Russell’s Metaethics

Abstract

_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2602\REVIEWS.262 : 2007-01-24 01:12 Reviews 179 RUSSELL’S METAETHICS Ray Perkins, Jr. Philosophy / Plymouth State U. Plymouth, nh 03264–1600, usa perkrk@earthlink.net Michael K. Potter. Bertrand Russell’s Ethics. London and New York: Continuum , 2006. Pp. xiii, 185. isbn 0826488102. £55.00; us$110.00. Hardcover. his book is a very illuminating examination of Russell’s emotivist ethics. In This Preface, Potter acknowledges a large debt to Charles Pigden’s groundbreaking work.1 Potter builds on that work and extends our understanding of Russell’s ethics in several areas. In the first two thirds of the book Potter gives the reader a plausible account of Russell’s transition from the objectivist ethics that he shared with G. E. Moore during the first decade of the last century into a “proto-emotivism” inspired by Ottoline Morrell and the onset of World War i. This immature form of emotivism, he says, can be found in Russell’s writings from 1913 to 1922 until it emerged in a more mature (“enlightened”) form in the mid- to late 1920s and full-blown in Religion and Science (Chapter 9) in 1935. Potter helps us to see the essential elements in this “enlightened emotivism” and shows us the similarities and differences with the better-known versions of emotivism put forward later by Ayer and Stevenson. He argues persuasively that Russell’s version, properly interpreted, though not without problems, is superior to theirs. The key to understanding Russell’s mature theory lies in his notion of the compossibility of desires. Desires A and B are compossible just in case both can be satisfied; they are in harmony. This allows Russell’s ethics to build up the idea of interpersonal subjectivity by invoking the notion of the universality of desire (or wish) as the essence of moral judgment (“X is good” means “Would that everyone desired X ”). A significant degree of moral objectivity is attainable in so far as desires are (or are not) universalizable, i.e. the satisfaction of our desires is (or is not) compatible with the (general) satisfaction of the desires of others. As Potter puts it: “To say a desire can be universalized is to say that it does not conflict with the general desires of most human beings, it is in har1 Charles Pigden, Russell on Ethics: Selections from the Writings of Bertrand Russell (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2602\REVIEWS.262 : 2007-01-24 01:12 180 Reviews mony with them, it can be realized alongside them …” (p. 94). In the last third of the book Potter undertakes an original exploration into Russell’s ethics by importing Russell’s earlier theories of impulse and desire found in Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916) and The Analysis of Mind (1921). In this way Potter shows how the infusion of these ideas into Russell’s normative ethics can enrich his practical ethics, although he says the concepts of desire and impulse want clarification and the behaviouristic nature of his notion of desire needs radical modification. As Potter explains, Russell’s early emotivism was likely the product of many influences, including Santayana’s Winds of Doctrine and the First World War, which later caused Russell to doubt both the objectivity of good and the desirability of belief in such a thing—he thought it led to irresolvable conflicting claims of moral truth and fostered human cruelty and even violence. Potter, borrowing from Nick Griffin’s work (SLBR, 1: 399), also suggests that Ottoline Morrell, Russell’s lover and confidant in the years leading up to ww1, may have played an important role in getting him to think of ethics non-cognitively. Potter refers to a 1912 letter to Ottoline in which Russell discusses ideals and their connection to religion and writes approvingly that “Man can imagine things that don’t exist … [which] are better than things that do exist” (pp. 8–9). Potter takes this (following Griffin) as evidence that Russell must have been speaking of good in a non-cognitive sense, otherwise Russell’s own theory of descriptions—according to which statements purporting to refer...