Section 2.2 critically examines the conventional wisdom that it is the useful consequences of morality which encourages people to foster it within their societies.

Section 2.3 looks at the mental conditioning that is associated with the moral upbringing.

Section 2.4 examines the moral hierarchy or pecking order that is established with moral upbringing.

Section 2.5 examines the use of the doctrine of deserts in encouraging people to remain moral after their morality has been established, and its effects in ensuring that members of a moral elite are rewarded in both power and material goods, giving them a vested interest in the preservation of the morality in society.

Section 2.6 examines the clash between the wide-spread belief in moral conscience and the equally wide-spread belief that the only road to knowledge of contingent truths is via observation using our ordinary sensory abilities.

Finally, in Section 2.7 I state my case for moral nihilism -- the belief that there are no moral obligations and that the morality of society is based on myth.

Let us proceed, then, to examine the preservation of morality.

2.2 The Perpetuation of Morality -- Some Implausible Views

The fact that all moral societies bear these qualities is no evidence for the theory that morality tends to generate these aspects of society. Perhaps any amoral society would bear these qualities also. Perhaps these qualities of societies are brought about by 'human nature' and societies would bear these qualities in greater degree were it not for the ameliorating effects of morality.

Many would argue that these qualities arise in a society because of its immoral nature. They would claim that if the society was moral (as opposed to immoral) as well as moral (as opposed to amoral), then all such distasteful qualities would vanish.

An alternative and contrary claim is that, as a sociological matter of fact, the way morality perpetuates itself within a society is causally sufficient for the perpetuation and aggravation of these aspects of society. It is the purpose of this essay to present this conjecture in such a light as to make it plausible enough to be at least worthy of more thorough investigation.

What do we know about the way morality within society perpetuates itself? Let us begin by examining a fairly common explanation for the perpetuation of morality, namely that morality brings obvious advantages to all the individual members of a society -- or at least a large proportion of them. Hence most members of a moral society will make it their business to perpetuate the system for the sake of these obvious advantages -- or so goes the argument.

Why would people believe, if indeed they do, that the morality of others is generally an advantage to themselves or at least to most people? It does not seem plausible that direct empirical evidence generates their confidence in the advantages of morality. Most of us have never lived in an amoral society to compare it with what we have.

Hobbes conjectured in the Leviathan that the pre-moral 'state of nature' was a fairly violent affair in comparison with a morally mature society. Paradoxically, he wrote during the civil wars at a time when blood-letting between competing moral systems in Britain was at a peak. But of course competing moral systems had been hacking away at one another before that for thousands of years. One may have thought, therefore, that it would have been reasonable for Hobbes to have dwelt at greater depth on the dangers of conflicting moralities and the likelihood of a continuation of such conflicts. One might also have expected him to have considered the continued exploitation of the poor and weak by the rich and powerful -- a feature glaringly evident in Hobbes' own seventeenth century as well throughout the history of moral civilisation as Hobbes would have known it.

Of course, nobody could have predicted the extent of the slaughter that was to follow: the massacre of the moral Catholic highlanders by the moral Protestants at Culloden and its aftermath, the genocide of the peaceful and hospitable stone-age Tasmanians by people from moral Britain, the mutual slaughter of all those dutiful men on the Somme and on the Russian front in World War I, the morally sanctioned slaughter in World War II, especially in the area bombing of Hamburg, London, Coventry, Cologne, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subsequent slaughter in Korea, Vietnam, Northern Ireland and the Middle East -- all this among people the great majority of whom wanted above all to be good and who did not want to be bad. If life in a 'state of nature' was less secure than this, things must have been very exciting indeed for our stone-age ancestors.

However, let me stress again that one cannot infer from all this that the violence would have been any less had those societies been amoral. The point being made is that if the only evidence there is to hand on this matter is of moral societies which frequently lapse into extremes of violence, then such evidence hardly favours the moral societies. We know that they are very violent. With no evidence one way or the other about amoral societies, at least they stand a fifty-fifty chance of being relatively peaceful.

One might suggest that the evidence might be there at a deeper level. Thus, if we had a measure of the morality of a society, that is, the tendency of its members to be motivated by moral considerations, as well as a measure of the violence of a society, then we might discover a negative correlation between morality and violence.

But we might discover instead that the two are positively correlated. The violence of which we hear daily in the Middle East is not committed by people who have the reputation of lacking moral motivation. Moreover, the Swedes, who, rightly or wrongly, have the reputation of being relatively amoral, are certainly a relatively peaceful society. But all this is sociological hand-waving. The fact is that no-one has done the research necessary to show which way, if any, the correlation goes. So it cannot be that this sort of empirical observation is the cause of the widespread belief in the advantages of morality.

Some might argue that it is in some way inconsistent to prefer to live in an amoral society. There exists a fairly sizeable literature which discusses the question 'Why should I be moral?'. The question presupposes that one should be moral. Many authors have argued that the denial of this presupposition is some sort of absurdity. Some recent writers, Francis Snare for example, have argued that this is a mistake. [1] It is true that any moral reason to be moral would beg the question. But for all that it makes perfectly good sense to ask for and to give non-moral reasons to be moral or to deny that there are any good reasons to be moral.

Many writers assume that there is no problem for the altruistic agent in providing a reason to be moral. They assume that the agent will perceive that moral behaviour will always coincide with altruistic behaviour. That assumption would be valid if the only beliefs in moral obligations implied that one ought always to behave as if one were kindly disposed to all other people. But it is clearly false that all moral beliefs are of this kind. (See section 1.9.) Some people have beliefs in their moral duty to their god, their sovereign, their country or their political ideals and such morality could (and frequently does) run counter to such altruistic inclinations such people have.

If any such person were strongly altruistic, or had any other strong motivations that ran counter to their moral inclinations, both the question 'Why should I be moral?' and the question 'Why should I want anyone else to be moral?' would be of considerable significance.

However, for many people with a conflict between moral and non-moral motivations, the moral motivations would be over-riding. For such people the idea that they should not be moral seems absurd. The question 'Why should I be moral?' has for them the false presupposition that being moral is not an end in itself -- that it is merely a means to some other end. Their response to this question would be to deny this presupposition rather than to attempt to provide the requested explanation.

Yet there is no logical necessity about the over-riding nature of the supposed moral obligations of these people. (See section 1.10.) So the question still remains: why are these people so motivated? Why do they prefer that they and others be morally good and not bad? If it is neither through observation nor rational calculation that people come to prefer the moral society, how does it come about that they do?

Fear of the unknown could be an explanation except for the fact that few people have ever reflected at length on the matter. They take it for granted, quite correctly, that society is moral (as opposed to amoral) and any suggestion that they might reconsider their preferences in favour of an amoral society is rejected with the immediacy of a knee-jerk reflex. But if only a handful of eccentric philosophers have ever considered the matter at length, it seems hardly likely that these considerations should have provided a motivation or a mechanism for the perpetuation of morality. We must look, therefore, for a mechanism which does not involve a continual rational choice by large numbers of people.

Most people would agree that it is in early childhood, when the moral concepts are being learnt, when the child lives in an environment of continual moral injunction, that these pro-attitudes to morality are instilled. In the following three sections, I sketch a theory concerning the development of pro-attitudes to morality and the perpetuation of morality as an institution. There is no claim for originality in what follows and the account is doubtless an oversimplification of all the psychological and sociological complexities involved. The account is presented as a first approximation which, hopefully, is accurate enough to support the consequences (see Chapter 3) which I believe to follow from it.

2.3 The Moral Upbringing

The end result of this training is a person who wants to be good and who has an aversion to being bad. When people reach this psychological condition, they will usually have quite a few beliefs about which sort of acts are good and which bad. It little matters for the perpetuation and operation of the moral society as a moral society, what these moral beliefs are. What does matter is that these morally trained people are now in a position to be morally propagandised by those whom they regard as their 'betters', that is, those who they feel know more about what is right and what is wrong than they do.

This is doubtless an oversimplified account of the moral training of children, but most psychologists and sociologists in this field would, I think, agree that something of this nature is a very large part of the moral upbringing of children. Carl Rogers is a case in point. He says:

There may be more going on here than Rogers allows, however. Perhaps it is not just that the infant is introjecting other people's values, if all that amounts to is introjecting other people's desires and preferences. Perhaps the infant is introjecting morality also. There is a difference. If the parent had acted just the same except for telling the child, however angrily, that she did not like that behaviour, rather than calling him a 'naughty, bad boy', then the child would not be intoning 'bad, bad boy' to himself when he pulled his sister's hair next time. Rather he would be reminding himself of his mother's dislike of that behaviour. True, he would probably come to introject that dislike, but he would not come to believe that he is bad.

Rogers seems to believe that the socialisation process, however accomplished, causes the child to become 'out of touch with his own valuing process', and this, he thinks, can be psychologically disturbing. This may be so. It may be even more psychologically disturbing for the child in later years if he is protected from such socialisation. I don't know. An additional psychological disturbance, however, is the insult added to threat and injury in providing a moral overlay to the socialisation process.

The moralisation process is more than a mere socialisation process. Moralising tends to generate people whose concern to be good and to avoid being bad overrides their other concerns -- including any concerns to satisfy the wishes of themselves and others, where these are inconsistent with their moral introjections.

Of course, if the moral nihilist is right in believing that there are no moral obligations, such moralising also gives the child a false view of the world as one in which moral goodness and badness are exemplified. In any case, the resulting self image of the child could turn out to be that of a morally bad person -- and the morally trained child is very anxious not to be morally bad. That would certainly be psychologically disturbing.

Morally trained people of all ages look for moral guidance in the same way as morally trained children do. They look for and receive injunctions from their elders, priests, newspaper editors, television commentators, radio announcers, doctors, lawyers, magistrates, university lecturers, union organisers, people in uniform or perhaps even their mates down at the public house. Almost all people will be candidates for moral leadership provided that they bear themselves with sufficient pride and dignity and self-esteem to encourage the respect and confidence of their followers.

2.4 The Moral Hierarchy

Often, too, the heroines and heroes of society, the leading politicians or journalists, may at best be puppets well removed from the centres of power. Even though they may believe themselves to be autonomous and uninfluenced, their positions as mouthpieces in the moral society may rest in the hands of relatively unknown people who nevertheless have sufficient influence at an appropriate level to control the occupation of those positions if not the charismatic occupiers themselves.

This is not to deny the possibility of a society's hero or heroine being at the peak of a moral hierarchy. Nor is it to deny that there may be tensions, even dangerous conflicts, between members of a moral elite vying for prestige and its accompanying power. Nor is it to deny that there may be value-laden ideological feedback via various societal structures from the common people to the controllers and operators of the mass media. It is being suggested, however, that the more moral a society is, the more it is that power and moral authority are to be equated. How would this hierarchy of moral authority arise, and how would it be perpetuated?

Remember that our morally well brought up people desperately want to do what is right. Hence they will be anxious to know what is right and what is wrong. Let us assume for the moment, as will be argued in section 2.7, that the moral nihilist is right -- that there is no moral right or wrong and that there are no moral obligations. Our moral agents, of course, will not be acting on this assumption. They will believe that there are moral obligations to be known. They will not be able to see or otherwise sense or rationally calculate these obligations. There will not be any moral obligations to see, sense or calculate. Neither will they be able to deduce their non-existent moral obligations from any truths that they have come to know. Hume's is-ought gap will be there if only because it is invalid to deduce falsehood from truth.

Now when there is something we wish to know and we do not know how to discover the truth for ourselves, we usually look for an authority on the matter. There are physicists, medicos, lawyers and accountants who not only have knowledge of physics, medicine, law and tax dodging, but who are trained to discover truths in these areas for themselves. Their ways of coming to know what they know are often a mystery to we lay people, but we trust in their expertise. So likewise, the moral lay person, not knowing the answer to his or her moral dilemma, nor knowing any way of finding out for himself or herself, may seek out an authority in whose moral expertise he or she feels confident. The authority, in turn, may sometimes feel the need to appeal to a still higher authority and so on.

If this were the only explanation of moral belief, it would lead to an infinite regress of moral authorities, in which case the moral society could not exist. So if moral nihilism and hence moral scepticism were correct, there must be at least one other mechanism for the production of beliefs in moral values and obligations.

David Hume has given us an insight into the mechanism required in his Treatise of Human Nature. Hume claimed that morality 'consists not in any relations that are the objects of science;' and 'that it consists not in any matter of fact, which can be discovered by the understanding.' He says:

Thus Hume is claiming that belief in objective moral values is a mistake. The mistake can occur if one takes one's personal sentiments for perceptions of objective reality.

Some have taken this idea of Hume's to be an argument in favour of naturalism. Hector Monro writes:

Although the naturalist's attempt to avoid explanations involving the dubious non-natural qualities is along the right tracks, the explanation offered by Monro for moral sentiments is dissatisfying in three ways. Firstly, it is consistent with a lack of non-natural qualities, that many people may nevertheless believe in such qualities (if not by that description) and may therefore use moral terms in order to state those beliefs. Secondly, the approval these people feel for some natural qualities may not be quite so directly a function of those qualities as the naturalist explanation would have us believe. Such approvals are likely to be tempered, or even drastically altered, by the moral agent's beliefs in non-natural qualities and the attitudes she or he has been conditioned to bear towards things with such qualities. Thirdly, the subjectivist-naturalist account of moral feelings fails to explain the existence and role of a glaringly evident feature of the moral society, namely the moral elite or what P.W. Musgrave in his book The Moral Curriculum calls 'the agents of respectability', whose identification, as Musgrave points out, is of major importance in the sociological study of morality. [5]

Furthermore, there is a way in which it may be moderately reasonable for moral agents to take their personal sentiments as an indication of objective moral fact, if not for the direct result of the application of their moral conscience. Let me explain.

Moral people who believe themselves to be less than virtuous are those who endure the annoyance. if not the psychological stress. of having some of their natural tendencies inconsistent with what they believe their moral obligations to be. Good people, virtuous people, would be those whose natural tendencies and whose moral obligations are in accord. Of course, if there were no moral obligations there would be no good or virtuous people. However, insofar as any people believe themselves to be virtuous, they are able to equate their natural preferences and inclinations with what is morally acceptable, and such injunctions that they wish everyone to abide by, they can equate with moral obligations. Thus they can believe themselves to have a sound moral judgement or a good conscience and can feel confident enough in their moral beliefs to pass on their moral judgements to others. Sometimes, perhaps often, this confidence in their own valuations and their lack of confidence in other people's valuations; combined with a fear that society is headed down the morally wrong tracks, taking them and their loved ones with it, can lead them to give their moral advice whether solicited or not. This, I conjecture, is the mechanism behind the priests and their pulpits, the newspaper editors and their editorials, the politicians and their platforms, the propagandists and their mass media.

How then does the moral society generate its pharisees, its magistrates, its priests and cardinals, its charismatic leaders -- its moral elite? Several mechanisms could be responsible, but I shall describe one which seems plausible. Again, the needed training takes place at an early age.

Children will vary in the way they react to condemnation and praise, and the quantities of condemnation and of praise will vary from child to child. One child will be held up to others as an example -- good or bad -- thus giving some children a moral boost at the expense of others. The children who receive most moral boosts from their parents or guardians are likely to believe what they are continually told, namely that they are very good. These will be the children who succeed in pleasing their moral mentors most. Other children get the inverse treatment and go into adulthood with an inferiority complex and a tendency to seek continual moral guidance and leadership from their 'betters'. Most people end up somewhere on the spectrum in between.

But those who are convinced of their own goodness will be those most likely to become the moral leaders of society. In fact such moral self-confidence is a necessary condition for entry into the moral elite. For with such self- confidence, it is easy to believe that what one wishes for oneself is moray permissible, and how one wants others to behave is morally obligatory. A good person will not want what is wrong.

2.5 Moral Deserts

However, to return to my point, if morality is to keep going, the moral carrot and stick must be displayed or applied continually to most people throughout their lives. The punishments include frowns, snubs, deprivation of income, deprivation of possessions, imprisonment and physical violence. The rewards include smiles, honours, property, economic security, power and privilege. This is the system of moral deserts. Again it is the trainers, not the trainees, who determine who deserves what.

Further, many of those low on the moral scale seem to be content or even eager to see that the privileged elite, loaded as they are with wealth and power, are rewarded still further. This is because they will be trained to assent to the proposition that people should get what they deserve -- and of course better people deserve more.

According to the gospels, Christ taught that it was easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. That sort of talk would have been enough to bring ruin to any nicely established moral hierarchy. But despite the message of the gospels, the Christian church soon found that it, too, had to embrace economic inequalities if it was to flourish as a strong moral system.

Of course, economic reward is not the only possible reward, but to a moral trainer, the advantage of economic or material rewards is that they show in a much more permanent way than the more ephemeral smiles or ego-strokes, and thus the trainee can be held up as an example and an incentive to others.

But there is another reason which could influence the moral trainers to keep up some sort of system of deserts, economic or otherwise. Being higher up the moral pyramid, they are believed to 'deserve' more than would otherwise be their 'fair' share. They have a vested interest in morality and its system of deserts and the perpetuation of both. So their propaganda is heavily laden with their views on the 'importance' of morality with the presupposition, often made explicit, that in making any decision, moral considerations outweigh any other considerations.

To sum up, it is conjectured that the moral society perpetuates itself in the following way:

1. Moral trainers apply the doctrine of deserts to condition most of the populace into being moral.

2. The training program generates a moral elite who have a vested interest in preserving the system and whose rewards include the power to see that the training program is preserved.

It was conjectured in section 2.4 that the morally self-confident equate what is morally right with their own natural inclinations and preferences. Their moral beliefs are the result of searching within their own breasts -- as David Hume put it in his Treatise of Human Nature. However, what they are doing and what they are thought to be doing are often two quite different things. What is often thought to be happening is that people are consulting their conscience. What sort of thing is this consultation supposed to be?

Conscience is often thought of as some sort of extra sense, but it is supposed to differ from the usual sort of sensory apparatus in one important way. With the ordinary sensory apparatus such as sight, hearing and touch, we receive sensations caused by things actually there in the world about us. But conscience is supposed to be able to tell us something about not only what is actually happening, but also what could possibly happen. The object of our ordinary sensory perception is our immediate environment. The objects of our conscience are possibilities -- possible agents, their possible acts and the possible products of those possible acts. Via their conscience, some people, at least, are supposed to be able to learn whether a kind of act is good, bad or indifferent -- before they ever experience that sort of act in actuality. It is in this way that ultimate moral principles -- principles with the aid of which all other moral truths are derivable -- are supposed to be knowable a priori, that is to say, prior to experience.

Jiminy Cricket is not of much use to his Pinnochio, if he is able to say only after the behaviour in question, that he has perceived it to be good or bad. Moral knowledge is for keeping you on the straight and narrow path to righteousness -- preventing sin, not simply describing it. The moral agent wants to know more than whether some act that actually occurs is good, or bad or indifferent. He or she wishes to know also which acts would be good, or bad or indifferent, were they to occur.

This latter remark makes would be moral principles look a little like the principles of physics -- the laws of nature. Insofar as an engineer (say) is equipped with knowledge of physics, he or she can have knowledge of what sorts of bridges would collapse under what conditions and which would remain standing. This sort of knowledge is hypothetical knowledge -- knowledge of possibilities -- physical possibilities in this case. It is knowledge which goes beyond which actual bridges have collapsed or even which actual bridges will collapse. To repeat, it is knowledge of what sort of bridges would collapse (whether or not there are or will be bridges of that sort).

There are many facts about the world that are not directly observable -- theoretical facts such as, for example, that the strength of the magnetic field at some point is proportional to the rate of change of the strength of the electrostatic field at that same point. One cannot directly perceive with one's senses that this is so, even though it be true that it is only via sensory experience that we can come to know or reasonably believe this to be true. It is nevertheless the case that these worldly facts do not require inner judgements of a factual sort on possibilities, for us to know them to be true. Finding out how the world happens to be involves at most conjecture, rational deduction and observation. The only knowledge of possibilities involved in all of this is knowledge of the logical relations between such possibilities -- what implies what.

Richard Brandt has claimed that moral laws are known in a similar way. [6] We 'see' that certain actual acts are good, bad or indifferent as the case may be, and extrapolate on these cases to produce conjectures about moral laws, conjectures which may or may not be falsified by future moral 'observations'. The more a conjecture survives the tests of experience, the more we are justified in taking it to be a moral law.

Others, like the eighteenth century philosopher Francis Hutcheson [7] and more recently Frithjof Bergmann and Michael Smith [8], have regarded the moral properties of immediate moral sense like secondary properties -- powers in the objects to produce sensations of moral approval or disapproval within us.

An immediate objection to such theories is that although our sensory apparatus includes eyes for visual phenomena, ears for aural phenomena and fingers for tactile phenomena, nowhere do we find a sensory organ devoted to moral phenomena. Someone might reply that of course our immediate perceptions of the world are visual, tactual, aural and so forth, and not moral; but that having perceived events in the normal way, people are then able to bring their moral sense to bear on those observations.

However, it is there that the analogy between knowing laws of nature and knowing moral principles breaks down. The perceivable facts of the case having been ascertained, what role is this inner moral sense supposed to play? Presumably what it does is to enable the moral observer to 'see' that this sort of act under this sort of circumstance is good (bad, indifferent). Thus when the tale of the moral observer is spelt out in full, we see again that with fairly plausible assumptions, this would entail the existence of the sort of conscience that was being discussed earlier, namely one which could directly intuit the truth of moral principles.

Many people talk about a so-called 'fact-value' distinction -- an alleged distinction between statements purporting to be true as opposed to statements of value which are supposed to be neither true or false. But for the sort of person who has the sort of intuitionistic idea of morality and moral knowledge so far outlined in this section, this usage would be misleading. Such a person (let us call her or him a conceptual intuitionist) would claim that if there were moral values, then there would be corresponding moral facts, namely, that there are these values.

The conceptual intuitionist would allow that there are three sorts of propositions:

1. Statements that are true or false because of semantic or logical considerations -- considerations having to do with the meaning of expressions and their grammatical construction -- and this alone;

2. Contingent non-evaluative statements whose truth or falsity is dependent not only on semantics but also on facts about how the world happens to be;

3. Contingent value statements whose truth or falsity depends not just on semantics and the way the world happens to be, but also on moral facts.

Conscience, if there were such a thing, would not discover logical relationships. Rather it would discover the moral properties of possibilities -- possible acts done under possible circumstances and the possible consequences thereof and the possible agents who would do such things. The moral rationalists like Locke and Samuel Clarke were right to see intuition about possibilities, or ideas as they called them, or forms as Plato called them, as being necessarily at the root of any moral knowledge. Where the rationalists were wrong was in thinking that this sort of intuition would be the same as logical intuition. Conceptual truths, (analytic truths as they are often called) such as the truths of pure mathematics and logic, may be universal, eternal and immutable. But the sentences which express such truths do so by virtue of the meanings of the words and the construction of the sentences. Any moral truths intuited by one's conscience, however, would not be true by virtue of semantic considerations alone -- that is to say, analytically true. On the contrary, to use philosophical jargon, they are supposed to be contingent (or as some say, synthetic). That is, if one were to deny them one might be wrong, but one would not be contradicting oneself.

Moral empiricists, or naturalists, as they are called, are right in thinking of moral knowledge as synthetic. Where they are wrong is in believing that such moral truth can be found by observation of nature alone. The basis of moral knowledge, if there were such a basis, would be a priori knowledge of synthetic truths.

However, as the teachings of seventeenth and eighteenth century British writers such as Locke and Hume have become accepted and disseminated by later philosophers, more and more people have lost faith in the possibility of there being a priori knowledge of synthetic truth. The only a priori knowledge possible, so most people who think about it now believe, is conceptual or 'analytic' knowledge such as logic and pure mathematics. All other knowledge is empirical, that is, it is to be gained via observation. No place is left for synthetic a priori knowledge. The idea that some people can come to have knowledge of contingent properties of possibilities via some sort of sixth sense is a case of the so-called Platonic fallacy -- a treatment of abstract objects as if they are concrete. We can think about possibilities, but we cannot observe them. They are not the sort of thing that can be causally efficacious, so they are not the sort of thing to affect our senses, no matter how many senses we may have.

But if empiricism is widespread, and it is also widely believed that moral knowledge, if any, must be rooted in conscience, why isn't the world filled with moral sceptics, that is, people who claim that nothing can be known of our moral obligations? One reason would be that societies can live with obvious contradictions for generations or even centuries -- especially if the contradictory beliefs are part of the rationales for important societal relationships. In religion this phenomenon is commonplace. It is no less so in morality -- or, for that matter, within science. What usually happens under these circumstances is that the apparent contradiction becomes tagged as a philosophical problem so that society can go on believing in its inconsistencies while the philosophers wrestle with their 'problem'.

There are always three ways with a dilemma -- to opt for one of the two horns -- or to wax sceptical over the dilemma being a real one at all. Of course, those taking the latter line often feel obliged to state why everybody is wrong in thinking of the situation as paradoxical. Occasionally the sceptic is right and a way can be found between the horns of the dilemma. But just as often the sceptic is wrong. There is no valid way out.

In such cases invalid 'ways out' often begin to appear, for example, like John Robinson's Honest to God, mentioned in section 1.5. Robinson avoids the acceptance of a metaphysics, inconsistent with the world view of most modern people by transforming God into an abstraction whose existence no-one normally thought of as an atheist would want to deny.

With morality, the 'ways out' have been moral rationalism (Basic moral knowledge is analytically true.), naturalism (Basic moral knowledge is synthetic but can be discovered empirically. Subjectivist theories would fall under this heading.) and lastly, non-cognitivism (There are no knowable moral truths -- not because none of the moral truths can be known but because moral language does not express propositions that are true or false. In that way it is supposed to be akin to the language of imperatives or perhaps emotive expressions such as 'Hoorah!' and 'Alas!').

This may read like a fairly clear-cut classification of mistaken attitudes to moral knowledge. With particular examples it is not so clear, however. One such example is John Searle's theory that in any case of a promise sincerely being made, there is a moral obligation to keep the promise. (See the Appendix.) Searle has claimed that this moral theory about promise-keeping is not only true but analytically so. Now if someone who shared this belief of Searle's also regarded the proposition as a basic moral truth, then one would have to classify that person as a moral rationalist. If that person were instead to regard it not as a basic moral truth at all, but rather just a semantic truth of language, then we could regard that person as a naturalist. He or she would believe that one could discover, at least in part, what prima facie moral obligations there are, by observing promising behaviour -- something that actually occurs in the world. The same comments apply to Philippa Foot's theory (see the Appendix) that the moral goodness of an act is to be equated with the self-interested prudence of that act.

Non-cognitivists are correct in believing that moral statements carry with them an emotive or an imperative or prescriptive force -- for those who wish to be morally good. So much was granted in section 1.9. But it does not follow that such statements are not propositional as well.

One of the prime motivations in the present century for saying that these statements are not really statements at all is the combination of three factors:

1. moral scepticism
2. the belief in the importance of morality, and
3. a doctrine about meaningfulness known as the verificationist theory of meaning.

According to one formulation of the verificationist theory of meaning, a sentence in the indicative mood is meaningless unless there is some way of knowing whether or not what it supposedly expresses is true. This theory, which became a central tenet of what was known as logical positivism, has become within the last few decades to be viewed with suspicion by most philosophers. I shall not be concerned to argue against verificationism here. However, if both moral scepticism and verificationism were correct, then it would seem that expressions which entailed the existence of moral obligations would turn out to be meaningless -- given that such expressions were in the indicative mood. Yet given the importance of such expressions they could not be meaningless. The way out of this impasse, therefore, was to deny that such expressions were really indicative, despite their superficial grammatical form. Their moral implications therefore were declared to have no descriptive meaning, but merely an emotive or prescriptive or imperative meaning.

Even those positivists who would reject the verificationist theory of meaning might feel pressed into non- propositional accounts of moral statements if they felt that the acceptance of moral scepticism removed a prop from the importance of morality. Non-propositional attitudes towards morality would be examined with a view to supplying an alternative prop.

However, non-cognitive theories of moral discourse have lost their popularity with philosophers over recent decades. The main reason for this is that non-cognitivist analyses have failed to do justice to the logic of statements which quantify over moral obligations, rights, virtues or vices, as in

as well as statements within which moral statements are embedded as clauses, for example, as the antecedent of a conditional as in

or within statements of belief or cognition such as

Again, attempts at imperative analyses of 'ought' statements have failed to account for non-evaluative uses of 'ought', which, as we have seen in section 1.3, can be given the same semantic treatment as uses of 'ought' within moral contexts.

It would seem reasonable, given the above considerations, to allow that conceptual intuitionism, judgment empiricism and hence moral scepticism are all true. All that is consistent with there being moral obligations, none of which, given scepticism, we shall ever know. In the next section, we shall examine briefly the rationality of believing in such unknowable moral obligations.

2.7 The Case for Moral Nihilism

Someone might suggest that, like molecules and Santa Claus, the existence of moral obligations may be postulated to explain observable phenomena. We quite reasonably believe in such a postulate if the postulate yields a good explanation of the phenomena concerned, provided that no countervailing explanation is at hand.

Thus we believe in the existence of molecules because the postulation of their existence explains so much about the behaviour of gases and the phenomena associated with heat, and there is to hand no other plausible but contrary explanation of the phenomena. We disbelieve in Santa Claus because we think that there is a contrary yet much more plausible explanation of how the Christmas gifts come to be in the stocking.

Now someone may claim that the postulation of the existence of moral obligations could help to explain, for example, the psychological phenomena of moral concern and guilt together with beliefs in moral obligations themselves. The details of such an explanation may not be explicit -- but let that pass. In any case the strategy fails. For in sections 2.3 to 2.5 a countervailing but much more plausible explanation of these phenomena has been presented, and if that explanation is accepted, there remains no reason to believe in the existence of moral obligations.

Now if there is no reason to believe in the existence of moral obligations, there is no need to believe in the existence of vices and virtues either. For virtue is conformity to one's moral obligations and vice is failure to so conform. If there are no moral obligations then there cannot be conformity to them or failure to conform to them. Similarly, if there are no moral obligations, there is no sin, evil, decency, indecency, nobility, vulgarity, avidity -- if the existence of sin, evil, decency, et cetera each entail the existence of vices or virtues and hence the existence of moral obligations.

[2] Rogers, Carl, 'Towards a Modern Approach to Values: The Valuing Process in the Mature Person' in Person to Person: The Problem of Being Human by Rogers, C.R., and Stevens, B., New York, Pocket Books, 1967.

Other modern psychologists and sociologists seem to agree with the view that the technique of reward and punishment lies at the root of the moral development of the child. G.M. Stevenson in The Development of Conscience (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966) gives a far more detailed and sophisticated account of the processes than the doubtless oversimplified version given here. The classical work of Jean Piaget (The Moral Judgment of the Child, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977 -- first published in French in 1932) and the subsequent work of Lawrence Kohlberg ('The Development of Childrens' orientations towards a Moral Order 1. Sequence in the Development of Moral Thought', Vita Humana, 1963, 6, pp. 11-33), are the most well-known attempts to study the psychological end results of moral training.

Carl Roger's examination of the training process (op cit) develops the theory of introjection in a way that is quite compatible with the story told in this section, even though the description is not as detailed with respect to the moral aspect of the matter as I would wish. I am indebted to Graham Jamieson for bringing the work of Rogers and other moral psychologists to my attention during some helpful discussions on an earlier draft of this essay.

[3] Hume, David, Treatise of Human Nature,

[4] Monro, D.H., Empiricism and Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1967, pp. 80-81.

[5] Musgrave, P.W. The Moral Curriculum: A Sociological Analysis, London, Methuen, 1978, p. 14.

[6] Brandt, Richard, Ethical Theory, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1959.

[7] Hutcheson, Francis, 'An Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil' in Raphael, D.D. (ed) British Moralists (1650-1800), O.U.P., 1969, pp. 261-299.

[8] These views of Bergmann and Smith were conveyed to me in discussion.