Anscombe’s Challenge

As in the first volume, my attention here will be devoted mainly, though hardly entirely, to ethical philosophers’ attempts to come to grips with deontic morality understood in the terms of Anscombe’s critique. Sometimes, these will be defenses and theoretical accounts, as with, for example, the nineteenth-century utilitarians – whether empiricist, like Bentham and Mill, or “philosophical intuitionist,” like Henry Sidgwick – or the moral theories of British idealists like T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley. But unlike mainstream seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophy – for instance, the modern natural lawyers, Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Locke, and Cumberland, the British rationalists, and Kant – the ethical philosophy of the nineteenth century is more often concerned to criticize deontic morality or to put it in its place. Examples here are Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and, of course, Nietzsche.

It will help to set out briefly the main lines of Anscombe’s critique (summarizing the opening pages of Darwall Reference Darwall2023a: 2–3). Anscombe’s most basic problem with modern ethical philosophy was that it is, as she put it, “moral philosophy.” It concerns, even if not exclusively, what it calls morality: a set of putatively universal deontic or “juridical” norms of right and wrong that purport to obligate all normal human adults, indeed, all moral agents, as it terms beings who have the capacity to respond to obligation. Anscombe called this a “law conception” of ethics (Anscombe Reference Anscombe1958: 5) since it posits a moral law of right and wrong, what Grotius and his followers called “natural law” (5).

The individuals who populate modern moral philosophy are moral agents or persons. “Person” is, Locke says, “a Forensick Term” that “belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law” (Locke Reference Locke and Nidditch1975: 346). To be “capable of a Law,” in Locke’s sense, someone must have the capacity to guide themselves by the moral law, which binds them simply as one moral agent among others. For many, maybe most, modern moral philosophers, it is not enough that they be able to comply with the law from whatever motive, say, fear of “external sanctions.” They must have be able to be moved by what Mill calls the “internal sanction” of conscience (Mill Reference Mill and Sher2002: III.6). They must be capable of knowing what morality requires and acting as required, for that very reason.

However, Anscombe thought it obvious that no practical law of any kind can exist without a lawgiver. So there can be a moral law only if it has a legislator whose jurisdiction transcends any posited earthly realm, even, indeed, that of the international law (jus gentium) that Grotius himself helped to originate in the early modern period.Footnote ¹ Anscombe concluded that there can be such a thing as morality only if it is legislated by God.

The idea that morality binds only because it is divinely legislated has certainly been represented in modern moral philosophy, for example, in seventeenth-century natural lawyers like Pufendorf and Locke. But it has been a decidedly minority view. Certainly this was true in the nineteenth century. Most moral philosophers then, as now, were content to employ the essentially juridical concept of morality without grounding it in divine legislation. And many denied that morality is even the kind of thing that could be legislated, even by God. It is not some existing thing that was made actual by creation or legislation. It is an essentially normative deontic structure. Anscombe thought that this left modern deontic concepts with no “discernible content except a certain compelling [‘psychological’] force” (Anscombe Reference Anscombe1958: 18).

In Darwall (Reference Darwall2023a), I called this “Anscombe’s Challenge,” which Anscombe posed to much of the ethical philosophy in the West since the early seventeenth century. I think that Anscombe was unquestionably right that a central feature of “modern moral philosophy” has been its fundamentally deontic or juridical character, though I am more sanguine than she that her challenge can be met. Modern moral philosophers have indeed been concerned to articulate, understand, defend, and attempt to ground morality with its distinctively obligating normativity, and many of their attempts are promising.

Even modern critics of the idea of morality – most prominently, Nietzsche, but also more qualified critics like Bernard Williams – have focused on the deontic features that Anscombe identifies. In seeking to overturn or at least rein in deontic morality they have implicitly accepted her point that it has been a, if not the, central focus of modern ethical thought (Williams Reference Williams1985: 1–4, 174–196; Nietzsche Reference Nietzsche and Ansell-Pearson2007).

The nineteenth-century figures we shall consider in this volume are either defenders or critics of deontic morality. Nietzsche, of course, is an unmitigated critic. But Kierkegaard and Marx are mitigated critics in different ways. And so is Hegel, perhaps, though more modestly. On the other side, the nineteenth-century utilitarians are mostly solid defenders. Mill begins Utilitarianism by decrying “the little progress which has been made … respecting the criterion of right and wrong” (Mill Reference Mill and Sher2002: I.1). This makes clear that Mill’s aim in Utilitarianism is to defend the principle of utility as a deontic “criterion of right and wrong.” It also reflects Bentham’s agenda-setting influence since he did much to shift utilitarianism’s focus from assessment of motive and character to concern with the rightness and wrongness of acts.

Ancient versus Modern

Anscombe’s challenge is one marker of a difference between modern moral philosophy and the ethical philosophy of the ancient Greeks and their followers, including the classical natural law tradition of Aquinas. A second, as Sidgwick pointed out, is that where the ancients were generally eudaimonists or, in Sidgwick’s terms, egoists, modern moral philosophers, including many nineteenth-century figures, like Sidgwick, were not. As he put it memorably: “In Greek moral philosophy generally, but one regulative and governing faculty is recognised under the name of Reason … ; in the modern ethical view, when it has worked itself clear, there are found to be two, – Universal Reason and Egoistic Reason, or Conscience and Self-love” (Sidgwick Reference Sidgwick1964 : 198). This is a contrast within what philosophers these days call “normativity” or the force of normative reasons or oughts.

This is connected to the central aspiration of deontic morality: to provide moral agents reasons intrinsic to morality – rather than eudaimonist considerations of self-interest – for complying with moral duties. Thus although Mill calls the normative reason to be moral an “internal sanction,” it is clear he is denying the eudaimonist position that any reason to comply with morality must be a consideration of the good of doing so:

Mill is but one example of a nineteenth-century philosopher who aims to argue the fact that an action is morally wrong is reason in itself not to do it. As we shall see, Kierkegaard is another, although he is a mitigated critic of morality even so.

“Continental” and “Analytic” Canons

A third theme running through this book concerns figures who look forward to what will be called “continental” and “analytic” philosophy in the twentieth century. Both schools proudly claim most modern philosophers up through Kant as ancestors, but the lines then divide. Post-Kantian German idealists, like Fichte and Hegel, and later, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, pursue a phenomenological approach that is formulated in more explicitly phenomenological terms in twentieth-century thinkers like Husserl and Heidegger. Among the ethical philosophers we will be considering, Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick pursue philosophical approaches that would come to be called analytical.

As it happens, Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick are all theorists of deontic morality. This is most explicit in Bentham and Mill. Sidgwick turns out to be more equivocal. On the one hand, he cites the “quasi-jural” character of modern morality and a major difference between ancient and modern ethical thought. According to “the Greek schools” of ethics, Sidgwick says:

On the other hand, his “Axiom of Rational Benevolence,” which comprises, along with the “Axiom of Prudence,” Sidgwick’s “dualism of practical reason,” is formulated entirely in nondeontic terms.

Rawls calls Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics, “the first truly academic work in moral philosophy” (Sidgwick Reference Sidgwick1981: 2). By this, Rawls means that Sidgwick’s careful way of laying out different ethical theories or “methods” so that their costs and benefits can be assessed for pedagogical, as well as for systematic adjudicatory, purposes, arguably originated with him. Sidgwick’s project, moreover, is generally taken up by self-styled academic philosophers more than continental ones. In Darwall (Reference Darwallin press), I will be arguing that G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903), which has been looked to as the founding work of analytic metaethics, began a divide between Moore’s analytic followers and the continental ethical philosophy Moore so decisively rejects.

Sidgwick’s analytic instincts are most apparent in his claim that all ethical judgments contain “the fundamental notion represented by the word ought” (Sidgwick Reference Sidgwick1962: 25). This is analytic philosophy par excellence. Moore credits Sidgwick with seeing that all ethical concepts must share a common basic notion, though Moore identifies it with good rather than ought (Moore Reference Moore and Baldwin1993a: 69). Sidgwick did not, however, pursue a program of analytic philosophy in the way that Moore would.Footnote ² Still, Moorean analytic metaethics undeniably descends from Sidgwick.

Another signal feature of Sidgwick’s and other proto-analytic philosophizing that we will encounter in this volume is the aim of articulating normative ethical theories and fundamental “principles,” not in their eighteenth-century sense as springs of action, but as standards or “criteria” of right and wrong. The aim of articulating normative moral theories is a hallmark of proto-analytic modern moral philosophy in the nineteenth century.

Modern Freedom and Individuality

A fourth theme is that defenders and detractors of deontic morality alike seek to lay out and justify distinctively modern forms of individuality and freedom. This is true of thinkers as diverse as Mill, Fichte, Kierkegaard, Bradley, and Nietzsche. Thus Mill says that “the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1977: 224). A central aspect of Fichte’s critique of Kant is that for all of his concern with respect for persons as ends-in-themselves, he overlooks their individuality. Thus Fichte says that Kant cannot “understand by pure apperception the consciousness of our individuality or confuse one with the other.” The latter is “necessarily accompanied by another consciousness, that of a Thou and is only possible on this condition.”Footnote ³ Fichte’s famous argument that a (second-personal) summons commits summoner and summoned alike to a fundamental principle of natural right is likewise connected to a form of individuality for which, as Fichte sees it, Kant’s theories cannot account.

Nietzsche is another clear case of a defender of what he calls the “sovereign individual,” but his defense is part of his critique of deontic morality. Nietzsche’s autonomous individuals transcend the deontic moral ideas of their culture and attempt to realize an ethical conception that is “beyond good and evil.” They create themselves as “autonomous, supra-ethical individual[s]” (Nietzsche Reference Nietzsche and Ansell-Pearson2007: 37). We find a similar idea in Kierkegaard, though, quite differently from Nietzsche, it is tied there to religious faith.

In the nineteenth century, ideals of individuality go together with conceptions of “subjective freedom,” which is, Hegel says, “the pivotal and focal point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age” (Hegel Reference Hegel, Wood and Nisbett1991: 151). Freedom, in Hegel’s subjective sense, is quite different than the freedom that is realized by practical reason, as in Kant. The latter is something that moral agents all actualize in the same way, following universal laws of pure practical reason. Subjective freedom, by contrast, is something we each realize in our own way, pursuing our own chosen paths. This is an aspect of the ancient/modern contrast that does not “work itself clear,” to use Sidgwick’s phrase, until the nineteenth century (Sidgwick Reference Sidgwick1964: 198). To be sure, a keystone of Kant’s ethics is respect for one another’s right to pursue our own ends. But Kant does not proclaim the value or good of our doing so in a way that nineteenth-century thinkers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Mill, and the British idealists do. This turns out to be an important difference between Bradley and Green and those thinkers that Terence Irwin calls “Aristotelian Naturalists,” with whom they otherwise share ideas.Footnote ⁴

Social Freedom

One of Marx’s great contributions to the history of ethics is his insight that many of our most important and intractable problems do not concern how we treat one another individually but how political, economic, and social structures in which we participate affect us, and that these are within collective human control. This is at the center of Marx’s thought, for example, in his rich account of the various forms of alienation to which human beings are subject in a capitalist political order in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, and also in his theory of exploitation in Capital. Although Marx is not himself a proponent of the idea of distributive justice because he thought that it was tied to capitalist political-economic orders, it became a staple of the moral and political philosophy of progressive thinkers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Fleischacker Reference Fleischacker2004). It is connected to the role that Mill gives social and political practices in his theory of justice and rights, and it is front and center in Rawls’s signature claim that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions” (Rawls Reference Rawls1971: 3). When Nozick attacks Rawlsian “patterned principles,” as he calls them in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, it is for thinking that justice can consist in structural features rather than properties of interactions between individuals (Nozick Reference Nozick1974: 156–159).

Marx, too, is the source of the idea that there is a distinctive kind of structural, social freedom or “liberation” that contrasts with various forms of social oppression, whether they are political-economic, like capitalism, or orders of oppressive gender or racial relations in patriarchy and white supremacy. The opposites of the latter are liberation from oppressive orders of these (structural) forms. Marx’s insight also shows up in versions of non-ideal theory in the late twentieth century, like that of Charles Mills, that focus on resisting and overcoming structural racial oppression here and now rather than attempting to take steps toward some ideally just society (Mills Reference Mills2005).

Social Activism and Moral Theory

Finally, an especially notable feature of nineteenth-century ethical philosophy is the connection many philosophers make between theory and practice. This is perhaps clearest with Marx, who in his Theses on Feuerbach famously says that “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Marx Reference Marx and Robert1978b: 145). For Marx, one might say, adapting Kant’s well-known phrase: “theory without practice is empty, practice without theory is blind.”Footnote ⁵ Marx also put his money where his mouth was, working for radical social change, informed by theory, throughout his working life.

Marx is far from the only nineteenth-century philosopher who ties together philosophical theorizing with social and political activism. The utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill is tied closely to social and political reform. From Bentham’s circle of “philosophical radicals” to the early Mill’s activism against the Corn Laws to the mature Mill and Harriet Taylor’s The Subjection of Women and feminist activism that it called for, the connection between theory and practice is a central feature of nineteenth-century moral and political philosophy. Indeed, this utilitarian line can be extended to Sidgwick since he was a strong promoter of women’s educational rights at Cambridge.

The point is not that nineteenth-century ethical thought had practical effects that were lacking among that of earlier, say, eighteenth-century, thinkers. Kant’s doctrine of the equal dignity of all persons and Grotius and Locke on natural rights obviously had enormous practical upshots. The difference was that Marx, Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick were all themselves socially and politically active not just in disseminating their philosophical ideas but in attempting to put them into practice. And influence went in the other direction as well. As we shall see in Chapters 7 and 8, Bentham’s deepest argument for the principle of utility is that it is uniquely suitable for free informed political debate, much like Rawls’s arguments in Political Liberalism, and the most promising interpretation of Mill’s utilitarianism is a rule or practice version that reckons the rightness and wrongness of acts in terms of the effects of social practices that hold people accountable for performing them.

Finally, a perhaps unexpected instance is the British idealist T. H. Green. Green’s idealism calls for a social order in which participants share a common mutually accountable life whose benefits they can share. Green himself practiced what he preached in his work with the Liberal Party. Of course, not all nineteenth-century moral philosophers were activists. Obviously, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were not.