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Immoralists do not escape this dilemma, because they too are in
the business of denouncing and exalting. In spite of some mis-
leading claims, they do not abandon the enterprise of guidance.
Nor do even the changes they can make in it turn out as drastic
as is at first hoped, because to make more than quite slight
changes is to become unintelligible. And those who want to
change the world cannot really afford to do that.
10 THE UNREAL PROBLEM OF WEIGHTLESSNESS
It is not easy, in fact, to give substance to the idea of sceptically
rejecting all traditional polarities of value, nor to see what work
it would do if it could be formulated. The parallel with the
Copernican Revolution may be relevant. It is often suggested that
the discovery that the earth was not in the middle of the universe
is radically disrupting to human thought, since it shows that
there is no real up or down.40 But this seems unduly dramatic.
Whatever use the image of a differently shaped universe may
have had in our symbolism, the idea of up and down does not
seem to have vanished. Beings such as we, having physical bodies
strongly affected by gravitation, can exist only where gravitation
allows, and act only in ways to which it is continually relevant.
Space-travel provides only a partial and trifling extension of this
sphere. Our life is framed for living near the ground. Even our
symbolism about value cannot be divorced from this framework.
Weight so shapes our lives that what is up is almost bound to
count as difficult, arduous, therefore probably good (since why
intelligibility and immoralism 43
would we be climbing to it otherwise?) and what is down is
where we fall to dangerous, swampy, liable to engulf us.
Copernicus has not robbed us of our up and down. We have only
lost an extra outwork of symbolism which we had built on
them. There is no need for vertigo about this. Similarly in our
moral universe, basic facts about our physical make-up which
many people find too mundane to count as the basis for our
more exalted faculties do in fact supply us with our bearings,
orient us initially to the world in which we live. They give us our
original polarities of value. Without them we could not start to
live, so we may as well take them and be grateful. What we do
with them afterwards is another story.
Scepticism about these polarities seems, then, to be mostly
mistaken melodrama and will not help us. The fixedness of these
polarities has been somewhat clumsily expressed by saying that
certain norms are innate.41 The language of this remark needs
watching, because of course it will not be true if norms are
taken to be the actual detailed standards endorsed by existing
cultures. But provided the term is understood widely, just to
indicate the general direction of approval, the remark is true and
none of us doubts it.
Now if this is right if the basic polarities are indeed given by
our nature and condition then the sense in which evil is nega-
tive grows clearer. To take the case of courage This concept
arises because we are weak, vulnerable, imaginative and subject
to fears, and yet fear is not a sufficient guide for us because we
value many other things besides safety. In fact, safety is a means
to other ends, not an end in itself at all. If, therefore, we always
abandoned other pursuits as soon as we saw danger, we should
fall apart in confused frustration. That is why, when we see the
need for it, we can make an effort to overcome fear. The purpose
and the effort mark this as a positive capacity. You cannot give
this kind of description of cowardice. To say that, if we see the
need for it, we can make an effort to give way to fear is absurd.
44 wickedness: a philosophical essay
Just as in the case of heat and light, a distinctive sort of activity
namely purposive effort is going on here, which marks off
positive from negative on the moral scene, and does so equally
for all cultures. But effort only makes sense where its purpose is
intelligible. Simply trying to do something difficult is not
enough. If, for instance, you try persistently to cut off your own
head, this will not qualify you for praise unless that difficult
enterprise has a point which other people can see. Our imagin-
ation is amazingly fertile in supplying this kind of point. As soon
as I mentioned this example the enterprising reader will prob-
ably have thought of a point for it ritual, legal, religious, exhib-
itionistic, Gilbert-and-Sullivan or whatnot. But if we really did
not share a common spectrum of aims with the rest of the
human race, we could never supply any point of this kind, and
this example would be no more mysterious than any other. We
would be equally at a loss whenever we tried to understand any
unfamiliar example of human action. And, in fact, we are not at a
loss in this way.
11 BRINGING THE QUESTION HOME
What I have been saying here about shared human aims and
values is in a way obvious to the point of being boring. In actual
life, we take it for granted. But exaggerated scepticism about it
has for some time been fashionable among theorists, and it has
become hard for us to approach these questions realistically. The
word wickedness in the title of this book will certainly have
struck many people as odd and suspect. This will partly be
because of the relativistic objections which I have just been
mentioning the notion that no act can really be wrong,
because standards of wrongness vary infinitely and are entirely
relative to culture. I am spending little time on this objection
here, because I think it is actually much less serious than others
which confront us.42 It seems to flow largely from an unreal
intelligibility and immoralism 45
exaggeration of the difference between cultures. That difference
cannot possibly justify a general paralysis of the moral faculties.
What we are trying to do now is to understand what wickedness
is. In order to do that, we do not need to get general agreement
first about every borderline case. (Just so, if we were asking what
poison is, we would not need to start by settling all disputes
about borderline cases of poisons, such as alcohol and valium.)
All classifications have borderline cases. But they also have central
ones, which provide the best starting-point. If we are inclined to
get paralysed here, and to doubt the reality of wickedness, it is
probably best to start from cases which are close to us, and
which we understand well enough to make doubts about them
look unreal. Outrageous acts of our own are one good source of
examples. Another is the political scene, where we often identify
large-scale criminals with some confidence. (By contrast, doubts
in the anthropological cases often turn out to be just a product of
their remoteness.) Most of us will have no difficulty in finding
examples of such odious acts. In these cases, we shall probably
not find that there is much point in questioning the wickedness
on the ground that the act may not be wrong after all, because
some other culture might have standards which would excuse or
justify it, or that somebody might shortly invent such a standard.
This would not be much of an answer to the charge you have
or this politician has behaved abominably. The people who
committed the acts in question including ourselves did not
have those alien standards. Instead they had reason, and as far as
we can see good reason, to believe that what they are doing was
wrong. These acts, therefore, are examples of the phenomenon
on which we want to concentrate, namely, actual wickedness.
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