Morality and Egoism

Abstract

In every society there are certain rules which its members are expected to observe, certain ways of behaving and attitudes of mind which are commonly and officially praised or blamed, and classified as virtues or vices. This practice of requiring or banning certain types of action and praising or blaming certain dispositions of character I shall call the morality of the society. Morality in this sense imposes some restraints upon the operation of self-interest, requiring the members of the society sometimes to behave to their own disadvantage in order to carry out a rule or exercise a virtue. Obedience to the demands of morality will be enforced by penalties of various kinds. But I do not count a rule as belonging to the morality of a society if obedience to it depends mainly on the fear of penalties imposed by a minority of powerful persons. Moral rules and ideals are those which have the general support of the members, in that most of them are in favour of these rules being obeyed and these ideals pursued. Since morality depends on common consent, and is derived from the opinions and attitudes of the members in general, every member is entitled and expected to contribute towards defining and eliciting moral conduct by forming and expressing opinions about right and wrong. Such opinions I will call moral judgements: that is, I shall mean by a moral judgement a judgement about the rules and standards which the members of the society should be required and encouraged to live by. I think this is one admissible way of using the words 'morality' and 'moral judgement'; I am not suggesting that it is the only one. A moral judgement in this sense-a judgement about the modes of acting, feeling and thinking to be recommended and enforced in the community-must conform to certain conditions of both form and content. Formally, such a judgement must either be general, taking the form 'If anybody is in circumstances of the kind X, he must behave in the manner Y, or it must be an application of some such generalisation to a particular case. For moral judgements are concerned with public standards, which can be formulated, promulgated, enforced, taught, learned, followed on principle or from habit without reflection. For a morality has the essential purpose of enabling men to trust one another by assuring one man of the way another man will behave. So of this sort of moral judgement we can say that whoever affirms it must be ready to agree that either the judgement itself or the principle of which it is an application should be a universal law-universal, that is to say, in the society in question. Of course, many philosophers have held that this universalisability is essential to moral judgements. My point is that this claim is not to be justified by reference to some a priori Idea of Reason, but by regarding moral judgements as concerned with standards that must be public, teachable and enforceable, and provide reliable expectations of the behaviour of others. There is of course no formal