Conventional Morality - Book Report/Review Example

Compare, Contrast and Evaluate JS Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche’s views on conventional morality? Traditionally approached there appears little apparent compatibility in Mill’s utilitarianism and Nietzsche’s existentialist philosophy, but when looked at in greater depths a number of themes overlap. Although Mill’s philosophy tends to be structured around community, and Nietzsche’s around the individual, for both philosophers the concept of morality, and more specifically conventional (or Christian) morality, was at the heart of their understanding of society. Despite a great variance in their approaches it is worthwhile to analyse each, especially in the wake of recent post-modern liberalist readings that have sought to align the two philosophers, especially those of Richard Rorty. It may be useful to set out initially the traditional interpretations of each philosophy and to work from there in exploring how the two can be seen to compliment, and to conflict with, each other. The basis of JS Mill’s utilitarianism rests on a number of principles, centred on the ultimate aim of happiness. In Utilitarianism he stresses “The utilitarian doctrine is that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end.”1 One of his main themes being that of the harm principle. Broadly speaking; the liberty of action of each individual to the extent that no other individual is harmed; “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”2 Most of Mill’s work is employed in attempting to reconcile his theory of utility with that of liberty. It would be a mistake to suggest that Mill held to the strict utilitarian doctrine of the necessity to ‘maximise utility’, and that any other action is prima facie wrong. It is on this point that Mill went beyond his fellow utilitarians and attempted to reconcile the concept of utility within society. Mill has been criticised on this point for his lack of clarity, but it seems that this stems from the nature of his work, that rather than laying down a strict doctrine he was actively, throughout his writings, attempting to work out and accommodate his principles. Mill understood the promotion of happiness as “The test by which to judge of all human conduct; from whence it necessarily follows that it must be the criterion of morality.”3 But what Mill has been criticised for, even by Nietzsche himself, is his failure to define what morality constitutes. He explores in depth the concept of morality, especially in regards to the idea of duty, but seems to suggest that morality itself is a given. J.O. Urmson suggests that Mill’s quest is “concerning the foundation of morality”4 and not in seeking a definition for the term itself. He presents morality as the realm of right and wrong, of duty and obligation, but his insistence on the ultimate aim, on the ends rather than the specific means of achieving them presents a conflict in his theories. On what level can right or wrong be judged? It is here that Mill introduces his theory on the harm principal but this itself does little to accommodate his theories. His moral theory rests on the principle of the common good, that it only applies once this common good is threatened. That individually, a person has recourse to their conscience, but once society becomes involved in a certain action, then the repercussions come under the judgement of that society, this, for Mill, is the standard of morality. But still the criticism remains in the lack of clarification, especially around the words duty, obligation and wrongness. For Mill there seems to be no dependence between morality and utility. David Lyons suggests that Mill could consistently acknowledge someone who rejected his theory of utilitarianism but accepted his theory of morality, and applied it “in the light of different substantive views about justification.”5 DG Brown looks extensively at how Mill attempted to reconcile his theories, concluding that “Whenever … there is definite damage, or a definite risk of damage, either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty and placed in that of morality or law.”6 Here we see the importance of punishment in Mill’s view on morality. For Mill, nothing can be called wrong “unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished.”7 The idea of sanction lay behind Mill’s theory of morality, the idea of punishment, whether legal, or through social condemnation, or even through guilt feelings. The measure of these sanctions was based on informal social rules (leading to moral condemnation), or individually, based on conscience (which itself corresponded to the values of society). Therefore morality rests within the values of society, a belief that would be echoed by Nietzsche, but when it is appropriate to apply these moral standards rests on utility. When an act cannot be judged on its utility, or when it causes, or threatens to cause, harm to others, then it passes from the realm of utility to that of morality. This was how Mill sought to unite his two theories. In his essay Auguste Comte and Positivism he states, “There is a standard of altruism to which all should be required to come up, and a degree beyond it which is not obligatory, but meritorious. It is incumbent on everyone to restrain the pursuit of his personal objects within the limits consistent with the essential interests of others. What those limits are, it is the province of ethical science to determine; and to keep all individuals and aggregations of individuals within them, is the proper office of punishment and of moral blame.”8 Mill advocates justified coercive rules in order to enforce morality. When something can be proven wrong, on the grounds that it implies guilt, or some other sanction, then coercive rules are justified. But once again Mill’s grounds are far from stable, begging the question against what measure can something be proven wrong. And once again we return to the harm principle. This would seem to unite Mill’s theory of morality with the harm principle; conduct is morally wrong if it is harmful to others. DG Brown is a proponent of this reading. But Brown also raises the question of how this can be unified with his theory of utility. And also the question arises of how Mill’s views on, and as an advocator of, the individual can exist alongside the nature of social coercion. Some academics, such as D.P. Dryer hold that Mill doesn’t see the principle of utility as containing a moral principle in itself. This would account for the two principles being proposed side by side, independent of each other, but at the same time relying on each other. Dryer argues that although the principle of utility is not a moral one, the moral judgement of wrongness can be arrived at by successive applications of it. But although the variety of readings of Mill’s views on morality make for healthy debate, the ambiguous nature of his work, and the failure to adequately unite his two principal theories, remains a limitation to his philosophy. Unlike Mill’s view of a morality for all, as part of social values, Nietzsche presents the view of a number of moralities, for each type of man. Nietzsche was maybe the first philosopher to really explore the structure of morality itself, from a psychological perspective, and it’s from this point that he forms his own views and attacks the conventional view of morality, which had previously been taken as a ‘given’9, being a central part of, as Nietzsche would show, the Christian tradition. In The Dawn Nietzsche employs his aphoristic style in his attack on conventional morality, highlighting its static nature in society, and its cunning. It is not that he objects to the universality of moral demands as intrinsically a negative aspect of morality, but he bases his attack on the grounds that “the demand of one morality for all is detrimental to the higher man.”10 The heart of his attack is that it thwarts the development of human excellence. To understand this it is first necessary to look at the different types of man that Nietzsche presented, and their respective moralities. The best examples of Nietzsche’s two types of character are the Ubermensch, or overman, and the Last Man from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The overman Nietzsche equates with himself, and certain other figures such as Goethe, the concept of the Last Man is based on the herd mentality of Jewish and Christian tradition. This is an important factor for Nietzsche as it was this mentality that European civilisation had grown from, and that he felt to be inhospitable to creative life. He claimed that it was with the Jews that “the slave revolt in morals”11 began. The morality built up through this tradition Nietzsche labels as slave morality (in opposition with noble morality which shall be looked at later). Kathryn Pyne Parsons describes the primary value of slave morality as obedience, that “it’s axiomatic that the moral person is the obedient person: obedient to the moral rule.”12 Nietzsche ascribes this mentality, highlighting its weakness, resentment and fear of strength, to the Christian tradition, and believes that the nature of obedience and the ideals of equality serve to restrict a culture, and limit the evolution of the “self-reliant, independent, unprejudiced men, (who are) the pillars of a strong civilisation.”13 As aforementioned Nietzsche finds no objection to this conventional morality itself, but only when it is applied to everyone. David Leiter even suggests that given a social order where morality existed, serving in the interests of the ‘lower types’, without having any effect on the ‘higher types’, then Nietzsche would have no objection.14 Nietzsche himself exclaims, “The idea of the herd should rule in the herd - but not reach out beyond it.”15 His criticism of morality rests solely on certain forms and notions of conventional morality, speaking of it he says, “(Conventional morality) works against our acquiring new experiences and correcting morality accordingly, which means that morality works against a better, newer morality.”16 It is the static nature of conventional morality that he rejects. In Beyond Good and Evil he accuses belief in morality as being merely “faith in the prevailing morality.”17 He holds that morality can only be seen in a pejorative sense when it includes the notions of happiness, altruism, equality or pity. Certain writers, such as Richard Schactt, have attributed Nietzsche’s view on morality as a reaction against his preferred standard of value; the will to power. Nietzsche cannot be reconciled with the slave morality because of the threat that potential ‘higher types’ will never have the opportunity of fulfilling that potential because they too will adopt the values of the herd. Nietzsche suggested that our moral paradigm wasn’t just responsible for how we looked at the world, but that our world itself had been built on these morals, that they were not solely reactive to the world around us, but stood as its foundations. It was this insight that drew Nietzsche beyond any previous philosophers who had explored morality. From this Nietzsche feared that it was our entire culture that was “ushering in the reign of the last man, of complete mediocrity and banality.”18 It may be useful here to quote Nietzsche’s view of a world in which human excellence and creativity are gone, from the view of Zarathustra; “Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man. “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” thus asks the last man, and he blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small… “We have invented happiness,” say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one’s neighbour and rubs against him, for one needs warmth… No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. “Formerly, all the world was mad,” say the most refined, and they blink. One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so there is no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled- else it might spoil the digestion… “We have invented happiness,” say the last men, and they blink.”19 In this passage alone we see all of Nietzsche’s fears and prophecies for European society. It is in reaction to this fear that Nietzsche created himself, and the image of the overman. From this image did he evolve his fear of equality and the slave morality, and mentality, which went with it. Leiter suggests that, “Nietzsche was not interested in whether our moral theories could accommodate the Good Life or the Extraordinary Life; Nietzsche was worried whether our culture was making it impossible for anyone to live and Extraordinary Life anymore.”20 In response to the slave morality Nietzsche developed his concept of the noble morality, applicable to what he called the Ubermensch. Parsons says of the noble or higher type that, “His valuations are the foundation of values for the society. A just act is one which the just person would do, and to act justly is to do such an act as the just person would do.”21 Instead of shaping his acts around the values of society he confers values upon his acts. Not through obedience or in the pursuit of happiness, but in suffering and poetry does the overman find his place. It echoes Dostoyevsky’s character, Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment, and his theory of the ordinary and the extraordinary, to which everything is permitted. Nietzsche rejects the ultimate aim of happiness, claiming that happiness cannot exist without unhappiness alongside it, the same for altruism, pity etc. This is why he rejects the teleology of the utilitarians. In fact not only in this does Nietzsche vary from the thought of Mill. Nietzsche doesn’t believe in the intrinsic value of happiness, the main proponent of Mill’s philosophy. Nietzsche seems to make the claim that conventional morality sets up happiness as a final goal in order to maintain obedience, in order for it to remain justified on a teleological level. This morality favours the ‘lower’ type at the expense of the ‘higher’. But even remembering that an overman could never apply himself to conventional morality, for then he would cease to be of the ‘higher’ type, a criterion of which being that morality in this sense is not, and cannot be, applicable to him. The basis, and to an extent aim, of Mill’s philosophy being equality, in the sense of morality for all, immediately contrasts with Nietzsche’s beliefs. This maybe stems from there widely varying approaches to philosophy itself. Mill’s is a philosophy based on society, using the traditional approaches to morality, and attempting to unite it with his theory of utility, whereas Nietzsche approaches his philosophy on a much more personal level, exploring the psychological foundations of morality which lie behind society, and it is this threat to the individual that forces him to attack the conventional concept of morality. Nietzsche had the benefit of reading Mill, but in his seeing little distinction between Bentham and “the flathead John Stuart Mill”22 it seems that Nietzsche’s reading is rather naïve, and that his criticism of utilitarianism is based on the idea itself, rather than the distinctive theories put forward by different philosophers. Another aspect at which Mill and Nietzsche are at variance is their attitude towards women. Although the traditional views see Mill as one of the first male advocates of women’s rights, and Nietzsche as confirmed misogynist, the truth lies a little deeper. Nietzsche’s contrariness to women, especially towards the end of his life, was not merely because he was misogynistic, but had a lot more to do with the fact that in women, he saw the epitome of slave morality. And this brings him closer to Mill’s position than might originally be thought. In his essay The Subjection of Women Mill echoes the sentiments of Sarah Grimké in proposing the differences between men and women as being based on education, training and expectation. Like Nietzsche Mill recognised that the subjective nature of women didn’t stem from something innate but was part of the fabric of society, that the existence of family and state were dependant on this subservience. However Nietzsche obviously went further to suggest that the entire moral structure of society led to the slave mentality of both genders. However Mill did, in The Subjection of Women, call for a reinterpretation of conventional morality, specifically related to class and gender division. Likewise Nietzsche was never opposed to women’s rights but felt that it could never succeed without first overcoming this slave morality. In fact some of Mill’s rhetoric on the subject of servility is almost Nietzschean; against claims of Divine authority inciting racism he exclaims “it is the first duty of human beings to resist such gods.”23 In recent years a new reading of Mill and Nietzsche combined their two philosophies in post-modern liberal theory, a creative association, first explored by Richard Rorty, that puts the two philosophies, especially regarding the nature of private and public, alongside each other. From analysing the two philosophies we have already seen how Nietzsche’s philosophy concentrates more on an individual and creative level, whereas Mill’s does so on the level of community. The identity of post-modern liberalism is, like Mill, to diminish suffering and, like Nietzsche, to allow maximum opportunity for self-creation, and it aims to achieve this by suggesting that creative energy be privatised and the realm of alleviating suffering be public. Gerald Mara and Suzanne Dovi suggest that a possible origin for the theory comes from the fact that, “A suitably privatised (and thereby tamed) Nietzsche satisfies the post-modern liberal’s poetic urges, while accepting the public priorities informed by Mill’s utility.” Obviously this theory has faced heavy criticism as to the potential conflict between the two sides and how they could be reconciled. Imagining Nietzsche’s own response to the ‘taming’ of his own philosophy, and Mill’s to the addition of a private sphere independent of his own concept, it is unlikely that either author would be themselves reconciled to the idea. However, having said that there is a number of comparisons between the two philosophies, especially regarding the individual. Both strongly opposed the influence of mass democratic society on individual creativity and self-development (Nietzsche radicalising this idea), and in each of their own philosophies the public and private remain separate. In his work On Liberty Mill emphasises, “In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”24 Supporters of the theory would suggest that separation of private and public would appear to be central for Mill’s liberal doctrine of freedom, and for Nietzsche’s poetic call for continued self-overcoming, and that both place strong emphasis on the importance of history and culture on people and society as a whole. Mill claims that those possessed of genius and individuality “are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool.”25 This view seems to echo Nietzsche’s fears of the static effect that morality was having on European culture. But there seems to be too much of a divide between the two men. A combination of their two philosophies would lead to both being weakened, and although post-modern liberalism may stand strongly on its own, it would be difficult to convince a strong believer in the work of either Mill or Nietzsche that there are benefits in it. Although on certain points both philosophers share similar ideals, it seems that these have become open to exaggeration since the new liberal reading, and there still remains a number of points that remain unreconciled, for example Nietzsche’s belief in the importance of suffering, in contrast to the destruction of which being one of Mill’s major principles. Mill also suggests that sympathy is “the natural basis of sentiment of utilitarian morality”26, but this is completely at odds with Nietzsche’s beliefs. It is useful to compare these two systems of belief and the new adaptation to liberalism is innovative and maybe productive but it is too much to say that the philosophies of Mill and Nietzsche naturally work together or support each other. While both the existentialism of Nietzsche and the utilitarianism of Mill hold different aims and principles, an analysis of the two shows that, as well as the natural conflicts, there are a number of overlapping themes. Though no two themes are approached in the same way it reflects in both philosophers the awareness of certain fundamental issues with conventional morality and the place of values in society. In the words of Parsons, “Nietzsche’s interest in psychological and development aspects of morality, his emphasis on transvaluation of values and on self-overcoming make him one of the few philosophers who have put ‘normal morality’ in perspective.”27 It is difficult to explore Mill’s philosophy in the same light as Nietzsche’s regarding moral revolution within the individual. For Nietzsche the evolution of morality, as opposed to its stasis in society, was a key element and was why the individual took precedence in his philosophies, here was someone who could, as an individual go against conventional morality in a way that society couldn’t. It was this idea of the individual in contrast to the herd that maintained the continual aristocratic theme throughout Nietzsche’s works. But the advantage of reading Mill is that one can explore the ideas of utilitarianism, not in the doctrinal sense of Bentham, but in a way that leaves more open to interpretation, to discourse. The lack of clarity in Mill’s work can be seen by some as a failing, but by others as an advantage. His work gives the sense of ongoing discussion, of a sense of exploration, which is why so many interpretations have been made and why, as in the example of post-modern liberalism, Mill’s theories still play a large part in today’s philosophical discourse. Read More