want respect and self-respect. In a number of our hierarchic democracies over the past decade, to mention but one relevant fact, millions of men and women have been denied the minimal dignity of a job. Most of the governments in question have not taken perfectly possible direct action, historically proven, to alleviate this destruction of morale. It is as if the New Deal had never happened. Their international economic policies have entrenched poor countries and peoples in the debt and poverty that perpetuates something near to denigration and self-denigration. We all want to be together with other people. That is, we want satisfactory personal or familial and also wider human relationships. These are in important ways dependent on the satisfaction and frustration of the fundamental desires already noted. In the hierarchic democracies, to speak only of the desire for a sense of membership in a society, it is frustrated for many by poverty and powerlessness. We all want, finally, the goods of culture. No one would prefer ignorance or shallowness or no skills, whatever disdain they may pretend for what has been denied to them. For some in the hierarchic democracies, education is made difficult, entertainment trivial, and group traditions unsustaining. Again these facts are in connection with the frustrations already noted. With this desire for culture, and with the desire for human relationships just mentioned, there is little need to speak of the grim contribution of our hierarchic democracies to other societies. So much for a sketch of the contribution of the actual policies of our hierarchic democracies to the satisfaction and frustration of fundamental desires. The sketch should not come as a surprise. It is something that might have been expected of systems of government and societies that are instances of Hierarchic Democracy, systems dominated by the general fact about grossly unequal economic

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and political power. More important, these contributions of our systems of government to many human lives make up an argument for the correctness of the Hierarchic as against any other conception of them. These are not contributions that suggest that our systems are correctly described by either the Ordinary Conception or the Pluralist Conception. In this connection, return to the idea that there is something excessive or otherwise questionable in saying that our democracies are systems of gross inequality. One might well consider the size of an inequality, its true size, in terms of its human consequences. You have heard a bit of the human consequences of our hierarchic democracies. Enough, I suggest, to make grossness clear. In sum, the contributions of our hierarchic democracies to the cutting-off and deadening of lives is morally criminal. It would remain so if, as so many have hoped, those contributions were slowly decreasing. That is, the situation would remain morally criminal if it were slowly improving. The truth, however, is that since about 1979 the conditions of life we are considering have been worsening. England has been dragged down by politicians whose policies are vicious and whose characters, if they matter, are therefore at least suspect. The United States has used still less of its wealth to help even unlucky Americans, let alone anyone else. In Britain we look away from a certain dismal truth too quickly now, like the photographs put in the newspapers by such charities as War on Want and Medical Aid for Palestinians. The truth is that since about 1979 the poor in Britain have continuously been made poorer while the rich have been made richer. It is grim, to me unspeakable, that this litmus test for the indecency of a society, passed by the Thatcher governments, has now been passed by six years of New Labour governments. No amount of callous dissembling touches this. As a result, the poor are dying younger than before. Samuel Johnson, no radical he, was right to say that a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilisation.6 We might add that reducing an indecent provision for the poor is the true test of a kind of barbarism. The account given of Hierarchic Democracy’s contributions to satisfaction and frustration, as you will have noted, has not been a merely factual one. It has included a moral judgement. Let me make that judgement or feeling more explicit by reminding you of a principle from which it derives. That is the Principle of Humanity. In one formulation, as you have heard, it is as follows. Our end must be to make well-off those who are badly off, by way of certain policies different from those that are at least ordinary

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in our hierarchic democracies. The policies of humanity are: (1) increasing means to well-being and, more surely, transferring means from the better-off that will not affect their well-being; (2) transferring means from the better-off that will affect their well-being, those at the higher levels to be affected first, and observing a certain limit; (3) reducing the necessity of inequalities; and (4) allowing only what can be called, without definition now, necessary violence. These various policies, as remarked earlier, are to be taken forward by a dependence on certain practices of equality, in particular practices of political equality. The Principle of Humanity seems to me the foundation of a uniquely decent morality. It may bring to mind again the ubiquitous political philosophy of John Rawls, and in particular his principles of justice,7 but it is not like them. Let me say a word or two more to distinguish the Principle of Humanity from them. The Principle of Humanity is not subordinate to or constrained by any other principle. The principle that is most like it in Rawls’s philosophy is subordinate to a principle of traditional individual liberties, including a liberty having to do with private property. Rather, the Principle of Humanity incorporates a limited respect for such liberties. This is primarily a matter of its attention to the fundamental desire for freedom and power. Further, the Principle of Humanity differs from the particular principle in Rawls’s philosophy that is most like it, the Difference Principle. This specifies allowable and obligatory socio-economic differences or inequalities between people. The Difference Principle states, in sum, that we may and must have any socio-economic differences or inequalities that make a worst-off group better-off than it would be without those differences. The idea behind this is that some people may demand favourable socio-economic inequalities in return for their contributions to society, but other people benefit from the contributions. The most familiar variant of the principle in ordinary political thinking is that we are to have any inequalities in wealth that make the poorest less poor than they would be without the inequalities. That is a thought related to ‘the trickle-down theory’ of Thatcherism. The Difference Principle seems to me wonderfully indeterminate. It is a striking instance of the hesitancy and uncertainlty of liberalism. What I have in mind is that, despite some of Rawls’s remarks to the contrary,8 it appears to justify, indeed oblige us to have, wholly different possible societies. This depends on what silent assumptions are made about the demands of the supposed social

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contributors. Hence it makes no determinate recommendation about societies. Let me show this. Imagine a society where social contributors do not to any significant extent demand favourable socio-economic inequalities for their contributions, which is to say extrinsic incentives, and where socioeconomic goods are distributed very equally. This society would have the full support of the Principle of Difference. So, on the given assumption about certain demands, the principle justifies a society of utopian egalitarianism. Now imagine a society in which supposed social contributors are more rapacious even than social contributors in our societies. They demand rewards that are in excess, whatever degree of excess, of the rewards demanded in our own societies. It is a society of whatever degree of socio-economic inegalitarianism. This, it seems, is also justified by the Difference Principle. The Principle of Humanity is in this crucial respect different. It is fundamental to it, as remarked, that we reduce demands by social contributors for economic rewards. It recommends the formation of and reliance on intrinsic rather than extrinsic incentives. It is therefore greatly less indeterminate. Could it be other than morally superior to Rawls’s Difference Principle and his liberal political philosophy generally?9

4

Mass Civil Disobedience and Non-Co-operation

Let us take stock. We have an understanding of the liberal democracies, the Hierarchic Conception. We have an idea of the contributions of our hierarchic democracies to fundamental satisfactions and frustrations, and of the change since about 1979. We also have a principle by which to judge these political systems and their contributions, the Principle of Humanity. That brings us to the question of whether those of us whose moral convictions are in some accord with the Principle of Humanity should support Hierarchic Democracy. Should we be Hierarchic Democrats?10 One alternative that may still come to an occasional mind is support for what there is reason to call Egalitarian Democracy, which is to say the communist states, also known with some reason as people’s democracies. Another idea, certainly a better one, is support for true compromises between Hierarchic and Egalitarian Democracy.11 But support for people’s democracies and/or the true compromises are not the alternatives I wish to consider. My main reason is not

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that Egalitarian Democracy has been disproved by the battle between West and East and the fall of Communism, as many absurdly say, or that both these alternatives may seem utopian dreams. As for the true compromises, I am attracted to them and take them to be possibilities towards which we can try to work. My reason for considering different alternatives to Hierarchic Democracy from these forms of government has to do with a certain concern for means rather than ends – different possible or conceivable means of getting one or another of a certain range of governmental and economic systems rather than a specific system chosen in advance as the end. There is nothing unusual about this concern with means rather than specific ends. It is in fact often the case that we can and should make up our minds about a means before we have made up or can possibly make up our minds about a specific end. There may be a strong or even overwhelming case for trying to move in some general direction, toward a set of possible outcomes, between which we have not made a final choice, and may never have the chance of making a final choice. This range of outcomes, as in the present case, may have as their most important characterisation just that any of them would be more morally tolerable than the situation in which we are. Should we then adopt some means, other than or in addition to just the means of Hierarchic Democracy, of moving towards better systems of government and societies of moral decency? More particularly, should we adopt means other than legitimate ones? That is, should we adopt means other than those in accord with the rule of law? Still more particularly, should we, in our hierarchic democracies, not limit ourselves to influencing voters and governments by activities in accord with the rule of law? What may still come to an occasional mind is violent revolution, where that is a Hierarchic Democracy’s being replaced by means of force by an Egalitarian Democracy. But, as already implied in what was said of a concern with means, I do put aside the idea of revolution aimed at Egalitarian Democracy. Another reason for doing so is a belief that, whatever has been true in the past, a kind of compromise with our hierarchic democracies is now and will continue to be the only possibility of progress towards moral decency. The supposed means of violent revolution is in fact now no means at all, since it is bound to be defeated by violence and repression. Such revolutionary action would be wrong on this ground alone, without reference to anything about any evils or shortcomings of Egalitarian Democracy itself.

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There are two other possible means to moral progress that come to more minds. One means is terrorism or political violence. It is welldefined as follows: a use of physical force that injures, damages, violates or destroys people or things, with a political and social intention, and whether or not intended to put people in general in fear, and raising a question of its moral justification – either illegal violence within a society or smaller-scale violence than war between states and societies and not according to international law.12 In at least its defiance of law, terrorism is in conflict with Hierarchic Democracy, but certainly not by definition aimed at replacing it by Egalitarian Democracy. The second means is mass civil disobedience and non-cooperation, also known as direct action. It too, since much of it departs from the rule of law, is in conflict with Hierarchic Democracy. But it too does not aim at replacing Hierarchic by Egalitarian Democracy. Mass civil disobedience in general, for present purposes, is to be understood as consisting in actions by very many people, actions that are illegal but non-violent, and have a political and social intention. Also, those who commit the offences in question may not seek to conceal the fact or to avoid the penalties.13 Mass non-co-operation, for present purposes, consists in actions with the same aim, but legal ones. The particular civil disobedience and non-co-operation that is relevant, of course, to speak more precisely, is the kind directed to the satisfaction of fundamental human desires that is so morally imperative and is called for by the Principle of Humanity. Some historical examples of civil disobedience are the Civil Rights campaign against racial discrimination and the campaign against the Vietnam War, both in the United States, and the campaigns against that war and against nuclear arms in Britain. As for nonco-operation in the past, it has mainly consisted of strikes, including general strikes, and boycotts, notably boycotts of products and services, including national products. Civil disobedience elsewhere has included the successful struggle for independence in India led by Gandhi, seminal for the tradition of civil disobedience. It has also included marches, demonstrations and occupations in Eastern Europe in the later and then the declining years of the Soviet empire. These actions played sometimes precipitating parts in political and economic transformations, non-violent revolutions. What is the general strategy in mass civil disobedience and nonco-operation? An idea owed to Rawls is too restricted and elevated. It is the idea of civil disobedience as a mode of address, an appeal within a nearly-just society to that society’s shared sense of justice.14

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Clearly there is no need to restrict civil disobedience to nearly-just societies in certain senses of that term. It might even be out of place in such societies. Perhaps, however, Rawls does not actually intend much restriction, since it may be that the nearly-just societies in his sense do actually include the United States and Britain. Such, I am tempted to say, is the moral perception of liberalism. It is also clearly not necessary for civil disobedience that there exists in a society something that actually deserves the name of a shared sense of justice. I doubt that anything ever does. Still, the general strategy in mass civil disobedience and non-cooperation does include a moral appeal. It is an appeal to act on what many already feel to be wrong, or an appeal to come to feel that something is wrong. But to say no more would be to underdescribe the strategy, and make less likely a proper judgement of civil disobedience and non-co-operation. Mass civil disobedience and non-co-operation is not just supplication. It is a kind of coercion, although what might be called coercion by persuasion rather than coercion by force.15 It is a refusal to continue in helpful compliance with injustice, often a refusal to continue in self-injuring behaviour. It brings pressure on a society, and more particularly its government. It expresses moral hatred, hostility, disgust or exasperation, a determination to condemn or shame a government and a society, to press them into decent human sympathy and into action on it. It is also part of this coercion, of course, that mass civil disobedience makes life harder for governments, their servants, and others. It may cost police time, reduce profits, disrupt order, and at least threaten incidental violence and damage. Officially peaceful demonstrations are very likely to include broken windows and broken arms. So we can contemplate, at least for a moment, two possible means to moral progress – mass civil disobedience and non-co-operation and the terrorism that has the same aim of moral decency. What is properly said against terrorism is that it destroys, maims and kills. No one in their senses could try to minimise the fact. Still, if it could be judged that it would achieve its large ends, it would not be so easy to think about as is commonly supposed. We are all constrained by conventionality of feeling and a customary morality that owe much to those who benefit from them. Hence we are mesmerised by terrorism and distracted from any real contemplation of related things. We concentrate on violent death to the exclusion of lives cut off or ruined non-violently and legally. We do not register the truth

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that unspeakably more living time is subtracted by the institutionalised and legal frustration of fundamental human desires than by terrorism. We do not think clearly of our omissions as against our commissions, of the real weight of the obligation to obey the law, of democratic terrorism, and of the true obstacles to judgements of probability in connection with terrorism.16 Still, we need not think for much more than a minute about the terrorism in question. At any rate we need not try to think about it except in the special case of terrorism on behalf of the political freedom and independence of a people in their homeland. Such liberation struggles can call on singular resources of determination and sacrifice, and are often enough effective. We need not think of the rest of the other terrorism for humanity, as it can be called, because it cannot be judged that it will succeed at a cost that is tolerable and could make it rational. The situation is in this important respect the same as with violent revolution, the attempt to replace Hierarchic by Egalitarian Democracy. The terrorism we now have in mind would kill and maim, and then almost certainly be defeated by the state and its supporters. What would make it wrong would partly or mainly be the effects of state-terrorism as well as legal repression used against it, and the absence of any compensating gain. That the state-terrorism and repression would or might be wrong would not diminish the wrongfulness of this terrorism for humanity. An act of mine does not become right, although there are philosophers who try to think so, if it leads to disaster only through someone else’s anticipated wrongful opposition. Why would the governments of the hierarchic democracies and their natural supporters, to think of them, almost certainly win? One part of the reason is that they are better at violence, through practice. Another more important part of the reason is that the fighting would drive out truth. Fighting would disarm one side, the side against the indecencies owed to or contributed to by Hierarchic Democracy. Fighting would disarm this side of its best weapon. That weapon is truth, including what can be called moral truth. No one attends to grim life-expectancies elsewhere or river-blindness or racial selfdenigration when there are tanks in the street and children are being killed. To turn to mass civil disobedience, you will anticipate that part of what can be said for it is that it is unlikely or not greatly likely to be met by unconventional state violence. In speaking of state violence, I mean more than the use of riot police and the intelligence

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services. Unconventional state violence involves the army and carries a significant possibility of civil war. To say mass civil disobedience is unlikely to be met by this kind of state violence is to assume something about a sense of proportion on the part of the governments of hierarchic democracies. It is also to assume they have a sense of the possible penalty that may be paid for using unconventional state violence against civil disobedience. Unconventional state violence against it, as has been rightly calculated before now, may win some support to the cause of those who are civilly disobedient. Should we be hierarchic democrats or should we instead supplement voting and legitimate influencing with the influence of mass civil disobedience? Before answering, I should like to pause briefly over one matter. It concerns a proposition of mine that will have been anticipated, that mass civil disobedience unlike the related political violence does allow truth and moral truth to be heard and to have their rightful effect. Some will disagree. They may disagree since this disobedience, as already noted, is not just supplication. It is a kind of coercion, a confrontation, which despite its commitment to non-violence carries a threat of incidental violence. It is possible to insist in reply that mass civil disobedience does allow truth to be heard, indeed makes truth heard. It itself, the main fact of it, is not violence. It is not such an abandoning of our conventions for dealing with disagreement as to impassion or madden both sides and leave no thought but defence and retaliation. What is often stressed in this connection by lawyers and the like who are sympathetic to civil disobedience is one of its defining features, that it is open and public, and that those who engage in it do not attempt to escape the penalties for their offences. This, the lawyers say, shows the restraint of respect for law. This misses the point a little, as lawyers are likely to do in political philosophy. It is not law that is being in a way respected by the civilly disobedient who break it, not law in general, not something that includes the law, say, of a tyrant-state or an oligarchy. What may be respected in a way by the civilly-disobedient is the law of, exactly, a hierarchic democracy, and, really, a hierarchic democracy itself. It is accorded a respect for the reason among others that Hierarchic Democracy too, as implied earlier, must be regarded as a possible means to a society of moral decency – and a less imperfect democracy. This respect cannot be missed by the adversaries of the civilly disobedient. It is part of what leaves room for truth, makes perception and reflection possible.

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But saying this, I suppose, misses another point, perhaps as philosophers are likely to do. We need not seek just to argue our way towards the conclusion that civil disobedience and non-cooperation leaves room for truth and hence for moral progress, argue that there is something that makes for such a fact. The historical record by itself establishes the fact. Alabama and Leipzig come to mind. They not only left room for truth to be heard, but got it a hearing it had not had before.

5

Conclusion

To a conclusion, then. I do advocate, without reserve, mass civil disobedience and non-co-operation. This seems to me a moral necessity. We ought to engage in and support such mass civil disobedience, clog the machine as Thoreau said, in order to resist further advances in moral criminality by our governments, new pieces of it: more indifference to famine despite the regular speeches of resolution, more monstrous and stupid wars, further vicious taxation, more victimisation by corporations in America, more profiteering by privatisation in Britain, more hypocrisy, more cant on every front. We ought to engage in and support disobedience not only on such new issues as they come up, but also disobedience against standing conditions having to do with our societies of Hierarchic Democracy. Shortened and cut-off lives in them and outside our societies, stunted lives including some that might almost be better if they were shorter, constraint and weakness in place of freedom and power, denigration and self-denigration, the impeding and wrecking of human relationships, ignorance and vulgarity in place of culture. We ought to resist not only the omissions of our societies, but also their ongoing commissions. One that is overwhelming, and to which there is reason to revert, is active support for the destruction of the Palestinians by the state of Israel. We ought not to pay tax. We ought to strike and march illegally. There ought to be demonstrations against our elections in hierarchic democracies, before, during, and after them It is possible both to vote and to advocate voting, and also to damn a way of voting, and the cheat built into it. We ought to find new forms of civil disobedience. So with mass non-co-operation, in connection both with new evils and standing evils. We ought not to buy from the corporations and companies that do so much to frustrate the will of our

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representatives when those representatives remember some of their promises. Those of us who are attracted to an inner core of religion should withdraw from churches, which in their meekness accommodate the true immorality of our societies. We ought to find new forms of non-co-operation. This, you may say, is utopian. Well, that is a right of philosophy, a right that has served us all very well. And I am not sure it is utopian. It was easier to be sure about that before the fall of Communism, before the civil disobedience that played a part in a once-impossible thing. There is an old saying, perhaps a saying of the Left. It is that only power can defeat power. Sometimes those who have said it have had in mind that state power can only be defeated by the power of terrorism. That proposition has often enough been refuted. Hope of decency in our societies, hope with reason, depends on the idea of many people coming to share a moral feeling. You will know that I speak of disgust and condemnation, and also guilt, about the denial to many people of what they desire as much as we do ourselves. It is possible that many will come to share that feeling, and that it will issue in civil disobedience and in non-co-operation. The globalisation of information may do us a service here, despite the attempted control of it. So may education, and argument, and the realisation that economism is not an answer to the right questions about societies, and the experience of immiseration coming to the aid of insufficient moral imagination, and the fact that those who drag down societies also lose. It is possible to hope, with reason, and I do.

Notes 1. Perhaps the Ordinary Conception is now asserted only by politicians. (Most of them, by the way, have given up talk of liberal democracy as rule by the people, which was not true even of ancient Athens.) The Ordinary Conception is not far from one of the polyarchies contemplated in R. A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1956), Chap. 3 and Appendix, and not far from models II and IIIb in David Held, Models of Democracy (Polity, 1987), p. 70, p. 102. See also H. B. Mayo, An Introduction to Democratic Theory (Oxford University Press, 1960), Chap. 4. 2. The Pluralist Conception, partly because of its contained claim about equality, is not to be identified with several accounts of democracy with similar names. See, for example, R. A. Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (Yale University Press, 1982). On pluralism generally, see Held, Chap. 6 (see Note 1).

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3. For the statistics on wealth, see Edward N. Wolff, ‘Recent Trends in Wealth Ownership, 1983–1998’, Working Paper no. 300, Table 2, Jerome Levy Economics Institute. For the income statistics, see The World Guide 2001/2002 (New Internationalist Publications, 2002). There is more discussion of such statistics in my After the Terror (Edinburgh University Press, 2002), pp. 6–22. 4. The World Guide 2001/2002 (see Note 3). 5. See, e.g. After the Fall ed. Robin Blackburn (Verso, 1991). 6. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1934), vol. 2, p. 130. 7. A Theory of Justice (Oxford University Press, 1972). For other objections to the theory, see Chaps 4 and 5. It has been remarked to me, by the way, that the present paper leaves out consideration of the thinking of the New Right. Indeed it does. One reason is that I am no longer inclined to dignify by discussion such a view as that a perfectly just society may be one in which people are starving and have no moral right to food, the perfect justice being owed to the fact that the distribution of goods in the society has a certain history. That, I take it, is propounded in Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974). 8. A Theory of Justice, sections 13, 26, 48 (see Note 7). 9. There is an argument for it, having to do with our human nature and our fundamental desires, in Chap. 2 of After the Terror (see Note 3). 10. It is only weaker general principles and considerations having to do with equality that issue more or less automatically in support for only Hierarchic Democracy. Sometimes there is not enough difference between the supposed premises and conclusion to make a real argument. 11. I do not have in mind the Third Way announced by the New Labour Party. See, rather, After the Fall (see Note 5). 12. For discussion of the definition, Chap. 8. 13. See the excellent collections edited by H. A. Bedau, Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice (Pegasus, 1969) and also his Civil Disobedience in Focus (Routledge, 1991). 14. A Theory of Justice, sections 55, 57, 59 (see Note 7). They are reprinted and discussed in Bedau, Civil Disobedience in Focus (see Note 13). 15. The point is not that it is non-violent. Some violence is also coercion by persuasion. It too leaves room for decision on the part of the persons or the society affected. 16. These various matters are considered in a revised edition of my book on political violence, now entitled Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy (Pluto, 2003).

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Chapter Eight

After the Terror: A Book and Further Thoughts

This paper is moral philosophy that attends to realities and is focused on six propositions, one on the wrong done in the attacks of September 11, 2001. Two more are on our own previous wrong by omission, and thus our contribution to September 11, our share in a moral responsibility for it. A fourth proposition has to do with our first response to the attack, and a need not only for self-assertion but for self-realisation. On the way to a concluding proposition about what is to be done now, there is a consideration of our most salient commission over recent decades, this being support of the state-terrorism of Israel – of what falls uncontentiously under that term. The book from which the paper comes, After the Terror, asserted in passing the moral right of the Palestinians to their terrorism. Therefore it got neo-Zionist attention, which led to the British branch of an international charity dishonouring itself. The moral right of the Palestinians is further defended here. It rests on a good deal, including an argument for the undeniability of the Principle of Humanity, thoughts on the alternative morality of relationship and of special obligation, and reliance on that first and last of aids to truth, including moral truth, which is consistency. In the absence of the latter, there cannot be reasons, and there cannot be reason. The paper was written before the war on Iraq by the United States and my country’s government. To remember a remark in the introduction to this book, the war makes it clear that there was still less need for the degree of civility of this paper in particular.

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Great Goods

There are things that all of us desire, great goods. We all desire to go on existing, where that is not a lot more than being conscious. We want a world to exist in a way, which literally may be what it is to be perceptually conscious. We have the same desire for those close to us, our children first. This desire can sometimes be defeated by others. It comes to mind that a lot of American men and women would have ended their own worlds, carried out suicide missions, to prevent the 3,000 deaths on September 11. Nonetheless, this existence is something almost all of us crave.1 A second desire is for a quality of life in a certain sense. This is a kind of consciousness that has a lot to do with our bodies. We want not to be in pain, to have the satisfactions of food, drink, shelter, safety, sleep, maybe sex. As that implies, and as is also the case with the first desire, we also want the material means to the end in question, this bodily quality of life. Some of the means are some of the consumer-goods, so-called, easier to be superior about if you have them. A third thing we all want, no less, is freedom and power. We do not want to be coerced by personal circumstances arranged by others, bullied, subjected to compulsion, unable to run our own lives, weakened, humiliated. We want this voluntariness and strength in a range of settings, from a house, neighbourhoods and places of work to the greatest setting, a homeland. It is no oddity that freedom from something is what is promised by every political tradition or movement without exception – and secured to some extent if or when it is in control. It is also promised by every national tradition. Another of our shared desires is for goods of relationship to those around us. We want kinds of connections with these other people. Each of us wants the unique loyalty and if possible the love of one other person, maybe two or three. We also want to be members of larger groups. No one wants to be cut off by his or her own feelings from the surrounding society or cut off from it by others’ feelings. This was a large part of why it was no good being a nigger or a Jew in places where those words were spoken as they were. A fifth desire, not far away, is for respect and self-respect. No one is untouched by disdain, even stupid disdain. No one wants to feel worthless. As in the case of all these desires, this one for respect and self-respect extends to people close to us, and in ways

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to other people, and it goes with desires for the means to the ends. If the generalisation that we all want respect and self-respect requires qualification, it remains about as robust as generalisations about human beings can be. Finally, we want the goods of culture. All of us want at least some of them. Many of us want the practice and reassurance of a religion, or the custom of a people. All of us with a glimmer of knowledge want the good of knowledge and thus of education. All with a glimmer of what is written down want to be able to read. We also want diversion if not art. This is no simple taxonomy of satisfaction or well-being. Certainly several of the desires shade into one another. There is room for decision rather than discovery as to where to locate a particular real-life desire – think of some of your own – since desires are of course several-sided. Other kinds of questions can be raised about the taxonomy, more than are answered in the book from which this paper mainly comes,2 but I think they can be answered. It will do as an account of our shared and fundamental human desires. It is by its nature an account of certain reasons for actions, policies, practices and the like. That an action satisfies someone’s desire to go on existing, or for a bodily quality of life that is decent, or for freedom and power where they have lived in their own memory and that of their parents and grandparents – these are reasons for an action or whatever. So too is an action’s satisfying someone’s desire to get over a threshold with respect to each of the other three great goods a reason for it. We may call all these six reasons first-order reasons. They are of course general, like all reasons. They are also of very great weight. That does not imply that they cannot be misused, or that one of them cannot be overcome by another such reason or conceivably by a lot of reasons of some other sort. In connection with first-order reasons, and large questions that arise by way of them, let us turn our attention to lives. Let us turn our attention to bad lives in particular but also good lives. A bad life, we take it, is to be defined in terms of the frustration of some or all of these desires for great goods. A good life is defined in terms of satisfaction of them. Other grades of life would be defined similarly. Uncertainty about such a question as whether a good life must have in it the goods of culture show this is partly a matter of decision. But it is not only that. Let us approach the matter by way of the world itself.

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Bad Lives, Good Lives

Take the nine countries of United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark and Japan. Compare them with the four African countries of Malawi, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Zambia. The individuals in the first group of countries, our group, have life-expectancies or average lifetimes of about seventy-eight years. Those in the second group live for an average of forty years. That means that many individuals in the second group, those who pull the average down to forty, have what with reason can be called half-lives at best. This is only partly owed to a certain fact, but it is a fact that needs attention for itself. In the United States and like countries, for every 1,000 live births, the number of children who die under the age of five years is about five or six. The number of dyings for the second group is about 200. The proximate or immediate explanation of this difference, and the full lives as against the half-lives, and of other things to be mentioned, is material means to well-being. We in our group of countries have means worth an average of $24,000 a year. The individuals in the African countries have means worth an average of $220 a year. Compare the economically best-off tenth of population in our group of countries with the worst-off tenth of population in the four African countries. The average lifetimes in our best-off tenth are about eighty years. The individuals in the worst-off tenth in the other group live for an average of about thirty years. So most of those in the latter tenth who bring the average down to thirty have what can reasonably be called quarter-lives at best. Consider the individuals in the worst-off African tenth, and the question of whether their average lifetimes might have been increased. You could keep in mind that in part of the twentieth century, the life-expectancy of American whites increased by about five years a decade. That happened, so to speak, without trying. If we in our countries had made a deliberate and real effort to help the four African peoples, would those Africans now alive in their worst-off tenth live an average of fifteen years longer? Ten? Probably seven? Say only five. There are about 10,000,000 individuals in the worst-off tenth. So there is a loss of 20,000,000 years of living-time. Losing living-time is not the same as being killed. No one makes that mistake about the

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loss. No one needs to make it in order to reflect on the magnitude of it. In thinking after September 11 of our part in the story, if any, and of other things, it seems to me that the first and largest subject must be our omissions, be they right or wrong. We have omitted to help those who die early. However, there are also our positive acts, so-called, our commissions, a less tractable subject, certainly less tractable when treated briefly. Or rather, since the distinction is not simple and commissions shade into omissions, there is the side or end of the whole range of our actions considered in terms of conscious intentionality – the side or end that consists of commissions. Here is one case, now the most salient one, a case where it is not possible to leave open the question of right or wrong even for a while. In 1900, within something close to living memory, there were about 500,000 Arabs and 50,000 Jews in Palestine.3 Many of the latter had arrived recently on account of the barbarism of anti-Semitism. The subsequent horror of the mass murder of European Jews in the Second World War did not issue, as in justice it ought to have, in a protected Jewish state carved out of Germany. After the war, according to a United Nations resolution, Palestine was to be divided into two states. There were about 749,000 Arabs and 9,250 Jews in what would be the Arab state. There were 497,000 Arabs and 498,000 Jews in what would be the Jewish state. It was a moral necessity, in my morality, that a Jewish state be founded somewhere. That it be maintained as and where it was founded, partly by way of Zionist terrorism, and certainly to the detriment of the Palestinians, was also such a necessity. There has since been no Palestinian state but rather fifty years of obstruction and the rapacious occupation of more and more land by Israel, importantly aided by a distinction between official or state killing on the one hand and non-official killing on the other hand. Most Arabs have been driven out of their homes. In the years 1989 to 1991, according to a disputed estimate, there were between 250,000 and 400,000 Jews settled on Arab land. Of about 7,000,000 Palestinians, about half are now outside of Palestine. All this history, and the actions by Israel and its army after September 11, have been importantly owed to the policies and actions of the United States in particular. The resolutions of the United Nations against Israel, unlike other resolutions, have come to nothing principally because of the United States. These accounts of deprivation by omission and by commission, our parts in Africa and Palestine, give rise to large questions. Our

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present concern, however, you may remember, was to be the general understanding and defining of bad lives and good lives. But let us not struggle with the matter, say, of whether a life can be bad in virtue of being frustrated just in terms of the good of culture. Let us rather resolve, if that is the right verb, that those with half-lives, dying children, those with quarter-lives, those who lose 20,000,000 years of living-time – that these individuals do have bad lives. It is worth noticing in passing, in connection with the nature of morality and moral judgements, that this judgement seems to be both indisputable, a matter of fact, and yet presumably in the old category of value-judgements. So too, we can take it, do the Palestinians have bad lives, first because of being denied the great good of freedom and power in a homeland.

3

The Principle of Humanity

How ought we to think of various questions – of whether or to what extent we have done wrong over decades, of the wrong of September 11, of moral responsibility for it, of terrorism more generally, of our response in Afghanistan and thereafter, and of what to do now? With what morality should we think of these matters? If you have well in mind such facts as those at which we have glanced, you may come to a certain principle of right action. It is not well-expressed, indeed expressed at all, as the truistic principle that we should rescue those with bad lives. It is the principle that we should actually take rational steps to the end of getting them over the line into good lives. That is, we should take steps that are not pieces of pretence or self-deception or politicians’ speechifying, but steps that actually secure the end. In being rational, they will also have to be economical in terms of well-being, of course – be effective but not cause more distress than they prevent. The principle, again, is that the right thing as distinct from others – the right action, practice, institution, government, society or actually-possible world – is the one that according to the best judgement and information is the rational one with respect to the end of saving people from bad lives. The end, by the way, is not a relational one, not the end of getting everybody on a level, making everybody the same. It is, as stated, the end of saving people from bad lives. It would demand action on your part in a world where everyone had equally bad lives. So it is a principle of humanity, fellow-feeling or generosity rather than of equality, despite certain weaker reasons for the latter name.

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The Principle of Humanity can be further understood by way of at least four policies to be followed to reduce the number of bad lives. The first policy is to transfer certain means to well-being from the better-off to the badly-off – means whose transfer would in fact not significantly affect the well-being of the better-off. An immense amount of these exists. Think about what we waste, or just about packaging. The second policy is means-transfer that would reduce the wellbeing of the better-off, without giving them bad lives. An immense amount of these means exist. As in the case of the first policy, some consist in land, and land of a people. The third policy, of great importance, is about material incentiverewards. It would reduce them to those that are actually necessary, and actually necessary in terms of the goal of the Principle of Humanity. They will not be the rewards now demanded. They will not be those that issue in the worst-off tenth of Americans having 1.8 per cent of the income or consumption and, on the other hand, the best-off tenth having 30.5 per cent. Or the bottom four-tenths taken together having 0.2 per cent of the wealth – not 2 per cent but 0.2 per cent – and the top tenth 71 per cent. The bottom tenth almost certainly has negative wealth. The fourth policy, implicit in the others, is against violence and near-violence. Like all such policies called realistic, it is not absolute or completely general. It accommodates some possibility of justified war and other such action. Also the need for police forces, some selfdefence, and so on. It gives a limited role to the distinction between official and non-official killing.

4

Propositions

The Principle of Humanity and the facts of bad lives can lead us to contemplate or consider certain propositions having to do with September 11 and with our past, present and future. Or rather, September 11 can prompt us, by way of the Principle of Humanity, to think of our own moral situation and then, properly and necessarily, of all of that situation, not only what is most relevant to September 11; not only some of the bad lives. You get a true sense of anything, including September 11 and its immediate explanation, only by knowing the rest of the story. Let me state all of the propositions and not just some of them without veiling, euphemism and cant, which common things pervade

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most writing on the matters in question and almost all the stuff of our politicians. Obscuring conventions that stand in the way of or are put in the way of thinking are no part of the Principle of Humanity. 1. We have done overwhelming wrong, and continue to do overwhelming wrong, in failing to help those Africans and others whose lives are cut short. This wrong by omission is as clear and indubitable as that of the positive action of an airforce commander who for reasons of international politics stops food from getting through to the starving. Our wrong is as clear and indubitable too as sexually abusing a child. 2. To be on an airliner and look around and see the people and be able to stick to the plan of flying it into a skyscraper is to do hideous wrong. To persist if they come to know that plan is to do monstrous wrong. Nothing can be thought that will take away from such judgements of wrong, from what seem to be moral data, whatever more needs to be said. Nothing will take away from the judgements, whatever needs to be said of something else, which is moral responsibility for September 11. 3. The wrong we have done and continue to do by omission, with respect to Africa in particular, is most important for itself and for ensuing rights and obligations. However, it was also a necessary context for the horrors of September 11. The horrors, despite their particular connection with the grievance of Palestine and also those of Saudi Arabia and Iraq, would not have happened save for the context. No such proposition is demonstrable, but this one is at least probable. To see that it is, think of the world in which our parts in Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq were lapses, rare and momentary, from an exemplary moral record. So for September 11 there are lines of moral responsibility into the past, as real as chains of command. We are in them with the killers, our leaders ahead of us. We need to escape the illusion that to be ordinary is to be innocent. 4. Our counter-attack in Afghanistan after September 11 was to an extent humanly inevitable. It is to an extent excused from judgement by the proposition that to say we ought to have refrained implies we could have. To the extent that the counter-attack was not necessary, only something conditional can be said. The counter-attack was right if it was accompanied by self-realisation with respect to our omissions and our own share of responsibility for September 11, and also self-realisation with respect to other things. It will take more time to tell.

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5. The invasion and occupation of Palestine by Israel, beyond its pre-1967 borders, is a moral crime. This too can seem to be a datum. So can what follows immediately from it, about the redress of the Palestinians. In their terrorism, their only possible means of redress, the Palestinians do have what Israel claims exclusively on its own behalf in its state-terrorism and perhaps war, which is a moral right – a moral right to killing.4 For our part, our support of the violation of Palestine contributed most to our share of responsibility for September 11. It is something else about which we need self-realisation. 6. What is to be done with respect to our omissions and commissions is first to try to change our own societies, our merely hierarchic democracies and our vicious economic systems – and our leaders whose existence and sense of moral possibility is bound up with them. This we can attempt to do by mass civil disobedience. It is now the only possibility, and it has had successes in American and other history. In the end it helped to bring down a wall of the Russian empire.

5

Alternatives to the Principle of Humanity

What you have heard so far is not idiosyncratic or eccentric, not news from nowhere. By the only factual test in this matter, that of counting heads, it is not radical or outrageous. Something very like it has the support of a majority of those who live on this earth. It has greater support, however inexplicit, than the morals of any major government or indeed people, or all of us in political and economic systems and ways of life so fundamental to the short or brief lifetimes elsewhere of which you have heard. That heuristic point about majority support is worth making, but of course truth is no simple matter of numbers of supporters. Nor, I trust, although this is more complicated, is moral decency. If moral decency were just a matter of numbers, this would be an embarrassment to each of the globe’s large minorities with which we are most familiar, say the members of centrist and in fact self-serving political parties, to which the Labour Party in Britain has lately added itself. Let us glance at a few things that can be said for the morality of humanity, its policies, and the propositions on September 11 that may be contemplated as issuing from them. First some comparisons with the Principle of Humanity.

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Liberalism is a morality in that it purports to answer the question of how the great goods ought to be distributed and what reasons there are for this. In its best formulation, by John Rawls, a philosopher of good intentions, it remains vague. This may be its essential nature. The vagueness is a matter of what it says and fails to say of material incentive-rewards. Also uncertainty about traditional liberties and their priority and sanctity. And, on account of both of those uncertainties, a large uncertainty about a certain principle having to do with the badly-off, the Difference Principle. Of what effect is this principle of allowable inequalities? It is clear that on different assumptions, notably assumptions about demands made for incentive-rewards, the principle could sanction degrees of socioeconomic inequality from none to hitherto unrealised amounts. The tradition of conservatism, and the special form of it that is libertarianism, is like liberalism in pretty much consisting in moralities for single societies. That is, however much these traditions hold themselves up as examples, they concern themselves with distributions of the great goods within one society. Robert Nozick’s libertarianism actually has the consequence that even starving people within its perfectly just society can have no moral right to food.5 This is vicious, but let us concern ourselves with something else – something common to liberalism, conservatism in all its forms, and also other things. It may be an element in what is called political realism or national self-interest. It can also stand on its own as a kind of morality. Let me speak, simply, of morality of relationship. It brings with it a genus of which it is a species and from which it takes support, this genus being morality of special obligation. To cut through the cackle quickly, morality of relationship is exemplified by a woman who goes further in favouring her child over other children than some other mothers do – say those with a feeling for the Principle of Humanity or for a certain clear Christian principle.6 Her reason, she says, is that it is her child. Morality of relationship is also exemplified by a reason that is given for being taken up to a certain great extent with some people rather than others – the reason that they are of your own country or kind. This goes beyond regarding relationship to those around us a great good, and goes beyond the sustaining of this relationship. As for the wider morality of special obligation, this large mixed bag includes general reasons of very many other sorts – more or less the stuff of orthodox moral philosophy. These general reasons

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have to do with good intentions in actions, bad and good desert or retributive justice as these things are usually understood, certain rights of individuals and peoples, certain claims of recent or ancient history, the positive law of a land, international law, agreements made, and such values as autonomy and integrity. All of these, along with reasons of relationship, we may call second-order reasons, without thereby begging any question. Morality of relationship, and all morality of special obligation, has been contrasted with the Principle of Humanity and related moralities. The latter are said to be consequentialisms, moralities that take right things to be such only because they are the ones with the best effects or consequences. Reasons of relationship and other second-order reasons are said to be different in one way in particular.7 To cut the cackle again, we may hear that the woman’s reason for favouring one child has at least a part that does not have to do with effects or consequences of her action. Her reasons, to speak differently, include at least one that does not have to do with benefits to the child or any other effects. It can be heard in her saying that it is her child. It seems to me that too much respect has been paid to this sort of thing. This moral philosophy is at least in this one way more than suspect. Its supposedly non-consequentialist nature calls out for examination. It is useful to bring some philosophy of mind onto the scene. Very little may be enough. What is an action? It is a movement or stillness in a way owed to a reason. A reason, as all agree, whether good or bad, is something that contains a desire, maybe a desire for a great good, something capable of being satisfied by some event or state of affairs. Leaving aside some unnecessary distinctions, surely we now have an absurdity. As we have heard, some moral philosophy offers us what it calls reasons for actions that have nothing to do with effects of the actions. These reasons are things, therefore, such that it makes no sense to speak of satisfaction or frustration in connection with them. No effects and hence no satisfactions or frustrations are relevant to them. In which case they are reasons that contain no desires. But reasons just are or just do include desires, things capable of being satisfied by effects of actions. So the conclusion has to be that in fact there are no reasons of the kind officially recommended in the case of the mother and in the case of your people rather than others. In general, there are no reasons of the kind recommended in morality of relationship, as we are supposed to understand it,

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and indeed in morality of special obligation generally. Second-order reasons as officially understood are not reasons. Of course the mother’s thinking, feeling or saying in a certain way that it’s my child does give a reason for action. It must then be something else than is officially maintained by the moralists of relationship. It must have to do with some event or state of affairs that satisfies or could satisfy a desire of hers. It is obvious what it is. It is no higher reason, as is supposed, or anything deeper either. It is the desire that her child should have still more than it would have if she were to favour her child to the extent allowed by the Principle of Humanity or a certain Christian principle. This is yet more obvious in the other case, where one is a little less distracted by personal feeling – the reason for a policy or whatever that people it benefits are of your country or society. One conclusion of all this is that morality of relationship is selfish. This conclusion need not beg the question by circularly assuming something like the Principle of Humanity. The conclusion will take into account, incidentally, that the woman’s true reason includes her own anticipated satisfaction in having done better by her child.

6

The Undeniability of the Principle of Humanity

Consider something else into which these reflections enter. It is something more fundamental and not even in part a moral judgement or objection strictly speaking. It cannot be questioned or put aside as having a basis only in such moral feelings as those against selfishness. It is a natural basis of morality. Consider choices of a certain kind. All of them are between (A) getting someone or some people or a whole people out of bad life – say bad lives as understood earlier – and (B) improving the already good lives of other people. Further, these choices are between acting for first-order reasons, getting people into good lives in one or more ways, and acting for second-order reasons – relationship, desert or whatever. Four examples come to mind. There is the choice, for example, between contributing to saving people from quarter-lives, or the loss of 20,000,000 years of livingtime, and, on the other hand, further improving the situation of other people related to the possible contributors, maybe by being of the same language or culture, but people already enjoying good lives. There is the choice between your contributing to saving people from quarter-lives and, on the other hand, enabling other people

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already in good lives to have more of the great goods for the particular reason that they deserve more in terms of their own efforts to put together a productive society. There is the choice, a version of one in sight earlier, between starvation to death of children under five and the tons of wasted food protected by the private-property rights of others. There is the choice between your supporting a people being denied freedom and power in their violated homeland and, on the other hand, supporting another people so as to be on the side of similar democrats or an ethnic group in your own society. Now consider yourself not a chooser but in one of the groups with the bad lives. Further, consider yourself freed of the absurd idea that the reason for your not being helped is different in kind from the satisfaction of desires. That is, consider yourself free of the idea that the reason for your not being helped is a higher or deeper reason, different in kind from your first-order reason for being helped, your reason having to do with the great goods. Rather, you believe that the reason for your not being helped is others having the satisfaction of still more of the great goods than they have already, and the agents in question having the satisfaction of bringing this about. I trust it is true that everyone reading this, if they themselves were among those with the bad lives in such a group, would give decisive weight to the first-order reason for being helped rather than the second-order reason for improving other lives already good. In short, each of us would take it to be right that we be helped. Reasons are of course by their nature general – that is the main fact about morality and much else of our lives. So you will anticipate the next step. For you to take the given position in the contemplated situation is for you to be committed to it in this actual world in which you are among those with good lives – an actual chooser between such options as those mentioned a minute ago. If we do not help the deprived and violated, the upshot is not only that we are in the wrong or selfish, which we are. The upshot is that if we do not help those with bad lives we have no reason for what we do instead. We put ourselves outside of humanity, by which I here mean a reason-giving species. There are truths at the bottom of morality. One, baldly stated, is that certain wrongful acts are irrational in the sense of going against the applicable reasons, those held by the very agents in question. These agents, so to speak, are false to their own humanity, which here is to say their rationality or intelligence.

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No doubt things need to be admitted in qualification of this argument for the undeniability of the Principle of Humanity, this natural basis of morality. One is the admission that there are or may be people like us, with good lives, who would not take it to be right that they be saved from bad lives in the situations contemplated. So they may say now, some without lying. It is hard to believe, but I cannot say it troubles me greatly. It is not my intention to claim an iron law of human nature. This basis of a properly naturalistic morality can rest perfectly adequately on the proposition that by far the most of us are in such a relation to the great goods that we would not be moved by second-order reasons pertaining to others for our having bad lives. Something not to be respected has to do with the idea that someone with a good life might carry a certain piece of theory or ideology with them into their contemplation of being in a bad life – and so actually take it to be wrong that they be saved from the bad life. The theory would be to the effect that not improving the already good lives would help the one person with a bad life but would on the whole result in more bad lives. You will know the theory. The rich need to be richer or there will be more poor. To my mind, if you will put up with some plain speaking, there is a great lie and self-deception of this age, speaking in particular of America and Britain. It is that any significant reduction in the material means of the possessors of good lives would necessarily damage further the bad lives in these societies or outside of them. The proposition, I take it, does not have such a probability as would detain anyone of ordinary altruism, sense and experience actually contemplating being saved from a bad life. The argument for the undeniability of the Principle of Humanity is not new or unique. Rather, it has the recommendation of great antecedents, the best-known of these being the Golden Rule. Among its other antecedents is Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative having to do with a maxim that can be willed to be a universal law, and the clear argumentation a couple of decades ago of R. M. Hare of Oxford, and no doubt that of John Rawls, and indeed the antecedent that is the feeling of much of the human race. What I have added, very briefly, is a consideration of the great goods as against other things, and an attempt to clear away some obscurity and confusion about the nature of morality of relationship and special obligations in general. Whether or not the obscurity and confusion has come about in order to save ourselves from our own judgements – that is a matter that can be left alone.

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Nor is it difficult for me to concede that some may not go along with my account of the great goods. You may jib at my account of our shared and fundamental desires. You may perhaps turn, for example, to a list that can be derived from the Roman Catholic tradition of Natural Law. There will of course be a congruence with respect to the two lists. But the main point here is that any of a number of factually arguable conceptions of great human good and bad and lesser, and thus of associated great reasons over lesser reasons, will generate an argument in terms of a fact of our natures and consistency.

7

The Propositions Again

More has now been said than can be reflected on or defended, indeed more than is fully treated in the book from which this paper comes. That is not the only possible disgrace in which a philosopher can find himself. One way of avoiding moral philosophical challenges is by glancing at the size of a reality and then, after a chorus of ‘Nymphs and Shepherds Come Away’, turning to this or that mere bit or part of the reality supposed to be manageable on its own, something that can be wrapped up in a journal article. In fact, the bit must carry something larger with it, presume a view of the larger reality. To leave it alone and unattended to, and imply that it is in good shape, is also a philosophical disgrace. It is to depend on gesturing if not conjuring. You may ask how what has been said hangs together, indeed whether any necessity holds it together. You may ask how judgements of moral data and first-order reasons go with or relate to the Principle of Humanity and to the argument of undeniability for it, and how the four policies having to do with means to well-being stand to the Principle of Humanity itself. Could the principle not be argued to issue in other policies? Well, not the intended principle. Rather, despite being factual in part, the policies give content to that principle. It, as distinct from any related principle, is a commitment to the specified policies. But leave the other questions, as we must, and come to the propositions on September 11, about wrongs, moral responsibilities, and what is to be done now. It is my view, as you will anticipate, that the propositions can be argued to follow on from the principle and the policies, although of course with the aid of judgements of fact

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and weighting. Anything that makes morality simpler is mistaken. Anything that delivers moral conclusion is mistaken, probably pretence. You will gather that the first proposition, that we do overwhelming wrong in failing to help those with the bad lives, must depend on an argument that omissions with the same effects as terrible commissions are as wrong. Given the standard or at any rate the most common conception of the right action, and not necessarily that of the Principle of Humanity, this conclusion seems inescapable. This most common conception of the right action is of an action that is the rational one with respect to a certain contemplated end on the best available judgement and information. The rightness of an action is something clearly different from what is persistently confused with it. That is an agent’s kind or degree of moral responsibility in the action, something into which honest mistake or misjudgement and a good deal else can enter. It is essential to keep clear that the right thing can be done for bad reasons, and the wrong thing for good or tolerable or ordinary reasons. To come to the second proposition, the wrong done on September 11 is untouched by the weak idea, having to do with our wrongful omissions, that two wrongs make a right or that two wrongs go somewhere towards making a right. Two wrongs do not make a right because the second victim was the first perpetrator – or because the second victim invited that second wrong. The attack of September 11 was wrong, rather, because there could be no certainty or significant probability, no reasonable hope, that it would work to secure a justifying end, but only a certainty that it would destroy lives horribly. Some half-suppose or half-feel, differently, that the wrong of the attack had to do with its being an attack on our democracy. Some half-suppose what our politicians of democracy imply or say, that all of the six propositions are to be looked at and treated in terms of the legitimacy that we have as democrats. This unique legitimacy makes all our actions, policies and the rest different from those of other people. Our official killing, our democratic killing, is uniquely different from non-official killing. Well, there certainly was a time when our democracy had an indubitable decency owed to comparison with real things. Now, to my mind, indeed to a majority of minds, it has an indecency compared with possible things. It is hierarchic or oligarchic democracy. This nature can be demonstrated by the means of standing up above the ignorant and managed consensus in which we are supposed to live our lives and attending to some tenths of income and wealth, say

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those American ones mentioned earlier in connection with material incentive-rewards. But our democracy’s easily perceived nature as hierarchic is not, relatively speaking, what overwhelms the idea that it can and does legitimate our actions. Something else does that overwhelming. It is that Hierarchic Democracy, together with what is bound up with it, our vicious economic system, is a fundamental and ineliminable part of the explanation of a sample loss of 20,000,000 years of living-time. Our democracy and our economic system do not do well at home, either, where we hear charity begins. I am sixty-nine years old, and have a hope of going on for a while. I suppose blacks in American democracy do too. Six years would make a difference. Black men in America have lives shorter than white men, by an average of six years. There are 30,000,000 of them. Do we do things better in the democracy of England and Wales? Seven years is the difference between men of the fifth social class and men of the first social class. There are quite a few men in the fifth social class. Some half-believe what our politicians of democracy also imply or say, that you can deal with some of the six propositions by depending on a word, ‘terrorism’. They are right in one thing, which is that the word can easily be defined plainly and uncontentiously. Terrorism, as can be elicited by starting from any decent dictionary, has quite a number of features but fundamentally is a kind of violence, which is to say physical force that injures, damages, violates or destroys people or things. It is this: violence with a political and social end, whether or not intended to put people in general in fear, and necessarily raising a question of its moral justification because it is violence – either such violence as is against the law within a society or else violence between states or societies, against what there is of international law and smaller-scale than war. This definition might be enlarged in several ways. You can try to give the content of the national and international law, particularly in connection with the killing of innocents, civilians or non-combatants. But there are various clear consequences of the definition as it stands. (1) Obviously the definition cannot be offered, so to speak, as a conclusive argument against the thing defined. Terrorism, plainly, despite the question it raises because of being violence, is not by definition wrong, all things considered. This is in accord with the fact that almost all who condemn terrorism have it in their self-justified national histories. In particular, not all terrorism used by peoples

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in seeking freedom and power in their living-places is wrong. The definition is of nothing like the strength of the Principle of Humanity in argument against terrorism or condemnation of it. (2) As clearly, the definition includes state-terrorism and cat’s paw or proxy terrorism, of which there has been far more in history than of other terrorism. American history in particular contains a lot. (3) It is plain that terrorism, by the given definition, can also be other things. It can be resistance. It can be self-defence. It can be resistance to ethnic cleansing. It can be the struggle of a people for their very survival as a people. To overlook these manifest possibilities, all of which are open to clear definition, is to fail again in moral intelligence. More particularly, to overlook the facts that may make these descriptions plainly true is to fail again in moral intelligence. If it must weaken argument, on any side, to avoid the name and reality of terrorism, the very same is true of these other things. (4) The plain and uncontentious definition of terrorism also has the consequence that there cannot conceivably be a simple moral comparison of terrorism with war. It is of course inconceivable that war by plain definition is right. There have been monstrous wars. All educated persons know it. It is clear that the ends and the rationality of wars can be as different as the ends and rationality of terrorism. (5) For an officer of a state, say a democratic state, to proceed as if a very different and self-serving idea of terrorism is just the plain and uncontentious definition is almost certainly lying. It may be lying in the aid of killing, killing in the aid of taking more land. Terrorism plainly defined is not only the terrorism of the other side. The other side’s terrorism does not necessarily justify either your terrorism or your war. It does not justify your democracy’s terrorism or war. The pretences to the contrary reiterated by the Israeli government changed and hardened my own thinking and feeling against it. To the fifth proposition then, of which more can be said.8 To claim a moral right to anything on anyone’s behalf is essentially to claim that it is permissible or obligatory for them to have or do the thing, and that this very judgement has the support of a fundamental moral principle – a true one, as we may say. The implication cannot be, obviously, just that there is a commonly accepted or established moral principle, with nothing said of its worth. No one has a moral right to something in virtue of a vicious moral principle, however entrenched. Claiming a moral right to something, then, does not go far beyond saying the thing is permissible or obligatory.

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To claim a moral right on behalf of the Palestinians to their terrorism, as I do, is to say that it is permissible if not obligatory for them to engage in it, which judgement has the support of the Principle of Humanity as set out. If it supports hardly any terrorism, it can be taken to support this. The proposition of the Palestinians’ moral right must also rest, of course, on a good deal more. It rests on the history outlined earlier of the rapacity of a state that quite quickly came to be secure in its possession of overwhelming force, now including nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The history in terms of populations, the numbers of Jews and Palestinians at the various times, overwhelms familar controversy about who did what in what year in terms of massacres, wars, negotiations, supposed offers and the like. The Palestinians are right to look back to Fascist Germany and say they are the Jews of the Jews. The proposition of moral right rests, further, on accepting that the Palestinian people have no other means at all of securing their indubitable moral right to the great good of freedom and power in their homeland and also other great goods. This seems to me to have been demonstrated by the fifty years of denial of that indubitable right, including intransigence in various negotiations conducted by America and culminating in what has been happening since September 11. That the past and ever-greater violation of the right of the Palestinians to their land gives rise to their right to their only possible means of redress can also seem to be a moral datum. The moral right of the Palestinians to their terrorism also rests partly on something else as large. This is precisely the claim of moral right by Israel in its state-terrorism and perhaps war. It is to me unthinkable that the Palestinians could justly be denied by their enemy exactly the moral right of a people secured and now being enlarged upon by that enemy. In connection with this requirement of consistency and rationality, something needs to be remembered. A declaration of a moral right to terrorism, like a declaration of a moral right to war, is an action within a conflict. It is a part of a conflict, even if distant from the scene of action. Asserting such a right cannot be regarded as only an abstract judgement, something only in the world of thought, something in the thinking of a moralist, philosopher, commentator or the like. The Israelis’ declaration of their right to terrorism is a use of morality in a conflict, a use of morality that in consistency cannot conceivably be denied to their victims.

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It is to me beyond reasonable doubt, as you will have gathered, that the state of Israel has in 2002 been engaging in terrorism plainly understood against the Palestinians while justifying itself to the world by precisely a denial of that fact. The uncertainty and vagueness of international law does nothing much to obscure the fact. The fact of state-terrorism, further, is entirely unaffected by the possibility that Israel may sometimes have been engaging in war against the Palestinian people. There was also terrorism, still taken as justified today, by two subsequent prime ministers of Israel, that was instrumental in the founding and earlier expansion of the state of Israel. There is another and more general requirement of consistency and rationality. It is as fundamental to the support of the proposition of the Palestinians’ right that the history of mankind, as remarked earlier, has importantly been a history of groups and nations claiming a moral right to terrorism and war – the just war – to secure or protect for themselves the great good of freedom and power in a homeland. With respect to this consistency required by our humanity in the most basic sense, there did indeed occur what was known indeed as Britain’s terror-bombing of German civilians in the Second World War. We did not take it to be wrong, but right. To the neo-Zionist policy of making distinctions between the claims of the Palestinians and themselves with respect to moral rights and whatever else, one reply is the request for a properly articulated principle behind the distinctions. What is it? What workedout and half-arguable morality can be put in place of the Principle of Humanity? Can there be anything that escapes at least the taint of selfishness? A second reply to the making of distinctions is what has been said already of the legitimacy claimed by us as democracies – and what has been implied of the use of the distinction between official and non-official killing. As well as analysis of the nature of democracy and a consideration of the world of half-lives and quarter-lives to which its omissions have contributed so greatly, there is a good deal of useful history. There quite obviously have been and are circumstances where moral legitimacy or authority is more possessed by a group that is not a democracy or any kind of state. Too many forget that Hitler was elected by a democracy. Do you still object to the definiteness of the fifth proposition? Are you inclined to something in the direction of a moral right of terrorism on the part of the Palestinians but subject to qualification? To something other than a yes or no answer to the question of rightness?

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There is a difficulty that needs to be pointed out. We do not have a certain possibility, a kind of luxury. There are degrees of moral responsibility, and shares of moral responsibility for things, and degrees of humanity or decency in a whole life. But there are not degrees of being right or degrees of being wrong. The question of which action is right is a question to which the only relevant response is a verdict. You do not have three possible answers. Nor, common though it is to try, can the question be avoided. Let me say, too, finally, and only a little uncertainly, that surely there is inconsistency in granting a people a moral right to freedom and power in a homeland and then denying them a right to the only possible means of getting it. In general it strains language and sense to accord a right to someone and forbid them the only effective means of getting it. If you purport to accord to the Palestinians a right to a homeland, and if you then deny them the only possible means, in effect you deny them the right to homeland. To accord them the one right is surely to accord them the other. But I have been drawn away by neo-Zionist passions from a still larger and darker fact,9 our omissions as against this example of our commissions. In thinking about the main subject of our omissions, like the lesser subject, it is possible to lose one’s moral confidence. It is particularly possible for a philosopher. We all have something of what ought to be our very nature, I hope, which is a scepticism including selfdoubt. Certainly we have doctrines that give little place to factual truth in morality. I admit to uncertainties, to an awareness of tensions if not contradictions in what I have had to say, to weakness of moral will, to doubts about my feelings.10 But it comes together with something else. Indeed, it does not count for much as against something else. Does the wrong of flying the airplanes full of people into the towers, doing that, with the further results, become uncertain when I canvas my doubts? No, I am pleased to say, flying the airplanes into the towers does not become only uncertainly wrong. And the 20,000,000 years of living-time lost? If I think, say, of the possibility of an excess of empathy on my part, does that loss become only uncertainly wrong? Something our leaders can qualify and explain? No, it does not become uncertainly wrong. That wrong is real and certain too. So too, I think, with the Palestinians and their moral right. Suppose you make it to one of those cocktail parties that some dream about, with famous people at it. You are about to meet the

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man who may still be spoken of by the International Herald Tribune as Mr bin Laden, maybe back from the dead. You are also about to meet Mr Blair, who has just announced again that he and allies are about to save the world. You shouldn’t shake hands with Mr bin Laden. You could think about keeping your hand in your pocket with Mr Blair too. 8 December 2002

Notes 1. This paper was read in New York, at Columbia University and the New School, near the first anniversary of September 11. The occasions brought to mind the possibility that there are places and times where, even if there are two sides to a story, only one fills the heart and should do so. Maybe even places and times where only one side of a story does and should fill most of the mind. With respect to the subject of perceptual consciousness as existence, touched on in passing, see ‘Consciousness as Existence, and the End of Intentionality’, in Philosophy at the New Millennium, ed. Anthony O’Hear, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures for 2000–1 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2. After the Terror, Edinburgh University Press, 2002. 3. The figures and those below come from a source neither Israeli or Western nor Islamic or Palestinian, The World Guide 2001/2002 (New Internationalist Publications). 4. All terrorism, by a definition to be mentioned below, is against law or what passes for law. Some of it, by a state, is nonetheless what I am calling official – terrorism by a democratic state in particular. The other kind of official killing is war. 5. A perfectly just society as conceived by Nozick is one where everyone has a moral right only to what is his or her private property as a result of mixing labour with things or subsequent voluntary transfers. A starving child in this perfectly just society may indeed have no right to food. 6. Is there an Islamic one, perhaps as overlaid by an institution of religion? No doubt. 7. Consequentialisms are discussed at length in Chap. 6. 8. All of it, I think, is at the very least implicit in After the Terror (see Note 2). There has been no change of mind on my part. 9. I refer in particular to the matter of Oxfam Great Britain. After accepting a donation of £5,000, royalties from the book After the Terror, Oxfam Great Britain subsequently chose to decline the money as a result of a Canadian newspaper’s threat having to do with my defence of the moral right of the Palestinians. Oxfam GB dishonourably gave in to the threat of having a story written about its accepting money from a ‘terroristsympathiser’, with the effect that it would lose neo-Zionist donations. For my account of this matter, see ‘Oxfam GB, £5,000, Zionism, After the Terror’ (http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/∼uctytho).

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10. I have also been given pause, in different ways and to different degrees, by philosophical and other books on or related to terrorism: Noam Chomsky, 9–11 (Seven Stories Press, 2001), J. Angelo Corlett, Terrorism: A Philosophical Analysis (Kluwer, 2003), Trudy Govier, A Delicate Balance: What Philosophy Can Tell Us about Terrorism (Westview, 2002), Michael Neumann, The Rule of Law (Ashgate, 2002), Richard Norman, Ethics, Killing and War (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust (Hodder & Stoughton, 2002).

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Acknowledgements

Chap. 1, ‘John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and a Question About Liberalism’ is not the paper with which this book was to begin. It was to begin with ‘The Worth of J. S. Mill On Liberty’ from the journal Political Studies, 1974, or ‘On Liberty and Morality-Dependent Harms’, Political Studies, 1982. However, neither survived rereading. The first seemed wrong in its final conclusion, and the second right in nearly everything else but not worth the effort. So the present paper, if it derives from these predecessors, is new. The original papers were improved by astute comments by C. L. Ten, Hugh Upton and Richard Wollheim. Chap. 2, ‘Conservatism, its Distinctions, and its Rationale’ has not been published before, but derives from my book Conservatism (Hamish Hamilton, Westfield, Penguin). It was improved by discussion with audiences to whom it was read, notably at the Universities of Copenhagen and Lund, and in particular Ingmar Persson. Chap. 3, ‘Trying to Save Marx’s Theory of History, by Teleology, and Failing’ is a revised version of ‘Against Teleological Historical Materialism’, Inquiry, 1982. The original version was better for many conversations with G. A. Cohen and John Watling. I am no Marx scholar, and my account of historical materialism was owed to Cohen. I am grateful too for comments by David Conway, Roy Edgeley, Dagfinn Follesdal, Alastair Hannay, Grahame Lock, John Mackie, David McLellan, William Shaw, Timothy Sprigge, Allen Wood, and also to Alan Ryan and others who heard the paper read in Oxford. Chap. 4, ‘The Contract Argument in a Theory of Justice’ is revised from ‘The Use of the Basic Proposition of a Theory of Justice’, Mind, 1975. A draft of that paper was usefully commented on by Malcolm

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Budd and others who attended a term’s seminar on A Theory of Justice at University College London. Chap. 5, ‘The Principle of Humanity’ is a revised version of ‘The Question of Well-Being and the Principle of Equality’, Mind, 1981. The original paper was better for objections made to it when it was read to the Association for Legal and Social Philosophy, and to university audiences in Oxford and elsewhere. It owed more to discussions with Janet Radcliffe Richards, which left the ownership of some ideas in doubnt, and to objections by G. A. Cohen, James Griffin, and Amartya Sen. Chap. 6, ‘Consequentialism, Moralities of Concern, and Selfishness’ is revised from the paper published under that title in Philosophy, 1996. I am grateful to James Cornwell especially, and to Shahrar Ali, Ingrid Coggin Honderich, Roger Crisp, Nicholas Dent, Brad Hooker, Joel Kupperman, Jane O’Grady, Hayley Roberts, Michael Slote, Michael Targett, Alan Thomas and Catherine Wilson, who commented on earlier drafts. Chap. 7, ‘Hierarchic Democracy and the Necessity of Mass Civil Disobedience and Non-Co-operation’ is revised from what was given under the title ‘Hierarchic Democracy and the Necessity of Mass Civil Disobedience’ as the Conway Memorial Lecture in 1994, and subsequently published by the South Place Ethical Society. The new paper corrects a mistake. A predecessor of the lecture, ‘Hierarchic Democracy’, published in New Left Review, 1994, is in some respects fuller. My thanks for comments by Robin Blackburn and Jong-Yil Ra in particular, and also A. B. Atkinson, Taik Won Ahn, Yoon Jae Chung, G. A. Cohen, R. A. Dahl, Kiaran Honderich, David Held, Byung Ki Kim, Ralph Miliband, William Nelson, Jane O’Grady, David Lloyd-Thomas, Amartya Sen, Gao Xian and David Zimmerman. Chap. 8, ‘After the Terror: A Book and Further Thoughts’ will also appear in The Journal of Ethics. It was improved by Ingrid Honderich, J. Angelo Corlett and by discussions after it was read at Columbia University, the New School, the University of Toronto, Brown University, Birkbeck College London, the universities of Oxford, Durham and Edinburgh, and a meeting organised by Philosophy Now.

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Afghanistan, 162 Africa, 142, 158–60, 162 agent-relative morality, 113, 115–16, 123, 160–6 Allison, 44 Ames, 35 badly-off, 96–7 Bedau, 154 Bentham, 16, 39; see also utilitarianism bin Laden, 176 Blackburn, 153 Blair, 31, 39, 136, 144, 176; see also Labour Party Burke, 2, 26, 35, 36 cardinal and ordinal judgements, 89–91 Chomsky, 177 Christianity, 166 civil disobedience, 148–53, 163 coercion, 149 Cohen, 50–67 commission, 159; cf. omission communism, 25, 50; see also Marx concern, moralities of, 112, 119–22; cf. consequentialism consequentialism, 112–19; cf. concern, moralities of conservatism, 24, 24–45, 164; see also New Right rationale of, 25, 29, 31, 32, 38, 40–1, 42–4 consistency, 20, 129, 155 contract argument, 68–81 basic proposition of, 70–1 Corlett, 177 Crisp, 23, 133 culture, goods of, 89, 156 Dahl, 153 Darwin, 59–60, 61, 62, 63, 64–5 democracy, 35, 109, 135–54, 146, 153, 163, 170–1, 174 egalitarian, 146

hierarchic, 138–42 ordinary, 136 pluralistic, 137 Democratic Party 24; see also United States deontology, 112, 114; see also agent-relative morality desert, 28, 35, 37, 41–2, 93, 106 desires, 17, 86–9, 113–14, 119–22, 142–3, 156–7, 165 Difference Principle, 69–70, 94, 95 dispositions, 54–5, 57, 66, 67 distress, 86–9; see also badly-off, desires, goods egalitarian democracy see democracy egalitarianism, 93–5, 104, 108; see also equality, humanity and equality envy, 43, 72–3, 101, 102 equality, 37–9, 68–71, 94–5, 102, 103–9, 136, 137, 140; see also Principle of Humanity equality and humanity see humanity and equality Equality, Principle of, 103–5; see also Principle of Humanity ethnic cleansing, resistance to, 172 explanation, 52, 57 explanation-claims, 51, 58–63 fairness, 20, 71–2; see also equality, Principle of Humanity Finnis, 111 Foot, 132, 134 Frankena, 110 free speech, 12 freedom, 6, 8–9, 32, 33–5, 37–9, 88, 156; see also liberty functional explanation, 50–65 Gandhi, 148 Ginsberg, 111 goods, great, 86–9, 142–3, 156–7; see also desires Govier, 177

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Index Gray, 22 Griffin, 132 Hare, 132, 134, 168 harm, 5, 9–10 Hayek, 2, 34; see also New Right Hegel, 36 Held, 153 hierarchic democracy see democracy historical materialism, 46–67 human nature, 29, 168; see also incentives humanity, principle and morality of, 1, 3, 43, 86–111, 103, 135, 144–5, 160–1, 163–9 equality-practices of, 102–3 policies of, 99–103, 161 humanity and equality, 103–10 Hume, 168 incentives, 27, 30–1, 37, 70, 74, 100, 113, 146, 161, 168 income, 139, 144, 158; see also wealth inequality, 138–42; see also equality, freedom, incentives, income, lifetimes, material goods, relationships, respect, wealth integrity, 122 intentions, good, 113, 118, 124, 127, 165 interests, 3, 6, 7, 10–12; see also rights interpersonal comparison, 91 Iraq, 3, 155, 162 Johnson, 144 justice see equality, Principle of Humanity, Rawls Kagan, 132 Kant, 85, 168 killing, right to, 159, 163; see also terrorism, Palestine Kirk, 43, 45 Labour Party, 24, 25, 33, 39, 43–4, 109, 144, 154; see also Blair Left, 25, 37, 41, 43, 44, 109; cf. Labour Party liberalism, 1, 4, 9, 10, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 68, 86, 135–6, 145–6, 164; see also hierarchic democracy, Rawls liberty, 4–22; see also freedom Liberty Principle, 69, 70, 94–5 lifetimes, 87–8, 113, 142, 156, 158, 166 Lloyd-Thomas, 111 McDowell, 132, 134 Mackie, 59, 67 Maclean, 132 Manning, 22 markets, 28, 34; see also conservatism, New Right, privatisation Marx, 46–7, 65, 140; see also historical materialism

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material goods, 88, 156 materialism, 46 maximin, 77 Mayo, 153 Mill, 4–23 Mirlees, 132 moral data, 162, 173 moral responsibility see responsibility moral rights, 15, 19, 22, 163, 172, 173 moralities of concern see concern morality, 1, 129–32, 167; see also liberalism, moralities of concern, New Right, Principle of Humanity, Rawls morality-dependent harm, 12–15 Murdoch, 138 Nagel, E., 59 Nagel, T., 132, 134 needs, 109, 113 neo-Zionism, 1, 143, 163, 172, 173, 174, 175; cf. Zionism Neuman, 17 New Right, 28, 31, 33, 38, 39, 154, 164; see also conservatism Nisbet, 45 Norman, 177 Nozick, 31–3, 34, 132, 164, 176 O’Brien, 44 O’Hear, 176 omissions, 5, 150, 159, 170, 175 opportunity, 108 ordinary argument, 75–7, 80 organic society, 33 original position, 69–71, 78–9, 80–1 O’Sullivan, 43 Oxfam Great Britain, 44, 176 Palestine, 1, 143, 155, 159, 162, 163, 172–6; see also neo-Zionism, Zionism Parfit, 132 Pettit, 132 philosophy, 2–3 pluralistic democracy see democracy political philosophy, 1–3, 46 political power, 139–40, 141 political theory, 1 Principle of Humanity see Humanity privatisation, 33, 44 production, relations of, 46–7 productive forces, 46–7 property, 28, 31, 32–5, 42, 93; see also income, wealth Quinton, 36, 45 Railton, 132 rationale of conservatism see conservatism, rational of rationality, 72–3, 87

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Rawls, 68–85, 94–5, 111, 145, 148–9, 154, 168 reasons, 126–7, 165, 167; see also consistency, desires, goods reasons, first-order, 157 Rees, 21 relationship, morality of, 164 relationships, human, 88 Republican Party, 24 respect, 88, 156 responsibility, moral, 125–6 revolution, 147, 150 right action, 124–8, 170, 174, 175 rights, 11, 15, 113; see also interests, moral rights Riley, 22 Rossiter, 45 Ryan, 21, 22, 23 satisfaction see desires Scanlon, 132 Scheffler, 117, 132, 133, 134 self-defence, 172 self-interest, 72 selfishness, 43, 128, 129–32 Sen, 132, 133 September 11, 154, 159, 156, 161, 162, 163, 170, 175 Shaw, 66 Sher, 45 Singer, 132 Skorupski, 23 Smart, 132 Smith, 21 social contract, actual, 68; cf. social contract, hypothetical social contract, hypothetical see Rawls socialism, 8, 24, 27; cf. Labour Party special obligation, morality of, 164

state-terrorism, 3, 172, 173, 174 superstructure, 47 Tawney, 45 teleological explanation, 50–67, esp. 58–60 Ten, 21, 22 terrorism, 1, 148, 149–50, 153, 171, 172, 173 for humanity, 110 Palestinian moral right to, 1, 155, 163, 171–2, 172–5; see also neo-Zionism state- see state-terrorism Thatcher, 26, 31, 145 Thoreau, 135 truth and politics, 151 United Kingdom, 3, 12, 142, 144, 171; see also Blair, hierarchic democracy United States, 3, 24, 142, 143, 144, 159, 171, 173; see also hierarchic democracy Utilitarianism, 5, 16–18, 92–3, 114, 121 rule-utilitarianism, 22 violence, 100; see also terrorism virtue, 113, 124 war, 172 Warnock, 21 wealth, 138, 144, 153; see also income welfare state, 8, 9 well-being, 86–92, 156–7; see also desires, goods Wiggins, 132, 132–3 Williams, B., 132–3 Williams, R., 177 Wolff, 154 Wollheim, 21 Wood, 50 Zionism, 156, 159; cf. neo-Zionism