Human Ideals and Human Needs

Abstract

G. E. Moore said that ethics was concerned with only two questions, the question what goodness meant, and the question what things were good. But there is an immense gap between these questions, and most of ethics lies between them. It deals with the various kinds of goodness. (Similarly, science does not deal only with the question what it is to be a thing, and the question what things there are. It deals with the kinds of thing.) Good is nearly as general a term as thing, lumping together many kinds of praise. The main business of ethics is to distinguish these kinds (and also the kinds of dispraise) and relate them properly. This involves studying, comparing, criticizing and deepening the various half-formed priority systems within which each kind of praise gets its sense. The disputes out of which ethics arises are not usually about whether something is good, but about conflicts between admitted goods (or evils). To arbitrate them, as we constantly must, we have to have a priority system of goods. And we get it by attending to the system of needs which those goods satisfy. Some, we argue, are more central than others. For instance-beauty, and the contemplation of beauty, would not be good at all except for a being that needed them. And since that being also has other needs, that contemplation cannot-as Moore suggestedi-have a walkover into a central and predominant place. If it is to go there, reasons must be given. Moore, unlike Plato,2 would not produce such reasons. But they can be given, and also answered. To understand the system of goods is to understand the system of needs which they satisfy-namely, in the human case, human nature. This line of thought, which is reckoned as naturalistic, causes alarm. I would like to explain it a little more in response to criticisms made by various moral philosophers, notably by Dr Christine Battersby in reviewing my book Beast and Man3 and by Dr Stephen Clark in replying to my paper 'The Absence of a Gap Between Facts and Values' at the i980 Joint Session.4 Both suggest that the notion of a structure of deep, central human needs is too obscure to be helpful. I quote some remarks from Dr Battersby: