Naturalistic Ethics • Scientific ethics does not wish to deal with the ideological

basis of morality.

• Ethical societies in Europe from which the conception of God or religion was explicitly excluded.

• “Moral obligations accepted by the civilised communities” during the last two centuries included the worst form of capitalism and colonialism, subjugation and inhuman exploitation of the non-whites and even unjust discrimination against the poor and the weak.

• All this was the natural result of moral chaos produced by rejecting any absolute standard or criterion of good and right except self-interest.

• According to nationalism, a nation is or should be the highest ideal of moral conduct.

• A society under the influence of this idea will be capable of great efforts of creativeness and self-sacrifice, its individuals will be disciplined and their behaviour fully coordinated for the realisation of the ideal of national welfare and prosperity.

• But in the absence of any higher guiding ideals, it always develops anti-foreign and aggressive tendencies, with the result that the spirit of self-devotion in the citizens is apt to be largely, if not wholly, replaced by the desire of personal gain.

• The motives lose the purity of personal virtue at the same time that the national end becomes injurious inter-nationlly and morally.

• The code of morality under the inspiration of nationalism is neither consistent nor uniform.

• The ideal of such people is not absolute moral ends but national welfare and prosperity.

• National morality can be justified only if it is based on the ideal of universal human brotherhood.

• Islam wants to raise a society built upon purely human outlook.

• It finds the principle of unification not in blood or geography but in the principle of tauhid.

• No national morality would like a nation to treat its enemy with justice and fair play.

• Such a code of universal moral justice could have no place in nationalistic ethics.

• Comte founded the so-called Religion of Humanity.

• He believed in the unity of mankind and looked upon human race as one great organism.

• Religion, according to him, is the full harmony of life and embraces equally the heart and the intellect.

• In the earlier stages of man’s development this was attained, according to him, by the unconscious creation, first of mania, then of gods.

• It was a noble ideal but, being based on no concrete reality, it could not evoke any healthy and warm response from the heart of people.

• What are the bonds that may unite people of different nationalities and races together?

• In the absence of any living and concrete ideology, it will not be possible to bring people together on a common platform.

• Any system of thought that tries to combine such diverse creeds as fetishism and polytheism with monotheism, or godliness with atheism, cannot be expected to evoke any uniform loyalty among its followers.

• In the absence of a basic moral ideology, there can be no unanimity among the congregation of people subscribing to the Religion of Humanity as to what constitutes real service.

• The ideal of humanity as presented by Comte was no doubt an advance on the narrow and one-sided ideals of nationalism and racialism, but due to lack of any spiritual basis, it could not succeed in winning the loyalty of the people at large.

• These secular moral ideologies proves that the best that they could achieve was to arrive at some form of utilitarianism.

• But, if pleasure and pain, the two subjective feelings of main, are to be considered, in the words of Bentham, as the sovereign masters and are to determine our conduct, there remains nothing for ethics to do.

• Morality means enunciation of certain objective principles which should help an individual order his life.

• Utilitarianism allows man to put no restraint on himself and thus the very notion of duty or ought is dispensed with.

• According to Bentham, it was “very idle to talk about duties” and “ought is a word that ought to be banished from our vocabulary.

• Green said, there must be permanence in the ethical end, for in its absence there can be no consistency in the moral behaviour of man who will find himself at the mercy of passing whims and momentary passions.

• If we accept pleasure and utility as the only criterion, we shall be face with total anarchy and disharmony in life.

• Man’s nature, if explained in terms of feeling alone, as utilitarianism does, would be to reduce moral consciousness or “ought” to the psychological “must” or fear of pains and hope of pleasures.

• All ethical codes that are divorced from the truly spiritual basis of human life.

• Unless we accept some objective standard of right and wrong, it is impossible to arrive at any universally valid ideal of moral conduct.

• Kant’s argument for immortality was based on the fact that reason demands the harmony of pleasure and virtue, and since they do not always or ever perfectly unite here, they must, on the ground of rational congruity, be at one somewhere.

• It is an undeniable fact that to raise pleasure or expediency to the level of virtue is to bring down the moral ideal to mere material or sensuous utility.

• It is here that religious ethics, i.e., ethics based on spiritual presuppositions, help us in avoiding this dangerous path.

• One distinctive service which religion renders to morality is to give a comprehension of the dimension of the depth of life.

• A secular moral act tries to resolve the conflict of passion and interest by resort to prudence, by the counsel of moderation appropriate to the moment.

• A religious morality is led to trace every force with which it deals to some ultimate origin and to relate every purpose to some ultimate end, thus giving it a place of permanence.

• Its main interest is not only with immediate values and disvalues, but with the problem of good and evil, not only with immediate objective, but with ultimate hopes.

• Our life and existence is a unity and coherence of meaning which cannot be realised without positing the transcendent source of meaning, God, by which alone confidence in the meaningfulness of life and existence can be maintained.

• The sense of obligation in morals, from which Kant tried to derive the whole structure of religion, is really derived from the religion itself.

• Man seeks to realise in history what he conceives to be already the truest reality, the supreme value, the highest ideal.

Definition of Ethics• It is defined as the science that deals with

conduct, in so far as this is considered right or wrong, good or bad.

• The term ‘ethics’ and ‘ethical’ are derived from a Greek word ‘ethos’ which originally meant customs, usages, especially those belonging to some group as distinguished from another, and later came to mean disposition, character.

• They are like the Latin word ‘moral’ from ‘mores’.

• Nietzsche adopts an attitude of moral relativism.

• That only is good which leads to enhancement of the will to power, and because in different times and climes it is possible to achieve this result with the help of different moral devices.

• He did not see any point in prescribing a universal code of morals.

• Morality has been only a weapon in the hands of those who had the will to gain power, hence various systems to suit the various ends.

• He who is strong and powerful is on the right side, and who is weak is destined to be reckoned as false.

• According to Dewey, it was in customs that the moral or ethical made its appearance, for customs were not merely habitual ways of acting; they were ways approved by the group or society.

• To act contrary to the customs of the group was to incur its displeasure and disapproval.

• The customs, therefore were strictly observed which gave birth to customary morality.

Customary Morality• The group life first took the form of Kinship group as a

body of persons conceived of themselves as sprung from one ancestor.

• Group life controls the behaviour of its members and tries to maintain right relations between them.

• Group morality is based upon its customs which are controlling agencies of its members and which are the product of certain approved way of acting common to the group or ‘mores’ as they are called by Sumner.

• Men inherited from their savage ancestors psychological traits, instincts, and dexterities, or at least dispositions.

• The result is mass phenomena, currents of similarity, concurrence, and mutual contribution which produce folkways or the behaviour to a people.

• Folkways are unconsciously adopted without knowing who led in devising them.

• They develop into traditions which ultimately assume the forms of ‘mores’ or ‘customs’.

• Customs had the force of law and were considered as good.

• Being the approved standards of morality, their violation brought the censure of the whole society.

• But there are periods in history when a whole community or a group finds itself dissatisfied with its old customs, for they fail to adequately meet the new issues and problems of life.

• This is the starting point of reflective morality which supplants the customary morality.

Reflective Morality

• Reflective morality takes into consideration the nature of moral act.

• Conduct and character are considered to be of the same nature and men, according to Aristotle, become good by education which he defines as character training that a person receives in a good family and a good city.

• Kantian theory of morals: “The concept of good and evil must not be determined before the moral law, but only after it and by means of it”.

• Kant subordinates good to moral law and to explain it he adds that “natural impulse suggests to a mother care of her infant; but to be morally good, but to be morally good, the motive of her conduct must be reverence for the moral law which makes it her bounden duty to care for the child. Thus, the act of good is only when it is performed under moral law”.

• A man engaged in service of a client is moved either by ambition for professional success or by acquired professional habits to do the best he can for the affairs of clients entrusted to his charge.

• His acts are morally good are right as distinct from satisfactory-only when such motives as affect his conduct, including even the wish to be of service to others, are subordinated to reverence for moral law.

• The conception of reverence for moral law and duty is the only right way of doing things.

• All that is required is to know our duty in a particular case and ask ourselves if the motive of that act can be made universal without falling into self-contradiction.

• This principle if made universal simply contradicts itself, for with such a principle there would be no such things as a promise.

• The principle of right action, according to Kant: “Act in a way that you would like to be paid back in your own coin”.

• To treat every other as end not as a means to gain one’s own end.

• The person who makes a lying promise to another uses that person as a means to his benefit which is immoral.

• There is a conflict between one’s good and the good of others, for in many cases men have a strong tendency to estimate their own satisfaction as of higher value.

• Kant’s theory become ineffective and meaningless.

• Character building is therefore, of prime importance but it cannot be built unless and until there is a well specified moral system and well-defined moral education.

• Without character, no good can be expected, for morality changes with the change in social conditions.

• Even the conception of as a virtue has different meanings and is defined in various ways.

• Plato, in his Republic treats of justice as one of the 4 principal values, the other 3 being temperance, wisdom and courage.

• Justice, according to him, is the controlling or architectonic virtue, the just man is the self-disciplined man whose passions are controlled by reason.

• Nietzsche conceives of it as the right of strong man- might is right.

• According to Hume, justice is an ‘artificial virtue’.

• Virtue yet cut-throat competition is fair and just in Individualistic competitive Capitalism.

• Kant attaches great importance to moral law but, unless backed by character, it has no binding influence.

• Kant seems to have affirmed what Islam had established centuries ago but failed to observe that man’s character is the basis of morality.

• His theory of morals appears to have been derived from Islamic teachings.

• Mark the highest standard of morality, for no one should wish for the other except what is good, let alone false promise referred to by Kant is his theory of morality.

• Another instance from Kant wherein he holds that motives alone count in determining the acts.

• Such being the case Kant’s theory of morals has nothing original in it.

• His failure to arrive at a right conclusion lies in the fact he lost touch with the original.

• Not only is character stressed upon, in Islam, but also a noble pattern is provided, in the life of the Prophet.

• Thus, Islam aims first at character training and builds in man a disposition to do good to others without which no moral theory can be effective.

• Kant’s theory of morals stressed on moral laws and motives.

• To him, motives alone count in determining an act.

• Bentham lays stress on consequences and says that morality consists in producing such consequences as contribute to human happiness.

• Kant puts sole emphasis upon how far the chosen act is conceived and inspired.

• Bentham lays stress upon what is actually produced or done.

• A survey of moral theories discloses the fact that thinkers of modern times have differed in their opinions.

• There are some who attach importance to the way in

which an act is inspired, for the consequences are often out of control.

• Some are impressed by the importance of the purpose and ends leading to the concept of ‘good’ as ultimate.

• Some others who judged the goodness of an act simply by its approbation and dis-approbation, praise and blame as the primary moral fact.

• The fundamental is that we cannot discriminate between the ends that deceptively promise to be good and the ends that truly constitute good.

• The real good, as such, is beyond our ken and God alone knows what s really good.

• It is better to rely upon the Divine revelations, than to be lost in the blind alleys of human thought and reason.

• Reflective morality, with its bearing upon human thought, proved of a character, erratic and not constant, unstable and not Permanent.

• Customary morality was unsound as it had respect and regard even for such Customs as were defective, irrational and injurious.

• With the growth of intellect, man did not feel himself satisfied with the group control.

• The passive acceptance of old customs was, therefore, discarded.

• It is interesting to know how changes occur in social conditions and shake the foundations of morality.

Bentham’s Utilitarianism• Bentham developed a theory that all ethics, thought and

psychology rest on this fundamental principle that pleasure is preferable to pain.

• Utilitarianism- a doctrine that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should be the guiding principle of conduct.

• ‘Nature’ has placed man under the empire of pleasure and pain.

• His only subject is to seek pleasure and shun pain.

• The principle of utility subjects everything to these 2 motives.

• Good and evil are, thus, interpreted in terms of pleasure and pain and this represents ‘utilitarian ethics’.

• Utilitarianism assumes that man is motivated and controlled by the desire to secure pleasurable and avoid painful experiences.

• The utilitarians have their own suspicious of reason and look to human observation and experience in order to find what men actually value.

• Instead of judging the conduct by its feelings and motives, they would judge it by its consequences.

• Bentham’s theory is criticised as contradictory in itself.

• The whole object of all actions is the obtaining of personal pleasure, which the proper standard for judging the morality of act is its contribution to the pleasure of others.

• In his theory, “desire for private pleasure as the sole motive of action and universal benevolence as the principle of approval are at war with each other”.

• Personal pleasure is indeed, a low set of pleasure and “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied”.

• Pleasure has no sound basis, for it depends mostly upon the existing state of a person.

• “What pleases in health is distasteful in illness, what annoys or disgusts in a state of repletion is gratifying when one is hungry and eager,

• “Which is pleasant to men of generous disposition arouses aversion in a men and stingy person, what is pleasant to a child may bore an adult”.

• There can be no standard of judgement as to know what exactly constitutes pleasure and morally speaking pleasure as an end cannot be considered ‘good’, for vile person takes pleasure in his wickedness and so on.

• The utilitarian theory that pleasure is the good and the end is baseless and immoral.