quest for a moral compass

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ContentsOn the capriciousness of gods and the tragedy of Man.. ... ... ...2

Gods of reason ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 3

On human flourishing ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 4

Heaven and hell ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 5

Nirvana.. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 6

The view from the mountains .. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 7

Faith and power ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 8

Reason and Revelation.. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 9

The human challenge. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .10

The revolutionary spirit and the reactionary Soul ... ... ... ... ... ... .11

The human triumph ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... . 12

Passion, duty and consequence ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .13

The challenge of history ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .15

The death of God, the end of morality . ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .16

The anguish of freedom ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .17

The ethics of liberation . ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .19

The unravelling of morality ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .20

The search for ethical concrete . ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .22

Confucianism, communism and the clash of civilisations ... ... .23

The Fall of Man . ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .25

Stuart Manins’ Summaries:

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On the capriciousness of gods and the tragedy of Man

Myths in Homer’s stories. Written in the eighth century BCE, the Iliad is set in the decade of the Trojan War. They are not primarily about war but the tragedy of the human condition of actors. The arrogance of King Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces, is set against the anger of Achilles his enemy, also a national hero, and son of the goddess Thetis. This anger had resulted in many heroes sent to Hades. Divine and human causation are inextricably linked. Homer’s gods are vain, vicious, and deceitful unlike the gods of Judaism, (and later) Christianity and Islam. The world was chaotic but inescapable. Life = the gods +_man + fate (the will of the gods).

Being good. Nestor, the aging Archaen king, used ‘agathos’ to mean both good and great. Moral and social status equate. To be good was to be born of a good family. Low-born citizens cannot be good. Agamemnon’s faults were not a matter of morality but fate. There is no free-will or choice involved. The gods determined fate. As the cosmos was seen to be more ordered, so the plurality of gods merged towards one god, which in turn led to a mechanical view of the universe, and later to the dichotomy of science and morality.

Classical Greek Era. In the fifth century BCE the plays of Aeschylus take over the role played previously by the Iliad. They address the questions of moral equity between commoners and nobles. Reason begins to replace fate and makes concepts of freedom possible. This is the period that saw the rise of Athens with its great art, architecture, and philosophy. Athens had been conquered by Northern Dorians but by the start of the eighth century economic recovery came with Homer. City-states developed from King based communities. Athens moved from oligarchy rule (a few wealthy were in charge) to democratic rule (although no women, slaves, or foreigners could vote). Athens displaced Sparta at this time and the Greeks were able to resist Persian invasion. This was the setting for Socrates and Plato, Aristotle and Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles, Herodotus and Xenophon, Thucydides and Aristophanes, Phidias and Praxiteles.

The Pre-Socratics. Ideas of virtue, the good life, and the way people reflected on morality were developed and explained through rational argument. Philosophy emerged from poetry and mythology. The Pre-Socratics asked questions such as, ‘Where did all things come from?’ and ‘Where did they go to?’ They were a diverse group: Anaximander and Heraclites saw the world as a product of divine justice; Leucippus and Democritus saw no place for the divine. They tried to explain the world in terms of inherent principles. Unlike Homer, they saw order everywhere but they were not yet scientific. They just tried to explain the unobservable; world origin, destruction, heavenly bodies, causes of motion and change. Principles had to be naturalistic (without divine intervention) and reductionist (explained in simplest terms).

Like Homer, they had faith, but in different things; not necessarily known, but firmly believed. For example, that the world was ordered and that it could be understood through reason. Herodotus studied humans from different cultures e.g. Egyptian, Persian, Libyan, Arabian, through their History rather than as portrayed in myth. Anaximander saw opposites e.g. hot/cold, wet/dry, which needed to be kept in balance. Human society did not model nature but visa-versa.

Imagine people on the beach at Piha waving to people on far away beaches on the Australian coastline. Or, if they turn a little they could be waving to the people of Rarotonga, or turn a bit more and Samoa or Hawaii or dozens of other beaches and countries would be in view.

That is how the Mediterranean world developed. People on coastal settle-ments sailing, trading, marauding and invading. The interchange of languag-es, customs, technologies and the development of ideas and economic interchange produced a vibrant intel-lectual world.

It has been an interchange going back to prehistoric times. As Yuval Noah Harari notes (Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, p 34) our Sapien ancestors also traded with Neanderthals. It is only some 200 gen-erations - say about 2,000 BCE - since that trade became more serious, more intentional.


Gods of reason

Socrates. He is called the father of Western philosophy. When the Peloponnesian war ended in 404 CBE, Sparta imposed the rule of the ‘30 Tyrants’ on Athens, and brought rule by individuals rather than by a hereditary monarch. They executed and expelled many from the previous democracy. Socrates, in Athens, espoused anti-democratic Spartan views although democracy was to be reintroduced three years later. His method of reasoning showed flaws in Athenian traditional thinking for which he was accused of ‘rejecting the city’s gods and corrupting the thinking of young men’. When condemned to death in 399 he chose to drink the poisonous Hemlock. Socrates wrote nothing, but sought truth through dialogue.

Sophists. In fifth century Athens, philosophy was influenced by Sophists such as Protagoras and Gorgias who politically followed democracy and intellectually extended the thinking of the Pre-Socratics. The atomist, Democritus, preferred reason to the ‘bastard senses’ but the Sceptics were distrustful of reason to resolve different opinions. Protagoras challenged scepticism. For him, reality and truth are subjective and not objective. But Socrates opposed sophistic, subjectivity-defined righteousness. The traditional virtues had been, ‘courage, moderation, piety, wisdom, justice’. When asked, ‘What is virtue?”he replied that morality was philosophical, not rhetorical. It was found through truth not persuasion, i.e. not from natural speculation but from rational study of the human condition.

The Euthyphro dilemma. Euthyphro was Socrates’ friend who wanted to prosecute his own father who had caused a killer’s death. The ethical question to be asked in this case was, “Who is being pious?” Is the pious being loved by gods because it is pious, or pious because it is loved by the gods? If goodness, through justice and piety, exists independently of God, then God is no longer the source of that goodness. Socrates and Euthyphro both opted for the first alternative. Where then do moral laws come from? This was to be a prime question for Socrates’ pupil, Plato. This dilemma has remained with philosophers until the present time.

Plato–morality. Philosophy not politics can define the better world. In The Republic, Socrates articulates Plato’s ideas in discussion with Cephalus and Polemarchus. Thrasymachus counter argues with, “Justice is found in being stronger”. In practice then, what is called ‘just’ can be ‘injust’. Conventional morality is a means of keeping ruling-class power. Plato responds with ‘self interest is individually and socially harmful’. He recognises a social structure of classes: Labourers (producing materials), Soldiers (guarding the state), Rulers (ruling!) which parallel the divisions of the soul: appetites (bodily desires), spirit (honour – anger and indignation), reason (desire for knowledge and truth). This sets up dichotomies of reason and desire, body and mind, ‘ego and id’. It is birth which decides which group we belong to, and a healthy soul balances its three parts as a healthy state lives with all three parts in harmony, and with reason ruling. His description of city states encompassed: 1 Aristocracy (rule by Philosopher

Kings), 2 Timocracy (rule by Military), 3 Oligarchy (rule by desire for material goods), 4 Democracy (rule by those valuing food, drink, sex, and pleasure), 5 Tyranny (rule accepting that everything is acceptable i.e. chaos). Thus pure ‘self interest’ led to ‘unhappiness’ and ‘slavery’. To live well is to have an ordered soul in harmony with itself.

Plato–Theory of Forms. Firmly rooted in the body/mind dichotomy and the political blueprint for

ruling the Republic is this famous theory. Rulers, here, have rigorous selection and training. Based on the Spartan model, they are wise and rational. There is no eating fish or sweets, no drama or Lydian music; they can see beyond this realm into the transcendental ‘Theory of the Forms’. Ordinary people are concerned with the physical world and its senses but philosophers understand ‘Truth and Beauty’ beyond things i.e. the ‘Good’. In this, they can fulfil their proper role in the scheme of things.

Plato–cave allegory. He devised an allegory about people in a cave. They were chained to face the back wall. They could see only the shadows of reality projected by the light from an outside fire. They have therefore a distorted idea of that actual reality. Socrates had in a sense, been killed by those democratic cave dwellers of Athens. Goodness and happiness are offspring of harmony, both of the soul and the city. We exist in community, not alone. Hobbes, Nietzsche, Marx, all echo Thrasymachus’ ‘self interest’. How to balance individual rights and social needs is a valid question for today and becomes even more so in an increasingly individualistic world.

Raphael’s painting of Plato’s Academy


On human flourishing

Plato and Aristotle. In Raphael’s Vatican painting of philosophers, Plato points to heaven, and Aristotle points to earth. A simplified scheme so far might be: Pre-Socratic - fickle, divine fate; Platonic – perfect, divine idealism; Aristotelian - scientific, divine humanity. Aristotle made major advances in understanding humanity through logic, mathematics, biology, physiology, astronomy, philosophy, literature and ethics. He was capable of mixing the profound with the obvious in “The good is defined as what all things aim at.” The supreme good (eudaimonia) was a mixture of happiness, pleasure, and satisfaction. Ethics now was not ideal but action seen in context, purpose and function. Reason remains the proper function of the human being. Plato saw reason repressing physical desires; but for Aristotle, reason guided desire. ‘Phronesis’ is practical wisdom. Moral virtues are not taught but copied and reinforced through practice. The doctrine of the mean… “Do the right thing to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, for the right reason etc, reminds us of the well-known advice from John Wesley, “Do all the good you can…”

For both Plato and Aristotle, ethics was subordinate to politics, where the ultimate aim was to ‘promote the good life’. We need to have laws, and obey society. The extent to which democracy, or other forms of rule, is preferable to further best society’s goals, is still held in contention in different parts of the world today.

Is democracy always the best arrangement? Aristotle didn’t think so. How are clashes resolved between individual interests and the common good? What are the examples of this dilemma that you see around you? How would you resolve them?

Aristotle. Born 384 CBE; died 322 CBE. For the next three centuries Greek influence spread with Alexander’s conquests. The Classical Greece Period ended and the Hellenistic Period starts. Then came four new dynasties: Ptolmies (Egypt); Seleucids (East); Antigonids (Greece); Atlalids (Asia Minor). Rule was maintained by military might.

With the maintenance of forced peace came increasing need to explain suffering and control pleasure. The Epicureans and the Stoics had their answers. For Zeno the Phoenecian (334-262), nothing at all mattered apart from virtue. How did important moral ideas increasingly influence Epictetus and Seneca in Rome? Did Stoicism have much influence on Christianity?

Your own investigation. As we are considering important thinkers, you might be interested to find out what Plato thought about the Arts (try music for a start), and what Aristotle thought about women and slaves, (can they control their feelings?) While you’re at it, consider ‘Theodicy’; the redemptive quality in the death of the Roman Statesman Cato who committed

suicide rather than accept Julius Caesar’s unjust rule. Did this have any influence on later Christian thought? Again there is much to ponder.


Heaven and hell

Israelites. Our move away from Greece, and the introduction to another culture, in Palestine, makes for interesting comparisons. Enter Moses and Abraham. At first, the Israelite God is not remotely human; not knowable, but jealous, distant, fearful, and terrifying. Ten Command-ments from Jahweh (via Moses) are to be obeyed or punishment is inflicted. Obedience brings a ‘promise’ or covenant to receive special treatment. However, later on, Abraham’s God is more approachable; sometimes appearing as friendly or even human, sharing food and conversation. Thus the first notable difference for Malik: The Greeks desired to obey reason while the Israel-ites sought to obey rules.

Jews. In the ‘Promised Land’ the Jews became defined as one people with a king and a coun-try. Later civil unrest resulted in two warring adjacent kingdoms. In time, both capitals were sacked. With the return of the exiled Jews from Babylon to Jerusalem, the Law was written down in scripture and monotheistic belief became codified. Again God’s nature softened from being angry and cruel in Deuteronomy (8th c. CBE) to more inclusive and compassionate in Leviticus (5th c. CBE). Morality in Greece was defined by a virtuous life, the means to different ends, but in Monotheism, the end was God who made the rules, announcing them through his mouthpiece, the Prophets. Total obedience to God emphasized the divine/human split rein-forcing the difference between heaven and earth. Hell was even further down the scale.

Christianity.In 70 AD Titus takes Jerusalem and trashes the second Temple. This disaster helped identify a new faith, Christianity. More sacred and quasi-sacred writings emerged including about 20 gospels, some of which were canonized in the ‘New Testament’. Essential to Christian thought is the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. He described the moral qualities needed to enter the ‘Kingdom of God’. One was guided by the Spirit rather than the letter of the Law. Christian virtue comes from embracing God’s love not by reasoning. Virtue is good for its own sake rather than a means to achieve something else. The Golden Rule became a common ideal of Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, and Judean writing, and inde-pendently in Buddhism and Confucianism. Many links can be traced back to Stoic themes.

Malik summarizes thus: with Aristotle, humans could define the good and achieve it; in Plato, the good was defined by a transcendental Form and some humans could reach it, for Chris-tians, only through God’s grace could humans be moral. The latter is what St Paul taught. He gave an answer to the question, “How could the Messiah be killed on a cross?” His death was sacrificial (remember the term Theodicy?). “Faith, a blind trust in God’s goodness and in the redemptive power of Christ, triumphed over both Law and Reason”. The ‘flesh’ is human weak-ness. Because of the development of the doctrine of Original Sin, Augustine took this idea over and fused Christian with Greek philosophy.

Early Christian Church. Augustine was influenced by the Neo-Platonism of Manichaeism. Plotinus discovered by reason what Augustine found through faith. Pelagius (5th c. Welsh Theologian) challenged the view that ‘salvation could be achieved by reason and free will’, but lost his debate with Augustine and was banned as a heretic. But the debate goes on.

Scattered Jews, after the fall of Jerusalem, centred on their history, their tradition, special language, rituals, and Torah. But Christian Jews had none of these aids to worship except for certain symbols and the rituals of Baptism and the Eucharist. Their authority was in their sacred texts and Rome, with its Pope, Bishops and the Empire’s Power.

During the time of the Early Christian Church some interesting contentious ideas formed. For example, revealed ‘truth’ was fixed for all time, a view which contradicted the earlier Greek and Israelite ways of handling their myths and stories (which could change). Faith was now above reason. Augustine had said, “Unless you believe you will not understand.” Faith had become a means of enforcing authority. It was being used to keep the weak, women, slaves and those of lower status in place. Malik observes that “The success of religious morality derives from its ability to cut its beliefs according to social needs while at the same time insisting that such beliefs are sacred because they are God – given.” Do you agree? What do you think Aristotle the Greek, and Jesus the Jew, would have understood by the terms, heaven, earth, and hell? What do you think they mean?


Nirvana

Oral history - Mahabharata. The oral history behind Hinduism tells of an epic struggle which nearly destroyed the world. In it, King Pandu with his five sons, the Pandavas, overcome the one hundred sons of his blind brother Dhtitarashtra in the fight for the Kingdom of Bharata on the GanglaRiver. The oldest of the five brothers, Yudhishtra, is crowned king. Thus emerges the Sanskrit poem Mahabharata or Ramayana. It is approximately eight times the length of Homer’s poems and three times that of the Bible. It contains the theology, philosophy, history and customs in the Bhagavad Gita. It is about the battle between good and evil. It describes humans fathered by the gods, a supreme god Vishnu, who descends in human form ‘to rescue righteousness’, and is based on events between 1200 and 800 BCE. This approximates the times of the Trojan War or the formation of the Israelite kingdom. The Mahabharata are more like the Iliad and the Odyssey and the wild tales of El and Baal than Sophocles and Solomon, and addresses the well-known questions: What is it to be good? Why do the good suffer? Can we avoid fate?

Hinduism. Hinduism is a collection of many religious traditions, seen not as faith but as eternal law. The oldest Hindu scriptures, Vedas, embody not the word of God but the eternal law that exists beyond any lawgiver. The Upanishads or Vedanta, produced between the seventh and second centuriesBCE, discuss attaining enlightenment. They consider wealth, pleasure, duty, and ignorance as they affect self knowledge. They see the need to be suspicious of perceptual knowledge. Khama comes through birth, death, and rebirth. The presence of evil suggests that God is either not omnipotent or not righteous. This view is similar to the questions raised by Job in the Torah. The beliefs in transformation and reincarnation justified the Caste System. Khama can be seen as the Hindu version of the Christian notion of the Fall.

Oral history - Ramayana. This is the other great mid-millennial epic to match the Mahabharata. The Ramayana looks forward in contrast to the Mahabharata’s conservatism. Rama, the earthly form of the god Vishnu, is tricked out of inheriting his kingdom by in-family feuding and demonic deception. With an army supported by the King of the monkeys he is able to rescue his abducted wife and restore his kingdom. Malik notices in this story a justification for monarchy which is further reinforced by the establishment of order, justice and prosperity through personal rule. Social ideas of equality, similar to the idealism in the GreekStates, and other recognizable views of nihilism, materialism, and atheism emerged. It is interesting to see world similarities in thinking arising out of social turbulence: In India, Greece, Israel, Persia and China, where the heroic age was giving way to a more structured world order. The stories of myth served well as a useful way to reinforce social change. In this Axial Age in India, asceticism and reincarnation became important. Out of this background emerged Jainism, with its non-violent protection of all life, and of course, Buddhism.

Buddhism. Siddhartha Gautama was born in the 5th c BCE. He chose asceticism, debated the nature of suffering, turned to meditation and sought enlightenment in achieving Nirvana. This took place two centuries before Aristotle. As in the record of Jesus’ teaching, he left little hard evidence of the actual words used, but like the effect Jesus had, they changed people’s behaviour. Important topics covered suffering, desire, reincarnation, ‘doing good’ or ‘the right thing’. Reason rather than revelation is the preferred process, and ethics rather than metaphysics, the non-theistic end-point. The eight-fold path was called the ‘Middle Way.’ The undefined Nirvana is a paradise without a central Deity. I appreciate the way Malik relates Indian thought to World thought, and connects religious thought to the local social conditions it was responding to and which it served.


The view from the mountains

Chinese Dynasties. The Yellow River is central to the development of civilization. Homo erectus was there 1,000,000 yrs ago; Homo sapiens perhaps 100,000 years ago. Bronze Age culture is in evidence in China in about 2,000 BCE. The first signs of Chinese literature existed before Homer’s poems were recited, and some 500 years before they were written down. Dynasties came and went: Xia followed by Shang, (basis of poetry, philosophy, art), followed by Zhou (1,000 years before Jesus). The Imperial Age lasted from Qin in the 2nd century BCE to Qing in the 20th cen-tury AD. China knew about the outside world but trade was mainly within its borders. Continui-ty matched change to give stability for a very long time.

Confucius. Kongzi (Confucius) was the first great Chinese philosopher. He wrote about ‘the good’ and ‘the wise’. Born about 100 years before Socrates he had no knowledge of the Greeks. But Chinese philosophers were concerned with down-to-earth practical arguments and avoid-ed abstract views and pure logic. Both the nature of the Chinese language and the geographical characteristics of the country supported this situation. They wanted to discover how to live rather than how things are. Chinese philosophy tends to be poetic, aphoristic and suggestive rather than scientific. Ethics, not religion, provided the spiritual basis for Chinese life. Confucius was born about 550 BCE, i.e. in the Zhou Dynasty and, in answering the question of how to live harmoni-ously in society, he identified two qualities:* ‘ren’ (humaneness – empathy, loving-kindness – like ‘agape’, the Golden Rule)* ‘li’ (propriety – following tradition, ritual, and traditional ‘mores’).

Established, social, hierarchical relationships of: father/son, husband/wife, older/younger broth-er, older/younger friend, ruler/subject should be maintained and reflect the balance between ‘yin’, dark etc. and ‘yang’, light, etc. (One Chinese scholar to whom I showed this material challenged Malik’s other adjectival inclusions expanding the two etceterasc but agreed with ‘dark’ and ‘light’.) Dominance and submissiveness are aspects not of an individual but of the social role. Li practices were ritualised through ancestor worship and sacrifice. It is estimated that Chinese philosophers were anticipating Western ethical thought by about four centuries. Universal equality, for exam-ple, predated similar Greek and Christian ideas.

Mo Tzu. However, in the second half of the 5th century BCE, writing at the same time as Socrates and Plato, was another influential Chinese philosopher, Mo Tzu. At the disintegration of the Zhou Dynasty there were a number of Chinese States at war with each other. This ended with victory for Qin in 221 BCE and led to the first Imperial Dynasty influenced by Mo Tzu with his two principles of ‘partiality and universality’. Universality was needed if wars were to cease but it needed to be mixed with a sense of ‘reciprocal altruism’ (the term used two millennia later).

Mo was for practical change in contrast to Kong’s conservatism. In terms of the Eurythro debate, something is right if heaven intends it. The relationship between Kong and Mo shows the com-plexity between faith, reason, and morality. Mo (like Hobbes later on) saw conflict arising from self interest and therefore needing the absolute authority of a ruler. In some ways, Mo was China’s first real philosopher to engage in explicit, reflective research for moral standards through reason.

Tao. With the unification of China in 221 BCE Kong’s ideas increased in acceptance as Mo’s ideas became considered ‘more dangerous’. For 2,000 years Kongzi reigned as Mo Tsu’s radi-cal position waned. In the following Han Dynasty, Confucianism was adopted and Kong was considered to be China’s greatest sage. It is important to understand at this stage the contribution of ‘Tao’ (The Way) or in its Romanised form, ‘Dao’. If Confucianism was the ‘yin’, then Daoism was the ‘yang’. Paradoxically, this was unknowable and mysterious, but a natural law. Taoist (or Daoist) ethics accept nature as perfect and complete in itself. In doing nothing we achieve every-thing! The Silk Road linked China, India, Persia, Arabia, Greece, and Rome in the 1st century BCE and brought Buddhist ideas to China. The Han Dynasty collapsed in 220 BCE making way for the Tang Dynasty. India had developed two versions of Buddhism – Theravada, the lesser in status and more literal in interpretation, and the Mahayana, which was more liberal and open to change. It was this latter version that flourished in China and by 500 AD had acquired some Daoist affinities. In Japan these ideas had become included in Zen philosophy. The rise of Daoism and Buddhism together challenged Confucianism. Zhu Xi, 1130-1200 refocused on moral cul-tivation from the bureaucratic approaches of preceding centuries. Zhu redefined ‘li’ as propriety plus essence, and ‘qi’ as the energy needed to turn the abstract into the actual. All this related to the ‘universe’ rather than just ‘the local’. He spoke of the ‘Supreme Ultimate”.

Qi. There were two answers to the Confucianism question, “Is human nature good or bad?” Meng Ke followed Kong with his belief in innate goodness, while Hsun Tzu, (about 318- 230 BCE) believed that all were born evil. Desires caused disorder and therefore society need ‘li’. Zhu combined essential goodness with the idea of it being corrupted by desire. Thus the original ‘ren’ and ‘li’ concepts were redefined to see humaneness perfectly materialised in ‘qi’. This synthesis held for most of the second millennium. Dynastic rule crumbled in the 20th century and Confu-cianism lost its privileged place. The rise of technology was in evidence with woodblock printing long before Gutenberg type, and with various inventions such as gunpowder, the compass, and the spinning wheel. But the social, political, philosophic, and ethical changes that overthrew the old order in Europe in the 19th century, never happened in China. When I read this last state-ment, I wonder if there is a connection between the relatively peaceful avoidance of revolution in 18th/19th century Great Britain when compared with what happened on the Continent and particularly in France? And if there is a connection, what contribution did John Wesley’s influ-ence make?


Faith and power

Muhammad. In the 7th century, as Arabia was located at the edge of civilization, so Mecca was at the edge of Arabia. At the heart of Mecca stood the Ka’ba where the desert peoples worshipped their gods and had done so since the 4th century. The annual pilgrimage to this place later on became the Haj. Into this world of new-found but disproportionately distributed wealth, came Muhammad the prophet. He cared about the plight of his people. He became a successful businessman but a mystic experience not unlike that of Moses before the burning bush or Saul on the Damascus Road, convinced him that God was speaking to him. He was commanded to ‘recite’, a fairly tall order for someone illiterate, and furthermore, to write down the ‘word of God’ as it was dictated to him. This he claims to have done and within ten years of his death, the scribe Zayd selected from his material, the Qur’an, considered to be the uncorrupted and the incorruptible, complete record of God’s word.

Qur’an. The Qur’an has religious and social implications. There is but one God and one special prophet. On one hand, its social ethic gave God moral content; on the other hand, his God gave his social ethic a sense of power. In 622, driven out of Mecca, he went to what became Medina and formed a new religious community. Eventually he battled his way back. Islam became more than a religion of compassion and benevolence but also one of struggle and expansion even including war, violence, and slaughter. Islam transformed morality not so much with new rules but with a new reason for being moral. To obey the will of Allah, one used prayer and alms-giving combined with the annihilation of enemies. Goodness was not to be found in certain behaviours but in unconditionally obeying God’s law and following the rules set down for entry to heaven. Along with Christianity, Islam combined an ethics “as malleable as clay with the iron rod of God’s word.”

Shi’ites and Sunnis. Towards the end of the 7th century, perhaps the greatest Muslim shrine was built in Jerusalem, not Arabia. It is the Dome of the Rock, a magnificent, beautiful monument to power that celebrates the phenomenal rise of a small desert tribal centre to a world-wide triumph over Judaism and Christianity. It was described as the spiritual junction between heaven and earth. With the death of Muhammad, a practical question of succession became important and contentious. Who was to become the new ‘God’s Deputy on Earth’? Was it a family member with Ali ibn Abi Talib in mind, to be known later as Shi’ites or was it to come from those from outside the family who were more politically able to maintain order and stability. This latter group became the Sunnis.

Spread of Islam. By the end of the second Caliph’s reign, barely a decade after Muhammad’s death, the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia, Persia, Syria, and Egypt had all been conquered. A new class of religious scholars the ‘ulama’ emerged to convey God’s will to the faithful.

Whereas the Christian Early Church history records that faithfulness was defined through correct beliefs (recall the debates over doctrines such as the divinity of Christ and the Trinity), in Islam the emphasis was on correct practice. Al-Ghazali, one of Islam’s most important early philosophers identified only three Islamic beliefs necessary as: One God; The Qur’an, as revealed to Muhammad, as God’s word; The afterlife. Thus the Sharia, the comprehensive body of rules, gained in power and is still influential in today’s world.

Summary. What I have learned from ‘The Quest for a moral compass’ so far is that very few religious ideas are really new. The one that stands out for me is Jesus’ idea of loving one’s enemies. I think that reason is a necessary component

of faith. The limitations of treating symbolic stories as literal, of considering one’s culturally sculptured faith as exclusive, and uniquely ‘right’; of claiming that what we wish to be morally true by putting it into words from ‘the mouth of God’ can be both inspirational as well as ego- and ethno-centrically delusive. It seems that all religious ideas need to relate directly to the social and moral needs of the people they serve but that there is danger in linking political power with enforced national mores. Mostly negative, perhaps. So what are good things that keep shining through? Respect for others, Compassion, Forgiveness, Justice. What would you challenge in, or add to, this large and diverse list?


Reason and Revelation

Islam discovers the Greeks. Malik records that in the 12th century, a remarkable, philosophical novel, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, was written by Ibn Tufail who had studied philosophy and medicine. His story showed a belief in the ethical importance of rational contemplation. He described a world of ‘transcendent forms’ that can be apprehended by ‘intellectual speculation alone’. He recognises the need for a ‘creator outside of time and space’ and all this, about 400 years before the Arab world discovered Plato and Aristotle.

Arabic became the common language for the empire in the 8th century, largely due to make collecting taxes easier. Many translators were needed and this led to discovering the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Ptolemy. Oddly enough, much of the language work for the Muslims was done by Christian scholars. In the mid-8th century, the new capital, Baghdad housed a library that became the greatest intellectual centre of its time. Later on, Cordoba, in Iberia, donned this mantel to support an outstanding flowering of philosophy and science. Astronomy was revolutionized, algebra invented, number systems improved, optics established along with cryptography.

Rationalists and Traditionalists.

The introduction of traditional Greek thought led to the development of two camps: Rationalists – promoting ‘falsafah’, living rationally, and seeking learning as an ethical duty. They accepted the Qur’an as the Word of God but used both reason and revelation. Traditionalists – they considered human reason to be weak. Revelation and scripture were the only sure paths to truth. Al-Ghazali was perhaps their greatest protagonist. An early Rationalist Movement was founded by Wasil ibn Ata and developed by Al-Farabi (c 872-951). This culminated in Ibn Rushd whose works apply rational argument to all kinds of topic. He was the supreme interpreter of Aristotle and had the greatest influence on the non-Muslim world. In turn, he influenced both Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas.

The Arabic Rationalists believed in God but one who ‘possesses no attribution either in physical form such as body or face, or absolute qualities of mind or character such as wisdom or will’. These they suggested were simply human ways of thinking because humans possess no language through which to describe God as a being-in-himself. Furthermore they denied that God could intervene in the mundane aspects of human affairs. ‘God does not deal in particulars’. God cannot be defined positively; only by what he is not: He is not human, not material, does not consist of parts. This was all in the face of what the Traditionalists understood from the Qur’an but will sound remarkably familiar to some Christians in the 21st century.

Good and evil are not arbitrary demands but rational categories that can be established through unaided reason. This takes us back to the Euthypro Dilemma raised by Plato. ‘Either goodness is divinely defined but arbitrary, or it is rational and exists independently of the gods’. The power of reason and the authority of scripture may be seen to mirror each other, but that raises the question of why not rely on human reason alone? Ibd Rushd explained that God created scripture for the unreasoning masses. The learned read it allegorically! The idea that scripture should be read differently by the learned and by the masses was already an important theme in Christianity.

The defeat of the free-thinkers. The most famous of freethinkers was Ala al - Ma’arri (c. 973-1058) who wrote, ‘They all err, Moslems, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians’. Humanity follows two world-wide sects: One, man intelligent without reason, the second, religious without intellect. His was a world that needed God for comfort and solace, and without God there was no hope to recompense for a life of pain and torment. So in Rushd and al-Ma’arri reason was either the equal of revelation or revelation was dismissed altogether. These views were not over-influential in Islam but were to find their greatest following in Christian Europe later on.

Al-Ghazali (1056-1111) was the most significant critic of the Rationalists and became one of the most important philosophers, theologians, and jurists of medieval Islam. He identified three major false claims for which unbelievers were to be killed: That the universe always existed; that God’s knowledge contained only universals; that the souls of the dead would not return to their bodies. Thus ended a period of free-thinking within the Muslim world. Politics, even more than theology, destroyed rationalism and an inquisition followed. The caliphate and ulama went different ways. Too much reason wrought too much scrutiny which challenged authority. It took two hundred years for the Traditionalists to establish themselves as custodians of Sunni orthodoxy. By then the rationalist spirit had found a new home in Christianity with the separation of faith and state. There is more to learn from this chapter, but enough so far, to start plenty of worthwhile discussion and further study.


The human challenge

Medieval Christianity. ‘Rome’ excommunicated ‘Constantinople’ in 1054 i.e. the Latin West Church divorced the Greek East. Theological grounds for such a split were attributed to disagreements such as the ‘filioque’ dispute, but political separation between a dying Roman Empire and a more prosperous, stable Byzantium had been looming. However, the precariousness of life in the West was the making of Christianity. The church maintained social order by taking over taxation and policing as well as fostering learning and the Arts. Thus as the Roman Empire expired, the spiritual empire centred on Rome, fusing the spiritual and the secular. By 1204, the Fourth Crusade Western forces swapped attacking Muslims to Sack Constantinople. But Byzantium and Islam had already absorbed much learning from the Ancient Greeks and from Persia, Babylon, and India.

The most significant casualty of the Christianizing of learning was Aristotle with his empirical, this-worldly approach. Plato, on the other hand, with his Transcendental Forms, became an ‘honorary’ Christian. Byzantium was conquered by Muslim Turks in 1453 but by then the Muslim Traditionalists had well crushed the Rationalists. The golden age of Arab science was over. Western Christendom revived and Charlemagne was crowned Emperor in 800 and Otto became Holy Roman Emperor in 962. Stability produced vibrant growth in commerce, technology, the arts, and trade and contact were renewed with the Byzantine and Islam worlds as well as renewed affinity with Greek thought.

Thomas Aquinas. The end of the 11th century saw the rise of the universities; first in Bologna, then in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Salamanca, Montpellier, Toulouse, and Padua. All taught in Latin, and combined the ideas of Western Christendom with ancient Greece, particularly as expressed by Aristotle. Thomas Aquinas was the scholar who stood out above others. Although at his death in 1277 many of his doctrines were denounced by French and English church leaders, within another 40 years he was made a saint by Pope John XX11. Born and educated in Italy, he rose to take a chair in Theology in Paris. He found in Aristotle the clue to resolve the tension between reason and faith. For Augustine, faith over-ruled reason, and the doctrine of Original Sin had corroded human intellect. Under the influence of Islamic Rationalists, Aquinas was able to reverse this order.

God was actuality itself for Aquinas; consequently he possessed no potential. He was perfect and changeless. Goodness is defined as the fusion between potentiality and actuality. Human goodness is shown in the ability to fulfil its nature. As rational agents, humans can choose to actualize their capabilities and therefore act badly if they want to. Free-will allows this choice. Aquinas said humans had a natural desire for good. It is Original Sin that is to blame for evil. Natural law needs to be augmented by virtue, law and grace. Moral virtues such as generosity, honesty, gratitude, charity, control the appetites. The Cardinal Virtues were prudence, justice,

courage, and temperance. The Theological Virtues were faith, hope and charity and were all gifts from God alone. Aristotle would not have agreed with Aquinas at this point but to his credit, Aquinas takes the tension out of Christian belief between humanity and The Fall, and unlike Augustine, expresses himself in such a way as to minimise human degradation and maximise reason. In ‘The Inferno’, Dante produces a brilliant poetic allegory of Christian doctrine, and in doing so exposes vividly, both a Papacy and a Roman Church of considerable corruption. He provides a view of a new moral landscape originally sketched by Aquinas, relating faith with reason in such a way that the ideas of Western Europe would be transformed in their grasp of human nature and ethical conduct.


The revolutionary spirit and the reactionary Soul

Humanists. In the late middle ages, wandering scholars known as ‘humanists,’ hunted for new or hidden manuscripts throughout Europe. They longed for a revival of Greek and Roman classics which they believed had been misunderstood by earlier Muslims and Christians. The Italian poet Petrarch, known as the father of humanism, gave us the name Renaissance for this rebirth of culture and learning which followed the so called ‘Dark Ages’. Previous theologians had been obsessed by studying Aristotle and asking questions about God and logic. There was a new appreciation for the poetry, oratory, rhetoric of previous times and the grace and style with which they were accompanied. Plato’s stylistic dialogues replaced Aristotle’s dry treatises, and intellectual excellence emphasised literature, philology, history, ethics, and politics, or the ‘humanities’ as they are now called. The ‘dignity of man’ replaced the ‘depravity of man’ and humans were seen as ‘self-creating agents free to transform themselves and the world through their actions. In fact, Giovanni Pico produced a famous oration on ‘The Dignity of Man’. He was condemned by the Pope and even imprisoned. But if Pico was to be considered the voice of the Renaissance, then Erasmus, the most influential humanist of his age, was its soul.

Erasmus. A brilliant translator of Greek and Latin and a great love of ancient texts, he applied humanist learning to Christian works. His 1516 edition of the Greek New Testament influenced vernacular Bibles over the next few centuries. His penetrating scholarship revealed errors in St Jerome’s Vulgate Bible. For example, he pointed out that there was no reference to Purgatory in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Jewish Scriptures. Erasmus criticised the church from within its own establishment, whereas Luther, after being excommunicated by the Church of Rome, proceeded to challenge it from the outside. The complexity of the Reformation as an outcome of Renaissance thinking is seen in Malik’s comparison of Erasmus and Luther.

Luther. All history needs to be seen within a context of time and place. In the mid 14th century a third of Europe’s population died from plague within a five-year interval. No wonder there was wide-spread preoccupation with death, insecurity, and salvation. The nature of the times, the intellectual ferment of scholarship, and the corruption by the church in selling indulgences, all need to be considered to begin to understand the Reformation. “I am bound by the Scriptures… I cannot and will not recant anything…” declaimed Luther at the Diet of Worms. This was a challenge not just to the Pope and the Emperor but also to Aristotle and Aquinas. Aquinas may have seen reason as helpful in finding God, but Luther maintained that God could only be reached through Revelation. His view of human nature was even darker than Augustine’s.

The only true moral rules are divinely given: e.g. The Ten Commandments; accepted by faith and to be strictly obeyed. Human reason was not to question God’s Word because human

reason was contaminated by sin. But here’s a problem: Good works alone do not ensure salvation. Only God’s grace can achieve that. Malik attributes to Luther the view that “ all humans can do is close their eyes, shut out reason and desire, accept God’s Word on faith, and hope for the best in the next world.” We are back to Euthyphro’s problem and Luther’s answer is that humans have to accept God’s idea of good, not because it’s supported by reason, but because we believe God tells us it is good. In other words morality is arbitrary.

Reformation. Whereas Aquinas believed that humans had a God-given autonomy of will, the Reformers insisted on God’s sovereignty over his creation. The only autonomy that Calvin admitted to was man’s autonomy to be wicked. The paradox of the Reformation is that an anti-will movement recognised the sovereignty of God through man’s unquestioning faith, but at the same time helped create a world where individualism and secularity flourished. The notion of ‘priesthood of all believers’ helped to dismantle hierarchical church organisation and encourage individual Biblical interpretation according to private conscience. The rise of individualism as part of the Reformation was consistent with Renaissance vision.

The Reformation created a secular space defined by laws that defended a political rather than a divine order. ‘Magisterial Protestantism’ replaced Papal power to allow for more secular rule. God was not replaced as the ultimate source of political authority; rather God was called upon to authorize the rule of a secular, earthly, representative monarch who claimed to rule by divine right. It is out of this context that ensuing Reformation sub-groups developed, such as the Anabaptists. New moral positions emerged like refusing to swear oaths to secular authorities, opposing the death penalty, objecting to fight in war, and even disapproving the ownership of private property. Luther and Calvin in the first half of the 16th century were to part company from providing sympathetic support for the demands of the ‘Peasants’ even though Protestant ideals fed the radical democratic spirit.


The human triumph

Seventeenth century philosophy. In the play Antigone by Sophocles, the eponymous heroine defies her uncle Creon, the new king, by burying her slain brother, Polynices, against his wish-es. To the modern mind, Creon is a tyrant and Antigone, a heroine. But not in Greek culture. Sophocles portrays Creon as defending the ‘polis’. Here is the chasm between the ancient and modern worlds; between the primacy of the state and the rise of individual liberty. The17th century was the hinge between ancient and modern.Aristotle found moral rules in nature and the community. Aquinas found moral value from God. The rise of the market economy and the growth of religious capitalism in the 17th and 18th centuries corroded both God and human-ity. Authority for moral rules was now seen to be in human nature. Two 17th century philoso-phers found different responses to this: Englishman, Thomas Hobbes and Dutchman, Baruch Spinoza. Influencing both was Rene Descartes.

This was a time of doubt and rejection of absolutes and the basic importance of existence because of the ability of humans to think. The mind is the private possession of the individual, and the human beings, as thinking substance, were machines. Descartes drew a sharp distinc-tion between the material world and the interior world of the mind. This highlights a modern problem: how to view human bodies – including brains - as machines but knowing that what we value about our fellow humans is that they do not always act as machines but as people. This is the conflict between ‘scientific mechanism’ and ‘human exceptionalism’.

Hobbes. Hobbes published a translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in 1629. It made him think about the role of human nature in war. The moral of this military story was to avoid the political corrosiveness of democracy. Athens had fallen to Sparta due to Athenian moral laxity. Therefore he looked to the ‘state of nature’ to find a vision of morality. To keep human desires in check, a strong political leader was required. No wonder Hobbes was also a strong Royalist in a time of rising democracy.

Like Descartes, Hobbes despised Aristotle. He also viewed nature as a piece of clockwork, but unlike Descartes, he rejected the distinction between mind and matter. Natural man became the focus for morality. In nature we all end up fighting. The law on which this is based is rational self interest. Only if the Sovereign threatens this, has the subject the liberty to disobey. Two principles rule: a pessimistic view of human nature and distain for Democracy. This view did not sit well with the rising importance given to individuality as a position outside social determination.

Spinoza. The Jewish Dutchman, Spinoza, b. 1632, did much to shape modern thinking about freedom, equality and the possibility of secular morality. He challenged ‘revealed religion, received ideas, tradition, morality, and …divinely constituted political authority.’ In 1656 he

was excommunicated from the synagogue and lived largely by himself, self-supporting as a lens-maker. He developed further, Descartes’ mechanistic philosophy, but insisted on only one reality, not two. Reality is a combination of mind and matter. Humanity’s aim is self preserva-tion and good and evil are determined by desires.

Like Socrates, Spinoza sees good and evil in terms of knowledge and ignorance. Therefore hate, envy, and guilt vanish. Self knowledge is the foundation of virtue and happiness. He be-lieves in choice: from a long way back the paradox of ethics has been that it is illogical to deny free will, and sensible to accept the possibility of moral transformation. The most significant shift was from being a slave to one’s passions to being the agent of one’s change.

Influence on Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant, at the heart of the 18th century Enlighten-ment, represents the full flowering of humanist sensitivity to emerge from the Renaissance. Here medieval superstition was shed and the light of reason shone on human problems. By and large the legitimacy of the monarchy, aristocracy, women’s subordination, ecclesiastical authority, and slavery were replaced with principles of universality, equality, and democracy. New store was set on civility and manners. Civility was expected from civilization and human-ity implied the ability to decide one’s own destiny independent of divine intervention. Malik cites Jonathon Israel as identifying two Enlightenments: Radical and Democratic. The radical stream included the lesser known Holbach, Diderot, and Spinoza, and depends on the place of reason as supreme. The Democratic, where reason is limited by faith and tradition, is the mainstream which included Kant, Locke, Voltaire, and Hume. Israel sees the Radicals defining modernity with toleration, personal freedom, democracy, racial equality, sexual emancipation and the universal right to knowledge. Deistic and Theistic views of God served different theists at the same time. These differences between mainstream and radical Enlightenment provide understanding for the post-Enlightenment world. Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza were not really moral philosophers yet they helped shaped new ways of thinking about what it is to be human. Can mind be understood scientifically and morally, objectively? Is morality just a pur-suit of rational self interest? Are drives naturally given or self created? Do humans have moral choices? Can human nature be transformed? No really new questions here but the old ones acquire new meaning with increased understanding.


Passion, duty and consequence

David Hume. The above chapter title is a fitting summary for the 100 years spanning the early 18th century to the early 19th century. In writing about morality, David Hume, born 1711, replaced ‘is and is not’ with ‘ought and ought not’. An important feature of modern ethics is the separation between facts and values. Morality is understanding reality through mind and passions. Whereas for Spinoza ‘reason, will, and structure open the door’, for Hume it was ‘the structure of mind and the nature of passion’. Imagination and fancy were replaced by human nature. The process of reasoning in induction, subsuming causation, became as important as deduction, which subsumed logic. He took empiricism to its logical and sceptical conclusions. But he saw that there was more to philosophy than this: namely the passions or more simply understood today as feelings and desires.

Hume viewed passions as vital to human nature; not as previously regarded in philosophy as a burden upon reason. They were, for example, able to make causal inferences. Reason relies on passion to produce action. Whereas reason transforms desire for Spinoza, it is the means of motivating reason for Hume. From Socrates to Spinoza wrongdoing had been seen as the product of ignorance – a failure of reason. Not so for Hume, it is through sentiment that we make moral evaluations and distinguish between virtues and vices. Virtue produces approval and gives pleasure; vice elicits disapproval and creates pain. Disinterested empathy allows us to recognise the effects of virtue or vice.

Some people consider that Hume saw morality as subjective taste; others saw him as considering it a phenomenon rooted in objective facts. For Hume, some virtues are embedded in human nature – benevolence, generosity, temperance, frugality. Others are artificially developed from rules created through human history. Whereas natural virtues are always good it is not always so with artificial ones. Justice is needed as a development of complex socialisation. In artificial virtues ‘Hume marries Aristotle and Hobbes, virtue and self interest.’ “No action can be virtuous…unless there be in human nature some motive to preface it, distinct from the sense of its own morality”.

Whereas Plato and Aristotle saw virtue and vice in terms of individual happiness, Hume went further to explain and include ‘fellow feeling’ – a Greek idea distilled through Christianity. Here the community explained the individual. He now viewed the ‘good life’ as not derived from divine precept but from human nature. Hobbsian morality of self interest legitimatised capital exploitation.

Hume opposed this. We know right and wrong because we are social and part of nature. Benevolence, generosity, sympathy, and gratitude have more important natural feelings than selfishness. After all it is through reason that humans develop a conscience. Malik sees a

weakness in Hume’s notion of individual prior existence to society, which had led to individual conscience, and the measuring of moral goodness i.e. Kantianism and Utilitarianism.

Kant challenged Hume’s scepticism. He suggested that the conflict between empiricism and rationalism be softened by viewing mind as an active not a passive recipient of sensation. “Concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind.” Moral values do not come from God but from the active mind. Duty not happiness is the measure of good. And duty conflicts with natural desires. The only good thing is good will. The moral person chooses through duty to act against natural desires.

It is in this context that Hume speaks of hypothetical and categorical imperatives. A moral act is driven by a categorical imperative; a moral action does not confuse means and ends, it can be made universal, and is based on principles that could apply to anyone. This is the first true challenge to the Virtue Ethics of Plato and Aristotle, and human worth, and becomes central to the ideas of human rights. However, Hume tells us what not to do rather than what to do and leaves an unanswered question in accounting for badness.

Jeremy Benthem. In the mid 18th century, Jeremy Benthem restored happiness to the heart of the moral code and challenged the idea that morality was defined through character and motive. All that mattered for Benthem was consequence. This is contained in the utilitarian definition, ‘an act which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers’. He promoted the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, Universal Suffrage, and the disestablishment of the Church of England. To maximise pleasure is to maximise happiness. The quality of pleasure is irrelevant; all that matters is the quantity. Malik wryly notes that this would make an excellent criterion for X-factor judging. His contemporary critics called this ‘pig philosophy’. Benthem dismisses ‘natural rights’ and although his ideas show demonstratable flaws, he has influenced thinking in two ways: morality can be defined by consequence, and although others had thought that certain actions can be intrinsically wrong, for him there are no moral absolutes.

John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill, b 1806, continued the cause of philosophic utilitarianism. A precocious child, he was learning Greek by 3, and at 8 reading Plato, Herodotus and Diogenes, mastering Euclid and algebra, and writing poetry. Had a mental breakdown in 1826 but was cured by reading Wordsworth’s ‘Romantic’ poetry. He modified Benthem’s utilitarianism by considering pleasure as qualitative as well as quantitative. He considered some pleasures as higher than others. He claimed that it is better to ‘be an unhappy human than a happy pig’.


It’s not easy for a utilitarian to defend this claim because of the logical argument for equal treatment; black and white, men or women, rich or poor, clever or stupid. Another difference in his consequential theory is that between an act and a rule. This is seen to have some problems which can be met by evaluating social rules rather than specific acts. For example, acts are moral when they conform to the rules that lead to the greatest good.

J.S.Mill was concerned with rule ‘consequentialism’ and act ‘consequentialism’. Satisfaction may also be measured in preference rather than feeling. Preference to act (e.g. publish) can conflict with the desire not to be offended. ‘What the history of consequentialism reveals is the difficulty in thinking about moral acts without passing judgement on the intrinsic worth of those acts.

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The challenge of history

Georg Hegel. The German philosopher Georg Hegel, 1770-1831, spent his life answering the question, “How does humanity gain freedom?” In other words, “What is the history of the progress of the consciousness of freedom?” Hegel wove history into philosophy. This challenged the Hobbesian view of static human nature. It established in its life-time the basis of Marxism, idealism, existentialism, and phenomenology – indeed the Continental tradition.

Before Hegel, human nature had been seen as fixed. Hobbes and Hume, Mandeville and Mill, Spinoza and Kant had also implied this. Hegel observed that humanity did not start ‘ready-made to be used’. People were shaped by their social environment. Over time, different human societies developed different forms; one form lead to the next. Hence the ‘dialectic’ idea emerged. Each state of being brings about its opposite from contradictions within itself. Thesis leads to antithesis and resolves in synthesis. He called this story of development ‘Geist’ or spirit/mind. Romanticism had emerged from Enlightenment and they both demonstrated their particular characteristics or Spirit of the Times, shown in politics, religion, and the Arts. The Romantic stress on the inner world of humans helped elevate imagination above science.

Hegel insisted that humans are not individuals who become social, but ‘social beings whose individuality emerges…’ Their desires are not fixed but shaped by this emergent process. Questions about freedom and goal setting must always be answered in the context of society. The Master/slave relationship he quotes is described at three levels: 1. The Stoic level of acceptance. 2. The Cynic or sceptic view of an illusionary world. 3. The unhappy consciousness of Christianity. Religion then, states that the Spiritual, not the natural world, is the true home of human beings. But this leads to a ‘false’, ‘ideal’, and ‘true’ self. The Reformation provided the path ahead for Hegel when it insisted that the individual conscience is the ultimate judge of truth and goodness. ‘Man is in his very nature designed to be free’. Hegel saw in the Prussian state the practical application of his beliefs and in it the combination of freedom and stability.

Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau was to provide some answers to further unanswered questions. Brought up as a Calvinist, Jean Jacques Rousseau converted to Catholicism in his teenage years. His philosophical starting point was human nature. Unlike Hobbes he insisted that selfishness does not exist prior to society but emerges through it. Society had embraced the practice of private-property ownership – the source of injustice, oppression, and slavery. Rousseau wanted to return to nature for basic needs, but develop the co-operative dispositions that nurtured self-realisation. The ‘general will’ is a better determinant of ‘the common good’ than a Hobbesian-styled authoritarian ruler. Hegel took the anti-democratic parts of Rousseau’s vision to develop a despotic power for the state. When Hegel died his followers split into ‘left’ and ‘right’ factions. Revolution and Conservatism ensued.

Karl Marx. In 1864 Karl Marx was one of a number of revolutionaries setting up the Workingman’s International Association. He greatly influenced the drafting of its Declaration of Principles and felt ‘obliged to insert references to duty, right, truth, morality, and justice. Malik notes the problematic inclusion of Marx in a collection of ethical and moral philosophical views, and yet, to leave out reference to his ideas seems itself to be immoral. Marx transformed Hegel’s idealism into a materialistic version of history. The driving force was the struggle against Capitalism. He was concerned with how people should act to create a new society – Communism. What makes Communism the ‘good society’ is the creative manifestation of life arising from the free development of all the abilities of the whole person. Malik rightly comments that some would dismiss this as ‘a hopelessly romantic vision’.

Born in Trier and educated in Rhineland, Germany, Marx worked in Paris, and thence to London. He teamed up with Engels, lived in poverty, and became acutely aware of the pitiful conditions of the English mid-lands in the Dickensian lower class disaster of industrial slums. Hence his moral critique of Capitalism. His admiration for Hegel linked nature and history to explain ‘human essence’. History and human nature are viewed now in materialistic rather than idealistic terms. For the first time in history the majority of people were denied access to the means of production and subsidence. Factories mutilate and degrade workers to the level of a machine. The human becomes alienated from his nature. Hegel had seen alienation as estrangement from God. For Marx this was the atheistic counterpart. The only answer was to overthrow Capitalism.

In reality, the Marxist Revolution, far from fostering self realisation, actually alienated its citizens and denied them basic freedoms and liberties. World-wide communist practice has been undeniably immoral. Marx’s critique of capitalism is as vital today as it was in the mid 19th century. It was in his violent and totalitarian methods in trying to destroy capitalism that his morality failed.


The death of God, the end of morality

Nietzsche. In his book, ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, Nietzsche traced the history of morality from Greek times. The meanings of good and bad have changed. Originally, Homer was describing two kinds of humanity, the good nobility and the bad ‘herd’. Greek drama personified irrational passion in Dionysus, and goodness in Apollo. The balance between them provided the desired ‘middle way’. In ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’, Nietzsche associated creativity with brutality. After all, it was Italy under the Borgias that had produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In comparison, Switzerland had in 500 years of democracy and peace produced little more than the cuckoo clock! The problem with Socrates, thought Nietzsche, was that he was not driven by Dionysus or Apollo but by reason and dialectics. Passions and instincts are what really drive human beings.

Jews and Christians destroy Enlightenment. In his opinion it was the Jews who had reversed the equation ‘good = noble’ and substituted it with ‘good = wretched’, and ‘bad = powerful and noble’. If the slave revolt had begun with the Jews then the Christians brought it to fruition by exulting the virtues of the weak, the humble, the poor, and the oppressed. Christianity reinforced the ‘good and bad’ connection to become ‘good and evil’. It was not driven by love but a hatred of nobility and strength. “The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity.” These views express his own views as well as the pessimism of the late nineteenth century. He represented the dying Enlightenment optimism of expected progress, and the growing disbelief in the concepts considered to be truth. But he was just as dismissive of Socialist ideology as he was of God and religion.

Power not truth. In ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ Nietzsche asked, “Why not ask, why are untruth, uncertainty, and ignorance not to be sought rather than their opposites?” “Philosophy is not the ‘will to truth’ but the ‘will to power’. What we think are ‘truths,’ are irrefutable errors. “A world in which all we knew was scientific truth would be an essentially meaningless world. The problem with the modern world is that truth has not become a means to an end but an end in itself.” What matters is the extent to which value judgements are life-promoting or not. Nowhere is this idea more clearly expressed than in his reference to the ‘Superman’. The ‘will to power’ was a concept taken from Schopenhauer but unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s view is life- affirming, not life-renouncing. His fundamental faith was that society existed to select a favoured species able to raise itself to a higher existence.

Influence on Hitler. It can be clearly seen that Hitler in the early 1930s was influenced by these views. The particular link was through Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche (Nietzsche’s sister) who had joined the Nazi party in 1930. Many people therefore view Nietzsche as the driver for nineteenth century Racism and anti-Semitism and overall fascist ideology. However, Elizabeth did not always agree with her famous brother on matters of policy. His influence can also

be seen in the left-wing, French, post-Structuralists, Foucault and Derrida. In “Ecce Homo” Nietzsche wrote that the ‘party of life’ must take in hand…the higher breeding of humanity…and the remorseless destruction of degenerate and parasitical elements. But it was not simply just the death of God that gave rise to Nietzsche’s Superman, it was also his rejection of equality and democracy so cherished by Enlightenment.


The anguish of freedom

Kierkegaard. The Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac set around a sacrificial altar on MountMoriah is one which poses the dilemma of moral choices and the painfulness of religious duty. Some find in it a tragically heroic description of Abraham while others see it a monstrously cruel demand by God. It contrasts the depth of commitment required by faith with the immorality of faith’s demands. The Danish poet/philosopher Kierkegaard, 1813-1855, used this tale to explore his philosophical and religious beliefs.

He came from an austere Christian, academic background with interwoven concerns for individual right action and moral choices. To him, rational argument only could help him decide between alternatives. In the moral world, reason had to end with humanity rather than God. He saw two basically different ways of life: The aesthetic life – leading to humanity rather than God, and the aesthetic life which leads to personal satisfaction through a deluded freedom. This results in a kind of existential despair. The other is the ethical life of internally realised duty. Any explanation to establish the superiority of one is, in Malik’s view, unsatisfactory, but the important aspect to notice is that the self can make choices. There is even another, third level of existence, which Kierkegaard says can only be approached by ‘a leap of faith’.

A second telling of the Abraham tale has, at first, young Isaac begging for mercy only to be told that it is better to beg for mercy than to lose his faith in God. The next story has a traumatised Abraham, almost about to kill his son when he sees a ram caught in some bushes, and slaughters him instead. The third story has Abraham not obeying God but then, as a result, finding no inner peace. The fourth retelling has Abraham calmly ready for the sacrifice but unable to kill his son. Young Isaac sees his father’s hand clenched in anguish and questions his own faith as a result of his father’s disobedience. If you, the reader of this summary, can understand all that is going on here, then you are most perceptive. “ Some scholars find it rather hard, To read the Danish Kierkegaard. More so, when from a foreign shore, You hear his name as ‘Kierkegaw’.

For Kierkegaard, Abraham was a hero in his willingness to abandon his ethical duty to maintain his obedience to God’s command. Here Luther’s Protestant celebration of faith over reason is taken to extreme. “Faith is necessarily offensive to reason…” Through revelation, Kierkegaard believed, religion brings to reason a truth that reason does not inherently possess.

Sartre. Here’s a problem. How do we know it is God, rather than something else, who is telling us how to act? This is posed by Jean-Paul Sartre in his influential 1946 lecture, Existentialism and Humanism. Sartre and Wittgenstein are perhaps the best known twentieth century philosophers. At the heart of Sartre’s work is an acknowledgement of the alienation

accompanying individual freedom and the demand for responsibility, commitment, and action. After student days in Paris and some early teaching, he discovered phenomenology, the new philosophical approach to the study of consciousness and mental phenomena pioneered by Husserl and Heidegger. Greatly influenced by them, he produced in 1943 his existentialist ‘Being and Nothingness’. Although drawn to Marxism he became largely disillusioned with communism after the invasion of Hungry in 1956. His long, difficult to read ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’ is an attempt to marry Marxism and Existentialism, but he is highly critical of seeing history in determinist terms waiting for the overthrow of Capitalism – a view that denies human responsibility for making change.

If ‘existence comes before essence’ as Sartre thought, then humans do not possess a given nature from which their personalities and values derive. They create themselves and their nature, by acting on the world. If there is no God, then humans create human nature. After all, Darwin had introduced in evolution a mechanism to self-create. But Sartre was not so much engaging with the ghosts of Darwin but of Aristotle and Descartes i.e. a determinist view of history. The key distinction for Sartre was between people and things. Things are determined by prior causes; persons redefine themselves constantly and are radically free. For Aristotle objects fulfilled or not their function and humans were designed to be reasonable. Sartre dismissed this view. In this sense Sartre is Cartesian. In another sense he is anti-Cartesian. ‘Cogito ergo sum’ places ego before consciousness, but for Sartre, consciousness helps create ego. This suggests that I don’t create my thoughts but my thoughts create me. Radical freedom arises out of the very nature of the human condition. “Man is condemned to be free.”

Meaning-making causes anguish. This condition produces ‘the anguish of freedom’ and the universe has no inherent meaning. We create our own. Albert Camus, a fellow existentialist, called this ‘the absurdity of life’. Religion has offered a means to bridge the search for meaning and finds one, but it is seen as a dishonest attempt. The price for meaning-making is anguish. T.S.Eliot captured this despair in his poetry. Sartre called conscious self deception ‘bad faith’. Here, the human condition is caught in a Sisyphus-like impossible struggle. He also called the background against which we make choices, ‘facticity’. The aim of social transformation is to transform facticity. The collective attempt to shape history is the means of bridging individual subjective choice and the objectively given environment.

Malik compares the existentialists’ problem with that of the consequentialists: It occurs when the abstract moral debate is rational but not reasonable within practical living. It occurs when the existentialists turn every moral choice into a ‘leap of faith’. Sartre turned to Marx to bring existentialism back to earth but in doing so confused his original meaning of human freedom. At one stage he wrote the seeming opposite of his previous view; “all men are slaves insofar as


their lives unfold into the practices of the practico-inert field.” You, the reader, will need to sort that out for yourself! In 1980 when Sartre died, it was not long before the Berlin Wall collapsed and the end of the Soviet Empire was in sight. The dream of an alternative to the market system faded away. This leaves the question, “If freedom is defined through struggle and through conscious social transformation, what does freedom mean in those conditions in which struggle and such transformation is no longer possible?” Throughout the twentieth century, moral arguments came increasingly to be seen either as purely subjective or as purely objective. Humanity came to be seen increasingly in terms of human desires or determined by factiticy. What Sartre had tried to join together became gradually ‘rent asunder’.


The ethics of liberation

Born free. Aime Cesaire, the Martinique poet and statesman noted that colonialism began to unravel when “black men stood up in order to create a new world…” The insurrection in Haiti in 1791 was as important as the French Revolution in 1789 or the American revolution of 1776. The common link, contained in the American Declaration is “Men are born free and remain free and equal in rights”. The Haiti slave leader, L’Overture, a former slave saw that al-though Europe was responsible for the enslavement of ‘blacks’, within European culture lay the political and moral ideas with which to banish slavery. A moral claim needs to be expressed in social transformation, and a pre-modern world needs to be moved into a modern world. Social structures are not fixed.

Freedom for black slaves. C.L.R. James was Aime Cesaire’s contemporary, and in writing ‘The Black Jacobius,’ most eloquently promoted the black slave’s fight for freedom. He was novelist, philosopher, cricketer, historian, Trotskyist, and revolutionary . Up until WW1 a handful of European States and the USA had confirmed a sense of inherent superiority and the moral worthlessness of the ‘Other’. Even Roosevelt in 1896 promoted ‘the elimination of the inferior races’. It is difficult for many now to understand the sheer immorality of imperialist subjugation. The importance of self respect to racial equality was understood when Russian forces were laid waste by Japan in 1905 – a white nation was defeated by a non-white one! It is possible, in fact desirable, to respect the learning of Western civilization while at the same time suffering imperialistic oppression.

However, the Enlightenment ideals were universal and so progressive that they were not con-fined only to one part of civilization. But non-Europeans needed to develop their own beliefs and values within their own distinct cultures. It was out of this context that the ‘Negritude’ movement was established. To some extent ‘intuitive reasoning by participation’ needed to replace European discourse towards utilization. The Martinique-French psychologist, Fanon, articulated these views in books such as ‘Black Skin, White Masks’. Fanon could also regard European thought as destructive of black culture and psychology when it suited his purposes.

Culture. The German physicist-turned-anthropologist, Franz Boaz, promoted two main ideas: First, culture not biology is the principal force behind human affairs; and second, humanity comprises many cultures, all of which are of independent equal value. His egalitari-anism was seen to be sufficient to bring about the social progress needed to overcome artificial divisions and differences. “For Boaz, no society was better, and none worse than any other... Cultural relativism encouraged moral relativism.”

Moral relativity. “Rousseau had observed that selfishness only has meaning in a society in which altruism is possible.” The same could be said of moral relativity. Enlightenment rational-ism and humanism survived in two directions: One liberal branch secured in John Locke and John Stuart Mill, and another revolutionary one from Radical Enlightenment and subsequent Marxism. Gradually over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pessimism has colonised both liberalism and radicalism through the moral force of idealism towards social transforma-tion. Now fading social transformation is seen as barbaric itself.


The unravelling of morality

Pragmatism. American intellectual life became focused in the 1870s in Cambridge, Massachusetts with the Metaphysical club which included such luminaries as the psychologist William James, his brother the novelist Henry, the philosopher and mathematician, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the future justice of the Supreme Court. Two events particularly contributed to public discussion and debate: The publication of Darwin’s, ‘On the Origin of Species’ in 1859, and secondly, in 1860 the American Civil War. Darwin’s theory challenged the idea of a supernatural intelligence governing the universe and the war destroyed the foundations of the grounding of American politics for both the South and the North. The set of ideas to provide sense for this new situation came to be known as ‘pragmatism’, a term invented by Peirce and popularized by William James. How could truth and good be found now, that could help people decide how to act and what to believe? On the other side of the Atlantic the twin crises of the age between truth and reason had been stirred up by the onslaught from Nietzsche, challenging foundational notions and rejecting traditional ideas.

Dewey. John Dewey was born in 1859 and made pragmatism respectable with philosophers and public. Pragmatists challenged the ‘correspondence theory of truth’ that had held sway since the ancient Greeks; i.e. something is true if it relates to reality. For James and Dewey however, the truth is that which works. For morality, right or wrong could be measured by what works in a particular social setting. Dewey applied his ideas first to educational theory with the catch-cry, ‘Learn by doing’. Then he transferred to ethical theory. Moral problems are not solved by obeying universal rules but by choosing one of the ‘plurality of changing, moving, individualized ends’. Malik states that he himself has adopted this position in ‘The Quest for the moral Compass’. However, this view fails to define intrinsically important values and what specifically should be our desired ends. For Dewey, the moral question is not, “How can I achieve a certain end?” but “What is the best solution to the problem?” Means and ends should be reciprocally determined.

Emotivism. Alongside pragmatism was another response to the problem of contingency; it was ‘emotivism’. Pragmatists said there were noa priori answers to ethical problems because context was everything. Emotivists questioned the possibility of pragmatic solutions. ‘Moral claims’, they insisted, were nothing more than the expression of subjective desires. George E Moore, the author of ‘Principia Ethica’ produced these ideas and with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gottleb Frege, was one of the analytic school of philosophy to dominate the Anglo-American world. He was also associated with the famous Bloomsbury Group in England. Moore asked two important questions: ‘What kinds of things ought to exist for their own sake?’ and ‘What kinds of actions ought we to perform?’ His answer: good things! But he claimed that ‘good’ can only be recognized intuitively, likening it to the colour yellow.

Of course, Malik develops his defence of all this in much greater detail than given here. The ‘Cambridge Intuitionist School’ took up the idea of moral truths as self evident. Within this group the leading English representative of ‘logical positivism’ was A.J.Ayer. The words ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ express not information but feelings. They also aim to arouse feelings and so to stimulate action. One of the problems with this view is to show no qualitative difference between “It is right to murder people” and “Barry Manilow has a great voice”. Somewhere moral statements must be expected to differentiate between such widely different opinions of appropriateness and appreciation.

Moral concepts. There is a lengthy discussion about the ideas of the Australian philosopher, J.L.Mackie, who also believes that “moral claims were both more and less than the expressions of feelings”. He presents two main arguments against the existence of moral facts. One is from ‘relativity’ and the other is from ‘queerness’. Moral concepts are not fixed but undergo change, and such changes are related to broader social, economic, political and intellectual shifts. “The key distinction between moral claims and personal preferences is not psychological but social. It is more than merely subjective.

In 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre wrote ‘After Virtue’, in which he described an imagined world after all science had been eliminated. In due time there is an attempt to bring it back but the old words without their understood meanings are hollow. This is what he says has happened to morality. “Moral thought has been hollowed out; everyone uses moral term such as ‘ought’ and ‘should’ but no one truly understands them.” Along with his contemporary Elizabeth Anscombe, they eschewed liberal individualization and insisted that morality can only be understood in its historical context. Opposition was directed towards relativism, emotivism and nihilism. MacIntyre blames the rejection of the Aristotelian virtuous life, which had dominated thought for nearly two millennia. In particular it had, since the Enlightenment, neglected the external teleological purpose and tried to replace it with inner reason or desires. There is now a new cleavage between facts and values. “Telos was the bridge between the way we are and the way we should be.”

Modernity. “There was an ambiguity in the radical view of history. On the one hand it expressed the idea of humans as made by history, on the other, of humans making history”. It is interesting to see this idea applied to Marx and Hegel. “Over time, not just the notion of humans making history but the very idea of historical progress itself came to be seen as suspect.” Malik claims that modernity did not destroy Telos but rather transformed it. ‘Man as he is’ and ‘man as he could be’ came to be understood in political rather than moral terms. And this is a step forward.


MacIntyre suggests that ‘the unity of a human is the unity of the narrative quest’. It is participation in a communal quest that moral claims become more than merely subjective. This allows us to rise above our own desires. Collective endeavour can produce this. “Moral clarity comes not from detachment from society but through embeddedness in it.” For example; “Not till modernity could slavery be seen as wrong not just from a universal perspective but from the local perspective too. And not till modernity did opposition to slavery become rational from both a universal and a local perspective. The significance of modernity was that it made it possible to align that which was rational from the viewpoint of both the universal and the contingent by making possible social transformation. Here is the ‘something more’ that takes moral claims above subjective desires or local needs without at the same time making them objective in the way of a scientific truth.”


The search for ethical concrete

Evolution. Today scientific arguments about ethics nearly all have their inspiration in Darwin. The twin main pillars are: understanding human psychology, and the understanding of what constitutes good and bad in the first place. How can humans be both charitable and cowardly in different contexts? As evolution suggested how to create without a Creator/Designer, so also it changed the debate on morality. A moral sense was recognised as most important in humans but also to some extent in non-human animals. “Any animal… Darwin believed would eventu-ally acquire a social sense or conscience as soon as its intellect developed towards that of man’s.” Natural selection provided the process. But even Darwin was puzzled about how altruism spread in a population.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) changed views over his life-time from one where the good was defined by God, and to another where the end of a moral life was determined by evolution. “All organisms evolve to a certain end which is ‘self preservation’”. Here is a secularised scientific utilitarian version of Telos developed by Aristotle and Aquinas and so cherished by MacIntyre. Of course, many people decide what they believe according to their religious or scientific views but in the gap between a lost faith and a destructive nihilism comes a renewed desire to find in science the ethical concrete broken up by the death of God.

Thomas Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ insisted that there was no correlation between the moral and the natural. “Evolution may have explained how good and evil came about but cannot ex-plain why what we call the good is preferable to what we call evil”. Morality’s influence is directed not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of us many, as possible to survive. “Peo-ple saw in evolutionary theory the idea that struggle for existence had created unequal races, that capitalist exploitation, colonial conquest and even genocide were simply the working out of the laws of natural selection, and that such conduct was necessary to improve the moral fibre of hu-mankind.” It was Nazism and The Final Solution that disconnected both racial ideas of difference as well as biological notions of similarity as well.

Natural selection. The idea that human behaviour was primarily a cultural artefact came to dominate post-war thinking. Richard Dawkin’s ‘The Selfish Gene’ helped change the language of public debate. Dawkin’s idea was that the natural situation works not upon the group but upon the gene. However it is a mistake to read a book about genes as if it were a book about people.

The American biologist Robert Trivers, developed the notion of ‘reciprocal altruism’ to show how natural selection would favour altruism where it was mutually beneficial. To some extent this answered Darwin’s question of how natural selection could create the social instincts. Scientific and political development transformed the landscape of human nature. Both philosopher and

biologist can exchange reciprocal altruism.

Thought experiments. There are some sophisticated moral thought-experiments which involve mechanisms in action to save the lives of a group of people and then test whether the person making the moral decision would deliberately cause the death of another one person in order to save the lives of the former group. It has to do with trains and trolleys. In practice the decision is different, but there seems to be no moral difference. The cognitive scientist Joshua Green suggests that the difference lies not in the facts but in the brain’s processing of those facts. Our ancestors evolved in face-to-face situations rather than in mechanical or distant situations. This supports the view that we arrive at moral solutions more instinctively and intuitively than thoughtfully.

But there is still the possibility of choosing a ‘manual’ or ‘automatic’(intuitive) mode. It’s rather like using a camera. However, Malik says there seems to be no real evidence for this. Green claims that the two modes correspond to different kinds of moral philosophy. ‘Automatic’ is like Kantianism; utilitarianism like reason. Although Green thinks both modes are useful, utilitarian-ism is superior to Kantianism and the other forms of moral philosophy.

Facts and values. The new Darwinian thinking into moral theory reignited the debate about facts and values. “The analyst and ethicist William Casebeer claims…that ‘the moral psychology required by Virtue theory is the most neurobiologically plausible’”. But Green asks, “How do we go from ‘this is how we think’ to ‘this is how we ought to think?’ And how is Aristotelian moral thought more natural or better than Kant’s or Mill’s?

In the nineteenth century, the evolutionary ethicists claimed that the natural was moral. These days, the natural is replaced with the scientific. But against this is the American Neuroscientist Sam Harris. In ‘The Moral Landscape - How Science Can Determine Human Values’ he argues that values translate into facts that can be scientifically understood. “Good circumstances give rise to good lives, bad circumstances to bad lives.”

Malik considers that Harris is oversimplifying his argument here and anchors his remarks in references to the debate about recent torture in war. He concludes that Harris “takes an accoun-tant’s-eye view of torture”. “The difference between torture and collateral damage in war is the difference between… treating a human being as a piece of meat and unintentionally killing some people.” It is in being blind to the humanity of a human being.” The wrong is seen when the classical argument of looking to God as the source of moral value – The Euthyphro dilemma – is equally applicable to the claim that science should be the arbiter of good and evil. (For a fuller explanation of The Euthyphro dilemma, revisit Chapter 2, ‘Gods of wisdom’.) Scientists can no more evade the Euthyphro dilemma than can theologists, says Malik.


Confucianism, communism and the clash of civilisations

Mr Democracy’ and ‘Ms Science’. Lu Xun, China’s greatest twentieth-century writer, suggests in his short stories that China’s old Confucian culture was to blame for their present unrest. By the end of the nineteenth century China had become a semi-colony of the Western powers. The Qing Dynasty collapsed bringing to an end three millennia of dynastic rule. In 1911 China became a republic. The two intellectual responses to growing social chaos were: an attempt to rework the Confucian tradition, and claiming that the tradition itself was the problem. For the first time Western philosophers from Descartes to Marx and Kant to James had been translated into Chinese. Later John Dewey and Bertrand Russell had toured China giving lectures. Fung Yu Lan, who had been a student of Dewey’s at Columbia University, tried to create a new Con-fucianism from Confucian ideals and Western ideas. He despised Daoism and Mohism as well as other Western philosophies but he was outward-looking, and sought to ‘master nature’. He embraced pragmatism and sought a middle way between ‘worldly’ and ‘other-worldly’ philoso-phies. National rage at the Allied carving up of post-WW2 spoils resulted in redirected energy towards a New Cultural movement with its ‘Mr Democracy’ and ‘Ms Science’. The nationalist Party with its leader Sun Yat Sen opposed the communist party led by Chen Duxiu. Chen was greatly impressed by Darwinism. ‘Evolution’ he wrote ‘goes from feudalism to republicanism to communism’. In 1928 the Nationalists replaced their leader with Chang Kai-shek who turned out to be a ruthless dictator. After WW2, China plunged into civil war between the Nationalist and Communist Party, now led by Mao Zedong. Within three years Mao had control of all China, causing Chang to flee to Taiwan.

Chaotic change. The identity of China and its traditional social order based on ethical terms and influenced by Confucianism, changed in the twentieth century. The result was chaos. In Western Europe, the Christian Church had had a similar role but the imperial bureaucracy of state in China had contributed many of the equivalent roles of the European Church. In China the power of the bureaucratic state controlled the growth of autonomous state groups. The two institutions with true authority were state and family. And unlike the European counterpart, the Chinese bureaucracy was meritocratic; not determined by inherited aristocracy. In Europe, erosion of church authority changed the debate about ethics. In China, ethics had been broadly secular.

Confucianism is little concerned with God, soul, sin or salvation. It provides practical rules for behaviour. The wrench from Confucianism tradition released a moral anchor.This left a gap and explains both the exploration of Western philosophies and at the same time the problem that they had not had time to be imbedded within the Chinese intellectual tradition. They inevitably carried little social weight.

Modernity and Mao. It was in 1949 with the Revolution and the coming to power of the Communist Party that the gap could be filled. Mao created a modern but bureaucratic state. In the past, ethics and politics were linked because social structures were taken to be immov-able. “In modern societies they are inextricably linked for the opposite reason: because social structures are fiercely contested.” Mao’s China embraced modernity and rejected tradition. It suppressed civil society, excluded the masses from political processes and excluded political debate or challenge. Social transformation could only be achieved from the top down, in often violent, mass movements such as in The Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and the Cultur-al Revolution of 1966. In excess of 18 million died in the ‘50s, and in 1966 from 300,000 – 3 million died.

“What had been a surreptitious nod towards Confucian ideology in Maoist China, became, after Mao a warm embrace…” In the past ten years Beijing has established more than four hun-dred ‘Confucian Institutes’ across the world. Jiang Qing is a most important new generation Confucian philosopher. His path to rediscover Confucianism is via existentialism and Bud-dhism. He saw the preoccupation with ‘Mr Democracy and Ms Science’ as incompatible with Chinese culture. He considered Western-style democracy as deficient because it rests upon one thing – ‘popular will’. “Popular will must always be balanced by sagely wisdom.” Governance in China has historically rested on three things: the legitimacy of heaven (a sacred transcendent sense of natural morality), earth (wisdom from history and culture), and the people (political obedience through popular will). In practice this favours an elitist minority to govern benev-olently over a more ignorant uneducated majority. “In the modern world this is regressive because it stands in opposition, not to aristocracy, but to democracy”.

Eastern thought shakes off Western shackles. The rise of China to an economic superpower will no doubt affect the whole world. How will this affect our thinking about moral values? Will universalism be seen as a Western particularity? Will everything be relativized? Previously in his book, Malik has observed ‘how the centre of gravity of moral thinking has historically shifted’. He now gives a helpful overview of the journey he has described. He concludes, “In the first two millennia, the development of moral thought ranged across the world. In the second millennium it became increasingly focused on the West”. This picture reflects the economic and political power of the main players at particular times. But no longer can Western ideas by force be expected to dominate non-Western ones. However, ideas themselves posses power, and such ideas that catch the global imagination through intrinsic merit deserve to become global and universal.


Conflict between philosophies of civ-ilizations. But Jiang suggests that there is a case to reject universalistic ideas, if in doing so the national cultural dis-tinctiveness is preserved. “China is not a nationalist state but a ‘civilization state,” Malik claims. Previous world conflicts tended to be within a civilization, but the American political scientist Samuel Huntington in the 1950s said that the battle lines of the future will be between civilizations. Huntington thought that the primary struggle would be between the Christian West and the Islamic East, but he included Confucian, Japanese, Buddhist, Hindu, Orthodox, Latin American and African as distinct civili-zations. “The real conflict is not between Europe and those of China.” The conflict is between those philosophies…that view human flourishing in more universalistic terms… and those that understand it in a more parochial way.” Just as we should be wary of the danger of polarizing the West and Islam, so also we should be aware of polarizing the West and China.


The Fall of Man

The changing nature of ethics and philosophy. The quest for a moral compass has both de-scribed a story and shown how morality fits into our lives. Morality is a map guiding us from ‘man as he is’ to man as he could be’. But unlike a map, the starts and ends of journeys are not fixed; they change over time. We need to know the content of the past to understand it, and we need to know about the historical ethical journey itself, to understand ourselves. Previous and present attitudes to such ideas as fate, human dignity, reason, God, theism, faith, and so on are all required knowledge. However, CS Lewis believed that ‘to deny objective values in a tran-scendental sense was to deny civilization itself ’, and claimed the need for their presence in all religions and philosophies. “Reject them and morality is replaced with ideology.” Such ‘absolu-tion’ that ‘there will never be a new judgment of value in the history of the world’ flies in the face of the history of moral thought.

Human change. Similarly, it seems unsustainable to believe that without God it is not possible to establish an ethical framework. Confucianism and Buddhism have done just this. Nor does faith in God relieve believers of the necessity to think for themselves about what is right and wrong. “It is not that God has changed his mind, but that humans have.” The theme of Malik’s book is that as societies transform, so do moral values. And different believers read their holy book in different ways over time. “Each reads the Bible in a way that allows them to fit it into their own moral universe, a universe that necessarily exists independently of the Bible…” This is as true for Muslims as it is for Jews and Christians. Once again, there is no getting away from the Euthyphro dilemma.

Modernity replaces conventional certainties. Modernity brought not the destruction of morality as CS Lewis feared but a distinctive way of thinking about it. As people rejected the idea of society as a given, they began to ask, “What structures are rational?” The capability to ask and answer such a question has been assisted by new forms of social conservation and at the same time new tools to assist the democratic practice. These two developments helped take moral claims beyond the subjective and the relative. They become more universal. Moral ques-tions do not have objective answers in a scientific way, but neither are they merely expressive of subjective desire. They need to have rational answers rooted in an understanding of social need. Malik changes the wording of CS Lewis’ phrase ‘The Abolition of Man’ to ‘The Fall of Man’. The death of God only made sense against the background of a new kind of faith: faith in humans rationally and morally without guidance from beyond. This is the kind of faith we need when we live well enough but do not have good dreams.

The ongoing search for meaning. In 1946, three years after Lewis’s ‘Abolition of Man’, Victor Frankl published ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. He believed that it was inap-propriate to ask what the meaning of life is, but for man to recognise that it is he who is asked for an answer. It is a question for him to answer, not for him to ask of someone or something else. During WW2 he spent three years as a prisoner in German concentration camps, including six months in Auschwitz. He developed a different kind of faith as a psychiatrist helping his suicidal Jewish colleagues cope with their depression and despair. His answer was to find meaning in life. They could only find it for themselves. Their predicament was not determined by their appalling environment but by their attitude towards it. It is not a faith in a transcendent deity but in the human spirit. “Humans, he suggests, find themselves only through creating meaning in the world.” It is not to be ‘found’, but to be created by acting on the world. And our individuality is to be found through interaction with others.

“The human condition is, however, that of possessing no moral safety net. No God, no scien-tific law, nor yet any amount of ethical concrete, can protect us from the dangers of falling off the moral tightrope that we are condemned to walk as human beings. It can be a highly discon-certing prospect. Or it can be a highly exhilarating one. The choice is ours.”

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