Commonsense humanist morality

By Air Marshall Vir Narain (Retd.)

Vir Narain, formerly Air Officer Commander-in-Chief, Indian Air Force Training Command, is currently Chairman of the Indian Humanist Union. His father, Narsingh Narain (1898-1972), founded the Indian Humanist Union in 1960. In 1966, he started the quarterly journal Humanist Outlook and was its editor until his death in 1972. The magazine remained in publication until 2012.

Lord Hailsham (1907-2001), also known as Quintin Hogg, was a prominent British Conservative politician, legal figure, and writer. The quotation below is from his 1987 book The Dilemma of Democracy. In this work, he critiques the state of contemporary philosophy, arguing that professional philosophers have become disconnected from practical concerns and the language of everyday people.

Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham (free image from WIkipedia)

“When we seek from the professional philosophers the bread for our daily journey they seem to offer us nothing better than a diet of small pebbles. The professional philosophers have failed us. For all their sophistication and subtlety, they have ceased to speak in language intelligible to the people or intelligible to those skilled in other intellectual disciplines. Instead they seem to take refuge in the arid wastes of intellectual disputation, remote from everyday experience and even from law, science, or history. Unlike science, but like politics, and like religion, philosophy requires to be couched in language which ordinary people can understand. The meeting place of disciplines cannot afford to speak in a language of its own.”  Lord Hailsham 

Commonsense Humanism (a phrase favoured by Narsingh Narain, founder of the Indian Humanist Union) requires a commonsense morality. Not only have our philosophers, as Lord Hailsham suggests, left commonsense hopelessly behind in their pursuit of higher abstractions; they have also contributed to a misunderstanding of the topic of morality. British philosopher Roger Scruton, in his own inimitable way, observed: “The misunderstanding derives from two sources: an impetuous belief that philosophical questions are solved through the analysis of language; and an inherited moral idiocy which has plagued English-speaking philosophy since Bentham.”

G. E. Moore’s influential book Principia Ethica (1903) could mark the starting point of this misunderstanding. Moore stated: “Ethics is the general enquiry into what is good,” and he went on to expose what he called “the naturalistic fallacy”. He held that “good” could never be defined in terms of natural properties such as what is pleasurable, evolutionarily beneficial and so on. To Moore, “good” is a simple, indefinable quality—such as the colour yellow. You can’t define “yellow” by describing it in other terms; you just have to see it. Likewise, “good” cannot be reduced to anything else. Shooting this down, Scruton argued: “Moore draws an interesting conclusion from his phoney argument. Goodness, he argued, is a property of whatever possesses it. (Otherwise it would never be true to say of something, that it is good.) But it is not identical with any natural property. Nor is it definable. Therefore goodness is a ‘simple’ (undefinable), non-natural property. It is a property, but one whose metaphysical status sets it apart.” For the ordinary person, this exclusive preoccupation with what is good is not very useful. Morality necessarily involves a sense of what is bad/wrong as well as what is good/right. In fact, for good reasons (and this must not be misconstrued as an endorsement of the traditional religious approach to morality) the Ten Commandments mostly spell out what is bad and what must not be done. 

Schopenhauer’s view  

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) held that the first thing to examine in ethics is not the nature of right but of wrong. “The man who starts from the preconceived opinion that the conception of Right must be a positive one, and then attempts to define it, will fail; for he is trying to grasp a shadow, to pursue a spectre, to search for what does not exist. The conception of Right is a negative one, like the conception of Freedom; its content is mere negation. It is the conception of Wrong which is positive; Wrong has the same significance as injury — laesio — in the widest sense of the term. An injury may be done either to a man’s person or to his property or to his honour; and accordingly a man’s rights are easy to define: everyone has a right to do anything that injures no one else.”

The Moral Minimum 

This brings us to the idea of a “moral minimum”, or a moral axiom, that hardly anyone will dispute: “Primum non nocere” – “First, do no harm” – commonly attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. A dictionary definition of the “moral minimum” is as follows:

1. (ethics) A standard or principle upheld as indispensable for moral conduct, whether within a particular context or in general.

2. (ethics) The specific rule that one should do no intentional harm, often considered the bare minimum required for ethical behaviour.

The moral minimum applies to our conduct towards all sentient beings, not only fellow humans. There will be problems, in marginal cases, of defining sentience and suffering, but we cannot hide behind these to shrug off our responsibilities as moral beings. Unfortunately, even in our day, eminent philosophers deny that animals have the right not to be subjected to pain. Roger Scruton, a defender of fox hunting, claimed: “Animals have neither duties nor rights, and it is not merely sentimental, but absurd, to treat them as though such moral ideas applied to them. If you try to apply such ideas to animals, the result is not merely confusion, but a radical failure to relate to them at all. You will achieve nothing that you want, and nothing that they want either.” The renowned biblical scholar and Nobel Peace Prize–winning humanitarian Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) had another view: “In our relations with animals and birds we are continually obliged to harm, if not actually kill them... Each one of us, therefore, must judge whether it is really necessary for us to kill and to cause pain. We must resign ourselves to our guilt, because our guilt is forced upon us. We must seek forgiveness by letting slip no opportunity of being of use to a living creature.” He went on to say: “Ethics is only complete when it exacts compassion towards every living thing.”

Traditional religions, with their image of a rewarding and punishing God, provided to the common man what seemed to Schweitzer a firm basis for morality. The false certitude and security, as well as fear, that this generated had to collapse as knowledge advanced. As the early 20th century American journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann remarked: “The Eighteenth Century in dealing with Newtonian physics, and the Nineteenth Century in dealing with Darwinian biology, went through a hullabaloo similar to that which we are going through in connection with behaviourism, psychoanalysis, and the so-called Gestalttheorie. Our only concern here is to ask whether underneath all the controversy there is not some trustworthy common ground on which the moralist can stand.”

For the most part the answer, I suggest, lies in the maxim: “First, do no harm”. Once we have crossed this first moral threshold, of doing no harm, we will then be ready to cross the second: how to identify the good and pursue it.

Notes

• A version of this article appeared in Humanist Outlook Vol 13, No 11, towards the end of 2012.

• The author's father, Narsingh Narain, attended International Humanist Congresses in London (1957), Oslo (1962) and Boston (1970). The Indian Humanist Union is a full member of Humanists International – formerly the International Humanist and Ethical Union.