On Stebbing's Ideas for Moral Philosophy.

Back in 1943, near the end of her life, Susan Stebbing (1885-1943) gave the Hobhouse Lecture, which was published posthumously as Men and Moral Principles in 1944. (I thank Ádám Tuboly for helping me locate a copy.) While none of the considerations and arguments she offers in it are much developed, the work provides tantalizing hints of what might have been.

In what follows I will ignore the way she distinguishes between science and ethics, and why ethics cannot be a science. (For a useful summary see Margaret Macdonald’s (1945) review in Philosophy.) While she touches on many topics, the question her lecture explores is “how ideals can be used to provide guiding principles” for conduct (p. 23). As she put it earlier in the lecture, “Moral philosophers…must be concerned with the ways in which men live—their ways of life which embody their ideals…it falls in the proper province of moral philosophers to formulate ideals worth living for and to attempt to make clear principles which may afford guides for action.” (p 4.) Crucially, she argues that “the determination and clarification of these principles is not a matter to be settled by definitions.” (p. 27)

Instead, Stebbing offers the outlines of a procedure to determine these principles by which one compares, and now I quote Macdonald’s paraphrase, “the ideals of different groups and societies and to recommend to their own societies the principles of a way of life adapted to human nature as it is and life as it is daily lived by the majority of people, but capable also of inspiring the development of a human being having as many as possible of the good characteristics which a human being is capable of possessing.” (Macdonald (1945): 77) This procedure has three main elements:

First, we should consider ideals, or ways of life, such as people profess to live by and not merely think about. Thus we might try to work out in considerable detail, and with a wealth of illustrations drawn from the examination of particular situations, various ideals which claim adherents in the contemporary world, e.g. the Nazi ideal, the Russian ideal, the Christian ideal, the democratic ideal, the capitalist ideal. Secondly, we should look carefully at the illustrations we have used with a view to seeing what of good and what of evil each exemplifies. For certainly no one of them will exemplify only what is good or only what is evil. There are incompatible goods no less than there are incompatible evils. Each ideal, if it were put into practice, would promote, or at least tend to promote, the development of a certain type of man and would be inimical to the development of some other types. Thirdly, then, we must compare these types of men seeking to discover which holds the greatest promise of developing into the sort of person we believe a human being is capable of becoming. This means that we could not neglect any of the activities of men; we should have to take note of a man's business transactions, for instance, and to evaluate his behaviour in these transactions in the light of his other activities and of the principles which have been found applicable to these. (pp. 24-25)

Now, before I get to what interests me here, one may read this procedure as a kind of embrace of or presupposing relativism or pluralism in social theory. And I don’t want to deny that. We may well wince at the thought that upon examination there is any good in the Nazi ideal as it was instantiated. (That was not so uncommon among her intellectual peers.)

She does not expect to achieve consensus: “even at its best” her procedure “could not yield conclusions universally acceptable.” (p. 27) But that’s because she recognizes that “ethical situations are for the most part situations of extreme internal complexity containing elements of ultimately diverse types; consequently, judgements of evaluation with regard to them are also of diverse types.” (p. 12) Interestingly, she is also open to the idea that there are distinct role/occupational norms, but these are not to be elevated to general principles.

It is unclear on what grounds and metrics the different ideals are compared and evaluated other than the good judgment of the moral philosopher. But, strikingly, Stebbing also recognizes that conditions of feasibility and a kind of conceptual opportunity costs enter into these issues; as she puts it a bit later, “The cost [of implementing any principles] has always to be taken into account.” (p 27)

However, what I really find striking is that her procedure is not oriented toward individual agency. Her procedure is really about normative world-making in a holistic sense. What she wants to understand is how social conduct of many can be shaped by principles. And, crucially, if some feature of our “industrial system” is, say, to be condemned then we must also understand what might take its place at what costs in wider context.

One final observation. Stebbing’s procedure presupposes a lot of empirical knowledge and comparative social theory. As she puts it, “To follow it would take a long time; it would require the co-operation of many experts.” (p. 27) So, rather than treating philosophers as the unique experts on “moral philosophy,” she thinks philosophers necessarily have to collaborate with and draw on many kinds of experts. In so far as moral philosophers legislate principles and ideals to others, they must on Stebbing’s view necessarily draw on a rich empirical and causal knowledge (without being pure inductivists).

I find this last feature rather attractive. But even if you don’t it’s worth noting that Stebbing here suggests a project for analytic moral and political philosophy very different from what developed in post WWII era which often abstracted away from such richly empirically embedded social theory. Stebbing herself recognizes that her procedure would be time-consuming: “it may well be doubted whether any speedier method can fruitfully be employed, if we are serious in believing that moral principles are principles for guiding the lives of actual men.” (p. 27) And if she were to be right, then one is left with the suspicion that much moral philosophy is not so serious as a guide to social life.