An Intelligent Person's Guide to Ethics by Mary Warnock

Author:Mary Warnock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co

Where Ethics Comes From

Anyone who has followed this book so far will realise that I am hostile to the idea of a rights-based morality. In my original stories, concerned with death and life, what was at issue was the most deeply felt sentiments that human beings can experience (and this was why I started with death and birth). Ethical issues were indisputably at the heart of the arguments about these cases, and were as much to be felt in the guts as to be disputed in the law courts, which is where rights must be properly upheld. What is public is what is needed to establish law and justice in civil society, to which belong the concepts of the rights of individuals and the duties of others to respect and uphold those rights. Within public morality, all humans are equal, whatever their individual characteristics; for to maintain this is the crucial function of the institutions within which rights may be claimed and recognised. What is private, on the other hand, is the inner sense of and interest in what it is to do right rather than wrong, an interest in morality itself, what I have referred to as the wish to be good. Looking around us, we can see that some people have this wish strongly, others have it weakly, or not at all. We may feel tempted to borrow Jane Austen’s phrase and say that there are those who ‘feel as they ought’; they have, that is to say, a moral sense; and it is to this moral sense that I have accorded priority.

Now in giving priority to the private over the public, I do not claim that every civil society has historically been built on such a private, individual interest in the morally good. Such a suggestion might well be false; and in any case we could have no evidence either of its truth or its falsity. But I maintain that public morality, the insistence on justice and equality, the search for a publicly acceptable solution to dilemmas on which opinions may differ, and yet where legislation is required, is dependent for its working on the conviction of at least some individuals that it is worth being virtuous rather than vicious, honest rather than dishonest, good rather than bad: that one must try, individually as well as collectively, to act for the best. We have now to ask where such convictions come from.

A sceptical reader may say that, though some people certainly appear to believe that they should follow the path of the good rather than the bad, how can we be sure that they are not simply deluded? I seem to be making an enormous assumption, if I am claiming that there is such a thing as the morally good as distinct from the morally bad, towards which it makes sense for individuals to aspire. Anyone hoping for a guide to ethics will seize on this assumption, and will demand that it be shown to have proper grounds.

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