Out of my normal context, and separated from my usual reference groups, perhaps I need first of all to explain the background from which I speak. As a developmental psychologist whose main research interests are to do with child rearing in the various social environments in which it takes place, I have been particularly concerned with the long-term dialogues (verbal and non-verbal) that go on between parents and children, in the course of which they commonly come to certain understandings about their mutual tolerances and intolerances, and learn to live together with some regard to these limits. I stress the intersubjective nature of these understandings because I take it as axiomatic that children bring up their parents in the course of parents bringing up their children, even though parents are more powerful in physical terms and marginally more powerful in psychological terms. Secondly, as a child psychologist working clinically with parents and handicapped or problem children, I am also interested in another kind of dialogue: that which takes place between parents and professionals with the child as focus. I am concerned to find ways of making this dialogue as effective as possible, in particular by recognising the differences that inform parental and professional approaches to our common focus, and then using these differences to enable a complementary partnership that builds upon the advantages of each.

‘Moral Integrity’ has struck me for some time as one of those things that is more a matter of name-dropping than of real acquaintance. But when I undertook to say something about it, I soon discovered that I had bitten off far more than I – or perhaps anyone – could chew within the hour. In this I find myself in good company: for Professor Winch also chose this title for his Inaugural Lecture – I apologise for overlooking this when I chose my own title – and in his first paragraph he explains that he will be saying nothing about Moral Integrity, though he expresses the hope that what he has said will be found to have a bearing on it. I shall not be discussing his lecture, except incidentally; but I commend his wisdom in not trying, as rashly as I am, to say something directly about the topic.

My topic may seem a bizarre mixture of epistemology and value theory; and perhaps it is best to acknowledge this oddity at once. I should also, perhaps, confess that such a mixture has always seemed something to aspire to. Any philosopher who has made it seem that feeling strongly about something, valuing it highly, is an inevitable consequence of the nature of human understanding, that from the facts of knowledge or perception one can derive the inescapable facts of emotion or desire, any such philosopher has always deeply appealed to me. I am therefore a confessed perpetrator of the naturalistic fallacy. Indeed I go further, and say that I love the fallacy. So Spinoza, Hume (however much people say that he first discovered naturalism to be fallacious) and Sartre all seem to me to be real philosophers, on the grounds that for them this connexion between knowing and wanting seemed inevitable. My aim is to illustrate this kind of connexion by suggesting that the human imagination is such that we ought to value it and respect it more highly than anything else; and that therefore, if it can be educated and improved, it is to this education that we should give priority, if we are concerned with education at all. It may seem on the face of it absurd to say that we ought to value any particular human faculty or capacity. It may be thought that this is not the kind of object or evaluation with which at any rate philosophers should be concerned. But the fact is, of course, that we do value very highly indeed all kinds of capacities that we have, such as sight, and hearing and understanding. And being unashamedly naturalistic, I have no hesitation in saying not only that we do value them, but that we ought to; they are, in every sense, valuable.

‘Faithfulness’ is defined in The Oxford English Dictionary of 1901 in a way that leaves out what one might take as a central paradigm. The OED entry reads, in part

Faithfulness … the quality of being faithful.

A. Fidelity, loyalty (to a superior or friend) …

B. Strict adherence to one's pledged word; honesty, sincerity. …

The feudal system, the army, and the rest of such things are provided for in (A) ‘loyalty to a superior …’, and so are friends – after superiors. In (B), commercial interests are satisfactorily covered: ‘strict adherence to one's pledged word, honesty. …’ It is a nice piece of social history: from William the Conqueror to the latter phases of the Industrial Revolution, in two definitions. But a very odd piece of social history, in that conjugal faithfulness, the most existential one that there is, does not rate a mention.

The prescription that lays down how one ought to reason in moral matters is normally supported by a more general account of reasoning, which suggests limits upon what can be counted as reasoning of any kind, whether practical or theoretical. If, for example, one accepts, or presupposes, a Cartesian theory of reasoning, the normal case of reasoning is apt to be represented as conscious and explicit inference from one more or less clear idea to another in a set of distinguishable steps. The distinguishable steps are the feature that I wish to stress now. Given this Cartesian account, the normal case of rational deliberation before decision will also be represented as more or less explicit inference from one idea, or proposition, to another in successive, distinct steps.

Should the insane and the mentally ill be held morally responsible for their actions? To answer ‘No’ to this question is to classify the mentally abnormal as not fully human: and indeed legal tradition has generally oscillated between assimilating the insane to brutes and assimilating them to children below the age of discretion, neither of these two categories being accountable in law for what they do. In what respect relevant to moral responsibility were the insane held to resemble brutes and children? In the case of brutes, the answer seems to have been that the doings of the insane appeared to lack whatever it is that marks out human actions as distinctively human. What the insane did could not be thought of as issuing from deliberation, or as capable of having issued from deliberation, but seemed rather to be the result of the unbridled operation of nature — if a diseased nature. The natural comparison with insane killings seemed to be, for example, the killing of birds by cats. This distinction between animal doings and human actions does not depend on Cartesian views about the workings of animals; the operation of nature need not be thought of as mechanical. The thought is simply that where there is no room for deliberation there is no room for moral appraisal. Children, on the other hand, though capable of distinctively human action — i.e. of deliberating about what they do — were held not to be capable of the relevant kind of deliberation: for they were held ‘not to know the difference between right and wrong’.

The truth can be dangerous. It is because they realise this that the Roman Catholic Church forbid cremation. Cremation is, of course, theologically permissible, and in times of epidemic the Church allows it. But in normal times it is forbidden — Why? The reason is that the Church fears the influence of the image associated with it. It is difficult enough for the faithful to accept the notion of bodily resurrection after having seen a burial (knowing that the body will eventually decay in the ground). But the image of the whole body being consumed by flames and changing within a few minutes to a heap of ashes is an even more powerful apparent contradiction of the theological claim of bodily resurrection at the Day of Judgement. (Indeed, the ban on cremation was introduced when the French Freemasons held anti-Catholic demonstrations, in which they burned their dead saying ‘There, you see: they won't rise again!’) In short, instead of relying only on abstract theological argument, which very likely would not convince their flock in any case, the Church deals with this threat to faith by attacking the concrete image.

The idea of absolute goodness and the idea of an absolute requitement tend nowadays to be viewed with suspicion in the world of English-speaking philosophy. The tendency is well rooted and has not just arisen by osmosis from the temper of the times. There are various lines of thought, all of them attractive, by which a recent or contemporary academic practitioner of the subject could have been induced into scepticism about an ethics of absolute conceptions.

The present paper is an attempt to study the acts and intentions which set up for the subject, and for the community of subjects, a set of values and disvalues which impose themselves as valid upon everyone, and which everyone must tend to prescribe, or to warn against, for everyone. The acts which set up a formal apophantic and ontology have been studied by Husserl in his Formal and Transcendental Logic, but he has not set out a comparable theory of the acts which set up a universally valid system of values and disvalues. He has not done so because he does not believe in such a system, because his thought goes no further than the values set up for and felt to hold in a given group or society. It is my view that there is an ineluctable progress from these relativistic group-values to a set of values and disvalues holding for everyone, and that moreover in their relation to everyone, and that these values and disvalues have definite and undeniable shapes and locations, even if these shapes also have somewhat nebulous contours. The views I am expounding on this occasion are not new: they are fully set out in my Values and Intentions and my Axiological Ethics and in other writings. Ideas, however, require restatement at intervals, with a suitable change of idiom and emphasis. And I feel my views on this topic to have a claim to truth simply because, quite differently from my views on other topics, and despite constant reflection, they have hardly changed over the last two decades. The inspiration for these views was only in part Husserlian, as I do not think that the emotional and the axiological are really Husserl's strong suit. Strangely enough, that dry thinker Meinong would seem to have had a much richer emotional life and the ability to frame a theory to fit it, than the much easier and at times effusive thinker Husserl. Meinong's 1917 Austrian Imperial Academy treatise, On Emotional Presentation, recently translated for the Northwestern Phenomenology series, is a much more systematic investigation of the presuppositions of value-theory than any writing of a professed phenomenologist. What I have to say will build considerably on Meinong, always a major influence in my thought. But I have also been much influenced in my approaches to value-theory by the transcendental methods of Kant. Kant, I think, could very well have worked out a transcendental deduction of the heads of value and disvalue, a deduction much more illuminating than the dogmatic intuitionism of Scheler and Hartmann, instead of producing the arid triad of categorical imperatives that were all that he actually deduced. Imperatives, I consider, are secondary structures in value-constitution: the primary structures are the ultimate objects of necessary, rational pursuit and avoidance which Kant wrongly thought of as involving heteronomy and a corruption of pure form by matter. There is, I shall argue, nothing more free from extraneous, pathological material than the objects of the pursuits and avoidances in question.

Sir, I have recently had occasion to give my support to a local demand by parents and teachers for a patrolled crossing over a busy road outside their children's school. I have been appalled at what I have learned.

First, that such requests are considered on the evidence of traffic volume, the number of children killed and injured, and the degree of ‘negligence’ of a child in contributing to his own injury. Second, the battle to justify the need for a crossing patrol has to be fought over and over again, by each school independently. Must we then draw up, for every school, a profit and loss account of children killed and injured balanced against inconvenience to traffic? Traffic volume is irrelevant, any traffic constitutes a risk. Can a five-year-old be ‘negligent’ in law? A child is a child is a child: of course he is ‘negligent’ — whatever that means! Whose children are they but ours who drive the traffic?

There can be no argument. The issue is, do we suffer some occasional inconvenience as we drive or do we prefer to risk death and injury to our children? There is only one answer and I am sure the police are only too painfully aware of it but find themselves trapped in a maze of bureaucratic nonsense, sanctified by committal to print and blessed by precedent.