Ethical systems Book

Bradley sets up his ethical system by countering hedonism (pleasure) and Kant (abstract duty). Hedonism proper, self-pleasure, and hedonism as utilitarianism (greatest pleasure for all) cannot constitute the ethical good, he argues. Pleasure is an infinite series of perishable states. Pleasure states are not enduring; ends are illusory. Pleasure is not and cannot be an end-in-itself, though it is a particular good and inseparable from life. Kant fares no better. Here Bradley describes Kant’s categorical imperative in a Hegelian-like formulation: the “outer,” the abstract End-in-itself, molds the “inner,” the particular will, transforming the latter into the former. The problem for Bradley is that Kant’s End-in-itself is an empty abstraction. As such, it is powerless to move or transform the individualized will and that will fills the abstract universal with its particularized content.

Where Bradley now goes with his ethical theory makes little sense unless it’s seen through the lens of Hegelian theory. The End for Bradley is “self-realization,” which can only occur through the individual’s merger with society. Society is “an organism.” The individual, standing alone, is a fiction.* In this state, the contradiction between the individual and society, the particular and the universal, is resolved. The individual ceases to be individual for it has become universalized. In this state of organic wholeness and unity, the individual identifies with a universal ethos, and this motivates the individual to follow its dictates. There is no Kantian duty for duty’s sake. Rather, we perform our duty willingly because we are one with the whole and to be that is to be happy in an enduring sense.**

“Self-realization,” though, is not a permanent state as the above description might suggest. Bradley discusses “evolution,” which is also Hegelian-like in the sense that the individual’s merger with society has a progressive quality to it because there’s a contradiction between the individual and society. “Morality develops” (“morality, the process of realization”) and therefore it is “not absolute.”

And now, entering onto the stage, Bradley brings in God (if not a person,*** then it’s an abstract Idea or the impersonal divine). God is perfect and by that standard we are imperfect. We fall short. Evolution for Bradley is a dialectical exchange between imperfection and the ideal of the perfect, as expressed by the divine. Self-realization, at any point in time, as well as throughout historical development, is a progressive “dying of the private self,” and that dying occurs through faith, not through good works or through imperfect sensuous knowledge. By faith, the self is “made one with the ideal….you must put your whole self, your entire will, into the will of the divine.” ****

Bradley’s ethical vision soars. Its anchor point is the divine, however defined. Though Bradley’s system incorporates it, the divine is external. It, initially, stands apart from us and is brought inside so that in Bradley’s terminology the outer and the inner become one. Remove the divine, though, and Bradley’s system collapses. Then one is left with a this-world, materialistic foundation for ethics that has its origins in our biology. We are private selves seeking our individual, particular good (survival, well-being), and success is indicated by pleasure (without the negative connotation of hedonism). Kant’s self-motivating End-in-itself can be reformulated to state that it’s in our own self-interest to respect the interests of others (the others as Ends) because that contributes to the order necessary for others to satisfy their particular ends. In this way, private ends become (in theory) universalized. The ideal is neither divine nor external to us. Rather, it’s embedded in our souls. It is a logic built into our biology and, ironically, it can be said that here too the ideal is real.

*The Hegel view of the state sounds familiar. As Bradley writes, “the state is not put together, but it lives…..in the community” the “individual is realized….They (the individuals) are aware in themselves that they possess this individual independent being because of the sacrifice of their individuality, because the universal substance is their soul and essence….”
**Bradley refers often to “My station and my duties.” It is not clear what is meant by this expression. There’s an element of Plato in it as the organic merger of the individual with society requires that each has a place and that one’s role is performed willingly and happily.
***Bradley writes that “We are to take the religious consciousness as an existing fact, and to take it as we find it now in the modern Christian mind, whether that mind recognizes it or whether it does not.”
****Bradley quotes from another writer that “‘in the man Christ, in his passion, his dying, his death, and uprising, in his own humanity, is reckoned for righteousness, so that the man becomes Christ, that is after the spiritual man….He who teaches and wills otherwise is yet in the whoredom of Babylon.’”