Sceptics, and Morality

I NOW turn to the sceptics. By "sceptics" I mean those who, because their main concern is, intellectual integrity, reject all theories that offend their extremely fastidious intellectual conscience. For this reason they refuse to accept the teaching, either of saints or of revolutionaries.

It is important to emphasize that the true sceptic is dominated by loyalty to the distinctively human capacity for critical intelligence, just as the saint is dominated by loyalty to the other distinctively human capacity, namely mutual awareness and kindliness. Reason and love may be fancifully described as the two wings of the human spirit. Flight is not possible with one wing alone. With love and no reason the saint becomes amiably ineffective and superstitious. With reason and no love the sceptic becomes a clever cynic. The perfect man would be a sceptical saint. And in our day he would be also a revolutionary.

I am by nature specially sympathetic toward scepticism. For that reason I feel bound to be critical of it. The sceptical attitude is of great value, but, like all other principles, scepticism is capable of becoming a fetish and of doing great harm.

The true sceptic's chief loyalty is to honest reasoning. What he most detests is deception, particularly self-deception. His scepticism begins with an emotional reaction against cant and humbug. He is also opposed emotionally to emotion itself. He has heard so much about the value of fine emotions and about the aridity of the purely intellectual attitude, and he has encountered so much self-deceiving sentimentality, that he has been driven to conceive an ideal of completely unemotional, dispassionate, detached behaviour. He is inclined to forget that admiration even of this ideal is emotional.

Just as there are true and false saints, so there are true and false sceptics. The true sceptic is one whose ruling motive really is intellectual honesty, who refuses at all costs to believe or pretend to believe theories that cannot withstand intellectual criticism. He is determined not to allow emotion to interfere with his reasoning, and is thus driven to doubt nearly all the theories that other men believe.

The false sceptic is the cynic. He is not at heart concerned with intellectual honesty but with setting up an intellectual smoke-screen between himself and duty. In rebellion against pretentious "faith", he conceives a morbid passion to put the worst possible interpretation on man and the universe. He is not concerned with the ideal of the dispassionate life. He cares only for the irresponsible life. Consciously or unconsciously he seeks only an excuse for detachment from all desires except selfish desires. It is with glee, frank or veiled or unwitting, that he denies the validity of moral obligation. The true sceptic also denies the validity of moral obligation, but the motive of his denial is intellectual honesty, even if, as I believe, it is misguided intellectual honesty. It is not sheer moral laziness or cowardice. Many true sceptics, though they profess to disbelieve in the objectivity of good and evil, would gladly believe, if intellectual honesty did not seem to forbid it. Often the actual behaviour of true sceptics is more moral than the average. Sometimes their devotion to the ideals of the intellectual conscience is heroic. Yet when they perform what appear to be acts of moral self-sacrifice they assure us that they do so merely because they are socially conditioned to behave in such a manner, or because of ingrained habits of group-feeling.

The generous sceptic's loyalty to reason helps to produce in him a strong loyalty to reasonableness. His guiding principle in intercourse with others is that he must try to understand the other's motives and appeal to them reasonably. He tends to believe in persuasion rather than force, and in rational persuasion rather than in appeal to emotion. In this respect he comes in line with the saints; and partly, I believe, through the same motive as theirs, though in him it is not a clearly recognized motive. At heart and more or less unwittingly this kind of sceptic is faithful to the ideal of genuine community, based on the mutual respect and co-operation of reasonable beings.

Even the most rigorous sceptic is sceptical primarily because of an emotional bias, namely toward intellectual honesty. Because he is a sceptic about ethics, he himself, of course, declares that his emotional bias in favour of intellectual honesty is just a subjective feeling in his own mind, that intellectual honesty is not in any strict sense intrinsically good. But he does behave as though he believed it to be intrinsically good.

Sometimes the emotional root of scepticism is simply a cold and phlegmatic disposition. Sometimes it is a sensitive emotional nature which must be protected by means of a cloak of detachment. But sometimes scepticism is an expression of the personality as a whole in response to the widespread superstitions of mankind. Whatever its emotional root, its conscious expression, in the true sceptic, is a passionate moral loyalty to intellectual integrity.

The sceptic is suspicious of all emotion. He rebels both against his own emotion and against emotion in others. He is constantly offended by self-deceivers and canting hypocrites. Particularly he objects to the sham saint; and in his view all saints are in a sense sham saints, since he regards even the most sincere of them as self-deceivers. His scepticism is largely a rejection of the vague and doubtful dogmas of religion, and a protest against what, in his view, is the gigantic humbug perpetrated by the churches.

Starting with his initial bias in favour of intellectual honesty, he soon comes to the conclusion that the intellectual side of religion is a pretentious sham. Its arguments are specious, its theories often unintelligible. If the sceptic is strictly true to his own lights, he does not positively deny all religious doctrines. He does not profess atheism. For the positive denial of theological theories seems to him as unsound intellectually as the affirmation of them. They simply lie beyond the range of intellect. The legitimate scope of intellectual enquiry, he says, is much more restricted than is generally supposed. Moreover, at every turn it is liable to be frustrated not only by logical obtuseness but by irrelevant and often unwitting emotion. In subtle manners our wishes falsify our thinking. For instance we crave the right to praise and blame, and so we believe that good and evil are not mere matters of whim. We crave comfort and security, and so we persuade ourselves that some power in the universe will cherish us.

Two kinds of reasons are given by religious people for this belief in a benevolent universal power. First, evidence derived from our experience of the external world is put forward to suggest that a benevolent power is in fact at work in it. To the sceptic this evidence seems to be all of the type of the old belief that God made the winds to fill the sails of our ships. The sceptic is not impressed. This kind of argument puts the cart before the horse. Sails were adapted to winds, not vice versa; and man laboriously adapts himself to the universe.

One form of this argument deserves more careful consideration. It begins with the assertion that human beings inevitably frustrate their own nature whenever they fall short of love and reason. This I believe to be in an important sense true. The next step is to point out that inevitably the human race as a whole must either progress toward love and reason or frustrate its own nature. This also I believe to be true. The argument then claims that this must necessarily apply to all beings and races which have reached the human degree of intelligence and self-consciousness. This also is in my view true. But it is surely illogical to infer that, if all this is so, there must be a power making for love and reason throughout the universe, and that this power is God, who intends us to behave in accordance with the principle of love and reason. Presumably the point of the argument lies in the conviction that anything so striking as love and reason must be a product of divine intention. But though it seems on the whole likely that in some sense love and reason are important factors in the universe, but it gives scarcely any support to the belief that they were ordained by a purposeful God.

The second kind of reason for the belief in a universal benevolent power is the saint's own intuitive conviction that there is indeed a God and he is loving. To this the sceptic replies that no mere feeling on the part of an individual can logically afford information about the universe as a whole. The loftiest of feelings, he says, is an event in an individual mind. Logically there is no necessity that the conviction generated by this feeling should be true of anything beyond the feeling itself. It is perhaps conceivable that the mystic has some kind of immediate acquaintance with the universe as a whole and its essential rightness, or with a benevolent universal spirit. But if so the mystic's mind must be of a radically different type from ordinary minds. This seems to the sceptic highly improbable, if not actually meaningless. Anyhow the mystic's experience, whatever it is, cannot be communicated to others, who do not themselves have such experience. Therefore it is of no public value whatever.

Against this reduction of religious experience to mere "feeling" some reply by turning the sceptic's argument against himself. His loyalty to truth, and even his intuitive sense of "true" and "false", are after all mere "feelings", and therefore they have no objective validity.

To this the sceptic may answer that there is just one thing which, in principle, cannot be undermined by reasoning, namely, reason itself; since, if the argument against reason is true, it must itself be condemned as worthless, because it is a case of reasoning. But, the sceptic may add, if reason is, after all, valid, the argument against religious experience must be dealt with on its own merits.

The sceptic insists that if people had a clearer idea of the scope and limitations of intellect, they would not be so ready to accept metaphysical beliefs. The true function of intellect, he says, is not to probe behind the world of ordinary experience, not to deduce metaphysical reality, but to clarify ordinary experience. It detects likenesses and differences within the flux of ordinary experience. In its scientific mode it formulates handy descriptions of the ways in which events observably happen and may be expected to happen. But it can discover no necessity in virtue of which they must do so. Nor can it logically deduce from ordinary experience a hidden reality of an essentially different kind from experienced reality. From the study of the world of perceived and fleeting events, whether physical events or mental events "in our own minds", it is logically impossible, according to the sceptic, to deduce any truth whatever about the universe as a whole, or about "the eternal reality". Therefore in his view the theories of the churches are completely without foundation.

Evidence of a purely scientific kind might, of course, make it seem probable that some benevolent power was interfering with the natural course of events in man's interest. The sceptic sees no evidence that this is so, but it is not logically impossible. What he regards as impossible is to deduce rationally any truths about the whole of reality. Again, evidence of a purely scientific kind might suggest that, as a matter of fact, individual human minds survive death, and succeed in communicating with us intelligently. The sceptic does not deny this possibility. On the other hand such evidence as there is in favour of it does not impress him. However, if he is true to his fundamental principles, he is very ready to examine the evidence scientifically. What he denies is that we can deduce the immortality, the eternal persistence, of individual spirits from anything whatever in the nature of an ordinary fleeting experience.

Thus far I agree with the sceptic, at any rate to a very large extent. The qualification is necessary because I feel that his scepticism is a little too dogmatic and sweeping. In fact he is not quite sceptical enough about his own sceptical theories. So far as I can see, there is indeed at present very little possibility of deducing necessary truths about the whole universe from ordinary individual fleeting experience; but how does the sceptic know that this sceptical doctrine itself is a universal and necessary truth about every possible kind of experience? So many doctrines that have been confidently asserted to be absolute truths have turned out to be too sweepingly stated, or even wholly false. I content myself therefore with saying that, in the present state of human experience, and with our present technique of reasoning, most statements about the essential or eternal nature of reality must be regarded as extremely doubtful. Those few that can be made with any confidence are in the main negative. Thus it is pretty clear that reality is not simply one unanalysable and featureless "absolute", or that all particular things are unreal. On the other hand, it is equally clear that reality is not a number of self-complete things, with no internal connections with one another. Reality is both one and many. But how far it is one and how far it is many we cannot yet determine.

One important criticism of the sceptic's general principle must be suggested. He assumes at the outset that a particular mental state is in fact something wholly distinct from other things in the universe, and from the universe as a whole. It is not clear to me that this assumption is justified. I am not convinced that it does not beg the whole question. Some mental states, such as sense-perceptions, certainly do seem to contain within themselves, or to apprehend directly, something other than themselves; and some, we are told by the mystics, seem to apprehend something of the whole's essential nature. Perhaps this is an illusion; but I do not see that the sceptics do anything to prove that it is so. They merely assume at the outset of their argument that a mental state or mental event must be a compact little bit of mental stuff, confined, so to speak, within its own skin. They do not entertain the possibility of its being a relation between something apprehending and something apprehended, and that the apprehended thing may sometimes be an aspect of the universe as a whole.

On the other hand, I am convinced that the sceptics are justified in pointing out that most metaphysical and theological theories are either meaningless or extremely doubtful.

So much for the sceptic's general position. I now turn to one particular sphere in which, I am convinced, he has allowed his scepticism to blind him to certain facts of experience. It so happens that this sphere is the most important of all for the practical life of mankind. Not only does he deny metaphysics and theology; he also denies morality. In his view the statement that anything is absolutely or objectively good is meaningless. The sceptic admits, of course, that we do have moral feelings, feelings of approval and disapproval. He denies that these feelings afford any justification for saying, "I ought to do so and so whether I like it or not"; unless the sense be merely, "I have a purely subjective feeling of approval of my doing so and so."

He explains these moral feelings in terms of ordinary psychology and sociology. They result partly, he may say, from the child's dependence on the law-making parent, partly from the individual's relation to the group. The root of morality lies partly in the family relationship, partly in gregariousness. The will to conform and enforce conformity has survival value. Hence arises the disposition to accept and to feel awe about the customs of the tribe, or of some dominating section of the tribe.

There can be no doubt that these principles form a very effective key to the understanding of the evolution of particular moral ideas. But they do not afford adequate grounds for denying the objective basis of morality. Any theory which simply explains morality away in terms of subjective mental states over-reaches itself, reduces itself to absurdity. There is something in moral experience which is far more cogent than any theory. Of course We may make mistakes about particular moral situations. We may misconceive the facts. Or we may be in some particular respect morally insensitive. But on occasions when a man is faced with a clear moral choice which comes, so to speak, within his particular moral compass, he perceives without the slightest possibility of doubt that the duty which confronts him derives its power from something beyond his own subjective feeling, beyond his craving for safety in another world or prestige in this world, and beyond his desire to conform to socially approved custom. In some sense, very difficult to describe, the rightness of the right course is logically prior both to personal feeling and to tribal custom. When one is confronted with a fellow mortal in grave distress, it is perfectly obvious that to refrain from helping him is to violate something more fundamental, and in the fullest sense more sacred, than self-esteem or than social convention. This is an obtrusive and inescapable experience which certainly needs to be related to scientific culture, but is no more to be denied than sense- perception of physical objects is to be denied. One might as well deny the reality of a charging bull perceived in broad daylight. The analogy with physical objects is helpful. No doubt physical objects are philosophically very different from what they seem to common sense; but simply to reduce them to feelings in one's own mind is to adopt a philosophy which, even if it is logically unassailable, no man can believe. Similarly with morality. "Good" and "bad", doubtless, are not the simple objective characters that they appear to common sense; but to reduce them to mere feelings in one's own mind is to adopt a theory which cannot be consistently practised. When it is sporadically practised it reduces the individual to self-loathing, and society to confusion.

This is not the occasion to try to work out a logically satisfactory ethical theory, but I must at least suggest what I regard as the right starting point and direction of such an enterprise. The root of the sceptic's error, as I have already said, lies in the illegitimate use of the immensely valuable method of analysis. A feeling, and in particular ............