Moral Worth In The Philosophy Of The Mid-Twentieth Century

In the mid-twentieth century, ethical philosophy was at a major turning point. It was, of course, no coincidence that this was amidst the Second World War. As the entire world watched in awe, Nazi Germany did many despicable acts in the name of moral motive. Prior to this, internalist Kantianism was the thriving deontological philosophy of the time. But many people outside of Germany challenged the internalist idea that ‘uncontradictory, rational evidence’ was something that exists within each human, as Hitler and the Nazi party had a clearly different CI than themselves. Thus, externalism was born.

Kant would reject a claim of wrongness of Hitler’s actions, as we are not to judge on consequences, and Hitler’s internal moral motive was followed. Kant may have held a naive position on the ‘goodness’ of human nature. H.A. Prichard and W.D. Ross sought to fix this. They were externalist deontologists, that is, they believed obligation to be independent of moral worth. Moral worth of an action is not the weighing mechanism of its rightness, and one can not infer the moral worth of an action based on its apparent rightness (and vice versa). This isn’t to jump back to consequentialism, as Moore may have argued. Rather, the right action doesn’t depend upon either our own good (internalist deontology), or what is good (monistic utilitarianism).

In Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake? (1912), H.A. Prichard offers a defense for naturalism. Moore had already offered a critique on Kant, coined the ‘open-question argument’. In Principia Ethica, Moore disproves a monistic definition of moral goodness by saying the definition of good is an open-question, that is good does not entail right (being a vegetarian entails not eating meat, a closed-question). Prichard wants to mention that this open-question argument doesn’t prove anything. Rather, it begs the question, meaning Moore jumped to a conclusion based on a premise that lacks support. Moore assumed the premise “all natural properties cannot be analytically equivalent to moral properties” to find the conclusion that “all natural properties are not analytically equivalent to moral properties.”

This idea of an ‘intuition’ lacks any empirical evidence, which Moore simply assumes is unavailable. Moore wants to make the claim that we can only know things which we can prove. But he’s using a lack of evidence as evidence. Epistemologist Alex Byrne points to the example of a detective investigating a murder to illustrate how we cannot use a lack of evidence as a part of our evidence. He says knowledge gained through your sensory experience is not to be doubted. “If part of the detective’s evidence is that no fingerprints were found at the scene, and she knows that the murderer wore gloves on that basis, then the detective must have known that no fingerprints were found at the scene.

If the scene was fingerprint-free, but for some reason the detective was ignorant of this piece of evidence, then she couldn’t have used it as a basis on which to extend her knowledge. As we might put it, if the detective didn’t know that no fingerprints were found, this piece of evidence was not part of her evidence.” (Skepticism about the Internal World, 2015). So, if we combine the idea that we can only know things which we can prove with Moore’s three conditions on proofs, we are left with a puzzling conclusion: anyone who knows true anything has infinite knowledge. Moore’s conditions for a sound proof are:

• The premises must be different from the conclusion.
• The premises must be known to be true.
• The conclusion must follow from the premisesIf the conclusion is true, all the premises are also true (and different, and follow from one another).

But if we only know things that we can prove, each premise requires an additional proof with additional new, valid premises, and so on. Since each piece of evidence must be different, Moore’s conditions combined with Prichard’s objection imply anyone who knows any thing knows infinitely many things. Prichard rejects the utilitarian view that we ought to perform an act when it is linked to something that is good and therefore desirable. He instead claims that the fact that an act is good for something we desire does not show that we ought to do it.

All this discussion of meta cognitivism and introspection can cloud the idea of moral motive. Kant simplifies it to an internal duty, but Prichard wants to make some cognitive distinctions. First, he distinguishes between general thinking and moral thinking. General thinking can be used to asses the facts of a situation, and can be doubted via skeptical analysis of introspection. However, moral thinking is based on an immediate intuition on the right thing to do. It’s not something we’re even capable of proving logically, but it’s more than simply “duty.” Prichard maintained that we musn’t judge moral words like we judge normal words (using introspection).

Rather, the decision of whether or not to perform an act is always considered in abstract from the motive we might have for doing it. This ‘removed’ perspective of moral thinking is independent of introspection of our motive. For instance, Prichard says Kant’s moral motivator of ‘duty’ roots from something salient, whether by ends, purposes or virtues. Even with Prichard fighting off critics of deontology, there were still questions within Kantianism (i.e. conflicting perfect obligations) left without good answer. Despite Prichard falling short of solving the ethical mystery, he certainly created a path for his colleague, W.D. Ross, to continue where he left off.

In The Right and The Good (1930), Ross responds to his criticisms of Moore and Kant, creating a successful externalist, deontological theory with a stated higher law. Prichard knew issues arose with Kant’s deontology, but couldn’t offer his own CI to replace Kant’s established deontological higher moral law. Ross rejects the idea that it’s the case that what he ought to do is act from certain motives, even moral motives. This is playing on Prichard’s idea of moral thinking, that it be an immediate distinction, other than duty, with no need for introspection on motive. Ross believes that ‘right’ and ‘obligatory’ are not equatable with ‘good.’ However, certain types of duties are right. Even though Hitler was following his maxim, he was breaking a higher moral principle, and was wrong in Ross’ eyes. Ross created a list of 7 prima facie duties, which was his version of the CI.

However, unlike Kant, Ross didn’t include a clause claiming no contradictions. Though these seven duties were clearly right to Ross, he understands that they are not finite. So, if an agent is faced with a situation where they’re forced to choose one or another, their moral thinking will automatically prioritize the right choice for that agent. He says that every person knows that both lying and killing are wrong. But he does not disallow an agent from breaking one moral law in favor of another. Ross thought his prima facie duties were self-evident, and rational across societies. But, he did not make the mistakes of Kant, namely using an internalist lense on deontology, and having ‘higher laws’ with a potential for contradiction with no solution.

Even after thorough speculation from all these brilliant minds, the simple questions of ‘what is good?’ remains unsolved. There be no clear ‘true’ philosophy, as I can imagine myself relating to each one, or justifying something I’d done with each one. Through the history of time, philosophers continue to grapple with the same fundamental questions. As each philosopher continues the work of their predecessors by critiquing and modifying their errors, we gain a clearer view into the diverging ideologies of ethics. By continuing this work, new ideas are sparked, and eventually, one may light the fire of total ethical knowledge.