METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 18, No. 1, January 1987 0026-1068 $2.00

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STUART HAMPSHIRE’S Morality and Conflict

STEVEN ROSS

A spectre haunts contemporary moral philosophy: it is the spectre of sensiti- vity. Everywhere, as if to atone for the various reductive enthusiasms that characterized an earlier era, moral philosophers are virtually tripping over each other to show how sensitive they are to the oh-so-difficult-to-chart vicissitudes of human life. Iris Murdoch, so much the lonely voice in the wilderness a dozen years ago, has clearly won the day. No one nowadays would be caught dead defending something so dated (and so insensitive) as the wholly formal ‘universalization’ thesis of R. M. Hare for example.’ Utili- tarianism, for similar reasons, is more than ever the view everyone loves to hate (more about that later). And Rawls? Rawls still has his defenders to be sure. But even those who continue to take their philosophical momentum from running down the ramp that is A Theory of Justice acknowledge that much of what is of pressing concern to us in moral life is untouched - and, it is usually added by such defenders, rightly so - by the arguments found there. The days when David Richards, with almost touching idealism, could speak of agents in some original position choosing what would and would not serve as the source and object of their amorous passions are long gone.’ Now- adays, to be a Rawlsian (or a liberal in general) is essentially to argue only for various principles of autonomy or rights to self-determination. (There are of course other arguments regarding social goods distribution, but I set those aside here.) So long as certain never to be violated boundaries are acknow- ledged - boundaries that usually stem from applying such principles or rights to all - what takes place for agents within those boundaries is not only very much a matter for the agent to decide, it is unclear whether such decisions can even be assessed very deeply from the moral point of view - at least in any ‘objective’ way - let alone count for very much against that which by contrast is impersonal and binding upon all. And it is just this that simply will no longer do. Philosophers have discovered and want to stress the ever non-impersonal urgency of romantic love, family attachments, the particular non-transferable bonds one bears to one’s particular culture and so forth. It is these things that really count for us, really make us who we are. Yet modern moral theories - utilitarianism, intuitionism, emotivism, pres- criptivism, Rawlsian contractarianism - all (allegedly) either surpress or dis- tort this fact. Conversely, if one is to be unflinchingly sensitive and call a

’ ’ David Richards A Theory of Reasons for Action (Oxford: Oxford University

There is of course one exception, but he need not be mentioned.

Press, 1971) see especially p. 94

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spade the particular non-impersonal spade it is, one must turn away from these theories and fix one’s eyes elsewhere.

Essentially, the problem is this. On one hand, our lives, and so what we refer to as our moral lives, center around a certain set of extremely impor- tant if all too familiar choices, actions, attitudes and relations we take up with respect to others and ourselves. On the other, moral theories purport to articulate the nature of the right and the good, what is genuinely worthy, ideally in a way that is non vacuous, yet sufficiently general as to be illuminating. Hopefully, the latter, the moral theory, will bear in a satis- factory way upon the former, our moral lives. Indeed, if it fails to do so, the whole point of a moral theory would seem to be lost. But does this in fact occur? Do any of our moral theories bear satisfactorily upon our moral experience? Stuart Hampshire in his Morality and Conflict argues no. Not all moral theories are held to be on a par of course. But in the end they turn out to be distinguished from one another by the kind of failure each exhi- bits. This comes out especially clearly when we consider the nature of moral conflict, for moral conflict Hampshire argues when attended to in the right way reveals the deep unbridgeable gap between what moral experience really is and what moral theory must always strive to present it as being.

These are large and, at this point, necessarily somewhat vague claims to be sure, and I hope to elucidate them presently. But first a word about Morality and Conflict itself. Even if one is sympathetic to much of Hamp- shire’s overall orientation, as I am, this is unfortunately a badly written and poorly argued book. Ponderously slow yet sketchy, Hampshire meanders across the contours of moral philosophy, frequently digressing, and never providing the few outright claims he makes with anything like the explora- tion or defense they require. But the themes found there are important. In one way or another, they will almost certainly be with us in moral philosophy until the end of the century. In what follows I want then to take up (1) a sketch of the central themes here (2) Hampshire’s treatment of them in Morality and Conflict, such as it is and (3) what avenues of philosophical exploration emerge as fruitful once we take these considerations seriously as I think we should. Too often moral philosophers seem content to stress that certain features of moral experience have been overlooked or attended to in an insufficiently appreciative way. If I am right, to acknowledge the sorts of things philosophers like Hampshire are anxious to stress turns out to require nothing less than our articulating a different, and initially quite troubling, conception of evaluation. Indeed, at the end of this essay I will be concerned to argue that the extent t o which such a conception can be articulated will go hand in hand with the question whether or more accur- ately in what form moral philosophy will survive.

1. Let us now turn to Hampshire’s argument. Hampshire is concerned to criticize and correct certain traditional moral theories, but he is con- cerned to do this in a rather peculiar way. Hampshire is not interested in criticizing a moral theory’s background conception of mind or language for

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example, nor does he ever question a moral theory’s overall internal coher- ence . Rather, Hampshire’s strategy is to grant a theory’s essential coherence as a philosophical doctrine (as he understands it) and then look at the pic- ture of moral experience he believes such a theory either entails or assumes in the background, arguing that as this picture is either false or incomplete, so then must be the moral theory which substantiates it. Thus, although there is a sense in which Hampshire is partisan to one sort of theory or approach over another - Hampshire favors an Aristotelian and to a lesser extent a Spinozistic view over a utilitarian or Kantian one - there is another sense in which Hampshire is partisan to no theory at all. Rather he wishes to com- pare all the theories he is interested in to moral experience and argue that in different ways and in differing degrees all face the same fork broadly con- ceived: either the complexity of moral experience is denied and our theory may appear more or less in good working order, or it is acknowledged and our theory breaks down. Now this is at first an initially puzzling claim. Just why should ‘the complexity of moral experience’ whatever that means, present insuperable obstacles to moral theory?

There is it turns out no one answer here, for Hampshire means to invoke two very different kinds of phenomena under the rubric of ‘moral com- plexity’, each corresponding in turn to one or the other part of the broad division Hampshire makes out among all moral theory: 1) ‘single criterion’ theories, of which utilitarianism rather than Kantianism serves as the primary example for Hampshire and 2) the ‘multiple criterion’ theories of which Aristotle (naturally) serves as the best illustration. For Hampshire, utilitarian- ism embodies a kind of double error, On the level of method, it assumes a certain conception of justification - i.e. that moral justification is com- plete if and only if we can tie whatever particular phenomena we seek to justify to some transcontextual general consideration. Thus a particular action undertaken by a particular person located within a particular histori- cal context is justified just in case we can show it accords with and so is merely an instance of the general principle of utility. Sometimes, Hampshire readily admits, our justifications will run this way but it is by no means always so. We need not speak of some general good of which my situation is but an instance, for if we did, presumably some other situation could also have that relation to me and it is just this that is held to be impossible. Justifying my action takes the form of ‘unpacking’ or articulating the particular commitments and attachments that characterize my situation, the ‘way of life’ to which I am inextricably bound. We do not ascend from our situation to increasingly impersonal and repeatable considerations (as Hampshire himself argued so insistently in “Logic and Appreciation”) in order to generate a bona fide justification. Rather we simply describe in more or less detail the particular context it is.

The justification is in this sense holistic. I would need either to abandon the way of life to which I am now, whether by choice or circumstance,

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committed, or I would find that many of the other activities and prac- tices, to which I am at present committed, have lost their significance, and my activities have come to seem incoherent and confused.’

Connected to this error about the nature or logic of justification is an error on the level of experience, for utilitariattism is committed to translating diverse criteria, “irreducibly plural” goods, into a single criterion, a single good. Hampshire rejects this ambition outright, but for highly unusual reasons. Rather than argue (as I would) that in attempting to perform this feat, the concept of ‘utility’ must invariably be stretched into conceptual vacuity (like the concept of ‘beauty’ before art, if it is stretched to cover every version of success, it will invariably come to tell you nothing about success), Hampshire finds the idea of a single criterion inhibiting:

The single criterion and single aim theories discard the peculiar interest of the species, and the interest of its future, as perpetually open to unfore- seen alternatives through continuous thought. The single criterion arrests development, both historical and personal. , , . If the single criterion in ethics is accepted by someone, that person decides to restrict the peculiar powers of his intelligence and of his imagination; and he decides to try to set a final limit to the indefinite development of moral intelligence when he prescribes the single criterion to other^.^

This criticism will surely strike many as bizarre. That the criterion of success in science will always be explanatory clarity hardly renders exploration or innovation in science impossible, nor, needless to say, does it render science in the least bit uninteresting. (This point holds even for far less ‘open ended’ enterprises such as chess or tennis.) And anyway, the utilitarian is hardly committed to saying in advance what sorts of practices or arrangements will produce happiness, and he may leave things open on this point in at least two ways. He might assume persons have a more or less fixed nature but will dis- cover through experiment and innovation what produces the greatest happi- ness. Or he can even drop the first assumption, arguing that what produces the greatest happiness will change as persons change, and so will always be open to a certain kind of exploration and speculation. More important is Hampshire’s first claim regarding justification. But it is extremely unlikely the utilitarian would accept this argument at face value. The fact that certain goods are realized in logically particular or non-substitutable phenomena is neither surprising nor of itself problematic. Indeed, nothing could be more commonplace. “This woman is my wife and not (merely) some logically transferable generator of so much units of productivity as she is to her boss” and so on and so on. The utilitarian need only say - to Hampshire at least - that what makes this logically non-substitutable X worthy must have some-

Stuart Hampshire Morality and Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) p. 5

ibid p. 28

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thing to do with the benefits X brings to or realizes for me. Hampshire has mistaken a claim the utilitarian does make about reasons for one he needn’t make about objects. Of course, at this point, one ought to be suspicious that this claim regarding reasons amounts to very little. The requirement that for X to be a reason for action we must be able to give some account of how X is to someone’s advantage or benefit follows (or can be made to follow) trivally from what it is to be a reason for action. Even when it is not “logi- cally non transferable” objects we consider, for example environmental ver- sus economic benefits, there is no ‘thing’ known as ‘utility’ each share - any- one who thinks to the contrary should just try specifying in a non vacuous way what it is - it is only that in each case, we can say (how surprising) what the benefit happens to be. (It is no wonder utilitarianism will always be with us.) The idea of a single good is I believe philosophically insupportable be- cause it is philosophically empty. It is not, as Hampshire thinks, because once we have an abstract conception of value we can give no account of how it may become attached to objects precisely in virtue of features which make them logically unique to the one who prizes them. ‘Moral complexity’ then turns out vis a vis utilitarianism to mean only ‘logical nonsubstitutability’ or something like it. And that certain things, peThaps even the most important things, have this kind of status for us is not, in and of itself, a problem for utilitarianism. At most, it is the first move in an argument to a different criticism: i.e. that a utilitarian Conception of value is empty, a grammatical trick. But that is not the argument Hampshire chooses to make.

2 . However, my argument so far does seem to support, in a roundabout way, one of Hampshire’s claims - that the logic of moral justification need not be characterized as invariably moving from specific token to general type, where it is the features of this type or rule that do all the justifica- tory work for us. As 1 remarked earlier, in his essay “Logic and Apprecia- tion” Hampshire was a veritable Grand Inquisitor on behalf of Universaliza- tion, and in a sense, Morality and Conflict marks a welcome 180 degree turn. Regrettably though, Hampshire proves himself no more willing now to separate out the relevant philosophical considerations than he was when he argued so forcefully for the opposing side thirty years ago.

Hampshire contrasts a justification ‘based on a general principle’ from one ‘based on a specification of a way of life,’ but just how is this contrast to be understood? Presumably, a justification grounded on a general prin- ciple 1) describes a particular action or arrangement as possessing some quality, e.g. utility, fairness, whatever; plus the further claim that 2 ) the presence of this quality is always good. Now, in addition to these, there may be the further claim that 3) this quality is the only good, where that may mean either 3a) all other apparent goods are either place holders for or translatable into this quality or 3b) other discrete goods exist, but this quality holds incommensurable priority over them from the moral point of view. (3a) is of course classical utilitarianism; (3b) traditional Kantianism. Now an evaluative justification need only meet (1) and ( 2 ) as far as I can

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see to be called ‘in accord with a general principle’ (otherwise Aristotle holds no general principles for example) but this cannot provide Hampshire with the contrast he seeks, for justificatory account, however rooted in par- ticularlity, will have this much. I t follows I think from ‘justification’ itself. After all, I don’t simply ‘describe’ the culture I am proud of in justifying my attachment anymore than I simply ‘describe’ that most notorious of logi- cally unique objects, the work of art I admire. I describe it as ‘noble’, ‘un- fragmented’, ‘worthy of loyalty’ in one case, ‘expressive’, ‘original’ and so on in the other. It is in virtue of certain descriptions being true of this par- ticular phenomenon that it allegedly merits the response or attachment it does. To be sure, if one asks ‘but where is this nobility or originality?’ one can do no more than elucidate the features of the phenomenon in a certain way, i.e. in a way guided by such a reading. Reification must be avoided. There is no ‘thing’ ‘nobility’ or ‘originality’ stands related to as an effect stands to its cause. That way of thinking does lead to conceptual and moral dislocation, but that way of thinking hardly comes inextricably bound to “justification by way of a general principle.’’ And to say that such and such a quality is always ceteris paribus a good merely follows trivially from what it is to speak with rational consistency. I t doesn’t say that this quality is the only good, or that other things cannot outweigh it in other contexts. It says, to be sure, very little, except it does remind us that the distinction between “justification by reference to general principles” and “justifica- tion by reference to particular (even logically particular) phenomena” is illusory. To justify our conception of some particular phenomenon is to seek to show how certain qualities are true of it, where these qualities are held for a variety of reasons to carry some justificatory force. Thus, in the absence of the additional requirement of (3a) or (3b), to say ‘this arrange- ment would be agreed to by all’ ‘this policy makes the most people happy’ ‘this culture or person is worthy of attachment’ ‘this music is expressive’ are all on a par. Why then do so many insist otherwise? I believe it is be- cause some of these predicates, such as ‘worthy of attachment’ often come to be true for an agent only in virtue of historical considerations that will not or cannot hold for just anyone. Thus the moral justifications we offer will some- times be grounded in experience that may be deeply personal. This point, that certain justifications refer to experiences not anyone can enter into, as opposed to considerations (such as e.g. ‘utility’) that allegedly anyone can see is I suspect what Hampshire’s claim comes down to. Nor need this be denied. The upshot is that assessing a certain class of actions and/or the justificatory ascriptions made of them may require a great deal.more in the way of elucidation and imagintive exploration than need come into play elsewhere. (This point is often, and I think rightly, behind those who find serious moral inquiry in literature.) But what a justification is remains un- altered.

3. Naturally, before a ‘many criteria’ moral view like Aristotle’s, Hamp- shire is more sympathetic. In what way is ‘moral complexity’ a problem

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here then? Hampshire’s complaint against Aristotle is two-fold. Whereas Aristotle located the work or justificatory force of the virtues in ‘the nature of man’, Hampshire argues, correctly I think, that any account of our nature we can hope to defend nowadays, i.e. one grounded in our biology and whatever other uncontroversial claims there are that can be made about us, will simply fail to determine very much in the way of a ‘way of life’.’ AS Hampshire puts it, the capacity for thought, which seemed to ground a single pattern or account of the good life for Aristotle must generate a plurality of patterns “indefinitely variable” for US.^ And in this plurality lies the problem. Each way of life specifies a certain moral ideal and each moral ideal entails the development of certain qualities of disposition and character. However

The reinforcement of peculiarities of disposition and character, in pur- suit of a distinguishing moral ideal, always entails a sacrifice of some dispositions which are greatly admired elsewhere within other ways of life. Every virtue in any particular way of life entails a specialization of powers and dispositions realized at some cost in the exclusion of other possible virtues that might be enjoyed, except that they are part of another way of life, and they cannot be grafted onto the original one.’

Thus Hampshire asserts in his climactic conclusion: “there cannot be such a thing as the complete human good nor can there be a harmony among all essential virtues in a complete life”*.

Hampshire himself seems unclear what these bold words amount to. Throughout Moruliry and Conflict Hampshire toys with and more or less endorses the idea that certain qualities of temperament, such as justice and friendliness “are expected of us” whatever the context and way of life we imagineg - but then it is in the “specific realization” of these virtues that “incompatible conflict” arises between the respective traits each realiza- tion holds up as good. Maybe. But is it really a problem for moral theory that this should be so? The analogous situation hardly poses a ‘problem’ for a maxim of self interested rationality for example. A Victorian banker and enterprising wild-catter require genuinely different qualities of character and understandably pursue different courses of action, but so what? The coherence, point and intelligibility of ‘make money!’ as a directive is hardly undermined thereby. But leaving this point aside, as it has all the signs of a pointless quibble, let us grant what is surely the case: there are different ways of life which articulate genuinely distinct ideals of conduct, pursuing or realizing one involves loss or sacrifice of some other. What follows from this? It is

ibid p . 155 ibidp. 145 ibidp. 146 ibid p. 155

’ ibid p. 143; 146-7

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hard to say. The fact that getting some X entails the loss of some Y, even when it is acknowledged Y is indisputably a good is not as such obviously something we need to worry about. Consider art Writing in a realist style, Mann necessarily forfeits the kind of accomplishments we find in Joyce or Marquez. We cannot praise Twerkoff for the way he handles light nor Duke Ellington for his ingenious use of atonality. Do we sigh and shake our heads at the sad state of affairs that ordains it thus? Hardly. Need criticism of persons be seen so differently? St. Theresa is not terribly cosmopolitan or witty; Oscar Wilde, though nice enough to be sure, was not known for being a saint. That no one or nothing can be everything cuts very little ice as far as I can see. But I want to pursue this parallel with art a bit further, for as with art, the other side of the coin is that everyone’s being unable to deliver all hardly renders what people do become on a par and so essentially immune from criticism. Of course, one wants access to the fullest range of pertinent considerations possible; as with art, locating the person or action within the way of life’ of which it is a part is crucial. But that is the background against which the evaluative enterprise takes place; it is no substitute for the evalua- tive exercise itself as Hampshire seems to think. Virginia Woolf and her character must be placed against the way of life or ideal she and others took this character to realize. But that hardly stops me from finding this charac- ter, this way of life fairly sexless and sometimes irritatingly precious. Love and loyalty may well be “realized differently”, but is that the final word? Is the love and loyalty Mrs. Portnoy bears to her son on a par with - a serious evaluative rival to - that between Dorthea and Will Ladislaw? No way. Nor can any amount of ‘particularization’ in our account of it ever make it

Hampshire is right to suggest that much of moral philosophy has been animated by a kind of closet essentialism. Philosophers have traditionally tended to seek to underwrite evaluation either by first articulating that which is said to be tenselessly true of persons, then ‘deducing’ some pattern of moral behavior from that, or by championing some single transcontex- tual criterion of assessment all others can be translated into or subordinated by. Here as elsewhere in philosophy, the time to lay essentialism to rest is long overdue. The real question, as Nietzsche pointed out a hundred years ago, is why in moral matters alone do we resist doing so so much? To the extent the recent literature that focuses on the deep ‘particularity’ of our moral lives hastens recognizing this point, it is all to the good. But once this is done, the real philosophical task just begins to open up. We then have to explore how it is that criticism and genuine justification occur without such artificial constructs. We need to take up and analyze the logic of justificatory concepts, exploring how terms like ‘generous’ ‘self possessed’ ‘over-precious’ and so on have the justificatory force that they do. This question has I think yet to be taken up at all satisfactorily, while its importance for moral philo- sophy would be difficult to exaggerate. I don’t pretend to be able to face that challenge here; I want instead to conclude simply with a suggestion:

so.

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Perhaps something like the project Wittgenstein undertook before the concepts of ‘understanding’, ‘meaning’, ‘language’, and so forth is now in order before our moral vocabulary and concepts like ‘justification’. We need to dis- entangle and explore the different ‘language games’ these terms may figure in, tracing out the various background understandings that underwrite their employment in various contexts. Their role or use in political life and their role or use in personal life for example is not obviously at all the same (nor is that clearly a problem, requiring that we strain to fit one into the model that sometimes operates for the other, unless of course we believe in some background conception that makes it so). As it would be were we to under- take the analogous task with respect to aesthetic concepts, this enterprise would have to be in part historical. No doubt it would also require fairly close attention to examples of some detail. It may turn out that our compe- tence as theorists will go hand in hand with our competence as critics, with our ability to use such concepts not only in obvious cases but in subtle or unexpected ones as well. I t may also turn out that if these changes await moral philosophy (as I believe they do) that will by no means be such a bad thing. But the reader who in pursuing these questions turns to Morality and Conflict will only be disappointed.

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