Morality

To speak of morality is to claim that some actions, dispositions, and ways of life are better than others not merely as a matter of taste or as a function of consequences but as a matter of how things are. The conservative tradition holds that this realist conception of morality is the one humans have always operated with in practice, and that the modern philosophical alternatives — utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, contractualism, emotivism — have either failed to displace it or have produced moral theories whose results their own proponents cannot live by.

The defence of morality, on the conservative view, is therefore not the defence of a particular code but of the metaphysical possibility of morality itself.

Key takeaways

• Morality, in the conservative tradition, is the realm of objective claims about how persons ought to live, claims that are discovered rather than invented and that bind the political community as much as they bind the individual.
• The tradition treats morality as continuous with metaphysics: real moral claims presuppose a real moral order, and the modern attempt to construct a binding morality on purely procedural or subjectivist foundations is, on the conservative reading, a project that cannot succeed.
• Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981) gave the contemporary tradition its sharpest diagnostic: modern moral discourse, MacIntyre argued, is the disordered remnant of an older Aristotelian framework whose metaphysical foundations have been abandoned, leaving the form of moral language without its substance.¹

History and context

The conservative tradition inherits the classical and Christian synthesis. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics developed the virtue tradition: morality is the science of how a human being achieves eudaimonia, the flourishing proper to a rational and social animal, and the moral virtues are the habits of character that make such flourishing possible. Cicero, in De Officiis (44 BC), transmitted this framework to the Roman and later European tradition. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas integrated the Aristotelian inheritance with Christian theology, producing the natural-law tradition that treats moral truths as discoverable by reason reflecting on human nature and confirmed by revelation where reason falters.²

The early-modern challenge to this synthesis came from two directions. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) reduced moral discourse to the artifacts of a social contract among self-interested agents; David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) located morality in human sentiments rather than in any objective order; Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) attempted to ground morality in the structure of practical reason itself, without recourse to nature or revelation. Each of these efforts produced powerful philosophical work, but each, on the conservative reading, replaced the older moral realism with something thinner.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the predicted unravelling. Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God and traced the consequences for European morality with a clarity that has rarely been matched. The twentieth-century emotivist tradition, represented by A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936) and C. L. Stevenson’s Ethics and Language (1944), held that moral statements are not assertions of fact but expressions of attitude, on the model of “boo!” and “hurrah!”.³ Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981) read this as the predictable end of the Enlightenment moral project: deprived of the Aristotelian framework of human ends and natural functions, modern moral discourse retained the vocabulary of objective claims while losing the metaphysics that gave the vocabulary its meaning.¹

The recovery of moral realism in late-twentieth-century philosophy — through the new natural-law theory of Germain Grisez, John Finnis, and Robert P. George, through the virtue-ethics revival prompted by Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) and developed by MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, and Rosalind Hursthouse, and through the broader retrieval of Thomistic and Aristotelian thought — has been read by conservatives as a vindication of the older tradition.⁴

The conservative position

Three claims structure the mature conservative view.

First, morality is objective. There are real moral truths, the same for all rational beings, and the central moral judgements of the great civilisations — that murder, theft, betrayal, and cruelty are wrong; that courage, justice, prudence, and fidelity are good — are not local conventions but recognitions of a shared moral order. C. S. Lewis collected the cross-cultural evidence for this convergence in the appendix to The Abolition of Man (1943) under the heading “Illustrations of the Tao,” and the conservative tradition has generally followed him in treating the convergence as evidence that morality tracks something real rather than something invented.⁵

Second, moral knowledge is acquired through formation, not through theory. The conservative tradition has been suspicious of moral philosophies that suppose the principal task of moral education is to deliver the correct set of principles to the rational agent, who will then apply them. The Aristotelian and Christian tradition holds that good character is formed by habit, example, and discipline within the family, the religious community, and the wider culture, and that abstract moral reasoning is reliable only when conducted by persons whose passions and judgement have been so formed.

Third, the moral order is not separable from the political order. The conservative rejects the liberal aspiration to a politics that takes no position on moral questions and merely provides a neutral framework within which individuals pursue their own conceptions of the good. Any actual political community presupposes substantive moral commitments — about what counts as a person, what owes what to whom, what the family is, what justice requires — and the pretence of neutrality is always, on the conservative reading, the smuggling-in of a particular substantive view under the cover of procedural language.

Differing positions

The classical-liberal and libertarian position accepts the first conservative claim — there are real moral truths, including the wrongness of force and fraud — but resists the third. The role of the state, on this view, is the protection of negative liberty, and the wider questions of morality belong to private life and voluntary association. Conservatives respond that this division is not stable: the political order will inevitably take positions on morally substantive questions, and the choice is not between moral neutrality and moral commitment but between honest and disguised moral commitment.

The progressive position has historically been built on the second of the modern alternatives to moral realism — on the view that morality progresses as our understanding develops, and that what was once thought to be objective moral truth was often the codification of unjust social arrangements. The conservative reply is that the progressive position itself presupposes moral realism: the claim that we now know certain practices to be unjust which earlier ages did not is intelligible only if there is a moral truth to be progressively discovered.

The radical-relativist position, which denies the existence of any objective moral order, is one with which the conservative tradition has had the least direct engagement, on the view that the position is self-refuting in practice. The radical relativist, when accused of acting unjustly, never replies that justice is a local construct.

References

1. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), especially chapters 1–3.
2. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999); Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, qq. 90–97 (the treatise on law).
3. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936); C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).
4. G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958): 1–19; John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
5. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), appendix.