Source of the moral judgment: Received notion of reason incompatible with true view. Shaftesbury’s doctrine of rational affection; spoilt by doctrine of ‘moral sense’
26. The work of reason in constituting the moral judgment (‘I ought’), as well as the moral motive (‘I must, because I ought’), could not find due recognition in an age which took its notion of reason from Locke. The only theory then known which found the source of moral distinctions in reason was Clarke’s, and Clarke’s notion of reason was essentially the same as that which appears in Locke’s account of demonstrative knowledge. [1] It was in truth derived from the procedure of mathematics, and only applicable to the comparison of quantities. Clarke talks loftily about the Eternal Reason of things, but by this he means nothing definite except the laws of proportion, and when he finds the virtue of an act to consist in conformity to this Eternal Reason, the inevitable rejoinder is the question—Between what quantities is this virtue a proportion? [2] In Shaftesbury first appears a doctrine of moral sense. Over and above the social and self-regarding affections proper to a ‘sensible’ creature, the characteristic of man is a ‘rational affection’ for goodness as consisting in the proper adjustment of the two orders of ‘sensible’ affection. This rational affection is not only a possible motive to action—it is the only motive that can make that character good of which human action is the expression; for with Shaftesbury, though a balance of the social and self-affections constitutes the goodness of those affections, yet the man is only good as actuated by affection for this goodness, and ‘should the sensible affections stand ever so much amiss, yet if they prevail not because of those other rational affections spoken of, the person is esteemed virtuous.’ [3] Such a notion, it is clear, if it had met with a psychology answering it, had only to be worked out in order to become Kant’s doctrine of the rational will as determined by reverence for law; but Shaftesbury had no such psychology, nor, with his aristocratic indifference to completeness of system, does he seem ever to have felt the want of it. He never asked himself what precisely was the theory of reason implied in the admission of an affection ‘rational’ in the sense, not that reason calculates the means to its satisfaction, but that it is determined by an object only possible for a rational as distinct from a ‘sensible’ creature; and just because he did not do so, he slipped into adaptations to the current view of the good as pleasure and of desire as determined by the pleasure incidental to its own satisfaction. Thus, to a disciple, who wished to extract from Shaftesbury a more definite system than Shaftesbury had himself formed, the ‘rational affection’ would become desire for a specific feeling of pleasure supposed to arise on the view of good actions as exhibiting a proper balance between social and self-regarding affections. This pleasure is the ‘moral sense,’ [4] with which Shaftesbury’s name has become specially associated, while the doctrine of rational affection, with which he certainly himself connected it, but which it essentially vitiates, has been forgotten.
[1] See Clarke’s Boyle Lectures, Vol. II., proposition 1. The germ of Clarke’s doctrine of morals is to be found in Locke’s occasional assimilation of moral to mathematical truth and certainty. (Cf. Essay, Book IV, ch. 4, sec. 7, and ch. 12, sec. 8).
[2] Cf. Hume, Vol. II., p. 238. [Book III., part I., sec. I.]
[3] ‘Inq. concerning Virtue,’ Book I., pt. 2. sec. 4. Cf. Sec. 3 sub init.
[4] In using the term ‘moral sense,’ Shaftesbury himself, no doubt, meant to convey the notion that the moral faculty was one of ‘intuition,’ in Locke’s sense of the word, as opposed to reason, the faculty of demonstration, rather than that it was a susceptibility of pleasure and pain.
Consequences of the latter.
27. That doctrine is of value as maintaining that those actions only are morally good of which the rational affection is the motive, in the sense that they spring from a character which this affection has fashioned. But if the rational affection is desire for the pleasure of moral sense, we find ourselves in the contradiction of supposing that the only motive which can produce good acts is one that cannot operate till after the good acts have been done. It is desire for a pleasure which yet can only have been experienced as a consequence of the previous existence of the desire. Shaftesbury himself, indeed, treats the moral sense of pleasure in the contemplation of good actions as a pleasure in the view of the right adjustment between the social and self-affections. If, however, on the strength of this, we suppose that certain actions are first done, not from the rational affection, but yet good, and that then remembrance of the pleasure found in the view of their goodness, exciting desire, becomes motive to another set of acts which are thus done from rational affection, we contradict his statement that only the rational affection forms the goodness of man, and are none the nearer to an account of what does form it. To say that it is the ‘right adjustment’ of the two orders of affection tells us nothing. Except as suggesting an analogy from the world of art, really inapplicable, but by which Shaftesbury was much influenced, this expression means no more than that goodness is a good state of the affections. From such a circle the outlet most consistent with the spirit of that philosophy, which had led Shaftesbury himself to bring down the rational affection to the level of a desire for pleasure, would lie in the notion that a state of the affections is good in proportion as it is productive of pleasure; which again would suggest the question whether the specific pleasure of moral sense itself, the supposed object of rational affection, is more than pleasure in that indefinite anticipation of pleasure which the view of affections so ordered tends to raise in us.
Is an act done for ‘virtue’s sake’ done for pleasure of moral sense?
28. Here, again, neither Butler nor Hutcheson, while they avoid the most obvious inconsistency of Shaftesbury’s doctrine, do much for its positive development. With each the ‘moral faculty,’ though it is said to approve and disapprove, is still a ‘sense’ or ‘sentiment,’ a specific susceptibility of pleasure in the contemplation of goodness; and each again recognises a ‘reflex affection’ for—a desire to have—the goodness of which the view conveys this pleasure. But they neither have the merit of stating so explicitly as Shaftesbury does that this rational affection alone constitutes the goodness of man, as man; nor, on the other hand, do they lapse, as he does, into the representation of it as a desire for the pleasure which the view of goodness causes. Butler, indeed, having no account to give of the goodness which is approved or morally pleasing, but the fact that it is so pleasing, could logically have nothing to say against the view that this reflex affection is merely a desire for this particular sort of pleasure; but by representing it as equivalent in its highest form to the love of God, to the longing of the soul after Him as the perfectly good, he in effect gives it a wholly different character. Hutcheson, by his definition of the object of moral approbation, [1] which is also a definition of the object of the reflex affection, is fairly entitled to exclude, as he does, along with the notion that the goodness which we morally approve is the quality of exciting the pleasure of such approval, the notion that ‘affection for goodness’ means desire for this or any other pleasure. But, in spite of his express rejection of this view, the question will still return, how either a faculty of consciousness of which we only know that it is ‘a kind of taste or relish,’ or a desire from the determination of which reason is expressly excluded, can have any other object than pleasure or pain.